Mastering the New Rules of Digital Marketing with Mickey Mellen & Chris LaFay

In this episode of Digital Footprint, Richard Simms talks with industry experts Mickey Mellen & Chris LaFay to learn how business leaders can stay competitive as the digital marketing landscape keeps evolving.

With AI-powered tools changing how people search for and consume information, traditional marketing strategies, including SEO, are becoming less effective.

According to our guests, organizations who want to stay relevant, will need to rethink how they reach consumers and measure success, including, potentially embracing, dark social metrics.

Key takeaways to listen for:

• How to balance your marketing efforts between the fundamental and what's trending
• What marketing metrics matter now & how to redefine your KPIs
• Why focusing on relationships is still the #1 marketing strategy
• When to leverage pay-to-play on social media platforms
• Why you still need SEO

If your digital marketing strategy is struggling to see results:
Connect with Mickey Mellen, Technical Managing Partner at Green Mellen Media.

Need a marketing-optimized WordPress website?
Book a call with Chris Lafay, Founder at Classic  City Consulting.

Want to bring a SaaS product to market, quickly?
Book a consultation: https://tyrannosaurustech.com/contact/

Connect with our cohosts Richard Simms & Carlos Gonzalez on Linkedin

Transcript

Richard Simms: 0:03

Music. Welcome to the digital footprint, a podcast for leaders in healthcare, public health and education, who are looking to leverage technology to solve problems and make a big impact. In each episode, we interview innovators and entrepreneurs who are solving the most challenging problems facing these industries Join us as we begin to the colossal tasks involved in bringing a new digital product to life.

Mickey Mellen: 0:32

Welcome to the digital footprint.

Richard Simms: 0:39

Hello and welcome to the digital footprint presented by Tyrannosaurus tech, an award winning technology partner, bringing SaaS products to market quickly and helping clients solve their trickiest tech problems, including how to implement AI into their current offerings. I'm your host, Richard Sims today if you're a business owner or leader struggling to nail down a marketing strategy, you are not alone, knowing where to invest, what platforms and metrics matter now, how to meaningfully leverage AI within your business, whether to focus on the fundamentals or experiment with what's trending, it's enough to make your head spin right. Our guests today are here to help you keep your eyes on the prize and grow your business. Joining me today, he's the technical managing partner at Green melon, a digital marketing agency, helping organizations with strategy and technical execution. He's a serial entrepreneur, a web developer. He's worked with industry leaders like truist, the Georgia Historical Society. Many, many more. He's a speaker, blogger and community organizer, as well as the host of the stacking knowledge and the brighter web podcasts, which are awesome. Please welcome to the show. Mickey Mellon, hey, Richard,

Mickey Mellen: 1:55

glad to be here. Looking forward to this. Yeah, man, I

Richard Simms: 1:57

appreciate you coming on. So our next guest is the founder of classic city consulting a WordPress web design agency, helping mission driven organizations build websites that drive engagement and increase their bottom line. He is also a serial entrepreneur whose client portfolio includes IHG, Autozone and E hire, to name a few. He's a thought leader on LinkedIn and board member for Entrepreneurs Organization Atlanta. Please, welcome to the show. Chris lafay,

Chris LaFay: 2:28

thanks for having me today. I appreciate him. Really excited about this conversation.

Richard Simms: 2:32

Yeah, I've been really looking forward to this. Y'all are awesome. And you know, I've known Mickey for a long time because of something, yeah, cold outreach to him when Carlos and I were starting to reinsource Tech, and he has been very generous all along with advice along the way, and especially reconnecting recently, you know, on LinkedIn with both of you all. I love the stuff you all share. It's given me a lot of good insights and kind of good, fodder to rethink some of my perspective, so excited to unpack things on the show today. So first again, you're both working in marketing. I mentioned this kind of in the intro, and we struggle with this in web development, design too, right? Even when we're building out applications and choosing technologies. And so my question is like, what advice you have for leaders that are struggling with their marketing efforts, kind of in this dilemma of the fundamentals that are proven, you know have been in practice for years really work in terms of getting folks to your site, driving brand awareness, versus some of what's trendier, right? And I think there's a lot of shift there in marketing, in SEO, just as there is in tech across the board. So what are your thoughts there? How do you all balance those things with your engagements?

Chris LaFay: 3:54

So for me, what I do, and obviously I'm coming from the B to B consulting perspective of growing my own agency is just getting out and meeting people like, where there's this concept within the agency life of it's gonna, it's gonna be hard to grow exponentially, right? Actually, I think you had one of the matchstick guys on back earlier. I mean, later last year, he was talking about is not a game of multiplication, but a game of addition. And I wholeheartedly agree with that, and that's very much grassroots effort style. But when it comes to the consulting space, the more folks you know, the more you keep in touch, and the more you build relationships, although it is a slow burn, for lack of a better terminology there, that's what's going to drive a lot more business in the consulting space than doing your other traditional types of advertising. There, yeah, that

Richard Simms: 4:53

makes sense. Mickey, any thoughts there? Yeah,

Mickey Mellen: 4:56

I would go back to the question. First, you said leaders that are struggling with their marketing, we should unpack what struggling means, because it could mean two very different things. One would be, I'm struggling to get out there and do it. I'm struggling to post on LinkedIn enough. I'm struggling to do that, or I'm doing all this stuff and I'm struggling to see results. And they're two different kinds of things. I think the struggling often comes from like, a lack of passion for either one. If you don't like doing it, you're not going to do it as much. And so I think if you went toward the trending stuff, that's gonna be even worse. Like, you don't like posting on LinkedIn much, and now you're having to keep up with everything in the world, like you'll like it even less. So I would think, generally speaking, sticking with the basics and just being consistent would be great. But as we'll talk about, I'm sure later in the show, the basics have been the same for the last decade or so, and they're changing rapidly right now. So even defining the basics is a tricky thing. But I think consistency and just yeah, getting out there, being consistent is the best thing you can do to start, yeah,

