Scott Reid 0:00
Scott, welcome to the Ecommerce Optimizers Show. I’m your host, Scott Reid on today’s episode, we have Matt Levenhagen of Unified Web Design. We have a great conversation. We learn about Matt’s experience in affiliate marketing going way back, and then we learn more about what he’s doing today and what he’s been doing for the last several years. In terms of building websites for E commerce brands, we talk about custom built solutions versus more out of the box solutions. We talk about the importance of maintenance, site performance, all sorts of stuff. So if you have an E commerce brand, I’m sure you’ll get a lot of value out of this. It’s a great episode, and without any further ado, let’s hop into it. This episode is sponsored by E commerce optimizers. At E commerce optimizers, we take a unique approach to optimizing e commerce brands by fine tuning the conversation between your website and your visitors. And we think about it this way, when someone interacts with your website. They’re having a conversation with your business. They’re assessing things like trust, quality and reliability. They’re asking questions. Through our purchase optimization system, we precision engineer every micro point of interaction to make that conversation smoother and more effective. As a result, more people make more purchases, boosting your business’s bottom line. You can learn more by visiting our website at E commerce optimizers.com All right, on today’s episode, we have a guy by the name of Matt Levin Hagen of unified web design. Matt, thanks very much for joining me on the podcast today.

Matt Levenhagen 1:40
It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Scott,

Scott Reid 1:43
thanks again. AJ Saunders, a mutual friend connected us and and the rest is history. We had a we had a great conversation last week. If I’m not mistaken, Matt is from Wisconsin. He’s from the the Greater Milwaukee area, which is, which is a wonderful area of the country. We talked about some of the local Wisconsin cuisine that I’m always envious of, that he’s right in his backyard. But in any event, Matt, why don’t you tell us about yourself and how you got into the web design business, among other things?

Matt Levenhagen 2:12
Yeah. Oh, and thanks again for having me. I Yeah. I’ll go back a few years. I’ve been around for a while. I’m in my early 50s, even though my pictures doesn’t look like it. But I am older than I look. So back in the early 90s, I was actually I tried to be an artist, and this will tie into what I’m doing today. I tried to be an artist, actually a fine artist that was painting on canvas in those days before the internet, trying to make it and having art shows, and certainly do some commissioned stuff. And while I bartended through my 20s, bartending paid the bills. The art was pretty much break even for those years. Yeah, and from there, so I eventually, mid 90s, I decided that being a struggling artist wasn’t something I wanted to do the rest of my life. So try to get into business. My second passion art was a business. So that was really, technically my first business. And I went back to school, took a couple years of business courses and and then ended up, believe it or not, in the insurance business. As an insurance agent, worked for Allstate. I somebody from my bar actually had an insurance agency, and he that my bar one day, Matt, you’re looking for a job, and sure, let me check out insurance. And we were all state agents for started working with him, all state agents for six months. And then after six months, we were getting along, and he was going to walk, which meant we could sell other types of insurance, we’d leave all state and we had 50, 100 different companies we sold for, and all different lines of insurance. I did that for from about 97 for next three, four years. And then I would get antsy because I wasn’t making the money I wanted to be making and and I actually did a side gig, and that’s how I ended up in the construction, remodeling, paint and repair business for a couple years. Ended up leaving insurance to just do that, because I was doing so well until I wasn’t, until I wasn’t, and I ended up going back to insurance for a while, and started my own little agency, and then I discovered the internet. This was about 93 or no, 2003 okay, built a website for my insurance agency, and then I ended up making an affiliate commission for something I had on my website, and, and I’m like, what was that? I didn’t know what that was. Somebody just told me to put a link on my site, and I made a $40 commission selling dental plan and, and that took me on this journey to to discover there was this whole world of affiliate marketing. And then I learned about pay per click advertising and driving traffic. And that took me the about the next 910, years. I ended up building a affiliate business, and I did digital products, had memberships part. Ownerships, you name it. In those days, sold my own ebooks and became known for my methods around pay per click, and it was more mostly AdWords and affiliate marketing test the market that but I by 2012 I was burned out, and Google had beat me up quite a bit for various reasons, it was time for a pivot, to cash out and pivot, and I that was when I made my assessment, like, what do? Or did my assessment What do? What should I do next? And I look back at those last 10 years and what I actually enjoyed out of that time, and I had built, I’d done niche marketing, I’d built tons of sites and sales pages and made money with those things. And I’m like, I really like tinkering with websites. Sometimes I’d like that more than the marketing part of it. So what I ended up doing was I decided to freelance for a few years see what would happen if I started doing this for other people. That led me to landing a job at a place called Rapid

