Busy Week

This past week was insanely busy. When I scheduled my trip out to Arizona the week before and the New York trip the week after, I had no idea the two trips were so close together.

Top that off with hosting a top golf event on Tuesday night with about 28 people that I knew. It made for a very hectic week.

The good thing is I feel fairly accomplished at the end of the week. I did a good amount of deliverable work this past week, and I feel like I accomplished it all very well. I do feel like I waited until the last minute for a lot of things, but on the other side of that token, I also only had a very limited amount of time to get them done. Not all of it was pure procrastination.

Time in Arizona

Allie and I went out to Arizona last week, from Wednesday through Sunday, and it was extraordinarily relaxing. We honestly just got to sit, hang out, play games, and do puzzles with David Rees and his whole family the entire week. It was great.

The impetus for this was a banana ball game over in Scottsdale. I think we've now gone to four Banana Ball games with them out in Arizona. This was the first time his two kids, Adalynne and Audrey, were able to go with us, and it was very exciting to watch how much they enjoyed being at a banana ball game.

There was one day when it was just David, me, and Allie. We spent the majority of the day playing the board game Slay the Spire. Allie got really hooked into it super fast. Once we were done, David told her that there was a phone version of the game as well. She has not stopped playing that since we have gotten back home.

Things I have on my plate

• I made good progress on the Pool Defence website. Andrew still needs to do his part of setting up Shopify, and I need to build out a block library, but that's basically 80-85% done.
• I got the Primo website up and running with a major tutorial video shot. When I reviewed the content the client sent over, I realized we don't have enough to populate anything. My thinking is that if I give him some page templates with blocks laid out, he can then go through and fill in the rest of it.
• Don did some more work on the Consumed Media website at the end of the week. There's a handful of QA notes in there that I should go through at the beginning of the week, but there's honestly not that much. We definitely over-delivered on this, and by we, I mean I over-delivered on this
• we just signed a new Shopify client called Aeon. We need to get them kicked off next week, preferably. I need to do a style guide for them so that if they decide to meet next week when I'm gone, they have that to go over
• I also signed another client last week called Lumberock that builds decking materials. The good thing is we're not going to kick off with them for another couple of weeks because we all have some out-of-office time coming up. Before the meeting, I need to get Claude to build out the block library using screenshots of their existing website
• Chris Dubois and I are going to be hosting a webinar at the end of April. He sent me his documentation for his workbook that needs to be input into my system. I have it about 80% done, but we also need to start creating marketing materials and come up with whatever the offer is going to be, and actually market it
• the big thing next week is the Agency Leaders Field Trip in New York City. That is going to take up all of my time next week. I leave super early on Wednesday and come back super early on Saturday. Super excited to co-host with David Ries

Keeping up with agency partners

need to figure out a way to keep up with agency partners. For example, I had a great conversation with Grace Nelson on Friday, and she has the potential to bring a pipeline of impact report websites into the business. I told her what my pricing was, and she was honestly surprised at how cheap it was. She looked at my website and saw my pricing, and she thought it was going to be around $25,000 to build out an impact report site. I told her we could probably get the first one done for about $12,000 to $15,000, and that future ones, if we templatize it, would be between $8,000 and $12,000. She was very excited about that.

The thing is, that's in the future. It's not a solid date, and she hasn't sold this yet. She has a lot of trust and faith that we'll be able to deliver, which is wonderful. I'm going to hook her into the Atlanta Marketing Events Group (she's already a part of it), so I'll be able to keep in touch with her. I'm going to have a lot of these agency partners who come up with an idea on the spot, and I need to figure out ways to organize and structure all of that

Atlanta Marketing Events

speaking of the Atlanta Marketing Events group, after the Topgolf event last week, I realized there were a lot of people who wanted me to keep them in mind for future events. The thing is, I suck at updating a CRM.

