Note:
This transcript was auto-generated from “audio” it will have some typos and other mistakes 🙂
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
marketing, companies, waffles, websites, emotionality, Nicole, software, ideal customer,
Announcer
Online with Amr, the internet guy streaming today on your favourite podcast platforms. This podcast focuses on entrepreneurs and business owners helping them become more successful and conducting their business on the web without being stuck with technology, getting a headache, pulling their hairs out or buying expensive software.
Amr The Internet Guy
Hello, everyone. Welcome to episode number 30. When I started this podcast, I never realized that I would still be going. It’s almost a year since we started. I think it’s 10 and a bit months, and we keep on going because of you, our listeners to all of you. I say thank you. So this episode is another special episode where we have been discussing some interesting stuff. You know, when you think about marketing, and especially when you think digital marketing, and I know that we’ve covered a lot of digital marketing before. But as a business owner, it’s usually very difficult to know where to start. Because there’s so much that needs to be done. And there’s so much that you can do. And you’re not sure whether you need all of it. Some of it, what are the parts that you must do yourself and what can you outsource. And if only there was some kind of an on-demand service that doesn’t cost an arm and leg just for somebody to give you a little bit of hand-holding, and put you on the right track. So that you know what to do and what to outsource and saves you like a lot of time. Well, their race, there is a concierge service that my next guest will be talking to us about. So we don’t we are not only going to discuss marketing, consumer service, but we discuss how to use emotional intelligence for your business. How to use emotional intelligence, in your marketing messaging, in your marketing in general, in your customer service. You know why emotional intelligence is very interesting and very important at the same time. We also discussed Vancouver and dipping swimming in the Pacific. So without further ado, let’s go and meet Nicole. guys here have Nicole Donnelly with me. Hi, Nicole. Hey, how’s it going?
Nicole Donnelly
It’s going well, thank you.
Amr The Internet Guy
So off the air, before we started recording we’ve been having a chat about Vancouver and the West End and and dipping into the ocean like you go to the Pacific on a is it daily now? Yes. And like Okay, for those of you guys outside Canada, I mean, we’re in the west of Canada, so we’re supposed to be less cold than the rest of the country. Right here. It says it’s minus one outside. And in summer, I wouldn’t even dare to get into the Pacific. So Nicole doing it now.
It is it’s always cold, the water is always cold. So in Fahrenheit, I guess in Celsius is about five degrees right now. And Fahrenheit. That’s like 41 degrees. And it warms up to in the summertime maybe 52.
Amr The Internet Guy
So cold I try that. It’s still cold.
It’s definitely still cold and outside. It’s been around freezing and below freezing. For the last what we’re at two weeks or three weeks or something of this cold arctic air and I get my water shoes on to most week. Yeah. And I get my water shoes on and put my like blanket hoodie on and go to the beach and get it in the water for as long as I can handle it which is a minute or two and then walk back in the muck and snow and we’ve had snow which we usually don’t have here and I love it personally, I think snow less cold is pointless. I really like this No. Makes things prettier.
Amr The Internet Guy
You’re one of them. I am I don’t want the first time so I’m an immigrant. So the first time I saw snow in my life, I was in Austria that was 2010 and then oh it was novelty and I loved it and everything and then I used to live in Dubai. So you know there’s no snow and the coldest it gets is about maybe seven eight Celsius like and that that’s like midwinter. Yeah, and usually like right now they’re being the 20s Celsius, to be maybe 20. And then 15 At night, then I came to Vancouver. And I think the first bad. Well we call it bad snow. So the first good snow was 2017. It’s not I think on the second of December, and it stayed there until April, I think. Yeah, until 2018. April ish. And it was, but it never dipped to minus 14 before. Like, I don’t recall that ever. I’ve been here from 2015. And I don’t really, I think the coldest was minus three or minus four.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s ever been so cold. And I like it. I like having snow here. It also keeps tourists away somewhat. I mean, it’s kind of a business busiest next. Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s nice and peaceful. And you go out at night, and you can you can hear the snow under your feet. I really like that. Or
Amr The Internet Guy
outdoors. He is oh, so what it snows and is that cool. There’s not much you can do. Apart from walking, and maybe even the hikes will be unsafe, you know, car can go swimming. Yeah. So swimming is. Maybe I start within those first. Yeah. So guys, like today, we wanted to discuss marketing, but we’re having so much fun already. And Nicole owns a website. I think it’s not the only website she owns. And Nicole owns a website called salty waffle. And every time I get there, I actually think of what So the message is what I
started out, so I started salty waffle in 2010. And we would go into the clients offices and make waffles. Oh, wow. Yeah, we would so salty was kind of I lived on the water in Seattle at the time. And salty is, you know, in, like Captain or ship terms has kind of this attitude about it, or where it’s just not like perfect, and you can have some fun. Yeah. And then for the waffle part of it. Food always brings people together. So I even worked with this big financial advisor firm and went in to their break room and made waffles. And everybody came around and it starts conversations and this smells like bring everybody in the office together. We’ve made we’ve gone into offices with up to 120 people and made waffles. And it’s I don’t know if anybody has I’ve never met a marketing company that makes waffles for their clients.
