Jeremy Weisz 14:27
You bring up a topic that I’ve heard agencies talk about, which is legacy clients and the ones that start sometimes, I have found people have a hard time going back. They started off maybe with much cheaper pricing, right? They were younger, like you said, there’s less overhead you’re doing the work you have to pay other people. There’s a lot of factors involved. How do you handle that as you grow and maybe you upgrade the level of service and the upgrade what you’re doing as well to have that conversation with that client that maybe is paying whatever I’m making, like, $200 a month. And now, new clients coming in, and you’re charging $2,000 a month. Like, what do those conversations look like as you grew with some of those legacy clients?
Ryan Tomlinson 15:18
Yeah, one of the prices hasn’t changed a lot, but Google has always kind of increased their pricing for Google Workspace. Our pricing is at par with what Google Offers because we’re a partner, so we get a little bit of a percentage. So we just offer exactly what you see on Google workspace and see the pricing. So when their pricing goes up, we get a little heads up, and then we send out the same kind of message of, hey customers, great news. Google is going to be increasing your pricing. They haven’t done it in so long, and these are the reasons why they’re telling us they’re doing it. So for some of those things, it’s kind of you just have to bite your lip and go on with it, because you’re not going to really change out your email system for a 10% increase on pricing or something. But in other cases, we kind of have grandfathered our clients into pricing.
So SEO, we have some clients that have been doing SEO for like five years on a set price. And if that same client were to come to us today, it would probably be at least two, maybe three times more than what it is they’re paying right now. I look at it as they helped us grow our business. Sure, we’re not going to be making the margins we are with our new clients, but we still are making enough that I’m not losing on it, and I appreciate their business, and they’re good customers too. If they were a customer that wasted my time and frustrated me and other things like that, then maybe I would be more inclined to tell them the news that our pricing has gone up by whatever the percentage might be, but we’ve been kind of blessed with having good clients and ones that we’re very happy to keep around. So I don’t really see the need to bring up a reason to have a discussion of why. What’s the reason for the price or upgrade or this or that?
Jeremy Weisz 17:41
Yeah, the grandfather of men and I have the same philosophy as you, Ryan, they helped us along the journey. They came in at a certain period of time, and they get to benefit from that, right? And so I totally hold that sentiment as long as, like you said, you’re not losing money, because I’ve seen some people, they have legacy clients, and then when they do the calculations, they’re actually losing money. Well, you can’t do that. But niche, we were talking about this before we record, that’s a big topic in the agency world, is niche. And you’ve helped a lot of different types of companies. And I know one of the niches that you’ve been focusing in on is property management companies. So talk about how you made the decision to do that and niche there.
Ryan Tomlinson 18:29
Yeah. So I’ve always kind of been looking for a niche, and it’s never really come to us very easily. If you look at our portfolio, we’ve done pretty much everything, and probably two or three of the same things of everything. But recently, we have found a little bit of a niche with property management companies. And some of the reasons is a lot of them are kind of outdated, or just kind of old and stale looking, and they need a refreshed brand. And look, I would say, kind of since COVID. I mean, websites have now become the first impression people get. In a lot of cases, they’ll go to the website before they visit the store. They’ll go to the website before they contact the person or go meet the person, or whatever the case may be. So that website is really your first impression. If it’s dull or boring, that person might just move on to the next site until they’re more inspired, and then they do pick up the phone or make an action or go to the store, whatever that next step may be.
So a lot of property management websites are kind of stale-looking so they all kind of seem to be in that same time area where they’re a bit over the hill with their current site, and they need something new, and it needs to look good. It needs to sell to their prospective audience. And then we’ve also been working really hard with a software provider that all of these property management companies use, which is called Yardi. And Yardi takes care of all a lot of the admin, or all of the admin that some of these property management companies do, holding all the information for all the units, taking care of payments, taking care of residence requests, and all those things that go along with condo buildings, apartment buildings and rental properties. So we’re able to build a beautiful, professional website, and then we’re able to pull in all that data that’s up in Yardi and put the two together.
So our clients have a really professional website, and it functions well, and it really acts as kind of a 24/7 salesperson, because it’s able to show the user what units are available, what the pictures look like, what’s the floor plan, what’s the price, and press a button to book a showing, or even put in an offer on it. So that’s been a really cool niche that we’ve been working on lately is the property management company.
Jeremy Weisz 21:24
Another one is government contracts.
