Greg Merrilees - Dialing In The Perfect Website Design

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hi there. We're back.

We're back.

Welcome to the show, Matt. And listeners.

Thank you. Oh, you're welcoming me to the show?

Yeah, why not like an announcer? I'm the emcee of the podcast today.

You're very announcer.

Yeah.

Congratulations on your announcerness.

Barry White voice. All right, so I think we about. We are about. We about to talk about some websites.

Yeah, we're going to talk about website design and conversion optimization.

Fun.

Yeah. I didn't make that sound too sexy, did it?

No, you didn't. It is sexy.

This is your really good conversation.

Thank you. That's better. Come on, man. I was setting you up.

Now, Matthew Wolf, today we're talking about CRO.

Like what? CRO?

No, we're talking not boring. Today we actually have the guy behind the websites of guys like Kevin Rogers, Perry Marshall, Jordan Harbinger, James Schramko, Chris Ducker, Ezra Firestone, and Soon Evergreen Profits.

And Frank Oz.

And Frank Oz.

He's the voice of Yoda, Miss Piggy and other Muppets. Yeah.

Greg's company. So we're talking to Greg Merrilies today from Studio One Design. And Greg's company did the design for all of those websites. And he is just a ninja when it comes to the optimizing the website, like finding the elements on your website. They're going to make visitors convert into leads and leads convert into sales. And that's really where we go with this episode.

That's pretty much it. I mean. Yeah. And so throughout this talk, you'll hear like, Greg has been doing this for a very long time. So he's seen the trends change online. He's seen what works, what doesn't work. And we talk a lot about those things. We talk about, like, the mistakes that a lot of people are, including us. We made some. He actually gave us some feedback, like maybe a month or two ago, and.

We made some tweaks.

Yeah. So we actually have. And we're in the process of getting a new site made by his company. Yeah. Studio One Design. So, I mean, these guys are fricking pro level everything. But Greg breaks down the psychology. That happens, you know, when. When you're building out a site, but also just from a customer's perspective, what you're trying to do to get a conversion to establish a relationship. And he's very specific and he lines out. It's like Three main key points, but then breaks down, what, five or six other keys. Key points where the psychology really gets in, and it's things that you wouldn't think of.

I also asked him, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see a lot of websites have with their design? And chances are you listening to this has one of those mistakes on your site. So make sure you listen to the. The portion of the mistakes, because a lot of people are making these damn mistakes on their website.

Bob, you listening right now? You probably have that mistake, so you want to hang on with us?

Get on that, Bob.

You too, Cindy.

Cindy. Cindy. Cindy's worse than Bob, let me tell you.

Cindy's got to call him out like that.

Sor. Sorry, Cindy.

It's a little aggressive, bro.

Yeah. All right. Sorry, Cindy. We love you. Yeah. And then, you know, I actually transitioned this conversation at the end because I was really curious about the agency model. We've kind of.

I was curious because we. No, we actually had the same thought. We're like, we're switching gears here. Yeah, we're switching gears the same damn thing. All right.

Yeah, we're switching gears in the same damn thing. The agency model, we've never had the greatest. I wouldn't say we didn't have success. We've always had success. When we've had agencies. We. We didn't have the greatest time running an agency.

It's how we want to spend our energy. It's like, how do we want to do that? Well, agency. We felt like, yeah, maybe that's not it, but Greg has dialed his agency in, like, a fricking Swiss watch.

Yes.

And he works remote. He has. I think he said he has 20 people working, but they are remote. And they don't even do team calls. Yeah. They just slack everything. Yeah. Like, whoa.

All right.

So this guy, and he's actually. He lives his life. He's a family man.

He doesn't work on Fridays.

Doesn't work on Fridays. He does Pilates, though. I think he said that's where he's off to after this. But amazing. So the fact that he runs an agency that I think it services about 100 people at any one time, literally says he uses Google Docs to manage the freaking.

Yeah.

I mean, what.

Like, he's created a. He's created a huge business that creates amazing designs that a lot of people love, and he's managed to simplify it, and that's what we love. And so we talk about all the design elements you need to focus on in your business. And, and then we wanted to shift gears and talk about how do you, how do you simplify your business? And so that's what we did. And we took notes on the process too.

We took notes. And I did not remember how to get these notes via text. What's the number, Matt?

Yeah, so you can get these notes pretty easily if you, if you're driving, pull over, but you know, pull out your phone, be Safe and text comp c o m p to 384-703-8470, comp.

38470, comp. You think I would remember that number? Yeah.

3, 4, 7, 0.

The jingle came back.

Yeah, we should make that into a real. Like, we should hire somebody on Fiverr to make a legit jingle out of that.

We're better. Yeah, but we have more fun with it.

Okay, fine. Or you can do it the old fashioned way like, like they did back, you know, back around the time the telephone was invented.

Back in those long form typing days.

Yeah, you can go to hustle and flowchart.com computer C O M P and that'll get you the notes too. You're gonna want these damn notes. You gotta get them quick, though. You have about two weeks from the day the episode goes live to get access to the notes. After that they get locked down in the vault. So hustleandflowchart.com comp or text the word comp to 38470.

That is 38470, comp. Thank you. Off to see Greg.

Let's go talk to Greg.

Hey, Greg, welcome to the show.

Hey, Matt and Joe, thanks for having me, guys.

Yeah, man, we have some history. Way back.

Way back. Yeah.

And you what, Matt, you've interviewed Greg before in a previous podcast, right?

No, but Greg actually designed shirts for a previous podcast for the beyond the Hype podcast that I had with Josh Bartlett.

Totally. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I joined your membership back then as well, and you guys were quite helpful. He did a couple of sort of group calls, but yeah, you know, made a set goals and I think I hit all those goals. Started podcast, did all that stuff.

Nice. Yeah, that was, that was at a time where Josh and I, we were partnered and, you know, we had our podcast. We knew we wanted to podcast together, but we didn't totally have like a business model figured out behind the podcast. So we were selling, you know, we had like some courses and we had some coaching and we had some group coaching stuff and we were really just trying to like figure it all out at the time.

Yeah. And then, you know, ThriveCart took off.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. ThriveCart just became a beast. And then, you know, that's where Josh had to shift his focus pretty much. And that was pretty much the evolution of that podcast.

Yeah.

Story arc.

Fair enough. Now, I noticed, like, If I Google ThriveCart, you guys come up, so you must be doing some pretty good stuff with that Hrefs.

It's funny you mentioned it. Yeah, they were a previous sponsor. I don't think they're sponsoring this one. Right. But, yeah. Yeah, we use ahrefs all the time.

Yeah.

And you're right. I think that's how we probably find a lot of those gold keywords.

Yeah, no, it's true. I mean, we had a little bit of a leg up with ThriveCart in that we were like, when he first opened the doors to it, he allowed like three affiliates on board. He was like, I'm just gonna test this on a very, very small scale. And so we were one of the initial affiliates that he allowed to promote it early on, and that allowed us to kind of get a head start on other people with our content marketing. So, you know, we did have that little bit of a up, but luckily, because of the timing of it all, we're pretty well SEO'd for a lot of ThriveCart related keywords.

Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome, man.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this all relates to what we're talking about anyway, is having a really solid website and asset that you can have it kind of decked out with the right components that has the end goal that you're trying to shoot for. For, like, so, like everything that you saw. It's more of like a blog in content forward. But yeah, it generates a lot of money. Yeah. And well, SEO'd, which are all key components of probably a ton of stuff we'll chat about here with you too.

Yeah, maybe not. Maybe not.

Who knows?