Scott Reid 6:04
crush. Rapid crush, it’s great for years, yeah, and

Matt Levenhagen 6:07
I had gotten to know those guys from the 2000s we were doing webinar, or not webinar, actual seminars, and met them in person. So new them. That’s my doorway in and did that for three, four years, until they got out of the WordPress business. And about 2000 end of 2018 and about January 1, 2019 I decided to maybe I could build an agency, and I was ready. I learned a lot in those years. Learned a lot from them and from the whole thing we did there. Building what we did, we built a WordPress theme, marketplace, teams and all this, and took it from there. And five and a half years later, here I am,

Scott Reid 6:55
what’s the web design agent? And so this is, what about beginning of 2019 you started unified web design, yeah, and your experience is very unique. It’s very thorough as well. Clearly, you touched a lot of different companies throughout that time as well. Especially being an affiliate marketer, you must have seen all sorts of different types of business models and different copywriting structures offers the whole nine yards, so that must be exceptionally helpful in your role today, with unified web design, to be able to draw on all that experience, even though it was 10, 1215, years ago. That was when the web was essentially in its infancy, as compared to today. But what type of learnings Did you extract during that time as an affiliate marketer that you now use today?

Matt Levenhagen 7:49
Yeah, that’s a good question. I look at those my formative years. Those are the years I learned a ton and I was really hungry to learn because I wanted to make money. That was the driving force in those days, I didn’t really have any other enforcement stuff. I wanted to make a living online. This was before was popular to work at home, and it was, you know, I was just determined, like this. I’m like, I like this. I like sitting in front of I like computers, sitting in front of computers. Anyway, so, yeah. So what I learned in those years, so as an affiliate, especially, convert your conversion rates and all those little details are super important, especially if you’re spending money. And so if I spend money, I hope to return, get a return on that as an investment, right? It’s like I spend $100 hopefully I make 200 or whatever. And in those days we could buy really in early days, we could buy really cheap traffic. We’re driving traffic for pennies and making conversions and but what I had to do is I had to we would drive traffic and an initial the methods we were using was direct traffic right to the merchant, right from AdWords account to the merchant, we wouldn’t even have a landing page. That got harder over time. But even that, you’re starting to learn, oh, what this merchant converts, or this product converts, and you look at that, you start to learn, pick up, why? What elements they have that their competition doesn’t because I could, I would compete merchants against each other with the same product, and I could have a product being sold by four or five different merchants, and only one of them converts with the traffic I’m sending. Okay, there’s a lot of variables there, but, but you start to pick up on those things, and so just, you know, learning and those type of things, and what a site that converts looks like. I guess it’s simple. It’s even hard to describe 100% but also copy. So when I did start to get into landing pages, when we had to learn how to build landing pages and websites that would convert, then we got. Into and I selling my own product too, because I would I had sales pages and stuff that I was writing. I got pretty heavy into copywriting and learning copywriting for a number of years. Copy was everything. I still write all my own copy, maybe with a little help of chat to TV date, but we won’t argue, he just refines it for me. Checks my spelling, which I was always terrible at, I had, I wrote, like a complete guide, like two hour my one of the, one of the things I sold was, like a 200 page guide, and I would have like customers, like offer to help me edit it. Oh, really. I actually had members of mine that were that would actually offer their time just to go through and edit something for me,

Scott Reid 10:38
at least, to learn that they were reading your content, though, right? Yeah,