Amr The Internet Guy
There is a National Pancake Day, but there’s no waffle day. So you can start. Yeah. National waffle day, that would be a good thing.
I love them. I grew up eating them. And it was always my grandma’s recipe. And she’s from the south in the states and waffles are a very big thing in the south. And my waffles are vegan and gluten free. And my grandma tried my walls. And she thought they were amazing and better than hers. And so that was a big compliment. Like, all right, we’re on to something with these waffles.
Amr The Internet Guy
Dragon’s Den is waiting. Yeah. And so let’s just backtrack a little bit. What was the idea behind salty waffles? Like why? What makes you think I need to start this? And I mean, we haven’t told people that it’s a marketing service, right?
Yeah. And am I first company was called baby legs. And I sold leg warmers for babies. And we sold them in more than 85 countries. We also sold them in all Target stores and Nordstroms. And they were everywhere. And what we were really good at I sold baby lakes to a sock company in New York. And what I learned that I really like to do and what I was just naturally good at was the marketing side of things and connecting with customers. And I really wanted to help brands connect with their customers better. And it was early days of social media. And so we started primarily as a social media training company. And so we would go in and do trainings and then companies didn’t have that proficiency in house. So they would hire us for a bit or we might help them hire and train a new person to manage all their social. And then you know, with that comes alignment of the rest of the marketing, the email marketing and everything else. And so we ended up over the last. I mean, it’s been almost 12 years, kind of evolving our offerings and doing a lot of customer experience design from when a customer touches a brand in any place whether they see it or they physically touch it in their in person event, making sure that that that that experience is spread throughout every touchpoint that a customer has, so that they have the feeling that you want them to have when interacting with your brand. And that can be for services or, or product companies. And we only work with companies who really care about their customers and are willing to invest in that, that customer experience. Because there’s a lot of companies out there just to make money still, you know, and people want to pop up something just so that they can have side income or whatever. But we we work with companies that really care about their customers long term and are investing in a relationship.
Amr The Internet Guy
I love that. Because I mean, there’s nothing wrong with making money. But if the sole purpose of a business is only to make money, I don’t think they’ll go for. Yeah, so they may be able to turn over a certain amount. And, and you see this like day in and day out with companies who have a high customer attrition rate. And in most cases, there are even big companies who would only focus on attracting new customers and then neglect the customers who they already have. And it makes me a little bit like wonder, how what’s this? Like? What’s your strategy? Why you’re always looking for new customers, new customers, new customers, and they’re concentrating and spending most of their budget in lead generation. But when you ask them, so what’s your retention plan? They look at you as like, retention. Yeah, there’s no point getting them and losing them after two months.
