We’re Trying to Outgrow the Valley of Death

Hello everyone. [music] Welcome to the 21 Hacks podcast. I'm your host, Lauren Feldman. Almost every growing business [music] experiences a moment when success starts creating as many problems as it solves. Sales are up, [music] the team is bigger, the product line is broader, and suddenly the systems that got you here start to break. [music] That's where Liz Picarazzi finds herself right now. We're in the valley of death, she says, and we really need help. Liz's company, CityB, made [music] the most recent Inc. 5000 list. But CityB has also hit that dangerous in between stage, too big to run on improvisation, too small to have put in place all the processes it needs. So Liz is trying to grow her way out of the valley. She's hired a marketing agency, a growth consultant, and two AI advisers. >> [music] >> She's testing new domestic fabricators and she's rebuilding her website from the ground up because right now it's generating no more than 10% of sales and she knows it [music] can do better. The site hasn't kept up with her expanding product line and it isn't even optimized for search engine discovery, let alone [music] for generative AI discovery. Talking it through with Paul DS and Jackie Russo, Liz confronts some uncomfortable questions. How much copy is enough for AI? How transparent should pricing [music] be, especially for a premium product whose prices could scare away some customers? And who has a better feel for the company's story? The owner who's lived it, or the agency that has more experience helping businesses connect with customers? Not surprisingly, Liz and Jackie have different instincts on that one. What follows is a candid look at what it takes to rebuild [music] a growing business at the dawn of a new era. Even in good times, owning and running a business can be a lonely pursuit. [music] Our hope is that these weekly conversations will let owners know they are not alone in facing challenges. In fact, that's the whole idea behind the 21 Hats community. Engaging with other owners to get the kinds of insights only another owner can offer. [music] If you're interested in learning more, you can sign up for a free trial of the Morning Report newsletter, which highlights the most important news of the day for business owners and shows how other owners are confronting challenges and seizing opportunities. Just search the 21 Hats Morning [music] Report to subscribe. Joining me this week on the podcast are regulars Paul D, CEO of Paul Downs [music] Cabinet Makers, which is based outside of Philadelphia and makes custom conference tables, Liz Picarazzi, [music] who is CEO of City Bin, which makes trash enclosures and package [music] bins and is based in Brooklyn, New York, and Jackie Russo, CEO of Brand Russo, a marketing agency based in Lafayette, Louisiana. The episode is titled We're Trying to Outgrow the Valley of Death. Welcome, Paul, Liz, and Jackie. It's great to have all of you here. So, Liz, I gather you've come to the conclusion that you need to completely redo your website. This feels to me at least, like a very interesting time to be doing that. So much is changing right now both in a general business sense but more specifically in terms of the technology. So I think this could go in a lot of different directions. Really eager to hear more but let's start with why. What prompted this? >> So there's a couple reasons. Um it started from the recognition that my website was not very SEO or AI friendly. There are a lot of errors. There's a lot of custom coding. There's a lot of band-aids. Um it's a Shopify site that we've had for four plus years and um we don't have a ton of sales on it. Only 9 to 10% of our sales are from online and we know it can be more. So I engaged um a marketing agency to help me sort of evolve the website and sort of make it more AI friendly. But going through and working with them, we realized that fundamentally that Shopify site um was not going to be up to speed with what we needed. And not only because of sort of the technical requirements, but also because in terms of content, when we built that website, we only had residential line of business. So our trash enclosures had been around for 10 years. The website was built for the residential customer and then four years ago we launched the municipal business. So for cities and parks and then last year we launched the Grisben business. So I suddenly have three product lines whereas when I first built the site I only had one. So if someone goes to my website right now they're going to think it's for residential customers. they're going to have to dig around quite a bit to see that we have three distinct product lines. Um, so as we're looking at the content and how does the information architecture in our current site work, we realized that trying to force that structure into the template or as they call it with Shopify, the theme that we had wasn't going to work. Um, and so we looked at new Shopify themes and new Shopify themes have many if not all of the bells and whistles that we wanted. Much easier to lay out the information, much more mobile friendly and importantly also optimized for AI and SEO. Um, I would say that there is one other reason and that is that you sort of get website