Jack:
Hello and welcome to Webflail, this is episode 49, so nearly at the 50 mark. I'm your host Jack and today my guest is Dylan Harrocks. I met Dylan for the first time in Barcelona a few weeks ago. Power of Twitter is crazy. Anyway, since then I join the same co-working space as him and we've talked about the power of his subscription-based pricing model for his agency, building a network and pushing through barriers. He's also an email marketing genius, and I feel like it's something that we might talk about today too. But although Nexus Creative has grown fast, he has had his fair share of failure. The three failures we'll talk about today are building a virtual agency, changing processes for clients, and being too hard on himself. Dylan, welcome to Webflail.

Dylan Harrocks:
Thank you so much, Jack. Just want to say it's a big honor to be on here. I've been listening to Webflail for quite some time now and also really great to be doing this with you. For all the listeners, Jack isn't just a great podcaster, he's a great person as well. It's been great to get to know you.

Jack:
Stop it, you're embarrassing me. No, but it's, and same for you, by the way, I should have said that, Dylan's a lush guy. And I think what's interesting about doing this podcast is the amount of people that I meet, but not only that, the amount of people that I meet who are very like-minded, and the second I met Dylan, I was like, bingo, I found my guy, and... Basically, this podcast, I feel, is going to be like an amalgamation of all the conversations we've had over the last few weeks, so I'm very excited to get into it. But before we begin, if anyone doesn't know you and hasn't actually been following you on Twitter or know really anything about you, I think you've got a really interesting background in how you got into building Nexus Creative. And I know that that's kind of a long-winded story, but if you can just give us some highlights and a little bit of background to you, that would be great.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, for sure. So I'm actually half English, but I've never lived in England. My accent does sound really English, it confuses a lot of people. I was born in Portugal and then grew up in Marbella, which is in the south of Spain. From there, I had a bit of a weird upbringing. I was undiagnosed ADHD, so pretty bad in the classroom. Left that, but I always loved the creative side of things. So I just... On the side, while I was at school, I was doing a lot of YouTube intros, you know, those 3D video intros that YouTubers used to have. So I focused on that, really enjoyed that, and then started working as an intern in some graphic design spaces. There wasn't that much graphic design going on in the south of Spain, it's more of a party place, so I ended up working for a lot of the bars and ended up being a nightclub promoter for a few years. And at the same time as doing that, while I was doing that at night... I was building up my freelance career, ended up getting a couple of jobs here and there to do design, and COVID struck, which was, I think, you know, obviously it's been really bad for a lot of people, but it was really great for me because it really made me pivot and decide what I wanted to do. That's when I built Nexus Creative, which is very different to what it is now when I first built it, and we're gonna go into that, I'm sure. But yeah, that's sort of my background, and now I'm a... agency owner. We do, as you said, web flow design and development on a subscription basis.

Jack:
And it's interesting that you, I think part of this story that I feel like I want to draw out a little bit more is your experience as a nightclub promoter, because I feel like you've got a way of talking that is very likeable. You're happy to talk to anyone. I've seen you just talk to literally anyone on any night out and stuff. And I'm so impressed by that. And I can't help feeling that maybe that is, you know, part of your success as, as a web flow and agency. And do you, do you think that's true?

Dylan Harrocks:
100% I don't know who I would have been if I didn't go into that line of work. I think it really brought me out of my shell. I learnt how to just enjoy being, you know, because it can be sometimes a little bit uncomfortable to meet new people and to sell to them and to build that trust with them. And I think, you know, the couple of years of experience I had there really taught me how to do that. And when you're doing nightclub promoting in Marbella it might be a little bit different to wherever you listeners are from. In Marbella it's very much about... it's not just getting people through the door, it's getting them to buy big tables. And tables, some of them are 5,000 euros minimum spend, just to get some bottles of vodka for a few hours. So to be able to do those types of sales and to do well in that industry, it's about building connections so that they'll always come back to you and building friendships essentially. So I think I learned the value of just building that trust and not just being extremely salesy. That's how you get successful in that space. So. I think everything I've done in my life, I've taken something away from it and I'm happy for every step in my journey for sure.

Jack:
Mm-hmm. And I think one thing that, you know, this skill set does that I think a lot of webflowers really struggle with is It's not being a successful webflow is not just about doing the creative work Well, it's actually a lot of the bit before which Isn't necessarily talked about or you know taught on courses nearly as much as like the nuts and bolts of webflow so for anyone that doesn't necessarily have the chance to learn to be a nightclub promoter and how to talk to people through that method. I mean, how do you think maybe webflowers who are at the start of their journey should think about approaching people and actually getting clients?

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, well I think the biggest struggle that you have when you're shy is you're worried about saying something silly or saying something wrong. And I think when you kind of get ahead of it and you don't care about being silly, I think everyone can be a little bit silly, it actually does the opposite effect. You kind of get, you're like, oh wow, they're so brave they don't care what people think about them, you know. So I think just don't worry about how people perceive you. Don't worry about asking questions. I think that's the biggest thing. People don't want to seem like they're the smartest people. They want to seem like they know everything. So just never be afraid of asking questions and going deeper and asking silly questions because at the end of the day, that's, to me, I think, makes you look a lot smarter.

