Discussing how to building a design agency from scratch with Matt Ellis, founder of Honcho Agency

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https://weardulo.com

Matt Ellis is the founder of Honcho, a design agency specializing in web design and development. 

Matt’s built Honcho from scratch and without knowing much about the agency world. He simply learned to dive into new opportunities head first and figure out how to do things as he’s going along. It’s a piece of advice he shared a few times during our conversation. We also talked about hiring first employees, pricing strategies, finding clients, running a remote company and much more. It’s an episode rich on resources and tools that will help a lot of you to automate and facilitate processes around your own businesses. If you work at a small agency or run a remote team, this is a very useful episode to listen to.

Topics we cover in this episode:

01:50 - Who is Matt Ellis and what does he do

02:34 - How Matt got into web development

05:49 - Saying "Yes" to things even if you don't know how to do them

07:23 - Learning to do web development properly

08:30 - From freelancer to founder of a design agency

10:30 - Learning how to build an agency

11:40 - Hiring the first employee at Honcho

12:55 - Freeing more time for learning and business development

15:40 - Finding clients in the early days and financial security

17:18 - Balancing a financial forecast with hiring

19:00 - Switching from a product focus to a sales and business development one

20:30 - Tools to help with automation to free up more time

23:30 - How to choose which prospects to approach

29:55 - Where does conversion happen

31:00 - Pricing strategies: project-based vs. retainers

35:00 - Providing more value to others by learning more about your own business

35:20 - Working remotely

36:20 - Running a remote company - the process and tools

40:10 - Fluid processes and trust

41:50 - Getting new clients

42:46 - Acquiring new clients through Adwords

44:10 - Future plans for the Honcho agency

48:05 - Links and handles

FULL LIST of Useful Resources and Links: https://weardulo.com/blogs/the-early-days-podcast/say-yes-first-figure-it-out-later