Plugging revenue leaks in your business

Hello, hello, and welcome everybody to today's webinar. Today's webinar is plugging revenue leaks in your business, just how to protect profit and reclaim thousands per year. Just going to give everyone a minute to join in and then kick things off with our first poll. But before we jump into that, would love to hear from everyone in the chat. Where's everyone calling in from today? Where's everyone located? It's nice always to see the wide variety of places people are joining from. I'm personally joining from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Yeah, would love to see where everyone else is coming from. You can always post on the right hand side of your screen. There should be a little chat function if you're over there. Awesome. So let us jump into our very first poll today. And we just love to get a little bit of sense check from everyone on today's webinar. What are your priorities at the business right now? What are you focusing on? What are you trying to fix? What are you trying to improve? Just gives a little bit of a sense check of where everyone's at and with them that way, we can also make sure that we solve some of those things here today. Cool. Seeing some people noting they want some improvements to workflow efficiency. I see some expanding services and revenue challenges. Awesome. Awesome. So let me start things off by just introducing myself. My name is Evan Benson. I'm a senior key account manager here at Ignition where we help professional service businesses automate their contracts, billing, and collections so that they get paid faster and stop leaving money on the table. I spend a lot of my days talking with agencies and other professional service businesses about where revenue quietly slips away, and which is what today's session is all about. Thrilled to be your host and even more excited to be joined by Jordan Snyder from Token Creative. Let's dig in. Before we jump into today's stuff, just want to mention that today's webinar is being recorded and will be shared out after with any of the resources we mentioned on today's webinar. If you can't stay for the whole thing, don't worry, we're going to share it out afterwards. Quick little agenda for today, start with some introductions. We're going to talk a little bit about some of the common revenue leaks that you might see, talk a little bit about some real world business success, and then at the end, we'll do a little bit of Q and A, also show a little bit of a demo about some of the tools that we talk about today to make sure everyone can see those things live. A little bit of an introduction on Ignition. If you're not familiar with who we are, Ignition, we help businesses get paid faster, reduce scope creep, and streamline proposals all in one place, trusted by over eight thousand five hundred businesses in the professional services space. Now, with that, no addition, I'd love to know a little bit about what you know about Ignition. It'll pop another poll over here for everyone to interact with, just understand where everyone's at. Cool. Cool. A couple existing ignition users, a couple of new people who are just checking ignition out for the first time. Very, very exciting. Let us introduce now my cohost for today, Jordan Snyder of Token Creative Services. Jordan, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Token Creative? Hey, everybody. Thanks for the intro, Evan. So my name is Jordan. I'm one of our cofounders and our CTO here at Token Creative Services. I am by trade a computer programmer. However, I fell in love with the world of businesses and agencies, and I was lucky enough to cofound my agency with my best friend by the name of Mohsen, who is our CTO. And we started our business simply with a mission to help people, to learn about the world of businesses, explore the skills that we and our friends at the time had, and just meaningfully help businesses and make impacts in lives. And so we're lucky enough to have been around for almost ten years now. We are born and raised in the Kitchener, Waterloo in Ontario area. So really close to where you're at, Evan, there in Toronto. We've been using Ignition for at least four years, I think. And, yeah, we've we've been loving the software and haven't looked back since. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for the the quick intro. So let us jump into a bit about why we're here today, which is revenue leaks. One thing is clear, businesses leak revenue through operational and pricing inefficiencies even when there's really strong demand from clients and then clients are ready to buy. So we've done some research across the board with across the agencies that we work with and across the industry. Sixty three percent of agencies report cash flow issues. Forty percent say they struggle to confidently raise prices. Twenty two percent rarely or never review prices at all. That one makes me cringe. I I hate to see that. So, Jordan, can you tell me what were some early signs of identifying that token creative was potentially leaking profits in some places? You know, you know, I think we as a business, we're always kind of afraid to, look at the aftermath of a project. And and then by that, I mean, you know, you go into something regardless of how you price yourself, you think you have an idea of how much profit you might get over a period of time. And, you know, I think a lot of it was sort of, you know, you know, don't look, don't don't listen to it. You're better off that you don't. But when you really start to pay attention to it, the numbers just weren't adding up. There there was something off. And in our case, there were lots of little things off, which I'm sure we can get into. But, you know, you you plan and hope for the best and things never really go quite as well as you might hope them to. Definitely. Definitely. From what you see across, you know, the industry, like like, where do you think most businesses are, like, kind of leaving money on the table? You know, everybody wants to be, you know, friendly and personable. And I think, our need to try to satisfy our clients sometimes gets the better of us. And I think that a lot of times we end up going above and beyond doing things that are out of scope or maybe just pro bono bonus work and, while that's only really nice, that does eventually come back to bite you a little bit. And I think that's where a lot of people struggle. It's maintaining that client relationship, expectations, and trying to meet them where they're at to make them happy. Yeah. Definitely. Definitely agree. I feel like I see people all the time. They kind of forget that a lot of their clients themselves are business owners and would understand the the requirements of getting paid and because they can put themselves in that shoes. And I think we forget about that sometimes because we like to be nice, because we value these client relationships so much. Perfect. Cool. Going to jump in another quick little poll and based on that, what we saw, when was the last time you and your business actually raised your prices? Are you doing that regularly? Is that a built in process? Are you like that twenty two percent that pretty much rarely does? This is always a very interesting question, I think, for some people, because they have to now think about it and say, when did I actually raise my prices? Some people who