Agency Forward

Chris DuBois 0:00
Hey, everyone, today I'm joined by Miki Wong. Miki is the co founder and partner at Endeavor, which is a tech agency specializing in some technical strategy and architecture for media publishing companies. Miki has built an incredibly successful agency. She's maintaining high profit margins while really keeping a super lean team endeavor has really figured out how to scale without requiring substantial overhead. So I wanted to bring Miki on because many agency owners just assume that growth equates to hiring more full time employees. But she is proving that that's not always the case. If you've ever wondered how to maximize profitability while staying lean. This episode is for you. In the episode, we discuss why a lean agency model can be more profitable than a large team, how to strategically use contractors to scale without adding overhead. Lessons from running a technical agency with high margins and more. No one was asking for another community, but I've made one anyway. So what's different? The dynamic agency community is designed around access, rather than content, access to peers who've done it before, access to experts who've designed solutions, access to resources that have been battle tested. And right now, the price for founding members is only $97 a year. Join today, so your agency has immediate access to everything you need to grow. You can join at Dynamic agency, dot community and now. Miki Wong, it's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. Why did you choose to keep endeavor lean instead of building a large team

Meeky Hwang 1:58
so lean, I think I didn't even realize we were lean, to be honest, in the beginning. So it kind of like happened more organically than we kind of planned to do it this way over the course of years, like now that we're hitting to year 10 that we started with. So we're always remote. We started in back in 2015 remote team wasn't that common, but we started remote anyway. So it was when we decided to start working with people that remote work wasn't for everyone. So we had to start with contract to hire. So we always, we've always been contract to hire approach when onboarding anyone. So that kind of like evolved to going back to going to just contract because, like, some of them were just kind of like they wanted to stay as a contractor, because most of our contractors been with us for a long time, so they're kind of like employees, but they just decided to say it that way. And it kind of like over the course of the years. In the beginning, we did have more contract to hire, so we had more employees. But for some things like, we realized that it's a little more efficient to work with contract basis. It's like less overhead, mostly, well cost wise, too, but mostly our time, like the owners time, because we're very hands on. So we have obviously with employees. There's a lot of other things that we have to do with them. So it was kind of like going that way when we got busy. So it was kind of, we're starting to use more contractors, and then COVID happened, and it kind of like it actually worked for our benefit, because around that time, we were pretty much all contractors right before we hit. And then that kind of save us a lot of overheads in different ways. So from there, we kind of decided to stay and see if it's more efficient. And then kind of like, and we thought about changing some of them to some of the contractors to employees, but all they kind of like being contractors. So Right? That's kind of like happened that way. So it wasn't, like, intentional, but it actually worked out. Yeah, sounds like it

Chris DuBois 4:15
with so you guys have like, Great margins within the business and some, and we don't need to get into the numbers specifically, if you don't want to share any of that, but like, most agencies get super excited when they hit, like, 20% right? And they're like, Oh yeah, we're crushing it. You've blown those numbers out of the water. And I'm just curious what's, what's like, the secret, what would, what would you say is the that one domino that kind of led to you being able to do that.

Meeky Hwang 4:44
I think it's because both owners are pretty hands on, so we involved. We were involved in a lot of the production work and client work, and that helps to kind of keep it very profitable. Because. Because we sometimes, like, if you don't, you don't need a lot of big team to start a project. And then once we start, and then we can onboard a little later than then you have to have all these people to start with. So like that kind of give us a little more wiggle room to be, like, easier to transition into projects, and then, because we're heavily involved in production, I think that's probably the main reason that we can be very profitable because, like, and also we're both technical, so we really know what's going on. So like, if you see some of the inefficient, inefficient inefficiencies, it's easy to pick up, and then we can swap it out,

Chris DuBois 5:42
ease quickly. How many contractors do you have right now?

Meeky Hwang 5:46
Think we have see about eight, but some of them are full part time. So like, we have couple people that are kind of like part time basis, and then just kind of like, kind of like a call away to onboard two different projects because they're part time.

