Chase Clymer is the Co-founder at Electric Eye where he and his team create Shopify-powered sales machines from strategic design, development, and marketing decisions. He is also the host of Honest Ecommerce, a weekly podcast where we provide online store owners with honest, actionable advice to increase their sales and grow their business.
Topics discussed in the episode:
- Chase’s story and the origins of Electric Eye
- The importance of removing yourself as an agency owner from day-to-day client services
- Leading and managing a team and the concept of swim lanes
- An intentional strategy for referral growth and partners
- How Chase approaches content marketing and his success with the Honest Ecommerce podcast
Presenting Sponsor: ZenPilot
ZenPilot helps agencies build more productive, profitable, and healthy teams by streamlining their operations in ClickUp.
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Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Chase Clymer on LinkedIn
- Electric Eye Website
- Honest Ecommerce Podcast
- ClickUp
- Andy Cabasso on LinkedIn
- Postaga
- Speero
- Google Analytics
- Justin Christianson on LinkedIn
- Conversion Fanatics
- CXL Institute
- Jason Swenk on LinkedIn
- Josh Nelson on LinkedIn
- Seven Figure Agency
- Dr. Jeremy Weisz on LinkedIn
- Rise25 Website
- Klaviyo
- Gray MacKenzie on LinkedIn
- Andrew Dymski on LinkedIn
- ZenPilot
Episode Transcript:
Gray MacKenzie
Welcome back to Agency Journey. This is Gray McKenzie this week. I’ve got the pleasure of bringing on Chase Clymer, who is the co-founder of Electric Eye, which is awesome. I know you don’t like just saying Shopify web design agency. You guys build it out a lot more than that. So we’ll talk about that messaging with what it looks like. But Chase is excited to have you on me. And thanks for joining me.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Thanks for having me. It’s funny, though, our clients would refer to us as a Shopify agency. It’s our problem, not theirs, right? Yeah.
Gray MacKenzie
The language that you want to use internally versus externally. People know us as the ClickUp guys, and we’re like, well, we do a lot more than just ClickUp, and ClickUp by itself doesn’t solve your problems, but, yeah, that’s fine. Think of us. However, you need to think less as long as that gets you through the door and we get a chance to impact your business. I think of ClickUp. You probably think of Shopify the same way ClickUp is like the Trojan Horse in our business model.
Gray MacKenzie
That’s why a lot of people come to us. But what they’re really looking for is there’s a result that they’re looking for at the end of the day. And I assume Shopify is the same thing in your business, right?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Shopify is just a tool – solving the problem takes strategy.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah. You’ve been the agency six years old.
Chase Clymer
Is that right?
Gray MacKenzie
Six or seven years old.
Chase Clymer
Five or six for the agency. I’m really bad at keeping track of time.
Gray MacKenzie
That’s all right. I know. I looked it up at one point, and then I forgot to put my notes here, so I’ll grab those.
Chase Clymer
But definitely our anniversary month, though. I know that we filed to be a real business in October.
Gray MacKenzie
Nice. Well, happy birthday to the agency. You were a freelancer for years before that, though, right?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Once upon a time, I was in a punk rock band, and that did not pay the bills. So I was freelancing the whole time while I was touring the country with the band dabbled in this dabbled in that cut my teeth, learned a lot of stuff, figured out what I like to do, what I didn’t like to do. And then when the band broke up, that was actually right around the same time that my business partner left his previous job, and he started freelancing and making every mistake under the sun.
Chase Clymer
So I was giving them general advice on, like, don’t do this position. Things just do this stuff. And through that, he kind of, like, introduced me to Shopify.
then we started to tag team some Shopify projects together.
And next thing you know, we had an agency because it was just easier to have a unified front when dealing with clients. And, like, billing and all that jazz than two weirdos with two email addresses. It was a lot easier to have a standardized title for an agency at that point.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah, I’m curious about the background. I’m going to come back to it in a second. But first, can you just the quick profile on Electric Eye right now in terms of team size in this agency, are you purely doing website projects?
Chase Clymer
So team size in the agency right now I would say ten employees full-time equivalent would be my rough guess. Got a bunch of assistants and contractors that help in the background, six full-time that are like on the core team. But the way I would position it as an e-commerce growth agency, the way our clients see us as Shopify experts. And that’s the funny thing. That’s why you need to do client interviews. Everyone needs to take away from this is ask your clients how they perceive you, and then that gives you all the copy in the world that you need for your marketing.
