Mickey Mellen - Current

Mickey Mellen: Yo, I don't hear you. You're muted.

Chris LaFay: I am. I did. The I mute feature works, right? It actually does. I. I felt like I was about to get very distracted, and so I went ahead and hopped on, like, 10 minutes ago so that I could just do whatever the heck I wanted to and get distracted and not have to think about it at all.

Mickey Mellen: At least I have things around here to distract me.

Chris LaFay: Huh? Huh? Huh? Yes.

Mickey Mellen: Stupid ducks.

Chris LaFay: Ducks.

Mickey Mellen: Fun of y' all all the time. She said, I hate your friends for doing that. And then when she was in. She was in Tulsa this week, and they bought some ducks and hid around the people's house they were staying at. Like, no, you can't be mad.

Chris LaFay: Oh, my gosh. Do you know about the ducks? I'm assuming.

Brooke Desmond: I've heard about the ducks.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah.

Brooke Desmond: I was gonna ask how many have been found.

Mickey Mellen: 24. Out of 30.

Chris LaFay: Out of 30.

Mickey Mellen: 30. But we did a deep cleaning of the main level last week, and that's where we found a few more, and there's still six somewhere.

Brooke Desmond: I don't know if I can ask this question or not, but did you stay only on the main level, Chris?

Chris LaFay: Yes. That. Yeah, that was. That was problematic. We were. I'm assuming you've been to his house before for some, like, part. Yeah. So, like, it's. I had not. I had not been before.

Brooke Desmond: Okay.

Chris LaFay: And I did not realize, like, downstairs is very tight. Like, it's very, like, 1990s styles, like, with, like, lots of walls, but, like, no matter where you're standing, you have people have, like, two different angles, have view of where you're at. And so in. His office was closed, which.

Mickey Mellen: But, yeah, I still got in at the end and got some. So.

Chris LaFay: But you were there.

Mickey Mellen: He still hit, like, four of them in here.

Chris LaFay: Oh. And they were crappily hidden because you were there. I literally put a duck in your mug, and it made a. Like, an ice cube sound. And I'm like, we're gonna go this way.

Mickey Mellen: Now, this is interesting because I assume. Because I haven't gotten to my bookshelves, I assumed you one of someone. You had tossed a few way up on the bookshelves or something. Maybe not.

Chris LaFay: So I don't. All I remember. How could they be? Actually, I remember the two. I remember the. The two that I put in your office. The one behind the painting and then in the. In the mug, and then the one that I chucked in your nasty bathroom. Like, not nasty, but just, like, very cluttered. Yes, very cluttered. And that's the one that I thought.

Mickey Mellen: Was under our guest bath vanity was just full of bottles and, you know, stuff just like overflowing with it. So he chucked one away in the back there. But Kel cleaned it all out a couple weeks ago and found the duck in the back. So.

Brooke Desmond: Nice.

Mickey Mellen: We figured there was one in there, but I wasn't gonna go look for it.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, he sounded like that was kind of like, maybe that will just be the 29th or the 30th duck we never find. Who knows, right?

Chris LaFay: But we found it, so I was hoping that would be the move out duck is like, hey, the kids are gone, huh? And I think we're all even. So, like, we had three of us do the ducks and we. I think I got one through 10, somebody that we numbered them all, obviously.

Brooke Desmond: Oh, you did number them all. Okay.

Chris LaFay: And we got them in order. So, like, Mickey knows, like, you know, 1 through 10 is Adam. 11 Through 20 is me. Yeah. So for a long time, up until really last week, I was in the lead where most of my ducks had not been found yet.

Brooke Desmond: Wow.

Chris LaFay: And Tim and Adam just sucked and put them in really basic locations. But now we're all tied, so.

Brooke Desmond: So that's great. You guys have a wager? Yeah, I could see. Do you guys have like a wager of, like, who, like, does the winner get a certain prize? Do you have like a bet going on with that?

Mickey Mellen: If I found all the ducks from two of you, but not the third person? Yeah. If that ever happens. I'm not even sure that'll happen.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah.

Mickey Mellen: If it ever gets where there's only one person standing, they should get. You should get a pretty fat prize for that.

Brooke Desmond: I agree.

Chris LaFay: I like this idea.

Brooke Desmond: All right. Yeah. Ponder on that.

Chris LaFay: The wheels. The wheels are a turning.

Brooke Desmond: That's right.

Mickey Mellen: After this call, I'm talking to Sarah Patterson.

Chris LaFay: Oh, nice.

Mickey Mellen: New York. So, yeah.

Chris LaFay: Lovely person. Love. I was so glad she. The only reason she came was she noticed one of my postings and one of my agency, like, groups that I'm a part of. And I've met her a couple of times, but she wasn't on my, like, mental list of like, oh, you live close by. I should invite you.

