Building High-Performance Websites for Profitability | Matt Dorman

PROFITABLE TALKS...

In this episode of The Profitable Creative, host Christian Brim speaks with Matt Dorman of Endeavor about the importance of high-performance websites for businesses, the challenges of client retention, and the need for agencies to adapt their business models in a changing market. They discuss the significance of niching down for profitability, the role of marketing in business growth, and the return to basic marketing strategies in an age dominated by technology and AI. The conversation highlights the importance of understanding client needs and building strong relationships for long-term success.

PROFITABLE TAKEAWAYS...

• The podcast industry has a high dropout rate, with many not reaching 100 episodes.
• High-performance websites are crucial for businesses aiming for profitability.
• Narrowing down to specific niches can significantly improve profit margins.
• Client retention is essential for sustainable business growth.
• Adapting business models is necessary in response to economic challenges.
• Marketing strategies must evolve to cut through the noise in a crowded market.
• Face-to-face interactions remain irreplaceable in building client relationships.
• Understanding the ideal customer is fundamental for effective marketing.
• Investing in marketing and advertising is crucial for growth.
• AI cannot replace the personal touch in client interactions.

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Are you ready to pay yourself more… yeah it’s called an S-Corp. ➡️
https://calendly.com/blouia/s-corp-evaluation

Transcript

Christian Brim (00:01.548)
Welcome to another episode of the profitable creative the only place on the interwebs where you will learn how to turn your passion into profit. I am your host Christian Brim special shout out to our one listener in Yukon Oklahoma home of the fighting Millers lovely town grown enormously since I've been around so thank you for listening joining the show today Matt Dorman of Endeavor Matt welcome to the show.

Matt Dorman (00:31.224)
Yeah, thanks a lot, Christian. Into the one follower.

Christian Brim (00:33.688)
So, and yes, one listener. It's fascinating. know, do you have a podcast?

Matt Dorman (00:41.174)
We do. Even smaller than one, but yes.

Christian Brim (00:44.502)
Yeah, well, it's it's a it's I've learned a lot. I've been doing this a little over a year and it's just first of all, like, and and if anybody's interested, they should go to pod match, because they have a lot of public data on that they track on on independent podcasts. But if you have in the first seven days, more than 27

people download your podcast, you're in the top 50 % worldwide. Which just speaks to the fact that most podcasts don't survive. mean, like that's statistics, like 90 % never get to hundred episodes. And just how niche the industry has gone. But Alex Sanfilippo, the founder of Podmatch,

Matt Dorman (01:15.941)
yeah.

Christian Brim (01:39.093)
Has estimated that one listener is it has more economic value than 100 Impressions of the social media post because of the engagement, right? So it's been fascinating so there's lots of lots of places all over the world where there's one person that has listened to the show and it's It's fascinating, but we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about you. Tell us about Endeavor

Matt Dorman (01:51.426)
Yeah, right, that makes sense.

Matt Dorman (02:08.012)
Yeah, we're technology services company. Really what we focus on is high-performance websites. Typically, most of them are driving some kind of profit, some kind of margin, whether they're selling goods or in the advertising space, like content sites.

Christian Brim (02:14.99)
Hmm.

Christian Brim (02:26.102)
Yeah, so my experience is most people in the website business are more on the creative side, the design elements, not the architecture of it. But the architecture, especially for certain industries, like you mentioned, if you have an online retailer or anywhere, well, I'll let you answer that question. Like who is it most important to have

Matt Dorman (02:32.376)
Right.

Christian Brim (02:52.994)
good technical websites as opposed to pretty websites.

Matt Dorman (02:57.464)
Yeah, well, I mean, I would say all, but that's not really true. I mean, there's a lot of good platforms out there that you work with a purely creative type person or yourself and create your website, right? And even if you're selling goods, Wix, Squarespace, there's plenty of them. Shopify on the commerce side is a good platform that you can grow from. The difference would be when you start hitting numbers that are a million plus or more because

the finite things that you can do affect real dollars. Like, you might be affecting tens of dollars by doing these things on a small site, but you're affecting tens of thousands of dollars as you continue to grow up. And those are not like, make it look different. Those are look different for the right person and really customized by the person that's coming to the site, knowing a little more knowledge about the person.

Christian Brim (03:32.11)
Mmm.

Christian Brim (03:57.079)
Okay, so I have a client and colleague who has an agency and he was one of those rare people that could do both technical and design. And he's since scaled back and only has two niches, one of which is very surprising. It's like, I want to say enough to be meaningful without disclosing too much.

It's basically a retailer of machinery in a dealership network. think car dealership, but not cars. And really, he had great success doing it with one and all of his growth is these other dealers from around the country saying, hey, I want you to do for me what you did for them.

Matt Dorman (04:53.707)
Yep.