envy. Um, when you look at other businesses, particularly for me, anything in furniture, outdoor furniture, not competitors, like my website is a lot better than my competitors, I got to say. Knock on wood, but you see what can be done on a website and you realize that some of the features that those sites have are those that you want. And so those were all factors that drove the decision. um the agency I was working on quickly pivoted to move it to a whole new website. Chose the theme, made the decision before the end of the year also because I wanted to pay for it the development. I had some you know taxable income that I wanted to put towards marketing and uh you know two months ago when I got this started I never would have thought I would have been doing a whole new website but it's firmly the way to go. Paul, it sounds like this is kind of similar to a situation you found yourself in. Like Liz, your offerings changed and your target audience changed and you made the decision to create a whole new website while maintaining your previous one. Correct. >> Yes. And uh that's worked out reasonably well. I mean, first of all, as I'm on your site right now, it's not that bad. It's attractive and it shows the product. There's the thing that says municipalities right at the top and uh not that much about bears but it's on the dropdown. Anyway, I would invite anybody who's listening this to go to citybin.com and see what she's talking about. So yeah, we had come to a conclusion that we had one site which shoots a lot of uh Google searches our way and I didn't want to mess with that and then we had another audience that was not approaching us that way and had a very different aesthetic set of preferences. So we just put up a different site with two different URLs. So I've got customconference tableables.com and I've got Paul downs.net. I also have pauldowns.com which feeds to uh the customconference tables.com site. And so we we went through the effort. We put up the second site and lo and behold without any real attempt it's starting to get some organic traffic but the main thing was to be a portfolio that we could send to a very particular target audience. So, I don't know, Liz, whether your municipal buyers are really all that different from your ordinary buyers. >> They are. >> How do you see separating those two streams of purchasers? So, at the very top of the site, we have an illustrator that we work with, and we had him essentially design tiles for our three different segments that you click into to get to basically the separate, I guess you could say, merchandising or pillar pages for each of those three audiences. Um, the product is different actually. So, and that may not have been what you're saying, but for municipal, we definitely highlight things about ease of opening. We talk about sanitation workers. We have different types of doors and latches and locks. Um, definitely different talking points. The motivation for municipal clients is not as much sort of design and attractiveness, although that's part of it. It's how does it beautify the atmosphere? So the streetscape. So the photography has you know time square in the background or h like for Grisbane it has mountains in the background whereas residential has a lot of photography with actual homes. So those three different paths it's sort of like the buyer motivation is different in each case and I want to make sure that the copy corresponds with what their buyer motivations are. Jackie, uh, you run a marketing agency. You build websites for people. I'm curious, is is this kind of situation something you see all the time? >> It is something I see all the time. And I'm just sitting over here recovering from the fact that my love for Liz is unrequited and that she's cheating on me with a different marketing company. >> Probably, you know, I will eventually [snorts] recover, but for now, [laughter] the pain is deep. >> No, I think Liz, I think you're absolutely right. Jackie, I have to ask you, how many trash enclosures have you bought from Liz? >> Oh, that's a good point. Um, the crazy thing is we don't have any trash enclosures. Um, in downtown there's a dumpster that the city provides next door, so I don't deal with that. And at home, we have a very specific truck with an arm, and so you have to use their cans to come by and pick up the arm, and that's it. That's all the trash in my life. >> Okay. But if I was buying trash enclosures, I'd [laughter] buy them from City Bed because I'm loyal to my friends. No, I am I am totally kidding. Totally kidding. I think there's plenty of business to go around. I love that you found somebody that you like. That's what it should be. And whether you already knew what you were doing or they've given you good advice, you're approaching it absolutely the right way. And Paul, I know looking at the website, you're right. It looks great, but there's a real strategy behind having it sectioned off to your audience. And so approaching it with a real understanding of who your target audience is and your target audiences are. There is a different language. They have a different want and need. They come to it from a different position of concern. You're solving different problems. The photography is going to be different. We try really