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Verbatim text
Lee:
Before we kick off the show, can I encourage you to listen back to episode 200, where I share how to transform your agency. It’s a combination of my own story, but also five pillars of transforming your business. Really, really useful episode. We’ve had tonnes of amazing and encouraging feedback. So I just wanted to encourage you, if you’ve not listened to episode 200, please download that and go ahead and check that one Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer podcast. This is your host, Lee. On today’s show, we are talking with Andrew Palmer, one of the panel members of the upcoming Agency Transformation Live. He is sharing his story. It’s fascinating and it’s varied. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.
Lee:
Welcome to a conversation today with Mr. Andrew Palmer of Somebody’s Hero Fame and Elegant Marketplace Fame. How are you, sir?
Andrew:
I’m very well today, thank you. It’s nice and windy outside, but a bit of sun, so that’s made my day.
Lee:
We just had a conversation about how high I feel my voice is compared to you right now. I feel like now I’ve mentioned it, anyone listening to this episode is just going to listen the two completely different pictures of our voices. Perhaps, Larissa, if you’re listening, add a bit of bass to my voice, will you? Maybe turn the pitch down so I can sound a little bit more radio DJ like this guy because he’s got a great voice.
Andrew:
Yeah, as I said, I’ve got a face for radio as well, so it’s a perfect match.
Lee:
Well, I think you look fine. I’ve seen your picture. Right, Mr. Palmer, before we carry on, I can obviously do an amazing intro where I talk all about you, but the best person to introduce yourself to the audience is yourself. So please tell us a little bit about yourself, who are, your companies, your favourite colour, favourite drink, favourite place in the world, anything that you think people might not know about you, and then we’ll jump in that time machine.
Andrew:
Well, I’m Andrew Palmer. I’m one of the original founders of Elegant Marketplace. There were six of us in the beginning, and it’s now just me four years later. The other guys, unfortunately, one person passed away, but the other guys that were involved are very successful in the divvy ecosphere, and some of them are now going into WordPress as a whole, very much like Elegant Marketplace on. We’re experimenting with going into Elementor, and we even bought a theme which was specifically for Elementor. We’re encouraging WordPress developers to come to us because I think we’ve got the best deal, one of the best deals, and we’re very high up on search engines. We’ve got 50,000 registered users on Elegant Marketplace, which is pretty cool. We pester them once a week, telling them what we’ve got. But it’s been a tough journey. A couple of years of not earning any money at and some investments, and people leaving, and things like that. But we’ve got 200 vendors and 750 products on Elegant Marketplace. Somebody’s Hero. Co. Uk is my UK-based consultancy. I do coaching, in divvy, business coaching, and obviously website design and build. I’ve got half a dozen developers that work for me pretty much full-time, and that’s about it.
Lee:
A couple of ions in the fire. When you’re not working, what do you do to relax?
Andrew:
Play golf, mainly with my twin brother, which is lovely because he’s hilarious. I’ve also recently started the gym because I’m quite a heavy guy, and I think that’s where the voice comes as well. But I’m really enjoying the gym. I joined a 24-hour gym seven days a week, so I can even go at one o’clock in the morning or whenever because I tend to work American or Australian hours because I’ve got clients, obviously, in Australia and America, and also Europe and the UK. My day is made up of getting a quick nap for about two o’clock, so you’re interrupting that, and waking up, doing some work.
Lee:
It is literally 12 minutes past 2:00 as we were recording.
Andrew:
Exactly, yeah. If you hear some zuzies, it’s me going, Oh, I need to sleep now. But no, so I can go to the gym at 1:00 in the morning or 11:00 at night or 5:00 in the morning, it doesn’t matter. It’s great. I’m really enjoying the gym at the moment, so that’s one of my main hobbies.
Lee:
I never thought I’d hear someone say that. I got to be honest.
Andrew:
No, I really am. It’s 45 minutes. I said to myself, If I can’t do an hour a day exercise out of 24 hours, then what’s that about? I just managed to go seven minutes down the road, 45 minutes of exercise, seven minutes back, ache a bit, and then just get on with my job, which is great.
Lee:
It sounds like a conversation I need to have with myself, actually. So thank you very much for sharing that. Me and Larissa have started going to the gym. We go twice a week. At the moment, it’s about 25 minutes of exercise as we ease ourselves in. But hopefully, I can capture what you’ve captured and actually start to enjoy it.
Andrew:
Oh, no, really, I really enjoy it because, well, I enjoy the results. I’ve gone from, it’s quite personal, but I’ve basically lost, in the last year, I’ve lost four inches off my waist. Well, that’s all right. So it was needed.
Lee:
The problem is it’s now costing you money in either belts or new clothes.
Andrew:
Exactly.
Lee:
Darn it.
Andrew:
Darn it.
