Local Jungle - Current

Chris LaFay: Good morning.

Gavin Taylor: Good morning. Good morning.

Chris LaFay: Did you have an exciting weekend?

Gavin Taylor: I ended up at the doctors with the double ear infection, so that was fun.

Chris LaFay: If I recall correctly, were you. Weren't you not feeling well last week too?

Gavin Taylor: Yeah, I've been putting it off a lot lately. Work's been busy and it's just I ended up feeling sick again. I'm like, there's no way I'm sick again. And I went in, sure enough. Hey, so really quick, I invented invited Tessa to this call. I don't know if she is in the waiting room or not.

Chris LaFay: Not yet. Now.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, so to give you a little bit insight, she's our other consultant. We were talking last week after I talked to you, and we thought it would be a good idea to everyone get on the same page. I wanted to use this week to do that, if that's okay with you, because you guys have very similar take on how we need to go about this process. This is going to work really well all together. I will say I did not get done with the

Chris LaFay: documentation.

Gavin Taylor: Yes. And the reason being is I talked with Craig. Of course, Craig is unique about processes, so I explained him. Everyone else is 100 on board, no questions asked. This is a great idea. He feels like there might have been something in the past that is the reason why we didn't go down this route for like advanced custom fields and stuff like that. I don't know why. Okay. But I am fully on board on this. Regardless of what's gonna happen in the future. He is on the fence about moving over. What is it called? Astro.

Chris LaFay: Moving away.

Gavin Taylor: So, no, moving away from WordPress to Astro.

Chris LaFay: Well, I think, I think we're. I think you're. I think we're getting some stuff mixed up here. So Astro is the, the. The CMS that Craig wanted to use specifically for landing pages. That is not WordPress at all. Whereas what we were talking about was doing it for the WordPress sites in general, whether you put the ad pages on them or not. That I don't care about, at least relative to the. The context of this conversation right now

Gavin Taylor: we were talking about the main sites is blocks. He got fed up with WordPress over the last like two weeks because we've been going through some site speed issues and everything's just crashing. So in his mind, he's just fed up right now. So I'm kind of giving him a little bit of space on that. With that being said, regardless if we stay on WordPress or not, we need to have this framework built out here's. My idea. Everyone's on the same page on the fact that we need to standardize. Here's a template, here's how it's built regardless. And then the implementation. Is it going on WordPress, is it going to Astro? I don't know yet. We're putting a pin in that and I'm going to move forward as much as I can without the actual development of the code.

Chris LaFay: Let me back up a couple of steps. What I heard you just say, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that there's a chance that you are no longer going to build your marketing websites on WordPress anymore.

Gavin Taylor: Yep. Craig's very. He's at his wits end with WordPress and the. Let me tell you why. I'm not sure why Tessa's not in here yet. This zoomy for curveball. I, I've gone through your range of emotions right now too because I've been here for three months, been talking crap about WordPress the entire time and finally when I'm all on board with WordPress, he's like, oh, I don't know. He's looking at WordPress as something that's very fragile. And we have our old developer that's in his ear still saying, hey, we can have this all built out and with any update on any anything. It could cause conflicts and it could cause issues in the future. And then we saw a page feed. So three months ago, every single one of our websites was above 90 performance score on Page Speed Insights. Now we're averaging 74. We had no major updates across the board. Our servers are fine, we have plenty of space and room and everything on our servers but it is dropped out of nowhere and we're trying to figure out what's caused that. And we've spent ton of money for our developers go in and look for it, they can't find it. We are having an old developer go in and look, he can't find it. And page feed is like Craig's, hey, this that 20 point score. He's like, oh, these ads are bad because this page speed is slower.

Chris LaFay: Let me, let me, let me ask you a question. I'm gonna ask you overly simplistic question for the easy winning a simple answer.

Gavin Taylor: Yep.

Chris LaFay: Let's pretend that you gave me access to a production site that is dipping into the 70s or page speed and access to the code. I realize this isn't happening, but just go with me for a second.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And you said, you know, spend a little bit of time this week seeing if you can Maybe pinpoint why this might be happening. And let's just say. And again, I'm not going to do this. I was able to figure out what the problem was. I implemented a fix live on production. You know, running with scissors on production. Right. And it got to be a 90 plus again. And we realized that that fix could then be applied across all of your sites.

Gavin Taylor: Yep.

Chris LaFay: Would that change his mind?

Gavin Taylor: I think it's gonna make him a lot happier, but I think he's still going to be in the mindset of WordPress. Might be fragile. Here's. Here's the thing. I'm letting him go through his range of emotions on this.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Gavin Taylor: But I don't think we're actually gonna move away from WordPress.

Chris LaFay: Do you want me to go ahead and let Tessa in?

Gavin Taylor: Yes. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Okay. Cool.

Gavin Taylor: Good morning.

Tessa Rolfe: Good morning. I'm so sorry I'm a little late here.

Chris LaFay: You are all good. We're talking about technical WordPress stuff. It's been a joy.

