504 – How To Scale Your Recurring Business Creatively

Podcast: Download (Duration: 35:00 — 32.3MB)

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Russ Perry

Podcast highlights:

03:28 – Fun versus authenticity
04:57 – The story behind Design Pickle
08:33 – What you can build when you solve your own needs
11:10 – Defining “agency”
13:39 – Focus on these customers
15:36 – A smart business model
16:15 – Who do you target?
18:35 – The retention numbers
21:19 – For those who “aren’t creative”
25:08 – Touched on so far
27:12 – Some smart advice
29:39 – Russ’s number one funnel filler
32:26 – Where the traffic goes

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I’m speaking with Russ from Design Pickle about creativity, and also I think we’re going to go a bit deeper and talk about business strategies, because there’s a real story behind this. So welcome to the call, Russ.

Russ: Hey, thank you so much.

James: Russ, it’s strange talking to you when I’m used to seeing you in a pickle costume.

Russ: [laughs] I’m actually a retired pickle now. I’ve since hired folks. That’s sort of the initiation here at Design Pickle as you must become the pickle.

James: That sounds tremendously motivating. So we’re doing this interview. You know those guys in the side of the road dressed up as a hotdog. You’re going to be able to do that.

Russ: It is, it is. It really tests the culture really fast to see what they respond.

James: I think one thing from a creativity aspect is that I do see little snippets of you on the social media. I don’t think I’ve actually met you, but I have seen you online with Ezra’s feed, and that’s one of the reasons we’re talking. I’m interested in finding out how can someone who’s got their own business step away from the computer and actually get known to their audience. I mean it’s a big question, and I’m going to guess that a lot of my audience are not going to strap on a pickle suit or whatever variation of a pickle that they might have for their business, you know, slightly different, perhaps a gherkin. They could be design gherkin, design onion. Do you think once that spot is taken that it’s harder for someone else to come and do their own thing?

Russ: Well you know, the pickle is really a reflection of me. Not only do I love pickles, I basically wanted to do something with a brand with my next business that was just simply fun and light-hearted because that’s sort of my personality. I’m a fairly, easy-going person. So that’s where I would always direct people to look. Like what is your vegetable or pickled item of choice? Maybe it’s not a cucumber, maybe it’s a mushroom or something, but being able to find that and extrapolate that, that has been why we’ve been successful, not because we’re super creative. It’s just because it’s really authentic to who I am and then the team around me who all sort of share this fun personality.

James: Does it have to be fun? I think that’s a great articulation by the way, how you ended up with a pickle. It’s a representation of you, your character. I’m guessing it’s a way in my brand, it’s a representation of me and my character. SilverCircle brand is almost certainly reflecting the brand values translated from Mercedes Benz, from all the time I spent with them. That certainly wasn’t a conscious thing, but it just happened around the domain name and it ended up being, wow, this is very similar.

SuperFastBusiness is also a reflection of me, usually quite fast with things. Some people say machine-like. We want high value, good service, and some people have said, “OK well, SuperFastBusiness says what it does.” Does it have to be fun? Or does it just have to be authentic?

Fun or authentic?

Russ: Authentic. The reason I use humor is because it’s usually not used in B2B or professional service-type context. You typically see humor in consumer branding and in consumer marketing. Things like Dollar Shave Club or beer commercials. So if you do choose to use it, and you’re in a blah or straightforward-type industry, you kind of have a competitive advantage, but it doesn’t have to be humor. It really just has to be authentic, because what people want is they want to then pay for you and your event or your course or service and have that be, whatever they saw or they signed up for, be similar or what they expect. That’s often when brands get screwed is they basically, they’re humorous, and then you sign up, and it’s a nightmare to work with; or vice versa, you think you’re hiring this professional service or product and then it’s a joke, and no one’s taking it seriously, and it’s very frustrating.

James: Right. So it’s like personality bait and switch.

Russ: Exactly.

