Jeremy Weisz 4:07
to like sell all home get rid of, you know what’s interesting, I want to get into the early days, even growing up, you know, because you’ve been in inception of the internet and you’ve you know, kind of been in the industry for you know, since the beginning, essentially. But I’m going back where did you grew up? And what was what were some of the big influences for you.
Ronald Pruitt 4:30
I’m originally from Spartanburg, South Carolina, which if anyone’s ever driven up ID five if you ever see the big peach there, and Gaffney South Carolina if you’ve seen the House of Cards, sure characters is from Gaffney South Carolina. That’s where I
Jeremy Weisz 4:51
remind me of Kevin Spacey a little
Ronald Pruitt 4:55
while but my wife did tell me to throw on little accent while I was doing this Have you ever seen a big peach? That’s where we’re from there? You know, it’s a small town. I think, you know, my early influences were probably family, family and friends. My grandfather on my father’s side was just the kindest man that I that I think I’ve ever known. And just learned a lot from him. As far as being kind to others following your passion. He owned a farm. So what kind of farm? Well, it was mostly animals, you know, he would have a passion, his passion would change every couple of years, you know, the rabbits, then it would be horses, and it would be cows, and it was dogs. But he just loved life. And I remember going over there and at one point, he had finches. And you could just go into the into the finch house. And it was just amazing. He would just sit with the birds all day. He just had a passion. He wasn’t really looking to make money. He was looking to just follow what he enjoyed doing every day. My father taught me to be constant. I don’t remember him ever. Sick, he worked at the textile manufacturing, never called in sick always was there worked, whatever shifted, they needed him to do whatever job that they needed him to do. He was there for 30 years. And that was an influence just to work hard every day. Whatever you need to do, to get things done. That’s what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to be forthright and, and go to work every day. So what was
Jeremy Weisz 6:45
an act of kindness you saw from your grandfather that you still think back?
Ronald Pruitt 6:49
Well, he used to he had dealings with other people when he would buy animals he you know, he would he wasn’t a great businessman. But he would, he would take an animal maybe that he shouldn’t that the other person needed to get rid of and bring it on to his farm. Probably pay too much for it. And then sometime later, a couple of years later, he would sell it back to them for less than what he paid. And just kind to his kids and could tell story. Loved to tell story. Love to tell a joke. could sit down and just talk to any
Jeremy Weisz 7:35
favored grandfather story. Oh, but you probably heard 10 times before.
Ronald Pruitt 7:44
Well, he used to. He used to always kid the children especially my my family. We weren’t the best eaters. So he loved to tell the story of how anytime the grandchildren come over, I don’t have to cook for them. All I have to do is run a hot dog under some warm water. So he would always be joking, you know, joking with you. Not really at your expense but he made it bring bringing the family together so did you do
Jeremy Weisz 8:16
anything entrepreneurial from a young age?
Ronald Pruitt 8:20
Not entrepreneurial, but I have had a job and been working since I was 16 You know I certainly didn’t come from a wealthy family if you wanted money. If you wanted work your own car you if you wanted to pay for the insurance on your car you had to go out and work for and so from age 16 all the way through till I graduated college. I was my head. I was working retail.
Jeremy Weisz 8:47
What was your worst job that you had? The
Ronald Pruitt 8:51
worst job was the very first job I ever had. It was telesales, oh cold calls, I was Hawking little coupon books. And I just felt horrible doing it.
Jeremy Weisz 9:04
We were the early Groupon. Yes,
Ronald Pruitt 9:06
yes. We would call folks and it would typically be the elderly and you felt like you were just scamming now I only let only lasted a week. It was just not for me. I just you know when you don’t believe in the product. Yeah. That you’re
Jeremy Weisz 9:24
exactly because I could see if it benefiting people. You know if if they’re good coupons? I don’t know. They weren’t what do you what did you learn from cold calling from that week?
Ronald Pruitt 9:36
You know, I think just love what you do. If you don’t, then you are going to have the most miserable time you can ever imagine. And I did I did. And then But then after that I went I went to the mall and I found a department store and talk to some people and these the people that work there and I ended up working on the dock and I would it was my job to stock the shelves. loves to bring out the merchandise to do all the little things that keep the store running. I did that for two years. And then when I went to college, I looked for a similar job that I could have while in college. And I worked almost full time doing that at another department store in the mall. And it just taught me a lot about just hard work coming to work every day. I mean, it was a great experience.
Jeremy Weisz 10:25
Run on when did you discover computers?
Ronald Pruitt 10:29
Late? You know, when I was I went to Auburn, and I had plans to be an engineer.
Jeremy Weisz 10:38
Yeah, I saw that you study materials engineering, materials engineering,
Ronald Pruitt 10:41
yes. Which is all about, you know, if you’re going to build a building, you got to know what type of steel that you’re going to make it out for. If you’re going to make something out of plastics, you have to know, you know how to build that plastic material. And I got to the end of that degree I was in my last semester, I just found that I passed my last course. And I came back to my apartment, I sat down, I realized that I just hated it, I realized that it just had no interest for me. I think I had been stubborn. And once you’re in it, you know, I felt like that I had to finish that degree. And I remember, there was a day I was I was screaming at the walls I was so I was just angry at myself. I was angry that I kind of wasted all this time. And luckily enough, my best friend, it knocked on my door just at that moment. And he came in and I started, we started talking about you know what I was feeling what I was going through. And he just said, Have you thought about the MBA program? Because he was just finishing up the MBA program? And I said, No, I hadn’t thought about that. He said, You know, you can come into it from any degree. And he said, You know, I think maybe looking to do something for yourself. Maybe business is where you should be. And I it was a revelation. I said, let me try it. I apply, I had to take some additional business classes before I could get into the MBA. And I started taking accounting and finance and all this stuff. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. I had found a passion there. My Grades certainly improved. I went from C plus to a plus, because I was studying something that I really cared about. And during the MBA program is really when the internet was really coming into play. We’re talking the days of AOL. CompuServe was still a viable company. I
Jeremy Weisz 12:48
had a cs.com. Yeah, there you go.
Ronald Pruitt 12:51
There you go. And I just made a decision that since it was new, that’s what I was going to go into. I didn’t have a lot of background in it are really zero. And I don’t think they really emphasize that a great deal in the MBA program. But as I started to interview coming out of Auburn, I remember that I was interviewing for a lot of business type positions. But I kept asking them, well tell me about your website. And I ended up not not getting a lot of those jobs because I was so focused on that I wanted to do something in the internet space. And I ended up I created my own HTML resume. So I built myself a little mini website
Jeremy Weisz 13:38
as weights huge back in back in that day.