I created a website using AI with a little database behind it that allowed people to sign up for the list. I can keep a running tally of the various events I know of inside it and email a subset of those people. One of the nice things I really like about this is that when you sign up, you have to note what type of role you have:

• Agency owner, director, or employee
• On the brand side: owner, director, or employee

That will eventually allow me to filter that list down to hyper-target specific people. now, the thing is, this is not connected to a CRM because HubSpot's way too large, and I don't honestly like it at all. I really feel like this should have been a form within a CRM, not a humongous AI mini app. I did it anyway.

I also have a tool called getdex.com where I do a lot of my personal CRM updates, but I haven't kept that up to date either. Even if I decide to switch CRMs from HubSpot and Dex over to something else, am I actually going to use it? I don't know. at the end of the day, I don't know how to stay in touch with people. I have the ability to drastically grow my network right now, but I don't know how to keep track of people, what they want to do, and good timelines. I'm just not good at monotonous work.

Top Golf Event

this was absolutely fantastic. I co-hosted it with Sophie Brannan from Studio Hawk. We had about 20 people show up, and honestly, they all hung out the entire 2.5 hours we had there. In all honesty, not that many of them played golf at all.

Pretty much everybody that I've talked to afterwards has said that they were able to meet a lot of good new people. The key word there is new people. I want to keep doing that.

One of the things I thought about while at this event was that I want to make sure people are always able to meet new folks at events that I host. That's obviously a generalization. It might not be true for events that are education-oriented, but for anything that's social-oriented, I want there to be a number of new people.

This is the format that I want to do:

1. I want to pretty much always co-host an event.
2. I want me and my co-host to invite six people.
3. When we invite those six people, we tell them that they have to bring a friend with them. We message it in a way that is more akin to, "Hey buddy, we know that when you go to a social event, the goal is to meet new people. I'm inviting six people to this event, and you are one of them. I have a co-host who is also inviting six people. All we're asking for this event is for you to bring one friend so that way you will meet, more than likely, at least eight to ten new people at this event."

If I can get people bought in on the idea that they can play a role in making sure that everybody meets somebody new, all the better

Finance App

I worked a lot on the operations dashboard, which used to be called the finance app. I ended up sending a copy of it over to Andy Milligan last week, and he sent me a Loom video on some of the changes and updates that he made to it. It definitely inspired me to make mine a little bit better.

Now I feel like a lot of the stuff inside that app is automated, so I can really look at it about once a month and get all the information that I need from it. I think I've reached the point in editing this where the time that I spend on it will yield very minimal returns at this point. I think I've maxed it out, outside of basically just building a landing dashboard that showcases:

• invoices
• anything that's overdue
• a quarterly overview

That's really about it. I feel really great about this. This is ten times better than any spreadsheet that I've ever created, and I feel like it has a lot of staying power because it's connected to all the systems that I already use.

Business Model Adjustments

I've been thinking a lot about how to structure an easy-to-understand offer that will get people on recurring revenue. I love the idea of being around $500/month because, at a price point of $15,000 to build out a website, $500/month feels fairly palatable to most people.

The thing is, I don't want to be stuck in either a reactive mode or a maintenance-only mode. Mickey Mellen does all of that super well, and I don't want to step on his toes. I honestly just don't want to do that type of work.

I'm trying to balance how I run a website company with a minimal monthly retainer that allows me to stay proactive and strategic. That is hard. What I did this past week was record a video and send it over to David Feldman to get his two cents on some thoughts I have about how I can combine things like the events I'm doing and Content Day. I'm trying to package that in a strategic position for a minimal amount of money per year. Below this, I have copied and pasted the transcript of that Loom video

