Greg Merrilees’ Insider Tips for High-Converting Website Design

This is Biz Ninja Entrepreneur Radio with your host, Tyler Jorgensen. Welcome out to Biz Ninja Entrepreneur Radio. I am your host as always, Tyler Jorgensen. And I have the pleasure of having someone come all the way from the other side of the world through the joys of technology. Today, Greg Merrilies is joining us. He's the founder and director of Studio One Design. And we're going to be talking about, not only we're going to be talking about the importance of conversion, the importance of having in conversion intent in your website, but we're going to be talking about entrepreneurship, we're going to be talking about life and talk about why he's so darn good looking, all of these things. He's, he's told us that he's going to reveal to us his supplement regime. So we've got everything on the table today. Welcome out to the show, Greg. We're really happy to have you.

You are hilarious. Thanks for having me, man. Yeah, it's awesome to be here. And I remember when we met, we met at the Go High level dinner and I was at the bar and it was free drinks as long as you had your ticket with entry. Right. And I lost my ticket and you go, hey, dude, have mine. I was like, whoa, this, this guy's awesome. And then we hit it off from that point. You were hilarious.

Thanks. Well, I appreciate that. I, I think part of life and business is learning to let your personality shine in business. And so that's something I'm working on and, but networking and hanging out, that's the best part. That's the parts I love the most. Greg, let's zoom way back, right?

Yeah.

When was the moment you first realized that you were an entrepreneur?

Wow. You know, I've actually had this business for, since the year 22,000, so 24 years. Right. But I did not know I was an entrepreneur until I reckon 10 years ago. Right. So that's because 10 years ago the hit the fan because we didn't design websites. When I started the business, we designed T shirts, point of sale and consumer graphics. Yeah, all sorts of things other than websites. Right. And so then 10 years ago, the clothing industry, which we predominantly worked for, went vertical. Mean all the retailers squeezed out the wholesalers, our clients were the wholesalers. So that's when I had to find out, okay, what do I do next? Because our clients were dropping like flies. And all of a sudden, you know, we had an office full of six people, had a young family at home and we had a mortgage, just bought a New house, all these things. And it was like, okay, I need to really get serious about what is being an entrepreneur. It's about solving problems. And so I went online and I actually found podcasts, and I started listening to podcasts. One of the podcasts I listened to, the two hosts. One was Ezra Firestone from Smart Marketer in New York. The other one was James schramko. Yeah. From jamesramko.com, they're both business coaches. Right. Ezra's in E commerce. James is in just general online businesses. And they said to me, Sorry, they said on their podcast that their logos sucked. So I just saw that as an opportunity to design them a free new logo just to say thanks for their awesome content. And I was learning so much from them. Yeah. About marketing online. And that was my sort of way into. I didn't realize at the time, I just want to design them a cool logo. Ezra, based in New York, just said, you know, hot dang, it makes us look like a fancy softball team. Right. And so from that point, just built that relationship and just started, you know, had calls with Ezra and he started. He started his agency at the time was, you know, 10 years ago. Now he's got a, you know, $100 million business. But at the time he had a little agency and yeah, he just asked us to do more designs for him and then for his clients. And he white labeled us for all of his clients. So that's how we got introduced to, you know, website design and online conversions, etc.

Okay. I. There's a lot to unpack there, so I think that's amazing. You. So you started this. Were you a designer by trade? Is that like, are you. Okay, cool. So you're a designer. Kind of did the. The whole thing where you're kind of the traditional. I'm a designer. I'm going to start designing. Boom. Accidental business. Right. So you move from. Move from like solopreneur to having a small team tell. I want to unpack the idea of apparel going vertical for the audience here. So is this like. Like when Target bought. Bought Mossimo and things like that, where all of a sudden they're collapsing and buying out brands then?

No, what. What it meant was Target, for instance, would go directly to China to get their own manufacturing done. So they didn't need the wholesaler to rely on to deliver the manufacturing. So that means they. That means I see they've gone vertical. As in, they got retail, they got wholesale. They do everything.

