Chris & Laura | Website Discussion

Chris LaFay: It's.

Laura McDade: Foreign.

Chris LaFay: Good afternoon.

Laura McDade: Hi. How are you today?

Chris LaFay: Today's been a good day today. I'm actually to go to Washington D.C. tomorrow to go hang out with a friend for a couple of days who lives there. So a little bit of a busy start to the week, but. But it's been good. How about you? Have you been exciting?

Laura McDade: No. That sounds much more exciting. No, I've been trying to juggle kids at camp and all those. Just. You can't wait to, like, you know, two more weeks of summer and you're like, thank goodness.

Chris LaFay: Right. How many. How many weeks of camp have they actually done this summer so far?

Laura McDade: Well, that's a good question. She's done four soccer camps. This is the last one. And I think that's it. Because honestly, when I started working with Tower, it was, you know, early May and it. I don't know if you've had kids, but that's like super late to book camps for the summer.

Chris LaFay: Yes, I. We don't have kids, but literally everybody in our life does have them. And the person that runs my operations and project management, she. I've known her, she's been working with me for almost a decade now. And there is a ritual every year where she has, like the same kind of. The same camps. Like, the kids have kind of grown up at the same kind of camps over the whole, like, their lives. And so it's like, May 25th is D day. I'm taking, like, I'm. I. I will be gone that morning because it is just. It's sign up day. So I. You gotta be. You gotta to be on the ball with it.

Laura McDade: You do. I know. And so then really what you're left with if you're not. Not planning for that is like half day camps. You're like, oh, great. So you got four hours. Get out.

Chris LaFay: Get out. Right, Exactly. Go outside. Go. Go do something. Yes, yes. The joys. The joys. So I'm curious, how do you know Lindsay? I haven't had a chance to, like, talk with her. I saw the. Obviously I got the email, but I haven't had a chance to, like, sit down with her and be like, hey, tell me about this. So I'm curious.

Laura McDade: Actually, we live in the same neighborhood, so I met her 10 years ago. And then I started working for Nado. I worked for them for about six years. So, yeah, I worked for them in running their digital marketing campaigns for clients. So we are, you know, we. I kind of decided that it was time for me to find something full time. It was a good time for them. So we parted ways in January. But we're still good friends. It's just there's a time, a difference in kind of time of life for me. So.

Chris LaFay: Wholeheartedly understand that. I run a small business as well. I work with a lot of my friends that I've got to know over the years, and sometimes they get busy and they're doing other stuff and other times they're not. And sometimes they need to go and find something very different. Like I totally. When. When you can work with your friends that you really enjoy working with and you can part ways with, well, that's a. Just a. Even more deepening of the relationship. Like, I know it kind of stinks to not be able to, like, work in the trenches with those people on the day to day, but, like, if you can maintain that long term, even with that decision, that has to be made, that's fantastic.

Laura McDade: So, yes. Yeah, I know initially I was a little concerned about, well, do I like mixed friendship and, you know, and working. But it actually worked out really well and it was really nice because it was flexible and I was part time. So I just kind of. You get to that point where like, my youngest one's going to middle school. So I was like, that's like a full day of work. What am I doing? Volunteering? So I guess, anyway.

Chris LaFay: Right. Yes.

Laura McDade: Did you work. Are you working with Lindsay's. You're working with their clients then on the development side? Okay. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So they do some design. They do some design, sub messaging, all that kind of fun stuff. And whenever they get website work that they don't want to do, they're like, you should go talk to chris. And so I actually met Chantel first. Both of them are in a meetup group that I'm a part of. Do you happen to know a guy named Mickey Mellon?

Laura McDade: No, but that sounds familiar. I do not.

Chris LaFay: So both Lindsay and Chantel go to a lot of these marketing meetups over in the general Marietta area, and they're hosted by one of my friends, Mickey Melon, who runs a company called Green Melon Media.

Laura McDade: Oh, that's why it sounds familiar. Got it. Okay.

Chris LaFay: Yes. And he is a very social person. He hosts a lot of events, the whole nine yards, etc. Etc. And so I hit up Mickey one day and was like, introduce me to like, four people that you know. And Chantel was one of them. And so I started hanging out with Chantel before meetups and things like that. And she then told, say, hey, I have a I have a business partner you should meet as well, too. So I've been getting myself kind of in green. I. I live in Snellville, which is like an hour east of the city. And so I've been slowly getting myself ingrained in some of the, you know, the. The Marietta side of. Of Georgia, because I. I don't know many people over there. And Mickey, both Mickey and Chantelle know a lot of people. And so I'm like, hey, we should hang out and do things together.

Laura McDade: So it's a good idea.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah, very much so. So I got, obviously I got your emails. I took a look at the old site. I took a look at what you drafted up, I took a look at what the agency drafted up, and I have a pretty decent idea kind of, of what you're looking to do. I don't want to make any assumptions, though, but the idea here, I think in a. In a bubble, or not in a bubble, but on a nice tight bowl, is you have a lot of pages on the site right now. The idea is to consolidate that down. The messaging of the current site's probably a little bit messy and dated just because the site's been around for a little while. So things just kind of stack up over time. And I noticed kind of across a number of the pages, they kind of look a little bit designed differently. Like, there's some icon sets that are different here and there and whatnot. And so, like, the idea of kind of like starting fresh and being like, here are the pages that we need to have, and we want them to be nice and consistent. Consistent. And we want to have like a design style woven out through them so that they don't look very disparate as well too. And kind of using this as a time to kind of clean things up around the edges and probably making sure that the website's easily editable and all that kind of fun stuff as well. So that's my summary out of just looking at what you sent over, what I saw on the website. How far off base is that?

Laura McDade: No, I think that that's really spot on. We went through a couple phase phases of the website. So the homepage is really the. The biggest. That was the biggest amount of effort. And the section where it's. There's. It says programs where it's like momentum, mastery, multiplier. Those pages were like the most. Were provided the most effort. Call that. And. And then the rest of it kind of just got what they. The agency called was like a facelift, which there is a Lot of inconsistencies. I don't know if I sent you the typography link. If I did.

Chris LaFay: No, I don't think that was not in there.