Ronald Pruitt 13:41
Yeah, that was 1996. So I taught myself HTML, I put myself a little HTML resume out there. Just to show that I knew what the internet was that I could talk to talk at a small company in Atlanta, called me up and said, We want you to come up for an interview. We have kind of a operations management type position, and they did a lot of web design work. This was cyber Net Solutions. cybernet solutions. Yes. They were an offshoot of a magazine that did a lot of publishing. And then so they created a little web design arm so they could do basically web publishing for companies. And I came up and I interviewed, they loved the fact that I they knew about the web. And how I really got into development and computers was I walked in the first day on that job. And they said, Well, you were going to be the operations manager, but our programmer quit. Good luck yesterday. Now that you are here, and since you’ve shown that you know how to program you’re now going to be the operations person and the programmer. Wow. So then I had a responsibility. Yeah, I had to teach myself right then and there. And luckily there was another programmer on stage. Have and I just followed his lead and, and taught myself everything I could about computers.
Jeremy Weisz 15:07
Yeah, you must have been doing some, you know, for that time cutting edge stuff, what were some of the things we look back on that was cutting edge that you that you laugh at now?
Ronald Pruitt 15:18
Well, one thing that it’s always funny you look back on those days and you think, gosh, if we’d only knew what we were working on, then we could be we could be billionaires now, because we actually built a little program that allowed you to check your email on the web. And we built it for a little company that just wanted to have access to that. And then, you know, I was still at cybernet, maybe a year and a half later, and we read, you know, how Hotmail was sold for $400 million.
Jeremy Weisz 15:47
You’re able to give people the landscape when you built that small programs, we will check email what else was on the web at that time?
Ronald Pruitt 15:55
Not much. You’re talking about the earliest days of you know, microsoft.com. This was the browsers that were used at the time were Netscape. precursor to Firefox, Internet Explorer 1.0, was there. So there really wasn’t much it was mostly big companies. Really, the blog phenomenon had not started yet. That came later. That was, you know, more around 2000 A little bit after when blog started. So it was really just larger companies felt like they had to have some type of web presence. AOL was still really the main way that people were accessing the internet. So you know, companies were still had a regular website and an AOL website. It really was the early days, we had makeshift computers, the web servers that were in the office that were hooked up to a T one line, I remember having to I got calls at midnight, we need you to go into the office and reboot the server. It really was you were flying by the seat of our pants.
Jeremy Weisz 17:11
When did you see that explosion? You said Hotmail sold for 400 million? When was that? When did you see that? Or realize that you missed that opportunity for the for the email?
Ronald Pruitt 17:23
Oh, that was late 90s. And then but of course, then we had the.com Bust. Right, that came right after that. And I think I’ve been doing this so long. I’ve seen quite a few of the booms and busts of the internet.
Jeremy Weisz 17:37
Yeah. So what was it like? What was the main learning youth that you got from cybernet? Solutions?
Ronald Pruitt 17:45
How to program by kind of understanding the logic of kind of how the web works. We not I don’t not only learn programming, but I also learned. I also learned networking, firewalls, security. We were kind of a jack of all trades there. I think the other thing that I learned is just being in an office interacting with people I learned a lot about what not to do. Like what, like don’t operate your employees don’t.
Jeremy Weisz 18:18
You don’t seem like someone who would berate employees? Yeah.
Ronald Pruitt 18:21
No, I would never. I would never, I don’t believe in that. I saw that happen. Yeah, I mean, if you work, you work, since you’re 16, you’re gonna have a lot of bad bosses, right. And I had a few. You learn how a company dissolves itself, the cybernet basically went away. It got bought out, you know, and then basically just faded away. You know, you see things that don’t quite work in a company, we never really had a niche. That certainly influenced me later. We would build websites for anyone. We’ve tried to take all comers we tried to take on projects that we couldn’t really fulfill. We take these big security projects from big corporations and walk in and we really didn’t have the expertise to do it. But we were desperate for clients. And that’s an that’s never going to be a way that you’re going to have success. So it was really just one of those small companies, one of those little internet companies that probably was never going to make it but you learned a lot while you’re there.
Jeremy Weisz 19:29
So what made you start for good cause?
Ronald Pruitt 19:34
Well, after cybernet, I took a consulting kind of a contract job at MCI WorldCom. And I was doing projects for them mostly for their intranet. So I was managing I would be managing a web developer, that would be building a website for internal consumption, mostly for sales and marketing. So we would be building websites that the sales team would look at to know how much all their products cost, what the current promotions are,
Jeremy Weisz 20:08
from your dashboard system,
Ronald Pruitt 20:11
right, things like that. So and I was there for six months. And you know, I started talking to the wife, you know, talking to developers that we were working with, and I was enjoying kind of the contract aspect of it, and really decided that I wanted to go out and build something on my own, that I didn’t want to be locked into a company. And I don’t think that culture wise, I really fit in at MCI. I certainly didn’t, I wasn’t a suit and tie person. I wasn’t, I didn’t see myself, I couldn’t envision myself being that big corporate type person. I think I had some sort of entrepreneurial fire in me, I wanted to go out and create something on my own. So luckily enough, near the end of the contract with MCI, I got to another kind of contract with the local health system here in Atlanta. And I did some on site work for them. And then some off site work for them, basically building websites, advising them on, on how to build both external websites and intranet, internal websites. And I just enjoyed it, it kind of took off from there, I borrowed $5,000 from my father, to just tide me over until I could, you know, start making irregular income. Luckily, you know, things start working out, I started getting more contracts. I paid him back within a year, I was so happy. That was a huge,
Jeremy Weisz 21:53
you know, yeah, you don’t want to owe your family money. Yeah,
Ronald Pruitt 21:55
you never do you never do. When I started out, we weren’t even called for good calls, it was the company name was open consult it, I kind of got the name from kind of the open standards of the internet, combined with consulting, it probably wasn’t a great name. And but I think that there was a desire to build something on my own go out and make a difference on my own. Just to kind of see what I could do. I don’t, I really didn’t have a lot of direction. And that certainly hurt me early on. Because I think when I got started, didn’t have a niche. I think just like cybernet, I was I would build a website or work for any type of company that I could. I started doing advertising, you know, in the local trade magazines and newspapers. But without really a story to tell. They really hurt me early on. I didn’t have a story that said open consult is this company. And this is why we’re different. So I mean, that built up, you know, dad, it was it was it was tough starting it really everything changed for me. And how for good cause came about is I got a contract with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, which they’re headquartered here in Atlanta. And I was it was both on site work and off site work. And I was going down there and really advising them,
Jeremy Weisz 23:35
how did you get them in the first place?
