Productizing Design Services, Adopting EOS Mid-Growth, and Shopify Partnerships with Matt McIver

All right, welcome back to Agency Journey. I am your host Gray MacKenzie from Zenpilot and this week I have the pleasure of Bringing on Matt McIver from Comet Studio. Matt, welcome to the podcast.

Hi Gray. Thanks for having me.

I'm super excited to dig into your story and get to be. I'm one of the one of the first places that gets to tell the Comet Studio and the Matt McIver story. So you guys have an exceptional name really in the design and Shopify space. I mean you've got a handful of different services and different things that you do and do well. But like Shopify and Design are the two things that pop to my head right away when I look at what you all have done. Will you give us kind of the overview? What is commentstudio? Who do you serve? How do you help them?

Absolutely. Commence Studio is a creative agency that focuses on brand identity, brand positioning, packaging design and then e commerce solutions. We primarily work with a lot of startups and SMBs that are know in the direct consumer space, often aligned with a purpose driven mission. So really the whole idea of taking a product from a napkin, giving it an identity, doing the packaging for the shelf and then creating the digital shelf for them for their consumers to access their products. We're going to be celebrating nine years in business here in October and we're a team of seven. We are a member of the Entrepreneurs Organization. We operate on EOS and leverage a Gallup strengths team culture.

Yeah, that's awesome. I know that you and I have talked about EOS before, but when did you first come across it?

EOS was brought up to me through the Entrepreneurs Organization accelerator program in 2019. So just before the pandemic, a member out of the Denver chapter was referencing it. Whereas like our local chapter here in the Reno Tahoe area was heavily based off of the Rockefeller habits and scaling up. So it kind of perked up my ears that these other chapters were learning different things. And he had mentioned EOS and Traction and I was like, I don't even know what that acronym is or what that stands for. Fast forward to 2021. I got a copy of Traction gifted to me and I just dove into it. It was a very quick read and I had just bought out a former partner in the agency and so it was really like my time to take the helm and really that EOS framework we self implemented starting in 2021 and it just was a big awakening for me on the idea that the integrator visionary pairing. I had been sitting in the integrator role as of service to the company, because we had needed that. But truly I'm. I am a visionary. And so it's just great to, like, kind of sit in both of those shoes, but then, like, have that moment like, oh, there, there's, you know, a handbook behind who I am and how do I operate as a leader. And finding within my own internal organization who is my integrator. It actually turned out to be my creative director. And so Kylie, she's my right hand here, she now serves as the integrator. And I'm now allowed to fully step into that visionary role. And we live it every day. We're using all the framework and all the tools in the toolkit, and it's been truly transformational for us.

Yeah, that's awesome. How many on your accountability chart today are you just in that visionary seat or are you in a couple different seats on the accountability chart?

A couple of different. So we are fairly small. We're bespoke creative studio. We're team of seven. You know, most recently, I delegated out the integrator role and the CFO role. I still sit in the growth side of the business, so doing a lot of the sales and marketing on top of some of the sales responsibilities of the visionary. But I get to do a lot of R D and relationship building, and it's just such a great feeling to have that support in that system. But primarily. Yeah, primarily just in the growth side now.

Yeah, that makes sense. That's awesome. Well, brand building, your podcast tours, all the. All the good stuff, which is awesome. Yeah. Where in the journey did Shopify become so, like. I don't actually know if I've asked you this question before. Did it start with the brand identity and design side and then move into Shopify, or did it start in like, E commerce web solutions and then expand into design?

