Sourfish Events (Gordy's Pumpkin Run) - Sales Call

Chris LaFay: I would love to be able to add a proposal through this dashboard view. I don't need it to be the full blown proposal view. I think that if we basically just have client name price and you default these, you can just default. You don't actually have these fields here. I think if you default the start month and year to whatever the month after the current one is, and then for the length, if you take the total price and divide it by 10,000, that will give you the approximate number of months. So for example, a $20,000 site will take two months and then for the cost of goods sold, you can automate and put whatever 40% of the total is in that field. So for an example, if we were doing a $100,000 website, the COGS would be 40,000 and then I can worry about putting in things like the referral partner, the client name and email and all that kind of stuff later. Does that make sense? Eric? Good morning, sir.

Erik Young: Good morning. How are you?

Chris LaFay: Hi, how am I? Yesterday I hosted an event and so for the, the introverted parts of us, yesterday was an exhausting day. And so needless to say, I'm glad that I'm not doing that today and I have virtual calls and whatnot. But it was a very fun event. It all went very well. I'm very excited. I slept great last night.

Erik Young: That's awesome.

Chris LaFay: How about you? What's up? What's exciting with you?

Erik Young: Nothing, just kind of getting settled into the summer. We're a very seasonable business so we're getting ready to hit our very busy time. So yeah, just ramping up.

Chris LaFay: I was, I went to the domain name and your, your email address. And by the way, Andrew's about to be here. He was hopping, he's hopping off the call right now. I went to, I tried to go to your site and I didn't, it didn't pull up. I got like a WP engine error message. I'm kind of curious, like what do, what do you do?

Erik Young: Oh, that's interesting. So you went to Gordy's pumpkinrend.com and got an error message.

Chris LaFay: I went to Gordy's. I went to. Your email address was. What's your email? Your domain name?

Erik Young: Sour. Sourfish.

Chris LaFay: That one. Yes, that.

Erik Young: Okay, that makes sense. We, we a while ago took that offline and we're trying to slowly transition everything to run.com because we're kind of a one trick pony at the moment.

Chris LaFay: Oh, I got you. Okay, I see, I see, Sorry.

Erik Young: So that makes sense.

Chris LaFay: Quick text back. I got You. Very nice, Very nice. So, got your email from the other day. I am curious. A lot of our work comes from word of mouth. How did you find Classic City? Was it through, like, the Shopify app store or the partner pages and whatnot?

Erik Young: Honestly. So we. I was talking in. Claude is the short answer, and was basically discussing, like, redesigns with Claude, things like that. And then I said, like, you know, what are some, like, for this type of vision that I have, like, as far as, like, design goes, what are some other websites like this? And they gave me like a laundry list and then from there trying to find out who had. Who had their hands in those websites.

Chris LaFay: I got you. Awesome. That's great to know. The world is.

Erik Young: I'm sure.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, the world is changing so quickly, and knowing these little details is very helpful for me. Most of my stuff is word of mouth that I get, and so whenever I get somebody that's brand new, I was like, having an idea of who that might be. I'm aware that came from. That helps a wonderful small business.

Erik Young: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic. My wife is giving me a call and I want to make sure that nothing is blowing up with her at her job. Andrew, I'll let you introduce yourself really quick and while I go figure out what's happening with my wife. Give me one second. I apologize. Cool.

Andrew Booth: No worries. I'm Andrew, software engineer. Been in web and e Commerce for 21 years or something like that. Worked with Chris for 15 or 16. We actually originally met each other back at a business that we both worked at as employees years and years ago. And then we both ultimately left and went off and did our own things and have worked together ever since in some form or capacity. And in the last, like, I'd say five, six years, I've really worked more with Classic City than I did previously. So, yeah, that's just a little bit background on me. I would say. I would say I'm a runner, but, yeah, my wife would laugh. She. My wife is definitely runner. She, you know, half marathon.

Chris LaFay: Marathon, all those.

Erik Young: We'll see that. That's crazy. I mean, I've. I started when we started the company back in 2012, I was not a runner. I had run one 5k my whole life and hated it. And so now I've become a runner because we do these events, but I still don't consider myself a runner. Yeah, more of a. More of a casual. Like, if I feel like getting out there and doing something, I do it.

