Jeremy Weisz 12:30
I love to hear the evolution of, we were talking before you hit record Justin about niches. I just had a Corey Quinn, he was the CMO of Scorpion and help build them. While he was there, they went from 20 million to 150 million. And he talks a lot about verticals and niches. And so talk about at least the evolution of like where you started with the types of clients and then where you’re at now?
Justin Frenette 13:01
That’s great question. So I’d say into the first five years, we very much were a local community agency kind of 20 kilometers around Kitchener Waterloo and our clients were everything, high tech companies, local small businesses, community groups, any and all. And so our libraries are loosely what we would call mid-market, high-tech, community and small business. We saw the real power of niching when we had rebranded a local brokerage called Condo Culture, redid their website built them a pretty powerful tool for lead generation on the real estate side. And they trusted us and brought us into our first real estate project. It was a pre-construction condo 188 units. We looked at how pre-construction, marketing was happening all the way from the branding to the way we communicate and market the way we address clients on the website and how we do sales centers and experiences and we flipped it on its head, we saw a lot of things that were done well, and a lot of things that weren’t done well, the biggest mistake we saw is the old school model was, hey, here’s my new condo come to the sales center. Here’s your brochure, let me tell you about it and sell you on it. And we said that’s ridiculous. You’re spending years building this thing, six to 12 months out, we should even a teaser page building SEO gathering leads, we should be starting a newsletter, getting people to fall in love with this product. So when you open up the sales center, you’re just taking an order. Data was horribly lacking. We were doing things like surveying the lead list or access to the event. So you could ask what their budgets were. You could survey people and ask, you could send three moodboards of interior suites and ask them which one they like more and they’re telling you what should be your premium package sweet. That’s just the tip of the iceberg of how we were using data. So that resulted in a 48-hour sell-out of that condo so $250 million project and 48 hours, we broke every price per square foot record in the region. The fastest condo it sold out was in a couple of months in the region. And from there clients just started reaching out to us direct through our relationship with condo culture to us directly. And that’s when we really saw the power of a niche. And that niche has been a pillar of Him & Her since day one. Now, niches can be a double-edged sword. So real estate, we always knew came with some risks as a business real estate is very up and down market and as we all know, real estate’s in a down right now. And so the other half of our business we insured was very horizontal, it still was that mid-market, high tech, small business, basically, we’ll work with anybody if you’ve got a trusting relationship with us. And where niching has kind of reared its head again, is, as we’ve began to expand into the West Coast, Vancouver into some of the Northern US getting included in larger bids and RFPs. We realize that you can’t be a generic marketing agency nowadays, you’re going up against agencies that are niched in the veterinary space agencies that are niched in clean energy space. And so we spent the last three months of this year working and workshopping on what clients have, we had the most fun with, have, we brought the most success to, can we say we’re experts in just like we are real estate, and we’re actually in the process of niching, down into high end consumer goods. So some really great companies being talked about in that niche. But that’s where we feel the future is for Him & Her in our secondary niche.
Jeremy Weisz 16:43
Yeah. And if you’re just listening, the audio, there is a video component to this, you can kind of see I’m on the himandher.ca website. And so you can poke around there, if you’re interested. And we’re here on the real estate. And one of the ways, because I know a lot of agents I talk to sometimes they want to niche down and there’s some trepidation in certain respects. But and like how do I do that? I don’t want to alienate the clients I work with, the whole conversation. And but like you’ve done a good job, it looks like, at least creating these separate pages, right? I mean, you guys, that’s what you do in general. But talk about you said, how you think about niching? Right, and you said, your thought process on that I think is valuable to hear. So the most fun the clients you have the most fun with the clients you are most success, you create the most success for them. What other criteria do you think of when you are thinking of niching?