Absolutely. When we founded the company in 2014, we were primarily a design studio at that point. We were heavy on the illustration, we were heavy on the. The creative direction side of things, really creating a lot of bespoke treatments for campaigns, typographic treatments, logo development, identity development. And then I had worked at some other agencies prior and also as a freelancer. And I had done a bunch of WordPress stuff in my career early on when I was a craftsman in the delivery role often. And so we were slinging some WordPress sites early on. And then we discovered Shopify about. I would say it was 2015. We had a couple of clients come to us and really start to expand our technical capabilities. We had a developer on staff at that point and we had built a website for a fine custom jeweler, a bespoke jeweler, still a client today, seven years later. Uh, but honeys and goldies, we developed a full custom theme, we designed a full user interface UX and implemented that into Shopify and ended up having like tremendous success with that project and, and kind of started to build regionally that we had expertise in that and that we weren't just using off the shelf themes to skin up all these different stores. And I believe it was the same year 2017, we had done another brand coffee bar that was expanding from a local roastery to a regional roastery into the San Francisco Bay area. So over the Sierra Nevadas, they needed to tell their brand story of, you know, how they become hospitalians. It's the Italian hospitality and, you know, expanding into new markets. It's, you know, we really needed to leverage that culture and that storytelling and then at the same time offer coffee subscription services, you know, direct ship to home. And we actually had won a Shopify global award that year for best storytelling through user experience. And yeah, we got to go out to New York for the Shopify Unite conference and have the award presented to us there. And the last couple years we've still been offering WordPress, but for the last three years our focus has primarily been Shopify, primarily because of the success we see there. And then it's so much easier to prove a return on investment to a website that's actually generating real dollars and selling physical products or digital products. And so we're just all in on the Shopify train at this point.

Yeah, we'll keep going on that route because you're building out kind of a whole product suite which I'm sure will tie into services and be a good interplay between both right now for the Shopify ecosystem.

Yeah, really, you know, as we had done those custom themes year over year for handfuls of brands, you know, the cost of maintenance became expensive from our own internal, you know, revenue standpoint and profit margins like we started to look at like, well, why are we rebuilding the wheel every single time? And, and it's because we love that craft, that crafted side, you know, and kind of, you know, that the anti use the third party themes off the theme marketplace to build a unique branded solution. Fast forward to today. We're actually building our own third party third party theme which is going to be on the Shopify theme marketplace about the time this podcast airs. Our product will be called Praise and really it's just a culmination of building so many themes over the years. We were like, hey, why don't we just focus on building one theme that can serve thousands of entrepreneurs, agencies, designers, everybody that has no to low code resources they can now use Commence studios expertise inside of this praise theme. And really it's been a, it's. This has been in like incubation stage for about two years now. We also were a part of the Shopify theme accelerator program last year in 2022 that was an invite only program. We got rated as one of the best themes they had seen in a while in the design review process. So we're really excited. We're leveraging our design chops there, kind of like our origins but then blending it with the technology capabilities we have now. And yeah, it's just an exciting time. And really, you know the idea of yeah, just delivering one product that we can have focus on. You know, as a visionary, our focus could be hard to manage. We get a lot of different ideas and we want to go down a lot of different R and D and a lot of different rabbit holes. So it really excites me to have kind of a core focus and slight plug here. For Zen Pilot doing our implementation phase prior we had 91 processes that we were trying to manage in our process hub and I've been tallying it up for this new business commenced commerce that we're going to launch here. It'll primarily be focused on building Shopify themes for the theme marketplace exclusively over the next couple of years. There's 16 core processes that I have to maintain and train and manage on. And so that just gets me really excited with like the efficiency from a business structure and then also like how are we empowering? Like continue our mission forward but through a different vessel. It'll be a great resource for a lot of our audience that's listening today. Like you know, if you're, if you have a client that needs an E commerce solution, Shopify is the golden standard in our expert opinion. And praise theme will be live and an option for a lot of food and beverage retailers, distilleries, breweries, a lot of people in the food and beverage space. Cpg. It's a great theme for that category and industry. And if you are lacking code resources, this is a great way to spin up a website in a matter of hours for your clients. So really excited about that.

I love that you guys are doing that. Anybody who's listening to the podcast for a while is probably sick of me talking about leveraged expertise. But how can we take what we're really good at, package it up in a way that we can leverage it and it's super cool, especially in the food and bev space. But really like you guys have built so many different sites and done so many brand identities and you kind of figured out, you know, you get to see like you were saying, the benefit of Shopify or working with E Comm clients is you get to, you know, prove ROI or conversion lift on those, on those platforms a lot easier than in the B2B longer sales cycle space. So you're able to package up a lot of what you've learned, a lot of the best practices and say, hey, here's how this thing gets played out. You still have the customization options and tweak it to make it look and feel like what you want it to look and feel like, but you get to bake some of that stuff into the products that you're producing there. So I think that's a really smart move for you all and I'm excited to see that launch and continue to grow. I know you also like along the lines of how folks who are listening might be able to benefit from what you all are building. You've also worked with, you've got a couple different agency partners or a handful of different agency partners who you've worked with as well. How have those relationships come about and what does that look like? Who might be a good fit to partner with Comet Studio?