Ronald Pruitt 23:38
I think referral from the health system that I was working for, they knew someone down there and I got in touch with that person. And they said, you know, we’re we’re looking for somebody who’s worked on intranets and understands kind of the inner workings of it, they were trying to find a way that they could work with all their all their local clubs all across the United States to get information to them. And so I came in and advise them to help them build their first intranet. And one of the one of the projects that we did was a website called Career quest. And what it was it was basically a website for the teens that they were working with, that advise them on on various careers. It was kind of an interactive website so that you could look up whether you wanted to be a policeman or you wanted to be a lawyer, what type of what type of education that you needed, in that and we had a really cool design for it. I had a really good design partner that I worked with for many, many years. And we built something really, really cool and I just fell in love with that project. And I remember coming home and telling my wife that, you know, we’ve just built a website that’s going to do good out in the community, it’s going to be more than just pushing some corporate product, this is seven, that’s going to make a huge impact, right? A huge impact. And it really got me focused on well, maybe our niche could be focusing just on nonprofits. Let’s just build websites for nonprofits. And we did that, you know, I did another edition of the open consult website where that was the focus. I got connected with the North Carolina Center for nonprofits, it was really one of our first nonprofit clients. And they needed a way for people to pay them to come to their conference, they have a big conference every year, they really didn’t have a way on their website that people could come, you fill in their information, put in their credit card, get paid for them to get paid for that conference registration fee. So that was the first time we really built a for good cause product, it’s helping them get paid for those registrations. And it was really just a simple little form. Now we put their logo on it, it was a simple form. We gave them a little database where they could get reports on the registrations.
Jeremy Weisz 26:27
So even from that time, you saw, the biggest need was, they didn’t have a way to get get paid online for for whether it was an event or some other service that they’re providing.
Ronald Pruitt 26:40
Right, there was there really wasn’t a lot of options for them. There were a few kind of shopping cart providers, but there was nothing there was not a lot out there that was nonprofits specific. There wasn’t a lot out there that for companies like ours that will customize something for the nonprofit. So you couldn’t certainly couldn’t do something specific to a conference registration, that where you’re, you’re trying to take really customized information that they’re going to bring these three people, they need the vegetarian meal on Saturday for the you know, for the for the breakfast, or whatever, that they’re having dinner at the conference, it really wasn’t a lot of options there. And so, at that point, we decided, let’s, let’s make this a product, let’s. And we dubbed the product, the product name was for good cause.com. And I created a separate site that where we would host all the E commerce pages that we were building for people, which you’re creating, I created a niche there, which was great. And that’s what we’ve done. Now for so many years this was in
Jeremy Weisz 27:46
what made you decide to you productized it so you’ve made it. So it’s a platform instead of building like almost custom sites every time what made you decide to shift, because I still feel like today, a lot of web developers, they’ll just do customize sites. And I wonder what shifted you to actually create one main platform,
Ronald Pruitt 28:13
as I knew I would, there would never be enough time in the day for me, or anybody that was helping me to build custom sites every single time, you know, we at least I at least needed to start with a template. And that’s what we did. We essentially, in a sense, really did build custom sites for each of the clients. But we started with templates and modules that we had, because we wanted to save us time, we wanted to save them time. And also at that point, I was really switching my business model, I was really moving to a recurring revenue model, which at first was really really hard, because heard about it, wow, you’re coming from getting paid by the project. Or getting paid by the hour to moving to we’re going to we’re going to charge you a setup fee, we’re gonna charge you a small hosting fee, we’re gonna charge you a small transaction fee. So we’re tying ourselves to their success. But I knew that that was going to be a long haul that it was going to be
Jeremy Weisz 29:18
to build up that membership.
Ronald Pruitt 29:21
That’s right, you’re gonna you’re gonna need a lot of nonprofit clients paying you that monthly fee before that really kicks in and you become as profitable as you want it to. I think we had some hiccups early on, certainly, you know, the fact that I productized it. So it was confusing and I probably was stubborn like this. I think I was maybe I was investing in the niche, but I don’t know that I was fully investing that were really going wholeheartedly that we were going to be the E commerce company because we were still doing a few websites, you know, custom websites for folks. And so open consult was the company name for good cause DICOM was the product. It took me a lot of years to realize it. That was confusing people. It took me a while to realize that the nonprofits that we worked with wanted us to focus on the E commerce part. They wanted to, to call us for a good cause. That’s what they saw us as. So eventually, I went down to the local county and said, we’re changing our name. And from from that point on, we were for a good cause. And then ecommerce, ecommerce was the focus. We still do custom websites from time to time but Ecommerce has is what we focus on what we’re great at. So many years of experience, we know what works there.
Jeremy Weisz 30:44
Yeah. What was one of those conversations you have with one of the nonprofit’s that you knew we didn’t need to do e commerce? Because I can see early on big oh, maybe we’ll just do events for nonprofit. And, you know, So what made you what was one of those conversations that you thought they really want this ecommerce component?
Ronald Pruitt 31:02
Well, you know, I think we had a lot of conversations with nonprofits that they were struggling with taking donations online. It wasn’t Yeah, there were a few services out there. But again, they weren’t, they didn’t have the ability to customize for people and give them those little custom tweaks that that their donors wanted, you know, the ability to give an honor or memory of someone the ability that to choose any program that they wanted to give to really to make that process simple, and easy. And I think what, what made the marketplace viable, really was I look back to 911. Because, you know, I tell the story, after 911, President Bush came out into the Rose Garden, and he wanted the American people to raise money for all these new york charities, the Red Cross, different fireman funds and things like that, well, he didn’t tell them to put your pennies in a jar and will come by and pick him up. He didn’t say they did. He said he didn’t say call this one 800 Number. He didn’t say put a check in the mail. He said we’ve created this website. And we want you to go here and we want you to give online. And I think that right there just taught the American public that that you can give online, you can go onto a website, you can put your credit card in and you can make a donation. That plus at that time Amazon was really booming is starting to boom, you’re really used to paying online teaching people that ecommerce was the right thing. And we saw it as a as a great niche. To, you know, this is what nonprofits need. Nonprofits are in the business of fundraising. And we can be in the business of providing an easy way to make that happen. So payment pages, hosting those for them, allowing them not to have to handle all the security of it. The programming, we can just bring all that for them. All they had to do is just set up a link on their website, and we would take everything.
Jeremy Weisz 33:23
So Ron, what did you see happen your business after 911?
Ronald Pruitt 33:28
Well, it was a doable thing. On the one hand, they were teaching nonprofits, that this could be a real viable option for them. So we were able to use that as a story in the sales, we were able to explain to people that this is something that you needed to be doing, the big charities are doing it the nationwide charities, the local charities needed to be doing it as well. You need to be competitive. So on the one hand, we were able to use that on the other hand, the economy fell out from under everyone. And the donors that were going online to give they were giving to the Red Cross, they were giving to all these big charity, raising millions of dollars for the 911 recovery efforts. And for these families. Local Charities who were in the game were that were raising trying to raise money online. were hurt by that. So there were a couple of years there were local charities. You know, your local Girl Scouts, your local Big Brothers, Big Sisters organization, those were hurt by that. So after 911 Certainly things you because of the economy, they were leaner than certainly we wanted them to be.