Yeah, we had a big I had a conversation with the, the director of a company earlier today. And we were talking about, we were talking about nurturing the current customers, and doing a better job at that for this, like a big goal to figure out what their best marketing tech stack would be to track every interaction with the customers, because we know that we have inbound leads, people come in all the time, and their team didn’t have time in the fall to reach out to all the old customers to make sure that they were ordering. And though they’re busy time is Christmas. And it could be year round if there was more of that outreach and nurturing of the customer relationships. And so we talked about how to be present, you know, like, what would, how could, how could we benefit the customer throughout the year, and deliver that value and be there when they’re ready to purchase because we know from looking at their past years, when someone’s a customer, they re order a lot. And they reorder throughout the year, typically five to 10 times. And so they need to be top of mind when they’re ready to order because they want more customers to behave that way. And they have a lot that do already. But we want to make sure that they keep on doing that and nurture the new ones so that they keep keep reordering. And really create an emotional connection with the customer in a way that they’re seen as delivering value consistently. Another conversation we had about emotionality today, too. It’s an emotional support text message service. And we want to deliver value everyday to the customer. So we’re actually looking at all the text messages we send and how we rewrite them because it started in October, the the beta did. And after all the feedback, we’re going to redo everything. Basically, we’re rethinking how the lessons are delivered. And we’ve taken all the feedback that we’ve gotten to make an even better program. And so whether it’s a physical product or a service, there are things to do consistently. And so while this is marketing, it informs product development. And it informs you know, it informs so many other areas of the business.
Amr The Internet Guy
I love that because I spent some of my early years in technology, implementing CRM systems. And in the beginning, it was purely like a techie thing. Like, you know, you go and speak tech, and you have to kind of twist the processes of the company to suit whatever app they’re using or whatever software they’re using. And then somewhere along the line, you realize that hang on a second, that’s not right. What’s right is to actually make the app work. The way their process works, not, not the other way around, not tweak the process to suit the app, but it’s kind of you know, change the setup of the app or software or whatever. You know, they were using at the time. It wasn’t just an app, there was no app on the phone. It was just a Big software sitting on a server in the company, it wasn’t even software as a service or online, it was just internal. But you learn a lot, because people in the beginning of this, especially big managers, they would come and say, oh, you know what our service ratings, like the rating that our customers are leaving for us for our service, did not improve as a result of implementing the CRM. And that made me laugh all the time. Because, you know, any service, whatever it is, it’s back to the human being delivering it, it’s not the software will not, you know, make your service better on its own, the software helps you to see what you need to improve. But if you’re not improving, if you’re not training people, if you’re not, as you rightfully do with your emotionality thing, changing the message, or getting the feedback, letting the feedback that came from your users go to product development, like if it stops with you, if it’s just like, hey, customer said that didn’t like this, but no one, no one along your chain of you know, your service chain, got this information, then things are going to get better.
That’s, that’s right. And that’s the important part of marketing, communicating with all of the other departments and being this liaison, because the marketing person, and you know, you might be doing marketing yourself, like you might have this mix of marketing and sales. But marketing as a, like Cornerstone function is the voice of the company that is out there in the public and interacting. And that, you know, it could be just through Facebook posts, and Instagram posts and things like that. And it’s also needs to be the ears of the company, to listen to what people are saying, to inform product development. And you know, we take everything with a grain of salt, too, because I’ve asked customers before when I had my first company, baby legs, we went on Facebook, we’re like, what color do you want? And they all said purple. So we made this whole purple line, and it did not sell, you know? So then we got smarter. Yeah, we had a lot of purple inventory. So then we got smarter about asking questions, and said, Hey, our distributor, and Japan has these different designs? What are three designs? Or like, what’s your top design that you would like to see come over from Japan? So we didn’t have to invest a lot in inventory. And we brought over stuff from Japan that was already made, and sold it right away? Because we gave a picture of what people were going to get, you know. And so the first time we asked it open ended question, which gave us an answer that didn’t really didn’t give people what they really wanted. And they didn’t, they weren’t able to see what they really wanted, because we didn’t put the images in front of them to select from. And so that’s one of the things where
Amr The Internet Guy
color do prefer was not Yeah, it’s not an open ended question. So was not beneficial to you, because they all said, this color.
Yeah, they wanted to see more purple, but they didn’t buy more purple. And so I always caution people to only listen to feedback to a certain extent, and put a paywall up as soon as you can to see if people are willing to pay for what they say they want. And it can be in a very small form. And that’s where you can do Facebook ads, testing and some of those things like or Google Ads testing, to see what people will buy, even if you don’t have the product on hand yet or service fully developed. So that it helps you develop your product or service. And because it’s when somebody puts the money down, you know, that’s what they want. Instead of just like,
Amr The Internet Guy
oh, right, because it’s like that. It’s like Kickstarter campaigns. You’re guiding the money before you even do the product so
well, and you could give people their money back. And it can be a simple test of like, will people actually pay for this? Because a lot of people want to do case studies. And i Yesterday, we were in a conversation about it. Like I don’t want to do a case study about this. I want to do ads testing. I want to do it with a shopping cart at checkout, because I want people to pay for it or not pay for it. Yeah. You know, and I want to really see.
