34:1 Niche within the niche

Lee:
Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. This is your host, Lee and on today’s show we are talking with Brad Morrison from GoWP. GoWP were absolutely awesome and sponsored this year’s Agency Transformation Live and they really got behind the show. This is an exit from an interview that me and Brad did together during lunchtime on day two and he was really open and honest and shared his journey into niching within the niche, within the niche. So sit back, relax and enjoy the show. All right, we’re back in action. How are you doing bro?

Brad:
I was going to have my Santa hat on and next year live. I’m bringing the Santa suit.

Lee:
Please do. That would be phenomenal. I’ve got to admit it’s slipped out like sometimes I have these thoughts in my head about people and that’s how I remember who they are, but then they slip out and then I’m like, I really hope he doesn’t get offended. I mean you do need a glorious bit obviously, but thanks for taking that one on the chin.

Brad:
Great! It was a compliment. I appreciate it. I have to just tell you man, this, so this starts at 3:30 my time, right?

Lee:
That’s right.

Brad:
And I’m still getting up. Like I would not miss it. Like I get up, I don’t want to step away to go to the restroom. Right. It’s the same kind of thing where you’re, when you’re in person, you don’t want to skip out and miss something that’s going to be important and you don’t want to miss the conversation going on in the chat. You don’t like. I feel like I’m there and so I just shout out.

Lee:
Thanks man.

Brad:
I feel like it’s groundbreaking. This is, this has really been a treat.

Lee:
Wow, that’s brilliant. Well I’m just gonna soak that in for a moment. I wasn’t expecting that, mate. I mean it has been really exciting. I knew we were going to have to do pre recorded content, but then for me, I thought that if we do that people are just going to log in maybe once or twice and maybe watch one or two things, but then there’ll be no community feels so I really wanted it to be like a TV show. Like this is live. We’re all involved. You can get on camera, we can have conversations. And the chats been crazy as well. It’s been so much fun.

Brad:
It’s been, it’s been cool also to have the speakers be able to give the commentary and talk while their presentation is going on. And that’s an enhancement beyond when you’re in the live physical, which is really cool.

Lee:
Exactly. I suppose it gives the speakers as well that kind of safety if they want to of I can get this like nailed in time cause everyone’s spent loads of time on them. They’ve submitted them in and then then like you said, then they’re there along the at the same time. So that’s been awesome but enough about us. But obviously, I’m really interested in, first of all thank you for sponsoring this because clearly, you know, everything changed. You sponsored a physical event in the UK, in England and then suddenly everything had to change obviously due to global crisis, etc. But you guys were straight on board with us so we just want to say thank you. Oh well you know, making sure this live stream happens, making sure the website, everything. Making sure that we were looked after. So thank you so much for keeping us. You’ve sent those regular messages. So that’s why I called you, you’re a good guy.

Brad:
Thank you. And we’re so happy to be involved and I look forward to being there in person next year as well.

Brad:
Yeah. I can’t wait to see you. So I’m interested in your journey and we covered a bit of this on the podcast, but there are quite a few people who will have not heard of GoWP. And I’d love to just hear your journey, of when you were, cause you were an agency, weren’t you, and you had care plans at the time and then you’ve slowly moved a niche or niche or whatever the words, however the hell you pronounce it in, you know, into GoWP and you went further down. Not only were you just doing care plans, but then it became just care plans for a certain type of person. And then, and then even then you went further. So you’ve needed within the niche, within the niche. And it’s brilliant. It’s been this constant journey. It’s one of my favourite episodes. So could you just explain to us where you were? So what agents, what your agency looked like, before care plans, and then how you got into Kaplan’s in general?

Brad:
Yeah, sure. And, you know, something I was thinking about too. I always, usually when I’m telling our story, I start with, we were an agency. We were building websites for small businesses. I had really, I don’t say forgotten, but I don’t usually include it as a part of this story. When I first started the business, I have a degree in computing and education. And so I wanted to serve like school systems and like have a very defined niche specifically in building like Moodle, LMS website.

Lee:
Moodle! I remember that.

Brad:
And so I, that was really what I wanted to do. And that was kind of, I don’t see a failed niche, but I had, excuse me, niche, but I had, I had to then jump into something broader because it was really hard to sell that to school systems. I came up against so much, I’m gonna say red tape. And, you know, it was a new technology or an open source technology compared to Blackboard and all the other stuff. And so at the time I had to kind of say, okay, well I had defined who I wanted to work with. I had defined what I was going to solve for them, what the solution was, but the market wasn’t really there. And so I think that’s important in the story too, because it’s not all, Hey, you just niche down and everything works great. You kind of have to realise that you need to have that market there. It’s not just what you want to do and you recognise the problem that you also have to be able to sell and have a viable financial business from this. And so what I had to do at that time was say, alright, that’s really hard and it’s a long buying process and it’s a lot.