do project work assume that they're doing it all the time, but they never actually do it systematically and can tend to keep the same prices and models over and over again. Awesome. Let's take a little look at what we kind of call the pricing puzzle. How businesses are actually packaging and pricing their services. I want to show this kind of like a little bit of a mixed bag across the agencies that we talk to from our revenue leak report. You know, it's really all over the place, right? So we're seeing here on this chart, you know, twenty eight percent of people use some sort of subscription style service, maybe some tiers and bundles involved there. Twenty eight percent about the same using hourly billing as their primary mode of pricing and modeling services. Slightly smaller, twenty five percent just typically do things that are project based, obviously with some varying levels of access and a few other little other items. Jordan, at Token, where did you start with when you kind of launched the business? How were you pricing your services back then? Hourly, honestly. I think for a lot of businesses, you know, when we're work to use used to working in retail settings or just, you know, on our own in standard jobs. I think hourly is where we tend to go. You know, we trade our time for value, and I think that's what we thought of as ourselves as an agency first. It's sort of the easiest way to get started, but obviously, you know, it is definitely not the best. And I think, sometimes people are also afraid to introduce pricing complexity. Right? Like, it going beyond just hourly to say, you know, we could do, you know, something fixed. We could do something project based. You could do something retainer. Like, there is no one size fits all model that I think works best with agencies. But, you know, I I know for us, hourly is the simplest way to get started, but that as we matured, we learned and grew and, you know, as such, so did our pricing models. Yeah. I think price I think hourly is is feel safe. Right? It's it's kind of no matter what happens, no matter how well we scoped things out originally, if we have no idea how to scope things out originally, hourly is so so safe. If additional complexity comes up, I never have to have really any major extra conversations. I just tack on a few extra hours and that's how it ends up. I understand why people start there for sure, but like you've alluded to, there's obviously some better ways to get into that. So why did you shift towards more kind of productized services and, you know, alongside using Ignition? How did that how did that process look? You know, I think it was it was in part, you know, our profit margins for sure. Also in part some feedback that we might get from our clients directly. But, you know, as an agency, you know, the the model, the modality of running an agency is a very well known thing. And I remember when we were first, you know, growing and starting things out, we participated in a lot of different partner programs that taught us about different agencies, and, you know, we really tried to learn from the best that was out there. And I found that as we matured and as we became a little bit more confident, we felt a little bit more opinionated about the way we should or should not price our services. And I think it was very natural progression for us to go from something hourly, you know, which which provided some simplicity. It provided us some safeguards for unknowns. But, you know, eventually, that just doesn't meet the mark when you're working with small to medium sized enterprises. And as we grew and as our confidence did as well, we found that we could, be a little bit more flexible with our pricing in a way that didn't necessarily introduce complexity. Like, we weren't, necessarily drowning our customers in language that they didn't quite understand with overages and subscriptions and termination clauses. There's a sweet spot between, you know, pricing simplicity, but making sure that, the scope itself is the most important thing that clients understand going into it. Awesome. And you alluded to something there, kinda like I said, you know, price hourly is safe, but you alluded to confidence as being a big part of that. Right? And I find one thing I see over and over again with the firms that I work with is that what happens when you do hourly is the stuff that you're really good at, the stuff that you're absolutely fantastic at and you have a great team or you make a new hire, someone who's really good at things, that actually you make less money from that when you count up the hours at the end of the project. Either you end up losing your revenue from doing the same amount of work in less time, or you end up starting to just tack on hours to make sure the prices make sense, at which point you're no longer really doing hourly billing, are you? You're just setting some fixed prices for yourself. So you talked about that change. You know, how did you find clients respond to to kind of the new the new way of pricing services and the new way of doing things? We we were, relieved that it was actually a relatively simple process. I think as long as you explain a lot of the why of what you're doing is, like, you know, new clients, they weren't necessarily as impacted by changes to pricing because, know, that was all they knew us for. But it was the existing clients that I think had the most resistance to moving over, you know, during renewal cycles, changing the way that you showed their proposals. Made them feel a little bit anxious, but I think, again, it just comes down to why. You need to explain, you know, the sophistication that can go into running, you know, complex marketing retainers that take four or five different team members. And, you know, as long as I think we took the time to, you know, sit down with our clients, answer their questions, but, explain the why of what we were doing. It all inevitably made sense. From one business owner to another, it just made sense. Yeah. And one thing I've seen time and time again is as teams get slightly bigger and bigger, something as simple, quote unquote, as simple as hourly billing becomes very complex once you have these advanced hourly matrices where this person makes this much, this person makes this much. Half the time, I feel like it gets just as complicated. And sometimes in in that modality that you described, it can end up being more expensive for your clients. If you continue to hit them at that same hourly rate at whatever increments you do, you're not necessarily getting to the right price point, and you might end up being overcharging them as a result. Yep. Yep. Definitely. Definitely. Cool. I mean, we had a little quote from you here that I thought was was really good that, you know, a little bit you know, while we're sharing the benefits of shifting to recurring revenue or, you know, different productizing services, and we know the hourly models are still popular. You know, Ignition itself, our tool, like, is kinda, like, designed to accommodate different billing styles. I think, like what you've mentioned, like, there's no one size fits all. There's kind of different projects need different structures and different work duties and different structures. That's what I love about Ignition and where we're at currently today, is the ability to use different models for different stuff. No matter