They were sourcing their own products at that point. And so, okay, so yeah, and I mean, so the links of the chain got shortened and you got cut right out of it.

Squeeze that. And so we went direct. Yeah, we went directly to the retailers, but they wanted to pay in 90 days and then pay 5% less if they paid within 90 days. So cash flow was just not working.

Yeah, yeah. 5% net 90 is rough and people don't realize it. A lot of companies that get into that finally win those big contracts with Walmart and stuff end up going out of business because of that. They're, they, you know, one, the cash flow pay is really rough. They're usually two, not used to that size of contract. And then a lot of those big retailers put in clauses that if they don't sell that the, that the manufacturer has to buy back a percentage. So it wipes a lot of companies out. So in this shifting, you come in and you're like, I'm just going to do things differently. And I love that you reached out and just started doing work for free. Something a lot of people you know today are teaching, like Alex Hormozi and people like that.

Yes.

They say, hey, go and just serve. Just give value for free. Don't ask yet. Do you like? So you started by doing logos. How did the shift happen from logos to web development to websites?

Just because Ezra said, what else can you design for us? You know?

Okay.

And at the time, yeah, he was trying to start Smart Marketer as an agency where he offered websites for, for his clients in the E commerce space. And so he just kept sending us briefs and we kept nailing it and he was wrapped with our, with our design skills. And yes, from that point, I mean, we learned so much as well from Ezra. He's just a guru at, you know, e commerce. So, yeah, we still use a lot of strategies that he taught us back in the day that he still uses himself, you know.

Yeah, no, he teaches some really solid stuff. And so you started expanding. But I think you and I can both agree that oftentimes art and design is contrary to conversion. Sometimes people design something because they're, they're designing it to appease the CEO. Right. The CEO or the, or the. Whoever pays the bill will think this is pretty. That doesn't mean that's what's going to convert. How do you bridge that gap?

I love that question. Because, see, we are not a traditional website designer, so we've always come from conversion first. Right. But if you go to any sort of website design community, they're all about the parallax effects and animations and all these latest design trends. And I get it, it's because it's cool, looks great, but they actually are proven to kill conversions because they're so distracting. Right. So Wedge, we've always been conversion focused and yes, we do want it to appeal to the customer, but more importantly, we want it to appeal to our clients. Customers, right. Yes. Because. Yeah, because when they land on the site, they want to know a they don't give a shit about you initially. They just care about what's in it for them. So they want to know, okay, what do you offer? How will I benefit from your offer? And can you prove that you're the trusted authority for me to trust you? So they look at others like social proof and how long, you know, have you been doing this for, etcetera? Yeah.

And so I know you're going to end up giving out a pretty cool resource to people. Let's go ahead and, and let the cat of the bag and spill that. So you were telling me that there's a certain number of things that people need to look for to know that their site is optimized for conversions. Explain that a little bit.

Yeah, sure. So we have put together a little like self audit quiz for your audience@studio1design.com Tyler and if they go there, they'll see 50 questions across five vital areas of their website. Where we ask them, do you have this on your website? Yes or no. And it's a whole range of things that to do with, you know, it might be specific pages on the website to your shopping cart, if you have one, to, you know, the analytics and user data that you collect on the site to your marketing funnels and things like that. Right. So it's not a little bit about look and feel, but it's about everything else that goes with it from strategy, you name it. And so most people probably get around 15 to 20 out of 50. We've got 50 questions. And so it just means they can self audit and see where the opportunity is missing so that they can boost their conversions, basically.

That's awesome. So as you've been doing this, you made this shift, you said, you know, you started in 2000. Was it around 2010 where that big shift happened? Is that a rise?

Yeah.

Okay. A little later than that.

Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So you made it through like the Great Recession. But it was after that where all of a sudden the businesses started saying, we don't want to go through that again. We're going to make some major changes. So what was one when you started making that change, when you started shifting into doing business design and conversion, focused website design, what was one of the first big mistakes that you made and how did you overcome it?