Andrew Booth: That's me. Yeah, that is me. I haven't run much in the last few years. But the last half marathon I ran, I was like, yeah, I'm gonna. I'm gonna train. And I actually put effort in, and I didn't. I ran. My training was. I literally ran two miles and then was like, I got this. I did it slow.

Erik Young: That's all that matters, you know?

Andrew Booth: Yeah. I mean, a lot of it's mental, what you get past a certain stage, but, yeah.

Erik Young: Yeah, I did the. I. I did one full marathon that I trained for and did all that. And, like, yeah, it's definitely by. Towards the end of it, you're like, this is dumb, and this is all mental, and I just got to push past whatever is going on down in my lower body.

Andrew Booth: Yep. Yep.

Chris LaFay: Say again. Sorry.

Erik Young: I said all. All good.

Chris LaFay: Yes. All was well. I. We had a delivery of, like, milk and cream streamers come in, and I don't get those notifications. And so my wife was like, please do not let them sit on the porch for hours. Yeah. Which is what I thought it was, but I needed to make sure. So it was. So now everything's refrigerated as it should be.

Erik Young: So perfect. Where are you guys? Where are you guys all at?

Chris LaFay: So I live about an hour east of Atlanta in a city called Snellville,.

Andrew Booth: And I'm about 45 minutes west of Atlanta in Marietta.

Erik Young: Gotcha.

Chris LaFay: So that basically means we live about three and a half hours away from each other, even though we live, like, 20 miles away from each other. So.

Andrew Booth: Yeah. Where are you at, Eric? Nashville, Tennessee, or North Carolina?

Erik Young: Tennessee.

Andrew Booth: Tennessee. Cool.

Chris LaFay: Yep.

Andrew Booth: Right on.

Chris LaFay: North North Carolina. Yeah.

Andrew Booth: There's Nashville, North Carolina. It's nothing like Nashville, Tennessee, really. That's the only reason I know that.

Erik Young: Well, it's like Paris, Ohio, is not like Paris, France, I can tell you that.

Andrew Booth: Right. Exactly. Do you actually live in Nashville, or are you, like, in the suburbs?

Erik Young: Like, downtown? For better or for worse, as close as you can get to what you think Nashville is. We live here. So my wife and I used to live in Ohio with our two kids, and we just moved here about three weeks ago,.

Andrew Booth: And we.

Erik Young: We wanted to buy a house here, but the market is just insane. So we're like, let's rent an apartment for a year, figure out kind of where we want to be. And then we went to a bunch of apartments. Houses to rent, things like that, and just wound up, like, right in the. And the action of it all.

Chris LaFay: Wow.

Erik Young: That's kind of fun.

Andrew Booth: That's unusual. Yeah. I think most folks. Think we might be losing them.

Chris LaFay: Oh, Testing. I thought I was the one with the problem. Oh, there we go. Now we're ready.

Erik Young: There you go. Sorry. I'm relocating to inside. I'm working remotely at coffee shop and I moved to a quieter spot, but it was farther away from the signal, so hoping this fixes it.

Andrew Booth: Got it. Got it.

Chris LaFay: There we go. Cool.

Andrew Booth: Most people I know that either live in Nashville or have lived in Nashville, lived like Bellevue. So like just south of Nashville.

Erik Young: Yeah, there's. There's so many good parts, but it just. We kind of like living in like walkable city parts, but not amongst where all the tourists are. So we're gonna, we're gonna find out where that happy medium is.

Andrew Booth: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Yes.

Andrew Booth: Well, you get the experience for a year anyways.

Erik Young: Yeah.

Andrew Booth: Cool.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. Well, I know Andrew has a hard stop at 12 Eastern time, so in about 20 minutes or so, I want to make sure we cover the stuff that he needs to cover because Shopify in and of itself is not my personal expertise. So we got your email, saw what you tossed over. We chatted a little bit about it. And so I'm kind of curious. Like, I looked at, I looked at the site, like, the aesthetic of it is pretty great. Like, I see a lot of. There's a lot of personality that's in the aesthetic, but I also see on the shop side where you have, you know, buying your tickets and also the like, the merchandise side of things that doesn't really have the same aesthetic as the rest of like the marketing site where there is a lot of like, good graphics with the pumpkin and all that kind of fun stuff. So I'm kind of curious where, where the division is, kind of what the push towards this is going to be. Is it the marketing site and the e commerce side of things all in one? Talk to me a little bit about where we're heading here.