Amr The Internet Guy
Just yeah, added to the cart. Do they go? Yeah,
yeah. Just asking a question doesn’t give you doesn’t give you the truth of what someone’s answer is.
Amr The Internet Guy
Yeah, and I mean, it’s usually communication, right? Like we I think during the past few years, and that that’s similar to what I was doing with with the CRM thing are what most of the people thought it was or most of them thought that it would give them because they’re only thinking tech and they will not they will not seeking customer service. and they were not thinking improvement. And I think is the same thing happened with digital marketing, it has been reduced somehow to tasks rather than the big picture. And people just think about this task or that task, like, Okay, I’m gonna have some ads, or I’m gonna do some, I don’t know, create a page on Facebook and try to attract, you know, some people to the page, and I could communicate with them or whatever. But these are little jobs here and there. But what’s the main strategy? What do you want to do with your marketing? I mean, I do understand that marketing leads to sales, and everyone will tell you, yeah, our marketing should make us sell more. Great, but your what type of conversation Do you want to have with your prospect customer and your customer? And what’s in it for them as well, like, this is we and I’m also like, I’m guilty as charged with this too. Sometimes we think about our own point of view, forgetting what our service or product, what the benefits would be for the would be customer. And then we focus on, I think sometimes people focus on impressing their competition, rather than rather than actually focusing on their customers. Yeah,
well, and knowing who your customer is, so with emotionality, um, we were doing direct to consumer. And so all of our benefits are to the end user. But the people who are purchasing, we found the people who could purchase the most that are really interested, is companies. Yeah. Because the number one initiative for companies in 2022 is emotional support of their employees. Right. And so if I’m telling you your individual benefits, it doesn’t speak to the HR manager or the person who’s going to buy for a whole team. And so we had to change our messaging. And we’re going to be doing Facebook ads testing to based on the messaging because I will happily give away a free subscription to an HR manager, if that’s going to be the influencer, who will end up being the one. Yeah, a lot of times. Yeah, yeah, they’ll implement it. And sometimes they’re not even the purchaser, you will have some person in it or something like that. That’s the purchaser. So it’s really important to know all the different people you need to influence in an organization to make a purchase. And so from a marketing perspective, I think, okay, am I speaking to these people? And is, let’s say, an employee who might be interested in can raise this to HR? Are they getting a good experience on Instagram, and Facebook and LinkedIn, and as the HR manager getting a good experience on LinkedIn to and some of these places where they expect professional information? Are they getting it? And so thinking about the content that goes out there into the different locations and making it, making sure it speaks to the purchaser, and the influencers is really like an influencers by like, the people who are going to influence the purchase in an organization. It’s, it’s so important, because you end up with, you know, two or three different types of customers that you need to message for, which is kind of good, because on social, you need to message all the time. Yeah. And then it’s like, okay, Monday, we message to this person, just a different personality.
Amr The Internet Guy
That’s the thing. It’s like, your ideal customer, Avatar, or whoever, like your ideal customer. Now, you have two sets of customers who have different targets.
Yep. Yeah. And so it’s important to think about those like to think about who the people are. And with the client that we met with today, they have business customers and consumer customers as well, like direct consumers that would buy things buy this as a gift for somebody or people who buy it for other employees, or for their clients as a gift. Yeah. And so our messaging needs to be different. We have different landing pages. And it’s still all about the emotional connection and understanding like Where where are we bring value to that person in their life, and just making sure that we’re there and present, giving them value in that category on a consistent basis.
Amr The Internet Guy
That’s excellent. And I could see like, there was something that poked my attention attention on on the website sold to awful.com. Because you mentioned consumers marketing service, and to me it speaks of handholding. Am I right to assume that?