Mickey Mellen: Nice.

Chris LaFay: Lovely person. Yeah. That's awesome.

Mickey Mellen: Nice. Speaking of lovely people, let's talk about Sharon Phelan because they are lovely people.

Brooke Desmond: They are. They are really lovely people.

Chris LaFay: Lovely people.

Brooke Desmond: Yes.

Mickey Mellen: Rebecca and Willie.

Brooke Desmond: Rebecca, Willie and David.

Mickey Mellen: We don't call him Willie, do we?

Brooke Desmond: We can't, because only I think Rebecca calls him Willie. And then I think some other people in the office do.

Mickey Mellen: And I stuck with William whenever I've said it.

Brooke Desmond: Oh, I only address him as William because I can't. I can't wrap my head around calling a grown man Willie.

Mickey Mellen: It's his wife, so.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, it's his wife, so. And then there's been things that I have written on their behalf with like the sign offs of being like William and David since they're the co partners of the firm.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Brooke Desmond: And like Rebecca will come in and be like, maybe we should change it to Willie. And I'm like, I don't think we should. I think we should keep it like it is. So. So. Yes. But yeah, they are really great people. I don't know how much Mickey has given you any.

Chris LaFay: Like, it's a. It's a legal website, but it's not like a legal website where there's hundreds of. Hey, I hate. I hate those.

Brooke Desmond: Oh, yeah, yeah.

Chris LaFay: This is a small. At the end of the day, it's a small business website.

Brooke Desmond: Correct.

Chris LaFay: They need something new. Y' all are doing ongoing marketing efforts for them. And given that they're still an active client, try to figure. Trying to figure out the way to kind of like, you know, exactly. Weave the story and the management and blah, blah, blah, so. Exactly. Yes.

Mickey Mellen: Add a bit more to both of you because I've talked both of you separately about this. I did talk to Ally a little bit earlier and she had two thoughts. She thinks, one, we should run the money through us just for simplicity. Which it all works out. The saying, that's fine.

Chris LaFay: And then.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah, we'll do the. If there's copywriting, we'll do that on our end as well. But probably with Robert. If not, maybe with Erica. Like, we'll handle copywriting if they choose to. Because again, I know they want to do copy or editing or nothing. So.

Brooke Desmond: Correct.

Mickey Mellen: We'll just take Chris's prices, add in a little or a little less or nothing. And. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Cool. Okay.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah, that sounds fantastic with our team for that.

Chris LaFay: With content writing, do you guys want to just write the content directly into WordPress or do you want to write content in a Google Doc and then have us import it?

Brooke Desmond: Second option, please.

Chris LaFay: Okay, cool. Sounds good.

Mickey Mellen: Was I just gonna say too? I don't know. All right, cool. Oh, yeah, yeah. Brooke again, Brooke and I will be involved to a heavier degree than other projects you've had. I would think Brooke will be on most calls that you have with them, but she will not be project manager. It's your project to Run. So, yeah, you. You do all that and factor that price in as well for that piece, you know. Yeah, we'll just be there. Just because they're our client, we want to. Yeah, we, we'll make it clear that you're a separate company. But also we're like, yeah, we're vetting you and we're going to be involved with the process and we're not just handing them off, you know.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So do they need anything other? Like, their website's fairly straightforward. It looks like it's seven years old, built a while ago. Like, do they need anything more than a facelift and a little bit of just slightly better messaging structure because it kind of looks like a wall of. Not like a wall of text, which is. It feels very random.

Mickey Mellen: And we do have a very robust messaging strategy that we did for them. Robert did like a. A huge awesome deck.

Chris LaFay: Oh, sweet.

Mickey Mellen: Send you that too, for messaging. So, yeah, yeah, again, we're doing writing, but that could at least give you a feel better for who they're serving and that kind of stuff.

Chris LaFay: Totally.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah. I would say the big thing that they did mention to me on the call I had with them this week is they do want individual pages for each of their services. So looking at it right now, there are like four main services that they have highlighted here. So that will be something I know that they want. I do. I believe they'll want to keep all the other functionality. Like, they like the team bios. They do want to keep the, you know, the closing cost calculator, which I don't know what that's powered through, but that's something that's embedded on their site that I know they'll want to continue using. So that might. I don't know.

Chris LaFay: It's actually, it's actually, it's actually an embed.

Mickey Mellen: Okay, cool.

Brooke Desmond: Perfect.

Mickey Mellen: Ideal.

Chris LaFay: So actually, wait, let me. Before I confirm that, let me look here. Yeah, okay. Yeah, this is a WordPress. I built an elementor. So, yeah, this is. This is an embed. They have something called pages.dev that they use. I don't know if that rings any kind of bell, but we've only been.

