Marcel Petitpas
Yeah. So I mean, the the crazy thing about this industry that has become really, really apparent to me is that it is one of these things running an agency is one of these things that a lot of people get sold the idea of where it’s like there’s really low or no upfront costs, you know, it can scale it Look at you can charge somebody $10,000 for a thing, and they’ll pay you up front. And it’s amazing. And then once you actually start looking at the business model, and what it takes to scale it, you start to realize that it’s a really challenging business model to scale. It’s a really challenging business model to do profitably. And I think a lot of that has to do with the complexity of your inventory as human beings, and they’re very complex and hard to predict. And, you know, they, they require a whole bunch of different levels of attention versus just hard goods that you might be selling. So the big lesson that I’ve learned is that so many agencies are out there, they might be doing amazing work, they might know how to get results for their clients, they might look on the surface, like they’re doing incredible. But oftentimes, when you start peeling back the layers and get inside the business, you realize, there’s so much money being left on the table, and some of them are really struggling to make payroll from month to month, even though they might be making tons of revenue. So that is the problem that we set out to solve for them is to help make agencies you know, more profitable, more stable, so that they can avoid laying off their team, they can grow, they can grow their impact, they can serve more clients, and they can do that in a sustainable way.
Jeremy Weisz
What kind of things do you do with Gold Front?
Marcel Petitpas
So I Gold Front has a unique case, because we’re you know, really in a bit of a partnership, they brought me in almost as a fractional COO. So I’m really embedded in that business. And I’m helping them streamline all of their operational workflows. And the the core place that we started was getting all of their data sorted out. Because I think this is one of the things that agency owners overlook a lot is that there is a data set that is central to their success. And that is understanding where their time is going, because their time makes up about 70 to 80% of the money that they’re spending in their business, you know, every month, every year, every quarter. So it’s really, really critical to get the systems in place to track that. But that’s a really hard thing to track. And it’s a really hard thing to flow through to the different areas of the business where it needs to go. So that’s been the bulk of my focus is making sure that they’ve got the right systems and processes in place to track that data to have clear insight into their financials, clear insight into their profitability. And that that cascades out to the other operational systems in the business like sales, like project management, and so on.
Jeremy Weisz
What does Gold Front do?
Marcel Petitpas
Gold Front does amazing work for some pretty incredible clients. They are a digital and video production agency. So they do an interesting mix of websites and video production. And they work with pretty cool clients. Like you know, recently we’ve done some stuff with Robin Hood’s Slack, Uber, Google, Nike, I mean, the list goes on and on. Really, really amazing work for some fun clients.
Jeremy Weisz
You know, when I saw you mentioned operational workflows, and you know, for people aren’t agencies or business owners, they may fall asleep when they hear that, but I perk up because it’s really what creates efficiency and allows things to run smoothly. So I’m wondering, you know, obviously, we’ll get into Parakeeto, a Parakeeto does what other software or things do you use to put in these operational workflows and systems?
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah, so I mean, personally, one of the first tools that I like to use is some kind of a virtual whiteboarding solution. And two of the ones that I’ve used with various clients that I love are Stormboard, shout out to my friend Reg, who runs Stormboard, and Miro, two great options for a virtual workspace where you can collaborate with your team, and start to do what we like to call process mapping. So actually writing down what is every step that happens in this workflow. So you can get it out, visualize it, identify the gaps, identify, you know, what it actually looks like. So when you go to create your processes, or you know, your data flows, or you start to set up tools, it’s actually set up for success from the start. So that’s number one. And then outside of that, you know, time tracking tools. And I’m not going to be super opinionated about this, because there’s a billion time tracking tools out there, and a lot of them are very good. I’m partial to Harvest. Because I think it’s really good at the two things that are most important about time tracking. Number one, the data structure side, it’s independent from project management tools, which I think is an important thing because it allows you to define the structure of your time tracking data, and associate that back to your estimate structure, which is a super key thing that so many people miss. And the second thing is that it makes it easy for your team to enter their time, which is another big reason that a lot of people struggle with time tracking is they make it too hard for their team. So Harvest is my recommendation on time tracking, but really any time tracking tool that you and your team will use. I’m behind it. I’m voting for it.