Justin Frenette 17:43
Yeah, the right size client. So, we’ve done a lot of work, we just implemented the EOS system, Entrepreneurial Operating system that’s helped us through this process of niching. And refining where our expertise are. And outside of just do you have fun with them? Do you bring them the most value is there the right side, like in our opinion, when we think about best-in-class consumer goods, you’re talking about a higher-end product that’s likely servicing a more affluent community that’s going to be less affected by economic downturns. You’re not chasing people to the bottom of the dollar to sell the cheapest thing. Typically, those clients are going to value an agency in their expertise, we see them in two categories, either their high growth, so they have those challenges we talked about at the beginning, they can’t hire talented people fast enough, they’re paying and juggling too many freelancers, or they’re a company that’s just been around a very long time, maybe they haven’t entered the direct consumer space. Maybe they’re just looking to refresh because they know now they need to innovate, they can’t rest on their laurels anymore. Those are all elements that we’ve seen when we look at the clients we have in that category. And I’d say that was the advantage of being generalistic Is it allowed us to work with so many different companies and see where we brought the most value and where we had the best fit. And then obviously, your market research, e-commerce, direct consumer, that’s a growing category, luxury retail, Omni channel, like those are all areas that are have high projected growth in the coming years, regardless of the downturn. And that’s all builds confidence. I think the other thing is, yeah, you can get scared to niche down. But that doesn’t mean you have to drop every client or your relationships. So to us entering this niche means publicly, our website is going to change who I target from a sales perspective, from a marketing perspective is going to become more focused and crystallized. It doesn’t mean that a client of ours like Canada life might reach out we have a long-standing relationship with us and they need a project and we’re not busy that we won’t take that behind the scenes just means we’re not going to talk about it. We’re going to publicly focus on the work we want. And you can take that filler work if you need it behind the scenes, but David C. Baker was definitely instrumental reading in that niching journey we’ve been on over the last couple months.
Jeremy Weisz 20:14
Love it. Yeah, his name has come up a few times. I’d love to hear what other people in the agency space that you follow or recommend people to but I just want to reiterate, I love what you said their most fun most success for clients size, less economic downturn, high growth, stability of market, which it seems like you almost hedged against your real estate niche. Because you’re like, yeah, this is a great niche, but there’s ups and downs. So you’ve been hedged against the niches that you went into a little bit. What other resources or people have you learned from in the agency space? You mentioned, David C. Baker, who else?
Justin Frenette 20:58
I’ve always looked up to code in theory as an agency, I connected with Dan Briefly at CES and we shared an email or two back and forth, and he had some very prompt advice around. You can’t do it all yourself, you need to bring in people you can trust and over the pandemic that him and her we really did focus on building in a management team. So instead of Aaron and I managing 14, 15, creatives and developers we built out, a true company. EOS has kind of been the epitome of that to say we have a team lead of development. We have a team, Executive Creative Director, we have a Director of Operations, a Director of Client Services, people that we can rely on to help build the company and let Erin and I focus on where it needs to go and the next level of what we want to achieve. That was definitely a key piece of advice from Dan. And then in the agents, space overall, we’ve actually felt like the downside to starting agency in a smaller community is that network of mentors isn’t there. And so most of the mentors I’ve relied on, have been Adam Belcher, of Magnet Forensics, he’s always been gracious with his time, even though he’s got a very large company under his hands. I would also say, Chris McBride, he owns Myovision, another very successful Canadian tech company, and the local community in Kitchener Waterloo is just very tight. So I get a lot of diverse, I would say, mentor perspectives, but we haven’t actually had a lot of agency perspectives. David C. Baker, and his books and writing was the first realization of wow, somebody who’s actually in your niche does have a lot of valuable insight. And so I’d say that would be a lacking point, we probably could have gotten farther and gone day with a proper agency mentor earlier in our entrepreneurial adventure.
Jeremy Weisz 22:59
You know, thanks for sharing that. Justin. And you mentioned building out a leadership team that’s probably takes a lot of weight off of you and your wife shoulders in a lot of ways. It’s not always smooth sailing, hiring. In general, what are some things you experienced some challenges in that, that you learn from to help bring on better people?
