330 - Lessons from a 7-Figure Agency Owner (who's not burned out) with Greg Merrilees
10 Jun 2024 · 64 min
Greg Merrilees built a seven-figure web design agency without burning out. He shares how he pivoted from T-shirt design, handles unlimited revisions profitably, and structures partnerships to keep his team sustainable.
Hey friend, real quick before we dive in, if you're enjoying this podcast, I think you would really like my newsletter. It is completely free. Every Sunday at noon Eastern I send a weekly email to you that will give you a free strategy or a tip or a success story or something that's working with my members in Web Designer Pro to help you grow your web design business. You can sign up today for free when you go to joshhall Co newsletter. It's a perfect complement to the podcast and and when you sign up today for free, I'm going to give you a few bonuses including my brand new revenue calculator. This is a way for you to set up your packages, your pricing and set your revenue target based off of your goals for your business. And I'm going to send you my top five newsletters over the first five days when you sign up again completely free joshall Co newsletter or the link below. So just let me know where to send all those goodies to you.
Thinking about where your clients hang out, but also potential partners. So yeah, we do have everything that you just mentioned, plus copywriters and you know, photographers and everything in an ecosystem of what a business will need to get a website live. Whether it's downstream of you know, the website or upstream like after they do the website they might need SEO or whatever.
Right.
And so what we've done, what I did was I did a lot of like joint webinars for the these experts for their clients or their communities. And so it's a private webinar. So I would you know, just build a relationship with them and a either get on their podcast where they interview me or B yeah, just build that relationship. And we may have already designed their website or some of their clients websites and then we jump on a, a private webinar for just for their community where we I review their websites basically and give them feedback. So that's kind of how I built those relationships. Welcome to the Web Design Business podcast with your host Josh hall, helping you build a web design business that gives you freedom and a lifestyle you love.
Great to have you here my friend for this one. And I say this a lot but I really, I always mean it but I really, really mean it on this one because we are about to hear from A7Amulti seven figure web design agency owner who's not burned out. And that is amazing because I've met a lot of agency owners over the years, particularly those who are running legitimate like six and seven figure agencies who maybe have a team of 20 plus people and I can tell you most of them are completely burnt out or they're just kind of grumpy or more commonly they've sold their agency altogether. But there are some amazing agency owners who have done it right. And one of those is with us today. This is Greg Merrilies, who I am so excited to have on the show. I've actually been looking forward to this for like years, like two or three years. Greg and I have a similar business coach in James Schramko. Excuse me. So that's how I got introduced to Greg, which you'll hear about here in this episode. And as I got to know him, he actually does the design work for James and, and as I just was kind of creeping on his website, I realized they have it going on and they're doing a lot of things right. The name may sound familiar. His agency is called studio1design.com. I actually feature it in a couple of my courses as a really good example for conversion based design. Really strong messaging and copy. And what's really cool about this is we get to hear from a seven figure agency owner who isn't burned out on exactly how he runs his business. We're going to get into how he started, how he started getting clients, how he built core partners and relationships with other service providers who, because he doesn't do everything, he's not a full blown digital marketing agency, but he has a lot of key partnerships. You'll learn how to do that for yourself. You'll learn how to focus on the core services you want to do that's most profitable. You'll learn a little bit how to find and hire team members, which he's done exceptionally well. And maybe most importantly, how to stay profitable and how to keep a team together of 20 plus employees. Even if you don't want to be a full blown agency owner. If you're like me and you like the solopreneur route with a small, lean and mean team, everything you'll learn here from Greg will filter down to whatever size business you want. So I'm so excited to have Greg here. He has a free resource for you after this one. Make sure to go to studio1design.com Josh. There's a free quiz that him and his team put together for you that's going to show you how to convert more of your website visitors into hot leads. And I'll just say this, if you're going to sign up for a freebie from somebody, why not do it from somebody who is legitimately a seven figure agency owner? You can learn for free from him. Like, that's the beautiful. One of the many beautiful things about this podcast. So I'm pumped. I hope you're pumped. Here's Greg. Let's learn from somebody who is making multi seven figures but not burned out. Greg, it's so good to finally have you on the podcast, man. I told you before we hit record, I have been admiring your work, admiring your agency ever since I joined James Schramko's membership. And I was like, who is the web designer who did his site? And then. And I have almost looked up to you as a mentor in a lot of ways, whether you do it or not. So, so excited to have you on the show, man.
Likewise, man. Yeah, I love your podcast. I really think you're. You're perfect for going from web designer to teaching people. That's obviously your passion and it shows through your content. So, yeah, I enjoy your podcast. I think it's great.
You have a very established agency. I mention it, I think in two or three of my courses is like a really good example in the way of content structure, best UX and design practices, but also messaging and copywriting. It's really the full package and it's a very, it looks like a very sustainable agency from what I've seen over the years. It's not like I've seen you go up and dip down and I've really seen you stay the course. I'm on your email list. I see what you do and all your ends of marketing, but it didn't, you know, I know it didn't start like this. Take us back if you would. I'd love to hear where this started for you. Did you, were you a freelancer? Did you have the idea to have a big agency or even a small agency one day? What. Take us back if you would, just briefly to the beginning of this of Studio One.
No problem. We actually, it hasn't been smooth sailing at all. Like, I actually started this business in the year 2000, but we were T shirt designers and we did a lot of point of sale and just general graphics for consumer products, right. Using a lot of license characters and, you know, movie characters and things like that. And so then basically because we, we dealt mainly with the wholesale industry for clothing in, I don't know, probably 2012 or thereabouts, the. The retailers in, like around the world in, in fashion pretty much went vertical, meaning they squeezed out the wholesalers.
Right.
So. And they just went to China direct, did all their design and manufacturing and just sold it directly into their own stores. So all of a sudden the wholesalers were dropping like flies and they were our cl really at the time, I had a young family. We just bought a new house, had a mortgage and all that sort of stuff. We had, you know, a, an office. We had like six full time designers at the time. And we were going down big time. So it was very difficult. And so at that point I went to the retailers direct, but they wanted to pay in 90 days and take 5% off if they do pay within 90 days. So cash flow was just going to be wrecked if we did that model. And I just found podcasts online and started listening to, you know, various podcasts. And one in particular, the two podcast hosts said that their logos suck. And I thought, oh wow, there's an opportunity to say thanks for this awesome content. So design them a logo. And when, when we design logos, we kind of think, will it look cool on a T shirt? Because that was my background.
Right.