Jeremy Weisz
Or come out you have to make a decision to who to integrate with right with Parakeeto, because you integrate so how did you decide on the integration partners and who do you integrate with?
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah, so right now we only integrate with harvest of course we are looking To change that, but the big decision there just had to do with who had the most market share. And we started collecting that data. You know, early on when we were doing content, and we had our lead magnets that people would download, we’re giving away free resources we still do. And when you download a free resource from us, you tell us what time tracking tool you’re using. And we just saw that the number one time tracking tool was nothing, unfortunately, so about 50% of people are not using anything, spreadsheet or none. Yeah, so no formal time tracking tool, it makes up about half of the leads that we were getting, and then beyond that their harvest had by enlarge the biggest level of market share in our target market. Then after that it was toggle and clock a fine a couple more. And then it trails off into this sea of you know, 100 time tracking tools that one or two people are using. So made it pretty clear that harvest was where the initial opportunity was to really validate the product and figure it out.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, it’s really interesting, because when you talk to even, you know, I, when I interviewed Wade of Zapier, they had to decide early on Who do you integrate with because you only have so they only have so many resources to do that. You know? So you discovered this issue, working with Gold Front? What is the issue? And what did you go set out to solve?
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah, so I mean, it was working with Gold Front. But you know, we also had lots of other agencies that we were talking to and working with on kind of smaller engagements and what we kept coming back to. It’s funny, because when we started the business, we had this thesis that it was hard for agencies to track really important information, like, Did we make money on this project? Do we have enough capacity to take on new work, you know, and that thesis still holds true. But we didn’t really understand the core problem behind all of that the reason why it was so hard for them to track this stuff. And when we started working really closely with gold friend, and with some of these other clients, what we started realizing was that all of them were trying to do the same thing. They were trying to get these outcomes, they’re trying to get this visibility on this reporting. But they were trying to build that on like a quicksand foundation of really inaccurate estimates for their work. So when you take a step back, and you think about it, when you run a service business, you know, when you’re trying to plan when you’re going to hire or who you’re going to hire when you’re trying to plan, your cash flow, your profitability when you’re trying to do resource planning, when you’re trying to, you know, manage your pipeline and reconcile that against your team and their availability, all of that comes back to your ability to say, this project is going to take roughly this much time, and that’s going to be split up against these different skill sets. And to have that be relatively true. And this was one of these fundamental processes that all these agencies kind of overlooked. And when we started peeling back the onion and digging into why that was, we realized that it was just as very manual ad hoc and often subjective thing that only the most senior people in the agency were doing. Because it was very much this like gut feel. Let’s think back to some things we’ve done before let’s rely on our historical experience do so
Jeremy Weisz
it’s like factors in the pert the the clients personality or company you’re working with, like, Oh, I think they’re going to be easier to work with. So maybe they won’t have as many changes, there is a lot of probably gut feel and factors that Right,
Marcel Petitpas
exactly. And when we started asking people, you know, what would you want to change about your estimation process, we’ll make it a 10 out of 10. Everybody said the same thing, which is I want it to be more objective, I want it to be more data driven. And I want it to be less reliance on these particular individuals that were just basically counting on their 10 years working for the company, to have the this kind of subtle sense of what is the appropriate estimation for this project. So that’s what we kind of set out to solve with our product. And I’m really excited about what we’ve been building.
Jeremy Weisz
So it seems like people are bad at pricing. Is that true? Yeah, estimating pricing? Yeah,
Marcel Petitpas
there are a lot of people that are pretty bad at it. And it’s not, you know, obviously, it’s not intentional, it has a lot to do with their biases. And this thing that I like to call kind of the optimistic estimation bias where you’re, you come up with a number in your head, and that number is based on everything going perfectly like your cat not throwing up on your home office bed while you’re trying to do the project. You’re not having to go to the doctor, you having a perfectly fast internet connection, the client giving you everything you need right at the beginning of the project, like all the things that always happen. So wrong, right. So yeah, I think that’s one of the challenges. And then the other challenge is, you know, not actually taking the time to go back and learn from our mistakes. So a lot of times we get into this this pattern where we say, Well, this is what we usually estimate for this product project. But we’re not going back to look at the data and seeing that like well, we are consistently under estimating that by 27%. So like the baseline estimation needs to go up by 27%. But we’re not looking at like what did it actually take, we’re just kind of relying on what we estimated last time and not really considering if it was accurate or not.