Jack:
Yeah, I think that goes with both clients and hiring as well, like just being honest about what you know and what you don't. And vice versa, getting clients. I think a lot of the time people try and push for a sale and be like, come on, I'm the best webflower out there. And actually saying, look, I'm not the best webflower for this, but I am really good at this aspect of Webflow and I recommend hiring me if you're looking for this, but not for this respect and vice versa, I imagine as an agency owner, you are maybe more attracted to hire people who are like, yeah, I'm not actually very good at this thing, but I am really, really good at this thing or whatever. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, so when it comes to hiring, I've got this... When we go into what Nexus Creative used to be, you'll see that I hired a lot of people. I outsourced a lot of people, and I have now sort of like a rule book of the type of people that I take on board and people I don't. And like we were just commenting, it's so important to get people that are humble and honest about what they don't know. So I'll even sometimes ask questions that I think they might not know the answer to, just to see how they cope with it. A big red flag is like... If they just say, yep, no problem, that could be done, and then not really talk about or go into it. The perfect type of answer is saying, okay, I'm not exactly sure how to do that, but I can definitely figure it out, and I think it might be something along these lines. So that's one of the main things I look for. I also, a lot of people tend to over promise of like what they can deliver, just because they wanna get their deal closed. And I think more experienced hires or clients will tend to... look out for that and to see if there's any pushback on any of the deadlines that they're giving or what's in scope. So don't be afraid of pushing back on the initial scope or deadlines.

Jack:
great advice there. So if anyone's listening who's looking to get hired by an agency owner and Dylan does hire people so he is speaking from a position of knowledge, don't just say I'm good at everything because you're not. No one is and that's fine but just admit what you can and can't do but have a really positive proactive attitude to try and work out the solution to whatever problem that you're being presented with. like getting in hot water by saying, yeah, I can do it, I can do it, I can do it. And then not being able to do it. And that is far more embarrassing. So, hey, a little bit of a nugget there from Dylan early on in this podcast. Dylan, are you ready to talk about your failures?

Dylan Harrocks:
I think I am.

Jack:
If you're not, then it's a bit late

Dylan Harrocks:
Let's

Jack:
my man.

Dylan Harrocks:
do this. I'm ready.

Jack:
Tell me about failure number one, building a virtual agency.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yes, so at the start of Nexus Creative, I've always been very customer obsessed. This is something like a mantra that I had from Jeff Bezos. I'm sure you know, pretty successful guy.

Jack:
Never heard of the bloke.

Dylan Harrocks:
He had a quote that goes, "'We're not competitor obsessed, we're customer obsessed. "'We start with the customer's needs and build backwards.' And I was thinking, okay, in the creative space... What does a create, what's the journey that a customer goes for, a client goes for to get that work done? So if they were to go for a freelancer, the cons of doing that is maybe they don't know what they're looking for, they don't know where to start, they don't have vetted people to look for, and maybe they don't exactly have the right language or terminology to describe what they need to get. But the good thing of course about getting a freelancer is you're usually getting someone that's an expert in exactly what you need to be done. I need a cursive logo, you'll go to someone that's really good at cursive logos. And then if you're looking at going to an agency, usually some of the problems with agencies is they have to charge a lot more because they have a lot of costs, they have to pay for the rent of the place, they have to pay for people's wages, a lot happens there, so they just need to charge a little bit more. And with that when you go to an agency usually you're limited to their skill set or the skill set that their roster has internally. So maybe not getting someone that does that specific solution that you need. So with that in mind, I decided, OK, what I'm going to do is a virtual agency. And I called it Nexus Creative. Nexus means the linking of two or more things. Because the idea was is I'd have 100 freelancers that I'd be connected with, that I'd vet. And then when I'd have a client that have specific needs once, or specific pricing, I can formulate or put together the perfect sort of team that is an expert in what they need. So there's a couple of problems here. It didn't work out mainly because the client perspective. Like if you're looking at that, you just think, OK, you're just an outsourcing agency making a cut on being a middleman. That doesn't sound good to me. So that was one of the first things. And it would be quite a frequent sort of objection that clients would have. And I think the other thing was you can't trust the team that you're always hiring because they could have other things go on in their life. and maybe they'll take on a job, but they're actually really busy with other jobs. So it led to a lot of sleepless nights. It led to a lot of stress, just not being able to either achieve deadlines or the quality of work wasn't up to par. I've had freelancers use sort of fake portfolio pieces. There was never them. If you're just image trace, this is a little tip here. If you're ever hiring someone, image trace or back image search their portfolio, because you'll be surprised how many times it's not even theirs.

Jack:
Oh my god, that sounds like so stressful. And I guess in your head you were like, hey, I'm gonna get the perfect source for every single individual project. I'm gonna make sure that this is the perfect experience for every single individual client. But actually, it was a hot mess.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, and what happened as well here, and we're gonna go into the processes a little bit later, but because I was offering so many services, I was offering branding, web design, web development, paid ads, SEO, so many things, that I wouldn't ever have a set way of doing things correctly, because I would just change. Every project was different, and every freelancer had their own way of doing things. So each time was a different flow or process, and that just ended up becoming a hot mess, because. I just didn't know what the next steps would be, things would get lost, things would get forgotten. So I think as I started to narrow down the services that I'm doing and reduce the amount of people that we're working with to do that, it ended up just getting so much easier to run an agency, so much better for the clients, their experience and we became experts essentially in one thing instead of a jack of all trades.

Jack:
Master of none. But one thing that I think is kind of interesting is that a lot of people think, well, the more doors I have, the more people that can come through the doors, right? Like I'm gonna do custom logo design, I'm gonna do web design, I'm gonna do all this stuff. But like you say, I mean, the smaller, the narrower your focus, ironically... the more people that actually know exactly what you do and why you're the perfect solution to their problem.