Christian Brim (04:54.964)
And I'm not sure what he does, but maybe you could shed some insight onto something like that type of business where what you do would be helpful.

Matt Dorman (05:05.589)
Yeah. Yeah. mean, there are a lot of companies, not a lot, there are companies out there like him or her, like ourselves, that by niching down into an industry, you're building out a platform that's very specific to the things that they're doing. We don't do this, but there's companies that service law firms. Like we have some law firm companies, but they're more, like they're doing different marketing things that are, they're not typical, but there's some that do, like they're very basic. Like they have a land.

Christian Brim (05:25.58)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Dorman (05:34.84)
landing page, lawyer information, and a portal for their clients to log in and all the legal stuff. So they handle all that IT stuff. We're primarily on the marketing side of all the things that we do. So we work, we've not struggled. We've gone through like, oh, we will do anything to everyone. We're starting out, we're now 10 years old. We're niching down more and more. My partner handles what we're calling active lifestyle.

So like mountain bike companies or roller skating or snowboarding companies, like really trying to focus on that area because it's our interest and B, we've kind of developed a certain thing around it. And then myself, I like outdoor off-roading and things like that. So I'm trying to focus more on those types of companies going forward. In the past, we dealt with, like I said, all kinds of things, a lot of media and publishing news websites that help us in these industries because they need to publish content really fast.

Christian Brim (06:06.742)
Mmm. Okay.

Matt Dorman (06:34.273)
really well. And that's, we've built tools for a lot of years for those types of companies.

Christian Brim (06:40.526)
I'm to throw this comment out there. I did not make it, but I want your response. I was actually on LinkedIn and it was one of my CPA colleagues and they were saying that the reason why some, not all, but some accountants have really bad websites is because they're investing their time in building relationships. You know, the old school marketing, if you will.

Matt Dorman (07:09.675)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (07:10.578)
And to me, felt like a little bit of an excuse. it produced this interesting discussion about in the in our industry, the importance of even having a website and what its purpose is. So like if you if you go back up 30000 feet and you look at all of the technology changes that have happened in the last five years, what what is why does a business need a website?

Matt Dorman (07:38.648)
Sure. Well, think people will invest the time in, a business owner will invest the time in the things that they've realized that they've had traction on, right? So if you're doing networking events and you're doing local things and you're getting lots of local businesses, then your website can be pretty basic because they need to look up your address. But if you're outside of a local market, right, for a long time, you need to have a website for SEO. SEO was the thing. People would Google it.

Christian Brim (07:49.55)
Hmm

Matt Dorman (08:08.039)
and they're going to find you. Or they're going to look up a review on somewhere. And if you didn't have a website from there, no one could find you. Now, as in last six, nine months, people are going to an LLM check, GPT, something like that, and asking it a question. And if you're not showing up in those results, then you're missing out on a new generation. And that's a multi-generation at this point. It's not just young people. And you have to have a website in order to get into those.

Christian Brim (08:24.139)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (08:34.178)
Right?

Matt Dorman (08:38.015)
skip or space that you can't have a digital footprint in order to get into those answers. So it's still kind of on the SEO space of like, well, I need something. But then it's a little bit more advanced because now I need content that the people are asking for. So it's a little bit more advanced than what it was even with SEO. And SEO, you'd have people that can create content for you and rank well.

I think we're seeing the, like we're not a company that does that, but I see companies out there that are building newer types of content just for the LLM models for the questions that people are asking.

Christian Brim (09:19.82)
Yeah. And I, I've run into this discussion with people that have done SEO and done content for us in the past. And it's like, are you writing for the robots or are you writing for the people? Right. Because they don't look the same, but I don't know how LLMs change that other than what, what I've been told is, you know, it's, it's really leaning into the question space. So like, what would you have on an FAQ?

you know, blow that up by a hundred and that's what you're shooting for.

Matt Dorman (09:55.478)
Yeah, I mean, a simplistic way of doing it would be to have, look at every post, every page that you have on it. Think of all the questions and the cheating way of doing it. You throw it into chat GPT, say, what questions do you have about this page? And then put those questions and answers onto it. I think that's where a lot of companies are doing essentially.

Christian Brim (10:13.976)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (10:17.814)
Well, and I would push back against my colleague that made that comment that even if you are doing local networking, right? And you don't care if anybody else ever hears about you, you're going to tell me that you meet somebody and they're not going to go back and look you up on the internet. Like I don't buy that. And what are you doing to support whatever you're telling them in person?

Like, you, where you have more than the five or 15 minutes or hour long lunch that you can go into depth and really, you know, lay out more of your story, more of your client stories, more of what problems you solve. Like you, have unlimited time with, with a website and why not? I don't, I don't get it.