Jeremy Weisz 34:49
So you know, when we’re talking early, the site looks beautiful. You have a really clear statement like it’s interesting to hear the progression because you went from I’m open console for good cause it’s very clear message, your message on the site is very clear, raise more, keep more. And I know you said like these, like the seventh version or something like that. Yeah. Tell me about some of the different key things that you changed in the different versions, when you saw, we don’t need this at all, or Wow, this is essential, we need to keep this in and make it even more prominent.
Ronald Pruitt 35:24
Right? Well, yeah, like you say, it’s a seventh or eighth edition, we I think we’ve built a new website for ourselves every couple of years. And we’ve had successes with it and mistakes along the way. I think the latest edition, what we kind of migrated back to really focusing on what we’re best at. So what we wanted to do is highlight really three areas. And I think anytime a company is going to build a website, or nonprofits going to build a website, they’ve got to take themselves through a progression. And the first thing is, why are we building this? And for us, I think we wanted to kind of double down on the message that on really three pillars, one is that the pages are extremely user friendly, so you raise more money. The second pillar is that compared to our competitors, our costs are are better. And the third is that, you know, the customer service that you get with us is more is better than than our competitors. So we went through a process of establish looking at our goals, why we are building the site, then you’re going to look at the user scenarios that you want on site. Okay, who are we trying to attract on the site? And then how are we going to give them as many clicks into where we want to take them? So for us, it’s about like you said, when you hit the homepage, you’re gonna get that value statement. And every company should have in a sentence or a couple sentences, right? Yeah, simple. What are you about? What value are you going to give to the customer? And then we link them right into the form to request a demonstration from us of the software. And we want some
Jeremy Weisz 37:20
things you tested there that you find didn’t work. Like right now you’ve requested a demo? Did you have get a free trial? Or were there any things that you tested there that, like, Yeah, this isn’t working with a change it?
Ronald Pruitt 37:32
We’ve done a lot of things in the past, there’s so many different editions of the site. Yeah, we’ve had just your basic get in touch, you know, we’ve had contact with you so many different terminology. The ones the terminology that we have now is really based on? Yes, it is based on that 16 years, 1617 years of doing this. We’ve had times in our in our past where we’ve had website additions, that maybe we were looking to get more bigger, you know, website projects, we’ve maybe you’ve kind of moved away from the E commerce a little bit, and we’re trying to get other types of projects, and it just hasn’t worked because we walked away from the core. Right, right. And then and then we would lose, we would confuse the client a little bit. We really, I think one of the main things I’ve learned is focus on what you’re great at the clients gonna love you for it. And
Jeremy Weisz 38:30
what was the messaging? That so yeah, what was the messaging on the site, when you start to get away from maybe you’re trying to get bigger projects or different projects, what was like,
Ronald Pruitt 38:41
I was a lot of that it was a lot of background on our experience, we had a lot about showing a lot of our custom design work. You know, when when reality we got we get most of that work from the clients that trust us to do their e commerce, let’s say. And we see they see that these guys have built this incredibly user friendly, easy system. And they have so much experience, well, hey, maybe they will also help us with building a little website for their event or building their entire website. So
Jeremy Weisz 39:17
this builds a lot of trust, because they come in with that’s what they want, and they know you for that and then other stuff just comes.
Ronald Pruitt 39:25
Exactly. Yes.
Jeremy Weisz 39:27
So what else from the site Did you subtract that you got rid of because this is not working or that you added? Because you were hearing it over and over from customers?
Ronald Pruitt 39:39
Well, testimonials, you know, we had, the way that we had always done testimonials on the side is they were kind of hidden in a sidebar or we would have a single page dedicated to testimonials, where you had to drill into maybe a client list And then you would drill into what these particular clients are saying about us. We really did a lot of research in terms of what customers are doing. Yeah, converting what customers want to see. And they want to see it big and they want to see human faces as something that we had never done before. We’d never provide a human face with a testimonial. And all the research is really positive on that they want to see that, okay, here’s a real individual that endorses it. Another thing that I added that I had never done before, is added my own photos
Jeremy Weisz 40:37
there. I had always had me about page. I mean,
Ronald Pruitt 40:41
I never had a, I always had a little mini bio about myself, but I’d never put up a photo of myself.
Jeremy Weisz 40:48
You have a friendly face. So
Ronald Pruitt 40:52
I don’t think I’ve ever tried to make this business about me, though. It’s always been I’ve always just tried to let the work stand for itself. But I think, you know, we looked at it. And you know, it’s time for I’ve been doing this a long time, it’s time for me to be more open, they want to see behind it. That’s right. And I appreciate you having me on, I think it’s a good positive step for me just to be more out there. You know, and so that’s something that’s something brand new.
Jeremy Weisz 41:17
I mean, I think I like your mindset of you know, obviously, you’re highlighting the customer, and it’s all about the customer. But there is that sense of it’s not like you’re putting fate your face like front and center on the homepage, and you don’t have like a big ego at least it seems that way. So you know, they do you want to see that? And I do you do get that personal feel when you see someone’s face? And from the homepage to what are the things that you discover with conversion? Because obviously, you know, it seems like you study conversion, and that helps your customers because your website is going to be conversion friendly. And I noticed even the words in the beginning like this big number 77% greater conversion rate, which can you know, goes into their donations going up? What have you learned about increasing conversions, what’s works?
Ronald Pruitt 42:03
The main thing you know, we we have spent a lot of years looking at that for our clients. And it’s really about you strip away everything that’s not essential. You focus on that, what is the what is the single message that you want for our clients, for a nonprofit that’s looking to take a donation when they hit a donation page, they want to simplify form, they don’t want to,
Jeremy Weisz 42:30
they want to convert, they want someone who gets the page not to bounce off the page they need,
Ronald Pruitt 42:33
they need photos, imagery that create an emotional connection to them, they need something that shows that you know, as few words as possible, that will entice them to make a donation. So really what we’re doing with our website, too, is we’re are we’re focusing on the core of what makes us great. And then, but not, you know, doing that in 1000 words that they’re not going to read. It’s all about keeping it simple. And one of the great things that we do, and certainly if you’ve ever looked at our website, or any of our clients stuff is it works on all platforms. That’s really the latest kind of big internet change. You were talking we were talking about the the early days of the internet. Nowadays, it’s all about mobile. So every site that we built for ourselves or for our clients, it’s got to be mobile friendly. It’s got to work on any device, from smartphone to iPad to desktop computer and everything in between. You have to make sure that that any website that you build is friendly to all devices, and that the content and the message is friendly to the audience that you’re trying to reach.
Jeremy Weisz 43:49
Do you use any tools specific tools for tracking that would be good for people to check out? If they have their own website that you use to track the conversion or see where people are clicking?
