Travis McAshan 5:26
shift of mindset, and you start to realize that you can’t solve all the problems. I mean, in fact, you as you grow as an organization, you know, we’re on this valley between, like, you know, transitioning from like, overcome, you know, taking the cup into over a million dollars to over $5 million in revenue, we’re still small. But is, is just trying to, like, have that next level of leadership, right, you know, where it’s not just a bunch of people doing the work, you need to have structures around those people that support those people in the administration and management and leadership. And so, I think that’s been my big focus. But yeah, I’m probably going all over the place, you know, so GLIDE our passion is just what you said, you know, digital creative agency is a mouthful. I mean, if I were to take away is triple A, the pretense, we plan design and build custom marketing websites. And then we also optimize in support those websites. Oh, there you go. All screenshare action. Yeah. So
Jeremy Weisz 6:17
if you’re looking at the if you’re listening to the audio, there is a video piece, and we’re looking at GLIDE here and it says beautiful custom websites, designed in good old Austin, Texas.
Travis McAshan 6:27
Yeah, in Austin is a is you know, it’s a great city. I think a lot of people seek out Austin, it’s technologically savvy, it’s like the second Silicon Valley. But at the same time, it’s also the live music capital of the world and quote, unquote, geared and creative. And so I think that we cultivate that. But we are a digital agency that’s remote. So that means we have team members all over the place. And you know, on multiple continents, and so I love the diversity that we have, because that, you know, in terms of geography, and ethnicity, and religion and gender and all that. So yeah, what I
Jeremy Weisz 7:04
want to talk about the evolution of services, right, because when I’m, we’ll get into the leap, because your graphic designer, your creative director for many years before you started your own, but I love to talk about the evolution of services, what you started off with, right? So we’re looking at, you know, you web design, web development, digital marketing, and what it was like, in the beginning, and then compared to now, yeah,
Travis McAshan 7:28
so many years ago, I read a book called The Discipline of Market Leaders, and they talked about this concept of, you know, you their best product, best price or best solution, you know, best product means you focus on one thing, and you do it really well, Rolex, Ferrari, you know, best price means, you know, you’re just trying to be the lowest cost, like Walmart, you know, or something like that best solution would be like Samsung, or like Amazon, where they just want to give all they want to sell all the things you know. And so I really kind of ascribe to this concept of best product, like I said, we always, we always kind of, like, circle our wagons around, we design and build the best marketing websites. And so when, when folks call us, you know, I think one of the most disarming things you can say to a new lead is we don’t do everything, you know, like, here’s all the things we don’t do. And so people trust you more, because you’re not just trying to say yes to anything they can throw at you. And so we really double down on, you know, being world class design, you know, world class, website design and development. And the nice thing about that is specialization makes you less replaceable, you know, when you’re just when you do everything under the sun, then then people can just go find anyone else to do what you do, the more you specialize. There’s a great book called The Business of Expertise, he talks about this idea of as you become an expert, you can notice patterns that other people don’t notice, because it’s the signal to noise ratio, that you can see the pattern in the noise better than other people, because you’ve done that thing so many times in such a specific way. And so, we and then also you just create processes, right, like you productize your service offering around a particular specialty. And so the answer that question is it was it was primarily website design and development in the things lots of people need that right, lots of people need to communicate via the web. And they have a story to tell, and they want it to look nice, and they want it to to like do something, you know, there’s information that needs to be provided credibility that needs to be created, you know, leads that need to be generated all that jazz. But what we found over the years was, it wasn’t sustainable. So in about 2019, we looked at our revenue, we said holy crap, you know, 90% of our revenue is project driven, which means it’s time down it’s fixed cost, it means that lifetime customer value for us would just jump off a cliff after a project was over it because we didn’t have we weren’t selling the client anything other than like, you know, support service.
Jeremy Weisz 9:50
There wasn’t like a predictability either.