Tessa Rolfe: Chris. You actually helped me. I've been Chris Dubois community, and we've slacked quite a bit.

Chris LaFay: And that's the only reason I'm talking to Gavin is because Natalie posted on LinkedIn about needing website consulting help that Chris Dubois tagged me in a comment.

Tessa Rolfe: Oh, that's so funny.

Chris LaFay: So, yeah. Chris Dubois is just the. The cultivator of. Of human. Yes.

Tessa Rolfe: Mass connector. And I apologize. I'm having technical difficulties on my side this morning, so things may be a little bit wonky. I don'. That's cutting in and out.

Chris LaFay: No worries. We have about five note takers on this call, so I think we're gonna. I think we're. I think we're gonna survive this one.

Tessa Rolfe: Yeah. I love it. A small world dream team here then, I suppose.

Chris LaFay: Yes, exactly. So before we. Before we jump. The conversation we were having before. So you're gonna let him think through all of his stuff? Because obviously migrating a bazillion sites off WordPress is going to be up cluster in general. Yeah. That. That's the appropriate response. So. Which is why you want to do this today. Because we're kind of in this, like, awkward pausing middle ground. So let's all just. Got it.

Gavin Taylor: Okay.

Tessa Rolfe: Yep.

Gavin Taylor: Next week, I think it should be a lot clearer. So I'm gonna finish your assignment this week regardless. So that way. I do want to move that direction. Everyone's on the same page. We talked with Tessa about it too. She's on the same page. Everyone loves that idea. We're gonna move that way. But let Craig go through his emotions about it. And we'll go from there.

Chris LaFay: Also, Tessa, I don't know if you've met Craig. I've never met Craig. I've only heard from stories from Gavin. And so I have this very. I, I don't, I don't. This is not a judgmental thing, but I always like painting mental pictures of like what I think a person is. I don't even know what the dude looks like. So I, I didn't even look them up. So I, I have this like interesting image in my head of like what this guy looks like, how he talks, how he thinks. And probably most of it's wrong, but that's okay. It's. I find it.

Gavin Taylor: If you say anytime in marketing industry, I'm sure you could paint a picture of him. He's very much a type personality in his ways. Yep, that's him. Love him, but yep, that's absolutely him.

Chris LaFay: I also definitely do resonate with some of the things that you're saying about like he's bouncing off of walls and you just had to give him a few days to let him get off, bounce off another one. I'm like, stop talking to me, please. I don't, I don't have that problem at all. I do. I'm easily distracted. It's fine. It's not fine.

Gavin Taylor: I think we all are in this industry, to be honest.

Chris LaFay: Yes. And AI has not helped. It's actually been a catalyst of more distraction. So anyway, that's a whole other can of worms. We do not want to go down that conversational path. So Gavin, you know what you want to accomplish for today. So I'll run. I'll let you.

Gavin Taylor: So, so happy you guys already acquainted A little bit. That's. That's fantastic. So that takes out a big portion of this is just kind of introducing you guys and thing which is great. So this was your idea that you wanted to all hop on, kind of get everything together. Do you want to share with Chris, like the full picture idea?

Tessa Rolfe: Yeah.

Gavin Taylor: And then where that handoff is and how we can help from onboarding to this. And Chris, this is one of the reasons why I thought this was going to be really important because last week you wanted me to do that assignment of hey, what can we automate and then test at the same time. It's going to be working on the front end of that of hey, what are we getting and handing off? So that's the whole idea here is make that end off smooth.

Chris LaFay: That all sounds good to me.

Tessa Rolfe: Yes. Excuse me, Chris. Yeah, I was thinking, you know, just looking at their high level workflow of planning, designing, building, launching, you know, all of the things, all the steps for building sites in there in the way that local jungle does, I was able to say, okay, that high level workflow isn't inherently wrong or incorrect. There's nothing wrong with the key milestones that they're taking to get this from point A to point B, where I was able to drill in on. In terms of, okay, we're getting stuck here, here's where all of the inefficiencies are. Let's look at these things. There's two key things and some of this, may you already probably know this, but just to like level set with everybody, the two key points where things are getting stuck is in the onboarding process and in the QA process. Makes sense. I mapped out the sales to Gavin, really sales to Gavin, sales to fulfillment process with their salesperson Dan, their director of client services or something like that. Gavin, I think his technical title is. I started with Dan and was like, okay, talk me through your process. What is it that you do? How does your work turn into the work that Gavin gets? And the. And then ultimately what the dev team is going to get after that conversation and mapping it out. Gavin, this is really where my mind went, was like, that process is super clear to me. And here, let me just pull up a visual, a visual for us. Because how Dan explained it to me was so clear. It's a couple meetings with the clients. It's. They fill out a couple forms, we walk away with like the client master sheet, information sheet, and then he hands it off to you. We decided that he's going to record a loom video of the quote unquote handoff to you. So we can just minimize the number of meetings and we're going to handle that a little bit more async. But really other than that, it was a very clear, okay, here are the things that we do and I've mapped them out down here. So this is the sales process. Ultimately here. By the end of the sales process, we're gonna have that completed client master information sheet, that onboarding questionnaire. All that stuff is saved in the client folder. We're gonna have that internal handoff video also saved to the client folder. We're also going to have a handful of these items in here and I've separated them out because you need to receive these things before you get started.