hard not to drop people on homepages anymore. We want to drop them on the path that gets to the thing they need and care about. Uh if you're going fishing, you want to have the right lure and the right bait in the right body of water. You're not taking worms to the Gulf. And so, same thing in websites. >> Yeah, I do have a couple comments on the existing site. First of all, you don't have a client list, which I think has been a big feature of our success. Like I have a theory which is that the main thing you got to overcome is demonstrating to people that somebody like them has your product. >> Yep. Yep. >> So a client list of okay you got New York City but do you have Chilikothia Ohio or something like smaller more of a range of different people? And then the other thing is you're not really shoving testimonials in anybody's face. And I think that that's something you absolutely want to do. You've got good Google reviews, you've got testimonials, but on our sites, we have the testimonials running in a like a streaming banner on the bottom. We try to make sure there's a quote on every page. And uh we have a client list that's so long that you just have to scroll for like two minutes to get to the end. It's not even who you sell to, it's just like how many you've got. So all those things would be things I would add to the new site. >> Yeah, both of those are incredible suggestions and the client list in that way I hadn't really thought of but you know we've got Times Square, we've got >> people heard of Time Square. >> Yeah, we've got [laughter] Harvard, Central Park, Epcot. None of those are residential, but those are big names, >> right? See, I think I think that's a mistake that a lot of small companies make, which is they land a contract from some big deal company and that's the only thing they put on their client list. So, if all you've got is Central Park and God himself on your client list, then people are going to look at be like, great, it's Central Park. I'm not Central Park. That's why I try to add every single person. And uh we go through at the end of every year and just add another 150 people to the to the end of the list. And I also have a map that uh shows the location of every client. And that's incredibly powerful when you're talking to people like, okay, we're not just doing New York, but if you wanted to see it in New York, you could zoom in and see like 6,000 of these. Um, and I would also for SEO, make sure you're linking your Google reviews into the site because I'm pretty sure that Google really pays attention to people who leave reviews on your business page. >> 100%. And they like the videos since they bought YouTube. >> Yep. But, uh, if you look on like I just searched CityB on Google Maps and then clicked on the location, I see a bunch of really great reviews. And so we have a a little tab in the corner of both of our websites that has some thing that just feeds those reviews right into the site. So when you're on the site, it's always hanging there at the bottom. And if you click on it, it expands and you can see all the good reviews we get. And then someone has to be making an effort to get reviews so that they're not all 10 years old. >> Yeah. We have a whole process for that. A really good process for that. >> Yeah. But if you're getting them, you want to be putting them on that site because I think it's all about trying to figure out what makes Google feel happy and do that. And uh that's often things that are a little bit different than you would do just for human beings. >> Well, that's the thing is you have three audiences now. You have humans, you have Google, and you have AI. And they each have different wants and needs. And so you've got to approach each of them very strategically. >> I want to get into some more of that. But first, Liz, could could you just tell us what stage are you at now? When did you decide you needed a whole new website and how far have you gotten? >> I made the decision probably a week before Christmas and just had a very kind of a light requirements meeting because we took a two week vacation. Um, and now came back and we're starting to populate all of the pages. I have my virtual assistant and um our graphic designer kind of going through all the photos to get the very best ones for the site. Um the testimonials are coming in, although I don't think they're coming in through like a Google widget. I think that they should. And then I mean the other thing I should have mentioned is that I'm not going to AI the copy on this. I want to write itself at least foundational things because the voice is so different for the three different clients, you know, and and one thing I'm also learning is when you redo a website, you're forced to think about your product hierarchy and your customer needs and what are your different value propositions. And so you get into just what you think is a website project, but suddenly you also are like, "Wow, I have so many different communication streams that need to reflect this differentiated messaging." Um, and so I already know for my salespeople that I want to get them on board with the different messaging for each, you know, demographic. um they're really good on it for most of the time, but there's a lot of residential speak that I