Matt Levenhagen 10:42
yeah, we Yeah. They were. They were, for sure, but so learning copy was really important. That teaches you a lot about what converts and how important a headline is, how important how you develop copy to get to prevail, and you learn about what prevents somebody from buying from you. Now, even little things like leaks, now we again see AdWords, and the whole Pay Per Click advertising thing evolved in those years dramatically. Like I said, we could go directly, then we would create these little island landing pages where was no links to anything else, because any link on there, even in the footer, is a leak, right? It’s going to leak traffic. You just wanted them focused on your offer and going off and buying something from your merchant. But over time, you had to, as quality scores evolved, you couldn’t do that as much, but you learn those little things, like, what contributes to not getting a conversion as well. And then the other thing, I think, the big thing I learned, was testing. And in those days, it was early days again, where we could, there was there were solutions to do AB split testing, multi variant. There was some, I don’t know if you ever heard of Taguchi testing that was, like, pretty hardcore. And it’s, there’s, I think it’s a little controversial. It doesn’t really work. But you where you’re basically, you’re not just testing, just a headline, but AB split testing. One thing, it’s, you could multivariate, like all kinds of things, and it has this formula in the background. That was the other thing, how powerful testing was. It was just little things I would learn I would test like in the beginning days, you would hear people. Another lesson out of this, too, don’t always believe everything you hear, or don’t let what you think inform what you do 100% like you can think something like, I would never do that, right? But your visitors and the consumer doesn’t care, they have a completely different idea. So I’ll give you an example

Scott Reid 12:51
of that, and that’s who matters, right? Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t matter what we think. It matters what the potential customer think.

Matt Levenhagen 12:58
Yes, and this is a really good example, and one of the most important lessons I learned in those years, because it dramatically increased my lead conversions, and that is, in the beginning, we would have a little sign up form to join my list, maybe a little newsletter, whatever, little giveaway, obviously a little giveaway, and you’d have that embedded on your page, but everyone would say, pop up started to become a thing, right? And you would that’s the thing. You would say, I would never go to a website and deal with a pop up that I’m gonna immediately back up. I don’t want to see pop ups. Yeah, I would immediately leave that page. And those are the type of stories we tell ourselves what I would do, like if somebody’s gonna spam me with a pop up, I don’t want to. They’re trying to get something from me. They’re nefarious. But now test it. So I the one of the first ones I taught first times I really learned this lesson, I had a guide called the campaign blast guide. Is that was my pay per click affiliate marketing methods. And I had a giveaway on that. I think I was filling the guide at the time, but I would have a shorter version of it or something as a little report that I’ve given away. And I remember, I’m like, I’ll just test this pop up. And it literally went from a couple sign ups to four by vaccine, just having that pop up, yeah, it just, it was suddenly just in there. I’m like, okay, apparently what I think didn’t matter. Like somebody out there doesn’t care if it’s a pop up. They just wanted the information. That’s right, yeah, they saw the value in what I was presenting them. And actually, they actually saw it because they couldn’t ignore it, right? So those are the things you know, that testing and then that pop up. Now we’re testing that pop up, baby, but testing that pop up. Those are the biggest lessons, I think, learning how to write, copy, learning about conversions, all that stuff, and tying what you’re. Original question. All that stuff does tie into what I do today. Now I am focused on web design development, but I have conversations when I’m translating the ideas of other marketers and other copywriters and other and business owners and what their ideas are, and understanding how to implement that, and being able to somewhat advise them, to a degree too, if they asked me, it’s

Scott Reid 15:23
interesting, because one thing that you didn’t mention, but I’m going to ask you, is that you didn’t mention your use of art or design into your role today, or since you started your agency, you were just really focusing on more scientific things, like the science of copywriting, the strategy, copywriting strategies, or the importance of AB testing, which is very much scientific by definition. But I gotta believe, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, that you’re in addition to the scientific aspects of your past experience, that you also must be taking your design experience or your artistic experience and bringing that to the table too. Is that a correct assumption, that you’re blending the two together to deliver to your clients?

Matt Levenhagen 16:10
Yeah, I think, I think everything’s a creative process, even writing the copy and in the fonts you choose and how you lay things out balance and using good white space, or good creating a clean design or creating something now we work in different industries, so what I create for a manufacturer and their website and what they need and what they think their website should look like and their customers is way different than being in the which I’m also In the Health and Beauty area that that’s a different style. So the creativity and the design aspect does play a role there, and putting together good imagery, choosing the right images, which is a huge part of your website. But back in the day, yeah, in the 2000s I was really focused for a long while on, on what we call sales letters or sales pages, right? That was very little imagery. Some of those were just letters, right? Or just words the old days,

Speaker 1 17:09
yeah, yeah, exactly. It was like sales letter, yeah. It’s

Matt Levenhagen 17:13
just like a headline, and it just pulls you in. And I still work with clients, or at least one client, that they’re very sales letter oriented. And when I work with their copywriter, we’re talking about, how do we hold their attention throughout this copy? And use some imagery to do that? But yeah, so look at even in high school, I took architecture. I thought I was gonna be an architect. When I was in high school, I took drafting for years, my senior year in high school was taking advanced drafting, two, three, and I was spending study study hall in there three hours a day, and probably drawing and all of those things. I think a lot of the concept, from color to structure and balance, all those things do lend to it. You’re still but you don’t, and also knowing how not to overdo it, they there’s this in the early days of the internet when everybody had flash websites and stuff and just it was, or you still see that once in a while, even other web design agencies where their website is just all animations and right, it’s freaking out. I