Jeremy Weisz
Walk me through a use case. So I know it could be ecommerce web development company or not, the pricing before? And now they use Parakeeto, what are they seeing? And how are they able to shift their pricing for later projects? Yeah,
Marcel Petitpas
so it’s interesting because it is a nice forcing function a lot of the time for people to charge more. But what it is mostly is a nice proxy for them to more accurately estimate what it’s going to take to get the project done and distribute the time, more realistically. So we see a lot of use cases, like for example, we have a client that they realized immediately when they started using our tool that they were way under budgeting, project management. And they were wondering, like, why is our project manager always kind of like, stressed and always looks like they’re drowning? And like, why are we struggling so much with that, it’s like, oh, because we’re under estimating it by 30%, on almost every project. So that was a really great insight for them to go and adjust, like how much time they’re budgeting for that they went and got some additional support in the project management team, they started working with their project manager to figure out how to make things more efficient. So those are the kinds of insights that you’ll get immediately. And then on the back end of that, yeah, I mean, we’ve seen their profitability almost double since they started using the tool about two months ago. So their per project profitability has gone up their average gross margin has come up quite a bit. And I think that’s part of the power of the tool, as well as being able to see what is my gross margin going to look like, as you’re building this. And the big difference is seeing that next to the projects that you’ve selected as comparable. So that, you know, not only is these numbers look good, but they’re realistic based on what we’ve done before. That’s the key
Jeremy Weisz
Mercel seems like there’s a kind of a combination of hiring also in there and pricing, because I could see, you know, it seems like in that particular case, they’re like, Well, you know, there’s probably 10 hours of project management that we didn’t even realize was there. And now that we realize is there, we need to price this project higher, but also realize, well, our project manager is tapped out. We need to hire another project manager. Have you seen that? factor? And also, yeah, I
Marcel Petitpas
mean, that’s a huge part of why the estimation process is so critical, because you you can’t just like clone your project manager, right, you need to have a really clear sense of how much time you’re going to need for a particular skill set. And that’s been a big revelation for a few of our clients is realizing that they’re over understaffed in a certain area, and realizing that what they thought it took to get something done was not at all the reality.
Jeremy Weisz
I’ve heard you also talk about pricing, you know, pricing, you’ve talked about how pricing isn’t necessarily a function of hours, but a value, can you talk about how people should think about pricing?
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the things that I get pushback on a lot. As soon as I start talking about hours, right, people immediately get the sense that I’m talking about the old school way of pricing in the industry, which is pricing by the hour, and using more of like a cost basis and plus margin to do your pricing. And I will fully acknowledge that I don’t think that’s the best way for most agencies to price, I don’t think it’s the best way for most agencies to maximize their profitability. So really, I look at it as you got to assess the level of risk that you’re taking on. And I think for most agencies that are doing more creative or marketing type stuff, there’s probably an opportunity for you to look at what is the relative value of solving this problem for the client and the price based on that, and then go and check if that’s going to give you a high enough margin for it to be safe, right? Because, you know, it’s great if you can charge a half a million dollars for a website, but it’s not so great if it costs you 400 grand to build a website. So, you know, you got to go and do that check. But the fundamental idea is, is it more valuable to solve or to increase the conversion rate by 1%? on a website that’s doing a million dollars a month in revenue, or website that’s doing 100 million dollars a month? Right? What who’s getting more value in that equation? It’s a really simple example. But I think it’s worth noting, like, if I can increase your conversion rate by 1%, and you’re going to make an additional, you know, $10 million, then is it reasonable for me to ask for 10% of that as a fee, regardless of whether or not it cost me, you know, 1000 or $100,000 to do that work. So that’s kind of the way that I like to think about value based pricing, and I think it’s something a lot of people should explore, but not without still having a process to reconcile does the estimated amount of work it’s going to take to get this done that is a margin that is you know, healthy enough to make this sustainable.