Yeah, okay. I mean, definitely made a lot of mistakes. And I'll tell you why. It's because I didn't have any clue at all about business. The way I got into business was because I worked for one guy for 10 years and he died. Right. Just had an aneurysm.

Yeah.

He just. It was devastating for his family and, you know, for me as well. He was like a good mentor. Yeah. And so two of his clients said to me, come and work for me full time. I couldn't decide who to work for, so I took a month off. And then I said, well, what if I start my own business? Will you give me work? They said yes. The other one said, yes. So that's how I started my business. So I really had work from the start. And we had a pretty good reputation in the clothing industry. And we, we found other mentors. Like, there was a screen printer that served all of these clothing industry clients that just spread our name to all of his other clients. And so very lucky. You know, it was just good timing. So the point of saying this is I had no clue about business. I just kind of fumbled my way into it. Got quite lucky. But then the biggest challenge was trying to grow a team. Right. So I. I employed a friend. Right. And I feel like that was one of the biggest mistakes. And also just employing people, not knowing, like, not vetting them enough and just employing people. Are there a good designer? But really, like design, it's a hard skill set to do really well. But more importantly is your attitude towards. Towards people, you know, And I found that. Yeah. So just implying people without thinking through, like, are they a good fit for our team and our culture and that sort of bit me in the ass.

Yeah, I can imagine if you, you know, you started as a employee and you kind of got thrust into the leadership role of owning and managing a team and so hiring a friend, you know, without properly vetting, hiring other team members out, proper, properly vetting what? You know, it sounds like you've learned a lot from that. What advice do you have from someone who might just be starting an agency or. Or growing their business on how to do a better job there?

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, now what I've learned, and I did have another lesson recently, like about a year and a half ago to do with team as well, and I think this is where the biggest lesson comes in. So it's all about creating a culture and starting with your mission and your core values. Right? And then you've got to have that first before you start thinking about hiring, if you're starting. Right. But even if you are an established business, you can reinvent yourself around your mission and your core values. And so what happened to us about a year and a half ago was our design manager at the time, he was looking at leaving and starting his own business, which he's now done. But in that transition of him wanting to leave, he's just started going against management in our business. You know, we've got 27 people on our team now. There's about 12 in the design team, 10, the dev team, and management, you know, customer support, et cetera. But anyway, so what he did was he started badmouthing the management team and we were hiring new designers at the time that would last for like two weeks. Like, what's going on here? We couldn't work it out. And so then, you know, in Slack, right? We use Slack and if you close a. And he had a private channel for their, for their language, Tagalog, which is fine in the Philippines, but if you close a Slack channel, all of a sudden it becomes searchable, right? It's not searchable if it's. Yeah, I didn't know this. Right?

Yeah.

So then we were searching for a project and. Or my general manager was, and she realized, oh, there's this Tagalog thread. And it saw, she saw her name in there a couple of times. So she transcribed it, sorry, translated it to English and saw all these bad mouthing. And then we figured out, okay, what's going on here? But you know what, it's my fault because up until that point I hadn't put much effort into the team culture. Right. And so from that point, we, this was, you know, early last year, 2023. And so what we did was just completely rebuilt the culture around our mission and, you know, our values. And we had a team retreat in the Philippines. We hired, you know, big villa and had the whole team come and stay with us. And we had lots of fun and karaoke and water sports and lots of meals together. And it was just really good for bonding. And I feel like that was the biggest lesson. Invest in culture.

Well, and I, I can appreciate that you, you took the feedback and you actually said, okay, this is what people are saying, like, which parts of this are true, which parts of this are emotional and how can we make it better and, and I think being a leader doesn't mean. Or being a great manager doesn't mean that you're not making mistakes. It means that you're improving when. When they happen. And so that's a really good example. And let's pivot back just for a little bit on advice to the listeners and people watching the show here on design. Right. So what are like five tips that you have for people to just have really high power converting design?