Travis McAshan 9:53
And so you look at marketing agencies like SEO and PPC and and full stack digital agencies that are on these big retainers. And they’re the exact opposite of us. Right? You know, they’re deriving 90% of revenue from these like beefy retainers. And there’s pros and cons to both approaches. But what I decided to do was like, man, we got to figure out a way to partner with our clients. And we always go back to our purpose, you know, just say, like, what is our purpose? How does our purpose guide? Isn’t this? How do our values guide isn’t this and our purpose is to help people who help others, that’s our codified purpose has nothing to do with work has nothing to do with websites. And so because it’s really just an extension of my life purpose to help people in. And so we said, well, how can we help people if we give them a website, high five, and walk away? You know, like, we’re not, we’re helping them, but we’re not continuing to help them. And if you found someone that you really like, why would you only help them once? You know? And so, we looked at ourselves, and we said, well, we don’t want to become a full stack marketing agency that does everything under the sun. We don’t want to be a PPC or SEO company, you know, that we got to figure out a way to offer services that are ongoing. So it’s like this kind of conundrum. And the solution we came to, originally was to create a roadmap. And the roadmap included, moving toward parting with our clients over time, he said, Well, what are we really good at? We’re really good at web design and development, you know, and we’re really good at strategy. What do clients need? Well, they need all those things they don’t and you know, if you look at HubSpot did a survey they said look like 52% of all marketers make one or less meaningful changes to their site in a year. That’s crazy, because your website for most marketing, most companies is that I think that they said something like eight out of 10 marketing leaders said their website was critical to their business success as an organization. And so you’re saying, okay, most people think their websites are important, and most people aren’t touching it for an entire year. And so, and so HubSpot, just like they, they coined the term inbound marketing, which is just like an aggregation of like, content marketing, and SEO and all those things. They created this separate idea called growth driven design. So I had the entire agency gets certified in this concept called growth driven design. And to save you the whole story was overcomplicated is a little bit too, too much of a fuss. But we took this idea that was embedded in growth driven design called continuous improvement. And we said, what if we offer clients one design and development on an ongoing basis, you think, Oh, well, that’s just like website support, but not enough. It needs to be more proactive, it needs to be more goal driven, it needs to have a process to it that’s beyond just waiting around for the client to call us and ask us to change something. And so it really is. It’s like if you took web design and development in CRO, which is conversion rate optimization, which is a very high end service, you know, that requires multidisciplinary skill. What if you had a service that was a nascent CRO that was like almost like web design development, and CRO had a baby, you know, and that’s continuous improvement. And here’s the beautiful thing about continuous deployment for us was that you tell someone, hey, we offer this thing called continuous Superman. They’re like, I don’t know what it is. But I want it. Because like, who? You know, who doesn’t want? Yeah, who doesn’t want continuous improvement? And so we went in 2020 to 2022?
Jeremy Weisz 13:05
Like, do you want the stagnant package? Or do you want the continuous improvement package?
Travis McAshan 13:11
Yes. So it’s like, almost like, what do you call it? Like, it’s like a baked in it sells itself? Right? You know. And so we went from zero clients and continuous improvement to about 12, in the first year of selling that service. And you know, on a retainer basis, that was a huge improvement for us. So over the course of two years, from 2020, to 2020, to mid q2 2022, we went from eight to one ratio of projects to services revenue to a one to one ratio of projects to services revenue, which means that half of our revenue was coming from projects now and half was coming from retainer services. And that created income stability, and it created long term relationships with existing clients. Anyway, I’m going in Yeah,
Jeremy Weisz 13:54
no, I want to dig into that a little bit, actually. So I know you help companies like the National Breast Cancer Foundation and develop WP Engine and a variety of others. Let’s take National Breast Cancer Foundation, I want to find out what you did with them. But as an example, you know, typically before you would deliver the website, like you said, high five and say bye. But now how do you have a process in your team other processes? What are they looking at on a weekly or monthly basis on how to improve the site?