Jeremy Weisz
What would be another example of a value based pricing so that is a good example. I also have heard you talk about logos. Um, yeah, talk about that but also any other examples so people can get to rap I need to wrap my head around different examples of value based pricing also, right so
Marcel Petitpas
so one one that I like to talk about is the million dollar logo, right is a is a logo worth a million dollars. Jeremy, would you pay a million dollars for a logo?
Jeremy Weisz
If I was Nike?
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah. Maybe if you were Yeah, exactly. Maybe if you were Nike, maybe if you were, you know, some huge airline, like, if the print budget for that logo was 100 million dollars, then it makes perfect sense to pay a million dollars for that logo, if only to have the sense that it’s being de risked, right that a decision, a design decision that has that big of an impact that has that big of a wave behind it should, you know be valued at that much just because the risk is so high, whereas you know, if I go to my local pizza http://getzonedup.com/ shop and ask them how much they’ll pay to get a logo done, their budget might be a couple hundred bucks. And that’s justified because the impact is just not going to be quite as big. But that’s the conversation that you want to have is like, what is this going to be used for? How is it going to impact your business? How does that correlate to revenue? What’s it worth to you emotionally, financially? Like? What do you value your time at? What do you value the strategy of that? And try to get a sense of like, what does this actually mean from a value perspective for the business? And you might find that there’s a really significant gap between what you want it to charge for that and what they’re actually willing to pay? It might be a lot more than what you’re coming in, you know, with that number in your head that
Jeremy Weisz
you started Marcel as an agency in VR, what was your What was your initial thought, in that VR fascinates me? So I want to hear what your initial pitch was in? What was that? That your agency like at the time?
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah, that man, that’s a funny story. At the time, I was working as an account manager for Apple, and there was this guy that just kind of kept coming into the store. And one day he was he was like an older guy, and he had some connections in real estate, he had a couple friends that were, you know, big real estate brokers around town. And he was like, you know, they’re, they’re asking for this, they want these virtual tours, like, do you and he sees me as like some young guy that works for Apple, he’s like, you know, you figure this out. I’m like, Yeah, I could figure this out. So you know, I get on YouTube, and I get on Google. And I figure out how to this was back before, like, any good technology was available for this like before matterport. So you had to get a DSLR, put it on a special like mounting system, take like a bunch of photos, stitch them together, and then load them into a VR, like 3d modeling software, build a model of the house, and then place these like hot spots around the house that people could travel through. And the idea was, you know, the real estate agents, instead of driving all day to visit a dozen houses, they could sit their clients in an office, throw a VR headset on them, have them take tours of a dozen houses and go see the two that they actually like, you know, so switching COVID
Jeremy Weisz
is probably a great like you are you are behind the times you were ahead of your time,
Marcel Petitpas
I was a little ahead of my time. And you know, one of the challenges is at the time, our housing market here was in this huge slump. So houses weren’t selling the price points were down, it was a total buyers, market sellers were you know, like their houses weren’t selling for nearly as much as they should have. And real estate agents were really stingy at the time. So they weren’t willing to really pay enough for that service for me to be able to outsource. So this was when I learned about this challenge of like, margins are important because I started figuring out like, Okay, can I hire somebody to do this for me, because I hated the work of going in and taking the pictures and stitching them, man, I hated it. So I was like, I need to get this off my plate as quickly as possible. I started doing the math, and I was like, Man, this is not going to work. This is not going to scale. We can’t build a business on these kind of margins. And at that point, you know, I had some challenges with the business partner, I thought, you know, I’m just gonna move on to something else.
Jeremy Weisz
So, it goes from agency to consultancy to software. Okay, did you always have the thought that Okay, I need to create a software solution.
Marcel Petitpas
It was a field that interested me a lot from the very beginning. And I think part of it in the younger years was naivety, right. It was like, well, software’s like the sexy thing. And you know, I’m clearly a special, gifted unicorn entrepreneur that’s going to crush it. So like, obviously, I’m going to go to the hardest. But that’s I think that’s very indicative of like my personality. It’s like I started new video game I’ve never played before. I’m like, Yeah, let’s go to the max difficulty right away. Like, that’s kind of how I look at this. I was like software has the highest risk, the highest reward, it seems like one of the most grueling spaces in entrepreneurship. So I just figured, like, if I’m going to take the risk, I might as well go all the way. And if nothing else, would it be a great learning experience? And that has certainly been the case.