Yes, with salty waffle. We we like a concierge, they’ll tell you where the best sightseeing things are. They’ll tell you where the best restaurants are. We might not be the best ones to execute on something and we know who the best people are. So if you need Google ads or SEO, we don’t Do that and we work with companies on a regular basis, I pretty much every day, we have meetings with people, because we believe that’s part of the marketing team. And it’s not my team specialty. So we we will provide vetted amazing resources in the areas that we don’t have. And so it’s often the way that work is now a lot of people are contractors. And so it’s this team of contractors that come together to do work. And, and so we can work within an organization and the competencies, and then supplement where it’s needed and help hire when it’s needed to. So that our goal is to have the organization self sustaining and managing their own marketing. And that could be with, you know, some combination of internal or external, it could be us kind of managing it during the transition, it usually takes about a year to two years, even to build in the competency from an execution standpoint, in an organization to where they, they can manage their own external, their external contractors. And that all the measures are across all the different departments and marketing metrics are in management scorecards, and you know, like to become part of the fabric of the organization. And that’s where we step into really help help spread that the marketing across and, you know, facilitate the conversations that need to happen to make it so that marketing is seen as really additive, we bring in money, and it’s not just a drain or spray and pray, as they say,
Amr The Internet Guy
yeah, yeah, and it’s a it’s an investment.
Yes, it’s an investment. And you we we can measure most things, some things are kind of hard. If you’re doing radio or TV or things like that, it can be kind of hard to measure the ROI on it. But we always do want to make sure that we are increasing sales at the margins that that people want, you know, and are very, very aware of the numbers and what our responsibility is to deliver. So we’re committed to delivering these things, and not attached to how it happens. So sometimes we need to keep legacy relationships and systems and sometimes we bring in our own and we’re really, we can be more innovative. And you know, it’s a combination of that. And that’s why it’s a concierge, because we we help to we work with you to figure out what your best outcome will be.
Amr The Internet Guy
I like that because you know, it’s kind of, in my opinion, many of at least, the small and medium businesses, the business owners, as you know, we have to wear so many hats, and you have your court, like you’ve started your business, because you’re very good at something, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re very good at everything. And sometimes marketing is not something that you even like doing, right? Yeah. And the problem is with all the noise out there, and with it being reduced to just people describing tasks, instead of describing marketing as a role, or people describing technology, like, you know, which application is better than another? Or what CRM, you know, would you use for your email campaigns or whatever? Rather than what do you want to do with email campaigns? Because that should decide which application you use? What when, when you first, you know, decide, what do you do with the campaign? How are you going to follow up? Are you going to automate that follow up? Are you going to send it to people who did not click or two people who click or you know, how do you segment, there’s so many scenarios and these things can be written on a piece of paper with a pencil, like you don’t need technology for that. Then you take it and automate it, put it into the software. Once the pros, I used to say this all the time, you cannot automate a process that doesn’t exist. Yes. So if you cannot write it on paper, the software isn’t going to do it for you, you have to be able to describe the steps and all the scenarios if they click where do they go? If they didn’t click? What do you do? Do you send another message? Does someone get on the phone and call them like, what? What do you want to do? What’s their preferences? Well, some people like even some people like SMS, others like phone calls, I mean, it all depends. So marketing is is ingrained within everything you do in the organization. I think. I love your vision of marketing because it’s more about enriching the communication and the value with especially with existing customers, rather than it’s just like bang bang, bang, fill the world with ads, and try to put everyone through the funnel and see what sticks.
And you know what, that’s what a lot of analytical people do who don’t have the like, EQ side of marketing. Yeah. And And there’s cuz I work with the people who are really good at that. I don’t do that. And my team doesn’t specialize in it in the ads and all of that. But we have contractors we work with the do, because they’re the analytical side of things and weird, like the pretty soft side of things, make things look nice, we make them sound nice, you know, we, we make that nice, buttery customer interaction that’s smooth. And we have all that technology to back it up. And we have all those data points, too. But there’s something to be said for, like that human soft side of things that you can’t necessarily quantify. And if you just decide to do digital ads, like that’s okay, that is a thing, but it’s not the whole thing. Exactly. No. And that’s, that’s one thing that you can measure. Um, and, you know, I, I love ads, and I love my ads, guys, and we do a really good job with it. And we don’t like we will influence the messaging on them. And we trust the the people with all the tools to run,
Amr The Internet Guy
they have delivery vehicles, you give them the message, and then they just know what to use to get them delivered to the right people. Yeah, I’m going to pick your brain after you know, this session, and tell you my experience with ads and ad people.