Dylan Harrocks:
I know it's the weirdest thing, it's counterintuitive. The less services I have, the less people that I can offer my services to, the more clients I get. That's always been a trend with me and that's why now I'm only a Webflow agency. And that's been sort of the best decisions I've always made, I've always been decreasing the amount of services and decreasing the amount of variables. I think Blair Wren says this, less variables equals less outcomes. So you can be safe and you can just fine tune what you're doing. But at the same time, I've learned so much from hiring so many people, from having this sort of outsource business model. It's almost a shortcut to be able to work with people that are better than you at certain things. So I actually learned Webflow by hiring Ethan Swirrow. You've had him on the podcast.

Jack:
It is episode number three, I think, yeah.

Dylan Harrocks:
He's a fantastic Webflow developer. And that's how I learned what it was. And it was just... throughout that project, I think it was a two month project, I almost knew exactly how Webflow worked. I didn't know the nuts and bolts and all that, but I understood from the outside what makes it work. And then I was able to go deeper and deeper in that. So it was also fun because I got to try so many different services in a short span of time. You know, I tried a little bit of SEO, a little bit of paid marketing, branding, and I fell on Webflow. Because, you know, we love Webflow, don't we?

Jack:
Come on, that's why we're here. But it's interesting that you had this idea of what your agency was gonna be, and that didn't quite work out. But the lessons that you learned from that have really, really helped you in the kind of evolution of Nexus Creative to get clients. And I think this might be a good time to talk a little bit about email, because for anyone that doesn't know this, Dylan is shit hot at email, and I think it's... Probably, maybe you learnt email during this phase of like trying out everything for different clients and stuff.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, it was where I learned it. I think it was just an agglomeration. There's a word. An agglomeration over time of different strategies that I knew that worked for cold outreach. And so yeah, I have a sort of a step-by-step process and I've had to stop it multiple times, the email marketing, because I get too busy. So I know that it works and I recommend it to anyone. So I think the first step is to make sure you have a target demographic. Everyone talks about niching. If you can niche, you should definitely do it. If there's some sort of area or industry that you're really passionate about, it's such a quick shortcut to just become an expert. So I can recommend that. Unfortunately, I could never find anything that I loved. I just wanted to bounce around different ideas too much. But what I realized is I could just niche down to Webflow. So that's my niche now. I know that I do Webflow development. So I then look at what types of clients need. workflow development and what types of clients can afford me and what types need a subscription as well. So, important to find a hyper-specific audience that you can target. Now, on the technical side of how you do cold email outreach, you should never do it from your own email. The reason is you have a domain rating, like a spam rating on each domain and if you're sending a lot of spam emails and not getting enough replies, then Google Outlook, they're going to start looking at you and say, no, this guy's a spammer, so let's stop getting this guy's emails in people's inboxes. So what you have to do is create two different domains, one or two different domains, similar to your name. So I'll have like maybe nexuscreatives.com or nexuscreatives.co.uk. I'll have a slightly different domain and set up a 301 redirect so that people, if they were to search that domain, would land on my website anyway. Okay, so we've got the domain set up. Now we have to put that into a tool like Instantly, I recommend that's the one I use. And that warms up your email. You wanna have it in there for 30 days, it's gonna send and receive automatically emails. It wraps up, so first day it's gonna send two emails, second day it's gonna send three, and it's just gonna go like that back and forward. After 30 days you would have accumulated a really good. domain rating, which means any email you're going to send out, really high chance it's going to land in a person's inbox. So then the emails that you want to craft, I usually send, have a sequence of three emails, and they're really short, and all I'm asking is can I send you more information. Don't ask would you be interested in these services, don't say please book a call here, it's too big of an ask, too big of a commitment. So it's a good idea to just say hi. I mean my email formula kind of is just, hi my name's Dylan, I found you here because and I wanted to contact you because I felt that you could be, our services could be relevant to you, this is what we do, can I please send you more information? That's it. Now I have a little trick that I've been using now and I don't know how effective it is because I haven't deployed it yet, but you can use ChatGPT to personalise each email. If you pay for the ChatGPT Plus I think it's called. They've got a plugin where they can scrape a website. So you tell ChatGPT, scrape this person's website, make a customized email that looks something like this, and then that really personalizes it. And I'm pretty sure that's gonna give a bit of a higher reply rate. So that's a hot tip there that's pretty fresh, and I think it's gonna be really effective. Yeah, I think that's the whole process there. Just make sure that you're not giving a big ask in your first emails, and it is a quantity game. The more that you can send out, don't expect to get any replies from sending 100 emails. You're probably going to need to send a thousand before you get a client. Find strategies to be able to quickly do this at scale.

Jack:
Okay, Gold Dust, I'm just gonna say back to you what you just said, because I think we need a recap. So, first of all, first important point I feel is you don't need to niche by industry, you can niche by tool, which I think is not really talked about enough. Like a lot of people say, niche, niche. And you're saying, I wanna focus in on web flow. That's the niche that you wanna be in. And then... Further than that, you want to have a hyper-specific idea of who your audience is and you've done that by their price and also how well you can specifically solve their problems. Then, you need a good domain rating so don't use your personal email. Set up two different domains, 301 redirect back to your website and then use instantly to warm up the emails from those two different domains. They'll send and receive emails. you'll get a good domain rating and then you can craft emails where you don't ask them to marry you from the first email guys. Take them on a date first. See if you would be w- if they would be willing for you to send more information because you feel like your services align with their services and you're gonna need to send a lot of emails using ChatGPT Plus or something like that to scrape different websites, understand exactly what their services are and- how they talk and who they're about, and then you can personalize them using something like that. But sending a thousand emails, Dylan, is there a better way to get clients or is this just a massive effort?

