We're in Sydney by ourselves. We don't have any family support yet. So when we had a baby, we had a lot of things to do and we were very busy.

It was just me and Brett.

Things were just breaking in the business. We decided I need to get off the tools. We need to separate the business away from me.

By having a team, it just means that we have multiple developers to step up when it's needed.

Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week we're joined by Brett Stone and Jeanette Wang, owners of Stone Digital, which is an agency based in Sydney that specialise in custom WordPress, WooCommerce, and Shopify web development projects. Brett and Jeanette are partners in life as well as business. So in this episode we explore how Brett and Jeanette manage to be husband and wife and new parents and business owners all at the same time. We discuss the keys to growing recurring revenue, how to foster and nurture your team of A players, even if they're remote and on the other side of the planet, and overcoming the fear of hiring and leading a team and much more. If you've ever considered working with your partner or you're already working with your partner but struggling to leave work at work, or even if you're a freelancer and afraid to take the plunge and build your own team, then this episode is for you. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us. Alright, without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Brett and Jeanette from Stone Digital to the Agency Our Podcast. Come on down, how are you guys? Doing well. You're looking pretty cold. It must be pretty chilly with you off. Melbourne is just absolutely freezing at the moment. And yes, I do have heating in the office, and I have paid the bill, but yes, I've put my big puffer coat on because it is cold and I'm old, and the older you get, the more you feel the cold. So there you go. Uh now, interestingly, we were talking in the green room before we hit the record button. I think this is the first episode of the Agency R podcast that features a couple who all work together and are a couple in real life. How's that working out for you guys? Maybe I should ask Jeanette first. Great choice.

Well, obviously it has ups and downs. Um, and yeah, uh it has been the best decisions we've made, but the journey has been challenging, but we just tackle what the challenges as we go. And yeah, joining agents in Mavericks is probably one of the best decisions we've made to basically to help to overcome these challenges.

Right, that's good to hear. Yeah. Um, full transparency, Brett and Jeanette from Stone Digital are in Mavericks Club. We were hanging out a few weeks ago at Mavcon on the Gold Coast. Before we start talking about the agency and what you guys are doing there, uh, what made you decide to work together as a couple? Like how how long did that decision take to happen and what were the conversations that went on around that?

I think it was mainly around what we wanted to achieve in our life, what kind of um outcomes we wanted to have in terms of flexibility and also the lifestyle. And after looking at that, we determined actually working from home, having our own business instead of having a corporate job in the city, or both of us having different jobs and having to juggle having a you know young baby and the duties with that. We decided if we could, we'll try and work together and have a lot of flexibility. Um, and that's what we decided to do. So it was really just about creating the lifestyle that we wanted to make. And obviously running your own business, it does have a lot of flexibility and a lot of stress, obviously. But we've been able to manage and improve over time.

Now, Brett, it was your you were running the agency and then Jeanette joined, is that right? So that's right. Jeanette, were you what were your what were your hesitations or concerns before you made this decision?

Um I think I think my main hesitation was just working with my husband and I did not what know what it was going to look like. And you know, by all means I do want to do anything just, you know, to hurt our relationship, because that is the most important thing for us. Yeah. Uh but a turning point was um I was at a corporate for a couple of years, and I can see sometimes it takes ages to make impact because there are so many layers and uh I'm always up for something that's a bit more entrepreneurial. And at the time, Brett was running Stone to Door for three years, uh basically by himself. So I thought that's the perfect opportunity for me to be part of something um a bit more fun. Yeah.

I've been trying to get my wife to come and work in my business for the last, you know, 10 years, and she keeps saying to me, we can work together or we can be married. What would you like to do? And I'm choosing the relationship and the family, of course. Um but but I think what we've identified that we couldn't work together because Unless we were in completely different parts of the business and we never spoke to each other, which is hot which is possible. That could also work. I'm curious about the how did you put boundaries in place? Maybe I'm assuming all sorts of things here. Maybe you don't have boundaries. I mean, did you just talk about work over dinner? Do you talk about work 24 hours a day? How do you switch off? How do you how do you be a how do you be a husband and wife and parents and and how do you you know how do you manage all of that? Because I imagine, especially working from home, it must kind of infiltrate the living space and the preparing the dinner and talking about what happened with this client and and then how do you have anything to talk about at the end of the day because you both know what's going on in the business, right?