Mickey Mellen: With an iframe in bed, what, six months maybe, something like that.

Chris LaFay: Oh, okay. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Yeah. Okay.

Mickey Mellen: We picked him up late last year while we were still building websites. Like, we could build you a site too. And then now they're found like, hey, build us that site. Like, well, yeah.

Chris LaFay: Okay. So it looks like. So if services are going to be broken out into four pages. So that's, that's for there they had their team which they kind of pop open like content and moodle boxes and whatnot, which I think even simplify that down. Not a big fan of modal boxes for contact. For not contact form stuff.

Mickey Mellen: But I prefer pages for each. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And then resources. What is this form? These are just PDFs. I think these are PDFs. Are these PDFs through the form to begin the closing. Oh no, these are actually forms like for. In these like intake forms actually. Got it. Okay. So boom. Seller form.

Mickey Mellen: Oh yeah, yeah, that. Yeah, I confirmed that is an iframe for that. Yeah. From title calculator.pages.dev so yeah.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. And it looks like they're using Gravity forms for all their forms on their website. So that can literally just be. That's easy. Blog is simple. So yeah, they probably need about 10 or 12 pages of stuff on their site. Migration of all their forms and then a migration of their blog posts as well too. And just bringing those over kind of as is from like a structure, like a content perspective obviously framed in the. A new frame. But.

Mickey Mellen: But yeah, if you want to keep it. If keeping an elementor is easier, you can do that. I mean, we prefer Beaver Builder in theory, but if you want to stick with that, either one of those is fine.

Chris LaFay: So yeah, we build all of our stuff with Gutenberg and advanced custom fields.

Mickey Mellen: Oh, nice. That works. Cool. All right. Even better. Even cleaner. Yeah, cool.

Chris LaFay: Which you'll get to see with the primo site once we're. Once we launch that.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah, nice. Sweet.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. This is not. Honestly, this, this site is probably between 12 and 15k straight up. And the, the variation will just be. Is there anything here that I'm not seeing? Is there any other functionality that they want that I'm not aware of? But somewhere in the middle there is probably. Okay, we'll. We'll do design. If we were doing all the content, all that stuff, it would have probably been between 15 and 20. Right. And so because we're not dealing with content because there's enough pages there to bump into kind of that next 15 is typically my minimum. And so when you're talking about 10 plus pages of content, that typically bumps into the 20 range. Yeah. But since we're not doing content, y' all are going to do it where it's going to design the design and dev. I don't also don't envision that their design of their site is going to be this award winning, crazy unique Website. Like the site that I just launched for myself today. I did, yes. It's on LinkedIn. There's cheat codes too. That's all I'm saying. And we have a good starting point. Yes, exactly as you should. So, yeah, I think probably between, honestly between 13 and 15 be where we land.

Mickey Mellen: So I guess can you write us up a little just scope of work with that and then put a number on it and then again if it changes from that, then we'll adjust the number accordingly. So yeah, and then we'll figure out. We'll probably add in a little bit just for Brooks time and then we'll give them the option for the different levels of stuff and then we'll just. Yeah, we'll pay you as percentages to them come in. We'll pass it along. So yeah, yeah.

Brooke Desmond: Are you going to be including a timeline with this or are you going to wait until after they sign anything?

Chris LaFay: This is probably a. I mean, I would love for the. Actually from what you guys know from a like design and aesthetic perspective of what you've done for them, like with social media and stuff, are they pretty easy to please from a design perspective? Are they annoyingly picky about picks?

Mickey Mellen: Great question.

Brooke Desmond: So they are. They're gonna be relaxed. I, I, to an extent, but they are, they do have thoughts and opinions and I'm trying to find this camp of board that they sent me with all of like this kind of. They sent me this huge dump of like a style board of things for us to consider for the new site. Now do I, do I think we need to follow this verbatim? No, but they obviously have put some thought into some things here. And I'll just quickly share my screen, show you what they kind of put together here. But it's like just this huge little.

Chris LaFay: Whoa.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Like, okay, that's way more than I expect. Oh, okay. Okay.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah. And then honestly, a lot of it doesn't like, it kind of like contradicts each other a lot.

Chris LaFay: So I'm not saying it's right.

Brooke Desmond: I'm just saying they, this is the starting place of where they want it.

Chris LaFay: To go, but really interesting.

Brooke Desmond: I know, I know. So then they even submitted things for color palettes, which again are actually kind.