And so yeah, they, we send them the logo. And one of the guys, Ezra Firestone, is New York based. He has like a $65 million E commerce business and very. And he teaches people how to do E commerce these days. But back in.
I am such an Ezra fan.
Yeah, he's amazing. Yeah, so back then it was quite small, but yeah. And he just, you know, sent this, you know, awesome know, dang, it makes us look like a fancy softball team. And then we just started building a relationship, jumped on a call with him and, you know, we started designing for him and he had an agency where he white labeled our design team to offer websites to his clients. And he started building a community that way. And it was a long time ago, but now, yeah, he's got a massive community and he has, you know, also probably 100 people on his staff at the moment. But yeah, so that was one thing. And the other. The other podcast host was James Schramko, as you mentioned. That's how we met.
Right.
And so he's a business coach. And I thought, well, I'm going to hire him as a business coach. He came to my office and he pretty much said, like, why do you have this office? I said, well, you know, we've got all these designers out there. We're just sitting in the boardroom and then we've got all these local clients that are just Melbourne based, which is the city where I'm from. And he said, well, what if I could show you a better way? At the time he had like, I think 70 people that worked remotely and he surfs twice. Twice a day. Right. And he's got a pretty cool business. And he wrote the book Work Less, Make More, and that's the way he lives his life. So hired him as my business coach. And from there, he just taught me everything about how to grow a business. And he coaches all sorts of businesses, and, you know, it was really just how to build a team, how to market yourself, you know, and at the time, I was really scared to get out of my comfort zone, to get on stage, to speak on podcasts, all that stuff. It was terrible, right? And you look back, you go, wow, you know, sort of come a long way. But, yeah, so he had me speak at his stage, and then Ezra had me speak at his stage at his E commerce event in San Diego. And our name just kind of spread, you know, And I just think if it wasn't for. And I guess this is a, you know, something for the listener, the web designer out there. If you have something that's unique to your skill set that you can send to somebody that has your clients, like business owners or whoever, whatever niche you're in, and send them something that's unique.
Right.
Not just a PDF download that everybody can get everywhere, but what's unique to you that they're going to find valuable and build a relationship with those people that have your clients, essentially. And that's pretty much what we did to now, I think we design. You know, we've designed over 2,000 websites, and we've got, you know, 27 people on the team. And, yeah, it's kind of from that as a starting point to lead, which led to where we are now.
And what were. What year was that timeframe when you met Ezra and then subsequently James?
Yeah, it was 2013. Yeah.
Okay. Also, just over a decade. You've had it. Wow. So really. So Studio one is. It's just over a decade, essentially.
Well, yeah, well, 2000 was when we started, but we just designed T shirts. But it was the same brand.
Right, Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We pivoted to website design. Yeah. In 2013, where we still do brand. We've always done branding, but was website design was the big pivot? And by the way, back then, we never offered coding. I. You know, I'm not a coder at all. And I know you say to your students, good to understand coding at a very basic level. I have no knowledge. I just say no. And so. And I didn't want to start a coding business at all either. And that's because, you know, I'm A designer by heart. And I love design, passionate about design, but the technical side of it is just a headache for me. And so we just held off hiring a developer or developers. We've got 10 of them now, but for years, because we just wanted to do the design piece. And you can do that and you can partner with other agencies to white label that side of the business if you don't want to do that. But we didn't do that at the time. We just said, here's the design, go find your own coders. Right. We hadn't built partnerships with other web dev agencies or anything at that point, so we just offered design. So, yeah, that's kind of how we started. And then, yeah, gradually after, you know, James Franco gave me some advice, just, just hire one developer, see how it goes, you know, and then we just gradually built that team into 10 developers today.
I'm so glad you mentioned that, Greg, because yeah, it's an important message to hear, especially for folks who aren't developers by nature or at heart. If they do have an interest in design, copywriting, messaging, other aspects of web design, you are the shining example that you can have a very successful agency and not know a lick of code. I'm curious though, to pivot to websites. Was it just you, like, how did you get by essentially without knowing code or did you immediately start to hire and partner up with folks as quickly as possible, development and coding?
Well, I mean, from like the way we got business was being very like results focused. Right. And we still do that today. And the other thing we offer is unlimited design revisions. We've always done that.
Right.
So they're two things that, you know, a lot of designers don't offer. They're not conversion focused or results focused like you say, and they don't offer unlimited. They might do three rounds of revisions. And so that's a starting point, right? So we got a lot of business just from that and getting our reputation out there amongst these, you know, business coach communities. And then so James said, just hire one developer. We hired one developer from the Philippines and that went really well. And then we hired like the second and third and fourth within probably a year, a year and a half. And it was generally through that developer who had a community of developers that he knew. And by the way, we, you know, We've always used WordPress for building websites. Back then it was using Genesis, the Genesis framework, which was all we knew. And that's what my business coach said to you. So I don't think there was divi or you know, elementor or any of those other builders back then.
But yeah, it was probably, you were probably in it like right before page builders started to take off.
Exactly, exactly, yeah. And so really it was just hiring people one at a time. Just, it was kind of slow growth, you know, and it was still hard for me because I have no idea about coding. But realistically, you get feedback from clients, you figure out if they're happy and then you just iterate based on feedback. And that's pretty much how we kept improving our process and building the team and putting on a dev team manager and a customer support person for each of our divisions, design and dev and then somebody that does qa and it's just constantly feeding all of this client feedback into our process. We partner with a lot of SEO agencies as well, which we get a lot of referrals from, but we also send work to them. It works both both ways. And so they taught us a lot as well about, you know, the back end, how things should be set up technically so that the websites rank. Obviously we're conversion focused, but if their website's not ranking then it makes no difference. We want them to get traffic and conversions. That's why we partner with SEO. But yeah, just bit by bit over time we just gradually, you know, improved our process and I still have no idea, you know, how to code, but I don't need to basically.
So your, your superpower since day one is design and conversion, is that right? Is that fair to say?
Exactly, yeah. So initially like when I found podcasts also, you know, discovered audiobooks and, and things like that. So I just focused a lot on understanding how people think. You know, Robert Cialdini's influence has been a massive influence in my life. And you know, various other books, Spin Selling by Neil Rackham, Building a story brand, you know, Donald Miller, those three books are really us off to, to focus on, you know, conversion focused design and that really guided us and we implement all these things now. You mentioned copywriting before. We don't actually offer copyrighting. We have professional copywriting on our websites and all of our clients websites but we partner with professional copywriters to do that. So yeah, because we just want to be best in field and we're passionate about design and so that's all we want to be known for. Even today we give clients the option to get it their website built elsewhere. You know, I mean, you know, we offer E commerce as well. So obviously most of them are built on Shopify and we don't offer Shopify Yeah.