James: Now you mentioned your next business, which implies you had a business prior to that. I’d love it if you could step us through what happened before Design Pickle, which has been around since January. At the time of recording, that’s not that long. It’s a fair time online, but it’s not a long time altogether.

Russ: [laughs]

James: So generally, internet businesses work fairly quickly if they’re going to work or they’d fail fairly quickly. So you’ve obviously got it going. But I’d love to know what came before that.

Before Design Pickle

Russ: I had two creative agencies. I basically came out of college, typical ‘what am I going to do?’ and got into the marketing, graphic design space, and ended up rolling a lot of experience that I had working with Apple into launching my own, I say agency like it’s the most generic term in the world, but it was more of a branding firm as what the probably more specific term. We helped just companies just take a look at their brand and come up with a bunch of ideas for them on how they can market themselves online and offline. It ended up just becoming a huge grind.

I evolved it, took on some partners the last few years. I did it for eight and a half years, actually. In the last three years of that, I had some partners in Argentina. That was when the world of international designers really opened up to me, because my partners, they were my partners because we were using the design team that they had already built in Buenos Aires. We got really good at this online process management for design. The Achilles heel was we were doing everything. So if you needed an app, a website, a brochure, a trade show, anything, we would do it. And it ultimately wasn’t scalable and we crushed under our own weight.

Making a change

James: Right. So you’ve been around for a long time online. But you basically had to make a change. I suppose a lot of people are reaching that point where they’re feeling that their business model isn’t working and they have to do something different. You’ve done something different. I’m a pickle, I’ll make Design Pickle. Was it successful straight out the gate? Or was there a few little twists and turns when you got started?

Russ: Yeah, so there is a bit of a transitional part to the story that I don’t really talk about. When I closed the agency, it was September 2014, I remembered it vividly, September 1st, that was my first day of being unemployed, and I was freaking out. I’m married, at the time, I had two daughters, I have one more by now, but I was like, what the hell am I going to do? And so I just reached out to my network and thankfully got a few consulting gigs.

Now the consulting gigs were everything from ‘hey I need a new business card’ to ‘hey I need a new brand strategy.’ It was fine, I covered my expenses, things were OK, I wasn’t going to get kicked on the streets, but the smaller design stuff, if you do that or you know how to do that, it’s not hard, it’s just very time-consuming. And so I ended up creating a little, virtual model with a couple of contractors, a project manager and a designer, who just happen to be in the Philippines. I didn’t decide to work there. They were just the people who I found that ended up working well. I set up a little system internally so that when my consulting clients needed these jobs, a brochure, a banner, or whatever, Facebook ads, they could just request directly to my contractors through a little helpdesk system that I had signed up for.

So once I started doing that and then I got a few more consulting clients, I looked at this and I was like, this is pretty clever. It’s actually really easy. I don’t have to manage this at all. This is sort of self-managed and running really well. I wonder if I could brand this and sell this. So then I did a little due diligence and what’s out there and some creative branding around it. That’s when the pickle came into play and then we launched. So I actually was using it for my own need first and then found out this could actually help other businesses too.

James: I think that’s a really important lesson. I want to highlight that. I’ll make a case study just to really reinforce this. Some of the things that I have in my business were actually created around my own self need, even the ones that aren’t obvious, like the coaching community. That was just a set of frameworks and checklists that I use for my own websites and then helped other people use them on their websites, and that was my first success online, the cheat sheet for people who bought a particular type of software, and I built a little group around that. And then of course they wanted help with other stuff.

So I built this community around helping other people, being able to answer their questions, putting more frameworks, and now it’s evolved to this point where it’s got a whole catalog of event video recordings.

Same for the SEO business. I signed up clients to do SEO, and then other people asked for help with SEO, and then I realized that I couldn’t do it all, so I brought in a team. Once I brought in a team, I might as well help other people. I built that business up to a huge business, and then I got them to set up a helpdesk. The team were actually able to support all the customers and affiliates were driving the traffic. So other people sold it, and my team were able to deliver it, and I was nowhere to be seen in that business.