Yeah, thanks for asking that. A lot of strategic alliances that we've built over the years are for larger agencies. And really, you know, my whole model here at Command Studio has been almost the anti agency model. When I had worked at other agencies, it was really, we were outsourcing the illustration, we were outsourcing the photographer, we were outsourcing the web development or the web designer. And so I wanted to create this multidisciplinary platform of those true creatives at heart that can come in and craft amazing, unique solutions. And that's what set us apart. And all these other agencies don't have those capabilities. So they want, you know, they want that trending illustration style, they want that art directed photo shoot, they want that award winning web design solution and their scalability. These agencies that are 50, 60, 80 people, they have a whole different challenge of resource management than we do as a smaller bespoke agency. And so they're able to come in and partner with us on brand identity, web design, illustration, creative direction. And we see ourselves as collaboration over competition. So Owning that mindset of we are partners, whether it's with, you know, a direct consumer brand or an agency. Like, we truly want to understand your business and KPIs and have shared goals together. And our success is going to be your success. And oftentimes we're working with the creative director at these other agencies. They kind of have a set version vision or a style that they like of ours, and it becomes a very collaborative approach where they're managing a lot of the process. They. They're outlining clear deliverables for our team to function within. And. And we can apply our own processes to those deliverables internally. And so it takes. It takes a lot of, yeah, just great team effort and we've seen a lot of great success. You know, there's a partner of ours that's known as, like, the Web Design Agency of Nevada, and we designed their website for them and they just had raving reviews about the process that we had managed. The uniqueness, kind of getting outside of the weeds and bringing in, you know, some. Some fresh talent to the situation to offer, like, a unique solution that's crafted well.

So, yeah, that's awesome. Well, if you're listening and looking for a partner in those areas, definitely reach out to Matt and the team at Comments. I wanted to bug you on some, like, EOS operational stuff. I think the point you brought up about processes and just how easy it is for processes to kind of spiral. Like, not necessarily spiral, but they kind of like multiply organically very quickly when you start adding new, new ideas and new things into what you're working on. What have so from implementing eos, what have some of the biggest takeaways or biggest celebrations, biggest wins been over the last couple years?

Yeah, just really having a rhyme to the reason. The rhythmic meeting cadences have been really powerful. Everything from our Level 10 meetings to daily huddles to quarterly planning, annual planning, it's really just brought a mentality of planning to our team. Whereas before we used to be running, rolling with the punches and trying to not get knocked out and saying yes to everything. And we had a lot of things slipping through the cracks for years and we were able to handle it. And ultimately my former partner got burnt out and I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, you know, I don't ever want that to happen to me or anybody else on this team. And how can we really provide a structure to our organization that we don't have to invent? You know, there's a lot of MBAs out there. I'm an art school dropout, you know and so it's, it's really, I've learned business off the streets and through great organizations like the Entrepreneur Organization, several business coaches and so EOs just really fell in line with a lot of that kind of DIY mentality that we had. But it was, it was packaged up nicely and we self implemented it and kind of made it our own. We are pretty rigorous in staying fairly true to the system and the toolboxes are there. So outside of the meeting cadences that have really worked well, just really building our team culture and then also like our KPIs and our rocks has been really critical to hold us accountable to what we're focused on, setting that 10 year target, the three year, three years and the one year plan. So I, yeah, I would say the, and just like the mentality of visionary integrator has really stuck well with us. You know, I had a former business partner and ultimately we were two visionaries in the room and it has really helped get a lot of strategic vision but also team culture buy in and those have been like really invaluable tools out of the toolbox itself.

