Full Transcript
[Music] Welcome to the Solspace Podcast. Thanks for listening.
Mitchell: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Solspace Podcast. This is Mitchell Kimbrough. I'm your host. I'm the founder of Solspace.
What is Solspace? I'm going to tell you a story that probably does the best job I can think of to explain what it is we do.
What we do is kind of complicated. It takes a minute to lay it out and make it understandable and make it clear. But today is my second solo cast, and I normally have guests on the podcast, and I get to ask them a bunch of questions that they wouldn't normally answer if we were just at a cocktail party or on the bus together.
In the context of a podcast, you get away with more. And this solo cast is going to let me get away with speaking about something that we deal with on a regular basis at Solspace that I can't think of someone I can invite on the podcast to help me talk about it. So it's solo cast made more sense.
So what is a Solspace? So Solspace is a web development company. What kind of web development do we do? Well, the story I'm going to tell you is going to do a pretty good job of explaining it. So this past week, we had one of our clients, who's been a client for about a year and a half now, contact us asking for some help with one of their digital properties.
One of their websites is an e-commerce website, and it handles pretty big-ticket industrial manufacturing products. So five figures, you know, that's the cheapest thing you can buy off one of these websites. We have been managing their dot-com website for a while, and now we have taken over management of some of their other digital properties, this being one of them.
And this property had an inventory management problem. So this website synchronizes with an on-premises database in their main warehouse in order to get inventory to put it up on the website to show customers what is potentially available to be shipped. Any sort of purchase and fulfillment with this client of ours serving their customers ends up being a pretty involved process.
The inventory being accurate is just one of many different things that has to go right. All right, so who was it that contacted us? It was the marketing director. What was the marketing director contacting us about? An inventory management problem on a website.
What does inventory on an e-commerce website have to do with the marketing director? The marketing director's job is to build up digital marketing campaigns, real-world campaigns to drive in new business for their company. What are they doing handling digital technology? Why are they the point person for that? One of the things we've seen as we've been in business for 25 years is that digital marketers end up being responsible for things well outside of their purview. One of the reasons that happens is the digital marketer in a business, in an organization, is often one of the most digitally savvy people at the company.
So when there's a problem on the web or with a web-based or cloud-based solution, it's often the digital marketer who's the most likely person to be able to get it and improvise and figure out a solution. So that's what was happening here. This was an e-commerce system, and it was an inventory management issue, but the director of marketing found themselves responsible for and answerable for this.
And this is one of the reasons these directors of marketing find themselves answerable for or find themselves to be the point person for questions having to do with digital, anything, cloud anything, is that so many business systems are now cloud-based. So the inventory management system was cloud-based. It was a big commerce website.
And another system called Soligo was being used to integrate that with this on-premises Microsoft Access database. Now, enough of that system was cloud-based, enough of it was web-based, that the first person to call in the organization, aside from the director of IT potentially, is a marketing director who has a lot of experience and seasoning with cloud-based tools. And even more importantly, that director of marketing has relationships with people who are sort of technically equipped to get into problems like this.
So we were called. Why was all this taking place? And what does this have to do with explaining what Solspace is and does? Well, what this story sort of illustrates and helps me talk about is that the kinds of businesses that Solspace works with and other agencies like mine work with are agencies that have found themselves in a specific stage of organizational maturity, specifically with regard to digital.
So imagine a mom-and-pop business. There's do-it-yourself tools to build websites nowadays. They don't need web developers. They don't need designers. There's templates. They can actually get quite a bit done with some of these platforms like Squarespace, Shopify, and so forth. They don't really need additional help.
But when that business matures and gets more complicated and its use of digital, its use of the web gets more complicated and they start to lean into some of those technologies more to create more efficiency, to reach more customers, to do things at a greater scale, then they need to scale up their sophistication of using the web. And at that point, they reach out to, you know, a brother-in-law or a cousin or something to get a little bit extra help. And then eventually, in pretty short order, they find that they actually need that type of help in a more dedicated manner.
So they maybe hire a freelancer to come in and assist with some of these digital properties and get them set up. But as complexity evolves and as they see more return on the investment in digital in the organization, they see a need to invest more. Some choose it, but so many of the businesses that we work with feel like they're pulled into digital.
They're drawn into it almost against their will sometimes. So you graduate from a freelancer and then you move into having a relationship with a digital agency. So why do they move into that space? Well, they move into that space for two main reasons when they're graduating from working with sort of a freelancer individual, individual contributor.
That person only has so much time in the day. There's only so much scale they have to offer to take care of projects and be on call and be ready around the clock. And the other piece is there's only so much technical expertise any one person can cultivate, especially in digital and cloud-based tools like we're dealing with.
I mean, it's 2024 now and there's a lot of technology out there to stay current with. So expertise and scale. So these organizations move to an agency model where they have access to a digital agency who in turn has within their roster, sort of under their roof or within their network of professionals, a variety of different types of expertise of different levels of depth, as well as greater capacity.
So just more ability to absorb projects when they come up, like maybe some sort of a marketing project or campaign becomes urgent and they need to really throw some resources at it. You have that relationship with an agency who's already up to speed on your digital stack, your web stack, and they can get to work more quickly. So we see that a lot.
And as the complexity and sophistication of the use of digital grows, their investment with that agency grows, and then there's a time when my customer will begin to bring people in-house. So they'll start to hire full-timers, FTEs, to come in-house as web developers or digital experts. And the good businesses who do this effectively, they gradually scale that up.