Yeah, I was, I was kind of curious how much of your, your projects are all in house. Like people and partners working under you, like you're building out for the work versus how much is done by you but then referred out to, to others.
Yes.
Percentage. I'm kind of curious about that.
Most of what we do is, is in house. We do have a Shopify development partner that we label so you know, it's under our umbrella brand. But yeah, that's probably E Commerce is probably, I don't know, 20% of what we do. So you know, 20% would be Shopify. Sorry, even within E Commerce, maybe out of the e Commerce clients, 80% percent would be Shopify, 20% would be WooCommerce basically. And if we build a Woocommerce website, which is really just to check out on WordPress, then yeah, we, our developers will do that in house. So yeah, all of the design work will, you know, will completely have our in house team do that and all of the WordPress we do in house. But we do give the client the option to get it built elsewhere if they've got their own developers, some of them do. Or if they just want to, you know, find their own developers for whatever reason basically. But yeah, I want to dig in that 20% of our projects would get coded elsewhere.
Gotcha. I want to dig into how you've developed these partner relationships because this sounds key to what you've built over the past decade. Plus for the web design side of things. I, I don't want to overlook though this unlimited revisions thing. In the words of our friend James Schramko, that scares the hell out of me. Unrelated, unlimited revisions. How do you manage that? How could I know the scope of web design projects? I mean, and that's a killer for a lot of people. How do you, how do you do that? How do you get by it practically and profitably?
Yeah, I mean like I'll come back to the partner question, but yeah. So with unlimited limited design revisions, you need a really good process to start with. You want to minimize the amount of time it's going to get you. Sorry. To design something that the client will like.
Right.
So there's a few, few things we do before we get to the design phase. And one is, I mean for a start, we want to make sure they're a good fit and all that. So we offer like a 15 minute call. It's not with me, it's with somebody else on my team. And then that's just to figure out if we're a good fit. We also offer like just send in an estimate, just a ballpark. It might be a range, you know, whatever that is, might be a 30% difference between the low and the. But at least it gives them an idea of what to expect. And at that point they can decide they're way out of my price range or you know, that's fair enough and that's within my budget. So we do that first. Then after we send them the ballpark and. Or if they do the 15 minute call then. And if they're committed to that and they want the next step, then we send them our design questionnaire. Now this is a 40 question design questionnaire that's super detailed and takes most clients like two to three hours. It's a real pain in the ass to fill out. Right.
Is this before or after? After they've paid you?
Before, yeah, before, yeah, good point. By the way, we do offer like a paid strategy session as well. If, you know, if they just really want some advice on how they like to pick our brains essentially.
Right.
Which I don't like that term but. But yeah, for that, if they just want to do that, then they can do a paid strategy session with me. We value that at $1,000, but I often give them a discount. It might be half that.
Right, Nice.
That's a huge. By the way, just to double click on that real quick. That is a huge thing that's going on right now that's working really well from a lot of my students. And something that man, I wish I would have done is to have some sort of. I think the post popular term for that is paid discovery or paid strategy, paid consulting. And then yeah, you could just use that as a credit to the project. But what I mean, sounds like it's working for you. It sounds like a great way to make sure somebody's serious.
Exactly. And it could be either one of those ways, you know, like if they, if you really just get something, get the sense that they just want to get ideas from you, then we offer the paid strategy. Yeah. So but if they're just ready to, if they're not scared off by the price, they understand we may have had a chat with them already. We understand that we're probably a good fit for each other. Then we'll do the 40 question questionnaire without charging anything at this point. Depends how they found us as well. Obviously, you know, there's various ways we get business, but we can talk about that later. And so then. And if I think they're a Good fit and it's worth investing an hour of my time. Then I will jump on that call. And that call is like, I'll probably do an hour of research before the call based on the way they answered the questionnaire. And when I come prepared for that call in a way that just blows their mind. Like, I watch their videos, their YouTube, whatever they've got on their website. I'll listen to their podcasts. I'll do everything I need to to get to know them on a more personal level.
Right.
And then obviously I review everything about their website just from a conversion perspective and have a look at, say, built, with how it's built. You know, obviously there's usually a lot of plugins and just see what platform they're on. We also just run it through like an XML sitemap tool to see which pages they have. And then obviously there's a lot of questions on the questionnaire as well, which maybe to do with marketing, there might be a whole bunch of pages that we can't see on their website that are obviously hidden from Google, et cetera. Right. So there's a lot that we need to know. And so what I do is prepare for, for that in a way that just blows them away. And when we jump on that call, it's all about them. It's not about me at all. They only care about what's in it for them, obviously. So, you know, that whole call is just offering strategies and suggestions and showing them examples, especially because we've designed so many websites of other websites that we've designed that are similar, you know, similar niche, et cetera. So by the end of the call, they're really clear on the, you know, the, the way that we're going to design their website. And by that point we send them the final proposal, which we use better proposals for that, which is really cool software. We customize that proposal. We had a lot of social proof into that proposal video into that proposal, and it's really clear on what they get, what's out of scope, our terms and the payment and all that sort of stuff.
Right.
And they just need to sign that if they want to go ahead. But just doing that little piece as well, rather than just saying, whip out your credit card and pay us, like, it's just the whole process, it takes out the ickiness of asking for money. It's just, you know, we said they know what to expect roughly from the ballpark. And after the call, we send them a supporting email with a proposal that really outlines what's in the proposal. But we might add extra things like we'll give them video structure, you know, like all the videos that we mentioned. We'll give them the strategies that we mentioned for the funnels for various things from warming up cold leads to, you know, the various steps in between to a sale essentially. But yeah, there's a lot we offer and so it's really building trust on that call. And then most of the time like our percentage rate from doing that call to a sale is super high. Like 80 plus percent.
Yeah, yeah. Because you've already weeded out a lot of the tire kickers and folks who are just not a good fit by that point.
Right, exactly. So it's worth my time to do those calls and just put in as much effort as possible.
So that makes sense. A better process expectation, deliverables. All those things are in place before revisions get, you know, you get back into feedback and revisions. I guess in a way I technically did unlimited revisions too. I. Mine was just kind of a hybrid to where I would say we can do as many revisions as you want in the deadline. Like in the, in the, in the scope of the deadline. Do you do that as well as far as like a, an end date for the project or a go live date?