Chris LaFay: Of in the same families here. Like this is actually kind of close. Like your dark blue, dark teal with like a gold goldenrod like accent. Like that actually all feels relatively samey. So.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, yeah, I don't think, Yeah, I think it's all gonna be fine. And then, you know, as We've been working on social content. I'll even give you a look of what we use that Canva board and kind of created a. Our own like, thing of social posts based off. And so we like, we created this like color palette as a reference and then this is just kind of a look, a feel of the social stuff that we've been doing. So you're welcome to use this as a reference point too.

Chris LaFay: This is all simple. Like this is nothing.

Brooke Desmond: It's nothing crazy. No. To answer your initial question, it's not going to be yet. This. They're not looking for a crazy artistic site by any means.

Mickey Mellen: Correct.

Chris LaFay: Okay. Because I have a good. One of the things I invested some time into earlier this year is kind of creating a. A style guide canvas for WordPress that has kind of like the core structures already built out and then having being able to write the CSS code on top of that to give each of them kind of their own unique style and flavor, but kind of following the same patterns that are automatically responsive on mobile and things like that to not reinvent the wheel. And what I have found since I've built that, there have been two sites already that were basically using 75% of that and it has made the design process so fast and then also development as well. And so my plan is to start with that and then move forward from there. So I think that this is. I. So I like to pitch all of anything that's more than just like a couple of page landing page site sort of thing. I always like to start people off at three months, but tell them that if we get through design and content at a slightly quicker pace, two months is not out of the ordinary.

Brooke Desmond: Okay.

Mickey Mellen: We probably told them five initially. So.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, I think so because I. Yeah, because I think I told them three to four when I was talking with them earlier this week. But their ultimate goal is to have something up before the end of the year.

Chris LaFay: So I think, yeah, that's fine.

Brooke Desmond: Way ahead of.

Chris LaFay: I typically do a month for design, a month for dev, and a month for content and qa. Basically that's kind of the first sites like this. Now if we're talking about 100 page websites with SEO migration like that's a whole different story. Also with SEO, are they getting a lot of organic traffic that they care about?

Brooke Desmond: Not necessarily the big thing that they just. The big thing. We just noticed they published a post about like something about title insurance and they've gotten a lot of traction from that. So they've been sharing that out Via email. They've been kind of sharing this out personally to people. So that's been gaining a lot of traction. But they're, they were just. When I show them the numbers, they were honestly like just happy but not like, yes, our efforts are getting us the SEO we want. Like they were just like genuinely surprised. Like, oh, that's cool. So I don't think it's a big deal to have SEO as like a big driver with these things, you know.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Because if we were going to do like a legitimate SEO migration, I would want to bring in somebody that has that expertise to make sure that everything is brought over very well.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah, don't worry about that.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, we need to work on that.

Mickey Mellen: We can work on that post launch or whatever. I would agree there's not a lot there. Yeah. And then I'll send you this PDF of messaging. But Robert went, we'll say above and beyond. He tended to make things. This is like a 35 page document. Oh, Emily. Hey, look at that. But target audience, their ideal customers. Again, most of this won't really matter for you. This is more for the writing. But yeah, it still helps though. Yeah, yeah. The customer journey, we see them going through the calls to action which. Yeah, that could be beneficial for you for sure. The before and after, you know, the things there, more about the brand, who they are, you know, more wording, core values. Core values, mission, vision. See tone again, that plays more to us. Tone messaging. So the key message problem. This will tell you more about them I guess too, if you read through it all.

Chris LaFay: But yeah, yeah,.

Mickey Mellen: Value proposition competitors. You can look at some of the competitors if you want to see what's going on with them. Terminology they don't like to use. And there we go.

Chris LaFay: So yeah, dope. Yeah, send that over. That'd be fantastic. And then also that canva board or whatever, whatever system was in, send that over as well. I can take a look at that and that'll honestly, that'll move us forward very quickly.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah, cool.

Chris LaFay: With all of that stuff. So great. All right, I send you a small. Basically what I can do is I can just do like an emailed up scope of work that kind of has like general phases, general timelines and then a process, a, a price at the end of it and that should give you enough of what you need. If you want more, let me know.

Mickey Mellen: Cool.

Chris LaFay: So I'm around till 4 o' clock today and I will try to get that out to you before I head out the door for, for dinner.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah, so send us Two versions of that, if you would. One with a price and one without.

Chris LaFay: Oh, it'll just be email and then the price will just be at the bottom and then you can just.

Brooke Desmond: Okay.

Mickey Mellen: PDF or something. Yeah, okay, cool.

Chris LaFay: If you. I figured you want to put it on your, like your proposal, your letterhead. So I figured playing like plain email text would be easier to copy and paste and format.

Mickey Mellen: I like it. And then so Brooke, when we chat with them in a few days, conceivably, should we have Chris on that call or should we discuss Chris first and then have a second call to bring him in?