Loom Video Transcript

Ignore the timestamps in here 0:00 Yo, okay, so, I like this idea that you had about the MMR stuff. I, uh, what I'm trying to think through is I, so, thinking about like regular small businesses, smaller businesses, It doesn't have to be small, legitimately, is if you take a pie that big. 0:23 $1,000 down payment, you take $1,000 a month, now you're looking at $17,000 a year, uhm, sorry, $17,000 for year one, $12,000 for year two, etc. 0:36 Now, I will say, I have not, I have not pushed this around yet to kind of test the waters on things. 0:43 So, I'm, I'm using my own mental blockers with this. But I have a, I have a slightly different direction that I don't have a full fleshed out thought on this. 0:54 I have a couple of sporadic ideas and they don't connect all the way yet. And so, welcome to, welcome to Lunch with Chris. 1:05 Uhm, so anyway, I have these events that I'm hosting by Topgolf. I have content days that I do that have, people have been wanting to come to. 1:18 Uhm, and I've gotten a lot of people say, like, hey, let me know when the next one is, sort of thing. 1:22 Hence the idea of building, oh, you see that hole right there? Yeah, that's been there for like a year and a half. 1:27 Uhm, anyway, uhm, all these people say they want to know when the next one is, this, that, and the other, blah, blah, blah. 1:34 Which is all great, that's why I built the, the thing that I sent you earlier today, uhm, so that I can keep in touch with people better. 1:41 Uhm, that's also a very free, easy way for me to stay in touch with people, uhm, and build a list of potential clients, and partners, and collaborators, and the whole nine yards. 1:54 It's, it's an easy win, it's like, do you wanna be, are you in Atlanta, and do you want me to come? 1:58 I help you, like, stay involved in, like, small community-oriented events that are not these, like, mega AMA events. Anyway. How do I monetize those things indirectly? 2:13 Uhm. I, uh, so, I would love to have a price point of something related to web at around 500 bucks a month. 2:24 Cause typically, if you have 15 grand or more to spend on a website, which is my average, probably average price point for websites this year is somewhere between 20 and 25. 2:35 Uhm, done a couple of 15s, done a couple of 30s. You have 500 bucks a month to spend. When you get to into that thousand, that's when you start like numbers become larger. 2:46 And maybe I'm, maybe I'm, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm just, maybe I'm making assumptions based on the type of clients I've worked with in the past to where if the, the monthly amount is a four digit number, it's a lot harder to get pushed through kind of like the, the ceiling that I hit was, you know, 3:03 for a while, like my minimums were 30 to 40 K. Now they're 15 and my turn time on these, getting them through the sales cycle is so much faster now. 3:12 Um, so I, I see similar things. If I had something for 500 a month where we are being proactive about your website. 3:22 I don't, I do not, I do not want to get into the update your plugins and all that kind of fun. 3:28 Like, no, no, no, no, no. I have a partner that does that super well. I can white label his services. 3:32 He's a really good friend of mine. That's all he does. And I can just, I can put that in. How can I, but I also think that the human connection element, especially in that small to medium space is going to be very key going forward. 3:50 Very, very key. Things that are going to get more efficient in this space of this like small to medium sized space. 3:58 How can I mash up being proactive about website stuff and in person events that provide value and charge $500 a month for it? 4:09 That's my thing. And the thing is I'm taking two, and this is what, this is what intrigued me about it is like, no web company is offering anything like that. 4:22 It's either you do maintenance or you're on these multi-thousand dollar a month plans to, you know, build out and grow websites, all that jazz, which all these are fine. 4:30 I mean, I'm still doing that. Um, I still want to do that, but this is, this is where my initial thought came from. 4:40 Um, um, or my initial idea came from, let's say we do 500 bucks a month. Let's say that I have the ability to, I personally, and this would have to be extrapolated beyond me. 4:52 Obviously if I'm creating a business out of it, I have the ability to talk with somebody for 30 minutes or 45 minutes about their business, where they want to go and extrapolate. 5:03 What should be done over the next month or so, for example, tell me about an idea that you have, like, and this is mostly like relative to like smaller, like smaller companies that are more nimble on their marketing efforts, not talking about companies with CMOs and multiple people happening here, tell 5:20 me what you want to do. Let's say you have an idea, like, Hey, we need X number of case studies. 