Brad:
So I’ll keep doing some of that, but open this up and kind of serve everybody. Right. And, and so we did that for like 10 years as an agency building Joomla sites and then WordPress websites. and then in that process of broadening things up, I was able to say, we as a team were able to say, okay, this is who we want to work with. We like doing projects for other agencies. So let’s kind of do a project. And again, it wasn’t like totally narrowed down to maintenance or content edits or, you know, it was, what can we do for them? So we kind of figure that out. and then over time we kind of got into, okay, we’re not as good at design, we’re not good with full marketing campaigns and SEO, we’re not good at like, this is really what we like to do.

Brad:
This is who we like to work with. Let’s kind of change our company and create, GoWP from that. And then that’s how we kind of niched into, serving, you know, doing maintenance and support for people. But at the time, again, we served anyone for maintenance and support and we had a white label offering. And so we said, okay, let’s play this, let’s let this run a little bit and see where, you know, again, where are the opportunities, who do we like working with, what can we prove it dies. And and then we kind of said, okay, we’re all in on serving agencies through white label offerings. And right now we have maintenance and content edits and we just launched site builds which is another very building in a page editor, not custom development, but you can sell them on other things once you kind of own that in. So I guess one thing I would say, Lee, is that even if you have not, if we get this a lot of time in our community, they’re saying, I just, I can’t, I hadn’t started my, I haven’t defined my niche yet. I’m just, I feel so bad because I haven’t defined my niche yet. And it’s like, Oh, this is the best time to learn.

Lee:
Absolutely. And a massive shout out to your Facebook group as well. We’ll have to throw the UR in a bit. I didn’t come prepared with that. I’m sorry, but it’s on your profile. I’m sure. I’m sure you’ve already updated your profile. Yeah. Cool. So one thing I love when I hear people’s stories, for me, I like to be able to hear what they’ve said and kind of put it into, kind of slot it into what I’ve experienced as well to help me learn the lessons from that. And everything you’ve said reminds me of back when we had our agency, in around 2005, we were serving the events industry and, but the problem with it was we were offering a service that was very, very competitive, very hard to get into. The cost of entry was super, super low. So we were often either competing on price or we were just competing against huge businesses.

Lee:
So we realised that the business model inside of that was really difficult. We started to expand to everybody. So it’s a similar sort of thing, isn’t it? You started with your niche, expanded to everybody. So then what ended up happening was we expanded the service that we offer to everybody found that it was still hard and competitive. So we started offering more to everybody until in the end we became a full service agency and three really tired directors, you know and we also went off down other different niches trying to work out which ways to go. I’m glad to say that it all came full circle Event Engine is actually powering this entire website that we’re all set on. about 10, 11 years ago we decided that we were going to niche back into the events industry cause that’s where our heart was.

Lee:
And clearly you can tell because I’m running an event still. And you know, we, we ended up going after that but changed the model. So there’s kind of two ways isn’t there. What you did was went into education, realised for the skills you had, perhaps that wasn’t the best, kind of financial proposition for your business to run a successful business. But you find your sweet spot looking after agencies and you kind of grow in that direction. For us, we had the same sort of experience. Eventually we went away, but then came back with the right offering because we realised that actually we were, we were meant to be in the events, but we hadn’t got the right product that they needed that we could really get behind.

Brad:
And you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t have known that had you not gone through that. The other thing, everyone. Yeah,

Lee:
Absolutely. And so often, like I love to hear people’s stories and I love to share mine because I still believe that people will listen to this and perhaps still have to go through that journey themselves. They may go, yeah, alright, I’ll niche, but then still make the same mistakes. And sometimes I think we kind of have to make the mistakes, don’t we, to then become better people and to work out where we need to go next. Now, I remember, during the podcast, and I think you alluded to earlier that you, you went into care plans, which is, you know, so you’re productizing, so that’s kind of a niche in its own right. You’re like, okay, this is my product and service niche. I’m just going to put my stake in the ground and I’m going to look after people in this way. At what point did it become apparent that although you’ve made that one step in the right direction, that serving everyone with this one service was not going to work?

Brad:
Yeah, that’s, that’s a real good question. It’s probably too late, right?