Chase Clymer
But what we do, there are two sides to the business. There’s the design development side, which is a pure optimization play, like conversion rate optimization, best practices. We’re looking to increase average order value as well and make sure that you have all the kinds of, like, correct apps and marketing automation in place on your Shopify store. So, like, you’re set up for success there, then the other side of the business is more traditional, like paid media and marketing. So it’s Facebook, Google, a lot of Pinterest as well.
Chase Clymer
You spend money to get more eyes on stuff and then also retention marketing. So email and SMS. The funny thing about that, that is purely a clay view as well. So we are very technology-specific at times because it just makes it more efficient and less SOPs for everyone to update. But on the website design and development side, a prerequisite to be a client at our agency is you either need to be on Shopify or the project is migrating you to Shopify, right?
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah. There’s a lot of similarities there between what you guys are doing and what we’re doing in terms of where you fit in the agency right now because I don’t think your background wasn’t just in web development, right?
Chase Clymer
No, I was definitely more of a marketing strategist when we first started the agency. What I was doing for clients is I was like running the Facebook ads and architecting the funnels. That’s like what I was doing at the start.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah, that makes sense. And then so what does it look like in the day-to-day now at the agency?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. So early on, I had coffee with a gentleman here in Columbus, Ohio, who had sold his agency like, three times, like sold it once to a bigger company, got put in for this earn-out, sold it again to a bigger company, renewed his earn-out. So he knew what he was talking about. And he basically said he was like, What’s the split of your time trying to win new business and do sales versus executing for your clients. And I was probably like, 30% sales, 70% client execution.
Chase Clymer
He said if you don’t flip that tomorrow, you’re going out of business. And so we took that to heart. I quickly got almost everything off my plate that I was doing trained another team member to take over my client responsibilities. And that was when I transitioned solely into the role that I kind of occupied for right now. And we’re going to be hiring Phil. So if anyone listens to this, likes what we’re doing, please reach out. Basically, what I do these days is I’m kind of the face of the brand of the agency.
Chase Clymer
And so I do all the content. The big picture marketing stuff is me. I have team members helping out with some of the smaller stuff, but de facto CMO, and then more tactical stuff is like, I am business development, I am partnerships, and I am sales. So those are like what I’m doing. So it’s all attractive. And the sell side of the agency model is what is on my to-do list now. But we’re looking to kind of grow the team and get some of that stuff off my plate.
Gray MacKenzie
Currently, that’s Andrew, my business partner. I’ve gone through a similar transition where I’ve taken over the front of the business, which is unfortunate for our business because I’m definitely the better looking of the pair. He should be the face of the business, and he leads the client strategy and client success team.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Early on, and just throughout an agency, you have to get a little earlier on it’s kind of all hands on deck, like, let’s get things done. When you add a new team member, you have to reevaluate swim lanes every time. And so now we’ve got seven people full time. And the swim lanes are very specific, the swim Lane is like, what do you do? What is your role supposed to do? And what is your role supposed not supposed to do?
And making sure that you aren’t doing things you shouldn’t be doing, which everyone wants to be helpful.
Chase Clymer
And that’s perfectly fine. But if you’re being helpful too helpful and not getting your core job function done, that is actually not a good thing right outside of.
Gray MacKenzie
So you mentioned the marketing, the content that you’re producing partnerships, and then sales. So if we dig into what that looks like for you right now, I was on the marketing side. You run a podcast, I think. Is it weekly? Honest eCommerce?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. We publish an episode every week during the pandemic. We went twice a week just because it was the only thing we can control. And then actually, as a result of the pandemic, we actually invested more in the podcast and went to a video format as well and really doubled down on what we were doing there. So when we kind of figured all that stuff out for the bonus episodes. We just merged it back together, and now it’s back to weekly.
Gray MacKenzie
Makes sense. Do you guys produce that all in-house?
Chase Clymer
I use contractors to help produce it. But the whole SOP and all that stuff are in the house. I was lucky to have an acquaintance in the industry basically hand me an SOP and says, this is how we do it. Yeah.
