Guillaume Le Tual 2:17
Well, if you want to keep it in super simple high level, the more complex the project is like multi warehouse, multi inventory, multi country, multi everything, it’s more complex and more Magento will tend to win hands down. And the more simple the project, the more Shopify will win. And the cost to build up keep Shadowfax Shopify is way lower. So at first that may surprise people as a Magento expert, I do tell them validate properly if a SAS system works for you, because the cost will be way lower. And it is a good idea to check that first. So that’s the point that I do concede, like, hey, if a SAS system like Shopify will do the job for you, well, great will be less expensive. But very often people find the limitations of Shopify eventually, and they need to move to a different platform. Sometimes Shopify Plus is enough, but they need even more personalization and selling capability. It will be a different platform like no
Jeremy Weisz 3:10
other. Yeah, so you’re gonna mention another episode. I’m just scrolling up here. We have Joe Valley of Quiet Light. They have a great podcast too. And check that out. And Jeff Cohen, who was at Cellar lLbs now at Amazon, actually, I know all these guys this is great. Steven Pope is on here. Chris Mercer is on here. Vinnie Fisher. And then this You said it was a good one, too.
Guillaume Le Tual 3:36
Yeah, well, they’re all good one like I’m having fun with all these guys. You just named here. But for sure. A Casper Illumio. Very interesting episode here because this guy built an agency to over 55 employees. Very nice exit for him and so on. He was also an E commerce only agency just doing Magento. And he they built their own IP intellectual property of Loomio, which is an integration platform, no code, no code, and so on. And he sold his agency and transition to that product business after so there’s a lot to learn even for agency owners about like risk management, project management, increasing agency profitability, and so on. This is a fun one that was valuable need to fill us in all of it.
Jeremy Weisz 4:18
This is great. So this episode is brought to you by Rise25 at Rise25. We help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships. How do we do that? We help you run your podcast. You know, Guillaume, you’ve known me long enough. I think the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships and I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people in the companies I most admire and feature them on my podcast and share with the world what they’re working on. So if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, go to Rise25.com You can email us anytime at [email protected] And listen, if a business will wants a powerful ecommerce online store to increase our sales. I know Guillaume people have piled up to move piled up doorman inventory to free up cash reserves, or they want to automate business processes to gain efficiency and reduce the human processing errors. Well, guess what? You’re in luck. That’s what MageMontreal does. Guillaume Le Tual has been helping ecommerce stores for over a decade. And the catch is they’re specialized and they only work on Adobe Magento ecommerce platform. So if you want Shopify, it’s a no go. You gotta have Magento ecommerce platform. And they’re among only a handful of certified actual Adobe Magento companies in Canada. So you can check them out at Magemontreal.com As you can see right here, and you could check their podcast out, Ecommerce Wizards Podcast. So, Guillaume, thanks for being with me.
Guillaume Le Tual 5:54
Well, thanks for having me. And definitely doing a podcast can say like, it expands my mind. So meeting all those amazing people. And yeah, it’s definitely a plus to run a podcast in this regard, also an amazing way to outreach people or establish a connection like it was meeting some of those amazing CEO and the guy’s like that big shot guy with 2000 employees. And I’m like, What do I tell to the guy like, I don’t have a specific question or whatever. So we’ll say hi, hi. And well, it’s hard to go anywhere from there, since they say I’m gonna invite him on my podcast. And this way, we can start having an additional 30 minute conversation to brainstorm If he says yes, and then additional one hour together, and then I’m starting to build a real relationship with that person.
Jeremy Weisz 6:35
Yeah. And from a professional development standpoint, I like to have people on that can teach me something, right. Like, you’ll learn some amazing stuff from a CEO who runs a 2000 person company, right? So it’s just amazing information. So let’s talk a little bit about you know, since you are an expert, ecommerce websites, talk about some big mistakes or low hanging fruit that people should be thinking about. And you mentioned, before we hit record here, some things you’re working on with with push notifications.