Chris DuBois 6:08
Yeah, I think that on its own, like the the idea that in order to be a successful agency, you need a huge team, and, like all these other numbers, like, No, you can actually find a different route. Like you have found a route where you're making great money. You've like, you're even, we can clip this later, if you don't want any of the numbers share, but like, like, you're making over 2 million a year as like as an agency and stuff like, even that number with your team size is like mind blowing to some other agencies that I work with who have very small deal sizes are looking to expand, but they certainly get there. So it's like, I remember the first time talking to you guys, it was like, Oh, wow. This is like an agency that's actually doing it right, the things that other agencies look to do, and so, which is why having this podcast is awesome. Hopefully it's an inspiration for some people listening. You

Meeky Hwang 7:01
know, I don't know if it's the knife thing, but I actually didn't know that people like, I thought were just normal, and it was more when I was talking to different agencies, and then they're, they're like, under a million, and they have, like, all these employees and structures and everyone else. We're like, really, like, do you what's your profit margin, that you can actually have that many people just kind of laying around sometimes, like, you know, like some agencies there you call it on the bench or on the beach, that there are a lot of people, if your employees, that don't have projects, they're just lying around. So I was like, what do they do? It was more like the naive thing that I didn't know that were, were that proficient or inefficient in a way as an agency? Because I thought that would be kind of like a typical thing to do. And I think it's because, like, we're very cautious of numbers, and we look at it very closely. That might be also too, because we're both, both owners are very, very data number oriented. So like, if you see something is not what we thought that would be like in the margin level or profit level and all that stuff. And we're kind of, like very quick to see as like, how can we make it better? So I don't know if that's like a thing that we unconsciously do or not, but, um, but that, yeah. So like, it was kind of naive about that, and I was actually didn't know that we're that much more profitable than other agencies.

Chris DuBois 8:27
Yeah, there's a book that I'd read years ago called surrounded by idiots, and it was a, I jokingly told my team I was reading it for them, but I actually was reading it for them, because they it was a, it's like a personality test, kind of like MBTI or disc, but they just break everyone down by colors, yeah, and so. But you have, like, no one's just one color. You have, like, combinations of colors, but the blue are, like, very analytical. And I started to realize, like, even within our own agency at the time, it's like, we don't we had like, a couple really analytical people like blue made up a majority of their personality, yeah, but not a lot. And then when I now, like, when I look at agencies, it's like, when you can see the agency that has like, at least one person in their, like, leadership team with, like, a lot of blue, it's so easy for them to just see, like, what's the next step? Like, what do we have to do next within the business? And you know, where they might not be as, like, big on, actually, the team leadership, like, a yellow is very big on having a team and being able to, like, work with them and influence them, and doing all that. Like, that's where I'm very large in the yellow side. Yeah, very low in the blue. But it's like, there's Yeah, these are, like, awesome combinations. But I noticed that a lot of those agency teams that are being very successful have a lot of blue within their like, leadership. I

Meeky Hwang 9:51
think I took the test at one point. I think my first job, I started Accenture. I think they made us do one of those. I think I was blue actually. Really, I remember seeing that. I'm pretty sure that's probably very blue too.

Chris DuBois 10:06
Yeah, just on what I know about you guys. I think you both, you both have a lot of it was actually a fun exercise, too. I made I trained the team on the book, so I made one slide with everyone on our team, and I guessed at what their color combinations were, and then I shared access to it, and they updated, like their bars. I was completely off on some of them, based on anything there, but it was a Yeah, that was a fun exercise. So you have you and Matt as full time owner operators, like working with all of your clients. And then the other contractors you can bring in. How do you maintain, like, a high level of value for your clients and like, just make sure every deliverable, everything you're doing is, you know, the highest level of quality you do while you have so much other stuff going on as the owners,

Meeky Hwang 10:59
that's a good question. So we try to structure in a way that that we're kind of like not really stepping over each other's toe, but we separate the projects. So he will own couple projects, so at our own couple projects, and will intentionally make the other person be the account manager. So like, anything high level that comes up that can kind of, like, oversee it. So, like, from like, a outsider's perspective, in a way, even though we're kind of internal, but then we can see it from like, outside that, like, when you're sometimes, when you're in, deep into your project, you don't necessarily see a lot of things, like, everything. So, like, so the other person is kind of there for your kind of the check basis, like, not really like quality check, but we still have, like another person, kind of like standing there to kind of oversee it in a way. And that actually helps with the client too, because, like, when the person the client is working closely with one owner or one person like the they also want someone else to kind of reach out to in case they're not happy with certain things that they don't want to talk to the direct managers. So we kind of structure it that way so that we have that for the client as well as we kind of see what's going on from like outsiders perspective. So like to kind of see whatever you can't see can be seen for other person. So that might be one of the things that we do to help make sure that projects are actually working well. And also we, since we're very we have experience with a lot of projects. It's like, Well, between two of us, like we probably had a lot of experience of different cases. So we're also not shy to ask for help or ask for opinions. So I will, we'll literally have some meetings to just kind of brainstorm certain things, if there's like anything, and then we also reach out to some other colleagues if there's something that we can't really come up with. So not being shy to ask questions or asking for help is also things that we want to make sure that, ensure that it's like, it's not an ego thing. It's like, it's like, I don't really care, like, I'm not going to know everything anyway. So it's like, it's asking a lot of questions, also clarifying a lot, and also having a lot of conversation with the client actually helps to kind of figure out, to make sure that we deliver what they what they need.