I'm not an SEO expert. Yeah, I get it. But that's why, you know, well, we team up with partners like Stefan Spencer and people like that, you know, world leading. He's been on this podcast too, hasn't he?

Yeah, he has. Yeah, we've been on his. He's been on ours and.

Cool.

We're actually in talks with him to. To maybe, you know, work with him a little bit closer on some things. So he's a. He's a good guy.

He is.

Yeah.

And yeah, your buddies with Schramko, of course, James Schramko is, you know, mutual buddy of ours and been on Our show. I don't know how many times now, how many hours. They're always long conversations.

I think he's been on three times now, and I think every time he comes on, it's like a two hour call.

So good.

Yeah. But then you leverage that. You put on both your podcasts, which is really cool.

Yeah, that was an idea.

Yeah.

We call it simulcasting.

It works. Yeah, we're like, let's keep doing that.

It's fun.

Very cool. Well, Greg, let's get into your backstory a little bit. I know today you've got Studio One, which is just an amazing design company, and I know you do shirts for podcasters and you do. You do web design for a lot of big name people. I actually learned today by going through these notes that you did Frank Oz's website.

Yoda.

Yoda, exactly.

You're doing some really, really cool stuff and working with some amazing clients in the design world. How did that happen? What were you doing before the design world and what was that evolution like?

Yeah, well, look, I mean, if I think back to school days, I always had a passion for drawing and graphic design, but I didn't really enjoy school. It kind of sucked to really just, you know, went there for the. For the design and lunch and the girls.

And then I quit at 16 because I had an opportunity to get a job in a T shirt printing factory, like, but as the designer, you know, one of the designers there and absolutely loved it. So I was there for 10 years, and then one of the owners had a brain aneurysm and died. But at the time, that was terrible at the time. But then two of his clients said, you know, do you want to work for us? And I said, well, let me think about this. And I was 25 or 26 at the time. And I said, well, if I start my own business, will you give me work? And they said, yes. The other guys, I said, will you give me work? They said yes. So I started my own business. And that was 20 years ago now, but yeah, so then at the time, we just designed T shirts and we did it for, you know, Australia's. Well, we designed for wholesalers that supply to Australia's retailers. So we only had like maybe half a dozen clients, but that was enough. But then probably around, say, 2012 or something like that, the clothing industry went vertical. Which means, you know, the retailers squeezed out the wholesalers. And because they are our clients, you know, that was kind of like the end of my business unless I pivoted. So, yeah, at that Point. You know, I was looking online and I found a podcast which was, you know, think I get with James Franco and Ezra Firestone. And they said that their logos sucked on one of their podcasts. So I thought I'd just send them a free logo design to say thanks. But what we do, because, you know, got that T shirt background, we put it on a T shirt and, you know, made it look something like that you would want to wear, you know, something cool and, you know, in true Ezra's style, you know, he's from New York and he said, hot dang, you know, and I can't do that New York accent. And he absolutely loved it. Yeah, he's, it looks like some fancy softball team. And you know, yeah, it was really funny. But so then, yeah, I started building trust with those guys and they liked our design, so they had us design bits and pieces for their websites and it just kind of grew. And then I remember James Schramko came to my office one day and he said, well, why do you have this office? And I said, well, you know, I've got local clients, I've got six full time designers. And what do you mean? Don't I need an office? And he said, absolutely not. What if I could show you a better way? And then I signed up for his coaching service and yeah, he's still my business coach today. That was like five years ago. But yeah, so then really, James said to me, look, that's a, that was a great idea sending us that free T shirt design. Why don't you do it to other podcasters and other influencers? So I did. I sent them to people like John Lee Dumas and Pat Flynn and Like LeadPages podcast at the time, whatever that was, and other influences like Perry Marshall, and There's probably about 30 odd influences that we sent free T shirts, T shirt designs too. And then, yeah, what I did was just built relationships with those people and built trust and then eventually designed a few things for those guys and then they sort of spread us out to their communities. And yeah, we started designing websites for, you know, a lot of people from, you know, sort of all around the world, but more in the online marketing space.

That's, that's brilliant, man. I love, I love the free, you know, giving value forward. You know, we've done that in so many different little aspects of our business. And even to grow this podcast by sending shirts to certain influencers or even the physical newsletter as like, hey, check out this little way that we're showcasing you. It's Almost like a little ego thing. You can kind of play into that.

A bit Now, I'm curious, with the shirts, what was your cost on those shirts?

Well, we just used a place called Spreadshirt based in the US and so there was no real cost. We just put a little bit of a margin on. And we sold these shirts on a website called successshirt.com and then so they fulfilled all the orders. You know, it just happened automatically. And all we did with the profit was just split a 5050 with the podcaster. So, yeah, it was really quite a simple model, but it wasn't to make money. It was really just to build trust.

Yeah, I was just more curious, like, you know, to sort of. I was trying to get an idea of what. What it cost to get on these people's radars. You know what I mean?

Like, ah, sorry. Yep, I'm with you. Yeah. Yeah. So. Well, it was really just, you know, maybe a few hours of time. Yeah. And I guess it wasn't just me. It was, you know, my design team as well. Still had at that time, I think, four designers when we were trying to, you know, grow the business and pivot. But yeah, it was really just time. And, you know, because we had something uni unique in this marketing world. It was all about, you know, there was a lot of lead pages and. And, you know, I don't even think clickfunnels was right in there at that point, but everything was very, you know, markety. And I wanted to sort of cut through that noise and just design something that was unique to, you know, our skill set, but also something that you can't just get off the shelf. It's not like, hey, here's a free copy of my ebook. You know, we designed, we custom designed a T shirt. And it was really not just putting their logo on a T shirt, but it was using, like we research their website and their testimonials and things like that, and we would put something that's relevant, like whether it's a tagline or things like that. For instance, like with lead pages, I went through their testimonials and someone wrote that they were the secret weapon. So we did a T shirt with secret weapon, just had a little lead pages logo up in the corner, you know, but yeah, so things like that just cut through.

I remember that one. Yeah. And that specific design, because you, I mean, in all honesty, you designed our Hustle and Flowchart shirts as well. So the ones that are available for sale have all been designed by you. Thanks. And your team, and they're absolutely amazing. I mean, they're high quality designs. We haven't even even made a podcast, a logo, but maybe one day.

Yeah, that one.

I like yours, though. I like your logo. Yeah, that was designed by Matt.

That was, that was done about 10 minutes at the. In Photoshop and it was a selfie and it was a picture of me and Joe and Brad, and I cropped Brad out of the selfie and then they messed with it in Photoshop.

That was true to us, you know, but, yeah, no, it's the quality of your designs and I think the thoughtfulness of the designs as well. It's not just like, here's a logo, you slap something on a shirt. But it's like what you just said, you're pulling out these elements that are true to the brand and I feel like that's what makes you really unique.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. With your logo of your podcast design, it's actually quite a trend at the moment to be a little bit more organic and not so polished with design. You know, if you look at all social media posts, they're the ones that get shared because people don't want it to be perfect. They want it to feel, you know, handmade and more organic.

Yeah. And I'm sure there's like a, there's probably a fine line. You can, you can go with your, your fancy designers and whatnot to play into those trends as well. That's. That's good feedback. That's good to witness or. Yeah, observe that.

Yeah.

So.

So as far as websites go, you've, you know, you've designed websites for Kevin Rogers and Perry Marshall and Jordan Harbinger and Schramko and Chris Ducker and Ezra Firestone. Like, how did, how did the T shirt business transition into a, you know, a website design business?