how you price and bill, as long as you're keeping the collecting and payment simple, as long as the proposal can be nice and clear and communicative to the clients. Yeah. I think, anything to add here to to what you mentioned? No. And and not to use too much jargon, but I think it is truly the flexibility that the that that the profile of the technician allows us to do, which is, you know, the reason that we are so successful with it. There is no agency only doing retainers or no hourly things. Like, there are definitely deposits and milestone billings and and and fixed rates and monthly recurring fees and, know, like, all of those play a factor. So it's nice to know that we can price ourselves flexibility flexibly and know that Ignition is right there with us. Yeah. One thing I see time and time again, I I bring on, get new people that I work with, new firms that I work with and they come and they say, My goal is to shift our billing model to having most people on subscription or most people on monthly or something like that. The reality is that you don't snap your fingers and make that happen. If we didn't support everything, you could have a couple firms, customers that you run through Ignition, and then the rest of your business runs elsewhere and suddenly have ten different systems managing all your clients and all your payments. I think it's really important that we make sure we again meet people where they're at with where they want to be. Would love to jump into another quick little poll here. Just would love to know, like you right now, your business, like what's your primary pricing model? Like, you find, you know, again, is it mostly hourly? Do things on a monthly retainer? Love to hear where people are currently at. And maybe maybe we've changed a few minds as well with this conversation here today, Joe. Yeah. Monthly retainers are a really good place to be in our space, I think, sure. Gets, you know, make sure that we get the value out of a monthly offering with the customer. But, I mean, for the customer, it more or less like guarantees, you know, certain allotment of services, which I think is a lot of what they wanna know is happening at the end of the day that they're getting what they're paying for. Yeah, definitely. And and consistency and reliability. Right? You know, they wanna know that if you can do the work with the client regularly throughout the years, it's probably a lot easier and simpler than one giant project at the end of the year or something like that. It can spread things out a little bit and a little more. Awesome. Let's now talk a little bit about especially as we talk about moving to more fixed prices, maybe moving to monthly retainers, the scary part of that, the part that often is a reason why people stick to hourly is a bit about scope creep, which we consider a little bit of a spiral because scope creep can come out of nowhere. It's often, I think, the most overlooked leak in business operations. Here are a couple of things that I always see pop up. The quick asks that end up during profitability. Can you tweak this little thing here? Could you just add a few extra things here? Would you jump in on an extra meeting or just get a few minutes of your time? These are all small requests that are common in the client life cycle and seem small in the moment, and you do them to keep them happy, but they're profit drainers. Right? Jordan, these are the exact things that you hear from people all the time, I'm sure. These keep me up at night. They make me up they wake me up too early in the morning, and they are the reason why I don't sleep at night. It because they are they are so simple. They are so light lighthearted seemingly. You're like, oh, yeah. I can Of course, I'd be happy to do this for you or, oh, you have renewals coming up. Why don't we just throw that in for you as well? But that is it is a dangerous game. Yeah. Because it it compounds. Right? Like, you know, one thing turns two things turns to three things or one thing across every single client and suddenly those are hours and hours of your week. I think if we can take away something from this webinar, one thing to take away is look out for these. Let the little red flags or alarm bells go off when you get an email that has these things mentioned, when you hear these things on a meeting. Make sure you're factoring that in and keeping track of those requests. Like I mentioned, these small asks have a very real cost. Even a few unbilled hours each week can turn into thousands in loss margin every year. Again, thousands every single year. And, like, you know, what could you possibly do with that money, that extra profit if you could, you know, put it back into your business or, you know, throw it your pocket, go on vacation? That's a lot of things that you probably again, all added up by a couple little small paper cuts. So from our our revenue report, that we we ran, you know, seventy eight percent of agencies say they rarely or only sometimes charge for scope creep. Get seventy eight percent. Like, they just everyone's doing it. It's perfectly normal, but it's a huge, you know, profit loss. Fifty seven percent of agencies estimate that they're losing, like, a thousand to five thousand dollars in out of scope work every single month. That's a lot of your time. That's a lot of your team's time that's going that's not getting up, as revenue. Thirty percent of them actually reported losses over five thousand dollars per month, so it's it's massive. And only one percent of agencies we talk to say that scope could cost them zero dollars and that they bill for all out of scope work. So maybe that's kind of what you we should be aiming for. Right? We wanna be at closer to that one percent where where we feel like we're capturing revenue from all of the work that we're doing. So, Jordan, you know, looking at these numbers, again, we'd love to hear, you know, in your early days before you you guys were quite so seasoned, like, what did scope creep kinda look like? Yeah. Well, I mean, when you when you were younger business or newer business with maybe, like, a smaller pool of clients, I think you were so adamant on keeping them around and keeping everybody happy. You know, it was very much like an overeager, just going above and beyond, just trying to make your client happy. And it wasn't even that we were thinking about scope is that we were just, you know, thinking to ourselves, know, how do we get this client to renew? How do we make them happy? How do we make their experience with us the best it could possibly be, to our own detriment inevitably where, sure, you might go above and beyond. But if a client doesn't necessarily understand the value or if they have a misunderstanding for the perceived value of what you might be doing, you know, for them to off the cuff ask you for updates or new designs or changes to an already completed web page. That might seem like a simple ask from them, but the work that's involved on your side, if it doesn't get communicated well to the client, they think that you spend thirty minutes doing a quick update. Meanwhile, you know, you have a couple people spending a couple hours on that in a day. And so for us, it was just being, maybe a little bit too nice for our own detriment and not necessarily, standing on our agreements and our processes to define what was actually in or out of