Chris DuBois 13:21
So think that helps. Yeah, so it's probably also worth mentioning to the audience that you're not a marketing agency, right or aligned as probably a tech agency. It's probably the good way to explain it. What are some of the misconceptions that you think people have for like running a tech agency? Um, yeah,

Meeky Hwang 13:44
um, so when, when people sometimes don't understand tech agency, because we're development agencies, so they might not know the difference between like the full site the full service agency also do design and all the other things, implementation and development so, but we focus on development and implementation and maintaining the technology side just intentionally, because we want to make sure that we stay there, and we're the expertise experts for that section only. So we don't design, but we'll we have some like agencies that we work with, or we work with their internal design teams to work with that. So we're agency, but we're very we're Development Agency sometimes, like, people don't know that, so we kind of have to explain that we don't do the design work. And then tech agency too. We don't outsource. So we kind of, like, we don't outsource to like, like other countries or anything. So we want to make sure that we only work with the senior developer, full stack developers too, because WordPress, the entry point for WordPress development can be very low, depending on how you look at it. But what we deal with is. Have very, like, complex, very, very custom sites. We pretty much develop a platform, so we only work with the full stack developers. So like, it's not just WordPress developer. They have to understand all the layers of what's going on. So because of that, we are very selective of the what, who we hire. So that's another reason why I don't, we don't have a big team because, like, the because I think that one of the things that a lot of agencies, that they outsource, they just kind of make it faster. They want to do things faster, and then there's a kind of have a lot of people, just a lot of bodies, just jumping into projects, but that's not how we do it. So that's, I think that was the, one of the things that we want to make sure that we don't do, that we just don't just put because that also kind of makes the quality of the code pretty, like muddy, because you're just adding bunch of different people, it's like a lot of times that you don't really look at what's really built to the baseline is just patching and patching and patching. So that kind of leads to, like, bigger teams may not be always the good thing. It's like, you know, sometimes smaller team works better. So I think that's one of the things that we want to make sure. And some tech agencies have, like, a ginormous team. It works in different things, like, if you need to work on a good, giant project with a lot of people, but so, like, that was one of the things that we want to make sure that we don't have to grow huge to be a good tech all agency, a tech agency, right?

Chris DuBois 16:31
One? Yeah, I don't know. Like, it's probably never been your bottleneck, right? For, like, growth within the agency, where it's like, Oh, if we just had more team members, and we'd be able to grow when it's like, well, actually, no, because we're experts in what we're doing, we can expand accounts, and we can just, just purely through people knowing that we are experts, that they'll come to us and and you've been able to, I mean, grow a very profitable agency like just through those means. And so

Meeky Hwang 17:01
another thing I think I probably just mentioned is, like the I think this is not just for the tech agencies, but like, a lot of times a client doesn't know exactly what they want, so it's a lot of times that our job to explain, and then just kind of like, also ask questions to understand what they need is not what they want. So like, doing a lot of that is also things that that we kind of like, make sure that we stay well, I guess it kind of goes into the circle that, like, why we're experts, because it's trying to identifying that correctly. Because, like, I know some people, there's clients always, always right. It's like, sometimes it's not. Sometimes you just need to let them know that they're maybe what they think might not be exactly what they need. So, like, just, just understanding that also kind of is, it's one of the big thing about the tech agency, and I think agents in general, yeah, I may say, Yeah, being