Dylan Harrocks:
Is there a better way? I mean, this is the highest return on investment way of getting clients that I've seen. It's low cost. Don't invest when it's your time. There is strategies to make this a bit easier and quicker for you. You can hire virtual assistants for really cheap. In the Philippines, for example, it's quite big to have virtual assistants from there. They work really hard. The average salary for a virtual assistant in the Philippines is $450. So if you hire one of them, pay them $600 a month, they're going to be very happy with that wage and they're going to work really hard for you. So that's the way that you could do a little shortcut in terms of scraping, personalizing emails. But from what I've seen, all that's worked for me is this cold email outreach and referrals. That's it in my time. But I know other people have got success from LinkedIn. LinkedIn's a really good one. I think that works more if you're niched. So if you can actually give specific problems and show them case studies. to the people in that niche, that can be really effective. But there is a lot of people on LinkedIn spamming, so you have to really stick out.

Jack:
Interesting. I mean, for those people that are like, you need to build a profile on social, you need to post every day on Twitter, you need to... Like, what do you think about social? I feel like there's quite a lot of different opinions about this. Like, where do you sit on, you know, whether you should be hyperactive on social or how important that is or, you know, what do you think about that?

Dylan Harrocks:
I think it really depends on your goals. I think it's a good idea for everyone to have a personal brand and try to build that up. Better to do it sooner than later. If you could just post some of your work that you're doing, some things that you're interested in. I've only done this recently with Twitter. I'm posting a lot of insights and things that I've learned and tips, like this email outreach tips. And I think it's just good to have because it's good. Social credibility, if you've got a lot of followers on social media and you're posting a lot about it, it shows to clients that you care and that you know what you're talking about and that people are kind of like, yep, this guy knows what he's talking about, I'm going to follow him. And then the other thing is that anything you wanted to launch in the future, let's say you have a new tool, a new platform, it's so easy to do it once you have an audience because you just automatically for free have hundreds of people see it or thousands if you're lucky.

Jack:
Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you. I think a lot of people, and I'm noticing this more and more in the Webflow space, is that people are launching products, courses, all sorts of things, but they haven't really thought about who cares, and have they built trust with an audience yet? And I think that's where social posting is really, really important. Having said that though, that goal is completely different to getting clients. And... to get clients, you can do that through all sorts of different means like you say, Dylan, but

Dylan Harrocks:
Good luck.

Jack:
email marketing seems to be an obvious way to explore at least.

Dylan Harrocks:
BANG

Jack:
Oh, bit of a slam of the door there.

Dylan Harrocks:
Sorry about that.

Jack:
No, no, it's all good. You're in a co-working space, so you've got to do your stuff. What I want to ask you now is failure number two, because I feel like these are very interlinked, changing processes for clients.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, so this was, I think we touched on it before, but it was really hard to have processes when you have loads of offerings and you have lots of different types of clients. And I've realized that, you know, you have this sort of notion that if I can accommodate the client as much as possible, if I can do it however they want to do it, they're gonna be really happy with me, we're gonna have a great engagement, they're gonna recommend me to lots of people. But I've found it to be the opposite effect actually. So I had one of my early clients when I signed them. I was really excited. They were quite a big client for me at that point. And as soon as we went into the engagement, we said, OK, but we don't talk on Slack. We talk on Microsoft Teams. We don't use Asana. We use Trello. What else was it? We take meetings on here. We want updates from you in this certain way on Notion. And it was like, OK, yeah, I'll do it whichever way you need me to do it, no problem. But what would end up happening is. I would forget what to say to them or when to update them. I would... It would just cause more stress on me because I didn't know how exactly they wanted to do it in their way. It was actually take away from my bandwidth where I couldn't look after my current clients. And then they ended up being a little bit unhappy because the engagement wasn't up to the standards that they expected. Now I found that if I... If I have a set process, it's called an SOP, standard operating procedure, and clients can come on board, they have a portal where they can upload the tasks that they need to do. They can message me on Slack and they can only have meetings once a week, which they can book through a link. And outside of that, I don't step out of it. And then there's also a bit of a parallel thing, which isn't processes, but it's types of tasks that I take on. I love to have a challenge. I love to take on something I don't know how to do just because it would be fun to do it. Always be transparent about not knowing. I never, you know, like we're going back to what we were saying before. So I don't know how to do it, but I think it would be using an API system and we could probably do it this way. But for me, especially with a subscription service, by offering stuff outside of Webflow or accepting tasks outside of Webflow, a task that we think could take two hours ended up taking ten hours just because I didn't know exactly how to do it. the API call and these type of hookups. And then that just becomes a bit unfair to the rest of the people within my subscription. So it's also a good idea to be strict with what you can do. If you have a subscription service, what you can do within that. Or if you're doing a standard agency where you're just doing it by deliverables, to not let the scope, not go out the scope too much. I know it's hard to tell the client. It's not in scope, but it's important to do that because it's just going to give you more stress and also create a bit of friction between in the client if you're unhappy about doing stuff that they don't even know that you're unhappy about.

Jack:
Awesome. Okay, nuggets to break down there. So one thing is that if you're constantly changing your process for different clients, it's going to be a bit of a headfuck for both you and for them because it's going to have a knock on effect when you're trying to work out what the hell's going on. And they're expecting you to try and lead the process a bit, but then, you know, you're not, the expectations aren't quite aligned. So. I think that's a really important point that you've just said there, that try and have a really clear system that you operate with and that you can say to your clients, look, in my experience, this is how there's the most streamlined process when we work together and I know that maybe you haven't used Slack before or whatever it is, but this is how I want to work with you and this is how I think it would be best to work together and here's how I operate. And if you don't like that, then that's totally fine, but maybe we're not aligned to work together or whatever it is. And then the other thing you talked about there was SOPs. Write down what your process is. Every time you do a client project, do a post-mortem, work out what went well, what didn't go well, and then you can, you know, change your SOPs accordingly, hopefully, just so that it's super, super tight. And then if you were to hire someone like Dylan has, he's got a clear roadmap. It's like, hey, this is how I do onboarding. This is how I send out proposals. This is how I do whatever. Probably the... the other way around there in the process. But anyway, point still stands the same. Write down what you're doing and who you're doing it for.

