066: 5 Years Ago

Title: 5 Years Ago

Featuring: Peter Wilson

Peter: Hello, listeners. It’s Peter here. Last week, I wrote about the experience of moving out of our Edmonds office in Edmonds, Washington and shifting our business to 100% virtual. This week, I wanted to spend a little more time on the podcast to dive a little deeper into that experience, and then I’d also like to issue a challenge to other business owners and managers. If you didn’t catch that blog post, what I was talking about was moving out of our office, physical office that we had in Edmonds on the waterfront for five years.

So we had a five year lease, and it expired, and we let it go. And now we are officially 100% virtual. Although in reality, we’ve been virtual for about the past six months. One of the things that this brought to mind was the fact that we spend a lot of time as business owners planning and thinking about the future. But I felt like moving out sort of had this finality, and it was this five year chunk.

We had a five year lease. So this five year chunk of time that I could stop and consider. And I felt like it was a good exercise to do. It turned out it was. And I would challenge you to try the same.

What I really felt was important was kind of looking back on the five years at that office. There’s no way that I could completely summarize everything that happened in the past five years, nor would anybody really care about it. But I did want to talk about some of the highlights that happened while we were there. So the the office we were in was a waterfront office where we had a view of the Puget Sound. We have a view of the Olympic Mountains and the waterfront area in Edmonds, is in the Seattle area, about maybe 15 miles north of Seattle.

When we started the business, it was based out of my home. And then I quickly outgrew that as I started adding folks to the team. We had a office that we put together with another company called The Branding Iron, and that is Tim Hendershot, Lillian Hendershot, and, Messfin, who have that business, mainly Lillian’s business. And I had known Lillian for, a little while through chamber, the Edmunds Chamber of Commerce. And we had met.

We kinda had a similar, approach to business. At some point, we were both looking for space, and we landed on a spot down at Harbor Square, and we shared it. We my my organization was me and Anne took a small corner of that space, and then Lillian and Mesfin and the printing took the rest of that space. And that worked for us for a couple years, and then we continued to expand and had an opportunity to move with, another individual, David Coffer with KDMC Marketing to the Edmunds Yacht Club. Now, sounds pretty ideal, having an office and a yacht club.

We were actually upstairs, And this is where I got my first taste of having that waterfront view while we were working. This was in the upstairs. We had a view of the whole harbor and the Puget Sound and and the Olympic Mountains. And it was kind of addicting having that view, really inspiring. It was one of those things that I had dreamed of having a waterfront view long time ago when I started my own business.

Never dreamed that would happen. It did, and it was great. The only challenge we ran into was we were subleasing from another organization, and that organization ran into some issues financially and had to vacate their space, which meant that we had to vacate our space as well. So then David and I went on a hunt for new space, and we looked all over. So this was in 2017, and we were looking all over the area for spaces.

And we saw some real dogs out there, honestly. Spaces that were really just kind of a leftover. Part of the challenge is when you’re a small business and you’ve got, you know, two or three people, you know, you’re partnering with another group with a couple people as well. You know, you don’t really have a lot of options when you’re looking for small spaces, at least in this area. So we looked and looked and looked and looked, and and the thing that I had really thought about was not settling because I figured wherever we land, we’re gonna be there a while.

And David had the same attitude. You know, we didn’t wanna just take the first space that was that came along. We didn’t necessarily wanna take the cheapest space that came along. We wanted to find a space that would work for the long haul. And eventually, I’m not sure how it happened, but eventually, we got we heard about this space in the Edmonds Waterfront Office Building, which is kind of an older building near the water.

It used to have some restaurants upstairs, and it’s been converted to offices. It does have a great view of the office. And if you know the area, it’s located right next to what was the senior center, which was an old cinder block building, brown cinder block building, ugly, ugly building that was eventually torn down. A brand new space called the Waterfront Center is in its place, and it’s just a a gorgeous space and very usable for everybody in the community. Anyway, so this building was right next to that and right next to the ferry dock in Edmonds as well.