Lee:
Darn it. I thought you were going to tell me that you are now ripped and have a six-pack.
Andrew:
I really wish I was. No, I think I’ve got… No, that’s not going to happen for a while yet. Don’t worry about that.
Lee:
No worries. Watch this space two years time, Mr. Universe. Exactly. There you go. Right, let’s jump in that time machine then, because I’m intrigued. You’ve obviously got two great-sounding businesses working with people literally all around the world, the other business with subscribers and vendors. Sounds phenomenal, but you weren’t always doing that. When did you get into the world of the web? How many years ago was this?
Andrew:
1998 comes to mind when I had a CD printing company. I was printing millions of CDs, basically, for people like TalkTalk in the UK. I did their launch and many others, music CDs and stuff like that. Then I thought, I wish I could make this easier. I built a little website just through HTML, went to little night school in Langley College for one day a week and learned how to build websites using notepad. It just expanded from there. I also had a printing company, and I said to my guys, my partners at the time, We have to get into the web. Now, at the time, they were my age, which is not young, so they weren’t interested, particularly in doing that. They were printers, and they said, Oh, what’s this newfangled interweby thing? Anyway, I did it, and I bit the bullet, and I went off and I built websites using just plain old HTML and Macromedia as it was at the time. Now, the name has lost me, but anyway.
Lee:
Adobe bought them out, didn’t they? Dreamweaver.
Andrew:
That was it, Dreamweaver, yes. Dreamweaver, you can still download from Adobe and stuff, but we don’t use that. We use little page builders called Divi and Elementor and sometimes Beaver Builder as well. I’m pretty agnostic on page builders. The only one I don’t particularly like is Visual Composer because it’s just-I think 98% of the online community support you in that decision. Well, no, it’s great. I mean, thanks to them, page builders were it. Let’s not denigrate it too much. And it’s still a very popular… The themes have got it built in, and now Elementor is selling themes on places like Invato with Elementor built in as well. It’s really good. I sell a theme that’s got Elementor built in, the free version. But it’s too codey for me. It’s still basic WordPress with short codes, and WordPress has moved on so much because of the page builders that literally anyone can build a website. It may not be a great website, but they can build a website. A lot of complaints we have in the developer community, I see it all the time in Facebook groups, is that divvy, particularly, is becoming more like Wix or they want to be more like the online guys like Shopify and places like that and offer a one-stop solution with no coding.
Andrew:
But you still need to know a little bit of code, even if it’s CSS, which is in coding terms, it’s still very recent as well. Absolutely. That’s what I did. I carried on with my printing business, and I’ve had a couple of restaurants. I started off life actually as a waiter and a chef. I started off in a restaurant at Heathrow Airport when I was 16, left home at 16, waiter, went off to be a chef. Somebody was kind enough to send me to college, so allegedly qualified as a chef. But you can only qualify if you learn how to cook properly. From that, had a couple of restaurants, had a couple of printing businesses, but really started concentrating on the web, probably full-time, about six years ago, maybe seven. That’s when I really dived in and said, Okay, this is what I want to be. I want to be an online person, so a digital marketer, SEO. That’s one of my specialties, if that’s the right way to say it. I love doing SEO. It’s Some people find it boring, but I love it when I get a client to the top of Google.
Andrew:
It’s one of my…The superpower?
Andrew:
No, I wouldn’t say it’s a superpower because no matter what SEO people tell you, it’s not that difficult. It’s just a process. So as long as you follow the process and follow the guidelines of Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and everything. They tell you how they want you to present a website to them. So if you follow those rules, nine times out of 10, you’ll get the result. Unless you’re up. If you’re selling health medications or anything like that, those are oversubscribed niches, if you like. But normally, interior designers or a kitchen designer or plumber, especially local SEO, that’s really easy. So that’s where I’m at. I’m concentrating mainly on elegant marketplace and the other products that we’ve got from there, which is Layouts Cloud for Divi and Layouts Cloud for Elementor as well, and a few other things on the side and dealing with hosting. We’ve got 300 clients on hosting, which But I’ve been going a while now.
Lee:
That’s over the last six years, though, just all of those things that you’ve mentioned as opposed to-Yes. Because for some reason, I imagined you’d been running an agency since the early ‘naughties’.
Andrew:
Well, I had because I had an agency called L’Affinici, which is Italian for the Phoenix, and it was named after the Phoenix Opera House in Venice, I think it is. I went there once and I like that thing. I’ve got a very strong Italian connexion. My best friends are Italian, my best man was Italian, my stepmother’s Italian. So it’s a very strong Italian feel to the business as well. And that was an agency that we sold ourselves as a design agency with our artworkers. We did all the CD printing and the print management as well. But certainly, we had another agency in London called Night and Day, which was a 24/7 comping agency in those old days. It was just typesetting and using the ITEC typesetters. Macs weren’t really around in the early days for typesetting per se. Certainly not to the level they are now. We were basic galley artwork producers. We used to run out the gallies and coat them with wax and then cut them up with scalpels and make mechanicals, which is where mechanical artwork comes from. So yeah, I was agency, more of a management position rather than physically doing it.