Guillaume Le Tual 7:11
Oh, yeah. Well, that’s, it’s a mix of a buzzword. And they’re a real thing I would say, but like, yeah, non fungible tokens you were talking before, and so on. So this, the PWA is progressive web app. Adobe has been talking about it since like 2017. But it was more like a better version prototype stuff. But now it’s really convenient that all of the major ecommerce platforms say they have a PWA or headless version, which is not exactly the same at all good enough, that basically, you have a better technology, sort of a hybrid between a native app and a website. So you get some of the benefits of both. So even though it’s a website in terms of maintenance, you don’t need to download the latest version of the app. So you’re like you have on the phone always on data. It’s a website. So you always have the latest content. It has some offline capabilities, not that much, but it has some of it. So you could browse for example, pages that you’ve already browsed even in offline mode, and it will still work on like a normal website that if you don’t have connectivity, it will just give you an error message. And you will also have it like overall a faster website. And you will also have push notification for marketing just like if you had no native app. So that’s interesting, too.
Jeremy Weisz 8:23
You know, the other thing we were discussing is, you know what’s next? You know, as a technology person person you’re always looking for what’s next in the company, what’s next for your clients. And so I’d love to hear your thoughts and what you’re thinking of in in regards to AI
Guillaume Le Tual 8:42
Okay, so well AI is step by step so it’s often seen as that magical thing but before it gets magical you have a lot of groundwork and manual work and data entry and data enrichment to do so most companies are not even there yet that truly using AI on this is something out of the box so it does like that so Magento commerce and some other places you can have product recommendation that’s using AI so the machine is learning does that suggest a product converts yes or no and if it doesn’t, it’s going to suggest something else so Adobe commerce and why Adobe sensei which is the AI platform there will do that kind of thing there. And Adobe sensei is used across all of the Adobe ecosystem even on the you know Adobe Stock when you go look for photos and you say hey, find me photos similar visually similar, this one you upload a photo it shows you the similar one, this is all Adobe sensei. So that’s like out of the box AI stuff. And for most company that’s would be sort of the low hanging fruit to get same thing for search results. So the search bar, the relevance for search bars was like always, okay, ish or not that strong and in lots of E commerce, Shopify, Magento, Bigcommerce, and so on. You would often replace the search bar with something else third party system Mongolia or other. And now you have something a little bit better coming out that you have Adobe sensei in the search bar for the Adobe commerce clients there that you have some level of AI in the search bar. So we’re having some evolution there, but it’s still very entry level, it’s machine learning. We’re really far from the, the general, you know, AI there. So so it’s step by step to get there you can see AI projects going on. Even here like government of Quebec is giving huge grants and subsidies to AI project for has to be approved by board and so on. But they’ll pay up to half of a bill up to a million dollar to help AI project get developed in the province of Quebec, here. So the government is pushing hard for this stuff. But a lot of it is just groundwork You see, most companies have a hard time even with just implementing an ERP integration, because they need to clean up their data, standardize their processes, and so on. If you want to get to AI, you need to get all that stuff and perfect functionally in order that is flawless. And then you can get to AI. It’s like the same kind of cleanup you need to do to do marketing automation, that every step of your email process onboarding process, claim delivery process and so on is a tomatin then that would be the next level after it after that say having everything run on keeper Active Campaign or whatever. The next level will be aI helping you run that stuff.
Jeremy Weisz 11:26
Speaking of AI, you know, as a business owner, CEO, what are some of the tools and software you use with your, for your company,
Guillaume Le Tual 11:36
in general or for for AI in general? In general? Well, we do have Atlassian, JIRA, and Confluence for like documenting and handling big project execution, we’ve built our own in house sort of ERP, CRM thing that’s called busy desk. It’s all our ticketing system, and so on. It’s a very expensive route of, of building your own custom system and maintaining it. But for the part of the business that it does run, there are clear benefits because truly customize. Other than that your accounting would be like QuickBooks Online. There’ll be the office 365 suite and the Google Apps. And then what else I mean, the team’s ms team, Ms team will use Zoom also for calls. For sales calls. I prefer zoom because it has a true full screen. When you’re on teams, you do a full screen share. It’s not full screen, you have people in the sidebar, and so on. So it like scales down your your presentations for sales differently. Zoom is better than Ms. Team at the moment until MSDN changes to true full screen support their
Jeremy Weisz 12:41
MS teams versus slack. Just because you’re on Ms teams all the time.
Guillaume Le Tual 12:47
Yeah, I mean, Slack is great, just like it’s paid thing. And like I didn’t see the I didn’t want to bother paying one more team’s personal preference. Slack greatest slack story, no problem there.