So we walked in the space, looked at it. David and I both immediately fell in love with the space and decided that this was the space for us. So moved in, and at the time when we originally moved in, we had my biz marketing had Anne and Emily working with us. And so we had two full offices and then kind of a bullpen area, open area. So we had divided that up and figured out who was gonna sit where.

And it was really nice to have folks come to the office. You know, for example, we’d have customers come, and of course they like coming down to our space and, you know, looking at the view and all that. And it was very convenient because it’s only about 10 from my house. Anne lives very close. Emily lived at the time relatively close as well.

So it was really a great setup, really convenient, worked well. And then after a few years, we had one individual moved away. Well, had a child and then moved away. And then, another individual started working from home. So it ended up being me working in the space.

We already had some virtual folks at the time. It was just me in the space until we hired our designer full time. Working together in a location certainly has its pluses. As a team, you can certainly collaborate more. You can get quicker answers.

You can think things through, as a team. You know, when you’re meeting together, you’re not necessarily just switched on and going through an agenda, which is, you know, now that we’re all virtual, most of the time, we have an agenda driven meeting, and we are meeting to get something done, and then we turn off our cameras and go back to what we were doing. So it it changes that dynamic significantly even though we’ve we do have meetings where we try to allow time for just some free form interactions with each other. But, you know, it on a day to day basis, that just doesn’t happen. Whereas if you’re in an office together, that’s certainly more likely to happen.

You know, five years ago, we moved into the space. Five years later, we are totally virtual. I’m back at my home office, at least for now. We’ll see where that ends up. We’re also a global company.

So we have team members, you know, in the Seattle area. We have a team member in Boston. We have an extended team member in Miami and one in Cape Town, South Africa as well. You know, I would say thanks to the team, we’re able to function as effectively as ever even though some of us have never met face to face. That is really a testament to being very diligent about the way that we work together as a team and weekly team meetings and other norms and tools that we use.

Looking back to where we were five years ago, we we were using some virtual tools. We weren’t using any video conferencing. We’ve always used cloud services to get our work done, so we always have the collaboration availability. And we also use a messaging tool called Telegram, which is really helpful for us just in quick interactions with each other, which I think, you know, in my mind, Telegram has really been a game changer in terms of the ability for us to stay together. We use it as kind of a private messaging tool for ourselves.

I know other folks use things like Slack. But it really is a great way to just quickly send a little message to each other and get a response. And one of the cool things about Telegram is that there are stickers, for example. So you can we can send each other stickers when, you know, we agree with each other or something cool happens. I’m at my screen right now.

There’s a Cookie Monster stickers, and there’s one with him holding a match, it blew up. That’s an oops. I’ve sent that a few times. We’ve got other ones, Tuna the dog, lazy panda, and all these other ones. So it really kind of makes it fun to communicate with each other.

It’s not just a bland text message that we send to each other. So that is just one of the tools that we’ve used that’s made it, you know, better for us to work virtually, and I think it’s kept us effective as a team. The other thing I was looking about and thinking about in terms of recollecting the last five years is not just the space, but, you know, probably more important is the team. Five years ago, our project manager, Anne, who I mentioned earlier, just marked her third year with the company. Our marketing director, Emily, and our web developer, Tim, both marked their one year anniversaries with the team.

That was five years ago. Since then, we’ve added a new designer, Marcel, and our marketing strategist, Chris. And in addition to that, we do have an extended team, our SEO expert, Paul and Alexi, who is our analytics expert. We’ve also had my daughter, Grace, working with us doing, social media and other types of work. Just looking back at the last five years, how the team has evolved, we were just getting started as a team five years ago with Emily being with us, Emily and Tim being with us for a year.

And it probably has taken us two or three, four years to really figure out how we can best work together as a team most effectively. Looking back on the last five years, I wouldn’t have dreamed that we would be where we’re at today with our team and the amount that we’re able to get done. Just the cohesiveness as a team and the camaraderie we have as a team and the, just the team vibe that we have. In fact, great team vibe is one of our core values. One of the things that did happen during the pandemic in about March or April 2020, none of us had any idea what was gonna happen.