Ronald Pruitt 44:02
We use, we use what I think most businesses use Google Analytics. If you’re gonna if you have a website, you must have a Google Analytics account. You definitely going to want to track every every visit to every page for conversions. We do something really, really simple. I mean, the numbers on our website that we came up with, you know that we get a greater conversion rate than other folks out there. We’ll do something really simple. We have Google Analytics, we’re tracking the visits to the pages. And then we’re tracking that against the number of donations that have flown that have come through that page. It’s a very simple process. I don’t think companies have to make it too complicated. Now. Now, you want to take a look at the visits that you’re getting. Google Analytics can tell you that it can tell you how much time they’re spending on site, they can tell you which pages are making an impact. Certainly there are more sophisticated tools that you can You can there are there things like heat maps where you could look at a site, and you can track the either the clicks of the user and what the
Jeremy Weisz 45:09
click Read or something was, yeah,
Ronald Pruitt 45:13
there’s a ton of tools out there. But I don’t think you have to be complicated about
Jeremy Weisz 45:18
what other components with the homepage because I do I love the clean design, how it is simple, and everything’s big, and it stands out. What other components Did you find to be impactful? Like, obviously, you have just a real clear headline, you know, proposition and then you have some of the numbers. Is there a thought process to the order of this? Or is it just the way it naturally flowed in the conversation? Because I see, well, then you have people or why know the cost. So you have the cost, and then you have some of the face with the testimonial, and then some of the the logos, which are, you know, credibility?
Ronald Pruitt 45:53
Yeah, we’re definitely trying to build trust there. And if you look from from top to bottom, on the homepage, there, we’re really telling the narrative. Because if our statement is raised more keep more, then what we want to do is we want to support that as you flow down the page. So the one of the first blocks there is all about the fact that the pages work on all devices. So what we’re, what we’re saying there and with this, those stats is that you’re going to raise more money. The next block down is all about the pricing that you’re going to save more, and you’ll get some great service along the way. And then we’re we’re kind of balancing those two things with the logos and the testimonial, to give credibility to what we’re looking at, above all, with the purpose both at the top and the bottom of having that person click to request the demo. Because then, then I’m going to set up a custom time with them. We’re going to do a little web session, where I’m going to walk them through all the various features and benefits and that type
Jeremy Weisz 46:55
of thing. So what have been some of the milestones as far as getting big clients, for you throughout the years?
Ronald Pruitt 47:07
Milestone milestones. For us, I mean, getting big clients, probably the biggest one was the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. That was huge for us. And that was early on. They’ve been processing donations with us for over a decade. Wow. They’re now raising more than a million dollars a year through the platform. Yeah. They’ve been a great client, they’ve been a great referral source for us. That, I think, lately, we’ve been really excited by some of the National Audit, we’re getting local chapters of some of the national organizations like Girl Scouts and Big Brothers, Big Sisters. We’ve had a big push over the past few years into monthly giving. So helping donors give you know, $10 a month, $20 a month to the charity of their choice. And we have some great partners that, you know, kind of helped us in the consulting on that and have forwarded some clients to us there to you know, it’s taken a lot of years, but
Jeremy Weisz 48:21
a couple of decades. Yeah, we feel so
Ronald Pruitt 48:23
good now, because we’ve kind of put all the pieces together, it’s taken a long time to put all those pieces together and to find your niche to find great partners. You know, on the banking side, when when you process a credit card for someone you work with a bank, a merchant account company, this sounds
Jeremy Weisz 48:42
like a nightmare, I mean, tells you there’s so many moving parts. What’s the hardest part about that people don’t see because they just want to work. But what’s the hardest part for you in the back end? To make things you know, to keep things smoothly running?
Ronald Pruitt 48:56
We’re always things like security, we’re always learning. We’re always I mean, I pay a company once a week to try and hack into our systems. Really? Yeah, yeah. So any issues that we have anything that we need to correct? You know, keeping the servers up and running all you know 100% uptime, you know, that that we guarantee so it’s, it’s, there’s a lot of moving parts behind the scenes that customers don’t see, but we’re working hard to make sure it happens. We have to work hard to keep track of the latest technology. We’ve just completed another edition of our reporting system for our clients. You know, we had to make sure that it’s working in the latest browser or with the latest technology, you know, redoing our pages so that they work on smartphones, you know, we’ve had to do that and and lastly, we’re always learning always seeking out the latest thing to make sure that our clients can get paid That’s, there’s a lot of lot of moving parts there. Yes, you know,
Jeremy Weisz 50:03
what’s the most complex, you know, because I could see transactions, I could see the Alzheimer’s Foundation doing a huge push and you get a ton of traffic, and then you have to manage that, I can see I mean, there’s a million different things that are going on what what takes the most amount of your time
Ronald Pruitt 50:28
probably customer service is where I spend most of my day is, we have a platform where we guarantee that nonprofits can have unlimited payment pages, as many donation pages as they need, as many event registration pages as they need. And we’ve got clients that are very technical, and we’ve got clients that are not
Jeremy Weisz 50:52
very technical. And they can do it themselves with your platform, though, they can
Ronald Pruitt 50:55
do it themselves, but they’re their main clients that that choose to have us do it, too, you know, they got a new event coming up. And they need to launch a new page where they can do an event registration, and we’ll do it for them. And we’re perfectly happy to do it. But that’s where we spend most of our time is just assisting them day to day, making sure that everything is running smoothly, you know, for their payment pages. You know, we’ve got clients that hey, they’ll call and say, hey, it’s that time of year, we’ve got our annual gala coming up, we need to get this event page and I say, hey, just send us the new pricing, send us the dates, and we get we get a good to go. We get it all set up for them. We don’t want to put any burden on them. So we put the burden, you know, on us on the technical side. So
Jeremy Weisz 51:46
run a what works best to get more organizations on board.
Ronald Pruitt 51:52
Really word of mouth. That’s where we get most of our clients. We get our clients to partners, partner organizations.
Jeremy Weisz 52:02
partner organizations, what do you mean?
Ronald Pruitt 52:04
Well, you know, like I say, there’s a lot of moving parts to processing a credit card. So we’ve got partners that will do the merchant count processing for us. We’ve got partners that we work with that do consulting on fundraising. And so they’ll feed us clients, you know, they’re actually so
Jeremy Weisz 52:23
those merchant processors who may work with like Alzheimer’s Foundation may recommend that they, you know, just to make it easy. Get on your platform.
Ronald Pruitt 52:32
Right. Exactly, exactly. And so it’s word of mouth, it’s referrals. It’s the fact that we’ve been doing this for a long time that that we’ve built the trust, we build enough trust. And it’s funny, we get new clients when one employee of a client leaves goes to another nonprofit, right? And then we end up working for them, too. We’ve, we’ve just built up a lot of trust over the years and then the website. You know what, I don’t do any I used to go to conferences.
Jeremy Weisz 53:08
Yeah. What do you do early on? Because I know, someone may be going well, I’m not 20 years in business. I don’t have referrals. But what do you do early on, that worked
Ronald Pruitt 53:19
early on, early on, and really even now, most of our leads have always come through website. We’ve always had people buying and clicking a little contact us and find that way. Other than that it’s been, we get a client and we get word of mouth, we get a referral, things that have not worked have been more traditional things. Advertising thing in a trade magazine, or newspaper,
Jeremy Weisz 53:50
or magazine would work actually, I’m surprised it didn’t work at all.