Laura McDade: Okay. I think on that too. But the, the agency was working. It's very kind of very high level and I think that some of our challenges is that we don't have like a. The only thing it even mentions as far as interactive design is like, like on a one hover seat on a button. That's it. And there are a lot more interactions on the site currently. It just, it's not like there's not like any standard essentially. So we're looking I think for more to kind of take a step back with the cloud design files we feel like are great, but just you know, from a coming up with kind of like a design framework as far as like the implementation goes would be really kind of think where we need to start. And I think some of the challenges right now is that our, the cloud designs are fine, but they don't match the homepage. So I think we probably need to potentially marry this too in some way. So. But yeah, like you said, the pages kind of feel a little bit disparate and, and all needs to be cleaned up as far as the site design goes. So yeah, I mean that's our goal is to obviously overall increase conversions for B2B business and that's the focus. So the site has evolved over time, but right now just really we need to kind of like take it, take it home, get this kind of rolled out essentially. So yeah, I'm actively working on content.

Chris LaFay: Okay.

Laura McDade: And so we have about eight pages done. Need to get to 25. And so that's just like work in progress. I'm hoping over the next two weeks that we can kind of start to continue to knock that out. But there will be new content and that Excel file has like. I sent you the Excel file. Right.

Chris LaFay: I. So I got the, the PDF from. That was an output of what the other agency did, plus the two pages that were your Claude coded and that was it. Which was plenty. I mean that was it meaning that that was like a small amount that was, that was good enough to get me started.

Laura McDade: Okay.

Chris LaFay: The things I have.

Laura McDade: Oh, sorry. Okay.

Chris LaFay: For some reason you're, you're why most people don't come. It's actually been really the last six months being I've been in. I've been doing web for 20 years now. The last six months have just been so odd because I get, I now am starting like We've reached the tipping point with AI in my industry in particular to where non agency folks like as when we do some work with agencies and they typically have a lot of like, you know, pre built stuff and all that jazz because they're not ahead of the curve but they're kind of like on more the cutting edge. But now I'm starting to get stuff from people who were not, who are not agency folks. Being like we did some pre work and I'm like, yes. And it's a whole, it's a mindset shift and it's why I love it, don't get me wrong because it allows me to move so much faster. But it still blows my mind at the end of the day. I will gladly take that information though if you have.

Laura McDade: Okay, yes. So it has all the pages. I will. So sorry, I thought I said that to you. I will just send that against an.

Chris LaFay: Announcement I would consider doing. If you're writing content and I. This is a, this is a global statement and I know you worked with the NATO folks as well too. So you might realize this one thing to think about if you're pre writing content, most of the time it's. That's harder to do because you don't necessarily know what different block building blocks you're going to have access to. Like so some things might be like a three column layout that might need just a sentence or two per pod. Some of them might need longer blocks of text. Like if it's a two column layout with an image on one side and text on the other. So one thing I would recommend and I can actually send this over to you, I have a very simple guide that has like the seven core kind of like building blocks that all websites are made up made of. They're not designed at all. They're just a way to think, think through different layouts for content. If you're writing content ahead of time, it would be very helpful no matter who you work with to have content written kind of in a general structured format rather than just a wall of word document text. Because websites are not a wall of word document text.

Laura McDade: Yeah, definitely. We are writing the content and well, I'm going to say we're editing the content. We're writing the content in like in coordination with Claude so that it doesn't. That it's like laying it out on the, on the page.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. Fantastic. So you're actually, it's actually putting it kind of in different building block. Perfect. Fantastic. Yes, lovely. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure that you didn't have to do double the work. That was really my primary point of concern. So.

Laura McDade: Yes. Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I actually ran into that right at the beginning, was like, I think we need a better way to do this so that. Yes, we were not doing that. Exactly.

Chris LaFay: So talk to me a little.

Laura McDade: You.

Chris LaFay: You sent over the Crisp website, which. I was actually at an event there last year. I didn't know that. I had no idea who those folks were. And we're in this big old conference. I'm like, this is a nice place. They have a. So when looking at their site, the things that I kind of keyed in on, that I didn't see in your. In your AI version of your. Of the SEO page that you sent over, they have really, honestly, a very simple website. It's obviously. It's solid black. It has a couple of background gradients that kind of provide accents, but outside of that, other than that really weird, like, quadranty thing that they have, like, halfway down the page, it's very simple and straightforward. They have a couple of grids. It's a solid background, a couple of gradients. Nothing too much happening there. So I'm curious, and I didn't see any of that general aesthetic kind of parlayed into the design that you guys came up with. So I'm curious to hear, like, what. Talk to me a little bit about design aesthetic and what you like versus what you don't like.

Laura McDade: Okay. So that would probably best be coming from Colin. So I. I report to Colin. He is in. He's on the design side. I'm definitely not, but I can. We can loop him into the conversation. For sure. He. He would have more, like, better direction from that perspective. But the chris. chris site, I think it's. A lot of it is just the. It's more on the sales side than the. Than, like, the aesthetic. I think it's, like, as far as, like, their approach, because they're going straight to, like, proof points, like in the client testimonials or case studies. And I think it was more like the kind of the concept of how, like, they flow through their site. Then. Then it was maybe this specific design. But. But I can. It might be good to just have another conversation with Colin because he could provide a lot better feedback on that than I can.

Chris LaFay: Got you. Awesome. That sounds good. We can definitely do that. I mean, I. I have a couple of ideas as well, too, that we'll kind of talk about toward the end, thinking about the site map overall, because, honestly, a lot of a lot of the timeline and cost is associated with quantity of pages that have to get QA'd and things like that. Yeah, I was thinking there's going to be about 20 to 25 pages. And I know you kind of reiterated that same thing. Yes, what, what I'd like to focus a little bit on now is what is the primary, what is the primary selling point and what is the primary call to action? And what my assumption is kind of consuming everything on the site is you have the four different programs to get folks into, etc. And they have different. I don't know all the details about all of them, but the goal is there's four programs based on kind of the scale of your dental practice. And it seems like the primary CTA is going to be booking a consultation call with somebody on the team. And what, what I want to know from a messaging standpoint is what is the, what is that overall pain point that, what I'm assuming is like a lead dentist who, that lead dentist is not a business person at all, typically speaking. And their practice grows kind of underneath them because of word of mouth and things like that. And then they reach this tipping point of they don't know how to continue growing their business. They don't know how to figure out what the next step is. They don't know how to scale it. So what is that core problem that dentists come to you guys with and they say please help.

