Mike Martin and Chris LaFay meeting

Meeting: Mike Martin and Chris LaFay meeting - https://meet.google.com/nby-oicp-tsd

Date: 2026-07-13 3:30 PM ET | **Duration:** 32 min

Attendees: Chris LaFay (Classic City), Mike Martin (fractional CMO, TechCXO), Andrew Booth (Classic City)

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Chris LaFay: Good afternoon.

Mike Martin: Hey Chris, how are you?

Chris LaFay: I am doing well. Let me just switch my headphones here really quick. Push the right buttons. There we go.

Mike Martin: My, my son would love your background. He's a big guitarist.

Chris LaFay: Hey, there you go. That's what I'm talking about. I, I play a little guitar, play a little piano, little drums, a little bass, a little bit of everything. So you know like, you know, was it. Shoot. Master of none. Generic society. There's anyway that, that's me music form.

Mike Martin: So my, my son is 15 and he loves a lot of the classiccity music I love. But he and some buddies went to Santana the other night, which is so funny. And a couple of them are great guitarists. But it's like a couple 15 year olds and a 16 year old with a bunch of 60 year olds. You know, it's funny. And they're at Ameris bank, you know, amphitheater. But I love that he goes to those shows.

Chris LaFay: That's, that's amazing. I will go and hear good musicians of pretty much any genre. In general. I don't really do a lot of like rap and heavy metal. That's kind of outside my level of interest. But outside of basically that I will, I will go. Especially a concert that has like actual honest to God seating.

Mike Martin: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Because even though I'm young, I cannot stand. I can't stand still. I can walk all day. I just can't stand in one spot for multiple hours. It crushes me.

Mike Martin: Yeah. So yeah, I hear you. Nice to meet you too, buddy.

Chris LaFay: How's it going?

Andrew Booth: Mike. Nice to meet you.

Mike Martin: It's going great.

Chris LaFay: Well, I definitely tossed Andrew into just one more meeting today because I think he is at 7 at the moment.

Mike Martin: So half day, huh? Andrew.

Andrew Booth: Monday.

Chris LaFay: Andrew. But. Such is life. But I did want to get us all together. I saw your link, told David, saw your LinkedIn post and then hit me up about it. And David tells me that y' all know each other. Haven't had a chance to chat with him a ton.

Mike Martin: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: But figured we could get together for a few minutes here. I do have a hard stop at 4.

Mike Martin: No worries. I can go fast and tell you a little bit of the context of what we need.

Chris LaFay: There we go. That all sounds good. So I'll get us started. My name's Chris. I've been in the web design development arena since elementary school. Literally. I don't know anything else. I've been self employed that entire time. The one and only job that I had was working at a company in Tucker with Andrew actually. So I. I wrangled Andrew up very early on and we've been working together on stuff for 20 years now. So.

Mike Martin: Small, small world. I went to Tucker High School.

Chris LaFay: Hey, there you go.

Andrew Booth: Nice.

Chris LaFay: What side of, what side of Georgia do you actually live in? Atlanta is generic. I know.

Mike Martin: Well, I grew up in Decatur, then moved to Stone Mountain for high school, went to Tucker and now I live in Dunwoody.

Chris LaFay: Okay, nice. Awesome. I live in. I live in Snowville, Andrewsville, east of Marietta, west of Marietta. So we do a lot of WordPress and Shopify. Andrew is my Shopify guy and we basically just. I grew an agency for a while, had about six or seven people. Realized I don't like managing people. I like working with my four or five people who just get crap done. And that's. We call it an agency called a studio. Whatever it is, I don't know what it is, that's fine. But that's me. I'm gonna shut up. Andrew, I'll let you introduce yourself too.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, I'm Andrew, software engineer, 20 something years. Been in web the entire time. Tons of experience in e commerce. Owned my own brand for the last, what is it, 20, 26. Last 14 years. Worked with small companies, nonprofits. I've done government work, I've done Fortune 500s. Tons of experience.

Mike Martin: Yeah.

Andrew Booth: Web, love tech, love building things. So.