No, we don't. So basically they just have to approve the proposal within a month and then once we get started then from that point. Yeah, it can take. I think we do have something in our terms that says six months but honestly we don't mind if it takes longer. Like we just as soon as they send us revisions, we just, you know, work on the revisions in the next couple of days and send it back. But yeah, but another thing actually just to mention part of our process to reduce the amount of revisions and we really don't mind because we have a design team in the Philippines. It's obviously, you know, a lot cheaper than having a western design team.
Right.
So we can afford to have designers spend more time. But we also know roughly how many hours we spend on each website project in the design phase and the dev phase. So our pricing kind of matches that being profitable, you know, overall over. Because we do so many projects, you may break even on the occasional project where the clients milk the revisions. Right. And but overall it's still profitable. Yeah, but so one thing we do as well to reduce the revisions is we have our brand director create a mood board first. And this will be every. It's a world class mood board. Like it's really a very detailed that.
Any even the most basic mood board or you know, type of designs you like that is so instrumental in reducing feedback and revisions.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely so and it's an extra cost as well. But we just give that, you know, them an option in the proposal to choose that. But we'll explain and show them on the call exactly what they can expect out of the mood board. But it's super detailed. Like it's a 10 page PDF that goes, has a page for each section. Like from just the overall mood that we're trying to create, the color palette, the color breakdown percentages and obviously contrast, call to action and things like that, to the font use, to the way where it might be font pairing, to the way we're going to integrate the fonts with the graphics, the call to actions, things like that, to custom illustrations, to photography direction. If it's E commerce, there's product photography direction as well as photography direction for, you know, the business owner, if it's a service business, et cetera, into page layouts. It's a social media graphic direction and just general graphic elements that we're going to inject into the design to give it brand personality because we really do offer custom design. I know you've interviewed other people that have very systemized, productized offers, but we don't do that at all. However, I might add that in the back end we do have templated inner pages. Never homepage, but inner pages. And then when we get to the dev, we're also starting with the previous websites inner pages. So it does save a bit of time. But the clients don't see that.
Right.
Oh, that's so glad you said that. Yeah, because it, I mean it can work always just custom obviously has the, the, the kind of issues that you might expect with a custom website, mainly with revisions and content collection and feedback and back and forth. But it sounds like like you said, you know, if you nail the process and everything leading up to actually doing the design and knowing what's expected, that can help that. And to your point, I agree, I've said it in a lot of my courses too. Customize the homepage and then. Yeah, like a services page or an about page or a contact page. You could customize parts of it if you wanted to, but that can be fairly productized or templatized. Unless they're requesting it. Yeah, like they look at the homepage. All clients look at the homepage.
Yep, that's right. Yeah. And you know, the argument as well for the designer is for the internal pages. Like the reason we Design them in this way is because it works, it gets results. So as long as the branding and all the elements and the social proof and whatever's relevant is just customized to that client, but the overall structure stays the same because that's what works.
Right.
And so that's really the selling point. So it's nothing to hide, it's just a way of you making, you know, more profit at the end of the day. Really. Yeah.
We did a website for a barber shop one time and I remember the owner was a little tricky to understand what he was wanting in the first place. And then we sent with the first version of the design and he was like, I just. I'm not feeling it. And he's like, I just. I hate to be a pain, but he's like, I really just want to try something different. And what I essentially got out of him was that it was a white background and he wanted dark mode. That's essentially what he wanted. So I talked about Jonathan, my designer, who's also an Aussie, and I was like, you know what? Let's just inverse everything. Let's background black with, you know, the. Obviously the inverse fonts and then maybe tweak a couple of the headings and. But the structure and the layout, I was like, I think is solid, so let's send that over. We sent it the next day and he was like, oh, my gosh, it's amazing. This is so much better. He's like, you get the work you did on this is amazing. I don't know how you did it so fast. And it was literally just, just mostly just inverse. So sometimes for clients, I think it's those simple changes that to them look so different. But it's just a contrast and hierarchy and design aesthetic that, you know, an average Joe who doesn't know design wouldn't think anything of.
Yeah, totally, absolutely. And if you think as well, I've heard you, you know, you with your students, they have different price points and really enjoyed that survey episode as well. Surprising to hear that that most people charge very little. Right. But.
Oh, I want to talk about that with you. Absolutely, yeah.
And so realistically, if you think about focusing on getting your client a result, a they're going to value that more.
Right.
You obviously need social proof to back that up. But. But yeah, if you offer a template like a. I don't know, a WIX or one of those sort of template style as a starting point, and then the client comes to you, like you just said, and we're going to change it from white to black or whatever. And they want all these changes, they always want changes. And then all of a sudden you go from having a template to a custom when you should have started with custom in the first place, if that's the case, you know.
Yep, totally agree. And that's where I think all those strategies work. As far as having a more templated approach or a productized approach or have a really custom, I think there's a healthy marriage between the two often. Sometimes. But I mean, really with where you're at, it doesn't seem like there's a reason to go productized or templated. You have it working for you. And that's, that's the cool thing and daunting thing about this industry is there's just so many freaking ways to do things and they all work. Like your, your strategy questionnaire, that's like 40 questions. I have one that sounds very comparable, but mine is after they pay. So we have a strategy questionnaire, like, or a kind of a, a quote questionnaire. It's a questionnaire for proposal. But then I don't even talk about design elements or anything like that until they've did the first deposit. So it just goes to show you that that works. That works too. Like it can also be a weed out system for you. So it all works. There's just so many things that work.
True. Yeah. And we don't offer a deposit. We just. You pay up front. That's it.
Okay, so you guys do 100% upfront.
Yeah. For the, for the design phase and then a hundred percent for the dev phase upfront once we get to that.
Yeah. So partnerships.
Yeah.
Obviously a crucial thing for you. It's funny, the, the most common question I get is how do I get clients? And a side question to that is how do I get projects? Because sometimes your own client, that may be what you're looking for, but you also may want to just get projects and work. If you're a new designer wanting to partner up with other agencies or, or have a specialty like you do. I think partnerships are vastly underrated and undervalued. I don't think people for the most part take seriously partnerships just like you've done. And I learned this in my networking group having people like videographers, photographers, digital marketing, people who didn't do websites. They were like my best referral sources. So you're again a shining example of how to do that. How did you go practically about building these relationships though? Did you go, were you DMing people? Were you in meetups. Were you in WordPress groups? Did you go to networking groups?
Yeah.
What did that look like for you?