Matt Dorman (11:10.891)
Yeah, and it's always there whenever someone's going to have the need to look you up. They're not going to look you up nine to five when you're available to answer the phone, after work or before work or on the weekend.

Christian Brim (11:20.216)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (11:24.898)
I want to pivot back to what you said where you started out with, you know, trying to be all things to all people and you've been doing this for 10 years and, kudos for you figuring it out quickly. It took me a little longer to figure that out. what have, what have been some of the struggles you've had with, you know, making that decision on like what niches to pursue or like, you know, what work you don't take like.

Kind of talk about that.

Matt Dorman (11:57.246)
so I, one of the reasons I like your podcast so much, because you do talk about profit quite a bit, like in my mind, for us, for a company for, especially for an agency or someone like us, like profit is the only reason we're around. So niching or specializing in certain types of clients, there's a huge difference in profit margin for us between companies that we're, we kind of know about, they need a website, but we're going to have to do a lot of background work.

redoing and things like that. And our dev team may or may not know how to work with their types of, you know, their content or just the creation of content. Right. So we spent, we burn a lot of time. A lot of our, our projects are fixed price or we're also fixed price, like the amount of work we're going to do in a month. And we're not, not going to charge them for overages that are caused internally because we have to learn something. So, you know, learn fast. mean, 10 years isn't super fast. And I've also been in the industry for 30 years. So like,

Christian Brim (12:54.893)
Okay.

Matt Dorman (12:55.273)
It's taken me a while to figure some of this stuff out. Luckily, even bad profit margins are still profit margins, right? So you learn from bad things, lose some money sometimes. The next one you make a little bit of money and it'll average out. But once you get into a smaller niche like us, not that we're making great profit margins, but we're able to invest more and then grow more is a bigger way to look at it. yes, if we didn't want to, like if we just want to take all the money then

We would do that for a while and die out anyways, but by investing more into the current clients and into like new things that they're trying to do, we have that extra money to do that in time.

Christian Brim (13:36.749)
Yeah, you know, if I were if I were to describe, you know, whatever to you like, okay, you're going to go out and today you're going to play baseball. And next week, we're going to go play football. And then next next month, we're going to switch to basketball. And then we're going to go to soccer and highlight and lacrosse and paddle like, you know, pick any sport, whatever, it doesn't matter. You go on and on and on.

And your, your, your point is, would you ever be really good at any of them? No. Right. And, so a lot of businesses, especially when they start out, get caught in that cycle of take anything so you can pay the bills. but it becomes a hamster wheel because you're, you're not making any money on it because you're having to reinvent the wheel and you're having to relearn. and I, I, I love.

I love the idea of being as the way I describe it to my team is you want to be so specific in your niche that you can grow at whatever rate you want to grow. We've set the target at 10 % and no larger. Right? Like get it down to as small as you can and still have an acceptable growth rate.

Matt Dorman (14:53.879)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (15:04.718)
Within that group that you're where you want to be and don't go any larger than that. Don't go expand, you know, like, cause we've, we've even talked about like, okay, well we've got these verticals that we market to. It's like, we, should we just pick one? Like is, is one enough as agencies enough is, is videographers enough is, you know, like, and, it's, it's a, it's hard when you're not.

real sure, I think in the problem that you're solving for the customer, right? because as you said, that, what you described was the exact thing. Like you've got to figure out what it is that they need fixed and then fix it. And it's going to be different. Might be 20 % different. might be 50 % different, but it's going to be different for every company. And you want to, you want to get that

Difference to 20%, not working on 80 % or a hundred percent.

Matt Dorman (16:09.813)
Yeah, yeah, for a lot of reasons. mean, the margin is one thing, but just the speed. Because the faster I can fix a problem, it's great for the client. Yes, I don't make as much money. It's not hourly as billable. I can get to their next problem because they're not going to have one problem, right? mean, especially with websites. We don't build a lot of websites from scratch, unfortunately. We're not a design agency. So we take a lot of problems on.

Christian Brim (16:28.28)
Yes.

Matt Dorman (16:40.055)
lot of problem websites on. So there's typically quite a few things that we get to address over the course of like a month or two, the initial engagement.

Christian Brim (16:50.872)
So how do you or do you interact with other elements of marketing? So like if they have an agency or someone that's managing their paid ads, how do you interact or interface with those elements?

Matt Dorman (16:59.863)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Dorman (17:11.703)
Yeah, it depends on the company, the partner company that we're working with. Some of them have, like, they'll have a development team. So we'll either be working with their development team, because it's such a big project, they can't do it well at the scale. Or it's in a, you know, we specialize in a few. For a long time, we were doing WordPress only, open source only, you know, big sites on those platforms. So they would come to us when they didn't have the skill set internally.