Mike Martin: Yeah, that's. That's awesome.

Andrew Booth: Grew up in Snow Mountain. I actually went to Shiloh High School. I was on the Gwinnett county side of Stone Mountain.

Mike Martin: Oh yeah? Yep.

Andrew Booth: But very familiar with the area.

Mike Martin: Oh yeah, that's so funny. It is such a small world. My mother in law still lives in Tucker, but she lives over kind of near the high school off of Shamba Tucker Road. So we're still over there pretty frequently.

Chris LaFay: Nice.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, my parents still live in Still Mountain as well.

Mike Martin: That's cool. And I love what downtown Tucker has. Has done, you know, with some of the restaurants and bars and, you know, really updating the little town.

Andrew Booth: It's changed so much. I mean it. For the longest time it was like Matthew's Cafeteria and nothing else.

Mike Martin: And I went to school with the Green family who run that. You know, we still go to Matthews occasionally, have some good food.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, it's been. Been there forever.

Mike Martin: Yes, it is. Well, I really do appreciate David and also Ashley Shepard, who I just love really.

Chris LaFay: I met her about a year or so ago. I do coffee meetups with folks and so I kind of put out a call to random like, you know, the ether and be like I'm gonna be at this coffee shop. You want to go hang out? And Ashley was like, that sounds like fun. So I met her last year, and she's been to a couple of my hangouts that I host. David Feldman has been my. One of my really good friends for years and years and years and years. We kind of grow our agencies side by side, each other and kind of, you know.

Mike Martin: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Work out stuff together and helped each other, you know, helped you to grow over the time and, you know, be a good sounding board for one another. So David's. David's great.

Mike Martin: Anyway, David and I shared a client, a restaurant group called Gusto, and that's where we. We overlapped and. And met. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Remember as Gusto days. Yep.

Mike Martin: I am a fractional cmo. I work out of a company here in Atlanta called Tech CxO. We have 125 partners across five different disciplines. So I'm the revenue growth team. And so we have actual CMOs, CROs, customer success. So we're almost like a big law firm where we're all partners, but we're all responsible for building our own book of business. Y and I started doing this about three years ago. I. I am dangerous in the software space too, but I'm no developer. I help grow a software development company called Code Smith that my partner had started. He was a. Joey Harris, was a developer for 10 years. Very smart guy.

Chris LaFay: That name sounds so familiar to me.

Andrew Booth: That sounds so familiar to me too.

Mike Martin: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, we're both over here, like, on LinkedIn, being like, I think I've heard of this before.

Mike Martin: Yeah. Well, we sold that in 2023. And what we did was we. We built products and. And my team took them to market. And after we. We both exited that, we went different directions and I started doing practical CMO work. I'm very different than most CMOs because I came from the creative side of the agency world before I. I was not nor. And had an agency too. So I know what that journey is like. I wasn't planning on focusing on hospitality as one of my main birds. I've done so much work in the food space that it kind of naturally happened. So I've worked with a number of different restaurant groups, and what I typically do for them is come and do an assessment. There's. I mean, no one hires a fractional executive when everything is going great. Right. There's some problem to solve, and it's usually a leadership problem. It's a team structure problem. It's a tech stack problem. And so I Come in, spend time, help reconfigure the team, bringing outside resources, sometimes run agency searches, but go to market strategies in place for them and then often hire and train a person to take my playbook and then I step out. Sometimes that can be done in months, sometimes it can be a year plus us. Yeah. So that's, that's the kind of work that I do. So the specific client you'll, you'll both know this one, I appreciate it. That I'm looking for a resource for is the varsity. So. The varsity. Yeah, the varsity. I mean anyone from Atlant obviously knows the brand. What, what's, you know, especially fascinating about the brand. So it's still family owned and operated, third generation, all 98 years old and they've never had a marketing team. Never. Not one person.

Chris LaFay: Wait, wait, not one, They've never had a single marketing person.

Mike Martin: They have had an internal family member that did some social media but didn't really know marketing. So on one hand that just tells you like the power of the brand experience, dude. The other side goes, gosh, think about what they could do with, with a revenue engine, you know, good. So.