Yeah, that's super cool. All right, I've got three questions I like to throw people here as we, as we turn the corner and head towards home. So you mentioned EO a number of times. Super resource for anybody who's not in eo. This is one that has come up I don't know how many times on the podcast. Probably a couple dozen times on the podcast. How else are you learning? Is it podcasts, books, blogs, what do you turn to for inspiration education around all the facets of running the business.

Absolutely. So my number two strength in Gallup strengths structure is input. So I love just gathering information. Everything. Yeah, from daily newsletters, I'm constantly reading things in my inbox to books. I really, I really value the off screen time inside of a book. The Power of Habit is one of the best books I've ever read by Charles Duhig. Just really transformational from a personal habit structure to societal and company structure habits and team habits. And as far as other inputs, it's hard to say like one resource, you know, like, you know, the Shopify partners resource is great to stay on top of the ecosystem that we're heavily invested inside of. If you ever need any knowledge about E commerce or Shopify, from everything from storefronts to 3PL, erp, Shopify just has a, a rich database and knowledge I constantly love to learn within and that kind of touching eo. You mentioned you've had a couple other guests here. I had a business coach at one point, about five years ago. He's like, matt, go try out this EO thing. If it's not worth it to you, I'll buy you a steak dinner. And it's about 17, 1800 bucks a year. And I did it for, I've been doing it for five years now. And the accelerator program has a structure of where you get two local coaches in your local chapter that are paired up within an accountability group of peers. And then you have quarterly learning days where they fly in an outside coach to facilitate the learning days, the cash day. Strategy, people and execution are the four themes. And their mentality is very similar to the EOS traction system. If you guys love traction, you love scaling up. It's really a great foundation and curriculum that is structured and has its own velocity behind it. But it's really been transformational to have that network of other entrepreneurs that are rolling up their sleeves. They're creating agencies, they're creating product based companies, software companies. Any business that you can think of. There's a global support organization. I call it business therapy. You know, you get that time and space to talk with other peers and mentors, lean into the toolkit that they offer as well. But mostly the relationship side of things has been very priceless for me in that, in that way, in state of mind there as far as tools or recommendations. You know, oftentimes as you know, executives, agency leaders, agency owners, we can be kind of lonely at the top, especially if you're not in that integrator, visionary pairing yet, you know, sometimes there's not anybody to, to speak about some of the key challenges that you faced in business. And I would say EO has saved our business a handful of times based off of the tools and curriculum there. And EOS is being one of those outputs of being a part of the. The entrepreneurs organization.

Yeah. So, yeah, that's awesome. All right, next question. I used to ask all the time, you know, like, hey, what are some of the. Some of your favorite tools? Yeah, I recently just switched that question to what? Are there any service providers who stand out to you and what have you taken away from them that you've been able to apply to your own business? You mentioned, you know, you've handed off the CFO stuff, so I'm not sure if that's an example, but are there any service providers that you've worked with that you feel like, hey, this is an outstanding experience and outcome and what, what has made that impactful?

Yeah, I mean, there's, yeah, there's been very limited experiences for us because we've always been very bootstrapped and DIY in that scenario. You know, we do have a great virtual CFO company called Vast. They're actually a client of ours as well. But Vast cfo, they primarily focus on accounting services. We helped reposition them for restaurateurs. They're doing over a million dollars a year. So if you guys have any restaurant clients out there in the food and beverage space, they're Vast cfo. They're a great solution. They've been our virtual CFO for about three years now, providing a lot of strategy insights to our accounting and our cash flow to leverage off of kind of your older question of tools. And my last answer to what has been really instrumental in our business. Float app is a cash flow forecasting tool that has literally saved our business. You know, in 2017, we had some cash flow issues where we weren't able to run payroll. We had no visibility into it. We had to furlough some people in the EO classroom. Literally the next day was a cash themed learning day. And like, oh, here's how you do cash flow forecast on a spreadsheet. And I'm like, I hate spreadsheets. I'm a visionary here. Come on, let's go. There's got to be an app for this. And I found Flow app and that was in 2017. I use it almost daily, but definitely weekly now as part of my cadence to have visuals into our cash flow forecast. So that tool paired with our virtual CFO is just a really strong vertical of where I can kind of let go of that, you know, finance department of our org chart.