So they maintain reliance on an agency partner, and then they have internal people that come in and sort of pick up some of that work. They still need that outside expertise and they still need that outside capacity, but they're starting to build up an internal team. And as an interesting side note, I had a conversation earlier this week with one of our clients who was asking, how much of your work could we farm out to Ukraine? Like how much of Solspace's billable can we send to Ukraine for a third of the price? And the reason they were asking this was because, of course, they're looking for cost savings.
And this is one of the things that happens in this evolution. A business evolves, they start to bring digital expertise in-house as full-time people, as employees who are part of the organization proper. And as far as cost goes, that tends to be one of the most cost-effective things long term that you can do.
So the investment in an outsourced agency tends to cost more because you're going to spend not more per unit, like more per hour, but you're going to spend more per project and also more per cleanup, depending on what source of integration and sort of planning and execution and expertise was brought to bear on a project and a web stack. So you can tend to create some confusion and some messes that have to be cleaned up later. But the most financially cost-effective thing is to have those full-timers in-house, but you can't leap to a point where you have 10 web developers on staff.
That's a really big leap of sophistication. You have to work your way gradually into that. So that's where a company like Solspace occupies an important place in the market.
We help businesses scale up their sophistication of their use of digital and scale up their capacity for doing projects on the web and taking advantage of what the web can offer. And we make it possible to not scale up too quickly, to scale up gradually. And a number of our clients over the years have kind of graduated from us.
They have relied on us to take care of the web properties and then they sort of evolve and they bring all that expertise in-house and then they invest even more fully in their digital properties. And we see that as a success. So this story I'm telling you about where a marketing director came to us as her go-to team to help with a problem that was not marketing.
It was definitely digital. And she was a point person because of that organization's level of sophistication at that time, she was the primary person who understood cloud, digital, APIs, integrations and that sort of thing. So I thought that was a pretty good story.
So how do you know as a business, how do you know what stage your business is in, in this evolution? Let's assume for a minute that I'm right and this is the normal state of affairs and this is normally how businesses evolve online on the web. How do you know where you are? Well, you obviously know where you are if you're using DIY tools. You know if you're using Squarespace, you know if you're using Shopify and you're happy with it, you know, it got the job done, you're up and running, you have a web presence, you're online.
You also know when you're dealing with a single contributor like a freelancer, you know, a friend of the family or something like that, who's able to come in and help you get a little bit more sophisticated and professional with your use of digital. But how do you know when it's time to hire an agency? I mentioned that a minute ago. There's two factors.
Does that individual contributor have capacity for more? Does that individual have the expertise to really understand sophisticated, complicated web technology? Up to a certain point, they're fine. After a certain point, it really pays for them to have expertise in say, integrating a website with Salesforce or building up back office digital cloud-based systems that are capable of handling inventory or handling personnel records or that type of stuff. So you want someone with some experience and seasoning there.
So once you have that pain, then you need to start reaching out and trying to connect with an agency who has more people on the roster, who has more people on the books, who can handle more different types of technical challenges. Well, how do you know when you're ready to move on from that agency? Well, this is a really slow, gradual, years-long process. In almost all cases in our client roster, there is someone technical internal already.
So there's some sort of a web developer, someone with web development capabilities, maybe someone from the IT team, maybe someone in marketing. And they're not necessarily full-time yet, but they're part-time and they are considered part of that company's team. When that person's overloaded or when that person says we have too much technical debt to do this next project that you have in mind, we need to go back and clean things up.
That's a time to reach out to an agency with some expertise, to a team of people that have multiple years’ experience handling all sorts of weird stuff on the web. That's when you know you're about to mature out of that. So when do you know to hire the next people? That starts to become easier because you start to incorporate the processes, best practices, habits, disciplines that the agency partner brought to bear on your client engagement.
You start to incorporate those internally. You sort of internalize that so you understand your web stack, you understand your sprint cycles, you understand how you're using something like Jira to manage arguably software. And you evolve to a point where what you really have internally are products that have product managers and product teams assigned to them.
So when you can see that one of your digital properties feels like a product to you, where you have a roadmap of things you want to modify over time, things you want to add to it, features you want to build out, capabilities, integrations. When you're getting into that space, you're starting to think of it as a product, which means you're thinking of an asset that needs ongoing, consistent support. You're going to start to evolve out of that agency model and into having your own internal team.
In a lot of cases, clients continue to use an agency like Solspace because we're going to have almost always more expertise, more experience than internal teams. So you can bring us into the mix and we can help you sort of short circuit some of the problem solving you have to do because we've already done it. Anyway, I thought that'd be a useful story.
Turns out that we helped the marketing director client reached out to us about this inventory management problem, and we helped her by figuring out who to ask the right questions to. That's really what this came down to. We needed to find the right person who understood the right part of the right system to resolve some of the bugs that she was being asked to fix.
So that's where the experience and the expertise came in. So there you have it, my second solo cast. There's what Solspace is.
We sort of occupy that space in a company's digital evolution, and we help you get from small, relatively unsophisticated digital properties to a place where you have actual products on the web that you're managing with internal teams. We're that bridge between those two places. So thanks for listening.
Tune in next time. I may have a guest next time. You never know.
Thank you.
[Music] You've been listening to the Solspace Podcast.