Ryan Tomlinson 21:27
Yeah. So that’s been a really fun project. We started our first government contract doing all the websites for Simcoe County and so we built this website right here for Simcoe County, and it was a lot of content, a lot of text. And so we came in to make this site look and be appealing to users, make content more bite-sized, make it more easy to read, make it easier to find as well. So those were some of our objectives, and I think we really nailed them all of making it a great easy to navigate website, easy to find the topics people are looking for, ability to put out the news and show off projects. And then we also did six other websites for them.
So we did the Simcoe Museum, the Simcoe tourism, Simcoe economic development, Simcoe Regional Airport, immigration services. So all those sites, yeah, at the bottom there were also part of the project. So it really took us into a vast project, and working with a lot of different stakeholders and putting together different visions for each group. And yeah, it was a really good project. And the last thing about it is the accessibility, with all the government websites these days and a lot of other websites that we do, website accessibility is kind of Top of Mind. So we were also able to show up all our website accessibility skills that we’ve been refining over the last few years as well.
Jeremy Weisz 23:16
I feel like Ryan, government-side is kind of a beast, because there’s so much content. There’s so many different things. Like, I’m even looking at the homepage, and there’s like, okay, we need maps, we need transit, we need housing. There’s so much info. And it must be, I’ve heard with government stuff, it’s, it’s really a lot of labor to get the actual contract with it. What was that process like?
Ryan Tomlinson 23:45
Yeah, they can be, like, 50 to 60 page long RFP, so a lot of reading. Good news is, if you’re ever going to try them, usually, the wording starts to become a bit repetitive as you go through 10 or 12 of them and start your submissions. But, yeah, it’s a lot of work to submit those RFPs. The first few that we did probably took me six hours, eight hours to complete, and your chances of getting them are kind of low, because they do have requirements of you’ve had to work with government before, so to get that foot in the door is a little difficult. But now that we have it, hopefully will be a little easier to get a few more. And now that we’ve probably submitted 30 plus of these RFPs, we’ve kind of built ourselves a little database, so when there’s a question in one of those RFPs, we can almost search our database of how did we answer this question to a past RFP, find the answer, make sure it looks good, tweak it a little bit, and then pull it into our RFP. Once you do a few of them, it becomes a little easier. But you are right. They are a long read, and you need a couple cups of coffee to get through of it.
Jeremy Weisz 25:11
I’m wondering, why did you even do it in the first place? Because I’m thinking, Okay, you talk to a plumber. They’re like, Ryan, Sign me up. Easy, right? And then you’re like, well, now I could do a 50 to 60-page RFP, it takes me eight hours. What made you decide to even go that route?
Ryan Tomlinson 25:32
I think it’s just because it seemed so at the end of the day I look at it where it’s a 50-page RFP, and there’s maybe 30 to 40 companies that I constantly see bidding on them. And then you can also see how many of those companies actually submitted the RFP. So you’ll have about 40 that registered for the bid. You’ll have maybe 10 to 15 that submit the bid. So I looked at kind of the odds of 10 to 15.
Jeremy Weisz 26:03
Your poker days came up.
Ryan Tomlinson 26:05
Yeah, my poker hand was telling me I have a 10% chance of winning this pot. So, yeah, I think that’s what I looked at. Just the odds were there. So we kept on pushing, and we eventually won a few and now we have some good stories.
Jeremy Weisz 26:23
Now you’re hooked. Yeah, there’s another one, just to highlight a little bit more about what you do this flooring company. What’d you do with them?
Ryan Tomlinson 26:34
Yeah, so this is Alexanian, and they have about 20 or 30 brick-and-mortar stores where they sell flooring, rugs, carpet, laminate, vinyl, hardwood, window coverings and all that type of material and products. So we built an online e-commerce store for them. And we’ve done many, many e-commerce stores, and some, I would say, would be maybe a bit more flashy and cooler designs and stuff like that. But this is a very simple, basic e-commerce site, very easy to find things, filter things, search for things. And one of the biggest things that I like to highlight for this site is there were about 35,000 SKUs that we uploaded into the site.
It’s got resources where you can take a picture of your living room and upload it into the website so you can see the carpet, or the flooring, how it would look on your space. It’s got inventory management system to it. It’s connected to social media ads, Google ads. It’s really kind of one of our examples of an e-commerce store that is totally, wouldn’t say self-managed, but it’s connected to everything that’s taking a lot of admin work and daily updates and work off of the company’s internal team. So the website really is doing as much as it possibly can on its own as a website and helping improve sales online.
Jeremy Weisz 28:15
Did you have to revamp the whole site, or did you have to build it from scratch, like on a separate platform. What were they using like the management system for the e-commerce?