Jeremy Weisz
So someone wants to use Parakeeto? How does it work?
Marcel Petitpas
It’s pretty simple. They connect their time tracking tool, in this case, you know, harvest, but if we don’t have an integration with your tool, please make a request so that we know you want it then it’ll automatically pull in all the information about your past projects. And then to create an estimate basically, you choose a couple of things. So is this monthly? Is it a one time project, you’ll choose a couple of modeling options. So do you want to start with the clients budget? Do you want to start by setting some hours and setting a target rate? Do you want to set rates for all the different tasks or services individually, so you kind of choose your style, then you’ll choose a couple of projects that looks similar to the one that you’re estimating. And then we drop you into this beautiful workspace where every change you make, you have graphs for exactly how that change impacts the profitability of the project, and shows you exactly how it aligns to the projects you’ve done in the past. So you can see on a graph, like we’re estimating 25 hours, this other project I chose is comparable was 29. And the trend line that pair keto is recommending we have some algorithms that help recommend the right amount of hours says I should be budgeting 25. So I think I’m in a good spot. And once you’re done with your estimate, you can share it you can save it, you can duplicate it, create templates, you can collaborate with your team, and really just use that to dial in your estimation workflow and get more accurate.
Jeremy Weisz
Oh, do you just send them pricing? for Parakeeto?
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah, my rule of thumb is if I don’t feel like throwing up on myself, when I asked somebody for a consulting, engagement price, I’m not charging enough for para Kido it was much more scientific and that we price it at $30 per user per month. So if you have three or four people in the organization that you know, touch the estimation process, then you might be spending between 90 and $120 a month on the tool.
Jeremy Weisz
Got it. Who are some of the mentors that you are colleagues that you respect in industry that you con for advice, or vice versa? Yeah,
Marcel Petitpas
I mean, certainly one that has been hugely influential in my life is Dan Martell, who runs a company called SAS Academy, which is the number one b2b SaaS coaching program in the world. I’ve known Dan for a long time, he lives in Moncton, which is a small place on the east coast of Canada. I think you mentioned you had never talked to anybody from the east coast of Canada. Really?
Jeremy Weisz
I haven’t read Dan. Right. Yeah.
Marcel Petitpas
But really unlikely success story, you know, from this part of the world. And he’s been hugely influential. And I’ve met a lot of really cool people through that community as well that have been super impactful. Obviously, we know a lot of the same folks from the agency space. So guys, like Jason Swenk, the David C. Baker’s, you know, John is a good friend and has been a great advisor, Kelly Campbell, Carl Saika. So lots of awesome people in the agency industry and Carl Smith over The Bureau of Digital as well, I got to give a shout out to him. So those are some of the folks that have really been helpful in, you know, allowing me to get this business off the ground. And I got to give one more shout out to a local Monkton entrepreneur, my friend, Mark Albert, over DPL, as well as Eve Doucet from Dovico, which is a time tracking company here in moncton. That is, you know, kind of a local staple in the tech community. And they’ve been around for a long time. So all guys that, you know, really kind of took me under their wing early on when they knew that I knew nothing, and helped kind of show me the way.
Jeremy Weisz
So Is he mad at you that you haven’t integrated with him yet?
Marcel Petitpas
I don’t know, man. I’m not sure if he doesn’t relate to the day to day anymore.
Jeremy Weisz
What’s his what’s the company called, again called Dovico?
Marcel Petitpas
It’s a time tracking company?
Jeremy Weisz
Got it? Got it. Cool. Um, yeah, thanks for that. And then what did Mark Albert What does he do?
Marcel Petitpas
He runs a company called dpl. I think it stands for Digital Products Limited, but they have a wireless interface for or wireless module for ATMs. Oh, cool. is a real problem, I guess.
