[Top Agency Series] Mastering Headless Architecture With Justin Cook

Justin Cook is the President of Internet Marketing and Development at 9thCO, a Canadian digital agency that specializes in b2b and e-commerce development and marketing. Under his leadership, 9thCO has focused on massive migrations from legacy website technology to what Justin describes as “headless composable architecture,” enhancing SEO, PPC, and cybersecurity for their clients.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [3:20] The transition of 9thCO into the realm of headless composable architecture
• [7:46] What led 9thCO to specialize in headless technology
• [10:09] The pivotal moment for 9thCO’s go-to-market strategy amidst the rise of headless tech
• [12:53] The challenges and emotional aspects of mergers in business
• [18:35] The importance of hiring the right team players
• [20:49] How 9thCO maintains a healthy and positive company culture
• [27:01] The significance of emotional intelligence and personal development in leadership

In this episode…

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, staying ahead of technological innovations is not just an advantage, but a necessity. How does one transition from traditional web technologies to pioneering in the realm of headless composable architecture? Could this be the future of e-commerce and SEO, offering solutions to longstanding issues of scalability, security, and speed?

Justin Cook, President of 9thCO, a Canadian digital agency, shares how his team embraced headless composable architecture. Initially focused on SEO, PPC, and custom web development, 9thCO transformed by adopting this emerging technology. By using cloud-based systems through secured APIs, they achieved better scalability, enhanced security, and improved SEO performance.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz hosts Justin Cook, President of Internet Marketing & Development at 9thCO, to talk about leveraging headless composable architecture for e-commerce and SEO. Justin shares insights into how this technology solves common e-commerce problems, such as server overload during high traffic periods and vulnerability to cyber-attacks, by decentralizing the website’s components. Their discussion covers the business aspects of adopting new technologies, including market repositioning challenges, the importance of internal culture during change, and strategic hires that facilitated 9thCO’s successful pivot.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Justin Cook on LinkedIn
• 9thCO
• The Second in Command: Unleash the Power of Your COO by Cameron Herold
• The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk M.D.
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey
• The Power Of Now by Eckhart Tolle
• Emotional Intelligence: The One Important Social Skill To Lead A Better Life, Build Happier and Meaningful Relationships, Enjoy Crazy Success At Work and Discover Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Brandon Goleman
• Teamwork

Special Mention(s):

• Aaron Mogàdam on LinkedIn

Related episode(s):

• [Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech on the Inspired Insider Podcast
• [Top Agency Series] Most Valuable Advice When Selling Your Agency With Todd Taskey of Potomac Business Capital on the Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “To navigate challenges in communication, especially virtually, understanding what makes people tick mentally and emotionally is key.”
• “When hiring, the biggest red flag is when someone always sees the problem ‘out there.’ They’ll likely bring issues into the team.”
• “Our culture is about treating people like human beings, giving them autonomy and recognizing their contributions.”
• “In business, the most important things are keeping clients happy and doing great work. Everything else builds from that foundation.”
• “Mergers are challenging. Managing the merging of cultures and personalities of leadership to be in sync is crucial for success.”

Action Steps:

1. Explore and understand headless composable architecture for your digital solutions.
• It provides increased speed, security, and scalability, which are essential for modern businesses to thrive online.
2. Create a culture that values open communication and employee autonomy.
• A respectful and trusting environment leads to greater employee initiative and better quality of work.
3. Establish a comprehensive interview process that includes probing for humility and accountability.
• This helps ensure you hire team members who are more likely to take responsibility for their actions and are a good cultural fit.
4. Continually challenge and improve your company’s processes.
• Embracing flexibility and evolution within company procedures can lead to higher efficiency and cutting-edge solutions.
5. Invest in personal development and emotional intelligence as a leader.
• Strengthening these skills can improve your self-understanding, stress management, and the ability to inspire your team.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:04

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz. 

Jeremy Weisz 0:19

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. I have Justin Cook of 9thCO.com. And Justin, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. Another one since this is part of the top agency series, I had Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech. He started an agency back in 1995. So it was really interesting to hear about the landscape of business, the internet, agency life and all the ups and the downs as well. And he kind of, you know, shared his mind as much as I was vulnerable on a bunch of things as well. So that’s a really interesting episode. Another one was Todd Taskey. Todd Taskey, also hosts the Second Bite podcast, but he helps pair private equity with agencies, helps sell agencies and he finds sometimes they sell more for the second bite than they do on the first because they sell the private equity, and private equity sells their portfolio again, and they have equity stake. So it was really interesting again to hear the landscape, the valuation, and he interviews people who after they’ve sold, so they’re kind of sharing the details there. So that was an interesting episode that many more on inspiredInsider.com. 

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise 25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast. And we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast. We do the accountability, the strategy, and the full execution. So Justin we kinda call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background to make it look easy for the host so they can create amazing relationships, great content, and most importantly, run their business. 