Jeremy Weisz 12:59
So for the CRM, it’s kind of acts as a CRM and helpdesk at the same time.
Guillaume Le Tual 13:04
Yeah, busy desk that we have in house we have also active campaign we used to have Infusionsoft keep stuff got out of there. Some friends call it the confusion stuff. So yeah, Active Campaign is what we use for the automation that separate the onboarding process of clients and so on.
Jeremy Weisz 13:23
Do you want for do you use the pipeline version pipeline? Features of Active Campaign? Or is that in the CRM?
Guillaume Le Tual 13:32
No, we’re not using it right now. That could be separately written on snowpark, Cisco and more using it to like a termite step by step, a new client will send a welcome email and then send a follow up and then book an appointment as you book it’s not send a follow up. So it’s more like process information for project execution.
Jeremy Weisz 13:52
How else do you use Active Campaign maybe other companies agencies should be thinking about?
Guillaume Le Tual 13:57
I’m not a big expert in that field. Since we’re, we’re not too strong on the marketing side of actually, like we we do the design and the build. And we’re really like an engineering firm at the core. So active campaign, we use it to send normal newsletter like everybody would do. And other than that, in processing? Yes, yeah, we use it because it’s standardized stuff. So like, if you want to scale up the agency at one point, even if some people will push back on it, you have no choice, you need to say okay, there’s not 10 ways of doing things anymore. Like there’s one way for each cell channel like where did I get this? Did I get it from my website? Is it an RFP request? Is it the reference is it from LinkedIn or whatever? And then what’s the next step in the funnel depending on where it came from, in the execution of my process, and if it comes as an RFP, and it comes with the 70 pages of requirements, it’s a different flow for the sales process than if it’s me who’s sourced that lead and they have no documentation whatsoever about their project needs, and we need to write 5070 pages of stuff, if we decide to go that route. So you need to have one ideal client experience that is step by step the whole thing, then you’ll have the detour, because sometimes clients will not want to follow the path. But each detour needs to be documented. This company called six divisions, pretty awesome, and that they they helped me there a lot. And then each client experience gets standardized. So if it’s coming from the website, if it’s coming from an RFP, if it’s coming from this or that, and they have variation of the same client experience,
Jeremy Weisz 15:33
one big step that you took, is you hired a head of project management, essentially, what were you looking for? And tell me about kind of that process?
Guillaume Le Tual 15:49
Okay, so Well, our company right now is sort of siloed into two, there’s one side is like, support in many projects in the way. So we have a person there in charge, and I was doing great job. And he takes care of the whole thing. So nothing comes to me as the intrapreneur and CEO. And when it’s like small projects, and, and customer requests and support. And if a customer and all contacts contacts me for some stuff I just forwarded to support and it’s taken care of. So that there’s that part, but then building new site, especially when we’re we’re building large, complicated sites, we can be talking like 1000 hours to 5000 hours per project, some of those can be quite a headache. So that part of the company was not yet running without me. So that’s the transition by hiring like a head of PMO project management office. That’s like, Production director of the whole new build, if you wish, my goal there is to completely remove myself from the delivery of all client process, I still want to be involved in the company in general, but I want to be completely out of deliveries, you know,
Jeremy Weisz 16:54
what were you looking for in that person? Were you looking internal, external, how did you find them?
Guillaume Le Tual 16:58
I was part of a project management hiring process, and sort of a bit of a surprise, I guess, that say, Hey, okay, think I just found amazing candidate. And now we’ll need that feeling to see because it’s a new hire, well, we’ll see to the person delivers, but I think so. So great organizational skills, but in a clear, practical way. So instead of me organizing everything as I used to, somebody can come in and organize me almost the same way that my accountant or tax specialists can organize may not say, Okay, now we got some solid expertise of someone from operation. So if you’re familiar with the EOS intrapreneurial breeding system, like Okay, so I’m learning the visionary seed, and then somebody else that can sort of just take the pile of to dues and make it happen and deliver on all that stuff for the project delivery and everything that we need to do to improve the delivery process as a company, basically.
Jeremy Weisz 17:55
So it was really a project management, the person just stuck out, and you saw them being able to shine as being in to help in a bigger fashion.