Laura McDade: Yeah, so we have, and actually I can share this with you. We have Personas built out and my. Am I. Did you, did I lose you?

Chris LaFay: I don't think so. No, there was, there was a little bit of a pause there after I finished my question. So there might be a little bit of a lag. So if we, if I talk over you, that's not my intention. There might just be like a two or three second lag happening.

Laura McDade: Oh no, you're good. Okay, so there are Personas built. It's. The pain points can be kind of range from. I want to kind of like what the dentist dental practice is looking to accomplish. So like I want, say I want to retire in five years. I want to sell my business. I want to build lasting wealth, like legacy wealth as far as like for generations. There's. So there's basically about four to five goals as far as what people are typically looking to accomplish. I want to expand to multi location practice. And so we have Personas built out of those people that we, I can send over to you in our brand guide. So we're trying to. The idea in the long term is that we'd like to be able to talk to those people specifically depending on, you know, where they're coming from, like what type of campaign, what the messaging was and then kind of really honing in on that. You know, what they are focused on essentially what they're trying to sell for.

Chris LaFay: Be able to build out landing pages. Basically you're going to do a campaign. Let's take page B over here which is structured fairly well, copy paste it, update the messaging on it so that it's more pointed and then now you have your lead magnet page effectively.

Laura McDade: Yes. Right. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. That sounds great. That all makes perfect sense. Talk to me a little bit about how let's dive a little bit deeper there as well so that all building out landing pages for marketing campaigns, all logical. What, what else do you want to use your website for over the next year or two outside of standard page content? Blog posts and landing pages that are specific to campaigns.

Laura McDade: Oh, now you're asking a hard question.

Chris LaFay: So what I'm here for, I'm here to make you think about this because I know you want to have to go through this again in a long time. That's the plan.

Laura McDade: That, that is the plan, yes. Yeah. What are we trying to use it for outside of you know, a lot of. I think just because we are a little bit challenged in this industry where there's, where our brand recognition is low. You know, I think we would like to be able to use it to establish ourselves in, in the, in the industry. You know there's longer term like larger partnerships and things like that saying coming out of like conferences like most recently the whole team visited a conference last week and of course partners are going to look at your website. And so I think there's definitely a brand element to you know, having being able to engage with larger organization, like larger organizations as a part of the dental industry. But as far as the long term goal as from within like a year or so. That's a, that's a good question. We, we just launched with go high level and so I think part of this is like looking at a lot of we're just like three weeks in. So a lot of this will be kind of planning out what we can do from an automation standpoint. Just really kind of blowing it up out there. I just spent the whole morning whiteboarding and so you know, I think there's a lot of opportunities but right now we're just kind of just getting our feet wet and I don't know if I have the answer to that right now, but hopefully that helps answer it. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And I'm assuming even though you have all of your CRM stuff in Go High Level, the plan is to still build the site in WordPress, correct?

Laura McDade: It is, yes. We talked about whether there's like integrations.

Chris LaFay: With pretty much any CRM, basically what you're going to get. And I'm not as familiar with Go High Level, but the gist of this is pretty much every CRM has two pieces. One is you can create forms within your CRM and then embed them on the website. So everything is a direct connection. Somebody fills something out, it goes straight into your system. How those forms look in comparison to the rest of your website, that's a different story. Some CRMs basically control all the code for how your form looks, and therefore it kind of looks a little bit disjointed on the page. That's just part of life. It is what it is. Some CRMs allow you to actually embed the form, the actual code of it, onto the website so that you have control over how it's styled. That's not as many of them, which is kind of surprising, but it is what it is. So that's part one and then part two. Most CRMs have what they call a tracking pixel and so just a little line of code that goes on the website so that if somebody does submit a form now that tracking pixel has followed them from the homepage to the about page to a service page to the form, and now you know where all they went prior to actually submitting that form. So those are the two primary pieces. And pretty much every CRM has both of those things. So I have not actually installed Go High Level onto somebody's site. But again, all of these things are copy and paste. There is no CRM that I've ever seen that has had any worse of an integration than take code copy, paste done. So not concerned there at all. I just wanted to make sure you weren't going to build it in there because there were. There would be a metric ton of limitations if you were going to build it in Go High Level.

Laura McDade: No, we're not. Yeah, fantastic.

Chris LaFay: Thinking of. So I've done some work in the past with folks that have programs for folks. That's like their primary thing they're selling are programs. And I know that you have some success stories and things along those lines, but I also noticed on the current site, kind of like on a testimonials page, this is kind of like A wall of words with like a frame first name and a last initial. How. I'm thinking this is from a storytelling standpoint. How private are the people that you work, that work with, Tower, are they intentionally not wanting to give their full names and their dentist office name and the logo and all that jazz, or is that just happenstance as to what's just on the website?

Laura McDade: No, I think that just happens if you guys on the website. For example, we just did a webinar with Dr. Conkran and he is like 10 million plus practice in Wisconsin and he. I mean, his name is all over that. Yeah, I mean, first door we have. And so what's on the website is not really reflective of what we have from an asset standpoint. We have many video. Yeah, a lot of video testimonials. Quite a bit over 25. So. So right now the website does not reflect any of that.

Chris LaFay: Great, fantastic. That thrill most people that don't showcase. Because I did see there were a handful of videos on there, but the primary. The primary page that I stumbled upon just looked like a wall of text. And so normally when I see that juxtaposition of wall of text versus like a couple of videos, I'm 90 of the time. It's just we have some quotes that we've pulled from emails and that's about it. So that's fantastic. I'm assuming that if you don't have this already organizing the. The dentist office, like their logos, their names and all that jazz would be very easy to pull together. So it almost would have like a database of like, this is the person's name, this is their dentist office, this is the link to their video. Like, having all that kind of like in an Excel sheet effectively would be fairly simple to pull together for you. Is that a fair statement?

Laura McDade: Yeah, right now everything's on SharePoint, but yeah, we can.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, lovely. Okay.