Justin Frenette 23:24
When you start the business, and you’re the doer in the business, letting go of perfection, and the way you want it to be done is definitely one of the hardest things to do. You have to be okay with getting 80% there and giving them the breathing room to learn and grow. Erin’s done a great job of that I blocked a little bit behind her. But we’re eventually there. Our dev. team lead was one of our last hires on the company side. So I was always juggling sales and the development team which are two different worlds, I would say that outside of giving them the autonomy to make mistakes, just building relationship, it’s a different level of management. So before managing your employees who are doing the work daily, there’s a different kind of management to that than managing managers. And so you go through this like disconnect of well, what are the direct reports under them doing like I’ve built such a relationship with them as like a family business for so long, that’s a hard thing to let go up. And just process and accept. And then there’s also like a bit more Erin’s the humbler side on the more aggressive side of him or her relationship. So Aaron definitely struggled with, well, what is the value I’m bringing, if all of my jobs are being handed over to other people and to go through that mindset change of your like our job is to think about the future of the business, the bigger picture of the business handle that for more important relationships and accounts, so you change as a person as you go through that, and just understanding the nuances of managing this next middle layer of people who are at a more advanced point in their career, they have stronger opinions, which is good and challenging. So it’s definitely been a learning experience.
Jeremy Weisz 25:20
Justin, from a director of operations standpoint, I’m curious your thoughts, because I’ve seen people, and they bring someone in from the outside, or they bring someone within what was your path.
Justin Frenette 25:33
Our path was from without, again, it was actually a personal connection of Erin, a longtime friend, she was at an in-house marketing department. It was actually at a Stratford Festival. So a lot of project management and process around the hustle and bustle of the theater space. So what was great as there’s a lot of parallels to the agency space, she also before that career path, was a graphic designer and went to school with Erin. So somebody that has agency experience, and at least one of the departments that we produce for is in an environment that’s as high-paced as us was definitely critical. And then operations. It’s not an easy job. It’s a pretty thankless job, you’re constantly bringing change, and people don’t like change. So trusting somebody that has the strength to handle that role. And trust, the guidance, you’re telling them is required, because people don’t like change. And that’s the biggest thing we’ve all companies faced, but we’ve seen it is going from a 15-person, mom-and-pop shop to a 25, 30-person, medium business that’s growing that culture and that change, and just people management is the, it’s what you spend 90, their time is managing the people and making sure they’re happy and doing what they need to do and productive, and with a younger crowd. Like we have a lot of young employees, today’s society and the pandemic, like there’s a lot of challenges around keeping people positive about the outlook on things.
Jeremy Weisz 27:13
What do you do that was worked? And maybe that hasn’t worked? When you talk you step in the new role of managing managers and overseeing the business?
Justin Frenette 27:23
I would say what wasn’t working and why we implemented EOS is we knew some of the fundamentals of okay, we’ve got challenges we need to solve goals we’re trying to hit but how do we more structurally manage them. We’re also in a pivot where Erin’s taking a step back further to focus more on the creative side and have time for our young girls. We’ve got two young daughters, and I’m stepping more into the lead CEO role at the company. And so I’m way less organized than Erin is. And so if you’re familiar with EOS, there’s your visionary and integrator.
Jeremy Weisz 28:00
Yeah, I want to give a shout out I had Gino Wickman on the podcast, people can check that out. And I also had Mark Winters on the podcast. So who co-wrote Rocketfuel Gino Wickman. And what Justin is talking about is there’s the visionary and integrator sounds like you’re the visionary. Basically, you leave awake behind you, and someone has to pick up all the pieces that you’ve left. But keep going on. And now you’re stepping into the role. You’re smiling.
Justin Frenette 28:30
That they call me the cowboy. There’s lots of rules and processes, and I’m the worst employee at the mall, which is an ideal. So us was a framework, the tools and the framework that it provides and the structure it provides was absolutely needed for us. And we’ve seen the power of following that framework, looking at your data, setting your quarterly rocks at all, this has really helped get everybody aligned on where we’re going and clarify where we’re going. And that’s made a huge difference this year so far.