Gavin Taylor: So this onboarding list, that right there is the issue.

Tessa Rolfe: Exactly. And that's my question is so by the time. So by the time you get kicked off on all of this, you have the photo sorted in the Google Drive. We've done our audit, we've said, hey client, we need you to get these photos. We get them to us, we've done the pricing and coupon strategy exercises, we've mined their Google ratings. You know, like we've done all of that. And that is perfectly packaged in a folder for you, ready to go. And that is what we mean by this. So my like looking at this list here and knowing Craig's goal is soup to nuts, this entire process takes 30 days. Like that's our time to delivery runways. 30 days, this entire thing, 30 days. So that gives us about.

Gavin Taylor: Well, let's back up though just a little bit. So that 30 days should include. Hold on, let me see here. Okay, so onboarding to launch, you have it at three weeks right now. That one right there, we need to cut off a week. So onboarding the launch needs be. The goal is two weeks.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay. This whole.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, got it.

Tessa Rolfe: So we're hoping the sales process takes.

Gavin Taylor: So that includes. So the two weeks is from onboarding lots. The 3:30 days or so. I can't remember last week's call, but right now we are about at the 30 day mark with all of our back and forth and just the total BS that goes into it. However, that does not include PPC pages because I usually don't have it yet from Craig by the time we're done with the actual site. So again, because this is something that we need to templatize within the template is just like, hey, here are all the PPC pages we need or could possibly ever use. And then from post launch, I guess that's just the post launch that's going to be within the same week. So launch to ongoing fulfillment. You should probably do one more branch there on post launch, I guess you have ongoing fulfillment but you have the PPC build out and the SEO as well, like all of that. Okay.

Tessa Rolfe: I'm just kind of,

Gavin Taylor: I'm not sure about the 30 days in general thing, but what I'm mostly focused on is onboarding the launch. Taking two weeks.

Tessa Rolfe: That's from here to here. Two weeks.

Gavin Taylor: Correct.

Chris LaFay: Okay. So and my thing, the thing that I was focusing on here was if we. The areas in the development process that I saw, obviously QA is a challenge. Right? But inside of that process there were a lot of pass offs between Gavin starting the thing like launch, not launching the site, but initializing the site, then passing it off for Marketing prep and then passing it off for page build prep and then actual page building of all the hundred or so pages, give or take. There were a lot of pass offs inside of there before it even got to qa. So the thought is when onboarding is done, every possible question is answered and documented so that when Gavin spins the site up for initialization, he can pass over. I'm going to call it a document. That might be other different things, but everything is in one location or linked off to other locations so that the one person who is building the site, setting up the social media, you know, like tag manager stuff and the different form submissions and where those actually get ported into and blah blah, blah, all of that can be done by one person in one stretch of time so that once onboarding is finished, the next time a local jungle employee touches it is qa. Yes, that's the, that's the way that the web process gets down to two weeks is, is all that stuff has to be prepped and then obviously the website has to be templatized and blah blah, blah.

Tessa Rolfe: Right, right, right. Okay, cool. Because.

Gavin Taylor: So I guess that would change the visual here too because you're saying by the onboarding there I'm gonna have all the photos and everything. So really the branch should not be off of onboarding, but it should be off of handoff notification. Actually, can you scroll to the left a little bit? So close. Deal. I know this is just semantics here, but handoff notification onboarding should probably be switched and then the branch should be coming off of onboarding because there's going to be technical onboarding and then there's going to be the photos and then the handoff notification. We are all on the same page. That's the, let's just call it a client packet from here on out. The client folder, that's better way. So the actual handoff is client folder is complete and that's what I would consider when my clock starts.

Tessa Rolfe: Right. Okay, so that's actually. That's great. So first of all, let me make sure I am leaving my notes here so I can come back to it. We said onboarding or client folder complete to launch is two weeks. That's the ultimate goal.

Gavin Taylor: Yep.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay. And right now we're around 30 days.

Gavin Taylor: And Chris, why I'm so on board with your idea is because Kim here is a really fast learner. Number one, she can take that client folder, spin up the site really easy and then drop in everything that's already in that client folder because she's going to Be the one responsible. While I guess, Tessa, this is more on your part. When the head off happens, when someone submits the onboarding or. No, once someone moves over to one in the CRM, it spins up the click up location and then it only has very basic information on that automation. So Kim's will be the one that's submitting all that onboarding information to ClickUp.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay.

Gavin Taylor: Ready to make sure that everything that we need is in ClickUp in addition to our client folder.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay. Is there a reason why we're having both areas have the same information? Can it just be one? I mean, ClickUp can access.