scope. Yeah. Definitely. Right? Like, as as long as clients understand, like I said, they're also Muzu business owners. Like, they they can understand where you're coming from, but this is your area of expertise. They don't know all the intricacies of what they're asking about, and so it's important to kinda bring them along for that journey. So, you know, now with your clients, like, what do you do to kinda define and enforce, you know, those boundaries now within the scope of the project? You know, you you you can you can say to yourself that you're gonna do something when a client asks or reaches out, but it it is very much like the tooling and the process around how you handle that, which I think makes the biggest difference. Because if you don't have the right technology or process to, enforce agreements to easily add to something for maybe, like, like an ad hoc bill or something like that. It makes it really difficult on your team to enforce that because it's very manual and time consuming, but it also makes it very disruptive on your client where you might be sending whole new SOWs, all new copies of agreements, going back and forth on email about things, having them, you know, pay a new invoice for whatever difference might be. And so today, you know, we live in a world where we use a tool like Ignition to, you know, very easily govern project specifics and then have the tools in place to say, okay. You wanna add this? Like, awesome. You know, here's a quick link that you can check out and sign. Payment goes through automatically. So it's gotta be a little bit more seamless than the manual intervention that I think it really took before. And so now when you have that sort of thing in place, it makes it really seamless for us to not only manage and handle those, but make it easier on our clients to actually understand as they go, what might be changing as part of their request. Yeah, definitely. And I think, an an aspect that I think is obviously underrated as well. I've seen some firms who have really do really good, like, set really good contracts and have really nice parameters at the outset, but how does their team actually see that information? The team that's doing the day to day, do they actually know what's on that contract, is that just one admin person at the business who sent out the contract once and they did a great job of building it out. But the rest of the team who's doing the work on the day to day, they don't actually even know what's what's in and out of scope. So being given visibility across the business is so important, and then I think timeliness with it is also important. So that's where the tool can be important. If you can get off the phone with a client who just had a request and very in a timely manner, get something in front of them for their approval or an invoice in front of them as it's top of mind is a very different conversation than sending them something two weeks later or an invoice a month later. Like, oh, remember that extra couple hours? And they're like, I don't remember that at all. And it's a very different kind of, proposition. Right? Oh, absolutely. How many times you're gonna get a client sign? Oh, I I didn't think it was gonna cost this much, or, I don't remember saying that, and then you're in trouble. Exactly. It's like he said, she said, and and then no one even knows what this invoice is for, and and that's it could be a total, total mess. Cool. So, yeah, I'd love to know I would love to see some stories from the chat, and Jordan, I think I'll get you to share some stories as well. What do you think what's the most ridiculous out of scope request you've ever gotten from a client? Something that is very clearly not part of the project, but a client has has chalked on extra. I feel like everybody's gotta have at least one good story for this kind of thing. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Jordan, do you have a do you have a little a fun anecdote to to share? I'd love to hear from you first. Yeah. So we we we were involved in this website project. We were supporting, like, a small local cafe restaurant with, like, just a simplistic website, like a landing page and a place for people to go to to understand that they're, a new business in the community. This business was was was pretty fragmented, and there were two guys that we were working with. So long story short, we delivered this very simple website experience, which is effectively just like two or three pages, only for the cofounders to disagree about what was delivered and then have the cofounder, which wasn't involved in the project, after the website is done, come to us with a huge list of complaints of things one that weren't included in the website, which was wildly frustrating, not only because the website was actually done at that point, but that this other person was not only unaware of what the whole agreement originally was going into it, but they were asking for things that were never ever ever discussed. And the worst part about it at the very end, I remember they they didn't go through with anything, but they threatened legal action. And it was for, like, you know, couple thousand dollars for, like, a super simple website. And you're just thinking to yourself, like, gosh. Like, how how did we get here? Like, how can there be such a fundamental misunderstanding of what we were actually hired to do versus what your colleague is now asking us to deliver. I love that. Right? And it's like, yes, it's like you weren't involved in these conversations. You never put together the request. You just saw the final result and decided that it wasn't what we asked for. It's crazy. I've seen those things time and time again. I see people I can speak on behalf of the firms that I work with. I hear all the time about firms getting asked to do work that isn't even in their area of expertise, firms that are being asked to do things that are well and above and beyond. Again, we see firms all the time. I work with some firms that are in agency spaces that maybe don't do websites that are doing websites for their clients because they realize halfway through a marketing project that they actually need that. I'm like, Do you actually get paid for that? Why is this not a service line item that you're doing? They're like, Well, I just just feel like it's going above and beyond. I feel like it's helping. In the end, it's helping the client, but probably hurting them overall. Awesome. Awesome. Let's talk a little bit about, we'll call it the billing bottleneck. Process of actually manually invoicing and delayed payments and that impact that it has on cash flow. We talked about timeliness a few moments ago. This is very, very relevant. Looking across the industry again, ninety seven percent of the agencies from our report reported late payments from clients. It's clearly a universal thing that everyone seems to deal with. Sixty five percent of agencies say that at least twenty five to thirty percent of their invoices are paid late, so that's not just experiencing it once or twice, that's experiencing it across a huge subset of their clients. Agencies typically say fifty six percent of agencies say it takes between fifty and sixty days past invoice due date to get paid. That's invoice due date. That's not just invoice, you know, raise date, that's invoice due date. So if you're, you know, add net thirty onto that, then who knows