Erik Young: Yeah. So I will try and give you guys as clear and as the same picture as possible. So Gordy's Pumpkin run has two parts to it. There's in person races, so you can sign up and go to an actual in person race. And that is currently on Gordy's pumpkinrun.com which is our WordPress site. Then we have a pretty popular virtual option which is posted on Gordy's store, which is our Shopify site. So the virtual run is open worldwide. You can sign up and we send all your race goodies to your door. So very e commerce focused. So those are kind of your two options. And then on the Shopify side, besides the virtual option, you can add different metals, different merchandise items and that that's all posted on Shopify. So We've had our WordPress site going in its current version since 2020. We did a refresh back then from our 2012 site and it was a big upgrade. But as we move forward, I'm kind of thinking of trying to combine them into one. And I know we can't manage registrations on the Shopify site and that's fine. I was thinking that we could build out the event pages like the city specific Kansas City race pages like that on Shopify because they're all going to halfbound to run signup which is our registration platform for the in person races, just like it does now on our WordPress site. Okay, does that make sense so far?

Chris LaFay: Yeah, definitely. So cool.

Erik Young: So I'm sure you can see the benefits of having everything on one single unified Shopify site. And then if they're doing a virtual run or shopping merchandise, boom, it's all handled on Shopify. But if they're trying to sign up for an actual race, they get all their information there, click sign up and outbounds them back to run sign up.

Chris LaFay: Andrew, what are your thoughts on the going like the plugin route here?

Andrew Booth: It would be worth exploring that idea when Chris says the plugin route about, I don't know, 3, 4, 5, 6 months ago, Shopify released a WordPress plugin to where you can actually take your product catalog from Shopify, display it on a WordPress website and the checkout from the WordPress website you're like do everything on WordPress but then when you go to checkout it actually sends you to a shop pay checkout page from WordPress. So you get the Shopify checkout experience. But Everything else was WordPress prior your products, inventory, fulfillment, all that stuff still in Shopify. It's just sort of consolidating and bridging that gap between the two. Cmss. It'd be worth exploring.

Chris LaFay: It's. It also does a really good job like are you familiar how technical are you by the way?

Erik Young: Not very technical at all.

Chris LaFay: Okay, so one of the, one of the benefits of the plugin is that it does a really good job of absorbing the stylization of your current site that you put in. So rather than like, I'm sure you probably have seen, you've gone to like various websites before and then like the contact form looks very different from the rest of the website. It looks like it's almost separate. That's what original implementations like that used to look like. But with this, the product layouts and the structures take on a lot of the colorations, the font styles, et cetera of the existing WordPress site. So, like, going back to, like going back to what you were talking about of like having event landing pages that you could spin up easily. Yes, you can do all that in Shopify, but from a content perspective, WordPress at the end of the day is a lot easier to manage a lot of that content. And so you could create things called custom post types in WordPress. So you keep all of your events segmented over here in the back end. You can do some things with cross linking. You can build a lot of really cool templates within WordPress that are very dynamic. So you get a lot of the benefits of using WordPress for content management and also having all your styles loaded into one, but the E commerce side being all in Shopify. So it's kind of a. It is potentially a best of both worlds scenario without having to do this massive rebuild all within Shopify.

Erik Young: Gotcha.

Chris LaFay: So that's like the starting point of that conversation. What is that? When you, when you hear all that, how does that sound to you?

Erik Young: I mean, it sounds good and I understand the. I actually saw the release of that, like, whatever you want to call it, the plugin for WordPress via Shopify. I saw that earlier this year and thought, oh, that work? I just wonder. Okay, so taking a step back, we also want to refresh the brand a little bit and the website. I think over the past five years or six years, we've kind of found things that we want. So is this something that you guys would be able to like, Would you be taking our existing website or would you be taking like building from the ground from a WordPress perspective? If that's the route we went.