Yeah, so really it was from listening to lots of different podcasts. You know, I mean, Leadpages, what was Podcast Conversion Cast. Conversion Cast, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. And other podcasts like that. And then just, you know, discovering a lot of, you know, conversion experts like Pep Liar from Conversion XL and Tim Ash from Site Tuners and then Mech Labs, I think his name is Flint McLachlan. And yeah, these guys and their YouTube channels. And I just got, I got right into it. I just loved learning about what gets results and, you know, reading books like Robert Cialdini's Influence and Pre Suasion more recently. But yeah, I just had a real passion for figuring out that it's not just about a pretty design at all it's more about conversion focus. Like you need to get a result with your design. So, yeah, I think what we did just to be a little bit different was, you know, we understood marketing at that point, but we were still like, we had a fashion background, so we wanted stuff to look really cool and not just on a T shirt, but on a website. So that, that was kind of our unique angle to not just give them a conversion focus design, but have it look sensational. So, yeah, I think that resonated with some of those experts, you know, and it's perfect.

And what other offerings you do you have now? I know technically design can go anywhere, but yeah, the website is kind of the core.

T shirts.

And I believe you have others too.

Yeah, we do. I mean, yeah, definitely websites and T shirts, but more branding as well. Like, you know, logos and just the whole look and feel of somebody's entire marketing presence, whether it's online or offline. And so what we do there is we have a brand director that will come up with a mood board. They'll come up with the look and feel of the colors, the composition, the fonts, the logo, pretty much everything. And she'll put this multiple page mood board together before we start designing. And that can just really help the designers, but help the client as well see the vision that we have for their brand. But yeah, so that's sort of like the starting point. But then that can go into pretty much anything from slide decks, you know, presentation, podcasts, pod, I mean, blog posts, pretty much anything related to marketing, graphics.

That's. I like that idea, the mood board, because I know you personally. It seems like, at least in our interactions, that you have a hand in a lot of this stuff. But of course, you have, what, 18 other folks on your team that all work remotely. So it's not just you. I know that.

That's right.

Yeah. But the mood board concept is interesting. Like, does that and I think, like, others can probably take this. I know we could probably benefit from having a mood board quote unquote, and kind of use it as a branding roadmap for the entire team. Is that kind of what it is?

Yeah, not really. That's more a brand style guide, which is like the last thing we'll design. But this is just an initial, you know, let's create a brand new custom look and feel that suits your business essentially.

Right.

And the way we come up with that is we start off, you know, our whole process is, you know, we send our clients a really detailed questionnaire which can Be a real pain in the ass to fill out, but it's helpful. And we get a lot of clients say that that questionnaire was really helpful for us, just figuring out, getting clarity, you know, figuring out what we want. And so then after that, we jump on a call with the client. We'll, you know, have an hour call or thereabouts, and we record that call. So then the brand director will, you know, look at all the answers to the questionnaire, listen to the call, and then design around everything that she studied, basically. And yes. So when we design, because every business is unique, we have to create a unique look and feel. And obviously, when we get to the actual website pages, we approach that with a unique style as well. But yeah, when we're creating that look and feel, we're not just thinking about what the client wants, but it's what does that client's clients want? You know what I mean? So what's going to appeal to them as far as colors and imagery and fonts and all that sort of stuff? We wanted to resonate with the target audience.

Yeah, that's really cool. And I think it's super helpful for anybody in their brand to get clear on that and really kind of study that.

Yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say. Yeah. And then so once we've created the look and feel and the client says, yep, we love that look, then we'll apply it to the web design and all the other bits and pieces. And then obviously, you know, we want the client's approval, so we offer unlimited design revisions on everything we do until it's approved. And then once everything's approved, we'll put it into a brand style guide if that's what the client wants as well. And that becomes the bible or the thing that you would send out to all of your creatives from that point so that you've got a congruent look and feel.

Yeah. And then you can use kind of that style guide even on like Instagram and with your images and things like that, just so it feels cohesive across all of the platforms.

Totally. Yeah. Spot on.

I love it. So going back to the whole T shirt thing and the web design thing was part of the plan to kind of convert people that you did T shirt designs for into web design clients. Because it does seem like a lot of the initial maybe web design clients started out as people that you design T shirts for. Was that kind of the idea there was, if I help these guys with T shirts, then maybe they'll hire me for more design Services.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

It was kind of the inroad I knew I needed to pivot. I had a passion for online marketing and websites, that sort of thing. And so, yeah, it was definitely the plan and it kind of worked. But it wasn't my idea. Like I said, it was James Schranko. Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of our best ideas are actually James Schramko's ideas too.

So as long as we give him credit, he'll keep feeding us ideas. It's all good.

Exactly.

Yeah. We hired, you know, we hired James as one of our business coaches too. So.

Yeah.

Another thing we have in common there is that James has had a very big impact on our business.

Yeah.

Awesome. Yep.

Yeah. So let's, let's tie this. I'm curious. Let's keep going down the website vein here. And so of course we can talk about your business covers a lot of this stuff. So anyone listening? No brainer to check out Studio One Design, that is dot com. But let's talk about. So like businesses as a whole, I think most people have a website who are listening and if they don't, probably should get one pretty good asset to have. But let's talk about the different components of what makes a really good high converting site, but also helps you boost your authority.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, if I think to our webinar that we did for your paid members, that was awesome, by the way. Yeah. And so we sort of have three principles that we design too. So principle one is clarity, Principle two is strategy, and then principle three is persuasion. So if you want, we can sort of dive deeper into each one of them.

That'd be great.

Yeah. Cool. So clarity is really, you know something, when people land on your site, they don't care about you, they only care about what's in it for them. Right. So they want to think. Sorry. They want to know things like, you know, how they benefit from your offer. Do you have a solution to my challenge or problem? Like, do you have proof that your solution works? Why should I choose you over your competitors? And what action do you want me to take? And do you have a clear pathway on how you'll solve my challenge? So if they land on your site and they don't see how they're going to benefit from it, and they're confused and there's too many things going on and the messaging is all wrong, then it has no clarity and then there's a good chance they're just going to leave without taking action. Right. And a lot of time, a lot of People have too many things on their website. And every website has a different approach with design. To me, a homepage is really to show how you can help somebody, but to also prove your authority and back it up with social proof. But then it's like a gateway to get to. You might want to segment people as well. You might have multiple offers, or you might have offers for a cold visitor, a warm visitor, or a hot visitor. Because it depends what marketing you've done off the website before. You bring people to your website. So, you know, there's a lot of sort of variations there, but it is essentially a gateway as opposed to just a landing page, which would just have one call to action.

Yeah, yeah. And it's that first initial touch. Typically if someone's just typing something in. Yeah. So it makes perfect sense as you're using that as a way to just let them. Let them just dig a little deeper after they get a quick look at who you are.

Exactly. And so you don't want to confuse them, but you do want to make sure that you can show them a clear pathway based on their particular situation.

Okay, cool. Yeah. All right, so number two on that one.

Number two, strategy. Yeah. So like a strategy is really when somebody lands on your website, you know, what do you want them to do?

Right.

And it might be for, you know, cold visitors. You might have a lead magnet of some sort. Might be a PDF download or a free course, a free trial. Depends what your business model is. You know, might be a discount if you got an e commerce business, that sort of thing, Which I'm not a real huge fan of having discounts. I prefer to have like, join our VIP club, which is what, you know, what we learned through Ezra Firestone. He's like the e commerce guru. And. Yeah, so what he taught. And we were his design team for three years before he built his $25 million business in house team. But you think for everything.

Dang it.