where that ends up? And then eighty four percent of agencies spend three to ten hours each month chasing down those unpaid invoices. You wanna talk about revenue leak? You wanna talk about waste of time, frankly, those unbilled hours in almost every single case of just sending emails, sending reminders, picking up the phone and calling people. Yeah, I can't even imagine what that possibly can do to to a a business's bottom line. Jordan, I think you mentioned in a conversation before that Token had forty thousand dollars in AR before, you know, making some of these, you know, business changes and moving to automated payments. What was happening? Sorry, Evan. I think I've had out there for a second. Was funny for us is we got ourselves into a situation where we it it was a state of mind, I think, for us. So we ended up with a huge amount of accounts receivable debt because we were invoicing our clients and and being willing to be paid after something was delivered. And I think that comes back to our confidence as an agency again, but we wanted to deliver something awesome that you were excited about, and then we got paid. And I think that's a, like, a good mindset to have. We want your clients to be happy, but it meant that, you know, every single client is getting a delayed bill. So if they don't pay at the beginning of the month, they pay at the end of the month. And over time, are gonna get laid, a couple invoices will be missed. And I think for us, what we were doing is you're trying to be too friendly with our clients. And we said, oh, you missed last month's bill, now it's the next month, but, you know, it's okay. You'll pay us. You know, we'll keep going this next month. And that might happen one or two times with one or two clients, and then you end up in a place where you've got multiple clients who are months late and you're, you know, still trying to deliver those good services. And that just gets you into a lot of trouble really, really fast. And so so for us, it was it was a mindset change where we said, let's not bill at the end of the month. Let's bill at the top of the month. And, you know, disputes around people being satisfied and services that are delivered, like, there are contractual terms which will speak to how we mediate those kinds of things. So it's about being confident enough to know that we're gonna do a good job, but we need to get paid for this work upfront. So, you know, I can pay my employees. We can pay for these tools that are gonna deliver all of these awesome things for you. And so, again, you know, we weren't necessarily the most confident business. We were just trying to appease everybody and make everybody happy and, you know, eventually it became our detriment for sure. Yeah. I had a I had a very fun conversation with a firm recently who we were discussing this exact thing of and they brought the point like, I thought sometimes you pay at the end, sometimes you pay at the beginning. They were like, When you go to a restaurant, you eat your meal, and then you pay your bill at the end. I was like, Yeah, that is true, but the restaurant doesn't let you leave unless you pay the bill. Not exactly the same context. I think that was a good reminder. If you order a coffee, you pay upfront and you get your coffee. I think there's a couple of different cases. The forty thousand dollars you mentioned, I've seen double, I've seen triple that at some firms. I've seen some firms, walking into me, joining me at Ignition and saying, that is problem a that they need to solve before we even, you know, fix, you know, our our onboarding process, before we even think about doing proposals, like, let's just clean up this. And sometimes it's just easy as just giving clients different payment options quickly, efficiently, setting up reminders. Just getting those getting those numbers down can be good. So, yeah, tell me a little bit, like, like, what were the kind of process and systems changes that helped kind of flip that that forty k AR into into closer to zero? It was it was, you know, it's it's really simple as, like, the tools that we use to enforce the process and some of our agreement language as well. Like, if if you were using something as simple as QuickBooks, not not that there's anything wrong with that software, just that it wasn't necessarily comprehensive enough for for to work with us because, you know, issuing invoices, manually logging in, sending reminders, sending links, following up with those people was, like, simply not working. And so what we needed was a tool that would do, you know, automatic reminders, automatic payment collection, you know, having a single space for clients to go to view that kind of information. And I think one of the most important things for us was was, again, like, billing at the beginning of the month, but having a sort of contingency year in your agreement that says, know, you might be signing on to a six month or twelve year deal. But if you get, like, a month or two behind, like, we we wish it the right to pause things and talk about what the issue is so that we can, you know, settle those debts before we continue on for those services. And so wasn't necessarily like a termination clause or anything like that, but it is setting an upfront expectation with your client as business professionals that says, this is how we're gonna handle this process together amicably. Yeah. Getting clients, like customer and clients or prospects aligned on all those things early, right, makes it easier to deal with them later. Right? Sometimes it feels like awkward conversations to have at the outside of a relationship, but they really do you know, what you know, setting those terms up initially on the contract and in conversations makes those future conversations so much easier. So now that you've made those changes, you know, what does billing look like now at the firm? Oh, gosh. Honestly, it it's not even something that we worry about too much. Right? Because, like, honestly, like, everything is automatic. Everything, you know, ignition based off the proposals and the dates, like, all of our services are getting billed automatically upfront. I'll set myself a reminder if I have to for something like a deposit or, you know, something being marked as paid on completion. You know, very, very minimal workflows. Everything gets billed upfront at the beginning of month across all of our clients. We have relatively consistent billing periods, so most of our clients fall on the first or the fifteenth of a month in terms of paying us. So, you know, there are certain days of the week or days of the month that we might, you know, look for payment bounces or things like that, but there's really not much work for us to do because the payments are just happening. If something fails, there's an automatic collection process. I know I don't need to follow-up with my clients because I know Ignition is sending those reminder emails. If it comes to pass that, you know, it can't get auto collected and and the client hasn't tried to add a new payment method or something, like, sure. I'll give somebody a call and email somebody. But it's it's really rare, and our clients have the expectation now that if you don't pay this bill, like, we are gonna pause services until you can talk to us about what's going on. So, honestly, financial stuff, payments, invoices, contracts, it was probably the thing that