Jeremy Weisz
Wow. That’s awesome. Yeah. Um, so we talked about hiring, pricing estimation, what are other any other big mistakes you see agencies doing? You because You have this broad perspective, you are working with a lot of agencies from the software, and from the consultancy side? So what are you seeing big mistakes?
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah, I think the biggest one is just not actually paying attention to how efficiently they earn the revenue. And there’s like two easy ways that they can do that. They can look at their gross margin, or they can look at their average billable rate. But really, it’s I see this most with the agencies that have a salary team, when you’re paying contractors, to do your work, you kind of have to pay attention to how much that’s costing you. It’s a natural forcing function, because you’re going to eat that cost every time they work an hour. When you have a salary team for whatever reason, people start kind of just disregarding the idea that the amount of time that somebody spends doing the work matters. But that’s almost all that matters, actually. And you need to still pay just as close attention to that as if you were paying everyone by the hour. And in a sense, you kind of have to treat where you should treat your agency that way that even though you’re paying them a salary, do the math, figure out what they cost every hour, and then make sure that you’re investing that cost in the right places in your business and that you’re being efficient. That’s the biggest mistake. I think it’s just not paying attention to how efficiently they earn the revenue because that’s really At the bedrock of their profitability, and so many of the challenges that they face and the symptoms that they experience of, you know, having tough cashflow, having poor profitability, having trouble with resource planning, the team feeling overworked, all of those tend to stem from this fundamental lack of a foundation of accurate estimation and fundamental profitability when they set up a project.
Jeremy Weisz
And then Marcel, you feel like, I guess that makes more sense. Maybe you said over half the people don’t even use time tracking. And it’s maybe because they have salaried staff. And they feel like, what’s the point? Like I’m paying them anyways?
Marcel Petitpas
Exactly. Yeah. And they’re just not thinking about the business model. In the right way. I think in that situation.
Jeremy Weisz
I could tell your tech stack type of person. So I’m curious what tech stack so obviously, an ideal tech stack, right. We have Parakeeto. We have Harvest, what other what other texts to actually be in someone? Someone’s agency?
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah, I mean, insert project management tool of choice, which here’s one thing that I like to Yeah, so I’m actually I really like, there’s three that I like, I like Monday.com. I like Asana. And I like AirTable as well. Actually, I think Airtable is like, a really cool, powerful tool, not just for project management, but for basically building databases for your business, like love air table, highly recommend. So yeah, insert project management tool of choice. And the one thing that I want to call out here is I think most of the time, even though it’s really easy to get sucked into the value prop of integrated time tracking, I feel like for most of you, you should keep your time tracking tool separate from your project management tool. And here’s the reason why. One of the biggest problems that I see in agencies is when we look at the estimate, and then we look at the time tracking data, you can’t match them together, the estimate says this many hours of development, this many hours of design, and then we go to the time tracking, and it’s like 20 minutes for wireframing front end UI. And I’m like, what does that map to on the estimate? So this is why so many agencies have trouble answering that fundamental question of like, did we estimate this correctly, because they’ve got to parse all this data and reconcile it back to the estimate. And the reason that happens most of the time, is because the project management and the time tracking are integrated. And so the project management tool dictates the structure of that time tracking data. And a lot of the time, the structure of your project management tool, and the structure of your time tracking data should be different. And if they’re integrated, you’re asking one team either operations or project management to make a compromise. And that doesn’t have to be the case. So quick side tangent, but I recommend keeping those tools separate for that reason. So yeah, insert project management tool of choice. And then on the back end, insert some kind of reporting tool, and an accounting tool as well. So QuickBooks or zero for accounting, you know, either one of those are going to work great. And then some kind of a central place for you to do reporting. Unfortunately, Google sheets or air table, probably still your best bets for reporting. I hope that we can solve that problem one day, it’s a big, dangerous, difficult problem to solve. But that’s probably still going to be your best friend is using a Google sheets or an Airtable. If you want some templates to help you with that. We’ve got some on the website, so make sure you go check those out.
Jeremy Weisz
may have to opt in. No, I’m just kidding. No, but you do have a toolkit right on the site. Oh, man, I have two last questions. Marcel. And I want to point people towards before I ask them before I ask you go to Parakeeto.com. Okay, it’s parakeeto.com. You also have a toolkit. Right? So where can people find that?