Yeah, totally. I love that. Yeah. And so, yeah, you, you know, I'm not a fan of having a, you know, offering a discount on E commerce. I would prefer to say, you know, join the VIP club and you'll get member only discounts and special offers, you know, tailored specifically to you, that sort of thing. Which works really well because then you're building a community as well as opposed to just cheapening the brand, you know.

Well, you probably get a lot of repeat buyers that way as well. So it makes marketing easier overall.

That's right. And if you've watched any of Ezra's Presentations, you know, it's all about the email marketing after the. Yeah, after you've got the lead. Yeah. So anyway, yeah, so for strategy, yeah, that's for cold leads. And then you might have something for warm leads, so they might have downloaded your free offer or whatever that case, you know, whatever that is. And then they might be ready to spend an hour with you. So for instance, with a service business or a SaaS business, you might want to have like a webinar and we do that on our site and it can converts really well. It's very software that you can use for webinars, which you don't always have to use. You can just put the video on the next page if you like, which is what we're testing at the moment. And we find that working a lot better than using software and saying select this time or that time. Because the problem with that is that people, they don't necessarily have an hour spare, they just want to skip through it. And we tested turning, like in Wistia, the video player turning off the, you know, the ability to skip through versus turning it on. And yeah, converted better. People were skipping through, but they were still scheduling the call after it. So it doesn't really matter if they watch it all or not, but you just want to sort of tweak things to make it easier for them. But yes, that's like for warm leads and then for hot leads. Depends on your business again, but, you know, just have a strategy call or something like that so that you can just see if you're a good fit for somebody, you know, and if it's a membership, whatever, just have a buy now button. You don't need to put people through like an ascension model, you know, to take them through this step or that step or that step. Just give them the opportunity to buy straight away.

Yeah, no, I think that's. I love it because that's very similar. I know Sramko preaches, I just call Shram. James preaches like a chooser type thing on his. On, you know, he has one on his website and like self select where you go. And it's a custom path.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that's really, you know, Ryan Lebeck's ask method. And it's meeting people where they're at. So it's not just a cold, warm or hot lead magnet. It's really just. Yeah. Giving people a clear pathway based on their particular challenge. So I think Sramco has four different things and, you know, four different, you know, I think he starts, I better Open his website. We designed it, but I thought so.

Yeah, but he has, you know, the first option is I need help with business strategy, and then the next one need help with, you know, traffic or sales need help with, blah, blah, blah.

Right.

So then people select that and then they go to another page and then it says, right, which profit zone are you in right now? So not quite 10k a year. Somewhere between 10 and 500. More than 500. So the point is, like, he's segmenting people, but it's really helpful for that person that's being segmented because he's going to provide them with a solution based on where they're at right now. And yeah, it is based on Ryan Levesque's ask method. And then what he would do, what Ryan Levesque says to do is let's say you've got a landing page for your offer, but they've come in through being segmented from, let's say, version A. Then the landing page of version A would have testimonials and copy that's slightly tweaked to, you know, to match that version A. And then same with version B or version C. So, yeah, you want to just tweak the text slightly. It's the same design, same landing page, same messaging, but slightly tweaked to suit whatever they came in from. Just pretty smart.

Oh, my God. I've always loved. And yeah, you're right, it's totally Ryan Levesque's model, but I love the execution of it.

Well, just from a conversion standpoint point too, like the sales messaging that you can put in front of them after a chooser is just going to be so much more dialed into that specific person.

Spot on. Yeah, spot on. Yeah. And then what? Also, as far as strategy goes, I mean, you might not be able to go to that extent, especially if you're more starting out and you don't have, you know, a bunch of different pain points and things to solve. But what people often forget to do is, let's say somebody has opted in for a free lead magnet, is they'll just get, say, hey, you know, a little text on the, on the thank you page. Say, hey, thanks for downloading the ebook, and that's it. Right. But that thank you page is a huge opportunity that most, you know, website designers miss completely. So that. Yeah, so you just want to offer something else on the thank you page. You know, it might be the next step in your funnel, that warm thing or the hot thing, whatever it is. But I recommend having like A video on that thank you page. And it might just be a face to camera video. Just saying, hey, thanks for download and the free thing, whatever it is. Now I'd like to sort of offer, blah, blah, blah, whatever the next step of the funnel is and then explain what that is exactly and educate them a little bit. And, you know, it's really the opportunity to build trust. I mean, they've just given you a yes, so now there's a good chance they're going to give you another yes. If, you know, if you get their.

Attention, I love it and everything. If you could just make it low friction slash, allow them to choose the next best option. This also reminds me, this is something that Matt, you'll know. The super, super signature email signature. Yeah, that's Dean Jackson. Dean Jackson. I forget who told us about it.

Yeah, who's Mitch who was talking to us about it on our show?

Yeah, you could use the same concept here. It's essentially that it's like, hey, now that you've done that, thank you. It's like, here are the next few ways that you can do business together with me. And it might be from easy, moderate to more advanced.

Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, once you've got their email address, don't just, you know, leave it there and respect that email address as well. I mean, the purpose of it is so that you can build more trust with them over time. They might not be ready to purchase yet. Right. So, yeah, don't abuse that email, don't spam them. Just keep providing helpful, you know, information and, you know, whether that's putting them into a nurture sequence, you know, where you have things already preset, or if it's just sending them new information once you've got it. And once you put new content on your website, like on your blog, your podcast, whatever. Yeah, send people back to your website to consume that helpful content. Awesome. Cool.

Well, does that wrap up everything for strategy?

Strategy? It pretty much does. Yeah.

I know there's a lot of strategy you can probably keep going.

That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Persuasion. So really this is like, you know, the book influenced by, you know, Robert Cialdini, the Psychology of Persuasion. And so that was really one book that, you know, sort of changed my business really because of the fact that it's just so powerful. If you put these principles, which are, you know, authority, social proof, consistency, liking, reciprocity and scarcity on your website, then that can really help persuade people to take action. So obviously you need the right copyright in and the right message and you need to have an offer that people actually want to pay you for. But if you put all of these elements onto your website, you can really give it a good boost.

Yeah. Now the persuasion, I mean, both of those books are absolutely amazing. And even just if you want a quick hit, it's like, look up a summary and you could probably get the points and, and honestly, just like go down each chapter. It's like cool. Make sure you have all of these and just start with like one.

Yeah, that's your conversions.

Yeah, totally, totally. And as far as, you know, I mean, I can sort of give some tips as far as a website goes, if you want, for each of those points. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, cool. Well, with authority, like, I mean, you can display your authority, you know, visually. Like for instance, you might be speaking from stage or even, you know, if you're a tradesperson, it might be professional photo of you and your team standing in front of your, your vehicles, that sort of thing. You know, just, I really encourage people to get a professional photo shoot done and professional videos as well, because you can really take your, you know, your perceived value to the next level based on that perceived authority, you know? Yeah, yeah.

And then it doesn't cost much to get some very professional looking photos. I mean, everyone has a really nice camera. Just get someone that has an idea of how to light it up and frame it.

Right, Totally.

To start, at least.

Yeah. And here's the thing. You might have an awesome service or business or whatever the case is, but if people land on your website and they don't see that you're awesome, then they might not think you're as awesome as you are. So you're kind of doing yourself a disservice if you don't invest in that. And if you think back to like the old days where shop fronts were, you know, sort of the first impression. Well, these days it is your website, so, you know, it is like the receptionist and yeah, you want to make those first impressions last so you don't get a second chance at first impressions.

Yeah, so that was, that was the authority element of influence.