see going out in emails or I'll hear in the office. And this is a good way to flesh that all out and really have everybody align around the three different customer types um in how we communicate in any stream, any path. That wasn't something I would have expected from this project. Liz, you said that your current site wasn't really optimized well for SEO, and you want the new site to be optimized both for SEO and for what I guess is being called GEO, AI discovery. What's that conversation been like? >> That's been very illuminating also. And I'll give you one example. On our current website, you're going to get a form that says we have this buyer's guide to trash enclosures. and you submit a form with your email address in order to get access. It's a PDF. It's a great resource. It's actually sort of product agnostic. It's all about what material do you want? Do you want metal? Do you want wood? Do you want plastic? Do you want a composite? You know, if you're buying a trash enclosure, how much space do you have available? What are the size of your trash cans? All of these considerations. Well, we quickly realized that that material should be available on the website without someone needing to fill out a form because that's what AI wants. AI wants to know if someone comes in there and says, you know, what should I consider when I'm buying a trash enclosure? What are the things I need to know about buying a trash enclosure? Um, the problem with the approach we have now is that great content in the buyer's guide to trash enclosures is essentially trapped in a PDF that's guarded by uh a web form. And the web form, we see it as these are great leads for people that want this resource in order to make a decision, but some people don't want to fill out a form to get that information. And an AI wants that information easily um accessible. >> And what's informing this decision? Uh is is your marketing agency telling you what kind of content you need to put on the site to get AI excited and discover you and share your information. So that's something I can attribute not to my agency, but sort of my own growing knowledge about AI and how AI wants to get people answers easily, quickly, and um if I have a great resource, I'm going to want it really front and center and easily accessible. So when I do searches, I see I see how it lays the information out. I know that AI also likes FAQs, which we have, but we haven't updated our FAQs in like six or seven years. There's a lot of new information for the two other product lines, which are not in the FAQs. Well, that's an imperative for an AI friendly site. So, anything having to do with a resource for people to make a decision about my product is it needs to be accessible. Paul, you redid your site before AI exploded and and became the thing that everybody's talking about. Are you concerned about that? >> Um, sure. I mean, nobody really knows how this is going to work. Uh, but one of my goals in the second site was to move away from the text, the language being written more for SEO and try to make it more human. And for those of you in the audience who don't know, I I've written quite a bit uh both for Lauren and the New York Times and then also a book. And I just have a particular voice that I like to write in. And so my new site is very much the way I write and the old site was very much me getting slapped on the wrist then having a bunch of keyword stuffing. And so it's not clear to me that the keyword stuffing is still a bad idea, but it certainly would make it harder for somebody to just lift language off that site as a quote. And the new site is much more like that. But uh when you write well, you don't necessarily explain every single thing, every sentence you put down. It's sort of like when you watch a movie, there's usually a little bit of exposition about who this person is and when they went to school and all that at the beginning, but if it was happening all through the whole thing, it would be pretty annoying. And so once you get divorced from the first sentences as we're talking about conference tables, all the other sentences don't necessarily reference that. And that's bad for SEO, but it's probably good for AI, but we don't know that yet. We just don't know how these things are going to work. >> Jackie, what have you figured out about making a site AI friendly? >> Well, I think that in a lot of ways Liz and Paul are both right and there are some subtle nuances that bear discussion. Uh, one of which is Liz not using AI to completely generate all your copy. 100% agree. I think proper setup, proper personalization, the class you're taking right now is going to help. You can get pretty darn close. Still don't want you to use AI to write the whole thing, but the brainstorming of it, how to build out the structure so that you have clearly defined the audiences you're talking to, the search terminology that they use, and attributing each page of your site to answer one of those questions that's a match for the search term. that structure AI is great at and it's going to be really helpful. Paul, you're right. We don't want to keyword stuff, but we do want to make sure we're applying all three audiences needs to every page. And so making sure that we have a clear path of what