How to Create a Digital Brain for Your Agency and Scale Smarter with Shawn Johnston | Ep #807

How to Create a Digital Brain for Your Agency and Scale Smarter with Shawn Johnston | Ep #807 Speaker 2: Hey, Shawn, welcome to the show. Speaker 1: Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me. Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm excited to have you on. Tell us who you are and what you do. Speaker 1: My name is Shawn Johnston. I own and operate a strategic web agency based out of Vancouver, British Columbia called Forge & Smith, and we have been building bespoke WordPress websites for 13 years and counting. Speaker 2: Wow. How'd you get into it? Was this by accident? Speaker 1: A little bit, actually. So I was a print designer by trade. I think I started out in the design industry in 96, I think is how long I've kind of been at this for. Speaker 2: Wow. Speaker 1: And I don't know if you remember, I was working in an advertising agency, just banging out newspaper ads. For Honda and the CSS end cardin blew up and there's this huge shouting match in the office that I was in behind between this one guy who thought CSS was going to change the internet and this other guy that thought in light styles were here to stay and I didn't know what they were talking about. So I dove into what all that was, taught myself how to code, started building some freebie sites for some people that I knew and just sort of fell in love. With the web and this whole idea of designing something and then building something that could be usable. And then I started freelancing and the agencies just sort of grew out of that. Speaker 2: I remember doing print design. That was some of my favorite work because then we didn't have to ever build anything. Like once the client approved it. It was going off to the press, right? Like we just had to make sure we had the bleed lines, right? And then I do remember too, when CSS came out, I remember looking at someone's code that just created the CSS. Cause I used to, you know, my style of designing websites was I would build in Photoshop or fireworks. I remember fireworks. And then, you know, you would do the guidelines, right? And then that would export the HTML, which was basically tables like TDs and TRs and that kind of stuff. And so when I saw CSS, I was like, what is this crap? Cause I couldn't understand it. And I was like, this is horrible. Like, how does anybody do this? Speaker 1: Yeah. It's I'd similarly with Fireworks, I was using Dreamweaver. That was, that was my first intro. And, and then yeah, when I, when I heard about CSS and being able to like apply styles to the HTML, just that concept, I was like, I need to play with this. So yeah, that was, that was a lot of, a lot of fun. I always found print super stressful. Speaker 2: Like why? Speaker 1: If there was a spelling mistake or, right. That was it. You were screwed. Like now with web, I just feel like it's a permanent cheat code. Like you've launched it a little bit wrong. That's okay. Just update it. Nobody noticed. Speaker 2: That is true. And especially it's kind of like, um, one of my favorite, my second favorite Christmas movie is elf. The first one is national lampoon's Christmas vacation. But you remember like in the beginning of Elf when, you know, they're a publishing company and they signed off on like some blank pages, which are like, that's it. Speaker 1: Yep. That's my nightmare. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, that is true. Yeah. You know, especially when you go to print. Yeah, it's final. Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I, I love the, the, the medium of print and how you could design for it. And it's a lot different. I always say like with print, you could design from the edges in, but from the web, you have to design from the middle out and it's different. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: I miss print, but I don't. Speaker 2: Yeah. I remember getting my inspiration for. Print, I would actually go to like a Barnes and Noble and I would just start going through magazines just for inspiration. And seeing what caught my eye, where did you get your inspiration when you guys were designing and print? Speaker 1: Oh, geez. Yeah. I mean, similarly, like just seeing what other people are doing, you know, I like to touch a lot of the catalogs and sort of brochures or sell sheets. I always leaned heavily towards like complex layouts or like larger books. So really touching like cookbooks or illustration books or things like that, really seeing what people were doing sort of be different, sort of break the mold, but still sort of sit within a system. I was, systems have always sort of been my thing. And so like leaning into, like I did a lot of in the early days, like flyer and brochure designs, like large multi-page documents. And it was always like, how can I create a design system, implement it in ways that I can break it here and break it there, but still have it feel like a cohesive whole. Speaker 2: Yeah. Did you ever do any die cuts? Like we did a lot of direct mail and we got kind of bored by just sending out like the postcard or like an eight and a half by 11. So what we started doing, I remember we were working with this lounge chair company. And we were trying to get the attention of these cruise ships, right, in order to order their lounge chairs. And I remember we die cut this. Man, I wish I could find find some of the stuff we did. But like as you open it up, the lounge chair would spin. Speaker 1: Oh, cool. Speaker 2: Right. So it was almost like a 3D pop-up book. If you remember that, it was like, yeah, I love those things. I was always fascinated on how those created. But we would create things like that where we'd get people's attention, where they'd open it up and then it would spin around. And I can't remember the messaging we had on it, but I mean, it had like a 20% response rate. Like it was nuts. Speaker 1: Yeah, we, I didn't get to do anything like that. We would do like a spot prints where you could get like a varnish over a certain spot. Right. So, and, or we would, or, or doing something, uh, not die cut, but like, you know, running a corner or doing a little something different. Uh, one of the. One of the things that I used to do all the time is a slightly