Yep. And then social proof, you know, which is really just having other people sort of say how awesome you are instead of you saying how awesome you are. Right. You want other people to give case studies or video testimonial, written testimonials, reviews, product reviews, that sort of thing. But yeah, the more social proof you can have on a website, the better. And case studies are especially powerful. So a case study might be showing how or what their situation looked like before they came to your business and then how you helped them throughout that journey and then what the results were. So then people that are on your website, they'll read those stories, they'll resonate and they'll figure out how, you know, how you help them might be how you can help that visitor as well.

Yeah, it's a relatability factor.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. And just on that like I see a lot of websites, they put logos of, you know, as seen on, you know, all these massive publications. But, and then they might have, I don't know, maybe say you know, two clients that were big names. But the problem with just putting those big names and as in all those big publications on your site is that if your clientele is, you know, a lower, you know, sort of say a smaller business, right. And they just see these big names, they're going to think that you're not for them. So you really want to mix it up and show a range. You know, if you've got a lot of medium sized businesses then put medium sized logos on for the majority of it. So that, yeah, people aren't turned away thinking that you're not a good fit for them.

Yeah.

Not to mention that the whole like as seen on stuff has kind of lost a lot of weight over the years, you know, because you know, you get people that go out there and they'll like, they'll submit a press release that gets, goes on like every website on the Internet and now all of a sudden they're as seen on, you know, Fox News or whatever.

Yeah, totally, yeah, yeah, I agree, agree. It's diluted and then consistency. So just having a consistent look and feel across your website and your whole online presence from your social media to your offline events, whatever you're doing in the form of, in the way of marketing. But yeah, also having a consistent voice and consistent values as well. So if you're sharing content on social media.

And you've got a consistent voice, then people are going to start to trust where you're coming from and that particular set of values that you have know. And then there's, there's liking. So once again, I mean people buy from people they know like and trust. Right. So you know, put your opinions out there and you know, if you're, if you're doing a blog post or if there's a news story or whatever, put your opinion, don't just like copy whatever else is out there, put your opinion into it so that people really get to know, like, and trust you.

Yeah, yeah, that's. Yeah, that's huge. And I was going to say something on the consistency factor too. We're realizing that at least in our experience in our business, Matt was literally.

Sorry, this is just like he was.

Flipping through Robert Cialdini's thing and he had a bookmarker that was actually a Power Rangers, like, playing card or something. Like, what the hell is that?

Yeah, I totally screwed up Joe's train of thought by handing him my bookmark, which is a Power Rangers trading card.

Where did that come from?

I have no clue. I don't remember ever collecting Power Rangers trading cards.

But consistency to what? Yeah, that was your third point from Persuasion. Robert Cialdini is, you know, with us, our voice, a long time we did not have consistency. At least, you know, it didn't feel as consistent or like our voice here as compared to, like, our stuff on social media, our website as a whole. But now we've definitely been, you know, folks that we meet in person say, like, no, you are the same person. You are here as you are online and in person.

Wow.

And the trust factor, like you said, then gets into liking and the whole authority building and persuasion, it just makes everything, the whole relationship much easier.

Yeah, Yeah.

I think a lot of people over construct what that should just like just be you everywhere.

Yeah, yeah, true. Which is easier said than done.

A lot of people know.

Yeah, a lot of people just put it on. But anyway, and it can take a while to find, you know, your sweet spot and your voice and things like that, you know, I mean, a lot of businesses. Yeah, and a lot of businesses pivot over time as well, so.

True.

Yeah. It's hard to be consistent, but. And then, yeah, there's reciprocity. So it's really leading with value, which is, you know, what you should be doing anyway. Yeah. And people are more likely to. To give back, you know, if you've given something to them first, essentially. So it's not just for lead magnets, but it's like, you guys, you got this awesome podcast, you know, and you're not asking for anything in return. And, you know, that's just building trust. And it's a really, really powerful, you know, principle, in my opinion.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, yeah. Cool. Yeah. And then, yes, scarcity and urgency, which is the final principle. And, you know, it's really human nature to desire what there's less of. Right. So as far as your website goes, you know, if you have an E Commerce, you might have put the quantity available remaining of each product. You know, a lot of them are sold out and, you know, but if you actually Show There's. There's 12 left or whatever, that can really help, you know, people take action if there's, you know, there's not many left. But same with, you know, if you have, I don't know, I don't know. Wherever is a limited time offer. Kind of depends on the business model. But if you're running a webinar or not so much a webinar, but a live event, you can show limited amount of seats. But yeah, just don't use fake scarcity. I know you guys talk about that a lot.

Yeah, not a fan.

But yeah, they're the principles.

Yeah, those are amazing principles. And just so everyone, just to be super clear, pick up Robert Cialdini's book Persuasion. If you haven't. That's like our influence. That is. That's the bible basically for all this and just follow along. That's totally. Yeah, it's great.

I love it.

And you can use them in life as well. But that's how we use them on a website.

Yeah, yeah.

And when you read Influence, Influence isn't necessarily a book that's geared towards entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs just adopted the hell out of it. And this is how you sell too, you know. But the book is actually literally just about like, how to have more influence over people. It's not necessarily a business book.

Totally.

Yeah.

I'm curious, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see people making with their website designs? Like, what are some of the things that stand out that you're just constantly banging your head against the wall going, why do so many people do this?

Number one is like, they sell on hello. Right? Like, honestly, even e commerce sites do this more so than anything. But if you have a look at like Ezra's latest Boom by Cindy Joseph Homepage, he's actually got an education piece on there now. And this is what we do with our sites as well. I mean, you want to let people know what you do, right? But yeah, I mean, he's now got see the tutorial. So he's educating people on, you know, why this product's awesome. And he's got social proof in there. And Jennifer Aniston, like, authority and things like that. And then the products are the solution to that problem, you know. And so, yeah, the biggest problem I see is people try to sell on hello and look at my work. And look, it's only worked with one of the websites that we've done because of the fact that they've done a lot of marketing off the site that brings people to the site. So then you can have a buy now button on there. But yeah, if you've got cold visitors, just don't try to sell on. Hello. So that's probably the biggest mistake I see.

Sure. Yeah, that's a huge one. It's all about the conversation. That's I think. And when you build something like this and have some, it's not like you need a lot of marketing to bring people to your online asset. Your website like this, you have some persuasion elements like you just listed. You should kind of start to trust or I think you'll learn to start to trust that online asset to do a lot of the work for you to build the trust. So then you just, yeah, get them on the list, but just have a conversation. Eventually the right time pops up and it's usually low friction.

Well, to what you just said about getting them on the list, what are your thoughts on, you know, opting them in on hello?

Definitely.

Yeah.

Because that's not really a sale. I mean you're not asking for money.

You know, given value in exchange.

Given value, exactly, exactly. So yeah, I would encourage people to, you know, to have an opt in for sure, anything. Just asking for an email address and just on that, don't ask for like five different fields like you know, email, phone number, first name, last name, all that of stuff. You just need an email address. And I asked for the first name because when you do send people emails, you want to address them by their first name just to make it feel more personal.

That's true.

Yeah, that's something that we don't do much of all of our customers we have their names. So we try to personalize customer emails. But for our actual lead emails, we rarely collect names. I mean to be honest, we haven't done a whole lot of testing. That was kind of one of those things. It's like everybody always used to tell us the more fields, the lower the conversion rate. So let's just, just only ask for email. But to be honest, it's something we probably should test again.

Honestly, it's like the quality of people in the conversations, maybe the people, the right people are going to take that extra second and then we're just nurturing that relationship on a deeper level when we do personalize our communication with them.