keywords, what meta tags, what alt image checks, what H1, H2, H3 headers, you know, all of the uh logistics of it, those things become really important. And so I think that the conver this conversation is what helps other people make better choices with their websites because a lot of times people think they're their only audience. So that's a big miss. And then they don't realize What do you mean by that, Jackie? >> Well, this is the example I use all the time when somebody asks because it actually happened. I'm working with a um a pretty big regional bank and I'm in the boardroom with, you know, as I look around the table in my mind's eye, there were I think 11 or 13 to 70 yearear-old white men. I mean, that was the board, right? So, that's it. And they were uh we were discussing target audiences and they were explaining to me that they did not like the it picture in this one ad and this copy and all this stuff. And I said, "But you don't like it. This campaign is first-time home buyers. Do none of you own a house yet?" Like really? And they all kind of laughed and there's some uncomfortable silences and they're like, "No, but I want to like the ad." And I'm like, "I want first-time home buyers to like the ad. Y'all have vacation homes, mountain lodges, and yachts. You are not the audience for this. And it turned into a thing where, you know, we kind of have a three strike out policy here. So, I can educate you the first time on how you hired me to do a job and you to let me do it. And I can kind of go toe-to-toe with you the second time on some real specific reasons and data and rationale on how this is the right choice based on the expertise of my 30-year career. And then the third time I'm just going to maybe put it up to a survey or have the target audience weigh in and at that point it's your money to spend as you want. I'll do your bidding, but it's not going to work the way you want it to because you're not listening to anybody who's giving you good sound feedback. And so we went through the second and third strike with them. And then I was like, "Okay, I I will go put the ad in your gated country club community where no first-time home buyers live and we'll see how it works." [laughter] >> How did it work? Not so good. >> Okay. Any other thoughts about what you do to try to make a site discoverable on AI? >> Well, we're we're back to the AI part. So, you know, mobile, we spent years and years and years explaining to people how important mobile was. 85% of search was kind of the the one of the highest statistics over the past couple years. So, if you've got 80 85% of people using a mobile device to search, feel like your site should be mobile friendly. I mean, call me crazy. And so we're at that same u precipice right now with AI. We're watching it gain rapid traction. To Paul's point, there is no published set of rules like you can get for Google. Google's pretty clear with their rules. AI is not. Well, because you got a lot of different AI platforms and you now it one of them starting to sell ads and so it's a whole thing. But common sense is prevailing. Good content is prevailing. not trying to game the system and just making sure that if you're sitting at a kitchen table answering the basic questions that your clients customers ask you on a regular basis in easy to understand language you know one of the things that they've started to kind of make real clear to us is pricing if people are vague about pricing calls for pricing that is going to be a big no no they want clarity >> that's something that I don't love Jackie >> no one does Liz Yeah, high price premium product and uh don't want to scare people away, but I do know that AI is looking for that. If you have a product, they're absolutely looking for it. And I just need to get over that resistance. >> And so, you know, I think in a lot of ways, we have to decide who we are. And so if I had a construction company right now, which I don't, I I would have to think long and hard about abandoning the policy of we are incredibly detailed and allin from the beginning because we don't believe in the get you to sign up and then hook you with the change order method of profitability, which we actually talked about on this podcast maybe two years ago, Lauren. And so that is how some construction companies work. That's not the kind of construction company I would run. And so Liz, same thing. You sell a top-of-the-line product at a high price. Paul's tables are not in Walmart. These are high quality craftsmanship works of art. My work, high touch, high value, high cost. And so all three of us have that same challenge of we want to be clear and transparent with pricing, but we don't want someone to use AI to apples to apples. I just made air quotes right there. apples to apples analysis because they're not comparing apples to apples. And so it's about language. It's about finding an entrylevel product that that's the price you really want to put out there. It's about finding a way to explain with clarity what things cost. >> Paul, how do you approach pricing on your site? Uh well, since it's the number one thing people ask about, we have a page that that talks specifically about pricing, what what it is that drives pricing, has examples of what we call the three