Dylan Harrocks:
And I think one thing that you're saying there as well, when we're talking about setting processes in place, the more responsibility or the more sort of, the more that you push how things should be done, the less the client feels responsible to do it themselves, I found. So if you over-communicate, they're not gonna feel like they need to be in charge of checking up on you and seeing it if you're doing the work. And if you... tell them this is the way that we do things, they don't feel like they have to tell you how to do things. So it just creates a more positive engagement all around, I found.

Jack:
Yeah, I think there's an element at the start of the engagement where you need to kind of set your stall out and say, look, here's how we're going to do things. I'm going to guide you by the hand. Here's how this process is going to work. And if that doesn't quite happen at the start, what I found is that the client gets more .. It's kind of like letting a bad child run amok. You kind of need... and if any clients are listening, I love you dearly, but I'm just saying

Dylan Harrocks:
Hahaha

Jack:
that you do need to kind of guide the process with a little bit of a firm hand at the start and just say look, this is how it's best to do things and here's the process that we're going to do together and here's the result that we're going to get at the end and here's step one. Because otherwise the process, the kind of, the dynamic doesn't quite work I've found or it can kind of go awry unless you have quite a tight handle over the project management side of things, which is kind of what the SOPs does, because you don't need to think about what you're gonna do next. It's just like, well, here's what we're gonna do, here's the roadmap, and kind of, we just need to take the first step and go through the motions a bit. So yeah, very important. Let's touch on subscription-based agency model, because this is the hot topic in the Webflow space. You've obviously had an experience at the start of your agency when you were like, we offer everything for everyone. And then you've kind of gone in the opposite direction to be like, we don't offer anything to anyone. We have a very clear pattern. We have a very clear model. And here's how it's gonna work. So can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dylan Harrocks:
Are you talking about the subscription pricing or just how it's like to work with our clients?

Jack:
why you chose subscription-based model and how your experience is.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, OK. Well, I think to go into that as well, I'd like to just, there's four different types of pricing models or pricing strategies, I think. You could do price by input, which is the hours that you work and the materials that are incurred in that process. And this is usually the lowest risk. It means that if you work more hours, the client assumes the risk and they have to pay for more. Obviously, that's great because you're probably never going to go bankrupt doing it that way. But the negatives are it's quite hard to grow over time. And The only way that you're going to grow is if you either get a lot more employees and a lot more clients or you start charging a lot more. Some of the negatives there is when you charge by hour, you start to get really easy to compare with other agencies and you don't want to let clients fish for the price like that. You don't want to create that mindset. Then you have the other pricing strategy which is by deliverables or by output. This is you say, okay, by the end of this, you're going to have a five-page website, for example. you're assuming more risk here, so because of that you're going to add some padding, you're going to add some buffer. You'll charge maybe 30 to 50 percent more because maybe it goes over those hours. I recommend that sort of strategy if you've got more experience and you just generally know how long things take. It gets easier as well if you offer less services because when you offer more services things can take a lot longer than you expect or the other way around a lot less, which is a win I suppose in that space. Then you have value-based pricing. This is something Chris Doe talks a lot about, and Blair ends with a pricing creativity book. This is where you're looking at the desired future state of the client. So you're saying, okay, after we do this project, how much are you gonna win? What are you gonna get from this? After having extensive conversations, maybe the client will say, oh, we're probably gonna make 100K from this project, and what you should do is trying to get a commission from that. percentage of that and if it's put forward before if you're going to get paid before the project finishes then that percentage should be a lot less but if you're going to take on more risk so maybe you'll say a money back guarantee if we don't achieve what you want then you could charge a lot more maybe 50% of whatever they're trying to achieve or the reward that they get from that. This I struggle I try to do value based pricing I struggled with it to be honest. You have to be really good at sales calls. You have to really find a way to show the client the type of value that you're going to provide and they have to be quite clued up. You always have to be speaking to the senior decision maker. You can't talk to maybe the head of marketing. You'd actually need to talk to the CEO or founder to make these type of decisions. So I struggled with it. I tried with it for a while, but for some people I know it works amazingly. It's a quick way to scale and increase your income. Then we have subscription-based pricing. And this is... where the best decision I've made in my life was moving into this. I had so many ups and downs prior to this, where I'd have one month and I'd make 30 grand. Oh my god, best month ever. Then I'd have three months of not getting any work in, or two months of hardly getting any work in. Now I've got much more stable revenue coming in. I can make a lot more intelligent or better decisions because I can expect what's going to be coming in. And it's really easy as well because it's packaged up so well. I don't have these long sales pipelines. I don't have to understand exactly all the deliverables that they have, try to send them these long proposals that only half of them maybe get approved. So it's just been a lot easier for me. I've really enjoyed it. Of course, there's a lot less clients that need this type of service. And just for anyone that doesn't actually know, I don't think we've explained what subscription like base services. Clients, my fees are now £3,500 a month. They can subscribe. and they can request unlimited tasks. And when we say unlimited, this is a term that I'm not really sure is the right one always, but it essentially means that they can add as many tasks as they want within the portal, and we will go through them one at a time. And maybe some tasks are done within 24 hours, some tasks are done, you know, maybe it takes three or four days if it's a whole page to be completed. So that's kind of how the subscription works. It's good if... Clients need to scale and they don't want to hire someone. It's a good alternative to them instead of hiring. There's a lot of risk associated when you hire someone. You've got sick leave. Maybe they're not doing very good work, so you have to fire them, but that's a bit complicated. So that's the type of clients that enjoy the subscription service. And yeah.