Andrew:
I’ve done my share of typesetting, and I’ve done my share of producing mechanical artwork and then presenting it to the customer. But in reality, if you’re a print rep or you’re an agency rep, or you’re an account manager, and I make no to account manager because they know who they are. You’re a taxi driver that takes along a presentation that your creatives have done. All you do is you hand over the artwork, you say, Sign there if it’s okay, or, Tell me what the amendments are, and I’ll take them back to the ranch and we’ll fix them. When we were very, very busy, we were literally designing or delivering printing proofs and chromalins, which were as close to a digital print as you could get, made up of film. That was actually produced through a chromalin machine. But now you just print it out on an inkjet printer and that’s the proof. It has changed quite a lot. So I still do some printing, but not as much as I used to, which I’m glad of.
Lee:
I can imagine. From what you were describing, it just reminds me of my business partner’s stories of when they were in London, they were a London agency, you used to have to essentially print out the proofs and there would be someone downstairs with a motorbike waiting for your parcel and they drive across London at top speed to take it to the client to get the the client to review it, and then the client would then either sign off or send demands, and then that poor soul would have to then charge across London again to bring everything back all for them to keep going, et cetera. I mean, this was early 2000s as well.
Andrew:
Yeah, definitely.
Lee:
Even in the 2000s, I can’t believe they were still doing that.
Andrew:
Well, I was an implant, if you understand, I was an implant of an agency in London, which was part of Y&R, called Mex Creative Services. I used to work there as a production director for them, but also have my own agency and my print management firm and all that stuff. That is exactly what used to happen. We used to do… Mechanicals would come out and the wax was still warm. If you touch the artwork, you’d have a transparent cover sheet over it and it was on a board. If you imagine it had to be a real size as well. If it was A1, it was massive. We had these portfolios that the motorcycle couriers used to take in. It’s exactly like that. A madness. When you consider now, we send a PDF, and we used to use a system called, I can’t remember what It was called Ad Something or Other, but we used to send things down the line at an ADSL line, and we’d have four ADSL lines together. Bonded together.
Lee:
Oh, my gosh, I remember that.
Andrew:
Crazy. So I’m old school, which is actually good for the modern day use because I know how it used to be done. That also helps me price things properly as well, because a lot of things people say, Well, you can build a website in a couple of days now. Yes, you can, but there’s 25 years experience behind that ability to build it in a couple of days, so that’s what you’re paying for, Mr. Absolutely.
Lee:
That’s something I say very often. People are not paying for the three hours it takes you to do something. They’re paying for the three hours plus the however many years of blood, sweat, and tears you’ve poured into being able to do it in three hours. Exactly. Which is absolutely 100% with you. I think the other thing as well for us, if you remember back, you’re lucky, you actually span because you are slightly older than me, only ever so slightly, I will add, for people who are trying to guess your age.
Andrew:
Well, they can have my age. I’m 59 in May. I’m not scared anybody knowing how old I am.
Lee:
You span two very important periods of time, which includes back in the day with the Commodore 64s, the ZX Spectrums, and all those coming out and people becoming superstars of programmers in their bedroom. You also span the age of the internet, as it were, when that all became a reality for us and we were all able to teach ourselves HTML and start launching websites, et cetera. But I think that background gives people like you and me, I can’t remember the ZX Spectrum. I just remember Well, I remember all the CPC stuff in the ’80s. But given our background and our ages, I do think it gives us an appreciation of how much easier things are nowadays. It also gives us, I think, a bit of a deeper insight in how we can add more value for people as well and help to frame the benefits of what we have to offer them as well. Because, holy crap, everything was so much slower only 15 to 20 years ago.
Andrew:
It was, but speed, even in our industry now, if we’re even, I’m presuming Sometimes you have to produce artwork for somebody. It has to get approved, PDF sent through the internet or downloadable or put on an artwork archive or something. But the issue is that if you rush something, and I’ve always tried to say this to clients across the decades that I’ve been working in this industry, it will never be as good as it could be. There’s got to be some finite timing on it. If you say it’s going to take three days, the reason it’s taking three days is because that includes some thinking time, creative time, maybe even queuing time as well. When I was a production director of an agency, I was basically called a trafficker. That’s what you’re called. You’re called a traffic manager. You manage the briefs coming in from all angles and you put timings on them. Every job is a rush job. You know yourself whenever a client has said, Oh, well, I need this now. There’s no timing on it.