Exactly. Um there's definitely some things we've learned to add some boundaries and to make the working relationship a whole lot better. Definitely, I would say the first six, twelve months were a really big struggle, and we were making a lot of mistakes and it was really difficult. And in fact, you know, seeing I think a counselor kind of actually helped a lot. And one of the key things I learned from doing that is that I kind of needed to like view uh Jeanette as my business partner. So instead of like seeing her as a team member, that I should, you know, just micromanage or give tasks. In fact, she has ownership as much as anyone else, yeah, as much as me in the business. So that was a key mindset change that I think was really important. But of course, there's very practical things as well, like yeah, I think we do try and avoid because you know, talk about work after you know 5 p.m. and 6 p.m., etc. Um Jeanette, what do you think?

We try, yeah. Um yeah, so I can give a few examples. For example, Brett and I, we yes, generally generally we work from home, but we don't really work in the same space. So as you can see, I'm in a different part of the house and Brett has his own office. So that's one thing. Um each time Brett and I will when we have a meeting, we try to do it on Google Meet. We don't really meet in person. And it probably sounds a bit awkward because we're so close to each other, but but just that's just one of the things we we identify that would help us to uh do a better meeting. Um and also if we plan to talk about something more high-level, strategy level, we try to do it outside a house. For example, we'll go to a cafe, talk about the plans for the next quarter. We try to avoid it to do it at home because uh it's a bit hard to talk about the business, think about high level things while there's a house chore mental load going down. Oh, who's doing the dishes? There's still things on the floor.

Diding tables covered in laundry, yeah.

Yeah, so these are some of the things that we've come up with. Also, from five to eight, we do not in the evening, we don't really look at our phones, uh, we don't talk about work, but our focus is family, and that's the reason why we set up this business. So yeah.

You know, I I didn't know I didn't know this. Um, I didn't know the answer to these questions before I asked them. We didn't really have a chance to talk about this in detail at Mavcon. But what I love about this and what I really admire and respect about this is how intentional you've been about this. The fact that you said that, you know, you've got some help from a counselor to help figure out how to manage this, you've put some which I think is super smart, by the way. Uh I'm a big advocate of getting as much help as you possibly can in every part of your life. You know, I've had personal trainers in the past, I've had lots of therapists help me. I'm still seeing a therapist at the moment to help me deal with my old wounds and help me manage my triggers and manage my big feelings. Because I'm a boy and I'm not very good at managing my big feelings. Um and and I think it's super smart as a couple who want to have a great life, who want to be great parents, who want to be the best version of themselves, to get help in areas that we're not equipped, we don't learn this stuff in school, right? And we don't and a lot of us don't learn this stuff from our parents because our parents didn't learn this stuff from their parents. And so I so massive, massive uh props to you guys for being really intentional and not just winging it, but actually thinking about some of this stuff in advance and putting some of those parameters in place. I've uh absolute respect for you both doing that. Well done. Um how's Keaton, your little boy Keaton, was at MavCon uh a couple of weeks ago on the Gold Coast and stole a show. He was the centre of attention. He was amaz he was so cute. How old is he now?

He's turning two.

Just turning two months.

Yeah.

Such a great age. And uh and how how's he doing?

He's doing pretty well, yeah. Um it has been the past two months, it's been pretty good. You know, sickness, that's pretty good. We sent he started daycare about a year ago. So I guess all parents know how hard it you know it was at a very beginning, basically getting sick every second week, of course.

Yeah, and also the operation. It's all it's like I remember dropping our kids at daycare for the first time, and the separation is like not just from them, uh, but as a parent, I would walk out and I'd have to wring my wife and I'd be in tears, and I'd be like, a little piece of me just died because I'm leaving Oscar with with someone else. And it's uh it's a massive transition and a massive adjustment. So uh well done for for navigating that.