Chris LaFay: Depends on how.

Andrew Booth: Go ahead, Chris.

Chris LaFay: I was going to say it depends on how much of an overhaul you want to do on the WordPress site. Depending on where that brand and aesthetic goes, would kind of determine what direction is best. Do you have any of those, like, updated brand assets kind of ideas that you want to like, start pursuing? Do you have any of that written down, organized, structured yet?

Erik Young: We don't. And that's what I was gonna ask you that question. Do you guys have people help with branding or do you guys work with other parties to do the branding and then you just implement it?

Chris LaFay: We have. If we're talking about when we're thinking about branding, if we're actually thinking about core messaging, logos, design assets that could be used across a Lot of different mediums and things like that. If we're talking about that type of branding, yes, we do have partners that we work with for that. If we're talking about basically taking a logo, updating some fonts and colors and things like that to where a lot of it's kind of more web oriented in terms of the brand, that's a different story. We've typically handled that and we go through a larger design process with it. But if you're wanting a full blown brand package that would definitely be external, we would have a partner we would put you, put you in touch with.

Erik Young: Okay, that's probably the route we're leaning towards because a lot of our, A lot of our brand assets are just so. They feel so old because they are old. Like we've gathered these things since 2012 and I'm just kind of like we. I need more to work with and I feel like it needs, overall, the brand needs some new life breathed into it. And so having someone that can really kind of see where we've been and where we want to go and be able to design basically Gordy's Pumpkin Run 2.0 would be.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, the route we want to go, absolutely. Is that a conversation that you want to have this week or next week? Because I can definitely put you in touch with our primary branding partner that we use. Her name is Jason. She runs a company called Tree Bird Branding and she's. She's fantastic. So. Okay, awesome. That sounds good. I'll put you in touch with her. In terms of, in terms of the website build, we're going to basically just push that off to the side for a little while. Then I. Her process for branding ranges from, you know, one month to three months typically. And then we would then kind of tack in right on the back end of that of one that once that's done and so if we were going to. There still is a portion of this technical conversation to have of still. Based on what you're saying, I still think that there is a play to be made to where if you want to actually have a really solid content strategy going forward, leaving your website in WordPress, building it from scratch, if we're going to have a whole new brand package and all that jazz, that would make sense to do building in WordPress but then tacking on Shopify to it, like me and Andrew were talking about. Is it possible to do everything within Shopify? Yes, but depending on the scale of that content strategy that you want to do, having a division might make the most sense but it also wouldn't drastically increase the cost of that rebuild either. The development time for that type of stuff, development and design time for that type of stuff is gonna be fairly one to one. So it really boils down to, are you adamant about having everything in one system and some of these editing processes and doing everything inside of Shopify might be a little bit more clunky versus having them separated and having some of that content management be a smidgen easier over time. But also with the trade off of having you would have two systems at the end of the day, there's no right or wrong. You can dive into a lot more details if we need to with that. I realize that's.

Erik Young: Yeah, I'm okay with having two systems if that's what it takes. But one, I want them to look the same aesthetically. Like, we want to get to that point where if someone navigates away from one side to the other, it's like, oh, wait, this looks fairly different. So we want to do that. But we also want to make sure that, like, especially for, like, the Shopify side of things, we have, like, full control of how it looks. And that's the other thing. It's like, for the virtual run, that's like our hero product on the Shopify side of things. And we want a dedicated, like, page design, like a dedicated landing page on Shopify PDP range to that that looks different than the sweater you buy or the baseball cap you buy.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Erik Young: So is that something like, if we use the plugin on the WordPress site for Shopify, would you be able to have each of those pages for each product look distinct?

Chris LaFay: Andrew, can you answer that question about having the different product pages be distinct? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, but Andrew's more on the Shopify tech side than me.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, you can. How many, like, what quantity of products are you talking about?

Erik Young: If you go to Gordy's store, if you're able to pull that up, if you hit join the virtual 5k, the 2026 virtual 5k, that's again, that's our hero product for the Shopify side of things. And we have a lot to explain on there. It's not just as simple as buying, like, a baseball cap.