I don’t think anybody did. We were all kind of panicked, not sure what was gonna happen. So we decided to do daily virtual meetings. Everybody was virtual. Everybody was home at the time.

And we did just a brief fifteen minute, twenty minute quick meeting every morning. That really bonded us together as a team and or just bonded us together as as individuals and personally, not just, you know, from a business perspective. And we did that for probably two or three months. And it was during those meetings that we decided we came up with an idea to do webinars for getting through the crisis. Figured, let’s put out some content related to what was happening and and how you could respond.

And we got a lot of good feedback from that, came up with some great ideas on how to help businesses get through, at least from a digital marketing perspective. That was that was a direct thing that came out of that, you know, those meetings that we had together as a team. It seems like a long time ago. It wasn’t really that long ago. Yeah.

The team, I’m just so thankful for the team, especially for just all the little things they do each day, to help our clients. That that’s just a big win for us. Some we’ve got some some small highlights as well. One of the smaller highlights is our logo. So when I started the business back in 2012, early two thousand twelve, I basically designed our logo on Microsoft Word, which is not really the way you design a logo.

And we were still using that same logo in 2017. So we’d been using it for seven years. This logo that I designed, which is not really even a logo, it was basically, I took a font and used different colors for the font. And we hired a designer, Kyle, somewhere along the line, not not in 2017, but somewhere in in since then, over the five years, we he convinced me, he and others in the organization convinced me to let him redesign our logo. I was very apprehensive on that.

I didn’t really wanna mess with it. It was working. Finally, I said, yeah. Let’s see what you can come up with. And he came up with some great ideas, and he kind of adapted what I had created and really did a great job with that.

And now we’ve got a much better logo and website design, and I’m extremely happy with that. So he in part of doing the logo was also updating our website and the design of our website. And I’m very thankful for that and grateful for that. You know, that was just a minor little blip along the way, but, you know, definitely makes a difference when we present ourselves to customers. And I definitely think it is worth looking at your logo if you haven’t looked at it in a while and having a professional designer consider, are there are there some alternatives?

Are there some upgrades? Are there some things that could be done to get it looking a little more modern and maybe better reflect the organization that you are now. So one of the other things that I had spoken about or wrote wrote about in my last blog post was the, the clients, which really I should have started with. Five years ago, we had the opportunity to help a little more than a 100 clients with their digital marketing, one client at a time. Five years later, I’m happy to report that a majority of those 100 are still our clients and they’re still trusting us with their marketing and we have added even more since then.

So we haven’t quite doubled, but we are on the path to doing that. I think part of the reason that we’ve been able to do that is that we focus on helping our clients one client at a time. Our first core value is we help businesses win. That permeates through the team. I think everybody believes that and everybody strives to do that every day.

Do we make mistakes? Sure, we make mistakes. But when mistakes are made, we do our very best to fix things and to, you know, to really make things right and not make the same mistake twice. I will say that I’m very thankful for every client we’ve had along the way, whether they’re still with us or not. I’m just happy with all the clients that we’ve had.

I’m very thankful as well for the opportunity to serve them. Those are just a few of the highlights from the last five years. And my challenge is for you as a business owner or business manager to sit down, get out a piece of paper and take stock in what you’ve done and accomplished in the last five years. And five years just seems to be a nice little chunk of time where you could probably still remember most of what’s happened in the last five years. And now would be a great time to do it.

Think about the highlights, what you’ve accomplished, maybe in terms of your clients or products or team or locations. There’s so many dimensions that you can think about. I would love to hear your story. If you’ve got kind of a five years ago story, please send me a note. Let me know what you discovered about yourself and your company.

My email is peter at bizmktg dot com. I’d like to perhaps set up an interview with you and talk about it on the air. Thanks again, and thanks for your time. Look forward to seeing you soon. Thanks for listening to this episode of Biz and Life Done Well with Peter Wilson.

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