The margins were a bit lower that way, so in the end, I integrated the team from the contract that I had and built my own team. And I also integrated the affiliates. So now, I was able to pick up two more margins. And that became a great business. It was so powerful, I was able to actually sell that to my biggest customer early this year after seven or eight years of successfully running in the background. It was a very great business.

But the key point I’m highlighting is that you can build a business by solving your own needs. And then other people will want help with that. So you just build it out to scale, basically. And that means you can’t do everything yourself.

There are lots of other solutions in your space Russ. There’s 99designs, there’s every kind of bulletin board, everyone knows a friend who can do design, a kid at high school, but what you’ve done, this is probably straight from that book Simplify, is you’re a proposition simplifier. You’ve made it easier for customers to be able to deal with you, and you’ve made the business more useful. You’ve basically gone direct to the customer, cut out the whole agency, the whole jobs board thing.

What is an agency?

I think we should even look at the word “agency” these days. Agencies tend to imply a lot of staffing, a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of middle layers of fat where there’s an expense.

Russ: I ran an agency for eight and a half years, and I really learned that agencies have the model, and the cost, and the expenses that they do, the good ones, because they’re really in the mitigating risk business. They want to do things and ensure that they don’t get backlash if things don’t work out well. So they move slowly, they charge a lot so that they could put a lot of time and resources into the ideas and whatever they’re doing, and that’s where I thought to myself, well that’s fine, and if I’m building a custom app or a new whatever, big advertising campaign, maybe I want that. But I don’t need all that overhead and red tape if I just need 10 Google ads or my old collateral updated with my logo for my new collateral.

For agencies, they don’t even like doing those small jobs anyway, but they bill $150 an hour or whatever, and they begrudgingly do 10 variants of a Facebook ad, wishing they were doing ad campaigns. So that was the dichotomy that I saw and I was like, maybe I could put something in the middle, not to say you don’t use an agency, you don’t use a freelancer, but just put a new option on the table that gives you a different experience but is personalized where you are working with a dedicated person, just not with a ton of overheard or surrounding that guy or gal.

James: I think that’s great. You try and find a supplier who just loves doing the type of job that you want done instead of someone who’s resenting the project.

Russ: Yeah exactly.

James: I had a chat with a supplier yesterday. They’re an agency and they were talking about managed traffic services. They were actually like really weird. They didn’t want me to do short-burst campaigns, or low-value campaigns. They told me that they would prefer me to be spending at least $10,000 per month. That’s great for them, but it’s not great for me because I don’t really need that right this minute. They really put their own needs before mine. It was like a clear signal. They’re not the right supplier for me, and I’m not the right customer for them. But it was fascinating how they were really more interested in what the average spend would be because that’s their metric. Very strange.

Russ: Yeah.

Focus on the right customers

James: So you’ve come along to the market and created a great fit for the smaller customers. It’s good to screen out the right customers from the wrong customers and only focus on the right ones. It’s just more economical that way. You can’t serve everybody with every product. So know your space and pursue that. Let people know who you’re not for.

Russ: Yeah.

James: Lots of companies go through their analysis and they find out that the least buying customers chew up the most of their support resources. And often you’ll see them cut the bottom off the market. I’ve even done that with my own community. I start with a paid model because I want a certain type of customer and we get fantastic members in our community because of that.

Russ: Yeah. I want to come back to what you mentioned actually kind of in passing. Our team, it’s like the no-judgement zone. I mean you could have the most boring stuff, and we’re going to be pumped to help you as a business. I think as you’re looking at, as anyone, whether you’re doing SEO, or copywriting, or any service that you go out there, you find the market fit for what you’re doing and someone who is into it, because it’s going to make your life so much easier versus trying to use one provider or one resource for everything. There’s just so many cool, new services out there that exist, where someone is going to be really happy just to do that one little niche part of your business.

