Say "Yes" first, figure it out later | The Early Days by DULO (S3E4)

Discussing how to building a design agency from scratch with Matt Ellis, founder of Honcho Agency THE DULO NON-IRON DRESS SHIRT: ▼ https://weardulo.com Matt Ellis is the founder of Honcho, a design agency specializing in web design and development.  Matt’s built Honcho from scratch and without knowing much about the agency world. He simply learned to dive into new opportunities head first and figure out how to do things as he’s going along. It’s a piece of advice he shared a few times during our conversation. We also talked about hiring first employees, pricing strategies, finding clients, running a remote company and much more. It’s an episode rich on resources and tools that will help a lot of you to automate and facilitate processes around your own businesses. If you work at a small agency or run a remote team, this is a very useful episode to listen to. Topics we cover in this episode: 01:50 - Who is Matt Ellis and what does he do 02:34 - How Matt got into web development 05:49 - Saying "Yes" to things even if you don't know how to do them 07:23 - Learning to do web development properly 08:30 - From freelancer to founder of a design agency 10:30 - Learning how to build an agency 11:40 - Hiring the first employee at Honcho 12:55 - Freeing more time for learning and business development 15:40 - Finding clients in the early days and financial security 17:18 - Balancing a financial forecast with hiring 19:00 - Switching from a product focus to a sales and business development one 20:30 - Tools to help with automation to free up more time 23:30 - How to choose which prospects to approach 29:55 - Where does conversion happen 31:00 - Pricing strategies: project-based vs. retainers 35:00 - Providing more value to others by learning more about your own business 35:20 - Working remotely 36:20 - Running a remote company - the process and tools 40:10 - Fluid processes and trust 41:50 - Getting new clients 42:46 - Acquiring new clients through Adwords 44:10 - Future plans for the Honcho agency 48:05 - Links and handles FULL LIST of Useful Resources and Links: https://weardulo.com/blogs/the-early-days-podcast/say-yes-first-figure-it-out-later