we spent most time on as a young agency, and it is now probably what we spend the least time on as a mature agency. Awesome. That is so great to hear. I think if you're listening to this webinar right now and maybe at any point you've said, well, maybe that wouldn't work for us. Getting paid upfront wouldn't work for us. Getting paid monthly wouldn't work for us. I really implore you to think and be about like, well, what would that reality actually look like? Just think about what Jordan just mentioned there and not having to stress about bills and invoices and payments. That can really change how you feel like the health of your business is at. Let's take a look at Chaos to Clarity. How do we actually turn not only the scope creep into disaster situations, how can we actually flip that on its head and turn that into profit? There's a number of levers to get automation going. Having a system for confidence, consistent pricing, scope control, and clear client communication, and then getting paid on time every single time, There's a lot of workflow gaps that most businesses experience. On the flip side of all these things, inconsistent pricing, vague scoping or no scoping at all, and accepting late payments or accepting that as a reality. We can use automation and tools to solve these things and end up right here. Across these three, Jordan, which of these leaks feel most familiar and which one do you think would be the easiest to fix you know, if if you were starting out or or dealing with helping a firm? Know, I think it's it's scope control and and more so maybe a little bit clear client communication. I think we in the agency world, you know, we speak a lot of jargon. There's a lot of stuff that we do when we talk about that our clients maybe don't even understand. And that's okay. Like, they hire us to be the experts to do that. But it takes a certain level of translation to talk to a client at their level to say, hey, like, you know, this is what this means. This is this is how we're going to approach this. And so it's not just about sending them beautiful proposals and massive documents and agreements to go through and, you know, very, very well articulated scopes. You know, those things are important, but, you know, we're humans. And and it comes down to, like, how you talk to your client about it and the way you build the relationship around that. It should be less of a here's your agreement. You know, we're a black box. Don't worry about what's going on on the inside. It is more so just like taking your client along for the ride, making it fun, you know, the positivity of something. If you have a really good success in the project, helping them understand why things flow a certain way, talking them through a report that you'd might share over. You know? And and it sounds really silly to say, but something as small and fundamental as just client communication, in a human way can can really go a long way. I can I I can send you huge copy of AI generated text and summaries and all of that sort of stuff, but if this is the point in that a lot of clients just need another human to talk to them about what's going on and help them understand? Yeah. I've I've seen that time and time again. And I've you know, anytime I see firms that have deal with any sort of client disputes or disagreements, and and that's an issue that they struggle with, having a legal the legal part taken care of is super important. It's crucial. That's that's the backup. Right? That is the the thing you can fall back on in case things go totally, off off center. But to prevent it even from getting off center in the first place is the relationship. The relationship is at the core of it there, having the expectations set, having that real human to human relationship with your clients. That's gonna prevent you ever having to get to needing to pull out the legal document in the court of law or something like that. What would your advice be, Jordan? What would you give to business owners who know that they are not here yet, not confident with their pricing, not scoping things out, not getting paid on time? You know yeah. What would you what advice would you give them? I think sometimes business owners can be a little bit of, adverse to change and disruption, and I think your confidence in in your skills and your products in your services speaks to the way you might handle these sorts of things. You you know, and I would just stress that, like, be confident in the good work that you do, knowing that you and your team are probably putting their best foot forward. And and this is important because, ultimately, the way you communicate, the way you control pricing, you you are enabling yourself to do a good job. So if you cut yourself short, you cut your team short, you cut your profit short, that innately inhibits your ability to do good work or to to fund more projects for your team or or buy those awesome tools that you make your clients happy. So I don't want people to think that the changes to your pricing models or the increase in pricing is necessarily like a negative thing or that your clients are gonna hate it or, you know, you don't don't have assumptions going into it. I think inflation is a thing. If prices are going up regardless of the product or services that it is, People are human. People understand that things are gonna change. And that by doing right by yourself, in your business, in your team, it's only going to help you do better work for your clients. So, you know, have faith, trust yourself, and know, a lot of this stuff can sometimes be inherently experimental. You might change your pricing, but, you know, you're looking for the feedback from your clients, you know, your ability to, you know, do good weight work based off what those margins give you. So I I would just encourage everybody to to be bold and try new things and experiment and find something that really works for you for your unique scenario. I love that. I love that. Right? It's it's it's it's try something. Don't be afraid of making changes. Don't be afraid of those changes not being perfect. Right? And and eventually you'll be able to settle on something. The last thing you wanna see anyone's business do is just get married to one way of doing things and and never even look at the opportunity to change. Because you've probably done quite well with your business and a lot of people have, but doesn't mean you can't do better, doesn't mean processes can improve, and doesn't mean that those little problems that you're dealing with on a database or pain points aren't just part of the fabric. Those are things that potentially can be squashed and removed and suddenly you're in an even better spot. We went out through these numbers together, Jordan, a little bit like what you found the success with Ignition. You said thirty percent revenue growth since using Ignition, eighty plus hours per month saved on the manual invoicing and follow ups, forty three ks in AR eliminated. Would you Think about Ignition, what would you never go back to doing now that you've kind of implemented Ignition as a It's kinda funny because I think these numbers are almost understated in in a way as well because that, like like, our agency has grown much more than thirty percent since joining Ignition because we're, you getting more money from the projects that we have, and we've got more flexibility in