Richard Simms: 5:45

yeah, for sure. And, you know, I am certainly not an SEO expert, but obviously, I know you want to be putting out content, you want to have backlinks like you want to be updating your website periodically. Obviously, there's the whole side of, you know, buying paid ads on these various platforms. So I guess in my mind, those are kind of the the gold standard, tried and true. But you referenced that shifting a bit. Mickey, can you expand on that a little bit like, how has that landscape changed, especially in the last couple years? Well,

Mickey Mellen: 6:18

I think the big one we'll get into is with AI, but I think it's how AI is impacting SEO and search engine optimization in a few different ways. Where, you know so many people on Google Now they do a search and Google gives them the answer, which is great for consumers, but people click through a lot less. Rand Fishkin just posted a study where of 100 of 100 people that go to Google, 36 now actually end up on the open web somewhere. So the vast majority of people that go to Google never even go to a website. They're go to a website, they either get the answers from google or Go to another Google property. And then you have people that are searching on social media or searching on AI tools using chatgpt to do their searches. And then you have all the AI stuff that's in the search results competing with yours. And so things like SEO, they used to be sure, let's create content and rank well. And Google is changing so fast that, and there's that one side. And then, of course, we can dig deeper into what it means for AI and all that. And I'm sure we will. That's kind of the big one. There is things like SEO that used to be pretty straightforward is rapidly getting more complex and kind of fading to a degree. I think the value in it is becoming a little bit less as attention shifts elsewhere. And I was

Chris LaFay: 7:17

actually going to reference that exact same article for this. And I was doing some some sample searches before we chatted today. And you have to get through sponsor the map pack. The people also ask section, the AI driven answer is the discussion informed sections, just to get to the first I'm going to call traditionally organic spot on Google. And so that definition of organic is very rapidly changing now, and you have to get above these other companies that are bigger fish than you are. And so as a small to medium sized business, do you want to invest that much time and effort and typically money into organic at this point in time when all of this is completely shifting, and sometimes the answer is yes to that, but I see a lot more folks leaning towards the more untrackable type of marketing, to where you're actually getting out there a Little bit more than spending time on the organic side, because it's just because of how fast it's changing at the moment.

Mickey Mellen: 8:27

Yep, it will say. And one thing we like to do to help with that, so we're both referencing something from Rand Fishkin that he put out. He's with Spark Toro, but his previous company is Moz, M, O, Z, and we use Moz for keyword research. One Piece it has when you do research is opportunity, as in, how high do the organic listing starts? We look at keywords and see how often do people search for them, and how competitive are they? But really, do the results even show up in the first couple pages before all the clutter that Chris mentioned? So that's something else to consider. But yeah, we're also kind of shifting a bit away from that toward more untrackable things. I mean, even things like tick tock. You know, if someone clicks through your site from tick tock, there's no referral code passing. You can't see that came from. You can't track where it came from. I look at it like we're on the Atlanta area, and we're reading a study saying when they build those express lanes on 75 when they were done, traffic was going to be set 20% worse than it was when they started. But if they hadn't done it, it was gonna be like 50% worse. And I think that's kind of where we are at SEO. If we help you through SEO, your organic traffic is only gonna drop 10 or 20% but if we don't help you, that's gonna drop 50% which is a tough sale to say, Hey, pay us all this money. And just that's only gonna drop, you know, 10 or 20% but I think that's about where we're getting these days. So, and I

Chris LaFay: 9:30

was thinking a lot about, like, what metrics do matter? And at the end of the day, if you are in a space where you're not, you don't have to be as concerned about direct ad spend, or direct SEO spend, focusing on all of the motions that you are doing to consistently be out in front of people, because a lot of that, like Mickey was saying, isn't trackable. The stuff on Tiktok isn't trackable. That gets passed around through Slack channels isn't necessarily trackable. And so tracking the efforts that you are doing and how that's impacting overall the bottom line, it forces more consistency across all of those mediums, whatever you decide to choose. And if you start only changing one variable at a time, you could then start seeing how that actually impacts revenue at the end of the day?

Richard Simms: 10:24

Yeah, yeah, very interesting. So one question I had coming to this conversation with you all is, and correct me if I'm wrong or you disagree, like I have this impression that these other platforms, you know, whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, that like, generally, it's been trending more towards kind of pay to play like, especially for businesses posting, they're not going to get much visibility unless they're engaging with ads. Like, are you seeing that trend? Do you think that's true? And then when for a business, does it really make sense to do paid ads versus double down on appearing more organically. So

Mickey Mellen: 11:03

I could hit the first part of that pretty good. We don't do a lot of paid ads, but for the organic part, I kind of agree and kind of disagree, because a trend that we're seeing more of is where it doesn't matter who you are and how many followers you have. Tiktok started that Instagram says they're going to it where Richard you joined today and you have three followers, but your video could still get 2 million views. You're not having to invest for the long term. And it doesn't matter how many followers you have, you know, Chris might have 10,000 followers, but if it's not good video, it's going to get shown to four people, you know, and vice versa. I think the pay to play applies a bit more in LinkedIn and some of those places, but I think the bigger struggle there is kind of back to the lack of attribution. Chris was talking about, that Rand has talked a good bit about, is all the social networks encourage you. They really want people to stay on their network. So External links are, you know, frowned upon, essentially, which I hate, because I still put them in there if they want to provide value, to sort my site, cite my sources, and that kind of thing. But statistically, if you don't have links in there, it's going to perform. So that's where, you know, the suggestion is, just be on social, let people see you on social, and don't try to link anywhere, you know, just get get seen more, because they want to keep you on there. So I don't, I don't like that either, and that's where I think the pay to play helps a bit more. Is if you want people to click on something, then yes, buy an ad, and that ad will show up based on how much you pay for versus any algorithm blocking you.