grades, standard, premium, and ultra, and actually gives you a a dollar amount per foot of length for each of those grades. And so it's got a lot of information in it without being specific because one of the things that we do is we work with a really wide range of of clients and some of them have a ton of money and some of them have very little money and so we've figured out ways to deliver what we can do to people with less money by controlling the design. So, uh, we have quite a bit about it and, uh, but it's not just like here's a table and this is what it costs. And we've tried that in the past. When I first rolled out a website in 1999, I did that when nobody else was doing it. And it was helpful because it would qualify the clients and they would be like, I can afford it or I can't afford it. And then they wouldn't bother me if they couldn't. And what we found when we did that with conference tables is that we would have a bunch of pictures of conference tables up on the page, people would inevitably click on like the craziest, biggest, the one we made for God and then the number right there would scare the crap out of them. So we had a huge drop off in traffic when we launched new site and put the pricing on each table. And then when we took it off, the price, you know, like the traffic came right back and then we had the conversation when people contact us. So instead of just throwing it on the web, a human person explains pricing options to each client depending on exactly what they're asking for. And that's a much better way to do business, but it's not an AI ccentric way to do business because AI wants the answer before without context. they just want something on your site. I hope that what we have is good enough because there is an explanation. There are numbers. >> One other thing that I'm doing is um more with bundles. So, we are modular. So, we have both trash enclosures and package lockers, planters, mailboxes. And in our current configurator, it even though it's called a configurator, it's sort of hard to configure what you want in a sort of a custom way bundling together. So, we're going to have a page that is going to essentially merchandise probably 8 to 10 of our most popular configurations with a focus on the add-on modules. So, people can look at the thing and say, "Yeah, I want this with a planter." and you see the whole thing together instead of having to build it in a configurator and then get the price at the end. That will be one way to show pricing that we're going to do. You know, we're working now with a growth consultant and raising the transaction dollar amount is one thing we're going to be working on in 2026. So, we're going to be doing a lot more bundling and the website makes that pretty easy to do and also, you know, shows the price in a very straightforward way. >> Is the growth consultant at the marketing agency or is this a different element altogether? This is a different element and that's probably a different episode, Lauren. But I actually have four different types of growth help consulting type people I'm working with this year. Um because we need a lot of help. You know, we're in the valley of death as you call it and we really need help. >> Explain what you mean by the valley of death. So when you're in that like 3 to 6 million in revenue range and your revenue is growing but your systems don't correspond with that growth. You know we have disjointed systems that don't talk to each other. We've got processes that haven't been documented. You know a year ago we had sort of one and a half factories that we're working with. Now we have four. So our supply chain has gotten a lot more complicated. We've got two US factories that we're now working a bit with. not a lot with but um you know we are experiencing that and it comes out of a good thing. it comes out of growth, but not having a handle in it has it's just personally become pretty miserable. Like I already know this weekend I'm going to work the entire weekend because the stuff that is just piled up. Um and a lot of it is stuff that if I had it operationalized or had delegated or we have AI more involved. Um, but yeah, this Q1 at least we're going to be engaging a lot of different people to help us. And the growth advisor is one and they're totally separate from the others. And I actually met the growth advisor, this is so weird, at the Inc. 5000 two years ago in the jacuzzi. >> Wow. >> Yeah. And yeah, it was pretty cool cuz Frank and I are, you know, in the jacuzzi in between sessions and you just meet so many great people and this is someone that struck up a conversation. Not in like a sleazy like he was trying to sell us or anything, but we kept in touch. They kept in touch with me over a couple years and it just became very obvious that we needed their help. And uh now we do it's uh twice a month uh 2-hour sessions, so 4 hours a month with the growth consultant. And um so far so good. >> You're right. That probably is a topic for another podcast, but I'm just curious with four different people throwing advice at you. Have you gotten conflicting advice yet? Is that an issue? >> So they're not different like four different growth advisors. It's just four different types of help that we're getting now. So, we have this outside marketing. I