Lee:
Always too late, mate. Always.

Brad:
Which we did identify that a little earlier on. But now you, it just brings, I think we solved the clarity that, Hey, if we were just serving this one agency, this one target audience, it brings so much clarity to your marketing. It’s easier to dig in and understand what their challenges are and how you serve them beyond maintenance or care plans. Like what the next thing would be. It gives you a chance to build community. And with that target audience, it gives you a chance to, if you don’t already have expertise, it gives you an opportunity to say, I’m going to learn about this niche. This is the niche that I’m going to learn about and I’m going to become not necessarily an expert or authority, but I’m going to dig in and travel this with them so that I can help them meet the problems that they’re having and create a service around that. So the clarity was huge. When you don’t have that, I’ll tell you like as a, when we were doing just maintenance, we had our website was split in half and it was like, are you a site owner? Are you a web agency? Are you, and I would get so frustrated coming to my own website.

Brad:
And then we found where, you know, you’re duplicating things out, you’re like, okay, so we need to add a page here for the new service we have. And we also need to add it under the other section. So sometimes something as simple as seeing the outline through a website or a site map or whatever it is, can just say this is dumb like that. Let’s imagine what life could be if we actually put all of our effort into really serving this, this one target. So

Lee:
Yeah, and then doing one thing really well as well is a massive lesson for me. You know, we only offer the one thing in Event Engine and as we add things to it, it’s all still part of that one thing. Solving the one problem and eventually we may offer other services that will still help solve problems and that won’t necessarily be a distraction. That will be well thought through when we launch those, etc. Similar to what you guys have done, you know, you’ve, you’re working your way through different offerings to solve problems for the same people that you’re serving and that absolutely does take time. I’ve kind of lost my train of thought there because there’s so many other stories I was going to share even for me in Angle Crown, I did a very similar thing to you for a while because we were offering multiple services for agencies initially.

Lee:
So I was doing web builds, I was doing CRM builds, I was doing, you know, you name it, I was offering it and I was trying to work out how to, you know, I knew my target audience and I was like, yes, I know my target audience. I know how I need to show up for them. I was showing up for spike Lee, you know, with the suit and tie and they need to hear that. I can look after everything for them. That was my really wrong assumption. I need to hear everything. I need to know everything so that they will trust me. and that was actually an incorrect assumption. What they really wanted to know was that I could build a WordPress website really, really well, and that’s what they could do. The rest. How would you encourage people to dig deep with their niche and discover some of that? So I didn’t discover for about two years that my target audience does not need me to know everything. but I, you know, I wasn’t having conversations with them. I was making assumptions. What did you do to make sure that you were following the right path for your target audience?

Brad:
Yeah, something that we really try to do is ask. We have conversations. I think something that gets left behind so much with productized services in general, SAS tends to be a little bit better about it, but productized services really drop the ball on customer success account management after the sale. You tend to say, Hey, I’ve got a recurring cell and you let it go. You really need to kind of, you know, look at who your customers are, the ones that are paying you the most, the ones that you know, you need to set up regular, have regular conversations with them. so that you can learn from them. Not just about your current, but it’s, yeah, it’s not just feedback on your existing service. It also opens things up and it gives you the opportunity to say, you know, what else could we do for you? What else is there’s, you know, could we provide that is a pro addressing a problem that you have? just the conversation surveys, but make it personal like, there’s so much impersonal and like just send a survey out. When you’re running a productized services service, you usually don’t have tens of thousands of customers. It’s very manageable so you can have real conversations with them. So you’re getting some type of structure in place to just have those ongoing conversations is huge.

Lee:
Well, that’s another interesting one then. So with regards to a productized service, I was in theory productizing, but I was productizing multiple things for multiple people. Which was obviously very hard. But equally, even if I was just selling web builds, I wasn’t necessarily charging enough, which meant I still had to sell a lot of my productized service. So people think productization is, the answer is an answer. But you need to be able to deliver and make money and be a profitable business. Now I look at WP Curve years ago and I don’t know how they offer a super cheap deal and got bought out by GoDaddy cause that’s insane. And clearly, you know, that’s not the track you guys have gone down. So, in me, if I was going to launch the GoWP, like pretend I’m Brad now, I’m obviously awake.