Yeah, yeah, correct.

Definitely better to have less leads of higher quality than more leads of lower quality.

100%.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And like for instance, like a couple of Websites we've designed for, like, personal training businesses, you know, that are really quite local and they're not trying to reach a global audience and they don't need a massive list. They just want people to come through the door, but they want to know that they're serious. Right. So they do ask for a phone number and they've tested with them without. And the ones that convert are the ones that give their phone number. So it really depends on the business.

Yeah, that makes sense. Are there any other, like, from a design standpoint, things that you're not really a fan of? I know, for me, one thing that I really don't like with design, and you may disagree and have counterpoints to it, but I really don't like it when people put sliders at the top of a website. Scrolls through images. Yeah.

And they're a proven conversion killer. So in like 95% of split tests then. Yeah. And this is not me doing the test.

Sorry.

This is, you know, conversion Excel and Mech Labs and all those people that I follow, they all say that in most split tests, image sliders will kill conversions. And there's about a dozen reasons why, but the main one is because it's freaking annoying for people. Right. They're trying to read something.

There's a lot of tech issues sometimes in browsers and mobile site load slower.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. And video backgrounds are pretty much in the same boat as that from the point of view that they are so distracting. Unless you've got, you know, not much else on the page and it's just a simple message or a simple opt in or something like that, then it can work. But yeah, generally speaking, they're slow and they're annoying and they do not work.

Yeah. Are there any trends that do work, like with design that are just like new and fresh or ones that you always go to?

Yeah. So anything you can have a little bit of a micro movement and it might be on a call to action that just, just potentially jiggles a little bit or things like that.

Like a button.

Yeah. Just to draw a little bit of attention but don't have it, you know, like, like flashing and like the old, old way of, you know, designing websites where there's spinning, insert bells and whistles. Yeah, just a micro movement. But also, for instance, we like to use this thing called like an impact, like a metric bar. Right. And it might be just like underneath the main banner on your homepage, a row of metrics that move. So in other words, you might have 10,000 followers for instance, so instead of just showing the number 10,000, it'll count up from 5,000 really quickly and stop at 10,000. So it'll get a little bit of attention. And the only things we want to draw attention to are call to actions and social proof. Really. Excuse me. Sip of water?

Yeah. No, that's, that's awesome. Actually. That's, that's a great, that's a great strategy. There is is call to actions, of course, but social proof, because that is creating the trust to then click that call to action.

I don't know if he still has, but I know on Pat Flynn's site up in the top right, he's got like his. This is my monthly income number and then there's like a little graph behind it. And the graph is just slightly animated.

Yes. Draws a bit of attention. Yeah, yeah. And that's kind of what makes him unique, you know, doing those income reports.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Although I think he stopped doing them about a year ago, but ah.

Did he? All right, okay. I don't know.

There you go.

That's since, since he hired James Schramko maybe.

So there you go.

Good friend.

There you go.

Yeah, but yeah, a couple other mistakes though that I see are leakage points. Right. So for instance, we see a lot of people use social media icons in the header of their website. Now the problem with that is people go press them and then they're off social media and they never ever come back. Now yes, you can have them open in a new tab and that might help a little bit. Some people have it open in the same tab that their website was on, so they just lost them forever. But then there's other leakage points as well. So for instance, you know, if you do have an opt in and it's a, you know, it's a requirement to have a privacy policy, you know, on a website or an opt in, especially if you're sending paid traffic to it. People, when people click on that privacy policy link, people have go over to another web. Sorry, another web page. Totally. And so therefore they may never come back. So what we do instead with that privacy, when they press that, it'll just open a pop up on the page showing the privacy so there's no leakage, they're not going to go anywhere else. And then for instance, videos as well. People embed YouTube videos on their website but you know, they don't have the paid account. And so people go and press, they play the video, they get to the end and then they have other recommended videos or they have the YouTube logo in the corner and they press that and they leak off to YouTube and never come back. So, yeah, we like to sort of eliminate any leakage points soon.

You say you don't have a paid account. There's like a way to pay YouTube to be able to not do that.

I actually didn't know.

Correct.

I did not know that was a thing.

It is a thing. Yeah.

What is this?

Yeah, well, I don't. I don't have myself. I use Wistia, but. Yeah.

Okay.

And the reason I use Wistia is because it has really good analytics and the leakage points and a beautiful player and it just looks really nice. But yeah, yeah, YouTube, you're asking for trouble. Unless you've got a paid account you can turn off. You know, when it gets to the end of the video, there'll be nothing else and you can remove that YouTube logo from the corner of the video. So you just can't lick off.

Yeah, perfect. Yeah. I mean, we, we use Vimeo for, you know, pretty much the same reasons.

I don't.

I don't think it has nearly as in depth analytics as what Wistia might have, but.

But no leakage points.

Same idea. Sim reasons.

Yeah, totally. Totally.

Yeah.

Yeah. Vimeo is great as well.

It is, yeah. Interesting.

Well, I sort of want to shift gears, unless, Joe, you had more stuff specifically on the design thing.

No, I wanted to shift gears too, but I want to show it. You're shifting too.

Okay. So I actually wanted to shift gears because, you know, your business is clearly an agency business, and, you know, Joe and I were at. We've actually toyed with the agency concept. We've had multiple agencies in the past that we did. We had a handful of clients. And then kind of once we finished up with those clients, we went to, we want to keep doing an agency, and then we sort of of phase the agency out, and then we had a new idea and started a new. So we've had multiple agencies over the years and that. That have kind of come and gone and we're actually in a position now where we're probably going to have another agency pretty soon in, In. In the podcasting space.

Wow.

So I wanted to kind of talk to you a little bit about, like, your agency model, and one of the things you said before we even hit record was you don't typically work on Friday. You know, you'll. You'll jump on podcasts on Fridays. But yeah, you know, your workday doesn't really. Your work week doesn't really typically extend through Fridays. And so it sounds like you've built a pretty good lifestyle business around an agency. And our experience with agencies is they've always been quite a lot of work, a lot of hands on from us, a lot of, A lot more time consuming than more of like an info based publishing business. Like what we, we sort of have done mostly. So I'm kind of curious how you sort of engineered that business to, you know, be an agency, work with a high volume of clients, but still create like a great lifestyle freedom for yourself.

Yeah, look, it's, I would say, you know, five years of just step by step implementing this and that and building the team slowly. And it is hard with a, you know, a service business where you're offering a custom design service. So I think there's a few things, but number one, like we offer unlimited design revisions because I don't want to have to sit there and count the amount of revisions. Right.

Love it. So you just nix that. You're like, all right, keep it easy.

Totally, yeah. So for the team as well, you know, they don't have to worry about it. We just offer unlimited revisions and that's it. So we just keep going until it's approved. But so that's one thing. And then obviously, you know, we've got a team, we've got 20 people on our team. And so with that we've got a design manager. I mean, my role is really just to bring the business in the door, but I don't do all of that these days. I've got a salesperson that's also a website strategist, expert marketer. So she does most of the calls these days, which is really helpful. But it took a while, like for each step of, you know, getting to that next level. I do systemize and I do have SOPs, standard operating procedures. And so even for taking the sales call that I don't do much of anymore, I had to write a full sop and then I had my salesperson do it with me on the call with the clients for about six calls. And now she just does it by herself. So it's kind of that you do it yourself. You write an SOP for it, you watch someone else, they do it with you and then you let them have it sort of thing. And so that's what we do with every sort of step of the way. And we do have design managers that. But I did help at the start, but I don't have to anymore. We do have a team that are based in Australia and The Philippines. So I find Filipino designers, they might have really good folios, but they don't have really good marketing knowledge or conversion focused design. So yeah, then our designers from Australia will teach them. And it's a bit of a long process of bringing people up to speed, but I think probably the biggest key is having the right people, like hiring the right people from the start. So we have a pretty good process for hiring people and it's kind of similar to when we onboard a new client. We have a lot of questions that we ask them, then we do an interview and then we'll sort of pick the people that we think are a good fit, put them on a two week trial and then extend that to two months and you know, then, you know, have them full time sort of thing. But yeah, I think having a good team is crucial. Having standard operating procedures for every step of the way. Now I don't create all of the standard operating procedures either. I have the, you know, the design managers create their own, the VA create her own. And the hierarchy is really just me and the salesperson and then you know, the brand director, the design managers, then the designers and the VA who deals with, with the customer support.