Yeah, sure. So look, number one is like, do a little bit of research before you start designing, right? I mean, before you ready for a new website. And so what it means is like really taking the time to understand your audience. And this is, if you do hire a designer, this is what they should be doing as well. Right? Because like I said, they don't really care about you initially. So basically, you want to survey your audience to find out what makes them tick on a deeper level, essentially. And so once you've got that intel where they hang out, et cetera, then all of a sudden you realize that your website should be designed to help them on their journey. Right. So that's number one and five tips. Brand positioning would be another tip. So what it means is like, study your competitors and don't rip off your competitors. Right. A, you don't know how well they're going. You want to be memorable. Yeah. So you want to zig where they're zagging. So that's. You really want to be unique and, you know, be unique in your marketplace and stand out from your competitors. And then also thinking about your price point with brand positioning. So what price point are you at? Is it the lower end, the middle end, the top end? And then your design, look and feel, your messaging, everything needs to reflect that value proposition, basically. So, yeah, I think brand position is super important. And then think about the marketing strategy. So, you know, you touched on it before. You know you want to lead with value. That's what I say, lead with value. Right. And if you think about, obviously if you're starting your relationship with someone, you just want to build trust with them. And the best way is to offer something that's going to help them on their journey for free so that it builds trust in your brand. So it's really having a strategy and potential, potentially a funnel to warm up that cold traffic. Now, if you also have warm traffic, you want to make sure you don't take them through a funnel that is designed for cold traffic. So you need to have a traffic cold and a traffic for warmer or hot leads, essentially. And then yeah, really just make sure it's clear that you have these different options for solving, takes them down a different pathway to solve their problem. Essentially number four would be to psychologically influence. And we get these tips and tricks from Robert Cialdini's book Influence, which are seven psychological drivers to help build trust in your brand. So yeah, that's one thing we definitely take a lot of value from and we implement those psychological drives into your website because once again, and those things are things like reciprocity, which is leading with value, authority. You want to showcase your authority in the marketplace and that could be from sharing your knowledge and just having a professional design and professional copy and video and photos and all that good stuff, but social proof as well. You know, people turn to others to see how good your stuff really is. Liking as well, people want, you want to be likable and then consistency, consistent voice, consistent look and feel. And here's a big one that a lot of people get wrong. Scarcity. So it's not just like a limited time offer, right. What Robert Cialdini really means is with that scarcity principle is what can they get from you that they can get nowhere else, right? So with your messaging and your offer, put whatever's unique about your offer in there, don't just try like everybody else have the same word and otherwise it just become a commodity. So think about what can they get from you and nowhere else. And then the last principle is unity. And that's because you know, if you like the same, like LA Lakers or whatever, right. You really want to just show your personality and people, whatever that is, whether it's religion or sports or you know, something in business, you just want people to feel like they're in the same place, safe place, basically. So that's, yeah, that's number four. And then number five would be like just having a conversion focused design. So it's really taken all those first four points into consideration before you start designing the website. And then you want to put everything into the right visual hierarchy. So it's not overwhelming. It's got the right things in the right order to essentially boost the conversions. And that conversions could mean, you know, an opt in or a sale essentially. But yeah, and then the branding elements as well need to appeal to your target audience. And you also want to make sure you use professional copywriting. I know you can use ChatGPT and other AI tools, but perplexity is a really good one. But you really want to make sure that it does talk to your audience and proves that you can solve their problem in a unique way. So, yeah, use that as a starting point. But I think it's better to use a professional copywriter to do a copy.

So they're kind of bringing up copy was my next thing. Right. The next thing I was going to ask you. So in order of operations. Right. Designing a site, building or launching a new offer or things like that.

Y.

There is one school of thought that says you start with a copy and then you design around the sales copy. Then there's another camp that says, I'm just going to make a template and I'm going to fit my copy. I'm just going to fit it into this template. And then there's the other school of thought that doesn't think about it at all. And they're just throwing stuff together. What. What's your take on copy and design and how they flow together?

