How to Build an Agency and Software with Charles Drengberg from Big Presence and Belch.io

Hey, what's up guys? Welcome to episode 130 here on Agency Journey. So excited to have you. This week I'm talking with Charles from Big Presence and also Belch IO about how he got his agency up and started. What I love about Charles story is that he started in a kind of a sales role, moved to a marketing role, and then after seeing success there, branched out into the agency and has continued to iterate on the agency, but building on its strengths over and over again. And that is what led to the launch of their product now Belch IO, which they're using internally as a kind of HubSpot CMS development tool, making it easy for the marketers and designers on the team to build out beautiful cms templates on HubSpot. So I'm not gonna give away any more right here. Dive into this podcast if you wanna learn about how Charles got his company started from a job and now how he's leveraged his product experience to actually create some products at the agency and how you can try it out too for yourself. Pretty cool. Let's go. How do you build an agency that allows you to live the dream that you have for yourself, for your family, for your community, for your team, while at the same time helping your clients knock it out of the park and doing it all profitably? These are the big questions that we tackle here on the Agency Journey podcast. I am your host, Andrew Demski. Now let's get to it. Hey Charles, welcome to Agency Journey. So excited to have you here this week. Would you kick us off just by introducing yourself to the audience and sharing a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey, how you got where you are today?

Sure. Absolutely, Andrew. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So I started Big Presence about four years ago. After working in business development for many years for different types of companies, I saw an opportunity to kind of jump on the inbound train before I really even knew what inbound was, at least the way that HubSpot says it. I wanted to create an agency that helped corporate marketing teams kind of catch up with digital and do it the right way so that they could grow their business the way that now we're starting to see everybody's realizing what's happening and you're starting to see this major shift towards content and well designed websites and starting to see that it's more important than ever. So it kind of brought me to a point of let's create an agency around easy to use solutions. Help companies kind of redefine their brand for the modern era. A Lot of people have been stuck in the 90s and 80s with the way they sell. So it was a good opportunity to create something new. And four years later, we're now in Newport Beach, California and trying to get comfortable doing this long term now that we kind of know who we are and we feel good about the solutions we're putting out there for our customers.

That's fantastic. Can you walk us through some of the journey of how you went from kind of the sales marketing inside of a company role and got the agency out and started and kind of hit that early traction?

Yeah, I think the big aha moment for me was I used to sell Microsoft Office 365. When that released, we saw that it was getting very difficult to get a hold of people in cold call scenarios and get meetings set up. Networking wasn't working the same way it used to for IT services. We saw it as an opportunity to bring people to us as opposed to going after them and chasing them down because it's just wasn't working anymore. And when I worked with the marketing department that I was with the company that I was at, it seemed like we had a good opportunity because not a lot of our competitors understood inbound. Not a lot of them were creating great content. And once we tried it a few times, we did webinars that were really, really successful. We went from maybe 15 to 20 people on a webinar to I think we maxed out at around 350 or 400 people on a webinar. And that was, you know, partly our relationship with Microsoft, but also a big part of it was that we were putting out the information that was making IT directors comfortable with moving to the cloud. And I think the education piece of IT and getting people comfortable with new solutions was where I started to realize that this kind of applies to any services organization, high technology company. And then it started to spread out through all the other businesses as the business process of selling has changed, as buyers have become more savvy at finding information on their own. So we saw a lot of success with IT there and the more confident I got in my skills and what I was able to bring to our marketing department and help them kind of get up to speed with it. The more obvious that it became that I needed to strike out and do this for more companies than just the one that I was working at. Luckily I had a lot of good small companies that were willing to trust me early on. And as I built my team, those companies started to grow in size. And now we're working with 50, 100 million 200, $500 million a year companies, which is a big departure from the mom and pops that we were working with maybe at the beginning, But I think that we're a lot more successful with these bigger organizations now.

That's awesome. What do you think are some of the lessons that you learned with some of those smaller companies that have allowed you to move upstream like that and work with kind of bigger level organizations? Anything stick out as you kind of look back on the past four years?