the way we price. And I was I I was the guy spending those eight hours, and I think I was spending a little bit more than that over time, especially for some especially tricky clients. And I think what's not represented on this slide is, like, the stress of having to hate to follow-up and bug these people and spend the manual time doing that. We are we are business owners. We are agency operators. There's a lot better things that we can be do than writing nice emails about following up and sharing links. You know, I think we would just we we can never go back to not having Ignition because, like, we have fundamentally changed the way our business operates, and it is foundationally with Ignition. And I just don't think that there is a world where we could ever go back to using QuickBooks as our source of truth for all of our financial matters. And how do you think now about, like, scaling and growth, now versus, let's say, like, two, three years ago? I mean, before, I was very preoccupied with man hours, headcounts, and I think that is, like, the enemy of a lot of business owners is, like, how do I scale without adding headcount? Because that's where all the expenses come into play. And I think that at its core is is why I think we can scale a lot better than we used to because, you know, our process before might involve manually creating agreements, manual red line review process, signatures, Then we send this proposal, and then we send these emails for onboarding. The sophistication that happens through Ignition where you sign a proposal, you add your payments, you sign up, you add your card, you read the terms, you get the automatic email replies, which then introduce you to, like, an account executive or customer success manager. It it all happens in a way where I'm not thinking about scale in terms of how many employees I have, but in how effectively we have orchestrated our tool and process to take on that work for us. Awesome. Awesome. Yep. And there was another little quote from you here, which is just kind of about the predictable cash flow and and, you know, the kind of cycles that those can create when you're struggling with that versus when it's, you know, a problem that's been solved. Anything anything to add there? No. Predictable cash flow is everything for any business owner. And if you know where you're headed, you know where you've come, then you you have a better opportunity for success, for helping your team, your employees that count on you every day, and your clients who hired you to do a good job. And if and if that is there, if predictable cash flow can be there, then I really think that you can do a better job of of helping everybody else in the process. Perfect. Perfect. Well said. So with with that, we've talked a bunch about Ignition. So I'd love to kind of just do a quick little demo, just share a little bit about, you know, show Ignition in action. And so the proposal is kind of the the kind of core piece of ignition. It's the actual process that a client goes through when you're onboarding them or when you're engaging them for new services. One piece of the kind of ignition puzzle. But let's go. My proposal here, this is imagine a client got emailed this proposal, they've opened it up in their browser, and mine starts off with a little bit of an overview about my firm, which is called BrightSparks. I built out this webpage, couple testimonials in here, built in a couple of things to talk about the firm and what I'm going to be offering. Mine has a little link right here that says, View Proposal, that takes them into the full proposal and engagement contract process. My proposal kicks off with a little introduction, cover letter, and a little intro video as well that I can use my personality and share a little bit about it myself. I have all the bells and whistles on this proposal. You could also have much less if it's a much more straightforward project that you don't need all the bells and whistles. This proposal I've created has three different options. Different packages that the client can pick between that have different services and different inclusions, different levels of kind of service available for clients, some fixed costs in there as well. Client can review what's included, see what works best for them, and they can choose their package. Now we get into really the contract. This is the meat and potatoes. This is the scope we kind of talked about the outlining of deliverables, clearly outlined, nice and readable for the client. They can understand what's gonna be included in their packages. This engagement that I am proposal I've created here also has some add ons, so available add ons the client can potentially opt into. Not only packages they can pick between, but also potentially a little menu of extra services I can get them to go for. These are nice little upsell opportunities for things that maybe didn't have the chance to talk about in initial scoping, but client can then add things on. Based on all those selections, we have a nice clear breakdown outlining what pricing is going to look like. So in this case, maybe an upfront cost plus some monthly recurring fees. Like we mentioned before, this can be kind of whatever you need it to be though. Right? This could be stuff due on completion. This could be some stuff that's maybe quoted out hourly, maybe just some other services here and there. Whatever billing structure you're following, can build out an engagement and ignition that is suited for that. The best piece of this is that payment is directly built into this proposal process. So while the client is going through reviewing their contract, they also can be prompted to put in their payment details. That's what turns this stuff here on the pricing schedule, not just a, you know, block of text, but to an actually actionable schedule of payments that is going to be executed once the client signs their engagement. What's cool, you can make this as a mandatory process, so a client can't even sign the engagement until they put their payment details in. If you're reengaging an existing client who's already signed a proposal maybe a year ago or six months ago, the payment details are saved, so it's even quicker and easier for them to sign their engagement or update to a different payment method if they want to. All that's left is the additional terms and conditions, so any additional legalese that I need to put into my engagements, maybe something your insurance company has said that you need to put on your contracts, or maybe just some basically written terms and conditions like Jordan talked about that you just want to be on the same page about with the firm. With the client you're working with goes in here, fine checks the box, puts in their name, and they sign and accept their proposal. Lastly, what's super, super cool is you then have a next steps page, which can kind of streamline the process from signing the engagement all the way into actually executing the work. Maybe I have some next steps for the client to kind of go through. Again, maybe an introduction video that I want the client to go to now that I'm welcoming them as a new client. Speaking of next steps, what are your next steps? Based on what you've seen here today, we'd love to hear a little bit about what you are looking for. You want to learn a little bit more about Ignition, you want to get set up with a free