Chris LaFay: 12:15

And also on LinkedIn. I just saw this yesterday for the first time. I was on my mobile, scrolling through it, and they have finally released the whole like the real swipe through on the feed. It's like videos you may like. And so even in the organic space, if you want to keep up, if you don't have the ability to produce that type of content at a certain quality, whether that is the actual words that are being said or the production quality, potentially, then, as that shift is happening, especially on LinkedIn, you might be seeing some folks that don't have that time or the the money behind it to be able to rank as well, and like Mickey was saying, the follower count and Things like that may mean less and less, I 100% agree with that. I know somebody who has a 10th of the follower count that I have, and the vanity metrics that he has are just as good, if not better, than mine, and we're doing about the same type of thing. And so it's interesting to see some of those things at play, and how that will impact the organic reach in the long haul,

Richard Simms: 13:26

right? Okay, yeah, those are all very good insights. So you mentioned, you know, metrics. Chris, obviously like, I know the basics. You know, website visits, you know, conversions, time spent on the website. What kind of metrics are you all you know, advocating for, I suppose, with your customers and like, has that changed? Because, of course, as you mentioned, it's if anything, maybe gotten harder to track where people are coming from in a lot of instances.

Chris LaFay: 13:59

And a lot of our B to B clients that we work with on web, we're really shifting our primary calls to action to directly booking a call with that particular business leader as that being the key point, because a lot of the B to B companies that we work with, at the end of the day, a lot of them do consulting, and what they need is a phone call. And so while we're not the ones actively doing those marketing efforts to drive that traffic there, working on things like heat maps and looking at Google Analytics to see how we can better drive traffic to those booking a call segments that is the key and B to B. And so that also play as well when that particular leader is active organically on places like LinkedIn as well, because it's also easy to get, it's easier to get a conversion to book a call with that human through that more organic reach than it is to necessarily say you should go work with classic city and let them website. No, you want to talk to that leader. It's it's about the person, unless the company, yeah, and I have a

Mickey Mellen: 15:03

couple couple thoughts along the line, I agree with what he said there. So we have one client's an HVAC company, and they have a great CRM product that manages their email marketing all the way down to sales. And so we can track very clearly. We did an email campaign form a couple weeks and said, Hey, we send this email out, and you got $22,374 worth of orders, because we can track it exactly where it goes, but in most cases, we can't track that even with the right CRM, because buying cycles are longer and it gets trickier. My favorite example this year is the finance company we use to handle our books and stuff. I saw him speak at a conference years ago, and then later followed his blog, and then later followed his podcast, and looked at all that and said, Ali, we should hire this guy. He'd be pretty good. So we Googled for him, found his website, filled out the form and hired him. And if they look at metrics properly, say, oh, SEO got us this win because they Googled for us and found us. So our SEO is doing great, and they had nothing to do with it. So I think trusting the metrics less, or at least understanding them, especially for branded searches. You know, I searched for him by name, that means SEO didn't do it. They found somewhere else and did it. If I searched for a CPA firm. Yeah, SEO might have contributed, but you really want to get to that? Anyone really wants to have more branded searches where people know I'm searching for Toronto source tech, because I know they're the best, like, that's great that it showed up in Google that way for you, but they heard about you somewhere else. And where was that? It's probably like Chris said, it's probably dark social or other conversations that you can't really see what's happening, which is fantastic, but also very frustrating. But it is what it is. And just watch that bottom line.

Chris LaFay: 16:23

And I also know, like the we sent out like a monthly marketing email, which, honestly, I would like to improve, and over the last few months, we've had a handful of replies come back from that, where we've been able to put in proposals for web projects and things along those lines. However, I know the the people that did reach back out, I know their personalities. I know them in particular, and the content of that email that we sent did not matter to that human being one iota. But I know that those people are very active on LinkedIn. Now. They're not liking things and commenting on things and stuff that type, but I know that they spend their time there, and I know that the content that I've written for those particular people on LinkedIn has been a lot more valuable than the marketing emails that have gone out. So kind of along the lines of what Mickey said, even though the metrics would have said the email is what generated that that particular piece of revenue, it was merely just the straw that broke the camel's back at that point. Yeah, yeah.

Richard Simms: 17:24

I'm sure you all encounter this, and I think this is part of what you're alluding to, is just there's a huge spectrum between, you know, let's say, like, high cost consulting esque services, versus like, very transactional products, even, right? And, I mean, there are tools that I think fit into a lot of different spaces there, but generally, like, one of my frustrations, I suppose, is that a lot of it naturally trends more towards, like, transactional. You know, yes, someone sees an ad that you want to buy this thing or, like, yeah, now they're on the list. You send them a few follow ups, maybe they'll convert. And I think we all know it's like, overwhelmingly our business, it's long sales cycles. I mean, for us, I can certainly say this, and I suspect it's similar for you all, it's often, you know, very relationship based coming from some kind of referral. And we still invest a lot in marketing, as I think we should, and we track a lot of metrics behind it, particularly with HubSpot and how people are engaging, and I think that's helpful. It definitely is. But I kind of have to embrace the idea that, like, if this helps us close two deals in a year, it was worth it. You know, these aren't people that are going to click on this and immediately call me and say, We have a project we're ready to get started. So I guess, you know, it's kind of just knowing what level of investment is worth it based on those realities to a degree. And

Chris LaFay: 18:53

one thing I'll add to that as well too, in terms of what level of investment I was mentioning before, like the monthly email that we saw, I personally feel like it could be a lot better and however, I could nitpick on that for days and hours on end and make it go from good to great. However, it has been the straw that broke the camel's back two or three times over the last six months. Why waste hours and hours and much more money on it right now, when it's working well, it's not, and I would much rather be consistent in those efforts than not consistent and try to be a perfectionist at that point. That's

Mickey Mellen: 19:33

a big struggle for a lot of companies. Yeah, perfect is the enemy of good, which I believe in wholeheartedly. My business partner does not. She believes perfect is perfect and so but having that, that battle, I think, is good, though, where she'll push me to make things better, but I'll push her to get things out the door, and it's a win. But, yeah, I think that's where people you talk about struggling. They struggle to the first one out because they're just afraid of it's not quite perfect yet. So they hold it and hold it and hold it, whereas, yeah, Chris is just sending out his emails regularly, and they're good, and it reminds people who he is. And they're like, oh, yeah, I meant it. So

Richard Simms: 20:01

let's go, yeah, totally. A little bit of a pivot here. But one thing I wanted to ask you all about, you've both been at it a while, you know, I'm kind of referring particularly to building websites thinking about the content. You know, how has it changed? Like the task of getting your customers to embrace the reality that the website is a part of this broader effort and ecosystem, right? That it's really intimately tied with sales and marketing, like it's not a stagnant just splash page to let people know you exist. I imagine just awareness of that fact has become much more common. But was that more of an uphill battle for you all early on in building out websites?