Ronald Pruitt 53:55
I didn’t know. Maybe at the time, we didn’t have the right message, or, or what but it just did not work for us. I think because maybe our product is simple. We need them to hit the website, we needed them see examples. We need them to actually get a sense of how it could work for them. Especially in the early days where the internet was so brand new, a lot of nonprofits had no clue that they even should be taking a donation online or how that might even work. i We used to go to I used to go to conferences, and I would set up a booth, you know at a nonprofit conference. And it was just a waste of time. It turns out that a lot of these conferences everyone’s so focused on they’ll go to the educational sessions and they’ll wave that batch way. Wave at your booth on the way it was a big expense or not a lot of payoff. We’ve gotten much more payoff in investing in our website. And now we’re investing. We’re kind of double down on that by investing in content marketing. You probably saw our blog on the website, we’re publishing once a week now, we’re getting really good feedback on that we’re getting really great feedback on our Twitter feed and stuff like that, where we’re basically, we’re making it our job to educate our clients on how to be better fundraisers. And that’s, that’s generating a lot of look sees into our website, you know, a lot of clicks into that. And when they’re there, they’re gonna learn about our product. So it’s a double fold, we want our clients to raise more money. So if we educate them on how to be better fundraisers, we’ll get more traffic to the donation pages will do better as a company with more transaction fees. They’ll do better, because they’re raising more money.
Jeremy Weisz 55:46
It’s a win win win all around, all around. Exactly. That’s interesting, because you’ve been in the business and you just inherently learn what helps people to fundraise. And even with Kickstarter, Indiegogo, like that’s valuable for those people trying to raise funds, in general for themselves or a project. So what have you found that has worked the best? As far as fundraising goes?
Ronald Pruitt 56:13
I would say, it’s really, that we kind of go back to that core message. If we talk to a nonprofit, I want to know. You know, what is the one thing that you’re going to do for the community. And then you need to sell that one thing, you know, we work with, and one of the groups that we work with is a group called project here. And they deliver medical supplies to to Africa and a lot of places in the third world. And if you go to their website, you go to their donation page. It is single focus is single focused on if you give us money, the supplies will get delivered. They’ve even developed specific programs, they have something called kits for kits for kids. And it’s specifically it’s like little medical supply kits for families. Something that that a family might have, you know, in their house, but in the third world, it can be a lifesaver. Yeah, yeah. So they’ve created a specific donation page, just for that, that speaks to that one thing, and it’s all about in fundraising. When a donor hits your website, they really just want to do things. They want to know who you are, what you do, and you’ve got with any like, with any website, you’ve got just a few seconds, 30 seconds. Yeah, you got to convince them of that right away, do they understand where they’ve land? Then they want to know, if I give you money? Where’s that money going to go toward? And what impact will it have, so the better that they can sell the impact. I mean, we have one client, Karen kids cancer, if you go to their website, you will see that right down the homepage, they have a huge button that says we’ve raised $7 million for children’s to fight children’s cancer. And then that links you into a section that talks about the impact that that has made, and the cures that the doctors that they work with, and working on. If once you convince them of the impact, then it’s where to like click to make the gift. And it’s about having a clear present donate now button that is present on every page of your site. It’s present, you know, it’s in that top corner of the navigation. And there’s a little spotlight on the homepage, that tells me here’s what we do. If you give us money, here’s what will happen. And here’s worth click. It’s it’s not that complicated. It’s all about keeping it simple. And like we were trying on our website to push people into that request to demo form everything on a nonprofit site, if their job is to raise money we’re about you’re pushing people into that donation page. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks the buttons, that way that you focus, the content is all about pushing them and they’re out there. If their job is to get volunteers, then it should just drive them into a volunteer signup form, or it depends on what their model is and what they’re trying to accomplish.
Jeremy Weisz 59:27
Yeah, essentially with fundraising. Yeah, the same thing you do and that you recommend for you is that one single focus call to action, and then the credibility and support and obviously, you know, for the fundraising is a little different if they’re saying this is what’s going towards everything like that. What has been one of the most rewarding campaigns that you’ve been a part of, because people have used or organization used for good cause.
Ronald Pruitt 59:57
And that comes to mind is the One of our clients is Mercy Health System. It’s in the Midwest. It’s a network of hospital mercy. Yeah. Okay. Well, one of their hospitals, St. John’s Hospital in Joplin, Missouri was completely wiped out by the big Joplin tornado, oh, well, a few a few years ago. And the day after it happened, they called us on the phone. And they said, you know, we’ve got to, we’ve got to fundraise for the employees for the local community for the ability to rebuild this hospital. And we just got on a conference call. And we said, well, let’s build a donation page specific to that campaign. And we had it up within the day, they were blasting out emails and, and tweets and Facebook postings, and every other way that they can get the message out. And that if you went to the site, if you donated, it was going to go for two efforts, it was going to go to helping the workers at the hospital with the basic needs, because not only did they lose their place of business, but many of them lost their homes as well, in that town, horrible. It was it was absolutely horrible. And it just gave us a good feeling that we could do something quickly for them. And it resulted in 10s of 1000s of dollars being raised for that community. happy and proud to say, you know, we kept going with that. They actually them and another of our clients, the Community Foundation of the Ozarks, which is near Joplin, Missouri, they, they actually build a rebuild Joplin website, which then linked into a donation page that we built for them. And the city is has come back, the hospital has now been rebuilt and reopened, which is amazing. So I think the ability to know that our clients can call us at the moment, and that we made an impact there. I mean, we’ve we’ve had clients that have raised money for tornadoes and the big tornado in Tuscaloosa. That was a few years ago. project here, it was just raising money for the Nepal disaster to send medical supplies there. Just to know that that we’re making an impact, and it just feels so good. It certainly, you know, I could make a lot more money if we were doing e commerce for the for profit world. But this just gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling that you make an impact even on just a local level. I mean, we’ve got a organization that we work with here in Atlanta called Kids Club. And what they do is they run an annual camp and other programs and services to council kids that have lost their parents. So these are kids that are grieving crazy. Yeah, it is. And the fact that we can work with a group like that and help them raise money. You know, and that’s, that’s not like a national, you know, big disaster relief organization. But it’s an organization that’s doing good here in our local community. And we work a lot of school foundations. You know, which is a big deal for us. My wife is a teacher. So she negotiated a little discount for them. So we know, all kinds of nonprofits fun.