Chris LaFay: Right, that's interesting.

Mike Martin: But the company is now run by the husband of third generation owner of the Gordy family. So his name is John Brown and he's CEO and president. John is nice guy but very operations focused. So when I came in, I built a hybrid team and I told them I needed to hire a marketing director at some point. Well, we ended up hiring our project manager and she became the director of marketing. And she's very nice. She's still a little young, but I think she was a good choice. Now there are a lot of things about the brand as you would probably suspect, they're not technically savvy. Shock. Yeah. They're very slow to adopt out of modern marketing. And one of the challenges working with them is their website is built on Shopify because of the merchandise and they sell a lot of merchandise out of the North Avenue. So that's, that's the logic. But there's a lot of other things, you know, your market site should be doing for you and there's some limitations of, of Shopify, but for now we are rolling with it. And then down the road I think it will be appropriate to redo this site in its entirety.

Chris LaFay: So can I pause you really quick there for a second? So I know, so within the restaurant space, I know there's, there's a lot of different. Well, I'm going to simply call them like tech Stack parts and pieces. I also know that, you know, the larger restaurant is, the more parts and pieces that it has. So I'm curious. And if I cut you off too early and you're about to get here, I apologize about this. No, in terms of the Shopify side of things, I haven't done a full, like, haven't clicked on my magic buttons that tell me all the technical stuff yet. Are we specifically talking about the merchandise only site? Are they wanting to keep everything with ordering, marketing site, the whole nine yards within Shopify?

Mike Martin: Yeah. So for now, it's going to live in Shopify. But I want to make sure I clarify when. When I say, or when you say ordering. There are different kinds of ordering. And, you know, we can dig deeper into this at some point, but they have changed some of their other tools. They. Their new POS system is toast, which is a huge improvement from where they've been. They do not have any third party delivery. They do not have any takeout ability. They don't have a loyalty app, which is something we're, you know, talking about adding.

Chris LaFay: Yeah.

Mike Martin: So it is pretty basic.

Chris LaFay: Okay, got you. So they're in the process of. And I'm assuming that those other parts and pieces that you're talking about, first party ordering, loyalty, all of those parts that they're talking about, that's not going to be a part of the Shopify experience. That's going to be something separate. Is that correct?

Mike Martin: Yes, with. With an exception. And this is. Yeah, the.

Chris LaFay: And the reason why I say that is because I know David Feldman's business. I know.

Mike Martin: I do too. I know.

Chris LaFay: And so that. So I'm. I'm actually, I. I'm texting him right now because when you're saying these things, I'm like, yeah, fantastic. Okay. Because I. Because I was like, hey, he said it was the varsity. Mike says it's a varsity.

Mike Martin: That's great.

Chris LaFay: And he was like, oh, well, they're thinking about Veya. I was like, wait a minute. Everything Mike is saying right now is about other things that could also be Veya. And so I didn't know how closely you and David were tied together, and I wanted to make sure that we weren't about to, like, accidentally cross wires.

Mike Martin: No, no, you're not.

Chris LaFay: You're fantastic.

Mike Martin: Okay, now.

Andrew Booth: Go.

Mike Martin: That's fine. Let me, Let me mention one other partner. I brought in an agency called Circus, and I know the founder. They're a wonderful agency.

Chris LaFay: Paul Carpenter. Paul Carpenter is not the founder, but I know he just joined.

Mike Martin: He just joined I do too. I know Paul well and they're handing our paid media, very data savvy agency. There will be a time when you do need to transition not only the, you know, the background of the site, but also some of the tools. But for now, I mean, they are, you know, slow moving. So, you know, improvement is kind of baby steps.

Chris LaFay: Yep. Okay, so that'll, that'll make sense.

Mike Martin: Okay, so let me, let me introduce one other quick component of this. I convince them to get Go High Level as the first ever CRM tool. They had no capabilities for CRM, you know, no customer segmentation, no nothing. No email. I mean, just sending email from company accounts, you know, so I know so very, very old.

Chris LaFay: Okay.