Christian Brim (17:19.287)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Dorman (17:40.514)
pretty ubiquitous, pretty widespread. They can pick up PHP WordPress developers pretty easily now. So if they're dealing with large content assets, assets, we're a good fit because they're typically, if they're building up five page marketing sites, right? But then they have this client that wants to do all kinds of content marketing. Well, their team may not know how to build out a tool set like that. So sometimes we're partnering with their team. Sometimes they're doing so much offshore that they've been burned too many times and then they decide to come onshore.

Christian Brim (18:08.174)
Mmm.

Matt Dorman (18:10.263)
I guess, or it's our client and yes, we don't do the content marketing, we don't do design, stuff like that. they're gonna go out and they're gonna be, that agency is gonna be quote unquote, I guess, forced to use us because the the client wants to use us for all the implementation.

Christian Brim (18:34.838)
You mentioned a couple of pricing or business model strategies. So do you typically do a flat fee or hourly or how is it you normally structure your engagements?

Matt Dorman (18:41.153)
Yeah.

Matt Dorman (18:51.317)
Yeah, do. Well, not a whole lot of hourly anymore. Those are like we'll do hourly for longer term clients where they're bringing on something new and we're not really sure about what it is. Typically, we're telling them a price of the project, of the task, let's say. Most of our clients, though, they're on longer term, month to month, technically, legally, I guess. We allow them to leave whenever they want.

Christian Brim (19:18.902)
Right.

Matt Dorman (19:19.777)
They're on for years with us building out. They put a list of things that they want to get done the next month. We do them within the budget we've already defined. Kind of a retainer type model, I guess, would be one way of putting it. And then go from there. So it's weird because, it's technically hourly because we do have a fixed amount of hours. But we go over all the time and don't charge them. Sometimes we'll go under and then be able to push to the next month.

Sometimes we'll find new ways of doing things over last year where we're using AI more to do development and we end up having to fix our estimate model and pricing model because we can do things so much faster sometimes.

Christian Brim (20:05.038)
So you've been lowering prices?

Matt Dorman (20:07.147)
We've been lower. Well, we've been, we've been increasing the, the kind of the, velocity, I guess, and being able to do more. so not really. So not decreasing like the monthly fees. it's kind of been fixed yet, because they're, know, they have budgets that they're already set to pay anyways internally. So they're not going to, they don't want to actually, most of our clients don't want to adjust month to month. They want actually a fixed amount that they're going to pay for the year. So we just ended up doing more work, or getting more work done.

Christian Brim (20:12.822)
Okay. Okay.

Matt Dorman (20:37.479)
the, the last, and that's usually on maintenance things where we're a little leery at doing, we've, we've tried to do some things from scratch with the, the vibe coding. that's one thing on our blog posts or our, our, podcast. We've done some, some actual doing it on live and it's fun, until you get to a certain point and then it blows up and it's like, well, where you look at what it did.

Christian Brim (20:38.113)
Okay.

Christian Brim (21:03.272)
Yeah. And, and like, if you don't, I mean, I like your background is as a developer, correct? I mean, like, okay, so you're a code monkey. sorry, that was derisive. the, the, the, I'm just a pencil pusher, so it's fine. the, the, the thing about that I I've noticed, cause I've played with some of these like, lovable and, and some others where, you know, it's really cool.

Matt Dorman (21:09.719)
Right. Yes.

Matt Dorman (21:18.935)
Right.

Christian Brim (21:31.031)
And it is fascinating. Like, you can do all this from a couple of prompts. But when you get into the, details and you start going a little bit left, a little bit of right, and you're not getting the outputs that you want, if you don't understand coding, you're screwed. Like you can't fix it if you don't have. So it like lovable specifically, it seems, it seems like it's grown with this idea that just anybody can pick it up and

put out a web app, which is technically true, but like the functionality is very shallow if it's a non-coder using.

Matt Dorman (22:12.021)
Yeah, I've used probably any of the major market ones out there I've used both in testing and trying to build some things from scratch. It works really well, like I said, and like you said initially. The difference is once you get past four or five prompts, I kind of align it with I'm basically getting a new junior developer every time I ask it to do something, good or bad.

Christian Brim (22:40.012)
Not the same one.

Matt Dorman (22:41.311)
They will overwrite the things that the last prompt did in a different way, even though I asked that one to delete things. And I've gone in circles many times around asking one to delete. The next one brings it back in. And it's a prompt. It's a machine. But it feels like a different person each time.

Christian Brim (22:58.36)
That that's a great example. I've had some of those experiences with GPT, and, like giving it, Excel files, data files and saying, okay, you know, extract this and give it to me. And it is, it's like, it forgets what like, it's like, wait a second. We, had this conversation.

Matt Dorman (23:14.485)
Yeah.