Scott Reid 18:20
think that’s distracting myself, personally. Yeah,

Matt Levenhagen 18:23
if you go to a website, you’re like, I don’t even know where I am, where they’re trying to get you somewhere, but where we go, I don’t know and but there’s also that’s part of it too. It’s almost takes more creativity and thought to make something simpler and to boil it down into the key elements that are important. Boy, if you go to my website, site, I don’t have a lot of animation.

Scott Reid 18:47
Yeah, I noticed I was just looking at it. It’s super clean. And it’s it’s like, when you said it’s simple, can be harder. It’s like, simple is sophisticated, because you got to think about it more. What is that all? If I had more time, I’d write you a shorter letter. Same thing with a simple website. It’s just boiling everything down so that you’re getting the most important things across just that amount, not too much, not too little. But that’s actually, that’s a really interesting background. It’s multi disciplinary, very holistic. Your experience is unique, as is everybody’s, but you’re especially since you’ve been, you’ve been, you know, in the industry, for over 20 years. So you’ve seen a lot. That’s a that’s like a millennium. That’s like 1000 years in railroad time he’ll have up there in terms of what you do at unified web design, you bring all that experience, and you have your team, what types of customers, or what types of clients do you work with, and or what types of clients do you like to work with, if you were to describe that, that typical client, of that ideal client, that that’s always interesting to me? Yeah, and

Matt Levenhagen 19:55
so I don’t think I’ve necessarily. Find industry like we go after a specific kind of product, or whatever or and it’s not just e commerce, it’s what I’m focused on is, and this baked into my messaging a little bit, is extending other people’s other teams, whether that’s a company or an agency. We built relationships with other agencies where we fill some kind of need that they have, and that can be different, that is different for each one. So we may fill in a gap in their business where they need more experience on the back end, or vice versa. They need somebody that can do front end or both. So whatever we’re facilitating there, and we work with everything from manufacturers with a couple of our agencies. We have an agency that’s completely focused on any entertainment industry, hands and concerts and things like that. We have our own clients. I just, we’re in the middle of a large project right now, building an LMS or learning management system, members, membership or or, like, they sell, like, herbal products. Yeah, completely,

Scott Reid 21:12
yeah. It’s a wide array of direct to consumer, B to B. You’re all across the board. You’ve mentioned health and beauty. Early, health

Matt Levenhagen 21:20
and beauty. Yeah, I gotta Yeah, a large client that they’re 100% on that. So it’s for us. We’re focused on translating what they need, and I’m focused on being really good at understanding what they need. And it’s less there’s a case to be made to focus in on certain industries and stuff like we have, one of the agencies we’ve done work for all they do is HVAC, well thing, and they have this process. They have webs, like a web framework that they know exactly how to build those websites, exactly what those clients need, how to write their content. They got a content plan for them, and it’s like this tread, like, it’s a beautiful thing, probably that would bore me to death, but the beautiful model, and they probably make really good money doing that, and others do the same. They’re that’s why they’re focused on certain things. But yeah, I just, I feel that we bring something different to the table. We are specialized. We’re specialized in building things custom, and also caring about the maintenance side of it, which a lot of custom work required more maintenance. So, yeah. And so that’s, that’s our wheelhouse. And then we just, you know, find people that can work with us, yeah.

Scott Reid 22:39
So in terms of E commerce, my understanding is just based on a prior discussion that you work a lot with companies that are on the WordPress platform, WooCommerce. Specifically, you also do some work with people that are on Shopify. Shopify. What can you tell me about the about, like, the benefits of building custom, having a custom built solution, versus, versus opting and going in the direction of the Shopify, where there is some customization, clearly, but it’s maybe, perhaps, I don’t know if it would be fair to taste a little bit more out of the box.