Gavin Taylor: Everyone has different access and it's in ClickUp. We have some reporting and stuff and we need quick references. So like for example, the dev team, the dev team lives inside of ClickUp and for them to see access of quick information, if they need it, boom, it's right there inside of the parent task. And click up while they can go back. It helps with our reporting, it helps with a lot of other stuff. But again, it's a be pretty simple information that actually lives inside of ClickUp.

Tessa Rolfe: Got it. So we're not duplicating all of the assets and everything that lives. Okay. That's what my concern was. I was like, I don't want two sources of truth.

Chris LaFay: We need one source for that.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay, cool. Yeah. So, Chris, I was holding on digging into this piece of the puzzle until you and I spoke.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Tessa Rolfe: Which is like kind of the reason for this meeting. And I apologize if you hear a screaming toddler behind me. So I was. I wanted to pull up with you first and go through that before I dove into there. So all I've really done is met with Dan, the client services director, to understand his output. So I know what Gavin's input is, if that makes sense. So my question here, and this is where I was going, there's two questions confirming that this is the deliverables, quote unquote, the output of onboarding that you're going to receive. Gavin. It's the photos, the photo audit, the pricing strategy, Google ratings, like, you know, the demographic or population area, like, all of that general business information. That's what you're gonna. That's what you're gonna get. My first question here is roughly how long does this process currently take for Dan to do

Gavin Taylor: side by side? It's different that. That part right there. I will say we need a ton of help in. I was honestly, I was just about done. It was within two days with one of our last launches when the Onboarding was finally completed.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay. See, that to me is like, yep, kind of a red flag for sure.

Gavin Taylor: Which that's something I've been helping everybody with a little bit more. I essentially put my foot down in a way. But we were telling client in December, right. Middle of December, hey, we're gonna have your website done a February 1st. Right. Ready to go. February 1st. Now, if we were middle of December, so if that timeline added up and everything, we should have had all the onboarding by end of December, I would assume. And then we had 30 days to work on the website. Plenty of time. We didn't finish that onboarding. I didn't have at least what I needed to spin up the site until middle of January. And now we had to rush the entire site and we had some bugs in it because we didn't have everything.

Tessa Rolfe: I want to talk about this. I want to understand this because it is such an issue, and there's a lot of ideas that I have swirling. And then by the time we walk away from this meeting, let's see, we have an hour together, right? Yeah. Okay.

Gavin Taylor: Yeah. So we have 30 more minutes. Cool.

Tessa Rolfe: And by the time we walk away from this meeting, I do want to make sure I understand that exactly, like, why this takes so long and what are the true dependencies that you need, Gavin? I want to make sure I understand the difference between this onboarding and technical onboarding and the marketing. Let me.

Chris LaFay: Let me type one more. Yeah, I'm sorry. Go ahead. Sorry.

Tessa Rolfe: Yeah, no, I just want to make sure that clear on the direction that Chris is moving in so that either I can support it or my role and what I need to be doing there is clear because I think it's like all just right here where it's getting stuck.

Chris LaFay: So the other piece to this onboarding deliverables, and I think this is going to kind of go more into like the technical onboarding piece. So what Gavin is working on this week is without going into all of the nitty gritty, is like, what data points for website development are needed. Obviously photos help and, like, understanding pricing, all that job. That's important. But, like, what are the data points that probably the sales guy is not going to get their Google tag manager scripts from them.

Tessa Rolfe: Literally. Yes.

Chris LaFay: So the. So the. There's two elements of this, and I actually think the. One of the answers from a process scroll back up to where, like, technical onboarding is. I think what we do is we take your main onboarding task that you have to the left. And actually not literally, but Branch that out into like content onboarding, technical onboarding, which then all funnels into the client folder slash, complete handoff is done and then there is no more marketing pre work. There is no more photos and content.

Gavin Taylor: The marketing pre work that's gonna have to be there anyway. Because what I consider marketing pre work is, well, that and piping is going to be CallRail setup. It's going to be all that because we own CallRail, we own cloudflare, we own what else? Obviously the Google Ad account itself. So when I say marketing pre work, that's more or less verifying all the information in client folder handoff. That gives us a second to kick it back. Hey, we don't have everything we need. Kick it back, get it from our client. It's going to give us. Actually I can give you the exact thing right now second. But client pre work is very, very important for me because that is essentially where everything lines up. I kind of separated that. That's what I'm about to push everything to development. So what I have in the current process is approved photos. So I'll go through all the photos and everything which should already be sorted according to this. Verify onboarding. So again, verify the onboarding, kick it back. If not, we're going to choose the website template in here. Report, pull in screaming frog reports. We are creating the URL structure like we talked about last week, Chris. And then we're going to be merging our piping task which is creating or updating the Google Tag managers. It's going to do the singlet update, trust, index stuff. We want to have that all ahead of time. So we hand it off to development. We don't have to worry about the technical side anymore. They have the codes, they have the snippets, they have everything they need to put all that technical stuff into the website.