Yeah, so it's a bit of all of the above. Like for a start it might be, you know, let's say going to an actual event, like a marketing event, that type of thing, which I've, you know, done it quite a few times at James Schramko speaking on stage, things like that. That's one side of it. But then yes, I also have like little communities of groups of mainly business owners or, or marketers, I should say that essentially business owners. I haven't joined any website design groups, just haven't sort of found the need for that. But yeah, so marketing groups, absolutely. Where really it's thinking about where your clients hang out, but also potential partners. So yeah, we do have everything you just mentioned, plus copywriters and photographers and everything in an ecosystem of what a business will need to get a website live, whether it's downstream or of, you know, the website or upstream. Like after they do the website they might need SEO or whatever.
Right.
And so what we've done, what I did was I did a lot of like joint webinars for these experts for their clients or their communities. And so it's a private webinar. So I would, you know, just build a relationship with them and A, either get on their podcast where they interview me or B, yeah, just build that relationship. And we may have already designed their website or some of their clients websites and then we jump on a private webinar for just for their community where we, I review their websites basically and give them feedback. So that's kind of how I built those relationships.
That's beautiful. Yep. It's a, not a hidden strategy, but just a strategy that most people don't think about initially when you're like, oh my gosh, yeah, I have people in my network who I could do a training for their customers. That's key. I, I was in a business coaching program and I did that for them and that's when it hit me, like, why wasn't I doing this for like years? Because this is a primed audience. If anyone works with a business coach or somebody who is like central to a bunch of businesses, you almost don't need to do any other marketing. You could build a healthy, multi six figure business with one lead like that. So that's true.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then that's just one. Like we do get business from a whole range of different sources. So we don't just rely on One avenue. I mean, that's. That's one. Okay. And then we have clients. Our website, like, we do, you know, have. It does rank for various things quite well, even though it's not for local. But yeah, we, you know, our white label page ranks really well. So we have a lot of clients that white label us. And the beauty of that is you just build a relationship once and then, you know, it's not recurring income, but it's recurring projects over time and some of them with us for years. So that's really cool. So that gives us a lot of work. But then on top of that, like, yeah, just getting on podcasts as well. That's what I'm focusing on this year. You know, that's. Yeah, that's huge for getting a lot of cold traffic. We obviously have referral partners. We have like a referral partner page on our website, but it's application only and we don't approve everyone. It's just people that we think will be a good fit. Then we also, you know, obviously have website footer links just to have people check out who designed this website and then it links off to us. We do advertising on social media as well. We do social media content. We have like a social media content manager on our team. Yeah, I guess that's kind of it. But also referrals just from past clients, even coming back or recommending us to others. That's obviously a big part of it, but all of those things. Yeah.
I was just wondering, what was your big driver in the beginning when you started doing websites? What was your main source of getting clients?
Well, I had to pivot basically because, you know, the clothing industry was going down. And now I really found a passion in, you know, online marketing, basically just because of these podcasts that I listen to. And I thought, wow, this is a whole new world. And yeah, I just spent like two years with my head down learning as much as possible and applying it to clients websites and realizing all this stuff works and it just felt so good and I just wanted to do more of that and. And obviously with the help of the business coach, just worked out each step to just slowly grow the business over time and. Yeah, still passionate about it today.
So it was like Ezra. You mentioned Ezra early on, you sent him a design and obviously he wasn't the Ezra Firestone of today, but you kind of. It sounds like you kind of just got in with some really good people at the right time. Is that kind of. Is that fair to say?
In some ways it's definitely fair to say right place, right time. But then you have to do good work obviously, right. Or just stop. So that's why I really wanted to focus on results instead of just doing, you know, good looking designs which I feel like we do and that's kind of, you know, our strength. But it's, it's good looking designs that get results. And so when you work out what gets results and you just keep learning and applying and learning from how you've applied it to websites, getting client feedback and getting, you know, amazing testimonials and case studies, it just feeds you to want to keep, keep going and learning more. Because there's no two businesses are alike that you're designing for. So there's always going to be a different strategy. You don't know what's going to work. You just have to base it on your past experience with similar clients to figure out right this is the best chance of getting this client good results. And so yeah, just apply the more client websites that you design, the more you learn and the more you apply, the more you learn. It's just like an OODA loop, just keeps going up and up, you know, it's there.
Yeah. Were you ever tempted to niche down into one industry or customer?
Great question. I know you, you're a big advocate of niching we call it.
I'm not necessarily because I was a journalist, I, I think it is a double edged sword. But I want to hear from you, like was that ever a temptation for you?
Yeah, absolutely. Look, I think it's good if you're starting out to niche. Right. I think you can really get a lot more traction faster than if you're designing websites for everybody. However, we started the other way around where we just design websites for everyone. But I, that's because we kind of focus on building our reputation first among you know, business communities that all wanted to market their businesses online. And so it didn't really matter at that point if we niched or not. However, what we do now is we niche. Like we just have landing pages like a, you know, very well written with a lot of social proof landing page for E commerce, another one for you know, coaches, personal brands, another one for SaaS businesses, another one like sub niche. Yeah, exactly. For, yeah, for service businesses and agencies. Like we design a lot of websites for other website design businesses, believe it or not.
Right.
So and so yeah, what we just, we find is those pages rank quite well, you know, for people that are searching for that sub niche. And yeah, for us that's, that's really Helped. And it's really good when somebody comes in from one of those landing pages because obviously it's a whole different, different form that it comes in and you know, we've got different, you know, nurture campaigns for each and things like that. So yeah, it's just quite powerful for attracting more clients. And we just picked the four niches that we really love working in as well and that, you know, we can get good results for. So yeah, that's how we.
It reminds me. You're. You're like the web design agency equivalent of. Oh well, you probably know James Rose, right? Content.
Yeah, absolutely. He's awesome.
That. Yeah, Jimmy. So Jimmy, he did the same thing. I don't know if you've seen his site recently, but it's like a page out of that playbook. So yeah, anyone to go to Content Snare and it's, you'll, it'll, it'll look really similar to yours. He did the same thing. Like Constant Snare was, as you probably know, Greg built for web designers initially because Jimmy did come from that world. But then he kept on getting hit up by accountants and law firms and education and finance people. So he did the exact same thing. He had like sub niches and that is really like the perfect hybrid. Again, it goes back to the idea that everything works. You could be a complete generalist. In order to do that well, you've got to have your processes in place and it should really just be about your services and what you do and what you offer. But you can also go hyper niche into just one industry or one avatar or. What I actually think is my preferred approach is what you're doing, which is we work primarily with these types of projects or these type of industries and it's. Yeah, it's a hybrid approach, I guess is the best way to put it. So I love hearing that it's worked for you really well.