James: Right. And do you think this model of yours is scalable now?

Russ: Yeah. We’ve scaled. I think we’re well past 500 clients right now. We do about 300 jobs a day and it’s increasing. It’s scalable like a call center’s scalable. We have to always be adding people, but we don’t need to have 10,000 clients to be a pretty profitable company. We’re already that. It’s just a matter of onboarding clients at a steady pace. We’re always hiring about 50 to 100 clients ahead of schedule.

Monthly subscription business model

James: Right. And I’d love to cover a few aspects there. Firstly, business model. You’ve got some kind of recurring subscription business model.

Russ: Correct. It’s a monthly subscription, no contracts or anything. You just sign up for the month and you can send in whatever you need during that month.

James: So it’s a till-further-notice program? So people pay until they say stop.

Russ: Correct.

James: Great. It’s smart. A lot of business owners and services are thinking, how can I put a subscription model to my business? I encourage it for my students, clients. Greg Merrilees, who’s a designer, has a program like that too. So does Alan Nunez. They have great customers on the right packages.

And some people target resellers or end users. Do you target one of those in particular or both?

Who to target

Russ: It doesn’t matter. When we designed the service, I always say that it’s best used if you’re the end user of our creative files because your designer’s creating a relationship with you. If you’re a middle man, then things can get lost in translations and stuff just move slower between the edits and the feedback and all that. I’ve seen agencies or companies using us on behalf of someone else. They get a design, they’re like, I love it. And then the next day, they’re like, it’s terrible. What the hell, what’s going on? And it’s because they’re not actually the person making the design decisions.

But we’ve had lots of people. That’s what’s cool. I think anyone going out to create a productized service, like we’ve done, don’t be so concerned about too many limitations out of the gates because people will find a way to get value out of your service. If they do great, if they don’t, they’ll cancel. That’s the biggest thing we found.

James: I think that’s great. You’re a performance-based integrity business where you actually want the customer to consume and to go well. Exactly like my business. I even built an app for my students so they can easily access the community. And I’ve got a private coaching section where I personally coach people. I want them to be successful because they will stay forever. This thing has just taken off, the app combined with the private coaching, because they’re guaranteed to get a result. And they’re going to use their membership, which will give them a profit way in excess of their membership.

Some people have gone from $30,000 to $300,000 a month in my high-level program just from having that, someone else making decisions with them, going through checklists and being aware of processes that they’re blind to. But isn’t it great when you have a business that’s centered around a customer satisfaction and they get joyful results? They just wouldn’t dream of leaving that and that’s a sustainable business model.

I think some people take the opposite approach, which is that they hope the customer forgets they’re getting billed, and they don’t care whether someone uses the product or not. They even say, “Well it’s the customer’s responsibility.” But I think if we can take responsibility for our customer using the product, then we’re going to have a great business model.

Subscription retention

Some people even talk about subscription retention being just three months. I mean that’s a crazy number. Based on my number, I’d be looking for three years. You haven’t even been going for that long but what sort of numbers are you looking at for your own business there for retention?

Russ: We always look at dollar value because we’ll often do prepaid promotions for our service, which I highly recommend as a strategy to capture more revenue from happy clients, is to offer them a chance to sign up for like a six-month plan at a discount or an annual plan.

James: Exactly what I do. Twelve-months’ subscription. And I’ve migrated most of my business to be 12 months or six months’ subscriptions, depending on which program they’re in because it allows people time to commit to getting a result. And it allows me that satisfaction that I can really help them significantly, in such a short time. And you get a great customer, because they’re filtered by a certain price point. And they’ve got this sunk cost of investment, so they’re going to use it.