Chris LaFay: That last bit of what you just said is that you want to have that all together so that the developers can do it all in one thing. Why can't that be done prior to the client folder handoff?

Gavin Taylor: Because the client folder handoff is when I'm actually getting it.

Tessa Rolfe: So the question applies, I think, I

Chris LaFay: think is, is your, is the salesperson giving you the, like the marketing, like the marketing information, like the, the, the Google tag manager stuff, the redirect map, this like no. So that's what we're basically what we're trying to say is when that two week window starts, both the technical stuff, the technical details and the soft details of content, both of those things are done. So that when you hand off the site to the developer, everything is at their disposal. So when you check back in a week, week and a half later, the site is 85, 90% done. You guys go and toss marker QA tasks like we talked about a few weeks ago onto the site. They just roll and do it. Yeah.

Tessa Rolfe: Literally I was like, are we not using marker?

Chris LaFay: Yes.

Gavin Taylor: No. As soon as Chris said that over we bought it. It was like, I love it. Except for the technical aspects, like instead of scripting frog reports and stuff like that. But on the website stuff, I love it. Okay, I see what you're saying. I guess the only way to change this then is moving the start of the clock to hand off to dev and not handoff to marketing. Yeah. Because so instead of the client folder handoff, it would be the design and dev via E2M. So this would be, this would technically still be considered onboarding and the client photo complete handoff. I still want that as the folder because technical onboarding, I don't know if I like. I don't know if I like adding the marketing pre books.

Chris LaFay: Why not? Because you could then give them all the, like the goal is to give them all the information ahead of time. So that means all of the technical data should be in the same spot project to project. So when you hand it to E2M you literally don't have to touch it again. So you're cutting out these like I forgot what the exact number is. But like I'm thinking through ClickUp of these like three or four handoffs between Gavin sets it up, marketing touches it, Gavin confirms it, sends it to dev to do the like initial like 5 to 10 pages QA, pass it back to actually do the sitemap build out, then more QA and then Craig's QA. Like there's 10 steps in there.

Gavin Taylor: Ish.

Chris LaFay: So the goal is to get all of that Data so that E2M can just run and get it to 90%. It's never going to be 100. Like this is not going to happen.

Tessa Rolfe: So

Gavin Taylor: give me like 30 seconds. Let me just think, let's. Let me look at this.

Tessa Rolfe: And to be honest, this may put a little bit more pressure on the upfront preparation, the work coming through. And I think that's if you guys want to hit your goals. I think that's necessary.

Gavin Taylor: Okay, so I see, I see. Okay, this is essentially what can I show my screen? Really quick toads, I've been thinking. So inside of this click up sheet. Okay, so here's you both have access to this?

Tessa Rolfe: Yes.

Gavin Taylor: I was already going to merge piping and marketing pre work because I absolutely feel that piping is a part of the pre work. Now according to that image that you just made, essentially technical onboarding and marketing pre work is going to be merged now here. So. Technical access on all accounts in my mind and how I've been working in any of the agencies I've been working in. The technical onboarding this is just again semantics. Technical onboarding is basically gaining access, right? Getting access to all the accounts, domains, hosted, whatever as well as photos. Now the photos is on dead and here is what I am concerned about. I already hate this. The fact that this one task has two owners to it and it drives me nuts because my ClickUp I try to work at net zero. End of the day I want to be caught up on everything. This causes tasks to sit there. When tasks sit there, I forget about things and overlook things that gets pushed. Causes issues with timelines. I don't know how else we could go about this task but that right there is why I do like having the marketing pre work separate. So it's not dependent on this one photo. Photo section.

Tessa Rolfe: Can you. Sorry, I mean interrupt you. Can you click into marketing pre work? Let me look at those subtasks.

Gavin Taylor: So this is approving the photos. This is. Dan is getting them here, we're approving them, pulling them all over to Google Drive, sort the photos, name them, All that stuff. This is done. This I did not add.

Tessa Rolfe: This is just an easy reorganization of what we mean by each of these parent tasks. You know like client onboarding. Yeah, like all of the get photos walk through their pricing strategy and their coupons like that is all like anything related to initial photos. Not hey we need these new photos but anything that's intake of what's existing is the client strategy and onboarding piece. So some of these tasks that you have under these different phases need to be in that client strategy and onboarding piece. Technical onboarding and marketing workflow can be very clearly all of your tasks, you know.

Gavin Taylor: So yeah I. I agree so that I think we're all on the same page. I think it's just how I was looking at this by. So at the end of this is starting today we I am going to be sitting with Kim and we're going to be mapping out every single SOP that I'm doing this month and who is responsible for it, any dependencies, anything like that. So I guess this is a great time. I don't want any task on the Overview process or the technical process to have two owners.