Brooke Desmond: I think we need to, I think probably this latter of the two. I think we just need to give.

Mickey Mellen: Up like, hey, here's this person randomly.

Brooke Desmond: Just to give up a heads up to say, hey, by the way. Yeah, so you're be working with, figure.

Mickey Mellen: Out, figure out which option they want with copywriting, all that kind of stuff and then say okay, cool, let's, let's meet Chris. Cool. I like it.

Chris LaFay: Yep, that sounds good.

Mickey Mellen: Awesome. Yeah, Brooke, I'll send messaging so you can send the other thing.

Brooke Desmond: Yep.

Mickey Mellen: And then, yeah, we'll be in touch.

Chris LaFay: In the coming days and then we can get. Are they looking to get moving within the next couple of weeks?

Brooke Desmond: I think so. Originally they had thrown out. They, originally they threw out the fall, but then I kind of talked them into starting sometime mid summer. So it could be, I would say probably as early as next month would be my best guess. But we'll, we can get that nailed down after we send them to Scope and stuff.

Chris LaFay: Perfect. I am in June. I have a couple of things happening. One, I'm going to be at the beach for a week and then as soon as I get back from the beach, I'm turning right back around and going back to Florida for a convention like two days later. So the middle of June into the end of June is a very hectic or from a work perspective, hectic. But there is, if we do get started at the beginning of June, we'll have two weeks to kind of get discovery and design rolling and then they can sit on some of that design for a week and a half or two weeks. And then when I get back, we can kind of pick up from there. So that, that's an option as well too, because that would also probably give you the building blocks and the structures that the website will have to start thinking about writing as well too, because writing and development could go in parallel because once we know what the building blocks are, all we're going to do at that point is just figure out how to arrange each of the building blocks on each of the pages so you would be able to be unlocked at that point.

Brooke Desmond: So I did get to ask. That brings up a question I was asking what does the typical process that you approach sites look like?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, so start. So starting off with that, typically do a longer discovery session and the goal is to kind of really hear from them how they talk about their services and their company, basically how they, how they think about their messaging overall, which then defines. We lock in the site map at that point too. So we'll kind of pencil sketch out 10 to 12 pages in the scope of work, knowing that those might change when we actually talk.

Brooke Desmond: Okay.

Chris LaFay: Once that is done, we have a general idea of the different building blocks that we need. And that's kind of where that's kind of, that's the behind the scenes lever of what triggers pricing changes. How many different blocks are we going to have to design and develop for them? And so we have about 15 that we already have built. We just kind of rearrange them and make them look unique. And so that's kind of the core side of what we do. And a lot of times we're only really designing and devbing maybe one or two extra building blocks that are unique to that client. And so once we're done with that discovery session, we kind of understand their message structure, the direction they want to go. We will then go through and either one of two things, we'll showcase the style guide with some of the styles that we've, that we've kind of made assumptions about, trickled into that and use that as a starting point and say, hey, and this is a new part of our process by the way, in discovery and be like, we have this starting point. We saw your design inspiration, we saw your messaging inspiration. Here's a starting point. That aren't wireframes, but they're not full designs. Give us your gut reaction with some of this stuff to see what kind of direction visually they land because then there's something tangible. There's there. And recently the last two times we did this, we got it like 85% right. And so that cut down a lot of custom design time going back and forth from Figma into Dev. So at that point we have an inflection point. If they like it, then we can immediately go into development and rather that we actually kind of can skip over some Figma design pieces. If they have adjustments and changes, we'll go into Figma design Out some new blocks, make some adjustments, things like that. That typically takes another week or two. Then we go into development. Then from a process perspective, we try to line up dev and content together because development, we're just doing stuff behind the scenes. When designs finalize, we know the building blocks that we have. We go through a look at all the different pages. We basically put the LEGO bricks together and say, here are your 10 pages, here's how the LEGO bricks line up, here's the content go. And a lot of people, what we have found is that folks don't like, we're not content writers by trade, but our clients aren't either. But we're better content writers than they are. So what we typically do is we'll put in our own content into these little mini mock ups with inside of Figma and say, here's a starting point for you. Edit away. Rather than giving them a white screen to go off and do whatever they want to with or trying to hold too tightly to be like, we have better content than you. So while dev is happening, we're doing content and kind of like page prototypes and Figma, most of the time that, where that lives in Figma is in the process of being changed because of some process updates. And then once content is done, dev is done, we merge it together and then we spend about three weeks on qa. Okay, does that make sense?

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, yeah.