Russ: They love it! Yeah, they’re like, better people. So our model, our kind of funnel is, get them in for a month or two, and that’s like the self selection phase. Either you’re going to love it, about 82 percent of our clients are a good fit, and they get the service, and they like their designer, and it’s awesome. There’s about eight to 10 percent that they’re kind of on the fence and we’ll work with them to make sure it’s not us, it’s you kind of deal, like a dating kind of relationship. And then there’s some people who just are like, super unreasonable, or their expectations are just to the moon, and they’re not going to be a good fit no matter what we do.

But once we get them in, our average lifetime value is like, well over $2,000. Because we’ll offer them, “Hey, you like this service, why don’t you lock in the support for the next six months?” And clients are super happy just to have the peace of mind that even if they’re not using it, if something does pop up, they can just send us something off, there’s not like, “Oh, is my designer available?” or “Can they fit me in?” or “Oh, I got to find somebody online,” kind of deal. So at that point, we consider that a win.

And if they renew another six months, a lot don’t, not because they don’t like the service, just because they overestimated how much design support they would need, which I argue, that means they’re not marketing enough. But that is where we look at it and like you said, they are happy, they love the service, they’re promoters. Like those people are the people that I just freaking love, and they’re the easiest clients.

James: Yes, they’re good ones. You get the best, and don’t worry about the rest.

What if you’re not creative?

So can people who aren’t creative be creative?

Russ: Yeah, I do think so, maybe not in the visual, I think like creativity is not about good design, which is usually the connection people make when you say “creative”. “Oh, I’m not a creative person.” They think, “Oh, I don’t know how to do design,” but being creative is more about communicating and solving problems. So whatever methodology you use for that, I mean your brand is very, I would say your brand is not very creative from a super traditional standpoint. You have a very straightforward, no-nonsense kind of brand. But I bet you’re solving a lot of problems creatively. I bet you have a very cool, creative business model with how you support your coaching clients and how you do these things.

It’s not about, do you look like you’re cool like Apple, but are you solving things in a different or unique way?

James: That is spot on. A lot of the people I’ve learned from fit that criteria. Straightforward marketing and logos, the creative stuff, off the charts.

My main concern when I was asking you to come on this show is I just didn’t want my customers to have to dress up as a pickle. And I wanted to make sure that there were other things driving your success other than flamboyant marketing tactics.

Russ: That was like, a super low-budget let’s just hustle and grind. Actually, the real reason, if you want to know quickly, is I got in super last minute as a sponsor for the Infusionsoft conference out here in Arizona, and they had no booths left, but they allowed us, I was like, well how about I hand out pickles at lunchtime, and just wrap the pickles in a – like they’re pre-packaged pickles, they’re not just like loose, juicy pickles.

James: Yeah, have a pickle. Go for it.

Russ: Like wrap it with a marketing collateral around it. And that was our sponsorship. And so I went on Amazon, I found a $40 costume, and I was like, well shoot, I’m just going to be as ridiculous as possible, so everyone notices me.

James: You probably bought it from Ezra, unknowingly.

Russ: [Laughs] Hey, if anyone out there wants to get back into the pickle costume making business, I can’t find any more! Like, I think I bought the last one, and all the stores are out of stock of pickle costumes.

James: That is hilarious. As your business grows, you need a uniform maker to keep up.

Russ: Please reach out to me. [email protected]. If you can hook me up with a new pickle costume, because our current one’s getting worn out, and we need some new ones.

But yeah, it was a bootstrapped, strategic marketing thing, but it was different. So you know, you don’t have to dress up as a pickle, but you could have a clever name, you could host a different type of experience with your groups, or whatever. You know, there’s a lot of different ways to connect, and that’s what we’re doing.

James: The key point here is that you are fishing at the watering hole.

Russ: Exactly. Yeah. And I was on a call this morning, I literally was on a call this morning from a guy who remembers me from March 2015 from that event, who just signed up like, however many months later from that event.

James: The gestation period can actually be a really long time. Had some people say they listened to my podcast for five or six years, and then they decide to take the next step, when they’re ready. At least they know who you are, they’ve got context, they know what you do, and they have a feeling for what it will be like.