Gray MacKenzie
That makes sense. And then on the content side, are you doing, like, a weekly newsletter?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. So we used to do a lot more content. That’s a great question. So we used to do a video, a video, a blog post, a podcast, and all that would end up in the newsletter every week, then we did an inventory impact inventory type analysis, and we took a look at everything, we just went, like, the best content is obviously the podcast.
And so we just stopped doing everything else.
And it was just like we’re doubling down on the podcast 80/20 rule just ignored everything else.
Chase Clymer
And so we went all-in on the podcast.
Gray MacKenzie
That’s really cool if you break it down, feel free to share as much as you want to hear. But in terms of the bucket will be as big as you want to as well. In terms of buckets, of where revenue comes from, the percentage that comes from partnerships versus content marketing versus how else. I assume referrals are probably a big channel for you as well, working with agencies. What does that look like? Yes.
Chase Clymer
I would say that referrals and partnerships are almost the same thing in the world that we play in because it’s a referral from our partner or it’s a referral from what have you. But I would say these days it’s probably about 50% from partnership referrals in general, from existing clients. There are people that we know in the industry, which is a healthier split than what it was historically was probably 70 ish maybe or maybe more. Word of mouth is the same thing as a referral. And that’s definitely how you get started.
Chase Clymer
You really hit up your network and you try to get things going that’s all kind of word of mouth and then referrals from there. But as you grow as an agency and we understood this early on, that if you are waiting for a lead to end up in your inbox, that’s the recipe for disaster. So that’s why we went into that content place so early on. And then it just took us a while to realize that the best content play for us was doing the Honest Ecommerce Podcast.
Chase Clymer
So back to your question these days, it’s about 50% referrals, word of mouth, and all that. And then the other 50% is definitely from the content play. Either our content that we’re putting out, or it’s probably more like heavy or skewed, maybe 30% from me being a guest on other platforms and sharing my knowledge to other audiences.
Gray MacKenzie
It’s one of the underrated things about building your own platform. And podcasting is with no qualifications beyond the fact that you yourself are a podcaster, you start getting invited into other areas, so it’s not that you’re not qualified, but just the act of getting out and doing it yourself will open up opportunities. People see you’ve got a show. It’s always easier to talk with someone who is a podcast who runs a podcast because there’s some certainty that this person’s thought about some stuff, they will know how to act on it.
Gray MacKenzie
There are all kinds of things that I think there are some native advantages that sometimes go under. Look, that’s not the primary reason to start a podcast, but it’s a fringe benefit that I think it’s overlooked sometimes.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I am so much better at public speaking.
I am so much better at answering answers on the fly. I was going to say I don’t say as much, and then I just did it, but I don’t say it as much as I used to. So with the podcast itself, I started it over three years ago, and so I’ve gotten so much better. All this stuff and through that, our quality has gotten better. Our guests have gotten better, and our reach has actually gotten better. With that being said, for the first two and a half years, I think the biggest mistake I made was focusing solely on my podcast and trying to grow that audience, which there’s a cheating tip, which is or just be an expert and go put yourself in front of other audiences that are bigger than you that have already put in that work.
Chase Clymer
So we started to do that six, eight months ago, getting me out into the world being a guest on the podcast. Funny enough, you asked me to be on this one, but it wasn’t like from our outreach, but we’re doing outreach for me to get on other ones. And that has actually been a very fruitful endeavor of ours that’s hopefully here.
Gray MacKenzie
Are you using any tools to do that? Are you just making a list and then systematically working through it or having a contractor work through it and where it makes sense to reach out the tools that we use for that?
Chase Clymer
Specifically, we have two outreaches, like cold outreach tactics that we have at the agency. They are both emails only. We haven’t tried anything else because we are getting fine results with just email. So we have cold outreach to brand founders to have them be a guest on our podcast because that’s my favorite story to tell. It’s my favorite type of guest to have. So we built that one out. So we use GMASS for our drip flows. And then historically, Nikki would just kind of bounce around on the Internet.
Chase Clymer
She’d do a lot of stuff on Instagram and just find brands that she has, like a checklist of what we’re looking for. But at a certain point, she just kind of knew what she was looking for, and she was doing a little bit more manually. And then we actually invested in a subscription to storeleads.net, And then I really pruned down what I was looking for in there, and I exported a bunch of stores. So we’ve got stores for days. But let me talk about that.