Chris LaFay: And you're, we're coming into this odd place where like design and development because of AI is kind of merging a little bit together. And so we're trying, trying, I'm trying to figure out where does that line, where do you draw the line of that? And so we're working with a client right now who they liked 80% of their building blocks, but some of them didn't tell the story well. So we went in and just custom designed a homepage top to bottom. And so in that there's going to be about four or five new blocks, We've already begun development on everything else. And then we're just going to move in these new blocks into the development phase in about the next week or two because now that homepage tells their story better. So it's a really fun and interesting time to be in this world because the process isn't really being edited, it's more like the, it's a, like erasing the whiteboard and putting the pieces back together in a different way. And so it's been, it's been a lot of fun and we've had a lot of really Good. I'm really happy. We've had a lot of good collaborative clients the last few months that have been very like, good with this like kind of dynamic structure of things. So anyway, that was my diatribe.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah. No, I, I'm happy I learned it because I'm just curious to know how other agencies are handling this.

Chris LaFay: Right.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah. So I'm just curious.

Chris LaFay: My, my, my thinking is if I'm going to stay in web for years and years to come, if I want to charge the same price as I am today, a year or two later, the value that I have to provide has to be a multiple, a multiplier above what I'm doing now.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So my thinking is how do I build such a solid foundation of where everything just works to where the timelines can start shrinking and what you get actually increases, but not just become elementor. Like that's not the point. The point is brand consistency and uniqueness. Not you can, you can change the pixels everywhere like you can in elementor. So.

Brooke Desmond: Sure.

Chris LaFay: Anyway, I digress. I was on a soapbox. Sorry.

Brooke Desmond: No, all good. No, I appreciate that.

Mickey Mellen: And then one last thing. When you send over the light scope and price and stuff, send over just some website examples that you think would be good to share with them.

Chris LaFay: Yep.

Mickey Mellen: Whatever ones you think would be most comparable to what you think this might look like from your end.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. We don't have any law firms specifically, so there definitely won't be one to ones. But I can find some like clean business sites. Yeah, that would work.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah, that works. Cool.

Chris LaFay: Dope. Awesome. Any other questions?

Brooke Desmond: I don't think right now, so.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic. Well, I'll get work on that scope of work and if I have any other questions in the meantime, which I don't think I will, Mickey, I'll shoot you a text and let's work on something fun together.

Mickey Mellen: There you go.

Chris LaFay: Yay.

Brooke Desmond: Sounds good.

Mickey Mellen: Or this one? Either one fun. You can come join us at 7:25 tomorrow morning for some FedEx R. Every time.

Chris LaFay: Every. Get in there.

Mickey Mellen: Well, actually, Brooke's husband needs to start joining us for many.

Brooke Desmond: I was gonna, I was about to actually tell him about how much you bombarded my husband about coming to play the putt putt golf stuff. Yes. He will not drop it. He'll never drop it. But anything you're not doing with Mickey, he'll talk about it with you. Nonsense.

Mickey Mellen: I thought Chris, three years to join golf. Was it worth it?

Chris LaFay: Yeah. Yes, it was. Okay, so I, I. So Mickey has been on me about getting a meta Headset. Has he. Has he told you about his birthday? Have you told her about your birthday?

Mickey Mellen: Not about that, I don't think.

Chris LaFay: No. Great. Fantastic. So he hasn't bugging me for about at least two years about getting a headset. And, you know, they cost 300 bucks. Like, they're not that expensive.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: And so he really pushed the pedal to the metal, kind of. I. I reoriented my business around the same time. Like, our timelines of reorientation were identical.

Brooke Desmond: Okay.

Chris LaFay: And so he pushed the pedal to the metal, like, last October, November. And I was like, I. I'm fine. I can spend 300, but I probably, like, I should probably wait and get settled into this, like, new. Like, new company structure. I was like, let me just close a client, and then I'll go spend 300 bucks and get a headset. And he sent over a lead. He knew I closed something, and I. I strung him along little by little. And his birthday. I. I suck at giving birthday presents. Like, I'm just. I'm bad at it. I'm just not. I just don't think of anything. And so what I did was I bought my. I bought myself the headset. I took a photo of myself in the headset, printed it out, and shoved it into a birthday card and said, your present is my presence in virtual reality.

Brooke Desmond: Wow.

Mickey Mellen: Your present is a picture of me wearing a gift I bought myself.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Brooke Desmond: Yes. Hey, that's a great gift. I mean, you both.

Mickey Mellen: So he does play golf with us now, at least. So Kelly's got to join us for golf now.

Chris LaFay: I do.

Brooke Desmond: Well, I don't need it.

Chris LaFay: Golf was. I will say, gol. The. The $300 for the headset and the. What, $12 or 20 bucks for golf or whatever it is that. It. It is actually worth that.