Tessa Rolfe: Yes. And to. And I'm going to take back over screen to show here, but I think it should be as simple as. And you guys can rename this whatever you want, but you're going to have a parent task that says technical onboarding and marketing pre work. And that's all of your stuff. Specifically Gavin. Anything strategy and onboarding, you know, like get their Google ratings and ask them their pricing sheets and what's the coupon strategy and landing pages we need. You know, like anything under client strategy and onboarding is going to be a damn task. And this is probably honestly a subtask of client strategy, but I have it pulled out separately here. So I would just have these two parent tasks and everything for you under technical onboarding pre work and everything for dam under client strategy and onboarding a subtask and keep it that simple.

Chris LaFay: Yep, 100%. And then once those two things are done, you each take your ownership of each of those things. Once both those are completely done in a documentation structure that's been approved of, that all gets funneled into whatever that client folder ends up being and then that's when the two weeks starts and you can then go back and check your website in a week and a half.

Tessa Rolfe: Yep.

Chris LaFay: Which obviously a part of the technical part of that list of things is going to also be determined on the template analysis that you're going to do this week in terms of what data points are consistent across the entire website to make sure that those are getting plugged in one time and not multiple time as well too.

Gavin Taylor: Can we do advanced custom fields with. What was I going to say, like call tracking, for example? Can we throw in like yeah, for call rail. Can we use a snippet in the advanced custom fields? Just drop it in the website? Yeah.

Chris LaFay: It's like if all you needed was like, I don't, I don't know the specifics of how call tracking is like script code is organized, but in general, excuse me, with most scripts like that, typically the. The entire script tag is exactly the same. The only thing difference is like the client id and so that script tag could be hard coded on inside the template to where all you have to do is drop in the client ID into a field field and then you're. And then you're done. So that's not like. That's all, that's all simple stuff.

Gavin Taylor: Okay.

Chris LaFay: When you're going through and thinking about like website templating and things along those lines this week, I would rather you be overly ambitious in your assumptions and I would rather reign you back on some of them than have to try to get more and try to dig more information. So because the answer with a lot of these things is going to be probably leaning to yes. And there's also some things that if you're willing to pull down this code into like a cloud code instance, that there's actually some of this stuff that could even be more the like the initialization of it, like filling out these fields could actually be more automated to where it might actually make sense to click.

Gavin Taylor: Say what I said we could connect it to ClickUp.

Chris LaFay: So exactly 100. Like if you actually put data in, depending on how we decide where to store this data, it actually might make more timing sense. If the last item in your technical onboarding is pull the code template down to your local computer, toss this Claude code script in the root of it and say go look at Project XYZ and ClickUp and pre populate data inside of this template file and then upload it to siteground. Now I realize that that's on a copy and paste to siteground but there's a chance that it might save you a lot of time. I mean it might be a lot more accurate. I'm not going to dive into the details of that right now because it's not a good use of time today. But just know that there's a chance that we could, there's a chance for automating once that data collection has been done. If it's done in the what I'm going to call the correct format or a consistent format. That's a better way to phrase it then getting it into eat M's hands and reducing that manual labor. It might add one more step further for you, but it might reduce hours and potential mess ups later down the road. So I digress.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay. For the sake of time I'm gonna jump, I'm jumping back in here and getting a few things confirmed. So this is actually really quite helpful because something that I told Dan I would do is come back with this general onboarding checklist from his things that we need him to get or things that we need in general. And I want to challenge that. Maybe it doesn't make sense that marketing needs to ask for these things and get these things. You know, Dan can send a templated email that says hey, we need these things.

Gavin Taylor: And in all honesty, even the technical onboarding, I would love for Dan to understand that I took that on because he doesn't know that and that that's fine. But having a list of. Okay. And I have. This is one of the things that I'm gonna be working on this week. What is it called? I'm gonna have to find it. Oh no, I know where it is. Let me share my screen with you really quick. Okay. Is it not here anymore? I swear I had. Let's look at this one. Okay, so here's a technical onboarding sheet that I made. I need to go and change this up a little bit. This is everything we could possibly want, right? Yeah. I'm gonna send you the template. It's.

Tessa Rolfe: Yeah, yeah.

Gavin Taylor: I need. I need to find the template itself. But basically. Okay, we need cloudflare if we can get this again. I need to go back now that I went through our process a couple times and fixed this up. If they do have an existing WordPress site that we can get access to, go and get me added to it. Appointment scheduler. Most of the times this is actually just going to be a script instead of anything else. Access the phone. Shocking. Call rail. Like if they already have a call rail, great. If not. So there's a few things that I need to change this. Most of the time they have call rail and it's just porting it over to our CallRail account. Any management shop management software, Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Google Business Page, Facebook. This is definitely optional but like if they want to link up indeed or something to the site or any third party integration. So I have a basis of this. I need to go in there and fix this. This is one of the sops I need to do this week, this month. So that's going to help out a ton. And I'm going to have. And the idea behind it is I'm gonna have instructions on how to get this for each one of them. So what I've done before for onboarding is a couple different things. But the client success manager has always done this on the onboarding call.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay. So we just may need to make this.