Chase Clymer
So you can export. You can get these data lists from all these different sources for whatever the heck you want online, whatever your niche is. That’s cool. But you still need to have a human clean it up afterward or it’s going to be garbage results. So Nicki now doesn’t have to source ideas for this, but she still takes them. She still double checks everything, make sure that everything makes sense, and then adds it to a different list that is actually going to start doing all the automation stuff.
Chase Clymer
And I think we send about 50 emails a week to new brands to try to get them on the podcast.
And then the other outreach is to other podcasts, And the way that I found that information was through a service called Listen Notes paid for me to export the data that I wanted on certain topics. Again, she cleans it up, makes sure that it’s still a podcast.
That’s like a very people just say that and then they go away, but that one actually has to lower it down.
Chase Clymer
I think we only send, like, 25 a week because I was getting such a good response rate because people were like, I’ve heard of that guy. Of course, you can be on the podcast. And I’m like, I can’t do twelve podcasts in one week. I need to calm things down.
Gray MacKenzie
That makes sense. I think that’s a list of notes is a good tip for folks we haven’t had him on yet. I need to have on Andy Cabasso, who is building a company called Postaga, and part of what they do is outreach and searching. And one of the ways that he’s built that brand is through cold outreach to podcasts as well.
Chase Clymer
I’m assuming everyone listening to this has an agency, right? That’s like all you guys do over there. And I’m sure you get these ads too. It’s like everyone’s, like, buy my $8 book about how I build a billion-dollar. I buy all those books because I like to see how the funnels work to reverse engineer them. I never go in the next step with some of those coaches because sometimes they’re just a little too gimmicky. But I do sit down and read the books because they’re easy reads.
Chase Clymer
You can knock it out in an hour because it looks like it’s thick, but it’s a huge font and a bunch of pictures. But I read one of those the other day. Hold on. I think I gave it to my business partner. I can’t remember what it was I’ll try to remember after this and email it so we can put it in the show notes. But basically, this guy built agencies for it was basically service businesses. So like, his agency would help you get leads if you are a contractor or a plumber.
Chase Clymer
Very certain niches. Right. But in that book, my biggest key takeaway there was just like Cold Outreach sucks, but you have to do it. And here are playbooks on how to do it. So that’s when I really went in on the Cold Outreach on email, which was just in the last year of the agency.
Gray MacKenzie
The Josh Nelson Seven Figure Agency.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. That was it.
Gray MacKenzie
That’s awesome. Josh is awesome. He’s got a great community. I think they’re on our website right now. We’re working with them as well.
Chase Clymer
Small world, isn’t it?
Gray MacKenzie
It is.
Chase Clymer
But no, the book was an interesting read. If you had a service like a business that helps service businesses, it’s a fantastic read for you. But yeah, my key takeaway from that was like, you have to have the systems for every business. Well, here’s where this leads into the systems that you should have for acquisition to try and get new customers is you need to have a rock-solid, solid partnership program in that you also need to have referrals, and you need to have a rock-solid outreach cold outreach system, and then you just have to be producing content, authoritative content in your niche, right?
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah. All three of those work in concert together for sure on the referral side, because I’m glad you brought that up again because that’s one thing I wanted to go back to. What are some of the things that you’ve put in place there that has helped because obviously, anybody selling Gold Outreach or any service other than referral marketing referrals are great when you have them, but you can’t control the pipeline at all? And I think to a large extent that’s true. But you actually can influence how many referrals you get from folks by getting some of the systems in place.
Gray MacKenzie
Is there anything that you guys have found that’s been really effective to earn more of those referrals or get one of those referrals to come through from folks who would happily do it for you, but may not otherwise?
Chase Clymer
Yeah, So here’s the interesting thing for an agency that has a model like us, which is like a larger project sizes fewer clients.
So you get into this funny situation where a lot of your partners who you’re working with, have to refer it somewhere regardless.
So they don’t really care about a kickback.
But the way that we try to incentivize things with those partners is just by being top of mind again, 80, 20, or your top partners that are always referring stuff where you get the best most qualified leads.