trial, or you just want us to send you over the resources and we're good there. While you're filling out that poll, would love to run through a couple of questions that we got through on the Q and A. And so me and Jordan can kinda split these based on which ones we wanna answer. So someone's asking, we're still doing manual invoicing in QuickBooks. Can Ignition integrate with that, or do you need to fully switch platforms? I can answer that one. Ignition typically will often work alongside your QuickBooks. Ignition directly integrates with QuickBooks. What that means is those schedules of payments that we have, that information can sync over to your QuickBooks. So if you have a bookkeeper or an accountant that needs to track your revenue and everything like that, all that stuff gets recorded in QuickBooks. Everything gets automatically synced over, things get marked as paid. You still have your books and your ledger all in great shape, but Ignition is just taking care of kind of the payments or reminders or or the actual creation of the invoices themselves. We'll take another look at the q and a. This is a good one. Jordan, maybe you can take this one, but what would you say to a business owner who knows they're undercharging or too flexible in scope, but worried about rocking the boat with their existing clients? Yeah. Existing expectations are certainly the the trickiest thing to navigate, I think. I I I would say don't necessarily let that stop you, but know that it's going to take an extra conversation with your customer. And and sometimes, you know, you don't you don't necessarily have to justify yourself, but you could explain the value to them about how this is gonna be better for them. Maybe it maybe it does mean, you know, more simplistic pricing model. Maybe they get more services for the same price. Maybe it guarantees a better price or that they don't get overcharged necessarily. I think the best way to do it, though, for sure is is at the time of renewal. Absolutely. Find any opportunities to pivot, see if there are any sorts changes that your customer wants to make, and then and then bring it up organically as a part of that renewal conversation. You know, timing is everything, and I think that for a lot of our clients, as long as they they understand what you're trying to do, then, they're more amicable to something new. Yeah, totally agree. Then this last one, I think this is probably good for you, Jordan, as well. Once you realize that it's time to make some changes at the business, how did you bring the rest of the team long fry? A little bit of a change management question, but yeah, how'd you get the rest of your team on board? Or are there any people who are opposed to making these kinds of changes? We'd love to hear, some some No. I think I think at the end of the day, you know, the team wants to get paid for the good work that they do. And and, you know, of course, anybody that works at a certain business wants to know that the business is doing well and profitable. And these sorts of changes almost always add value and confidence to your team and the work that you're doing. And I think in our case, as we change things around, you know, everybody was on board. Everybody was excited to hear that, you know, you're we mature in our philosophy and our pricing strategies, and we didn't necessarily have any naysayers, I think. But in the inverse of that, when things aren't priced correctly and things aren't necessarily going well, you're probably gonna hear a lot of complaints from your team. So for us, it wasn't necessarily complaints about the change that we were making. It was about the complaints that led us to making those changes. Awesome. Awesome. And another question here that we can kinda run through, and that was from came from the q and a as well, is is that we currently require private clients to pay upfront, but we do have some public sector clients who just typically do not allow upfront payments. So curious, Jordan, I'm sure if you have any public sector clients that you work with or if there's any tips for plugging leaks beyond what was shared. No. That I think that's certainly fair. There are some very interesting nuances in that exact example of the kinds of business that you work with. I think, like, government organizations or agencies could be another easy example of that sort of thing. It if you end up working with a client that is in that space and they have certain policies and procedures, then, you know, just like in business, everything is a negotiation. And, you know, I think that there is probably less risk in those public sector and and and government agencies when you work with them if that is the case for, you know, those sorts of policies where they might not pay upfront or they might push you to have net payment terms that are more than you're typically comfortable with. Unfortunately, there's no wiggling out of those sorts of scenarios. I think those tend to be a little bit larger, more lucrative opportunities. And so I think sometimes we as agency owners need to be flexible to accommodate those sorts of things just as you're comfortable with the business risk and understand what follow-up procedures might need to take place if if there's a remedy or negotiation needs to happen as a result of the dispute. You know, just, you know, have your agreement signed just like you meet them in the middle with theirs and, you know, just try to find a path forward together. Don't don't think that everybody's always gonna sign your agreement and do things your way without any red lines or comments. You know, there's always gonna be something that comes up and you wanna be flexible and understanding of those. Yeah. Yeah. Totally, totally agree. I think having a real conversation with whoever you're working with in those spaces and getting an understanding of what is realistic to expect and making sure you understand all that at the outset, I think is super, super key. Like I said, it's okay to be flexible with some of those things. Think at the end of the day, don't pass up a good opportunity just for some small detail. Awesome. I think that goes through all the Q questions that I saw in there. So I think with that, just a quick little thank you. So firstly, thank you Jordan for joining me here today. I really appreciate you helping out and sharing some wisdom and some of your learnings from your years in business with Token Creative. Then also a big thank you to the audience for joining today. Hopefully this was helpful. Hopefully this got some thinking involved and got some gears turning of maybe some opportunities that you can take advantage of. If you think that Ignition might be able to help you on that journey, definitely definitely let us know, and we'd be more than happy to help with that. Any last thoughts to add, Jordan? No. I I, I was happy to be here today. Again, I encourage everybody to be bold and try new things for your businesses. If things aren't working, you know, don't be timid. You know, people will be a lot more understanding than I think we may assume that they are. So, be bold, try new things, and, you know, just put your best foot forward in all the work you do. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks, Jordan. Great place to end it. Everyone have a great rest of your week, and and looking forward to hearing from some of you soon. Talk to you later.