Ryan Tomlinson 28:29
So they were on an e-commerce platform previous, and it had problems to it. It was difficult to learn. So internally, you know, getting anyone new on board to figure out how things worked was a bit of a nightmare. And because it had issues, it was costing a lot just to continually fix it and update it. I mean, it was a bit of a headache. So we came in and offered a simple solution. This site’s built on WordPress and WooCommerce.
Jeremy Weisz 29:09
I think that’s the most popular one out there overall, probably because it’s built on WordPress, yeah.
Ryan Tomlinson 29:16
And so a lot of our sites are…
Jeremy Weisz 29:17
Was it on Magento before? What were they using? Do you remember?
Ryan Tomlinson 29:22
It wasn’t Magento, but I can’t remember what it was, but it was kind of a big name, CRM as well with it, but I can’t remember.
Jeremy Weisz 29:32
But you like WordPress and WooCommerce.
Ryan Tomlinson 29:36
I do like it. I like it because it’s been around forever, so there’s definitely a reason why, and it’s because it’s easy to use. In the back end, it offers complete customization. There’s no limits to it. And it’s, it’s open source, meaning it’s free other than you do have to pay for host. Thing, and you do have to maintain it and update it. But other than that, like there’s no licensing fee to it or any contract like that. And also I don’t selfishly try to lock people into you’re going to work with us for the next 10 years of your life. I kind of promote that if you choose WordPress and we build the site, but for some reason you no longer want to work with us, you’ll be able to find a handful of agencies that will be able to assist you, because everyone knows how to work with WordPress. So I kind of even use that as a selling tool, just to kind of show that we’re not trying to lock you into any contracts or anything. The reason I like this is for SEO and the ability to edit but also just so you know anyone else would be able to manage this site.
Jeremy Weisz 30:52
What mistakes do you see people make on their website? Ryan, because I’m sure they come to you and like, here’s what we got right? What are some of the elements that are a must and what are some of the mistakes you see companies making with their site?
Ryan Tomlinson 31:10
So some of the mistakes I see often are just too much words and just no call to action on a page. So again, like I said, that a website’s really, especially these days, like your first impression of a company. So when you land on that site, and if it’s not engaging you or promoting or making some sort of feeling of excitement in you, it’s failing, because you really need to make that good first impression, and then have good call to actions. So it pushes people to really where you want them to go. So like our site, this is an old site, 10 years old, but it’s still kicking it’s still doing what it needs to do. We have call to actions all over, right, in your face. Get started. Get in Touch click on those. It’s going to start taking you to a request form.
Jeremy Weisz 32:04
Yep, that’s a good one, because I’ve gone to many, many sites where, you know you go and you’re scrolling and scrolling. It’s not really guiding me to do anything, right? But you could see with yours, it was get in touch, it’s get started. If we go to this one here, obviously there’s a shop now there’s a direct let me say, with e-commerce, it’s essentially a call to action. So that’s a good one. What else? What other mistakes do people make?
Ryan Tomlinson 32:31
I see a lot done on SEO and even developers, or whoever builds the site, they build it. It looks good, they’re done, but there’s a lot of things you should be doing before you can say you’re done. And for SEO, it’s as simple as putting a title on the website. So if you build a site and just say you’re done, by default, it’s probably the title of that website is going to say either home or it might say the company name, but at the end of the day, you’re not telling Google or other search engines.
Jeremy Weisz 33:06
You can see right here. It’s when I hover over websites, designs and SEO services, and then Gooder Marketing.
Ryan Tomlinson 33:15
Yeah, so we’ve set up a title on that page that tells Google what we do. We do web design and internet marketing. So we see it so many times where a company or client will come to us and say, like, no one comes to my site, no one can find it. And I look at it and I see, well, your title says home. If I went to a library and I was looking for a book on how to hang a door, and I came across your book and it said, home. I wouldn’t pick it up. I would pick up the book that says How to Hang a Door for Dummies or something like that. So again, if you don’t put a title on your page, you’re not telling Google or people, so they’ll just avoid it because they don’t know what’s inside. So that is the easiest thing. It takes 10 seconds to do, but often gets overlooked.
Jeremy Weisz 34:05
Talk about the evolution of the team when you first started, it’s you right? You’re shaking hands at networking groups. How did the team evolve?