Chris LaFay: So.

Erik Young: So there's that. And then we have a couple other products like Fall Natic Challenge and Tough Pumpkin that would be, quote, unquote, unique products. And then we have our general merchandise, which are like T shirts, beanies, extra sweaters, all that. That can kind of be the same template. If you will.

Andrew Booth: Got it. Okay.

Erik Young: Yeah.

Andrew Booth: So I mean, you can quite literally at the product level, set a unique template for quite literally every single product if you wanted to. And then if you were running the products on Shopify, let's say, and not doing the plugin to WordPress, you'd have a unique template. You could use the Shopify customizer to drag and drop sections and, you know, lay that page out. I assume that your current Shopify store is On a Shopify 2.0 theme, is that. Yeah. Okay, so you're fully familiar with that then. So you can drag and drop it in the Simpleton. If you wanted the virtual 5k to be its own unique template, obviously. And then the other maybe generic products share a template that's easy to set up as well. It would just be like the virtual 5K template and then maybe the default product template. And then you can have different sections based that. The virtual 5k template. I see shirt size, quantity, and then if I scroll down the page, you can add on the race metal.

Erik Young: It looks like. Yeah, different. We have different. We have different additional race metals that you can add on.

Andrew Booth: Okay. All fanatic challenge or tough. Okay. Yep, got it. And then that's it. Correct. There's no other like E commerce pieces for that part.

Erik Young: And then, yeah, I mean if you go all the way down or just click like the sidebar and click Shop Merch, you can see we have a bunch of just random little merchandise items that are totally separate, that are viable. So I think my question was if we did the plugin on the WordPress site, how is that going to look on WordPress when they open up the virtual 5k page versus say a beanie? Yeah.

Andrew Booth: So same idea. I'm going to say something and if you don't understand what I'm saying, stop me. In WordPress, we can use shortcodes. Are you familiar with shortcodes?

Erik Young: No.

Andrew Booth: Okay, so part of the plugin is they've got a technical piece set up to where I'm going to call it like a text based identifier that you would use. That text based identifier you can drop in on any WordPress page. And, and what that does is, is tells Shopify either load an entire collection here or load a specific product here. If we loaded a specific product, we could on one page just load say the virtual 5K products and then style that WordPress page to look like whatever. So same idea as the Shopify site. But I would actually say in that.

Chris LaFay: Regards,.

Andrew Booth: I would probably favor going the Shopify route. For that. Just because your ability as a non technical person to edit and update that page is going to be a bit easier than if you use the plugin. I need to think through that a bit more. But just from the standpoint of you not being technical, I think I do lean more towards the Shopify route. Just because the editing of product templates and stuff will be easier for you. So you'll be able to manage that long term and not have to rely on us or a technical dev or some like that to like make silly.

Erik Young: Content updates that I, I follow all that. That makes sense. And that's kind of. That answered my question, I think. I mean, I know how to do like the. I, I did, I do all of our Shopify stuff myself. So I know how to, you know, clone templates and assign products to it, this and that. That's not an issue. So it. Would it be something if it. Now it sounds like we're just looking at having the WordPress site for the in person races and the Shopify site, which is how we are right now. But we could, you guys could help make it so they look the same overall, right?

Andrew Booth: We could, but actually, let's step back a second real quick. So the WordPress website is gordonyspumpkinrun.com and the reason why you really have that is to have the signup forms correct.

Erik Young: It's purely informational. When they click sign up, it takes them to run signup.com, which is basically like the ticket master for endurance events.

Andrew Booth: Got it. Okay.

Erik Young: So.

Andrew Booth: Looking at your domain authority scores. So Gordy's function, run.com has a.

Erik Young: What was it?

Andrew Booth: Give me just a second. I had it up and changed it. While I'm pulling this up, I'm going to say that Gordy's store has an authority score of 7, which is very, very bad. Gordyspumpkinrad.com has 33 though. So that's actually a good number. So it's 1 to 100. The higher the number, the better. The reason I bring this up is if you were to do away with Gordystore.com, you really don't lose anything because there's not much value there as it stands today. So if you were able to consolidate everything under Gordy's pumpkin run.com that would be better from an SEO standpoint as well as just having consolidated domain name, SEO, SEM, all that kind of stuff, it would be better. You wouldn't really lose anything because the other one only has a, a rank of seven, which is very low. Your registration forms technically are on a subdomain of Gordy's Pumpkin Run. Anyways, so those wouldn't be Shopify, but you could run the Shopify store there and then just have those subdomains be Go Run or Run run.