Yeah, there's a couple of things that are the biggest things for us on the agency side. One being that even small companies compared to large companies, everybody was kind of in the same place where they didn't know a lot of things. There's been a lot of misinformation in digital marketing in the past, and I think that's just because everybody was learning it. That's the agencies and the corporate marketers. But there's a lot of misinformation about what's valuable and what's not. And we had to learn early on, even with the small companies around, especially with the small companies, that we needed to educate first before we started to push them in a new direction. Because it's very uncomfortable for marketers to be told that they've either been doing something wrong or that there's a better way to do something. And that was good for us to learn the smaller clients first because we had to do the same thing. And we continue to do the same thing with larger organizations and helping them understand the value of certain things. And I think it was good that we got to learn with the smaller companies what they didn't understand because we assumed a lot of people knew what we knew. And we've learned that the hard way. You know, I see.

Has there been any impact to your operations how you guys have, like, begun to tackle that problem of education to new customers? Anything you guys do during the onboarding process or in the sales process to make sure that new customers, new clients are educated and kind of know what you guys are working through?

Yeah, we have different layers to the education. One thing that we've been really successful with is using our audits with new customers to help them understand what we see and how we see it and where we want to go with them, as opposed to just kind of pitching that solution at the beginning. We found that if we educate them on where they are and really give them a good feel for their business as far as digital marketing, then they're a lot more Comfortable with new ideas and new ways of doing things because they've kind of caught up to us as far as how we think about their marketing. The next place that we were really focused, and this has kind of been my MO For a long time, is transparency. So, you know, every client's different. Some want to know every single step that you're doing so that they can learn from you, and others just want you to do it and solve their problems. But we're very transparent with everything that we do for our clients and even letting them see, you know, at all phases of what we're doing, what we did and why we did it, and giving them the intention behind everything so that they can replicate that and learn from us and continue doing that in their own marketing and just be a stronger client on the marketing side.

Gotcha. Are the audits that you guys do, are those a paid engagement, or is that kind of part of the sales process?

Yeah, it's kind of a mix. If it's something lightweight, like, can you take a look at our site and tell us if there's something that you guys can improve it? Obviously, we'll do a quick audit and very much a surface audit. But more so than not, what we're doing is clients are bringing a problem to us and saying, here's our problem. We think this is the problem. This is what we want to do. But can you kind of take a bigger look, a deeper dive into it, and let us know if you see anything else? Which is always the best way to go, because we can uncover a lot of things in an audit that if we had just done a project based on what a client said, we don't know a lot of things until halfway through. So it's always good to do that audit, make sure you know all the problems before you try to solve one of them.

Yeah, I think that's huge because we can get so, I guess, wrapped around just selling one solution that you kind of lose sight of the whole picture. And to really be successful with a client and, like, have the relationship be where it needs to be, the agency has to have a full picture of what's going on. So I like leading there and just getting to know them before you dive in and start operating on different parts.

Yeah, and part of that problem, Andrew, is that some people believe they know their problem, and whether it's somebody told them that that's their problem and then they believed it, or they feel like something's their problem. But if a company doesn't have all the reporting in place to really know where things are coming from, what's contributing, what's not. You're really just guessing. And in 2017, with all the softwares we have out there, all the ways to track things should be a lot less guessing and a lot more pinpointing the issue. So we're helping clients do that.

That's awesome. Amen to that. As you look at where Big Presence is today, kind of four years in, how would you kind of say you're different from other agencies out there? What have you guys kind of filtered down to as your sweet spot in terms of your approach?

Yeah, I think our difference is really that there's not one thing or another that we're completely focused on with every client we work with. We want to work with less clients and do more for them. So what I mean by that is if a client comes to us and asks us to do their website, we want to understand if we do this website and do a great job, how are you going to manage these leads? How are you going to filter these to sales? How is sales going to attack those leads? So I think the big difference is that we're working with a lot less clients than maybe some of our competitors are. But we're doing end to end, whether it's rebranding or sales strategy or software implementations, or coming up with new ways to sell the product, or even introducing new products for our clients. That's the difference is that we're able to do all of those things and most of our clients have been with us for a couple of years. So I think that's the difference is that we're really a part of our clients teams. I know a lot of agencies say that, but we really want to stay with them and learn about their business and be able to speak about their business as well as they do. So that when we're creating content, it doesn't feel like an outside agency is creating that content. It feels like people inside the organization contributed to it because they did.