Matt Levenhagen 23:19
Yeah, there’s there’s limitations to what you can do as as how they’re structured and how it’s hosted and all that. Yeah. So the thing about building a website is that every website is a little bit different. Every business is a little bit different. And sometimes businesses are simpler and they can use things out of the box, or they don’t have as much. Maybe it’s a knowledge gap. Maybe it’s they don’t know. They’re like, I’ve built websites for clients where they just have no input whatsoever. We just filled it, okay? I have no and the opposite, where they they’re looking at every detail and changing things and doing but, but every business is different, and sometimes so we don’t necessarily, in our minds, start with thinking custom. We first see what’s available out there. We don’t want to reinvent the wheel. There’s plugins we can use and all this, but, but then there’s always limitations. There’s always something that somebody wants. They know they want it, and there’s absolutely no solution for it out there. Well, they have a very unique business process or something they need to facilitate where it’s difficult, then you may have to use multiple plugins to make it happen or and custom work. But there’s things that a lot of businesses need and but would be limited if they couldn’t do it. If you have somebody that could do a custom and I don’t I, I hate saying no, like I hate saying I will try my darnedest to make something happen for a couple. For a client. Now I may come back and be like, yeah, we can do this, but it’s gonna cost, right? It’s like 500 hours to do it. And if they might say, yes, right, obviously the budget considerations and all that, that’s one of the reasons somebody might go to shop file and might just stick with debates, because they don’t have a web developer or a team to help them do these things, and it’s good place to start. And then as their business grows, then they bring that in. We’re working the LMS I was just talking to, they, I think they’re on Wix or I think Squarespace, so they have a website at Squarespace e commerce site. They’re actually a brick and mortar. They’re they’ve been on offline. They’re like in New Jersey. They have a pretty good local business, and now they’re going international, but they’re at this point where they started out with running their own site, but now they’re growing. And now they have like, they’ve had 1000s of students, and they have a community of 800 to 1000 people. And now they’re like, and they’re doing all this manually yet, and they’re thick. And so in that case, it’s, we’re gonna, we’re gonna build them. They got a lot of requirements, and so part of the value we bring to the table is wrangling all that for Okay, you got this piece over here. You’re doing the invoicing manually. You’re managing access to this way, manually. We’re going to bring all that together with the recommended plugins, and then we’ll how are we going to make it all work together? Is there some kind of custom requirement they need in their particular case? Then we can build a function to do that, or a special kind of pop up, or whatever they need notifications. There’s so many little details, like some of our clients that we have that have larger business, e commerce, established businesses, we’re in a continuous state of doing customizations for them, because, again, I don’t like to say no, and that’s probably why they like us, right? We’re like, we can do that, but they’ll tell me what their vision is. We need it to do this. We want it to look this way. We don’t like this, and then we figure out how to hack the site to do that. Now, using something like Shopify. We’ve translated designs on Shopify. We managed some Shopify sites. We Shopify is Shopify, but when my experience is there, we run up against this wall where we can’t do certain things, or we can’t optimize it for performance the way we like to, and don’t have control of every piece to the back end. But when I work in WordPress or in WooCommerce, and I especially when I have control the server and I can do it, we can do so much more. And also there it’s, I have to say, no less, which is my favorite thing, yeah, but yeah. But with that, there’s a cost. Obviously, you have to maintain that, and there’s custom work is a little more expensive. But

Scott Reid 27:59
what types of things is there? Like one example that you could think of that relatively common to Shopify, that’s presents itself as a limitation that isn’t necessarily ideal for many businesses. Or some businesses that you can think of the checkout, perhaps the flow there? Is there any, there any areas that that just jump out

Matt Levenhagen 28:20
often? It’s been a little while since we’ve done any real customization. And trying to think of one example i The performance is what jumps out at me. I remember. So we have a client that they have both a WordPress site and a Shopify site,

Scott Reid 28:37
and it’s a great comparison. It’s great

Matt Levenhagen 28:41
and for some reason, the Shopify site doesn’t do as well as the word pro site. But there may be other reasons for that, but what? But one of the things, one of the initiatives of this client, because 90% of their sales come from organic search, is that all those are things are relative in terms of the algorithm and the speed of the site is one of those things, the performance of the site, how fast things load and and one of the things that I ran up against in that case, and we tried multiple times with Shopify, was the apps we were using just weren’t optimized, or they were just dragging down the site in terms of speed. And that’s

Scott Reid 29:23
that may seem like this innocuous type thing, but site speed is massive in terms it is. It’s one of those things that does not get enough focus. So I think that’s a great example. I didn’t mean to interrupt you, but I just wanted to interject with that commentary, because it’s No,