Gavin Taylor: It may just what are your thoughts

Tessa Rolfe: on that moment or a template or you know, a. Hey team, we're re rolling out this process. Here's what this looks like moving forward. Just something even as simple as that.

Chris LaFay: How often does this checklist get completed on that call versus how many things lag behind? A few days.

Gavin Taylor: It's a question. Coin flip right now.

Chris LaFay: Okay.

Gavin Taylor: I can run through this list in 15 minutes. Assuming the client has access to everything.

Chris LaFay: Do you do this live on the like if you're doing this with them, you're not I'm assuming you're not collecting credentials. You're doing it live on the call with them, and then they're doing screen shares and you're walking in through how to do stuff. Right.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay.

Gavin Taylor: Yep.

Chris LaFay: So is the reason why it's not done, why it's a coin flip, is because the person that you're talking to does not have access to everything ahead of the call and they have to go back in. Okay, so how much prep work on your side to inform the client of. I need all of these things is done before that meeting happens. Like, make sure that you are logged into ABCDEF and G before we hop on this call.

Gavin Taylor: Right now, I know nothing about the client. Nothing until this call gets scheduled. This is a call where Dan goes and schedules it, and it schedules it, both of our calendars. And I hop on there like, oh, hey, nice to meet you. So the correct answer right now is none. Dan could. So he has a welcome call, more or less like setting, planting the seeds. Right. He. I've already talked to him about pictures because that was number one that we needed to. Hey, we need to shorten this time frame. We could add this to his welcoming now along with the pictures. Hey, here's the pictures that we're gonna need from you.

Chris LaFay: So if. If you can knock this call out in 15 or 30 minutes, if they have everything already ready to go for you, then to me it sounds like the issue is more about communication on the upfront and less about doing the actual me because this has to happen.

Gavin Taylor: Well, it also might be like, I had one client who. They have an IT department that handles all this for them, so I had to get on with them or send this over to them. And then that was a bunch of back and forth. Another client where it was his partner had access to things that. And he had access to other things. And it's just a normal. I don't know why people set things up like that, but I guess when you're not in this space, that's what you do. So, yeah, this sheet, the idea of it is, number one, we. We have a checklist of everything that we need access to ahead of time. Number two is if we can't complete it on the call, we can share this with them. And this is actually copied into their client folder and it's just kind of a checklist. Now, ideally, we take this off of Google Drive and put it into ClickUp. So it's going to be a standalone checklist in there and then in each one of these, like access to cloudflare, there's gonna be an SOP assigned to it. So let me. Dan will be able to. If he's not able to get all the information, he can share a sheet, he can share a checklist, he can share whatever. And it will be a hybrid access where they can see here's a list and here's how do you do it.

Chris LaFay: So at the end of the day, a simplified version of this list needs to get sent over to them ahead of time. And saying as a requirement for this call, you must be, you must have access and prep for these seven things. And if there needs to be other people invited to the call that have this access, make sure that they're invited. Because if we're going from the 50 50, the goal here is how do we improve that 5050 shot to get to 70, then 80 the night. It's never going to be a hundred, I don't think. Because I know how technical organizations are and they're not organized super well. So I don't think getting it to 100 accuracy is ever going to actually happen.

Gavin Taylor: But I'll be happy with 75.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So communication ahead of time and simple thing. Because a lot of people aren't going to know what all these things are in this version of the doc. So it needs to be a less technical write up of this. And honestly you can go and click up, but you probably need to send it to these people in an email as well too. I'm just like, here's the list done.

Gavin Taylor: Kim, can you go ahead and create me a task? I want to prioritize this before anything else. Thank you.

Tessa Rolfe: Here's what I just did as you guys were chatting. So the sales process, this is obviously a massive. Just sales bucket here. Right. So the deal is one and then we send a like, yay, congratulations. Here's what we need, here's what you can expect as next steps. Let's get this welcome call scheduled. Probably at this point in time, we're already sending that simplified checklist of like, here's what's to come. Start prepping these things. We're going to need all of this right away. Then there's that welcome call, the screen share of the technical access, all of that stuff. Then that's when you and Dan branch off. He finishes the strategy and onboarding piece of it. You start doing the technical onboarding and pre marketing work. Then that's consolidated down into the client folder with the official handoff into for E2M. Right. Just want to make sure this is all what we're thinking is that accurately captured.

Chris LaFay: And then I'm working on all the bottle. The bottleneck stuff between E2M and Gavin Q and A. That's all. That's where. That's where I live.

Gavin Taylor: Well, I think even to expand that more, it's client folder complete handoff through QAs where you're living is. We are working a little bit on that too.

Chris LaFay: So that client folder handoff to design, to dev, like, there's not. There's minimal. Like. Yeah, that's all the same thing.

Tessa Rolfe: Like, that's all kind of like a checkbox.