Yeah, definitely. And yeah, like you said before, there's not one way to do it. I would just go with your passion, you know, like if you're a web designer listening, what do you. Who do you love serving the most? And yeah, just focus on that. And if you get, focus on getting them a result, then that's what you'll be known for and you'll attract more people in that niche.
Yeah, and a lot of it too can be based off of background. I found I had a student who came from some sector of law enforcement and shocker, their websites and digital presences were horrible. So he took off really fast because he was like the web designer for this particular end of law enforcement. So if you come from a world, you could crush it. If you know people and you know what works, what doesn't work. Speaking into, you know, conversion and design, you probably know what type of copy and messaging resonates because you are in the industry. So that's another way to niche. But you could again, you could do it and still be a generalist too.
That's a good point. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, couldn't agree more.
That's so cool, man. Yeah, I love seeing what is working and what excites you because obviously I think if you got to the point where E commerce projects were just not worth it, even from a design perspective, I imagine, you know, when the. Have you ever had to cut off certain types of projects or, or I guess one question I have for you too because it's kind of the perfect, perfect segue to this. I was wondering how far do you go in your suite of services? Because like you said, you do offer a lot and I know a lot of that are upsells and add ons potentially. But how do you know when you know I've got enough things I could do? When do you. What's the cutoff point for you?
Yeah, look, we just focus on the front end of all of our marketing. We just let people know we offer branding and website design. That's it.
Right.
However, obviously we do coding and you know, but we'll only code websites if we design them. Some people want us to code other designs like nah. And we don't just do revamps of a website, we do a full redesign. It's like we don't tweak things, we just start again because usually you know, they're terrible even if they think they're good. And. And so then after that we offer designer on tap.com, which is really just a recurring service for design.
Right.
So it might be for all of their marketing graphics. We've already worked on their. And by the way, it could be for marketing agencies that uses for repeat clients, sorry, multiple clients. But generally it's for our existing clients that we already know their brand. We've got all their design elements and assets and so really we're just going to create all of their social media marketing and we'll upload to their Canva account. They can use that as templates moving forward and things like that. So yeah, we just, that's one offer. And then from a dev perspective obviously there's just a maintenance pack but we have a couple Options there. One just has some developer time included and the other one doesn't. One thing I want to add, though, is we don't offer hosting. Like, we've, we've never done that. We just recommend WP Engine. Right. And the reason we don't. And I know you say do to your client, to your students, which is cool, but the reason we don't is because we just want. It's one of our selling points when, you know, like a lot of clients will say, I don't want to be stuck to my web designer. You know, it's like, well, we don't. You're not stuck to us. After your website goes live, you have your own hosting. We'll obviously get it live and make sure everything's working, give you a free month of support and all that. But from that point, you have the keys, you have full control to change designers or developers at the drop of a hat. You don't. We don't hold you to ransom in any way. And that is a good selling point. That's why we don't offer it.
Have you found that to help reduce, not churn necessarily, but like, has that helped with making lifetime clients that approach?
It has indeed. Absolutely. Yep. And so, yeah, then, you know, they come back for just little ad hoc things here and there. And, you know, if you, if it's less than half an hour's work, we won't even charge them. But yeah, if they want to go on our maintenance plan, then that's great. You know, it's just the monthly. They can pause, they can cancel at any time.
Yeah. I mean, and the reason, I'm sure you've heard me say this for anyone who hasn't, the reason I recommend offering hosting and maintenance together for every client is because I found in my experience, I was getting the calls anyway and I was like, I need to just freaking charge for this. They're calling me when there's an email issue. I don't even know where their email is or their domain is. Is an issue. So. But to your point, I never, you probably know, like, I didn't come across it as like, if you're going to work with me, you've got to host with me. Otherwise, no go. I always said this is, I recommend it and I'm going to be in your corner. But if you choose to move hosting, you always have that option. If you choose to move your site, no problem. But I do recommend hosting with us just because we know it and we're going to be your. Your support System, so fair enough. That's still my approach on it and again. But it works. It works.
And we do have like an affiliate link when we send people to WP engine, they'll get three months free and we get a commission from that.
There you go.
Yeah.
And it may be different too. I mean, I don't. I'd love to hear about vision and aspirations for you for the next step of all this, but I think the model of hosting your own clients is also one of the best ways to build recurring income if you are a solopreneur or just a couple designers. I mean I had a very, very lean, just few person team and they were all. No one was full time. I, Well, I had one full time designer at one point, but everyone was subcontractors so it suited my business model. With a team of what, 27 you said, right?
Yeah, 27 is what we have currently. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's, you know, that's you're doing a lot of other things proactively that, yeah, may not warrant or need such a push with hosting and maintenance. But as you said, it's also a selling point to be, be really cool about it and chill about it.
Yeah, totally. Yeah.
What are your, what are your dreams or aspirations for the next step here, Greg? I'd love to hear about, I mean, are you really, are you satisfied with where things are at? It seems like it's sustainable. Are you, are you able to have more time to kind of dive into your superpowers and what you want to do? What's the road ahead look like for Studio One?
Sure. So I must admit, during the pandemic, like we live in Melbourne, which was actually the world's most locked down city, we had like 250 something days of lockdown. It was just hell, right. And the government sucks. But anyway, that's another issue. And so because of that I lost a lot of interest in the business. I want to sell the business big time. So I had a couple of brokers in the us, you know, giving us quotes and all this sort of stuff to what they think the business is worth. And it was very appealing, you know, multiple seven figures. And it's like, like, well, I could just throw in the towel. And then I speak to my business coach, he said, well, why don't you hire like a coo etc? And so just somebody to take away all the mundane things that I didn't want to do.
Right.
And so I found somebody and she's in my city. I advertise on LinkedIn. I sent an email to my list and she ends up that she's in my city. And the way I found this person was just asked, you know, people to put in a five minute video and ask them a bunch of questions to answer in the video. And based on that, I thought just her answers and her personality was fantastic. And so she started working for me and it was initially like, I think 25 hours a week. And she was so good and she loved it so much and I loved having her so much that it quickly turned into 40 hours a week. And, and then like a year and a half later, we're at a Christmas party, we're drunk, and she just gave herself a promotion to general manager, which was hilarious. And so from there she's just made such a difference. And it turned around my mindset from wanting to sell the business to really doing our best to just enhance the business, to just keep building the value in it so that whether I sell or not, and I don't want to sell now, right, because I'm working way less. I'm working 20 to 25 hours per week and that's proven because I have rescue time on my computer that tells me I spend a lot of my time, I do things outside of work during business hours these days. And so now we're just constantly trying to improve our offer, our profitability, you know, client satisfaction, retention, all that sort of good stuff. And it's just slowly, slowly working together with Sally, my general manager, to just make sure we're doing all the right things, even down to investing in our team culture, which has been a huge thing. Like we actually had a design manager a couple of years ago who caused some ripples amongst the design team because he was thinking of leaving and it just left a bad taste amongst the designers.
