I tend to share our progress every year in this subreddit.
In 2014 I started an agency called 'Kreatix' with a friend from school. It was terrible.
And that's fine.
The problem
We did everything. Websites, e-commerce, Facebook Ads, graphic design, social media, PPC, SEO, analytics, audits, ...
Our agency was a master of none.
We decided to take a different approach in 2018 and identified a few core issues.
- Too many services
- No clear role division
- A lot of guesswork
- Barely any processes
The solution
We decided to change that.
Gone were the days of graphic design, social media and services that had no clear connection to our core.
We rebranded as a 'marketing agency'. Nothing spectacular, but it did the job.
Our renewed focus were websites that deliver results. (pic)
This instantly made it clear for our prospects what we were doing. We would rebuild their website in Wordpress, integrate our analytics suite and run PPC Ads. We'd track conversions and made sure our client knew where the leads were coming from.
Every service we 'sell' needs to have actionable data. It's hard to argue about the design of a flyer or a logo, too subjective. It's way clearer for clients if you can say you spent $500 on PPC and they got $6000 revenue through their webshop.
We decided we did not want to do marketing for websites that weren't built by us. This saved us a lot of time. Ever tried to integrate conversion tracking on a website built in a wacky CMS by a developer from another country? It's a big hurdle and slows everything down.
When we build the website, we know everything can be integrated easily and we can deliver results.
After we defined our services, we decided to take a look at role divisions.
We have 2 founders. William and Oliver.
William is a technical guy. He has patience, knows his way around code and servers. He loves working with some techno music and being left alone whilst coding.
I'm outgoing. I love data, talking to people, experimenting and working on our business.
Can you image for the first 3 years of our existence, we both did everything? In hindsight I honestly don't know how it ever worked out.
We split our tasks. William would build the websites. I would handle meetings, growing the business and marketing. (pic)
Our sales skyrocketed, the websites were way better and productivity was off the charts.
It's important to look at your team and recognize each others strengths and weaknesses.
Then we cut out the guesswork and unclear processes.
We drafted templates for everything.
Client intakes, website audits, PPC reporting. Basically everything we had to do more than once, we had a process in place.
This saves us a lot of time and makes it easy to onboard interns.
The results
They speak for themselves. Our revenue grew from 83k to 227k. We moved to an office that's three times as big as the previous one (pic)
We're hiring our first employee next year. Mind you we're still only 23 years old and it's pretty expensive to hire in Belgium. We think it's a step in the right direction and it will allow us to scale even more.
We managed to close bigger projects. We're working on a platform for the biggest universitary hospital of Belgium, we did a marketing campaign for the city we're located in and we spent about $100.000 on PPC ads. We signed 95 new clients in 2018. We have been asked for guest blogs, got featured on national television and had the opportunity to do a bunch of speaking gigs.
Main takeaways
- Find a niche and define core services that solve their problems (in our case: underperforming websites)
- Look at your team strengths and make sure their role compliments their talents
- Grow slow. Learn from your mistakes. Adapt to problems
- Be an entrepreneur! We're doing this because we like it. Make sure work stays fun and keep learning
I sincerely hope a few veterans of /r/Entrepreneur recognize us. We try to be as transparant as possible.
I'm always excited to answer questions and receive feedback. So feel free, shoot!
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