Laura McDade: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Going back to. I'm gonna hone in on a very specific detail that's going to sound very minute. So right now you have your four core programs. Momentum, mastery, multiplier and exponential. You were so close to doing 4M letter words for the alliteration and so exponential just out there. And what I see when. With people that have what. I'm just going to call them names for their products. Folks are going into your website for the first time, do not know the difference between momentum and multiplier or mastery and exponential unless there's that tagline of the. The million. You know, the revenue markers for that. And so what I'm curious to know is, is your team okay with the idea of leading with. Is your practice between these brackets? If so, here's the program for you. Because one of the things that I see on a lot of folks that have programs or service offerings that have a drop down menu of names that mean nothing to people is there's a lot of confusion in terms of analytics. People don't know exactly where to go. And so one of the first conversations I like to have from a messaging perspective is your product names are important, but we have to teach people what those are. And so to get people to those pages to begin with, we have to lead with something a little bit more commonplace that they're, that they would recognize. So I'm curious, is that a conversation that y' all are interested in having when it comes to the website, how things are laid out, especially on generic pages like the homepage where you kind of have a little bit of everybody hitting it?

Laura McDade: Yes, actually, funny enough, I think that might be why I got my job. Because I told them that if you're talking to people and just looking at brackets of even, even the names are one thing, but also just the approaches are really. And you make between 1.2 and 2 million or, you know, just breaking out that way, it doesn't really resonate for people, especially because we're talking about a lot of what we sell is that dentists don't know they can't run a business. But so how would they. They may not even know what they bring in. To be honest with you, A lot of them have not seen their own financials. They couldn't even provide you those documents. So anyway, so yes, we actually. And I have to send this to you. If I didn't, I didn't send you the Miro. Okay, all right, sorry. I, I think I was afraid to send it because it's so the Miro. I can just talk to it really quick. It actually I can just share my screen. I. Well, I don't know if I should do that because it might bog down the whole thing, but I can try to.

Chris LaFay: But what's in the mirror.

Laura McDade: Is a little messy because we also like went into like content at the same time,.

Chris LaFay: Like a whiteboard for like all things website related.

Laura McDade: Yes, got it.

Chris LaFay: Okay, one second.

Laura McDade: We'll share this. Share this window. Okay, so this over here, let me see if. Can you see that it's blurry, but.

Chris LaFay: I think that's just because Internet connection is acting up at the moment. It's probably me because I just Worry because of you. Here we go. It's getting crisper.

Laura McDade: Okay, good. All right. Well, it's really large file anyway. Okay. So I'll just go to the top. Okay. Can you see it now?

Chris LaFay: It's. It actually is coming. It's actually getting a lot clearer. Perfect. This is great.

Laura McDade: Okay, good. Okay. So we did this session to kind of think through what we. Where we kind of how we want to approach this. So we. I'm sorry I didn't share this. So I'll share this and the Excel file, which will make things a lot help. More clear from a scope standpoint. But we basically were like, hey, this. This idea of having programs and services makes no sense. So let's fix. Let's get rid of that. So, yeah, our approach is actually now our methodology. So I have to change that. And then as far as. Just from a. This is why I probably didn't want to send this over. Is it from a scope standpoint, like the blue. The ones that are blue are pages, and then the ones that are orange are just more like, here's what we're covering on those pages.

Chris LaFay: That makes sense.

Laura McDade: And then green was called action. So we actually ended up burying those pages down here under our Ascension model because we felt like it was just. It does not resonate with people. They don't know what those things are. They don't think about their business that way. They're thinking about what their. What their challenge is. So we put them down here, and then we also, in this, where we have those services pages, we threw those down here. Just ignored that. It says hidden. That they're not hidden, but they're not.

Chris LaFay: Linked from the navigation bar.

Laura McDade: Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And so we put those down here because those are really. Those are created by the current agency to drive organic traffic. However, like, it didn't make any sense to people. It's like program services. Where do I go? What do they really do?

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Laura McDade: So we got rid of all that. So we. I have this, and then I have. I think this is page size. I've got this Excel sheet that. Got it. Okay. It's mad at me. That basically says, like, is here's. Like, is new content coming? Are we using the current design? So did like for these, use live. These. The four program pages. We're using the live side content, and then the rest of it will be new. So I can send this book here? All right. Yeah, so I'll send that. And sorry, I did not send it to you. I think I also didn't want to Scare you with that mirror? Because it's a little bit.

Chris LaFay: No, you are, you are perfectly fine. No, that, then that, that definitely helps. I would have assumed that you probably weren't going to go from a 30 page website to an 80 page website. Most people don't do that. And so that all. That all sounds good. Okay. So.

Laura McDade: Okay. But yeah, so, I mean, I think that was a long way to answer your question. But we do not want to lead with that essentially.

Chris LaFay: So if you're not wanting to lead. So I understand not wanting to lead with kind of like the, the names of these different programs that you have to offer. What if the, the goal is to the, the primary CTA is to book a call with somebody and they're going to be booking a call. These are the, these are the four things that you do though. This, these are your primary revenue drivers. Is that correct?

Laura McDade: That is, yes.

Chris LaFay: Okay, so when, when you're, when y' all are saying you don't want to lead with those, those programs, what I'm hearing is you don't want to lead with. Pretend that they were like old school boxes. Like you had to go buy software at a best Buy. You don't want to lead with. We got box one, box two, box three and box four. Come and pick your, come and pick your best program for you to come install, if you will. But we still, the goal is to still lead people to those pages to learn more about them, but just based on more about the problems that they're experiencing and not their pretty names and their revenue figures.

Laura McDade: Yes. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. When we change the services section to be, to cover our three buckets and really focus on how our like, you know, there's tons of dental consultants and how, what makes us different as far as we have advisory strategy, operations consulting and then finance slash accounting. And those three buckets are really like very unique areas as far as their focus and what, what is actually happens kind of like down on the beat, down on the ground. But they are all integrated within one kind of ecosystem internally. And so we are going to, that's how we're trying to approach it as far as that goes. Like every, no matter what size client you are, you're going to get those three unique teams that are going to work, you know, specialized teams that are going to work with you on improving your dental practice. So, and they all work together to kind of for the end goal, obviously. So I think that kind of what makes us different is that there's a lot of consultants that are just, they're isolated, they're not looking at the bigger picture. This, you have strategy and advisory to come in and look at the bigger picture, whereas you have operations and consulting teams that actually go into your office. They are in your practice, they're trying to figure out what, you know, what's going on in the day to day. So I think that's how we're thinking about approaching it and then clicking through to those programs like the specific programs based on your size, essentially. But we're trying to try to stay away from leading with size.