Right.
And we had a couple of new designers join and they left within a month. It's like, whoa, what's going on here? And anyway, Sally found out that he was bad mouthing me and Sally. And so anyway, we, we decided like that was probably my, my fault for not putting enough effort into the culture. So he was gone and we replaced him. But then what I did was, was really invested in the culture, went to the Philippines to meet all of our team. We had like 20, I think it was only 22 of the Filipinos that went, but plus took my Australian team over there as well and we hired a big villa and we had everybody stay there and, you know, we had the head staff and they cooked food for us and we did Karaoke with every meal and we did some water sports down the local beach in Boracay. And we just saw all these things that just built the, you know, the team morale and relationships amongst the designers, the devs, and what an incredible result that's made and such a difference to our business. And everyone's so happy working there and nobody's left since and, you know, so all those things are just little things that make me feel like we're heading in the right direction, we're improving our business and I just want to keep improving it until a point where, you know, it's so valuable that I get the choice to sell or not. But, you know, at this point, it's the definite no. But who knows, you know, if it's so valuable, somebody offers me 10 mil, then why not?
Are you going to do the Studio One annual retreat every year then?
Yes, exactly. Yeah. It's so important. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I would say, I mean, gosh, for a team of that size, absolutely. You gotta have some unity there. I'm sure a lot of people barely even interact with each other at that. Exactly that level of folks. So it's probably like, oh, Lisa, I seen your name, but I didn't know what you do. So.
Yeah, that's cool. That's exactly right. It was a lot of.
Yeah, well, I, I definitely going down to the Australian Open is on my bucket list.
Oh, yeah, you love your tennis.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I will definitely let you know whenever we get down there because that sounds. Yeah, that sounds amazing, man.
That's in Melbourne, my city.
Yes.
Yeah.
Looks awesome. I don't know the government stuff, but by God, I say it looks great as long as we're open. So, yeah, what you mentioned your company is, is potentially valued at multi. Seven figures a lot.
Yeah.
As a. As a company that is not solely focused on recurring revenue and subscriptions, what's most valuable to you? Like, what would be the most valuable thing with your model? Is it the process? Is it the customer list? Is it the proof? Is it your team? Is it all the above?
Yeah. So what the brokers say is it's the customer list. It's obviously our process and what we deliver, but, like, our income is very consistent. Consistent. You know, like it has literally gone up on average 10 to 15% for the last, you know, seven years, thereabouts.
Right.
Which is a good amount of growth. It's not too fast and they find that really appealing. But because it's so consistent, there's a lot of value in that it doesn't drop, the revenue doesn't drop. So like I said, that's because of all of those a. We do good work but all of those different channels of getting business, if we just relied on one, one like SEO or ad paid ads, like you turn that off or your account gets banned or whatever, then you're gone. So it's not recurring income, but it is, you know, really good solid amount of income and it's a lot of repeat clients as well as referrals as well as all those other things, white label and you name it, you know. But yeah, recurring, major focus. But if we can build our recurrent, then it'll be even more valuable.
Yeah, to your point though, even with your model, you got processes, proof team. I mean if you're not going to have a decent amount of recurring, then that's what makes a business valuable for exiting eventually. When I sold mine, it was not a sexy sell. I didn't sell it for much, but what I realized I sold was essentially my maintenance plan and a client list.
Yeah, client list, exactly. Yeah. Because normally the potential buyer for our type of business is a, a much bigger marketing company that wants your clients so they can offer all of their other services to your clients as well as potentially, you know, website to their existing clients. But it's mainly around the other way.
Yeah, yeah, totally. That makes sense. I was curious for you what those value, I guess what value propositions, value assets, what those were for your business? Because a lot of people I think do get into a place where web designers, it's really common to basically create a glorified job and if you step out of the business.
Yes.
Things probably fall apart for you. Like speaking to you, it sounds like you're at a place with your team where you tell me if you left for a month, would things still run pretty smoothly or.
Yeah, absolutely.
It seems like you're at that point now.
Yeah, the team would run smooth, there would always be work for them. The work may drop off a little. Like my role is really to build client relationships because I love doing that. It might be with our white label partners or past clients or you know, new prospects, et cetera, etc. That's kind of what I spend my time. I do check in with the team obviously a lot, but at the same time, Sally, the GM does more of that and we've got a design team manager and a dev team manager. So you know, I don't need to spend a lot of time with them, but obviously I do check, check in with them. And we have training and things like that. But yeah, look, what was the question? I forgot the question.
That was it. Yeah, yeah. All the question was just. Yeah, I was just. I mean it seems like you're at the point and being valued at a multi seven figure range would tell me it's not relying on you. Like it's not the Greg Merrily's show, it's. It's Studio One.
Yeah. And that's one thing that I've really tried to focus on reducing my hours. And so like I said, I'm at 20 to 25 every week and if I can reduce that to 15 to 20, that's pretty appealing for a new buyer. Yeah, if they can.
Just one thing you hit on, one thing you hit on too that I think is really important is the steady growth. The just 10, 15% every year. This occurred to me. I had Mike Michalowitz on the show last year, author of Profit first and he told me too many sales are usually a bad thing for most service providers. And I was like, oh my gosh, it's so true. Especially if you have a team like that. It's like if you were to have a 50% growth window, that sounds awesome and it might be cool to brag about, but what does that look like for your workload and your team and hiring? What's that going to pull you away from? Have you. I mean, I don't know if you've ever had, you know, it's a good problem to have, but still that's a big time challenge. I don't know if you've ever faced any big waves either high or low on that, but I guess it sounds like just staying steady has worked for you. I don't know, have you had any big influxes and big drops that have even out?
Yeah, it's like, it's a bit of a. Bit of a wave. As in like over January, February, we take a little bit of a dip because we kind of shut down for two weeks. I normally go to Canada skiing, but the team shut down for two weeks and I go away for three weeks. But, you know, and so that can affect us a little bit. But it's not the end of the world because we planned for that. And overall, you know, the 12 months, it's pretty good. But the biggest lesson I had was when I was being white labeled by Ezra in our initial growth phase. He was a big fish for us, you know, like we had, I think 40 or 50% of our workload came through the clients that he Sent our way.