Erik Young: Was it Go run run sign up,.

Andrew Booth: Run sign up live on Run, sign up as subdomains and. And then if you did that gordyspumpkin run.com would be Shopify, it would be E Commerce. You could run the content piece there. Since you're very familiar with updating templates and content with the 2.0 theme customizer, you wouldn't have any trouble there. All the content pages, I mean, we could build out several versions of those so that you get like different preset layouts that you could just apply templates to. And then, you know, if you want to make a small change to a specific page, you could duplicate that out and then make that change just for that page by signing that template. And then, I mean, unless you're stuck on WordPress, I at the moment don't see a reason that you need to keep it.

Erik Young: Honestly, no, I'm not stuck on. I'm not stuck on WordPress. I thought my vision with this being non technical is that we could do it all on Shopify, but again it's like we're like the signup part is not taking place on Shopify, it's taking place on Run Signup. So just outbound while still using those subdomains.

Andrew Booth: Correct? Yep. Yeah. And then I think from a content management standpoint, it would be a little bit easier for you to manage if products, content pages, all that stuff was unified into a single place. And on a platform you're already familiar with, there's plenty of like big brands out there that quite literally just use Shopify for content, like brochure type websites and don't actually use the E commerce piece of Shopify at all. Which sounds crazy to say because it's an E Commerce cms, but there are a lot of brands out, like big brands that do that.

Erik Young: Yeah, we used it in a pinch for one of our side projects two years ago just to build out a page and get some. Literally do what we needed to do and it, it worked. So it's like, all right. And then I was with very minimal like, you know, a day spent of me just trying to make this, it looked halfway good. So I'm sure if we put some time and care into, it could look really, really good.

Andrew Booth: Yep, definitely. And what does Your fulfillment look like for your merchandise?

Erik Young: Is it self fulfilled as far as like who's. Who's like 3 PL versus self?

Andrew Booth: Yep, we do it.

Erik Young: We have. We have a small team that we hire every fall to. To knock it out.

Andrew Booth: Okay, cool. Fulfill within Shopify or do I use like a third party? Like Shift Station?

Erik Young: Yep, within Shopify.

Andrew Booth: Okay. Yeah. I mean based on everything I'm hearing right now, my, my gut's saying you don't need WordPress. It's overhead that doesn't carry a lot of value. And then you don't have to worry about two different domain names looking the same. It's all the same template. If it's on one you get better authority and SEO by consolidating your run. Signups don't matter because that's a different platform. Sub domains. Yeah, I don't see any downside and it would be cheaper.

Chris LaFay: Andrew, roughly how. What is the. If we had all the branding assets from a branding company, based on what you're seeing, what do you think the timeline of the build would be based on a site this size?

Erik Young: Yeah.

Andrew Booth: So let's see. I mean a lot of these high.

Erik Young: Level.

Andrew Booth: Top menu items go to the run sign up on the. Well hang on, let me get out of this. I got trapped into Indiana. Indianapolis.

Chris LaFay: Here we go.

Andrew Booth: So dates about that's content. Yeah, very straightforward. Virtual run goes to the other site which would just be Shopify products. FAQ content page with an accordion. Not a big deal.

Chris LaFay: Media.

Andrew Booth: Blog posts with different categories.

Chris LaFay: Yep.

Andrew Booth: Not a big deal. Merchandise would just be collection pages on Shopify. So not a big deal there either. Sponsor is a content page with a contact form, bunch of different sections. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: I mean.

Andrew Booth: It's not a big site. It's really not. I would peg it to be like equivalent to like eon laser what we just did.

Chris LaFay: Okay, cool. So about two months give or take.

Andrew Booth: Okay.

