How to Improve Your Web Design Process with Clients

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.

All right, this week on the podcast I have Ulf Lonagren. Ulf. I feel like I didn't even say the business name yet, but I feel like I messed it up again. Did I just mess up your last name? Is it Loneren or Lonagren?

Lonagren. I think you got it right. Yeah.

Okay. See I shouldn't. That's what I get for second guessing myself. But you guys are. You know what, I don't know if we've had an agency owner on yet who is from bc, from British Columbia, but you are you I think co founded or did you got. We'll walk through the story, but Roccato. Am I saying that right?

That's right.

Okay, so Roccato, which is an awesome. And you guys are going to love first of all, the URL radio rocketroket to. We'll link that up in the show notes. But you guys are gonna love the website. But I'm really excited to dig into the story of what you guys have built, how things started. So let's maybe start at the very beginning. Did you start this business along with. Along with Chris or how did the business start initially?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. So it was Chris and I actually met here in Kelowna at arts, digital arts and marketing type of college, let's call it called Cato. And we met there, kind of went through our schooling together in a course called Digital Media Design, which is very revolved around like building websites and everything kind of digital and marketing and business. And then we both exited school and got into the workforce and I got a job as a web developer designer and Chris went on to get a job as a digital marketer specifically. So he wasn't building websites or anything like that. And that was kind of how we met. And then after our time in the workforce for a bit, kind of honing our skills and learning our different areas of expertise, we stayed in touch. He was actually in Vancouver, he moved cities, but we stayed in touch. And when the time came around, we both had been talking about it for a while and figured, hey, it's time to start up our own business. And that's what we did and it happened.

That's awesome. So you just mentioned to me that you guys were doing a lot of web design and custom design for people and then joined the HubSpot partner program here just in 2017, right?

Yeah, that's correct. It's been a short but very engrossing experience so far already.

Yeah. So if we look at, I guess just to kind of understand the background of the. Or a little bit more info about where the agency is right now in. In terms of the types of services and maybe one of the easiest ways, I think, to kind of break it down is just in terms of maybe revenue buckets or in terms of type of clients doing what. Is most of the business still coming from like web design projects or are you starting to shift towards either growth driven design retainers, which obviously still very much related to web design and largely web design, or inbound retainers or partnerships or what's kind of the servicing model?

Yeah, no. So, I mean, you've caught us in a funny place because it's kind of very much a transitional period for us where, I mean, we've been in business for eight years. Like, we're not by any means a new agency. However, we do feel very in our infancy when it comes to inbound marketing as well as things like, you know, growth driven design, which is relatively new to begin with. But so to answer your question, our services are very much kind of split, I'd say about 50, 50 right now between digital marketing and web design. And most of our web design projects are. Well, they're. Sorry, they're all traditional right now. So we're very much still on the traditional website kind of bandwagon. But that's not because we want to be. Actually, I'm already 100% sold on growth driven design. That is the future for Roccato as far as the website side of things go. But as with any new kind of service offering can take a while to implement. So we're still kind of figuring that all out before we jump two feet in. And on the inbound front, that's grown huge for us already. And I expect into 2018 it's going to be much greater and hopefully does surpass our web design side of things quite a bit.

That's awesome. I'm curious on the inbound side of things. So our agency, Guavabox, we started a couple years after you guys did in 2011 and similar story, like, started out really heavy on the web design side of things and then made the transition into inbound. We knew from the beginning, we wanted to do the content side of things. That was kind of a big part of our story prior to starting the agency. But the benefit of having some of those web design projects and existing clients there was the ability to kind of go back to some of those. Has most of the growth on the inbound side been obviously over eight years. That tends to build up a pretty decent sized portfolio of companies. And in our case, we actually worked with a lot of companies who just weren't. They were too small to really be profitable. Inbound marketing retainers. We had a couple that worked out well and then a whole bunch that just didn't make the transition successfully for us. But is that kind of how it's grown quickly is from the past client base, or have you found it's a totally new set of prospects and customers?

Yeah, actually, it's funny to talk to someone and be able to relate on this subject matter, but it was very much. It's been pretty much the same for us. So while we still have. We still have a lot of those same older clients that we've had and we've been working with for a long time, but they haven't all been a good fit for inbound. You know, whether that was due to just company size or budget or things like that, most of the inbound business that we found so far has been from new clients, you know, new business, that sort of thing.