Chase Clymer
So this week we were reaching out to some of our top partners and sending them the T-shirt that I’m wearing, or do you want the hat? It’s cool stuff like it’s business. They don’t really care. But I’ll take a free T-shirt. I like the guys over an electric guy. I think that’s fine. But then your top of mind. So when they get something that comes in that they’ll definitely think about you with our clients, what I found, and you’ll actually have some data to back this up.
Chase Clymer
Like, 10% of the deal size or just cash, in general, isn’t actually much of a motivator for a lot of people, especially when you’re talking about their livelihood and referring friends or acquaintances that they have in the world to work with your business. But what things that do work are bonuses back to the client for referring like, hey, if you give them a kickback that’s tangible for them to use in their business, like, hey, if you do that, we’ll do this sort of like a mini project for anyone that wants to send something back, or we’ll make a donation to the charity of your course or something that I read that was great was actually having it be like a physical tangible product that’s interesting, like iPads and phones.
Chase Clymer
You see that all the time to try to just incentivize people, but we just get kind of creative two or three times a year and just reach out to our clients asking for referrals and just have some sort of creative offering there to see what happens.
Gray MacKenzie
That’s cool. That piece will be a podcast production. I’ve given him a shout-out number of times on the podcast, but Jeremy Weisz and the crew Rise25. We got somebody who’s looking at starting a podcast and they don’t want to do it in-house and they want to work with somebody else. Jeremy is one of the folks who will send people too, and all their referral stuff is like, go through this form, select the type of gift, not the actual gift, but you answer these different questions and they shipped out a super nice gift.
Gray MacKenzie
I’m sure it was not that expensive, but it was cool to get kind of a semi-customized gift back. It’s just a creative way to I know I knew that was going to happen.
Chase Clymer
But it’s there’s a good book to read on the topic of gifting called Giftology and some key takeaways. There were money and food are terrible gifts, and you might disagree with me, and that’s fine. But in the business context, you should read the book. If that’s a model that you want to go after.
Gray MacKenzie
I’ve seen the book. I haven’t read the whole book.
Chase Clymer
Why do they say food is not a good gift because you don’t know someone’s dietary restrictions, right. So if you guess wrong, it’s very detrimental.
Gray MacKenzie
Don’t send me seafood. I’ll probably pass it up, but everyone else is probably great.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And then wine is often considered as a good gift, but there’s a lot of people that don’t drink, you know what I mean? So there’s more risk versus reward, right.
Gray MacKenzie
Makes sense.
Chase Clymer
But it’s a thoughtful gift. The purpose of the book is to talk about thoughtful gifting, so just do a little research you can figure out, especially if you’re doing it from a sales and trying to win business perspective.
Gray MacKenzie
Right.
Chase Clymer
A little bit of research can go a long way.
Gray MacKenzie
How do you guys structure the podcast right now? You said you went to video. Have you thought through kind of the format of what those look like? Is it similar to has it always been similar to this format where it’s interview-based? Did it start out as an interview show?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. It was always interview-based when I first got started. And this is how anyone starts a podcast, which is the perfectly fine model, which is just get started and interview smart people that, you know, that’s semi-related to what you’re doing. That’s how we started. And then since then, I have pivoted more into where I wanted to be in the first place, which was interviewing brand founders and getting their stories originally. What I really wanted to be was basically how I built this for Shopify stores. That’s what I wanted it to be.
Chase Clymer
And now it’s finally like getting there. So I’m happy. Like I’ll have experts on every once in a while. Here’s a Sidebar here. Co-marketing with your partners and being top of mind with your partners by having them on your podcast is another great way to get them to always be thinking about you. But I digress most of my episodes now are with brand founders, right. And then the process that you ask my process is this person will reach out or I’ll reach out to them.
Chase Clymer
If they seem decently qualified, I’ll just skip them to the next step, which is an onboarding form. This is something that is usually a hiccup at times is like you don’t get a headshot from a person or their bio or their Twitter handle or whatever, and you ask for that after the recording and then they get busy and they never give it to you. And now you have a wasted piece of content. Whereas if you just forced them to do this the first time you’ll have it and then the content will come out.
