Friday, July 10
Entrepreneurial Spark
Nicholas Petroski (Promethean Research) — "Referrals are the best revgen channel for most agencies. They produce the longest-tenured clients in our research, with referred clients staying about 1.9x longer than clients acquired through events, networking, or outbound. … The most common failure is 'giving partners homework,' asking 'do you know anyone we can help?' and forcing the contact to figure out who fits and write the intro. The better move is to ask for introductions to specific people and arm the referrer with a ready-to-send template."
Source
Chris: Creating leads is a flywheel at the end of the day. The goal there, no matter what decade you toss yourself into, is to stay visible. I know there were stats about, and there still are stats about, how many times somebody needs to see your name, your face, your brand, your message before they decide that they want to get in touch with you. That number of touch points has increased drastically. While referral-based business can't be the only play in your playbook, what I've realized over the years is that you need to perfect one motion before moving on to others.
I've worked with a ton of people over the years who have tried to get me to niche down, focus in on one particular kind of client, and basically blast out cold messages to a ton of people. That's not my style. That's not the thing that I enjoyed doing the most. That's actually probably the better way to put it now.
I'm very much aware that some level of outreach is required. One of the things that I did, going into this year, was decide that I'm going to make hosting events one of my primary motions. For me, that is simple. For whatever reason, this introvert does not mind hosting social events, which is just absolutely wild to me, but here we are. My goal with that is to take a very dead referral engine that, for all intents and purposes, I've relied on for the past two decades but, honestly, have left just kind of sitting there getting stale. A lot of the growth that we had over the years from referrals was almost purely happenstance.
My primary objective for the year was to hang out with people and do it very intentionally and do it in a way to where it's easy for people to bring other friends and whatnot. What I found very quickly were two things: (1) People really just enjoy simple social events, no agenda, no nothing, just hanging out, and that's fantastic. (2) How we provide value in today's age has to be different and unique.
Probably back in the day, one of the primary reasons that people came to their event was that there would be a photographer inside doing free headshots. There is definitely still value on that, but I wanted to think what is the next level of that. It was free video. I got a video crew. We put them together for a day. We put slots out, and you can come in and get free video of yourself talking about whatever topics would be beneficial for you to have, either for social media or for your website or whatnot. Even though we're not a video company, the way that we're providing value is that we found a problem that the types of people I want to hang out with (agency owners, fractional marketers, marketing people, etc.) have solved it.
→ Spun into LinkedIn post + blog drafts in the Workbench (2026-07-10 briefing).
ChrisLaFay.com Redesign — done this week
Chris: Over this past week, I decided to use Robin Rendle's website as an example for my blog. I really like the texture of it and the older school file folder feel, and this was a great example of me being extraordinarily focused on something that I probably didn't need to do right in that moment, but I did it anyway. Within a couple of days, I redesigned the entire ChrisLaFay.com blog to be very different than what it was before.
One of the things I realized is I hate finding featured images for things, and I realize how small that sounds. One of the things I really liked about Robin's style was the fact that it didn't require imagery. It was very simple and straight to the point, and images weren't necessary. That was one of the reasons I did it, because my thinking was that if I could do my daily briefings and start learning to write on a more regular basis, if I didn't have to think about images, I know that I'd be a lot more excited to actually do it.
Process Change
I decided to drop a question into the Bureau Slack channel to start a conversation and I think it's good to reflect on.
What is one process you've changed this year that has REALLY helped your business?
At the beginning of this year, I realized that the majority of the people reaching out to build websites had a couple of commonalities:
- They did not have the $50,000 to $60,000 that I was charging the last couple of years.
- A lot of them had extraordinarily dated websites, to the point where quite literally anything I designed for them would be better than what they have now.
- A lot of them just said, "I need a simple and clean website."
This got me thinking about my long six-month website build process, and I realized I can't just take scissors to it and chop it up. I had to start completely over. I realized I have about 15 to 20 building blocks within WordPress that I get a ton of reuse out of.
I thought, what if I put all those together in a "style guide" format and built a little Brand Builder tool I could use internally? Ahead of the discovery call, I could populate fonts, color schemes, gradients, and a baseline imagery and messaging to fill in those building blocks and have two or three different page layouts with those blocks on them. Not as a finalized design, but as a way for them to see something very simple with their colors and fonts so I can gauge an initial reaction from it.
Ahead of the Discovery call, I'll populate it. During the initial Discovery call, I'll have the tool open in the background making small tweaks. At the very end, I'll wrap with a preview of it: "Wanna take a look at something very simple that uses everything we just chatted about?" I've used it 4 times so far this year and each time, I hear something like: "Well, that gets us 75% of the way there!!"
I obviously will take this and then design on top of it -- don't get me wrong, this is not the final version as it's a glorified, colored, wireframe (lol), but that update to my process immediately trimmed off a month's worth of back-and-forth that I used to do.