Yeah, and I would say daycare was like had a big impact on the business as well. Because after we um enrolled him in daycare and he started going to daycare, I remember one of the coaches in Mavcon, he said to me, get ready to vomit after we started taking the baby to daycare. And I thought that was such a strange thing to say. I'm like, how could you say that? But literally within a week or two, I believe, I had crazy gastro. I was out for a few days. Um and um and yeah, like we were sick a lot and have been the past year because of daycare, and that's been a big part of what we needed to change in the business, that we could be a little bit more off the tools, we could take time off, and the revenue will still come in and you know the work will still get done. So that's you know, been a big impact. And the whole influence of Keaton, our baby on the business as well, having him has transformed, you know, our business because we want to basically make it so it can rely a little bit less without us. Um so that's been a big thing. Yeah.

I've said, you know, they're the ultimate um, they're the ultimate uh disruptor, children. Like that, you know, you have this life that's just going along and everyone's cruising off. I remember one of the first days we took Oscar out for breakfast after the first couple of weeks of just staying home and just going, what the actual hell is going on here? And then we got the confidence up to go out and have breakfast and we're walking home at nine o'clock in the morning, because of course we were out at breakfast at 7.30 because you know Oscar was awake. We're walking home at nine or nine thirty, and I was watching these younger couples kind of spill out of their apartments with hangovers from the night before, and they were kind of making their way down for a late breakfast. And I remember thinking to myself, You have no idea what's about to happen. Have some children. You won't be sleeping until 9.30. They're the ultimate disruptor, and uh, and and you know, the most challenging and the most rewarding thing you'll ever do. Um, so well done for you guys for navigating, working together, having children, being parents. It's you know, you it's the full catastrophe, and and you're doing a great job. So uh let's segue a little bit towards the business. Tell us what what is Stone Digital? What are the services that you offer, and what does the current team look like these days?

Yeah. So Stone Digital is a so we're a custom web design and development agency. So we're specialized in doing websites and in particular uh very well equipped to doing pretty custom, you know, bespoke websites and custom integration. Um so that's our kind of focus and our specialty. Um I started as a kind of freelancer and then eventually grew up to you know being a busy freelancer with project contractors on work and then eventually turned it into having full-time team members, which is a very new development. It's kind of a development that's gone alongside being a part of Mavericks Club. So I mean, I was looking at it recently a a year and a half ago, I was still basically a freelancer with project contractors. And it's only really in the past year that I've had full-time team members. And yeah, the past year has been really crazy in terms of growth and development. So right now I think we have eight, including us two. Wow. So us two here in Australia, and then we've also got another kind of Australia-based um project manager who's in Berth, Perth, who's helping us. And then we we must have, I guess, five uh full-time team members overseas.

Wow. Fantastic. Um and how what what what's your role in the business, Jeanette?

Yeah, so basically I'm I'm actually a project manager in a business. I mainly look after projects at our typical package, a website design development. So that's basically what I do. I also handle uh quite a significant amount of the client communications uh involve a bit of HR and BD. I guess that's what happened to a lot of um couple businesses who just be a bit of all under the end. Yeah, so that's basically what I do. Yeah.

And also small business, I think you know, a team of eight, you'd you'd you're typically gonna have um people who are doing multiple, you know, you you're not quite big enough to have specialists. I mean, we still we're a team of 14 or 15 or whatever it is now, and uh we have people who still have hybrid roles that do a little bit of this, and you know, here's their main focus, but they're still doing a bit of this and a bit of that just because you don't have a team big enough to to really be specialists, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It just you just have to be aware of it. Um how how's your role changed, Brett, over the last 18 months since you've grown the team?