Jack:
So you take on how many clients, just to give an idea of, to people out there that, you know, if it's 3,500 pounds a month, you have how many clients currently?

Dylan Harrocks:
We've got nine at the moment and we've just recently increased the pricing, it's £3,000 before so all the clients that were subscribed then have kept that old pricing. And so we're making around £20,000-25,000 a month through the Weflos subscription and then I hope that this will just keep increasing now that I'm building the team up. I've been making recent hires and I'm still very customer obsessed. As we said at the beginning, I still want to make sure that we're providing the best service possible. So I'll try not to scale too quickly and slow down with the clients.

Jack:
Interesting, and your team is how many people now?

Dylan Harrocks:
We are four people now, four or five. I've got a virtual assistant, so five, that we've talked about before.

Jack:
And I mean, this is a really interesting period for you because I guess you're trying to extricate yourself from the work to be more high level thinking and how are you finding that process?

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, well that's a great question. It's only recently that I've made a decision now that I need to just focus on the business and grow in the business. I love Webflow and so I spent a lot of time working on the client projects myself directly. In my head, because I do want to just keep improving my skills in Webflow, I want to get to the best I can be, but it's just ended up me plateauing because I don't want to take more clients on because I haven't got enough time to focus on. the marketing side of things, I make sure project management is going well for everyone. So it was only recently I took some time off work and I looked at it and I've decided that if I want Nexus Creative to be what I want it to be, which is a leading web flow agency with the coolest people working at it and I want to empower everyone that works at Nexus Creative, I have a vision to really kind of do how well FinSuite is doing with empowering all of their people. I want everyone to have a sort of personal brand within Nexus. And for me to be able to grow to something like that, I need to focus on the business instead of working in the business.

Jack:
Mmm. It's really weird that you say this. Joe Krug I actually interviewed last week for episode 50, that's going to be dropping after your episode Dylan, but he talks a lot about how he basically tried to build the business by finding people that had similar characteristics to him. which I thought was a really, really interesting way to build and grow. Essentially, he was saying that a lot of people try and find people that are incredible at one particular technical element that you can't do, right? Like that's your hiring to plug the gaps as it were. But he actually said something really interesting about finding people who wanted to, who were as excited about his vision as he was. And, and I think that's part of the success and the secret source of, empowered employees to have their own personal brand and their own voice as part of FinSuite. But anyway,

Dylan Harrocks:
I can't

Jack:
listen

Dylan Harrocks:
wait

Jack:
to that.

Dylan Harrocks:
to hear

Jack:
Yeah,

Dylan Harrocks:
that episode. It's going to be great.

Jack:
it's really weird. A lot of the stuff that you're saying it overlaps a lot with him. So I'd recommend, I'm just trying to get another listener from a

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah.

Jack:
guest. It's a bit weird, isn't it? But yeah, I recommend checking out that episode next week. And for anyone that's listening as well, if they're interested in building an agency, that's coming. But let's stop plugging next week's episode and talk about this week's episode. Talk to me about failure number three, being too hard on yourself.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yes, so this was something that I struggled for many years. I had ADHD my whole life, obviously, and I've only now fully understood it and been formally diagnosed with it, maybe six months ago. And it's led me to understand a lot more about myself and why I'd have maybe certain insecurities of being hard on myself, essentially. I would go through these phases and I'd go through these like times where I know I had a lot of work to do but I feel so overwhelmed that I just couldn't do it and then I just I'd be blocked I'd be frozen and Then because of that I'd feel really bad and when I feel really bad I didn't want to do work and it was this constant spiral that I didn't feel good And I thought there was something wrong with me. Well, I guess there is ADHD, but I thought like okay I'm never gonna amount to anything if I'm all always been like this. And the only time I wasn't like this is if I was doing direct client work for some reason. I just, again, maybe people please are here, but I just wanted to do that well. But if it was ever work for myself that no one else is depending on, I would struggle so much to get started on it. And then since discovering that I've got ADHD, I've learned a lot of strategies that help me like not feel so bad about what I'm doing. Everyone has bad days, which is completely fine. know if you have a bad day just let it be a bad day and do what you can and if not just go for a walk and that usually helps a lot listen to music. It's one thing that I do a lot as well just look back at all these times that I felt like this and how much I've achieved since then and just understand that you know that that's how it can get sometimes and I think also there's a common tendency with business owners and probably actually all types of people comparing ourselves a lot. We see so many people on Twitter, on all these places, that are doing so much to start in like three businesses. They're like growing here, they're making loads of money there. And it just looks all so cushy from the outside. And I think it's important to understand that they're probably having bad days and they're struggling to do stuff and to get motivated. And everyone has phases where you get really excited and other phases where you don't. So anyone listening, you're not alone. I think a lot of us go through this with or without ADHD.

Jack:
Thanks so much for sharing that. I feel like, you know, there might be people who are looking at you, Dylan, thinking, damn, this guy is where I want to be. And he doesn't seem to have any problem. I mean, he's got his life sorted. You know, he's got 25k a month coming in from his subscription-based model and he's gone through all these failures. And now he's on the other side and now his life looks so pretty in Barcelona, doesn't it, Dylan? That's probably what some people are thinking, but what you're saying is... actually you still have good days and bad days and mental health is not, it's not like you're immune to mental health problems regardless of where you are in life. It's kind of like this constant thing that you need to work on and find strategies that you can employ at certain times depending on how you're feeling. So, important to

Dylan Harrocks:
I think...