Erik Young: That's okay. I mean we're obviously looking at for launch for in January is our time frame.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Erik Young: Because obviously we didn't expect to have this done this year.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So like it branding takes a couple of months and then building it out will take a couple of months. The site that he referenced was a little bit less on the design side of things. It was more of a quick turn build. But in terms of the same size, it's about the same. So that site took about a month and a half, give or take. So probably now that I'm actually speaking this out loud and thinking about it's probably about a two and a Half or three month project with added design time because that, that project didn't have that aspect to it. So. Okay, that all sounds good. I'll chat back. And we definitely actually hold on one second, Andrew. I know you have a meeting at noon. I'll let you go ahead and hop. I do have a couple of extra minutes, Eric though, so I'll see if I can answer your questions.

Andrew Booth: Okay, cool.

Erik Young: Thank you, Andrew.

Chris LaFay: Thanks Andrew.

Andrew Booth: Nice to meet you.

Erik Young: Yep, nice meeting you. So like we definitely want to, there are certain pages that we want to make sure that we are really designed out well. Besides just like the content itself, we need like certain pages to just really pop and you know, really look like awesome. So that's something that I'm not sure like when we talk about that. Is that something that you would, we would have like to like the branding agency help with or is that something where you guys get the stuff from the branding agency and kind of figure out how to make it look really good?

Chris LaFay: So we're actually. So the agency that I'm going to get you in touch with, Tree Bird, this is what we typically do is they run their, their actual branding workshops. That's kind of like a one set and done thing. But then they also do some animation packages as well to where they'll work with you for a couple of months on designing out some custom animations and things like that that we would then take and absorb. And so the way that this would actually probably work is that you would work with them for a little while on just like the core branding pieces. Like this is your style guide, this is your brand packet, this is what it is. And then there would probably be another couple months of work added onto that where you would work with them. We would all kind of work in tandem at that point of like, what does the website need, what is the purpose of these particular pages and what types of animations would be helpful here. So we can do a lot of the design and build with just their brand, a brand packet. But if you're like, hey, I wanted these couple things to really pop, those would be the part that we could actually kind of overlap on. We could start the primary build process, all the main building blocks, the whole nine yards that lines up kind of, you know, in alignment with that brand. But then those pop elements of those custom animations and things, they would build it, we would talk with them about it, we would talk with you about it and kind of work as kind of a kind of like a three headed monster. There's a More positive metaphor in there somewhere together on what that looks like. So that you know, the 80% of your site that doesn't need that special touch. Meaning, like, you know, the standard building blocks with heroes and buttons and all that kind of fun stuff that all doesn't get stopped by a couple of really good animations. And then we work together on what those other pieces need to be, and then we launch the site. So it basically would be them first, and then we would start the building, plus then the conversations on custom stuff would happen. We would then do that in tandem, and then we would come together and then we would finish everything out.

Erik Young: Makes total sense.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. Fantastic.

Erik Young: Cool. And then one final quick question for you, and I'll let you go as far as, like, ongoing maintenance of the site. I'm assuming this would be a custom theme within Shopify. I want it to remain, you know, kept up fast, no issues. All that. Is that something that you guys offer in house?

Chris LaFay: Yeah. So what we typically do, we have retainers for Shopify work starting at around 1500amonth. And those are for people that are typically looking to, like, do something with their website. What we tend to find works out. If you're doing simple, like, maintenance and smaller things, that number is fine. We typically meet with you about once a month, get a task list, and we knock out a handful of things over the course of the month. If you're actively wanting to build out functionality and things like that and kind of be more like, hey, we need to meet up every couple of weeks. We got ideas, we got plans. Let's think about some new layouts every so often. Let's add some blocks to the library on a regular basis. We're typically seeing somewhere around the 4,500 to $6,000 a month for that. More like consistent moving. And we typically hop in slack with you at that point so that you can toss stuff in. We get a project manager involved, we do all the triage stuff, et cetera, et cetera. So. And Andrew is the one that leads all of this, by the way, so you will. He will be a major. I'm a big proponent of you meet the people that you work with on a regular basis. Andrew is the one that spearheads all the Shopify stuff. Now, he is not a designer per se, so he won't be in, like, the design discussions, but when it starts to getting into, like, core functionality, connecting into Shopify, like, he is the guy. He's also an entrepreneur, which is one of the reasons I like working with him. So he Understands the business decisions behind things and asks good questions when it comes to that stuff. So that's, that's kind of the plan. So the only person you haven't really met is our project manager, Dawn. She's been with me for a decade. She'll be the one keeping everything on the rails. All these creative folks just in alignment and trudging forward.