Great question. Well, basically it's gone from every hat to a lot fewer hats, which is amazing. I can't believe all the different hats that I had to wear when I was being a Superman freelancer. Um and I'm just so happy about that. And you know, talking about Jeanette's role in the business, like her coming into the business at that time was like totally what the business needed as well, and it was totally beneficial for the business. Because at that time, I was just so busy, so I was the bottleneck for the business, and I really wanted to offload the project management hat, you know, just basic communication with the client, updating on things, interpreting that feedback. I really didn't think I really wanted to offload that. Um and Jeanette came in and did an amazing job, and it was exactly what the business needed. It was the next high that I wanted. And the other amazing benefit of it all is that you know, she has you know, cares about the business, obviously, because we're both partners. And she has a gr an amazing sense of ownership because we are business partners. And there's a you know, there's a lot of practical benefits in in that. You know, we're obviously um distributing the profits, there's no kind of like large upfront wage payments I need to do each month. So yeah, I I feel having her come on board as a business partner and helping with project management really helped the business and what we needed at that time. So that took one hat off, and other hats have been taken off as well over the past 18 months.

What's what's been the uh what's been the uh most difficult I see, I have conversations all the time, as you'd expect. I'm very visible and active in a lot of Facebook groups, and people reach out to me in Messenger all the time. It's pretty much my chosen platform. I'm not on any other platform really except YouTube. Um, but I hear this all the time. People say, I've tried to hire someone to do the technical stuff, right? I've tried to hire a developer, I've tried to hire a designer, I've tried to hire a copywriter, I've tried to hire an SEO. They don't do it as good as me. I've had to micromanage them, I've had to fix their work. It takes too long to train them how to do it, I may as well just do it myself. Which is a false economy because if you do everything yourself, you're gonna stay stuck at a particular level. Which there's nothing wrong with that. It just means that you can't go away on holiday because if you go away on holiday, there's no one else there to generate revenue and to deliver the value for the clients. What's been I guess from a mindset point of view Because m because I think most of this is just a decision. Right? You you just make the decision that we're gonna hire a developer and that they're going to succeed. So what's been the mindset uh change that's had to take place? But then also what have you done from a practical point of view to make sure that you've hired people who can succeed in that role so that you don't have to spend your life fixing mistakes or you know, micromanaging or putting out fires or or doing QA work? Yeah.

The the key is absolutely being able to recruit a player talent. And it's taken us a while to learn that. We've learned we've learned that process and learned so much from being in Mavericks Club that has enabled us to basically recruit A players in a repeatable way. Right now, with the team we have, they are A players and they're doing such great work. Like those pain points that you mentioned of like constantly having to micromanage them or check their work, we we don't have to do that really. They're doing better work than what I would have done. Um and they're you know, they're based overseas, but their communication is amazing. Um they're really top tier um in the industry and we're really happy to have them. But it's took ages and took a lot of effort to learn how we'd find those types of people and a lot of failures along the way. You know, I like to think that when it comes to recruitment, we're probably gonna whenever you're new to recruiting or new to recruiting a particular role, you'll probably fail the first four or five times before you actually figure out how to recruit consistently for that role.

And and you and usually it's uh it's got less to do with them and more to do with us, right? Because because I I, you know, I was I mean, I still think I'm a terrible manager, right? I think I've become a good leader over the years. I wasn't I think leadership comes naturally to me, but it took a long time for me to own that. I think I was very self-conscious and very anxious about leadership in my earlier days as an entrepreneur. But I think it does come naturally to me. Managing doesn't come naturally to me at all. I hate managing, I don't like being managed, I don't like managing people, I would just rather employ grown-ups and everyone get on with their job. Um, but it's my the first half a dozen hires that I made ultimately failed because of me, not because of them, but because I had no idea. I didn't, I mean, I was terrified, absolutely terrified of leading people and trying to rally the troops and get them moving in the right direction and absolutely petrified. And but it's very easy to blame them and go, oh, well, it's their fault. It's you know, that they're not as good as me, and then I'm just gonna do it myself. Why what made you guys uh so determined to keep you know, because it would be easier just to shrink and go, well, there's you know, we'll just do everything ourselves. What made you so determined to to break on through and to keep pursuing the recruitment path until you found the right people?