Lee:
The campaign goes out tomorrow. That’s what they usually shouting at us, and we’re like, Oh, really? You waited till now to tell me Your lack of planning does not make me.
Andrew:
That’s what you call emergency on mine. Exactly, does not make me. He has a very famous saying, Is it your lack of planning? But you have to be able to get on with clients to be able to say that thing, of course. But there are things that we can do to help customers realise that things still do take a little bit of time. I think that’s a part of agency issues, especially the young agency, the young, keen agency that want to impress and are hungry for the work, mainly because they’ve got bills to pay like all of us. They want to say, yes, now what’s the question? But really, they should say, yes, we can do that. It’s Monday now. We’ll get you something on Friday. And then we’ll give you the weekend to think about that. And then on Monday, you can give us the amends if there are any, or it can go to print, or it can go to press, or it can go to the web, whichever way you want it to go. I think we have to be in control of our clients. I wrote a blog post the other day, actually, about how to train your dragon.
Lee:
Yes, I saw that.
Andrew:
It’s only a very short one, but it was just somebody was complaining to me, I just can’t control my customers. Really, it is totally about teamwork. If you are not a team with your customer, if your client is always shouting at you, Get this done, get that done, I need that done now, that is not the type of client you want. So you have a choice. You can either resign that client, and I’ve resigned plenty, or you can reeducate them and make them work in the way that is beneficial to both of you as an agency and as a customer. Absolutely. I think a lot of agencies, when they’re trying to grow, they do make mistakes by saying or getting the timing wrong. Then if you get the timing right, you never have to apologise for being late.
Lee:
We’ve got a golden rule here. We only do two rounds of amends before people have to pay more. But equally, for every round of amends that come in, we ask our clients to make the round of amends, as in make a list, and then wait 24 hours before this enters them because they’re always going to think of more stuff in the 24 hours or talk themselves out of things by the end it until in the end, you get a proper defined list of, All right, this is that round of amends. We essentially say, Don’t waste your two rounds of amends, so take your time. That really does help, I think, as well. Well, you said it didn’t your team work. You’re explaining the benefit as well to them of, This is why you should wait. Take your time, use the amends wisely, and then we’ll move on to the next round of amends.
Andrew:
Yeah, you also have, and also when you say two rounds of amends, you’ve also got to watch scope creep. Amen. Because the phrase, Can you just, years ago, there was when you used to reverse plates out and film out to make white text on something. Somebody said, Oh, can you just change that reversed out text? Well, actually, yes, we can. It’s going to cost you 300 quid because it’s plate making and film making, all that stuff. Now, with the benefit of the web and with the benefit of online design tools and stuff like that, you can make amendments like that very, very quickly and give a digital proof. But you still have to watch the scope creep. I had a client the other day say, Oh, I’ve got 20 images. Can you choose the best five? Well, actually, no, because my best five might not be your best five. Exactly. You choose the best five, and then we’ll do that. How’s that? They’re doing that because they’re busy. They don’t want to put that in. So part of the education of clients is really, as I’ve said, get them to become part of your team for that project.
Lee:
You’ve just made me think of I sent a lazy brief the other day, and I’m writing a blog post about this, and I’m showing the example. To one of my ideas, designers, I sent a very lazy brief. I didn’t think it was lazy because I was in a rush, and the designs I got back for the new logo were utterly hideous, looked like a childhood made them. I was like, Oh, okay. I then sat down and spent half an hour going through getting the example logos I like, the typefaces, writing about what it is I wanted to achieve. I kid you not, the next logo that came back from the designer was absolutely spot on and looked beautiful, and I couldn’t even imagine it. As in, I hadn’t imagined it, but they’d captured everything because I’d spent the giving the brief. So there’s me doing that, and I’m always going on our clients about giving us better briefs. And then I did the exact thing I tell people off for doing. It was just a lazy brief.
Andrew:
It’s weird, actually, because a client of mine, I’ve built about seven websites for them over the last three years. And he emailed me yesterday with just such a detailed brief. It took four hours to build the website. It was five pages, but the brief was so on point. It was just… He got exactly what he wanted, and it was signed off straight away, and it’s now launched. But it’s a tight brief. It will also save the customer money and time, and you time and money. So yeah, it’s very important to…
Lee:
And keep a relationship strong as well.
Andrew:
Yeah, and as I say, this guy bought seven websites off us in the last, I think it’s four years, actually.
Lee:
I think from this experience, he’ll be buying more from you as well. One would hope. One would hope, wouldn’t you? Well, now, earlier, you mentioned that you’re pretty much flying around the world and you’ve got clients around the world as well. So in your consultancy out of the business, can you describe who are the types of people you’re working with? What’s the work you do with them?