Copy. If you had the choice copy or design, I would go with copy every day of the week. Because it's. Yeah, it's seriously what people. It will help convert a lot easier than design because design has no clarity. Clarity. If copy is done really well, then it's going to have clarity. It's going to be persuasive and you can have no design. It could still work. Especially if you've got a good reputation. You just send people an email and it'll convert. Right. So copy is more important. But the way we work is we work in conjunction with conversion focused copywriters and we do understand their framework. So we also understand that copy can take a bit of time because they have to do a lot of market research before they get started. So we offer unlimited design revisions and we get started with a framework that we know our copywriters are going to use. And so we'll just rough in the design. Sorry. We'll do proper design, but we'll rough it in with rough copy that we'll just use from our design questionnaire and the initial call transcript that we have the client just to rough it in to say this is roughly what we're doing. But just understand you can either hire our conversion focused copywriting partners or you can do your own copy. But. So we get started without the copy. But we understand the copy's really going to be the game changer needs to be.

And so you start with design, then you overlay the copy. But what I'm hearing is because you'll do unlimited revisions, if the copy leans you to doing a redesign or restructuring the design, we'll do it. You're Going to prioritize that. Okay, that makes sense. That's a clever way to.

Totally.

Yeah, I like that.

But then we also, we've been doing a lot of websites. We understand what converts and if clients give us really crappy copy, we're going to push back and let them know, hey, this is not going to work. And here's why.

You know, right now you, a business offering unlimited anything is interesting because I'm assuming that you're not offering or receiving unlimited pay. Right. You're being compensated in a finite amount. But offering unlimited, how do you balance making sure that doesn't get out of hand?

Yeah. So you just got to do the maths and figure out. Right. Okay. How much do you charge for a project? We charge up front and we know on average that's what's going to be profitable. Now some clients might, you know, be. Might take a little bit longer to get to that final result and that's fine. But if you average it over, you know, x amount of many clients per month, then, you know, it's the numbers work basically. So yeah, sure, we found it's just a really good way for. It's a good hook for getting people, you know, to trust us because, you know, we're obviously conversion focused but we want them to love it and design is subjective. So, you know, we want to make sure they're comfortable with moving forward and offering that Unlimited revision is one of the main reasons people choose us.

Yeah, I, I've built a lot of websites, a lot of sales funnels over the years. I do my best to stay platform agnostic because platforms change, but the concepts don't. Right. Like the concept of conversion and the concept of a sales page, that's all pretty solid. What, what's your platform of choice and what do you guys work in over there?

Yeah. So look, We've been using WordPress forever and if it's E Commerce, we prefer Shopify. However, we love webflow. Now I don't know if you're interesting, you're familiar with. Oh my gosh, it's like the Mac of compared to PCs in my opinion. Yeah, WordPress, I mean Squarespace, Wix. I know Wix Studio is meant to be pretty good, but they're more, I don't know, they're just more for people that aren't serious designers. And webflow is, if you have a look at the design community, everybody's using webflow.

But I feel like webflow is very design focused. I mean the things you can do in there are much, much More generous to designers. My only concern with it has been that it does, it makes it to where it's harder for the, the website owner to manage. Right. Like because it's not as user. I'm only in my experience. Right. I'm not. Which is limited to a few people, a few clients that move to webflow, they found themselves overwhelmed by the adjustments. Right. Then.

Got it. I mean, to start. Yeah. Like it is harder to create a website. Right. Compared to say a page builder or a WIX or whatever. Right.

However, once it's not wysiwyg, so.

Yeah, exactly. But once you hand hand the website over to the client, it's easy for them to make tweaks and changes and add new pages and things like that. But to start from scratch is probably, probably harder.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. So let's, let's zoom back to the fact that you had this accidental agency and you had to go through a massive pivot and now you've grown it to a 27 person team that you've worked with some really cool clients and done some amazing designs. In that light, imagine that you're talking to somebody who's just making that first move from working for someone else to going out and working for themselves.

Yeah.

What's your advice to them? To go get their first two or.