Lee:
You’re way cooler than me. Now. I’d be like freaking out looking at those prices, thinking how, how on earth can I match those prices? And how on earth could I run a business that does, you know, it offers this, you know, this is a big promise. We’re going to look after you. We’re going to be your white label people. This is a big promise. How did you come around discovering the right sort of price that would allow, A you to give the value to the agencies so that they could afford to use you, etc. And B also you as a business, that kind of sustainability cause I was not a sustainable business by just having to ship more and more of the productized service that I thought I was doing.

Brad:
Yeah, I think, I think that’s other like learning that you have just we’ve had over the years and that even in delivering what we deliver, it’s not just, we do a certain thing and it’s not really even maintenance. it’s the, the thing that we do is we essentially take grunt work. We take important but low value work. It has to be done. It’s important we take that off the plate of the agency and, and incidentally, we’re really good at it because we’ve been doing that a while and so we built these processes. The agency can do everything that we do. In some cases can do everything that we do, but we’ve got it so that it’s, you know, one, two, three, we’ve built that. Like that’s a strength of ours. So being a maintenance provider is not necessarily the strength.

Brad:
The strength is in having the process to be able to take something that is tedious, that can be menial, setting the processes up and getting the right people to deliver the service. And so in doing that, you can then say, okay, we can do this for maintenance. We can do this for this, we can do this for this because that’s what we do for agencies. So I think that has been, that’s one of the things that I would encourage is look within yourself and find out what you’re really good at and then build that around that. As far as price point goes, what I would like it, it’s easy to look at a $79 subscription or a $29 subscription and think, Hey, that is you know, that’s really cheap for what you’re doing. Okay. If you take that and you say your average customer is going to have 30 subscriptions and they’re paying $29 and $79 or 50 subscriptions, that value of that customer has now gone up and you look at the touch points on that.

Brad:
You’re going to have some averages there. Where some people are taking your time, just like if you’re a plugin developer and supports coming in, some people are gonna use support more than others. Right? So you, you have some things there that you can kind of play around with and look. but it is, you do have to kind of feel around and say, okay. And we do have discussions internally where we look, and I’d encourage anyone doing this. If you’re spinning up a GoWP type service or a productize service, always evaluate your margins per customer. That’s really important. And so having that, you know, locked in, is something that you really can’t neglect because a WP Curve type model can go sideways really, really quickly. You can grow the top line, but your bottom, you’re, you’re losing your shirt. So

Lee:
On a practical level then, because what you say is absolutely true, analysing your margins, etc. But on a practical level, I can imagine being an agency owner listening to this, and they may not be starting to GoWP. They may just simply be productizing their branding service, etc. But I if I rewind to 10 years ago, I would not have the first clue how to work out what my margins were or whether something I was doing was profitable. All I could ever do was look at the bank. And if there wasn’t much money in the bank, that meant I needed to get more business and that’s the way I operated. What advice would you give to kind of make it a bit more practical for people?

Brad:
Start with your costs. That’s one, start with your costs and then you know, you, if you identify, okay, so let’s take maintenance because there’s definitely more variables when you’re doing, Hey, I’m logging into your website and doing things. If there’s someone involved, maintenance, semi-automated or automated for the most part, right? So with that, you’ve got some pretty fixed costs or at least variable per site that you’re going to be paying. And so look at your cost to deliver the service. I think Dave mentioned, you know, the multiply times three essentially. So take, take your costs, build in some extra and that, but that’s where you is with your costs. Now, the other thing you can look at is over time, you’re going to want to drive that cost down internally. And so the way you can do that is with innovation, right? You can, you can develop something on your own to cut an expensive tool out.

Brad:
That’s something that, you know, using a great tool like managed WP or blog vault or whatever, you know, a tool that can provide, you know, updates for the site. You could then say, okay, we’re going to build something on our own. Now we’re just paying the cost of Amazon for our stuff, right? So we’re not paying a license to a third party, so you can kind of drive that down and increase your margins. But the simple answer there, I think is just start with your costs and build margin in. So, yeah, it’s hard. It’s harder when you’re doing support tasks for someone if you’re doing work because then, you know, someone, especially the unlimited model, so many of us that, that look to WP Curve that was doing that at the time. That’s, there’s so many variables there and that’s a lot harder to pin down. So you have to have time. Unfortunately. I think,

Lee:
Yeah. One of the ways we solve that is similar to what you’re saying. Obviously, we started with our cost and our costs were the entire business costs because most of it was a service anyway. So, we were understanding, all right, we’ve got this many employees, we understand that this cost to operate this business and to break even is X. So with this cost, now let’s look at our clients and we recognise that we needed at least three to six months of data for us to be able to really start to understand what was going on. So we started to time ourselves on everything that we did for every client. And we created a categorization structure that helps us to understand, can kind of silo different types of work so that we could have a high level, not accurate, but a higher level understanding of where are we spending more times trying to solve problems because of updating a plugin or where are we spending more time on documentation and creation?