And it will be a remarkable enough thing that someone will open an email, watch a video, listen to a recording. I’ve seen photos online, so I keep seeing that profile pop up. You’re there. That’s what the branding’s been effective with.

In recap

So let’s do a quick recap. You’ve been in the business a long time, you’re not a greenhorn with the online marketing. You’re not an instant, overnight success, you’re a decade-long overnight success. And when your moment came, just like in Nine Mile, you got into that spot, you’ve strapped on the uniform, you realized the old way wasn’t working, you wanted to be Netflix, not Blockbuster, you set up a business around your customers’ needs, you’ve put it on with a subscription, which is very smart. And it’s focused on getting customers’ results.

And you were able to cut the dead weight of the old model and transition, which some people never make that move. You had to swing from one vine, let go, and grab the next one. Great marketing strategies, helping people, getting used to the product, and you’ve got a longer-term relationship with them. So you’ve done a great job.

I’ve seen people doing different models in that space, but it is a tough market. With design, the more customized the work, the harder it is to scale.

Russ: Awesome. Well thanks, thank you.

James: Do you get a lot of stress?

Russ: Yeah. I have like, 45 full-time employees, you know, so that’s like, thinking about them, and their families, and the support that we’re doing, it is a bit daunting at times. It’s easy to forget, because it’s all remote and they’re all virtual and we don’t come to an office, but you know, you take a step back, and it’s like, wow, we’re really doing something.

James: You’re definitely supporting entire families, depending on where your team is.

Russ: Exactly.

James: We had over 60 people in our business, and it is a big responsibility. It’s just not good for your team or customers of your customers or you or your team if your business doesn’t go well. So the best thing is to make your business successful.

Russ: Yeah. Who knows? I unplug every election cycle. I just unplug, because it gets too insane.

Some words of advice

James: So what would you want to pass on as a legacy from this podcast? What is your advice to someone who has a business already, which is 95 percent of the listeners to this show, or they’re at least working on one on the side, and they have all sorts of frustrations, I’ve asked them what they are, Ryan Levesque style. They struggle with business model, recurring is definitely something they’re interested in getting, because some people have spiky cash flow.

Russ: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the first things I wrote out when I was consulting, I just had this wish list. I didn’t even know what my design would be called, but it was like, I want these sort of things in my life. This is the lifestyle I want. And recurring revenue was the number one thing, not because it was cool and sexy, but it was stable. It allowed me to, it’s like a litmus test that you’re creating ongoing value, if someone’s willing to pay you more than once. And whatever that was, that’s the type of business I wanted.

My agency was me trying to convince people to hire me, and then me being tested massively to produce so much value in such a massive way one time. And sometimes we would, other times we would fail and it just sucked. I was stressed out. The recurring revenue was like, you’re steady, you’re like the tortoise. Here you go, here you go, here you go, here you go. And that’s what I wanted, and I think that’s the best type of lifestyle business, because you’re now not trying to prove yourself every single month over and over and over again.

James: You’ve brought your personality to it.

Other frustrations they have: trouble scaling, partly because they’re struggling to hire a team. If you’ve got a lot of employees, you must have learned a few things about dealing with people.

Russ: Yeah, well, it was document the sh** out of everything. Every process, everything we did, it was, can I share this with someone else? And if the answer was “no”, then it was too complicated or I was not being clear and I needed to scale it back, or change it up, or break it out. And that allowed me to build a big team really fast, was because we just kept our business model simple, we said “no” a lot, and we documented it all in a backend system that everyone has access to.

Filling that funnel

James: You’ve got a goal, you’ve been at lots of events, you’ve made great connections. And you’ve indicated this in technology going on in the background, to move people from one plan to another. What would be your number one way of filling up your funnel for prospects?

Russ: Like me personally, or just the general recommendation for anybody, or both?

James: Could I be greedy and ask for both?

