SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
EP 332: This Agency Went form $30k to $1.3M in Annual Revenue with 14 Employees
21 Jun 2016
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have.
Chapter 2: What motivated Kevin to leave his secure job to start Webfor?
I'm now at $20,000 per top. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
Chapter 3: How did Webfor grow from $30k to $1.3M in revenue?
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka. Okay, Top Tribe, every Monday I give one of you 100 bucks to invest in an idea and to get to the top. To enter, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes now and then text the word Nathan to 33444 to prove that you subscribed. Again, text the word Nathan to 33444. Last week's winner was Dr. Paul Vasquez. Dr. Paul Vasquez with My Ads Nation.
And he currently is working a full-time job and is dying to get out. This is episode 332 coming up bright and early tomorrow morning. Episode 333, Warren Jolly and how he made $15 million from managing ads in 2015. Okay, Top Tribe, good morning, good morning, good morning.
Our guest today is Kevin Goetsch, and he is the founder and director of digital strategy at Web4, a creative and digital marketing agency that has helped hundreds of businesses captivate their marketplace. He's been quoted and published on leading sites like Forbes, Huffington Post, Search Engine Journal, and Mashable.
He enjoys speaking at industry conferences as well as volunteering his time by serving on the board of directors for SEMPDX, a nonprofit focusing on fostering education in the search marketing industry. Kevin, are you ready to take us to the top? I am. You bet. You bet. Okay, so tell us first, what does Web4 do and how do you guys make money?
So we're a creative and digital strategy agency. We do everything from logo, branding, design, website design and development to search engine optimization, social media.
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Chapter 4: What revenue models does Webfor utilize?
We basically develop and help businesses implement a digital marketing strategy.
Okay. And are you one of the founders? When did you guys found this business? 2009. Okay. And you are one of the founders, right? Yes, I am.
Chapter 5: How does Kevin manage his team and client relationships?
Okay. So what were you doing before that? What encouraged you to kind of jump into the business?
So I was actually working for another very large company that worked in the digital space and I was, you know, I went to work every day and it just ate away at me because what they were doing for their clients was of little to no value and they didn't really seem to care.
They were just more of a sales organization, which I respect the sales side, but the business model made no sense to me and we weren't doing good things for clients. So I thought, hey, I can do that actually benefit from our services and we can retain them for a long time if we do good work for them. And so that's how I started.
Okay, and that was in, again, that was 2009, you said? Yeah, yeah.
I left a six-figure job, worst part of the economy ever. My wife wasn't thinking I was the smartest guy in the world.
Yeah, I was going to ask you, were you married? Did you have kids? Yeah, married and two kids, house, mortgage, actually two homes.
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Chapter 6: What challenges did Kevin face in his entrepreneurial journey?
So what you say six figures, what was the specific salary you decided to give up?
Well, the salary itself was actually only, what was it, 60-some thousand. But with commission, I made probably 120. Okay.
Okay, so good. So people listening right now, you have no freaking excuse. Get off your butt, take risks. This guy was married, two kids, two houses, mortgage. He gave it all up in 09, right in the middle of a financial crash.
Chapter 7: What lessons did Kevin learn from his previous failures?
So, Kevin, what gave you the confidence to go in and start this agency? I mean, were you just so unhappy?
You know, that was definitely it. and just eating away at me was not good. I was willing to make half as much and just enjoy what I was doing and be happy. And then I'm just a little bit of a serial entrepreneur. I wanted to, you know, work for myself. That was a big part of it. But at the end of the day, what gave me the confidence is a lot failures I had made previously.
I'd made a lot of mistakes. I'd started my own business previously that, you know, been successful, but, you know, ultimately wasn't something that was going to sustain me.
Chapter 8: How does Kevin envision the future growth of Webfor?
And I had some pretty big failures as well. And so I think those all kind of made me the perfect weapon for what I'm doing now.
Okay. And help us understand, you know, agencies do all kinds of different revenue models. What's yours?
Well, we have both project-based and we have kind of recurring revenue retainer type models. So on the marketing side, The majority of our work is retainer, so that's a big part of it, and that's a great thing, not only for us, but for our clients.
It's a recurring revenue stream, and on the website design and development side, that's always project-based, and we have to continue feeding in new projects all the time, but we're growing that side as well, so...
Can you give me the average in both of those? So an average web designer dev per project fee, what is that? Sure.
Yeah, so right now, probably our average web development, web design project is somewhere in the probably $10,000 range. And our average ongoing marketing project is probably anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.
Okay, got it. Got it, got it, got it. And how big, you're up there in Vancouver, right?
Yeah, Vancouver, Washington.
I have to, okay, Washington. I was about to say, in the other Vancouver, I'm getting so many people telling me there's just so much happening, but Washington's hot too. I mean, there's a lot of things going on up there tech-wise. Tell us how big your team is.
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