Marcel Petitpas
They can head to Parakeeto.com forward slash rise25. And we’ll put it I’ll put together a special little toolkit for them there. I’ll add a couple bonuses on that. But yeah, that in that toolkit we’ve got, we’ll walk you through The Agency Profitability Flywheel framework, which is the framework that we use with all of our consulting clients to help them improve their profitability fast, as well as maintain their profitability over time. And in there, there’s a bunch of checklists and templates that we also use with our consulting clients. So you’re basically getting the Do It Yourself version of the consulting that we charge a lot of money for.
Jeremy Weisz
It’s amazing. Thank you. Yeah, that’s super valuable. Um, last two questions, Marcel. Any other places we should point people towards though, online, on your website.
Marcel Petitpas
I will second your statement about podcasting. At the beginning of the show. We also love podcasting. I’m a huge fan of that. So I have my own podcast, The Agency Profitability podcast, so if you like listening to podcasts, and you like profitability, then you should probably check it out and subscribe and consume some of that content. Yeah,
Jeremy Weisz
I listened to several episodes. It’s really good. Check it out. Last two questions, Marcel. I always ask this Inspired Insider what’s been a low moment in how you push through and then what’s been a proud moment on the other side.
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah, these are good questions. So I I would say one of the low moments was early. Well, not even early on, it’s about halfway through the journey. If we look at the timeline as being the beginning of the company today, I started this company originally with a friend of mine, his name is Jared, he runs an agency in Boise. And, you know, we kind of both agreed on this thesis that like man is way too hard to answer these simple questions as an agency owner without spending a ton of time in spreadsheets. And we kind of set down the path to create the company, we made some agreements of at that time, about like, how long each of us were going to invest for and how far the company was going to get. And of course, as most things go, it didn’t go the way we thought it was going to about a year and a half in, we hadn’t hit the milestones that we thought we were going to hit. You know, we weren’t getting the traction that we thought we were going to get. And that was a really difficult moment where him and I had have some difficult conversations about, you know, how the business was going to move forward and what each other’s involvement was going to be. And I think for a while, that was a TSN turning point, if you will, in our relationship, and thankfully, that’s kind of come full circle. And and, you know, we he’s still on the board, he’s still a part of the company is still an important part of what we’re doing. But that was a difficult moment. And I think, partly because, yeah, the business wasn’t doing what we expected. But I think as an entrepreneur, you get used to that reality. But the big thing was, you know, the relationship and an important relationship with a person that I really respected and admired and gave me a big opportunity that for a while was kind of on shaky ground, because I think some of the things we had to work through at that time.
Jeremy Weisz
Running a company is no joke, Marcel. I mean, it’s really tough. You know, um, Anyone? Anyone who says different? I don’t know what, what’s that? What’s going on with them. But, um, before we get to the proud moment, what some great advice Dan Martell has given you obviously, he’s built helped a lot of companies, he built his own successful companies. What, what advice Has he given you,
Marcel Petitpas
and I, I would, we would need a whole other episode to go through that, because I’m really fortunate that I get to be very close to that guy, and he’ll just show up in my house and be like, we’re going for a run, you know, like, just, and then and you can’t be around the guy without having a deep conversation. I he, he’s not the kind of person that wants to talk about the weather. Like, you know, he always wants to just talk about real stuff. So there’s a lot of things that he’s he shared with me that have really impacted me. I think two of the biggest ones, though, are the way that he manages his calendar. And just watching that. And what he says about is Show me your calendar, and I’ll show you your future. And I’ve watched Dan, you know, everything goes into his calendar, including his personal life, right. And a lot of people think that’s weird. And I got some pushback from some of the relationships in my life when I started doing that. But really, the way you got to look at it is if it’s important, it should be in my calendar. So the reason that he schedules family time is not because it’s not important or because it’s like it has to fit with his schedule, it’s because he wants to make sure that nothing is going to encroach on that, and that he can protect it. And I think the idea of protecting time is something has really changed the way I approach my life, and prioritize the things that are important, but make space for them. So that’s one. And the second one is he said, if you look at your competitive landscape, almost everyone that is around today will not be around in five years is to half the game that you’re playing right now is survival, you just need to find a way to survive for five years. And in that time, you’ll figure it out. And that’s been, I think, an important mental shift for us, because it’s taken us a lot longer to get to the places that we want it to get to than we expected. And so remembering that so much of the game we’re playing here is survival has been an important way to keep getting up every day and doing the hard things that we need to do to move the business forward.