So it sounds like. I think it is because I know you love to travel and do a bunch of other cool stuff. You kind of created a really solid lifestyle business with this agency model and leveraging the team and being remote. That sounds correct.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not. You know, I still work probably 40 hours a week in four days. So yeah, it's like 10 hours. But at the same time, I do love what I do. And, and I don't mind working 10 hours a day for four days in a row, you know, because then I get three days off. But having said that, like, you know, I will still take my daughter to school and pick her up and take her to sports or, you know, anything like that. So I don't have to work throughout those 10 hours. It's just that I'm available. And really my role is just to, like I said, have calls with clients and bring the business in the door partly and maintain relationships and, and just check in with the team. But yeah, I don't even have team meetings because they don't want to have calls. Right. So we just use Slack for that. We have a project management system. All the projects go through that. We use Google Docs for a bird's eye view of how many projects we've got in the system. And you know, at any Given time, we've got between 75 and 100. So it's quite a bit. Yeah, but it's really, it's quite easy once you've got a system in process, you know, and a process and people to manage it. So. So yeah, it just doesn't really rely on me that much. I do love the business and I'm quite passionate about design and I like to oversee it, but I probably don't have to work as much as I do.

Well, I mean, we filled out your onboarding questionnaire and it's a pretty hefty questionnaire, but just going through the process of filling out that questionnaire, I found so many holes in our business and so many. It was like, like it was, it was a very educational process for me because in the process of answering these questions of like, you know, who is your ideal client and what does your avatar look like and where's, what's the demographic and you know, trying to just, you know, get all this information out onto this document, I was sort of, sort of uncovering blind spots in our own business. So, you know, the questionnaire, although it is pretty long, it is something that I think will be beneficial for, for clients to fill out. And then obviously it makes the process so much smoother for you guys once, once the client is onboarded and you know, we're gonna, we're gonna be doing a, a complete overhaul of our website likely in like November or December. So, you know, that's in the works.

With you? No. With the competitor. No.

I'm just kidding.

Yeah, no, we're, we're stoked and because we, we finally. And you helped us actually through that questionnaire. I think, Matt, when you were filling that out, it really had us thinking about our brand as a whole. Like, where do we focus? Because, you know, everything has its own little brand to it, but the cohesive brand, it really got us to think like, what's our hub? Where should we be focusing? And Evergreen Profits is what we decided on as the main hub where everything kind of lives under. So it's, you know, like Matt said, it uncovers some blind spots. It, it brings clarity to a lot of things in our business and probably for most people that fill out that form too for you, so. And then they could a cool looking logo or website too, as a benefit.

Yeah, you got it. Yeah. I'm looking forward to designing your site, guys.

Yeah, it'll be cool. Thank you.

It's gonna be fun. Now, I know you said you had a different topic. Was it the same Topic.

No, no, no. I pointed out that, yeah, we literally shifted gears to the same exact thing. So I just wanted to shine light on your business model and how the day to day looks like. And you did it perfectly. It gives us. Gives us hope that, you know, you can create a good agency with amazing systems. Because I know with the systems that's like the backbone to everything, but also keeping it simple sounds like is the big thing. Not going too wide with it.

Yeah, exactly. I think it's pretty simple. Like I said, just using Google Docs for an overview. It's pretty manual, but you can just see it and it's all color coded. You can see who's working on what and all that sort of stuff, so.

Well, you're also not trying to launch a new brand every three months like we do.

That's the thing. We definitely work a little harder than we should, but it's these freaking ideas and talking to people like you where we get good ideas.

I love it. Yeah, we do have some amazing guests on this podcast.

Yeah. You want to know what the actual, like, the podcast is 95% amazing, the 5% that's a slight curse is that we're getting fed amazing ideas constantly by brilliant people.

Yeah, that's true. Actually.

No, it's seriously this. It's a blind spot that we didn't know and we're like, crap. That actually kind of deters or, you know, it slows us down in some respects. But we're finally at a point where I think we're realizing that and we're gonna get the best of both the worlds, so it's okay.

Well, I do have one last question about the actual business, and you mentioned that the key is really finding a great team. Do you have like a specific resource that you like to go to hire, or are you just kind of, you know, putting feelers out all over the place and, you know, bringing in who you can?

Yeah. So my biggest resource for hiring a team is my team.

So.

Yeah, but look, that takes a while, obviously. But yeah, before. Yeah. When I. When I first started looking for, you know, people in the Philippines, I looked at onlinejobs.ph. and we still have our feelers out there as well. There's. It's pretty hard to find really good talent in the design world, I find. But yeah, you know, you might find 1 in 100 type of thing applicants, so.

Same. I've had that experience too, back in the day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But still. Yeah, so now it's the team. They always know somebody that's looking for work and they, you know, mainly they have a nursing degree but then they have other skills as well. But yeah, so yeah, especially with design. They're all part of design communities. So yeah, when we need to put the feelers out, they'll put the word out.

Very cool.

That's nice. It's just leveraging relationships and I know that helps with, you know, the team as a strong entity, as its own, that they can all support each other, which it sounds like they are if they're kind of self managed and then with just slack, that's the beautiful thing. They don't need calls. That's even better.

Yeah, yeah. And we don't. All we do is get them to record their time on each project so we know what, you know, how much time we spend on each project. But you know, we don't monitor that. We don't put any of that software on their screens to do screenshots, make sure that they work in like, I know they stuff around, you know, look, I mean, yeah, they might be on social media, they might be doing other things, but that's fine as long as the work gets done, you know.

Yeah. Funny story, I actually hired somebody once back on Odesk, I think it was and they at the time they had like a screen capture thing where it would capture their screen like every like 10 minutes. And I went and looked at their screen captures one time because they were developing something for me and they charged me for like 10 hours or whatever and I went looked at their screenshots and like five hours of it was porn.

Five hours. Wow. Yeah.

So needless to say, Odesk didn't end up charging me for those hours, but.

Didn'T even know that.

But no, we don't use those screen capture tools or anything. That was just like a mechanism that was built into that.

Yeah, that's right.

Not for our team, but yeah, for someone brand new like that, maybe. Good thing that you did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The way I see it is you want to build trust in them, you know, you want to let them know that, yeah, you trust them. So that's a good way to lose that trust. Put a screen captured tool on this, on the computer.

Right, right.

Yeah, it's true.

Let's, let's wrap it up. I know we've cooled down a little bit. Unless Matt.

No, no, I'm good.

Give me that look.

No, no, we're good.

Yeah, man. Well, let's.

This has been awesome, guys. Thank you.

Yeah, Greg, I mean other than the, you know, we talked about Influence a lot in Persuasion. If they're. And then this is a swipe from Justin Brooke the other day when we had him on. If there were like a fire in your house and you had, like, you know, a minute to grab a book, like, which most impactful book would you grab? And this could be one that, you know, you recommend to others, I would say.