5:25 Great. I'm going to interview right now. Right now on these three clients, you tell me all the things, bada bing, bada boom. 5:31 I will get somebody on my team to go build out those case studies. We're being proactive with the website. Um, let's say it's like, Hey, I need to, um, trying to like, they have a new marketing campaign idea that they might have somebody building out some like LinkedIn stuff or ad stuff and things like 5:48 that for, let me interview you. I'm going to talk to you about it and the next time we talk, you're going to have a page already built with images, graphics, the whole nine yards. 5:58 We're working within their marketing motions of being proactive, not, Hey, go edit this and add a button on this page. 6:07 And this is where like the rub is because I'm, I realize I'm saying things that are very similar to kind of that like reactive maintenance stuff. 6:14 love. On the other hand, if you're a part of this, obviously if you live in Atlanta, you can come to content day once a quarter for free and get content for yourself. 6:26 And you can take those videos, convert them to blog posts, convert them to emails, the whole nine yards, do whatever you want to with them. 6:34 You now have access to that. You also then have access to all these other Atlanta based marketing tools events that I'm hosting and also other people are hosting. 6:42 The rub here is all, some of them are paid, some of them are free, and obviously I'm allowing people to join this mailing list for free. 6:49 So I can't make that a value ad because I'm not going to strip that away if you are not a client. 6:56 But how do I do something for 500 a month? That mixes the stuff I'm already doing with in-person things, content day, and funnel it back to the website without becoming a content company. 7:14 Or a maintenance company. And there's a messaging thing there. There 100% is. Because like, I know for me, if I had a person, I'm just going to, I'm going to boil it, I'm going to boil this down to LinkedIn content. 7:28 And so this is, I'm comparing apples and oranges a little bit, but like, I was so much better about writing LinkedIn content when somebody interviewed me once a month and then wrote all my stuff for me. 7:40 And this is before AI really took, you know, was big on the market and stuff like that. So I get that there's automated ways to do that now, but people say they want to be proactive with their website and growing it over time, but don't necessarily have the budget to be building in new features. 7:53 That's fine and dandy. That's great. What could I have a $10 an hour team member do to execute on, but use my brain or somebody else's brain, and this is where the business model would have to expand to pull that information out of them very quickly and be able efficient with it and have that entrepreneurial 8:16 brain that's like, I see where you're going with this. This is where you should go. We'll build these things out on your website for you and then have a $10 an hour guy actually execute it. 8:23 Cause we're not talking about big old features. We're talking about, we are talking about content on the website at the end of the day. 8:29 Don't get me wrong. I realize that, but it's the angle that's being taken. And then how do I merge all the in-person stuff in without making all my events invite only, which I don't want to do that. 8:41 Um, and make that valuable. I just think that there's some, there might be something there that could be a really unique cross-section that nobody else is offering. 8:55 And all of that for 500 a month, you would pay $1,500 to go get five or seven videos a video clip shot by a junior videographer, like just coming to one content day, even if you got a junior video, like you could, that, that covers it. 9:11 So that's, that's where my head's at, where, but it doesn't make sense. Help.

Podcast Queue

• The "bring a friend" event format: A repeatable framework for social events — co-host invites 6, you invite 6, everyone brings a friend. Guarantees 8-10 new faces. "If I can get people bought in on the idea that they can play a role in making sure that everybody meets somebody new, all the better."
• The $500/mo offer nobody's building: Proactive website work + in-person events + Content Day access — without becoming a maintenance company or a content company. "No web company is offering anything like that." The tension between strategic value and low price point is the whole episode.
• Making the website build process feel tangible: Clients feel like they have nothing until the final third of the project. How do you keep them bought in during the long middle? "People can build sites with AI. But everyone I know who has built a full multi-page marketing site with AI have not enjoyed the process."
• "Win Atlanta": Paul Carpenter's line — "I'm just trying to win Atlanta right now." Chris knows a lot of people in ATL but does almost none of his work there. The correction is going local.