Jeremy Weisz
Protect your calendar and survive. Love it. I’m so proud moment, Marcel, for you in this journey.
Marcel Petitpas
Yeah, I would say that’s honestly, it was the day that’s my new co founder and the CTO of our company, we kind of inked that paperwork and brought him into the company. This is a guy that has become one of my closest friends. He’s a person that I think is so incredible, and was the VP engineer. So I remember I had a conversation with another mentor. And he was asking him about finding a CTO. And he said, Well, here’s what you need to find. And he described this, this person that I didn’t think I could find, and if I did, I didn’t know how I was going to convince them to join. They have to have, you know, they have to be super smart, super qualified CTO tons of experience also has to be, you know, has to have experience at a company that’s relevant in adjacent space, a big company, hopefully a leading company, so he’s like some like x, VP engineering at harvest x, VP, engineering Asana x, and I’m like, okay, and he goes, and they have to be so excited about what you’re doing that they’re willing to make an investment in the company to join it. And I was like, how am I ever going to find that person and my co founder Ben Zittlau is that person he was, you know, the VP engineering at Java, which was the second fastest growing company in Canada, behind Shopify. They’re in an adjacent space. So they were Doing like an end to end business management platform for service companies more so in the blue collar space, so electricians, plumbers, that kind of stuff. And yeah, like we really hit it off, we worked well together. And eventually we made an agreement to have him join the company. And it’s been so much fun working with him. He’s been such an incredible addition to the company, we wouldn’t be where we are today without him. And just the the opportunity to bring him into the company was probably one of the most important moments for me personally, and for us as a company.
Jeremy Weisz
How did you convince them?
Marcel Petitpas
I don’t know, to this day? I, I really don’t know. But I think our approach there is something to learn about this approach the
Unknown Speaker
parrot shirt. Yeah. Sure, yeah.
Marcel Petitpas
That there’s something about the charisma that must have, I don’t know, pushed him over the edge. But no, the way that it all happened was was very organic and very natural. And I think I would take this same approach again, if I had to do it over and a lot of this, again, was advice from Dan. And Dan, you know, always talks about ask for advice, and you’ll get the sale, ask for the sale. And you’ll get advice. And this is kind of how I approached the, this relationship with Ben, I was introduced to him by a couple of friends red storm board, actually, my friend Pawel who runs a company called snap projections, they said, you got to talk to this guy, Ben. He’s a consultant that we hired, we brought him in, and he helped us, you know, fix some stuff in our business, and I’m sure he’ll be willing to help you. And at the time, Ben had recently left, you know, his VP job at Java, and he was freelancing. And I just said, Hey, man, I want to hire you for a few months to help us move the product forward. And I’m going to be interviewing CTO candidates, and I’d love your help vetting them. And so we started working together, it was going really well. And then he kind of circled back one day and said, Hey, you know, I might be interested in being the CTO, like, let’s talk about that. And then we really took it slow. We said, All right, let’s work together for a while. Let’s make sure we spend some time together. So we rented a cabin in the woods in Alberta and hung out, went to Banff went to canmore and spent a few days like really making sure that we were aligned from a vision from a values perspective. And at the end of all of that, finally, we were able to make all the dollars and cents work. And we brought him in, but I think I focused on the relationship, and really not trying to force it like yes, I wanted him to join the company. But I also didn’t want to mislead him. I didn’t want to, you know, pretend that I was somebody that I wasn’t or that I had a different vision for the company that I had. And it all worked out in the end.
Jeremy Weisz
Marcel, I want to be the first one to thank you everyone. Check out Parakeeto.com and if you want all those special spreadsheets, bonuses that they use with their consulting clients, go to Parakeeto.com/rise25. And, Marcel, thank you so much. Awesome,
Marcel Petitpas
Jeremy. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.