Gotcha.

And it feels original and it feels fresh. It doesn't feel like it's coming out of a machine, which is how we always try to fight against that feeling that we're creating the same stuff for anybody.

I see. And so is there you mentioned kind of like high tech companies or like highly companies with a lot of technology ingrained in what they do? Is there any kind of focus that you guys are operating within for that smaller number of clients where you're diving deep?

Yeah, high technology, software as a service and manufacturing have really become our core industries that we focused on.

And.

And I think that's one part I'm comfortable there. So I've kind of built a team that's comfortable there as well. We're also a technology company in the sense that we build our own apps. So I think that's just a natural thing for us. But I think the other part is that the marketing for high technology and manufacturing is more difficult. It's more technical. There's a lot more layers to getting a solution put together from the client side. The very smart people that are creating the solutions to the salespeople that are selling it to the marketers that are trying to deliver it to everybody. There's a lot of layers to doing that type of marketing. And I feel like we like that challenge and we're comfortable with it because we've been through it so much that we kind of gravitate to that harder work because we know those clients have less agencies to choose from and less people that are willing to do that hard work.

Gotcha. Okay. That's a great guess, a great filter to think about. Like when people are looking at who they want to work with, kind of looking at how they want to work with companies there. You mentioned that you guys are also a technology company yourself. That's something I wanted to dig into. Here is like more and more agencies are thinking about creating products or have created products, and you guys have a new product out there right now. Could you walk us through the story of Belch and what it is all about?

Sure. So Belch I.O. is a visual template builder for HubSpot COS, or CMS as they call it. Now, the reason we created this is We're a HubSpot agency. We work with a lot of HubSpot clients, and we did a lot of homework around what are these clients typically asking of us when it comes to HubSpot, what do they need the most help with? The recurring theme for the last few years has really been that most corporate marketing teams do not have a developer on their team, and they don't even have marketers that generally do CSS or HTML, even at a basic level. Now, that's not everybody. Some people can do it. There's a lot of good marketers out there that know CSS and HTML, but most of our clients don't have anybody on staff that could do that. So usually they were reaching out to us. We got the content side. We're doing campaigns. That's one thing. But the ongoing need was always new templates, new custom elements for their email templates or for their landing pages. And we're doing the same things over and over and over for all of our clients, whether it's onboarding them and rebranding templates or creating new ones based on that client's needs. But we saw that those clients weren't really willing to refresh them very often or create something new for a campaign. And because they weren't giving us the budget to do that, we're just trying to squeeze content into the same templates that they've always used, which over time gets stale and conversion rates go down. So we wanted to create a product for ourselves, at least internally, that we could do that process a lot faster than just going into old templates, repurposing them, rebranding them and having a developer do that. We wanted to create something where the marketers on our team could also do that, or the creative people on our team could create landing pages and email templates, because, let's be honest, they're the ones that are designing it anyway. So we built an app. It's a Mac desktop app that allows them to create those templates and customize them and iterate on those and push them directly to HubSpot in a matter of minutes as opposed to hours or days, which is what we were seeing in the past.

That is awesome. And the app looks really cool. So we've played a little bit. Can you walk me through how you took this thing from just an idea of. Oh, because everyone is worked with a HubSpot site before, I said it would be nice if these templates were easy to build, but how do you take it from just an idea to something now that's a Mac app. It's out there in the wild. Can you walk us through that process?