Jack:
say that.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, and I think talking about it as well, every time I talk about it, it feels less bad, so it gets like less of a wound. I've got Felicia, which is my partner, and I talk to her a lot about these things and she helps me through any time that I'm feeling demotivated, just to get excited about life and that things are good. So try to not keep it within you. If you've got a partner, speak to your partner. If you've got your mum and dad, speak to your mum and dad. If you've got Twitter, speak to me. We're all here to help each other out in the community. So I think

Jack:
Yeah,

Dylan Harrocks:
talking about it. important.

Jack:
I think coming off the back of what you said there and linking back to earlier in the conversation, you know, we talked about what's the point of posting on social media? And I think some people use social media as a kind of strategy. There's an outcome-based thing that I want to achieve. I want to grow an audience. I want to do this, that and the other. But, you know, at the same time, as much as there are people that are using social media because of, you know, an outcome-based goal that they really want to have, just being social is healthy. Freelancers are all sitting behind a laptop being like, oh my god this is the most serious project I'll ever do, or whatever. And we probably think that a lot and get stressed and we think, oh my god, this is the worst day of my life. But actually there's a lot of people out there that might be going through the same stuff, might be having the same doubts, might be seeing the same stuff on social media about how much money other people are earning that you're not, and feeling low. And that's a big reason why connecting write people on social media and being social on social media, you know, actually messaging people that, you know, you might be like, hey, this seems like a cool girl or guy. Let's just DM them and see if they want to have a coffee or whatever. It is really, really powerful. So shout out to the Webflow community for just being so supportive. But if you're listening and you're like, I just I don't really know if I really want to put myself out there and talk to people. can be, you know, super beneficial just from the point of view of knowing there are other people out there like you.

Dylan Harrocks:
I think you're doing a great job as well Jack, the London meetup that you've done, I wish I could have made it, but that would have been so helpful for a lot of people just to make new friends. When you came to Barcelona you introduced me to a lot of people so that's really great. So if you want to also make a lot more friends just meet Jack and he'll hook you up.

Jack:
Jokes aside though,

Dylan Harrocks:
Fred

Jack:
like,

Dylan Harrocks:
Matcher.

Jack:
no, jokes aside, it is actually crazy doing webflail how many amazing people I've met through the podcast. And yeah.

Dylan Harrocks:
Who's your favorite though?

Jack:
Well, you're sat in front of me, so I'm going to say you. No,

Dylan Harrocks:
That's the right answer.

Jack:
I mean, that's a hard question. There's

Dylan Harrocks:
No, no, I was joking. I

Jack:
so

Dylan Harrocks:
don't

Jack:
many

Dylan Harrocks:
know.

Jack:
amazing

Dylan Harrocks:
So.

Jack:
people that I've interviewed or that I've spoken to after having They might have listened to an interview and want to chat about it or at the London meet-up. I'm pretty sure a lot of people came who actually weren't on the invite list and were just, I have no idea who you are, but some of them were amazing as well. There was a girl who just walked in and she wanted a slice of pizza and I just chatted to her and I think she thought she was getting ratted out, but she just wanted a slice of pizza. She just came in and we had a great chat, even though she

Dylan Harrocks:
We'll

Jack:
had...

Dylan Harrocks:
see you web flow-er.

Jack:
No, no, no. She later admitted... I just, she was like, to be honest, I just came in for a slice of pizza. I was like, Hey, no problem. Um, so it's

Dylan Harrocks:
That

Jack:
crazy,

Dylan Harrocks:
is amazing.

Jack:
crazy how you meet such interesting people just by virtue of having a podcast and doing events and trying to connect people. So anyway, rant over, go and talk to, um, you know, people, whether that's in person, if there's an event near you, I gazillion percent recommend going. But also the second best thing is just reaching out to the Twitter community of the web flow. they are lush. But to circle back to what you said about ADHD, I think there's a few webflowers that I've met, Matt Evans, Peneo, Lorenzo, a few others that have ADHD and you said at the start of talking about ADHD that it's something that you struggle with, but actually having known you for a little bit, I think it's a little bit of a superpower for you. in some respects, can you tell us about the positives of ADHD and how, you know, actually in some instances it's like, boom, I feel like I can smash this out of the park.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, well, okay. So I think part, like, yeah, I think I'm just get, I could get really excited about something and hyper-focused into something, so, which is good and bad thing because, you know, that feeling that you get when you're, when you have a new idea and you're trying to go to sleep and all you can think about is that and it's racing through your brain. I can have just periods of that, like I'm like that for hours in front of my computer trying to get something done. So I think that's a really big positive. I think I can also, especially with the subscription thing, I've got a lot of things that are like, a lot of plates that I'm spinning at the same time, tasks that I'm trying to get done, and my brain can sort of cope with that. It can understand, like, okay, I've got to do this, like that, and the negative there is, task switching isn't always the best thing. I do have to, I try to time block so that I don't task switch, but at the same time, it means I can always be sort of on top of things because of that. And I'm not sure if this is an ADHD thing, but it has helped. I think it, because I'm a little bit hyper sometimes, it can really be fun to connect with people and have conversations that go pretty far and deep, especially with you, Jack. We've had some of those.