You know, for me, 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 companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So you thought about podcasting . If you have questions, go to Rise25.com or email us at [email protected].

I am excited to introduce Justin Cook. He’s president at 9thCO. 9thCO is a Canadian digital agency. They’re focused on b2b and ecommerce development and marketing. I guess Justin, you call yourself a former web developer turned SEO and PPC specialist. Currently, they’re focused on really massive migration from Legacy website technology as what I know you term you’ll explain more headless composable architecture. But, Justin, thanks for joining me.

Justin Cook 3:08

Thank you for having me. Happy to be here.

Jeremy Weisz 3:11

Start off a little bit, and for those of you listening to the audio, there will be a video version of this. And just talking about 9thCO and what you do.

Justin Cook 3:20

Yeah, so we’ve been around as 9thCO since 2013. Prior to that, we were the result of a merger of two firms. Since 2013, we predominantly focused on SEO, PPC, that’s paid media analytics with maybe a little bit of custom web development. That really, we went through an intense metamorphosis through the pandemic. Our development team was working on some experimental new technologies, launched a couple of platforms and API integrations for some clients. And we kind of had this eureka moment of this stuff’s incredible. So while the world was waking up to digital, and a lot of our clients were hiring in-house SEO specialists and PPC specialists because it was becoming so important. We were stumbling on to this new world of headless or composable architecture. And in a nutshell, I can explain what that means non technically, is pretty simple. 

Years ago, if we were to build a website or an ecommerce store for a client, you’re going to use a pretty standard content management system, you’d use WordPress or Drupal or if you’re in ecommerce, you fire up a Shopify store, WooCommerce and it worked. It worked well as a good framework, good platforms. I should say it worked well enough. But there’s problems, right. So number one, they’re based on a single server, you got your database, you got your functional layer, your content layer. Your visual layer all in one single sort of stack. So, if there’s a huge grain on the server, you know, let’s say it’s ecommerce, and now the server’s just gonna, like, grind to a halt. And that’s obviously bad for usability. 

Or if someone leaves their password on a sticky note on a monitor, or, even worse, it comes to a phishing email. Now all of a sudden, your site can be taken down and held for ransomware. Because it’s all on one server. So the concept of composable or headless is, instead break everything into their pieces, is, you know, sitting in the class, so you want content management, no problem, we’ll use this system over here for content management. You need any e-commerce or transaction processing, no problem, we’ll have Shopify here, we’ll have Stripe here. They are all the components in this composable array. And what we’ll do is instead of having them all connected on a single server, we’re going to hook up to them through secured APIs. So now your website is decoupled. it’s cut off. It’s it’s headless as it. So it’s not attached to the database anymore. Instead what it’s doing is it’s pulling the content or or if it’s ecommerce pulling the products out of the cloud based infrastructure through the APIs. If you got, say, a transaction, it’s pushing that transaction to the API, right. And then what it’s doing is pre-rendering and publishing the entire website on a cloud based global CDN or content delivery network, which means you don’t have a website, you have literally hundreds of copies of your website statically around the planet. So if you’re a multinational retailer, if someone’s buying your products in Texas, someone’s buying your products in Quebec, if someone was buying your products in Brisbane, Australia, they’re getting a local cache, blazingly fast version of your website, and you know, not waiting for that data to transmit. 

So usability is great. SEO is amazing, because he had perfect scores. And cybersecurity is albeit a thing of the past, because there’s nothing to hack anymore. There’s no access to the database, there’s no access to a server, it’s just all through security API’s. So it’s really incredible. As soon as we started working with it, we’re like, oh, man, let’s completely stop working with all the technologies we used to use. And let’s move fully into headless because it’s perfect for SEO, and it’s perfect for cybersecurity.

Jeremy Weisz 7:46

How did you end up stumbling across this? Right? Because this is not your typical way of thinking.

Justin Cook 7:54

Yeah, it’s funny, it was very serendipitous. We had a large manufacturing client asked us to do a custom API integration for this 3D rendering system. And it was built kind of in this technology, and our dev team could do it. At the same time, we had a very large North American retailer that they sell into Canada and the US in the netbook space, they were considered replatforming. But they couldn’t afford to lose their SEO, which is very common when you move platforms. So we consulted on it, and ended up using this technology. 

And then this was kind of the linchpin. We had, for the sake of confidentiality, I’ll say we had one of the largest stock exchanges in the world by market cap, came to us. They had attempted to replatform their site to one of these technologies and their SEO fell off a cliff. And so we kind of rolled up our sleeves, Doug and I said, Okay, here’s what you need to do. Based on our experience with these technologies, here’s the appropriate way to do it. And after those sort of three things, we kind of stepped back and said, Wait a second. We’re kind of specialized in this like, yeah, we do amazing technical SEO. We’ve always built websites and ecommerce platforms. But now we have this very unique layer of ability to execute, and build really good headless solutions in a way that is perfect for SEO. 