It goes back again to the family situation. So we're kind of we're in Sydney by ourselves, we don't have any family support here. So when we had a baby, we had a lot of things to do and we were very busy. And I was realizing that um, yeah, things were just breaking in the business, things were grinding to a halt because I was too busy, we were too busy. And because of that, and because of a few, you know, you know, crisis outcomes that happened because I was just totally missing in action and busy, we decided I need to get off the tools, we need to separate the business away from me, which is a key reason why we needed help and we looked for help, which we found in Mavericks Club.

I think the other perspective is that we're looking into how the clients see us, because if we if if it was just me and Brett, um, and obviously we are parents now, so we're gonna get sick, or um, there are things there are times that we won't be able, for example, to get back to the clients on time on certain things. So if it's just two of us, there are all these breaking points that they probably won't have that continuity of the service. But having a team, um, it just it just means that we have multiple people developers to step up when it's needed. So uh that's also one of the benefits we see to have a team. So the client will see that continuity of service from us.

How I love my team, and uh we have a team of A players now. We've had a bigger team in the past, we've shrunk, we've moved things around, we've restructured, we've changed the business model. My team, our team, the team, not my team, the team, uh I mean, I just couldn't imagine. I I I don't wake up in the middle of the night worried about losing clients, I wake up in the middle of the night worried about losing team members. Right? Because the without the team, I couldn't do I I mean I just couldn't do it. Right? I there's no way I could go back to to doing this on my own. What are you doing, if anything, um what are you doing to you know, remote teams are hard because we end up communicating with each other through devices and through screens. What are you doing to kind of foster and nurture that that sense of confidence? And teamwork and culture with your team members?

I think there are a few aspects that we when we look look into retaining top talents. I think number one, we want to make sure that they are properly um remunerated. So we want to make sure that the offer we provide to them is competitive in their local market. So that's the very first thing. And we also have a pay rise scheme that we recently come up with. So we do reviews every six months to look at a team member's performance and to see where they are on the scale. So obviously, if they're doing really well, they will get relevant base. So based on our research, this is quite frequent in the industry. So that sort of served in a way to um to motivate our team members to continue to strive for excellence. Um the other thing is that we invest in their personal growth as well. So for some of our team members, we have a UI designer who's super young, he's early 20s, uh, really talented. He's very interested in attending different like UI and design-related conferences. We sponsor him to go, we encourage him to go because we just want to make sure that he will learn as much as possible to grow. Um, I guess these are the two main things we do. Um, and yeah, we also talk about personal things on the call as well. Like recently, one of our team members had babies, so we send congratulate messages to him. I ship some, so I also send him like a baby, like a parcel of baby items to him. We want to make sure, you know, even they are so remote from us, um, they're also part of the team. I want them to feel they're part of our team, they're not someone just based remotely. So yeah, so basically that's some of the things we do. Yeah.

Love it, love it. I want to, you know, hiring is scary if your cash flow is lumpy, and I know you guys have had a big uh transformation in your recurring revenue over the last 18 months or so. What's been the key? Because, you know, let's face it, if you've got recurring revenue, uh, it just gives you a little bit of security so that you can hire a team member and know that you're gonna have cash flow coming in, right? Now it's not guaranteed, but it's better than you know just surviving on project revenue. What's been the key for you guys to grow your recurring revenue?

So the key to yeah, growing our recurring revenue has been basically promoting it and pushing it. Before this, we did not have it on our radar at all. Um of course we have mechanisms to you know um promote it and make it seem, you know, and uh yeah, just promote it in a way that you know makes sense for the clients, etc. And through paid discovery, it's it's a good way to sell onto subscription revenue. But before this, we just did not have it on our radar. It's thanks to Mavericks Cloud that we kind of had this revolution of thinking, hey, we should get people into subscription revenue, because before this, we were basically starting from zero each month, you know, and having to estimate with clients, oh I think you know, we'll we'll estimate it'll be this amount or only doing fixed fee. And then it just became very uncertain. And we had a lot of months during that time where it was very lumpy and uncertain, and you're not quite sure what revenue you're gonna get. Um, with the subscription revenue, we've loved it because it does have um that stickiness to it, that predictability. Of course, things can change, but it's it's a fantastic base to stand from, and it just kind of happens automatically, and you don't have to manually set up invoices and negotiate with the client, etc. So yeah.