Guillaume Le Tual 18:04
Yeah, as head of all project managers, basically,
Jeremy Weisz 18:08
what should we any of us listening, be thinking about as far as the hiring process?
Guillaume Le Tual 18:16
That’s one white question. For sure. The values, like I used to think, oh, values, my company values, like it’s, it’s cliche, or whatever. But no, when we scaled up really quickly to company like, we sort of grew a little too fast. And we would compromise on some value or some value, we’re not even written now clearly. And, and then the first list of value was way too long. And it’s hard to stream it line, streamline it down. And I’m also in that process myself, right now to have a very, very short list instead of like a to like three or four. And this is must be truly universal across the whole company. And no compromise is acceptable on this. So if the person doesn’t meet those three or four checkbox, for all position, from HR, to accounting to product development, and deliveries, then it’s just not a fit, you know, so to not compromise on values on the team that we’re trying to build, take a little bit more time and the hiring funnel, this pressure, we need to want to increase our sales want to hit our numbers, and we have a new client we want to sign but like to hire too fast the wrong people. I’ve done it. And that’s definitely a mistake. Number one thing to avoid,
Jeremy Weisz 19:30
what’s an example of a value? And well of the hero, it’s kind of baked into the hiring process. Maybe it’s something you asked maybe it’s something you observe, what’s an example of one of the values?
Guillaume Le Tual 19:42
Okay, well, like I said, we since we have such a long list of values, we’re trying to recruit them something like build future proof quality solutions, for example. So this is one and then we’ll try to find specific examples of quality work that they’re proud of their work of strong work ethic. So like I want to hear how they work. Like, you know, for example, when I was starting out as an employee before starting this company, I’d come in, in normal times everyone, but I’d be typically the last one out, like at 11am was closing the shop at five or six, I was stopping to work for the business, but back then I didn’t have a powerful computer like the company could provide to me, it was like 2003, or whatever. So I would stay there to use the company’s resources. And then I would work on my own stuff. And I’d go from like five or six to 11pm and say, Okay, now now that’s drive a strong work ethics. And do you pay attention? Do you care about the customer, you know, so deliver in an awesome client experiences and under value in this will have all kinds of subsets such as like, honesty, integrity, and we want to define all that stuff, somebody who builds great client relationship as clear communications, and transparency, you know, so to be customer service oriented, so we’ll try to identify, or athletic examples where they deliver great customer service, if that’s applicable, and so on. So we’ll be really probing questions to try to have to see if it’s a fit for that person. Another one for us is resourcefulness. Like, figure it out and get it done. We’re a small company. So it’s not we’re not 400 people here and we sometimes see that problem if we hire from the 400 people company, and they come here, it’s sometimes an issue, you know that they just want to put the screw or bolt in the hole all day long and is like, no, no, here you have to be able to do a lot.
Jeremy Weisz 21:34
I want to hear some resources and books that you like, I noticed that you are a certified scrum master. One of my favorite books is scrum The Art of Doing Twice the work and half the time I JJ Sutherland. Yes. What are some of your favorite books or resources?
Guillaume Le Tual 21:53
Oh, for sure. Scaling up by Verne Harnish. That’s, that’s one by I really love. Top of mind for me. Everything from for EOS intrapreneurial breeding system as we said, so like once called Get a grip on your business. So that’s a that’s a really strong one. And then I guess I have just like so many I’d have to
Jeremy Weisz 22:15
take them. I’ve had Gino Wickman on the podcast and also Mark Winters who wrote rocket fuel with Jules Wakeman on the broadcast, but those are both great. I mean, both great. Books and Authors.
Guillaume Le Tual 22:30
Yes, Agreed. Agreed Built to Sell because that can definitely help you to streamline but like I explained before, it goes more in depth. John Warrillow. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And the list is really long. Again, trying to browse through the the list here of failure on Audible. Yeah, exactly. Listen to a lot of it. Yeah, getting things done is good one, if you want. I had that funny joke. For the one I started a book called Getting Things Done. I didn’t finish it. You know? And I thought I was some kind of wiser saying, Yeah, exactly. But then I listened to the audio version. It’s amazing. The the guy on audio is amazing. And it’s like, oh, man, I should have listened to that thing a few years ago. And that was that was still many years ago from now, but it was was a really good one. Yeah, I’ll have to think a bit about it. But ya know, there are so many ones.