Travis McAshan 14:32
Excellent. That’s a great question. Well, I think our best clients would engage us in a few a few important ways ongoing. So we do now offer SEO services and PPC. Because we just see that as the top of the funnel, I mean, when you build it’s like, if you give someone a Corvette, that’s great, but if they leave it in the garage, then they’re really not getting any value out of the Corvette, right? You know, so you could have the most beautiful Most high converting marketing website on the planet, but if you don’t have any traffic to it any qualified traffic to it at the top of funnel acquisition, then you know, we have given them an incomplete solution. So, you know, in our, in our minds you have, you want to continue to optimize the site, which is continuous improvement, but you also have to make sure you’re helping them drive traffic. Now, as we move up market, we work with lots of companies that have pre existing marketing relationships with with other agencies doing some of those, or they have in house resources. But to answer your question related to like some of our best clients, you know, we’re, we’re helping them not only right, with the experience of once people get there, but also helping them, you know, increase visibility in the marketplace, to create more opportunities for people to give to them. Right. So, and, you know, it’s great, as you mentioned, this, at the very beginning of the call top of the call, you said GLIDE helps people with good idea, you know, good people with great ideas received the exposure they deserve. Well, if we just build a website, we’re not really doing that, we’re just giving them a nice poster, you know, like, but if we’re out there helping them drive traffic in the marketplace, then we’re actually giving them the full solution. And so with our best clients like National Breast Cancer, you know, that we’ve been working through it for many years. In fact, our VP Brooke Chaley is was invited to join their board, which is a very big honor for her and for us, and, and so we’re just really well connected with them. We’re doing all kinds of stuff. So we do continuous improvement, and SEO and PPC and website support. And so it’s it’s it’s basically just an embedded relationships. So we did go from more than like, the discipline of market leaders, it’s like, okay, well, we were the best product, but now we’re best solution and best solution, no way to define that is CIC or customer intimacy, you know, so you know, so customer intimacy is you don’t know where your company ends, and the client begins, because you’re so embedded, and you’re so symbiotic right to their success. And so we have transitioned the company from a best product company to a customer to a best solution company. But it’s still a niche way, you know, like we, you know, so anyway,
Jeremy Weisz 17:03
it’s interesting, you know, Travis, because the tough part about doing web design is it really touches everything. So it’s very hard, at least in the beginning, you probably naturally got pulled into these things like, okay, we’re doing your website, we got to you’re thinking of the design and the conversion. And the next question is like, Well, okay, well, how do we get people there? Okay, well, you need the content, you need to pay traffic. So like, you prot your, your clients are, like pulling you into this realm, when in sounds like maybe you resisted. And then you’re like, you kind of gave in to the, you know, the clients asking you these questions and solving it, right. So we
Travis McAshan 17:48
100% gave it and it’s funny, because we had a handful of PPC clients. And I wanted to kill that business. I literally wanted to, like stop doing PPC, because I’m like, I don’t like it. To me, it’s like if you have an army, and they only they’re only loyalty when you pay them I either mercenaries like i That’s how I look at PPC because the second you stop paying for PPC you get nothing from it. Right. But with SEO, if you work hard, basically authentically marketing yourself creating great authoritative, relevant content, that content will be found for years to come. Right, hopefully, if it’s continuing to be optimized. And so like, I just like, I don’t want to do PPC, but then we looked at our we looked at the data, we looked at the numbers, and we said wow, two of our clients that have been with us the longest that have the highest Lifetime Customer Value, we’re both doing PPC in here, I was trying to kill it. And, and so you know, I just kind of like I had to, you know, give it you know, the this is important, and it works. And, you know, we we hired a really talented PPC expert to come in and kind of take over that. And it’s been gangbusters for us, you know, it’s still one big challenge that we’re trying to solve. And I think maybe for the listeners of the podcast, anybody that’s trying to like move into new business areas, offering new services and products, we’re in an identity shift because we have been so like, our like literal identity of who we are as a company and how we think and how we act and operate is a creative agency, we design stuff. But all of these marketing services were like a marketing company, market stuff, like it’s all about, like performance. And so if we are like, when you look at our marketing site, when you when there are proposals or legal structures, everything was geared around creative design and creative and so I think that what a lot of people don’t understand is that you can’t just slap on a new service even if it generates revenue. Because in the marketplace, you’re not known for that, right? You don’t have credibility. You don’t have testimonials you don’t have client tell you about customer case studies, you know, and so you start to realize, like, you know, it’s an identity shift that is like full stack like it goes all the way from how people perceive perceive you and where your trust and credibility in the marketplace, all the way through customer satisfaction in follow up, you know, and that service needs to permeate all of those areas, you know. So that’s the journey we’re on right now.