Matt Levenhagen 29:38
that’s right, yeah, yeah. It’s more than people think. And when you work with clients that have a lot of sales coming in on an hourly basis, yeah, and they are really in tune with their rankings. So when we make a change, they will see their ranking drop a couple positions. Positions or improve a couple positions based on what we’re doing, and they in almost real time. So, but yeah, I just it was frustrating, and it’s it. And, you know, we always pride ourselves because we do custom work, and we know the code inside out, especially when it comes to WordPress. And there’s, we don’t like to say no, but there are those situations like that where it’s like, especially when it’s related to apps or plugins, where it’s a third party, yeah, and you can’t force them to optimize their app. And apps together can start to conflict or add together, they make things worse and but, yeah, it’s, it’s so that would, I think that’s the thing that stands out the most. I think we were able to customize quite a bit of the experience, because there still is code behind the scenes on Shopify. You just got to learn, learn how to deal with that. But yeah, that was the biggest thing, and something that was just, I just felt like in WordPress. If this was WordPress, we would have had an easier time.

Scott Reid 31:05
Another thing just, I think the biggest thing that that jumps out at me in terms of what you said was that control, that enhanced control that you have over things as you grow your business and actually and your website has, and I would direct people to the unified web design.com site. If you have any more questions about building custom, in addition to speaking to Matt directly, you can also go and he’s got, I don’t know, got, probably got about 10 or 15 different things on why build custom when you click on the click on the custom tag. So just wanted to point that out that’s there. How about maintenance? Let’s talk about maintenance, because that’s another area of your business that you mentioned is, is important. It’s an important component to your business, and it’s clearly important, especially when you start working on a custom site. What do you do in that regard, and how does that benefit your clients?

Matt Levenhagen 31:55
Yeah, so there’s, there’s multiple, there’s a couple different tiers, right? There’s your basic maintenance which or like a WordPress site, and it’s the same for other sites that require that have like third party plugins and things that need to be updated. WordPress, particularly, has to be updated continuously as often as possible. And we there’s different reasons for that. If you have plugins, or you have seams, and they get out of date, really out of date, you have an update them in two years. It’s really hard to update them all again two years later, because a lot happened, and some of those are going to be major upgrades to those things, and that can break stuff and but if you do it incrementally, you can just fix little things as you go or you don’t have to make the huge leap. Here’s incrementally improving things. It’s also a security thing. Websites get hacked, and we don’t see hacks, not really, period. I’ve had clients have had hack, but over to five, six years I’ve been doing this as an agency, and before that, I’ve run into clients that have had hacks, or usually they come to us and they have it, or we inherit a site that gets hacked a lot, and then we got to figure out how to lock that down and figure it out. But for the most part, if you keep your site maintained and updated security wise, you are patching a lot of stuff regularly, patching vulnerabilities. Your site’s going to be solid. You’re going to have, you’re going to have a pretty good experience, and you always have a backup to you having a good backup process. But that’s one part piece of it. But yeah, is so maintenance for us goes even beyond that. So above the maintenance, you can just go in and update plugins and themes on a regular basis, fix a bug, an issue here and there, but there’s also more depending on the site, you might need more robust processes. I’m not going to get too technical here. I don’t want to bore, put the put the audience to sleep or anything, or freak out their brains, but there is a whole development process that larger sites, and whether it’s larger e commerce sites or anything that they have, what’s called staging areas, they don’t make anything directly on the site. They don’t make any changes directly in the site. It’s all done in this like staging, like a clone of the site, that’s separate. Everything’s tested there, and there’s testing, there’s QA quality assurance. Everything tested before it’s even pushed out to the this production site, the live site. So that happens. There’s something called Get where it tracks all the changes and versions of things, and so there’s, there’s that next level where that’s all very important, and it keeps things that’s maintaining your site to a level where, if you’re going to introduce fewer bugs and fewer issues, and when you got sales. Coming in hourly or every minute, potentially, that’s all really important, because you lose money right? If you push something that’s not ready, or

Scott Reid 35:10
it’s your insurance policy, basically, that’s right. Maintenance contracts is an insurance policy for your business performance that