Chris LaFay: Gotcha. Let me rephrase a couple of those pieces. So on the current site right now there are probably about 12 pages or so underneath the services tab about coaching, consulting, accounting, growth goals, etc. So what I'm hearing is that those services are all a part of the programs that you offer. So you, if you, if you go into any of these programs, you are going to get some sort of concoction of all of those things. Maybe not all of, not, not everything, but you know, most of them. Obviously not. The higher up you go, the more of those pieces you get, the stronger the concoction is, the more it costs.

Laura McDade: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Okay, awesome. Which makes sense to. Why. Because you're not offering those services like CFO and accounting. You're not offering that as a standalone service. You have to go through one of the four programs. Correct?

Laura McDade: Yeah, that's just specifically about that one. Of course.

Chris LaFay: Of course.

Laura McDade: I picked out.

Chris LaFay: I picked the one thing, didn't I? It's great.

Laura McDade: Yeah, that one. So we do have some clients that are just finance and accounting and tax. And so I think we don't like sell it that way. In other words, like it's more of an integrated services. But we do have clients that are just for finance. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Okay. So that given how small of a pod that is and how unimport. Not, not unimportant. Sorry. But to a cold. You have four potential offerings. When, when somebody walks in the door, you have four potentials. Obviously they specifically whoever walks in the door, there's one of them that is specifically tailored to at them based on their size, their team member count, that whole nine yards. But bogging down the decision making criteria and also saying, by the way, we'll just help you out with your fractional finances as well too. Probably not the most important thing to have highlighted on the site. And that was more of a con. I'm assuming that's gonna be more of a conversational piece of like when you're actually talking to somebody and you're like, oh, you actually might not need this. We could then downsell you to. We can at least help you with this part over here.

Laura McDade: Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Chris LaFay: Okay, awesome. Perfect. That all makes sense. Okay, so we have. We're dropping out services entirely. We have the primary programs that we want to lead in some way, shape or form with pain points and conversational pieces that people have actually said out loud. And then when they actually get to those pages, talk about the specific problems that dentist offices of that size have. And then towards the end thinking more of like, if all this sounds good to you, this whatever program they're specifically on, folks that actually get the most value out of this program are folks that have A, B, C, D, E, F and G. And if this sounds like you, let's talk and book a consultation. Mixing in some because you have testimonials, video and text, the whole nine yards. Putting in testimonials and success stories within each of those four core pages as well that are very specific to that one program. Definitely a thing. And then you have obviously your blog posts and things along those lines as well too. So yes, those are going to be your primary pages, are going to be the homepage, maybe a couple of the about pages, because people that are interested in coaching do actually want to look at about pages to understand who these people are, unlike other verticals. And then driving people to a specific program page to hopefully having that be their point of conversion more than likely. So that to me sounds kind of like the general funnel and a very like very overly simple 60 second setup. Does that feel right?

Laura McDade: Yeah, that makes sense. Yes.

Chris LaFay: Awesome.

Laura McDade: Yeah. And I will tell you that we are aware that Dennis are generally fact finders, so they will go and research a lot about the. About us. We had one find a page that was not. It was. It was not unpublished, but it was not navigable. But he found this page about our CEO when the CEO was previously not the CEO. He was the director of sales and marketing. Anyway, and he. And he and him wrote a paragraph to us about how that was that he found this and how could Matthew be the sea. I mean, it was just wow. And he's not even our client. So yeah, they like to find all the detail. Oh my gosh.

Chris LaFay: That. That's freaking wild. God, the. The amount of time some people have as well too to like really, really dig in. I'm like, you. You spent a good like 15 minutes of your day figuring that out about a company that you're not worth. Like what?

Laura McDade: Yes. Yeah, I know. Yeah. We have A lot of. I mean, we have. There's definitely required requirements is work engaging with us. So once we receive something like that, we're like, oh, we're a bit blacklisted.

Chris LaFay: Exactly. You're gonna just start out complaining. Yeah, no, thank you. Bye. Not happening here at all.

Laura McDade: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Oh, man, that's. I wish I could say I've heard similar. I have not heard anything similar. I. I have, I have. But here we are. Okay, so we have all that. Did I put this meeting until 3:15 or 3:30? I forgot if I did. 45 Minutes. I just want to make sure I'm cognizant of your time.

Laura McDade: So.

