BC Gurus

New Business Catalyst Template: Saltbox - Bootstrap

Wed, 15 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Consulting for Business Catalyst Partners

Thu, 02 May 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Consulting for Business Catalyst Partners

If you enjoy exploring capabilities of Business Catalyst platform, then you will be glad to know that now there are more ways you can improve your knowledge and skills.

We’d like to introduce our new Consulting service, and show how you can benefit from it. We created this service because a lot of BC Partners are focused on learning. They are excited to find more ways to use the platform features and opportunities. We want to help our clients use Business Catalyst in the most smart way.

How it works:

You submit your question for Business Catalyst Experts Advice. We provide a detailed answer. If you like we can also do the implementation for additional quote according to our rates.

What does our Consulting Service mean for you:

Sometimes you don’t know how to implement certain functionality. Or you need help with integration of the third party API. Or your client has special requirements for site administration. We’ll lend a helping hand!

We will help you handle the tricky details of the project and to give the most precise estimate. You will be able to competitively bid on the most intricate projects.

Very often there are several possible ways to implement certain functionality, and we will help you select the most effective one. You will build websites that are fast and easy to maintain.

With our Сonsulting service, Business Catalyst Partners are able to improve their knowledge and skills of using JavaScript and Business Catalyst API, improve integration with the third party applications.

We’re looking forward to helping more BC Partners use the platform in the most effective way!

New Business Catalyst Template: Mintech Electronics

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

View the Mintech Template details page

Simple Tips to Get More Call Backs on Sales Opportunities

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Learn How to Build Value (instead of eating ramen)

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

I have never avoided the topic of trying to get the Business Catalyst community to charge more for their projects.

More often than not I feel this advice falls on deaf ears. But perhaps I know why...

Because too many partners think that charging more is simply a means of increasing your prices. Now, while I do recommend to increase your prices (if you haven't in a while, dial them up 5% today), there is more to it. Higher prices mean you have to sell and deliver more value.

The natural tendency is to get a prospective opportunity, drive to the proposal as quickly as we can, then wonder why we aren't getting paid squat for the project.

So what is this elusive word "value?"

What does it mean for our business and our customers'?

It means pain.

Searching for pain. Finding pain. And delivering a solution that will cure that pain.

Most of the time this pain resides in your clients wanting to grow their business by getting more customers. But even though they all might have the same core pain, the route to solve that pain will be different depending on their market, geography, and how their business operates. It will depend on what they've tried before, what's worked, what hasn't. It will depend on their management style, risk tolerance, and knowledge of the inter-webs.

But this pursuit...

The pursuit to find pain and build value for your services that solves that pain...

Is exactly the thing that will cure you of sleepless, ramen-noodle filled nights.

Referring Traffic: Why You Might Be Getting It Wrong

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

If you are relying on online channels to solicit new business, most probably you also monitor referring traffic using Google Analytics. This way you can analyze and compare effectiveness of your campaigns, and maybe even calculate your partners’ rewards.

Recently we’ve discovered that our data on traffic from our partners’ sites varies significantly from the numbers provided by partners. We did a research and came up with a few reasons why you might be deceived by your web analytics reports. We want to share them with you, and give an advice on getting the most accurate data.

Five Reasons Why Referring Traffic Results are Not Accurate:

1. You Are Not Differentiating Between Clicks and Visits

Whenever you’re analyzing your partner’s clickthrough data, keep in mind that outbound clicks are different from the inbound visits:

Users may click a few times in a row.
They may click the referral link, leave your site, and then come back again via the same link. This will increase the clickthrough data but will not impact the visits statistics.
Some visits get filtered out as they are considered as visits from bots.

These are just a few possible explanations for discrepancies between data on clicks and visits - so you should never confuse these two.

2. Your Tracking Code is Not Working Correctly

When you were configuring Google Analytics, there were small pieces of javascript code you had to paste on each page - ‘tracking code’.

Most common mistakes in setting up the tracking code include using an outdated version of tracking code, and having non-Asynchronous (or ‘traditional’) tracking code.

Before Google released the Asynchronous Tracking code it was not recommended to put the traditional Google Tracking Code in the head of your page, because traditional code could decrease site loading speed. Asynchronous code works differently; it is designed to be downloaded only once, and afterwards it’s served from the cache. Therefore we recommend you to follow official recommendation from Google and place the tracking code before the closing tag.

3. You Are Ignoring the Invisible Visitors

A growing number of visitors attempt to eliminate behavioral advertising by setting their web browser to reject cookies, and activating the Do Not Track (DNT) option. Also, users with comparatively old versions of mobile devices, certain versions of browser on Android and iOS devices are unable to use cookies and therefore are excluded from your traffic reports.

Mobile traffic is often interpreted as direct traffic, or is not recognized at all. The javascript code used by Google Analytics is not supported by many mobile browsers, especially Opera, and calls a certain external files, which may not be properly obtained over mobile connections.

4. Your Analytics Might Be Showing More Referral Traffic than There Really Is

Google Analytics does not update cookies for visitors from referral sites unless they visit your site again from another referral source. If a user clicks through to your site via a partner’s site, the utm_z cookie is updated with traffic source information and it will not be overwritten until another referring campaign takes place.

This means that even if a certain visitor has left your site, and then returned the next day by typing your URL in the browser, this visit will count as another referral visitor.

5. Your Partner’s Redirects Are Turning Referring Visits into Direct

In some cases, a link on your partner’s site would take visitors to a redirect link page - for instance, asking them to confirm they are willing to leave the page. All such visits are recorded as direct traffic by your web analytics.

How to Get the Most Accurate Data on Referring Visits

Tip # 1: If you’re negotiating conditions of a partnership program with another site, be very precise as to the benchmarks and rewards. Specify whether you will pay a monthly fee, pay-per-click, pay-per-visitor, pay-per-impression fee etc.

Tip # 2: To ensure most accurate results in your analytics, use the latest version of the tracking code, and place it in the head of your page. The sooner the code is loaded, the more events you track.

Tip # 3: Tag All of Your Campaigns with Custom URLs. Google has a free tool that allows you to build custom URLs using the utm tag: Google Analytics URL Builder. This way, you can track results of each campaign via the Campaigns module in the Google Analytics. Also, you can create an advanced segment, which will give you even more information on behavior of visitors who came through a certain campaign. This approach will also help you separate different campaigns and activities if there are currently several projects with the same partner.

Bottom line: the practice of tagging links is the foundation for accurate marketing analytics. It is the best way to avoid misleading data on referring visits, and we also strongly recommend that you tag links whenever it is possible. Tag links in advertising campaigns, integrate the tracking code into social plugins on your site etc. This way, you will better track results of all partnership programs and social shares.

If you have questions or thoughts, feel free to post them in the comments below. Also, if you’ve encountered any other examples of misleading data in web analytics reports - please describe these in comments, and share your tips on overcoming these pitfalls.

Consulting by Business Catalyst Experts

EZ-BC now provides consulting services. We are answering any questions related to custom functionality on Business Catalyst platform.

This includes any difficulties with the development of custom solutions for BC websites using JavaScript and Business Catalyst API, integration of BC with other third party applications on the basis of various technologies such as Java, .Net, PHP.

Get fast and professional Business Catalyst consulting and support. Business Catalyst website estimation, features implementation and many more!

Getting Out Of The Cold

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In my last post I shared about my experience in cold calling. It’s been a great time learning how to discipline myself. I haven’t been able to ‘ring the bell’ to say I’ve gotten business from it yet but from what I’ve learned from others is that it could take about 6 months to get your first client from this method. It’s because you don’t know what state they’ll be in or what’s taken place before you call. If I don’t get through this week I add them to my recycled list and I’ll call back again in three months time and perhaps this time they’ll have a pressing need or will be open to taking the call.

I’m not exactly wanting to wait that long for the cold calls to pick up a new client. But I do want to keep it up to find out what my average is. In the meantime it’s time to warm some of these calls I’m making so my time investment starts paying me some dividends.

Sunny Days Ahead

What do I mean by making warmer calls? I’m talking about calling what are called your ‘strong ties’ or clients that are in good standing with you. Specifically for this I had wanted to partner with my customers in bringing my services to their business customers.

What’s in it for them? Depending on what they offer I’ve made deals where they get a finders fee or if their customers buy a certain amount from them they can get a discount on our services/packages.

Leverage Your Strong Ties

Imagine you’re out to get a new TV. You’ve done a bunch of research and found that the best one out there is the LG. You go to your friends house (that friend that you trust and knows everything about technology and TVs) to tell about your great find. After you’ve finished telling your friend about all the research you’ve made and which TV you’re going to get they say “No you shouldn’t get the LG you should get the Samsung.”

Has that ever happened to you? One of two things happen after this either in one moment all your research goes down the drain and you end up buying what your friend said was best or you go back and revalidate all the research to make sure you’re buying the right one.

Isn’t it funny that we could advertise our TVs and people are ready to buy them but all it takes is one of their strong ties to influence their decision. This is what we’re wanting to do with our network. Get our customers to recommend us to their customers.

This method has helped warm up my calls and my customers have actually received this idea with open arms. In the coming months I’d love to share how this all unfolds. Let me know if this was helpful for you. Until next time, keep fit and have fun!

New Business Catalyst Template: Haymaker

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

View the Haymaker Template details page

Hosting Multiple Websites on a Single Business Catalyst Platform

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Sometimes clients have multiple brands or subsidiaries and they want to build a single Business Catalyst website with several different full or micro sites.

This can be really beneficial if the client is using BC to hold their customer, order, and marketing data. It can also save them a little money on a monthly basis by only paying for a single BC site.

How BC Handles This Well

BC allows you to add multiple URLs with different start pages for each. You can also create custom templates for the various pages on your site. This allows you to create micro-sites within a single BC application that can be entirely different sites running from one implementation.

You could run completely different brands or simply landing page offers for a brand that wants vanity URLs and specially designed landing pages.

BC's email system can also handle aliases for a single email account.

Limitations with Multiple Sites

The problem with working through a single implementation is that some BC features only have a single template.

There is only a single invoice, cart, and system message template. Most modules also only have a single layout template. This puts limitations on what features you can use across multiple domains and sites within a single Business Catalyst build.

Can You Hack It?

Of course. You can actually use Javascript to read the URL being requested and load in a different stylesheet for the pages within BC that are locked to only one design. This does add a layer of complexity to your project and adds a little overhead to your projects for ongoing management.

If hacking it or working with the limitations of running multiple sites on one build don't work for your customer, but they need their data in a single BC app, there is still hope. You can use the API and a custom app to sync data between Business Catalyst sites based on what your customer needs. This would of course require two BC accounts and some custom software written, but it might be worth it.

Q & A Thursday

Are you facing a challenge in your Business Catalyst partnership that you need help on? Or perhaps you have an insight you would like to share with the community. We would love to hear from you. Send us an email: info@bcgurus.com. Make sure to mention "Q & A Thursday" in your subject line.

How to Transfer a Site to Another Business Catalyst Partner

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Losing Clients Can Be Painful

On a long enough timeline, you will lose clients. No matter the circumstance, it can get emotional.

You have probably invested a lot of time and energy to get the client, build the project, and support their needs. When a client wants to move on (or you'd like them to), it can drain your energy.

My advice is to try and make the whole process as smooth as possible and get it over with quickly. You don't want to draw out the process. You also probably don't want to spend a lot of time trying to convince the client otherwise, or even try to figure out exactly why the parting of ways is occurring. Even if the other party tells you why, it might not be the truth.

Transferring to Another Partner

In order to get your client to another Business Catalyst partner, you will have to have all parties contact Adobe support. This double-verification system ensures that someone couldn't just go through your client list and try to steal your customers out from under you.

The client's site will seamlessly transfer from one partner to another. You do not have to rebuild anything or create any backups during this process. Adobe simply re-associates the site with the new partner.

One of the "gotchas" in this process is that they websites billing will restart. So you typically want to line up the transfer at the end of the billing process. If the site is being billed monthly, this is quite easy. If your customer has already paid for an annual subscription, then it might be best to hold off on transferring partners until you are closer to the billing cycle renew.

Unless of course the relationship has gone so toxic that it is just time to pull the trigger. In that case, don't cry over spilled milk.

If you need to direct your client to another Business Catalyst partner, I recommend using our directory to give them a place to research other partners around the world.

Q & A Thursday

If you have any questions or comments about transferring a client to another partner or what to do when you are losing a client, let me know. If you have other problems or issues in your Business Catalyst partnership, let me know and I will do my best to answer it next week.

Make Extra Money with Your Business Catalyst Experience

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Yesterday we opened our doors officially to the Business Catalyst partner community for both idea suggestions and full contributed posts for tutorial courses, blog content, and templates.

AND, if your content is good enough, we'll throw in some dollars and Guru Points to sweeten the pie.

About a year ago I realized that BC Gurus was publishing a lot of content from a very specific point of view (ours). There are a lot of different lenses that you can look at the world in, and I wanted to capture that in our content. We started the Everyone, Guru project last fall and it has gone better than I expected.

To date we have had over a dozen tutorial / course contributions, a template, and many blog posts. Seeing other folks in the community get recognition for their hard work and expert opinions has been truly rewarding. Sometimes you get those crazy ideas and think: "what if..."

And then they become reality.

So cheers to everyone that has already participated. But now it's your turn.

Visit our new contributor page, or while you are browsing our site, simply click on the "+ Contribute" button to submit an idea whether you want to produce it yourself or not. Either way, we'll at least give you some points for submitting an idea.

Everyone, Guru.

=> Start contributing now! (even if you just have an idea)

New Business Catalyst Template: Fitness

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

View the Fitness Template details page

HotPress Web / Distill is Hiring Contract Interactive Designer / Developer

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

HotPress Web / Distill is one of the largest BC partners in the world and they are hiring.

View the full job description

Lone Wolf to Small Agency Part 2

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In our last installment we discussed my journey of being a solo freelancer and growing into a small agency. Along the way we've experienced the growing pains a lot of you may have. Just like Rambo had to learn the value of delegation and teamwork, so do we my fellow gurus. Ok - so Rambo, never really had to learn that lesson until Rambo 4...which was really too late...but I think you get the point.

As you grow, you may find the tools that worked for you just fine for a long time, might not hold water any longer. Here are some areas where we changed how we did things.

Keeping track of relationships

THE SOLO WAY

I had people as contacts in my Google contacts and Apple Address Book. At one point I had all active and past clients in a spreadsheet, and while I dabbled with some CRMs (customer relationship management), but never committed to one. I had notes on each relationship in different places, not at my fingertips.

THE AGENCY WAY

We got a proper CRM and stuck to using it. In our case it was Highrise, a cloud based product from 37 signals, the makers of Basecamp (which we'll discuss in a bit). As we started working for new clients, they each got a profile in Highrise. The mobile app turned out to be great for on the go and in person meetings. We also started tagging contacts (e.g. "BC partner", "Lead") so we could better follow up with people.

Any meeting, internal or with a client became a scheduled event everyone could see. Highrise allows you to set a task for an event like a meeting, and will even send a text message and email to you when a meeting is coming up.

THE RESULT FOR US

We can easily scan the history of our team's interactions with a client
Easy access to client contact info on the go
Business and personal calendars are separate and we are always on time for meetings

Tracking time, managing budgets, and gettin' paid

THE SOLO WAY

For time tracking I started by using paper (gasp!), then I graduated to a running log in a text file, then started using a time tracking app online.

For budgets, I had more of a gut feeling. I knew what I quoted, and then I would add up the hours at the end. I did very little tracking Phase to Phase.

THE AGENCY WAY

We used a tool that handled time tracking, invoicing and project budgets in one. Our choice was Harvest, and it's probably the nicest app I've ever used. The process of copying time entries into an invoice format was gone, as we could now run a report for all the hourly work done for a client, and have an invoice out the door in minutes.

We got more specific about tracking tasks within a project. Rather than say "This project budget is 60 hours" we broke it down into "Discover Phase - 5 hours", "Design Phase - 20 hours" etc. Then we started tracking our time against that, and we were able to see where we went over or under and adjust accordingly.

We got clearer on our payment terms. For work already completed, payment is due upon receipt of our invoice. If it's a deposit for a project starting soon, we were sure to invoice the client early to allow time for the check to arrive. We only accepted credit cards for amounts $500 or less. This ended up saving us a good chunk in CC processing fees.

We automated followup for due and past invoices and reported often. Harvest allows us to send automated, personalized reminders for any outstanding invoices. By running a simple 10 second report, we were able to see how much we were owed, how much we made this year, how much we would be billing for next month. Best of all, Harvest can send its invoices over to Xero (our accounting software) automatically, and so our accounting software was now in the loop as well.

THE RESULT FOR US

Estimates in proposals are MUCH more accurate, because they were based on how long past projects had ACTUALLY taken
We started charging more for our projects, because we kept a better eye on what value our clients were actually getting
Invoicing for the month used to take a couple of days, now it takes a couple of hours
Tax time got easier because all our invoices were fed right into our account software and categorized

Managing Projects

THE SOLO WAY

I sold, managed, designed and built each project myself (with minimal help for coding elements from contractors).

I replied to emails whenever I got them, no matter the time of day.

My inbox continually adjusted the trajectory of my day.

For big projects I used Basecamp, the aforementioned cloud-based project management tool. But for small gigs I just had a text file on my desktop to keep track of them.

THE AGENCY WAY

The first person added to the company was a project manager. I was fortunate in finding someone with a strong professional background, who understood and improved the way I was doing things. Having this person meant projects stayed on track, and clients got "touched" with much greater frequency than I could handle all on my own.

We started telling clients exactly how we wanted content. For text, we started using a "copy deck" which was a word doc with a page for each page on their site that they just filled in. For products, we gave them a customized BC product import sheet which saved us time for most products.

We only answered emails/phone calls during OUR business hours. Anything outside of that was batched for the next day, even if we wrote a response on the weekend, we saved to drafts and sent out on Monday. We felt much less stressed and balanced after doing this. When I'm good, I still only check email once in the morning, once in the middle of the day and once at the end of the day (still improving on this one).

We ran ALL projects, big AND small, through Basecamp. We all have those tiny projects, maybe it's a quick update, maybe a half a day of work. We created a project in our Basecamp called "Micro Projects" and created To-Do's for each tiny project in there. For more time intensive jobs we gave it its own project. That way we never lost track of what was on the burner, big or small.

We stuck to scope, and documented any additions or delays transparently. Every project starts out with a list of goals which will be accomplished, usually broken down into tasks. But we've all seen projects spin out of control, with a lot of requests for "little things". You don't have to say no to any of them, but you do need to stay on task. We have a to-do list in all of our projects for "Additions to scope" so we can document these requests, and then hold them up against original goals. Then the client can make the choice to pay more for those extras.

THE RESULTS FOR US

Lower stress
Better client relations with clearer expectations on both parties
Projects run on budget

When do I need to put these things in place?

What I found was that when I had 10-15 clients in hand, I could still manage things pretty well without these systems in place. But once I grew beyond that, the wheels started to come off little by little (I've heard this from others too). That said, the sooner you put them in, the better you set yourself up for growth, and better service for your clients.

Find some systems that work for you and stick with them for a few months. There are always new products coming on the market and it's tempting to jump around from one to another. Obviously if something is a disaster switch it right away - but try and avoid playing with every "new shiny object" that hits the market as that can suck up a lot of time.

We're kicking around the idea of having a 2 week re-evaluation period, once a year. All our systems would be fair game, and we would give ourselves two weeks to evaluate and switch over to other options - or just keep them the same. If we don't make the switch during this window, we'll keep things the same for another year. I'll keep you posted on how this goes.

What's next in this series

Here are some ideas I'm considering for future posts in this series:

The rebranding process from individual to agency
Working with contractors - some rules to live by
Solo to team - how to transition from doing everything to delegating

Got some other ideas? Post a comment below - and thanks for reading!

Educate your Referral Partners

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

This is when people just call you and you have no control or influence over when a referral pops up. The typical activity is to wait by the phone until it rings. This is one of the reasons why we suffer from the feast or famine cycle.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

You can setup an "active" referral pipeline with just a little bit of continuous effort.

One of my recommendations when reaching out to potential referral partners is to make sure you have a Referral Marketing Education Asset handy that you can email or print out for your contact.

The document itself is not going to magically deliver business to your door, but properly followed up on, it will help give your client the vocabulary to look for.

If you don't like my super boring looking template, then take note from this example of a spruced up version courtesy of Pauline Kraus at Tavistock Creative.

New Business Catalyst Template: Charity

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 07:00:00 GMT

View the Charity Template details page

3 Free BC Templates for Your Immediate Consumption

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Here are three free Business Catalyst templates we have made available for zero credits to our Community members (well, technically available to all members now):

Twitter Bootstrap

Maple Tree Valley Real Estate

Wireframe Prototype

What are you waiting for? Get off this page already.

BC Academe March Class - Scott Shefler Dev 1 Finale

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

The guys over at BC Academe have been structuring their classes: Scott teaches the first 4 weeks, and then Mike takes it from there.

Why is it a big deal that this is your last chance to take the Dev 1 course with Scott?

Scott knows Business Catalyst and is an excellent teacher.

Scott has been the lead dev for Chicago Digital on close to 200 BC projects. That's right two-hundred-business-catalyst-projects.

After the March class, Scott may participate in future advanced courses coming out at the BC Academe.

Checkout a couple of projects that Scott has built:

After March, BC Academe will be bringing in a new instructor for May (whom I know will be excellent), but I want to make sure everyone knows that this will be the last Dev 1 with Scott (for the foreseeable future).

Make sure you cash in on our deal

Just a reminder, the premium members to BCG also get some pretty steep discounts on BC Academe classes.

Plus members get a $400 clip and Pro members get $700 off. This coupon works for both the March and May classes.

Check out your My Deals page to get additional details.

March deadline approaching

In order to make it into the March BC Academe class, you need to register by March 11. That is only a few days away, so I'd act now if you are interested.

EZ-BC Discount to Premium BCG Members

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

If you are building sites on Business Catalyst and you don't already know about EZ-BC, then you need to introduce yourself to their team. They have turned the service of building sites in BC to a product.

They have 3 primary services that are available for this discount:

PSD to BC - convert designs right into Business Catalyst
Troubleshoot My Site - prompt development assistance with the existing BC sites
Convert from any CMS to BC - convert WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or any CMS site right into Business Catalyst

If you are curious about quality, their team has produced over 500 projects (this number is months old) on BC. To my knowledge, they produce more individual projects with more BC partners than any other service provider building on BC.

So what do you get?

Current Pro members now get a 10% discount on the above mentioned 3 services.

And Plus members get a 5% discount.

These discounts are available now when you login to BC Gurus and click on "My Deals" under your "My Account" portal.

Not a premium member yet? Consider signing up to take advantage of this new deal.

Online Businesses Best Served Cold

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

That day came in October of 2011. Eager to educate myself, I signed up to BC Gurus. It was time to change my business style; a passive approach just wasn't going to get the job done.

After the initial euphoria of being my own boss wore off, harsh cold reality set in: “Where was my next paycheck coming from?” I knew I needed information.

At the time, BC Gurus had a waiting list. I patiently waited for my name to reach the top then devoured the content on sales.

The information was sound; I wished I'd had it before I'd signed up my first few clients. One idea kept jumping off the page at me: cold calling.

WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get)

After eight months of being on my own, I was learning the hard truth about having to write your own paycheck: it was really difficult. Not the act of writing your own paycheck, but getting jobs, timely completing them, and collecting fees in a cashflow positive fashion.

My vision for being my own boss wasn’t about just “getting by.”

I wanted to prosper.

And through meeting some great people, reading some inspiring books, and brainstorming on a whiteboard I started painting a picture of what my company could look like a year from now and then started reverse engineering it.

My primary strategy was to get in front of more business owners. I targeted companies in Winnipeg, Canada spending money on some kind of advertising (yellow pages, magazines, or newspapers), but did not have websites.

I don’t need a lot of clients to prosper being a one-man-band. I set a goal of picking up just two new clients per month.

Now that I had a vision and monthly goals I needed to start taking some action. BC Gurus has several marketing tactics in their Plus tutorials to enter a market - and for me, cold calling seemed the most attractive.

Cold Calling Like A Boss

I had gone through the content on cold calling several times but had a hard time warming up to the idea. But now having a clear picture of where I wanted the business to be in a year it gave me the drive to test the waters.

My plan was to keep track of everything on a spreadsheet and keep things simple. At the end of the week I’d create the list to call the next week. One way to quickly create this list is to look in your local yellow pages for businesses with an ad and don’t have a great website that would generate leads or sell their product. I used this as a quick way to qualify my call list.

During my first month the hardest thing was making those first few calls and I might have sounded like a robot reading from the script (exaggerating a little here). The script was helping me to learn the concepts behind what Brent was talking about with cold calling.

What I’ve learned:

Always reminding myself that the only reason I’m calling is to book that first meeting.
Even after doing this for a couple months that first call is still a bit uncomfortable to make so I don’t really think about it and just do it.
Writing down my ideal customer profile helped me create some good qualifying questions. (E.g. According to my notes your business has over _ employees. Do you do your marketing in house?)
Don’t take responses personally.
Smile during calls. This helps with your enthusiasm and tone of voice and makes the call more fun.
If people say to call back in a month then make sure to book that in their calendar. So they can expect your call. Even if it’s to reschedule. (I learned this the hard way.)

The Pudding

I started this for one month in November and now again in January. The results have been getting better every week with more scheduled meetings. Last week I got three meetings from calling 11 businesses.

Now it’s your turn. I’d love to hear some of your experiences in cold calling.

New Business Catalyst Template: Red Rocks Pet Clinic

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

View the Red Rocks Pet Clinic E-commerce Store Business Catalyst Template details page or if you are a PRO member, Request Template now.

Unlimited Plan = Unlimited Templates

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

We know many partners have wanted to download more than one template a month - either because they have an additional client project or maybe they want to use one of our templates to learn. This has been possible, but only by paying our full $249 retail price (or waiting until the next month).

Now with Unlimited, there aren't any restrictions on downloading templates. From day 1 you get access to our entire library plus you get every template over the next 12 months (beyond that if you renew). We plan on producing about 2 every month.

Of course with Unlimited you will also get annual access to our entire tutorial library, forum, and client trainer.

The retail price on the plan is $1,179 per year.

Act before January 31, 2013 and we are taking 15% off so you will only pay $999 for the first year.

That's a pretty good deal if you ask me.

Checkout our Pricing page for more info or to signup.

~~Use coupon code "unlimitedintro"~~

Before and After Business Catalyst

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

The boomerang business was sold to the only logical buyer in Perth, a boomerang enthusiast called Roger Perry and the graphics business moved into a small office in the middle of Fremantle.

The Rangs Graphics business specialized in product packaging, designing for product placement boxes, logo development, brochures, CD covers, a cookbook, business cards, billboard signs and car signage. The business got some good clients in Fremantle and word-of-mouth, a big part of advertising in Perth, got us a regular stream of new clients.

The Early Days

The tools used in the business were CorelDraw for layout and output to PDF and Photoshop for image manipulation, and artwork. Our business specialized in setting up a small business with all it needed to start out, logo development, business cards, brochures and packaging for their products. The internet began to take off and our clients began to ask for brochure websites to advertise their business. After a bit of research, we worked out how to design a brochure site using Photoshop, slice up the design using the wonderful Adobe Imageready, and then how to set up a table based site and upload it to the client's ISP using Dreamweaver.

Our clients soon wanted more than just a brochure site. They wanted to have online shops, forms which were complex to code by hand, blogs, databases. We just did not have the coding knowledge to do this, and would send them on to experts who could program using PHP, or SQL to set the sites up. This work was often way more expensive than our clients could afford, so it was frustrating for us and them that we could not easily provide this kind of functionality on websites, and that they could not afford it.

Finding BC

Then in late 2006 two young blokes called Adam Broadway and Bardia Housman from a Sydney company called Business Catalyst visited Perth and did a presentation on their all in one web solution. It provided web hosting, email, blog, interactive database, online shop, secure zones, forums, photo galleries, a content management system, and heaps of other features that our clients wanted and we could not provide. Adam and Bardia had written a Dreamweaver extension to upload and manage the website files. You then logged into the back end of Business Catalyst to set up the modules that provided the other great features for the website such as online shops etc. We signed up immediately as Business Catalyst partners, and haven't looked back since.

Suddenly we could provide our clients with online shops, forms, mailing lists, mailing campaigns and all the other features that Business Catalyst offers. And we still did not know anything more about coding websites than a bit of html. Of course, since then we have had a bit more training, and now do CSS stylesheets for websites rather than tables. We still miss Imageready though!

Our first years ... then with Adobe

In the first year as Business Catalyst partners we did around 20 websites, most of them online shops. Suddenly we were a Graphics and Web Design business. We found the technical support was great. Adam and Bardia ran online webinars in how to set up the product. (These days, there is the BC Gurus online training). The hosting cost of $507 was affordable for our clients and our development costs were reasonable for them. The ability to take payment using Paypal was plus. As we got more confident with the product, we set up more complex sites with web apps, forms that could collect data from clients and email campaigns.

Then in 2009 Adobe bought Business Catalyst, on condition and Adam and Bardia stayed on for several years to help with the transition. During the first three years of BC, there were growing pains and sometimes online help was stretched. After Adobe bought BC, online help fell down for a while, but the product itself was so robust and so good, it survived these teething problems. Now Adobe is engaged, updating the product, moving the websites to better servers and increasing security.

Continued Success

Six years later our business has totally changed. As the internet has grown, the demand for print graphics has dropped right off. The demand for websites has filled that gap, and now our business is 50% web design and 50% print graphics. So if you are a small Graphics business, wanting to provide good websites to your clients I highly recommend you become a BC partner. The entry cost is reasonable, the commissions are generous and the platform is reliable and good.

We have done nearly 100 sites now and Business Catalyst is a big part of our strength and diversity in what we can offer our clients for their websites. One of the strengths of BC is the use of modules and the way that you can combine them to get your client a low cost, easy to set up with programming knowledge solution. The ability to place modules inside others, eg. Photogallery insidge a web app item give the product a huge amount of flexibility. There are other open source solutions out there, but when it comes down to it, there is nothing that is an all in one solution, requiring only one login, like BC. I also think that the closed environment, it not being open source, is a plus.

It is a testament to the original Triangle Dreamweaver interface that it has only now been discontinued, and the new CS6 Dreamweaver integration is better than ever. Bardia and Adam did one hell of a great programming job, and the product itself is robust, reliable, a bit quirky, but also has enough complexity to cover every challenge our clients have thrown at us over the years. Adobe is building on those foundations and we know that BC will be able to grow with the internet as more and more features become mainstream. Login to secure zones using your Facebook login, mobile web design, web apps that can be made into an app. All of these are in our future, and we are confident we can continue to provide a great web service to our client for a reasonable cost.

We could not have done it without BC.

New Business Catalyst Template: Oak Tree Landscaping

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

View the Oak Tree Landscape details page or if you are a PRO member, Request Template now.

From Lone Wolf to Small Agency Part 1

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

One of the things I love about the BC partner community is the diversity of the stories - none of us got to where we are the same way. While we're centered around the same platform, our individual stories go a lot deeper than that.

Maybe you're a partner who started building websites as a side gig. Maybe you started out in print and moved to web. Maybe you started as a designer and taught yourself how to code. Or maybe you're not even a BC partner yet, and you're on the fence about even diving in. If any of this describes where you're at, I know the feeling. This series is all about sharing my progression, from a lone wolf freelancer, to a small agency, and some of the lessons I've learned along the way.

The result of this evolution was the following:

4x growth in revenue in a single year
Client base went from 20 to 50+
More long term relationships and recurring revenue
Less stress
More incoming leads

I'll cover what lead to each of these, but lets start with a little context.

Starting Points

I came out of college, with a very different career path in front of me. While my fellow Corporate Communications graduates took jobs at firms like Forrester Research and Accenture, I decided to make a career as a touring musician. A drummer since the age of four, myself and three other guys somehow transformed a college party band into a nationally touring, full time operation in a few years. My day to day consisted of calls with our booking agent, writing songs, recording albums, and driving to 150 gigs a year. I consider myself truly fortunate to have been able to do this for nearly a decade.

I know what you're thinking..."Devon, stop being so modest. Let's just skip to the part where you became wildly rich off of recording royalties, quit the band over 'creative differences', and launched your web agency with your millions." Not exactly how it went down. Playing music, as you may know, is not a lucrative industry, and each month you're piecing together enough for the necessities - rent, food, new brakes for the van...things like that. I had figured out a way to do what I loved, but it wasn't ENTIRELY paying the bills. I tried teaching drum lessons but it didn't take, so I dusted off the design chops and started freelancing on the side.

For a few years I charged $25/hr, massively underbid every project, and found work through family or friends. My first attempts at websites were clumsy Adobe GoLive creations, but it got me excited about working with a medium where changes could be made quickly, and efficiently. Then, in 2007, I signed up for a 3am webinar of Goodbarry with Adam Broadway, and started to see the potential of what BC allowed me to offer my clients.

Half Time

About 5 years into the music career, I found that running the band was actually helping my freelance business as well. Dealing with club owners and agents had made me pretty good with negotiation and contracts. We started to use Basecamp to manage promo campaigns, and I started using it with my clients to great effect. Improvisation, group dynamics and problem solving were all part of both gigs. But freelancing was still on the side, taking 30% of my time...and I was slowly learning the process of building a site from design to code, launching no more than 3 BC sites a year while working on a handful of others.

I raised my rates to $50/hr, but still wasn't tracking my time well. I couldn't tell you if I was making a profit on a given project. All I was looking at was the incoming checks, not the overall health of my business. As a result, I started picking up a lot of smaller projects because I "needed the work", only to have them take up more time than I was paid for. I was always grateful for the work, but there seemed like there had to be a better way out there somewhere.

All In

After 10 years my musical partners and I decided to release a digital box set of 70 songs, do a final tour, and put our band on "indefinite hiatus". It was a strong finish, and it gave me energy to move into my next project - making freelancing a full time thing. It was during these 2 years that I saw the biggest results. Reflecting back on it, here are 5 key steps which I think had the greatest impact:

1) I only took on projects which could be successful on the BC platform, all other jobs I referred elsewhere
There are plenty of people who disagree with this approach, but I saw multiple benefits:

I became an expert on one platform vs a layman of many. This increased my value to a certain pool of customers.
Training up on new features, for myself and my clients, got a lot simpler
I started viewing myself as a "online business consultant" who specialized in BC, vs just another "web guy"
I got more inbound business from business owners with existing BC sites looking for a new relationship

2) I said NO more than YES
There was a point where I was not selective at all. I would take any work that came in, ignoring red flags like clients who were solely price driven, over involved, or unreasonable. These were the projects that devolved into unprofitable time wasters. I used to see this as a cost of doing business, but it doesn't have to be. The more selective I was, the more screening I did, the more I found myself working with clients who were a better fit. This was no doubt an evolution, but it's one worth going through. Brent has a great post here which flipped the lights on for me.

3) I followed up on every phone call and email, and some of these became massive pipelines of work
Even with my new found confidence to turn down projects, I always referred people on. I became friends with a good Wordpress developer, an SEO specialist, and print and logo designer. All of those things I would have attempted to deliver in the past - with mediocre results - just to win business. But other gems of work emerged from spending non-billable time with other creative professionals.

One time I spent 3 days talking with a designer who was considering becoming a BC partner. In the end, he decided to stick with design only, but he and I have ended up collaborating on 5 large budget sites now.

I got another random email from another BC partner inquiring if I could help with some overflow work. After a couple phone calls she revealed to me that she was closing her web agency to move to a large firm, and wanted to hand off her 30+ clients to the right person. That followup call ended up expanding our client base x2 in under 6 months, which led to even bigger projects.

4) I got more people involved and started using "we" verses "me"
How you speak about yourself can subconsciously impact your value. The first person I added to my team was a project manager. As more work came in we found design & development talent from within the partner network and beyond. I began referring to "our team" in meetings, and writing "let us know how WE can help you" in emails. When clients perceive there is a team, even a small one, behind their project, they become more comfortable. It removes their "what if you get hit by a bus" fears, and can also justify charging more for your work.

5) I got more involved in the BC partner community
Taking a more active role in the growing partner community led to a lot of important relationships too. Interviews and project features on BC Gurus have directly led to a couple projects which were over $5K a piece. After meeting Jason Tinnin at MAX last year, we kept in touch, and we were able to bring Simpleflame in on a 9 month project for a client who had advanced API needs. This project pushed the boundaries of BC, and the collaborative work we did with this experienced BC partner has led to a close relationship. Plus our ability to think outside the box while accurately scoping our work shot through the roof. Many of these opportunities wouldn't have happened without attending MAX, being involved in the LinkedIn group, or tuned into the forums.

The result so far...

These were the gains I saw after those "aha" moments after going "all in":

4x growth in revenue in a single year
Client base went from 20 to 50+
More long term relationships and recurring revenue
Less stress
More incoming leads

What's next in this series...

I'll be the first to tell you I don't have it all figured out, but I'm always learning from this vibrant partner community, and open to suggestions. The years it took me really master BC could be compressed into months with learning tools like Zero to Hero and Kiyuco.com these days. Combine that with some in the trenches project work and there is a strong opportunity for anyone to build a strong business in this space.

Coming next:

How to manage spikes in growth
Ramping up from 10-15 clients to 50+ can bring with it some growing pains, we'll share some of the systems we used to make it work

Re-branding from an individual to an agency
This is a process we're currently going through and we've learned some helpful things

How many of you have gone through a similar process or are going through it now?

Business Catalyst Secure Zone Expiration Dates Demystified

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

I'd like to begin this post by introducing myself.

My name is Erick Stubbs and I work for uGurus LLC, which does business in Denver, Colorado where we use Mountain Standard Time, except for when we use Mountain Daylight Time.

One of our products is a website called bcgurus.com; hosted on servers located in New Jersey which follows Eastern Standard Time, and sometimes Eastern Daylight Time.

Those servers run software called Business Catalyst which is configured to host our website using Mountain Time.

Business Catalyst was created and is maintained by computer scientists and engineers who work in Bucharest Romania where they observe Eastern European Time who work for a company called Adobe which is based in San Jose California where they use Pacific Time.

While Business Catalyst is a global-ready product and operates in time zones all over the world, there are parts that are still tied to it's roots in Sydney where they use Eastern Daylight and Eastern Standard Time; the Australian version, not to be confused with the USA version of Eastern Time. However Business Catalyst more closely follows the folks in Brisbane, Australia who don't observe daylight time at all.

As I said, we have a website, and people pay us on a monthly basis to gain access to our content. This system is supported by 2 different payment processors. One of these is built into BC and usually does what the rest of BC does with regards to time zones. The other is maintained by a company called Recurly who does business in Pacific Time, and reports payments to me in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

These systems are linked together by software which runs on servers in San Antonio Texas where they use Centeral Standard or Central Daylight Time, but are configured to use UTC.

Then there is my customer, who lives everywhere in the world and uses global everywhere anywhere time.

Finally there is my business model which is to collect payments from my customers and grant them access to our website. We charge them periodically and extend their access for a month, or 30 days, or 4 weeks, but sometimes its 28 days, and others its 31.

So long as a paying customer always has access to our site they are happy, so long as a non-paying customer never has access to our site, I'm happy.

Which brings me to Monday, when a customer named Zeb called me to sign up. They wanted to give me their credit card and gain access to my site for a month, it was 4:20pm somewhere in the world and all I had to do was figure out when to make their secure zone membership expire.

Luckily for me, the rules regarding time zones, secure zones, and Business Catalyst aren't documented anywhere, have changed over the course of the product, and from time to time exhibit bugs which can affect some of our members, but not others.

But the hommies at Adobe are fine folk, and after working it out, fixing some bugs, and doing some tests I can now take Zeb's money and set his Secure Zone Expiration Date.

Here is how it all works

A Secure Zone expiration date represents the point in time when a users Secure Zone access expires.

Meaning, if the current date and time is less than the Secure Zone expiration date and time, the user will have access. If the current date and time is greater than or equal to the Secure Zone expiration date and time, the user will not have access and be considered expired. This value is precise down to the second.

When viewing a user's Secure Zone expiration date in the BC Admin area, the time component of the Secure Zone expiration date is not shown; instead only the date will be shown. The date component will be shown with regards to the time zone setting of the BC site.

When manually setting a Secure Zone expiration date using the /adminconsole, the date should be set with respect to the site's local time zone. A time component cannot be set by the admin user, as such the time component will always be 12:00:00 AM on the date specified in the site's local time zone.

When querying the SecureZone expiration date using the BC API, both the date and time component will be returned in string form *'MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss tt'. This value has an implicit UTC +10:00:00 offset. This value corresponds to Australian "Eastern Standard Time". "Eastern Daylight Time" is never used, it will always use "Eastern Standard Time" with a UTC offset of +10:00:00.

When using the API to set a Secure Zone expiration date, the value passed to the API must be in the string form *'MM/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss tt'. The value specified will be treated by BC as having an implicit UTC +10:00:00 offset. Meaning if you wish to expire a user on December 15th, 2012 at 7:45pm Mountain Standard Time, this value should first be converted to UTC +10:00:00 before passing it through the API.

When working with the API and converting between time zones, 'Australia/Brisbane' should be used when working with Olson time zones, and when working with Windows time zones the 'E. Australia Standard Time' system time zone should be used.

EX: TimeZoneInfo tzi = TimeZoneInfo.FindSystemTimeZoneById('E. Australia Standard Time');

* The format specifiers used here are documented at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/8kb3ddd4.aspx

Guide to Adobe MAX 2013 for Business Catalyst Partners

Thu, 03 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

And because Steve Johnson of Graphite Web Solutions asked me to.

ATTENTION: First things first. If you are planning on attending, please reach out to me. I would like to line up as many BC Partner interviews as possible. Send me an email: brent@bcgurus.com and we can schedule / coordinate from there.

I reflected on my last guide and realized that before MAX 2011 I was hurriedly trying to launch BC Gurus Pro. Oh how my world has evolved. We launched Pro with just about a dozen videos … sounds crazy because we now have hundreds of videos, resources, and a growing library of templates.

Enough reflecting, lets get down to business.

What to Expect

Adobe MAX is the annual super-conference celebrating everything creative that is held at the Los Angeles Convention Center & Nokia Theater from May 4-8, 2013.

Since Business Catalyst was acquired by the big red A many-a-moons ago, it is now an event that we can call our own. This will be the third time the BC Partner community has had the opportunity to attend (although some Partners have been attending this conference for years).

This will be my third year to attend. If this is your first year attending, #getexcited, it’s well worth the investment. The first year there were less than a dozen Partners; in 2011 there was probably around 50. I expect a hundred or more this spring.

Not sure who all from BC Gurus will be attending yet, but expect several of our team to be present and accounted for in addition to myself.

The Business Catalyst team has put together a nice host of sessions related to BC, but there are also tons of non-BC sessions you should consider attending. MAX covers the entire creative universe, from photography, video, web, advertising, marketing, and just utter-creative-awesomeness.

There will be a LOT of BC Partners to connect with and much networking (probably the most valuable reason to attend), however I urge you to step outside your comfort zone and attend at least a few non-BC sessions.

Adobe MAX is a total of 5 days - 2 “pre-conference lab” days and then 3 days of regular conference sessions and keynotes. The pre-conference labs go Saturday and Sunday, then the main conference days are Monday through Wednesday.

Plan on learning a lot, meeting a lot of people, and staying up for drinks and dinners every night you are there (ie. get your sleep ahead of time).

Conference Passes

I suggest getting a full conference pass. It includes an annual Creative Cloud membership which is a nice cost-offset. The pre-conference lab sessions do not directly relate to BC, so if you opt to do that its an added expense. I’ve never done them, so I can’t provide any recommendation there.

There is “early bird” pricing going on until February 28th for $1295. I am currently talking to some folks over at the Adobe BC team to see if there is going to be any special pricing available to BC partners. We will see. I will make any announcements via our blog/social, so stay tuned there.

If you are considering bringing your team out, make sure you checkout the “3 for 2 pricing.” Basically for the full price of two attendees you will get three passes. Good deal.

Accommodation & Transportation

I will be staying at the Westin. There are a bunch of options in the area, I would reference the Adobe website to make sure you stay at one of the locations listed that either is in walking distance or provides a shuttle. They provide MAX “rates” at the various hotels as well, so make sure to call and ask.

Unless you plan on doing some sightseeing, I wouldn’t recommend renting a car. Everything is within walking distance and you can typically find someone to share a cab to the airport with.

Networking with a Purpose

Before I get into the conference schedule, I want to give some pointers about networking at the conference. Every year I have attended this conference (and many other non-Adobe conferences) I always hear people say afterwards: “the networking was the most valuable.”

So let’s not kid ourselves: that’s why we go.

Many of the Adobe BC team will be present. Take time to meet each of the team and get to know what they do. I have been doing this for years and it has been a huge help to our business and the direction of the product. I have been able to sit down and share my opinions (love ‘em or hate ‘em) with many Adobe staff. I suggest you take advantage of this time and do the same. Get on a first name basis.

Also, there will be BC Partners from around the world present. I have learned SO MUCH from what other companies like mine have been up to around the world. I have found subcontractors, channel partners, and people to share/trade ideas. Make sure you don’t corner yourself into just one group for the duration of the conference. Don’t get comfy. Make the effort to introduce yourself to as many people as possible. You don’t get second chances (well, at least not until the next conference).

I also suggest having some kind of follow up plan post-conference. Make sure you allot some time the first day back after MAX to properly process any cards you've received, write follow up emails to new friends, and take action on anything you came up with at the conference. Too often I schedule my first day back with things I was unable to do while at a conference and I never leave myself that buffer to debrief from the event. Block the time ahead of the conference to make sure you get the most out of the event.

Business Catalyst MAX Sessions & Schedule

[note: I included a short link next to each session that goes to the Adobe MAX website - for some reason these are getting a certificate error, but just accept and you’ll get to the site and session details]

Saturday May 4, 2013

There is nothing scheduled this day. I will be arriving in LA sometime this day - would love to meetup with anyone that is planning to be here early. Dinner? Drinks? Of course.

Sunday May 5

Again, no official BC sessions, but most likely (not yet confirmed) will be “Drinks with the BC Team” if Jackson holds true to tradition. This is a great time to break the ice before the official sessions start with all of the BC Partners. Plan on attending around 5pm. Last time it was at the Figueroa Hotel in the upstairs private room. I will update this once I know for sure from the Adobe team. If you are not attending the conference but live within the Los Angeles area, I suggest attending as this is not an official conference event.

After drinks, around 7 or 8pm, we typically arrange a spontaneous group dinner with anyone willing to join.

(Note: last year they did 1-on-1 meetings with the product team on this Sunday in the morning ... we'll see if they plan to offer those to folks in town that day or not)

Monday May 6

9:30AM General Session Keynote (view session details)
This is the “big bang” start to MAX. Lots of lights, lots of effects, and a welcome to the conference. They typically go through major accomplishments and an overview of what to expect at the conference.

12:45PM Building Business Websites with Dreamweaver and Business Catalyst (LAB) (view session details)
This session will walk you through how to build your first site with BC. Adam Broadway is hosting this session for both Monday and Tuesday sessions. If you are an experienced BC user, this session might not be for you as it will most likely cover information you have already wrapped your head around dozens of times. However, if you are new to BC, I highly recommend this session. Adam is an entertainer at heart, so it’s sure to give you at least a couple of laughs.

2:45PM Creating Impactful, Responsive Websites Using Business Catalyst (LAB) (view session details)
There was a similar session in 2011 on using the mobile templating within BC, but it wasn’t a hands on lab. If you are a designer or coder, this is a great session to fully understand how to build responsive sites in BC. If you are selling BC sites, you most certainly should pay attention to the responsive/multi-display trend as its a great way to make a better user experience as well as adding revenue to your next project.

5:00PM Building Web Apps Without Coding Using Business Catalyst (LAB) (view session details)
Jason Tinnin of Simpleflame will provide a hands on session to create your first Web App on BC. Jason will also walk you through some workflows on creating advanced Web Apps like a real estate listings app. The session description is a little opposite what the title says. It does require some HTML/CSS/Javascript knowledge, but perhaps the title of the event is talking specifically about not needing to know database or backend server side code. I have a call into Jason to clarify, look for an update shortly.

Tuesday May 7

10:00AM General Session Keynote (view session details)
This is the second day keynote that usually entails any big announcement from the Adobe team: new product directions, releases, etc.

12:30PM Building Business Websites with Dreamweaver and Business Catalyst (LAB) (view session details)
Repeat of the Monday session.

1:00PM What’s Next in Adobe Business Catalyst (view session details)
Alexandru Costin and Bogdan Ripa from the BC product team will be taking us through upcoming features to be released on BC as well as an update about the product vision and roadmap. These guys have been releasing great things lately - I am very excited to see how this product momentum builds by MAX.

3:00PM Creating Impactful, Responsive Websites Using Business Catalyst (LAB) (view session details)
Repeat of Monday sessions.

4:00PM Online Marketing: Best Practices for Your Client Sites (view session details)
Brett Stockley of Pretty Pollution will be showing us best practices deployed by his very successful agency to market his clients. Brett’s companies was one of the very first Partners in the BC community … he might actually be the longest standing active. Brett has tons of experience running successful marketing campaigns for his clients - driving both revenue for his clients and his agency.

5:30PM MAX Sneak Peeks (view session details)
“Sneaks” are a string of short presentations from various lab teams within Adobe. A lot of times this could be features that may or may not end up making it into product. Lots of fascinating whiz bang … typically emceed by someone famous that doesn’t have much knowledge of technology to make it funny. I have really enjoyed this session each year. Always entertaining and gets the imagination going.

MAX Bash (following sneaks)
Each year Adobe puts on a big fat party. It’s a lot of fun. In 2011 they had tons of food trucks and Weezer performed. The whole event felt like a bag of oompa loompas and a bunch of pixies were mixed in a bowl and then blown up with Gandalf's fireworks.

Video for reference:

Wednesday May 8

Unconference (TBA)
In 2011, we had the BC Unconference in the main exhibit hall all day Wednesday. This has not yet been announced, but it wouldn’t surprise me if its on the same day. I will update this post once I get details.

The unconference is a less formal area with back to back sessions from BC partners and the BC team. It kind of reminds me of sitting at a campfire watching a friend tell a story. You are free to come and go and if you don’t have the full conference pass, its a great place to hang out in the exhibit hall to get great content and meet with other partners. I like to bring my camera to the session so we can do a bunch of interviews.

9:30AM Sneak Peek: Business Catalyst, Building Powerful Web Apps Without Coding (view session details)
Bogdan will be leading this session accompanied by Jason T and myself to show you some demos of what you can do with the next round of Web App enhancements. This is a session that is on the calendar and planned, but since a lot of the features we plan to show off aren’t ready yet, it’s hard to say exactly what will be shown (but it’ll be cool).

11:00AM Developing an Effective Sales Strategy for Your Web Agency (view session details)
Tim Gentle of Design Experts runs one of the most successful BC agencies in the world. He has launched and maintains over 300 clients sites on the platform and is keeping up with demand with an ever expanding agency. Tim’s core value of building his business through educating people means that this presentation will certainly be packed with value. If you haven’t met Tim yet, check out his tutorial series.

11:00AM Building Web Apps Without Coding Using Business Catalyst (LAB) (view session details)
Repeat of Monday session.

3:30PM Zero to Hero: The Business Catalyst Partner Journey (view session details)
Created by yours truly. I’m excited to have the opportunity to present to everyone for the third year at MAX. My presentation this year is going to be about the various types of partners that exist right now in the ecosystem and some real world stories of overcoming challenges to grow businesses.

Non-BC Sessions

There are a ton of other sessions throughout the three days. Depending on your interests you can find a full schedule with ease. I typically gear towards the business development sessions about agencies and major accomplishments.

I do have a personal interest in digital publishing for tablet / eReader devices and it looks like there are a few sessions that cover those topics. If you find great sessions that you find interesting, leave a comment and share a link so that others can consider attending them with you.

Previous Conferences

If this is your first year attending, you might want to have a gander at some of our reviews, interviews, and content from previous conferences:

Adobe MAX 2011 in Review Part 1
Adobe MAX 2011 in Review Part 2 (just realized I forgot to write my part 3, oh well)
Adobe MAX 2011 Recap by Guru Nicole Windham
Adobe MAX 2011 Recap by Guru Chad Smith
Adobe MAX 2011 Recap by Guru Carol Lemke
Adobe MAX 2011 Recap by Guru Erick Stubbs
Adobe MAX 2011 Interview with Alexandru Costin of Adobe
Adobe MAX 2011 Interview with Kristen Lindsey of Apokrisis
Adobe MAX 2011 Interview with Jason Tinnin of Simpleflame
Adobe MAX 2011 Interview with Bill Sholar of Frisco Websites
Adobe MAX 2011 Interview with Alex Yagolnik of EZ-BC
BC Gurus Introduction at MAX 2010 (this was the blog post we launched the website with ... oh my, personally entertaining to look at the old stuff)

###

That’s it. I will update this page as I get more information. If you have any questions just leave a comment and I will do my best to answer it based on my experience.

My Business Catalyst Christmas List

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Web Apps API & Linked Tables

Ok ok, that’s two things in one. But really, these things are holding back major functionality for many sites we build. If Web Apps had an API and we could actually link the data properly from one Web App to another, we could start building very advanced content-driven sites.

Some of us have the ability to accomplish these things today with fancy Javascript, but it requires so much hack that it is rarely worth the benefit of keeping the app in BC.

Sorting, Filters, Search and Logic

I don’t care if it comes in the form of Liquid or in existing module arguments. I need the ability to sort, search, and filter my data on the fly. Whether in Web Apps, Modules, or E-Commerce, I need to be able to prune and expand information server-side. This has the benefit of working with SEO and not piling up the jQuery hacks that make some of our BC sites oh so under-optimized.

Flexible E-Commerce

Again, I don’t mind if it comes in the form of fully enabled Liquid or just built on the frameworks we have today, but I need better control over my carts, products, and the checkout process.

Email Marketing Deliverability

Major achievements happened at the end of Q3 and then all the way through Q4 of 2012 in regards to email marketing, but top-of-the-line deliverability is still something I’m not sure we have on BC. This would be a service that I would be happy to pay more for (as some of us already are) like SendGrid.

Support that Gets Me

There is always a lot of chatter around BC support not delivering, and I’m not making that statement here. Support has gotten a lot better and I think we are just now starting to feel the benefits of the Zendesk migration that happened earlier in December. The support team is learning more about BC (and the BC Partners) every day. Compared to where we were in January it is a whole different ballgame now.

But, I still don’t feel the average (or new) Partner is fully understood when they participate with support. I don’t think there is enough “reading between the lines” when partners come to the table with issues. I don’t think there is enough “innocent until proven guilty” mentality from the support team. More often than not support assumes the onus is on the supported and not the platform in finding a great solution for their problem.

When I start seeing blog and forum posts that are like this: “wow, you wouldn’t believe the support I just got from the BC team!” then I will know the culture has changed with BC support.

What's on your list?

There are a few things on this list that I know are on the way. A couple of them ... not quite sure yet.

Leave a comment if there is something that you'd love to have in 2013 for the platform. We'd love to hear from you.

EBWAY Creative Returns Over 420% to Client on Business Catalyst Project

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

EBWAY Creative has an approach to building Online Businesses that is very humbling. He prefers to pass on upfront design and development revenue to make sure his projects contain solid marketing budgets to help drive traffic and make sure the business succeeds.

This technique leads to outstanding returns for his customers. Not only that, but he is able to work with his clients to build solid marketing budgets for his clients (which is a great return for EBWAY).

My Interview with Jon

White Label Agency Templates

Two weeks ago Jon made his debut on BC Gurus as a contributing author with the release of a 6 video course walking you through several documents that are key to how he operates his agency.

This week Jon continues with a tutorial on an Inbound Marketing ROI calculator.

We thank you Jon for these massive contributions to our community. We are happy to have you on board our Everyone, Guru project.

EBWAY Projects

If you are interested interested in checking out more of EBWAY's work, please visit his agency page in our community. He has uploaded video walkthroughs of several of his projects.

New Business Catalyst Template: Mountain Plumbing

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

View the Mountain Plumbing Template details page or if you are a PRO member, Request Template now.

Creating Heroes: 3 Months Free Business Catalyst Hosting

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Our current list of graduates (alphabetical by last name):

Greg Buchanan	Gel Fuzion
Penny Elbery	Fortune Green
Dave Haggblad	Digital Ink Multimedia
Ahmad Hijjawi	OBS Corporate
André Houdet
Steve Johnson	Graphite Web Solutions
Pauline Kraus	Tavistock Creative
Sébastien Lauper
Kieran Mahon	Design Chief
David Morgan	Fon Designs
Myra Rhodes	Everyone's E-Learning
Minainyo Sekibo	Creatrix Web Solutions
Bill Sholar	Frisco Websites
Dario Tesoroni
Thomas von Miller	W3 Consult
Shane Williams	Visionar
Carlos Yuste	360 Ideas

Congratulations to those hard working partners! It has been a pleasure to interact with each of you via the comments as you have moved from start to finish.

December Update

We have added two additional courses to Zero to Hero for our December update - CRM and Reports & Analytics.

CRM is an update to “Technical Basics” and has the following individual tutorials:

Reports & Analytics is also an update to "Techincal Basics" and includes:

We hope you enjoy the new material. For those of you that have already earned your Zero to Hero status, this will not be taken away, however - you are invited to earn the new badges to continue bettering yourself.

Heroes Gift: 3 Months Free BC Hosting

We are proud to announce that all Zero to Hero graduates are going to get a little bonus coming into the new year. If you have earned your Hero badge (completing all 23 courses - or 21 prior to the update), you will be eligible for this promotion:

3 months free hosting on any annual site you upgrade from January 1 to March 31
You can use it on as many new upgrades from trials as you want between that time
New sites only
Any plan
At least 1 person from your company must have graduated Zero to Hero (includes existing grads)
Upon purchase of a 1 year plan, the validity of your website will be set to 15 months. The free 3 months come at the end of the 12 you’ve paid for.
Graduates will receive specific instructions on how to claim this benefit

Let us know if you have any questions on this truly awesome promotion.

We are looking forward to another great Zero to Hero update early in 2013.

Until next time.

EU Datacenter Now Available for Templates!

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

This is now available for most of our Business Catalyst Templates:

Park Hill Dental
DURA Chiropractics
Fly Fishing
Family Medicine
Organic Roots
Sparky's
Mercury
Vertical
Twitter Bootstrap
Maple Tree Valley
Kuhnert & Haas

We haven't quite finished our entire library, but we should be there soon. Just didn't want to hold you up if you were waiting for any of these templates on the EU datacenter.

If you have already downloaded a non-EU template and you would like to redownload a template, don't be worried. Our system now works on single "rights" for each template no matter the datacenter.

What exactly does that mean?

Well it means if you use a template credit to download "DURA Chiropractics" on the US datacenter, but then in a couple of months you snag a European based customer, then you can just redownload that template on the new datacenter and it will not take an additional template credit from your inventory.

In short: for $99 per month you get access to 1 template downloaded on any and all datacenters and you can even re-download it at any time if you mess up your original.

That's pretty cool if you ask me.

Until next time.

New Feature: Request the Project Template

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

With our most recent Business Catalyst Tutorial (Creating Effective Product Pages by Brian Lowry), we added a new feature to the "Resources" section called Request the Project Template. This section is available throughout the 6 video course.

It is available for both Plus and Pro subscribers. When you click on the button, you will get our standard template transfer form. It will request some details, but once filled out, our app will begin to work for you.

What does it do you might ask?

It transfers a working demo site to your partner portal (on any of the datacenters) that has this web app, all of the pages, and all of the assets ready for you to play around with.

At this time we can't transfer the code over to a working, live site of yours, but I think between these resources and the demo site, you can implement all of the techniques used through this course on your own.

We plan to continue to use this feature as we release comprehensive courses so that you can get your hands on our demo environments in the fastest way possible.

Until next time.

BC Academe Graduates 2012

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The purpose of this partnership is to recognize people that are participating in the BC Web Pro Guru Journey. Each graduate of a BC Academe course receives recognition from our site in the form of "Guru Points."

Each BC Academy Level 1 Developer graduate earns 5,000 points and we are happy to congratulate them by calling special attention to each:

Chris Stonestreet, Australia

Dave Haggblad, Westbank, BC, Canada Digital Ink Multimedia

David Radick, Chicago, IL

Hugo Costa, London

Jeri Yingling, Chicago, IL JeriRiggedDesigns

Jessica Michels, Menasha, WI

Melody Boates, Fresno, CA LAKOS

Thomas von Miller, München, Bayern

In addition to points, each grad is awarded a special BC Academe badge that will be view-able in their showcase.

Let's give a BC-applause for these awesome graduates. If you are a company looking to hire some extra BC help, you might want to start your search here.

PS. For Plus & Pro members, stay tuned for an exciting announcement regarding our continued partnership with BC Academe.

Support - How are We Doing?

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In the last 30 days at BC Gurus, we have

Received 449 support tickets
Solved 454 support tickets
Received 40 x 10 ratings (smiley faces . . . I am happy)
Received 1 x 5 rating (neutral face . . . I am indifferent)
Received 0 x 1 rating (sad face . . . I am unhappy)
Monthly average is 9.88/10

Our lifetime average over the last year is 9.75 (which means we have recently seen a tick up in positive ratings from our customers. We have done many things behind the scenes to improve our support experience.

Hired Michelle (she handles most tickets < 1 day and dispatches the tough ones)
Improved many workflows on the site to decrease the amount of tickets
Increased automation with a new billing system

Let's take a look at some of the responses to put some texture to these digits:

"Very responsive support. Great!"

"Excellent and timely response. Thanks."

"Nicole is very helpful! Great communications!"

"Speedy response!"

"Breath of fresh air. Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions... which at my novice state are hard to even formulate. It seems half the battle is knowing what you don't know. Your arrows pointing me in the right direction are very helpful."

"Friendly helpful advice, thanks."

"Cheers!"

"Thank you for your help."

"Fantastic feedback!"

"Thanks for the quick response and sending me to the resource I needed."

"Thanks for the quick reply!"

"I appreciate your culture of promptly responding to support requests."

"Very helpful."

"Your customer service was prompt and polite. I am a very happy customer. :)"

"Very pleased with the service. I received quick responses and had no push-back when I clearly made a user error. I look forward working with you & your team."

"Thanks for the quick reply and fix!! PS Jeans bad, Kimonos good!"

"WONDERFUL! Brent Weaver got back to me very fast, he was friendly and understanding and knew exactly how to help me. As a web designer, I know weekends are never our own (especially running your own business) and I really appreciate the I was able to get prompt assistance on an "off day" so I can continue working on my current website project. Thanks again - I look forward to the new features that BC Gurus is offering!!!"

###

This kind of feedback from our customers makes me a happy man.

We back both our Plus and Pro subscriptions with a 30 day money back guarantee, but what matters more to me is providing an excellent product that doesn't have to ever be returned.

Beyond that, we want to make sure that if you are a customer or considering becoming one - you know we are humans (and very accessible ones at that) on the other side of our help form.

New Business Catalyst Template: Park Hill Dental

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

View the Park Hill Dental Template details page or if you are a PRO member, Request Template now.

New Business Catalyst Template: DURA Chiropractics

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

View the DURA Chiropractics Template details page or if you are a PRO member, Request Template now.

23 Fundamental Laws of BC that You Should Know Before Your Next Project

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Most of these rules are buried deep in the 4 foot long Knowledgebase (KB) document on that module, and therefore, sometimes, you get tripped up by missing that one fundamental point, and that causes you to have to do a lot of extra work to get the project done.

Here is a list of some things that we wished we knew earlier during the last 6 years of implementing 100+ BC sites:

1. Paypal Standard does not work with Web Forms, you have to have a seamless gateway to take payments.

Find out if your client has a merchant facility with their bank. If they don't and they plan to use Paypal Standard (a non-seamless payment gateway in BC speak) then you CANNOT use a Web Form to take payment, charge for use of a web app or charge for subscriptions on a Web Forms. You can only use the online shop module to take payment.

1b. You can direct a web form to go to a page on submission.

So you can take details from a client on a Web Form and then direct them to a page with a product on it, which they can then go to the shop and buy. So that is how you can get around problem 1. It is a bit funky I know. You can also customize Paypal Standard so it looks like the BC site and lands them back in the site after taking payment.

2. Web apps have standard address fields so don't create new ones.

Yes those fields are there, but you can't see them in the area where you set up custom fields, and you can't see them in a web app item unless you tick proximity search in the setup of the webapp. You can see them when you download a sample CSV file to upload data into the Web App via spreadsheet. So I suggest that you start the Web App, tick proximity search in the setup and then download the upload template for the Web App. Those fields are there and available to use.

3. When you upload data into a Web App via CSV, the release date has to be filled in and in text format for the Web App items to display.

Otherwise you will think the upload didn't work. The field must be a text field, and in the date format for the release date field in the Web App. So create the Web App, set up the fields, and then have a look at the format for the release date field. That is how the field needs to look in the upload spreadsheet, and it must be text. Also every time you upload using the CSV file, the field will reset to date, so you need to reformat to text again before you upload. Otherwise your data will not be visible again.

4. There is only one percentage that can be set for affiliate programs on a site.

And also the reporting is consolidated for affiliate programs. So really you can only have one affiliate program per website.

5. There is only one shop checkout layout per BC site.

So really you can only have one shop per website. So if you are hosting two sites for a client, they need to use the same shop if they are hosted on the same BC account.

6. If you upload customers via CSV and subscribe them to a secure zone on the upload they get the secure zone username and password email immediately.

This is not supposed to happen, but it does, whether you tick don't send email or not. So plan accordingly. You may want to email all the customers first before doing the upload so that they don't wonder why they got a weird email about a secure zone they have never heard of.

6a. (Courtesy of Jim Cassimatis) When you setup a Web Form that allows people to "request" to be added to a secure zone and includes the system username and password fields, then the secure zone details email gets sent to them immediately after the form is submitted even though you have not automatically subscribed them to the secure zone. This is confusing as it implies the user has been given access, whereas they have not. The workaround is to use custom CRM fields to capture the username and password, instead of using the system ones. Later when the administrator grants access, they also need to copy and paste the username and password CRM fields into the corresponding system ones.

7. There is only one secure zone subscription email that gives the customer their login details.

So you have to make it quite general if you have several Secure Zones on your website. Also the tag in that email showing the secure zone they are subscribed to is the only tag available to show secure zone subscriptions and cannot be customized.

8. Folders cannot be placed into a secure zone in BC and therefore cannot be secured.

So if your clients are uploading data or pictures into a Web App that has to be secure, you need to turn them into literature items and secure them individually and then delete the original uploaded data. SEO is very good on BC sites, and all data in all folders on your BC website will be google-able.

9. Google maps code only looks at the default address fields in a Web App.

So don't try making any other fields or long lat fields. The Google maps functionality in BC only looks at those default address fields in a Web App. So tick proximity in the Web App setup and go for it.

10. Every time you add and delete fields in a Web App you will need to redo the Web App forms.

Yes any change to web app fields will require a redo of the forms associated with the web app, list, detail, additional detail, edit and upload forms. So get those fields narrowed down first. You will still probably have some changes to do, so I suggest putting the code for these layouts into notepad, resetting the forms to base, getting the code for the new fields (including the JavaScript checking below if the new fields are mandatory) and adding that code into the code saved in the notepad file. Then copy all and paste into the form and test it yet again. Tedious, but effective.

11. Every time you add and delete fields in a Web Form you will need to redo the form customization.

I suggest putting the code for the customized web form into notepad, resetting the forms to base, getting the code for the new fields (including the JavaScript checking below if the new fields are mandatory) and adding that code into the code saved in the notepad file. Then copy all and paste into the form and test it yet again. Tedious, but effective.

12. You need to have an email list set up before you start an email campaign.

I know that makes sense, but it didn't to me the first time I ran an email campaign. I read everything in the KB and still didn't get it.

[Editor note 12/6/2012: This is true for sending to a specific list of customers, however you can send to "All Customers" or to a "Customer Report" without having to leave the Campaign workflow.]

13. You need to set up the template for the web app before adding web app items to it.

Otherwise if you add a template to a web app later, those items will not display in the template and you will have to specify the template for each item. You can do this with a csv upload.

14. When setting up catalogs in a shop you can only specify some things in a CSV upload.

So product catalogs will need some individual treatment in the BC back end after you have uploaded them.

15. The key customer field in BC is the email address.

So if a customer interacts with the site using two emails, two customer records will be created.

16. If a client had a mail service already, leave them where they are.

If you switch a client from an existing mail service to BC there will be a blip in the service. Most customers won't back up their old emails and will lose access to them. There are a million email browsers out there, and you can't know the ins and outs of them all. We only set up a client on BC email if their business is new, and they don't have their email set up elsewhere already. Email is a pain and very hard to troubleshoot if you are really a graphic designer and not a software tech.

17. The online shop purchase does not work in the online shop layout as a module.

So insert the form itself on the checkout page, not a module tag.

18. If you want custom fields to be available throughout a site, make a custom CRM field.

If you make the exact same field in different forms it will be a different field on each form as far as BC is concerned. Use CRM/Extend CRM database to create CRM fields. You get these fields in the CRM tab in web form customization area. This will insert all custom CRM fields on the form, so you will need to then edit the form to show the particular CRM field you want on that form.

18a. (courtesy of Barry Alt) If when creating a new form you want capture company info such as Company Name and want it to show up with the customer name and info. under CRM > Customers don't use the default Company Details form item listed under contacts tab when creating a Web Form, use the CRM > Extend CRM database to create a CRM form field that you could call Company Name, then add it to your web form in the Web Form builder under the CRM forms tab. If you use the default Company Details form fields two records will be created one for the person (Contact) filling out the form and one for the company. This does not make sense but this is what I ran into and how I made it work.

~~19. You can't run a secure zone subscription report.~~

~~You need to export a list from the secure zone to CSV to get the list of people in that secure zone.~~

[Editor note 12/5/2012: This is now possible in BC with the Customers and Secure Zones custom reports.]

20. When working on a site in DreamWeaver, set up a page template in the back end of BC first.

I set up a blank template, and then download to DW and work on it. You can create the stylesheet in DW and upload no problem. But the page template needs to start off in the back end. Just name and save it and download and do the rest in DW.

21. You can't break a Web App.

Believe me I have tried. Switch on and off take payment, proximity search, change the name, add and delete fields, even if there is data in them. That makes them very flexible. But don't forget the bit about the layouts for the web app needing to be redone every time you change fields. (See no 10.)

22. Hitching a ride with BC will change your little graphics business to a graphics and web business.

And you won't need to know too much code to do it. So hang in there it will be worth the ride. Just thought I would throw that in so I don't look too grumpy!

23. (Courtesy of Jim Cassimatis) On eCommerce sites that accept checks or EFT you need to make the following changes to the invoice template so it shows the "actual" amounts.

Paid Already: change {tag_amountpaid} to {tag_amountpaidactual}
Outstanding: change {tag_amountoutstanding} to {tag_amountoutstandingactual}

Note that credit card payments will be unaffected by these changes.

###

What "Laws of BC" have you discovered?

Fall Update - New Pricing, Tutorial Browsing, Contributors, and More!

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Our objective is to make learning about BC fun, engaging, and of course to make sure we have the right info you need for your next project. We are here to give you the tools to succeed.

I would like to give you a bit of an overview of the new changes we've made on BCGurus.com so you don’t miss anything.

New Plan, “Plus” for $49

BC Gurus is now more accessible to those who might not have considered becoming a PRO member at $99. We are VERY excited to launch this new plan, called Plus for $49, which includes our world famous Tutorials and extremely active Forum.

Plus gives you the education and support that you need to succeed with BC. And when you are ready to make use of our Templates or Client Trainer - you can upgrade at anytime.

We guarantee you will love Plus or you can have your money-back just like we’ve done with PRO since the beginning. With our new subscription engine, you can upgrade, downgrade, and cancel at anytime. You have complete control over account - updating billing info is now a breeze.

New Tutorial Browsing

After a year (oh yeah, PRO has been around since last October!) of publishing tutorials and business education we realized we had a lot of content. Not only that, but we felt we had only scratched the surface.

With all of this content, our side was kludgy. New visitors couldn’t find the information they needed. The site was not “surfable.” I imagined myself kicking back in my couch wanting to learn - and wondered what that experience would feel like. From my iPad, could I just scroll & scan?

Not on our previous site.

Now we have a fully responsive, infinity scroll, and cover based display that makes browsing enjoyable. We also honed in our search to just focus on Tutorials so that searches returned meaningful results.

On the details page, we brought back an emphasis on the Author. This is hugely important for our Everyone, Guru project - but we wanted you to know who you were learning from. We can’t be right there with you at your desk, but maybe this is a step closer.

You can also browse by "Free" or "Premium" to easily see content available via our new Community Membership which is free.

Check out Tutorials now to see the difference.

Contributors Now Live

I have been plugging our "Everyone, Guru" project now for a few months and I am very happy to say that we have our first contributed blog post by Brad Lawryk of Auratec (part 1 and part 2) and first tutorial course by Jon Hinshaw of EBWAY Creative Solutions.

Part of this project is to gain additional perspectives on BC and being a web professional from all around the globe. We believe by doing this, we will help others become Gurus and in turn they will be more successful in their own practice.

Special thanks to Jon and Brad for breaking the ice on this project. I am not ready to say who else we have contributing - but we have some excellent content on the way from the community.

Introducing Courses

We learned a thing or two producing the now very well known Zero to Hero project for Adobe. One of those things was that you could cover big topics effectively by breaking content up into several tutorials as part of a course.

And boy do we have some big topics we’ve been dying to cover.

Instead of just producing 4 individual tutorials each week, we are moving to a more flexible structure of a course and or a tutorial each week. This will definitely prove to be more content than we’ve done before, but it we will go into more depth on specific topics.

For example, "Launching a Website," can be a complex process. Involving things like DNS setup, email migration, quality assurance checklists, etc.

In the past we just produced each of those ideas in stand alone tutorials - now we are conquering them as a well planned instructional set that you can rely on to solve a big problem.

Earning Points by Interacting

We introduced "Guru Points" in Zero to Hero and have now begin bringing the concept over to our main site. We are not quite complete with this yet, but you can now earn points for interacting on our site in various ways:

Commenting
Visiting our site and logging in
Posting to our forum

These are rate limited activities and we will remove comments and forum posts that do not add value to our site (and remove your points too). So act responsibly :)

The whole point of this is to be able to showcase your expertise to the community, your clients, and also prospective clients. Expect to see leaderboard and ranking factors that you will be able to advertise very soon on your own site.

What’s to Come

Don’t let all of these really great additions to BC Gurus make you think that we are "done" or anything. We aren’t. The team here is working day and night to continue advancing our mission to give you the opportunity to become a Guru.

Expect:

More in-depth content covering a variety of topics pertaining to the BC universe
Official "Guru Levels" that will put meaning to points
"Point Cashing" so you can begin to use points to redeem meaningful things to help your business
Quizzes and Challenges for our Premium content
New Site Template framework

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That’s it for now. Hope everyone celebrating Thanksgiving has a wonderful holiday - and to the rest of the world - give thanks anyways!

Until next time.

2012 BC Gurus Holiday Party - Denver

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

We are happy to present a celebration between BC Partners, Clients, Friends, and Family to mark another year of mutual success. Time to take our business hats off for an evening together of great conversation, laughter, introductions, games, and of course ... some food and drink.

This event is sponsored by Adobe Business Catalyst and being put on with the great help of the team at BC Gurus, HotPress/Distill, MediaTrik, and EBWAY Creative Solutions.

December 7th
7PM to Late o'clock

=> Click here to view details and RSVP

"Let’s have coffee" to get more business

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

My original business strategy (or lack thereof) was to just go with the flow of passive referrals and unstructured networking. I got business, but it was not a dependable flow. I was always in the feast or famine cycle.

Creating a Simple Strategy

I don’t need a lot of business – maybe 1-2 new clients per month to really make my business solid. My problem was that I was not talking to enough business owners…I just waited for them to contact me (apparently that doesn’t work very well).

The first part of developing a simple strategy was to define who I wanted to work with. It turns out a lot of businesses in my area advertise in the local paper or magazines and either do not have a website or it’s really bad.

Most of these businesses were owned by people that also operated the business. We both had the entrepreneurship thing in common and I figured if I could get in front of them, I would have a chance at helping them with their Online Business.

My strategy: Get in front of more business owners to have conversations about their business. These businesses need to be in my local geographic area and spending money on adverting but do not have an effective online presence.

Tactic to Getting More Conversations

My original tactic was more of a “let’s do lunch” approach but quickly realized it could end being quite costly: I would have only been able to meet with one business owner per week.

“Let’s have coffee”

This tactic is very simple and inexpensive. I schedule myself to meet with two business owners each week for coffee. I have discovered that meeting in a neutral location such as a coffee shop helps keep the conversation a little less formal.

My primary goal of these meetings is to learn about their business - not to pitch them on a website. My secondary goal is to get a referral of another business owner that I can approach for a similar meeting.

I try to find out in the business owners words:

What the business offers
Narrow it down to one or two main focuses
Why the business owner provides that product or service
What is the business doing in way of marketing
What are their competitors doing as far as marketing goes
Who is the targeted client demographic of the business
Find out what business pains the client may have
What are they struggling with
If they are not on the Internet – why not
Ask them if they keep a current and updated email list

These are just some of the ideas I discuss. More questions than answers will come from taking this approach.

Quite often I find the discussion migrating to talking about my own business. This is my opportunity to show I am genuinely interested in their business by putting the focus back on them. My first objective of the meeting is to learn about the other business not pitch mine.

I often allow the conversation to stray a little when it touches on topics such as the business owner's family or interests. I try not to let this take up too much time and try to get it back on track within a few minutes.

Information I find out about the owner personally will come in handy in future meetings. I’ll talk about how I use that information in next week’s blog post.

Never Leave a Meeting Without...

As the meeting winds down, I always remember to schedule a second meeting.

During the second meeting, I will go deeper into discovery about their business. The time between each meeting allows me to use information from my first meeting to do research to prepare for my second meeting.

Before I finish any of my meetings I always ask for an introduction to another business owner. Many times someone comes up during discovery and it is fairly easy, other times I flat out ask for an introduction. This is an important step for me because it keeps new prospects flowing in my pipeline.

Not all series of coffee meetings end up turning into projects for me. If I have come away with more contacts and a better understanding of a new industry the meetings are still a success.

The key to these initial meetings is to learn more about the other business. I don’t let the conversation turn into a pitch. I learn as much about them as I can. It is always easier to sell a solution to their pains than it is to sell a 'website.'

It’s not until meeting number three that I start the ball rolling towards closing a deal.

Next week I’ll discuss turning coffee into clients using the information we have learned in this process.

Keeping Your Business on a Successful Path

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 06:00:00 GMT

I hope to find a more permanent place for that quote. For it was this quote that potentially changed how I run my Business Catalyst based operations.

I recently found myself focusing on so many things that in reality I wasn’t really focused at all. By cutting down on the many so-called focuses I had it has seemingly made me more productive, successful and most importantly – happy.

Focus #1: Find a Business Catalyst Mentor

One of the most intriguing benefits of being a Business Catalyst Partner is the very strong and supportive network opportunity between partners. This is something rarely seen in any other industry.

A few months ago I had a casual email conversation with Brent Weaver of BC Gurus about how I was running my business. We came to the conclusion that there were many holes and financial leaks that needed to be corrected.

I make finding a mentor the number one focus for a couple reasons. First, it isn’t hard to find another partner that cares enough to gently guide you on your path. Second, a good mentor will keep you accountable. Knowing that I am going to get that weekly phone call has without question been the number one factor in keeping focused.

Focus #2: Reduce Costs and Increase Productivity

One of the biggest issues I faced were small cash flow leaks that alone were really insignificant. Yet when you add up all the little leaks it becomes more comparable to a fire hose.

Leak number one was being involved in many other projects, betas and social media that I was not focusing enough on what really counted. Setting up a personal schedule with time allotted to do these activities has helped me reduce time on non-billable hours and increase time for finding those billable hours.

Another leak was the many non-profit organizations that I was helping both in time spent and hosting costs. While these organizations were close to my heart they didn’t pay the bills. I found it just doesn’t make sense to spend money that won’t bring revenue in return.

I continue to volunteer my time when I can, but I have requested each organization to at least cover my out of pocket hosting expenses. They were more than happy to oblige.

Another significant cost was spending cash on personal blog sites and my own business site. Again, an outgoing cash flow without an incoming revenue stream.

I then took a look at proposals that I have recently sent out and how I went about presenting those proposals. I was so wrong on my approach. I did learn two things when it comes to doing proposals.

First, never email a proposal to a client. Always go over that proposal in person with the client. There is a good chance that your client may not understand certain aspects of your proposal. You are the professional and need to help them understand it.

If you can do it together in the same room that is ideal but it is not always possible. Technology these days has given us every opportunity to present and go over that proposal over the Internet if person to person meeting is not possible. The more time you spend in front of your client the more likely your client will understand what you are proposing.

Second, never leave a meeting or end a phone call without setting a follow-up plan. Know your client’s needs!

That brings us to focus number three …

Focus #3: Have a Strategy

Being in front of potential clients as often as you can is a must. Sitting in the office waiting for clients to come to you simply is not enough. Be proactive in your approach to networking with other business owners or managers.

To me this is the most important and surprisingly addicting aspect of my new strategy plan. And yes, I did say addicting.

You will have to come back next week to read all about this new strategy. So in tune with the concept of always scheduling a follow-up I will have a detailed account of that strategy for you in my next blog post here on BC Gurus.

In closing this week I would like to challenge you to adopt these three focus points or come up with three focus points of your own. I’d love to hear them!

Denver Colorado BC User Group Nov 15

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The Art Institute of Colorado is hosting our next BC Meetup in Denver (in their 10th floor penthouse downtown with sweet mountain views). If you are a Business Catalyst partner, considering the platform, a customer or business on the platform or considering the platform, then this is a great chance to meet others like you.

Presenter, prizes, etc to be determined.

We are being limited to 30 attendees by the venue size, so please RSVP if you can make it.

November 15, 2012 @ 6PM

=> Register on Meetup.com

Online Businesses, not Websites. Ready-Set-Go.

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Online Businesses, not Websites

The statement is powerful for any web designer to come to grips with in the small to medium business space. The last two releases have begun to key into this value proposition. Adobe will continue to deliver.

But for us, it's too easy to fall back into the rut of saying "I'm a web designer," because people get that. They know who that person is.

Getting into "Online Business Builder" mentality and language-use can take more time, more discipline, more study, more exploration.

My San Jose partner conference presentation last month touched on this idea. It was just a brief toe dip into this exciting pool.

Several partners came up afterwards saying things like, "you changed my perspective on what I'm doing" or "BC is bigger than I thought."

Talking to you about this subject makes me imagine we are studied Japanese Samurai...perched on a cliff drinking hot tea...discussing war theory and philosophy before heading to battle.

The theory is that websites alone are dead. Gone are the days of the 5-page online brochure. Dead as nails are the "welcome to my website..." intro headlines. We are above these trivial executions of our craft.

Climbing above the wastelands of "free" websites come our ONLINE BUSINESS solutions.

Solutions worth investing in. When presented right, our prospective clients get it. They spend good money for them.

But if all you know how to do is design websites, then you too are to be left in the dust. Join that wasteland or learn the theory, strategy, and tactics of the Online Business partners.

Understanding the core value prop, features, and benefits

Originally when BC came out, "Online Businesses" was just getting these 5 systems in one dashboard. Anyone with website development experience for small businesses knows having these 5 systems in one hosted solution is hugely valuable by itself.

It won't take us forward.

Discovered in July was the need to get these 5 systems connected to do game changing workflows not possible in other platforms. Instead of making any of the individual silo's compete against other specialized software, we explored how these tools can work together to solve unique pains.

CMS/E-Commerce -> Email Marketing

Our clients manage tons of content in their sites AND they send out lots of emails. Until last month, those two things were silo'ed. Blogs, Web Apps, E-commerce could not influence what content was delivered to your clients' lists. The data was in BC, but it was not accessible.

Now it is.

Armed with unlimited list view templates, you can now create these types of effective tools for your clients:

Weekly digests driven from recent blog posts
Product special emails driven by categories
Form-fill newsletters via Web Apps (vs. your client using the email editor)
Loyalty campaigns with dynamic content (think about that for a minute, setup a 10 part series that will always have the most current up to date content, like "register for this weeks webinar")
Listing update emails (think real estate properties, articles, or portfolios)

Part of having the "Online Business" conversation with your clients and prospects is getting the chance to talk about these features as they relate to potential strategies for that business.

Asking, "How can we use this to solve real pains you have right now?"

Here are two big business owner pains that are solved:

The don't have time to send out a weekly email AND blog/update catalogs/update listings (ok, just do one and the system will do the other)
They don't have enough patience to learn how to use a web-based HTML editor

CRM -> Email Marketing

You can generate a set of rules to run a "Customer Report" in BC. You can save this report and then send emails to this list. Before each email is sent, BC re-grabs the list based on your saved report data.

Lets expand on a couple of workflows from above:

Send an email to active subscribers in a "Secure Zone" -> Email is a dynamic template that sends out the most recent 5 Web App items from a protected web app
Send customers that spent more than $100 in the last week a featured product from your "special" catalog with a discount coupon that expires at the end of the week
Send customers who have not yet purchased a ticket to an event a special last minute coupon for your upcoming event

Recurring Email Marketing

Once we had new capabilities in Email Marketing to include dynamic content and to dynamically segment and exclude people on our lists, what else would solve big pains?

In San Jose, the idea of "Recurring" campaigns came up. This feature is not yet road-mapped, but I wouldn't be surprised if it came out before the end of the year.

Right now in BC, you have one-off and loyalty campaigns. Which made sense when email content wasn't dynamically driven. When you had to actually write in all of the content to individual emails, recurring didn't make sense. You wouldn't want to send your clients the same email over and over.

Now that has changed.

What if you could create a single "weekly" email for a real estate client that each week it automatically sent loading data from your listings web app.

Or a monthly newsletter for a client that took the most recent blog post content and turned it into a "newsletter" look and added registration links for the next two webinars your client was holding.

Or create a 7 part intro loyalty series, but if the customer purchases a product on your website, then they will stop getting the loyalty series and instead be added to your "daily deals" emails.

Even using the term "added" to a list doesn't make sense because your lists aren't really lists. They are just sets of rules you created to either send emails to people or not send.

You get the idea.

Other useful data in BC

Getting access to more data in BC to send "smart" campaigns is going to continue. In the most recent releases there is a new feature that allows list segmentation during the email campaign creation process. Other things on Adobe's radar:

Running reports from "favorites"
Running reports based on top traffic and SEO data
Running reports based on specific user interests or social activity

Partners need to talk about these workflows

I have been studying Online Business, Traffic, and Conversion for several years now. I will begin to use these new features in BC to do really effective online marketing for my own site and my clients'.

What workflows have you opened due to the new functionality?

As a platform, we can now do things that other tools can't. There are possibilities with Business Catalyst with these email features, reporting, and unlimited list layouts that you cannot do in other software. These workflows will change how we drive traffic and convert traffic into REAL BUSINESS for Online Businesses we build.

Join me in having this conversation with the BC partner community.

What Online Business strategies and tactics are you using or thinking about now with BC?

What could Adobe unlock in BC with existing data to do additional workflows?

October 2012 Release Commentary

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 06:00:00 GMT

More details on Adobe Business Catalyst October 2012 Release Notes.

New Business Catalyst Template: Family Medicine Health Template

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 06:00:00 GMT

View the Family Medicine Health Template details page or if you are a PRO member, Request Template now.

BC Academe and BC Gurus Join Forces

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Two years ago I met Michael Sallander & Scott Shefler at Adobe MAX. I could tell these guys were super motivated and moving fast with their web agency Chicago Digital - powered with Adobe Business Catalyst.

Earlier this summer, Mike & Scott rolled out the BC Academe, a HANDS ON training program for Business Catalyst.

They take on 30 students at a time, conduct a bunch of webinars, work with you over live chat, and provide a structured curriculum so that you can learn how to build your first BC site from scratch.

Since BC Academe's inception, Mike and I have been trying to find a way to collaborate. Very excited to announce that we have formed a nice strategic partnership.

Part of the "Everyone, Guru" project, we are implementing a community-wide point system on BC Gurus. Those on our email list have already started participating in a beta of this program via our Zero to Hero pre-launch. We will soon be releasing Guru Points on our entire site after our public release of Zero to Hero next week.

The next BC Academe course begins October 29, 2012 (the deadline to register is October 22).

The graduates of this course will receive up to 5,000 Guru Points. They will also receive an exclusive BC Academy badge which will be displayed next their profile and company listing in our directory.

I realize that this might seem elusive...but let me wrap some value around what you can do with these points:

Get a BC Gurus template credit (to download any of our templates), a $249 value
Schedule a BC Guru consulting session, a $99 value
Have BC Gurus include your company in a social media plug or in one of our weekly emails (that goes to thousands of BC partners), a $priceless value

Earning these points will also help you work towards the soon to be released "Guru Status" which will help promote your business based on the achievements you receive on this site.

I was curious to understand a bit about the results Mike and Scott got after their first class finished. Here are some testimonials from their inaugural class:

"This has been an excellent course, and provides me with a great understanding of working with Business Catalyst. Prior to taking the course I had set up a few sites and worked with templates, but I feel confident now that I can take a site from scratch to fully implemented on Business Catalyst."

- Dave Haggblad (Digital Ink Multimedia)

"Business Catalyst is an empowering system for web designers. The Academe is an excellent hands on way to familiarize yourself with the system. The feedback and support from instructors outside of the classes is excellent. I highly recommend the course for anyone looking to learn how to use Business Catalyst."

- Jessica Michels (Edward J Campbell Inc.)

"My first attempts to use Adobe BC on my own were not successful, as the learning curve was way too slow and tedious for me. Then I discovered Mike Sallander and Scott Shefler... and because they were willing to walk me through some basic fundamentals of the platform, I became comfortable with it for the first time, and began to see the opportunities ahead of me.

I went from having ZERO paid websites in Business Catalyst to four (4) in just over a year! And there are more on the way. But none of this would have happened if it weren't for these guys. I am grateful that they continue to provide the knowledge, experience and competence as Adobe BC developers. It has helped me bring my business to a new level. Thank you!"

- Karen Dippel (Creative Edge Marketing)

Pretty cool guys.

Something that Mike and I also discussed was that we plan to create a BC Academy category of tutorials on BCG that will allow students to access exclusive follow up content via our website. This will get more concrete in the next couple of months as their next class gets closer to graduation.

If you are starting out with Business Catalyst and you need personal attention from two of the best PROs in the business, then this program is for you. I highly recommend it, and know that Mike and Scott deliver nothing but rock solid results.

They are also offering the program through a lower price payment plan option than their first class. You can now get started for just $399 per month over 4 months. Nice.

=> REGISTER NOW! (Deadline October 22)

New Business Catalyst Template: Organic Roots Clothing E-Commerce

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

View the Organic Roots E-commerce Store Business Catalyst Template details page or if you are a PRO member, Request Template now.

Work Less, Charge More

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The theme is this: I don't get paid enough for the work I do.

Outright, that is not because people don't have money in their pockets, it's because you do not know how to get the money out of their pocket (or you spend time with people that truly don't have money).

About a year ago I had an exchange with a Partner and I wrote him something that I would like to share with you now. It's about finding the right opportunities and passing on the bad.

Getting out of the famine cycle and into the feast by picking the right projects and clients. Getting out of the "scarcity" mindset that your next prospect might be the last or something. Get into the "abundance" mindset to know that there is always something else better.

### Email Excerpt ###

Keep a balance, don't overwork. By working less and passing on opportunities you are going to let your subconscious weed out those those projects that you probably shouldn't be taking in the first place.

Almost error on the side of always saying NO to a new project. Let your prospect CONVINCE you why they would be a good client.

You don't have time to work on your own website / marketing / messaging because you are taking jobs for too cheap. By charging more for the projects that you want to work on, you will make more money in the same amount of time and you won't have to take on additional projects to make ends meet and take up more of your time.

When you are working on one thing, you are inherently not working on something else. Think about it. When you take that project for $2,500 (which is dirt cheap for site + branding), you are not pitching that other project for $5,000 that might come along or you might seek out.

Lets think about this together. Take an opportunity like that and propose that it is going to take 100 hours to do the sale, logo, website, and followup. At $2500 you are going to get paid 25 per hour. Lets propose that by charging more you either have to work harder to get that client by spending more time with them building value for yourself or you have to pursue another client that is a better fit for that budget.

Lets propose that you put in an additional 10 hours; either pitching that customer longer or looking for another client that is a better fit. At 110 committed hours at $5,000 you are at $45.45 per hour even counting the over hours. Lets go farther to assume you put in an extra 25 hours to get a customer that will pay you $100/hour for the same amount of work, so $10,000. Even counting the extra 25 hours you put in to find that client or sell them longer, you are at $80/hour.

You need to figure out what you want to be making per month. Lets say you want to make $10,000 per month and there are about 140 productive hours in a month (35 hours per week). Some of that time needs to be reserved for your own marketing and selling of customers. If you can figure out how long it takes to get a client that will pay $10,000 for 100 hours worth of work, you can basically assume that your cap is 40 hours and then try to work it down from there.

I hope this is making sense. Basically, you have 40 hours per month to spend on your own marketing, skill development, networking, etc, in order to book 100 hours at $100/hour to reach a $10,000 per month revenue goal. Part of you should be saying, well, that is only working 35 hours per week, that seems too little. Its not, you will be balanced, healthy, focused, and enjoying life.

In the model where you are getting $2,500 for 100 hours worth of work, to make that same end goal of $10,000 per month, you would need to work 400 hours per month on projects . . . no marketing or sales time there. Or if you are selling or marketing you are rushing the process, you aren't building the right value which is why you end up with $2,500 deals. 400 hours can be done in a month, it really can be, you work about 14 hours per day 7 days a week. You will crash though and you will then not be able to work for a while or your work will be crap.

Work less, charge more. Its that simple.

### End Email Excerpt ###

Now back to replying to everyone's emails :)

BC Gurus Needs a Talented BC Web Designer

Wed, 29 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Are you solid in design and front-end development? Do you know BC inside and out?

I want to hear about it.

Send me a link to 3 projects you have completed, weekly availability, and hourly rate:

brent@bcgurus.com

US-based preferred. Need to speak US English fluently and be willing to work USA hours.

Meet Mario Gudelj from Adobe Business Catalyst

Tue, 28 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

I apologize for the weird audio in this video, my mic fell off as we started the interview - had to work with just Mario's audio. DIY fail :)

Video Transcript

Brent: Hey, this is Brent Weaver from bcgurus.com. I'm here with Mario from Adobe, welcome to the program.

Mario: Thanks, man.

Brent: Mario, I think you're quite famous with most BC partners. If you haven't seen Mario's name in support of the forums, I think you're missing out on some really valuable stuff, you've been around the BC community for a while. So I just want to start off by thanking you for everything you've done for the partners over the years.

Mario: You're welcome.

Brent: So, Mario, tell me what you do at Adobe.

Mario: Well, I'm kind of clean support. I've been in support for quite a few years. At the moment, my project is managing the new forum community that we started off two months ago.

Brent: OK.

Mario: And, you know, moved from BC forums, which we've outgrown, to the other B forums, hosted in [inaudible 00:01:08].

Brent: Very nice. So now, you've been around, you've been in the BC team for quite a while, but what is your background? What did you do before BC?

Mario: Before BC I started off in a networking company called Net Come Here, and I was doing IP telephony and routers and all that, setting up and supporting all that and then moved to BC in May 2007, started off as a first support agent.

Brent: Very cool, so you were like in BC from the beginning almost.

Mario: From the beginning, yes. I was the seventh person, back in the days when Biden was buying your lunch on Fridays.

Brent: Adobe doesn't buy lunch on Fridays?

Mario: No. I was thrown in there with a PDF document, which was the documentation before, and V1.

Brent: I don't know if I've ever heard, I came on in 2008, so I'm not even sure if I know what V1 looked like.

Mario: It was this orange blue thing that wasn't very user friendly, until we re-skinned it into V2 which you know now.

Brent: OK.

Mario: So one of my early tasks was to develop an online solution for the documentation, which was the online business wiki on MediaWiki.

Brent: Oh, yeah. It still has a place in my heart. I'm always wondering when the online business wiki is going to come back to Business Catalyst ,
I don't think that that is going to happen but it was an elegant solution for sure.

Mario: Yeah, I liked it. It just needed a better search, but it was quite nice.

Brent: Very nice. So, you said you guys used to use support in a single email box. That must have been crazy.

Mario: Yeah, it was. It was support our BusinessCatalyst.com, and until recently, if you email that account you probably would have gotten support through it.

Brent: I think for a while..[inaudible 00:03:35]

A:It was supportbusinesscatalyst.com, we used the IMAP protocol to connect to it, and everyone who wanted to reply to support could simply go there and reply and delete.

Brent: So it's evolved a little bit.

Mario: It's evolved a little bit. We later on started using customer service ticketing which is built in to BC, and we used it up to two months ago, when we moved onto Adobe tools, and you guys have experienced it.

Brent: Yeah, for sure. So what's, I know, kind of forums, support, all that stuff, it seems like there's a bit of a transition right now. Can you tell me a bit now that you're managing the forums, I mean, obviously you guys are transitioning a lot of content, tell me how that process has been.

Mario: Because BC doesn't have forum export feature, the two systems are incompatible, I had to go through all the forum posts, and all the topics that were started in the last 12 months and manually move all the content that I found that's useful. So it's a lot of manual work, it took me weeks. I moved everything that I thought was good, and we ended up with about 250 topics that I thought helped.

Brent: OK. That were relevant, still?

Mario: That were relevant.

Brent: OK. So, was it just yourself that did this, or wiki members that participated?

Mario: Liam did help me a lot, everyone knows Liam, really. Shout out to Liam, thanks man. He really helped me out with setting up the new platform and moving those posts and producing some new stuff on Menus V2 and with Liam's experience. So, us two pretty much did it.

Brent: Very cool. So, just thinking about how the community interacts currently on the forum and even with support tickets in general, you've been doing support for BC for so long, I feel like if you could tell a BC partner anything to make their support experience better, what are some tips and tricks and suggestions you'd make to partners?

Mario: The main tip is to provide enough information at the beginning, when you first reach out to support. To provide enough links, screenshots, maybe a short video of what's happening. Error messages, definitely. Anything that can help us replicate the issue and come up with some sort of conlusion. If it's a bug or something we can fix. Just provide as much information as you can in your first touch so you don't have to go back and forth with support.

Brent: I'm just thinking from past experience there's been times when I submitted a support ticket and maybe said, "I need help with my web forum."
And that's it. And you think about that from the other end, and you have a partner that has 50 sites, and that individual site might have five web forums, and it can be very confusing about what that really means and that delays the process.

Mario: Exactly, and that's a good example. My web forum isn't submitting, which web forum, where does it reside, what URL? Sometimes we get a site URL, but then we don't get a page URL where the forum, so we reinsert the forum onto the test page and, oh look, it's working. So if you can just give us the URL, all the form names and so on, so that we can troubleshoot the issue.

Brent: Very cool. Now, on the forum itself, are you looking for partners to contribute and start participating in that?

Mario: Definitely. That's one of my goals now is to kind of get the community to contribute, because what I want partners to do is try to help out, you know. I've noticed that your guys are participating, and thanks for that, it's awesome.

Brent: Yeah, no problem.

Mario: If you can help out, put a link to the website, promote yourself, but if you're generally helping out, I love it. I want the Jive to become like a real good community knowledge repository.

Brent: Just to explain to the partners out there, I think Jive is the software.

Mario: Jive is the software.

Brent: The forum and the knowledge base that is getting built and rebuilt on BC, which is really cool. Some other changes that you mentioned to me earlier, you guys were looking to use tags and categories to help provide quick access to some of the content?

Mario: Yeah, I've noticed that when people are posting discussions that they are good at tagging the discussion, if it's e-commerce related, registration form, people are really tagging the discussions well. So what I want to do is build a browse panel, where you can easily navigate through those tags and categories and it will return everything that's helpful in those areas. So that's one of the plans and also I'd love to have a video section, of our official videos, and also anything that support agents are producing. You know, the community is producing, we could tag it as videos and have a section of a few hundred videos.

Brent: Yeah, for sure, I think unlocking the potential of a broader community, there's so much knowledge out there.

Mario: There is, and to have it centralized and have a go to place for help, it would be fantastic.

Brent: Yeah, for sure. So, you've just finished a couple of days of partner conferences here, so what was your experience? Did you enjoy hanging out with partners?

Mario: I loved it, you know, I shook over 200 hands, you know. It was so good to see the partners that I supported for so many years and to approach me and say, "Yo, Mario", "Your, Phil!" it was really nice to put a face to the name, and really hang out and talk to them and see who they are and where they work from and how big their team is, all that sort of stuff.

Brent: For sure, I feel like when I was hanging out with people, people would come up and introduce themselves to me, and there would be a minute where I was sort of squinting, imagining what their face looked like in a 100 pixel by 100 pixel avatar. So it was really cool to see a lot of people. And, unfortunately, Mario and I were on the same lawn bowling team, and we didn't end up placing, but we still had a lot of fun. So, what can we tell as far as getting partners to engage? Going to the forums is kind of the first line of defense, that's where we want people to start participating more. You know, do we want people to reach out to you and see how they can contribute, is that possible?

Mario: Definitely. If you really want to contribute and I see you contributing a lot on forums, reach out to me and we'll see what we can do. If you produce useful content, I'll give you thumbs up and credit.

Brent: Nice.

Mario: It's definitely,yeah, please do.

Brent: Yeah, I can tell you from my experience at BC gurus, having a unified effort to participate in the forums, and it's really helped drive a lot of traffic back to our business, and a big part of our market is partners, that's a lot of fun and it's cool to provide something of value back to the community and I can tell you that it does definitely pay back depending on how your business is set up, so I can encourage partners to do that a lot.

Mario: And also, I think if you, I subscribe through an RSS feed to forums, and although I answer all of them, I notice that a few partners actually keep up to date with stuff through forum RSS feeds, so, like, they'll see what cool stuff other people are doing, and a lot of people post cool stuff, links and stuff like that.

Brent: Yeah, I feel like it's sometimes difficult to jump into the forum and look at the newest stuff all the time, but I think using Google Reader-
type RSS can really make that experience a little bit better. So definitely that's a good tip out there for BC partners who are looking to get engaged. Is there anything else, while you have the floor? I mean, you've got the millions of people who..[inaudible 00:13:07]

Mario: That's all. Come to forums, contribute, help the community, help us, let's all hang out there and be happy.

Brent: For sure. Very cool.

Mario: And come to the conference next year, if you can.

Brent: Definitely. The conferences that are going to be coming up, definitely with more partners participating. This was awesome, the Australian hospitality was absolutely awesome, lots of good times, lots of good people out here, it's been really amazing. I want to thank everyone that participated in the conferences. Mario, I appreciate you taking the time to share some info with us at BC guros and I'm sure we'll see you around.

Mario: Definitely.

Brent: Thanks for watching BCgurus.com, and we'll have more great content coming to you soon.

Tuesday Meeting #3: Block & Tackle

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

This week, the conversation started with some overview of planning for the September 24th conference in San Jose. As I have mentioned before, if you have the means to make it out there, it will be an amazing conference for BC Partners.

A lot of energy is going into the release that hits right before. Not only that, but we are planning to be able to piggy back our own content at BC Gurus (and I know Jason will do the same at Tribevita) to show off the new features coming.

Most of our standup was dedicated to blocking and tackling some particular issues of how a case goes from level 1 to level 2 support and how communication works going all the way up.

I can't get into details due to NDA, but what I can do is urge two things:

1) Provide as many details as possible to support when opening a ticket that might be related to a system bug or malfunction. Get back to the team quickly (even if it takes them some time to get back to you). This might be uncomfortable, but in order for the team to get the right people on the issue as soon as possible, the more info the better.

2) Use the "rate support" survey functionality after your case. BC uses this as a performance grade - if you do not fill this out and have a bad experience, they have no idea. You can imagine the magnitude of support tickets that come through to the BC team...these indicators and feedback loops are imperative. Use them.

The BC team is exploring how to improve support constantly. They are creating some hypotheses for how they can improve the flow from level 1 to level 2 and how to classify people that know the system from others (this is particularly important so support can skip running through basic troubleshooting).

One of the things that came out of the meetings a month ago was that support is a huge part of BC performing well for partners and business owners. I will be happy to circle back around to this as I understand the solutions that will come from the work they are doing.

Meet Daniel Gundi from Adobe

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Video Transcript

Brent: Hey, this is Brent Weaver from BCGurus.com. I'm here today with Daniel Gundi from Adobe. Welcome to the program.

Daniel: Thank you.

Brent: So, Daniel, tell me what you do at Adobe.

Daniel: Currently, I'm a technical writer for Adobe, just working on the BC help documentation, video tutorials and all that.

Brent: OK. Very cool. So what's your background? Where did you get introduced to web? How did you find yourself at Adobe working on BC?

Daniel: All right. OK. Well, honestly, I didn't know web was the way I wanted to go out first. I started off with a network engineering path, and found myself in a start-up job with a web-hosting company. Then I thought,
"Wow. Web is the way I want to go. It's the future." Then I found myself really wanting to work with a small start-up company, just a small group of guys just trying to get their way out there.

Brent: And that was Adobe, right?

Daniel: Well, yeah. That's how I found Adobe. No, no. I've been with Business Catalyst since 2008. Now, in 2008 when I applied for the job, the role was actually for a GoodBarry Company, which is Business Catalyst's sister company.

Brent: I'm sure some partners are like, "What are you talking about?"

Daniel: The newer partners might not know, but yeah. I applied for this GoodBarry job so I thought it sounded small enough and it was a support role at the time. So, yeah, we were in a small office this is prior to acquisition, obviously, a small office, me and Mario from support sitting there just doing our support cases. Now, at the time, it was one inbox was basically where our cases were. We'd go through an inbox and just take them ourselves and write back to them so we've definitely come a long way.

Brent: So there have been improvements.

Daniel: Slightly, yeah.

Brent: I can't imagine what support would look like if it was still through one inbox right now.

Daniel: It was a bit tough, yeah. It was a bit tough at the time so now I don't think it would be too great. Yeah, so from there, obviously, the acquisition to Adobe, still working on support, getting a feel for what our customers need and the pain they had.

I found that documentation was a big thing so at the time, we had no one dedicated to documentation and, in my spare time in between support, I was sort of updating whatever I could, in terms of articles and everything like that. Slowly, slowly, I transitioned more and more of my time into focusing on documentation and less support as we got our team built up. Yeah, so I found myself now as a technical writer for Adobe, working on the Business Catalyst documentation.

Brent: Got you. So I'm sure as some partners can understand right now, it seems documentation is kind of in a transition if you will. Can you maybe elaborate a little bit about what's going on in that department?

Daniel: No, that's fine. That's probably the word I would have used as well. There's a bit of a transition phase now. There's a few reasons for that. One is, as you would all know, the V2 to V3 transition. So we sort of needed to cater for the two interfaces still available. Then we also have CCM, the credit cloud subscription. There's a few different workflows to getting to building a BC site now, as you may know. So you have your Dreamweaver users, you have your Muse users. You have your guys still coming through the BC website, so it's really important to sort of differentiate the different sort of workflows in the article. So you'll need a quick set-up guy for the Dreamweaver users, the Muse users, the BC users, and so forth. So it's still a transition phase but it's definitely going to be improving.

Brent: OK. Is there kind of a light at the end of the tunnel? Where are we going to see documentation kind of get back to where it's really taking partners' businesses to the next level?

Daniel: Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. The light at the end of the tunnel here is that we finally have a structure in place, as opposed to just updating it through support. We are basically rebuilding our knowledge base, and all our community content. Now when I mention "community", the big part of the difference between what we were doing before and what we're doing now is we really want to leverage the community in this.

One thing I took out from the partner conference we just had yesterday, is that a lot of our partners are more than happy to share their content and help out other partners. There's a strong community around BC. It's amazing, and that's what we want to take advantage of. We don't have to write every, single article or make every video ourselves. There's a lot of good content out there from our big partners, and we want to take advantage of that. And we can reference to them from our articles or from our topics pages. It definitely doesn't have to be Adobe-written content, no. Yeah, that's a big part of it.

Brent: Very cool. So we've seen the new forum come into play. I know we're going to be talking to Mario here in a bit about that, but the new knowledge base as well, there's going to be the ability to kind of contribute at some level? If a partner, say, has something they want to contribute back, what's the next step for them?

Daniel: Right, OK. Well on that step, I'm going into the forums as Mario will go into more detail about how the forums are going but as you may have seen already, the forums are a great community aspect. There's private messaging. There's ratings if articles or documents are helpful. If anyone does want to contribute any videos, any articles or just want to discuss anything like that, feel free to actually get me on the forums, private message me.

Brent: You're probably one of the top contributors on there.

Daniel: Yeah. A few people have already found me through some of the documents but, yeah, just get me on there. We can definitely discuss.

Brent: OK. Now I see some documentation coming through on the forums, but the knowledge base itself is kind of going to get revamped with this whole project?

Daniel: Yeah, that's right. So with the old knowledge base or the previous knowledge base, everything was sort of all in one funnel. We had technical documents such as jQuery, work arounds. We had tutorials, quick help reference articles, everything in one place. Now in the forums we've sort of found a good way to have those quick tips, jQuery, any Java script help, because everyone can comment on it and actually add any further tips, which is great. But we're actually redoing right now, we're restructuring the actual help content, what we like to call "the core content" so that's probably the most important to start with. We're in progress with that. We're doing quite well. I'd say we're looking at it this year.

Brent: Very cool. So expect some better, the nuts and bolts of the documentation be in 2012. That's really cool.

Daniel: Definitely, definitely, yeah.

Brent: So, Daniel, is there anything else you'd like to tell the BC community now? You've kind of got the floor.

Daniel: It's all me now. No, I'd just really like to emphasize that we do want to take advantage of those partners who do want to help out other partners, or who just want to get their own content out there. We're more than happy to help you do that. Just, once again, contact me on the forums and we can work from there.

Brent: Very cool. Well I definitely appreciate it. The hospitality, I think as I said when I was talking to Jackson, has just been amazing in Australia. I can't thank you guys enough for taking care of us here at this two-day conference and we appreciate your time, for sure.

Daniel: No problem.

Brent: Well thanks for listening in and expect more great content from BCGurus.com.

Adobe 2 Day Vision Review with Jason Tinnin

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Visit Jason's projects at SimpleFlame.com, Tribevita.com, and Kiyuco.com.

Video transcript

Brent: Hey, this is Brent Weaver from bcgurus.com. I'm here today with Jason Tinnin. If you're on our website and you don't know who Jason is, then just close the browser now. Welcome to BC Gurus, Jason.

Jason: Thanks, man. Thanks a lot for having me. I appreciate it.

Brent: So, Jason and I are actually out in San Francisco doing a couple-day visit with Adobe.

Jason: Yep.

Brent: We've been involved in a few of these over the last couple of months to try to help solve some problems...

Jason: That's right.

Brent: ...and try to work through some stuff with Adobe. Obviously, they're a big part of our lives and every partner out there. So, I think it's just going to be nice to share some of that information with the partner community, in general.

Jason: Yeah, agreed. It's been a really great trip. We've made several of these trips out to meet up with them and kind of help Adobe understand the partner network, which is of course a massive asset to Adobe. As a matter of fact, depending on who you ask, it was the biggest asset that they acquired when they acquired Business Catalyst.
So, we've been on here several times. This trip in particular has been really fun because it was the first time in a long time that we've talked about things other than just simply technology and that's it. How this fits into the overall ecosystem that is the partner network and that is, of course, Business Catalyst at its core.

Brent: Just to second that, I think it's the first time that we've been participating with a couple of days of deep dive.

Jason: Yeah.

Brent: Where we're not just focused on the glaring problems or the emergency issues, those types of things. I think a couple of other meetings, the March 1 meeting for instance. That was a very reactive...

Jason: Yeah.

Brent: There was an explosion in the community. We also had wanted to get in the door and start really working with them, have a seat at the table as a partner, but a lot of those things were very reactive meetings.

Jason: They were.

Brent: This one, to me, was something where we really deep-dove with them, gave them, I think, a good piece of who a partner is.

Jason: That's it.

Brent: What we do on a day-to-day basis.

Jason: I would second that. The March 1st meeting was definitely a, "Uh-oh. We have some issues. We definitely need to address those. We need to bring some partners in to help us understand." We can't forget it. Adobe is a big company. They've got a lot of things going on and we're small businesses, and we can make decisions on the fly and what have you. Adobe is a bit of a different monster in that way. They're a big company. So, the March 1 meeting was really a, "Okay, let's bring you guys in, try to figure out what the problems are. Help us understand them." There's no better way to do that than when it's in person and you can see body language and tone, and irritation and what have you, right? This is really more of a follow-up to that. Granted, it's four and a half months later, and I think we all would have preferred to have that happen sooner.

The reality is, though, again, Adobe is a big company. The meetings this time around, though, were I think a great response to what happened as a result of the March 1 meeting.

Brent: Absolutely.

Jason: Yeah.

Brent: So, what would you say some of the results out of the last two days have been?

Jason: Yeah. The biggest takeaway for me is that we walked away from the last two days with a common framework, for how we'll work together moving forward. When I say "we", meaning the partner network in its entirety, right? We didn't walk away with, "Hey, on every Tuesday we're going to get together and have a coffee," or anything. It wasn't that detailed. But it was more about just this general overall overarching framework that, for the first time, wasn't based around technology alone. So, if you think we came out here to have them fix the bookings engine alone, or fix e-commerce or what have you that definitely wasn't the intention. If it were just that, we would maybe end up with a promise of fixing bookings that isn't going to be fulfilled, and it's because there's never been a common framework with this big asset that Adobe has, which is the partner network.

How do they interact with that, and how do we move forward together with respect to technology, communication, marketing, and all of those fun things that go along with BC?

Brent: Yeah. I've found that a lot of times, we kind of silo parts of BC. Support is just over here in its little space, and then the technology and the hosting and those types of things. I really felt that there was this bigger picture that we began to unfold of how these things interact with each other.

Jason: That's right.

Brent: Like, what is the mindset if you're in support and you're not really getting what you need out of it?

Jason: Yeah.

Brent: What's the result of that? What's the net, net of that?

Jason: Yeah.

Brent: There are partners like us that we're launching a lot of sites, and so sometimes I feel like we can deal with some of these bigger problems. That roadblock, it might be the deciding factor for somebody that's just kicking the tire of the platform.

Jason: That's exactly right.

Brent: Or if they're a brand new partner, and really getting them to understand that if you hit a roadblock in those situations, what are the ramifications of that.

Jason: Yep.

Brent: Then, developing a framework around addressing those problems on a regular basis.

Jason: Exactly, yep.

Brent: That's really interesting. So, what do you think? I mean, you said earlier that the partner network is the largest asset.

Jason: Mm-hmm.

Brent: Do you think Adobe still believes that?

Jason: Well, that's like the common thread, I would say. If I heard anything over the last two days - and let me back up and say it's not just the last two days. It's what I've heard for a very long time. "The partner network is important. The partner network is our biggest asset." It's difficult as a partner, sometimes you don't feel that. You don't see that, right? That's again, some of that "aha" moment. On 4/1 it was like, "Wow. They don't see or feel that. The reason they don't see or feel that is because we're not really investing that much in that at this point. Maybe we should," which again seems very obvious to us, right? We live in it every day. For them it wasn't so obvious. So, although the "aha" moment happened on 4/1, this session was all about, "Now, how do we do that? How do we work with the partner network, moving forward?" Again, what came as a result of that was incredibly healthy.

Brent: Yeah, very much so. If you look at it like they were developing a lot of these ideas and go-to market strategies and all the stuff as Adobe does. They have lots and lots of products.

Jason: Yeah.

Brent: But I felt like, in the past, the partners have not been involved in that conversation.

Jason: Well, they haven't been.

Brent: I'm not saying, "Oh, you just need to pull in the Brents and the Jasons of the world, into that conversation and we'll just take care of it for the partner," because I understand how that might look to a lot of the partners.

Jason: Yep.

Brent: But even just having a partner in the room to work through some of their ideas in real-time, talking about how this affects our businesses, how we look at the vision and strategy of Business Catalyst and to try to validate that.

Jason: Yeah.

Brent: I think for them, they got something out of a partner literally being in the room with them when they're developing that stuff, as game changing.

Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

Brent: I don't think they're going to go back to developing stuff in a bubble...

Jason: No.

Brent: ...and just pushing it out to the partner to see how they react.

Jason: Right. Yeah.

Brent: So, would you say your overall takeaway was good, bad, or neutral?

Jason: Yeah. The overall takeaway was very good. Again, we have this framework that we're developing with them, right? I consider the time very positive. I think we'll see some traction come from it. The reality is, though, when I see it happen, when I see this framework manifest itself over the next several months or what have you, again, just like any other partner, I'll be much more motivated to actually believe that they received that message fully and this is how we need to work together moving forward.
I think that will happen. I know this may sound and feel a little abstract. Do you know what I mean? It's all like, "What's a framework, and what's this whole thing?" It's kind of the best way we can describe it, at least at this point anyway. But it's this common ground that we'll work from that the tangible pieces of that will be more obvious over the next few months, or what have you.

Brent: Absolutely.

Jason: So, sorry if it's a little abstract, but we'll go from there.

Brent: Yeah, for sure. So now, Jason, working with Adobe isn't the only thing you do with your time.

Jason: It isn't?

Brent: I know you guys at SimpleFlame. You've had the TribeVita brand.

Jason: Yeah.

Brent: I think TribeVita has delivered an amazing value to the community overall.

Jason: Thanks.

Brent: I mean, I hear partners talk about how many templates they've purchase. I started doing math on my calculator and it's cool. It's inspiring.

Jason: Yeah, sure.

Brent: I think it's very inspiring for most partners to look at a business model that's on top of this partner network that is successful. But you guys have something new coming out and maybe give me the elevator pitch on that?

Jason: Yeah. Well, they say keep those under 30 seconds, right? I don't know if I can do that. I don't think I've... Yeah. So, anyhow, what we are working on right now... Let me move it back and just say, TribeVita provides templates that are prewired into Business Catalyst that are ready to go. You can come buy them and start projects with them and all of that fun stuff. But when we created TribeVita , we didn't just go, "Hey, let's make templates and toss them out there and see if people will by them," or what have you. It was really more about trying to solve a problem, and it was a problem that we were faced with as we went through our Business Catalyst journey. So, what we found is that most people, when they start a project, they sell it and then there's this period of time where they work on it. We call that "production", right? Then they deliver it. So, if we consider this zero to 100, depending on what you sell and what you do, you open up Photoshop here, with a blank slate, start designing. You get to a point to where you send a JPEG to your customer. Then you have to then code this thing, put content in it.

That is a huge cycle, and depending on what you sell your contracts for, what your hourly rate is, what your skill set is, all of those variables, you either - very simple formula - you make money or you don't make money. If you don't make money, you don't keep doing this. You stop and probably do something else, right. So, what TribeVita did was accelerated the development and design cycle by about 60%.

It didn't make it all the way there, right? But, by probably 60%, which gave you the inherent framework around Business Catalyst to, it's already prewired in. You've got the PSDs. You can design them for your - take the PSDs and skin the template out. But there was still this 40% left that meant that I had to take the PSDs, cut them up still. Wire them into the template.

Sure, it cut the cycle down a bit, but being an entrepreneur myself, I go, "Man..." This thing kept me up at night, like, "How do I solve the other 40% in terms of helping a person go from, instead of just using PSDs to design, present flat JPEGs to their customer, have their customer tell them, "I can't click on this, and don't know what this is..."

You know how customers work, right? They try to click on a JPEG and try to make it work, right - all the way through to production. So, what we did was we actually created currently what we're dubbing as TribeVita Plus. Whether it stays that way or not is another thing, right?

Brent: We're the hard link to that. We're never going to change that. We're going to call it that on BC Gurus forever, no matter what you think.

Jason: We're coining it in a little bit. That's it. I'll never be able to change it. That's exactly right. So, what we did was we created - if you take any of our templates, we actually overlaid a re-skinning engine that actually lets you re-skin the entire template on the fly inside browser. So, what that ends up doing is, is instead of taking a PSD file, skinning it out, then coding the remaining pieces of that skinned-out PSD file and wiring it in - which, depending on your skill set can take anywhere from a day, a couple days, a week, two weeks, it just depends on the skill set - reducing it down to what most people are doing in an hour or two hours. What that ends up meaning is that production life cycle that you go through to build the site. You start with an existing framework and can skin that thing in an hour or two hours...

Brent: Wow.

Jason: ...and reduce that production cycle down to next to nothing. The person who has - and we've all been through this and some of you may still be in this position right now, where we, in our projects, or if we think about our business, we always have your cousin or Jim who owns a repair shop down the street. He wants to have a website and he has $1,500 in his pocket. That's all he has. He may have more like $3,000 in his pocket, but he's only telling you it's 1500.

Brent: I've got a few videos on how to squeeze that extra $1500 out.

Jason: Yeah. That's it, man. This is the guy here for that. Yeah. So, he has $1,500 in his pocket. I can remember when we were taking on $1,500 contracts. First of all, it's like, "Yeah. $1,500 contract, man, let's take that guy," because that equals revenue for my business period. It was next to impossible to make money on that project. The reason is because the production life cycle didn't work.

Brent: It's brutal.

Jason: It was very difficult. So, you either developed custom, you work from a template or what have you. What we just thought was, wouldn't it be interesting if you could actually keep the bulk of the money on a $1,500 contract and actually make money on it for the first time ever or make a majority of the money on it, for the first time ever?

Brent: Yeah.

Jason: So, when we built it, it wasn't just, "Hey, cool. Let's go..." Don't get me wrong. We get geeked up over this stuff, right? But it wasn't because we just wanted to make some cool re-skinning engine that sits on top of our templates. It was simply because we never made money on a guy who had $1,000 in his pocket or $1,500 in his pocket. What if we could? It was from that perspective that we actually built the re-skinning engine on top of TribeVita.

Brent: Sure. I've seen it, I've watched you pitch it a few times to some people, and I'm impressed. I'm excited for the community to get their hands on it. I mean, I think that this is a tool - it opens up a whole channel of opportunities for the Business Catalyst partner.

Jason: Yeah.

Brent: Just from my own perspective of creating pro content and things like that, to support how this thing goes out to market is something that, the wheels are already turning for me because it does change. You're not necessarily trying to just always filter out those smaller deals. Now there's an actual opportunity to bring those people in.

Jason: That's right.

Brent: The lifetime customer value of, maybe, that $1,500 website, if that business becomes successful, you've got a client for life because you help them out when no other web designer was even able to deliver a high-quality product like that, in that manner. So, I think it's really cool.

Jason: Yeah, thanks.

Brent: I'm extraordinarily excited to see you guys launch it. I'm not going to grill Jason on the when and the how much, or the name.

Jason: Thank God.

Brent: We won't hold him to that either, but I know you guys are working hard on it, no question about that. When it launches, it launches and it's going to be right.

Jason: Yeah. Well, we're spending a lot of time. Some of the BC Guru's followers here are going to be like, "Yeah, I know. We're in beta right now with you. If you hurry up, quit talking about it," or what have you. But, it's really important to us that we get the product right. You know what I mean? You have one shot to make a great first impression and, in addition to that, you just need it to work, fundamentally, right?

Brent: Absolutely.

Jason: So, we're taking that to heart, making sure that we dot all of our I's and cross all of our T's. We're very, very close at this point, right now. So, one thing I can mention, though, is that we're always looking for people to really test this thing out and beta test it. If you want to, you can drop me an email. What might be better is to drop Mercy an email because I become the bottleneck on these things.

Brent: Yeah, for sure. I would say, we'll throw in a link in the post to tribevita.com. Go to the contact page, just submit a form request.

Jason: Yeah, perfect.

Brent: Say, "Look, I'm interested in talking to you about TribeVita Plus and you guys can take it from there."

Jason: Yeah, thanks, man. Appreciate that.

Brent: Very nice. Well, Jason, we appreciate you taking the time to hang out. This is bcgurus.com. It's been a fruitful two days and I can't speak for Adobe, but I'm excited to watch some of this framework stuff play out over the next couple months and to see how the partner community starts to take in that good stuff.

Jason: Yep, agreed.

Brent: Very cool.

Jason: Thanks, man.

Brent: Well, thank you for joining us at bcgurus.com and stay tuned for more great content.

Jason: Take care.

Unlocking Opportunity with Bryan Mills

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

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Bryan Mills owns IE Web Services out of Riverside, California.

Audio Transcript

Brent: Yeah, man, my parents actually live in Newport Beach.

Bryan: Okay.

Brent: And, I've got a cousin that lives in Loma Linda.

Bryan: Yeah, so [Malinda] is in San Bernardino County, and that is one of the areas that I serve as well. I have clients in San Bernardino County and Riverside County. But, with Southern California, I have clients all over the place at this point. I have Orange County, which is just south of L.A. And then pretty much going down into San Diego. So, I have a huge area. Any place I could get to within a hour, or an hour and a half, I don't mind taking them as a client.

Brent: Sure.

Bryan: That's the biggest thing. The total number of business is well over a million.

Brent: Yeah, I was going to say, man. California. We actually used to do a lot of business out there, just because my cousin owned an advertising agency in Riverside. So, we did a lot of car dealership work. And, there's a lot of business, a lot of money, but man, competition is steep, and there's a business mentality in Southern California that is I want to say cut-throat. Like, people do some really loud stuff to get business out there, which, it's just not usually how I operate. My cousin definitely operates on that level, and I sometimes get a little freaked out.

Bryan: No, I require to meet all my clients prior to signing any type of agreement with them. Partly because if I don't feel comfortable, I just can't do it. And that puts, a lot of the time, I've had clients say, "What do you mean you won't take our business? You don't want to get paid?" No, that's not the case, the case is if you tell me you want to do a family friendly website, so that your friends can post pictures, and you want it to have a monthly subscription and you're from Santa Ana or from up there. It's not really for that. It's for something completely different.

We get the product specs and say, "How much will you charge to do this?"
And, yeah, it's, yeah.

Brent: A family-friendly website from Santa Ana. We see right through that.

Bryan: That's exactly it. So, I've been around, done that. I had a guy call me from, a year ago, and he was representing a website, From Saints to Sinners, and I was like, "You know, just the domain name, I'm just going to refer you on."

Brent: Very interesting. What I really want to dig into is, where are you at with your BC partnership? Kind of, where have you come from? And what are your biggest pain points, sticking points from going from that 12 sites to 25 sites? In what we can do in this hour to maybe help you blow through some of those barriers? If Pro ends up being a part of that formula, but that's really not, at the end of the day, what I'm trying to work with you on. I want to look at your business and maybe figure out some of those walls, and try to analyze and try to blow up, so you can really start growing faster.

Bryan: Sure.

Brent: That's my top priority.

Bryan: Okay. Well said.

Brent: Yeah, I guess starting there. Where have you come from? You said you have 12 sites right now. What's the makeup and how have you gone about getting those clients?

Bryan: Well, I've been doing this since '97 actually. Not with obviously BC, with Business Catalyst, but with custom development. I really did not like platforms, or WordPress platforms, or anything that was already designed, based on my knowledge, I was trained in the Air force on programming websites, developing websites. So, before Web App was term in the web industry, I was already creating them back in '97. The ability for a user to login and to change their own pages, and so my biggest thing is going from the developer side of it, because I can't have-, like I have two data entry people, and in graphics, three graphics people that are available to me. They work for me in various modes and with different clients. And to move myself from that developer mode, to pushing up to the Business Catalyst, the Business Catalyst platform.

So some of what happens is, especially in Southern California, I get called from random people or referrals for somebody's site that is on WordPress. They paid somebody five grand to do to their website, and that person is no longer even responding to them. So they want to move it away from that person, so I go into that area of, although I'm a programmer, I also have connections with GoDaddy, with all of the registrars to assist in moving people out of those contracts and getting their sites back to them.

But a lot of it, when I started introducing Business Catalyst and how it will change for them, a lot of times they get more worried about, well, it's a new platform. It's through Adobe. Where's it hosted? Do I own the-
Can I take the platform with me if I leave? So, it's not like WordPress where, yes, you can take it with you. So, I've explained that, and most of them, when it comes down to it, they like the idea of it, but they still want the ability to be able to move later on.

Brent: Interesting.

Bryan: Yeah, so, at this point, my big thing is, although I've looked at the numbers with Business Catalyst for a while, and my goal is, I want to move from 12 to 25. The goal is actually to get to 25 then immediately get to 50 within- so it takes me six weeks to get to the 25 then in six weeks longer, I want to be at 50. So I want to compound it up, just so I can start turning over those sites. I can launch a site in about three business days without any issue. And if the person is giving me full control over even the design, I can launch it within four hours. So, that's a big turnover.

Brent: Sure, sure.

Bryan: So, I do like Business Catalyst. I like the structure. I like the content holders, the way they have that set up. The templates, the new mobile, the mobile and table style sheets and everything like that. And that's the thing, it's a great platform, but when it comes back down to it, it's really getting them off of WordPress or getting them off of Joomla, or even out of basic HTML pages, at some point and getting them to understand the benefits of Business Catalyst.

Brent: Yeah. That's interesting, we- I think a lot of web people, especially in the Business Catalyst partner community that I know of, they do get a lot of clients in that scenario, where there really unhappy with their existing developer. And something I've found with WordPress developers in general, they really like WordPress because they can install it on a cheap hosting account that the customer themselves contract with, and they can basically build the site, and a lot of them have a very shortsighted business model. Their business model is as a web-designer is to build the site and to go on to the next site. Most WordPress developers that I've run into, that build small business sites, they actually don't have any part of their business model set up do to any kind of service and support for their customer base.

So for the business owner, they're not aware of that business model, because they're very focused on price. They're very focused on key word like open source, and this is free, and you're not going to have to pay much for this ongoing, but as a business model that actually ends up leaving the business owner out in the cold. Because they end up with this hosting account, and yeah sure, they own the hosting account and they pay
$5.99 a month to GoDaddy, and they basically own this WordPress site. And they could technically, yes, move that to any WordPress developer, but that as a fundamental business model, when you're in there selling that, or if you're selling against it rather, it's really, really easy to smoke that company. Because, if you come in and say, "Look, the business model typically for my competition is they build websites and they move on to the next website, and I don't build that way. I like to build a site that has the three-year plant, the five-year plan in mind, and I know that once we build this site, you need a company that's going to be available to you to do updates and changes to that website on a on-going basis. Maybe it's training. Maybe we need to upgrade our server infrastructure. Maybe we need to add security features on an on-going basis to the system that you don't even need to be aware of."

And you can direct them to the WordPress security updates page, which is available on the WordPress site and say, "Within a system like WordPress, you have to stay on-top of that technology." And rare is the WordPress developer out there that actually continuously updates their portfolio of websites on a regular basis, because that's not their business model. Their business model is build a site for 5K and move onto the next site, and that's why we see a lot of these business owners that try to call their original web designer to maybe add a feature or change something, or God forbid the website gets hacked and they try to get the original web designer to go in and fix it, that's not the original web designers business model. They don't really care, because their entire revenue stream is based on new website build, not maintaining an existing client base.

Bryan: Sure.

Brent: And so having that conversation with a client, it gets you out of the WordPress versus BC versus Joomla debate, and you start talking about your long-term vision with the custom. And you say, "Look, this technology Business Catalyst, I like it because it's always being updated by Adobe. It's hosted in one place. All of my clients are on the same version, so I don't have to worry about juggling five different versions or 10 different versions. I've got all my customers on a single version, so whoever calls me for support, it makes it really, really efficient, and I'm always thinking about the long term. I'm always thinking about how you and I are going to partner up, and we're going to built this business model."

And, it's funny, the business owner a lot of times will come back and say,
"Well, what happens if this doesn't work out? Can I take this to anybody?"
And that question is pretty much pre-loaded with the fact that they have failure in mind. Like they're thinking about the fact that you're going to start working together and they're not going to like you, and they're going to cancel service with you and move to somebody else. Like, they've been burned so many times, that that's actually what they're getting at. And that's what that question of, "Can I take this to somebody else?" Is based 100% around the fact that they believe that they're going to hire you, and that you're going to completely fail after three months or six months or whatever.

And I love to address that question, because I love to talk about how many clients end up stickpin with my firm, and if they do want to move to another Business Catalyst partner, I always give them a link to our directory, and I say, "Look, there's people all over the world who work on this technology. There's a process that Adobe has to handle this. There's rock starts that are in your-", and I guarantee you that in Southern California there's a handful of BC partners that I'm sure they could check out. But there are rock stars world-wide, that are great with BC. And they have that option if it ends up not working out. But I like to always address that, that's not how my business model works. Like my business model is build that site up front and then totally, just, wow you with service on the ongoing bit. So that you don't have to think about moving off.

Bryan: Sure. And that's- you hit on a couple of different things that I've actually added. Because I am a programmer I have clients that are locked-in and they're on e-commerce platforms that basically, they can't switch to BC because their site is so online already and they're just locked-in on their programs. And so, with those programs, I'm not trying to enhance theirs or even trying to move them in, but I've told them, the use WordPress as their blog, and I've tried to show them, if we were to switch the blot over to BC, use the BC Catalyst as the sub-domain, where's the blog at? Blog dot or whatever, I can show you how it will increase with the SEO increase all these different things. And how much easier it is to release content over time. And with WordPress, they're having issues that they did get hacked by one of their competitors.

Brent: Interesting.

Bryan: Yeah, so. So with them, I explained, I said look, "We don't need to move the e-commerce partner, but here are the features we can use within the photo-albums, or with the readers submission and so forth." So, I showed them that, and they are very in-tune to doing that, without using the e-commerce, except for noticed that, well, with Adobe Business Catalyst, the server, is it going to be in America? Is it going to be in Australia, etc.? And I showed them, "Well, we can set it up in New Jersey, using the New Jersey Data Center, I believe it was." And they're very keen on doing that. So, there's the dynamics for me. If the customer says, "I want to use Business Catalyst or I don't." I try to show them the benefits of going towards it, but in the end, if they push to keep in on WordPress, then I just have to keep it that way, especially with that particular client.

Brent: So, as far as on the e-commerce side, I'm just kind of curious, why do you know think that- What's the- I know that they're some complexities of certain e-commerce sites that BC just might not have the feature base to back that up, but I am curious a little bit about why you're being held back on the e-commerce side particular?

Bryan: With the e-commerce they use, they use Pinnacle Cart on a dedicated server, and they use if for their shipping services. They need to have an hourly import to update the inventory, and they need to have a hourly export of all of the orders that come it. And it needs to update into their Sage MAS 90 system so it all has to be automated. And because of that, Business Catalyst, yes it has the APIs it has that ability to call information, but I cannot, based on looking at the API, I've looked. I've looked into doing it, and at this point, the inventory updates, the hourly calls, all of those things, at this point, the API, it just doesn't seem like it's going to work for that.

Brent: Yeah.

Bryan: In the way that they need to work.

Brent: Yeah.

Bryan: So, and then, on top of that, it's a space issue, as well. With their existing dedicated, they're set up to where they have eight terabytes and they're at half of that within the server system itself.

Brent: Gotcha.

Bryan: With images and videos, etc. So, they require a lot of space, a lot of bandwidth, that Business Catalyst that their fees each month would be well over $300.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah, and thinking about that I mean, I always will tell people when they're selling BC in generally, just know what the technology has to offer, just so you can make the right recommendation to your customers. I mean the last thing you want to do is recommend that BC is the end-all be-all solution to websites on the Internet. That's not true, but I think for the majority of small businesses the BC e-commerce is a really great solution, but obviously if somebody's taking up 500 gigs of storage.

Bryan: Yeah.

Brent: The pricing kind of breaks down.

Bryan: Exactly, and that's why, when I originally did sign them up as a partner in 2008, I had them in mind for Business Catalyst before it was even bought by Adobe, because of features that were there and so forth, but knowing the requirements- I did a seven year plan with them, to establish where they want to be in seven years, and with the staffing, and the easier it is on the staff with the clients, the easier it is with that, that's what they're looking for. They don't want people manually exporting every hour, they don't want people importing, because when you do that there are so many more errors and so many more issues within the systems. And so, that's why they choose to use the other platform, because of the ability for me to go back into it and reprogram it. I mention that it's using Pinnacle Cart, but at this point, with all of the changes I've done to it, it is no longer Pinnacle Cart, but their own Cart system.

Brent: It's interesting. You're talking about integrating the blog into their site, and something that I would recommend, I know that there's going to be some really cool features that are coming out in BC that are going to have some enhanced e-mail marketing capabilities and stuff like that. But thinking about, how if you want to continue to use Pinnacle Cart for the actual transactional stuff, but even looking at the API for how you can start utilizing other features within BC like e-mail marketing or the CRM system to start, not just blogging on the platform, but using BC for some of that marketing capabilities, might also be something that you could look at for a customer like that.

Bryan: And, like I said, I mentioned showing them. And they are-
Basically, I am their lead, wherever I take them, they are willing to go as long as hey are confident with it. An that's the thing, as long as I'm confident that it will help us meet the goals that we've set, then they'll go that direction. And so, showing them the features with the Facebook tie in and sign into Facebook. And the ability to add a drop of a hat, any one of the modules, and not be paying any additional fees. And that's their big thing, if they ask me to add something, I have to give them a quote every single time. And so with Adobe, with Business Catalyst, if they're trained well enough that monthly-

I've been switching a lot of them over, even the 12 that I have, 10 of them have monthly maintenance agreements. I actually call them maintenance monthly production fees. Because maintenance it give such a derogatory term, because it's not maintaining the site. It's not that the site is always going to crash or anything like that, but we go through a production list where we set up goals for your website and we make sure that everything that we add to the site is part of that production goal.

So it's a monthly production service. And every person that I've worked with when I was setting this up, I asked them, "What is the minimum that you're looking for in a month?" And most of them were like, "We don't want a service we don't to pay for it. If we're not going to update we don't want to pay for it." But I showed them based on other sites that are similar to theirs that the traffic they receive is because they do update on a weekly basis.

Brent: Sure.

Bryan: I showed them that, a simple update of a blog, yes, it's a blog. But use it as your news feed. "We're launch this new product. We're going to a chamber event. We're going to be at the golf course for this tournament." During Christmas time, I had one client that was saying,
"Yeah, I just gave $10,000 to this boy's home." And I said, "Look, that is great news, you should be putting that on your website. You should be putting a press release together and putting a link back to your website."
And he goes, "Okay, let's do it." And he goes, "I don't think it will work or anything." His site in two weeks, and all the bounce back on that donation, he ended up going from 500 people visiting, uniques, in a week, to over 5000 in a week.

Brent: Sorry.

Bryan: Yeah, and he came back and was like, "What else can we do? This is great. What else can we do?" And I said, "That's exactly my point. That's what I saying with these monthlies. That's what I can do with this, is to show you how to do that."

Brent: Yeah.

Bryan: Yeah, go ahead.

Brent: No, just finish that thought because I've got some stuff that I want to talk to you about.

Bryan: As you can see, with development, I'm not just a web developer, I also help them with the business in the business that they're doing. When I meet with them, I break down their system and their business, to assist them, not only in the web and online, but in any area that is possible. And that's where a lot- and that's why I have to have the data that my data girls and the graphics team, because I don't have a lot of that time to just be in the office to do the work, but I meet with them, so I'm more of the consultant/design, give them, "Here's what I'm thinking." And then I push it to the design team to make it a reality.

Brent: Yeah. So, one thing I want to challenge you a little bit on, Brian, is you mentioned that you're sitting on 12 BC sites and you want to go to 25 over the next six weeks and then you want to hit 50. And I do have a specific series that will give you a methodology and a platform to do that, and that's something that's part of Pro, and I'll talk about that here. But first I want to challenge you a little bit on specifically focusing on just a number of sites as a method of growth.

Bryan: Okay.

Brent: You're looking at a client base, and you're already starting to do it. I think you're already seeing the opportunity that being an online business partner with your clients is something that is probably a lot more profitable then just being a web developer with your clients. And it sounds like to me, from a staffing point of view, you've started looking at other cogs in that wheel. And for me the online business wheel has a lot of different parts to it. I mean there's the basics of building the site that includes HTML, CSS, it includes design, it includes Photoshop Comps, and knowing how to actually make something that is credible for your customers.

Bryan: Yeah.

Brent: But then there's also these other aspects of it. The search, there's the training of the customer. Not only training on the system, but training them on what it means to have an online business. So, you've got helping them with how they use their e-mail list, how they grow their e-
mail list, how they blog, so that people can find them through search engines. How to simply use something like the Google key word tracker, and be able to do some key-word research on the web, so that when they create their blog post they might be a little more key-word smart then just putting a blog post out on the Internet. You actually show them, "Look, when you create a post, you don't just want to create content on the web, you want to create content that we know people are searching for."

And so, I'm not saying that it's 100% of how you create your blog post titles and such, but you want to start bringing that thinking into your customers. So there's the nuts and bolts of building the online business, and I always use the term online business, not websites, because that's what Business Catalyst was founded on. And, when you start selling the online business, it starts changing the rules of the game considerable against other open source and other solutions out there. And you start to spend a lot less time talking to the technology, and typically when you bring the online vision to the table, instead of just being a web developer, your actual pricing can increase dramatically.

How much you charge to be a online business consultant, typically, I've found in my own experience, we doubled our cost, we tripled it, then we quadrupled it. We went from offering $5000 sites to $30,000 solutions within literally a year. And that was because we changed from building websites to comprehensive online solutions. Now, granted those $30,000 projects included a little bit more scope of work, because we had to start tying in SEO and good copy and social marketing strategy, e-mail marketing strategy etc. But overall, we were profiting more on a per-project basis.

So, looking at that initial project with you customer, instead of just a website, looking at it as an online business and how you can start creating that vision with your customer is one thing that I'll tell you off the bat, instead of focusing on how many sites you're building, focus on how many complete online businesses you're building, because let's say you had 30K projects, and you did ten of those per year, like that for me would be a lot more powerful than $65,000 sites. Because not only are you building these comprehensive online business solutions, you're also creating a partnership with those ten customers. And in my experience, that on-going service comes in two different parts.

So, we've got the build, so the build part is what we just talked about. That's creating the online framework that the customers going to exist on the Internet, and then we've got the management portion. So, we've build the site, now we've got to manage it. Typically, we find that our customers need some kind support in that department. Whether it's being able to pick up the phone and being able to call my team, and be able to ask questions and get on-demand help desk/on demand training, and that comes in a lot of different colors, it could come in a fix retainer where they get an hour of support per month, it could come in an all-you-can-eat retainer where they can call you as much as they want for a fixed fee. It could come in the form of dedicated webinar training every single month.

You could actually pool your clients together. This is actually something that we like to do for our base fee. So let's say that we mark BC up for all of our customers, but we also include some give-ins in that fee, and one of those would be a monthly training. And we don't typically cover just the software we cover things like email marketing, blogging, SEO. We do a lot of generic training for just the online business stuff with those customers, but that's like the manage portion, so helping them manage their online business is something that can come in the form of either you doing the work, or you train them and support them to do the work themselves.

So that's something that if you pull in less sites, but each site you pull in has a managed component to it, that you're helping them manage. Like you said, that PR post, you could almost do a month free of the manage training for a client and once they see that value, they'll sign on for the next 11 months. If you're able to give a client a free month of helping them manage their site, and you're able to deliver some results like, "Look we got that PR post online. We took you form 500 visits to 5000 visits. Drink the Kool-
Aid faster. Get on board with this." Most people are willing to pay you to do that, and the paying part become less of an issue.

And then there's a third component which is grow, which is helping your client grow their business, and this usually comes in the form of some more in depth online market. We do a lot of contracts with our clients where we'll start off with $500 a month for online marketing service. That might come in the form of helping them send out their monthly -emails, it might come in the form of hiring a copy writer to blog once a week for them. There's a great website you need to look at. It's called WriterAccess.com, and actually plugs right into BC. It's a website that you can contract topic area experts to write blog posts. And they write that content and it literally goes into BC as a draft post. And then your customer can just go in and approve it and they can just work directly with that writer, and they've got something like 5000 writers that work for them. So, it's pretty inexpensive.

So, you can plug in services like WriterAccess and stuff like that, but the whole point of the Grow phase is you're not just thinking about how we can make this widget better. You're working with them as an online business partner to help them grow their business. SEO is another place, where if you see that there's a lot of demand in the search space, then you can offer SEO services. If you don't personally do managed SEO or managed link building, find a partner. There's lots of great SEO companies out there that you can white label and mark their services up.

There's a company here in Denver called seOverflow. They do a great white label offering, and they can come in and do the campaign, they can do the link building. Because link building is a highly technical art. It's a science and an art. But if you're out there focusing on the build and focusing on getting clients, managing an ongoing link building campaign is something that can be really resource intensive. You can go in there though, and, we have contracts with SEO for our clients where the SEO portion alone is $2,000 a month. And then we're layering on top of that a pay-per-click campaign where our management fee is an additional thousand dollars a month, and the customers spending $5000 a month on pay-per-click. So these types of things, they start to compound.

And instead of having, 60 clients you can have 10 to 15 clients with proper grow campaigns where you're making $200,000 or $300,000 a year off of these campaigns that you're running, and you're delivering a lot more value then just a website to the client. Like, they start to actually see that you're their online business partner. And that's something that's hugely valuable. So, I think there's two ways to go about growing the business. You can launch a whole bunch of sites, or you can look at the sites you have and try to do something a little bit more in depth with each of those clients. Now, what's that sorry.

Bryan: Oh, it's okay. So, you're saying you think with- there's really a couple parts of what I do. A lot of what I've been pushing towards of the 12, six of them are non-profits where they don't have a thousand dollars a month to pay for that type of service. But they are willing to do two hours of updates a month for $150 and to do, when they need training, they want training once a quarter. So, they do have that ability to do the lower end style of a basic agreement I would say. To where it's a starter package. But they don't seem, when it comes to advertising-

I took one non-profit and I showed him how on Facebook with some simple ads, he can grow his Facebook Fan page from 100 people to 500 and showed him how to do that with, including links to a blog post. He's on the Business Catalyst platform, links to the platform. To show him how the growth. As your Facebook page grows, your website will grow because they're going to be checking out who you really are. Facebook is great for that interaction, but when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of what your organization does, they're going to go back to your website.

So what we were able to establish over a two month period, is that he would get about 5000 people from these adds to the website, and only about 10% of them would actually click to like his fan page. So he went from 100 to 1000 Facebook people in the two month period by doing that.

Brent: Yeah. And I want to, a little bit, push back on that non-
profits would not spend money on advertising and marketing. Non-profits, I've worked extensively in the non-profit space. I've been on boards of non-
profits. And for them, just like a business, they need to see a return on it. And whether that return is more e-mail address that they can send their message out to, so if one of their components of how they grade their success is based on awareness, for instance, or how many people they're able to touch, these are things that non-profits think about.

Some non-profits are driven highly by how many donations are they getting?
How much are they able to raise to go into their general fund. General fund is one of the hardest things for non-profits to get money for, because a lot of people like to donate to non-profits for specific programs. So there's program funding and there's general funding. So a lot of times generic donations on a website are usually earmarked for general fund.

So when you walk into a non-profit and you start to talk their language, and you say, "Look, we're going to help you guys do some marketing campaigns and we're going to try to focus this on first moving traffic to actual e-mail address, so we can actually start to do permission based marketing to these people, so instead of you guys spending $1000 a month on Google and people come to your website and they leave your website, you're going to spend $1000 a months on Google, people are going to come to your website, and they're going to opt in for something, and over the next three months we're going to turn those e-mail addresses into donors, and this is how we're going to do that." Right?

If you explain to them that vision, they're a lot more likely to start paying for marketing, but I will agree with you in the sense that non-
profits love training. They love doing it themselves. So, if you can start that relationship with training them how to do certain things with a monthly training, sitting down in person with them, really getting them to adopt the system and to start using it. Some of our non-profit clients, definitely are our heaviest users of BC. They love getting their hands dirty, they love updating their content. Because a big part of non-profits is that awareness. They love telling their story, so if you can get them to be able to tell their story better, using the website, using the online business, then they'll start to buy into that vision.

But then, all non-profits they have to raise money. They're in a different tax code, but part of a non-profit is still like running a business. They need to be able to attract people and raise money. Now some non-profits are purely grant funded, but in their case they're looking for awareness. They've got certain numbers that they need to report in their grants back to their funders to say, "Hey look. This is how many more people we are exposing to our vision." In those cases, you focus heavily on the vision, you focus heavily on those number, page views, visits, e-mail address, those types of things.

But for a lot of non-profits, they are boot-strapped and they need the dollars. They need the money to come it. So if you can tie the online marketing stuff, the e-mail newsletters, the SEO, the pay-per-click, the social media stuff, back into them actually raising dollars, it becomes very compelling.

Another thing that I'll urge you to check out and do some homework on, because you do have 50% of your clients on BC at least, are non-profits, and maybe you're aware of this program, maybe you're not. But basically, Google Grants, is basically Google's give back to the world, and you can go in and basically apply for a Google Grant, and what you actually end up getting is up to $10,000 a month in free AdWords budget if you're approved for this grant. And you go in and you set up that campaign for your non-
profit.

Now, you're only allowed to bid up to a dollar per key-word term. But something that we've done for our non-profit clients, is they hire us as a consultant to help them through the Google Grant process, and then we help them with the application, we make sure that they're submitting the application correctly and this is a few month process. I want to say Google comes and approves their Google Grant applicants once per quarter.

So you can come in and say, "Look we're going to help you guys on the management side. We're going to help you learn how to use the online business and then while you're doing that process, you're going to pay us a consulting fee. We're going to take you though the Google Grants process, but if you guys do get approved through Google Grant, then we can actually help you guys manage that $10,000 per month ad spent. So you're getting a huge bang for your buck. And maybe you might pay us, 10% of that ad spent, like a thousand buck a month to manage the $10,000."

Typically though we've found through Google grants is it's kind of hard to actually use the $10,000 a month, because most non-profits have a very niche focus, and you're also limited to that dollar per-click-area so you can just go in and highjack people's search terms, but you can typically go in and get it to use $3,000 or 4,000 a month in spend, and then if you charge a %10 management fee that's $300 or 400 a month to the non-profit to have you guys on call to manage that. So becoming aware of those different opportunities, just because non-profits are in a different tax bracket, and they say, "Oh, no, we don't have money for marketing." There's different ways to kind of slice that pie out.

Bryan: Yeah.

Brent: And then, on the, the fastest way to get from 12 sites to 50 sites. I'm curious if you found my Pro content on Crushing Verticals, if you've taken a look at that yet?

Bryan: I looked at several of them, let me see which one. I made some notes. Yeah, I don't think I watched that one.

Brent: Okay, so, I'll send you some links post this conversation. And a couple of those are going to be specifically around growing your business. And we're definitely aware that how Pro is structured right now, all of our content is not very clear, of what we have in there and what good tracks are to look at. And that's something that we're going back to the drawing board and we're looking at, because we have over 200 pieces of content, and some of those pieces of content are even like- There's like hours, and hours, and hours of content.

So it's kind of like- Part of the issue with our Pro tutorials is where do people start. Where do they start? If they're looking to grow their business, if they're looking to up their coding skills in BC etc. And that's why I wanted to have this conversation because what I wanted to do is I want to link you to probably a dozen posts that are on this track of what you're talking about. How do you go from 12 to 50 sites?

And there's two big ideas that I'll link you to. One of those is on referral marketing, is on how you actually get your customers and how you build an active referral pipeline. And so that post is, I believe it's a two part series that I did and I'll send you a link to that one. And then the other one is the idea of verticals within Business Catalyst. And that is, instead of being the web generalist that just takes any client that comes to the door, and it sounds like you've got some partnerships with some domain registrars and stuff, which I'm very interested to learn how you set those up, because I think other partners would be very interested in that.

But the idea of a vertical, and I've got like, 200 or 300 minutes of content on this, so I link to the post, but I'll give you the mile-high view, which is looking in a specific niche market and establishing a brand and a presence in the niche market that is building on-line businesses for remote-controlled pilots, building online businesses for restaurants, building online businesses for lawyers that operate in Riverside and do intellectual property law. Getting really specific and crazy with your ideal customer, where you literally hone in on a market and you say, this is my market. And then I've got a plan that backs that up of how to go about moving into a vertical.

But the idea is, you come up with a handful of pre-built templates in BC. You leverage the replicate site framework within Business Catalyst where you can actually have a template site, you can replicate site, you can apply some personalization and customization so that you're really able to leverage that three, or four, or five hours to get that site up to where it's customized for your client. So let' say, for instance, you were going after the restaurant vertical, which restaurants are, it's a huge vertical, but there is competitions there, but a lot of people get restaurants, so I use it in a lot of my examples.

But in the restaurant case you'd have like a pizza joint template. You'd have a fine dining template. You'd have a pasta place template. You'd have a fast food template. You'd have a cafe template. Right. So you'd have these five templates that you invest in, or you build them kind as you need to, as you're moving throughout your vertical, and you go to conferences within the vertical. You join associations, you become an expert in this vertical area, and we launched as a side project, we had one designer working part-time on this project, and I was selling part time. I was also managing our agency and doing all that stuff, doing those big online business builds. And over six months we launched over 30 BC sites and eventually sold our vertical, this specific vertical, over to another Business Catalyst partner, and then we've taken that content that framework and we've pumped in into BC Gurus.

And so, inside of a vertical, you can build a reputation that you're the go-
to company for online businesses within that space. And it's really powerful, and it allows you to not have to reinvent the wheel every time a new project comes up, like you're no longer learning about each new type of business. You're honed in on a specific vertical, and that's something that's extremely powerful, if you're looking to just leverage and just build lots, and lots, and lots of sites.

And then, these online business, the manage, and the grow portion of this, like teaching your clients how to use the system, becomes really easy, because you can throw ten people that are the same type of client onto a webinar and you can teach them how to use the site all at once. You can use that for your sales presentations where you get all the people that are speaking the same language they have the same set of needs, and you can push them onto a similar webinar and you can pitch them all at the same time.

And so that kind of method we've found, is definitely the fastest way to go from 12 sites to 60 sites within a six month period of time. I think if you followed some of my framework within my vertical stuff, I think your eyes would be opened a little bit to how you could go about doing that.

Bryan: Definitely, and that's the base. Ideally, it's nice to see the number of sites. I'm not one to put up a bunch of clients- Half the time, my clients are the ones telling me, "Do you want me to write a testimony for you? How can we help you promote your business?" And so, for me, that's nice that they offer that, but I've always been in that mindset of that I protect the client and the client list from others. And so, a lot of them, I have some of them that want non-compete contracts, so I guarantee that, because it's easy in that particular category because I don't see myself taking another client because they already take up 15 to 20 hours a week.

Brent: Yeah.

Bryan: So that's, I definitely have a lot more to think about.

Brent: Yeah. I mean if a client came to me, I'll just tell you how I'd handle that. If a restaurant came to me and said, "Brent, we want you to sign a non-compete." I would laugh at them in a jesting kind of way, and the reason being is, they will benefit from me being an expert on Denver restaurants much more than they'll benefit from me not working with any other restaurant in Denver. And that's really easy for me to explain to them.

I could say, "Look, yeah, you don't want me to work with any other restaurant in Denver. That makes sense. And I'm more than happy to welcome you to go to a web-designer and you're their first restaurant in Denver. And I welcome you to go to them, and hire them over me. But let me tell you a little bit about what I've learned over the last seven years of marketing and working with some of the top restaurants in Denver. I've learned that these media outlets completely such and are waste of money. I've learned that by building website in this way, I'm able to leverage mobile content, and also, I have relationships with the top people at Yelp, and we can do Yelp promotions with you. I have relationships with these three magazines, and I know that they actually work, and I know how the SEO landscape in Denver is played out. Because I sit around and I research this for ten clients and I figure out how to get your guys at different points and rankings."

And I can say, "Look, you can have that knowledge and you can join me and my client base, and you can think that the works for you, or you can go hire the web developer that's never made a restaurant website ever in his life." And they go, "Oh. This makes sense. Never mind. I won't make you sign a stupid non-compete agreement."

Bryan: Yeah, in most cases, non-compete, those are more for the client I was telling you about earlier. They can switch with their e-commerce but they can do it with their blog. That client, they're also, out of all my clients, I didn't even get into clients or turnovers or anything. I have like 99% continuance rate, every year with all my clients.

Brent: Wow.

Bryan: Yeah. I only lost one. I've had 300 clients and I've had three that have up and left. I've had several that have left. Because they got swindled away or whatever you want to call it. Basically the person told them they were going to save more money, and then they found out that they didn't save money that they spent more and they have nothing to show for it.

Brent: Yeah.

Bryan: So, for me, it's easy for me to sell a site to someone and show them the benefits of it. And to do that. The big thing is that push to get it to where- Most sites I'll be honest with you I am not in the ballpark of the $30,000 for a website with Business Catalyst. My main goal with Business Catalyst is to provide them that online marketing. Now, going back to you're adding on the features of management of fees, of management of key-words and management of their site, doing additional trainings, and the continued monthly support, yes, I can see $30,000 in year for some of them. But, yeah, I think that's a good place we're going to start with that is to look at that.

Brent: For sure. Have you, just on the managed side, have you taken a look under our tools, our Business Catalyst client training videos?

Bryan: I did look at a few of them, but the seem more basic on where I've already been.

Brent: Well, do understand what that client training App is? It's actually not for you it's for your customer. If you actually go to that page, and you log into Pro, there's some Javascript code that you can take and paste on your script and it's actually to help your customer train. So it's a plug and play video-training widget.

Bryan: That's actually one of the features of where I like Pro, is are the videos. One of my clients asked me about the e-mail marketing and doing that and I was on vacation. I said, "Here, take this." I had already put it on the site, so I could look at it and test it. So I sent him the link and said, "Go ahead and take a look at this. This is going to be part of the maintenance agreement that we discussed, and get back to me." And he ended up watching all of the videos. And he came back and he said, "That is great. How many are you doing per week, and what else can we do with these?"

Brent: Gotcha.

Bryan: So that is an area, I do see that is a great benefit, especially to the client side of it, but like he said, what's the plan on producing more?

Brent: Yeah. So, we launched that a couple of months ago, and there's 40 base videos there right now. And our big project that we're working on inside of the white label trainer is actually getting all that content, "translated" for the Australian market. We're doing an Australian accent version of that. So once that's done, we'll be releasing additional tactical training. So everything in there right now is how to use BC. There's going to be another evolution of the White Label trainer that's actually going to have business training for your client as well.

So, when we just talked about what are good methods for email marketing?
How do you do- what are good tactics for a blog post? How do you write a good blog post title, for example? Those types of things, we're going to create those videos, short three to four minute videos, for your customer so that you can actually start leveraging our expertise to help you in the manage and grow phases with your client. So, how that will work, is, if you have the trainer installed on your website, those video will automatically start appearing within the trainer as well.

So, keep in mind, the trainer is only a couple months old, and we wanted to kind of see how it was being used and where it was being installed. And then the third evolution is going to be to allow our members to upload their own video content. So, that's also something we're keeping our eye on. But the White Label trainer, it's a good value for Pro, and I'll send you some examples of how our clients have installed the trainer app. And we cover streaming and we keep updating that as part of the subscription. But, it's only a part of the Pro community right now.

I think if you haven't looked at the vertical content, and you haven't looked at some of my sales content, that's going to the fastest way for you to start getting turned on to some strong ideas to get you from 12 sites to 50 sites in the next six months. There's some specific content that I've created and put a lot of time into to help partners on that journey. And what I'll do is, after this conversation, and if I end up posting this on my blog, I'll just link to those specific videos that I think you should take a look at. And it's specifically around the idea of growing your BC partnership and what are some of the methods that we've used that have worked. And then hopefully give you some clues as to what's next for your business.

I know a little bit about your market, and I know a little bit about your company of what I've learned over this last hour, but I can't tell you what to do next, but what I can do is hopefully turn you on to some ideas that might work well for you.

Bryan: Yeah, so, one last real area is the pricing. I have stopped actually listing the pricing, partly because, based on the agreements with everybody, I found that I put it in with the monthly maintenance and put it all together, and that was one structure that I found that helped me as well. Do you- when they see the Business Catalyst and they see one partner is getting four hours of help and video webinars and I charge them 250, and the other one is doing the same thing, but because they were on with me from day one, they're only at 150. Have you ever experienced any issues with them coming back to a lower price?

Brent: So, your concern is you've got multiple clients and you've got kind of a variable pricing depending on who the client is and where they came into you and you're worried about those clients knowing what each others' pricing is, or publishing that pricing?

Bryan: Yeah, well, not necessarily publishing, because I would like to be able to publish set ups. Of being able to say, here's a base online business assistance and going that route. And saying, "Here's what we'll for our basic entry-level website. Instead of saying it's $9 a month of $11 a month for hosting, and then add on these other features, I want to package it all together.

Brent: Yeah.

Bryan: So price packages, how did you come up with your structure with that?

Brent: And I'm kind of hearing that you want to put that pricing out there on your website, is that kind of what I understand?

Bryan: Yes, and just putting that if you're new to the system and this is what you want, this is the price we have to offer yes.

Brent: Yeah. Publishing pricing in general, especially for a service business, is really- it's a very sharp double-edge sword. Because you are in essence you're potentially turning people away before you've been able to build value with them. Or you are locking yourself into a box before you've been able to properly do a discovery with the client. Because a support retainer that's picked from a menu on your website for a company that's doing $50 million a year online and a support retainer for a company that is doing $500,000 a year online- it's dangerous to put yourself in that box.

If you go down a vertical, and you have a specific vertical package offering, like this is my restaurant website package, and this is my restaurant website retainer that's very specific to that niche you can typically get away with putting that pricing online, but one of the reasons that you would do that, the benefits would be that you're doing some kind of mass market appeal where you're marketing to a variety of people all at the same time, and you're trying to get them to kind self-serve the sale.

So what I would do in a vertical, my sale got down to where I could do an say in less than an hour on the phone with somebody, and one of the reason is that my website, it did a lot of the sale for me. And it also served as my actual point of sale. A customer would actually use the website to sign up for the service. And in a vertical you can get away with that because your pitch is very specific. And you're trying to mass load customers into the funnel at the same time. We would do these promotions with the associations in that vertical, where they would send an e-mail out to 3000 people pointing them to our website. I'm a good salesman, but I can't have 3000 conversations, right?

So, I basically was doing marketing tactics that was getting a lot of people to our website, and then qualifying those people though an e-mail opt-in, and then also qualifying them through here's our website packages. And then the interests people would either opt-in, sign-up for our webinar, or call us straight away. And so, we could use that published pricing for our advantage to shorten the sale cycle. Now, if you have clients in a variety of different industries and you publish a standardized pricing, you need to be willing to offer that pricing to all of your clients and get rid of your variable pricing.

Now if your sales process right now is, a customer calls you us and you go through a comprehensive needs analysis, discovery with them, and then you get to a proposal and that proposal is different for each one of your customers because they're all in different niches and different markets, I would never publish pricing on the Internet, because in that situation, you have no idea what the pricing is going to be, and you're only going to get yourself into trouble. And, your non-profit client, there over at the right, they maybe need different support than your e-commerce store from the left, and if you try to standardize that between those two different markets, you're going to get yourself into trouble and those clients are going to be unhappy.

So, I would start with having that sort of pricing models being built offline for your own needs so that you can answer it quickly and effectively, but I wouldn't standardize that if I were you. And also, when you get to price, you want to qualify somebody with budget. You kind of do and you kind of don't, because asking somebody on your first meeting,
"What's your budget?" First of all, they're never going to tell you the truth, and if they tell you the truth, it means that they're an idiot, because it means they're showing you their hands.

So, you need to build trust with somebody. And a lot of times I've found that, when I get a 30K for a project, very rarely did that budget exist before we started talking. Maybe they had 10K earmarked, but then as we unpacked the box, we realized that they needed something actually much bigger than 10K and of course they said, "Look, we can phase this out or what have you." But maybe they don't have the full budget allocated, but if you build the value in an elegant way that appeals to them, they will find the money. And so, you want to give yourself that opportunity to build that value with the customer.

And definitely you want to quality them, you want to figure out, what their revenue per year are? How many people do they have working for them? Do they have a board? Do they have investors? Are they a brand new business or have they been around for five or six years? We typically like to work with established businesses. If you're a brand new start up, I typically will say, "Look, you don't even know who you are yet, so I don't want to be that company that helps you discover who you are." That's not our forte. I'm good at that, but that's not what I like to get paid for.

So, we like to see businesses that have been around for five years. That have tried another web company and they've been burned and they've tasted what it feels like to have somebody build a WordPress site and abandon them. I like those types of clients. And that also helps me understand, if they paid $10,000 to some WordPress guy, and they got abandoned, it tells me, first of all, that they've spent 10K on a website before. They know that it's valuable. They know the pain of a person not being around is, they know what that feels like. So, I think pricing, if you're in that general market, I would never publish pricing. I would publish pricing in a vertical, if I'm going for the mass market appeal.

Bryan: Yeah, so that answered my question on pricing. Well, I've toyed with the idea of doing the packages for like restaurants or non-profits, but then putting their estimated prices based upon an analysis. Because, I've done that before, where I've said, "Oh, it will be about five grand."
And then I got to actually looking into the business. And what they described to me and what we actually ended up planning on doing were two different things, but yet he was stuck on that $5000 price tag.

Brent: Yeah. And, I've got this series on interaction, and I'm kind of getting the feeling that you haven't watched a lot of my content. Like, Interactions of the Sales Process, that's a really good one that goes around this idea. And then there's actually one I have called, 3X Pricing of Business Catalyst.

Bryan: Okay.

Brent: The interaction model, typically for me is, you start with small interactions with somebody. And you don't start with the proposes in your first, second or third meeting. Like, proposal is reserved for meeting six or seven, and that's typically where I talk about price is in that sixth or seventh meeting, as part of the proposal. And literally, I never send over a proposal as a document in an e-mail. I always schedule an hour with the client or two hours with the client and I present my proposal. I literally sit down with them. I know that clients do not read proposals if I send them over to them.

What they do is, I e-mail them a PDF document, I used to do this, I did this for year. I probably delivered 500 proposals by just e-mailing a proposal and then just waiting to hear back from them. And I've found that the majority of clients would open the proposal. They'd fast forward to the pricing page, they'd look at the pricing, they'd close the document, they'd e-mail me back and they'd say, "We really like you guys, but you're way over our budget." And I'm like, "Crap. What just happened? Why did I loose that deal?" And that's why my closed rate sucked.

And so, what I do now is, first of all, I build up a series of interactions with the client. So, by the time I sit down with them with the proposal, I've already met with them five times. Right, I've already had five phone calls, or I've had an in person and a few phone calls. We've already learned a lot about each other. I've showed up on time for everyone of my meetings, I've always delivered what I told them I was going to after the meeting. I've built this rapport with the client over interactions.

And when I deliver the proposal to them, I literally sit down through a webinar, and I have some actual recordings of me doing this in Pro. I sit down with a screen cast and it's story time. Grab a cup of coffee and Brent's going to tell you a story. And I literally walk them through the proposal, and I give them the scope item in my own worlds and how it effects their business for every single item that I include. And nothing in the proposal that I present to them, is ever something that we haven't already talked about.

So when I literally go through the document, I'm verbally reinforcing the vision and the story for their business and I take them through that proposal over an hour or sometimes an hour and half or two hours. Sometimes these conversations balloon into a big meeting, and when I do that, one of the things that I do kind of as a joke, is when I sit down with them I'll say, "Okay. Thank you for coming to the meeting. I'm really happy to present to you guys my proposal. Before we really dig in deep, what I want to is just, let's all turn to page 10, and boom, there we go. See this, it's $25,000. Let's all just sit there and stare at the number for a minute and be like, that's way over what we were talking about. And let's just get comfortable with that $25,000 number, and then what I'd us to do is just really quickly is just accept that that number is here, and then let's go back to page one, and I'm going to spend the next hour talking to you guys about how we get to that number."

And then what they do is-, it gets this idea that 25K is a big deal, off the table, and I literally tell them, "If we get through this next hour, and you don't understand where that $25,000 comes from, then that's where let's dig in deeper and let's get into some questions." And almost always, we finish with the hour of the proposal presentation, and they go, "I get it. We had this other proposal from this other company. And it was a lot less than you, but they weren't doing a fraction of what you're doing." And you immediately differentiate yourselves. What's that?

Bryan: You actually just show them what they're basically putting up that money for.

Brent: Absolutely, and you don't leave that up to chance. You don't leave it up to them, possibly looking through your proposal in an in depth way. You walk them through that. But I'll send you some content that actually is me doing that in real time, and you'll see how that unfolds. I'm not sure if I do the, "let's go to page 10" thing or not. There's one of the sales calls that I have online though, where literally the client like right away says, because I sent the proposal ahead of time, and I actually don't do that anymore. But they were like, "You're three times what the nearest competitor is." And then, over the call you'll actually see me build that up. And it makes complete sense. So I'll send you a lot of links on that stuff.

Bryan: Yeah. Okay. The more that you can send me the better. I have gone through- I just pulled up my notebook. I went through about 18 of the videos it looks like. And so, the content, some of them seemed very basic. And I might have been distracted on a couple other ones, I'm not sure, but I have notes. Normally, I recall these things fairly quickly but for whatever reason I can't.

Brent: Sure.

Bryan: I have some notes, but on one video, I wrote one note, "Good observation on pricing." So, obviously, I listened to one that had to with pricing already. So.

Brent: Yeah. For sure. Like I said, I'll send you my quick list of-
I stand behind a lot. There's a lot of content on there. It's a lot to wade through. So, I'll send you my quick list of things that I've put out there, that are inline with what we've talked about today, and if you've already watched them, it is what it is. But otherwise, I'm pretty sure they'll be some posts on there that fit into this conversation. And, you can obviously just let me know where you want to go from the point of view of Pro after this. You've still got some time to close out if you still need to.

Otherwise, have a look at it, we've always got new stuff coming thought the pike. I did do a recent follow up on vertical post that went live yesterday. And, so I think that will also be something that you'll want to watch. It's longer content, so definitely go to have your cup of coffee like ready, or maybe just listen to it in the background while you're doing some other work, and pay attention when you want to. But definitely some stuff you want to take a look at, but yeah, somebody's car alarms going off in the parking lot. I'm sure you can hear that. That will be a nice sprinkle of variety for our video here.

Bryan: There we go. Well, I do appreciate your time, and taking the time out to discuss that with me. You've given me a lot to look at. Like I said, 2008, although there's only 12 on there, I think that's a great starting point. To work with them first, and move forward on adding these whether they'd be a package or not, a package for individual restaurants, or areas, even non-profits just looking at that.

Brent: Yeah.

Bryan: I'll go through that content as you send me the links, and I'll definitely get back to you on progressing forward.

Brent: Cool.

Bryan: All right.

Brent: Sounds good, Bryan. I appreciate your time today. I will probably be posting this content up on our blog in some format, so stay tune on that. I'll link out to your company, as well. So people can get to know you as part of the partner community as well.

Bryan: Okay, I appreciate that.

Brent: All right. See you Bryan.

The Future of BC Gurus

Sun, 12 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Looking back on this year, I can make several observations:

The Partner Network has a massive amount of collective knowledge
When Partners connect and work together, they accomplish amazing things
New Partners need to be educated on the basics of BC
Experienced PROs need a way to share best practices and fancy edge case how-to's
There are a whole lot of people trying BC that are not Partners
We've created a platform at BC Gurus that gives the BC community a voice
People within the BC ecosystem want a way to tell others how well they know BC
It takes more than mastery of BC to run a successful business around BC

Recently, I have had several revelations about who we are and how we as a company can help propel the overall community upwards. I realized that my job was not only to lift up the community, but to begin making you the Gurus, not just my company.

What does that mean - make you the Guru?

It's going to mean a lot of things, but its the most important revelation and reflection I've made this year.

There is nothing I need to tell you we are going to do besides that: You, the Guru.

What you will begin to see is changes on this site to begin realizing this vision. You will see our product begin to rapidly evolve down this path and along the way I welcome feedback.

The September 24 San Jose conference is a beacon that I have put forth for my company to reach for to have this new framework in place. Parts of it will be released before the conference, but that day is where I will present what it means in concrete terms.

Everyone, Guru.

BC Partner Client Poachers: You are Warned!

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

[Linkedin Thread]

No way. Who in their right mind would think to do that?

I will tell you my friends: unethical snakes. These people aren’t Partners, they are slime.

The routine goes something like this:

You build a relationship and deal that ends with you creating a BC project for a customer (these often times take weeks, months, or I know from experience, sometimes years).
You are super excited to finally launch!
You are so proud of your work that you decide to share it in the Partner Gallery accessible in the Partner Portal feature in our private Partner Network.
And here it begins: little miss cockroach sees your project, goes to the client website and calls up the customer and says: “I would like to offer you a better deal on your BC hosting services and would love for you to switch to me as your BC Partner! Come on over! I’m so great!”

Wrong. You are a maggot. You are that feeling in my mouth when I have strep throat. You are a bottom feeder. You are worthless.

Let’s think about this interaction from our customers point of view for a moment. Did little miss cockroach even think for a second that this customer might not even know what Business Catalyst is? Did she even think that this phone call or email might be damaging the value proposition that a white-label partner has brought to the table (providing solution over just technology)? Did she even consider that she is actively trying to undo a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears that her fellow Partner has endured to get this project live?

Nope. She is a cockroach, no care or worry for the Partner Network.

Lets set some things straight before I get into what I plan to do with cockroaches.

First, I do have the stance that our customers should have choice. I have lost clients to my great brethren Simpleflame, Frisco Websites, and Mediatrik to name a few. I am the first to say that I’ve messed up on a couple of projects and that has cost me the customer. In these cases, I have directed those customers to our BC Gurus Directory - and I know lots of other Partners that have used that resource - when the relationship goes South. Or in a couple of cases, the customer simply called me up to inform me that they were on their way.

Fair as any. It is what it is.

If a client is not happy with their Partner, it is their right to go elsewhere - either to another Partner or another solution outside of BC. This is ethical and right. We all agree on that.

What I see as despicable is using Partner Resources (the project gallery) as a means to prey on other people in our network’s hard earned customer base. Whether our customers would ever switch is hardly the point (as I know many of the Partners who are experiencing this can attest, good luck cockroaches).

Besides the damage that you are doing (you know who you are you slime) to the other Partners, you are also damaging the validity of the project gallery. I also realize that you could be using my very own website for this activity by searching our Directory and the projects that are now displayed with each company for these activities. The fact that you are turning these great resources for Partners to share their work and skills into a huge risk for us makes me so angry (if you haven’t been able to already tell).

So here is your warning: stop now. Cease all activities of Partner-poaching at once. If you know what is good for you, you will call up each of those Partners that you did this to and apologize.

Or else...

I have already put feelers out to these key Partners and customers to spill the beans on who is contacting them. From there I will compile a list of these companies and then my reign of rampage on you begins.

I will out you publicly to the community. You will have a website with a much higher pagerank than your own with the subject line: Company X Poaches Clients and is Unethical. We’ll get that on page 1 for you, don’t you worry.

If you have a PRO or Free subscription to our site, you won’t anymore.

I will then work with Adobe in the most aggressive way I have available to me to have your Partner status removed. They don’t have official policies on this, but I do: you suck and I’m going to stick it to you. I will lobby that they modify their Partner Agreements so that you can be booted. It will become my #1 priority.

You will be shunned at any BC event. I will ask you to leave because you are not a Partner, you are a bucket of slime.

I will make sure that my entire list of thousands of BC Partner email addresses also knows who you are.

Cockroach. Slime. Maggot.

Let me return to a more pleasant tone to wrap this up. I have spent thousands of hours to work my ass off to build a community of people that are excited to collaborate and work together for a better tomorrow. We attend conferences together, share ideas through my site and others, we talk on the phone a lot (yo Jason! where’s my call back from this morning brotha!), we push each other to build better companies, and we push each other to provide the best possible solution to our clients.

Your actions work against this. You completely undermine what we are investing our entire careers to build. Please stop. Think about what you are doing before you continue. The number one value that I live by is simple:

Treat others as I wish to be treated.

Please take this to heart.

Meet Brett Stockley of Pretty Pollution

Tue, 24 Jul 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Brett Stockley, Director and Owner of Pretty Pollution based in Sydney, Australia, has been a top performing Business Catalyst Partner since the beginning. I think (correct me if I'm wrong) he is the longest active BC Partner running - his journey began in 2005.

Video Transcript

Brent:Hey. This is Brent Weaver from bcgurus.com. I'm here today with Brett Stockley of Pretty Pollution. Welcome to BC Gurus.

Brett:Thanks, Brent. Thanks for having us. Thanks for coming to the office.

Brent: Absolutely. It's been great here in Sydney for the last couple of days here at the Business Catalyst Partner Conference. Australians are very hospitable. You guys have been showing us a great time, so I want to thank you for that.

Brett:Great. Thanks for coming. It's been awesome.

Brent: Brett, tell me a little bit about your background. What got you into technology, what got you into web and explain to us where you come from and what's your background.

Brett:Sure. I come from a background in IT, so I'm a systems engineer by trade. I have ten years of experience in Microsoft systems and Citrix systems, as well as a certification in iTill foundations. So principles around releasing sprints into a production environment and also IT systems changes, best practices, I guess, yeah.

Brent:How did that lead into Pretty Pollution? IT and actual website creative agencies seems like there's maybe a little bit of a difference there. What was the progression there?

Brett:I guess towards the end of my career in IT, I moved towards a web focus. Working with .NET developers in large, corporate web environments, managing websites with loyalty programs for big corporates. I progressed in my career, I guess, into more management-style roles. I had that web experience, that IT experience, experience around D and S and web servers, managing web servers and also the management side of things. So the progression into web was quite seamless for me.

Brent: Very cool. When did you start Pretty Pollution.

Brett: Pretty Pollution started about eight years ago.

Brent: Tell me a little bit about it. We're sitting in the Pretty Pollution office right now. It's been cool to see where you guys actually work. I've seen your name around the BC community for a while. I think you guys have been partners for a little bit. Tell us about who Pretty Pollution is.

Brett: Pretty Pollution is a creative agency. We do branding, print, signage, car decals and also digital. Business Catalyst is a large part of what we do, and we are very active in the catalyst community.

Brent:What's the makeup of Pretty Pollution? How many people are they, what kind of roles do you guys have working here?

Brett: We are split into design and development. Every one of my staff specializes in a slightly different area. I'm sure it's a case across all agencies, some more on the Javascript side of things and some more in building the HTML, and some that have very in-depth knowledge of Business Catalyst as a content management system. I guess the fundamental requirement for working at Pretty Pollution is a passion in user experience on a website and the marketing component above all else, that's probably the one component that we hire on.

Brent:Who is an ideal customer for Pretty Pollution?

Brett: Sure. We love fashion.

Brent: You're quite stylish, I have to say. He's got a pretty stylish wardrobe. So I can understand that.

Brett: I do what I can. We love fashion. We love fashion because they usually can provide us with sexy images, and we love that they turn over their look and feel and products quite regularly. It's a very competitive market so they're very focused and dedicated on marketing and what they can do to lead the industry. We love fashion and we love fashion when they're big enough to have a marketing person that we work with.

Brent: So somebody that gets it on the client side.

Brett: Yes. Somebody that gets it, can work with us, we can work together toward a common goal. Ultimately, how we view ourselves, rather than a digital agency or a creative agency, is an extension of their marketing department. We like to think we can offer quite a broad set of skills to their marketing team. Where they wouldn't necessarily be able to hire a designer, developer, a marketing expert, an SEO expert, a social media expert. They can have one marketing manager, and they can use us as their extended marketing team.

Brent: Very cool. I know you guys do a lot of campaigns, at least that's my understanding. Tell me about how you approach web and the types of projects you build for clients.

Brett: I guess when we take on a web project or we're working with a web project, our focus so much isn't about turning a website and setting it live and moving to the next website. We're more focused around clients that we feel that we can work with in a marketing capacity. We probably wouldn't build as many websites as some of the other design agencies, because we simply don't focus on how many sites we can build, but rather which clients we can work with to get results. One client, we might work on them monthly, all year-round. It'll be campaigns: email marketing, direct mail, social media strategies. We'll buy brokered lists from companies, and blast out to try to bring in new business and convert new business to get those hundred thousand people into the Business Catalyst list. It's more about the marketing strategy.

Brent: OK. I assume you guys use the marketing tool within Business Catalyst quite heavily?

Brett: Sure. That's primarily the reason we got into Business Catalyst: the suite of marketing tools integrated into Business Catalyst. As you see these days, there's more and more tools coming onto the market, and they'll be built into Business Catalyst as Business Catalyst evolves. There's a lot more technologies. Web is going more toward integration, web is getting more competitive. Once upon a time, you could turn a website and put it online. It would be a fashion site and you would do well. These days with the international sites having distributors based out of Australia and New Zealand and they've got distributors all over the world, it's just become a cut-throat market. You need to really be on it and pushing it.

Brent: Yeah. Very interesting, that's very interesting to view. I'm sure you guys have sent out a lot of emails and types of campaigns and the amount of integrated stuff you guys have done. Also, I've found that in the online business space, it's not just a website. You've got to focus on the social, you have to focus on their print, all the different types of media that you're producing for that company. Getting specifically into the Business Catalyst, you guys have been a BC partner for quite some time as I understand.

Brett: Yeah. We've been partnered with Business Catalyst for eight years. I believe we're the longest current-standing partner that's still active.

Brent: Wow. That puts you as a partner in 2005. I feel like I interview partners all the time and it's 2008, maybe 2009 or 2010. It's interesting that you guys have been around BC for that long, and stuck with it. Obviously, it's providing a great return on your business.

Brett: It is. Business Catalyst is an awesome platform. It's always been a really tight-knit community. We used to go for Christmas barbecues and all Sydney over with the BC staff. It's always been very tight-knit. It still is with the partners. You see from the last couple of days, we've all been hanging out, exchanging ideas. It doesn't matter who I talk to at these conferences. What the partner does, what level they're at, whether they're a sole trader working out of their bedroom in their house like we did once upon a time, it doesn't matter who I speak to, I always pull something valuable out of them. I hope I give something back as well.

Brent: For sure. There's definitely been a lot of that going on at the conference. What's been your impression of the conference? We had two days:
we had a day of presentation and we had a day of lawn bowling. What was some of the takeaways from the presentations?

Brett: The presentations were awesome. Just getting together and discussing how different people run their agencies and what components of what they do can I take out and implement into my business. I think just networking. A lot of these people I've known for many years and I've never met them. I know who they are, I've emailed them, I've worked on sites of their clients, but I've never met them face to face. So to be able to go into a room and actually meet personally is kind of like a connection which cements the relationships.

Brent: Absolutely.

Brett: It's been mad.

Brent: Within the BC space, what kind of work do you guys do? I know you do a lot of fashion clients, you have a lot of end clients. It's been my understanding that you also work with a lot of partners. What does that capacity look like?

Brett: Half of what we do is working with partners. Our business is split into half partner support training, and half direct to our customers. We work in all capacities. Whether it's a white-labeled capacity or a partner wants us to work directly with their client. Ultimately, I'm open. I will share all of my knowledge, all the tips and tricks of what Pretty Pollution does. It's just what the partner needs. Quite often, it's training their staff. We have partners that have their developers trained once a week, one hour or two hour training session once a week, to keep them progressing along in their skills. Quite often, it's training their clients under a white-labeled arrangement by Adobe Connect. Or it's when a client knows enough about Business Catalyst to design and develop their own website and support their own client, but when that client comes to them and asks them for a custom solution that their not confident to deliver, they'll outsource it to us. We'll deliver it and step back again.

Brent: OK. Very nice. One last question. I know you have a few staff here. Some of them are of a different kind than normal human BC partner staff.

Brett: We've got staff of all sizes and denominations. We've got a security staff. Hank, come. Up. This is Hank. Hank is head of security at Pretty Pollution.

Brent: I'm not sure how dangerous Hank is but it's been a pleasure to meet their head of security, as well. Did your team end up winning at lawn bowling?

Brett: We did. We did. We did have a bit of an advantage in the fact that along with partners like yourself, we organized the event. So we knew that lawn bowling was the game, and we had a chance to practice in the office, rolling down the hallway.

Brent: I see. You did have an advantage. It seemed like you were very consistent on your bowls.

Brett: Rolling apples.

Brent: Very nice. It's been an absolute pleasure, Brett. I appreciate you guys taking the time to host us while we've been in Sydney. I appreciate it for taking the time to chat with the BC Gurus community. We definitely wish you guys the best at Pretty Pollution and hope a world of success for you.

Brett: Thanks, mate. Thanks for coming to Australia, thanks for your presentation. It was awesome and you guys do a great job. We've been following you for a long time. We're big fans.

Brent: Nice. Very cool. Stay tuned for more great content from bcgurus.com.

27 Mistakes Most BC Partners Make When Working on Client Projects - And How To Avoid Them

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Thursday July 26, 2012 from 9:30AM to 11:00 AM Mountain Daylight Time (Denver)

When I first started building websites, projects would quickly get out of control and become a disaster.

Maybe You Can Relate With...

Doing work not in scope for free
Not getting content or feedback on time
Clients dropping out of communication
Finishing months over schedule
Getting paid late

The "I'm glad this is over" feeling at the end of a project really, really sucks. You shouldn’t feel like a failure and insecure at the end of your projects.

The secret to success is avoiding common mistakes before they happen. Putting checks and processes in place is vital to preventing things from getting out of control.

Learn How To "Corral The Madness"

My experience with managing projects and client expectations has led me to a set of simple guidelines. This method is being presented to you as a set of 27 rules.

My staff at HotPress Web have learned to follow these rules with consistent results that deliver quality and on-time projects that leave everyone involved feeling great.

Join me on the "27 Mistakes Most BC Partners Make When Working on Client Projects - And How To Avoid Them" webinar so you too can learn the secrets to project success.

Reserve Your Spot Today

Thursday July 26, 2012 from 9:30AM to 11:00 AM Mountain Daylight Time (Denver)

Time Zone Converter

Alternatives to the tag_edit and tag_delete Web App tags

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Business Catalyst provides tags that allow visitors logged into a secure zone to edit or delete a web app item. Depending on how the web app is set up, users can edit all web app items or just be allowed to edit their own submissions. Users are only allowed to delete their own submissions. If users try to delete an entry that was created by someone else, they will get re-directed to an error screen that says, "ERROR: You cannot edit an item that was not submitted by you in the first place."

The tag you would insert to edit is {tag_edit} and this will output an <a> link that surrounds the text, "Edit".

The tag you would insert to delete is {tag_delete} and this will output an <a> link that surrounds text, "Delete".

Alternative output for Edit

This allows you to edit the HTML of the tag or change the link text from "Edit" to something else.

Alternative output for Delete

This allows you to edit the HTML of the tag or change the link text from "Delete" to something else.

Add Alert to Delete

As I said before, users are only allowed to delete their own submissions. However, the user may not be aware of such an issue so it may be nice to include an "onclick" event on the delete link as a way to alert the user of this issue before they get automatically re-directed to the error page.

Pet Supplies E-Commerce Business Catalyst Template

Fri, 06 Jul 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Resources

Business Catalyst Release Notes Commentary July 2012

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Resources

Adobe Business Catalyst July Release Notes

Update from Jackson Palmer at Adobe BC Sydney Conference

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Resources

How to setup a BC User Group in your area

Video Transcript

Brent:: Hey. This is Brent Weaver from BCGurus.com. I'm here today with Jackson Palmer of Adobe and the BC Team. Welcome to BC Gurus.

Jackson: Thanks and hi everybody.

Brent:: We are just following up a couple of days of the Business Catalyst Conference in Sydney. It's been reallly awesome couple of days of networking with partners. It's really good stuff.

Jackson: Yeah. It's been awesome, man. We had well over 200 partners in attendance on the first day followed by over 50 on the second social day event so there was a great effort from everybody and thanks to everyone who attended.

Brent:: Yeah, I think one of my biggest takeaways from the partner conference was that there is over 200 partners, and everybody seemed to have a little bit of a different angle on their business and how they use view BC Partnership type of things that they're bringing to the community. It was really diverse and I really enjoyed the presentations. I think there's a lot of ground covered.

Jackson: Yeah. I think definitely big ops to all presenters that were able to go up there and strut their stuff. I think we had a perfect kind of blend about technical versus growing your business kind of advice. I think there's a lot to take away for everybody that attended.

Brent:: Absolutely. So what was your biggest takeaway from the conference? Like was there that just jumped out at you?

Jackson: The big takeaway for me was there's a really passionate community there and in Tim Gentle's presentation one of the things that he was really pushing is we have the community, we just have to make sure we grow it together and try to educate one another, so sharing advice like technical advice or advice about growing your business. I think it's there, we just need to come together more often and through different channels and educate one another.

Brent:: Absolutely. I think Tim's presentation, he had a really good angle of viewing the world in terms of kind of abundance. There was plenty of business for everybody and if we just were able to contribute to each other then we'd all come out ahead which I think was really cool. There's another community issues that are going on, I think both in the United States and maybe as we're looking to get those moving here in Australia.

Jackson: Yeah. So one of the big things that came out of yesterday I think was a lot of people were saying "Hey. I've got another partner that's just down the road from me." So now we've got people I know in Melbourne and in Perth that are talking about starting up user groups and user groups are a great way of getting together your local BC partners. Whether there's five or ten of you in your local area and having a, say, a monthly meeting. And that's definitely something that we're talking about doing in the future. Having Adobe sponsored events organized by the user groups. It's really important that if you know a bunch of partners in your local area that get together and fill out the, we have some phones on the BC blog and you can get started with these groups.

Brent:: Nice. We're actually did our first user group in Denver. Had about 20 people show up for that so it's definitely primarily partner focused but I think we're looking to see if we can get more small business owners and more diverse group of people in Denver. So I can definitely encourage partners across the world to start forming those groups because I think the more of those that exist, the better the types of conferences that we just had will be. Have more great content to bring to the table. That kind of brings up the idea of being a Business Catalyst partner. I mean, how is that changing? How is Adobe changing, how is that reviewing the partner program and what's the future of that?

Jackson: Yeah. I think someone we've really wanted to do this years and it's been a goal of mine and a goal of any of the other members is to revisit the partner program and the value that we offer to our standard and premium partners and make sure that we continue offering that value. So be it via priority support, what we do in terms of white labeling just providing you with rebrandable materials that you can use in attracting clients. So that's something that for the next six months we're going to really revisit and by the end of the year we're hoping we're going to come back with a revisited partner program, which in turn kind of includes a revisited partner portal, as well. Kind of a rethinking of the whole way you manage your BC sites and how we help you as partners.

Brent:: Very cool, very good to know that. So I know we had a big, I guess, a big hurdle. It's been jumped over in the last month. Has been create a cloud. How has that affected the partner base and the BC community at large?

Jackson: So we've just gone through months of infrastructure work to make sure that we're ready for the creative cloud, and we've seen a really great response to the creative cloud. And what that means for the BC community is that we're seeing a lot of creative professionals coming through via Dream Weaver or through Muse, and really kind of engaging with the platform. And what that means is that we have a stronger creative professional community behind business catalyst and hopefully that means we can grow against like we had over the past few days and also share more, share the education between partners.

Brent:: And I've been excited to see integration because I've used all those creative tools, which hopefully help the actual production of this type of client work for every single BC partner. I think the new CS6 stuff in Dream Weaver is pretty exciting. I think Muse for most BC partners are kind of like one foot out of the water. Like what does this mean for the community? That kind of stuff. But I think that's a totally different group of people that are using Business Catalyst and I think that in the end it will be better for everybody. So as far as the platform goes, I know now that the creative cloud hump is kind of done, it's time to get back and focus on BC as a product. I've heard this term of "web publishing", that's kind of the feature. What's next for that?

Jackson: I think when we think about web publishing, we think really nailing down the process of publishing pages online, but also taking that through blogging and photo galleries and some of the things that really make up just your basic website. I mean, the essentials, if you will. And so what we really want to do this year is build on what we've already gone forth in V3 and offer a really intuitive, easy to use side editing experience for your small business owner clients, to replace what we currently have. Also at the same time, back that up with some really rich tools to developers out there to edit their pages and build templates faster.

Brent:: Very cool. When I hear about developer tools, web platform, development, that kind of stuff, definitely gets really exciting, but definitely looking forward to seeing that stuff start come into fruition, so it's good stuff. So is there anything to takeaway? What can partners start doing now to really participate in the community? I think the last couple of days has been all about community so I feel like I want to focus a lot about that, about how we push the community further.

Jackson: Definitely. As I said, it's one thing that kind of shone through was that there's a ton of passionate partners out there. We just need to come together and i think forming these user groups is a great way to do that. It brings together like-minded individuals and businesses, and you can share your knowledge and really help everybody grow together. So, as I said earlier, jump on the BC blog. There's some application forms and everything you need to get started with these groups, and so say you want to start one in your own state or your own city. It's a great way to just get involved

Brent:: Very cool. We'll definitely link to that in our blog post and we definitely appreciate you taking the time to hang with us today, Jackson.

Jackson: No worries.

Brent:: The Australians have an amazing sense of hospitality. everything from lots of drinking to lawn bowling and good times so we appreciate you guys having us here.

Jackson: Happy to have you.

Brent:: Stay tuned for more content from BC Gurus.com

Meet Michael Sallander of Chicago Digital

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Mike is the current President at Chicago Digital - his new venture in the Business Catalyst space is the Business Catalyst Training Academy.

Video Transcript

Brent: Hey. This is Brent Weaver from bcgurus.com. I'm here today with Mike Sallander of Chicago Digital. Welcome to BC Gurus.

Mike: Thanks Brent. Glad to be here.

Brent: So you guys have been introduced in voice through several of your project features on your site, but this is your debut.

Mike: Great.

Brent: How's it feel?

Mike: Feels excellent. I'm glad people get the chance to maybe meet myself in person or in video and get to know a little bit more about me.

Brent: Absolutely. So, tell me about your background. I mean, what got you into web? Why did you do this versus going and working for the man, you know?

Mike: Sure. I think I really got my start really early on in life. My dad was an entrepreneur, and he had a computer assembly business and so I was always surrounded by computers and technology and so I really developed that passion pretty early on. It was in high school where I kind of took my first computer science class, where I really got excited and really kind of decided this is what I want to do, and so Scott Scheffler and I were good friends in high school and we started doing some freelance web design on the side.

We kind of did that throughout high school and college, even though we had some other jobs here and there working for corporations. When we got home we went and did web design as a hobby. It was like, you know, this is what we really enjoy doing. It was what we were really passionate about, and so, really it just became a natural decision to say "Hey, instead of doing this just in our spare time, what would our life be like if we did this full time?"

It was really, not that working for another company or a corporation is bad or anything like that, not that I kind of see it as working for the man necessarily, but at the end of the day we really just want to do what we're passionate about, and really kind of be in control of our direction and our destiny, and so that's kind of why we got started.

Brent: Very cool. So, tell me about Chicago Digital. That's obviously the business that came out of it, and I think if you're a BC partner and you haven't heard of Chicago Digital now's a good time to check our your work. You guys have been doing great things. So, tell me a little about how Chicago Digital started, and what your vision there is.

Mike: Sure. So, we got started in June of 2009 when Scott Scheffler and I graduated from the University of Illinois. Our vision really was to help small-medium businesses utilize new technologies to grow and manage their businesses. So, in terms of the web, we sit down and work with the client to figure out what their real needs are, their business needs are, and how to use a combination of design, development and online marketing techniques to really accomplish that goal for the end business.

Brent: So, it's very cool about Chicago Digital. I think you guys have a really good thing going on there. Tell us a little bit about what the staff situation is. I mean, how many, what's the make-up of Chicago Digital?

Mike: Right, well, we have five full-time employees right now. We're looking at expanding that team, currently, as we see demand for Business Catalyst and our services continue to grow. It's an exciting time right now. We're kind of changing offices and doing all that.

Brent: Very cool. So you guys have enjoyed the entrepreneurial pursuit of Chicago Digital. Like, the actual running of the business seems like something that you're also passionate about.

Mike: Yeah, I mean, my background is I have a business degree, and kind of going back to my dad's entrepreneurial roots, it's something that's always really fascinated me. So from the early on I've always had a vision of it's not just a freelance or a two-man operation. You know, it's just something that I'd like to continue for the business to grow, and to see that evolve over time into a larger agency. So, it's definitely been a very, very interesting ride, a lot of hard work and I'm just really excited to be a part of this community.

Brent: Yeah, for sure. So, who's the ideal customer for Chicago Digital?

Mike: Sure. Well, it depends on, you know, there's probably two different ideal customers. One, the more traditional one for us would be the small to medium business, who has a particular objective in mind and really kind of lets us run with that, and create the solution. And kind of execute that for them, without a lot of kind of micromanaging of it. So, we see our probably most successful situations is "Hey, I want to double my sales next year" or "I want to increase customer retention", whatever it may be, and then give us a budget and let us go and run with that and bring all the different elements to the table that need to be done in order for that to work, instead of just "Hey, I want a simple website in two weeks" type thing.

Brent: Got you.

Mike: On the other side as we've kind of gone, gotten into more of the partner to partner business within Business Catalyst, our ideal customer, or ideal business catalyst customer is someone who really wants to take BC to the next level, or do some other things that business catalysts might not do out of the box, and really deliver some very compelling things for their clients.

Brent: Very cool. So, speaking of Business Catalyst, how did you get introduced to BC and what's that journey been like?

Mike: Sure. That's something that I feel very fortunate and very lucky to have kind of happen to find out about Business Catalyst. We were a little embarrassed to say, though we were working with Drupal and WordPress and .net nuke all of those sorts of things, and when we first got started we were kind of trying to find our way. Right? We figured "Hey, we're going to find a customer and we're going to try to recommend the solution that was best for them, and then pair that up right" and then, so, we actually got introduced to Business Catalyst by a potential client. We pitched him "Hey, we're going to build you a platform and we're going to build it off of Drupal". It was a vertical, which you're very big into, and we were going to use Drupal to then replicate that 10, 20, 50 sites, and create like a whole platform for her on it. But, she was using a different designer who had already been building in Business Catalyst and she kind of fell in love with Business Catalyst, the whole idea of being able to create a template and replicate it. She's like "I want different vendors for my solution, but I like the same platform". She wanted that standardization. So, seeing the opportunity, we probably had, like, four projects off the bat that we were going to deliver for her. So I decided "Sure, we know Business Catalyst. Well, we'll build you a Business Catalyst website", right?

Brent: So there was maybe a little white lie in there? We've had 10 years experience.

Mike: No, no. Absolutely. I mean, we didn't lie about anything, absolutely. I mean, initially she came to us and said "Hey, I need some HTML slicers" right? And then I need to put into a CMS, and so, never heard of Business Catalyst before then, but figured "Hey, we can figure this thing out." This was back before there was the BC Gurus and the Kiyuco and Tribevita and all that kind of stuff, which would have been a great, great help back in the day. So, we had to deliver about four sites in a month and a half and these were, I wouldn't say overly complicated, but they weren't just, you know, your very basic BC sites. So, it was a lot of learning by trial and error and a lot of late nights and a lot of support chats and tickets and all that kind of good stuff, trying to figure out exactly the system works.

Brent: Very cool. So, it sounds like you guys have had a good amount of work with BC. I mean, you've done an assortment of projects. Maybe you can tell me a little bit about the types of projects you picked up with BC.

Mike: Sure. I think we've worked with about 120 different Business Catalyst websites. We've worked with a lot of partners where we worked behind the scenes to deliver all the functionality on the platform and it might be underneath their partner portal. Then, we have a lot of direct relationships as well. Our clients really span a lot of different industries, a lot of different vertical markets, a few different sizes. In some respects, you know, it creates a little bit more work for us, in some instances, but it also gives us a wide variety of experiences and different challenges, which I really think has helped us get to the point where we are today. We might not have really got to the scale that we are today without having that diverse set of experiences and challenges.

Brent: Very cool. So, obviously we're here in Sydney. We're actually at the Pretty Pollution office. We've hijacked Brett's conference room. So, how have you enjoyed this? You know, you actually went to the San Francisco conference as well.

Mike: I did. Yeah.

Brent: We've been on this two city tour. How have you enjoyed the conferences, you know, you can talk about San Fran and Sydney.

Mike: I mean, these events and conferences have been fantastic. I mean, I remember Brett when we were at Adobe Max back in 2010.

Brent: [inaudible 00:009:12]

Mike: Yeah, maybe 10.

Brent: Well, it was you, and Scott, and me, and there was like a couple other people.

Mike: The BC team outnumbered the partners for sure.

Brent: Yes. That was actually quite interesting.

Mike: So, it's very, very encouraging to see the progression of the community, over the last couple of years, and the fact that over 200 people, I believe, showed up for the Sydney conference.

Brent: A lot of people.

Mike: It was fantastic. It was very, very encouraging to me. Without getting into too much detail about the information that was presented at both of those, which I'm sure you'll cover in probably some greater detail later. The big takeaway for me was just the BC community is thriving. Although we're small we're growing. People are collaborating. They're working together. They really want to help each other out. I think, I hope the main takeaway too from Adobe is that "Hey, these partners can't be ignored". You know, we need to work with these partners. We need to do more events like these. We need to keep continually growing and fostering the community.

Brent: Absolutely, and it's been a lot of fun to be in just in general in Sydney collaborating with a lot of people that I feel like I see them on forums, we talk on the phone or Skype, and you get to see little avatars of people and stuff, and it's been nice to get that face to face for sure. So you guys have a little bit of an initiative coming up. I don't know if you noticed, Mike is sporting a quite nice t-shirt. I'd like to get an understanding of what you guys are trying to do with the BC Training Academy. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Mike: Absolutely. Before get kind of into that let me get into kind of how we came across the idea, if you will. Kind of going back to our first encounter with Business Catalyst, when we really had to create a lot of projects right away, and there weren't really a lot of resources available. We kind of thought "Hey, what would we have liked to have been out there to teach us about how to become Business Catalyst developers, right, so we can go and build projects more effectively?" We really tried to, we thought about the answer to that question, and then just kind of, that planted the seed for the training academy. Then, also, probably the need of Business Catalyst developers out there right now. If you're an agency or a designer or a partner who would maybe want to hire someone internally or do it contract, or even just partner with another BC developer. We noticed that there wasn't really any sort of standardization or any sort of like accreditation or any way to really have complete confidence that "Hey, this person actually knows Business Catalyst". From an agency standpoint a lot of times you've got to go and hire an HTML/CSS programmer, someone to front end, and then go train them about Business Catalyst. So it might be three, six, nine months before they become productive on any of your projects. So, it was kind of that need that really spawned the BC Training Academy. So, what the BC Training Academy aims to do is provide a structured one-on-one learning environment for people, to get over that BC learning curve quicker. So we have weekly webinars, live chat, structured course and agenda, and weekly assignments to really get people from not knowing how to do anything in Business Catalyst, to productively building a BC website.

Brent: Very cool. So, some of the details on that, I mean, I'll include the link to bctrainingacademy.com, but also I know you guys, your first course is coming up here. I mean, give us some more details. The cost and when people need to be able to sign up by.

Mike: Absolutely. Our first course launches July 16th, and we have a special going on right now for all the people that sign up early, by June 15th, it's half off, so only $800. Typically the course is $1595, so it's about 50% off. We really think this is going to be a very effective way for people to learn the system in 12 weeks, so really kind of reduce the entire learning curve down.

Brent: Absolutely. Very cool, so good luck to you guys with that program. I'm sure we'll see, get to see some feedback here in a few months once the first crew of student have gone through the BC Training Academy, so best of luck there. So, one last question here. There was a lawn bowling game, it's not a US sport so I keep getting my tongue wrapped up on how to say it, but you guys were, you had a competitive team for lawn bowling.

Mike: We did.

Brent: How'd you turn out on that one?

Mike: We ended up getting third place.

Brent: OK.

Mike: It was, I don't think many people expected that of an American, so, it was pretty nice showing up in Australia and at least placing.

Brent: And just to explain to the non-Australian viewers of BC Gurus. Lawn bowling is like regular bowling but it's on grass. You go barefooted, so you don't wear shoes, and the ball is actually weighted to one side so it kind of curves or flips around. If you bowl like I did, which is, you know, it just kind of goes off and goes the wrong direction every time, so congratulations that you guys got third place there.

Mike: Appreciate that.

Brent: Adobe was kind enough to give us some prizes, some free year-long subscriptions to sites. So I can tell you that the next conference that comes around there's lots of goodies and competitions that you guys can win free stuff on, so that's good stuff. So, appreciate your time today Mike. We'll definitely include links to your Chicago Digital website as well as BC Training Academy. Definitely appreciate you taking the time today.

Mike: Thank you. I appreciate it Brent.

Brent: Well, stay tuned for more great content from bcgurus.com. Thanks.

Event Planning Responsive Business Catalyst Template

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Resources

Business Catalyst Project Feature: Custer by Stevens Advertising

Tue, 29 May 2012 06:00:00 GMT

I am happy to introduce Mike Muller to the blog with a feature on a new project for their longtime client, Custer, at Stevens Advertising. Mike and his team deployed a variety of projects for this client - but at the core of their web strategy sits Business Catalyst.

Video Transcript

Brent: This is Brent Weaver from bcgurus.com. I'm here with Mike Muller of Stevens Advertising. Welcome to the program.

Mike: Glad to be here.

Brent: Mike, we're going to be going into a really cool project that you guys have done over at Stevens, but I want to understand sort of what your background is. Maybe can you give me the quick elevator pitch about Stevens Advertising?

Mike: Sure. Stevens Advertising is a 90 something year old full-service advertising agency that I've been with for almost 20 years. We're a full-
service agency, and we have our roots in sort of more of the traditional agency world with print collateral, TV, radio, billboard, etc. In the past probably seven or eight years have been doing a lot of web and a lot of electronic as well.

Brent: Very cool. What's your background and what's your position at Stevens?

Mike: I am one of the owners. It's myself and my partner Allen who run the place. My background is actually kind of on the design side. I have a degree in Visual Communications, and then a Master's Degree in Advertising Design, but have kind of fallen in love with the electronic world. When the web exploded, probably six or seven years ago, it was just something that I kind of veered off a little bit from the traditional. I have been kind of managing and running the sort of the interactive side of the agency for probably the last seven years or so.

Brent: Very cool. Now, I've seen you around the BC scene for a while. I think you wrote the first Adobe MAX with Business Catalyst included. How did you become a BC partner? Kind of when, where, what peaks your interest with Business Catalyst?

Mike: Yeah. We've been a BC partner for almost four and a half years now. I saw as a webinar from I don't even remember who, way back when, and we were at the time using kind of more of a proprietary CMS. It was working, but there were issues with it. It wasn't as fast as we would like and the development was a little more expensive than we would like. I started to see the capabilities of Business Catalyst, and this was way before Adobe became involved, and just realized that, hey, this could be a really great platform for a lot of our clients. I just kind of dove in and then never really turned back. I would say probably 98% of the web projects that we do are all on BC.

Brent: Very cool. You've got this project Custer that you're going to show us here in a few minutes. Do you want to tell us a little bit of background on how you guys acquired Custer as a client, and kind of what Custer does?

Mike: Sure. Custer has been kind of in our region for quite a while. We've known of them, and have had relationships with them here and there. But, we really started working with them going on almost four years ago when we were actually moving our office and were needing some additional furniture. We began talking to them, and as we began having conversations we realized that there were a lot of synergies in our business philosophy and their business philosophy. They were getting ready to think about completely re-
branding their company. We kind of talked to them about what we do and it just seemed to be a really good fit. So, we began working with them, and over the course of the last three and a half, four years, we've pretty much completely re-branded almost every element of their business. From their website all the way down to their email signatures, business cards, even truck wraps and things like that. It was a pretty in-depth process.

Brent: Very cool. So that kind of, I think, speaks to a little bit of this idea that you guys are a traditional agency and Business Catalyst is just one piece of the puzzle for you. For you guys, you control a much bigger picture of what their branding strategy is and Business Catalyst is just a piece of that. Is that kind of what I'm hearing?

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Business Catalyst, actually, what it was is a great online tool for us to take their brand and extend it out into the digital space. It provided all the features. It made editing content super easy. It made adapting the website going forward and making changes to it pretty efficient. It was a great platform for them to really extend their brand. It had e-commerce. It had all of the pieces that they needed on the back end to be able to really grow their website. It's really the workhorse of their brand. That's where everybody goes to check them out. It was really one of the first pieces that we did.

Brent: Very cool. So, you guys have been working with them for a while. I guess, tell me a little bit about some of the project requirements and some of the specific things that they needed to accomplish on the web.

Mike: Well, the biggest thing that they needed is they were completely restructuring how they talked about themselves. They were trying to get away from being just a furniture dealer. They wanted to be much bigger and work at a much higher level than that. They had these four areas that they were really, really good at. It was interior design, it was actually architecture, it was the furnishing piece which is the actual furniture, and then they were also just phenomenal at all the technology that goes into office settings and office spaces. So, in part of the re-brand, we kind of segmented those four areas and wanted to really highlight the fact that there's a lot of things that Custer can do before you even buy furniture from them. What it's done is it's really exposed them to a lot bigger clients, more clients. They're involved in things that they wouldn't have typically been involved in because they can do so much more than just furniture. The biggest requirement was taking that message and getting it out on the web, and making it clear and making it understandable.

Brent: Very cool. We're sitting here looking at the project. I'm looking at the Custer brand. I'm seeing a very clean site design, some very specific kind of branding element. Do you want to tell me a little bit about the inspiration behind the brand?

Mike: Yeah, sure. Custer has always been a fairly progressive company. Because they're in the design world, there's a certain edge to it. What we really wanted is we wanted something that was very clean, very modern, felt very progressive, but it was somewhat simple and subdued. So that the imagery of all of the projects that they do really, really becomes the focus. We didn't want to have a lot of element around the site that got in the way of just this stunning photography that they've got on some of the projects that they've done, because that's really, really what sells. So, we crafted a very white, clean, modern site that allows that photography to really stay front and center and provide that wow factor that they wanted.

Brent: Very cool. So, if you want to just start giving me a tour of the site.

Mike: Sure.

Brent: From what I've looked through, you guys have done an excellent job on this. I really just want to see or have our listeners be able to see some of the cool things you guys have done with web apps in the store. I think you guys have knocked this one out of the park. So, why don't you just take us through the site, give us the tour.

Mike: Sure. This is the home page. We really wanted the home page to really be image based. We've got a rotater that's here, and again this is web app driven. It's a series of images that the client can load, change, and alter as much as they want. We've got navigation up in here, so we're using dynamic menus and this same menu is actually feeding this same menu down here. It keeps life really simple on the back-end when they're adding pages and changing things.

The front-end of this site is fairly straight forward. If we go into the design section, things are color-coded. We have red for design, all of the headers match. The pages aren't terribly deep from a content standpoint. They're pretty simple. What they really wanted is just to give somebody a good overview of what they do in these areas. As we click through some of these pages, it's pretty much basic content. There's a literature item here. As you can see it's all color-coded. Again, all these images are all controlled by the client, so they can change these out whenever they want. The core of this site is pretty straightforward and pretty basic.

The two areas where they really wanted this thing to zing was the project showcase. So, from any of these sections if I click on the project showcase link, it takes me into this area and actually opens up a panel that was relevant to where they just came from. If somebody was just on the technology section, now we can come in and we can see all of the projects they've done, that have a technology element to them. This entire showcase is actually built with two web apps that are sort of related together. They're all categorized so I can actually close this down and open up architecture and see which elements were sort of architecture driven. Likewise, I can go down and look at stuff where they just did the furnishings, and you can see there's more of them here, or I can actually come in here and look at all of them.

Again, this is all web app driven just using categories as a way to segment the web app content. As somebody clicks in, you go to kind of a large photo, and again the user can just sort of click through and take a look at some of these images here. It's kind of an image gallery sort of thing. Most of this is all, again, it's all custom. The client has the ability to load as many or as few thumbnails as they want. They can control the little text that comes over here. They wanted it pretty simple when they did it, where it was done, and for what company. Again, when you come back, we've just got some little things in the back-end that kind of open the tab back up where you just were, so I can click around and see. Again, all of these are pretty much the same. Very big photos. We realized that some of those take a little bit to download, but it was worth the wait because the imagery is really what makes this thing zing. That's kind of how the...

Brent: I'm digging their content. I love the Calvin Science Center, or Science Lab. A couple of these places, I mean just, their content is really cool. And I've found working on projects, when you have a client that has really great work, it makes things so much easier. Your creative expression as an advertising company is better heard because the company actually has really cool stuff to work with. I always love to see projects where...

Mike: Yeah.

Brent: The business that you're working with actually does really cool stuff.

Mike: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It does absolutely make our job a lot easier, because you've got good stuff to work with. You're not trying to manufacture something, make something look good that really doesn't look that good.

Brent: For sure. Are there any other web apps that you guys built out on this site, before we jump into e-commerce?

Mike: The other web app that we built was, they're people are more important. They wanted this to reflect not only the size of their organization, but make it real easy for people to get in contact with some of their designers or different people. So, if I wanted to look up somebody who's in the corporate office, this is all web app driven, so the client can go in and add people, take people out. As we all know, staff changes whether we like it or not. So, they can disable web app items. They can create new ones. All they have to do is fill in some fields, attach a photo, properly classify it, hit 'save', and this kind of all shows up exactly in the right spot, in the right place. They don't ever have to come to this page to edit anything. It's all edited back in the web app, which keeps them from breaking any of the scripting that happens to sort of open and close these sections. Web apps have been really effective for a lot of content in a lot of these sites to kind of protect the things that we do, keep the display nice without having to go in and fix things that they break constantly.

Brent: Very cool. Just to reiterate on that, you create a nice designed page, especially with something like bios, where you've got lots of photos, phone numbers, lots of formatting requirements. If you give a customer access to that and you're guaranteed in six months it's going to look like a completely different animal. So, web apps there might go to BC Module to keep content under control, and also to be able to keep a really elegant design solution on the front-end. I think it's a win/win for both the user, from your end-customer's point of view, and also the end-user.

Mike: Yeah. Absolutely. This page here has been live for probably a year and a half, and I have yet to get a phone call that anything's broken or they've had trouble getting something in or out. Which is wonderful for me because I don't have to worry about it.

Brent: I think that the word you used earlier was, it makes it idiot-proof on this site.

Mike: Yeah.

Brent: That's exactly what it does.

Mike: Yeah. Then, not only does this customer have a lot of services that they provide, but they also have product to move. So, we built a store for them, that is just sort of highlighting some of their core product that they're able to sell. Here on the front page, we've given them the ability to tag some products and kick them out as feature products, to change this out at times.

There's some advertising that goes on the page just to promote different things. If we go into the chairs for example, we've kind of rewritten our hacked, or however you want to call it, some of the BC functionality so that the poplets actually load up the image right in the main area versus coming up in a modal window. Again, done just to keep the presentation really clean, really nice, reflective. If you want to look at some of these fabric samples, we brought in some really big thumbnails for the attributes, so that people can see what these fabrics are really like. We have some related products going on. This chair happens to have an armless version as well, with it's own set of poplets. These are just some related products and styles nicely.

We also had to manage the fact that some of these products have different attributes that change the price. This table here is $388, but if you go to the bigger size it adds $50, and so what we did is we, again, wrote some scripting on the back-end that goes in and dynamically changes the price here. The standard out of the box function would be that would stay the same, and you would only see that increase when you go to the cart, but we changed that here so you can kind of go back and forth. Again, just to keep the display really nice. Again, here's the thumbnails for the different woods, so if you want to see what that maple looks like you can get a really good view of it. Outside of that, the cart is pretty standard with different shipping and discount codes and things. We actually did write some scripting that if you add a number of these to the cart, it will actually dynamically bring in some discount codes, based on the value of the order. So, they don't have to promote the code, but it can just show it up here. If you spend $2,000, you get 5% off or whatever it is. Then, the checkout process again is pretty standard, just tried to clean up the page a little bit. That's kind of what we built for them for the store.

Brent: Very cool. It seems like a very comprehensive site. It seems like this is a solid client to you guys, that's obviously doing a lot of online work. Those are always fun to work with, always new work around the corner. Do you guys have any new projects planned with Custer?

Mike: Yeah, we do. We're trying to really promote the store so there's some outside e-marketing that's going on. One of the bigger projects that we're working on is actually revamping the showcase, yet again. Once you get things out, you realize what works really smoothly, where you can improve, so we want to improve the layout a little bit. We actually want to improve the ability for them on the back-end to get in and add items a little bit quicker. So, whether it's using web app submission forms that are pre-populated with certain pieces of information, just sort of rethinking some of that and just improving the layout a little bit based on some needs. We actually designed that with some functionality that they ended up not using so we're kind of retooling that a little bit. That's probably going to be the area that they will continually improve on because it's probably one of the cores of their service. When people come here the first thing they want to do is look at the projects that they've done.

Brent: Very cool. I'm sure you're super busy. Do you guys have any cool BC projects that you're currently working on? I'm sure you guys are going to have more content to feature on BC Gurus coming up.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. We've got a pretty nice e-commerce solution coming out in the next week or two for kind of an online retailer that is managing, I don't know, probably 15,000, 20,000 different products, that we're just in the process of populating the store. We've got a resort site that we're reworking on that will be ready in about three or four weeks, which is actually it's probably one of the largest sites on BC right now. It's for a big Four Season Resort near us. We're kind of redoing that entire site, really bringing in a lot of web app driven content to be able to dynamically pull content from different web apps based on the page that you're looking at. That's probably the other real big one that we've got going.

Brent: Nice. It sounds like you guys are keeping busy. I'm looking forward to featuring you guys more in the future on our BC project features here on bcgurus.com. I want to thank you, Mike, for spending time with us today. Any other last words on this project or what you guys have for the BC community?

Mike: No. Just, we've been living in the middle of BC for four and a half years and absolutely love it. We are excited about where it's going. Even with some of the little bumps here and there it's a great platform that we've really found, number one, let's us do the design an presentation that we need to do, but also give the client the best possible way to access and edit the content on the back-end. We're just excited for the future, and excited to put more projects on BC.

Brent: Great to hear, Mike. Thanks for joining us and stay tuned for more great content from bcgurus.com.

Are you falling into the website copy trap?

Tue, 22 May 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Content can potentially be the most frustrating part of a website project. I know this from years of painful experience on the subject . . . I have tried many different methods of attacking this problem but the single best solution has been to bring in a content expert to write and edit content for all website projects. I am happy to share my interview with Aaron Wrixon of The Copy Trap - a Business Catalyst Partner that has converted to a copy expert to hire. Listen on . . .

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Or download the mp3 directly (right-click, save-as)...

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Audio Transcript

Brent: Hi, this is Brent Weaver from bcgurus.com. I'm here today with Aaron Wrixon. Welcome to the program.

Aaron: Thank you Brent.

Brent: So, Aaron, is a copywriter, has been working with my agency, HotPress Web, for some time now and I thought it was finally time to grill him and put him in the hot seat for a little while on bcgurus and maybe he can tell us a little insight into some of the magic he produces for HotPress. We're really glad to have you here today.

Aaron: Thanks, man. It's pretty fun to be here. It's my coming out party I guess.

Brent: So, Aaron, tell me a little about your background.

Aaron: I'm a writer. I've been a write for a decade and a half, 15 years and counting. I got started a long time ago writing for a company that makes really great stereo speakers. I cut my teeth with them and moved to a larger company and have been working ever since to sort of learn the ins and outs of writing for an audience, motivate behavior and getting people to do what you want them to do with just the power of the written word.

Then, I guess it was probably early 2009 that I discovered Business Catalyst. Essentially, the content marketing solution in a box that BC is. The combination of blogging and email autoresponders and loyalty campaigns and often downloads that essentially make it really easy out of the gate to get customers with content. So that's where I am today, a BC partner and a copywriter.

Brent: Now the reason that you came on our radar was because I finally realized that web designers writing their own content and far and wide my customers writing their own content typically turned into absolute disasters from a project standpoint. I think a lot of BC partners can connect with that, not always waiting around for your content and it's never very good and all that kind of stuff. We finally decided as HotPress why we were going to kind of take it up a notch. We looked at content as a really, really important piece of the puzzle. How did you find you were able to do that kind of stuff with Business Catalyst? Did you kind of find that it was a good fit for you as a copywriting to also be building BC websites?

Aaron: Well, here's the shameful secret. I identify with what you're saying because that was my life. It's ironic for a writer, but I could not get clients interested in good web copy. Here I was sitting on top of the most powerful content marketing engine I had seen and I couldn't get people to look sideways at it because, essentially I was right where you're talking about. Right at what I call the copy trap, where you're so busy running your BC business that you don't have the time that you should have to dedicated to web copy. So you just leave it for the client to do.

The client either gets frustrated because they know they're not a writer and they don't think they should be doing the copy, or the client gets delusions of Pulitzer Prizes and thinks they're the greatest writer since Ernest Hemingway and just works on it, works on it, works on it. Both situations leading to the same outcome; content that is weeks late and bad, ineffective, the worst for the search engines and the worst for the clients own clients. Nobody wins in the end.

There I was, stuck right in the middle of that situation. So, essentially I sort of raised the white flag and said enough. I need to figure out how to get better at doing what you do and outsourcing that web content to the professional writer. Essentially I needed to figure out how to, as me, outsource to someone like me. That's what I did. I went back to square one and learned the sort of secrets, on the ground tips and tricks on how to do that.

Brent: I've had this adage for awhile that if you want to keep doing something you have to actually make money doing it. So if you want to have good web content on your site, you need to sell web content as part of your website package. Why do you think it's so hard for the average BC partner, web designer, marketer to sell website content, considering if you look at any website, the content itself, if you take away all the different parts, content is a pretty big piece of the pie, why do you think so many web designers and BC partners have a hard time selling web content?

Aaron: It's partly the BC partner's problem and partly the client's problem. If the partner is anything like me, they came up out of the garage on a desk made out of a door and a couple of saw horses and bootstrapped a web company based on their knowledge of the technical skills that are required to build a website. Now the good ones transitioned into learning how-to-sell websites, but probably never made the leap into learning how to sell content because, to someone who doesn't appreciate them, words are words. Any words will do in the middle of a web page. Words are meant to be styled as H2s or put in a bulleted list. They're not necessarily, unless you're thinking properly, something to sell in and of themselves.

Then on the other side, on the business owner's side, you've got Joe the roofer who has been doing roofs for 15 years and has built maybe 150 roofs, 200 roofs, and is a great success at building roofs, but has never written more than an email to his wife to say can you do me a favor and pick up some bread? But then looks around at all the other roofers out there in his city and sees all of the same garbage that they're doing, all of the welcome to my website, we're the premier roofing company in Back Corner, Alabama and we've been in business for 15 years. You should trust us because we've been in business for 15 years.

He sees all this and thinks well they're doing it so maybe I need to do it too without ever thinking to ask the questions. What does somebody want me to say to them? What are they looking for? What kind of pain are they going through because their roof is bad? So you've got this sort of perfect storm of BC partner that maybe doesn't know what to do with content and business owner who's taking the worst cues and learning the worst lessons about content. It leads to this situation where web copies is uniformly bad.

Brent: What I was going to say there is maybe BC partners worldwide need to sign a treaty that says we will not launch any website that says welcome to my website on the homepage.

Aaron: I would be more than happy to write that treaty for the BC partners of the world to sign.

Brent: I signed my career that when I stopped looking at web design as web design, I looked at it as building online businesses and there's all these different facets to the projects. It's not just about designing a couple of templates and then telling the customer, "Hey, go load your content." I think that's where a lot of BC partners find themselves in projects that are $2,000 or $3,000 for the whole project because their vision for it is very shortsighted.

When I started added in content and helping the customer who would tell a story about their business through their website, it kind of changes the rules of the game for what we charge. What is the solution to the copy trap that most BC partners are going to find themselves in with their projects?

Aaron: The solution I found, really when I went to work for you guys, when I watched how you guys sell content, how you make it valuable for customers, working for you and watching you guys behind the scenes I realized where I was falling down. It was almost like you threw a rope down into the copy trap and said, "Here, climb on out." The solution is to; a) outsource it to a professional expert, and b) make that outsourcing a given. Make it part of the process. Make it something that the client is signing up for as part of their website. They are paying you $8,000 to design a website and they're paying $3,000 for the content in that website.

It's just part of the game. It's just part of the deal. You wouldn't think of going without professionally written web copy anymore than you would think of going without the client's logo in the top left corner. Or with a contact us page so people could get in touch with the client. It just has to be part of the package and sold as part of the package.

Brent: One of the things that I, the questions that I ask, I've got a pretty big list of little sales tactics that I've used over the years, is I'll get to that point where we start talking about content in the sales process. This is a lot of times part of my discovery which is I'd ask them if they're a writer. They typically will say, "No, I'm not a writer, I'm a roofer." I'll acknowledge the fact that I'm not a writer. For a lot of purposes we don't keep a writer on full-time staff because we just want to be able to have a couple people in expert areas that cover specific types of content available to our company. It's always kind of funny. I'll say it in a joking way. "Are you a writer?" The client's like, "No, I'm not." Well good, because I'm not a writer either so let's bring somebody in to do that. All the sudden it seems like this really easy thing that we just both agreed on versus, we just assumed that the client was going to do the copy. I had this sentence in my proposals that actually said you must provide us all the website content.

Aaron: It's in everybody's proposals.

Brent: In a sense you're up for this massive failure because you can't launch a website that has 15 pages that are missing from it. So a lot of times you can't collect your fees. But at the same time, you don't want to do it for them because it's going to take a whole bunch of time and then you end up in this place where you end up waiting for two or three months to sign a project off because you're waiting around for content.

There was actually a point and time where this problem was so bad for our business that I actually proposed, I put a proposal on the table in our company to say why don't we just pay for our client's content? Then the projects will launch faster and we'll get the recurring revenue for our marketing campaigns faster. We were actually going to use this as a loss leader. Then it was like, what the heck are we doing? We're solving the problem on the 5 yard line, not on kick off.

Aaron: It's so funny that you bring that up. People will spend $20,000 on a kitchen and they wouldn't dream of doing it by themselves. They'd call the kitchen expert. When it's time to launch their website for their business, they think they're the writing expert. It's exactly like you said. The content plays out and plays out and plays out and plays out. It takes three months and maybe you've signed the 50/50 where you've only gotten 50% deposit and you're waiting for three months for that cash to flow in.

What it boils down to, even just from a money point of view, outsourcing, getting over that fear of outsourcing and saying listen, let's put some controls in place. Let's bring in a writer. We'll do some checks and balances to make sure everybody feels good about it. Outsourcing to that writer means that you finish your project faster and you get paid faster. If for no other reason, people at BC partners should be doing this.

Brent: When should the copy and content development process begin? You've been involved in several projects on our team. When do you believe that the copy process should begin?

Aaron: Well, the short answer and I'll give you the short answer because I know we're almost out of time, the short answer is as early as possible. If that's before you pitch the client, if you're consulting with your writers, saying what kind of content would this person need, how much would that web copy cost, all the better?

The worst possible time is to do is, like you said, at the 5 yard line. You want to get in there at kick off. You don't want to get in right when the other team is about to score a touchdown. It just costs more. It's more stressful. If you leave it until the last minute, it's going to read like it was left to the last minute. If you bring it on at the beginning of the game then you can do all that discovery process. You can figure out who your clients ideal customer is and you can figure out how they want to be talked to. You can put the copy in the language that resonates with that ideal customer. You can essentially, with the power of content, create a sales force that will over and over and over again, make money for your client. It's as simple as that.

Brent: I really appreciate that perspective. I think content is on the websites, it's the invisible 800 pound gorilla that for some reason web designers, because their trade is design and code, or maybe they understand SEO and those types of technical, tactical marketing methods, they don't a lot of times think about who's consuming these websites at the end of the day. It's human beings are hitting the web page and they might soak in in less than a second.

What they do from that point on is they read and they view content. I mean there's other types of content photos and video, etc., but I feel like the actual text on the page is such a crucial part to grab somebody's attention and take them through this story. I can sit around and talk about this all day. I think you and I in the past have probably attempted that.

Aaron: I could keep going. I'll talk for four hours with any BC partners that wants to.

Brent: Very cool. I think we've got some PRO content that's coming up that you're spearheading. You're going to be diving a little bit more in depth into the copy development process, but I think anybody that is not thinking about copy in their BC projects is, first of all you're missing a huge place to really wow your customer. You guys understand how to run a professional website project from start to finish. Websites are more than just a few page brochure. It's an online business. Part of that is telling the businesses story as best you possibly can. You're leaving money on the table.

I wish I could tell everybody that I just took your prices and passed them through to my clients, but every single project that you worked on for us, we made a good deal of money on the actual content itself. So it's another place for partners to really build in some profit in their projects and I think at the end of the day deliver a much better product.

Aaron: It's true. Take it from somebody who's been there. Life in a copy trap is brutal. Brutal. This is your rope. Grab hold of your rope and climb on out.

Brent: Speaking of the copy trap, I know if you guys want more information about Aaron Wrixon and what he's doing, he's done great things for our firm, take a look at his website, thecopytrap.com. I will have a link in this post about the content or about his website. Also, there's going to be some additional posts in pro that are done by Aaron. He's going to really show you guys some, I think, very, very useful tactical level stuff and also on the strategy side, what you can do to deliver better website projects through great copy on those BC projects.

Thanks for joining us today, Aaron. Stay tuned for more great content from bcgurus.com.

Aaron: Thanks, Brent.

PRO Bonus: White Label Video Client Trainer App (v3-ready!)

Thu, 17 May 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Are you worried about training your clients on the new Business Catalyst v3 UI? Do you find it a pain to create your own training materials on basic operations of Business Catalyst for your clients? Or perhaps you are frustrated about the fact that Adobe is no longer making white label training material for BC anymore? Do you think this description sounds like a used car commercial? YES to everything?!!!!

Checkout our new PRO Bonus: White Label Video Trainer App and see for yourself...

Already a member? Go directly to the install page!

Adobe Business Catalyst User Group: Denver, May 23

Mon, 14 May 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Are you in the Denver, Colorado metro area and using Business Catalyst? Or maybe you have thought about BC. Or maybe you are just a new Creative Cloud subscriber and you are wondering what the heck BC is?! Then this event is for you.

Wednesday, May 23 at 5:30PM we will have our first meeting at Strings Restaurant (1700 Humboldt St, Denver, CO 80218, map).

The plan for the evening is to:

do some informal networking
presentation on what Creative Cloud is all about
how Business Catalyst fits into that equation
question & answer about BC

The whole BC Gurus team will be in attendance, so if there is anything burning that you have wanted to chat with us about, this event will be a sure-fire way to get it out there.

---> Please RSVP via our group on Meetup

Feel free to email me directly with questions: brent@bcgurus.com.

Holes in Your Ship Sink Ships - Make Sure Your Billings are Up to Date

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Building a successful Business Catalyst Partnership requires you to be disciplined about your billings. The first couple of years we were building Online Businesses we struggled to break a profit - the main reason was that we were giving much of our time and resources away.

Spend some time reviewing your existing accounts and make sure that all of your billing profiles are current and correct. Mistakes in recurring billings can cost you a fortune in the long haul. Also, I found that I leaked an incredible amount of time at no cost to my clients. This practice is intended to "pay dividends" in goodwill, but more often than not it just makes you have to close down your shop because you aren't making any money.

Business Catalyst April Release Notes Commentary

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

April's release comes packed with . . . infrastructure! Infrastructure! Infrastructure. Adobe is getting Business Catalyst ready for the big leagues (also known as Creative Cloud). Some new minor features, lots of bug fixes, and a whole new support and forum workflow. Beer provided by Breckenridge Brewery of Colorado.

Business Catalyst Project Feature: Mall Sites by Dashbee

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Karim Ardalan of MIS, Inc. and Dashbee makes his debut on our blog with a great series of projects for Cushman & Wakefield. Karim takes us through how he acquired a mall developer through another creative agency channel and the many sites its turned into.

BC Gurus Summer Tour: San Fran + Sydney

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Looking for more Business Catalyst in your life this summer? I am speaking at both Adobe events early this summer:

San Francisco, California: May 31, 5PM to 9PM Pacific Time (official announcement & registration)
Sydney, Australia: June 4th & 5th (official announcement & registration)

Make sure you visit the BC site to register for a spot if you can attend. As we get closer to the events, I will release some info on what my presentations will be encompassing along with wanting to meetup with partners for video interviews. In San Fran, I will be in town an extra day and Sydney will have a day on each side of the official festivities.

Business Catalyst Project Feature: Blockmarkets by Distill

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Phil Lockwood, a Business Catalyst Partner, over at Distill Agency solved a neighborhood problem BC-style with a really cool micro-niche market website called Blockmarkets. I get a chance to hear Phil's insight on how he built a yard sale on steroids with Business Catalyst.

Overcoming Your Fears Epic-style

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

This is an excerpt from a recent PRO weekly digest - several folks requested that I re-post the content to our site, so here you go...

I'm an avid snowboarder - its just what I do here in Colorado. I decided to go up to the mountains and really hit it hard this past weekend with a couple other BCG team mates. It was President's Day weekend, so the crowds were thick. A friend of mine and I decided to take to some back-country and peak hikes instead of wade through the masses. We wanted the real fresh pow that was untouched.

One of the lifts drops you off toward the top of one peak, but then you can take the option of hiking beyond. When you are in snowboard boots at 13,000 feet, hiking is, well, you know - hard. But there was the peak, high above...

One foot after another . . . the journey is exhausting, I wonder if it is even going to be worth it. Hope is my fuel . . . with a vision of how great the ride is going to be once you get to the top. I have felt this feeling many times in my ventures in business, but this day I could feel it physically. Were we embarking on something dangerous? Something that would hurt or worse . . .

After about an hour I reached the peak . . . oh man! After all of the hard work to get to the top, I had no idea that my exhaustion was going to be replaced with absolute fear. It was windy, it was cold, wait, scratch that, it was freezing. There were vertical drops on both sides and nothing forgiving about what was around me.

Being at the top of a mountain, out of breath, legs burning, and my mind racing about what is to come next reminds me of my early days as a BC Partner. All of this work to just get my business up and running and then what? Oh, yeah, you want me to jump off that cliff over there and just dive in. That is exactly what was happening to me on Saturday morning. I was freaked out, I was scared.

Then, as I looked over the edge, a wave of tranquility came over me. I remembered that this is what life is all about: taking chances and going for it! If I don't give it my all, then I would end up walking back to the lodge and my mouth would be shut when someone asked how my day was. I wasn't about to have gone through all of the hard work to just turn around. No sir. I stood up, inhaled, dropped into the bowl...

There was a rush of adrenalin. A couple of turns and then I was done with the vertical steep . . . I acclimated to what was next. A deep and steep set of powder surrounded by the most beautiful mountain ranges the world has to offer. My fear and adrenaline replaced with confidence and excitement. On top of that I was more aware than I was before, my senses were running on all cylinders. I took a chance, didn't die, and then had my spoils right in front of me. Time to let it rip!

The following minutes were epic. Big turns, jumps, and lots of untapped powder. I was reminded that hard work alone isn't enough. I need to have guts to make the big decisions and move risk aside to enjoy the life that is around me.

It's beyond Business Catalyst for us here at BC Gurus. What we are here to do for you as BC Partners is to inspire you to not only work hard, but have the guts to do big things for your business. I want to give you fuel so that you have strength to climb mountains, take risks, and live a great life. I am jumping in with you - ready to take this community to the next level. Are you ready?

Looking back at the ride, it felt refreshing. So refreshing, that I decided to do it all over again once I got to the bottom :)

Business Catalyst Template: Twitter Bootstrap Prototype

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Our newest Business Catalyst Template in our library is an evolution of our "prototype" template. It is built based on the Twitter Bootstrap framework, pre-wired into Business Catalyst, and fully responsive for different devices/resolutions. As always, our PRO members will receive this template transferred to their Partner Portal as part of their membership bonus. If you are not a member of PRO, you can checkout the template in our store:

Business Catalyst Twitter Bootstrap Prototype Template

Business Catalyst Partners Join Forces, Start JVs or Partnerships

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

In the last couple of years I have heard some amazing stories of Business Catalyst Partners linking up and working together. Just yesterday, I was on a call with Phil Lockwood over at Distill and he was telling me about how he’s working with 5 other BC experts. Maybe it has something to do with that post I did about him earlier this year . . .

Even though I have heard a few stories here and there, I am not satisfied with the amount of collaboration going on in our community. There needs to be more and you need to step up and start doing it. And I’m not talking about collaboration in just sharing knowledge; I’m talking about doing work together.

It appears demand for web and online businesses is up. I know this because we get lots of new leads and folks wanting to work with us every single day.

Couple this growing demand for our services with the wave coming of Creative Cloud and you have a serious recipe for opportunity. If you haven't noticed, Adobe is putting Business Catalyst right at the front of their machine. Sure, there have been some hiccups on the platform recently with their massive investments in infrastructure and growing a much bigger dev team, but these will subside.

Don't let these Creative Cloud integration snaffus get you down when it comes to making investments in your business and how you are aligned with the BC platform.

Find your yang

My belief is that this opportunity is better experienced with other like minded pros like you.

My own story includes collaboration with talent from all over the world, but also a lot of high focused collaboration in building my team here in Denver, Colorado. That pursuit all started when I joined forces with my business partner, Steve Thiel. He added a huge balance to my skill set – we are both good at very different things. The old adage of the sum is greater than its parts certainly holds true here at BCG.

Chances are, if you are working in the “one-man-band” format, you have an area that you desperately need assistance with; you might just not be recognizing it. Have you thought about whom that person would be that you would start a partnership with? Is it a marketer? A search expert? A coder, designer, salesman, project manager?

Spend a moment; write out what you are great at and also what you are not so great at. Does the stuff that you are not great at appeal to someone?

When you interact in the community, be on the lookout for others like you to begin collaborating with in the hopes that you will find someone that loves to do exactly what you aren’t very good at (and of course is talented in that space).

There is no time like now to start.

Business Catalyst Project Feature: ChicksFlicks by Chicago Digital

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Chicago Digital continues to pump out great projects - one of their recent, ChicksFlicks.com, is no exception. Mike and I get into the details about how they won the project and produced some amazing Web App driven content for a very polished finished product.

An in depth look at SimplaCRM with creator Matthew Knighton

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

If you haven't heard of SimplaCRM yet, you should take a look. Matthew Knighton and his team over at MRK Development have been working on this app for a couple of years and it does great things for your BC database. I got a chance to go in depth with Matthew about his history with Business Catalyst and what Simpla is all about.

Note: I am aware that our voices are coming out of separate audio channels - this interview was done with a new Skype app and it is not being very nice to me ;)

Build a BC Shopping Cart for Mobile: Part 2

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 07:00:00 GMT

This is the second video in the two part series that explains how to design and implement a shopping cart that is BC friendly. Part 2 will focus in on the code (CSS and HTML). The assets used for building the cart are available for download.

Resources

Mobile Design Build Assets

Adobe One-Day Meeting

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 07:00:00 GMT

There have already been some post-meeting responses from Jason, Phil, Brett and Brendon. . . I have not read them yet in hopes that I can keep my commentary from my point of view - so if I repeat things that have already been said, please forgive me. I waited a few days to write this reflection so that I could allow any “fanboyism” to fade and I could provide a real account of how the meeting should effect our businesses moving forward.

The idea of this meeting was “accountability and action” - something that Jason Tinnin of SF had presented as a roadmap to get us all on the same page. I wasn’t alone on the trip, there were a few other Partners that made the journey as well:

Jason Tinnin, SimpleFlame
Phil Lockwood, Distill
Brett Stockley, Pretty Pollution
Brendon O’Sullivan, Bosweb Systems

To be honest, it seemed from the Linkedin group that there was both support behind the Partners chosen to attend this all day and a little descent. A lot of Partners thought that the Linkedin thread was the first time a lot of this conversation was being brought up, however, I want to shed light on the fact that there was a several month push that also played a big factor in the when and why of this all day session. On a personal level, I had not been very happy with certain accountabilities since MAX and had written several emails and had many conference calls to push for such a meeting.

Here are a couple of factors that drove the meeting to actually happen:

Support issues
Release issues
Communication issues
Vision issues

So the gauntlet had been set and we hopped on planes and left for San Fran. Thursday morning at 9am we all (around 20 people) took seats in a large conference room and jumped in.

Adobe says, “Partner who?”

Ok, they didn’t really say that, but during the first third of the meeting, it became very clear that above the Business Catalyst team, no one had really spent time with any BC Partners. In the following days from the meeting, a Partner on Linkedin said something along the lines of “What could they have learned from that meeting that they couldn’t have already read on the forums, etc.” Well, I can tell you - a lot.

There is no substitute for meeting people in person, face to face. It is very difficult to understand one’s demeanor or tone over a support thread or forum commentary. Outside of the BC team though, Adobe was very forthcoming about the fact that they understood very little about what the BC Partner’s mindset was, their top concerns, and what they were trying to accomplish.

The 5 of us were able to dig into many scenarios to paint a picture of what the BC Partner is looking to accomplish with their business and for their clients. For you to understand the impact of this, it is very important to separate (for just a moment) the BC team and Adobe. You see, Adobe purchased Business Catalyst and then expanded a team around the product. There was some work done to survey the Partner-base, but Adobe execs had never sat down with a BC Partner to get to know their business. They had spent a lot of time with the technology, not the people selling it (hence why the focus has been on the tech, not the people).

There is no forum thread that is titled Here is the BC Partner Business Model . . . which means it was never really taken into account (based on the conversation that went down). Granted, there are a dozen+ business models that you could wrap around BC, but we were trying to get as much information out to them as possible. Each of us talked about our story - where we were before BC, how we found the product, and how we have used it to grow our own businesses along with our clients’.

They listened intently.

There were people taking notes and then I’m pretty sure there were people taking notes for the people taking notes.

The two points that I hammered in were this:

Partners are a business model of their own, if BC does not intend to invest in what it means to be a Partner, then it needs to be honest and forthcoming about that.
We need a better community fostered via better communication and events.

Adobe says, “We need Partners.”

After we each let out our stories, there was a unanimous response from every single Adobe and Business Catalyst team member in the room that said, “we need you, you are important, and there is no BC without its Partners.” That is paraphrased, but that was the response.

The other major response from Adobe was that they screwed up big time on the communication front. They had some very big initiatives going on . . . some of which will become apparent in the coming weeks, the big one of course Creative Cloud. Infrastructure was a big deal - as one Adobe employee put it: “BC got drafted to the big leagues, it is getting put at the forefront of our products, and it just wasn’t outfitted for that.”

What they admitted they failed to do was to bring Partners into that conversation so that we understood what the implications are to our business models and how we need proceed. They unfolded a lot of their plan to us, and my assessment is that what they are working on is great and all Partners will benefit.

Adobe says, “Lets redefine our Partner program.”

One of our complaints was that the current support, training, and communication paradigm is broken. In order for them to gain any ground in this area, it became clear that they need to work with Partners to redefine what it means to be a BC Partner and how the program is supported.

This doesn’t mean that the idea of “Free,” “Standard,” and “Premium” Partnerships will be changing, but it does mean what Partners get will. There were many ideas thrown out there, and in the coming weeks, they will release official status on what is what, but here is a recap:

Tiered support for paid partners
Partnership hierarchy based on investment in the Platform, # of sites, involvement in the community, experience, etc (think MS & Google certification programs...)
More training and “onboarding” resources for new Partners
Lead generation for Partners looking for more business
Introduce an official “Master Partner” program to encourage more Partners to invest in other Partners
Dedicated account managers
Sales enablement kit
Partner events - local, regional, and world-wide
Partner-focused engineering resources (tackling specific bugs, wishlist, etc)

Adobe says, “Lets improve communication about the Platform.”

This was a big topic - how Adobe communicates its releases and future vision with the Partner community and what room was there for a feedback loop. There was admission that BC communication going dormant after MAX was a big mistake with the onset of the CC initiative.

Here is a recap of initiatives that we will get more clarification on soon:

Monthly Partner “townhall” conference call that is open up to all Partners
Release notes reviews
More blog posts from Alexandru outlining product roadmap & vision
Paid Partner Forum

Adobe says, “Lets fix support.”

How support works and what the plan for it was a big conversation. We also learned that things that were being included in support were bugs and wishlist development . . . which probably should have separate areas.

Partners complain about getting “bad” support, but in many ways there is a conflicting understanding of why that is. In some cases Partners are reporting bugs into support, and when a bug gets inputted, it gets transferred to an unknown engineering list that uses a different bug tracking system. If I am a very experienced BC Partner and I know I have found a bug and I invest 2-3 days replicating and creating a case for that bug, should I be served up a tier 1 support person? No.

Another instance is understanding when and where Live Chat is available. Why tickets get closed, etc.

Here are some initiatives that are getting opened in order to address support:

Tiered support
Separate access to bug reporting / tracking system
Better education about support
Community initiatives so that more Partners can help each other

Adobe says, “Lets open the Platform.”

The engineering initiative behind Business Catalyst right now is focused on game changing improvements to BC. This at times has been called the V3 initiative, which took up a great deal of our conversation. There has been some botched messaging about what BC V3 is and isn’t. As Magda said best: “I surveyed a handful of Partners and asked them what V3 meant to them and they all had very different responses . . . each Partner pretty much said V3 was going to fix whatever problem they had in front of them, whether that was e-commerce, web apps, etc.”

As the BC team presented, they explained that they had realized that BC was a mile wide and one inch deep. At first, they split the engineering team up into teams to tackle each major area of BC . . . only to realize that without significantly changing the infrastructure and “platform” elements of the software, it was never going to reach the intended vision.

They shifted resources then to focus on a major rewrite of the core of BC. The result of this was a lot of intense work that we are beginning to see the fruits of:

Improved performance on the backend
Security fixes
Better APIs
New analytics engine
UI being not just revamped visually, but the actual infrastructure how it works is changing to allow future enhancements
New FTP engine
New HTTP engine
New DNS engine
Operational email improved for guaranteed delivery
Ability to purchase Domains from within BC

One of the key areas of the vision for BC is to allow Partners to develop hosted apps for the Platform. A lot of the infrastructure rewrite is betting that this initiative will provide major long term benefits for the Partner (and developer) community.

A lot of Partners right now are requesting a “longer candlestick” - it became apparent that the BC team is working to build a light bulb. For example, the #1 request on the Wishlist is “Partner - Controlling partner employee access” - is this really the #1 need from Partners? No. Any Partner can attest that there are bigger priorities.

So what does “opening up” mean?

Ability to create node.js apps on the backend (or similar functionality, this is being prototyped)
Liquid everything
Editable admin screens
Everything BC will run from APIs, therefore, the APIs better be damn good because the Admin and all backend functionality will run from this framework . . .
Future marketplace, etc

A lot of this stuff we have been told about at MAX, but we saw some demos, its getting there and very real. I will let Adobe speak for what they intend to deliver and when, but I wanted to make sure that you understood that a lot of what we were looking for is ammo to hold them accountable. I want to see them ship things that impact our businesses and those of our clients.

My conclusion

There was a lot discussed. Now it is up to Adobe to deliver. My personal agenda is that I want to see Partners succeed. No Partners, no vision for me. After spending a day with the team, it was apparent that they were investing everything to make sure Partners could succeed. Furthermore, we have a literal "seat at the table."

Whether we as Partners choose to believe that is true will be seen in the coming weeks and months. If you are looking for a canary in the coal mine, you will not find one here. Based on that one day and my assessment of the team in place, I am doubling-down on my investments in Business Catalyst.

Note: In this post, I took some liberties to talk about initiatives that were brought up in the conversation as part of my recap of what all we talked about. I would expect that in the coming days Adobe will begin to provide some clarity and debrief on which of these are happening in the short-med-long term. If you have any questions or would like to talk further about anything on this list, please reach out to me: brent@bcgurus.com. Thanks.

Adobe One-Day Meeting

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Last week I had the opportunity to go out to Adobe, meet with some heads of heads, and represent a set of growing concerns from the Partner community. The catalyst to this meeting was a Linkedin thread in the BC Cafe that turned ugly and it became readily apparent that Partner needs were not being met by Adobe.

Jason Tinnin, SimpleFlame
Phil Lockwood, Distill
Brett Stockley, Pretty Pollution
Brendon O’Sullivan, Bosweb Systems

Here are a couple of factors that drove the meeting to actually happen:

Support issues
Release issues
Communication issues
Vision issues

So the gauntlet had been set and we hopped on planes and left for San Fran. Thursday morning at 9am we all (around 20 people) took seats in a large conference room and jumped in.

Adobe says, “Partner who?”

They listened intently.

There were people taking notes and then I’m pretty sure there were people taking notes for the people taking notes.

The two points that I hammered in were this:

Partners are a business model of their own, if BC does not intend to invest in what it means to be a Partner, then it needs to be honest and forthcoming about that.
We need a better community fostered via better communication and events.

Adobe says, “We need Partners.”

Adobe says, “Lets redefine our Partner program.”

Tiered support for paid partners
Partnership hierarchy based on investment in the Platform, # of sites, involvement in the community, experience, etc (think MS & Google certification programs...)
More training and “onboarding” resources for new Partners
Lead generation for Partners looking for more business
Introduce an official “Master Partner” program to encourage more Partners to invest in other Partners
Dedicated account managers
Sales enablement kit
Partner events - local, regional, and world-wide
Partner-focused engineering resources (tackling specific bugs, wishlist, etc)

Adobe says, “Lets improve communication about the Platform.”

Here is a recap of initiatives that we will get more clarification on soon:

Monthly Partner “townhall” conference call that is open up to all Partners
Release notes reviews
More blog posts from Alexandru outlining product roadmap & vision
Paid Partner Forum

Adobe says, “Lets fix support.”

Another instance is understanding when and where Live Chat is available. Why tickets get closed, etc.

Here are some initiatives that are getting opened in order to address support:

Tiered support
Separate access to bug reporting / tracking system
Better education about support
Community initiatives so that more Partners can help each other

Adobe says, “Lets open the Platform.”

They shifted resources then to focus on a major rewrite of the core of BC. The result of this was a lot of intense work that we are beginning to see the fruits of:

Improved performance on the backend
Security fixes
Better APIs
New analytics engine
UI being not just revamped visually, but the actual infrastructure how it works is changing to allow future enhancements
New FTP engine
New HTTP engine
New DNS engine
Operational email improved for guaranteed delivery
Ability to purchase Domains from within BC

So what does “opening up” mean?

Ability to create node.js apps on the backend (or similar functionality, this is being prototyped)
Liquid everything
Editable admin screens
Everything BC will run from APIs, therefore, the APIs better be damn good because the Admin and all backend functionality will run from this framework . . .
Future marketplace, etc

My conclusion

Design a BC Shopping Cart for Mobile: Part 1

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

This is the first video in the two part series that explains how to design and implement a shopping cart that is BC friendly. Part 1 focuses on the design side while part 2 will zero in on the code (CSS and HTML). PSD resources are available for download.

Resources

Mobile Design PSD Template

Control what content is shown when a user is logged in/out

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Why would you want to do this?

Below are a few examples of why choosing to hide/show specific content when a user is logged in/out would improve the user experience on a site.

Navigation: There is a specific public navigation and a specific member navigation that should show. Perhaps the public navigation would read, "Create an Account | Login" and the member navigation would read, "My Account | Signout" and

Advertise: If a user is not logged in, you may want to have an advertisement throughout the site that directs people on how to register with your site. Once that person finally registers and logs in, you would want to replace that ad with more member relevant content.

eCommerce: A person is only able to add to their wish list when they are logged in. If they click Add to Wish List when they are logged out, they will be directed to the log in screen. To make this experience a bit more user friendly, you could hide that Add to Wish List link and show some text when a user is logged out to say, "To add to your wishlist, please login". Then once logged in, they will be able to use the functionality of Add to Wish List correctly.

The Code

Place before the closing </head> in a <script>

Place within an external JS file Remember to hide the #member-div within the CSS

Business Catalyst Project Feature: Wicker Park Bucktown by Chicago Digital

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Michael Sallander from Chicago Digital and I get a chance to review their most recent creation for Wicker Park Bucktown's Chamber of Commerce. Mike and his team rolled out a pretty sweet solution for the chamber on Business Catalyst - I think they used just about everything the platform has to offer...great job guys.

Adobe Max: Interview with Kristen Lindsey of Apokrisis

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In my last interview from Adobe Max 2011, I sit down with Kristen Lindsey of Apokrisis based out of Alaska. Kristen has some great insight into how her firm focuses on search and focusing on the businesses goals versus just plain 'ol web design.

Adobe MAX: Interview with Alex Yagolnik of EZ-BC

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Alex and I sit at MAX to catchup about his initiatives for EZ-BC and some of his history in web. I know Alex has some really great new things to announce soon and we will definitely get you more inside info on how those are playing out.

Need BC work in 2012? Distill is hiring.

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 07:00:00 GMT

I always hear people complaining that they don't have enough work . . . but then at the same time I know tons of people that have too much work and need an additional set of hands. This paradox keeps me up at night: knowing that there is unused talent in the world.

Phil Lockwood over at Distill tapped me on the shoulder today and asked if I knew any excellent BC-trained designers or coders.

I don't know, do I?

If you think you have what it takes, checkout his Careers page and get in touch with Phil. Distill has a deep history in the Denver to international scene of busting out some incredible work . . . and better yet, its all on Business Catalyst.

For those agencies out there that are in the same predicament, send me a note and I will see what we can do to promote your openings and get this talent placed.

For those freelancers looking for some additional work, you should also send me a note with some of your recent work and qualifications.

If I can connect the dots, I will gladly . . . if all else I can broadcast a post and get you some coverage. There are no excuses in 2012 for not CRUSHING IT!

Business Catalyst Project Feature: Camp Newfound Owatonna by Devon Reehl

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Devon Reehl takes us on a journey through his recent project for Camp Newfound Owatonna and how he took this family camp from being bogged down with paper applications to a complete Online Business solution. Devon utilizes Web Forms, invoices, online payments and much more to bring this camp into the web age.

Adobe MAX 2011 in Review Part 2: MAXamillion

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

This article is Part 2 in my 3 part series on Adobe MAX 2011. To check out my first post, visit Adobe Max 2011 in Review Part 1: Getting Inspired. Photography courtesy of Brendan at Bos Web Solutions.

Rest not on Adobe MAX Sunday . . .

My team would arrive in the early afternoon, but I had already lined up some 1:1 sessions with 3 different BC teams to checkout some fresh of the fresh coming down the pipe from engineering.

Bogdan & Lucian: Liquid + E-commerce

If you haven’t already seen the releases about this topic, I recommend you have a look. I got an opportunity to sit down and play with some liquid code prototypes and see what they had done with implementing it into the e-commerce system. If I was a kid and BC was a candy store, I was right in the thick of it. Pig in mud.

This kind of pre-release viewing gets my creative juices going. As they unfolded the new coding framework in front of me, I could just see all of these little BC-barriers that we have been coding workarounds for or not getting complete control over start to disappear in front of my eyes. The most inspiring thing was to think about all of the cases that hadn’t even come up yet - the customer requests that were bound to happen in the next 12 months and to think that system limitations were no longer going to be a part of our vocabulary made me ecstatic.

Full control over:

add to cart actions
e-commerce data-layer at any time and how you wanted it
your own loops, conditional statements, and as many template files as your heart can desire (us BC folks’ hearts can desire a lot of templates)
a lot, lot more

Dragos: SBO needs, new partnership programs, extensibility of BC

As Lucian, Bogdan and I wrapped up our walkthrough, Dragos joined us. We dived right into some new screens they had developed for email marketing campaigns. These screens were really exciting for me. Email marketing has been one of the most cost-effective ways for small businesses to market to their customers for years and it was great to see that BC was developing some powerful, integrated tools:

better campaign controls
multiple lists, exclusion lists
setting goals with conversion funnel-type metrics
and editor that allows you to pull in CMS data like products right into the templates in a simplified interface for SBOs....hell yeah!

You must realize that through all of these conversations, the amount of ideas that were pouring out were like 1 per several seconds. The most amazing part was how many times I would bring up a recommendation based on valid-customer experience and their response was “yeah, we can do that, Bogdan, make a note of that” or whatever. This was such a different experience than my previous year at MAX. These guys were out here not to just show off their platform at a conference, they wanted to get hardcore feedback in real time from top Partners. I couldn’t have been happier to oblige.

You could feel this competitiveness in the air. The BC team wanted to get this product taken up 10 notches in record time and they were doing it in real time.

The 100+ sites partners 4 hour power-lunch

Dragos and I headed down for lunch at the Westin to meetup with all of the other Partners that were on the super-special-list of folks asked to attend the 100+ sites lunch. I’m totally kidding, it was a Linkedin post, but it did seem that everyone there was top-performers.

This gathering quite possibly made the entire conference worth going to. The roster:

HotPress Web: yours truly
SimpleFlame: Jason, Cesar, Dan, Curtiss
Bos Web Systems: Brendon O'Sullivan
Chicago Digital: Mike & Scott
Frisco Websites: Bill Sholar
Pretty Pollution: Brett & Matt
Stevens Advertising: Mike
Adobe: Alexandru, Bogdan, & Dragos

Some of the top items we discussed were related to how we manage large inventories of sites in the Partner portal, rolling out v3 UI training, Partner-users permission settings, Partner support, creating “template” sites that can be moved between Partners, not deleting trial sites, integrating BC with Xero, getting Partners access to other Adobe tools to help sell more, promoting Partners through the Adobe network, BC marketplace, liquid, “Community” tab, “Master Partners”, and then a bunch of BC-related nerdy jokes and laughs.

Marius & Max: The New Web Apps Framework, Lets Name Some Stuff

The BC intensity was beginning to set in. Sunday afternoon was barely starting and we had already gotten so much accomplished. Heading up to meet with Marius and Max to review the soon to come Web Apps overhaul was exciting. Web Apps has been one of those BC features that we have pushed really, really hard. It seems like whenever a client-situation comes up that doesn’t fit a standard mold, I always go to this feature and say: “Yeah, we can do that with Web Apps.”

Top three requests in order of importance for web apps: defining multiple templates, true relational tables, and an API. Marius gets right into it, no primer, he just has me sit down and dig right in. He opens his laptop and says, “Ok, go.” Meaning, figure out how to use the liquid-enabled super-alpha version of the new framework, “here it is, what do you think.”

After fumbling around a bit, we explore ideas for better naming conventions. There is a new 4th layer that was being introduced right in front of my eyes. At present, Web Apps are really only three layers - you have the Web App, the fields, and the items. In the new framework, it was Web App, tables, fields, and of course, items.

On top of this, their plan was to only have a rudimentary interface in the backend for editing - more importantly, you would create your own editing interface that would be accessible from the BC-admin. Take it a step further and the whole thing is powered with Liquid templating: goodbye Backup Listview.

It was a rough cut, no doubt. Our conversation wandered into not only how the API would be enabled, but more importantly, how Web Apps were now going to be able to be packaged up and transferred between Partners. This went further and touched on the idea of a Web App Marketplace . . . yeah, that’s right, just let that one soak in. How with this new framework, things like a booking engine, blog, donation database, real estate listing system could be solved extremely well by a single Partner, adding to by another Partner, and turned into a single best-of-the-best solution that could be used by all Partners.

Something that gets me even more excited is the idea that Partners are going to be able to earn a bit of revenue from these Apps. Earning revenue means a higher quality product. Higher quality product when it comes to these types of add-ins means that BC is going to kick the Opensource platforms asses.

The rest of my team had arrived at the hotel, it was time to go meetup with the HPW crew, freshen up, and head to drinks at the Figuora.

Drinks on Business Catalyst

Steve and I met up at the hotel - looked like the rest of the HotPress team was already en route to the initial BC social. Monday was our first official launch of PRO - we knew that a lot of the top Partners would be hanging out with the BC team at the Figuora Hotel for drinks the night before. I figure, we should all have some standout t-shirts promoting PRO:

Brent: Helping Partners Make Cash Money Daily
Carol: Got BC?
Chad: Light Weights Need Not Apply
Erick: Eat. Sleep. BC. Repeat.
Steve: Serious Partners Only
Nicole: Only PROs can see my goods

They were a hit. Lots of familiar faces in the room: SimpleFlame crew, Adam Broadway, Jackson Palmer, Colin Frost, Kathryn Hayden, Katie Zulanas, Brad Lawryk, Brendon O’Sullivan, Brett Stockley, Matt, Chicago Digital guys, and lots of new people I had yet to meet.

I have to say, one of the coolest things about getting BC Gurus going has been solid recognition throughout the community. A lot of people were very forward coming up to us (throughout the whole conference) which makes networking a whole lot easier.

I was a bit surprised (not sure why) at how many Partners were already excited about PRO. Now, we had obviously been well into our pre-launch marketing campaign, but the amount of questions I had on price and specifics was really, really encouraging: we might just pull this off I thought.

Getting to know people is a passion of mine. Not just learning about what they are doing with their business, but getting a grip on what they do in their spare time, where they are from, and some of the cool stuff they have going on in their life is a real plus. So many of the attendees had made an effort over the year to reach out to us at BCG, comment on our posts, interact with us on Linkedin, and the BC forum - but it just connects the dots so well to meet in person.

One of the guys I really enjoyed meeting in person was Alex Yolgonik from EZ-BC - we had exchanged countless Skype and email conversations but never really spoke. He had some great initiatives coming down the pipe along with some entertaining client/project stories. Oh, I guess we all have a handful of those special clients.

Drinks led to pizza at CPK, which then for Steve and I - we had to get back to the hotel and actually get this PRO thing off the ground . . . the rest of the team decided to see what LA was all about at night.

Adobe Keynotes are Big

The morning got moving quick, hit the gym, then breakfast, on to the keynote. We still weren’t done with PRO - needed some more time to get our initial Bonus content together and some other house keeping.

I won’t go into too much detail, but walking into the Nokia theater for this presentation is a little like going to a concert. Loud music, full on floor to ceiling projects on the entire front-facing walls of the auditorium, and lots of anticipation. The presentation breaks out with a violist and dancers which turns into digital dancers, broken violin bow strings, and even more loud techno music with explosion sounds and lights and all that.

The single most impressive thing of the whole presentation was at the very beginning of the keynote address, they present the idea of the Creative Cloud with one of their very first bullet points: Business Catalyst.

They didn’t go into any detail or show the application itself, but this one piece was such a big change compared to MAX 2010. This feature told me what I needed to know - BC was going to play an integral role in the future of Adobe and more importantly, in the future of where the web is headed.

Lots of whizbang at these keynotes, I would almost say that its worth going to MAX just to get amped at these presentations. Once it wrapped up, it was on to the Community Pavilion for Steve and I - we had to get PRO launched.

Going Live

Loading up all of our initial content - the 40 training videos and the Playbook content took a while. I focused on that while Steve wrapped up our initial email sequences. Once we were ready, we made the registration page live. Only seconds after opening the doors we had our first registration - hadn’t even sent out our first email: awesome.

Steve sent our initial blast. This was a pretty major benchmark of accomplishment for us. For the last 11 years, we had been hustling a service business, hours sold - for the first time, we entered the world of scalable products. I’m not saying that we had expectations of PRO blowing up and being a household name, but it was our first home-grown product.

My one concern with our initial launch was not having enough content once people signed up. We had about 10 pieces of content for our Playbook and another 40 client-training videos, but I was confident that in the following month we could deliver and delight.

Our initial blast started to settle in - members were signing up. It was such a great rush - checking my phone and seeing familiar names giving PRO a try. Our first forum post, our second, PRO was in full swing.

So far the big drawback of launching PRO in conjunction with MAX was that we spent the majority of our first day huddled over our laptops.

The first (non-lab) Business Catalyst session was delivered from Bogdan on the future of BC with all of the v3 initiatives. Bogdan did a great job presenting the content - if you haven’t had a chance to read his post on the BC blog, take a look (http://www.businesscatalyst.com/_blog/BC_Blog/post/What_is_Business_Catalyst_V3/) - it gives a much better summary than I could plus his video from MAX is there for your viewing pleasure.

Colin and his Russian Army hat

Arriving at the Meet the Team series continued our immersion into Business Catalyst for the week. This session was in the evening guarded with pizza and beer. All of the Adobe BC team was present, but this was an opportunity for non-BC-oriented folks to wander through all of the different Adobe teams, get to know them, and network with other enthusiasts.

In my head, all of the conversations were starting to meld together. PRO, Web Apps, E-commerce, Marketplace, API, Selling, Pricing, Replication, Design, Mobile, Templates, Email Marketing, CRM, Operations, Accounts, Upselling, Cross-selling, Support, Xero, Freshbooks, Accounting, Projects, Managing, Hiring, Firing . . . we were covering it all and just letting it fly.

At one point in the mix, Alex from EZ presented Colin Frost from Adobe with a Soviet military hat - Colin wore it proudly along with a cigar that he had on hand (of course he did). Apparently Alex’s suitcase coming over to the States was of interest to some extent . . . it was full to the brim of ex-Soviet military garb to give as gifts. Us Americans never tire of the classics.

Another day wraps to a close, we decide to take our team back to the hotel to get a quick debrief over some drinks. One of my favorite parts of MAX was getting to spend more time with the HotPress team. We have had the fortune of creating a very close-nit family that enjoys each other’s company - even if half of the conversation is aggressive banter, with the more than occasional mom joke. So it goes . . .

Multiscreen, JQuery Wizardy, and Party Time

Tuesday starts off strong with Jorge Taylor introducing the concept of multi-screen for Business Catalyst. For most of us experienced Partners, this was a review of things that we had already been messing with for the majority of the summer, however, Jorge had a fresh perspective on the subject and the content was solid.

After Jorge’s presentation we headed over to the second Adobe Keynote. If you haven’t had a chance to watch, here you go.

In between presentations, Steve and I were plugging away at PRO, getting questions answered, new content queued up, and working through our marketing series. Besides that, getting my MAX presentation ready for Wednesday morning was my #1 priority.

Later that afternoon, Jason Tinnin of Simpleflame presented on some really cool stuff they’ve pulled off with JQuery. This technology is so important to the Business Catalyst scene at present - without direct server side access, its very important to be able to manipulate the user experience based on client need. Jason and his team presented five very solid examples. His presentation wrapped up with a quick preview of their new template builder prototype system - pretty damn cool guys.

Every year Adobe has a session called “Sneaks” where they preview new technologies that may or may not end up in an actual Adobe product. These are really, really cool techy, nerdy previews and they are hosted by someone famous. Last year we had William Shatner - this year was Rain Wilson. I have to say, if I was presenting something, I would have probably preferred to be interacting with Shatner. Not because I’m some closet-trekie or something, but because Rain was pretty ruthless to most of the presenters. We, the audience, did benefit on an entertainment level from this.

Party like its hawt

After “Sneaks”, it was time to Bash. This annual party that Adobe throws is unparalleled. I had heard that Weezer was going to be performing which I was pretty stoked about. The MAX conference is in downtown Los Angeles - there isn’t a whole lot of space to work with, but Adobe created an outdoor extravaganza.

There were these crazy stilt-crab-walkers, fire twirlers, big stages setup with performance artists, DJs, projected Wii on the side of buildings, every delicious food truck in LA plus Wolfgang Puck catering, and a Willy Wonka style dessert palace that had everything from fresh-made donuts to candies, brownies and massive rice crispy treats. Add on top of this the loud music, spotlights, and the main stage which Weezer was going to headline, and you have first-class entertainment worth the MAX ticket by itself.

Figure a little video will give you a better understanding...

Decided to take it in pretty early - I was presenting my topic for MAX first thing on Wednesday, so time to get some rest.

Next week I will be covering the final day and my perspective on why Business Catalyst is going to revolutionize Online Business forever: The Business Catalyst Renaissance.

Adobe Max 2011 in Review Part 1: Getting Inspired

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

With MAX behind me by over two months, I decided its time to give my op-ed on the weeks leading up to MAX, the week itself, and some notes about why Business Catalyst is going to be the top website platform in the world faster than we think.

A long time coming

For over a year before we launched it, we had been discussing our plans for PRO. Steve and I knew that we had built a successful company with Business Catalyst at the core and it seemed many others were in the same pursuit. Our hypothesis was that if we exposed everything that we were doing, from business, design, and code to even our one-on-one idea sessions, we could inspire others to achieve their own success, in their own way.

Business Catalyst was an important piece of the PRO equation, but it was more the equal sign than the variables itself. It was the equation, but what we wanted to help others with was all of those areas of our business that we had tried and failed and gotten back up and made right. We wanted to help Partners from around the world avoid learning about nuances of BC the hard way. I personally wanted to teach people with strong design and programming backgrounds the art of selling as this was my own personal journey. From coder to salesman to entrepreneur.

We had a dream to use our skills to give other BC Partners an opportunity to be more profitable, get more deals, and build more projects. In order to carry this out, we needed a platform to deliver content in a more aggressive way than simply a blog post here and there. We needed to persuade Partners to invest in the product so we could use the investment to double-down and solve the tough problems for BC Partners and all they would have to do is part with a small amount of money each month.

Getting inspired

The time was coming to draw a line in the sand and just get it done. Several months before MAX, I was on a plane to Ethiopia for my 4th volunteer trip in as many years. I sit as chair on a board of directors that works to build libraries in Ethiopia and solving the tough problem of literacy in the impoverished country.

Between trips to the US embassy, meeting with the heads of Peace Corps, and visiting our library projects throughout the country, I had a lot of time to think about the big picture. Taking two weeks away from HotPress is not easy, but in hindsight it was two weeks well spent thinking about HotPress. One of my mentors had recommended that I read Start with Why by Simon Sinek. If you are anything like me, you constantly have that stack of books that you intend to read and rarely make a dent in, but one entrepreneur to another: make time for this book.

I won’t go into details, but over the couple of weeks, I discovered my Why, the deep down truth that made me tick.

I live to inspire and nurture entrepreneurs to make positive change for themselves.

My Why is the result of reflecting on my recent teaching of high school students through Junior Achievement, my 11 years as Managing Partner at HotPress Web, and all the way back through my countless schemes to turn products or services in my early years on this earth into a viable business. Most notable being my sea shell business that I ran on the beach when I was less than 10 in which I sold sea shells to passer-byers on the Balboa Beach Boardwalk.

The real accomplishment here was not the many nickels, dimes, and quarters that I was exchanging for items that were right there in the sand in bottomless supply, but that I had enlisted my older brother and older cousins to be my laborers to scan the beaches for top quality product in exchange for a share of the profits. I stood guard at the boardwalk slinging my wears, knowing whole heartidly that being a younger, much cuter kid, I could maximize our sales efforts.

After I returned from my trip, it became very clear that if Steve and I were going to pull this whole PRO community off, we needed to set a deadline for it and stick to it. We knew MAX was coming up and knowing that we would be taking most of the team, plus a week off, and then all of the prep time for the conference already needing to be there, just figured: why not, sounds like a good time to launch a product...

The weeks before

Putting the pieces together to launch PRO was a lot of fun. We had a lot of ideas of what content we wanted to share with the Partner community, and distilling that down to a first release took some finessing. We figured if we were going to get to the really fun stuff, the tough parts of building Online Businesses, we needed to first get a lot of basics out to our members. We chose to focus on some project process stuff, introductions to selling BC, and some hot button topics that we had heard a lot of Partners need the answers or inspiration to over the last couple of years.

There were more rudimentary problems to solve though, like how we were going to have our staff record high quality screencasts when they were on the production floor and everyone was busy team-working on projects, talking to clients, and listening to Phantogram’s Mouth Full of Diamonds on full blast. Our recording and focus office was born.

I needed a low-reflective white board surface and bought some Cre8 paint which required me to sand down a textured wall and apply the toxic solution. This seemingly simple task took over 8 hours of sanding (with an electric sander) . . . which then covered our entire office in a thin film of dust . . . which required another 5 hours to clean. Next time: hire professional.

Steve and I constructed a low-cost lighting setup consisting of high-intensity halogen bulbs inside of hanging Chinese lanterns on an adjustable racking system that allows us to move the lights around as needed. Pretty ghetto, but so far its working out (he as long as the video looks top notch, who cares right?).

All of this stuff was a good time, but we still had to build the actual content platform itself and oh yeah . . . actually produce content. We wanted to focus on our members and not on constantly marketing the product, so with this, we decided to outline a limited release marketing strategy. This way we would open up for new membership every couple of months and in the between areas we could focus 100% on our members without being distracted with new people joining or lining up ad campaigns or something.

As we produced our first round of content, prepped bonus material, and polished our prototype, we scheduled our launch to coincide with the MAX conference, a decision I would regret for a bit, but ultimately it turned out incredible.

Somewhere along the way I woke up in the middle of the night and penned an idea that I called “Open My Kimono” which ended up becoming one of our core marketing slogans along with a video that . . . , well, you know how that turned out.

Getting the right people on the bus

This would be my second MAX conference to attend; after being inspired, motivated, and overwhelmed by the Adobe crew in 2010, I wanted my team to get a piece of that. We decided that our core production team would all come with Steve and I as a professional development / just good ‘ol sweet time excursion.

One of the great things about Adobe MAX is the emphasis on creative expression beyond just Business Catalyst. We knew that everyone would have a great time networking and getting to know the BC team, but I also knew that having everyone be a part of an event like this, would help us continue to innovate as a company.

If you haven’t already taken a read, our team wrote follow ups right after they got back that we posted to our blog about a month ago: Chad, Nicole, Erick, and Carol.

Stay tuned for next week's post: MAXamillion

Adobe Max: Interview with Bill Sholar of Frisco Websites

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

While out at Adobe MAX 2011, I had a chance to sit down will Bill Sholar of Frisco Websites and talk about his very unique history in the web business. He was building websites on a boat . . . yeah, that's right.

[update: Since filming this, Bill has actually moved his focus away from Zoot Interactive and is 100% back working on Frisco Websites.]

Video Transcript

Brent: Hey, this is Brent Weaver from BC Gurus out here in Los Angeles at the Adobe MAX Conference with Bill Sholar from Zoot Interactive, formerly Frisco Websites. If you've seen him on any of the LinkedIn groups or seen his partner website, he recently updated that company.

Bill: Yes.

Brent: So we're out here, it's a Saturday the MAX is starting. Really, a lot of the festivities get going Sunday through Wednesday, but we're just chatting a little Business Catalyst today. So welcome to BC Gurus.

Bill: Thank you.

Brent: Bill, tell us a little bit about your history? Where did you get interested in web and how did that all start for you?

Bill: Well, I first got interested in web when I was working for a company overseas - in Saudi Arabia of all places. The segment of the organization that I ran had the responsibility of putting together a web presence for our company internally.

Brent: Okay.

Bill: And so I spent some time mostly supervising that, bringing people in to make that work, getting my hands dirty a little bit doing it, and playing around with that technology. That was shortly before I was able to take early retirement, because they have a very generous early retirement plan over there.

Brent: Okay.

Bill: I could retire at 50.

Brent: 50?

Bill: Yeah.

Brent: They retire at 50 in Saudi Arabia?

Bill: They allow you to retire early at 50, so that was good. We then did something we had dreamed of doing for a long time - moved onto a boat and went up and down the east coast for several years. And to keep myself occupied I just kept doing web stuff, and enjoyed myself doing it.

What I mostly did was I worked with some designers who would send me design. I would turn them into websites for their customers initially. That allowed me to deal with a very low- bandwidth communications from a boat.

Brent: Yeah, I was going to say. Just to give some frame of reference here, you're doing web design on a boat. And this isn't like last year, this is 2001.

Bill: 2001.

Brent: 2001. So, you said you were doing that from a mobile.

Bill: From a mobile, albeit at anchor, out in the middle of the Inter- coastal Waterway somewhere off the coast of Georgia or you name it.

Brent: Okay. And what was the speed of that modem? I'm just curious.

Bill: I think it was 9600 baud or so.

Brent: All right, that's, I'm just trying to reminisce a little bit.

Bill: It was pretty slow; it was a plug-in to a cell phone. That was before you had cell phone modems.

Brent: Wow! That's the real deal. So when did Business Catalysts come into the picture for you guys?

Bill: From 2004 when we moved back ashore I started doing websites. One of the things I looked for was a way that clients could do their own updates. That was a little bit early for that type of a thing, for entry-level sites, but I was able to find some stuff I liked. It wasn't great but it was better than nothing. We couldn't do e-commerce. We could not do much of the web database stuff. There was a lot we couldn't do but they could update their own sites.

2008, summer of 2008, I discovered BC totally by accident. Just stumbled across it.

Brent: I think our story is somewhere on the same thing, so we can relate.

Bill: Okay. And it was immediately useful for a project that I was about to turn down for an e-commerce site, because you're not going to do an e-commerce site without having the overhead that I would've had in the older system.

Well, then I discovered I could also do some data-related stuff, so we did a membership organization site, where members can update their own information; there's a directory online and things I couldn't have done before.

Brent: So using web apps to do some of that stuff. Okay.

Bill: Exactly, right. So I started using more and more of the tools and finding more and more places to use it. So all of a sudden we were able to take . . . I used to joke and say we're taking Fortune 500 quality back-end stuff we could allow the Unfortunate 5,000 clients to use. Again, these were all mom-and- pop businesses, or typically one-person businesses, so their ability to pay was pretty low. They couldn't afford custom development of SQL, ASP, PHP stuff.

Brent: Got you.

Bill: So it really worked out well for us. So from July through I think the end of October we did about 15 sites, and we're well along the way to being really serious into BC.

Brent: So you guys, I mean when you signed up, earlier you said it took you a couple of days to make the decision to jump in, and within a few months you had 15 sites.

Bill: Right.

Brent: Okay. So you guys went at it.

Bill: And the reason I remember that date was because November we made the decision to rent some office space. We had been a "work from Starbucks" kind of a place at that point.

Brent: Okay.

Bill: And we were looking at what's our run rate with BC? And at that point, we were doing about a website a week. And so we said if this keeps up, then we definitely need space. We need space to add more people, we need space to grow. And it's pretty much continued since at about that rate.

Brent: Very cool. So now, July of 2008 to October of 2011, how many BC sites have you guys done?

Bill: I think we've done probably 300, ballpark.

Brent: Okay.

Bill: I would say two-thirds of those are current, live running sites. One- third are for sites that were either for a short-term purpose - and I'll tell you about an interesting one of those that came from Haiti of all places in a second - or, unfortunately some other business owners, being start-ups, decided they had to abandon their small business and go back into the working world.

Brent: You mentioned startups. You have kind of a niche or focus area where you got all these clients?

Bill: At the time, from 2004 to a few months ago, I would say that probably 90% of our businesses were startups. Some of them turned into bigger businesses; most of them were startups. We're in a very fast-growing city. The census says we're the fastest one in the country.

Brent: Okay. And this is Frisco, Texas?

Bill: Frisco, Texas. And that brings in a lot of people that are starting lots of businesses. Lots of service businesses primarily, some retail. But that gave us great opportunity for growth.

Brent: So where . . . I'm just trying to give some BC partners some navigation tools.

Bill: Okay.

Brent: Where would you find contacts that are starting new businesses?

Bill: Best place for us was Chamber of Commerce and similar sorts of networking groups. When I first started in 2004, or moved ashore in 2004 and made the business a little bit more of a real business, I was a solo web guy. I went to the Chamber of Commerce every single week for their networking meetings, a couple of other ones that were similar types of meetings. After about six months seeing other web people come and go - they'd stop in and visit and leave - after about six months of steady attendance, I started getting referrals. I'd say, "Why'd you call me?" "Well, I talked to so-and-so and they said you're the web guy." Those people who were referring me only knew me from seeing me once a week.

Brent: Got you.

Bill: So that consistent presence in the market where those people went was tremendous for me.

Brent: So being able to keep that kind of front-of-mind presence within the - not just the people that were attending those meetings from the new business side, but the actual organizers with the Chamber?

Bill: It's mostly just the people who attended.

Brent: Okay.

Bill: The other attendees. Now, while that was happening there was only two other web people who consistently showed up. One was a designer who - and she's going to see this and going to kill me - but her programming frankly wasn't very good, but my design was even worse.

Brent: Okay.

Bill: So a mutual friend convinced us to sit down and have coffee together. We discovered that we each had skills in areas where the other had weaknesses, and for a year we decided to try this out without telling anybody that we were teaming up. We were farming work to each other on a contract-type basis behind the scenes. And after a year we said that this is working great, so we teamed up and that's been since 2007.

Brent: Okay.

Bill: So before we started working with BC.

Brent: So you're focusing on the code aspect of it, she's focusing on the design aspect, so you guys kind of found somebody that you don't do well better than you do.

Bill: Right.

Brent: And that helped you in some way?

Bill: It helped us in a couple of ways. Obviously the business was better because just the internal side. Let's say a project took 15 hours for me to do. In the old days that would've been 10 hours of design, struggling, and 5 hours of coding. For her it would've been 10 hours of struggling with coding and 5 hours of design.

When we teamed up, now we're spending 10 hours doing a project that we previously spent 15 on. So the client pays the same, we make more per hour, client gets a better result, so that worked out well.

Now at the same time that's happening, the clients that she couldn't' satisfy previously because of coding struggles, all of a sudden she has more to offer them. I had more to offer my old clients where I couldn't offer as much in the design world. So we started seeing about a tripling of our inquiries and so forth, not just doubling, so that part by itself worked very well.

Brent: So talking to other partners out there, if you're the one- person show, and there's a part of your projects that you're maybe not good at or that you struggle with, I think this is a good example of reaching out or finding somebody to kind of do that part of the business for you, whether it's on a contract basis or if you're looking as going as far as a business partner or employees and that kind of stuff.

We have, at HotPress we have several staff people that their designs are a hundred times better than I ever did. Their code, it's cleaner, it's sharper. They're up on the new stuff. So finding those resources I think can be a really important move to grow your business.

Bill: Right. I will say, be careful. We spent a year trying this out without anyone knowing we were doing it. And that proved that it was a good match. We've met folks, and we've had some clients we get a call from once in a while that were partners, and one partner calls and says they have a court order saying the other partner's not involved anymore. Oh, great. I mean, definitely want to avoid those sort of situations!

Brent: Got you, interesting. So now that business was Frisco Websites - that's evolved or changed.

Bill: It has changed.

Brent: Okay.

Bill: It's changed in a couple of ways. One is, as we grew and more people heard of us we started being asked to do bigger and bigger jobs, for bigger and bigger clients. We typically stayed away from very large projects, just not wanting to spend the time to go after, to travel two hours to a big meeting, do a proposal and so forth. So we stayed away from those initially.

But one of our clients was an advertising agency that needed someone to help do websites for their clients. And there it wasn't a sale to be made; the ad agency had made the sale. So we started doing some work with them and after a while we decided that that too was a partnership that was a good match.

They brought even better design and more design for a different category of clients. They brought a whole sales effort that we didn't have previously, and brought us into a whole market we never had before.

Brent: I want to hear the whole story, but one thing that we've done as a business is for a while I was going after ad agencies, marketing agencies, PR agencies because they can kind of be a constant flow of clients.

Bill: Right.

Brent: You know, you sell one ad agency and really, you're getting this annuity of new projects as they sell them.

Bill: Right.

Brent: Kind of expanding your sales force without actually hiring salespeople. So you guys were working with them, that was working out well.

Bill: It was working out well. And together, I mean, they initially made an offer that sounded sort of like they wanted to buy us, and we weren't all that interested. And their motivation at the time, they wanted something they could control because they'd been through a variety of people coming in and doing things and then going away. And then when they needed work done on it those people may not be available anymore, or all kind of issues related to transient web people. So having someone there made more sense.

But we valued our freedom; we valued the ability to run our own business, so we settled on an arrangement where we formed a third company. It wasn't Frisco Websites, it wasn't the ad agency - we formed Zoot Interactive.

Brent: I just want to show these.

Bill: Okay.

Brent: This is the Zoot card.

Bill: Yeah.

Brent: It's the real deal, so if you guys are making your own cards, just know that Bill has the die-cut Z.

Bill: That's right. So we did that, and they are partners in the web company. And at the same time we invested in the ad agency, so we are partners in the ad agency as well.

Again, it's a partnership arrangement, not a contract arrangement. We each have - the other's success is in our own self-interest, so that's working out very well.

Brent: Now the client, now your customer dynamic, going from these new businesses that are forming up real quick, to now you're doing a little bit bigger projects, it sounds like?

Bill: We're doing I'd say three levels of businesses. The original businesses we were dealing with, the ones who really had almost no money to be frank, were not as able to take care of them as we were in the past, partly because we're using now multiple staff people to solve a problem.

Like it or not, a single web programmer who owns the business is going to code a lot faster and knows exactly what he wants to get done - when he was involved in the sale, the creative brief, everything - than when you start dividing up duties among other people. So our costs have gone up a little bit, so we can't do the super-small jobs as much as we could in the past. We're still trying to solve that, and I think we have solutions in mind.

Our next level up is the clients who, they're funded well-enough to get going and get a good business running, and they really want a well-done website that is taken care of for them in many cases, not necessarily them doing it themselves, which was our previous market.

We're also dealing with the large customers of the ad agency. Those are typically people for whom we are simply a small bit in the whole process, and in effect the agency is our client even though we're partners in it. So we do whatever they need as well.

Brent: Interesting.

Bill: So from, you know, you can add several zeros onto the values of some of the projects that way.

Brent: That's pretty cool. So you mentioned earlier you did a random project for somebody in Haiti? I mean, we've done client business all over the world. I have yet to do business in Haiti; sounds interesting.

Bill: It was interesting and it also taught me a lesson. The lesson was: Make sure you know what the client really wants to do before you do the entire project.

We had an inquiry from somebody who was working for the Peace Corps in Haiti, and he wanted a website done that would allow people to go in and submit projects they were working on as part of the Peace Corps. The public could go in and look at those projects, ask questions about them. All kind of activity going on with Peace Corps projects.

So this seemed like a perfect fit for BC. We built the project for him, gave him a nice break, but he still paid the cost of getting the job done.

The job was only up and running for one month and he called me up and said, "Okay, we can drop the website now." I was puzzled. Why in the world would you drop the website after one month? He was, like, "I only wanted it because I wanted to show the Peace Corps what I thought they ought to be doing as a website for Peace Corps volunteers."

Brent: Wow.

Bill: This was my demo. Now I've done it, I don't need it anymore.

Brent: Wow, ouch.

Bill: I would have obviously have done a lot less rigorous, behind-the- scenes coding for how the data's handled and so forth, and saved them some money if I'd known it was simply a proof of concept.

Brent: Gotcha. So understanding those objectives seems like a very important thing.

Bill: Yeah.

Brent: So what does the future of Business Catalyst hold for your company?

Bill: We have actually added a couple of web partner portals.

Brent: Okay.

Bill: So we have multiple premium partner portals because part of what we're going to be doing is doing some branding for some companies that will have many clients of their own - not so much clients, branch locations, restaurants, for example - where they have hundreds of locations. Well, they want their own branding on their location's back-ends. So when the restaurant manager logs in he sees his restaurant's logo, not my logo on it.

Brent: So you're doing some franchise-based websites or multi-location stuff?

Bill: Yes, basically multi-locations. So we're doing, we're starting with that. We are continuing to work with BC almost exclusively. If we don't have to have - like we've got one PHP project we have to use - otherwise they're all BC. And it's not quite the same reasons as before. Most of our clients now, the new clients, don't go into the back-end and update their own websites. They don't add products and so forth. A few do, but most don't.

But for us, what we find is the ability to have work done in our organization. I can have my superstar programmers work on things that require a superstar programmer. I can have a person we hired, who used to be one of our clients when we were dealing with startups, she works for us putting content in, adding pictures, formatting newsletters for clients and sending them; uploading their data and so forth.

So I've got multiple levels of people in my organization and it's much easier to work with those levels when I've got a tool like BC. I don't have to have a whole room full of superstars. They can be stars in their own areas; they don't have to be all J-query, JavaScript superstars.

Brent: I've personally found that having Business Catalyst is kind of our lowest common denominator; allowed everybody in our team to work at that same manner. If you have a client that calls up, for instance, has a support issue, if I pick up the phone, if somebody across the office picks up the phone, we all understand Business Catalyst.

Bill: Exactly.

Brent: We don't ask them, "Hey, what version of Drupal are you on?" Or, "What's this site? I didn't really work on this project site so I don't get this site."

I mean, that's stuff I think you really get rid of with Business Catalyst, and then you get to focus on maybe what's most important in your business, which is growing your business, finding new opportunities. Sounds like you guys are definitely loading up on some new, big opportunities.

Bill: Yeah.

Brent: So that's good stuff.

Bill: I agree very much with the issue of anybody being able to help. Because if our account manager gets a phone call from one of our clients that needs a text change, something changed that's something that a good BC user will be able to fix, he fixes it without submitting a ticket into our work.

Brent: Absolutely, that helps big-time. And I've even found that, you know, when I'm in client meetings on the sales side, I understand the system. It can be part of my sales presentation or a client meeting, all the way down to every single person at the company all understands the same platform.

Bill: Exactly.

Brent: The same access levels, all that kind of stuff.

Bill: Exactly.

Brent: Well, cool. Bill, thank you for joining us today at BC Gurus.

Bill: Sure.

Brent: I'm looking forward to probably doing some follow-ups with you. I think you're going after some cool verticals, some cool niches. I know a lot of partners out there are trying to figure out how to do that themselves, so I think that's a conversation that's probably worth its own video. So I'm sure I'll be hassling you for that again sometime soon.

Bill: Yes.

Brent: So thanks.

Bill: Thank you.

Brent: Stay tuned for more videos from BC Gurus.com. We'll have lots of great content coming out at MAX. We're just getting the ball rolling here, and look forward to more stuff. See you guys soon.

Adobe MAX: Interview with Jason Tinnin of SimpleFlame

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Jason and I get a chance to sit down during MAX 2011 and talk shop. Get an idea of SimpleFlame's history, some updates on his ventures, and ideas of what the conference was like this year.

Video Transcript

Brent: Hey this is Brent Weaver from BC Gurus. I'm here with Jason Tinnin, a superstar in the Business Catalyst space. You might have seen him with things like SimpleFlame, Kiyuco, Tribevita. I'm sure there's more ventures in the future. So welcome to BC Gurus.

Jason: Yeah thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Brent: We're here at Adobe MAX 2011. Have you been enjoying yourself so far?

Jason: It's awesome. Yeah, last year we were here and it's amazing how small the crowd was last year. It's amazing how small the booths were last year for Business Catalyst. What's even more amazing is how huge the crowd is this year.

Brent: Yeah.

Jason: Right, I don't know if by this point you all probably seen the picture that Business Catalyst posted with everyone all wrapped around. Everyone in the picture all at the same time. Last year there was a fraction of those people.

Brent: It would have just been front row.

Jason: Yeah exactly, exactly. And the booth's inside of Business Catalyst, inside of product demo space. It was tucked away in a corner last year and this year it's right in the middle, it's huge and people have just been flowing to it the entire time. And Business Catalyst, of course, was promoted within the first five minutes inside of Kevin Lynch's keynote. That was huge.

Brent: I was really excited, but I was honestly surprised.

Jason: Yeah.

Brent: The first five minutes, it was like Business Catalyst 30 feet tall. Like this is something Adobe is really getting behind.

Jason: I think we all sitting in a row went, 'Wow, awesome.'

Brent: So besides good times, we've been doing a lot of work here. A lot of networking. I don't know if everybody out there knows the Jason Tinnin story. I mean where did you guys start, where did SimpleFlame come from?

Jason: So long story short, because it could be a long story. Long story short, two guys working at a company developing software for a Fortune 500 company. Cesar Keller, of course who is my business partner, was the Vice-President of Communications, but really performed the role as a designer for the most part and led that whole direction. Sat across the table one day, we were doing stuff on the side, I said, "Hey listen, I like your design. Do you want to do some design for me?" And he said, "Hey you know I was going to ask you, you want to do some development for me?" And that turned into about probably 50 lunches at this really nasty Chinese restaurant at where we were working at, which turned into casting vision for what the company would be.

Brent: Okay.

Jason: Low and behold we decide to quit our jobs one day, which was a real risky move, but really it was one of the best, exciting, not really difficult, but it was certainly challenging because you're leaving your 9-5 and the security that goes along with that to do this thing, but it was the greatest thing that we have done to date.

Brent: Very cool. So at that point you guys made SimpleFlame?

Jason: No. SimpleFlame didn't exist at that time. It was actually still a company that exists today just that we don't do anything through it, called Pixel IQ. And Pixel IQ, we did exactly what pretty much everybody else does. We go out, go to our local market, look for people who need websites.

We, however, as we went along that path, we continued to keep finding difficult situations that we'd find with respect to web development. All these disparate systems and things like that which, of course, ultimately got use to Business Catalyst. However, after probably, I guess it was probably a year or so, is when SimpleFlame was developed.

Again which was all around the Business Catalyst platform, but we were still just targeting direct business owners. It wasn't until a later time that we said, "Hey we're Business Catalyst experts" and took that approach to our business.

Brent: So the first evolution was Pixel IQ, which turned into the SimpleFlame brand, which was still working with what I call Direct to Client, then there was an 'A Ha' moment at some point and you guys decided to start working almost exclusively with partners. I mean do a little client work, but mostly partners.

Jason: Yeah, exactly. Back at that time, as a matter of fact I can remember where we had the 'A Ha' moment. My son was having his tonsils taken out. We were walking around. All these things, it seems every time we start something it revolves about someone being in a hospital somewhere.

But at any rate, I was walking back and forth and we were getting . . . I don't know why we were getting emails from partners at that time because we didn't promote that we were working with partners. We thought, "You know, maybe there's something to this, let's try it out." And of course that just kept going and going and going until we got to the point where we redesigned our website. It's only been like two and a half years ago I believe.

Brent: Wow.

Jason: It's really not been that long. From there, it just went from that point forward.

Brent: Very cool. So then you start working with partners. At what point in time do you say there's more than service based work? I mean because I know what you guys have done. That didn't just happen overnight.

Jason: No it didn't. It happened by paying attention to the community. Seeing where people were struggling. There, of course, were massive amounts of opportunities. We happened to just come from a really strong design and development background. That's where we wanted to focus our time and energy.

So one of the first things that we notice was that people really needed education. They needed education about Business Catalyst. Business Catalyst provides all kinds of videos and things along those lines, hence getting to Kiyuco. They have all these videos out there and what have you, but the thing is they're coming from Business Catalyst; they're coming from the software vendor that makes the software that you go buy.

There's very little deep diving on features. There's very little like how do I do some JavaScript thing. There's also very little use case scenario type things that Business Catalyst partners experience with respect to Business Catalyst functionality. So we frankly, when we started that we said, "Let's try it and see what happens." That's how everything starts at least in our camp anyway.

We go, "Today's a good day to start it, let's go do it." We did that and, of course, the response has been fantastic.

Brent: Very cool, very cool. Now Kiyuco. For any of you that are not familiar with it, I would recommend going to check it out. We'll include a link on this post. I mean we use it as a company and when we have hit a roadblock or a new feature comes out, it's always one of the first places you go check to see, "How do you use that, what's going on with that feature." It's great stuff. Real time code examples, commentary and all that kind of stuff. So then you guys. You didn't stop there though. That was just one piece of the puzzle. One problem that you guys decided to solve. But you guys looked at other things as well.

Jason: Yeah, actually before I forget. Kiyuco is one year old today.

Brent: Okay. Very cool.

Jason: So it was one year ago today that Kiyuco was born. So, of course, we're very proud about that. However, yeah there was certainly other areas. One of those areas happens to be templates. Every major software platform. The Drupals, the WordPresses, the Joomlas. They all have a template offering somewhere in and around that community. As a matter of fact, all of them have multiple template opportunities in terms of companies providing template solutions.

So the way we look at a template is not necessarily it's kind of this dirty word in the design community. For us, we consider it to be a starting point. It takes the development and design cycle and just squeezes it down some. Not all the way. Just squeezes it down some. The difficult things that an average partner runs into like, "I've got to go code this site now, I've got to wire it all in, I've got to figure this whole thing out." What we like to think is that we've just reduced that down.

Now you definitely need to re-skin them. They have to look like the company that you're doing them for, but we like to again, think like they're a starting point. They get you almost all the way there. Although we're working on some tools now, just some prototypes and things like that.

As a matter of fact, if you listen to the session that I did here at MAX, you'll see some of the prototype stuff we're working on. It is just a prototype, but that's it. No promises. But really try to squeeze that down to next to nothing in terms of a delivery point of view for some projects.

Brent: Okay. And one of thing things I've noticed with Tribevita that I think brings a lot of value to the table is you've got a lot of rich content around the template itself. You're doing videos that walk around the features. You've got cell sheets. You guys have made this not just a tool that a partner could buy, but you're trying to get them some things that they could use in their sales process as well.

Jason: Absolutely. As a matter of fact, we had the little one sheets that people download just off the product detail page. And we thought, "I don't think anybody's using these things." So we took them down and go, "Whoa, yeah they are actually using them." So we had to put them back in. You find those things out when you take them down.

Brent: Don't take features away.

Jason: Don't take features away. Note to self, don't take them away. So at any rate, we included those back in. People are using them. They're taking they're little one sheet into their client. Print two or three of them out based on a template that they think will work well for their client. Spreading them across the table. Giving them some suggestions. The client makes the choice and then they come buy the template.

They don't buy the template without having the tools to be able to go sell it. That's some areas that we're thinking about a little more with respect to Tribevita. How do we make that not be such a difficult process. There's plenty of people out there that have no problem with it. The communities been really good around Tribevita. But we want to make that as easy as humanly possible.

Brent: Okay. Very cool. You mentioned the community. I think that I've tried to do some initiatives to try to get people out there talking together. You've obviously worked with tons of partners. You've been to MAX for both years of Business Catalyst. What's your two cents on getting people out into the community and getting them active? I mean is it worthwhile?

Jason: Yeah it is. Again I'll go back to every major system that is out there. WordPress, Drupal, Joomlas all of those. They have active communities. Which means if you have an active community it means people are involved in them. Not necessarily people just creating products or like a BC Gurus Pro, helping people sell and get the most out of their partnership. But people who are consuming those things and just trying to simple move their business forward, period.

So things like the services that we're offering up to people. Just trying to help them move forward. But even like coming out to Adobe MAX. Man, you need to take the time to come out to Adobe MAX next year. I mean it's one year from today. If all you do is sell two projects, say they're a couple grand each. You take that money stick it in the bank and next time the ticket sales open up, you go swipe your card, get a ticket, get a plane ticket, and get a hotel room. Just come out and I think it's really important for next year to do that anyway because I have a pretty good idea that Business Catalyst will get some primetime space as it continues to evolve.

Brent: Absolutely.

Jason: I'm pretty sure that will happen.

Brent: We're not going to go into too much depth here, but if you've been watching the Adobe TV stuff, the sessions that have been going on about Business Catalyst. I wrote a post awhile back about this wave, but it's truly coming.

Jason: Yeah, no doubt.

Brent: I mean they're launching a marketplace, opening up web apps to be bought and sold. Improving our ability to sell templates, distribute templates. There's a lot of changes coming. E- commerce being overhauled, email marketing, just amazing features coming. It's going to attract a big crowd and the earlier people get involved, the more leverage they're going to have in the market.

Jason: Absolutely. With all of the liquid markup stuff. It is an absolute exciting time to be a Business Catalyst partner. And if you are not moving your partnership forward, if you're not selling more business, if you're not trying to consume the resources that are out there. You just really need to get involved, you just need to move this forward. Because I'm telling you, Business Catalyst with respect to being inside this Adobe space. You're going to miss out.

Brent: Very cool.

Jason: Don't say we didn't tell you a couple years later.

Brent: So did you like Weezer last night?

Jason: Oh yeah.

Brent: Are you a fan?

Jason: Totally man. As a matter of fact, it reminded me, I was telling Cesar as it was playing it reminds me of dating my wife way back when, it's been awhile. Reminds me of dating my wife, so it was awesome.

Brent: Yeah and part of MAX is they do a bash and last night they had Weezer and lots of crazy stuff like a Willy Wonka town where . . .

Jason: Oh my gosh.

Brent: . . . you could get any kind of candy you'd ever want in life.

Very, very entertaining stuff.

Jason: Well we were standing out there too and I got to tell you when you're MAX-bashing and all of this stuff is happening around you. You look up and you see the Staples Center and you see the J.W. Marriott hotel and the Ritz-Carlton and all these things around you and the lights shining off. You stop for a second and you go, "Man we're actually like participating in this."

Brent: Doing something pretty cool.

Jason: We're here. I would love for every Business Catalyst partner to experience that next year.

Brent: Very cool.

Jason: It's a really cool thing.

Brent: Well, thank you Jason for taking the time today.

Jason: Yeah, yeah you're welcome.

Brent: Well stay tuned for more MAX content from BCgurus.com. Got a few more interviews coming your way and thanks for showing up. All right. See you guys.

Jason: Thanks guys.

R169 Guru Commentary

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

R169 comes out strong publicly getting Partners access to v3 UI and its an early Christmas for me on one very special feature I have been requesting for years!

Business Catalyst Project Feature: The Surgery Center by Chicago Digital

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Chicago Digital recently deployed a great Business Catalyst project for The Surgery Center LLC in Wisconsin. They not only utilize Web Apps for some simple client-controlled content apps, but also to power the client's in-office Digital Signage! Mike, from CD, and I walk through this project step by step to showcase what they produced.

Looking for more PRO members to feature, if you are a member, please fill out the form and let me know!

Use Pipedrive for Your BC Sales Pipeline

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT

If you haven't thought about how you manage your sales pipeline, then you are probably missing out on either getting more business, or being able to reduce the amount of time it takes to close a project.

If you plan on trying to execute a marketing strategy, cold calls, or referral marketing campaign and you haven't laid out your sales process with stages and have a tool in place to manage your pipe, then you will lose business.

I recently did a 30 minute, in depth post for our PRO community - as I am not going to publish publicly that post, I did create a quick summary post of the idea and a walk-through of what I use to manage my contacts and deals: Pipedrive.

Business Catalyst Tutorial: Removing Facebook Scroll Bars on Fan Pages

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Greg Marcel of 2140 Interactive out of Philadelphia breaks onto the BC Gurus blog with a follow up post to Brian's tutorial on how to create a Facebook Fan Page. Greg tackles the issue of how to get rid of the annoying scroll bars when your content maxes out...

Resources

Business Catalyst Tutorial Code Snippet - Remove Facebook Scrollbar Javascript

Adobe MAX: Interview with Alexandru Costin, Segment Owner of Business Catalyst

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 06:00:00 GMT

While at Adobe MAX, I had a chance to sit down with Alexandru Costin, the Business Catalyst Segment Owner for Adobe. I can tell you first hand that Alexandru's vision for the Partner community, the product and the future of online marketing is awesome.

Read a Transcript of this Video

Brent: Hey this is Brent Weaver from BC Gurus. I'm here with Alexandru Costin, the head of Business Catalyst more or less. I mean you're the product owner?

Alexandru: I am. I am the segment owner actually and that's like a general manager for BC, so I manage the business but I don't actually have the PML ownership. I'm working with the PPNG and with Business Catalyst but I'm kind of making all the calls these days.

Brent: Okay. Is this your first venture into web or do you have some previous experience?

Alexandru: I have a long experience. We're here at MAX today. It might be our second MAX. It's my ninth MAX conference. I'm an old Macromedia partner and I'm an old web developer actually. I built my first website I think in '96 with Java and all this. There were some crazy days and I was using text only browsers. Crazy days back then but my story shortly - I started with computer science when I was a kid. Actually, I was friends with Bogdan and we were contesting the computer sciences in Romania. They're pretty big and I didn't manage to win any nationals but I helped Bogdan learn computer science so he won a national prize for best computer scientist in the world.

Brent: Wow.

Alexandru: Yeah.

Brent: I was unaware that Bogdan is a prize winner.

Alexandru: Yes, he's really smart. This is how we actually select the challenge we hire for Business Catalyst back in Romania is by picking the folks that are winning this computer science contest. So the way we've started with the internet business back in '97, we created a startup in Romania to sell internet and websites and with a guy from Harvard that was a friend of ours for a couple of years. But it was completely unfunded and it didn't take off so it was my first failed startup. Then one year after I bailed out again from the university, and I created another startup with Bogdan to try to build an e-trade of Romania, which failed too. Then the third company we started together InterAKT with Bogdan's second-hand car money that he was saving in an internship in France, so he decided to lend me half of this $2,000 and start the business together, which ended up being acquired by Adobe.

Brent: Wow, so third time's a charm?

Alexandru: Third time's a charm, for us at least, and this business InterAKT was actually targeted exactly to the same type of customers that the BC is in terms of partners. So BC is basically working with partners that are most of the time web developers or internet consultants or online marketers but that are basically doing web development to some extent. InterAKT was selling tools for web developers inside Dreamweaver to allow them to build like mini Business Catalyst sites. So we're very familiar with this. I'm very familiar with this market and with the customer segment in particular and Interact was quite the successful business. We grew from zero without external investment up to almost $2 million in six years. We had tens of thousands of customers in the web space so it's a very dear customer segment to my heart.

Brent: Very cool. So several months ago you made the transition into taking over the Business Catalyst segment. How has that transition been? You've come to know a new, not just a product but a partner community. What's that transition been like?

Alexandru: It's still happening and it's an adrenaline rush. I mean before BC my role in Adobe was to run the Romanian Center where we do a lot of web-related technologies inside Adobe, webkit stuff, CSS related stuff, video, etc. BC is our biggest team in Romania and since I took over I kind of returned from being a senior director of Adobe Romania to being an Entrepreneur in Residence for Adobe, which is I'm feeling like I'm having my own start up again.

It's a very, very exciting feeling for me because it allows me to basically run the whole business from within Adobe and having not only engineering targets but business targets and having marketing teams reporting to you and customer care teams reporting to me, it's really making me feel like a business owner again. The surprise of the whole business is the partner network. I mean it's not very clear when you look at BC that we're really thriving with the help of the partners.

The fact that we're thriving is actually helping them be successful, so it's a great symbiosis, and I've found the partner network actually really in harmony with each other. There's a lot of collaboration happening and there's you guys and there are many other partners I've met that have a lot of community growing initiatives, which are great. So I'm very happy actually with having the opportunity to help grow this business.

Brent: Very cool. So on the technology side, more recently there's been a nice acceleration of new features coming out but there's also what I think is maybe this bigger technology vision for the product. Have you gone in and kind of changed things up a little bit? Made things maybe work a little bit faster? I mean I've seen some difference in the outset.

Alexandru: I hope it's visible, right. I mean, yeah, I think I've injected a lot of energy personally. I'm a very competitive guy and I'm deeply on the enduring side I'm very skilled so what I managed to do since I took over I brought in some more of the challenge we had in Adobe Romania with me and kind of did some shifts on our areas of focus. What's happening today is a renaissance of Business Catalyst basically.

I'm taking the system from the ground up and trying to see what can we do to really improve web publishing on our SaaS-based platform. This is my first task. I have many others I'm going to mesh later on in the interview but I've built in the past many CMS systems, e-commerce system, email marketing systems, this is what we were doing at InterAKT so coming back to this customer segment I come with a vast baggage of knowledge.

The advantage of the Business Catalyst business is the fact that it's hosted and the fact that we have the partner networks. I'm just trying to apply what I know on the engineering side to bring you guys the same level of usability and productivity that my previous customers had with InterAKT.

What we're looking at today from a technology perspective is to really make the system, one of the core problems I discovered was the lack of complete customizability with the current modules and tags and layouts. So what we're doing is introducing this new technology called liquid markup and it's an open source technology that even some of our competitors are using but we really are taking it and making it really work fast inside BC and also linking it deeply with the BC internals to give you guys a lot of complete access to BC and complete customizability of the HTML that we're generating. So that's a major technology change that we're doing.

A second big change is the fact that we're completely improving the back end, the admin section of BC. So we're going to have soon a new beta UI console that will allow small business owners and partners to configure a website faster and to manage all the data in the BC back end really easily and improve the productivity across the board for both web developers and small business owners so this is another big trend that's happening.

All of those are powered by some infrastructure investments we're making trying to bring some of the enterprise technologies that Adobe masters in the other spaces like Omniture, so we're looking at bringing in Java systems to try to give BC a lot more power and flexibility, and we're looking at reinventing the web app system to give you guys a really, really extensible system inside BC to completely unleash you're creativity.

Brent: One thing I've notice being a partner, you've got this incredible product that's now within the Adobe family of products but the only integration with other Adobe products at this point has really been the Dreamweaver widget. Does Adobe have this vision of going beyond just a Dreamweaver widget? I mean is it going to be a part of this bigger picture within the Adobe product family?

Alexandru: It is. It is and we're here at this MAX conference and we had Kevin Lynch, our CTO, on stage and his first slide started with BC actually. Adobe is embracing the idea of providing solutions to our customers, not selling them tools, but give them complete solutions. For the web developer space or for the creative space in general, we think that all of our customers would benefit from embracing a set of tools and services provided by Adobe and Business Catalyst is the Adobe solution for web publishing.

So it was recently announced and we still are working on the integration as we speak, and we're going to have a new kick ass Dreamweaver integration. We're going to have integration, I mean maybe some of you know it was designed for more of creative people but we're going to improve this integration too, and we're going to look about integrating with other Adobe technologies and stacks of technologies like for example the Omniture technologies, which are designed to improve online marketing to allow to optimize online marketing budget spent. So there's a lot of innovation on the technology side inside BC for sure.

Brent: So with something like Omniture, which is a very powerful application, what you guys are trying to do is maybe take some bit and pieces of that that would apply to the small business market and incorporate that into this hosted content management system. Is that kind of . . .

Alexandru: That's kind of the vision. I mean we still have a lot of work to do on fixing publishing, making publishing not perfect but really evolving it to the next level. So this is our short-term focus. We're going to make this publishing great Adobe integration great but if we look into the future, we think that there's a major opportunity for you, the partners, to really move from web development into helping your customers be successful.

We see a major spend in this area, which is online marketing, and we have technology to optimize online marketing and there is an opportunity for all of us to try to take the Omniture technology, put it inside BC, and then see how we can really give you some new tools at an affordable price that will help you demonstrate ROI to your customers and take a share of it basically. So that's kind of where some of our vision is - try to evolve some of you that want to make the step into SMB online marketers.

Brent: I find that really exciting. I mean a lot of what I'll tell the partners is the upfront project is just creating the platform for the client and you to go in and really have fun with it. I mean a lot of times and I think Brett Stockley had a great presentation today from Pretty Pollution of you have that upfront project but then if you're doing online marketing for them you can make that same amount in that next seven months, the seven months after that, the seven months after that so the upfront project is really just where you start with the client and then you evolve that into something that's more highly engaged and on an ongoing basis.

Alexandru: Exactly and I was a web developer myself, and that's one of the problems with web people, not you in particular. You're a great sales guy and you get it but sometimes the engineers or web developers, they just don't see the bigger picture and there's much more value if you move up the value chain to online marketing budget management versus just creating the site and throwing it over the fence.

So that's a mission and the vision for BC that we're still crystallizing, but we feel that this could be another accelerator to help BC continue to grow and to help the partners continue to grow and evolve with how the world is evolving, while we continue to do what we know how to do best, which is help the small business owner be successful. That's what you do and that's what we're trying to do with our platform.

Brent: Very good. So what's to come for Business Catalyst? What's coming down the pipeline that partners are going to get to sink their teeth into, maybe in the short term, medium term, and long term?

Alexandru: We've just announced and showcased at MAX several key features that are not accessible to everybody but starting October 13th actually the new admin console will be available to our partners. The old console is still staying and we will retire it only when and after you guys have the chance to retrain your customer base. But there will be a transition period, and we're looking at best practices in web UI transition to really not impact you guys with changing the UI completely and not giving you the option to use the old UI for awhile.

So definitely this will be available to partners only and we're looking to get a lot of feedback. We have a small feedback. We just did rewrite the entire console, so we're looking at receiving feedback and improving the UI until you guys are happy and then we want to make it probably to the end customers, get their feedback, and integrate it. So it's going to be a very intense period for the admin console. We'll get a lot of improvements and we're going to fix a lot of the obvious usability issues.

Then there's liquid, this liquid markup I mentioned previously. We have a web page at businesscatalyst.com/liquid where you can apply to be part of the private beta at the beginning and you can apply and write us a nice essay to influence our decision. The idea is as we're evolving the language, the liquid language, and integration we don't want to make it wide spread, have you guys create real sites on it and then be forced to really go back and fix them because we're changing the language because of the feedback.

So this is why it's going to be more limited for awhile, but it's something that some of you will test and we're going to work with the close partner community to really make it the best extensibility layer for BC ever. Also, in the new admin console, there's a new template import functionality that allows you to pick any template like a WordPress template, a ThemeForest template and make it a BC template and create monster site wide templates, extract dynamic menus, etc. Really cool stuff that's accessible only in the admin console v3.

We have other web forward stuff. Something I didn't mention actually with BC what we're trying to do is give you guys from a web development perspective give you guys the opportunity to really be web forward. I mean we plan to expose some functionality that is not yet available in older browsers and there's a library called less CSS. It's a JavaScript library that allows you to write very optimized but more futuristic CSS that is not supported in the browsers today.

But we have integrated this library in BC that pre-compiles this less files on the servers; serve them to the browsers, such as you can use this futuristic and really productive CSS while the browser can still interpret it with no runtime performance penalty on the client. So we really want to make BC not only great for web development but really help you guys move forward and embrace the future of what the web would be.

That's something that actually Adobe, if you guys have recently seen the announcement, we've acquired a couple of companies, and we're really planning to do across all our BUs and across all our product segments embrace the open web. And regarding this acquisitions, TypeKit and Nitobi PhoneGap, that's another area where we're looking actually actively today of integrating with TypeKit integrating and with Nitobi and allow you guys to really go into creating nicer sites and also coming up with mobile apps from BC. Generate mobile apps, that's an area of interest to us.

Brent: Very exciting. Very exciting. Are there any other initiatives that are further out on the horizon that should be talked about or can be talked about? What can I pull out of you?

Alexandru: I think there's a fifth one. It's kind of escaping me right now. We had some busy days here at MAX, but what I can say is web publishing, Dreamweaver integration. So we have the liquid markup; we'll have a new integration with Dreamweaver that's really much more usable. You see the data structure inside BC. You'll have a preview similar to what we have in the current admin console, but you'll have a much nicer in the preview to really allow you to see what you're inserting.

So just things to improve the productivity of the web developer creating a BC site. It's kind of where our focus is so initially it's going to be web productivity and just satisfaction of the web developer instead of satisfaction of the business owner by using the system and being happy with the system, remove any frustration.

Then we're going to move into this, this is more futuristic, the online marketing space trying to explore what tools could we give you guys because it's you that need to make the sell. We're going to enable you with new tools in the ecosystem to really help you guys sell this vision of online marketing optimization.

Brent: Very cool. Very cool. Is there anything else you want to tell the BC Gurus fans? I think they would probably listen to any word you said.

Alexandru: I think there's a nice video of brands that you should see. He's going to shameless plug his new service too, which is actually quite a good thing, because I think what Brent has is the capability of teaching partners how to sell. And that's something that at Adobe where we're very engineering focused, and we're very creative focused or enterprise focused, and we're learning our ways into the SMB space, and we're learning our way into teaching web developers not how to program but how to sell.

You're actually one of our spear heads into this area, and I think that's something that all the partners would benefit a lot by doing because code is commoditized, the website production is commoditized, and I think what Brent is trying to sell is the vision of business, online business not websites, which is basically taking us also to the online marketing optimization of the future. So this is where I think I would like you guys to start thinking about how can you learn how to sell BC more because that's how you're going to be successful and frankly how we're going to be successful.

Brent: Absolutely. Yeah, and to shameless promote, I think Alexandru mentioning our pro product. I'm sure you've been barraged with emails and seen that stuff, so hopefully you're aware of it but it's nice to get an official plug or maybe it's unofficial. Very nice. Well, I appreciate you taking the time today to chat with the BC gurus' fans. Alexandru, it's been a pleasure.

Alexandru: Nice seeing you again.

Brent: Yeah, for sure. Stay tuned for more content from Adobe MAX 2011. That's it for now.

Alexandru: Bye, everybody.

Brent: See you guys.

Adobe Visit Finale - Steve Thiel

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Our final interview from our Adobe San Francisco visit is actually not with any Adobe employee, but my business partner, Steve Thiel. You have most likely seen Steve come on the scene for BC Gurus in a big way with our launch of PRO, but this interview proves to be his official video introduction to our blog.

Read a Transcript of this Video

Brent: Hey, this is Brent Weaver from BC Gurus and HotPress Web. I'm here with Steve Thiel from BC Gurus and HotPress Web. Steve, this is your debut on BC Gurus, so welcome to the program.

Steve: Good to finally meet everybody.

Brent: Steve, tell us. What is your position at HotPress Web and your background on it and what you've been doing?

Steve: I'm a managing partner at the company, and I focus mostly on the operation side of the company, project management, HR, dealing with current clients and working with some of the business strategy stuff with Brent. So, mostly operations.

Brent: Very cool. So, your history with Business Catalyst is obviously a little bit different than the folks we've been interviewing at Adobe. Tell us a little bit about how you found BC and why it fit into what you do at HotPress Web.

Steve: Well, going way back we started building our own CMS systems. I think I wrote a couple. They weren't very good, but they got the job done. I looked around at some premise solutions and some other hosted solutions and just wasn't happy with the overall feature set that we were getting. Everything was very fragmented into different systems.

We weren't getting a solid feature set with the products that we were finding, so I started looking around, and I don't know how I found Business Catalyst. I think it was a GoodBarry at the time, and I got in contact with a partner. He really didn't want to tell us what Business Catalyst was, so I had to really dig to find it. Once I did, I was like, oh my God, this is perfect.

Brent: The answer to our problems.

Steve: Yeah. I think that was late 2008 that we found Business Catalyst, and it definitely changed our business. We started to grow tremendously in the number of projects that we could take on and staff as well.

Brent: I've got some inside information on your business. I think that looking at, not just the amount of projects that we took on but the amount of projects that we were able to support and how the production of that stuff went. You've been tied into that in developing processes around a single technology and how to make customers happy and all that kind of stuff.

Steve: Depending on your background if you're a freelancer, agency owner or you work at an agency, for our stuff it's easy to understand Business Catalyst and get your head wrapped around it and learn it fairly quickly. So, training staff for us is easy. It's easy to bring on new people. I think it only takes a couple months for a designer to figure out how to work with Business Catalyst.

Brent: So, being able to use a designer to essentially build a whole site from the ground up is really what you're talking about there.

Steve: Yeah, exactly. It doesn't take as many people to make a website now. Pretty much one person can do it. The project life cycles for us have really come down. It used to take months and months to build a site. Now, it can take weeks to build a site.

Brent: And that's important. If you look at the bridge of cash flow of most design companies, they've got, I don't know, it's the good and the bad, this 50-50. You get 50% of your money up front and 50% at completion, and with the shorter project life cycles that inherently improves cash flow.

Steve: Yeah, definitely. Your projects aren't taking as long. Your clients are happier because at Business Catalyst you have a set of tools for testing and quality assurance cycles are less, and the client gets something quicker and it's actually working.

Brent: Very cool. Are you, as a business person, the recurring revenue side. I think you gave a presentation four years ago that was called "Attaining Peace of Mind". The idea was to increase the amount of recurring revenue that we had coming on so we weren't always in the "feast or famine".

Steve: Yeah. Recurring revenue for me is really important. If you're living hand to mouth with taking on a project and you never want to talk to the client again, I think you're really missing out on what it is as far as being a web professional. There's so much ongoing that can be done with a client, whether it's email marketing or helping out with SEO or copyrighting or whatever it might be.

The lifetime value of your clients is more than just that initial project. You need to find ways to be continually selling them and helping them grow their business because that's really what they're coming to you for. It's not so much for a website. As Business Catalyst says, it's an ongoing business. It takes time to develop that. It's not just building that first website.

Brent: So, as an experienced web professional, you've been building sites for a long time. Coming to the Adobe offices, what has this trip been like for you?

Steve: It's kind of been like the first day of college. You walk in and it's this big, really nice place. It's got a cool vibe, and they've got this huge cafeteria happening, and people are talking and also ideas, and there are these little rooms all over the place and people are just hashing out ideas. It's a really cool environment. It has that excitement of college. That's what came to mind when I walked in.

Brent: I think when you see all of these people around and talking ideas and just the size of the company that's now behind Business Catalyst. To me, it's getting to roam the halls of it. You see that this is not a startup show any more. This is not an amateur hour operation. These people are some of the top talents at what they do and the types of visions they have. That's some of the impression I've gotten.

Steve: Yeah, it's a big company, but it's still very, very personable with the people here. They're really passionate about the products, and it's not just this big company called Adobe that's trying to profit. They're actually really passionate about what they're doing here. So, coming here, experiencing that, it's been nice. It's been reassuring to see that there is a solid team of people that love this product and want to see it grow.

Brent: Getting into some of the product stuff, what have you felt about getting some one-on-one time with key members of the Adobe team on the BC product? Has it changed your views on it? Has it encouraged you? Tell me a little about that.

Steve: Well, I wish I could talk about all the things that I've seen here, but I can't go into details. But, yeah, it's exciting to see the things that are coming down the pipe. They're definitely listening to partners. The things that I've seen here over the last couple of days are exciting. They're thing that I want to see in the product.

We've gotten to dictate some of the feature sets. We're in close communications with a lot of the PMs on the project. There's no reason that you guys can't do that as well. You've just got to get out there and get involved in the community and get involved with contact with Adobe and talk to these people.

Brent: I think one of the places that we've been told, that the community elements that they're going to be building into, the partner portal, the support forums, those types of things, there's a lot of opportunities for partners to spend a little bit of their day giving back to the community instead of just always being this take-take thing. Personally, I feel like when you give in a little bit you get a lot out in return, and the more you give into the community I think the more you get out of the business. How many things have we been able to improve because we've been active with other partners and with Adobe?

Steve: Yeah. Unforeseen opportunities, get out there and do something, and you'll find partner-to-partner where you'll find a new way of doing something that helps you sell more deals or whatever it might be. Just get out there and put it on the line and see what happens. But getting out into the community for us is nothing but great things.

Brent: Absolutely. I just want to touch on something a little bit. BC Gurus has been going through some changes, some improvements in the next month, or I guess by the time this video airs, it might be in the next week or so. What's your vision for how BC Gurus fits into the partner community?

Steve: I think BC Gurus is really for the serious partner only. We want to get in and get our hands dirty, help you guys do some of the really big cool things that's going to make you a lot of money. It's going to get you clients that you want but really get serious about the involvement and what you're wanting to do with the products and really try to take yourself to the next level and really see success. So really getting more serious about the content that we're pushing out to you guys, opening up the kimono of the agency work that we do and letting you in on the ins and outs, whether you're a freelancer or an agency growing your business.

Brent: I think the stuff that's on the board right now, Steve, you said opening your kimono, we have a lot of experience or maybe we're self-proclaimed experts or something, we have a lot of experience with building sites. We've built several hundred. We've had, at any given time, hundreds of clients that we deal with, and I think sharing that experience for us is the next chapter in our business, and that's going to be real exciting and hope you guys definitely stay tuned for some of those new things coming down the BC Gurus pipe.

We definitely invite you to take a look at some of our membership products when they come out, and like Steve said, definitely only for the serious partners. We're not here to get a haircut. So, thanks, Steve, for spending some time. We'll probably be going to be seeing a lot more of you in the BC Gurus community, and that's pretty cool.

Steve: Yeah. Come out to MAX, too. We're going to be at MAX. It should be a lot of fun.

Brent: That is true. There will be several BC Gurus and HotPress folks out there, so you'll have a chance to connect with us. I'm hoping that that's going to be four or five days of just crazy collaboration. Last year it was truly like the only thing . . . I was starting to dream by the end of it of like BC, BC, now talk about getting some brainwashing in. But, yeah, definitely show up and stay tuned to bcgurus.com for more great content around the Adobe Business Catalyst. Thanks.

Adobe Team Interview - Adam Broadway

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:00:00 GMT

We are getting close to wrapping up our interview series from our Adobe San Francisco offices earlier this summer. Adam Broadway, Business Catalyst Evangelist, is one of the initial visionaries that created the Business Catalyst platform. His insights into the history of the product and the vision for the future is a must-see.

Read a Transcript of this Video

Brent: Hey, this is Brent Weaver from BC Gurus and HotPress Web. I'm here with Adam Broadway. He's one of the original guys from Business Catalyst. We're just at the Adobe San Francisco offices, chatting a little bit of BC, the past, present and future.

So Adam, what is your position with Business Catalyst? Your official title?

Adam: My official title is Product Evangelist. My mandate has been firstly to spread the word of Business Catalyst internally, within Adobe. So not as much external connection with partners in the 18 months that I've previously had before the acquisition.

It's been a lot of meeting different folk within the organization, and looking at ways that other business units within Adobe might help us, or we could possibly help them by providing extra services to their client base that might complement. Of course, doing the webinars, partner education, "Getting Started" series that we do each week, other webinars that might be more advanced around web apps.

Brent: I think you have a Product Evangelist blog out there. You've been reaching out to some partners and doing that kind of stuff. If you are an existing Business Catalyst partner, you might have seen the Adam Broadway name. You're pretty active on Twitter.

Adam: Yes. I'm starting to invigorate the BCEvangelists.businesscatalyst.com site with a lot more content, connecting with partners. So definitely reach out to me if you'd like to include your own BC partner learnings, to share with the community. We've had yourself, Brent, interview the SimpleFlame guys.

Not just around technology. I think that's one of the things I'm really starting to focus less on, is the tech, and more around what are the business strategies that help a Business Catalyst partner be more successful? That's how to sell effectively, not just features, features, features all the time.

Brent: I mean, the features are great, and it's nice to have a product that meshes well with the clients. But cracking that nut of expanding your business, getting more clients, attracting more business is something that I think every single partner out there is interested in, even from the most experienced to the brand new ones.

Adam: We've always recognized that early days, when Business Catalyst was born. We recognized that just providing the technology platform, which incorporated all these wonderful tools all in one wasn't enough. We had to educate designers on how to sell, and what is your unique selling proposition that you go to market with?

Those Business Catalyst partners, just because you are a BC partner and you use this platform doesn't necessarily mean that, when you're competing with other Business Catalyst partners, for example, doesn't necessarily mean that you're on a level playing field. You need to have your own uniqueness blended in with every proposal and the things you do.

We're definitely trying to tap into that business strategy aspect. Some of the initiatives that we're playing out over the coming months and years will be to really ramp up on that. Partner Connect, for example, is a way that we'll be connecting small business owners, educating them, on online businesses, not websites. That mantra that we are always beating about. Then connect them with partners. All around, the business benefits. It's not about the features.

Brent: That's interesting. Some partner questions came in on, what is Adobe doing to educate the small business owner? When you go to the Business Catalyst website, it's very focused on the web design, web developer. Creating some additional materials that maybe channels those leads into the partner community?

Adam: Definitely, and we recognize that. We recognize these two-fold parts. It's a two-part problem. Educating the SBO or the SME, the small business owner, small medium enterprise, about online businesses and how they should be rethinking the way they look at their website.

Websites are dead. What's your primary goal for your business? What about a phased approach to projects? Don't have features for the sake of features. Educating them in that way, but also providing that material for our partners to use in their own sales process.

We believe, yes, invigorating small business market will help drive leads to our partners through the Partner Connect program, but also giving that same collateral white label through our partner community to be able to leverage in their own day-to-day business dealings.

Brent: You've had a long history with Business Catalyst. You've been there from essentially the beginning, or before it even started. That's something that came from you, and you and Bardia.

Adam: BC, yeah.

Brent: Yes. I'm interested, if you could just share a little bit of that background. I think some partners maybe get bits and pieces of the story, but it's an interesting story from just a tech start-up, and now we're here in this big building in San Francisco that's owned by Adobe. That story is very interesting.

Adam: It's a great story that, even back home in Australia, not a lot of people are really aware of the significance of the acquisition of Business Catalyst by Adobe. It didn't get much press. But the background story is that I was working with local government organizations and the vehicle industry back home, building some software and knowledge management tools.

I was sick of doing that and went out and looked for a company that I could rebrand their technology and effectively leverage that.

Brent: Obviously, you see the rebranding of BC, and that's really the core of the business model is this idea of white labeling somebody else's stuff.

Adam: It was definitely part of our foundation. We had that in our DNA, the ability to leverage our channels by giving them the smarts that they could build their brand on top of. I wanted to leverage somebody else's smarts to build my brand on top of.

I went out and Googled, and Bardia Housman's name came up. It was from that first contact with Bardia that I came across his company Monkey, which was doing some interesting things with expertise, identification with the Internet, something that I was looking to do.

After a couple of, not waters, but beers, we decided let's pool our resources.

Brent: Your company at the time, just to make the animal comparison.

Adam: Ribbit Software was my business, and Monkey was Bardia's. We came up with those separately, but there was that animal attraction.

Brent: Monkeys and frogs, yes.

Adam: From there, Business Catalyst was born. We joined forces and within three months, we had the first working prototype of Business Catalyst with paying customers within three months. It was January 2004 that we actually launched, and we met up and we'd done our preliminaries and background checks on each other, who could skull the most beers in the shortest amount of time.

There was an affinity as well. It was about our skills that complemented each other, our drive, our entrepreneurial drive, as well as a common vision. It was just shoulder to shoulder, head down, focused, 24/7 building the company from scratch in Milsons Point in Sydney. So we've come a long way.

Brent: The product, I think, from you and Bardia's vision to now, it's incorporated into this multi-billion dollar company. What is the next step for Business Catalyst?

Adam: Do you know something I don't about our revenues? That's good revenues, Alexander.

Brent: I mean, not BC, but Adobe is a billion.

Adam: Okay, sorry. I get your point. We're almost there. So the transition?

Brent: Yes. Like what is the grand vision for Business Catalyst? Why is it in Adobe's hands now, and how is that going to be playing out over the next couple of years?

Adam: Well, I think one of the attractions that Adobe saw in us was the fact that we're going after the same type of audience - web designers, web pros, people in the web space - but also that we had built a business on software as a service, and not the traditional shrink-wrapped approach to selling software. So that was the other thing, and the fact that we had revenues, we'd had a proven business model. There are a number of factors. The team, definitely. We've built up an amazing team, most of which are still part of the Adobe Corporation that's come over from BC.

We have a really great team, a great business model. We're focused on the same customer base. We complemented with the extension into Dreamweaver, so there was that bridge. We bridged the gap already with Triangle. Triangle being the third tool in the designer's toolkit, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Business Catalyst, and that plug-in inside Dreamweaver completed that toolkit for them.

All of those things came together with the fact that we're also out in the same places that Adobe were at. We're going to an event apart, future web acts, future web design. We sponsored MAX one year, and were really on the radar by then.

The vision for the future is that they've virtually kept us intact. There hasn't been a dismantling of the business. There's been certainly a cultural change in the way that Business Catalyst now operates, and you need to when you're inside a large organization.

That's taken longer than everybody expected. There have been infrastructure issues, as you know, with the changing of the guard on the data centers, which are all now completely switched over to the Adobe infrastructure.

It's been in the last few months since that happened, when we shut down that last data center, that the engineering team's been able to really focus on getting the nitty-gritty of day-to- day features released, addressing the needs and concerns of partners and their customers in getting the features out.

That's Adobe's drive, is to continually hand over to our Business Catalyst partners the tools they need to succeed, to be able to build online businesses, to address the needs of the small business owner by enhancing and making the contact management side of things and that workflow around managing human interactions through their online business, make that more seamless, reporting and all those things. But also on the other hand, with the creative tools suite, beefing up some of the Dreamweaver integration.

There's no slow down now in that respect, and it's been awesome that Adobe has recognized that on its own, Business Catalyst has stood the test of time. Now that the baton's been passed from Bardia's leadership to Alexander, Alexander's now picking that up and running ahead with it, with the team growing in that development focus now in the coming months.

Brent: You've seen it from two people in an office to this big thing. Are you happy with how that dream has turned out?

Adam: I have to say that it's a little bit surreal. In the process of building a business, you don't rest. Every entrepreneur knows that, unfortunately, and people talk about work/life balance, I haven't experienced it. It's always been, unfortunately for my family, business first.

When that phone beeps and there's an issue, it's hang on, kids. Daddy's just got to do this. It's surreal now that I'm actually within a work environment where I can smell the roses. So I would say that it's been amazing just from the perspective that I can now relax a little bit and enjoy the moment.

Brent: Yes. We just had to relocate. The sun in the skylights was starting to bake Adam; he was starting to glow.

Adam: Don't have much protection up here anymore, so . . .

Brent: We didn't bring our sunscreen.

So yes, you're talking about work-life balance. You guys now, you have this opportunity to not only enjoy your spare time, but enjoy the product a little bit more. One of the things we were talking about last night was, you guys have set up response teams, and there are people that are now in the position to respond when there is issues in the middle of the night, off- hour type stuff.

I think some of the stories I heard on the critical response types of things you guys would have to do back in the day would be, you're at a ski resort, somebody's got to run down and get on their laptop if something's happening. Or you're at dinner or whatever and the cell phone rings and you've got to leave and take care of that stuff.

That, to me, over the last three years, a website would go down and we'd start immediately complaining. But there were actually things you guys had to do.

Adam: Yes. We were proactive in that we were looking at how we could expand the data centers, so we were doing those normal growth initiatives, spending money on hardware. Then we grew more data centers, and we would have automation around the monitoring of those.

But then towards when the acquisition occurred, there's a period of time where you can't spend all your money and you can't put more staff on. During that time, we had some issues as partners know. But now with our response teams, we've got a cast of thousands. Not quite that many, but we've got dedicated teams that all they do is eat, breathe, sleep, dream about that task to make sure that things don't go down.

The quality assurance side of the business, in making sure the code before it gets released is checked to the nth degree. Even scripts that automate all of that. There's so many new things we've been able to leverage inside the Adobe machine to be pro- active and fast response. It's made a huge difference.

The new data centers are all auto-scaling. There's some pretty clever people behind the scenes making sure that we're built for massive scale.

Brent: I think with our own business, looking at vertical channels, looking at these different ways that we can scale up our company, it's nice to know that as you add more sites you're not really worrying about that part of our own business. We can scale how many sites we have to the nth degree.

I think the other day, I was working on a project with Collin where we duplicated 1,600 websites using the new API. That's cool. That kind of stuff, I think, excites partners and gets them motivated to be getting on the platform, to make more money, to grow their businesses. To know that you guys are set up to scale is great.

Is there anything else you want to tell the partner community, now that you have their undivided attention?

Adam: Well, we're certainly dedicated to helping our partners' businesses grow. You can be rest assured that over the coming months, there's going to be some exciting new features but also initiatives around our mentoring program that we're looking to build with some of our premium partners.

Also, the generation of leads to go out to our partner community. Other things in the pipeline are more initiatives around our multilingual side of things, so for those of you who are dealing in various language areas, we're going to be addressing that as well.

There are just so many new things that are being driven. I can't tell you them all now. Suffice it to say that Partner Connect and the partner mentoring program are two things that are high on our list to make sure that we can get out to you.

Brent: Very cool. You've got a Twitter account people can follow. I will put the link to that in our post here. You've got the BC Evangelist blog that I'll put a link to. A lot of partner interviews that you've done, uncut there, some of them end up in the BC blog, but you can check out a lot of that stuff on the BC Evangelist site.

Definitely thank you for joining us today, Adam. It's been a pleasure.

Adam: Thank you, Brent. Great to have you.

Brent: Stay tuned to BCGurus.com for additional Adobe interviews and other partner interviews. Stay tuned for more. Thanks.