Matt Levenhagen 35:17
is right? Yeah. And then beyond that, there’s if it is a custom site, if it is like maintenance is to us, is also maintaining integrations or helping with other types of things that, because it’s not your website’s one thing. But then there could be integrations with outside systems, let’s say your HubSpot, for your sales forces, or your sort of whatever is out there, or in your particular industry, whatever that is. So there may be integrations and things that have to be happen there. There’s forms to maintain, there’s there’s an issue with a form or something, and some of it’s reported to us right there. We’re having an issue with the form, or we’re not. This isn’t this page is broken or whatever, and that may have happened an update, or somebody just broke some we gotta figure it out. But

Scott Reid 36:02
well, so much of every e commerce brand or any business that’s online, it’s really composed of a wide variety of complex digital components, and they’re all interconnected and interdependent. So there’s so many different variables that turn something sideways, and what you do is you’re making sure that everything is playing together in the sandbox properly, yeah,

Matt Levenhagen 36:27
especially as a business develops over time, things get snapped in, and suddenly you have multiple part of our process. We do regular audits, or we look at things, and you can look at the saying, like, Why do you have two form plugins? You’re not using this one over here. Are using this one? What are you part of our bit? Our job is ask question, go back and be like, Why do you have this? Do you need this? Yeah, so, how

Scott Reid 36:51
about your work with with agencies? You touched on that earlier. Is that something that a white label situation? Are you partnering with agencies to be an extension of their business in those areas that they don’t have expertise in. Could you talk about that? Because that’s definitely something that that I would imagine would be interesting to many of our listeners, because I have them know that many of our listeners are people that work at different agencies, so in addition to end users, in terms of an E commerce brand,

Matt Levenhagen 37:23
yeah, both shades and shades in between. It depends on so when we, when I, engage with another agency, usually they have some need, right? There’s, there’s a reason they’re contacting me. They and they were, saw my content on social media, or saw a podcast, or whatever they were, one of my guests, but when I engage with that person or the owner or whoever’s there, sometimes it’s the team. It’s like, we’re gonna we’re gonna solve a problem. A lot of times it is white label. So it’s basically, they need somebody to come in and do things for their clients, and we just stay behind the scenes. We’re just helping them do more or maybe do more technical stuff or get more done. Right there’s an agency right now where I’m actually we’re in a process of onboarding. We’re doing some projects still in the test phase, and but their whole thing is they have this backlog. They have 100 websites, and they have this backlog of to do’s for their team. Different team members have all these to do’s, but they’re trying to do new stuff. They got other initiatives and things they don’t worry about all these little bugs and all that other stuff or content updates. And so there’s a particular problem there. But if we engage with them, and we do that, we’re just going to we’re going to be just doing our thing, we’ll have a way to communicate and handle things. Sometimes it depends on the agency. Sometimes I do interface with the clients that their clients, and in those cases, I show up as just part of their team, and I may even have, most cases, I have an email for that company, that agency, and Matt attber, and so I communicate an email or in their project management system with those clients, and far as they know I work for that agency, there may be situations where they Do know that I am independent and helping out. So it just depends on the agency, how open they are and how they or if it matters. If it came up, and it never does, if somebody actually looked up my name, they would find me all over the Google. And what is this? The same guy? What does the unified weapon? They

Scott Reid 39:36
can put one and one together if they wanted,

Matt Levenhagen 39:38
yeah, if they wanted some effort, yeah. And maybe if you have and then,

Scott Reid 39:43
but the way of the world these days anyway, if that’s a reality, yeah, it’s

Matt Levenhagen 39:46
not uncommon, right? People do that this. That’s what partnerships are all about, and working together and being able to do more, and that’s what we’re doing for these agencies. We’re allowing them to win new business because now they have an expert or somebody that can extend. Their teams and do more. And the way we have the other relationship as well, where there’s a couple agencies that just refer business to us, like the HVAC agency that we work with, they have their systems, they have their in house teams to do all this, but they’re on rails, right? They have there. They don’t go outside the lines. I think it’s right, so Matt’s here when they when the clients. We need to go outside the lines. We need this integration over

Scott Reid 40:26
here. Yeah, that sounds this tool. It’s a great partnership, because it keeps them on track. And then you do what you’re great at, and they do what they’re great at, and it’s then the and then the client gets a great result, exactly, exactly, exactly, which wouldn’t be the case if they tried to go outside of their lines, or vice versa. It’s