Jeremy Weisz 20:09
How do you decide to build out the departments? Versus have a specific partner, that maybe you have a really close partnership with, let’s say, for SEO or some other service?
Travis McAshan 20:25
That’s a great question. Well, I think that I mean, if if you’re doing things the right way, I think you will go back and look at your purpose and your values, right, you know, and say, you know, what is true to us? Because value, your purpose is, why do you exist, and it’s something that you should be manifesting on a daily basis, every day, more than the day before, your values are the lens that you look through and say, This is what’s most important to us. And so I think, if you start with your values, and if your values are clear, you know, I’ve been on some podcasts, and I feel like, you know, if anyone hears more than one, they’re gonna be like, Oh, my God, he’s talking about values. Like, there’s so important, right. And so, for example, we have a value called build meaningful relationships. And to me, I feel like if we just grab a partner company, and just outsource that entire department, you know, then we’re not really one we’re not really doing is we’re not really doing a service to our clients. Because we’re not really owning that outcome. And well, the inputs and the outputs, but, and like, also, like, a lot of times, when you have this black box of mystery that’s outsourced, you don’t really have relationships with these people, like you do when they’re an employee, or a long term retain contractor. And so I think it was really important to me to roll out these services more thoughtfully, you know, and make sure that they were integrated into our identity, even though it’s been a Herky jerky, you know, ride, versus we probably could have executed at a higher level at a lower cost, you know, with a venture, you know, with a vendor partner, and, but it’s just, you know, and we still we have interim partners, I don’t want to say that we don’t like in different ways and development and support and stuff like that acquired but like, offering a whole new service just didn’t feel authentic, because I’ve had people say, Oh, well, you can start doing marketing automation through HubSpot, just like contract does, and we’ll do all the work for you. But that just doesn’t feel authentic to me, one of our other core values is delivering faithfully and I just felt like whenever you outsource the entire responsibility relationship, it’s a little bit difficult to deliver faithfully, I think. I want to talk
Jeremy Weisz 22:26
before we hit record, we are talking about your mentioned uncanny valley. And I’d love for you to talk about that.
Travis McAshan 22:35
Sure, wow. So I’m sure I don’t know, like the demographic of your podcasts and how many people are listening that they’re they’re trying to get to above a million dollars in their business, or maybe they’re aiming for five or $10 million in their business, you know, gross revenue for the year, and we’re in that journey between one and $5 million, you know, we’re kind of like midway through that journey, you know, or a little more and, and what we have found and Greg Crabtree, you know, financial author talks about this in his book, Simple Numbers, but is that, you know, you’re going through this journey to this valley. And you’re too big not to have the administration and structure and systems that support the business, but you’re too small to really, truly be able to afford them all. So like, a good example is like an HR person, like most companies with 10 to 15, employees probably can’t afford a full time HR person, it just falls on the managing director or some other person. But we decided early on, we had a project manager who was just fantastic at dealing with people, she’s the most empathetic person she’s got, she has life coaching, and a side business, you know, and she had a passion for people. So we are very early on took her career trajectory to people culture advocate, recently, we promoted her to People Operations Manager, and she’s essentially exited a billable role of project manager that would create revenue for the company to a non billable role that supports our people, that’s expensive, you know, it’s like, oh, you know, let’s pay, you know, 50 to $100,000, to help our people, you know, every year, you know, most companies don’t always prioritize that, you know, so, and then other roles of the company. So, you know, we leveled up, we had project managers, you have too many project managers, Senior Project Manager lead, then you have, and then you have too many services that people delivering the services needed Director Client Services, and then the organization gets to a level where you almost have bid management, you need kind of like a CEO or a VP. And now all of a sudden, you know, you have all these people in these roles that are no longer direct, you know, basically creating billable revenue for the company. They’re just there to support the people doing the billable revenue. And so we’re in that journey, but it’s interesting because I, we had our leadership meeting. And I was like, you know, what, between here and $5 million, or between here and $10 million, we’re not going to have to hire another VP, you know, we’re not going to have to hire another Director of Client Services. We’re not gonna have to hire another People Operations Manager, you know, so if we can just get to the other side of this valley, you know, we’re gonna get to where that profitability is. where it should be, and, you know, and then we can, you know, we don’t have to kind of make these hard decisions about, you know what, what to do and how to achieve our financial goals. So hope that
Jeremy Weisz 25:09
that sounds like the first step in this was creating a middle management layer. And even that is taking people a little bit, I guess I kind of put it into maybe a player coach scenario, and then they graduate to really just a coach scenario, like a head of whatever, right? So even the middle management layer, sometimes you’re still taking them out of that utilization. Right? So when was maybe for the HR example? Or a different one? Was Did you find what were you metrics? Or things were you looking at to move them up? Or is it more like, this is painful, we need someone helping with the management piece?
Travis McAshan 25:53
You know, that’s interesting. So I never even heard the term player coach until I hired an EOS mentor. And we’re going to the EOS process of if you’re familiar with Gino Wickman on the podcast, yeah. Okay. Well, you know, I wish I could meet with him. He introduced me to him. I’ve read all his books, he’s awesome, you know, but the concept of us or Entrepreneurial Operating System is really cool. Riddler use that term player coach and I, I love when people say something, and it’s just gonna ring a truth. And you’re like, okay, yeah, now I can describe something easily that I couldn’t before. And that’s what player coach did to me is like, oh, okay, some employees need to be a player, some employees need to be a coach, some employees need to split their time between both, you know, and I would say it was pretty early on, we didn’t really have any coaches, you know, everybody was players. In fact, if I look at our billable rates, like from three or four years ago, it’s like, you know, 80 plus percent, which is like very high, you know, and, but now we have a lot of like, coaches, you know, and then we have a lot of player coaches, and now our billable rates are like, much lower. But,
Jeremy Weisz 27:02
so if you take one of those, and you take the evolution up person, I’m wondering what made you to just make the decision to okay, they’re a player, now their player coach, now they went from player coach to only coach.
Travis McAshan 27:17
Yeah, I think it’s the need, like, and it’s the prioritization, right. Because there’s a lot of companies that are dealing with burnout issues, there’s a lot of companies that are dealing with high turnover, there’s a lot of companies that are dealing with low employee engagement, but they’re still not doing anything about it, right, they’re still not investing time and resources and energy to improve it. And I think it just goes back to, you know, your values, right? Like, here’s the thing, almost every company has values, but the values aren’t values, if you just made a list, you know, like, a lot of times and you just make a list that’s created values, but creative values don’t exist they are, you have to uncover your values. And so if you really, truly value your people, then you would prioritize that. And if you prioritize that need, you will just look at that need over time and say, we need to, okay, here’s how much we need to invest, or whether we have the ability to invest into it now. So I’d say like, pretty early on, you know, like for this HR example, it was like she had a passion for it, one of our core values is love what you do. So one of my desires was always to look at people and never force them to be in a position that they didn’t love, you know, but at the same time, we got, we got to have people do their jobs. And so it’s like, if I would say, it’s probably we literally formulated about a two year roadmap for this person, you know, to exit and she’s still supporting that old player role that she was using before, occasionally. And but but less and less over time. And so, you know, I think that the more intentional you can be about anything, the more likely you’re going to be to achieve it. And when you make something important, then you look at it a lot in the new GT. Yeah, so
Jeremy Weisz 28:56
I’m just showing here on the screen. Trousers, so we see if you go to glidedesign.com You could find on the team, the company piece, you can see what we believe builds the meaningful relationship, love what you do deliver faithfully better every day. And just a couple of those explanations, you could check that out on the GLIDE Design. You know, it’s interesting, and people can check out there’s the Gino Wickman interview. And also Dan’s a wacky the lobstermen he started lobster Graham, he is an EOS implementer. We had him on and he talked about some of these concepts that Travis was talking about. Sawsan, you know, I want to talk about you know, sometimes it’s it’s a hard decision, you probably think it’s not because it’s necessary decision to focus on purpose. And so I love to hear how you how you think about purpose. And when you say purpose, I know it’s the world but also internally.
Travis McAshan 29:54
Yeah, yeah. So purpose. Here. I’ve done a lot of research about this. And there’s it’s so interesting. Enable, I mean, a lot of people interchange purpose with vision with mission. And I think these can’t I mean, if you really want to get nuanced, there are differences, right? I see purpose as the best way I could describe that as Why do you exist? And you know, like, there is a question, I’m reading a book called CEO Excellence is really good. It’s by the senior partners of McKinsey. And there was a question in there that said, like, like, like, why should you it was, the question was basically like, for, for a CEO to answer, which is like, why should you exist in 10 years? Like, you know, and it’s like, oh, because we need to, because I gotta pay my mortgage or whatever, like, you know, I just, we sell things, you know? So it’s like, what’s the meaningful reason that this company should exist? Right? You know, and so that’s the purpose. The vision is the opposite of that. It’s not Why do you get out of bed? And why does this company exist? The vision is the hopeful future, like, what does it look like, if you were to close your eyes, and in vivid detail, describe a future state that you have achieved, you know, and then a mission is like, in the military, it’s like, Hey, here’s this hill, I want to go, I want to go capture this hill. So mission is what do you do every day to achieve the vision? So you can kind of see the difference between those three, you know, purposes? Why do we exist? And why did we get out of bed every day? Why are we even here? You know, the mission is, what are we doing on a daily basis, and then the vision is to achieve what you know, like, what’s the end state. And so you can, you can use all of those. Now, it’s tough with GLIDE, it’s tough with any company, because, you know, if you start throwing all these things out to your employees, they’re gonna get confused, I get confused, you know, so, a lot of times, you know, we stick to our purpose, because it’s easy, and it’s memorable, and people align with it, you know, and I think, from a retention perspective, you know, that’s the area where, you know, we get the most excited because it’s like, when I look at a client, and let’s say that they are fighting to stop the the use of animal testing, you know, so they’re standing up for the little guy, in this case, the little guy is animals that don’t deserve to be tortured and killed. If I help that company, that I’m helping people who help others, you know, and versus let’s say, another company comes along, and they’re a machine learning AI insurance platform. And they stiffed people, right, you know, of their of their rightful insurance, because they can figure out because big companies can use data to their advantage, right. And so like, I’m looking at these two companies to work if they let’s say this, this machine learning AI company has five times the budget, you know, well, it’s like, you know, it’s a real hard choice, because you got to pay your bills, you know, but, so ideally, we’re finding clients that align more with our purpose, you know, and that’s the, that’s how you would use your purpose to make a simple decision, like, which client should we work with? You know,
Jeremy Weisz 32:51
I know, you know, we are have a few more minutes. I don’t know if you do, or if you have to hop off, but I am.
Travis McAshan 32:58
I mean, you know, as long as people are listening,
Jeremy Weisz 33:00
I did have, you know, you have big goals, right. 5% donating 5%. top line, we mentioned, you’re applying for the B Corp. But also another one is, you’re talking about a four day workweek. Yeah. So talk about that, because you went through a pilot on on that?
Travis McAshan 33:19
Yeah. So it was I had been a vision for about five years. And we had been traversing this goal, I had just been doing it myself. Maybe about 2017 2018, I had this idea. And it’s not unique, you know, but and so I started hey, let’s just try, you know, not not having Friday’s long, you know, through the summer, let’s try not having Friday, every one Friday, a week for an entire quarter. So 13 weeks in a row. And different other things like you know, throughout the year, we tried having no meetings on Fridays, and things like that. And so we had just slowly eroded our accountabilities and responsibilities on Fridays. And so we were ready to make the leap. So it was I think it was 2021. And I said, guys, we’re going to do it. We’re going to try it. We’re going to pilot a four day work week. And everyone’s like, This is crazy. How are we going to get our work done? You know? And we didn’t know how we’re going to do it. And I literally just googled, how do you do a four day work week and boom, up pops 40 work, we’ve done work. And I realized there’s a guy who’s running an organization, doing pilots around the world who wrote a book called The 40 Hour Workweek. I didn’t know any of this, right? And we reach out and we literally were the last candidate that they accepted for the official US pilot, and they were doing major publicized pilots in the UK in the Ireland, this was going to be and we made the cut. We made that and they weren’t they weren’t doing everything for free. You know, it was the last one that they started now. They’re like charging for all this. But so we joined this pilot is really cool. We were in there was Kickstarter and some other cool companies, and we had a lot of resources and help and they had data scientists that were reviewing the metrics to kind of like release a study on this. And so like it was exciting for us and so having that support was great. We did a six month pilot from April 1, so 2022 through cute the end of q2, which is, I guess us into September. And we looked at it, we said, Okay, well, this is good enough for us. Let’s, let’s just go ahead and keep going. And so we there it is, yeah.
Jeremy Weisz 35:16
For the week dark, we’re looking at here.
Travis McAshan 35:19
He was alright. Now there you go. I know that’s the UK version, but they probably have the pilot results for the US pilot as well. Which we were part of, but like, we there’s some anecdotal results of this, that like employees, we, we know that everyone loves it. I mean, who wouldn’t love a four day work week, right. So that’s obvious. But some of the other the other results that I already knew, that I, that I’m starting to see is like hiring. So like, when you put a job out, and you say, this is a four day work week, one company was getting 10 times more applicants to their job listings in the pilot, that was, you know, a piece of evidence in, I already knew that this was going to make the job more attractive. And the nice thing is, if you’re still paying kind of commensurate salaries, then, you know, you you essentially are like giving people I mean, the construct for a 40 work, which is a significant amount of less work in a year, you know, being in the office. And so, you know, I think that from a revenue from a salary perspective, you know, you start to attract people that care more about work life balance than they do about making money. And those are the kind of people that I want working in my company anyway. You know, like, I mean, I, I want to pay people, well, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want people to get the job and GLIDE because of the money. I want them to get the job with GLIDE, because they they agree with the purpose, they love what the company is doing. And that yes, the pay is good, you know. And so I think it allows you to not like have to fight so much on the salary stuff, because the kinds of people that are going to be interested in that are prioritizing their life over their revenue, you know, which is important to me. That’s one of our core values, again, is love what you do I really want to attract people that enjoy what they do more than I’m only taking the shot because it pays me the most money.