Oh, I’ve worked with a lot of ad people over the last 1520 years, you know, and I have some really good ones now. And it’s an it changes so much Facebook, and Google, and Instagram, like all of the things you can and can’t do. Pinterest, LinkedIn, we’ve experimented with all of these different platforms and continue to because it changes so often. So often, every month, there’s new updates.
Amr The Internet Guy
Filming, like for the business owner is like, oh my god, like what? How much am I gonna learn? Like, I don’t want, I want to focus on my core thing. I just don’t want to keep learning think.
Yes. Yep. And if you can use like, 10 10% of someone’s expertise, that’s what I try to do on a project like, Okay, I’ll take 10% of your brain 10% of your brain. And, you know, welcome to the project, because I don’t want to retain all that information. I don’t want to learn it. If we were talking about CRM, I was like, I know, this is possible to do this kind of tracking. I don’t know how, and I don’t know what tool we’re gonna use. And we can find the right people. Yeah, be awesome. Yeah. Yeah, it’s like, we’ll set the specs, and we’ll invite in the the right people to implement that, you know, because it’s like, you can see all the things that are possible. But I mean, tech changes so fast now. So fast, it’s good to get those really specific niche experts, you know,
Amr The Internet Guy
I think, not your app, guys. But I think most of the ad guys, they miss the other part as well. That’s the problem. Like the many marketing agencies, they do call themselves an agency. But what there are, they are just ad brokers. In generally speaking, they just go and buy media, and you give them money to push your ad to the people that you know, where this media was bought from, or whatever it is, like it gets displayed on these networks or whatever. But at the end of the day, they don’t actually tell you, like, I’ll tell you my experience offline. But in general, it’s very hard to get someone who would ask you, who is your ideal customer? Like, that’s basic guys. Like, you’re gonna advertise? Like, what’s the point? You’ll make me pay Google for? I don’t know, 67,000 new visitors, but none of them is my ideal client. That’s a waste of your time and my money. You know, had you asked him the beginning. You know, who’s your target? Exactly. Then you go and ask yourself, How can you reach those people, specifically, those people and only those people, not everybody else on Earth? My customers are not 7 billion. No, they’re not. We want to use everything that we can in marketing. And we want the people who do the ads to learn a little bit more about reaching the right person, and what type of message in order for your ad to have the effect that you wanted to have? Yeah, and it’s kind of like I don’t know how to describe this because it’s kind of like some agencies know more about the messaging, but not the tech to get it delivered. And the majority of agencies that I have seen personally, are more taken less people, like less people More techies. And I’m attacking myself. So it bugs me because like, I don’t need more tech I need, you know, I need more help on delivering the right message to the right person, I don’t care what you use to deliver it because this I can learn.
Yeah. Well, and if you’re listening and you’re a tech person to story brand is really helpful for that. And you can go to story brand.com and learn more about their methodology. When we start working with a big client, we do the story brand process and we get this story out so that in one to two sentences, you can say, you know, this is what we do. This is who it’s for, this is how we do it. Yeah. And it makes a really big difference to have that clarity on a website. And even though we do that for clients, I pay someone to do that for me on my projects to Yeah, so I work with a consultant for emotionality. Because I need that detachment, I need someone else. So
Amr The Internet Guy
I don’t do my own website. You know, I do the functionality. But never the design, it will take me forever, I will not finish. Because every time I look at it needs a change here needs a change there. Yeah. And it will be ongoing forever. So what I do, I get like one of my designers, I say, Bill me for this, you do it on your own, don’t even show me your work until it’s done. Otherwise, we will never finish.
That is so funny. I love that I have to do the same thing. And it’s it’s like even this, this is a core competency of mine. I can’t do it for myself.