Chase Clymer
So we have the form first and then scheduling and then it gets dumped into base camp. And then first there’s a light edit from the producer to get it kind of bounced to what it’s going to be. Then the copywriter comes in and then the producer and copywriter work together on like, what are the snippets going to be? What are the social assets going to be? What’s the pool type and all that stuff? And then they publish it out and all that jazz.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah, that makes sense. That’s awesome. We’re recording this here at the beginning of Q4, when this goes out. This will be towards the end of Q4 2021 in terms of milestones. Looking forward here to 2022. What are some of the things that you guys are focused on building out? You mentioned kind of scaling out more of the team as you guys grow. Are there other major milestones?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. So milestones. There have been two things that I’ve talked about on podcasts like this one or any other podcast I’ve been guessing on over the last year that are now lies. So I’ll clear the air on this show. One I used to say, go to Electricguide IO, hit Connect, and you’d be connected with me. I’ll be the guy you talk to. That is now a lie. We’re looking to hire a team member to get that off my plate. That’s part of growing. I have to stop doing that.
Chase Clymer
So like you said, the growth of team members is something that we’re looking forward to be doing next year. It’s definitely going to be a pain point for the next twelve to 16 months as we grow the team and reestablish swim lanes. So that’s something that we’re going to be doing. And then another lie was, wait, what was the other one? We would always say that we only have about a dozen clients at a time. We’re probably going to kick that up to 18 very quickly and then maybe up to 24 after that.
Chase Clymer
As we expand the team, we will have more capacity.
Gray MacKenzie
Makes sense. I think you mentioned to me at one point that you only take on I forget what you call them, like design, sprints, or something.
Chase Clymer
But basically, discovery. We just branded it to make it sound cooler, but it’s basically paid discovery. It’s called a strategy. Sprint is what we call it.
Gray MacKenzie
I think you said you only would take on one of those at a time and then move people through. But it sounds like you’re saying, I don’t think I realized this before. You sell that as a one-off. Like you buy the.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. It’s like a foot in the door offer, which is a great way to think about getting the relationship started with anybody. Yeah. So here’s something that took me a long time to realize this actually is from Jason Swenk, who’s a good consultant in the eCommerce, not e-commerce in the agency space. But basically, you got to have a foot in the door offer. Your sales process, all the upfront work needs to make sense and need to be able to show value in what you’re doing for your client.
Chase Clymer
But then you chop off just the beginning part of it as like a paid engagement where everyone has the opportunity to walk away afterward and then your guarantee on what that is can be whatever you want it to be. Guarantees are a whole other conversation, but ours is like just the discovery element of architecting the solution together and making sure everyone’s on the same page with what that looks like. So we call it a strategy sprint. Then from there, if it’s not going to be a project, but it’s going into a retainer, we do a retainer trial period.
Chase Clymer
That is three months, and then after that, we will have a conversation about either going month to month or annual for a discount.
Gray MacKenzie
Right. Makes sense. The walk away from that. Let’s say it is a web project. The core thing that we’re focusing on first is Shopify. Is there a hard takeaway or deliverable at the end of it? Ie site map or site architecture or even a wireframe of a page?
Chase Clymer
Yeah. They’re getting a strategy in the form of a statement of work, which nothing’s stopping them from printing that out and taking it to some other agency.
Gray MacKenzie
Sure.
Chase Clymer
But we’ve done all this work together. If they are getting it done nine times out of ten. Like, we’re moving forward, right.
Gray MacKenzie
That makes sense.
Chase Clymer
But the reason to do that is once you get into the scoping phase and everybody on the team is involved and you’re now getting into the actual codebase and looking at other product architecture and really investigating and making sure that your proposed solution is a solution that will work for the project rarely. But it does happen. You go, this is going to be way more complex than anybody anticipated. And now it’s like, okay, you have to go back to the drawing board. You have to reestablish timelines and budgets, and sometimes it isn’t going to work anymore, and it’s like, okay, well, that sucks.
Chase Clymer
But at least we didn’t get into some crazy big agreement before realizing it was going to suck, right? Yeah.
Gray MacKenzie
That makes sense on the back end of website projects. I’d assume obviously you’ve got a retainer on the marketing work that you guys are doing. Is there a separate retainer that sticks around on the website side, or do you just build those into one single retainer on the back end where you’re getting your website maintenance and the updates made as part of what the retainer looks like?