Mickey Mellen: 20:47

I think it's more of an uphill battle now really, I think, yeah, I think people are seeing so many easy ways to do marketing, and some of it can work. I mean, I know some folks that don't really have a website and could do pretty well. I still think everyone absolutely should, though, because of all the things we're going to talk about today. That's the only thing you own. Like, if you're killing it on Tiktok or LinkedIn, or whatever you're doing, that could go away tomorrow. They could go out of business. They could get sold. You could get wrongfully banned or rightfully banned, I guess, for that matter, but any it could be gone tomorrow. I mean, really, the only two things you can own are your website and your email list, because those you can take and move somewhere else. You know, the worst thing that can happen, particularly with a WordPress site, is your host says we don't want to host you anymore, and say, okay, and you move to a different host. But you know, other that's part of the reason we use WordPress, and I think Chris does as well as Squarespace and others are fantastic. But as Squarespace says we don't like you anymore, which we've seen happen, you're dead. You have to start from scratch somewhere else. So take a website that you own and you fully control, and it's yours, and again, with your email list. If, if MailChimp says we don't like you anymore, or we think you did something, you can take your list and go out. And go elsewhere, but everything else, the following you built on LinkedIn, and the engagement Tiktok and all that could be gone tomorrow. So having that website there matters. And then ultimately, if things are successful in other channels, it generally leads back to the website. You know, if you're successful with your email stuff, you may get emails back, like Chris does, and people may sign up directly. But most successful interactions, obviously, are in marketing. Go back to your website. Your website better be awesome. Or you can say, hey, Richard, we did this campaign. We got you 5000 clicks from Facebook. And you say, Well, I didn't land any leads. Well, your website stinks, but we got you 5000 clicks like, who cares? It doesn't matter if you don't close it and the website's where so much is still closed.

Chris LaFay: 22:19

I like to say that the the website is the operating system for sales and marketing, because if you're doing sales and marketing without it, you're there's going to be a lot of disconnect, especially the larger your company gets. Like we actually just recently talked to a client where they have a lot of different partners, and every partner does sales differently. They have different decks, they have different styles, they have different things that they do. There is no cohesion across any of these folks, and that has led to years and years of disarray and a website that has cobwebs on it for lack of better terminology. And so if you view your website as that engine, even in that B to be relationship driven landscape, you're going to be able to create a lot more custom tools within your website that your sales folks and your marketing folks can utilize. I love using our site throughout the sales process. Rather than sending PDFs and slide decks to folks. We build our proposals directly on our site. We link dynamically to case studies, to where things are, just check boxes on the site, and now we're driving potential clients back there to then also spend more time on the site, because who knows what are those calls to action will actually trigger the Oh, yeah, this the straw that broke the camel's back again. I don't know which one of those it'll be, but if I can curate something very easily with a handful of check boxes that solves a problem for them, great. I can't do that anywhere else.

Richard Simms: 23:52

Yeah, yeah. Okay, awesome. So kind of a follow up question here, I know for green melon and for classic city, you know, you're both doing some brand, brand strategy, some content strategy. So to what extent did that piece of the business kind of evolve out of building out the websites? Was it kind of an obvious, hey, we're helping people build websites, but clearly the they need help with, you know, really a cohesive plan for, like, how they talk about business and the brand, like, what's the evolution been like on that front for y'all, yeah, it

Mickey Mellen: 24:29

should have been more obvious. In hindsight, it was very obvious. But I did go some years without doing that. We'd say, hey, send us your content. We'll load it up and go. But then we realized, with the help of things like Donna Miller's book, building story brand, you know, which we follow that quite a bit is, is understanding what we really should be saying on the site. You know, if you say, we've been in business 16 years and we're going to be the best in town, like no one cares about that, it's more about talking about their problem. If you come to the site and say, Whoa, that's what he just said, my problem on the site, he gets me, you're going to hook him right in so, I mean, we follow story brand lucid. Say, Hey, what's the problem people face? How can we solve it? How great is your life afterward? People you do that is fantastic. I was looking for Rory Vaden that says you're most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. And that's what most businesses are. They saw a problem, they fixed it. And so if you can say, I've been in your shoes, I had that problem, I figured out a way to solve it, and I can help you solve it too. And so just understanding these things made us realize that, yeah, the content clients generally have is just like, hey, we've been in business a bunch of years. We can fix these widgets, you know, and that's not going to get anyone to make me take action. So spending time with that process, which we now require for all the sites we build, has made a huge difference.

Chris LaFay: 25:31

That's the power of having a niche as well. When you know that particular industry, you know that those particular problem sets, and you know how those problems fit into that framework to drive both web success and content success. That's where the biggest victories come in. And so when you have alignment on what that problem is and you know how to tackle it, you know how to make that emotional connection with that potential customer, that's when you're driving home wins for folks,

Richard Simms: 26:01

yeah, no, I love that. And we're actually kind of revamping our homepage right now. And, like, I think we've always thought about it in this way, but really struggled with, like, what is that header that speaks to this immediate pain point? You know, that will resonate with someone, and I do think that's crucial, of course, and no one really wants to hear about, like, we build great, you know, React Native apps. It's like, that's, that's a means to an end, right? So, yeah, I can definitely appreciate that. So we've alluded to AI a couple times in this conversation, and of course, it's, you know, I think you can't talk about anything in the tech world these days with, at least without, at least touching on it. So what are you all seeing out there, like we talked about the Google search results? That's a big shift. But what else? And how do you think AI is, you know, impacting your interest, that your industry, yet at this stage, in the relatively early stages, right?