Matt Dorman (23:18.891)
Yeah. Or the amount of times I see you're absolute, like I tell it, you didn't do what I asked. You're absolutely right. I'm sorry. Let me try again. Or give me one more chance. I've had it. I get a little irate with, with my, my prompts sometimes after a few, and it gets very apologetic. And it's like, do it right.

Christian Brim (23:39.459)
I well, yeah, I mean, I was working one. I what I was working on on GPT. I could not, I could get it to work myself. But as soon as I turned it over to somebody else in our team, they would not get the same results, right? Because of whatever's going on in the black box of the LLM. They were not getting the same responses. Okay, screw this. I'm going to go over to Zapier. And I because I had more control.

Matt Dorman (23:49.175)
Mm.

Matt Dorman (23:54.177)
Yes. Yeah.

Christian Brim (24:08.626)
over what the steps and what I was doing and the agent itself was not doing as much right. But even then just trying to get it into a standard like I gave it a template email to use. I'm like use this and I had to go through a dozen times before I got it to stick. It was like you're right. That's not what it's it says explicitly do this, but I'm sorry it didn't do that. I'm like what the hell like

Matt Dorman (24:24.277)
output.

Matt Dorman (24:35.159)
respect.

Yeah. Yeah. And you'll understand why. So our podcast is called boozy browsing. So we're typically drinking while we're doing this and yelling at it. And it's not a lot of drinks, but it doesn't take a whole lot when you have someone or something responding in that way of like, I just told you this and now you're doing the exact opposite and apologizing for it instead of just doing

Christian Brim (24:45.3)
nice, nice.

It's enough.

Christian Brim (25:00.938)
Okay, we've wandered off the dev path. Let's come back to the agency model and the billing. So have you noticed an increase in your margins and your profit since you niched?

Matt Dorman (25:02.103)
Very far off.

Matt Dorman (25:09.303)
Hmm.

Matt Dorman (25:21.455)
not well, not in, not in like net because we're now spending a lot of money on marketing and advertising, to grow into that industry. So not in that, but like gross, like top line, like we're, it is definitely more efficient internally. the, the internal operations. Yeah, sorry. You're. Yeah.

Christian Brim (25:29.934)
Fair enough, but the...

Christian Brim (25:41.295)
So your gross margin, I'll define it for the audience and you can pretend you already knew. The gross margin is the revenue less those direct costs. So in your case, it'd probably be software costs and dev costs, you know, right? So that remainder, that margin, that has increased since you niched? Yeah.

Matt Dorman (25:57.953)
Yeah.

Matt Dorman (26:05.687)
Yes, somewhat. mean, it's noticeable because, similar to we were saying, it is easier to do the same thing over and over for the most part. I mean, it's not the exact same thing, but we can now templatize and we're looking for the right things and we've developed a tool set to do it. So we're saving money there. like I said, currently we're spending more money on not just advertising and marketing, but also in

It is internal training. So like we, we, we put it in a different area while it is kind of tied to like internal, like it is a cost that we have, but yes, it's kind of an operational cost. So.

Christian Brim (26:52.174)
Yeah, growth, growth. So, you know, I, I, uh, have been revisiting a book called predictable success. I don't know if you've read it, but, um, the, the, you know, the, whole model of a business is, you know, there's, there's, it's hard when you start up, it's fun when it's growing, then you start hitting some turbulence and then you plateau, right?

Matt Dorman (27:21.643)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (27:22.966)
And the reality is that growing consistently profitably is hard work. It's not, it's not easy. And in a lot of ways it's harder than when you start the business. and so a lot of people get to the point that the you're describing and they're like, I just am tired. Like,

this is I it's too much work. Have you reached that point yet? Or you're like,

Matt Dorman (27:58.008)
Yeah. Multiple times. Well, not multiple, like, not a lot of lot, but like three times at least. And this year is, I mean, honestly, this year is one of those. Like that's one reason why we're not, you our margins are not great. We're investing all kinds of money into trying to get new business. there's just, it's a bad year for agencies in general, I think. And the ones I talked to, some are going to go under some are just, they have like us, we, we've had enough money put away for things like this.

to invest in more, but unless things turn around soon, we're not really sure. That's just an honest thing. We've had other cycles of this, but they've been less macro affecting us and more just we had internal turmoil. We weren't doing things right and things like that.

Christian Brim (28:48.12)
So what do you think the macro factors are that are impacting you that's different this time?

Matt Dorman (28:54.967)
I mean, I think, I mean, I'm not a political, I am a political, I'm like, you know, the, tariffs and things like that, that affected big businesses trickled all the way down to all kinds of businesses, right? It's whether the actual numbers affect them, the unknown is what affects, are the people we work with. Like they don't know what to do, so they're not going to do anything. So status quo, keeping your websites the way they are, broken or not, wait until

Christian Brim (29:12.259)
Yes.