Chris LaFay: I have a really solid grasp of all that. So basically what I would like to do is I am a huge proponent of transparency and I like to talk about the stuff that people don't want to talk about on the first call. I would love to spend the last like five or ten minutes walking you through like a very baseline process and the pricing bucket that I think you're probably going to fall under. Just so that we leave this call very much in alignment and if it makes sense, great. We can do some follow ups. If you're like, whoa, no, thank you, then that's also fine too. Does that sound good? Lovely. Let's go. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen. It helped to share the right screen. This one right here. Boom, share. Awesome. All right, this is my homepage. You. I. There's nothing to send you. You can just go straight back to this. And so what we typically do is we have a little bit of a longer process outlined here. It's actually going to be a little bit shorter than this because over the last three months we've been able to actually kind of chip away at some of the edges that we don't really need as much anymore, which is fantastic, which makes things cheaper and easier and all that kind of fun stuff. So we have a good idea of what your sitemap is going to be. I want to lock that down. That's what's part number one, because that's going to drive a lot of the pricing and timeline pieces is knowing exactly what's going to be in your site map. We don't have to have all the content, but just having a good idea of what that page count is going to be is going to be great. Part two, what we normally do is wireframes, but folks like you send over page layouts that are already kind of laid out appropriately. That's great. We can cut a Lot of that out as well too. So a lot of our initial conversation is, is going to honestly be around sitemap calls to action and design aesthetic. And that's going to basically be the very first, like week of us working together is just that. And we're going to get through a lot of it in our discovery call where we talk for like an hour and a half or so. Just because it's a lot of like you're doing some of the legwork here and this is fantastic. Like it's, it makes my life easier, it makes the timeline go by faster. Then what we'll do is we'll design out the homepage. How the process of this has changed over the last three or four months is normally we would design them and I'm sure you're familiar with like Figma and stuff like that. We're designed straight in code now because we can do that. And the reason why is because I, as a human, and both a designer and a developer, I have both sides of the brain that are working there. And we have a block library like what we're talking about with your current site right now. Everything is very different from one another. Yeah, you have so many different things. And one of the things that I spent a lot of time on this year is developing out basically a white slate of about 30 different building blocks within WordPress. And we then style and theme those up according to, accordingly, and that reduces our, our amount of time drastically. And so our goal here is we go directly to a homepage design, look at it together, chop up the content, see if we like it, see what parts of the aesthetic we like, what we don't like. And then we focus a lot of our time on some of the detail pieces, what are some of the, the two or three more artistic pieces that need to happen here. Because at the end of the day, you don't need a website that looks like a video game. Like I have. That's not the point. But what, what makes a website look great is a consistency first off, and then two, one or two or three different elements that basically transcend all the different pages that make it feel like it's very cohesive. And we want to define what those things are. And that's kind of, that's the key point point here you'll have a block library of 25 different blocks that all just work very nicely together. They're all core WordPress blocks. There's nothing super custom. Well, they are custom built, but there's nothing, there's no required page Builder and things like that. The if you want to dive into the weeds, the page builder that we use is Gutenberg, which is now called the WordPress full site editing Experience because Gutenberg was apparently a bad name. I have no idea why, but it's the one that's baked into WordPress. Now. It's not a third party tool, so we keep that bloat off of the system as well. Once we lock down the homepage and the various different blocks that we have, what we'll then do is we'll take all the content that you have and we'll wire that up and connect that into the building blocks that we already have pre that we've already talked about. So we'll take all the content that you've written, the context of some of your old site, and then move everything over in one fell swoop because AI is a wonderful tool. And then we'll go through and QA that internally and find pieces that we think are bad, think are good, etc, etc. And go through and manually craft the remainder of those pages. That in and of itself cuts off two weeks of our standard timelines just with that, which is fantastic. Then we'll do some rounds of qa. So what you'll see is really the next time you see your site after the homepage, the next time you see it will basically be a full blown site. Now it's going to take a few weeks at that point because there's a lot of time baked in there. But we'll have a little button that lives on the side of your website and you'll click on it. It'll take a screenshot of what you're looking at and you'll just tell us what things you want to change and whatnot. So we keep that as simple as possible. You don't have to take screenshots and create a Word document and blah, blah, blah. It's all directly baked into your site and we'll do a couple of rounds of that, then we'll launch it for you and we'll also record educational videos so that you know how to actually manage your site long term so that you're not locked down to anything. We give you admin credentials, you pay for your hosting, you have everything you need to be successful. That is the ballpark time. That is the ballpark process. That will probably take, given the size of your site, probably about probably eight to 10 weeks. If we go through the design phase a little bit faster, we might be able to trim a little bit off of that but eight weeks is a good round number for that process for this site. How does that affect you?

Laura McDade: I'm not surprised by the time frame. I do think that Colin would like it to be shorter for sure. Okay, so if there are ways to. To kind of keep things moving there. We are a team of two. So we're. If the feedback rounds won't be very lengthy, like a large review process or anything like that. So if that helps just like from a. Just to give perspective on like our size organization. You're not looking at like a team of like 30 people or something.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Laura McDade: Okay.

Chris LaFay: QA. So the tip. The longest parts, and these were. These have all gotten shifted over the last four months. Which parts take the longest prior the. The design, the homepage design and locking down the block library design. That's the part that took the longest because that was the most creative part. And there was a lot of back and forth when you're dealing with FIGMA files and not just straight code because now you're having to go back and edit multiple Figma files on multiple things and then having to then duplicate that effort in code again. That was the longest part. That is typically not the longest part anymore. There have actually been. There have been some pro. There's actually been a couple projects over the last month or so that on meeting number one, showcase the homepage design, which assumes some of the building blocks as well too, and got an 80 sign off on the aesthetic on day number one. There's a chance that it happens. There's a chance that it doesn't happen. But I'm not going to lock you into being like you have to prove the design the first time we talk to each other because that would not be fair either. Development and content typically takes about three weeks, sometimes four. I always like to err on the side of caution. You do have a lot of your content that's going to be written. I can send you over some content. Like if you're going to be writing your content using Claude and actually laying it out kind of in building blocks, that's going to actually be very helpful because those blocks won't line up one to one with what we're designing, but they will line up really close and that will be.

Laura McDade: Yeah, just like. Yeah, okay, that makes sense.

Chris LaFay: Because then we won't have to make assumptions at the end of the day. Like, oh, you put a three column block with images at the top of each of these columns. That's easy. We have a block for that. We're not reinventing the wheel here. Excuse me. So more than likely that will take that three week timeline down a little bit, but development still has to happen. And so that can maybe get cut down to a week and a half from three weeks. But again, I don't, I don't like to set a timeline based on the best case scenario that's at the end of the day qa. If you send in your QA within a day or so of us giving it over to you, chances are most of the QA we can knock out with within a couple of days and then we do two rounds of that. So I do like to bucket about two weeks, basically one week per round, but there's a chance that we could actually knock out two rounds of QA within a week. So all of those things that I just listed off, there are definitely ways to go from, we'll call it a nine week project, maybe down to about six. But we do have to have some things align very nicely to make that.

Laura McDade: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Does that give you a little bit more context? Is that helpful?

Laura McDade: Yes, it does. Yeah, that's helpful.