Mike Martin: Yeah. So some of the improvements that are, are happening are very service specific. So as an example, you can go on the Varsity site and you can look at the large group page, which is an update. So I have a friend, she's also a friend of Ashley's who used to, she's worked for me full time twice and freelancers for me. She's a great UI UX designer. We, we built that page update in Figma and then we handed the Figma files over to our Go High Level team. Now this is important note the team that implemented Go High Level for us. Two very young brothers down in Florida, very nice guys. We didn't intend for them to be a resource for website improvements, but they raised their hand, said, hey, our background is web development. We can help with this stuff too. And we said, oh great. Have they helped? Yes. Is it a slow, painful process of missed deadlines? Yes. And it has nothing to do personally, but I have brought in some new Go High Level resources ironically out of Tucker. Yeah. Or Kaylee. And we are not going to try to merge those skills together. We want two distinct. Yeah. Vendors who are working in close collaboration. But I don't need my Go High Level support to also be my web support.

Chris LaFay: Very different people. Now if your website was built in Go High Level, that's a different story. But I would pretty much never recommend people building their websites that would. Yeah, that's a very edge case. Okay. Yeah, got it.

Mike Martin: So we are in the process transitioning away from, from that Go High Level vendor and moving to the new ones and talk. But also, you know, the, the other gap in your field was, was this one. Haley needs a web developer partner and you know, are there a thousand things we could do to the site? Yes. You know, have they committed a massive budget to those changes? They have not. So this is Going to be kind of a. A project by project, but ongoing work. There's no shortage of updates to the site and then what could become. And again I'm not trying to vang that this is not true, but it is factual that at some point the whole site is going to need to be updated. And so I would love for her to have a trusted partner that when the time comes to start doing the planning on migrating the site and integrating some toasts and high level and other tools into that, I would love for her to have some good folks out.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, no, that all sounds fantastic. No issues with that at all. So kind of in summary. Yeah, what, what I'm hearing is the sites in Shopify now obviously there are going to be some page updates, UX updates, things like that to the current site as it stands now. And those need to be updated, relatively speaking in a timely fashion without being ghosted. That's kind of the bar is not ghosting people here at the end of the day, hopefully go a little farther above the bar than that and be able to knock those out. Be able to provide feedback on those as well too because not all. Yeah, there's some things within designs we're like oh hey the theme supports X but you designed Y. Do we really want to invest X more development hours to make the button purple instead of. That's, you know, that's a stupid example. And so.

Mike Martin: Yeah, well now one other, one other request I'd like to, to make. So Lisa UI UX designer we mentioned she is supremely talented. She builds, you know, really the most thorough UI toolkit. So developers love her and she worked for me at Codesmith too. So all our development team loved what she did. Now she has not done comprehensive site redesign but the pages she has designed are very thoughtful but they're built as modules. And what I would love is for Kaylee not have to reinvent the wheel every time we need a new page. What I'd love is to add have modules where we can repurpose them and even some that we build and may not activate immediately. So there needs to be some consistency. And she's also, she being Lisa is working right now on a brand new set of of guidelines that did not exist before. And so this will help anyone that touches the brand moving forward from design, writing, positioning, everything.

Chris LaFay: In terms of like block composition. This is where I'm going to get out of my technical depths a little bit because I don't know. So Andrew, what are the. I know there are some things within Shopify or different versions that allow liquid modular support. But I don't know what those are though.

Andrew Booth: It's. It really comes down to the theme. Is the theme newer? Older? Which is older? It's older. Is it. Do you know if it's Shopify 1.0?

Mike Martin: I don't know what it is honestly.

Andrew Booth: So that's the biggest like hold up as to like what is really doable is, is the theme Shopify 10 or is it 2. 0 Or higher? Because that's like the big split with themes. Because pre 2, pre 2.0 you had the block editor but you were limited in where you could place place blocks on pages and like depth levels and things like that. If it's 2 or higher it's I don't want to say a like free game but like you can pretty much do anything you can do with most cms as far as blocks go. So that's the deciding factor. 10 Versus 2 0. If it's 10 there is a world and we've, we've done this for other clients. Magic Spoon's probably the biggest example off top of my head. The serial company where they have an old one oh theme but they needed to upgrade to do 2.0 block stuff. We actually upgraded just bits and pieces of the theme. So it's still technically a 1.0theme but the high conversion pages are all 2.0. So their team has full block control. So that is a world that we could go with as well.