Jeremy Weisz 1:03:39
I think I discovered I was doing research for interview someone I was interviewing for a nonprofit. And I just like, this is a beautiful design. I think I scrolled down to the end, and I saw, you know, something built by for good cause or something. I clicked on it. And just to see. And that’s kind of how I discovered you actually. And then I saw Wow, they’ve been doing this for forever. We really need to have have you on you’re kind of going back to the nonprofit sector, because you almost feel like, okay, you’re going through this huge turmoil. Let’s like just do it. I don’t even want to charge you. I mean, that’s kind of the I’m not saying to run a business, you need to charge people, right? But there is that this is such a good cause I want to give this away to you too. I’m gonna charge you This is really worth a lot of money because it’s improving conversion donations. How did you decide on pricing for this?
Ronald Pruitt 1:04:37
We kind of looked at what, what we thought the marketplace would bear. I think certainly early on we we made mistakes in that we certainly I think I could have been charging more. But I think that’s a mistake that a lot of businesses make when they first starting out. As you’re kind of looking at you kind of trying to judge and it was something so new. They really want A lot of other companies were out there doing it. So we didn’t have a lot to judge against. We kind of looked at what was bad, right? Good and bad. But we thought we we looked at what we thought the nonprofits could bear, and would would pay. And we’ve had different when we first started, the first year, we had a completely different pricing model, we used to take a percentage of the total, right? Because it wasn’t merchant companies that would do a lot of things on the web, there weren’t a lot available there. There wasn’t a lot of technology. Yeah, there was really only a few programs where that you could hook it hook a website to process a credit card, we found one way of doing it, and we would kind of take a percentage and funnel the money to them. And it just didn’t feel right, it didn’t. And there’s still tons of companies that do that we didn’t feel we didn’t feel it was right. When $1,000 donation is the same hit on AI resources as $100 donation. So we switched our model to what we thought was more fair, which is small transaction fee, which then we’re still covering our costs to on the server and the little things that we have to do to process a transaction. But we thought it was it was more fair. Over the years, we’ve tried to keep things as low and as fair and transparent as possible. I’ve only had I think two or three price increases in 17 years. Yeah, maybe I should have done it more. But I make a respectable, you know, living wage, I’m happy. You know,
Jeremy Weisz 1:06:37
I got to get happy. Yeah,
Ronald Pruitt 1:06:39
I enjoy. I enjoy my job. So the clients are happy. That’s that’s all we care about.
Jeremy Weisz 1:06:45
Yeah. You know, people, people have like a monthly charge, just to the hosting and the site. And then there’s like an interchange fee, based off of the transactions, which I think you explained it better than the credit card companies do actually, what what that is, because I think I’ve had conversations with them for like, 40 minutes. Like, I still don’t understand what this energy.
Ronald Pruitt 1:07:06
Yeah. So you know, it took me a lot, it took me a long time to really come up with a great explanation as to how ecommerce works, and what we do versus what our partners do.
Jeremy Weisz 1:07:22
Because I like it, it’s like a small fee, your interchange fee. So people, so you cover your costs, you make money, because you want to provide great customer service. And so you need to charge people and have a profit there so you can provide the best service to
Ronald Pruitt 1:07:40
right, right, it makes sure that they have the latest technology and everything that they need.
Jeremy Weisz 1:07:44
So Ronald, I always ask because it’s inspired insider, what’s been the lowest point and then how you push through that tough time?
Ronald Pruitt 1:07:54
Well, I would say a low point for me it really is. I wouldn’t say it’s business related. It’s probably more personal related. It has to do with our daughter. We when she was born, she was born with something called hygroma us and they were in her in her cheek its little growth. And we didn’t even know it at the time. We shot we thought this was just a happy big cheek baby,
Jeremy Weisz 1:08:28
you know, just look like big chubby cheek,
Ronald Pruitt 1:08:31
chubby cheek baby. And we didn’t really noticed that there was an issue till I’d say she was about a year old and she got a cold and one side of her face where most of the high ground was are swelled up. And we noticed that there was a big imbalance or not big, but it was an imbalance between the sides of her face. And you just don’t know what the issue is. So your worst thing you think the worst, the first thing that comes to your mind, that’s cancer, right? And so we went through, you know, a process with doctors and you know that basically we need to go in and biopsy that and get that looked at. And one of the steps that we took was we had to we got an employment down at the Aflac Cancer Center, which is at the Children’s Hospital here in Atlanta. And sitting in the waiting room was probably the low point because you’re looking around and you think that’s this could this could be us here. You see families that are there. And you know, this could be this this could be what’s in store for us and it was a hard process we got we she had to have surgery, which was fraught with danger too because they had to pull something out for a cheek, which if they, if they hit a certain nerve, then you’ll never smile again. Right. But it’s, it’s something that that had to be done. And luckily, you know, we had a fantastic surgeon and the biopsy came back negative. And you know, she’s had a couple of surgeries since then. And it’s we’ve had a lot of it taken out, but just, I think that day when we visited the cancer center was was a low point because you just you worrying about your kids and where you go from there. And it also, to kind of tie it into the business side, it informed that we were on the right path with for good cause. Because at the time that we went down there, the the Aflac Cancer Center was, it was one of my clients. Hmm. So we were actually raising money for the place that we were at, that’s doing this amazing research on children’s cancer
Jeremy Weisz 1:11:06
came full circle,
Ronald Pruitt 1:11:08
it came full circle, and I came home, you know, and we we talked about it many times that yeah, this is this is the path that we we should be on, and we’re supposed to be on. Because there are so many nonprofits out there that are doing good work, like these folks were to help these families that we need the websites that we build to do something to make a difference.
Jeremy Weisz 1:11:39
Why is that story not on your website.
Ronald Pruitt 1:11:43
Like it took me a long time to put my photo up there. I’ve never tried to make any about you about us,
Jeremy Weisz 1:11:50
but God should be on your About About section to me,
Ronald Pruitt 1:11:55
maybe we had a hard time having her too. We we we it took us a long time to have kids, we had to get some professional help and that in that manner. And it taught me a lot about just overcoming things. You know, when you had going through something reach out for help. We reached out to there’s a nonprofit called resolve. That kind of educates, educates families. They’re having trouble having kids educates them on fertility adoption and a whole bunch of other things. That’s really common. Yeah, it really is. And but we didn’t, we didn’t know it was common. And you think you’re the only one think you’re the only one we came across so many people that we knew there was a time when we knew 15 people who were having kids 15 families, and it was just all around us. And we went to a meeting there. And it just was like, ah, opened
Jeremy Weisz 1:13:01
your eyes.
Ronald Pruitt 1:13:02
Yeah, we’re not alone. And we can get through anything. You know, nowadays, even with my business, you know, you’re never too old to to get the advice and kind of sit down with people. I’m a regular. I have regular meetings with score, the retired executives group says, you know, you need to kind of sit down with, with, with people that you can bounce things off of and know that whatever you’re going through, you’re not alone. So,
Jeremy Weisz 1:13:32
so Ronald, who are some of your mentors?