Mickey Mellen: Yes.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Which is a weird thing for me to say, because I don't.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah. Putt putt video game is worth 300, but, yes, it totally is. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. Now, if I didn't have people to play it with, then I probably wouldn't. Correct. I don't play solo hardly ever by myself. Like, I don't play any game by myself. And so, yeah, now I just have to start wake. I was up early today because I posted my post about my website at 7.

Mickey Mellen: You could have hopped on.

Chris LaFay: We were there. I could have. But then I had to debug. Somebody emailed me and was like, oh, hey, by the way, you're. This and this were messed up. I'm like, dude, why didn't you. Why didn't you find that bug when I asked you about it yesterday? This guy doesn't work for me, mind. She's a friend. But I had to fix bugs that this morning.

Brooke Desmond: Aren't clients fun sometimes? Yeah.

Mickey Mellen: Well, yes, they. He's his own worst client. So.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, say what about who's.

Mickey Mellen: You're your own worst client there, though.

Chris LaFay: So, yeah. Yeah, I got tired of looking at my site. Not tired of it, but I got bogged down by looking at it. I sent it to, like, four people and was like, please push all the buttons. And then the thing that he found was that the footer was not tall enough. I'm like, so son of a gun.

Mickey Mellen: I did notice I still can't click that bumblebee in the footer.

Chris LaFay: So, yeah, I need to figure out what to do with the bumblebee. Like, multiple people have said the bumblebee clickable, and they're right. But I also. Inside of that separator, I also have a bumblebee, a fly, and a fire monster as well, too, that I need to make sure that they do all different things.

Mickey Mellen: Nice.

Chris LaFay: I know. I need help. I turned my website into a video game, by the way.

Brooke Desmond: I'm. I'm actually, like, going to it now because you guys are talking about it so much, so I need to check this out myself.

Chris LaFay: It's fun.

Brooke Desmond: Okay. See, I'm here now, but.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah, so see, like, the blocks.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah.

Mickey Mellen: Like, double click on the. The shiny ones or triple click on them or whatever, and they'll.

Chris LaFay: They blow up now.

Brooke Desmond: Now there's like a Corgi flying in the space thing. Okay, got it.

Mickey Mellen: The other one. And then there's some coins down further you can collect.

Chris LaFay: And yeah, there's a cheat code button on there too.

Mickey Mellen: I don't know the code.

Brooke Desmond: Is it mother load?

Chris LaFay: It should be. I see. That's. I'm gonna. I'm gonna. That's where I'm gonna add more. What I. What I realized I did some earlier this year. I posted. I had the idea of building, like, just a, like, retro video game hero section for the home page. That was just weird and different, and I got so much traction from it. Like, I got. I got multiple people saying, hey, I forgot. I need to work on a website. Let's talk. And it was from. That was the straw that broke the camel's back. So my entire mindset around this is if I create something fun and I give people a reason to go to the site because it might put a smile on their face or laugh, that's better than being like, here's my new blog post. Go read it. Yeah, so it's a little weird. It's a little bit of a risk, but it's fun and it's memorable, and I'm basically banking on word of mouth as my growth strategy. So here we are.

Mickey Mellen: Do you track the cheat codes that are entered?

Chris LaFay: The cheat codes? No, but that's on my list. But I do.

Mickey Mellen: I've entered some fun ones that haven't worked. Dang it.

Chris LaFay: Okay. Something I, I actually, I. I'm glad that you verbalized that, because that was a thought that I had, you know, yesterday morning, but it didn't get into my ideas tracker. I'm also going to create, like, a contributor section on it because I'm. Multiple people have given me great ideas, and so I'm going to. I'm going to try to find a way to visually give credit to people so that they can see their ideas come to life later down the road.

Mickey Mellen: Fancy.

Chris LaFay: So I'm going to, like. Because my whole thing is referrals, right? So one of my friends has an idea and they can see their fun thing on my website and their name pops up or does something fun. Like, that's just. That's just cool. So anyway, it brings smiles to people's face. Like, that's. If my marketing. If my core marketing motion can be. How can I bring a smile to somebody's face and that actually work? I'll take that.

Mickey Mellen: Here's the problem. Whose shirt are you wearing today, though?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, you know what? Dang it. Of like, I was like, I, I. This is the only meeting I had today. So I didn't go put an orange shirt on.

Mickey Mellen: He always wears an orange shirt.

Chris LaFay: Always wear an orange shirt. Always. I was like, I'm not gonna do it because this is one. I don't want to dirty up an orange shirt. For one thing.

Mickey Mellen: I didn't know you had any. Others just have more orange shirts.

Chris LaFay: This may or may not be the shirt that I slept in last night. I don't know. The jury's still out.

Brooke Desmond: No judgment.

Chris LaFay: Jury's out.

Brooke Desmond: By the way, you didn't tell me I'm on your website.