different sized business card or like rack card. So like it's still fit. Yeah, there you go. But it was just different enough that it sort of just poked out by itself. So yeah, those types of things. I didn't get to do a lot of Because that was just the first like 10 years of my career. And it was a lot of like production and pre-press work. So I didn't get to do too many fancy things before I switched to web and left that behind. Speaker 2: Yeah, the business card I was holding up that didn't probably focus in, it was probably too far away. But we rounded off two of the corners, the right bottom and the top left, rather than rounding off all of them. And like no one had it then. I mean, hardly anybody has any business cards now anyway, right? Speaker 3: It's kind of crazy. Speaker 1: I went to an event and realized that I had nothing to hand to people, so I had to do a quick little thread run at the UPS store down the street, handed two or three of them out, and that was it. I learned the whole LinkedIn tap, that whole thing, where you guys come on the QR code. That was pretty cool. Speaker 2: If I was going to hand out something, I wouldn't even go to the print shop. I would just get a bunch of $1 bills and just write my information on it and go. Here, I'm giving you money now. Let's keep it going or something. I don't know. I'm just thinking about it. It's kind of cheesy, but... Speaker 1: That'd be a bit harder up here. Loonies are not particularly big, so it'd be hard to write on that. Speaker 2: Oh, okay. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: We'll just get a dollar bill from us, right? Well, you guys might be hating Americans right now anyways. Speaker 1: No, we're all friends. I think a lot of us is just Feel a little bit bad. It's probably not going the way anybody hoped it would. So, yes. Speaker 2: Now, when did you realize you really kind of had an agency and like a true team? Speaker 1: Yeah, so that was the hardest part. So like when I started freelancing, it was right at the beginning of the housing collapse. Speaker 2: Oh, perfect timing. Oh, wait. Speaker 1: Yeah. So it was when all that went down, where I was working, I was all in on one client and it was the automotive industry and that was cratering as everybody just stopped buying cars. So I had a couple of good clients on the side and I just sort of took the plunge and did my Craigslist hustle for quite a while. So... Speaker 2: Did you get business through Craigslist? Speaker 1: I sure did. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Yeah. It was every morning. I would check all the ads in a couple of key areas and I would answer anything and then I would just I just hustle my way through that every day. Speaker 2: What do you charge? What were you charging? Speaker 1: I was super pumped if I can get 1500 bucks for like a small site. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's good for starting out. Mine was $500. That's not bad. Speaker 1: I mean, I only needed three or four of those a month and I was making more than I was making for an agent. Speaker 2: Yeah, it's good money. Speaker 1: Yeah. So, you know, as I sort of settled into that routine with the follow-ups and sort of creating that scope, and then that sort of baked itself into, because I did all my own WordPress development at the time, so I was able to keep both halves, so I could do all the design and strategy work. And then I could build it out so I could make the full budget. And I was able to sort of kind of keep it in some repeatable pieces with some special bits. Grunge was really popular back then. So it was like lots of splatter textures and like, yeah, anyways. And so As you just sort of rinse and repeat that, and you get more and more of these sites that were sitting out there that the clients would come back for support, I realized that I couldn't both sell, deliver, and support. And so, supporting existing clients and the reputation and sort of the referrals that would sort of fuel, I knew was sort of really important. And so the first person I brought on was to just take that part off my plate. And then I backed out of development and then I backed out of the strategy piece. And then I eventually backed out of out of design. So I sort of built that team under me as sort of the work scaled and the projects we had out in the wild grew. Speaker 2: And then it was perfect after that, I presume. Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. No, no problems at all. Speaker 2: What was the biggest problem with that? Speaker 1: I think, and this was sort of maybe anecdotal to me, but I was always a producer at the same time that I was also a salesperson and administrator. So I think the hardest part for me was to replace myself in the production. With people that could do it at the same pace, or at least close to the same pace. And so that's why I sort of backed out of support, which was easier to provide. And then backed out of development, which again was more production oriented. And then like strategy was sort of the last thing that I backed out of. Speaker 2: Jason Tucker, The Design and Strategy was the last? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: You knew that, right? Like that's your background. Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah. So, strategy and design are sort of like where a project's scope can get ruined. So, it was sort of the one area that I really try to keep focused on because then you're sort of like managing situations and expectations and that sort of stuff. So, yeah, just I think as I replaced myself, I realized that every time I did that, lack of process, lack of handoffs, lack of understanding, lack of like fundamentals for how we do things and why we do them and how we talk to clients about that. That was where a lot of that lived in my head. And it was hard for people to learn that when it wasn't somewhere they could reference. Speaker 3: Hi there, agency owners. Let me ask you, are you ready to scale your agency without increasing your overhead costs? If yes, then you need to know about E2M Solutions. 