Erik Young: So that makes sense. Awesome.

Chris LaFay: Yep. All that work for you. Any other questions?

Erik Young: Yeah, no, I think a. I'd like to hear if you put me in touch with the branding agency and then also obviously let me know like what you know, you know, two months build like what you guys think price wise. But yeah, this all sounds great.

Chris LaFay: In general. We quoted out something very similar that similarly with this, with our branding partner jc our side of things is probably going to land somewhere between 45 and 60 grand for the initial build old and that's taking all of her stuff and things like that. I don't know her pricing as well as I should and so I won't speak for her on that even to give you a range of it. And that process, our process will probably take given like some of the custom animation and some of the more like custom touch points. We're probably going to lean closer to the three month timeline for that. If you, if we were going to just kind of build out kind of like 12 core building blocks. Really no an like no crazy custom animations, no like high touch pages, that price point would probably lean a little bit closer to the 25k mark in probably two months. But with that additional piece we're probably looking at closer to 45ish in three months.

Erik Young: Makes sense.

Chris LaFay: That's just verbal quotes. That's typically what I do to start off with things. I also, I also know that people just like they want to know numbers, they want to know timeline and so I'm like been doing this for 20 years. I can give you a ballpark on the phone.

Erik Young: So yeah, that's good. And we have the timeline for AS on our side. We will run with our current setup for this year and then we launch in January every year. So as long as you're good to.

Chris LaFay: Go by January, we're set Our goal with January launches. Our plan to kind of give you an idea we try to not do. We don't schedule launches between December 15th and January 15th. And the reason why is if you schedule on December 15th, something happens and it gets bumped to Christmas. And if you do it before January 15th, there's the like I need you to work on January 1st. I need you to work like we have to get stuff done, but if you do it past January 15th, you can pretty much come back January 2nd, 3rd, 4th, whatever the date is, and have a few weeks to wrap up those loose ends. So will either plan to launch before Christmas or after the new year.

Erik Young: Cool.

Chris LaFay: So that's all good?

Erik Young: Yeah, Sounds totally good to me.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic. Well, what I'll do is I'll share a lot of this conversation with J.C. lund. I'll get in touch with her either today or tomorrow. I'll give her. I'm going to call her and if she's available, I'll chat with her and talk to her about it. I'll probably also share this recording with her as well too, so that she can kind of hear some of the thought process behind things and then let you schedule a chat with her. And if all the vibes feel good. I hate that I just said that word, but I did. Then we can get stuff rolling. So, and we'll. And if you decide to kind of go with this kind of paired like partner route with them doing branding, us doing web, we'll go ahead and get kind of all the paperwork stuff done in a one fell swoop. We'll just have our scheduled for whenever her piece is going to end. And if that all works, we will probably. I will probably attend a couple of the branding meetings just to kind of hear your thought processes and as you process through things, just because that'll help get us rolling a lot faster once they get done with their stuff. Hearing some of that from you guys directly will allow us to basically be like, okay, cool, we're gonna grab the baton and we're just gonna go ahead and go.

Erik Young: So that makes sense.

Chris LaFay: Awesome, man. Well, thanks for reaching out today. I appreciate it. Thanks for spending a little extra time with me. And once I get in touch with jc, I will. By the way, JC is a woman. Her name looks like Jackie. It is jc So I will remember that she doesn't get offended by it. But I also mean me as a person. When I look at a person's name and I'm like, I don't know how to say that. It bothers me. And so I figured I'd at least give you that $0.02.

Erik Young: So good to know. All right, thanks, Chris. I appreciate it.

Chris LaFay: Have a good rest of the day and you'll hear from me via email either later today or tomorrow, just depending on what I can get a phone call with jc.

Erik Young: All right, see you.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. Take care.