Jeremy Weisz 23:23
All those are good ones. The one I you know, talk about websites for a second because everyone has a website. And so I like to hear how you think about websites. And specifically, let’s just start with if you’re watching the video, butcher box, butcher box.ca. This one specifically, was a migration from Shopify to Magento. So why might you know, he pointed out a couple of reasons of why Magento? And also why Shopify, why this one migration to Magento.
Guillaume Le Tual 23:59
Yeah, exactly. So this one, well, I’ve done both, by the way I’ve done I’ve seen people go from Magento to Shopify, and vice versa. So the importance of picking the right platform from the start, or in their case, it was probably a good idea to be on Shopify when they were a startup, but it just kept growing. You know, and just NDA cannot say too much on the details there. But let’s say that the millions were piling up in terms of top line revenue, and eventually, they need more flexibility and power in terms of how they handle the day to day operation of the business. So what we’ve done here is far beyond just like, Oh, you just, you know, create yourself a box and choose this, which is all a fully custom buying process, you go step by step to start building a box, because Magento out of the box doesn’t look like that at all, you know, it’s this whole subscription model. So it basically turned it more or less into an ERP in the subscription model here. It has so many added features that it would be difficult to develop on the platform that is not Open Source and so flexible because he’s pushing the boundaries really far for everything customer options, internal operation notifications, and so on.
Jeremy Weisz 25:11
I mean, look at these pictures, delicious. If you’re in the US can you buy from here?
Guillaume Le Tual 25:17
You’d go to.com, which is not a client, but
Jeremy Weisz 25:21
it’s the same company.
Guillaume Le Tual 25:23
I think it’s a franchise per contract.
Jeremy Weisz 25:26
Exactly. Okay, because this looks amazing. Yeah, actually 100% grass fed naturally raised meats and fish to your door, sign me up, think they just got another customer because you give them. So any other things that we should just think about? When we’re thinking about our own website? Like, what are we looking at here? And why is it designed the way it is?
Guillaume Le Tual 25:53
Well, for sure the it’s step by step. So it depends where you are in the permanence of needs, so to speak. So the first step is you need a website, and ideally, make it transactional, even for a service company sell a package that will retain or something online, if you can, you know, it’s always fun to wake up with money in the morning even for service business. So but we focus on product business, obviously. So the first step is just have it have a website be transactional, clean up your inventory, standardize your system, and have a lot of data for all of your products, like all the technical specification, PDF, lots of photos, and so on. And what I’ve just said is sort of the table stakes. Now it’s the it used to be if you have an amazing, really well detailed catalog, you could stand out, you will still stand out a little bit, but it will just put you with, with the leaders of the pack in a way, but it’s also the table stakes. So if you look at some Amazon listing, and was showing this a few days ago, to accompany they’re sending, like an ad, their average, like b2b Order is like 150k. Like, Yeah, but look how Tim, this is in content, here’s a $59 Amazon product with three times more content and details and pictures than yours, you know. So that doesn’t work. But again, that’s just a table stake, then you need the traffic. And you need to sort of evolve at each step of the growth of the site to evolve with it. So I had customers that, for example, reach over $100,000 a month, and above in Pay Per Click, but had some resistance, I guess, to exploring more SEO, simply because they were burnt in the past or didn’t clear, we see the value, whatever. But you have to evolve with each step that you step up. And when you have the traffic for the user experience optimization. And you know conversion rate optimization, a B testing, lots of merchants don’t do it that have a sufficient traffic, like in the several 10s of 1000s per month and above who should be actually doing and multi version testing.
Jeremy Weisz 28:01
Now you help maintain that for for customers clients after you develop the site.
Guillaume Le Tual 28:07
Yeah, exactly. That’s pretty much the only services we offer. We build sites, we maintain site. And we’ll offer general like consulting, and then for execution of marketing stuff, we’ll refer other partner agencies.
Jeremy Weisz 28:19
Cool. Yeah, you can see on here. The next thing I want to talk about is is kind of clear step by step on what people need to do to get this and I’m gonna click on the View products, because I’m hungry here. This looks good. The next thing is clear. bags.ca Talk about what you did here.