Chase Clymer
That’s a great question. Currently on that side of the business. Building a website is a very fluid and creative process, and if it’s not in the statement of work or it’s not in the design, it is not a deliverable you’re going to get. But, oh, boy, there’s going to be a lot of things that people ask for during that process, and you got to be really rigid about it because you’re protecting your profit and you didn’t agree to it. You don’t need to be nice, but we just throw all that stuff onto, like, a wish list, and we keep track of all of it.
Chase Clymer
Then after the fact, we offer what’s basically called a flex fund retainer, and we’ll just tackle the small stuff on an ongoing basis. And it’s X amount of hours a month. And we’ll tackle those types of things. It’s more on the design development side. Oftentimes it’s a lot of just straight-up consultant SJ. They’ll have questions about stuff, and it’s like peace of mind and insurance types for the client as well. But through that, we end up building out other crazy big projects with them because they’ll be like, well, there’s this thing that’s going on in our business, and we’re already so ingrained in it that we know about it.
Chase Clymer
And we’re like, well, we could just do all this crazy cool stuff together. We’ll do that. So the Flex Fund retainer is what we offer kind of the design development side of things. And then in the spring, actually, we’re going to be implementing we’re going to be testing our CRO retainer with a few of our clients before we really go public with it.
Gray MacKenzie
Yes, that makes sense. I feel like we’re about to see a huge uptick in CRO agency. I was talking to an agency today that is trying to build it out. We had Justin Christianson from Conversion Fanatics on the podcast maybe a month ago talking through what they do from a Cr perspective. But it seems in Speero, it’s kind of offshoot of the CXL Institute, but it seems like there’s a number of agencies. I mean, it’s been around for a handful of years now, but there’s a number of agencies who are just kind of picking up.
Chase Clymer
Remember when at the beginning of the podcast, I was like, our clients call us Shopify experts, but we consider ourselves like growth strategists. Another thing is CRO is a very broad stroke term at this point. That doesn’t even mean what it means anymore in the perception of clients in our industry. What they want is like, KPI optimization, really. And it’s not just the conversion rate. There are, like other things you can do, because at the end of the day, it’s Socratic questioning. Ask why they’re just going to be like, we want to make more money.
Chase Clymer
And you’re, like, cool. There are all these other ways to make more money in there, but the split testing element of that and the thinking through it and testing and all that stuff, the process behind what CRO is you can do for any KPI.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah, for sure. There’s a huge opportunity there. There’s a handful of other metrics that I think we’ll see over the next couple of years. More agencies just build offers around each of those where it’s not just saying that the front one easy one to see the one that we could go into your Google Analytics or your CRM and look at relatively quickly is conversion rate. But there’s a whole other segment of those businesses.
Chase Clymer
That stuff is exciting to me because then you get to be creative and strategic and strategically think about how to solve problems that kind of don’t exist. But tinkering. And iterating is like what I love to do. So I’m really excited to get that going.
Gray MacKenzie
Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, we go a lot farther, Chase, but we’re getting close to time, so I want to make sure I can get you out of here on time. Honest Ecommerce, I think, has its own site, right? Honest Ecommerce co if I’m remembering, right, yes.
Chase Clymer
C. O. Because the guy will not sell me. Com.
Gray MacKenzie
Nice. Good move. Let it blow up in value and then go get it down the road and then electriceye.io, That’s right. I-O.
Chase Clymer
Because the guy that had that one wanted $20,000, and we’re like, Nah, yeah, that’s awesome.
Gray MacKenzie
Well, anywhere else we should point people.
Chase Clymer
The YouTube. I personally like when podcasts have a video element to them. So all of our podcasts are actually on YouTube, and it’s just the Honest Ecommerce YouTube channel. And actually, now on our YouTube channel, our courses are completely free. So we actually have a free course on Facebook and Instagram advertising that you can check out on our YouTube channel and a free course on Klaviyo Like setting up your Klaviyo account the correct way.
Gray MacKenzie
Awesome.
Chase Clymer
Cool.
Gray MacKenzie
We’ll make sure all that stuff ends up in the show notes, and it’s been really fun. I appreciate you coming on, chase.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Thanks for having me. Bye.Thanks for listening to the Agency Journey podcast. Visit Agency Journey Insiders to join the podcast community and be sure to subscribe for future episodes.