So right now, it’s funny. Right now our largest source of new prospects and revenue is mid sized enterprise companies that have attempted to replatform or migrate to headless, their agency is just trying to like figure it out and kind of mess it up and they’re like, Okay, you guys really have a portfolio you know how to do it, can you please just do it correctly? And so it’s an enviable spot to be in right now. We’re quite happy with it. 

Jeremy Weisz 9:59

How did you create a different go to market strategy now that you’ve kind of repositioned the company?

Justin Cook 10:09

That is a really good question. How did we create a different go to market strategy? It almost created itself, because what happened was our go to market strategy previously was let’s just do really good SEO, let’s do award winning websites. And we’ll pick up clients by the result of the work we do. But those all became table stakes. Like now, every company has an internal SEO department, every company has a beautiful website. So if what you’re doing is what everyone already has, the markets’ not asking for it. What happened was, as we started to specialize in this tech, the CMOS and CFOs of the world are waking up to their hearing of headless like, we’re having meetings with C-level marketing folks, and like, Oh, we’ve heard of this headless thing and it’s much better for security, you know, can you tell us about that? So we kind of got there ahead of the curve. And our go to market strategy was like, well, let’s just position ourselves as what we are, which is experts in this technology, and the market will come to us, it’s the perfect product market fit at the right time. 

Jeremy Weisz 11:21

You know, I myself had never really heard of that. Is that something that you came up with? Or is that just, there’s just, like, whispers of this in certain industries? 

Justin Cook 11:33

No, I mean, it’s been getting off the ground since, call it 2017 or 2018 as you know. And there were different terminologies it was called. It was called the MERN stack and the Jamstack, like all these techie terms that never went anywhere. Even composable itself, it is still a bit technical. The one that seems to be sticking is headless, because people get it like, okay, so it’s not just one system, like, okay, my CMS is over here, my website is just connecting to it. So it’s a little easier to grasp from an abstract perspective. And it’s also a good sticking point like, yes, we want a headless CMS, and we want a specialized headless CMS agency to do the implementation. 

Jeremy Weisz 12:17

I feel like we need to come up with a different term that’s like coined only for 9thCO. Like, not headless. I visualize headless and it’s not a good visualization, but I get what you’re saying there. So maybe by the end, someone can, can message us like, what’s a, what’s a coin term that 9thCO could only use? In regards to this headless, maybe yours will catch on more? I don’t know. Like the Kleenex of headless or something, I don’t know.

Justin Cook 12:46

I don’t know, that would be great, 

Jeremy Weisz 12:53

Early on, talk about the merger for a second, and some learnings there and why.

Justin Cook 12:58

So at the time, we were mainly an SEO, PPC agency. And we kept running into the same problem, which is like, hey, we get in and we audit a company’s website was okay, fix these kind of things. And then the design and the development side, they’re like, Well, no, we can’t do it, we want to do this. And so it was just this constant battle and all these false starts. And we’re like, well, we need our own design development team internally. So we can do the audit, and we can make it work. And so we started working with another basically a design agency here in Toronto as well. We saw eye to eye in terms of producing quality work and not just mass producing junk work. And so amalgamated the two firms after about a year of working together. And it worked very well in terms of having a fuller service offering. 

Things I’ve learned, mergers are challenging. When you have a merger of equals, it’s managing the merging of the cultures together, but then also, also the personalities of leadership have to really be in sync and get along. But when it works, it’s a beautiful thing. Like I don’t use the word synergy very often because I hate buzzwords, but the concept of synergy, which is like one plus one equals three or one plus one equals seven. Like that’s, that’s the beauty of a merger of like minded individuals. 

Jeremy Weisz 14:37

What was the toughest part about merging? I imagine because it’s like, like you said, I see so many moving pieces, like from a culture perspective, also from a client perspective, from a systems perspective, from a financial perspective. What stuck out like you wish you would have known before that would have made it smoother?

Justin Cook 15:00

I’m speaking candidly, I wish I think one of the most challenging things would be my own emotional maturity. I mean, I was a young guy. So you know, when, when you’re young, and you’re in business, you’re just like, let’s go, go, go, go go. And, and that, you know, when you’re working with partners, that you know, I’m a much more patient, much, much more understanding person now, and I’m going back in time I kind of wish I was had the emotional maturity, I’m only figuring out at this stage of my life.

Jeremy Weisz 15:37

So you may have, you know, not saying you rushed things, but like, maybe you just would have been more patient and let things kind of unfold as it came instead of pushing it to unfold faster.

Justin Cook 15:52

I’m definitely impetuous by nature, but also, you know, don’t take enough time to understand the areas outside of my own, like areas of expertise, you know, I look back and go, maybe, perhaps, you know, the company would have grown even faster, had I not even pushed back on some directions, but you only know what you know, when once you know what,

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