Yeah.

And then just in pure candid share here, and huge thanks to you and your vision for your company, I'm constantly telling my team, after interfacing with your team and doing an implementation of ClickUp with zenpilot, that I've been truly blown away. And this is an honest, authentic response here. Like I've been truly blown away by your team's capabilities and the way that you guys do account management and customer service thought leadership. It has really inspired us to get our ducks in the row. Honestly, it's, it's. I'm constantly reflecting back through that 12 week engagement that our teams were collaborating together from a service based firm to a service based firm. And there's still lots of lessons to be learned that we're still kind of cherry picking and figuring out how do we be that way, you know, and, and so zenpilot has been a phenomenal experience to just learn like osmosis, like pure osmosis, like, this is gold standard. Like, let's be that. And that has by far been the best service to service based experience I've had.

I appreciate you saying that and that's, that's awesome to hear. There should be, I think what you said is like kind of the secret value of Zen Pilot, that I want to be there and something that we're pushing hard on. And I think the team has, has really stepped up in this way and continues to step up in this way. And that used to come from, you know, a hard push of like, hey, my vision is that people are getting the value they anticipate out of it, but that there is a lot of osmosis. Like, oh, I'm just witnessing a different onboarding experience. Like, wow, we should take elements of this. And part of that is just like we get to work with so many teams and we should see what the best of the best do. That should become part of our habits and practice. But what's been really cool is that that's become like a huge driver of the, that like that's not the team, that's not me. I don't, I'm, I'm out of the deal. Like my job is to not do any end runs, to use any phrase, and get involved on the, on the delivery side, but still had to run with it. And to see that that's possible for a team to kind of adopt that and be like, hey, how can we provide exceptional service? Push people to the outcome that they anticipated, but also kind of have the, the experience of working with us is as educational as the actual teachings that we're doing, hopefully. So I think. And that's something we can all strive for, like in, in any business. Certainly agencies have a big opportunity to influence how internal teams operate as well. Coming off of that final question that I'll grill you with here is what's your number one tip for other agency operators, other folks who are in your shoes? You've mentioned a lot of good ones already, but if you had to sum.

It up, yeah, really just be fearless, like go forward, be daring. Try something that, you know, other people aren't doing. You know, there's a lot of thought leadership out there, but I believe that all of us are enough and that like, we are the ones that are taking the risks out here day to day to, to build a team culture, to offer what amazing services to our clients and our partners and yeah, just believe in, believe in ourselves and like the ultimate why we started these agencies beyond you know the, the metrics and the KPIs and the profitability and you know, to really enjoy our day to day and the purpose that we provide to others and that is, that is valued. And it can be hard during, you know, challenging times to remember that client turnover, economic turnover, you're not alone in any of this. And you know, really I believe that what we do is, is very arduous and you know, client cycles and, and being in like if we are in the weeds of delivery at times it can be hard to get that 30,000 foot view. So take care of ourselves. You know, I, I love to hop on my bike to get that 30,000 foot view. It's, it's my meditation, it's my, my way to disconnect from the screen where we spend a lot of our time delivering and leading and building teams and setting vision. And so I would say the number one thing is just make that time for yourself and believe in your vision.

Yeah, that's awesome. Be fearless. That's a great succinct phrase for it. That's awesome. Well Matt, this has been super fun to do together. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for highlighting what you're building and lessons you're learning comments Studio and with comments commerce as well. We're excited to follow along on that journey. Anywhere that you'd point folks. So you know, we'll have the website and stuff linked up but anywhere else that we should send folks who are interested in learning more.

Yeah, you can go to Commence Studio or follow us on LinkedIn or Instagram. We also have an active dribble account as well if you want to stay on top of Franklin Fresh designs and, and kind of some of the solutions that we're providing for other agencies or other businesses. Would love to have you guys join and thanks for watching today and allowing me to be part of your journey.

Awesome. All right, Matt. Well, thank you for joining us today on Agency Journey.

Thank you.