Christian Brim (29:18.058)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Dorman (29:24.559)
you know, something changes. that's, that's one area. I some people have started to write about it now, but in technology with the tech, the tax changes that just came back finally, so we could expense our expenses. Like as a company, as an IT company that we, the first year we were only able to expense, I think it was like 20 % of our expenses. so we had a massive profit tax wise, for two years.

Christian Brim (29:28.492)
Yeah, that's not political. That's not political.

Christian Brim (29:38.925)
Yes.

Christian Brim (29:51.149)
Yes.

Matt Dorman (29:52.76)
Like we paid more in taxes than we made as owners all of a sudden. And now we're going to get it back because we're supposed to get it back over five years, but now we're going to get it back quicker because, that's a, I don't think a lot of people even understand that. Like on the Twitter and like the big tech companies, like that's probably trillions of dollars that they couldn't spend on people. Cause they had to give to the government for a couple of years and wait and let it come back to them over the course of years.

Christian Brim (29:56.205)
Yes.

Christian Brim (30:03.96)
quicker.

Christian Brim (30:17.806)
Yes.

Christian Brim (30:23.434)
Yeah. And, it's, you know, that bonus depreciation has been around long enough where most business owners have it baked into the pie, right? They don't, they don't remember when it wasn't that way. And like most things that come out of Washington, when, when you give somebody something, that they get a, receive a benefit from it they try to take it back, there's all kinds of

Matt Dorman (30:39.414)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (30:52.854)
you know, wailing and gnashing of teeth and you know, the the idea that you could write off everything you bought unlimited sitting from my seat. I'm like, that's nuts. Like that. I mean, that's never been that way. I understand the benefit and I sure enjoyed it myself. But like that that's expensive. An expensive way for government to do taxation, right?

to the government, not to us. Yeah, but going back to the unpredictability, there's a lot of unpredictability out there. I kind of, I also, I'll say this as an opinion and get your opinion. I've talked about on this show the crackhead energy in the marketing space. And it's this,

Matt Dorman (31:23.275)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (31:50.647)
It started with, I went to a mastermind of agency owners earlier this year and there were about 20 there. And I'd had agency clients for decades, but I'd never really got into that setting with them where I was a fly on the wall and they were just talking about their businesses and comparing. The thing that struck stuck out to me like a sore thumb was their retention and

the, this group was patting themselves on the back because their retention, was up to what essentially, equated to 50 % a year. Like they're, you know, they were churning clients where they were keeping them for two years. And I'm sitting back here going and our retention has hovered in the high eighties, low nineties for, for decades. And I'm like, wow, like I can't imagine the pressure.

Matt Dorman (32:36.289)
Right.

Matt Dorman (32:41.985)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christian Brim (32:48.898)
to have to go out and replace that many clients every month, right? That sounds awful. It also raises the question of

Matt Dorman (32:53.109)
Right.

Christian Brim (33:00.896)
Are you guys actually solving any problems for anybody? Because if you were solving the problem, why would I leave? And I'm not going to, if you look back at how I hired agencies, I lasted longer than two years on average, but I can see where people, you know, buy the quick fix, right? That's where the crackhead comes in. They buy the quick fix.

Matt Dorman (33:25.271)
Right.

Christian Brim (33:28.916)
And then when they, they, they not getting the high anymore, they go find another dealer and it's, this selling people what they want, rather than what they need. And I understand very clearly that, that sometimes you can't sell them what they need because they don't perceive it, that they, they don't want it. Like, I don't think I need someone to technologically fix my website. Right. So.

I think you do have some headwinds in the industry that and with with the technology changes. There is never been more noise ever like and trying to market in that as a business owner. It's really challenging because how do you cut through the noise? I mean it's it's hard.

Matt Dorman (34:18.645)
Yeah, when everyone can create volumes and volumes of content and we do things great, it is definitely harder.

Christian Brim (34:30.168)
So what types of things are you trying to do on a marketing level that have been effected?

Matt Dorman (34:34.965)
Mm.

So we got away from, and this is because we got so, it's my business partner and I are 50-50 owners and we run the team. We're both technical. We started out the company doing lots of webinars, in-person events, speaking, know, knowledge sharing type things. And we grew, I think we grew quite a bit. And then we got really busy and really involved in just running the business, like doing the business, guess, versus running the business. And so we're getting back into like,

this age of podcasts, also webinars, also online events, speaking events, in-person speaking events, in-person networking events. getting, I guess getting back to basics. And I've seen a lot of people actually writing about this around the, you know, that's the one thing AI can't do. They can't get the face-to-face handshake and like even this, like they can't replicate that. And I think that's, you know, we need, it's a long game. Like we can meet someone that would do work for the three.