Jack:
We, yeah, I mean within 10 minutes of meeting you, we were talking about what is the meaning of life. I don't have ADHD, but maybe this is just the deep, the deepness, trying to get to the grit and the oyster. You know, I didn't really want to talk about the weather. I think this is, you know, I didn't really do the small talk very well. I actually got told that at a wedding the other day. This guy was like, you don't do small talk very well, do you? Because I just asked her what the meaning of life was. Anyway. Um, okay, so we've talked a lot about subscription modeling. We've talked a lot about email. I feel like you are. You are what a lot of people's version of success would look like, but you say, you know, you've told me before the interview that you've got more to go. What's next for Dylan?

Dylan Harrocks:
Hmm, yeah, so, okay. That's something that I started, like I just said before, I've taken some time off now and just wanted to look at the business from an outside perspective or where I want it to go. And it seems to be very similar from, what, F in suite, absolutely, or Fin Suite. Is it Fin Suite or F in suite?

Jack:
Finsweet.

Dylan Harrocks:
Okay, I think it used to be effing sweet, because

Jack:
Yeah,

Dylan Harrocks:
it was meant

Jack:
they,

Dylan Harrocks:
to be, look.

Jack:
I think basically they have like a cat phrase, you know, it's FN Suite.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yes,

Jack:
And,

Dylan Harrocks:
exactly.

Jack:
and then they've got their YouTube stuff as well. But yeah, Fin Suite is the, the title.

Dylan Harrocks:
So it seems to be my mission quite aligned with what they want to do, but I think they are more geared towards creating products for the Webflow community. I just want to have a team within the Webflow community that we're growing and that everyone's extremely happy and proud to be part of Nexus Creative. And I want it to almost be like, oh yeah, I work at Nexus Creative like a bragging right. I think that'd be so cool. And just serve like some of the coolest clients. And I think that would be my next two year plan to try and position myself there and give a lot of value as well. I think that I'm doing that now, at least I'm trying to on Twitter, just everything I know to share all of that value. So I think that's one of the ways that I'll get there. And I also, I've got this itch to teach people. I love to like, I've never had a mentor, but I'd love to be a mentor, I feel like. It's one of these, I think you learn a lot more by teaching. So maybe that would be something that I'd like to go into later on, so like helping people build themselves up. And yeah, and then after that I think I've sort of got this idea, which is very abstract at the moment, but I'd love to actually have a few different agencies. So we've got Nexus Creative that does like web and maybe it will go into branding as I grow and maybe that's a path that makes sense. Then I'd maybe like to do something like Nexus Marketing. which focuses on helping clients, you know, through maybe social media marketing, maybe some email outreach marketing, because I, of course, know quite a bit of that. And it'd be cool to have like a little bit of an umbrella, or a nexus, you can call it, of nexuses. Hey!

Jack:
See what you did there.

Dylan Harrocks:
Yeah, and then with that, maybe, you know, this is maybe like a five, 10 year plan, is acquire companies that aren't doing so great digitally. Maybe they've got great infrastructure, they're old companies. and kind of put them through the sort of process of all these channels and digitise them, make them really cool companies and then either sell them or keep them within a portfolio. I think that would be a cool fun thing for me to do, especially ADHD, just loads of new projects every couple of months would be cool.

Jack:
Wow, okay, so yeah, let's stick to a simple plan then. Okay, you've got your work cut out, man. I guess step one is consolidate your team in Nexus Creative right now with your subscription-based business model. And maybe once you kind of get higher level as you build a team that are really, really strong without you and get your systems and processes down, then you can maybe... focus a little bit more on audience building and see where it goes from there I guess.

Dylan Harrocks:
Definitely.

Jack:
Exciting times ahead, we'll have to have you back on Webflail in a year's time because I feel like in a year you're going to rock it. You've done

Dylan Harrocks:
Thank you, I'm glad

Jack:
so...

Dylan Harrocks:
you believe in me.

Jack:
Dude, I am... I back you. I really... Yeah, you're going to go places. I'm going to stop getting all gushy at the end of this. Tell me about what your next failure is going to be.

Dylan Harrocks:
Well, of course, I've listened to this podcast a lot, so I knew it was coming. I can't pretend that I was surprised. But it's funny because it ties into just what we're talking about now. I'm probably gonna be too, spreading myself too thin and focus on too many projects at once and try to get too much done. So I think I constantly have to remind myself to ground myself and stay focused on one track. So my next failure will be spreading myself too thin.

Jack:
Dylan, it's been an honour having you on Webflail. Thank you so much for coming on, sharing money information, subscription, emails, ADHD. This episode's had it all. It was a banging episode. Thank you so much. If anyone wants to ask you anything about this episode, where should they find you?

Dylan Harrocks:
You can find me on Twitter, it's Dylan, D-Y-L-A-N, J-Harrox, H-A-R-R-O-C-K-S.

Jack:
Beautiful and Dylan's actually been posting a lot of really powerful content on Twitter all about subscription brace pricing how he deals with ADHD running his agency and where he's going and I feel like you've got a kind of indie hacker mentality with your Twitter right now, you're just like You know posting so much to and growing your audience and sharing loads and loads of value in the process. So Keep it up man and go and follow Dylan if you haven't already. This isn't just like, oh maybe go and follow Dylan. Go follow Dylan, okay? Dylan, thanks

Dylan Harrocks:
Thank

Jack:
so

Dylan Harrocks:
you

Jack:
much for

Dylan Harrocks:
so

Jack:
coming

Dylan Harrocks:
much

Jack:
on the

Dylan Harrocks:
for

Jack:
pod.

Dylan Harrocks:
that Jack.

Jack:
Hey,

Dylan Harrocks:
Thank you.

Jack:
I support you. Let's have you back in a year's time on Webflare and we'll see where you're at, okay?

Dylan Harrocks:
Let's do it. I'm excited.

Jack:
Cheers man, bye.

Dylan Harrocks:
Bye bye.

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