Gavin Taylor: Yep. Yeah.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay, cool. So, and Chris, Gavin did fill me in a little bit on how we're planning on approaching the technical aspects of all of this. I'm intentionally trying to like la, la, la, la, la on that, just so I don't, you know, but it sounds like we're all on the same page.

Chris LaFay: All the notes that you took, all the notes that you took above are all correct. And that's probably at the. The lowest level that you'll need to know the details of. So perfect.

Tessa Rolfe: I do. Also, I'm a technical project manager by trade, so I've. I've done a lot of the, like, infrastructure and architecture planning too. So if you ever want to just spitball. Happy to do that. Happy to not do that. You're obviously more than qualified to do that. But I just want to make sure that the work that I'm doing and building is a. I can very easily turn around, be like, cool. This is all the stuff that Chris needs. Yeah, off you go.

Chris LaFay: That sounds good. No, I think, I think we're. We're very much on the same page right now. So.

Tessa Rolfe: Yeah. And everything Gavin shared with me, I'm like, okay, cool. You guys have already thought of that. Cool. That's how I would approach that too. Like, it seems very, very aligned. So that's great.

Chris LaFay: Good.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay, my last question here, and I do have a hard stop at 11. I'm so sorry, I'm in backtracks. The last question that I have year really is. And Chris did already touch on this. It's important to understand what is absolutely required and dependent before this moves forward in the process. So there's an opportunity here that I think is it's necessary to just have the conversation to make sure the local jungle team is entirely aligned on it. There's two ways to approach this. We can identify the dependencies and what's required and say, okay, if we have the required, required elements, we can move Forward. These non required elements that are nice to have to receive at this phase would be again nice to have but not required. It's not going to actually delay anything. We could still move forward. That's option A to approach this. Option B is everything is a hard gate. This is a hard gate. We are not moving forward with E2M. We're not kicking them off in any capacity until all of this is done.

Gavin Taylor: If I set my foot down on that, that's what's happening moving forward. And as I get executive order from Craig, I'm putting my foot down because these, it's coming back on me now. When a site gets rushed at the very end, we just had this again, when it gets rushed at the very end, for whatever reason, there's problems that arise.

Tessa Rolfe: So that very well may mean, and I think it's important to explain the scenarios that are likely to happen in the day to day. If that means don't get the photos we need for three months, that means the project is delayed for three months and we're not kicking off development.

Gavin Taylor: Yep.

Tessa Rolfe: Yeah, like that's, that's just what that means.

Gavin Taylor: I think the whole team's on board with that. I put my foot down. Everyone understands why, we'll all get on that.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay, so that being said then I think we need to have a realistic understanding of how long this should take, you know, and like how long, what is the goal for it. But that may not happen. And if that doesn't happen and then, you know, the timeline is just extended by that much, you know. So is it realistic for all of this work here that Dan needs to do and all of this work here that you need to do? Gavin, is it realistic for that to be a week, two weeks, whatever that

Gavin Taylor: may be on my part, more than more. It's honestly all of that takes me two hours, three hours to do. It might take him a day to do. And then as far as Dan is concerned, I know you have a hard shot here, photo sorting, I would say that's within a week.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay, so from your guys's general operational understanding, it is realistic to do all of this in a week?

Gavin Taylor: I believe so, yeah.

Tessa Rolfe: If we don't have something, we're pencils down until we do have it. And that just needs to be. Client expectations need to be set on that. That needs to be set up. Honestly, literally up here, this very first sector, this is how operate.

Gavin Taylor: You know, the biggest bottleneck there is going to be getting access to everything that we need access to and then photos and Then client pricing, Dan has to make some calls because we manually do that. We call the competitors as well.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay.

Gavin Taylor: So he can do that within a week.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay. Beautiful. Beautiful. Okay, great. Then I'm going to bounce. You guys answered my questions. Chris, I'm not going to be looking over here until you tell me otherwise. Okay?

Gavin Taylor: Nope.

Chris LaFay: That all?

Tessa Rolfe: Yes.

Gavin Taylor: This is gonna help me. I'm mapping out everything this week.

Tessa Rolfe: Okay. I'm just gonna drop this in here because I gotta bounce, but thank you so much.

Gavin Taylor: I appreciate it.

Tessa Rolfe: I'm super excited. Appreciate it.

Chris LaFay: Have a good day, guys.

Tessa Rolfe: Take care. Bye.

Chris LaFay: I also do have a hard stop here that I got to run to. So next steps in general, work on that documentation that we talked about last week. Perfect. And we'll touch base on all that next week and then we'll start working on what does that. That dev process look like? And I don't mind next week at some point digging into a little bit of code and giving some examples of some things once I have that documentation to showcase to give your devs a technical direction of what to do, so.

Gavin Taylor: Okay.

Chris LaFay: That sound good?

Gavin Taylor: Sounds good. Yep.

Chris LaFay: Awesome, man. Have a good rest of the week, sir.

Gavin Taylor: Bye.

Tessa Rolfe: Bye.