Jeremy Weisz 29:03
Keeping the workforce energized, obviously, this whole, there’s a balance right working remote in office, how does your company strike that balance?
Justin Frenette 29:19
Yeah, we currently operate very much like a workspace model, where we’ve asked employees to come in one to two times a week more if they can manage it, humans are a creature of habit. So the pandemic is definitely instilled the habit of I like working from home. When everybody’s in the office for a lunch and learns we do lots of lunch and learns monthly, with different departments sharing their expertise or insights. We do team potlucks we do, we call it summer camp, so we always do an exciting outing. Anytime we’re all together. The energy is there and I think people forget the energy you get. It’s so easy. If you’re having a bad day to be sitting in at home, plugging away on a project not around anybody else, and you’re just going to sit in your fields all day. But when you’re at the office, and sure, maybe you’re having a bad day, but everybody else is having an okay or a great day, you get to feed off that energy and realize that, hey, the day is not so bad. We constantly, in our team updates, reminding them that we’re paid to do hard things. If a client had easy problems, there would be no need for agencies, we’re here to solve problems that are hard. We’re here to juggle work. And that that pace we have to forget is exciting. If you take a step back, the problems we solve are exciting, even the mundane problems, there’s plenty of projects you’ll do that aren’t exciting. But if you really take a step back, what you learned on that boring project is probably a key skill or solution that you’re going to use on a more exciting project. So we have a lot of open communication with the team, we share a lot about where the business is going. And so they feel part of it, they feel engaged. And yeah, just you have to put the effort into them and those initiatives to help them feel connected. Slack is big, even though we are disconnected. Slack where we live, day in and day out in our teams really has really adopted Slack over the last amount, like six or seven years. We have a strong kind of culture in Slack when we’re not in the office together. What else
Jeremy Weisz 31:23
do you use in your tech stack, whether it’s CRM project management tools, so slack is one with what others.
Justin Frenette 31:29
Asana basically runs the company. Asana is where we keep our estimating and invoicing processes. Asana is where we have boards for all of the individual client projects. Asana is where we map up to the workflow view to check team workload capacity, agency life, you can set a plan for next week, and it changes every day. And so we live and breathe and Asana ever our so we use for time tracking, obviously, with an agency, you’re always told that line of employees can sometimes feel like they’re just a commodity like you need to track every hour. But there is a business side of this, the reality is we do need to track every hour. And it’s not because I want to put more dollars in my pocket, we need to be profitable, so that we can give you guys the raises you need, we can do the fun activities we want. We can hire the best people and work on the best projects. If we’re not efficient, we can’t do that. And we’re also a little more hard on it. Because another founding principle we strive for and Erin hated was the agency model view of you work 80 hours a week minimum. And that’s what’s expected. And we very much having a young family said, as much as possible, we want to be a nine to five agency, that doesn’t mean there’s not times you work overtime. That doesn’t mean there’s not times the development team is doing boys early morning. But it does mean I want to respect your time. So you have to respect our time and hustle in that nine-to-five and like work your butt off. And then you don’t need to work in the evenings and everything else you can do it in the nine to five if you work hard.
Jeremy Weisz 33:09
Were you at Blackberry? What was the project management tool? Was it like an internal? Were you using things like Asana there? Or do you have more like an enterprise-level solution?