Andrew:
I’ve got customers that are wholesale food distributors, 10, 15 million a year turnover, to people that make things that can make a drone fall out of the sky, a 300, $400 million a year turnover, to the plumber down the road that £250 for a website is an extreme amount of money. It’s a whole real mix of customers. But effectively, I try and keep my customers to the 1,500 to the 2,000-pound mark for a website because it takes just… Industry people always know that it takes just as long to build a £500 website as it does a £2,000 website. You can put extra things in the £2,000 website and stuff like that. It’s not necessarily about the size of the customer. Every single customer wants the same thing. They They want their website to be functional, strong calls to action, and be a lead generator. Whether you’re a plumber, a one-man band who has no friends, because plumbers tend not to have any friends because they don’t want people calling them at three o’clock in the morning saying, Where do you think my stopcock is?
Lee:
I wondered why I don’t know anybody.
Andrew:
That’s why. That’s why. Because a plumber told me that. Just like electricians, they don’t have any friends either.
Lee:
Well, actually, I do know an electrician, but I know better than to call him.
Andrew:
Exactly. It’s a whole raft of people, from really blue-chip corporates to very successful companies that have been going for maybe 10, 15, 20 years that value a relationship with somebody that can solve their problem. I think that’s the issue is that we We’re problem solvers. We’re time savers, we’re problem solvers, and we are responsive. Because we’re small, we’re flexible. We can move a project to the side for an hour to build, say, one of the things that I do is build distress websites. A lot of car manufacturers know me from years ago, and I still get these calls. When a vehicle is on a callback, they want to rather than have it on their main website, so it’s announced to the new people that there’s a problem with their particular car or a particular car, they want a separate website built that isn’t SEO optimised, that is effectively hidden from the search engines, but they want to be able to email customers and say, Go here, and this is how you deal with this callback. No way. Those are really good sites. We call them distress websites. And that’s a real good money earner because they are literal four-hour turnarounds.
Lee:
I didn’t even know that was a thing either, but as you describe it, it totally makes sense. Yeah.
Andrew:
Well, you don’t want it seen by… So we block it from search engines via the robots text or HT Access or whatever it is, or discourage search engines for listing it. And we build the email list. It’s almost a funnel as well because that email list everybody has to reply. So It’s become even more difficult with GDPR because those people may not necessarily have signed up, but it’s under the… I can’t remember the phrase for GDPR, but it’s legitimate use. It’s under legitimate use. They’re all covered, but all these companies are very worried, especially if you’re the very large corporates, because 4% of your turnover for breaking GDPR rules is quite extreme. But if you email out on legitimate use, there’s no problem. That’s distress websites. Also, a A lot of people want different websites for their products. A lot of landing pages for companies that have an e-commerce website, but they want to highlight a particular product. Those are the things that we specialise in these days. Nice quick turnaround. That’s why page builders, let’s be honest, and I’m very agnostic in life as well as in how I treat page builders. If Beaver Builder is the solution because it’s got some great funnel stuff in there, or Divi, or Elementor, or straight HTML, I’ll use whatever I can to both monetise it on my side and also make sure the customer gets exactly what they want.
Lee:
I always harkom back to this. Years and years ago, I interviewed a guy very early on in the podcast, something like episode three or four or something. He mentioned that it doesn’t matter what tools you use as long as you’re providing the value, enabling your customer to get the end result. It literally does not matter whether you do hand-coded in notepad or you use visual composer, whatever it is, just use the tools you have to provide the value that you need to and to help the client achieve the results they need to do. And it literally doesn’t matter because a lot of us feel like, especially when you have the coders who are a little snobby and they’re like, Oh, you use a page builder? And it’s like, It doesn’t matter. I’m still providing the value that that client needs. So I’m totally with you.
Andrew:
No, I agree with that. And I did a thing at WP…
Lee:
John Perez, that was it. Sorry, I was trying to remember.
Andrew:
There’s a beautiful… There’s lots of WordPress communities out there, and I’ve been to London one, but one of the most impressive is in Bristol, which is for people who are listening to this in the UK, it’s in the West country. It’s a big city. It’s a very vibrant city and very digital, and there’s lots of incentives for people to open up digital agencies there. They have WP Bristol, or @WP Bristol, I think it is on Twitter. They asked me to do a little presentation. I met Hannah, who organised it, on a plane to Serbia when I was going to Word Camp Europe last year. This is how things happen. I did a presentation on why you would use a page builder even if you can code. I One, I really enjoyed it because I really enjoy just explaining things to people that are… They start off negatively straight away and trying to get a positive result from it. Two, it was a 30-minute presentation, which is quite easy to put together if you’ve been around for as long as I have. And three, it was a 30-minute presentation, 15 minutes for Q&A’s, and the Q&A lasted for 40 minutes.