Guillaume Le Tual 28:45
Okay, so this is the Magento open source one, the other one is Magento commerce, which is now called Adobe commerce. So this one was totally revamped from a previous sort of homegrown platform that they’ve built very beautiful success over the years and was time to get more modern. It’s already a few years old and I think it’s aging well as a website one of the key highlights these guys it was helping them help improve their internal processes. So for example, how do you fulfill an order when you get an order it may sound silly but sometimes shaving off five minutes or three minutes per order processing. If you have the volume for it, it makes a big impact so in this case with these guys with the help of course of the owners suggesting stuff and US suggesting stuff they were able to cut off the three hours per day per employee and they have five employees processing orders. So the the 15 hours per day of time saved here, in this case. So what we do is we would check like step by step how do you process an order? Okay, it comes in what’s the status is it sent to your ERP at which step is it sent to your repeat? Okay, now do you do you print a pickup list in your you go in you Walk into the warehouse, okay? And how do you do that show us on the webcam and, you know, then you, you open this other software to prepare your, your printing, you know, shipping label and so on. Okay, let’s, let’s bridge that together, and so on. And so step by step to really automate all of this, the owner, of course, knew a lot of the opportunity that were there and needed someone to give general counsel and to also implement that stuff. Some other things were suggesting from us, it’s sort of a collaboration with smart owner down on how to streamline the whole process for technology.
Jeremy Weisz 30:33
Most people don’t think about at least I don’t, I don’t think about that when it comes to a website you’re really walking through and how to make the process more efficient. And people or companies are used to doing it the way they always done it. And like, oh, just, yeah, I just need you to do the website. But you’re thinking, how did the website integrate into the whole business?
Guillaume Le Tual 30:54
That sounds exactly, exactly. And I guess that’s something that I do enjoy, like, especially with the midsize companies and larger one, but like, Okay, how does it actually work? Was the process a bit more of a engineering and process world view on it than just, oh, let’s make it pretty, and let’s rebrand or whatever, that’s important, too. But a lot of it comes down to do you have enough traffic? Does that traffic convert? Is it relevant? Do you have proper product market fit, and then how efficient is your operation and handling all that volume, you know, to ship out the orders and so on. So that’s what I’ll focus on sort of, you could say it’s a critical part of the business to optimize that a lot, because you could waste a lot of your time just tweaking colors and whatnot. And even though I’m a former professional visual artists may sound funny to say this. But very often, there’s a lot of time that’s wasted by going over these other sound design. Yeah, I
Jeremy Weisz 31:47
was reading about your background, some of which include matte paintings for the Discovery Channel.
Guillaume Le Tual 31:54
Yeah, and wonder about it and movie 300 and some from national banks of the long slog. And so yeah, once upon a time, it was a matte painter. So remove the green screen around the actors or whatever card something into put a fake background, because obviously, they didn’t go to the moon to film the Mars rising and Mars know, what
Jeremy Weisz 32:13
is the point? I have no idea. The I want to talk about how you think about partnerships, right? You mentioned that, you know, there’s stuff that you do, you stay in your lane, and there’s then you pass along to someone else who, you know, can kind of carry the torch and whatever other service that company needs. So what are some of the general types of partnerships, you think of whether it’s hosting or whatever, maybe we could talk about some specifics?
Guillaume Le Tual 32:41
Yeah, for like, business, the volume, business intelligence do like to refer some partners for that. Marketing for everything, pay per click management, SEO, off site, SEO, link building, press release, and all that stuff for an external agency for that stuff. Hosting, we do none of the hosting in house, that to external partners. So that just some key event, I do believe like, even from an operational point of view, and from a partnership point of view, like if you’re clean, and like you said, you stay in your lane, then you can partner. If you’re trying to take over too wide. Well, it’s harder to partner, but also from an operations point of view. Like when we started the agency, we were super wide, we had so many services at one point, I remember looking at the Apple website, like maybe 12 years ago, whatever say hey, I have more services than apple. You know, that’s the Apple has products, I get that something’s wrong here. So let’s let’s trim this list down and not offer everything from graphic design to we’ll print your business card to will do your IT support and normal fix your printer and we’ll do your website. And we’ll do your pay per click and your social media and your reputation management. Like you can be a super wide agency, but you need hundreds of people to support that to the level that I see. Makes sense.