Yeah, it it it removes a lot of admin if you're not invoicing and then chasing money. Um now, uh there's a lot of benefits, there's so many benefits to recurring revenue. We've I've been a recurring revenue business model since 2013, I think, 2014. Um, there's definitely no going back. Um But what I'm curious about here is that a lot of people think that in order to be in order for a digital agency to offer something on recurring revenue that they need to be doing, you know, ad management or you know, SEO or you know, marketing services. You guys are a uh predominantly a design and development house, right?

Yeah, that's right. So we still definitely do have project based fees, so fixed fee projects. But we definitely have also tried to morph a lot of the projects into kind of monthly payments over a 12-month period. So we definitely do have website projects that come to us, and instead of doing, you know, a fixed fee project, you know, 50% on commencement and 50% on launch, we kind of um add a little bit extra to the kind of overall fee and then just kind of spread it over a 12-month period. So it's almost like a payment plan with additional services, and the total ends up being larger because we're providing more services, we're providing support and minor adjustments after the launch. Um, but the clients are happy to do it because it's very cash flow effective, they can plan it well in advance, and they know there's not really going to be any surprises outside of you know that monthly fee that we've discussed. Um so that's one way we've approached it, as well as doing pretty standard retainers of you know having an approximate amount of hours that we're doing each month for a particular project. Um but for those projects we also try not to get too focused on the hours. We basically want to have a you know a roadmap of their features that they want to have over the next six to twelve months. And the idea is that we want to package together a monthly fee that should cover that roadmap. Um so that's another way that we've built subscription revenue. We build out the digital roadmap of features they want for the next six to twelve months, and we basically say for that, there's a monthly advanced website support plan we have, which can cover that. If there's anything major outside of the roadmap, that's outside of scope, we might have to discuss it. But we do always try and go above and beyond anyway to provide value to the client. But that's some of the ways we did subscription revenue.

This I think this is a really important point because a lot of people think that in order to sell a growth plan or a retainer or whatever you want to call it, that you need to be offering marketing services because the only thing that a client would pay for ongoing is marketing services. And it's not true. I would happily pay, you know, um and and in the past have happily paid, you know, up to $3,000 a month for non-marketing services, right? For people to do things that are a core function of the business that are not related to marketing. And you know, I'm not the anomaly, by the way. There are plenty of uh clients in businesses that look like me are at our level that will happily pay that for someone else to solve a problem that we don't have to think about or that we don't have the capacity to do with our internal team. And you're not alone. I know there are several agencies in agency Mavericks who don't offer any marketing services, they just do web development or web design, and they are rolling out these recurring revenue packages because I think one of the things it it gives everyone more time. You know, the old days of let's charge 20 grand for a website and try and get it done in six weeks, and then everyone sprints like crazy to meet a deadline. Deadlines, you know, invariably get missed because clients don't provide content on time or something they move, you know, scope creep happens throughout the process, and it's a it's a panicked kind of relationship. And then you launch the website and then we expect that we're never going to see the client again. I would much rather have you know six, nine, twelve, thirty-six months to work with a client to help them achieve their objectives, and part of that might be rebuilding them a new website. But if you think about what is building a website, it's a series of smaller projects, isn't it? It's a you know, it's contact form automation and follow-up, it's a landing page, it's a services page, it's a category page, it's some CRO, it's uh eventually a home page, which is a landing page anyway. So it's a series of smaller projects. And I think spreading that out over a period of time, thinking about, you know, adding a case studies section to your website or adding a gallery or a portfolio to your website, this is going to happen, it can't happen now because we don't have the images, it's gonna happen in three months' time. Spreading that stuff out and breaking it down into smaller sprints, if you like, and spreading that out over a over a payment plan makes a lot more sense for us as a b as an agency to manage it and for the team to manage it, and for the client to be able to get what they need to us in a timely fashion and manage their cash flow, instead of everyone just being overwhelmed for six weeks and and kind of sprinting to meet this deadline that you know that that was kind of set arbitrarily at the start of the at the start of the project. So well done for being one of those agencies that's managed to do this without having market or without feeling like you needed to add services in order to charge recurring revenue. Because I know that's a big misunderstanding a lot of agency owners have is they I need to add services to be able to charge recurring revenue. Jeanette, quick question for you. What's your learning curve been like? Because you don't come from this background, right? You don't come from this wasn't what you were doing in corporate, was it?