Chris DuBois 17:59
able to spot the patterns. Writing is what defines someone as an expert. Anyone can spot the patterns, but like, you can do it faster, so you've had so many reps and just seeing the same thing, right? And so like, with the problem that your agency solves for platform fragility, it's like you can go in and look at a publishing platform and be like, Oh, this is wrong. This is wrong, right? Whereas someone else who has never touched it isn't going to have that level of a junior WordPress developer can't just pop in and be like, Oh, these are all the things. Like, no, they would just try patching those and not realize the core issue is actually this. And so, which, obviously, when you can solve for that now, right? How much? How much money does a publishing company lose per like hour of their site being down, right? It's like 10s of 1000s or whatever. Yeah,

Meeky Hwang 18:48
I think someone I just recently wrote about that. I think Splunk did a research, and they actually calculated the downtime, and it was like more than a billion dollars, like for this downtime, I forgot the exact number for it, but then I was like, it was, it's kind of like a mind blowing I think I shared that at LinkedIn at one point, and I was like, oh, because, like, I thought it would be a big number, but I didn't know it'd be that big, right? And

Chris DuBois 19:12
so when you get one of these, like, enterprise level media companies, it's like, you're, they're almost able to pay for your services, just with the potential money they would save if their site had gone down. So it's like more, more reason to anchor to to a problem. Yeah, good case. More people need to hear that on the podcast. Like you niche into the problem. There you go. So, so actually, let's, let's get into that a little with so like you and Matt are involved in every client project, so you're also engaging with your like the client leads. Are you going about, you know, like building the trust, making like, doing the things to to potentially, like, expand those accounts, to get them to want to keep working with you and doing more with you.

Meeky Hwang 19:58
Yeah. I think, well, first of all, you need to deliver the high quality work. Like, you need to your basic base job, right? Do the base job, right? And that's, like, the main thing, and everywhere, I think. And also, we're very transparent about the feedback, so, like, we don't some something's wrong and weird or not right? We'll, we'll actually be, we'll have a genuine conversation. Was like, yeah, it's not, it's not ideal. And then we'll, we'll do the tough conversation as well. So we're not, we always have, like, a very transparency is one of our thing, that we want to make sure that we're honest with them. And when we work with the team, like we became, I don't know, I for, I think Matt too, but like, we became very close to them. Like, it's kind of like we're working as their team as well. So it's just like, it just naturally worked that way. So we kind of like, became more like a colleague than like agency or like a client relationship. So like, and that's probably the one of the reasons that we were able to keep them long term, and then, like, very, very frequent communication, like, just, not just, like, on the work and all the other side, like, they'll come to us about some other, like, employee things, and they'll just, like, ask some, some like, other type of issues. And this, we're just kind of, like, very transparent, and we give honest opinions on a lot of things. So that's another thing that helps with the client relationship. And also, like you, when you go to different projects, there's patterns of certain things that you see as, like, potential issues, a potential flag, and we'll kind of, like, communicate with them when we see it. So, like, sometimes it actually helped them to prevent certain things. So and then having different experience with different clients that actually give them more insights on The Last of Us, some of the things that they want to kind of like, implement that that we have already done in different clients, and we can give them how how it worked well and what didn't work well, so that they can actually better prepare for this. So yeah, but most importantly, you you need to be good at what you're doing. So that's the main thing. But yeah, secondary is just like, you know, making sure that you're transparent with your communication and the feedback for for every level. Yeah, so

Chris DuBois 22:19
I'm glad you brought that up, or just being good at what you're you're doing, because it's literally the first step of my coaching. Yeah, and for most, for most clients, it's like, we just jump, jump ahead, like we're good. We can see evidence of results. We know you have the competencies to deliver. But I've also worked with some other agencies, so it's like they they have things on their like services page. It's like, they don't, they have no skills to be able to it's like, yeah, we'll help you with SEO. And it's like, they don't want to actually have anyone who understands SEO. It's like, okay, let's, let's remove that so that doesn't become what gets you fired, right? But, yeah, so like, you guys were one of the one, like, clients you have, like, it's so clear that you're already doing all the right things and and your clients love you for it. Because, I mean, what's your you've had? What one client turnover ever anyway?