Jeremy Weisz 34:03
Yeah, you have to say discipline, because I’m sure you know, you’re a trusted adviser. When you go in and you save them three hours per employee. They’re like, Yo, um, what else can you do? You know, like, we need SEO, we need pay per click, we trust you. How do you stay disciplined in that and decide we’re not going to build out this service? Or you are going to build out this service? Maybe it’s a slight offshoot of Magento development and something else is not how do you think through that when you get requests?
Guillaume Le Tual 34:36
Well, that could be a question of volume. At one point, if you have enough volume for something and you have the interest for it, you might decide to add one additional service but again, stay clean in your lane and just add one additional service top 310 of them, you know, so in our case, we do large project like 1000 5000 Our work typically per project, and that’s for the new build and then there’s a whole support the new Any project division, so the volume is limited when each project is that huge, there’s a limited number of new projects. So it’s just super logical that starting new, you know, service offers like this is not necessarily, at least in my way of viewing it a super smart business move because you’re just diluting your time and focus and resources. And then each time you add one surface service, you need to have more than one guy who can deliver it, you want redundancy, you know, he’s on vacation, he’s sick, whatever he leaves. So you need to build that you also, if you want to offer a super awesome client experience, you will have to document the whole user journey step by step to this new service, and not just like start to wing it at first you wing it to develop the process. But then you need to document it and standardize it. And I tell my guys, I don’t mind if you if you invent new way, but we’re going to document it, we’re going to call it you know, Michael’s way or second second approach or second type or agile prototyping or whatever, and it’s going to be documented. You know,
Jeremy Weisz 36:04
I have one last question was kind of a two part question. Before I ask it, Jim, I want to point people to your website, and then go to mage montreal.com. To learn more, they can do more episodes of the podcast as well. Last question, which is kind of two parts is, when you’re looking at ideal clients for you? How do you categorize that, and we’ll talk about ideal staff, because I know, you seem to be always hiring and looking for good people. So start with ideal clients, who’s an ideal client, for you?
Guillaume Le Tual 36:41
Well, first of all, would be a company that’s that’s driven to grow, that has the ambition to grow. And that has, the budget of their ambition, of course, goes with. So we’ll typically be talking like six figure builds, for for the new website, new projects, and so on, the support side is much lower, you know, just a prepaid Timebank, we can start and try to services. And if they like, it could move to a retainer, with guaranteed availability, and so on. But it’s really the vision of the customer that I’d like to spend my time with someone that I believe we can make a big impact for them. And that if we work together for several years, then I’ll have like a champion to talk about, like some of these guys that we’ve taken from, let’s say, almost nothing to like a low A figure. And then I can show this and say, Oh, wow, you know, this is a flagship demo project. And then I can bring that client even on a call with other potential clients or to an event, and so on. So I want to be able to have that kind of impact for a few businesses that want to go far basically, that I’m going to spend my time in the right place there.
Jeremy Weisz 37:51
I mean, spending or saving three hours a day for an employee is pretty remarkable emails for one day, little on
Guillaume Le Tual 37:58
each day. Yeah, each day, and then five of them, you know, so that’s pretty neat. Definitely on this one. What about
Jeremy Weisz 38:05
from a staff perspective?
Guillaume Le Tual 38:08
Well, staff, you know, is the value fit, I do believe in that to really hire fire, reward and review based on the values and when we didn’t do this, we had issues and now we, we do it, we believe in it. And we’re really doing it, you know, so we want people who have that, that commitment of continuous personal improvement, continuous improvement, to strive for the mastery of their skills and to cultivate world class expertise, to be coachable that wants to build a great relationship or resourceful that will have strong professionalism, work ethics, and so on that want to build, you know, quality solutions, basically. So we’re really looking for these things, and then we’ll look after, like, do how how well is the technical how good is the technical knowledge? Do you have certifications, let’s say on Magento or not, and so on.
Jeremy Weisz 38:59
Everyone, check out magemontreal.com Check out more episodes of the podcast and obviously check out Ecommerce Wizards Podcast as well. Yum. Thanks so much.
Guillaume Le Tual 39:11
Thank you Jeremy for having me.