Chris LaFay: All the Mickey website.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Mickey sent me a folder, a picture you of Mickey.

Brooke Desmond: I'm sitting right next to him on the team page.

Chris LaFay: I asked him to send me some casual photos. But the thing is, I think Mickey, did you take most of those photos? Because you're in, like, three of them.

Mickey Mellen: No, they were probably just from our.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, they're probably from our stuff.

Mickey Mellen: Where is that?

Chris LaFay: Go to the team. And I have a partner section at the bottom.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So I tried to pick the one that had. There weren't many with Mickey in them. Mickey had a picture of him in a llama that I was very. Oh, yeah. Wanted to use. So if it was. It was vertical, and I couldn't crop it horizontally.

Brooke Desmond: Okay.

Chris LaFay: I was very much considering using that. It's the casual vibe.

Mickey Mellen: Where are we? In that brook.

Brooke Desmond: That's the place we did the photo shoot. Like that place in Atlanta. Yeah. We're sitting on the couch.

Mickey Mellen: Yeah.

Brooke Desmond: But that's hilarious. I'm like, on this page, like, wait, that's me.

Chris LaFay: That's me. Holy cow.

Mickey Mellen: Nice.

Chris LaFay: Because there were some. There were a good number of photos in there of folks that I knew, like, were not, like, Robertson. Some of them, I'm like, I'm not gonna shut Robert on. Like, I'm not gonna do that. And so I was like. I was trying to figure out the right. The right bal. And then the other ones with Mickey, he was kind of farther away. And I'm like, I needed one where he was kind of the subject, but not with a llama.

Mickey Mellen: I kind of wanted the line. There you go.

Chris LaFay: His photo on my phone. So every time he calls me now I see Mickey and a llama.

Brooke Desmond: That's nice.

Mickey Mellen: Is Annie Milligan coming to the conference?

Chris LaFay: Yeah. He needs to buy his ticket, but yes. He told me how he texted me and said yes, that he was good. Yeah.

Mickey Mellen: Bailed on New York, you know.

Chris LaFay: All right. Right. Gave him crap about that already. Kids are punk.

Mickey Mellen: Yep.

Chris LaFay: I asked the photo that he sent me. I was like, does this make you look. Feel like too much of a child with your backwards hat? He's like, nah. I was like, all right, good.

Brooke Desmond: He's like, I'm owning it. It's fine.

Chris LaFay: Exactly. Huh? Exactly. It fits in with the rest of the site. The only one that looks odd is Amy's because it's a professional one. But I didn't. I didn't send her the right memo. I needed to go back and edit it. But I also don't think she has a ton of casual photos that are, like, business ish. So.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah. I also think it depends on who you ask, because I'll say, even as, like, a girl, like, if you asked me for a photo that you were going to include me in your website, I probably would go the more professional route. And unless I saw the collective pictures and I saw everybody did something more casual, that I'd be Like, oh, we'll get rid of that. I. I got others.

Chris LaFay: And that's what. So when I asked everybody, I asked. I sent out the same text message blast to all of them, and I didn't have the right verbiage in there. And so. And a couple people asked, like, do you have ideas and samples? I'm like, nobody has responded yet. I don't know. But now I do. And so I'm gonna. That's probably gonna expand to about 12 or so. Cool.

Brooke Desmond: That's great.

Chris LaFay: And whatnot. There's also a couple of links on the actual site over to Green Melon. So just FYI, Mickey, you're kind of called out a couple. Couple of times in a good way.

Mickey Mellen: Of like, okay, all right.

Chris LaFay: You want. You want. You know, these are our prices and packages. Are you looking for maintenance? This is. You should go over here instead. So. Yeah, it's. So many people have messaged me about this thing over the course of the day. I got so many screenshotted quotes that are just wonderful. So that's great. So far, so good. It's fun.

Brooke Desmond: Hopefully we have the same response when we do our new site.

Chris LaFay: Make it a video game.

Brooke Desmond: You have to talk to Al. You have to talk to Ali Green about that. I don't know about that. Yes.

Chris LaFay: Oh, my gosh. That's delightful.

Brooke Desmond: Yes. But. Well, cool. Well, thank you for all this. I will make sure to send you the messaging strategy and that canva board and. Yeah. And then we'll make the introductions when the time's right. But all that sounds great.

Chris LaFay: Perfect. That all sounds good. Well, this will be exciting. I'm looking forward to it.

Brooke Desmond: So are we.

Mickey Mellen: And, Brooke, hang on just for a sec, too.

Brooke Desmond: Yeah, I will.

Chris LaFay: Okay, I'll leave.

Brooke Desmond: Bye, Chris.

Chris LaFay: Bye.