wouldn't even call it like a big agency. They're a little bit more of like a spot projectbased company. We've got the growth advisor. We've got kind of two AI people that we're working with. And we also got Frank into the COO alliance um so he can become a better COO. Um, so all of those things are sort of bringing in these are the things that we need to improve upon. And I'm delighted that Frank finally joined the COO Alliance. I've been pushing it for years. You know, somewhat similar to EO, but he's attended his first couple of sessions and he's learned so much already. and you know some of the operational things that he wasn't always taking action on. Now he sees the imperative and he hears the stories of other COOs and how they're handling their growth. So yeah, a lot of a lot of new expenses on that, but I feel pretty good that it will do the return on investment that we we just we need to spend more to make more, need to spend more to stay sane. >> Can you give us a sense of what you expect to spend redoing your website? It's actually a very low amount. I can just tell you and Jackie is going to know I am getting a really good deal on this. I'm paying 6,000. >> What? >> That is a very good deal. You could not have hired me for that. >> Made a wise choice. >> Yeah. So, I mean, we'll see. But it it came out of an EO friend uh works with them and they do a really good job for her on her ecom site. Um, and I decided to look into it. you know, I got the price. I started working with them more. As I said, we don't plan on the website, but it became an obvious thing to do. Um, and I know it's a great price. You guys know that's an amazing price. >> Amazing. >> How do you explain a price like that? It seems too good. >> It's leaning on the Shopify theme. You know, current Shopify themes are really, really good. Nothing like when we started working with Shopify whatever, 6 years ago. Um, all of the bells and whistles that we want are plugged in. Some stuff that you want custom is not that difficult to do. We're already doing a little bit of customization. I mean, I think that's it. And they're porting over a lot of our existing assets. Um, and then adding new for the two other product categories. They also have a developer that's overseas and um, is really strong. They don't have a big team of like 10 people working on it. They only have two people working on it. and that is lower cost. >> What's the process like? How uh how are you going back and forth? Um I've been involved in a couple of projects and it's always scary to me how quickly it moves, how you can get locked into something and you know a week later realize, oh, I wish I'd done that a little bit differently. How are you managing this? So, I I think I need to get into it a little more to fully answer that because we're still sort of early on. I need to input a lot on this. So, I feel like this weekend, um, I actually like to go straight into the site and write the copy in it. Obviously, not the live site, because then you get a sense of how it looks on the page and how much text you need for a particular section. If I write copy outside of the page, I often write way too much and then I realize it and rewrite it or or or keep it long and just say, "Oh, I'll deal with it." I don't know if that's something that people normally do, Jackie. You might know that. But I like being inside the site and playing with different things and seeing what what looks the best. >> You know, we have a running joke around here that the fee is one thing if we do it. It's a little bit higher if we do it together. It's a little bit higher if we watch you do it. [laughter] >> And how do people respond to that? >> Um, kind of with an uncomfortable laugh like Liz just gave. [laughter] >> And what do people usually choose? >> They let us do our jobs. >> Yeah. Except for the bank. >> Oh, the bankers. It's not the bankers. The bankers are great. It's the board of the bankers. >> Okay, Jackie, let me ask you this, though. If you do all of it, does that mean that you do all the writing and the photography, the graphics creation? >> Yes, absolutely. >> So, that is something like we're pretty strong with our photography and we also have someone that does great like creative assets. I know that's a pretty big cost if you're working with an agency and have that sort of overhead. >> Well, it just depends. So, we would say, you know, show us your photography and if it's good, then yeah, take that off the list. You've got it. Uh sometimes it's a collaboration, a good collaboration in the sense that the client has taken some pretty good photos, but we need to do some editing. Not overfiltered. They should always look natural, but just clean them up a little bit. Making them web ready because, you know, people want to upload these super big high-res photos. Well, those aren't mobile friendly and those are going to wreck your Google scores. So, it's it truly is it should be a collaborative effort. And so we're never going to insist on doing it our way so we can make a dollar. We want what's best for the client and the project. >> Liz, you faced a pretty big decision when you decided, you know, we're not just going to freshen up our existing site. We're going to start over. Do you have any decisions