Mickey Mellen: 27:01

I'd say early stages not impacting us that much, yet we're on the press of is affecting us a lot, short term in some good ways, the long term in less good ways, because I think it's gonna really out of efficiency. It's gonna make us more efficient. I mean, as we can use it more to improve efficiencies, we can serve more clients, we can do better and all that. But as everyone begins to do that, we're gonna have to serve way more clients, because each client is gonna be less valuable be able to provide able to provide people to be able to under, under price us, which isn't fair as it should be. You know, we're something like $500 to write a blog post these days. We research and do, yeah, SEO, and they're fantastic posts, and it's better than what AI can do as of this recording. But before long, AI is gonna be just as well. So if I say, Richard, we're gonna blog for you every week. Has to be two grand a month. It's gonna be fantastic. And Chris says we're gonna use AI to do it's gonna be just as good as me 200 a month. Why? I mean, you wouldn't pay me to pay humans just to be a nice guy, you got a business to run. So I think Chris is gonna do that, and he's gonna under price us as he should, writing with AI, but he's only gonna make 200 bucks, so he's gonna have to have way more clients. I think we're all gonna be in that boat to some degree. We're gonna have to do so much more because it's so much more efficient, which is, I don't like it at all. I'd rather human everything and but it is what it is. It's not my decision where it goes. So we're gonna, we're gonna follow where it is. And I think that's, that's one of the angles we're looking at among many, right?

Richard Simms: 28:13

I think, sorry to interject, Chris, I know you have an opinion on this too, but it's funny. Like, Have you all seen I guess there's memes that are like, you know, I thought AI would do, be doing all the work that I didn't want to do, so I could be making art and writing music. And now it's the other way around. And, you know, I think at Tyrannosaurus tech, like, we're pretty bullish on AI for sure, and I think we're getting a lot of value internally and for clients adopting it. But yes, part of my not fear, just, I think cynicism about it is like, really the outcome is we're all going to be expected to do more. You know, it's not like you use AI to write that report and then cool. Now I can take the rest of the afternoon off. It's like, no like, expectations are just going to level up. And there's kind of no end to see. It's just going to make us all need to be infinitely more productive, which, in a sense, is good, but it's kind of like, you know, a little daunting. It's like, where does that end? So yeah, and like, from a development

Chris LaFay: 29:21

standpoint, one of the things that this is probably a year, year and a half ago, one of my team members took two completely third like, two different third party tools that he needed to get connected with one another within the confines of a WordPress site. And typically, you know, reading through all the documentation and funneling through, we all know how wonderful technical documentation is always he wrote prompts for 10 minutes that basically said, This is what I'm trying to do on product A, this is what I'm trying to do on product B, and I need to tie them together. And an hour and a half or two hours of DEV work and research work within all that documentation turned into 15 minutes. Now, obviously it didn't write any of the algorithms and things like that that he needed to do with the data at that point, not yet, but he saved those one to two out of researching crappy documentation, and that baseline code was all completely correct. And again, that was an example from a year ago. Like it's, it's only going to get better, and that, like Mickey said, that's absolutely terrifying, because I like humans, and I like putting food on the table for people. And so it's it's interesting that even from a development perspective, you don't have this like white screen staring at you. If we're going to use a writing metaphor anymore, you you start with something now, almost no matter the industry that you're in, yeah,

Richard Simms: 30:45

yeah, for sure. And I think that whether it's like content creation, certainly this applies for like ways we're using it for code in particular, but it is really serving as a really valuable starting point, right? And, like, really clearing the path for Yes, like, where do I begin, and how do I get the initial structure in place? Obviously, I think there's still a ton of human intervention involved, and I've, I've said this before, but I think one of the things that we've seen or struggled with is like, we really want folks adopting AI internally, and we're trying to create a space for that and oversee it in a way that is, like, responsible and all that good stuff. But the spectrum of like, folks who are very uncomfortable with AI, you know, don't want to touch it. They know it's not perfect, so like, they're kind of throwing their hands up. And then certainly, there's folks who put too much trust into it. And I think that's, of course, a big disconnect. And, like, that's one thing that, you know, my partner, Carlos and I have pushed back on, is like, folks bringing a deliverable to you that is AI generated, but is ripe with errors. And like, they're like, Well, hey, I made this. It's like, well, your name's on it, buddy, not an excuse. So, like, you know, yeah, like, so anyways, I'm not sure where I'm going with that, except that there's, there's still big gaps there. And I'm sure this is the case with, like, more heavy duty strategy, like brand strategy, content strategy, certainly in our world, like, what is the real product strategy, understanding the users, you know, really mapping out a user experience, like the industry landscape, and then on the technical side, you know, bringing this tooling together, like it can write code, but what's the infrastructure? What's the business case? How does this all tie together? I still think there's a lot of a lot there that just has to be drawn from experience and human beings, but that gap will continue to be bridged for sure, we

Mickey Mellen: 32:43

can we? Can we have our experience? Big kid read about the experience of everyone and put all that together at once, which is problematic. You also mentioned that the gap of people that are scared of AI, the people that embrace it, that's like the top 20% of humans, though I think there's 80% that have heard of AI and don't even really care or understand or, you know, and so getting them to understand too is going to take some time, because, yeah, we're, we're kind of in a bubble here of, yeah, US nerds all talking about this stuff, thinking people either love it or hate it, but there's a huge swath of people that have heard about it, like, I've heard this chat GTT thing, like, I don't even know what it's called, and, you know, that's as far as they've gotten. That's probably the bulk of people is still in that group. And so over the years, as that begins to fan out wider, just like it was with early internet and stuff, where we all talk about it, and great bulletin boards we were on and connecting to all that, but most people had no idea what this stuff was. So I think we're still there to a degree, but it's accelerating way faster than anything previously did.