Right.
Or him having, you know, white label our team. And so then my, my business coach said to me, well, that's a problem. You know, if he pulls a pin or goes out of business or changes supplies or whatever, you're pretty much screwed, you know. So it was a really good eye opener to really just make sure that, you know, we reduce our biggest client that just don't take as a high percentage of all of our, you know, of work, basically. So yeah, to me that was a big lesson. But apart from that, it's pretty steady. But we're just going to be careful that we don't rely too much on one client or a few clients.
Do you have a. This is funny. This is so timely. We just talked about this today in my community. Do you have a percentage that you try not to exceed with like a partner? Like I always say, about 10 to 15%. You wouldn't want one client being worth more than 10 or 15%. Is that. Yeah, you know, somewhere around there or even less. What do you think?
Yeah, I, I think you're right. Absolutely. We don't have that issue at the moment and we haven't had that issue for a while. But yeah, we definitely had that issue back with Ezra because it was such a high percentage and yeah, I would say 10 to 15 would be pretty safe life.
And like you said for the, for the marketing strategies, it's, it's equally as important there too because if you're reliant on Google, for example, I was just thinking recently one of my members of my community, Web Designer Pro, one of his clients think it was in some sort of like van travel like influencer type blog site and literally overnight lost 30k a month because of some algorithm changes with AdSense with what was pushed into their blog. No, they didn't make any other changes. It was just algorithm change, 30k a month, boom. Like that. So they're scrambling to figure out another marketing avenue. So just like it is with clients, it's the exact same for marketing. You can't rely on just one channel. I mean, earlier I was saying you could just do partner webinars and that could be it. But that could be a good place to start. But don't stop there. I agree have a few areas of marketing.
James Franco calls it own the race course, not the racehorse.
Right.
And so what he means is don't build your asset on somebody else's land. Meaning social media basically.
Right.
Or yeah. Relying on one source of leads, it's just dangerous. So yeah, you Just want to build a moat around your business, basically. And yeah, the more ways of getting income that you have through different sources, the better.
Better. Greg, this has been awesome, man. I really, really appreciate you being transparent with what's worked for you and shedding some light on your journey and how you've built Studio One. I mean, like I said, it. It really is an impressive setup. I'm going to recommend everyone go to studio1design.com if anyone's students in my courses. You'll see it. You'll see the site as I. I continually refer back to it for just good design and conversion. Copy all the above. Where would you like to go? Where would you like to send everyone listening and watching right now? Greg, do you have a resource you want folks to check out? Maybe. I know this is a fellow web design crew, so it's not necessarily. I don't know, maybe there'll be some good leads that come your way from this, but this isn't for DIYers or business owners. This is for web designers. Do you have anything that you'd like to send them to?
I do indeed. So success leaves clues.
Right?
So I know a lot of your community are of kind, kind of starting out or they might be finding their feet and they're in this sort of growth phase or whatever, but if they want to just kind of R and D, rip off and duplicate what we're doing, we've created a little lead magnet that we send to our clients that they can do something very similar.
Right.
So if you go to studio undesign.com forward slash Josh.
Right.
And then you'll see what we're doing there. And there's a mini funnel off the back of that which has a webinar as a thank you page, has a webinar and has, you know, opportunity to book a call. So some of the somebody that's listened to this as a web designer can R and D that.
Heck yeah. Dude, I didn't even know you guys had this set up. Look at that. Look at your team go. That's awesome, dude. Heck yes. By the way, is this similar or comparable to the masterclass that you had been. Because I signed up for one of your master classes probably a couple years ago.
Yeah, yeah, we've updated that, but yes. So basically the first thing is like a checklist of 50 things that, you know, we sent about. This is what we sent to our clients. Right. So I'm just showing your community exactly what they can copy if they want.
Right.
Don't copy it. Verbatim but because it is our USP that these 50 questions that we ask are really a yes or no to our clients. Do you have this on your website? Yes or no.
Right.
It's kind of like a self audit. And so at the end we give them the score out of 50. Most clients will get it like a 20.
Right.
It's pretty unusual for them get a 50 or above 30 to be honest. But. And so from there we have a thank you page. They've got to opt in so for this but these are all the steps that you know, the designer watching would want to do for their clients. And so they opt in in the results page and then they get the results emailed to them. They go into a nurture campaign but then they get taken to a thank you page video that invites them to watch this webinar. It's like a one hour workshop and then that will be. They can view that on the very next page and then they can get a quote on the very next page after that. So yeah, so that's what they could do for their clients. The web designer work watching.
Oh, killer man. Well Greg, thank you so much for sharing that and yeah, I mean no, nobody in Web Designer Pro or, or my students or this anyone listening are, are Rip Ripper offers completely. We look at what works and make it our own. That's. That's the motto.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. I really appreciate that you sharing that man.
Pleasure. Yeah. So good to catch up, Josh. And yeah, really enjoyed this interview. So thank you so much.
Well, thanks so much for your time, Greg. You're killing it. I can't wait to see what the next handful of years look like, man. We'll continue to, to keep tabs and see what works. So thanks for leading the way man.
Likewise with your business. Yeah, I think you're doing a great thing, so keep it up.
Was that freaking awesome or was that freaking awesome? Greg is just great. Again, maybe it's the Aussie nature of just being kind of chill, but for somebody to have as much success as he's had to be a seven figure agency owner, but to to be still really fired up and to be so sustainable with it, I think that is the very definition of success. So big thanks to Greg for taking some time to be with us today. I hope you enjoyed this one. Please let us know. You can drop a comment for the show notes at this episode at Joshhall Co330. I will let Greg know when this goes live. Maybe he'll keep an eye out on some comments if you have any questions, just drop a comment there at Joshaul Co330 and again, Greg and his team put together a free resource for you to take some of the tactics that's working for him and his agency. To get that, go to studio1.com that's the number one studio. Number one design.com Josh to pick that up. You'll learn how to convert more leads into visitors or excuse me, visitors into leads. There we go. I just started getting the hiccups. Terrible timing. And we will have all the show notes links in a full transcription over at the show notes for this one, which is going to be at Joshall Co3 3 0. See you over there. And check out Studio One Design for inspiration. This was awesome and I hope you're as pumped as I am. See you on the next one. Friends.