That's. That's awesome. I think it's like looking back at some of our early clients, they were, I mean, obviously at the moment, in the moment, a huge blessing. But it was like, looking back, I think at some point you find, like, some of these are a blessing and a curse. Like, it was great to have the business at the time supporting that and the business of that size and like, what we. I've just never. I'm really bad at like, walking. If I built something, I hate to walk away and say, I'm sorry, we can't help you with that anymore. But they were just clients that, you know, you have to cut ties with at some point and it's just not the right thing for the stage of the business anymore. But that's always been a challenge for me for sure.

Actually, I got a funny quick story on that in that when we made this transition, I mean, a big part of this year as well for us has been having that saying, no, when it's not a good fit mindset, rather than just taking on everything and everything because we want to keep your business going. So that Being said, there was a client of ours, he'd been a client for a couple years, and our services with him had actually kind of dwindled over time. They didn't grow. They kind of went the opposite way. He kept pulling budget and that sort of thing. And it got to a point, you know, we were getting into inbound and we started thinking, you know, we gotta, we gotta cut ties if it's just not right. And so we reached out to him and, you know, as politely as possible, we were kind of like, you know, you want another, you want to cut budget once again? And we're just thinking at this point, maybe it's not a good fit. You know, we're really focused on working with businesses who are serious about growth, who are serious about their digital marketing, and they're looking for a knowledgeable partner with the experience to help them get there. So anyways, we kind of put it in a nice way and said, you know, it might be best that you find another company to work with. And he comes back to us and he says, guys, let's get together for a coffee. And we're like, okay, you know, fair enough, we'll get together, get in front of him in person. And we do. And it went the opposite direction where he's like, so you guys want me to be more serious? Like, what are you thinking? Like, what, what kind of direction? Like, what does that mean? And. And we kind of spelled out inbound our direction and how that could work for his business. And the next thing we knew, we had him on a retainer with us and like increased his budget. I don't know what it was tenfold. So that's awesome.

Yeah, that's the few and far between, but that's enjoyable when you get it.

That's awesome. Yeah, totally, man.

So someone comes to you. This is, I think, for a lot of agencies who've kind of moved, especially moved into the inbound space. And it's like we've got what we were doing and we've got this new service offering. Sometimes find themselves in a little bit of limbo. Somebody reaches out for something and knowing where to start when you have multiple services can be challenging sometimes. How do you guys start? Client. Does every client engagement start the same way, or is it different between? You know, somebody wants inbound, somebody wants a website, or eventually growth driven design. How do you guys structure your client engagements?

Are we talking from the very first interaction?

Yeah, I guess basically kind of from that. In that sales process, somebody reaches out and says, I guess, is it A different journey that you're taking someone down. If they say, hey, I need a new website and I heard you guys were the guys to go to Versus. I need to grow and solve this problem. How can you guys help me?

Right, okay, yes and no. So the sales process and typically that's me at this point in the game, that's me who's handling a lot of that. And during the first conversation, I mean, whether they say they need a website or whether they say we need help with our SEO, that's very common, or they say, hey, we want to run some adwords, whatever it might be, I kind of try and always take a step back and I'll tell them that, like, okay, before we just start talking about the service, let's just take a step back and find out more about your business. Like, let's learn about your business. Where are you at what stage? How are you looking to grow? What's the stage of your website? What's your social media presence and where have you seen success and where haven't you? And by finding all that stuff out, sometimes maybe they were right and they do just need a website. Or maybe when they said to me, hey, I need some help with my SEO, they meant we need a full inbound marketing plan. And so they do start the same in that sense that I'm looking to dig deeper and find out how can we really help you guys versus how do you think you need us to help you?

Right. Do you guys charge at all for that discovery phase of the project or does that happen? Kind of follow through the process and then that leads into okay, and here's what it's gonna cost you.

Right. So we don't charge for like our sales discovery call, like a connect call, a discovery call meeting consultation, like the initial one to two in depth meetings. No, for us it's about providing what value and help we can in that initial process free of charge and in the hopes that we're going to show that we're the right partner to help you out and then make that sale. And if we don't, at the end of the day, we spent some time with someone and hopefully we were able to help them out on some level and point them in the right direction. But we don't charge for that. However, if it is something where it's a complex project, let's say it's a complex website with many moving parts, or it's like, like inbound marketing, we do have things like within my marketing, we've got our inbound launch Plan which is kind of like a. It's the strategy phase and you know, that does cost money and we do have, with websites that are complex and do have a lot of moving parts, we'll have like we might suggest to them, hey, how about we do a strategy phase up front to really dig into this and help you map out what the website architecture is going to look like. And then we would charge for that. But I mean at that point, you know, that's a sale in itself really.