Justin Frenette 33:20
Every team was different. So Blackberry, I’d say was like a bunch of different agencies all cobbled together. So on our internal data team, we were using JIRA for our project management’s. I’m not sure what the managers were using to communicate within one another and report up but any manager reporting was very much like, hey, I need data on how battery testing levels are doing this week. So you’d gather the raw data, they put it in a PowerPoint and just pony it on up through all the layers up to the top company. So JIRA, definitely they had more serious intense project management bug-tracking software than we do. So you got to see that, and you got to see where you could lighten the load and balance, how much time are we killing people with emails and processes and extra administration steps they need to do versus billing, like we looked over the last year, and there was just way too many meetings happening. We had to really tighten down on who needs to be in a meeting because you just get caught up in yeah, everybody should be in that meeting. But now you just had your whole project team, six people sit on an hour-long meeting, that’s six billable hours that disappeared that you weren’t accounting for when you estimated that project. And so efficiency was the theme of kind of the last. Our current kind of theme we’re finishing out this fiscal year is we need to be efficient as an organization so we can do more.
Jeremy Weisz 34:49
Justin, managing projects. Talk about I know some have pods of people when you take on a project. How does it work on the type of people and position that you put on that particular project that maybe would take the consumer goods when Lomi will talk through Lomi. Like, how do you decide what team members are on this? And how do you manage that project from a team perspective?
Justin Frenette 35:15
Yeah, great question. There’s a couple of categories, projects and processes. Lomi falls under our retainer relationship process. So we made the Shopify Plus store, we participate, we just finished a large redesign and deploy for a new product launch. So the site and their product offering was evolving from one core hero product into secondary products, tertiary products add-on products, and so the site needed to evolve from that initial phase, I’ve got one product, and now I’m selling multiple things. So they entrusted us with the design process and build up actually just launched two weeks ago. Now, it’s sold out in two hours, the new product launch. So it was great to be a part of that. But team assignment, every project and him and her gets a project manager and an art director, because in our opinion, every project is creative at its core, no matter what we’re doing. And our director is always a key lead on it. So where some agencies would have a project manager and maybe an account director, our view is that a project manager and an art director together, or act as an account director, and keep up with the client’s best interests in mind. And then depending on the technical stack, for the type of work, in this case, there was a strong web UX component. Obviously Shopify Plus as a stack skill set, we brought in two of our designers, a senior designer, and a just a designer. And actually, depending on the project we’re working on. Three of our developers, so our dev. team lead oversees the onboarding of Lomi oversees the technical rollout, estimating timelines on the development side, our front end developer managed, I would say, 80% of the development, and then there would be key things like if it’s a complicated nav, mega nav update, or app integration, we would have our back end dev. come in and support with some of those elements. So they’re a true sense of like, this is not a company where you build your website and leave it for three years, this thing is changing weekly, monthly, quarterly, there’s major changes happening to it. And so we use a shared Asana board with the client, where we’re prioritizing on a monthly basis, the goals for the month, week by week, though those priorities and last minute things pop up and you’re constantly adjusting. And in a team meeting with the client on a weekly basis to make sure we’re all aligned on process.
Jeremy Weisz 35:16
Yeah. How often do you meet with a client like that? And let me just reiterate. So like, you have a project management leading, you have an art director lead, and then you have depending on what skill set of the project, this one is, you can see, by the way, if you’re if you’re looking at this Lomi is on the screen here, it says food waste isn’t smart, it’s time for something different. And yeah, you can poke through here, some really cool stuff and features on the website, but skill set. So this in this case, it’s obviously designers, developers, and then certain types of developers under that. So talk a little bit more about that piece, as far as with Lomi.