The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama. That's probably one of the first books that I read in my, you know, early 20s. And I was just thinking then that, yeah, if the house burnt down, well, you'd want to try and find some. Some happiness somehow. So I'd probably read that again.

That's a good one, man. I just finished the. What is it? The. The Joy Book of Joy with. It was the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu.

Oh, wow.

It was like a. Like an interviewer was interviewing them, so you might like that one too. I have not.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, we should do. If you're open to it, maybe like after. After we get our website revamped in the next, you know, six weeks or so. Six, eight weeks. Maybe we should bring you back on for maybe, like a shorter episode and we could just like, talk about, like, what elements you put into the website and why and just kind of have like, kind of like a little interesting dissection of it before and after some stats, too. That might be kind of a fun concept.

Cool. Good idea.

Yeah, please get stats. That'd be awesome.

Before.

And then we'll measure them. Yeah.

Heck yeah, man. All right, well, Studio One Design is. Is. Is where, you know, to find Greg. Is there any other resource or anywhere else we should point folks?

Well, if they want to download a checklist which has 50 things that will, you know, it's just a yes or a no. If they turn those no's into a yes, they'll, you know, be able to get converting website. So if they go to studio1design.com forward slash checklist.

Perfect. Studioone design.com checklist. We'll link that up too.

We'll make sure.

Cool, man.

Awesome.

Well, great.

Thank you so much, guys. Yeah, it's my absolute pleasure. Take care.

You too.

Hey, thanks for listening to that episode. Hopefully you enjoyed it.

You dang right you did.

Of course you enjoyed it. What's not to enjoy?

We weren't going to publish it unless you. And we're going to enjoy this.

If we don't enjoy it, we. We don't publish it. Therefore, we only publish the stuff we know you're gonna enjoy.

We Listen and read the notes as well. So.

Very, very true. Well, you know what I want to do? I want to actually start reading some reviews of some of the people that listen to our podcast because we're getting some really cool reviews. And also I want to kind of incentivize people to leave more reviews because then we're gonna read them for you.

Hey, man, this is our shout out section. Yeah, that's kind of what this is gonna become, the outro shout out section. So, yeah, let's do some reviews and prior to that, let's talk about some.

Of the guys that have supported us.

Yeah. And there's a couple shout outs from our friends and some other folks that reached out to us. These two actually are our friends. They're pretty close friends of ours and they support our show. So if you want to get more of an exclusive shout out, reach out to us. We have a couple spots available occasionally, so it depends. But the first buddy of ours actually Steve Olsher, he's one of our masterminds. He runs a podcast called beyond eight Figures. And they're chatting with just amazing entrepreneurs who do have either exited or they currently run a business that is above 10 million. And they basically grill. So they have three hosts over there, Steve Olsher, Mary Goulet, and Richie Ote. They're all buddies of ours as well, all in San Diego. And they basically grill them until they figure out their methodologies, the tactics and action steps that actually got them to accomplish that, which are what few companies ever would ever get to that point for.

Sure, it's a great podcast. They cover a lot of ground. And, you know, the whole thing is trying to uncover what goes into creating an eight figure business so that other businesses could sort of reverse engineer the success. So amazing podcast. That's Steve Olsher's beyond eight Figures podcast. Definitely. Go check it out on Apple Podcasts and everywhere where you listen to your favorite shows.

You gonna like it. It's very similar to this one with different approaches. So I think if you're a fan of this, you're gonna love his show beyond eight Figures.

And then our other supporter for this episode is our good buddy Casey Zieman's easy webinar.

Bam. And both these guys have actually been on our show too, Steve and Casey. So if you like them, you can even check out an episode too.

Yeah, so check out EasyWebinar.com hustle because Casey put together a 20% off deal for listeners of hustle and flowchart. So EasyWebinar.com hustlez now, easy Webinar is kind of a. It's a webinar tool, but it has live webinars. It's got automated webinars, it's got kind of hybrid webinars. It's got all sorts of, you know, social media functionality. It's got. It's pretty much like the only webinar platform you would ever need. It's got everything all in a single platform. A lot of the other platforms you got to buy one product to go live and one product to go automated. And one product if you want to hire. And this one is just, you know, you get Easy Webinar year covered. You got it all. So if you want Easy Webinar, get it for 20% off. Go to easywebinar.com hustle and again, I just want to thank our partners and our supporters on this show. Casey and Steve, we love you guys. Let's go talk about some of these cool reviews we're getting.

Yeah, let's get into them.

I got another review for.

Wow, that was quick on show. The quick on the trigger.

Quick on the trigger. Yeah. You don't see the behind the scenes, but I like to throw Joe off of his game and just like hit record sometimes.

That little thing you don't know. I'm always on my game.

Except for the times that you're not.

I'm ready, waiting. Alrighty.

So today's review, the title is Actionable Tips for Success. Hyphen. Love it.

Hyphen, Love it.

Hyphen, Love it.

It's a lot.

Exclamation mark.

You don't see a lot of hyphens in these titles, so I'm happy a hyphen made an appearance. And five stars was attached to this review.

Five stars and it's from Isaac Jacobs. Thank you so much, Isaac in Great Britain for leaving this amazing review. Isaac says, I love the real vibe that you bring to your podcast. It is packed vibe. Not that kind of vibe. It is packed with actionable tips that can really help us focus on the meat and potatoes needed to grow and improve. Looking forward to listening to many more and thanks, guys.

Dude, I'm hungry. Isaac, did you send a meat and potatoes with this review? Because I want lunch.

I think this guy's got it wrong though, because focusing on meat and potatoes is a recipe for just eating too much and getting. Not getting more done in your business.

Potatoes, do you work out a lot of carbs associated with that? If you sit behind the computer all day, that's gonna catch. Catch it up to y'.

All.

But I appreciate the review and I know what you're actually saying. Isaac, you rock, man.

And vibe is a big. A big thing for us. We're trying to go for the good vibe. Not, you know, not the vibrator that Joe was talking about. But we're trying to.

I'm just saying vibrations. Vibrator.

You were vibrating. You were going.

I listen to binaural beats or vibrations in audio form that sound like that too, but vibrators can be entertaining for some folks. Jokes.

Yeah, but we're going for a vibe.

We are going for a vibe. That's true. And we. We like the vibe that we have. I think I'm happy the vibe is resonating. Yeah, that means a lot. That's super cool.

That's true. Yes. Our vibe is we just goof off and have fun and talk to our friends a lot.

It seems like the feedback we get from most of our guests, too. High level people that do podcasts are like, you guys have been the most fun I've been on.

That is the most common, frequent, like, feedback we get from guests. Not from listeners, but from guests, is I have so much fun going on your show.

Those are quotes, like, straight up. It's usually off air after we hit record or the stop record. So, yeah, we just got to, like, keep recording and just, like, fake it out and just get that on recording a lot more.

Or you can just take our word for it and believe us, God, have some faith that people actually say this.

Yeah. Don't you chill with our vibrations over here? I mean, come on.

All right, Isaac, thanks so much for leaving the review. Everybody else listening, head over to itunes or Stitcher or wherever you like to leave reviews. We're reading reviews off of itunes specifically.

Because that doesn't exist anymore.

Oh, Apple Podcasts. Yeah. Go over to Apple Podcasts and leave reviews. And we love you for it, and we love reading them and having fun reading them. So thank you. Thank you.

Muchas gracias.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a CliffsNotes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it Wiki Wiki. We love you.