Chris LaFay: 33:35

And it's just it's interesting to see, like from the web perspective, like back when things like Squarespace and Wix and these, like DIY, website builders didn't really exist. You either had a really bad site or you had a really good site. Because in order to have a really good site, you had to have somebody that knew how to design, somebody that knew how to code. And then when these things like WordPress and templates and Wix and Squarespace all came out, like this, ability to be mediocre expanded a lot. This like middle 80% if you will. And so you have your 10% of excellent, of really bad, I feel like with AI right now, across the board that it's just easier to be mediocre, and you have to figure out how you're going to utilize that to your advantage, to be kind of on that, if you've ever read the book, 10x is easier than 2x kind of on that 10x side of things, that that tail end of excellence that's trying new things and being creative, and not accidentally slip into kind of that middle ground mediocrity area. And that's going to be the piece that's going to differentiate folks.

Richard Simms: 34:43

Yeah, I agree. And, you know, in some, I mean, in a lot of ways, it excites me, and I think that, like for us, I think engineering is at our core, and that will continue, although we're, you know, leading very heavily into the AI tooling. But what I like is, you know, a lot of the drum we really beat, which comes from a very sincere place, is like, what really is going to make you successful or not? Is this line of code well written, right? Or is it written, you know, super fast, or whatever, it's the broader product strategy. And so it's been a natural evolution for us. But I think the timing just pushes us further in that direction, right where, like, it's, you know, it's kind of like that. It's easy to have an idea, can you execute? And some of that is like, really looking at the landscape, yeah, really deeply empathizing with the users and their pain points, figuring out where your position in the market, your go to market strategy, like, I think the the more optimistic view for me is like, yeah, it frees us up to be a lot more strategic. Now, will AI eventually be more strategic? Maybe, but I gotta sweat it too much right now. I

Mickey Mellen: 35:57

think you will be, but we've got some time. Yeah, yeah. Yeah,

Richard Simms: 36:02

cool. Well, changing directions a little bit, you know, I love talking to other agency owners, and I've of course, spoken a bunch, you know, in with candor about, like, here's what we're struggling on. Or like, you know, this quarter's been tough. This one was great. Like, you know, it's all over the map. And I think that even though our businesses are different, there's just a lot of those same, you know, struggles, highs and lows, growing pains, etc. So one thing that I know I mentioned I wanted to talk with you all about, is just what's your perspective around growing an agency? Right? Like we hear the term scale a lot, I think is, like, generally more applicable for, like, a SaaS product or something like that. You all have grown. We've grown. I've like, Chris, I think that terminology that must have come from one of the matchstick founders, which is, like, it's not a game of multiples, it's addition, but just what shows, what shows perspective on that at this stage in the business, like growing headcount versus being lean and mean. Like, love to hear your thoughts there.

Mickey Mellen: 37:06

So we're we've intentionally chosen to stay more lean and mean. You know, we're 15 years anywhere, and we'll probably get up to maybe 11 or 12. We'll see if we can either. I don't want to go past 12. So I've talked a lot of agency owners had coffee with one this morning that she's happy with what she did, but she went up to 25 and then sold to a bigger thing now that it's bigger thing. Now they're at 60, and she's she's happy, but she also misses it. And most people I've talked to miss it after 12, because after 12 you don't go to 13. You go from 12 to 20. Because once you get to 12, you got to duplicate a couple of the roles. Get some more, like management in place, and some HR and like, you've got other things you got to start fiddling with. And I don't want to mess with that stuff. I like where we are, but it's also kind of tough, like we have to scale more. What's AI going to mean for that? I don't really know, but we've we're trying to scale what we do for clients and really scale profit margins and that kind of stuff as we get better and better what we do, versus just adding headcount. But like most people, we get to a point where the nine of us are so busy, we need to add someone else to relieve some pressure, so it becomes easy just to hire more and more. And so we've tried to, somewhat successfully say, Okay, it's too busy. Who are our worst clients? Let's maybe shed a few bad clients, ease the burden to get and give us some room to have more of the good clients that we like. And sounds great on paper. It's possible we've done something. We've let a few go over the years to kind of Yeah, ease some pressure, but yeah, that's kind of where we are is yes, lean and mean on purpose, knowing we'll never sell for millions. I mean, if you want to sell for multiples of millions, you have to grow big. And that's just kind of how it is. And you know, be lean in the meantime, and don't think about showering. Just keep hiring and hiring and get big and sell for millions, which is fantastic. And you may make millions, or you may go out of business. We'd rather just be comfortable and happy and have a nice lifestyle where we

Chris LaFay: 38:37

are. So there's a book written by a fellow Atlanta guy named David Feldman. It's called Small by design. I have it in my background over there. Highly recommend it for folks that are kind of in that zero to$5 million space and even really applies across the board. But it's about, how do you use your size to maintain being nimble, and how do you use that as a competitive advantage against other folks that might come into these types of meetings and proposal opportunities RFPs with that's kind of like the 100 pound gorilla and flee. And so I'm of similar mindset to making I'm actually trying to figure out what my answer is. Now, actually, I don't know what we want to be when we grow up, and what I want to be when I grow up, and that's okay, and that'll probably shift and change over time, but really understanding what type of skill you want to be at and being comfortable with that you don't. I read a book, and I think it was one of the EOS visionary integrator, books that was written to where it almost would put words to a lot of what was in my head. Of you don't have to be making 510, 15,$20 million a year. Success. There's not one singular definition for success. Success can be whatever you want it to look like, and numbers on paper at the end of the day don't matter, other than obviously, if you're running a business, you need to be profitable, you need to have money in the bank to be able to pay for people and to undergo slash times. But success, defining success, is up to you, and that was really my biggest takeaway, is there is no there shouldn't be any pressure to go from 1 million to 2,000,002 to three, three to four at the end of the day, if you're content, great. And I would much rather take the slow and steady model then try to keep duplicating ourselves over and over and over again just for a few extra bucks in the bank. Yeah,

Richard Simms: 40:48

you know, I totally respect that. And I think it's very easy to get caught up in, like, the vanity metrics of headcount or, you know, optics of fancy office space. I think the good thing is, like, I do think some of that's shifting, you know, I think, like, small teams that are really strong and dangerous, like, you know, in a sense, objectively, like have been proven to be able to accomplish. So I'm right there with y'all, I think Carlos and I navigate that, and it's kind of an ongoing conversation, right? And we've, you know, like, I think for a lot of our history, a lot of people would have told us to hire more, you know, because we always leverage contractors heavily, which is great, and kind of gives you that versatility, typically, is a little more expensive, at least if you're very busy. But then at times, like, I think we've over hired, and you know your overhead that can get a little daunting, right? So like, I think, to your point, Chris, like, you know what works at 10 people versus 20, or 25 or whatever can be wildly different. And I've certainly seen, like, some of our processes break in ways I wouldn't have expected, even when we just added, like, a handful of additional people.