Justin Frenette 38:38
Yeah, the initial retainer was very much just development. So, the core team working through the integrations, the updates they want, but they quickly saw the additional skill sets we had. And so the design phase of this project started similar to almost every other project in that we identified the right skill set. So like we said, a senior designer and a designer that would have the level of experience for Lomi as a client and their needs generally at him and her everybody’s a generalist, but people will have specialties in either UX or web or app or print traditional prints, etc. So we brought in a team that was more specialized on the website, we go through a standard discovery. We go through our own research best in class, not just in terms of competitors, but we always cross compare other industries. And then we used Figma, to go back and forth with the UX design with the lonely team to get their feedback and approvals. And then we queue up development. And so every client is really a variation of that process of you get an art director and a PM. You get the correct team to lead the project based on the goal. And we go through that discovery and process so whether it’s a web Project we go through our web process a rebranding process. pre-construction, real estate is a beast of its own, because you’re basically juggling 50 different project types, you’ve got splash pages, websites, paid media campaigns, you’ve got your traditional Out Of Home Marketing print campaigns, you’ve got events, sales center activations, branding of the actual development, so a condo project as a PM, generally two of our project managers specialize on the real estate side is running every real estate launch is like its own business with every single need, you need in a business from start to finish over a six to 12 month window. So that’s really exciting. And that’s where we’ve differentiated ourselves is the ability for us to deliver all that work in such a tight turnaround and such a level of quality that they didn’t have before, you can look at the biggest cities New York, Miami, Toronto, and you’ll see beautiful projects, campaigns, etc. Because they’re using the best agencies in the world. Every other secondary city is using some local shop that’s probably templated, the same real estate project forever. And we realize that our current level of expertise is to come in and shake up all of those secondary markets and own those. It’s not to say we’re not competing against the big guys in the big markets as well. But where we actually focus our growth efforts is on those secondary markets so that I don’t need to fight with the 500 person agency or the agency that already owns the most competitive landscapes. There’s plenty of amazing projects in what I would call secondary cities around the world.
Jeremy Weisz 41:44
Justin, I have one last question. Before I ask it, I just want to, thanks for sharing your journey. Thanks for sharing your stories and expertise. And I want to encourage people to check out himandher.ca to learn more about your work in the company. And, when you say Shopify Plus, my last question is going around what conferences and events do you like to go to that you are hurt or good in that space? And I think I saw actually a video of you talking, I don’t know if it was at Shop Talk maybe but what conference events do you like to attend or you heard are good to check out?
Justin Frenette 42:22
Yes, I’m a little bit, I would counter in that I don’t actually go to the stack-based events. I feel that a lot of these companies like Shopify, they’re doing a great job of releasing a lot of the core materials you need online. So those events are great for staff. So the Adobe event for our designers, some of those local tech get-togethers for our devs just for networking and skill building. Most of my time as an owner is focused on the conferences, or my target demographic is going to be so the interior design show in Toronto, there’s a lot of consumer goods companies that are also real estate adjacent, the home builder associations, and the real estate associations, consumer goods shows all of those where you can meet fellow agencies and see what’s going on. But you can also interact with the target demographic that I’m after and can start my focus my network there versus the technical stacks. My view as an agency is that I want to use the simplest off-the-shelf software and piece it together. I don’t need to build custom all the time, I don’t need to use the fanciest thing we use Shopify, we only use Shopify for e-commerce, it does its job well. It’s got pros and cons every stock does. But the principle is how to I don’t want to reinvent the wheel, I want to use all the great tools that are out there to reinvent the wheel. So the last example I’ll give is on the condo side, we have a unique tool where we piece together Salesforce and DocuSign. And we’ve created a real-time point-of-sale system where you can buy a condo in five minutes virtually or in person. And that 2 billion in sales we’ve done and helped marketed about a billion of that has gone through that tool, which has helped developers innovate and sell their projects out faster, anywhere today’s market and that’s just an example of I don’t need to build a CRM. I don’t need to build a document signing thing Erin had the ideal of five years ago, like why can’t we just send somebody a DocuSign without signing triplicates of paper? And why can’t you pull up real-time inventory of all the units that are for sale? And that question, then at an agency like ours prompted okay, what technology can we use? We had the design skills to piece it all together and magically we’ve got a product that we’re selling to clients and it’s increasing our profitability.
Jeremy Weisz 45:04
That’s ripe for disruption because I went through a real estate transaction within the past year and I’m like, why am I still signing paper? It doesn’t make any sense. So hopefully more people adopt it and get what you have in that space. I would encourage anyone check out himandher.ca and Justin, thanks so much.
Justin Frenette 45:26
Thanks Jeremy.
Jeremy Weisz 45:27
Thanks, everyone.