No, I was in finance and a communication. So this is something completely different from what I was doing. Yeah. So very different.

Yeah. And and how how have you gone about learning uh, you know, because obviously the project manager team to do these things, you need to you need to know enough about what they're doing so that to make sure that they're doing the right thing. How how have you skilled up in in the technical side of the business, but also the the business model itself?

Yep. So I guess um now I've I've learned pretty well how to navigate the WordPress dashboard. That's probably the only technical side that I've upskilled pretty well. Um, I would say my key learning is uh back to what Brett mentioned about recruitment, is to have A-players. I think for me, uh in particular for in my situation, it's very important to have a players, top developers, top talent. So we work together to deliver really good outcome for the clients. So um that has been our learning curve because we had a few ones that um that we were not necessarily, you know, I could not be so not necessarily that uh um me and the developer could be in a very good team, but now we have really good team members. So yeah, so that has been, I guess, the biggest of learning, and it's been going pretty well so that yeah.

Awesome. Um, what are you guys most excited about over the next 90 days? And and I I probably do need to ask also, uh, how is how are you getting your head around the AI avalanche of stuff that's coming down the pipeline?

Yeah, good question. Um in terms of the AI question, so we're all in, we're doing everything we can to get up to date with the latest tools to help enhance our work and improve it. And everybody in the team and the company knows that if there's ever an AI tool that can help them with their job, we want them to experiment it, experiment with it, and we want to hear about it in the next team meeting. What's good about it, does it help, etc.? So I would say every team member has been experimenting with AI tools to help with their job. Um if they ever need an AI tool through any subscription that they want to try, we're happy to do it. You know, uh team members have gotten in touch with us and said, hey, I want to try, you know, GitHub Copilot, I want to try a different thing. And we're all for it. And we want to enable any other team members that want to try that as well. So of course I'm using AI all the time, Chat GPT for rewriting things, Jeanette is as well. So we're using it a lot. I don't see it as like any huge risk. I think it's just gonna enhance our work and make us better, you know, developers and designers and and a better web agency. So that's the answer on the AI.

Yeah. Cool. And and what are you most excited about over the over the next three months or so?

Okay, what I'm excited about over the next three months is we are consistently achieving pretty impressive growth. Like we're hitting pretty amazing revenue numbers over the past few months, and I can see that's gonna continue to happen. Um Yeah. I think we're gonna achieve a pretty amazing kind of revenue number over the next one year. So the next financial year. Already last financial year was um you know above what we had aimed for. So we're we did a really great job and we're continuing to grow. And also the leads in the pipeline are really high-quality, high-value clients that I can see once they convert, it's gonna really, you know, help with that revenue growth as well. So I'm really excited about that point and what that unlocks for our business. Because I feel like we're probably gonna have a lot of capacity to hire extra people, whether it be offshore or maybe even in Australia. Um, so I'm really excited about that. It's gonna be a challenge, it's gonna be an adventure, but that's what I love about having our own business. That there's always a new adventure, always a different challenge that we have to tackle. Um, so that will definitely be one as well. Um, so I'm very excited about that, but also excited about some upcoming travel that we have. So we're trying to kind of travel interstate as much as we can to visit clients that are overseas and kind of loop it together with a holiday. So we've got and of course, recently we went to Mavcon, and I think that kind of inspired us, to be honest, because we went to Mavcon, we did some work, we had our baby there as well, and we've made some great business, you know, contacts while we were there, caught up with you know agency contacts that we've met through Mavericks Club, and it was just really amazing, and we loved it. So we're looking to do more interstate travel and connect it with work.