pending that you're concerned about that you're going to have to figure out? Is there anything that you're not sure which way you're going to go on? >> Actually, not really. We're going to use a lot of illustration in this site, which I always like. I'm very fond of illustration on the website >> as opposed to photography. >> No, both. But it's an element of the website that's new. And as much as I like it, I know I'm probably going to get some stuff from my illustrator that I don't like right away. But it's a minor thing. I, you know, I'm not scared of it. I'm I I know Shopify well enough to go into the new theme and see what needs to go where. You know, the my dependence on my team to pull the assets together is probably the thing I'm most worried about because we have absolute chaos in our Google Drive. And I actually have no patience to find anything. So, I always have my virtual assistant find anything I need. Like, I won't even look for it. And that is this I don't know call it a diva move or something but if you don't have those creative assets organized when you're doing anything creative which I do all the time it feels like quicksand and that's also something with my AI coursework I'm doing. I want to find a better way to keep creative assets and I think Gemini is probably going to be really good with that. But it's a little bit with internally. How do we get the assets needed into the site? Cuz we have a lot of photography, like a lot. Every installation we do, we do photographs. We also take a lot of pictures just in the wild. So, if I'm walking around the city and I see a really great bin, I will take photos of it and it usually just sits on my phone and it doesn't go anywhere. Um, and I have a lot of that on my phone, but I also have this sort of, well, how am I going to get it exactly from my phone and should because I have a ton of photographs on my phone that have nothing to do with trash, believe it or not. Um, but, you know, probably 50% of the photos on my phone are are of trash enclosures or trash. >> Your kids are like, "Oh, it's the other kid." >> Yeah. Well, I have an only child, one one daughter, and she if she looked at my phone will see she knows how many how many trash photos I have. Even when I was in Europe on a trip a couple weeks ago, I was taking photos especially in Barcelona of their trash containerization systems because they're sort of the world leader um with municipal trash in particular. And I really admire what they've done. New York City is going to be doing some of it, but every time I saw one of their really sophisticated bins, I took photos. >> Well, I wonder whether whether AI is going to be able to help with that because when I think about trying to describe the photos we take, they're all conference tables. [laughter] Oh, so what what differentiates them to me is a bunch of very subtle technical things that I'm not sure an LLM knows anything at all about. I mean, Jackie, you tell me. Can can can AI currently organize thousands of tables, thousands of pictures of basically the same thing? >> It does a really good job. Uh, for example, if you have your Google photos connected to your chat GPT paid account and you have the um paid Google account, the amount of search that is possible and the things it can do are ridiculously impressive. But I'm regularly impressed just by the basic Google search, Google photo search. I needed a handdrawn picture of a sunset or sunrise, I'm still not really sure, from my now 23-year-old daughter when she was a kid. I don't remember if she was 4, 6, 8, 10 years old. I mean, she was little and I have 40,000 photos. And so I just described it and it took, you know, point 4 seconds and there it was. I was like, "Oh yeah, that's exactly the picture I was looking for." Liz, when is your site going to be completed on up live so that anybody listening to this can take a look? >> So, we did our yearly strategy retreat on Tuesday and the deadline for the website is March 31st. >> Deadline to have it up live. >> Yes. >> Got it. >> And I think we're going to hit that. Um, but we'll see. Get a little further into it and see. >> Jackie, is this kind of a a tricky time to be redoing a website? I I I just have a sense that so much is evolving. If we were having this conversation two years from now, is the conversation going to be the same or very different? >> No, it's going to be the same. Uh what I actually love about this time and the people who maybe skipped a couple of years of updates and so now they're like, "Oh, wait. I am way behind." This is the perfect time because it's still kind of the wild west and now's the chance to go plant your flag on the Oregon Trail. and stake your claim in the AI search answers. And so I think Liz is absolutely doing the right thing at the right time. >> All right, unfortunately for this episode we are out of time, but my thanks to Paul DS, Liz Picarazzi, and Jackie Russo. Really appreciate it, guys. Thanks for sharing. One thing before you go. Everything we do at 21 Hats is created by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs to help us [music] all learn together. If you get something out of listening to these podcast episodes, consider joining the conversation. 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