Unknown Speaker 23:13
Turnover either

Chris DuBois 23:17
being in business for 10 years with no churn is, like, who right mind blowing? Like, I don't know another way to put it. And so,

Meeky Hwang 23:29
yeah, and also we, I think this is one of the things that we will try to be more proactive about. Is like, we do get feedback from them too. Because, like, if the project ended, and then, you know, like, and then we kind of don't have anything for a while. And then, like, if after the project, we'll just ask them, like, how did it work? And then anything that we could have done better, we do ask that too. And then just kind of, like, that feedback actually is very good, because, like, some of the things that sometimes, like, you don't, you don't really think of, I was like, oh, right, oh yeah, we could just kind of adopt, that's one, yeah,

Chris DuBois 23:59
again, just getting that other perspective on, yeah, on the project, yeah. So I guess, how has your role changed since starting endeavor to now?

Meeky Hwang 24:12
So I think starting, I think every it's probably a lot of agency too, because we have co owners, like we're doing everything, so there's no, like, breakdown of different things, but we're just everyone's doing everything, pretty much. But we just kind of quickly realized that's not an if that's not efficient, and then the accountability just goes weird, because, like, you just kind of think that the other person is going to do it, and then, like, realize that it was like, Oh, wait, we both forgot about it. So yeah, we're pretty much wearing all the hats to, kind of, like realizing that the mat is good at certain things and I'm good at certain things. Like, we're both, we can probably do both things anyway, but we're just like, there's certain things that that he does better and certain things that I do better, and, like, attract it better. So, like, we kind of like break down different tasks. Um. So that we don't both jump into things all the time. And that actually helped mission C. So we divided the responsibilities, and then we pretty much divided the accountability for for that reason. So we now he takes care of certain things, and I take care of certain things, like breakdown like he will do the financial support of it. I'll take the marketing and then, like, the operations. There's like, we break down to further into it, but, um, it's up. But client work is the only parts that we overlap. And then account management, because I kind of explained in the in the beginning of the house structure, the different structure we put in for that. But other than that, most of the internal stuff is divided so that that we don't have to all jump into certain things, and also we just kind of make sure that we route it to the right person when we when we hear things like with some client comes in that's Matt's kind of involved in sales, and I'll direct it to him, and that there's, like, any marketing initiative kind of thing that it gets and that he directed to me. So, so there, it's more structureized after the years of us all jumping into everything than when we started.

Chris DuBois 26:14
All right, so want to start winding down here. But, uh, what advice you have for agency owners that are chasing bigger instead of better?

Meeky Hwang 26:30
Like, yeah, so I think it's kind of goes back to you need to be good at what you're doing first. So I think being better is more important than getting bigger, because, like, when you grow prematurely, there's a lot of overheads, and it's harder to kind of scale down. So again, that's probably not the right way you want to go. So focus on delivering exceptional quality if we're chasing the growth, because I think it's more important because, like, you want to make sure that do you do the one thing right before you scale to like five different things? So bigger is not always better. Better is better. Is pretty much what I what I will advise to

Chris DuBois 27:12
the quote for the episode, better is better. But, yeah, there are a lot of agencies that just think doing more like, it doesn't matter if you're just doing more, if what you're doing is is garbage, and so right now you're just producing more garbage. And so, yeah, well, I got two more questions for you. Yeah. First one, what book do you recommend every agency owner should read?

Meeky Hwang 27:38
I think there are a bunch of books, but then I think the recently that I was reading, because it's kind of like trying to understand the numbers better. So the one like, I can never memorize this, because there's a long title of this. I don't know if you see it, simple numbers, straight up, big Profits by Greg prep tree. This actually kind of explains what to track and what to be cautious about the number wise. So I think that somebody, oh no, I think Cody, such as, actually, she mentioned it at one of her podcasts, and she was kind of like, she always give this to the his, her operator every time she gets a business. And then I have just so kind of made me curious. And reading it. It's like, it makes you understand numbers a lot better, and then what you want to track to get to that number of profits, and then margins and all that. So I think this is kind of like a great book to kind of read, um, if you want to understand numbers. And it's also like, when you're in business, it all comes down to numbers, revenue and profit and all that. So understanding this is pretty important. I think,

Chris DuBois 28:43
yeah, I have to grab a copy of that one. Now, last question, Where can people find you?

Meeky Hwang 28:50
LinkedIn, I'm not very active in other social channels. Just LinkedIn, so, LinkedIn,

Chris DuBois 28:56
yeah, I just avoid all other channels.

Meeky Hwang 29:00
Well, awesome, Mickey, thanks for joining. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to talk to you.

Chris DuBois 29:09
That's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. You click the link in the show notes to subscribe to agency forward on sub stack, you'll get weekly content resources and links from around the internet to help you drive your agency forward. You.

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