Andrew:
Now, that either says that the presentation wasn’t good enough or that people were really interested in exploring divvy element because, again, agnostic on what page builder to use. But they were very, very… And these were all developers. These were all WordPress people that say, Yeah, I’m a developer and I’m a coder and I can do this. But they actually saw the value, the total value. The Q&A was more an added conversation. But the point is that WordPress developers are coming round to the benefits of page builders for their working processes as well. When you go into real hard coding like Ruby on rails and things like that, that’s irrelevant. To WordPress in a way because you can’t use a page builder for those complex API connexions and things like that. Obviously, custom coders will always be needed, whether it’s WordPress or Joomla or whether it’s straight bootstrapping.
Lee:
I’m not worried about artificial intelligence replacing us yet, which is good. Now, I’m intrigued. Obviously, you’ve got the day-to-day agency side of the business, but also you’ve gone into digital products as well with Elegant Marketplace, as well as providing an online service as well with your Layout. What’s the company called? Layouts Manager, is it?
Andrew:
Layoutsmanager. Com. Layoutscloud. Com for divi. And layoutsmanager. Com for Elementor.
Lee:
Tell us all about these online ventures that you have, and I guess how they got started and what your plans are for the future as well.
Andrew:
Well, they got… Divicloud got started because somebody mentioned DiviCloud. I think it was actually nick from Elegant Themes that mentioned DiviCloud. And then two years later, which is typical of developers, they don’t do anything about it. So I thought, well, I’m going to get some flack for this, but I’m just going to start DiviCloud. And basically at the time, Divi didn’t have any built-in layouts, and there were a lot of people out there giving out free layouts and things like that. So I thought I would start it as a service. So effectively, you have a plugin, you get a number of free layouts with that plugin, and you can import them directly from our systems. You can use them, save them unlimited times. They’re all free issue, if you like. If you upgrade to freelancer or agency, you get to be able to save those layouts in the cloud. It basically helps your development process. You’ve designed a website for something, and you’ve saved your layouts to your cloud. You then instal all divvyCloud plugin onto your website with divi, and you’ve access to all those layouts within that instance. You don’t have to go searching around from them in various folders or Dropbox or anything like that.
Andrew:
They’re all labelled and marked and favorited within your own cloud. Now, Elementor, when they first started, they have always supplied layouts. It’s a challenge for anybody to start a SaaS service, if you like, for Elementor, because Elementor were a web design agent Agency anyway. The guys, I think it’s Pojo Themes, owned Elementor or own Elementor. They were always great designers and they always sold them themed as well. It was a no-brainer for them to include layouts within the Elementor plugin and as an upsell. If you’ve got Pro or if you want a premium layout, you have to buy that. But I thought, you know what? There’s plenty of room for everybody. I had a word with Ben just on Messenger. We talk probably once a month or something. I said, Look, I’m going to do Layouts Cloud for Elementor. He said, Yeah, go for it. Absolutely no problem at all with it. I think we’ve got about 500 people who are using it, mainly the free version, because there’s another guy out there, and I can’t remember it, to be honest, that does Elementor Layouts for free as well. But the benefit of having the paid version is that you can obviously save them to your own cloud.
Andrew:
We’ve developed now for Layouts Cloud, actually, and Elementor Cloud, just the MyCloud plugin, which is much, much cheaper than an annual fee or something. I think it’s $35, and that allows you to save your own layouts to your own cloud. It’s 35 bucks for a year, so it’s pretty competitive. But I always felt that it would help people develop and design. It’s perfect for landing pages because they’re all single-page layouts. We do do some sets, but every single month, Freelancer and Agency would get 10 and 20 layouts, and even the free plugin gets one new layout a month. It’s more a community-based thing. We don’t actually make any money out of it, to be honest. It’s costing me money for the last six months, but it’s fine. It’s community. You’ve got to build something around the community that you’ve got, and you’ve got to give back. I think with the success of Elegant Marketplace, we can afford to give back. That’s why I’ve done it. Yes, eventually I would like it to make some money, but it doesn’t really matter if it doesn’t, as long as Elegant Marketplace continues to be as successful as it is.
Lee:
That’s awesome. Tell us about Elegant Marketplace then as well, because the Layouts Cloud is the one where you put the plugin into your divi or your element or you can download and create your own cloud, as it were as well, your own repository to share designs across multiple sites. And then tell us about Elegant Marketplace. So what do you do with that?
Andrew:
Well, Elegant Marketplace is, again, it’s a vendor marketplace. So we have vendors out there that have child teams, plugins, layouts, modules, whatever for divi and Elementor and WordPress. And just like Invato, the big guys out there, they can sign up to be a vendor, and they get a commission based on anything from zero sales to $10,000 a month or $20,000 a month, whatever they’re on. But they always get the same amount of commission. We decided not to do a scaled commission or say actually you get 20% after $1,000 or 30% after $5,000 or whatever. We just straight away, if you’re an exclusive vendor on Elegant Marketplace, you get 70%, and if you’re non-exclusive, you get 60%, and if you’re a subscription model, you get 80%. So subscribers, if you’re a vendor who subscribers, you become a featured vendor and you get 80%. I think it’s one of the fairest deals out there. Well, I know it’s one of the fairest deals out there. That’s why I’ve done it. But it’s also about community because some of the vendors do some free stuff. For instance, Kate WP, he’s a featured vendor, got loads of plugins, and on our platform, you can download free layouts for Elementor and Divi as I’m literally just looking at them now.