Chris LaFay: 42:04

I've always been a huge fan of the whole try before you buy sort of thing. So, you know, contractors, and it's try before you buy on both sides of the aisle. It's, it's fantastic. And I read a quote recently on LinkedIn that was something akin to don't hire until it hurts, because it's if you tend to over hire, you typically try to you find a very small little pain. You're like, Oh, I'm gonna solve that with a few 100 bucks or$1,000 or whatever the number is. And then those types of things just start adding up really quickly. And you're not waiting long enough, you're not waiting until it hurts to then make that that jump effectively. And so it's just a really good frame of reference that I read that felt applicable to really help kind of change the mindset around that a little bit. The

Mickey Mellen: 42:50

important process this is good too, Richard, where things change there, and I don't. I don't want that to change for us, so we won't, but it's been beneficial, because there's two different agencies, the one I talked to this morning and another one I've talked to, where they said, We just can't build even a relatively simple website for under $100,000 because our processes is just so convoluted to to build that kind of simple thing, it has to go through all these big pieces. And so that works well for us. We can do a site for a fifth of that, or, you know, something like that, and they become a good referrals. They do it anymore, but I don't want to be in that place where we can no longer serve those clients, either. So it's it's worked out well for everyone, because they're still wildly successful best I can tell, building big projects for big enterprise, things which good for them, and then they can pass along these small, quote, $30,000 websites to us, and we'll be happy with that too. So yeah, yeah, no, we

Richard Simms: 43:33

struggled with that dilemma a little bit because we've seen, you know, a huge range, particularly if you look at the history the business of like, complexity of applications we're building. You know, is it one simple MVP? Is it like a web app with two mobile apps, a bunch of integrations, 1000s of users? And so a lot of our processes, which are very valuable, but they've been built out for these large use cases where there's a lot of moving pieces, and so, you know, there's ongoing, healthy dialog of like, that's great, but we should still be able to build a scrappy MVP for under X dollars. Like, how do we do that without sacrificing quality, but recognizing that, you know, like a slingshot, not a bazooka, right? So, right? It's hard to keep both of those things alive. But I think that is important, you know what? And I don't know that

Mickey Mellen: 44:25

it's just a both either. Because, I mean, our sites are generally 20 to$30,000 which is a lot for a lot of is small in some aspects. It's a big number in other ways. And so I know companies that can still do sites for three to$5,000 they do template based stuff, which we aren't capable of doing. We don't have any workflow to do that. And so I think there's just a whole scale of that going all the way up. The way up and just finding your place and trying to serve too many of those could be tough, but we try to serve those folks and do the bigger ones, and it could get messy. So we serve our lane. And I know great folks that can build bigger, more complex ones, and great folks that can build smaller, simpler ones. And it's yeah, I'll point people wherever the right direction is when they come to us, yeah,

Richard Simms: 44:58

yeah. I can appreciate that. Okay, last question, I think so. Again, you've you've both been at it for a while. What have been the biggest challenges, like, when you look back on the history of the company, what's the biggest challenges you faced? How'd you overcome them? And then what do you see as, like, some of the biggest

Unknown: 45:17

that you're proud of?

Chris LaFay: 45:18

I'll start so one of the biggest challenges that we have faced over the years, and the cornerstone reason why this happened was because I was a freelancer for a good 15 years, so the only person I really had to worry about paying was myself. We brought in some contractors and things like that on the side, but it was very minimal, and so really understanding cash flow, for me, was honestly the biggest learning curve since the our agency officially started, and really understanding how clients were Pro, which clients were profitable, which ones were not, which ones were all stars, which ones needed to get kind of like what Mickey was talking about. Y'all should get cut and how to then define those right metrics. And I know that's a very broad answer to the question, but it's something that really was a core part of, kind of my key stumbling blocks over the years, kind of when I go back, this is where we took a downturn for a few months. This is where we took another downturn for a few months. And it all happened to be around the types of clients, the cash flows, and really understanding the business as a whole unit, and not just Chris and his buddy is going after some stuff effectively. That was that's really the biggest piece, if you can really understand that you can make a lot more informed decisions about the business as a whole, for sure.