Ronald Pruitt 1:13:37
You know, I don’t think that I had a lot of real kind of business mentors, certainly, like I said, family, you know, one person that might stand out mentioned that I worked retail for many, many years. I mentioned that I had, you know, bad bosses along the way. But I had one really fantastic boss. His name was Joe Braxton. And he was the manager above me in the men’s department at a small department store in Auburn, Alabama. And he was just incredibly kind patient. He wouldn’t he would instruct you on what he needs you to do. But he did it with just Extreme class. And I remember that, you know, wherever I was going to work, I was going to be like Joe, I kind of conduct myself with the same thing. He would be flexible with you. He you know, whenever I got my college classes for that semester, we’d sit down, he said, Tell me your schedule. We’re going to work around it. I mean, I used to come in to work from eight to 12. In the morning, I’ll go to class from one to five or one to four. And then we’ll come back and work five to nine. So I was working full time but he would be working. As long as you’re coming in, you’re getting your work. work done. As long as you’re producing the results, that’s what was gonna matter. And so, you know, you’re gonna be like, Joe, you were doing you were doing pretty well, always a kind voice you sit down and explain what he wanted you to do why he wanted to do it, not just go do it. And but this is how it was going to help the business. Yeah. So I learned a lot about sales, I learned a lot about just retail. And you know, why one product moves versus another? Why, you know, you know, I was in charge of doing all markdowns all the little things he do. And he was there as just teaching me along the way.
Jeremy Weisz 1:15:43
So Ron, what was one of those hard times in business that you had to push through?
Ronald Pruitt 1:15:49
Well, I think it’s hard time. Probably for us. It actually was, it was great personally, what it was hard on the business was after my daughter was born, we made a decision as a family, my my wife is a teacher, we made a decision that, you know, since I was running, and still do run a home base to work from home. Yeah, yeah, that the kids were going to be with me, we weren’t going to have a nanny, we weren’t gonna
Jeremy Weisz 1:16:21
feel like getting any work done. We’re gonna have, we’re gonna put
Ronald Pruitt 1:16:25
them in daycare that and I want it to do I want it to be there with them all the time. So we kind of kind of scaled back to business in a lot of ways. You know, we stopped all the advertising, we lead, we did, like just word of mouth, bring new clients to us, and we had enough to keep ourselves going. But you’re right, it was hard to get things done. It was hard to kind of be there at that instant, when a client would call or when you need to do sales presentation.
Jeremy Weisz 1:17:00
Dirty Diaper over here, I gotta think
Ronald Pruitt 1:17:01
I did, I did. I changed a lot of diapers. It was great. Personally, it was a joy. They were amazing. And on the business side, one very positive thing is it actually helped me identify who were going to be great clients.
Jeremy Weisz 1:17:18
Because a cut out everyone else, you only can keep the best ones is that why?
Ronald Pruitt 1:17:22
Well, when when potential clients would call, and they were inquiring about our company, I would have to preface the fact that there are two toddlers. right with me right beside me, I might have a baby carrier right next to the desk, you know, I might have a three year old running around the desk. So I would in my welcome speech, I would let them know that, that my two little vice presidents, you may hear them in the back residence that he met in the background. And that also was letting people know kind of, you know, we were a family company that was going to be the priority, that kind of stuff. And I had some potential clients that I could tell right away that that was we were done. We were done. They, they just could not handle that I would have my kids with me when I needed to help them. And then I had other clients who turned out to be clients, so stay with me for a decade who said that is fabulous. I did, they said I did that, that I worked. And I had my kids and it was wonderful. It turned out to be this great.
Jeremy Weisz 1:18:32
Not a business, just a business fit but a personal, personal fit to
Ronald Pruitt 1:18:36
and you need that in business. You know, you need the client has to fit with you personally. You know, I think most hope most of the clients that we have now I consider them friends. Right? If
Jeremy Weisz 1:18:50
Ronald so what’s been one of the proudest moments in the business for you?
Ronald Pruitt 1:18:57
Well, I think when we hit 10 million per year for the for our clients, that we that we hit an achievement where they had raised $10 million in one year. Yeah, that was that was huge. It really sat back and remember no big number we’ve made it we’re making a huge impact. That was that was big. Certainly in the early days becoming profitable to know that, gosh, we can actually do I can actually do this, that this can be a viable business that you can actually do do good and do well at the same time. We can make this work that this can be something that I hope to do this till I retire I hope that I hope
Jeremy Weisz 1:19:46
or you just won’t retire or maybe
Ronald Pruitt 1:19:48
I’m teaching my kids to to program currently. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, teaching we’re teaching them the Python language and now
Jeremy Weisz 1:19:58
program. How do you do you do with a special program like online? Or do you just how do you actually teach them like other people want to be like, oh, I want to teach my kids to.
Ronald Pruitt 1:20:08
There’s a book that we found how to teach your kids to code. And the language is Python, you can probably Google it and find it. But it’s little step by steps. So we started this summer. And in between all the baseball games and everything else that we do, we found some nights to sit down and, and just kind of go through the book and less little less than step by step. And, you know, maybe when they’re teenagers, I can give them a job. You never know
Jeremy Weisz 1:20:34
how old you think the kids have to be for you to start? Or when did you start? How old are they? Well, they’re
Ronald Pruitt 1:20:40
nine and 10. Nine and 11. Now, so that’s we’ve just started doing my son, who’s nine expressed an interest in it. So yeah, let’s let’s try it.
Jeremy Weisz 1:20:52
That’s fantastic. Yeah, Ron, I really appreciate your time. This has been amazing. And I have one last question for you. But before I ask it, just tell people where they can go to find out more, and where they should check you out.
Ronald Pruitt 1:21:07
I just check us out at for good. cause.com That’s the number for a good cause.com. And, you know, invite them to read our blog and check out our social feeds and learn more about being good fundraisers.
Jeremy Weisz 1:21:21
Yeah. And from you know, business from a business perspective, just to look and see the layout and design it’s really well laid out. And you can tell you took the time to think through each part of the of the site. So what’s the best thing about having your own business working from home?
Ronald Pruitt 1:21:46
Never having to wear that Suit Tie. I’d say one thing that I just really love. And this is kind of part of my daily routine, or I try to make it part of my daily routine is every day before lunch. Outside this window is driveway. And I have a basketball goal there. And I will spend a half an hour just shooting the basketball. It clears my mind. Yeah, just to be happy. It just clears my mind. Yeah, it’s great working from home. It really is. And like a work you know, you can build a virtual team. You know, it’s like any other business. I just enjoy it. It’s nice. During the summer. Of course my wife is off the kids are home everybody’s home. You know, come down.
Jeremy Weisz 1:22:38
It’s very enticing. Yeah, it’s very nice. Yeah, well if you’re ever in Chicago, we’ll play a game of horse or if I’m ever by you are down by you. But thank you so much round everyone should check out for good cause.com
Ronald Pruitt 1:22:53
I appreciate it very much. Thank you for having me on Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 1:23:04
Game