Lee:
As you talk, I’m clicking.
Andrew:
Yeah, so we’re a a repository for vendors, but for premium items. Some vendors can earn 500 bucks a month, and we’ve got some vendors on there that are earning $5,000 a month. It’s quite good. We’ve got probably 20 vendors that don’t actually do any other work than produce stuff for Elegant Marketplace and their own shops. What we’ve seen is There were two other marketplaces, and one guy’s decided to give up because elegant themes are allegedly bringing out their own marketplace. We got Divi Cake, which is great, but they use the same vendors as us. We’re the same, if you like. They’ve got a slightly different deal with their vendors, and it’s friendly competition, if you like.
Lee:
Well, there’s millions of websites and millions of developers, so I do think there’s enough room for everybody, isn’t there?
Andrew:
Oh, God, yeah. There’s no reason why Even if elegant themes bring out their own marketplace, there’s no reason why elegant marketplace won’t be around. There’s no reason at all. It’s just it’s about choice, isn’t it, Lee? You give people the choice, that’s fine. I think we’ve got our support pretty much nailed down. We definitely reply well within 24 hours. We definitely are sympathetic when people want refunds for any particular reason. We know that we’ve got our own support system where the vendors get contacted directly If you order a product, you go back to the product page and there’s a support form there. There’s been a lot of investment in Elegant Marketplace to make it as appropriate as it is. It’s just a new design, a couple of months old. It’s what you call a flat design, but it’s resulted in an increase in sales. I knew it would. It’s just a bit faster. So people are wanting to… When you’re online, you don’t want to wait for something to load or something to be paid for or something like that. With a transaction website, when you check out, they are generally a little bit slower because guess what?
Andrew:
They’ve got to connect to PayPal or your credit card processor or whoever. So we’re as an e-commerce site, we are vulnerable to if PayPal’s communications are a bit slower or Stripe or whoever we’re using. So we have to make sure that the rest of the website is as fast as it can possibly be. But it’s a community. Again, another thing about community, it’s a community website because the vendors are drawn from the community. So whether that’s element or I’d love some more Elementor developers on there. We’re just going to actually get another guy on. He’s developing a new theme for Elementor, and it’s going to be exclusively available on Elegant Marketplace, which I’m really pleased with. That’s the thing I want. I want some WordPress developers on there, and I want some Elementor guys and even Beaver Builder. As I say, we’re theme and plugin agnostic as well. We’ll basically sell anything, Lee. Give us it and we’ll shell it for you.
Lee:
We’ll shell it for you. This time next Next year, Rodney.
Andrew:
This time next year, rodders.
Lee:
Well, I was actually going to ask about Beaver Builder, but I think you just mentioned it.
Andrew:
Well, no, Beaver Builder. We spoke, again, we interviewed my colleague, Eileen, interviewed them maybe two years ago, and I think it was Robert that spoke. They’re just such nice people.
Lee:
They are, aren’t they?
Andrew:
The divvy guys, the element of guys, they’re just nice people. That’s what I like. I like people that are nice. I don’t like nasty people. There’s no need for it, frankly. He says who can be nasty. Oh, dear. Well, no, I’m Ginger. What do you expect?
Lee:
Well, there’s a great song on… If you download the TikTok app and then just run a search for the Ginger song.
Andrew:
Brilliant. I need that.
Lee:
You won’t like it. Oh, dear. But I’m going to let you just do that separately, and then you can message me once you’ve listened to it.
Andrew:
No, I definitely want to listen to that. I love anything Ginger. As long as it’s really rude, it’s great.
Lee:
Yeah, you’ll be happy then. Excellent. Oh, dear. I don’t know whether I should cut this out or not. I don’t want to offend anyone. I, for one, love gingers.
Andrew:
Yeah, I wouldn’t worry about it.
Lee:
Just disclaimer.
Andrew:
Exactly, yeah. I am Ginger. Or I was. I’m slightly grey ginger now, but fine.
Lee:
Slightly grey. Silver.
Andrew:
Silver fox. Silver fox, literally.