Lee:
Or where are we spending more time on training? Where were the places that our staff were having to spend the most time? And we would also then refill to that by client and say, is it a problem with the products or service that we’re offering? Or is it a client specific problem? And then we would instantly be able to flip that data just using Excel easy. And I mean now I would use that table for it cause our table is like magic just saying, just one. So this as well as I believe complete magic, but you know, and that allowed me at times to see that because a bad client can really make you doubt yourself and can make you like almost finish a business. I’ll go off in a completely direction. And sometimes you just have to acknowledge that they’re actually just a bad client, unfortunately, a bad fit.

Lee:
And you just have to kindly eject them because actually if you look at the data for everyone else, they’re rocking and rolling now on by clients. This is kind of the last question I’ll pull you with and then we’ll get on with the stream. But on bad clients, obviously, you know, you have a productized service. What is your process onboarding a client to make sure that you’re going to give them the best value they can possibly get for that, but, but equally that they’re going to be the right fit for you guys as well, etc. What’s, what’s that process look like?

Brad:
Yeah, so, we kind of spell out, again, almost most things come through the site honestly, like, and it’s usually referrals from people that have used us and and so they come through, they sign up as an agency partner, which is just essentially a free sign up. And then that’s kind of when our onboarding process starts. It’s kind of letting them know we serve agencies, this is how we help agencies. Thank you for joining our community. And then we lay out the different ways that we can help them and we’ll try to have a call like we do try to personalise it. Like I mentioned because this isn’t about a $29 or $79 or $1,300 subscription across our three products. This is really about let’s understand the agency, how can we help them grow? I’ll tell you in that process we talked about costs.

Brad:
I always challenge the agency to put their costs down because GoWP may not make sense for them on the site build service, the maintenance service, whatever we have, it may not make sense if you put it down in black and white on paper. And I think that builds trust because what we’re doing in doing that is we’re being very honest and we’re being transparent because we don’t want them to resent that later on. If they say, Hey, you know this, I’ve got 30 sites on maintenance or I’m using your site note service or whatever it is and it’s, this is costing me more or this is not what I thought it was. And so having the conversation and running through that from costs all the way to this is how our service works, this is how we can help you. And getting feedback from them early on is really important.

Brad:
But then of course we have the automated sequences in place to. We are very strong in, you know, we want to make sure early on the whole team has kind of focused when that new agency signs up. But if there is any like, Oh well I don’t understand that we are quick to react like you want to knock it out of the ballpark in that first 30 days. Because if you in a lot of, most of the, any of the issues that come up, it’s, it’s usually, and I think this is probably universal, if you’re doing a good job with what you do, it’s the miscommunication or difference in the expectations. It’s not the service. And so if you can attack that really hard and open up communication, that’s the way to do it. And so we do it with a combination of manual hands on and then also the strong email campaign

Lee:
Because you mentioned that and, and that is a lesson I keep having to relearn. Unfortunately, it’s the communication where sometimes I let it slip. I think I’m the greatest communicator ever when it comes to a project. And then the big problem I have is I’m always an assumer. I’m so in on the project, I’m so in on the process, I know so much about it. And I often forget to tell the client that bit or set their expectations. So, you know, and that’s, you know, even today, like last week I think I probably forgot to do something and upset someone, you know? And, and yet I’m still teaching people on my podcast how to run better agencies and I’m still making the same fricking mistake. So it’s really hard. It is hard, but it’s definitely a journey and you know, so hopefully people can learn from the mistakes that we’ve made and make some key changes in their businesses from just from this live stream and not have to go through the process, but also don’t beat yourself up as well if you find yourself making the same mistake again because every mistake, every failure is a platform to build on any way.

Lee:
It’s another lesson and sometimes you need to be hit just a few times before you then realise you need to make a change. And I’m one of those people sometimes I need to make that same mistake a few times. You’ve been awesome. Thank you so much. We will say adieu to you. Thank you. We’ll see you in the chat buddy. And we’ll see what table number you are if people want to come hang.

Brad:
I’m in table six and then we’ve got our meet go to booth as well. Yeah.

Lee:
Can I encourage you, go and meet Centra and Emily. I mean, I’m sorry, Brad and Emily. They’ll have their booth open for chat.