Ryan Tomlinson 34:12
Yeah, so it started with me, and I did have a developer as well that I kind of started the company with, and that developer I met while I was doing the online poker and those type of websites. So we kind of just transitioned into what we were doing now, that developer still works with us today. They actually live in Australia, so that’s kind of been an advantage as well to our service offering, because if you call us at five or six o’clock on Thursday at night, I can just flip it over to our colleague in Australia and it’s 830 in the morning for him, so he’s ready and eager.
Jeremy Weisz 35:03
You’re telling the clients I drink coffee all night. We stayed up all night working on this, and 8am is ready.
Ryan Tomlinson 35:09
Yeah. So we are able to surprise our clients and kind of look really good when a client has something break at the end of the day, they can come back in the morning and sometimes be very surprised that, hey, it’s magically fixed. So yeah, that’s pretty cool. My first employee is still with us, so that’s again, like a 15-year relationship. From there, we, I think, hired another developer, and then after that, we hired someone to help us with marketing, and then we hired maybe another developer. Then we brought on a project manager, just because with three developers and a marketing person, the workload got bigger and more than just I could handle. So a project manager came in to help out balance and keep the workflow going and make sure deadlines and deliverables were met.
And then from there, we’ve just kind of hired a few more developers and marketing people. And somewhere in the middle of that story, there was also a designer that we hired full-time, we were kind of contracting out design a lot, just because, at the time, it didn’t make sense to have a full-time good, good designer on staff. But as we grew to a stage where we definitely could support a full-time graphic designer, that’s when we made the move to bring someone on for that.
Jeremy Weisz 35:13
Ryan, what software you mentioned obviously, as you grew, you kind of professionalized, got a project manager to help coordinate. What are some of the softwares you use internally to manage the agency?
Ryan Tomlinson 36:50
So Google Workspace, we’ve always been on as a Google client that helps us out so much. All our documents are in Google Drive. I can share it with all our colleagues and staff. It has everything for spreadsheets and Google Docs, email. We also use Google Chat. A lot of times agencies, they all use Slack and all these things, but we’ve pretty much stayed everything Google just kept it all in one spot. And then we’ve gone through a few different project management tools.
Jeremy Weisz 37:33
What ones have you gone through? And what are you on now?
Ryan Tomlinson 37:37
We’re on project management tool called Right currently, and we’ve been happy with them. It does everything that we need. We’ve been on a few others in the past, and I honestly can’t even remember their names, but we’ve been on right for at least five, six years, and so that’s what we use for project management. And then we have a few other tools for invoicing and accounting and things like that, but for the most part, it’s just Google and Right? And that gives us everything that we need.
Jeremy Weisz 38:14
What do you use for invoicing?
Ryan Tomlinson 38:18
I love fresh books, and I don’t love change, which I hate saying out loud, accountants, they love QuickBooks. So I have both. I have fresh books that I use to send out invoices, and then our bookkeeper and accountant that pulls everything into QuickBooks where they like to have it.
Jeremy Weisz 38:40
Yeah. I mean, you want to make it easy for you, but I get it. First of all, Ryan, I have one last question before I ask it. I just want to point people to check out your site, goodermarketing.com to learn more, you can check out more episodes on inspiredinsider.com and just thanks for sharing your journey. My last question, Ryan, is about resources. Some of your favorite resources, it could be books, it could be podcasts, it could be just mentors that have helped you in the journey.
Ryan Tomlinson 39:18
Yeah, I don’t have any one particular resource. I mean, I listen to a number of podcasts, and they’re not even all business related, like some are even fantasy football related, but some are kind of marketing related. Yeah, there is no one resource I can really point to, but there’s been so many things that I’ve come across from either people saying or doing. I think for me, the number one thing is talking people, even if they’re in your same industry. Like, doesn’t matter what business you’re in, you’re probably going to have competitors. At the beginning, I was, like, afraid to even talk to them, like I wanted to avoid them, and I’m going to crush them somehow.
I kind of quickly learned actually talking to competitors, they’re going through the same problems. Sometimes they’re overburdened with work even, and they’ll be like, hey, can you just take this project? And so, yeah, I guess talking to kind of competitors and just other business owners is where I’ve learned a lot of helpful information, and I also do kind of like to share that information with other business owners too. I use fresh pokes to do invoicing. If you’re still using spreadsheets, maybe you should try something like that. It will save you a lot of time.
Jeremy Weisz 40:50
Yeah, love it. Ryan, I wanna be the first one to thank you. Thank you for sharing your journey knowledge. Everyone is gonna check out goodermarketing.com or episodes of the podcast, and we’ll see everyone next time and Ryan, thanks so much.
Ryan Tomlinson 41:03
Thank you.
