Say “Yes” first, figure it out later
Discussing how to building a design agency from scratch with Matt Ellis, founder of Honcho (S3E4)
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Matt Ellis is the founder of Honcho, a design agency specializing in web design and development.
Matt’s built Honcho from scratch and without knowing much about the agency world. He simply learned to dive into new opportunities head first and figure out how to do things as he’s going along. It’s a piece of advice he shared a few times during our conversation. We also talked about hiring first employees, pricing strategies, finding clients, running a remote company and much more. It’s an episode rich on resources and tools that will help a lot of you to automate and facilitate processes around your own businesses. If you work at a small agency or run a remote team, this is a very useful episode to listen to.
As usual, you can find a bunch of resources mentioned in this episode with links below, as well as the main topics we covered in the episode.
Topics we cover in this episode:
01:50 — Who is Matt Ellis and what does he do
02:34 — How Matt got into web development
05:49 — Saying “Yes” to things even if you don’t know how to do them
07:23 — Learning to do web development properly
08:30 — From freelancer to founder of a design agency
10:30 — Learning how to build an agency
11:40 — Hiring the first employee at Honcho
12:55 — Freeing more time for learning and business development
15:40 — Finding clients in the early days and financial security
17:18 — Balancing a financial forecast with hiring
19:00 — Switching from a product focus to a sales and business development one
20:30 — Tools to help with automation to free up more time
23:30 — How to choose which prospects to approach
29:55 — Where does conversion happen
31:00 — Pricing strategies: project-based vs. retainers
35:00 — Providing more value to others by learning more about your own business
35:20 — Working remotely
36:20 — Running a remote company — the process and tools
40:10 — Fluid processes and trust
41:50 — Getting new clients
42:46 — Acquiring new clients through Adwords
44:10 — Future plans for the Honcho agency
48:05 — Links and handles
Useful Resources and Links:
Say hi to Matt — twitter, linkedin
Treehouse — online school for design and software development
Agencynomics by Spencer Gallagher
Dov Gordon — Sales psychology videos and resources
Mailshake — An email automation solution that integrates with Gmail
Zapier — A collection of automation workflows
Craft CMS — content management system
Built With — tool to easily identify the technology behind websites
The StoryBrand framework — a framework for copywriting and clear messaging
Daily.co — video conferencing tool
Teamwork — project management software
Harvest — time-tracking software
Shopify — an e-commerce platform
Originally published at weardulo.com.