Christian Brim (35:20.162)
Mm-hmm

Christian Brim (35:24.237)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (35:28.643)
Yes.

Christian Brim (35:35.85)
As any good marketer will tell you, every marketer tell you, it's just going to take time.

Matt Dorman (35:42.42)
Yeah, I know that this takes time, so I'm good with it. But it could be three years where that person would come back. It could be also three days. So like they could have a problem right then, your conversation with them changes everything. But yeah, I think that's the thing that we're trying to get back into. And we've been doing it all year. I think it could play out, you know, it's now fall, fall being September, everyone's back in school, the kids are back in school.

Christian Brim (35:45.293)
Yes.

Christian Brim (35:50.51)
Yes?

Matt Dorman (36:10.475)
Business typically turns around this time of the year. The more we get closer to the end of the year, it's more likely to turn around. So I'm cautiously optimistic that all the things we've been doing are right. If all the things we've been doing are wrong, we're not going to know until the end of the year, I guess.

Christian Brim (36:29.164)
Yeah. And, and I would add to that, that I very much agree with your, your statement, like going back to basics, like marketing, think, I think in the advent of the internet, so the last 25 years, there was a lot of movement away from the foundations of marketing, right? You know, like identifying your ideal customer, like

how many business owners are running around out there without having an ideal client profile. Like they don't know who they're looking for. And then because they don't know who they're looking for, they have no idea what the messaging should be, what you should be talking about. And you don't know where they're congregating to even hear the message, the channel. So, you know, just going back to those basics,

I think is not only more effective, but prudent because you can waste a lot of money on crack. I mean, it's, easy. It's easy. I want to pivot back one more time to, the, the model, the billing model, and I'll share a conversation I had with my attorney who is a friend since, grade school.

and he, he's in the professional services business like I am, and he's roughly the same size. And we're both roughly at that. We're both roughly struggling to get past this plateau of, taking it to the next level. And I, I'm one of his clients. And when I, when I signed up, and maybe this will give you some insight or you can give me some insight. When I signed up.

I thought it was a fee for service. okay, I'm going to pay you a thousand dollars a month and you're going to take care of these things for me. Right. And he had a list like this is by month, what we're going to do. And over the time realized that it really was a retainer model. Right.

Christian Brim (38:49.792)
And so if we get down to that list and this month it says we're supposed to review your corporate bylaws or your lease agreements or whatever, and I don't have that need, well then there wasn't anything for them to do, right? And so they'd go down to the next month until they found something that I needed, right? But the problem arose then when I went over budget on a month because there were some differences and some technical

challenges with something that I was working on and I'm like Well, but you didn't give me credit for the time that you didn't really need to work You know two months ago because I didn't need that thing done, right? but but it all came back to his mentality and their company's mentality of I've got to have X number of billable hours. That's his his you know, he's like I need six hours a day from each of my attorneys and

Matt Dorman (39:45.526)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (39:45.889)
And I don't care what they do other than that. Right. But that was, that's their whole mantra. Give me six hours every day. But there's something fundamentally flawed in my mind about that model because I don't really give a shit how long it takes you to do anything. I'm buying the outcome. For instance, I need these documents reviewed on a regular basis to make sure that we're not, you know, setting ourselves up for trouble. Right.

I'm buying an outcome and I don't care how much it takes you, how much time it takes you. I don't care who you have do it. Whether you have somebody offshored or you have an AI, I don't care as long as the output is reached at the agreed amount, right? So hearing my rant, I actually called him a communist, which he's not, but you know, in any case, how,

How do you respond to that? What is that race for you?

Matt Dorman (40:47.415)
Yeah, think, I mean, we've toyed with that model. mean, on the books, we do more of that model where, yes, you're paying a certain amount a month. We expect this amount. Next month is a new month. The reality is we don't do that. And that's mainly because we're expecting and hoping that they're going to be along the ride for years. We're not the 50%. We're the 85%, 95 % kind of retention.

Christian Brim (41:09.677)
Mm-hmm.

Christian Brim (41:15.587)
Yes.

Matt Dorman (41:15.927)
We're expecting that they're going to be around for a long time. And we're going to have low months and high months with an individual client. And we're going to work through that. And I don't know how to put that into a legal document or a statement of work that says, yeah, don't worry about it. I tell people, yes, we're going to move things. If you want us to keep track of the hours, and we'll push it.

then fine, but if you're gonna ask me to do that, then I will be more strict about it. Like, we'll do it for three months and then they're gonna go away, right? If you're gonna ask me to keep track of it. But if we're just in a relationship, like a business relationship and we're good, then yeah, every time you ask me, we're just gonna do it. And if it hurts after a while, then we have to figure this out for next quarter, next year, the next time we renew. That's how we handle things. So more around a renewal of...