Russ: We have now enough data to show that finding niche communities and sponsorships for those, whether online or in person, is our money maker. Like, getting in front of people, mastermind groups, trade shows, conferences, that’s the way to go. It’s like hyper-direct mail, is the way I like to look at it. We basically can just say, “Here’s what we do, do you want it or not?” and people can make a quick decision. So that’s been our biggest success. It costs a lot of cash, you know, it’s not the easiest to do if you’re bootstrapped and just trying to… $5,000 sponsorship, a $20,000 sponsorship, it can suck up a lot of resources, but it definitely ROIs.

The other thing that I say is, become a Facebook marketing expert. That was the first pay channel that I went after, I took some online courses, I did it all myself almost the first year, and it totally worked. And Facebook wants you to succeed, and that’s how we got a lot of our reach out there. I now have an agency that does it. But I knew that if I was to ever hire an agency, or grow to the place I wanted, I would need to be able to call their bullsh** and be able to know that tool. And it was like, a weekend course. It was maybe like five hours of content, and I knew enough to be dangerous.

So it’s not a complicated bar, but it’s almost like learning how to drive a car or something. I just feel like knowing that is really, really, really important. We haven’t had a lot of success with Google, we’ve tried a lot, but I think Facebook’s good for us.

James: That’s a really good distinction. I’m surrounded by Facebook experts. Four of them in SilverCircle alone, who are doing really well. There is an insatiable demand. I just had an episode with Ilana, episode 501, classic Facebook mistakes. We also shared how to fix them. And that was specifically designed just to get up and running. If you fix those things, you’re in a way better position. We also covered a cool trick on how to keep social proof on a campaign. That was tip number 11.

So it really is a how or a who question, as Dean Jackson says. Instead of learning how to do it, who can do it? Get brushed up on the basics, sure, but find someone who knows and palm it off to them as quickly as possible.

Where does the traffic go?

You can be hyper-segmented, and get the exact type of customer you want. That definitely falls under the conversions and selling topic, which is another topic that people are struggling with. What are you driving people to, while we’re on conversions?

Russ: Well, we have tested everything. I mean, I’ve done webinars, I’ve done downloadables. Honestly, at the end of the day, our sales pipeline is just, here’s our service. It’s an awareness thing for us, because I’m not trying to convince somebody to start designing, as if they’ve never done design before. Like, here’s this new thing you need to do in your business, or this new software. It’s mainly, do you have a pain right now that’s around design? And, here’s an opportunity for you to use this service instead of, or for the first time.

And we’ve tried to be super clever. I mean, I read DotCom Secrets by Russell Brunson. I was like, doing all the cool things and all these crazy funnels, and we were a LeadPages customer, and our sales cycles were like, 21 days, 30 days, 60 days. And we finally just cut all that out, and just said like, “Here’s our service,” and we found that people just either signed up or they didn’t.

And that’s why Facebook kind of works, is because people who are looking for oh, I need to find an agency or designer, we don’t want to tackle that problem. We just want someone who is already spending money on design to say, “Oh, I didn’t know you guys existed. I’m interested, let me take a look.”

James: Yeah, there’s a nice little ad headline. “Are you spending money on design?”

Russ: Yeah, totally.

James: We’ve covered quite a few topics on this general episode, and I think there were some great points people can relate to. Because in small business, we’re looking to scale, we want to make conversions, we want good business model, we want to be authentic, want a great relationship with customers, and this has been really useful, thank you. Thanks, Russ.

Russ: Yeah, absolutely. I love talking about it. I mean, if anyone needs anything, including if you have a pickle costume, hook up, Rus[email protected]. Always I can help out, answer any questions.

James: Fantastic, thank you. I’ve been speaking with Russ Perry from designpickle.com. If you’d like this show and if you got value from it, why don’t you share it with someone who could get some use from it, or perhaps leave a rating on iTunes? That would be amazing. Thank you.

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