Chris LaFay: The whole education thing, you can scroll down on the. Farther down the page, I actually have sample education videos. You can kind of see a little bit behind the scenes what some of the actual sites look like once they're built. You will be working with me because I don't believe in somebody selling you and then you get to work with other people that you don't know. More than likely dawn will be managing the project. She's been with me for a decade. She makes sure that crap gets done. So that's who that is. You can take a look at some screenshots of stuff that I built as well as there's some links to sites that are live at the moment, so you can click on those. We got case studies, the whole nine yards. There's some nice logos and what we actually did for people, nice words. We got the training and then I like to have simplicity in pricing. And so where you're going to be at is probably going to be in this mid tier here where I kind of divide up page count into two different things. There's a set of pages that we're going to spend more time on making sure that they are right. That's what I call the handcrafted pages. And by the way, there's no real good terminology for this. I've tried about 15 different terms. Nothing makes sense. These are the pages that we're going to just spend be a little bit more intentional on and Then the migrated pages down here, these are the ones that we're not going to spend as much time on. These are kind of like your SEO pages that do need to get migrated in. They can't literally be copy and pasted. They have to be merged in some way with this new style that we have. But we do have to take that time into account. And so. Yeah, go ahead.

Laura McDade: No, I was just agreeing. You're right. That makes sense.

Chris LaFay: And so while your quantity of pages is a little bit higher than what these are going to be, this structure was also written up about two or three months ago where we didn't have as many of the automated processes to bring content in. So as you do with pricing pages, you lower things down so that you can then say, oh, hey, we can do this this way. That obviously includes things like the blog, a couple rounds of qa. Basically, with this content types, we'll be able to put all of your testimonials into a second, a separate section within WordPress so that you don't have to go back and retype testimonials over and over again. You'll have your testimonial blocks that you have for your website. You'll be able to click a checklist of like, oh, I want these four testimonials to pop up here in this style. So it'll be a way to make sure that content's a little bit more automated for you. So this right here is the tier that you're going to fall in. Roughly eight weeks is going to be what it's going to take, possibly a little bit less. I'm going to be out of town some this week, and then also there's a week in August that I'm going to be out of town. So those two things have to be taken into account as well, because you will get to work with me on it. So that is the process, that is the pricing, that's the sample sites. That's basically everything. Not everything, but It's a good 75%. Do you have any thoughts or questions?

Laura McDade: Okay, well, thoughts. Okay. So I think we're. We're facing. We're faced a bit of a challenge. The current agency is, and I, as you know, since I work for an auto, I, I understand these things too, but the current agency is charging them $60 an hour, which is probably very unrealistic, unrealistic to say. So I'm kind of faced with a little bit of an uphill conversation regarding, you know, going in a different direction. So. And I, I realized that when I looked at your website, I was like, I'm pretty sure we would fall in like where you had mentioned.

Chris LaFay: So this is why I do this. Nobody likes talking about websites. Everybody has to talk about them and all of them look the same and nobody talks about prices, pricing. This is why I do it. You had a generic. You were able to kind of bucket yourself into it. Kind of knew what you're getting into. Anyway, sorry, I digress.

Laura McDade: Thank you for.

Chris LaFay: Thank you for telling me that because as a small business owner, I very much appreciate that feedback.

Laura McDade: Yeah, no, it's. It's really helpful. So I will definitely think that we'll have. I have a conversation with Colin and I think it would be good if we, you know, decide as far as next steps. Would be good to have for you to connect with him just because he is more on the design side. But I think it's going to be a challenge to, for them to, to put the investment in as far as that much money. I just want to be completely transparent.

Chris LaFay: That's. I would rather know that now and know where, because most people that I talk to don't either. They don't know the budget, they're not wanting to talk about the budget, et cetera, et cetera. So I just decided that my whole sales process is. I'm going to be like, on meeting number one, we're talking about timeline and money, so we just get it out of the way. And so do you know where there's a potential comfort level?

Laura McDade: I would say about 15.

Chris LaFay: About 15. Okay. So the way that we would do that is I definitely couldn't guarantee it being done within six weeks from like tomorrow. The way that we do that is when you're, you're in the process of writing content. What I would want to do is, before you get too far in the weeds of your 25 pages, is I would love to see some of the output of what's being output and if it's being output in a real, in a solid way, what I would like to do is actually take some of that output and toss it into some of the agents that I have and say, hey, my agents know all different building blocks and all the different structures that we have within WordPress press and be able to say, hey, this is the output that I'm. That I'm going to get. How is that content going to be brought over into the site? Is that going to be an easy lift, a low lift? Is it going to require a lot of my time to then go back and Manually massage. I'd like to take it for a test run because at the end of the day, what it's not. Because a lot of this content importing is automated. Now what has happened, even though the initial bulk work has been consolidated so much, the amount of QA has increased. Now, it's not a one to one thing. If we save 20 hours, we're not also doing 20 hours. It's not a one to one. It's definitely less. But everybody gives content over in different fashions. And so I would be more willing to drop the price down if I knew for a fact that the, the content structure that you were handing over would map fairly close one to one and be a relatively easy QA process for me. That makes sense.

Laura McDade: Yeah, it does, exactly. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So that, that would be my. That would be my one thing. And so I would want to take that for a test run. And I think if, if we had that, I would feel more com. I've. If I knew for, if I, if I had a decent amount of confidence in knowing that I would probably be comfortable with coming down closer to 15.

Laura McDade: Okay.

Chris LaFay: On it.

Laura McDade: So I'm not trying to talk you down in any, any.

Chris LaFay: No, you know, it's fine. We're all, we're. I'm learning this new world at the moment. I've been doing basically my. The exact same process like I have been for the last, like, 18 years. And within the last six months, that process has got completely upended. And that's okay. Life happens. It's good. It's. It's forcing you to think in different ways, in different fashions and whatnot. And so that's my biggest thing is making sure that we're not doing the same amount of work for less money. We have to make sure that there's that trade off there. And so content is typically the thing that makes things drag on, not because of deliverability, but because of some people's creatives. Creative styles with content is different than a client's. And so what looks good to us from a layout perspective might not look good to you. And so then going through that tweaking, all those tweaking rounds just takes days. It doesn't necessarily take hours upon hours upon hours. It just takes time. So that would be my, that would be my thing. So if you could actually, if you could send over the, the mirror board, the fonts, the brand guides, the different things we talked about at the very beginning, I can go ahead and take those in.

Laura McDade: Okay.

