Personal

What did you do today?

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How did you feel about today?

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Work

What did you accomplish?

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What did you learn today?

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Did you meet anyone new?

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Family

What did you do today?

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Evening Check-In

Meetings Recap

First thing I did was coaching with Chris DuBois. We went over a better structure for his virtual event that's happening in a couple of weeks. In fact, he's already sent over the signup link with the artwork. We're going to split this into two webinars because we need one session to deal with their positioning and another session to deal with the actual website side of things. That ends up creating a little bit more work for him, but that's okay.

EO went really well. Actually, walked through a lot of my event marketing plans, and everybody seemed to be very positive about it, actually.

One of the things that I went over with Chris DuBois was that he wants to tell me with my content. I asked him to send me over a list of questions that I could voice-to-text answers to on my drive back home from EO. He did that, and I was able to go through 21 questions and give him a metric ton of answers.

Deliverables

Lumberock: I messed around with this for quite some time. I'm editing the style guide mini app that I created and adding in some other blocks into it. I'm thinking I could actually use this almost as a sampling with clients to show them what some of their stuff could look like. If they're structured well, they could export directly into advanced custom field blocks, which would drastically decrease the amount of time it would take to get to development. I'm trying to figure out ways to kind of bridge the gap between design and dev and have less question marks there. The primary downside that I see with this is that this could get us stuck in a design rut where most of our stuff looks almost exactly the same, and I definitely don't want to do that.

New Clients / Prospects

New Potential Clients:

Jaipur Rugs: one of the owners of this company, Nitesh, is in my EO forum. This is one of the sub companies that they have. They have multiple direct-to-consumer rug companies, and they're all running very separately. Nitesh wants to centralize them within Shopify. The nice thing about this is they don't have to integrate with the bazillion different ERP things that the primary business unit has to integrate with.

We started the conversation about what that could possibly look like today, and he's going to need to get me on a call with Andrew Booth and one of his lead people over at Jaipur Rugs to really better understand what needs to happen. There's not a huge quickness to the timeline on this. If we can scope this out within the next month, that would be awesome. I did tell them that this is probably a three- or four-month build because I know that they are running about $3 to $4 million in revenue for this one company, and they have a lot of SEO traffic. Another good thing is they have Studio Hawk that they're already using for their primary Jaipur Living website.

TexBuilt: Referral via the Las Vegas mall connection. They're a Texas-focused commercial general contractor, spun out of BLDR Holdings / EMJ Corp — 100% Texas projects, branded "Built Texas Tough." Studio Ortiz already handled logo + brand, and the target domain is tex-built.com (not yet live). Client folder is stubbed at Classic City/Clients/TexBuilt/ with a full pre-meeting prep pack: meeting guide, spec analysis, and messaging direction. A few flags to keep in mind before the first call: (1) their handover doc reads like another agency's proposal — it specs DIVI, NitroPack, Search Atlas, LinkGraph, which is not our stack, so probe whether someone else already bid; (2) no budget stated, only a $900/mo support add-on; (3) timeline is aggressive (4 weeks to BETA, 6 weeks to launch) for a ~40-page site with CPT, careers upload, and sub portal; (4) the ESOP page is "On HOLD"; and (5) "Rebecca" is mentioned generically — need to confirm the actual POC and decision-maker.

Reflections

What worked today worth repeating: I definitely enjoyed the tinkering with the Lumberock site style guide. I realize I'm probably stepping on my designer's toes by doing something like this, but this also might get us into development a lot faster, so I'm curious to see how we can bridge the gap here.

What surprised me: nothing really.

What's bugging me / sparks worth chasing: I really need to start delegating stuff, like, seriously.

Open Loops

I need to make a decision on whether or not I'm keeping HubSpot.

Podcast Queue

• The Style Guide tool as a sales weapon: Built a mini app for Lumberock that generates a visual style guide with blocks in context. Realized it could double as a sampling tool — show clients what their stuff could look like before full design begins. "If they're structured well, they could export directly into ACF blocks, which would drastically decrease development time." The tension: "I realize I'm probably stepping on my designer's toes... but this also might get us into development a lot faster."
• Voice-to-text as a content machine: Chris DuBois sent 21 questions. Chris voice-to-texted answers on the drive home from EO. Metric ton of content generated in one car ride. The principle: the content already exists in your head — you just need the right extraction method.