Mickey Mellen: 46:44

So a few of our challenges, one is hiring. Hiring is just always tough, and especially early on. There's two bigger challenges that come with it. Is that revenue, in theory, your revenue is kind of going up at a steady pace. When you hire someone, it's a stair step. It's boom. It's a huge expense. It just comes in all at once. You can't you could. I mean, with contractors, you can sort of ease in, but it's generally speaking, your revenue is always going to do that. But gonna do that, but your your people are always gonna do that. And that's tough. And Steve Jobs was big on I think, no, it's either him or Elon Musk, one of the interviewed like the first 3000 people at the company, because it mattered so much. But jobs talked about, when you hire someone with your third hire or your partnership, you hire another your company, and when you're 10 people, you hire another one that's a 10th of your company. That's still a huge deal when it comes to how they're going to work with you and all this stuff. It feels like we have nine people hire a 10th. Like, okay, but that's gonna make a big difference to our culture and all that kind of stuff. So hiring has been tough, but I think we've done pretty well with it. We've we've made some mistakes, we've learned a lot. Another challenge I sort of alluded to is like abusive clients. And I use the word abusive, kind of loosely here that we've not had any clients that have been awful, but clients that are unacceptable and bug us too much and want things and calls the middle of the night and all that. And so again, for a while we're like, we need the revenue, but we got to the point where we said, no, no, we don't need the revenue. Like, you can you can just go away. Now. We don't need you anymore. And our last challenge we have now is, what are we doing next year with all the stuff we've talked about? Do we need to dive deeper into AI? Do we need to get rid of our copywriters and start having chatgpt do things, do just a lot of what if questions, which are super fun but super challenging, and then on the success side, two things come to mind. One is sort of an accident, but like the website maintenance we do, has turned out to be just a fantastic thing for recurring revenue. For us, in the way we do we're able to do it very affordably. Where you're welcome to go do it yourself. Here's how to do it yourself. It's gonna cost you more just in tools. Do Do it yourself than you pay us, and you still have to do all the stuff with the tools like so it makes it where it's a no brainer for them to hire us, but it's a win for them and a win for us and that kind of thing. And then the last one, and we can almost get into this, is a partnership like the partnership I have with Ali you have with Carlos. I'm sure that's been one of the best successes we've had, and that was Chris and I talked about this, but he said, How do you do this? And for us, it was just blind luck. I mean, we happen to just decide, let's just build a couple of sites as happens. And it worked out, like, I don't have a good answer, that's been a huge part of our success as we've had challenges. It's so great to have someone else to lean on. It reminds me of like in the office when they have to make that after Jim becomes the CO manager, and they hide out Michael's office like they were both. I'm so glad that we have each other with this horrible decision we have to make for cutting the pay. You know, that's how Allie and I are. A lot like this is a bad decision to fire this client, fire this employee, you're hire, or whatever. I'm so glad I have someone else to lean on for that, and that's been a huge success for us, just having that person there. And again, I feel like Carlos has been very much that for you as well. Yeah, definitely.

Chris LaFay: 49:17

Even though, like, I don't have a partner, an owner of classic city. What kind of after one of our kind of, I'll say, downfalls. And again, that's a very strong word. But back in 2019 I realized that I was not spending quality time with folks that are have been 1234, steps ahead of where I am. And so in 2019 when that shift forcibly happened. I got very, very much more intentional with who I talked to on a regular basis, and I just started asking questions some people that I either knew well, and some people that I didn't know as well, and a couple of very key advisors popped up, and those are folks that I have been who have really been the shoulder that I have leaned on as a, I'll say solo entrepreneur. Obviously, I'm not solo. My team supports me. I don't mean to discount that in any stretch of the imagination, but having those folks that have those outside voices that are for me Give me that sounding board, and it's really interesting, because I've intentionally tried to craft that group with different types of people from different walks of life. And it's really fun when there's a big decision that has to be made, and I go talk to all these different individuals when they all say very similar things, even though they come across from completely different angles. That is a very confirming element to all of that, for me, where all of these different types of people are like, yes or no, this is the direction, yeah, yeah.

Mickey Mellen: 50:52

There's the big I mentioned the founders podcast before we started the founders podcast by David senra, it's a fantastic podcast, but it's all about founders as you can learn the lessons from all these other companies that went other companies that went before you, and hopefully not make some of those things. Kind of like Chris is saying it's not quite as good. I think humans, you can talk to us better, but founders is a great way to do that. He even talks about building a personal board of directors, not of people that actually know they're on the board, but like, I follow people like Seth Godin and others. Like, if Seth was on my board, what would he say to this decision? If you know, like humans, I could even think like, if rich, board, would he agree with what I'm doing here? You know, I could reach out to you in that case, but it's still good to have just that invisible board of directors. And as Chris has done so well, the real almost board of directors, of people to bounce off of. And again, things like founders and other podcasts can be a great way reading all those biographies would be even better, but it's nice like he reads them all and just condenses them up to an hour to take some time. So that's fantastic, too. And

Chris LaFay: 51:43

I second that podcast, it's a fantastic one.

Richard Simms: 51:45

All right, good. That's a good recommendation. And, yeah, I mean, I I know from my experience, like, people are a lot more willing to listen and help than you might think. I think that's true in general, like, especially here in Atlanta, there's a good camaraderie. And I I've also found, and I think you all probably have to that, like, the more you're just candid and willing to, like, be vulnerable, like, the better the advice you get, you know. And I think I have that relationship with you all where, like, we don't have to pump our chests up and act like every single second of, you know, 10 out of 10, and we're crushing. Like, it is great to be able to be real with people. And of course, other especially founders, I mean, they get it. You can't really tell them much that's going to shock them. So, like, right as well. Like, awesome guys, it's been super fun. I think this is a good place for us to wrap up the conversation. Hopefully we've given our listeners clarity and strategies that they can implement right away. I want to thank my guests, Mickey Mellon and Crystal lafay for taking the time to share their expertise with us. Really appreciate you guys coming on. This

Mickey Mellen: 52:57

super fun. This was fantastic. We appreciate you. Yeah, thanks, man.

Richard Simms: 53:02

And if your organization needs help with your digital marketing strategy, reach out to Mickey greenmellon.com right?

Mickey Mellen: 53:09

Yep, greenmedia.com would be better, because then you can spell melon creatively, and this will get you

Richard Simms: 53:13

there. Greenmellonmedia.com There you go. If you need a world class WordPress website, you can book a call with Chris at Classic city consulting.com be sure. Chris on LinkedIn, they share a lot of great stuff. Had a lot of fun engaging with you all, especially over the last several months, which I think kind of led to this great conversation. And to our listeners, we want to hear from you. Do you agree disagree with any of the points we've discussed? Reach out. Let me know I'm on LinkedIn. I am at Richard L Sims. That's si MMS. So thank you again for joining the digital footprint. Follow us on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows, and if you need help productizing a service or expanding a current offering, head over to tyrannosaurustech.com check out our big byte define and design package if you're trying to get started on a new SaaS product and bring that market. Fast, fill out the form, and let's chat. Thanks, everybody. And thanks again guys for coming on. I really enjoyed it. Cool. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. All right.