Christian Brim (41:51.928)
Yeah.

Matt Dorman (42:12.683)
Well, last year you asked for a lot, but I think we got like, it's typically that we had to get through something. You know, some type, something went wrong, something was already wrong when they came on and knew it. And then this year's already like, we can already see what this year's going to look like. So we're not going to ask them to increase, but it's a conversation that we have, know, individually, we have myself and my partner as account managers. So they're talking with an owner. They're not talking with someone that's dependent on.

Christian Brim (42:15.33)
Mm-hmm.

Matt Dorman (42:40.203)
the hours being a certain amount. mean, technically we are, we're more cautious of them sticking around than us hitting internal numbers or anything. For now.

Christian Brim (42:52.78)
Yeah. And, like accountants for decades, I track time, right? I tell my colleagues that we don't have any method to track anytime. have no idea how much my people work and their eyes dropped to the floor. Like now the only reason that we can do that is, is we have a very, very specific scope of service, right? Like this is what we do. And if you want something outside of that,

Matt Dorman (42:56.907)
Mm-hmm. Yep.

Matt Dorman (43:08.055)
Hope we.

Matt Dorman (43:19.361)
Yeah.

Christian Brim (43:21.868)
We probably are not going to do it. We'll help you find somebody that does do it. But if it is something that we can do and we want to do, we're going to, it's going to be outside of the scope and it's going to be a separate price. And that's the only way that we can do that that way. Where you've got so many different variables and so many custom things, would not be possible to do that.

Matt Dorman (43:45.578)
Not completely. I mean, I'm tracking the hour that I'm on this. It's an internal tracking, but we track every hour of every day that we do. And that's not to keep accountability. Well, it is, I guess, but it's a financial thing of we now know what things, inputs and outputs of everything and what levers we can pull. for us, it averages out. If one client is really

Christian Brim (44:07.724)
You what?

Matt Dorman (44:13.463)
Needy is what like not like demanding but need they need actual work, right? Most likely other clients are not going to be so why not? Kind of move our resources to that or me or my partner we can jump in and work a little later one day that's that's not a sustainable model forever But it is one until we get there. No, like we were tracking it So we know that this is happening type of thing. So then we change next year

Christian Brim (44:22.786)
Yes.

Christian Brim (44:30.381)
Yes.

Christian Brim (44:41.806)
And that yes, and that's not to say that if we have a more complicated client or more complicated relationship, like they're just more needy, like they want to get on the phone more often. That's not to say we're not going to charge them more because we are. But the thing where we ran into a problem and still kind of do is like capacity. So it's like, okay, well, how many more clients can we add? Because we don't really know how much

You know, know how this book or this bookkeeper has this number of clients, but we don't know how much they can handle more or less other than what they say. And the reality is, you know, for us, it really is more about what that employee wants. Like if they're doing what we need and they don't want to do it, take anymore because we're growing. Well, then I just have to go find somebody else to add to the team. Like I

I'm not, I'm not going to sit there and say, well, you've got to take more clients and you've got to work more. Like I'm not, I'm not, that's not part of our culture. So, um, but you know, that's not to say like, if you're just coming in and you're only getting the minimum amount of stuff done that we're not, we're not going to, you know, it isn't about accountability for us, but accountants, uh, really the, they struggle with that. I, and lawyers and engineers.

They want to measure things and I'm not saying don't measure them. I'm just saying how is it? How does it potentially affect? How you do business?

Christian Brim (46:22.924)
Matt, how do people find out more about Endeavor if they want to work with you?

Matt Dorman (46:28.171)
Yeah, I mean, the best place is to go into Endeavor.io, N-D-E-V-R.io. That's our website. LinkedIn, what's that?

Christian Brim (46:34.03)
Is that the French spelling? Is that the French spelling?

Matt Dorman (46:38.923)
I don't know what language that would be. We dropped a lot of vowels. I actually did a blog post finally about this, about our misspellings of our name. Part of it was a domain thing when we first registered Summit, a play on words, and Dev, or our development team, were based out of Denver, Colorado. So lots of fun with that. But yeah, LinkedIn would be the next place. Myself and my partner are very visible. If you looked up Matt Dorman.

Christian Brim (46:40.768)
Okay. Okay.

Christian Brim (46:50.722)
course.

Christian Brim (46:54.744)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christian Brim (46:59.544)
I love it. I love it.

Matt Dorman (47:08.407)
find me most likely.

Christian Brim (47:10.68)
Well, thank you very much for being on the show and sharing your experience. appreciate it. Listeners will have those links in the show notes. If you like what you've heard, please rate the podcast, share the podcast, subscribe to the podcast. If you don't like what you've heard, shoot us a comment, tell us what you'd like to hear and we'll get rid of Matt. Until then, ta-ta for now.