Mike Martin: I have Shopify credentials. I can go find out and get back to you and let you know. But the reason I bring that up is I don't want to make this overly cumbersome on Kaylee, the director of marketing where every page update becomes a blank canvas, brand new, you know, project where we don't repurpose a lot of the design that we've already made on other pages, even if it's somewhat unrelated content.

Chris LaFay: Yeah. And that's where we would then have to think if, if it is a 1. 0 Theme, if that's the longer term goal, then moving to 2.0 would. We would be one of the first things that we probably would want to tackle in some way, shape or form. Whether we decide to do it partially like we do with Magic Spoon or do an overhaul of it so that your team can do. Because just with 1.0 it's just there's so much stuff that's done within code and they just didn't have the tech stack back then to handle kind of, you know, the normal CMSE type of stuff. So that would, that's going to definitely be a gap that we'll want to figure out sooner rather than later so that we can give you the best guidance on it.

Mike Martin: Okay, I, I can. Like I said, I'll, I'll figure out where to go. Pull the current status of their, their Shopify site and I'll send that to you guys.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic. Is there anything that you could send us so that we could get a general idea of what's coming down the pipe so that we can give you as much of a kind of ballpark or a heads up as possible on things?

Mike Martin: Yeah, absolutely. And I can rattle a couple things off to you that I know are coming down the pipeline because I rent the strategy. One of them is we have a limitation with customer segmentation because all the contact forms or the ability to contact them is very outdated. And so we are creating Go High level forms that are going to be embedded on the site. Each one is unique to the type of customer they are. So every time, whether you're a catering customer or a merchandise customer or whatever type of customer you are, we want to pipe that directly into Go High level. But also make sure we alert the right individual when that form is submitted. So I have a very detailed strategy for that. That is one of the number one things for the new Go High Level team. But they'll probably be some work with the web team. The next one after that is location page updates and I have written the whole strategy for that. And we have not like wireframe that up yet but we do have the plan for that. And then on the heels of that, number three would be catering. Catering experiences. Really bad. And they do a ton of catering.

Chris LaFay: I have no doubt about that. Yeah, yeah.

Mike Martin: And I'm glad I we brought this up. They have a custom built catering management tool and it is I have never even laid eyes on is incredibly problematic. The development team who built that has got problems. I don't touch it quite honestly. Their IT guy does. He's kind of an old school Microsoft guy. You know what, I don't know if it's that or not. I wouldn't be surprised if it is. But that is going to go away and they're likely going to migrate over to Toast catering tool. Oh okay. But we had never promoted catering before and I'm like John, I'm like John, can you even begin to imagine. And I've done the same strategy with other clients and it's been a huge source of revenue. So this is one of those situations. Where it's. The fear is not, it's not that it won't work. The fear is that they're maxed out on the number of trucks, the number of jobs they can currently take. Each truck cost $250,000. So it's not a small investment when you know, when you add another truck to the mix.

Chris LaFay: Yep.

Andrew Booth: Man.

Chris LaFay: Interesting. I mean catering is where, I don't know, I'm not in the weeds of restaurant world, but everything that I know, catering is where the money is at at the end of the day. And so you can turn that nozzle on even more.

Mike Martin: Yeah, well that's what I completely focused on with gusto. Really grew their catering so much and that allowed us to have the money to then focus on some other initiatives. So yeah, all right, so those are just three examples of things we want to do. But what next steps in my mind are. Number one, I need to know what a rate do you guys just have like a rate that you charge for this type of work for Andrew's. Andrew's time. Like how would that work?