Sure. So there's a lot of history with my team. My other two partners in this are Marky Arnold and Tim Joyce, who I've worked on several projects with. Tim's our lead developer at Big Presence. So, you know, we've been working together for four years now on building solutions that marketers and non technical or non developers could actually use. And that probably started more so with our other startup, which is called simply Launch. It's a easy to use website builder that is really targeting those small business owners or freelancers or individuals that want to create something. It's very similar to Wix or GoDaddy Builder, but a little bit easier to use even than those are. On top of that, we've been doing WordPress sites the same Way Visual Composer, Divi, all these other visual builders out there, we wanted to create something for HubSpot that was in the mold of something like a Visual Composer, where you can drag and drop and pick out blocks and reshape things using sliders and settings as opposed to code. And we were trying to replicate that with Belch, and I think we did a pretty good job because every feature that you see in there is literally something that our clients ask for over and over, whether it's reducing padding around certain elements, changing font sizes, Google, custom Google fonts throughout the site or the page. All these things are the same things that clients are asking for. But if they could do it themselves, I know that they would do it themselves. So we built it for ourselves, we used it. We realized it was much better than just an internal tool. We added a few more things to it and decided to release it to HubSpot partners earlier this summer in kind of a soft launch and then a much larger launch at Inbound a few weeks ago.

Awesome. And how's that been, like, actually bringing customers in and kind of handling this from the other side of it and working with HubSpot partners as your customers now, have there been any lessons learned or anything that you didn't expect prior to that launch?

You know, early on, I think when we were still figuring out how we wanted to present this to people outside of our own team, maybe we weren't really doing a great job of explaining what the value of it was to at least the agencies we were working with in beta. So when we went to Inbound, it was really the first test, and we had a new version for Inbound too. So there was a lot more. There was, but I think we were walking into inbound thinking 50, 50. Some agencies are going to say, hey, this is something we really need because we don't have enough developers on our team, kind of like most marketing departments. And we figured other agencies will say, yeah, templates aren't that big of a deal for us. We rebrand them and throw them into a client portal and go on. So I spent a lot of time thinking about that before Inbound, and I think we solved that confusion a little bit with a new message for Belch. It's not just about doing what you were doing in the past and using a new tool to do it faster, but we're trying to get people to rethink about digital assets and what they're doing with landing pages and emails and let them know that you don't have to squeeze your content into a pre made template. You don't have to do what you were doing in the past as far as limiting yourself to what you could do inside that portal. We want to open up HubSpot and there's so many great tools in HubSpot, so many cool features in HubSpot. But I think the one thing that most marketers that even outside of agencies, especially outside of agencies, the thing that they struggle with most is that that builder inside of HubSpot still requires a lot of learning. It's a big learning curve to use it effectively and build your own custom templates from the ground up. We just want to break down that barrier and give people a tool that allows them to to spin up a new landing page if they have a new design in mind with a different number of columns or the form is centered as opposed to the right. We just want to make it easier for people to iterate and try new things. Ab test different campaigns a lot faster than they could in the past and just do better Marketing is really the goal here.

That's fantastic. It is really sweet. So again, another plug. Go to Belch IO, check this thing out. They're doing cool stuff there. How did you guys come up with the name?

Yeah, that's a question. I got a lot of at Impact and generally people can't see me on a podcast, but I look like the kind of guy that would probably name an app Belch, but I'm not the one that named it. Our lead designer and front end developer Marky, she actually came up with a name and the idea is that we have a roadmap for this app that's going to go a lot further than where we are today. But the general idea is that when you're building with Belch, you're building with HTML. Not that you have to touch the HTML. That's what we're using on the back end. When you hit publish to HubSpot and we push that template into your portal, we're injecting the HubSpot hubble code so that it's as functional as it would be if you had built it with a design manager inside of HubSpot. So we like to joke about the fact that we're taking HTML and kind of regurgitating these themes into HubSpot and the result is we're belching.

I love it. That's great. Well done, man. Well, it's really cool. I'm excited to hear about where you guys have come. Really excited to see where you do go. So thank you for contributing a really cool product to the community here. If anyone's listening and they want to grab more info or they want to connect with you in some way, what's the best way for them to reach out?

Yeah, go to Belch IO. You can download the app for free and try it out for Mac. We have a Windows version coming soon.

It out.

You get three free publishes if you download it and try it out. And then if you have questions, you can always email me directly. Charleselch IO I'm doing demos nonstop for people and answering any questions they have. I know everybody thinks about HubSpot and building for HubSpot differently, so we want to hear how you feel about the app and I'm happy to answer any questions people have.

Awesome. Well, Charles, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your insight, your expertise, the lessons that you've learned along the way. We've really appreciated it. So thanks for your time, Ben.

Thanks, Andrew. Appreciate it.

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