Jeremy Weisz 37:05
True, Travis, first of all, thank you. I have one last question. Um, but I want to just point people to glidedesign.com To learn more about what you guys do. And my last question is, again, you help. We mentioned the National Breast Cancer Foundation, you help companies like the Austin FC Soccer Team, a pro soccer team, Circuit of the Americas, another company to help is WP Engine. And I love free to talk about you got to meet childhood hero but speak so I’d love for you talking about what you talked about in in that experience.
Travis McAshan 37:45
Oh, super sure. Yeah. So I was invited to speak at the WP Engine’s Digital Innovation Summit in 2019. I got to share the stage with a personal hero of mine, Emmitt Smith. He was the keynote speaker. My talk was it was like a David and Goliath. So what they did was they took their agency partner so they have an agency partnership program. It’s it’s symbiotic. Obviously, the you know, agencies resell, hosting and hosting company refers us great clients. Well, so they took element. So Edelman is one of the world’s largest marketing companies, they have like 6000 they have 60 offices, 6000 employees, they brought their EVP, you know, Executive Vice President of digital to come speak, right. So it’s me, this guy with like, 10 employees, you know, total, you know, with the executive, Vice President of digital for Edelman, 6000 person, you know, 16 agency company. And so, you know, he spoke and then I spoke, and it was it was, the one thing I want to say about that was that experience was just epic. If I there was about 800 or 1000 people in the room, it was a pretty big room. It was definitely I was nervous. And but I remember they had a short part where we’re able to speak we I shared some case studies of clients that we work with, but my favorite part was they did a panel discussion directly after that, where they brought up me in the follow up from element of regretfully forgetting his name, but he’s a good guy. And they he asked us some questions and you know, ahead of time, the panelists are always like, you know, he kind of like, here’s some questions that we might talk about, and all my questions related to people and culture and all his questions related to like data, you know, like the market and I remember, like being afraid of talking about the things that I’m most passionate about, and like, which related to like, how do I cultivate a culture of gratitude in my company? And that’s like, one of the most important things to me, and I remember like, just going in on that like going all in on that I said, I really love to talk about these things, you know, and, and I can’t tell you how many people reached out to me after that talk, like at the conference, people coming up to me after I spoke but like after, for weeks and weeks, people were like messaging and tweeting and, and I just want to encourage everybody out there like be yourself. Like, like, you have something unique that you bring to the world. And I know this is maybe a little cheesy, but like, it’s so true like, like, if you try to be what people think you should be, you know, it’s going to be met with like, I don’t know, tepid, it’s going to be like, Okay, maybe good to prepare really well, maybe great. But if you’re yourself, you’re going to have a passion for it. And that’s going to come through and people deeply crave authentic passion, like of whatever it is, however quirky, it is, you know. And so I just felt really thankful that I leaned into that. And I think that it resulted in a lot of great new relationships, new opportunities. And, you know, I think the video is out there on the web somewhere, if you ever want to look at it, but you know, I just, I just wanted to encourage people that what was Emmitt Smith, like? Amazing. So I don’t know if you knew this, but Emmitt Smith is one of the most gold driven people
Jeremy Weisz 40:50
and they always say never meet your child. I don’t know who said that. But, but
Travis McAshan 40:55
he’s super humble. You know, he’s a man of faith. He’s very kind guy. I have a picture, you know, of me with him I was real proud of but, you know, he just always inspired me. I mean, he sat down and said, you know, if you go look like just Google Emmitt Smith goal setting. I mean, think about someone who was the MVP of the Super Bowl. Right? The the it has basically every major rushing record in the history of the NFL essentially he you know, he used to Walter Payton and total rushing yards and all that stuff and, and he set all these goals he like, wrote them down, and he like, went all the way at them every year and just very impressive, to look at the things that he accomplished and how he how intentional he was about accomplishing those things. And I’m very goal driven person, as well. So I think that’s why he inspired me so much.
Jeremy Weisz 41:46
Travis over the first one. Thank you everyone. Check out glidedesign.com, where episodes of the podcast and thanks, Travis. Thanks, everyone.
Outro 41:54
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