Chris LaFay: So basically what we do is there's two different, there's two routes that we can go. One is we can do project basis and we would basically take all of the stuff put into a project, assign a flat hourly rate to it and then have an out of scope rate as well too. And then time box it so that, that's option A. Option B is we do quarterly retainers. And so based on the amount of hours we have, you know that we have bucketed, that rate goes from 180 an hour down to about 160 an hour on the higher, on the higher end number of hours. We also have a project if we go the retainer route, we have a project manager in our team that will basically just be in slack as well just to make sure that when stuff pops in that it gets organized according appropriately. And so that's really, is basically the whole crew is basically me, Andrew, my project manager and a designer. So we keep it lean and simple.

Mike Martin: What we had allocated in the budget currently was 20 hours a month of dev work. But that often exceeds 20 when we have a project that just is a little bit heavier. So what we had anticipated is go ahead and let know, commit to a monthly end. There's no shortage of things to do. Understanding there's times where we're going to have to say hey, we're, we're next going to tackle this thing and we know it's going to exceed 20. So let's figure out what that looks like.

Chris LaFay: No, and that's. That's actually the way we. We would rather do it as well. I would rather, from a business. Like a pure business perspective, have the minimum viable stuff coming in so that my budgeting is all pretty solid. And then if we go above and beyond.

Mike Martin: Yeah, great.

Chris LaFay: That's fine.

Mike Martin: I would look the same thing in your shoes.

Chris LaFay: Well, yeah, I just. Because then if you go too high, then you're, like, scraping and clawing to, like, try to find things to do. And I. I hate. I hate that. It drives me nuts. And so our lower. On the. The lower quantity of our side does fall at 20. And so 180 times 20 is whatever that number happens to be. Mental math is tough.

Mike Martin: Yeah.

Chris LaFay: So 3600. That rolls in about. That rolls in about one meeting per month to do strategy. And then we're in Slack as well. And so when we can tack in whoever you want to in Slack with. That.

Mike Martin: Does use Slack. Yeah.

Chris LaFay: Fantastic. Our agreements are all technically annual just because I hate paperwork, but they renew quarterly. And so if you don't. If you want to go up or down in a quarter at the end of a quarter, you can do that. You can also zero out at the end of a quarter. So that makes us do paperwork once a year. But you're not on the hook for 12 months either.

Mike Martin: Okay.

Chris LaFay: We just have an hourly rate attached to it that if we're like, hey, we're about to hit our cap, you know, the hourly rate. This thing will take an extra 10 hours. We also, if we need to attack in a designer into something too, we can do that. I know you have a lot of that covered, but if you needed something done, we could do that. So.

Mike Martin: Okay. Excellent.

Chris LaFay: Easy.

Mike Martin: I will share these call notes with you if you want them. I'd have Gemini turned on, but I will give Kaylee an update on this conversation and then reach out and make an intro to her. And then we could schedule a call where you guys get to meet her and we could, you know, talk a little bit more. But I'll relay all of this to her. I just told her I was going to do the legwork on finding some options, and. And then, you know, but she needs to feel comfortable with the team. Because it's her team.

Chris LaFay: Yeah, exactly. And my schedule is typically harder to work around than Andrews. I always like to be a part of the first ones because that is. But Shopify is not my bread and butter. So whenever that second call comes up, I'll probably have Andrew actually take the lead on a lot of that just because that's you're gonna be talking to anyway most of the time. So. We also have another Shopify dev on our team. His name is Samson. I forgot to mention him. And so Andrew and Samson kind of tag team some stuff together, so.

Mike Martin: All right, well, this sounds great. Yeah. Well, it's really good to meet both you guys and I appreciate the introduction.

Chris LaFay: Likewise. By the way, Mike, I. We. We have never met before, but I'm actually hosting a lunch for some marketing folks around Atlanta in a few weeks. Do you enjoy hanging out with other fractionals and agency type people?

Mike Martin: Yeah, send me a. Send me information about it.

Chris LaFay: Awesome. I'll shoot you a link. That sounds good.

Andrew Booth: Awesome.

Mike Martin: Have a great meeting, you both.

Chris LaFay: Take care.

Andrew Booth: Yeah, see you. Might.

Chris LaFay: Bye.