Three clients first two or three clients? Yeah. Look, go at a low price. I mean you can't. You want to build up to a high price. But I would say, honestly, it's hard. You gotta build your reputation first and that's what I'd be focusing on. You'll find that most of your sales will come through referrals. So if you just, if you're a really good designer, you need to be a good designer for a start. But yeah, I would look for a point of difference in the marketplace from what everybody else is doing and try not to focus on all the fancy parallax and animation effects and point of difference in the marketplace and try and niche down. Initially, we designed for pretty much, you know, a lot of different niches. But when you want to start out, if you niche and you've got a point of difference, that's probably a better way to go and get, you know, target a few specific clients, but do it at a lower price point initially. That's what I would say.

That makes sense. All right, Greg, to me, business is a wonderful thing. I love it. It's like my hobby. But it's not everything in life. So what is one item on your personal bucket list you're going to accomplish in the next 12 months.

Yeah, so I'm a snow skier. Have been since I was 4, apparently, and absolutely love it. And. And, yeah, last year we went to Canada, so every year we want to go to a different country overseas because obviously we're in the Southern Hemisphere.

Not a lot of skiing in Melbourne or.

Well, we do have, like, you know, ant hills. They're tiny, basically. I mean, look, you know, our ski season is very short, and we're very lucky if it gets more than a meter of snow. What's that, like three feet or whatever? Yeah, yeah. Sometimes it can get to six feet, but it's very unlikely. And so, yeah, every summer for us, which is, you know, winter for you guys in January. Last year we went to Canada, which absolutely love. But, yeah, this come in January, we're going to Japan. So every year we, you know, we want to go to a different country in the Northern Hemisphere skiing.

What's your favorite place you've ever been skiing?

I reckon Big White in Canada. We've been there twice now. And. Oh, my God, it's just so beautiful. Like, the lift lines are tiny compared to what you guys experience in America. The snow is really dry. It's not near a coast, so it's not wet snow. It's just really good powder. But it's not like Japanese powder where it's good for snowboarders, where it's too fluffy. Right. It's. It's not too deep. It's just a good, good amount of deepness. And they have fresh snow every night, basically. I love it there. Yeah. And good long runs, you know, you can spend 20, 30 minutes on one run.

Yeah, nice. One ski resort you never want to go back to.

I reckon Whistler.

Overrated. Too busy.

Yeah. I mean, you speak to locals, they're done by 10am because it's just the crowds too much. Yeah. Yeah.

Amazing. Well, Greg, I really appreciate it. Everyone should please go check out Studio One Design. That's the. The numeral one in studio1design.com. Greg, what is one thing that you wish everyone knew about you as a individual that you can share with them before we sign off?

I have no idea.

I thought you're going to share with us your whole supplement routine. All right, fine. Not that. What's.

Just.

How about sign us off with you love racing cars that you said.

Yeah, I don't have a racing car, but, yeah, I do love racing my car around a track. Yeah, it's so much fun.

Brand is.

It's a Mercedes AMG thing. That's. Yeah.

A huge AMG fan. Big fan. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So now I got another car. What. What's the car?

It's a. It's a CLA 45. Yeah, but it's.

Yeah, solid.

Very quick one.

It's the big V. Is that the V8? Not the V10. Right.

It's actually not. It's actually a four cylinder, but if you look.

No way.

It's the world's fastest four cylinder production car.

It's got to be fun.

If you look at any reviews, like, people just love this thing. It's such a beast. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like, you know, 10 seconds. Ten and a half seconds over a quarter mile, or zero to 60, you guys would say, in 3.7 seconds. So it's pretty good.

That's pretty quick. That's awesome.

Yeah.

All right, well, have fun doing that, but stay safe. It was really great having you on the show. I'd love for you to stay around. I'm gonna hit end and we're gonna wrap up the show, but I got one other question for you.

Yeah.

So to all my biz ninjas, wherever you're watching, you're listening. Wherever you're tuning in from, just remember it's your turn to go out and do something.