And I think what once you do that with with a a two-year-old, you kind of get your confidence up, and you know, then you want to do it a little bit more. And I remember Oscar by the time he was 19 months old, I think he'd had 19 flights. It was ridiculous, it was kind of crazy. Interstate, Thailand, New Zealand, Thailand for one of our events. Um, and then of course, COVID happened and we had Goldie, so Goldie didn't go anywhere for the first two years of her life because we were in lockdown. Uh, but I think, yeah, once you kind of break the seal and you get your confidence up, it's like, yes, we can travel with kids, uh, then it opens up a whole new uh world of possibilities. And this is one of the things I love about the agency business model too, is that you can work from anywhere, right? You don't have to be stuck at home. You can take the laptops with you, and and if you've got that remote team, you can get work done no matter where you are.

And another thing I just thought of that we're definitely excited for is if we continue to hit the goals and the growth that we're hitting, we are definitely going to have a kind of team retreat in Thailand. Um we'll kind of get all the teams together in Thailand. There's other agency owners in Mavericks Club that we've definitely been inspired by for this. Yeah. Um and we've learned a lot from their experience, and it just looks like a lot of fun and really beneficial for the company. So that's definitely something we've got on the radar as well. Awesome. Yeah.

Love it.

That's gonna be great.

Very looking, very much look looking forward to it. And also currently, we're working on some quite profile websites. Um, so that's basically an elevation of what we were previously doing. So we're I'm very much look looking forward to launching this website. So hopefully that will serve as a bit of marketing uh tool for us to let more people know about Still Digital. What we want to make sure, you know, hopefully one day one client knows they, you know, they're working with Still Digital. It's something they're proud of. Our team members will be proud of working for Stone Digital if they're no longer with us. Um, people know about they have worked with a really good brand. And that will be our end goal. Yeah.

Great. Love it. Well, again, thank you so much for joining us here on the agency hour and sharing your story with us. I've, you know, just massive respect to uh couples like you who manage to work together and parent together and be together. And uh I think it's a I mean, I've you know, I was just on a podcast this morning. I was on the Funnel Vision show this morning, which is the Funnelytics podcast, and Mikhail, the uh uh CEO and founder of Funnelytics, he said to me, What's your kind of humble brag moment? And I said, Well, look, the cold, hard numbers would say that across our um client base and the agencies that we help every year through our the free templates and that we give away and our online courses and our coaching, we know that we help generate somewhere between $50 and $100 million a year in revenue for our clients. And while that's nice, what the the the thing that's really humbled me over the years is meeting the agency owners and seeing the impact that we have on their lives. And I and for whatever reason, we just attract a large number of family based businesses that are, you know, run by a husband and wife team. And uh this is a really common story. I mean, Amber and Chris Hines were one of the early episodes of our the old WP Elevation podcast. And Amber was growing her agency, Chris was working in restaurants part-time at night, and eventually he quit that job and came home and worked with Amber full-time, and then they took the kids out of school and drove their RV around the country for a year and homeschooled their kids in the van while they ran their agency. And I mean, what a what a story and what an opportunity that that family has had to spend that time together because of the agency business model, and you know, we've played some part in helping them do that, which is incredibly rewarding. So I want to thank you guys for joining us here on the show and and uh sharing your story and look forward to hanging out again at our next Mavcon with you all and and seeing Keaton grow up over the years. Definitely looking forward to it. Absolutely. Thanks for having us. Hey, thanks for listening to the Agent Tower podcast and a massive thanks to Jeanette and Brett for joining us. I'm really looking forward to catching up with them in person again at our next live Mavcon event. Speaking of Mavcon, our next live event is happening in San Diego in October. And you don't have to already be in Mavericks Club to attend. Uh, it will sell out. So if you would like to get a taste of Mavericks Club and what it's like to work with us, and you want to tap into our amazing community of agents, guys, and mentors, then check out the link in the description and book your ticket to Mavcon before we sell out. It is October 14 to 16 in downtown San Diego. Okay, folks, remember to subscribe and please share this with anyone that you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dane, and remember, Captain Crunch's full name is Captain Horatio McGellan Crunch.