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Trust me, if you're ready to grow without burning out, e2m is the partner you've been looking for. That's e2msolutions.com slash Smart Agency. Go check them out and tell them Jason Swenk sent you. Speaker 2: How did you give them the tools to be successful then? Did you just one day have to write it down? Did you hire the right people? Because there's a lot of people that struggle with that, right? Like I, cause I remember going through that. I was like, man, I am the best designer in the world. I wasn't, but I felt like I really understood the user experience and where the eyes need to look, you know, in order to, you know, based on what the client wanted and that kind of stuff. And, and that was really hard for me to communicate to certain people. So what worked for you? Speaker 1: It sort of grew and evolved and gained polish over the years. But where it started was documentation, but sort of a more robust starting point. So basically what it worked out is that the whole process from start to finish was fully documented so that everybody knew who was responsible for what at what point. And that process And how it was documented was how we managed the project. It was the project manager and then each individual expert was sort of responsible for their piece of the pie and each individual responsible for that handoff. But as we got bigger, those handoffs had to become also documented in sconce, so it could be a repeatable process. All the assets that went into informing that, like the UX component library, the strategic guidelines, the build quality requirements, all of that had to get documented and built so that it became less all roads lead to me for answers and became more, here's the information for us to collaborate together so that we are empowered to make our own decisions. That was the hardest part. I think underlying all of that is the why. Why do we work with clients the way we do? What are we trying to recommend to them? Why are we sort of doing it this way and not that way? And so when we all understand why we do things the way that we do and what that common goal is, that informs the decision making. And so there is a cultural aspect, sort of like a Like an institutional body of knowledge, this is what we do and why we do it. So then, yeah, we had to at one point take a step back and just codify what we believe in and why we do it, what strategies we feel are effective and then codify all of that. So then again, it's, we weren't wanting to create limits. We were just trying to provide as much information as possible for us all to make decisions. Yeah. Speaker 2: I was chatting with a member earlier this morning about. Kind of the same thing. We all start by accident because we knew how to do something really well. And we're really good at it or great at it because we understand all the stories that happened in the past, right? To build up to a point of all the knowledge that we have based on going, well, our eye tracking is going to go here. We want them to go here. Boom, boom. And we can exactly build it in our heads. And so I told this member, I was like, it's the same thing of what I just did with our marketing AI agent. I was a bottleneck or let's say a toll booth. Like let's say we had 20 lanes, but all 19 of them were closed. And the only one open was me. And so everything had to go through me. And so the first step is really kind of identifying what are the stories, what are the guardrails, what are the requirements, all this different things in order to train someone to get to almost to the knowledge of you. And the goal is to get to someone to, if they can do 80% of what you're good at, A lot of times as you're growing your agency, you have all these different things that we're doing. So we are never at 80% because we're focused on a thousand different things and a thousand different fires. Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah. Speaker 2: But I told him, I said, You know, supersize it by using AI. And what if you create this AI agent? This is what we did on our marketing front. We loaded our branding guidelines, our message, all of our clients' challenges, like thousands of records that we've recorded, all of our podcasts, our books, everything. And we told it, you are going to be this marketing agent. You can do the same thing in design, in user experience. We're the world's best user experience. Load up all the designs that you like and how you came up with it, videos and transcripts, and really kind of train that agent. And then people can use that agent within your team as a knowledge base. In order to not come to you for everything. And a lot of times when people would come to me, like I wouldn't even remember half the stories, right? My mind can only handle so much. So, you know, your story kind of reminded me of what our conversation this morning was and then like how to really elevate all of that even more. Speaker 1: Yeah, well, what I started doing, because one of the biggest bottlenecks I was creating was in the sales process, right? So I'm still the primary salesperson. I have all of this email back and forth. I have these discovery calls, I create this proposal, and then we win the project and it moves into the team and we start our process. Speaker 2: And then you're out the door. Speaker 1: That's right. Yeah. And so, yeah, what I started doing like early last year was recording and transcribing all of those calls and really leveraging it to help me sort of research the existing site, sort of create some recommendations and write that proposal. But then between the emails, these transcriptions and the proposal and all the work that went into creating it, I now actually am able to synthesize that and provide that to the team. So now you have this robust understanding And it isn't a whole lot of this, well, mid-process, Shawn said this, or we thought that, or we had this conversation about that. And yeah, just sort of setting everybody up for success by making that information as available as possible. Speaker 2: Yeah, I've been telling all of our agency members in the mastermind, you should be creating AI agents for every single client you have. And loading up everything you know about that client that they sent, the transcriptions, the meetings, everything in it. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So we can always reference that because a client could tell me something last week. I'm going to totally forget it. Speaker 1: No, that's true. Yeah. Speaker 2: This AI agent is going to be like, Oh yeah. And October 13th at 2 48 and 23 seconds. We talked about this and this. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 3: It's incredible. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's yeah, I mean, that's where at least my neurodiversity comes in. Like, I'm really good in the moment. I might recall that later on. There's a good chance I'm not. And I might not remember when somebody says we talked about that. So having access to that digital brain has been a real game changer, not only for me personally, but for the team as well. Speaker 2: Yeah, it helps what I call the Frank the Tank moment, right? Like you remember, like when Frank's doing that debate in old school? And he goes, he's up against like the best debater in the world, like he's a famous politician or something. And so Frank, the tank goes first and he says something and it's like, perfect. And then he's like this, you know, after he's like, and they're like, that was brilliant. And he's like, what happened? I blacked out. Cause you forget the amazing thing that you say now. I just got back from speaking from a conference. Now this is, I think a little overboard and I thought this was a little freaky, but I'll tell you what this agency was doing. He literally wore this little thing on his pocket. It looked like a little air tag. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: And it was an AI, something connected to AI that recorded his whole day. Speaker 1: Yeah. I have one of those as well. I don't record my entire day. That feels like a bit much, but crazy, man. Yeah. Yeah. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Like I kept going to him, like in the side of, I had mentioned like weird little stuff, like I wanted to do because I knew that was going, I was like, just a mess of them. So are you going to tell me what that says later on? Speaker 1: Once a time I found myself in a client call. We're waiting for some clients to come in. Their Fathom note taker was in there and we were just killing time. We were just talking about politics and then because I thought they were, they were in it, but then they came in. So I was like, by the way, when you get the summarization of this particular meeting, this is what we were talking about. It looks super weird. Speaker 2: Yeah. Oh, that's awesome. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I like nerding out and going back in time for some of the tools that And how things used to be and how things are now. I appreciate you sharing with us, Shawn. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the listeners listening in? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think just how far you can take those pre-built pieces or sort of those predefined pieces. That was something that's really completely changed the game for us over the last few years, five or six years. It's been sort of something that we've been pushing. The first step was taking what the UX teams were using to prototype and structure and actually have our strategies baked into those pieces, not in a way that's limiting, but just in a way that's just easier to put together and a bit more rapid. Then ensuring that the way that we're building is lined up to that and all of that's lined up to our strategies. Just leaning further and further into those systems, we've been able to carve a huge amount of time Out of our builds, each step of the process isn't completely rebuilding the one before. And then a couple of years ago, we made the shift to low code. And that just took that whole idea a step further. So 80% of our project is using similar things. It's the 20% of the project that's going to make that unique. And then you fill that with content that's that brand story. And that's how we create these experiences. Contact pages are contact pages. We don't have to pretend like they're special. Speaker 2: So way more profitable too, right? Like you're not lowering your cost. You're raising it. It's taking you less time as well? Speaker 1: That's right. What that allows is for the teams to really focus on the parts that are going to lift the project and set it apart and not have to worry about the millwork, the stuff that's the same. And yeah, that has really reduced the amount of time needed for the standard stuff and has completely changed the game as far as our profitability is concerned, while still delivering even better products. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, we were always trying to figure out how to streamline everything, right? Anything repetitive, we're like, how can we streamline that even more? And, you know, we even got to a point where, and this was many years ago, but like to do like a 20 page public facing website. You know, it basically cost us like 10K. Probably now it's probably way even less, but we're charging over six figures for these sites. So profitable because we were able to do those kinds of different things. And I can only imagine now, you know, if we were doing the same thing of like, you know, how low cost that is. But I like what you were saying is. Now my team can concentrate on that 20%, that strategy, the thing that's really going to take the client to the next level to get those results. Speaker 1: Well, and that's the value. And that's another way to sort of look at the golden, the holy grail of value-based pricing is that if I'm able to charge the same thing for something I spend less time making because of stuff the client doesn't actually care about, and we can really focus on the stuff that makes us valuable and unique and tailored to that brand story. Then then everybody wins. Speaker 2: That's awesome. Well, cool. Well, Shawn, thanks so much for coming on the show and for everyone listening. You know, if if you like talking about things that are working. Or be able to have people on your team that can see the things that you might not be able to see. And you want to be around other amazing agency owners going through or have already gone through what you've gone through. You know, we have an amazing mastermind community of the best and the best of the agencies that are cool, you know, sharing what's working and not. And make sure you go to agencymastery.io. And until next time, have a Swenk day.