Amr The Internet Guy
Because you’ll be we usually you’re your worst critic. Yeah, absolutely. And he’s got to be perfect because your your prospect customers and your customers will see it. So it has to convince them that like, it will be this good or even better for them. But the problem is when you criticize it from an expert perspective, that’s not from a user perspective, like, yeah, when I build a website for you, for example, if you’re my client, I do the website for you. This website speaks to your customers, or your prospect customers and website visitors. They’re not web designers. So it shouldn’t be done. From like the design industry perspective, it should be done. From your industry perspective, if you’re a coach, and who’s coaching, for example, let’s say about money, then it’s about financial literacy or whatever. If you’re about emotional intelligence, then it’s about, you know, the emotion, the feeling, the listening, things like that. So it’s not. So what I do it for me, I’m a web designer. So it’s a web design industry, and then it becomes now it doesn’t speak to, or it will not speak to a business owner who wants their website to be better. Yeah, because it will be mostly speaking to other web designers like me, and that’s not what I want.
Yeah, I always
Amr The Internet Guy
outsource the stuff that, you know, doesn’t feel right, or it’s a good message, actually, don’t try to do everything yourself. Use health when available.
Yes. Because I mean, you get to a certain point in life where you’ve tried all the things like I can do graphic design, I can build a website, I can put all the things together doesn’t mean that I should or that I’m like super at it either. I might be particular, about my design, because that’s what I studied in school. And so I need a designer with the highest Stetic to work with. And it’s better to send it out. And it’s better to spend my time creating more relationships with people and bring them into the platform.
Amr The Internet Guy
I love them. Every business owner should do that actually, like, focus more on creating and nurturing this relationship, these relationships. You don’t need to learn another tool, you don’t need to learn one more, you know, email marketing software, or one I mean, I have seen I get a lot of people asking for help building their own websites. And I don’t know why that tormenting themselves with this, I would gladly help them like for me becomes a small project where I’m paid by the hour just to give them advice or show them how this is done or how that is done. And for me, it’s okay. I like that because it also gives me the opportunity to speak with more people and learn a little bit more about what they do. And you know, sometimes you realize there are some business ideas that nobody thought of, and like you see someone who’s like, how did they come up with this? Like, yeah, but I see them actually torturing themselves. Trying to build their own websites and spending, like 100 hours. And then when you ask the question, the dreaded question, how many hours did you spend on that? And I think the minimum would have been 60. And I say, Okay, do you know what your hourly rate is? Yeah. Okay. Can you do the math? Yeah. Okay. So if you hire not me, necessarily, but any professional web designer, you would have paid half of whatever, you know, time value you have for the time you spent and you wouldn’t have had as much headache. You’d have saved money, you would have saved your time and invested your time with your customers, which means, you know, probably you would have made more money.
Yep, absolutely. agreed on that one.
Amr The Internet Guy
Perfect. So Nicole, where do you want people to come? If they want a little bit more information? Or? Oh, sorry, your mic has gone off now. Oh, yeah. Okay.
My daughter, my child decided it was a good time to vacuum.
Amr The Internet Guy
Oh, don’t worry about it. I thought it was the blender. Oh, yeah.
No, the vacuum cleaner. I appreciate the vacuuming and the timing is, you know,
Amr The Internet Guy
immaculate, don’t worry about is not that high.
I’m okay, so where can people find me? If they want more information?
Amr The Internet Guy
Where do you want them to go? Yeah, you
can go to salty waffle.com. And check out the website and you can email me at Nicole at salty waffle.com.
Amr The Internet Guy
Perfect. And I’ll put these I’ll put all the links below. So for people watching us, you can have the links below. And if you’re listening to us on a podcast and you don’t see us on YouTube, you will be able to actually go to the link on my website that will have all the links how to communicate with Nicole. And also the storyboard. You mentioned storyboards
story brand, brand story brand.
Amr The Internet Guy
Story brand calm. Yeah, so anything that we mentioned hero, I’ll just have it linked at the bottom of the episode.
Thank you. Thank you for having me. This was a fun conversation.
Amr The Internet Guy
I loved it too. Nicole, thank you very much for being here. Hey, before you go, I would like to remind you that if you have a WordPress based website, you need to be really looking after its maintenance and security and having a professional looking after it. So if you feel overwhelmed, or if you feel that there’s back and and boring stuff is something that you don’t want to do. Please do hire someone, but get it done. Do not delay this. Do not leave your WordPress website, not updated. Do not leave your plugins not updated. This will open it up for hacking and malware and you don’t want that. If you’re unsure head to my website, human talents.ca That’s human talents, one word human talents.ca and click there you’ll be able to book like a 30 minute consultation and we can discuss this together and see if we can help you Thank you and see you in the next episode.