Right, right. For sure. That makes a lot of sense. On the web design side of things. I've got just kind of a question. This is like a very down in the weeds question. So I think if I, if my research is right, your background is kind of as a front end developer and especially or at least a lot of projects in WordPress. I'm sure that that's as things have grown as you moving into the HubSpot ecosystem, I'm sure that's, that's starting to evolve as you guys are, you've defined the site architecture and you're moving into at some point here into the design phase. Do you do most of the design like in the browser and it's you know, front end designers or developers building it out there. It's a lot of your design in a design tool like Photoshop or Sketch or how do you guys tend to design sites?

Yeah, I love your questions, they're awesome. So it totally depends, mostly depends on things like the size of the project so and like the goals around that and that sort of thing. But for most, let's say, for lack of a better description, smaller website projects, we do design in the browser. So we do start with wireframes and I'm really big on that. I think that the time you put into wireframing even for the simplest of websites can go a long way to keeping a project on track just because of you get the clients and yourself on the same page as far as what content is going to go where before you ever get into the design that way. So we will map it out and build out wireframes for the website, but then we will design it right live in the browser however, for a bigger website project. And that might just be, it might be bigger in size, like actual size of the site, maybe number of pages, complexity, that sort of thing. Or it could just be bigger in like budget. So for example, the client might want to do specifically a full wireframes and then full on flat design process and really have that back and forth with revisions and in that case we'll be like, okay, let's not worry about designing the browser and about like the speed of our delivery so much. Instead let's slow it down and let's go back to Photoshop and design the website in Photoshop and present that way and then we'll present through like Envision or an app like that.

Right. That makes a lot of sense. And I think that that's that kind of breakdown between obviously the higher the budget, the easier it is to go through kind of sequence through fidelity from, you know, lower fidelity wireframe to a higher fidelity but still flat design designed out into. You just have more, more room to play with budget wise there on a larger product. So that does make sense.

Yeah, And I don't mind telling clients that either. Right. Because like sometimes it's the kind of thing where I feel like maybe, and I don't know this for sure, but maybe other agencies or agency owners. You know, it's like kind of like we want to hide that because we don't want it to like we don't want a client to look at us as like we're like cheating or something by not designing it first outside of the browser. But like it's pretty easy when you can explain it from a budget standpoint. It's like, look, we save you time, we can get your website done faster and therefore we save you money if we do it this way. But for some people, they want that more hands on, step by step process. And so in those cases it's like, sure, if that's what you want, you got the time and you got the budget for it. Maybe it does make more sense to just design it in Photoshop and handle that process that way.

Right? That makes a lot of sense, man. If I could ask you questions all day, I'm gonna, I'm gonna wrap, I'm not gonna do that though. I'm gonna wrap up here with one question. Kind of around 2018, as you guys move forward, is the big, and this is kind of like the classic, you know, if you could pick one big thing that you guys are focused on for, for the next year, what is it going to be? Or the one big agency changer is that like the move towards growth driven design, the move towards inbound, Is it something completely different? Anything stick out as far as what you're most excited about in terms of kind of whether it's a minor pivot or small change in direction or new focus at Rocketto?

Yeah, yeah, there is. And from a service side, it's easy enough to just say it as inbound marketing. You know, we're still young in this kind of game, so for us to develop our skills as inbound marketers, to refine our process, that's what it is. But from the business side. And this relates right back to email marketing. But it's growth. So growth for our company on every level, from revenue to our team hiring more awesome talent. We've got a great team here, but I'm just really looking forward to 2018 to expand on that. Expand on all our processes, our team and their abilities, and the culture here at Rocketto.

That is awesome. Well, we'll definitely link up the website. Is there anywhere else ulf that makes sense to point people to follow what you guys are building, what you personally are up to?

Well, we're super active on social media, so definitely check out our website and Facebook, Instagram. Great places to follow. Roccato as well.

Awesome. Thanks so much for coming on, man. It was really good to connect. Love to have you back on at some point and appreciate your time.

Definitely. Thanks, Greg. It was great chatting with you.

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