Lee:
That’s awesome. Well, mate, this has been absolutely fascinating just learning about all the different things you’re involved with. I love the fact that you’ve built some businesses around community. WordPress is a fantastic community. Like you said, there are such lovely people out there and you’re able to grow this marketplace and the layout clouds, etc, which are both great ideas with communities. I love what you’re doing there. But equally, I love what you’re doing in your agency as well. You’re very clear on what you want to do. Those good, valuable, quick turnaround projects. You’re working with people all around the world. You’re working with different people and you’re enjoying it, which is awesome. So this has been a phenomenal story. I guess one thing I would ask you then is what’s a piece of advice you would give to somebody who maybe is literally just starting out with their agency? Maybe they’ve moved into WordPress circles because that’s what we’re talking about today. What would be your advice for them getting started? It’s a big question. It just came to me now, so I can feel with me telling you that to give you extra time to think.
Lee:
Was that good? Did that work?
Andrew:
Yeah, no, it’s fine. Excellent. Over to you. It’s absolutely fine. But just one thing, if they’re starting on, make sure that you are fully committed to it. Make sure you’ve got a plan. If you don’t have a plan, you are going to fail. There’s no doubt about it. So have a It’s a plan. But there is another thing is listen intentionally. When a client or somebody you’re talking to is a potential client, it’s not about you. So listen intentionally. It’s always about them. Once you learn how to listen intentionally, then you will be a success because you’ll be able to transfer what they say to you into a concept, into a product, and then into a launch. And that’s it. Actually, the main thing is just to listen intentionally.
Lee:
Listen intentionally. I love that. And equally, by doing that, then already are you going to create that amazing product for them. But equally, you’re going to convert much easily because they’re going to see that you’re demonstrating that you’ve understood what their need is.
Andrew:
Absolutely. And there are a couple of other things. I wish you’d said three, really, because there’s a great guy-You’re just doing them anyway. You’ve done two. Well, I know. There’s a great guy out there. He’s called Brian Casselle. And just searching on Twitter. He’s got this product or a learning situation called productise with a Z, and it’s genius. He basically teaches you how to productise your business. It can be anything. It could be a web design business, it could be print, it could be plumbing, it could be electricians or whatever. But you basically productise it. Because one of the things that we have in our industry is pricing issues. But once you’ve productised your business, it’s a price. Your product is a price. You’ve got this web design is £5,000, this maintenance contract is £200 a month, this hosting is £80 a month or whatever you want to charge, and you’ve productised your offering. If you’re just starting up, I can’t remember how much it is. I think it’s a couple of hundred dollars, but one of the courses, there’s loads of courses I could recommend now, but I’m not going to. But for startups, productise, look for Brian Casselle, C-A-S-E-L.
Andrew:
He’s just totally on point.
Lee:
Sounds like another legend I need to go and check out. I’ve not heard of him, but I do love the concept. We’ve had a couple of episodes. We’ll pop those in the show notes as well of people recently that have gone down the road of productising their services and offering monthly packages as well for what they do, which works really well. It’s a really effective sell. That’s awesome. Thank you for that one in brackets three. Pieces of advice for anyone who’s getting started. That just means you’ve tripled on the value that you’ve provided today. And that’s the fourth tip. You’re good. Overdeliver. Under promise, overdeliver.
Andrew:
You’re good. You’re good. If you didn’t have a job, I’d offer you one now.
Lee:
That’s awesome. Mate, thank you so much for your time. This has been wonderful. You’re going to be rocking the Agency Transformation Live conference summit, whatever you want to call it, in Wellingborough with us, which I’m really looking forward to hanging out with you. You’re going to be on one of the panels as well. So thank you for being a part of that and also for supporting the event. So really, really appreciate that. My pleasure. Folks, if you’re not going, be sure to check out agencytransformation. Live. Have a look at the programme. You’ll get to hang out with people like Andrew, Troy Dean, Chris Ducker, Paul Lacy. He always gets a mention on this podcast just because he’s a legend. So check out that. And if you want to be part of the fun, then do get a ticket. Andrew, thank you so much. Have a wonderful day.
Andrew:
Thanks, Lee. I really appreciate your time today.
Lee:
No worries, mate.
Lee:
And that wraps up today’s show. Now, if you are listening on Friday the 22nd, that means that there is only 34 days to Agency Transformation Live here in the UK. If you want a special offer, if you want to come, then there is a special offer in episode 200. So go check out episode number 200 for a very special offer on Agency Transformation Live. We’re going to have Troy Dean, Chris Ducker, Kelly Badder. We’ve got myself. We’ve got Dave Foy, Amy Woods, Dave Toomey, Paul Lacey. We should do the jingle. Mike Killen and Samantha Hearn, Dan, Picca Neri, Nicole Osborne, Pete Everitt, Gareth Morgan, Tristan John-Griffin, Martin Hunt patch, Andrew Palmer, and Regendra Zor, as well as many more. Oh, that rhymed. Folks, we really want to see the Agency Transformation.transformation. Live.