Chris LaFay: And whatnot. And get those processed because I do have a couple of ideas from a creative standpoint that I would like to kind of play with a little bit. I'm not going to play with them now, but I do have a couple of ideas. One of the things that y' all are missing very much right now is texture. I'm a very big proponent of texture. I think texture goes a long way, especially today, where everything AI generated has like no texture at all. And I mean that in a very literal sense. One of the things, and I'll kind of show you this, I did do a little bit because one of the things I would like to see and this is without talking to you. And so, like, I, I fully realize that is I do kind of like the idea of the rounded edges and the sharp corners that Claude produced, but that's not a design aesthetic. And the logo as is. I like to think about, like, what textures could be pulled from the logo or assumed from the logo. And I didn't really get anything from that either. And so I was playing around with some things and I, I like this idea. You're. You're working with people to solidify what they do and to make it better. And that kind of, that solidity, I really like the idea of kind of using some, like, more very low, not low quality, but low opacity, like marble textures behind the scenes. Because there's that. It's, it's a little bit of that not importance, but that, like, there's a better word for that I can't think of right now. I'll think of it later and it'll come to me. It'll be fine. I also do like having some type of an accent, fun font being played here. And I think if you're gonna go big and bold, I think the idea of having a little bit of a juxtaposition of some kind of a handwritten font that is not equally as bold, but fairly bold and easily legible, I think draws the eye to where you want them to look really well. And I think that combination of the, the niceness of kind of these, like subtle marble textures that bright. Break up these like solid color walls, if you will, with also a little bit of a scripty text going on here, I think really would pop really nicely without making it seem cheap at the same time. So I think there, there's something there that I want to play with that adding in that, that literal texture, but also an interesting accent font. Both of those things and pairing will make the site design really pop without a lot of like, not Extra effort. That's not the phrase I'm looking for. But without investing in custom artwork and things along those lines, because that's not necessary. So that kind of gives you an idea where my head's at. What do you think about that in general? And that's obviously very cold without a conversation.

Laura McDade: No, I thought it was great. I mean, that looks a thousand times better than what we have right now.

Chris LaFay: That's what most people say. They're like, we need something better than what we have right now. We don't need to go win design awards or anything like that. We need something better than what we have now that looks cohesive and consistent. And so if you did like that general direction, that would obviously also expedite the process too, so. And therefore allow me to kind of, you know, take go from 25 down some more as well. So.

Laura McDade: Okay. Okay.

Chris LaFay: It's fun working with the tools that we have now. It makes life. I've actually sent less proposals this year than I ever have. I've closed more deals than I ever have. And I've also started the conversation off with designs more than I ever have. And it's just a weird world we live in and so moving fast. Yes, exactly. Exactly. I just hit you with a wall of information the last like 20 minutes. So I apologize. I went on a couple of soapboxes there. Do you have any questions for me?

Laura McDade: No, I don't think I do right now. Not. I'm also just conscious of your time. So I. I'll definitely meet with Colin and if it makes sense. I think it means. I think it does make sense just to hop on, if you don't mind. To hop on maybe in just like a 15 minute call with him, just to talk on the design side and that way we can. He can meet you as well. I think that might be helpful if you're okay with it.

Chris LaFay: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Do you want to go ahead and get that scheduled now?

Laura McDade: Yes. Let me look at is calendar.

Chris LaFay: So I do have availability tomorrow morning before I leave town. I would.

Laura McDade: Okay.

Chris LaFay: I don't know that that's uber quick. The rest of the week I'm. I'm booked by at least one to offer. I could do between. It's a very. It's actually a very thin window. I could do between like 10:45 and 11:30 tomorrow. If tomorrow is something that is accessible and logical.

Laura McDade: One second. I know we have a call at 10, so let me just look really quick. Okay. So his. Oh, yeah. So we could do after. Yeah, we could do 11.

Chris LaFay: Sweet. Let's do 11. Let's do it.

Laura McDade: Yeah, that would be great. Okay, perfect.

Chris LaFay: Let me go ahead and put you on this meeting invite. What is his email address?

Laura McDade: Just Colin C O L l I n towerleadership.com.

Chris LaFay: Perfect. That sounds good.

Laura McDade: That.

Chris LaFay: So we got Google Meet set up there. Lovely. I went ahead and blocked off 30 minutes. We can do 15, that's also fine. But it's at least in the calendar for 30. That sounds good. My agenda for that would basically just be to open up the floor for him to talk a little bit about design and aesthetic to kind of hear what his thoughts are. So if you want to prep him with that ahead of time, if there's two or three sites that he really likes that would be helpful to see, not to put them on the spot and be like, hey, let's call and meet and talk. But if that's the primary, if that's the primary thing that he'd like to get out of it, I would love to have some back and forth with him about what he thinks and then I can also bounce some questions and ideas based off of his ideas and help filter those down appropriately. Is that a good use of time?

Laura McDade: Yeah, I think that would be great. Just for times. Thank you.

Chris LaFay: Perfect. That sounds good. So both of y' all are on that. We have the Google Meet scheduled up. As soon as that is over, I will be jetting and going. So there will probably not be a follow up email that comes before Monday. So just a heads up on that. That's not, that's just letting you know what, ahead of time.

Laura McDade: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: But other than that, if all of this ends up sounding good, I'm sorry I talked over you because we had a little bit of delay there. What were you saying?

Laura McDade: I'm just gonna say that we have, our plan is to make a decision on Friday. So we would. And you know, I obviously need to send anything from a proposal standpoint since I, I don't think we need anything as far as I think just having that next meeting with him. And our plan is to just connect at the end of the week so by the time you get back, we, we would connect with you.

Chris LaFay: That sounds good. I will be relatively busy from nine to five, both Thursday and Friday. If you have any pertinent questions, my phone number's in my signature. You can call me, I can pick up the phone. Phone, that's not a problem. I just won't be checking things regularly. And if there's anything you need from me, do let me know, and I can try. I can get those to you. It just might be during off hours at that point, so.

Laura McDade: Okay, cool. That sounds good.

Chris LaFay: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for your time today. I very much appreciate it. And we'll all chat tomorrow morning and talk a little bit about design and whatnot.

Laura McDade: Okay, that sounds great. Thank you. I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Chris LaFay: Likewise. Have a good one. Take care.

Laura McDade: All right, bye.