Matt Levenhagen 40:46
really important to know your lane and and just like me, like I with our agency, like we do, even though we do a lot within what we do, like we’re a full service Web Design Development Agency. We’re not going to be doing SEO. Do base basic SEO, like we but if I really, if I just had a client ask, do you know anybody? I’m like, Yeah, I can set you up with or so if it goes outside our line, our lines is just web design development, and then we work with other outside copywriters or videographers or whatever. And, yeah, it’s a good way to do business, because I just had somebody on my podcast. We were talking about that, where she was like, she’s also got a web design agency and create her name. I had too many people on my podcast, but she, she was the same thing. We talked a little bit about that even before. I think we’re a conversation where she’s, I don’t understand how some people agencies, do everything. You can’t do everything. Monica Pitts, you can’t do everything. You can’t be all things to all people. You gotta specialize. You gotta be really good at some

Scott Reid 41:55
that’s I’m reading a strange group, yeah. Oh, Good to Great. Good

Matt Levenhagen 41:58
to Great. Yeah. There’s a kind of part of that book there talk about that where you could find what you’re best at. That’s where great companies how you succeed, hopefully,

Scott Reid 42:08
a good Dan Sullivan refers to as your unique ability, right? That doesn’t

Matt Levenhagen 42:13
mean you don’t do other things. That doesn’t even mean that we might not even do a little SEO, like I am a SEO person, actually on our team that mostly works on our own SEO. She’s but she knows SEO, so if somebody needed something sometimes I throw it in. Be like, Yeah, I’m sure we’ll do that. It’s nothing too outside the lines. But that doesn’t mean you don’t, but you have that you got to build your marketing around some your messaging too. That’s where it helps, because I’m able to focus more what we do, yeah, like this narrow, extending teams, custom maintenance, but I don’t have to talk about anything else, but we catch doesn’t mean we, once in a while, write a little content for somebody. What keeps it interesting, too? Right? Strategize with them. Yeah, exactly.

Scott Reid 42:58
And your podcast, you mentioned that you beat me to the punch. But podcast is called the builders, and you’ve been doing that for three and a half years, almost four years. Is that right? Yeah,

Matt Levenhagen 43:08
we’re at, where are we? We’re at about, yeah, 176 episodes per one per week for haven’t missed a haven’t missed a week for

Scott Reid 43:18
years. Solid. That’s solid dedication. Yeah, so it’s, I listen to a couple episodes. It’s very good. Very good. Thanks. Very comprehensive. Good conversationalist. As as I think we found out today. Anyway,

Matt Levenhagen 43:33
I hope so it helps. I don’t want to, but again, I don’t want to put anyone asleep

Scott Reid 43:38
or no, it’s been a great how can people get in touch with you? If they want to, they want to learn more about it.

Matt Levenhagen 43:44
Yeah, they can. So I in terms of social media, I LinkedIn is the best place to find me. There. You can follow me, and then our friend friendly. What do we do on there, on LinkedIn, just to follow people?

Scott Reid 43:55
Yeah, poor. We follow, yeah.

Matt Levenhagen 43:58
We invite people, you know, and you send me a message there if you want, or just follow our content there and then define web design.com is if you’re if you have any interest at all in web design development, or you need your team extended, I want your, maybe your one of the reasons I focused in on agencies, and I actually have agency solutions at the top is one of my Main Menu items is because I saw that a lot of agencies struggle without sourcing and things like that. I also just released my first lead magnet in years, but called a lead magnet my I on my website. Matt levinagan.com, if you go there at the top, I might create a landing page for this too, but there is a new guide about outsourcing fit, and that is basically teaching or sharing my experience, like I just told you all agencies we work with and the companies we have relationships with. It’s all about relationships at its core. It’s not just getting somebody, just feeding someone tasks, and they just get sucked on. For you, the success we’ve had, and I think that is a good model, is to build relationships. And there’s four pillars I talk about in there, and how that works, and how you can work with others. So that’s another thing. It’s free. You can go there and download it. Yeah, I

Scott Reid 45:17
just, I just opted in. Awesome. Great. Thank you very much, Matt for taking the time to join me on the podcast. Was a great episode. It’s great learning more about your business and your whole journey and what you do to to make it happen these days. So thanks very much. I really appreciate it, and we will talk to you soon, I’m sure.

Matt Levenhagen 45:39
Thanks. Appreciate you having me on, Scott, you keep doing what you’re doing too. You’re doing awesome.

Scott Reid 45:43
Thanks very much. Thanks for listening to the episode. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai