Taylor Wilson: The Secret to Scaling a Creative Design Agency

Speaker A: And I think if you create really valuable content, that's helpful, that's not real salesy, and you regularly put that out on the Internet based on where you think your audience hangs out the most. I think then when you do that outreach and it's cold, but people go look you up, they'll say, oh, uh, this person, they seem like they know what they're talking about, like, I'll take their call. And so I think content marketing is incredibly important for inbound and outbound and just overall trust building and relationship building.

Speaker B: Welcome back to the Honest Marketing podcast, where you learn proven strategies to grow your business without selling your soul. I'm your host, Travis Albritton, and joining me as my special guest today is Taylor Wilson. She's the CEO and founder of Creative Chisel, which is a creative design agency. Welcome to the show, Taylor.

Speaker A: Yeah, hey, Travis. Good to be here.

Speaker B: So walk me through a little bit about the origin for Creative Chisel and how you came up with that very unique name.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, uh, it's good to be here. And it's a fun story. I lived a long, long time in life in the day of the content marketer. And when I started my company, it was just me. I hung up my shingle. I actually started the agency Asbar Lele, which means only soaring. And I knew I always wanted to sort of like productize creative services and like, make it more affordable. Really. I. I'd worked at very large agencies for much of my career and felt I think there's a way to scale design and content and brand work for more small businesses, startups, smaller teams who don't have a six figure budget, but they need good quality and consistent work. And so I was actually thinking about fun names for a blog. I thought, oh, we've got this agency website. But like, I want to put up thought leadership. And I don't know, Creative Chisel came into my mind because I was like, I could put podcasts up, I could put blogs up, I could do a lot of things under Creative Chisel. And then it just kind of dawned on me, so I went and bought the domain. Like every great name, uh, these days starts with like, I went and I bought the domain 100%. Yep.

Speaker B: Turns into a squarespace ad real fast.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I bought the domain and then was like all of a sudden again one day just thought, oh, that's the name of this new thing. And so, and then I told, you know, other people at that point, I had a team, I had more people working with me. And I said, I think we should call this new thing Creative Shizzle. And so we went with it and it really became an offshoot brand from the original, um, brand of the company. And that's really our core focus now and where we're going and how we're growing.

Speaker B: Tell me a little bit about how you've built that particular offering, um, how you differentiated it from typically what creative agency work is. To create something that's unique, that's distinct, that's different in the market. And then tell me about how you kind of felt your way around the kinds of services that you would offer within that to have that eye towards more affordability but without losing the quality that if you're going to outsource to an agency, you kind of expect to happen.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: It's like, I want to pay an expert, so I want expert level work. So walk me through that process.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. And um, you know, it's still a learning process. You know, every single day I think, like it, I think that that never ends. We constantly learn and improve and iterate. Um, I think it all started with frustration in selling hourly selling time for money. And it's a, ah, very traditional, normal model for creative agencies, consultants, lawyers, a lot of people sell their time for money. Right. And in the creative agency space, I just felt like what I would see happen is you'd be implementing a website or you know, doing design revisions or something like that. And when you're in this hourly time equals money mode, I think a couple things happen. One, I think that you spend a lot of time tracking your time. Um, you spend a lot of time thinking about, well, how much did I spend on that? I was sort of lost in my creative space for a while. And then you go back and you do your best to like track your time and how much you spend on things. And when you have a whole team of creative people doing that, it's not always real accurate. Um, you know, people, we're humans, like, we forget we don't always punch the clock and punch out the clock and we have to go correct things. So that was a frustration sort of internally serving clients. On the flip side, I see clients feeling nickeled and dimed, like, oh, well, I want to do this change. Well, that's going to be another two hours. Are you okay with it? Uh, let me go get approval. And I'm like, why are we getting approval for, you know, two hours of like, I just want to get it right for you, you know?

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And so that was, I think the biggest frustration that led me towards, I want to create, make creative services that are sold on a subscription basis. Just like I buy Netflix, just like I, you know, buy all sorts of, uh, software subscriptions for my company to run. Why can't we sell creative services that way? And so I started thinking through and really like, looking at the market, looking at what other people were doing. I've hired a lot of people on Upwork and Fiverr and like freelancers over the years too, and also felt like that was a little bit of a pain point for small businesses where you. It can be a little bit inconsistent. You know, maybe you find a freelancer who's great, you're jiving and working really well with them for a while, and then all of a sudden they just go away or they get too busy for you, and then you gotta go back to the drawing board and find some other one. Or you find freelancers where the quality is just not quite right. You don't necessarily know what you're going to get when you initially hire them. And so that's another kind of piece to the puzzle that I wanted to solve. And so we just kind of went out. I looked at, uh, years of my own pain points as a content marketer and thought, how can we do this better? I looked at years of myself selling services at other agencies and doing services at other agencies and like, kind of meshed all of those together into creating this thing where we have graphic design. It's unlimited graphic design on a subscription. It's month to month, we don't want you in. And some people have told me that I'm crazy. Um, you know, how can you be profitable? Well, a couple of things. One, again, still learning all of those things. Um, but two, I think that we have guardrails around our systems. So, um, I'm really big on process. I think it's very important to have clear process for your services, especially when you do something like this. And so the way ours works is that based on your subscription level, you get only so many projects that we will actively work on at any given point in time. You can fill up your queue, your design queue, with as many things as you want. You tell us the priority level, the due date, and then our project managers kind of play traffic cop with our design team and they help to make sure we're getting the highest priority thing done for you first. As soon as you approve that, we mark it done and we move on to the next thing in your queue. And so people sometimes ask about, well, what about Revisions. Well, we'll do is if you want 20 rounds of revisions, that's fine, but that's the only thing we're working on until you approve it and then we move on to the next thing. And so that's a guardrail that I have found, I think works pretty well. I mean, you're going to find in this kind of a, um, model with agency life that some clients are heavy users and some clients are not. And so to be honest, it sort of evens out in the end. And now I don't have to waste time on tracking time or having that hourly. Is it okay if I bill you for this extra hour, you know, discussion? We can just actually be more effective and more efficient and move things along faster.

Speaker B: And what's been the reception of kind of repositioning your approach to billing for creative work and structuring your agency when you have those calls, those onboarding calls with new clients or with, you know, prospects that are potentially interested, they have a need, they're not sure kind of what the best solution is for them. What's been the kind of reaction or reception that you've gotten as you've kind of explained how you work differently than a normal creative agency?

Speaker A: People have been really receptive to it. There's always questions about what does unlimited, um, design mean? And so we talk through that. We show people our system, how you put it, how you put your design request in. So there's always like a little bit of a learning curve at the very beginning, but it doesn't take long to get it. And I'll say we onboarded a new client just recently who went out and said, I talked to seven different people and I went with you. And I was like, that's awesome. Why? And she was like, I just think, you know, what marketers need right now. And it was a couple of things. We talked about it. It was the affordability. It was like right in the, in the lane of price point. That was something that she could easily go, um, get approval from her boss because it wasn't, I need a year contract and it's going to be 100k. Well, I've never even worked with you before. I don't know you. Are you going to be good? I'm signing away $100,000 in 12 months. I don't think people are working that way so much anymore. I mean, clearly there are businesses working that way. But I think we're shifting more and more into where B2B buying and selling is more like B2C buying and selling. And that's part of uh, like what we're doing with our businesses, I think trying to adapt to that shift.

Speaker B: I've definitely noticed that as well. Where, you know, it used to be B2B was very like old gentleman's club kind of vibe.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And it was very like 3 quarter turn headshot on LinkedIn type of vibe. And now there's like, you know, guys doing contests and making viral LinkedIn content and, you know, all kinds of stuff. And it's like, wow, this is, this is a new wave of millennials in here shaking things up, uh, doing things our own way because that's what we like to do. We believe we can do anything and then we're depressed because we're not there yet.

Speaker A: That's so true.

Speaker B: Uh, but no, that's really great. And as you were kind of doing some of this initial exploration, how much uh, were you looking at other existing solutions in the market versus just kind of charting your own course and saying, regardless of what anybody else is doing, this is what I want to build and what I want to focus on? Because ultimately that's the kind of business that you wanted to build. How much of external kind of market research did you do at the beginning?

Speaker A: A lot. Yeah, a lot. I definitely looked at, uh, I sort of started having some ideas and then I started researching things and then I started finding, oh, there are companies doing this. So I definitely looked at what they were doing. That helped me sort of figure out, okay, I think I could do it this way. And I like this that they do, but I don't quite like this. So we adjusted and now we're actually kind of in the middle of making, ah, our next pivot, which is really to be also adding in content writing into our subscription plans. Um, we. And I think that's going to be a differentiator from what I see from some of the other design subscription services, um, that are, that are still design only. As we've noticed that it's really content marketing that people need. I mean design is one thing, but it's like when I look at a marketer who has, you know, little resources or a small business owner who doesn't know marketing or doesn't have, I don't have time for social media, you know, like, what should I write? How do I make my carousel file look pretty? I'm doing this in Canva and it looks bad. You shouldn't be doing that. You should be focusing on your business. And so we're actually kind of, um, adding content, um, Writing into the mix. And we're actually developing a software platform right now that will use the power of AI to give you a bunch of ideas and like the first draft and then leverage our design team of humans to like actually make it really hit the nail on the head.

Speaker B: That's really cool. And so that's just been an additional extension of your offer based on conversations you've had with clients and them kind of like saying, man, it'd be really great if somebody could figure this out. Or, you know, have you ever thought about doing this? No, uh, no, we don't offer that exactly yet. And then it just became more of a recurring thing and you're like, well, enough people ask us about it, we'll figure it out. Is that kind of how it evolved?

Speaker A: That's pretty much how it evolved. Yeah, exactly. More and more. Like kind of seeing how when I first started my agency, there was a lot of writing involved and then going through the like, this needs to be sustainable, this needs to be scalable. Let's do it with design. Because I really felt like design was an easy place where like, there aren't emergencies. You know, in marketing there's emergencies in pr, There shouldn't be a lot of emergencies in marketing, but a lot of times in digital marketing there are with websites. Oh, my website's down. What happened? Well, um, sure, buddy. You didn't pay your bill. You know, like, you have no idea how many times that happened. I'm like, we didn't do anything to the website. You just didn't pay your hosting bill. So there's all sorts of things like that. And with design, there's not a ton of emergency like that. And so I felt like that was like the safest thing to scale now with that kind of regular feedback. Yeah, I'm just finding that like I need help writing things for social media. I need help writing blogs. Like people want that full content, you know, um, cycle. And so you're really going to be focusing in on, you know, content on demand, on subscription.

Speaker B: Now, you mentioned something a little while ago about really believing in building scalable systems. Uh, especially if you have an unlimited offering where you really are going to fall down to the level of how resilient your systems are when you have all these requests coming in and all these different opportunities to get distracted with the minutiae of the day to day and kind of lose sight of the big picture where, you know, I've been a part of agencies where you're just putting out fires all day. That's all you do, you wake up, you put out fires, you get to the end of day, like, what did I do? I don't know, but I put out a lot of fires. So how, what's your approach to building systems within a, uh, creative agency where it's not boilerplate, it's not just copy and paste from the last client. You are really trying to go that extra mile for them to make something really distinct that's really going to pop for them, but do so in a way where you're not pulling your hair out. Like how do you do both of those at the same time?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it's not for the faint of heart of uh, that it's you know, I think it's a little bit frameworks and systems with the team and with people and with how we decide to do things. And then it's also leveraging technology to make it easier for us. So our platform we use Monday.com like that is the end all, be all. Will it get done? M. It will if it's in Monday. If you want something done, enter your project request form and Monday. And um, all the magic happens when you m. Put that in there. And it's the same for our internal things too. And so I've got a really good, good team. Our uh, designers are the creative people that help bring the, you know, the vision to life. But then like we hardcore back it up with good project managers who set expectations, who, you know, like I mentioned, play traffic cop between client and design team. We even recently added on design qa, you know, this role where it's like you're sort of part project manager and also have a design background so that you can be QA things and helping to manage the team a little bit as well. Um, and have that design lens and perspective. So there's a little bit of that. And then we also do have some basic frameworks that we use from a strategy perspective. So like when we're working with a, ah, client on um, more like copywriting and messaging and stuff like that, I use I'm a story brand guide. I use the story brand framework. And so it's like we have those principles in place that remain the same, but then based on what we ask the client about their audience, their goals for their business, their ideal, you know, target, um, customer. Those things, you know, create like the uniqueness of what we actually put together for them.

Speaker B: Tell me a little bit about some of those deliverables and specifically the consistent projects that you find are the needs of your clients. Right? Because content marketing could be this big umbrella. It's like saying digital marketing. It's like, what is that? Yes, it's everything. Uh, what are, what are the specific channels, mediums, platforms that you see your team producing more work within? Kind of as an indicator of where the needs are in general for content marketers and for brands moving into 2025 here in two months.

Speaker A: No, it's. Why, how is it 2025 crazy. So weird. I feel like we're in Star wars in the future or something when you say 2025. Yeah. So. Good question. Um, there are definitely a lot of like repeated things that we're seeing people are asking for. A lot of it is coming from the sales teams. So, uh, when we're working in B2B marketing and sales teams, the sales team wants really nice looking sales decks, sales enablement materials, one pagers, you know, LinkedIn banners that they can give to their team. So it's a lot of sales enablement, one pagers, you know, presentation decks, pitch decks, things like that. Social media is a big ask, a big request. Uh, we're doing more and more, like, help our company consistently look good across social media. So having consistent look and feel across all the different platforms and channels that they're on. Um, giving people good, consistent toolkits for their social media posts. So, and like just having things sized appropriately. We like to do like social media kits for people. A lot of times when we're like first starting to work with them, um, like, hey, here's a kit that you can use to like, if you guys want to start doing some things on your own, you know, and like, you kind of want to really pump up the volume. Like we made a kit for you so you can take it and run with it and then use it across Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever it is. Because that videos, like, we're seeing more and more video requests. People want video clips. You know, I was on this podcast, you make me a video clip, you know, or real like an Instagram reel. So that comes up a lot. And then I like looking at the things that I'm not expecting, you know, so sometimes our chief happiness officer, she'll send me like, hey, look at this cool thing that we just did. And be like, oh, designed a bicycle helmet, you know, or um, this one was fun. We helped a college in Texas go through a rebrand this year and she sent me a mock up of, uh, a wrap. She was like, add 18 wheeler wraps to the list of what we can design. And it's like we designed like the wrap to go on like some 18 wheelers and trucks and different types of like vehicles that they have that they want the college brand to be on. So it's really sort of like anything that a graphic designer would do, like we can do with Creative System. But there's definitely those consistent things and it's usually across digital media, like social, um, presentation decks. Those are probably the most widely requested things I would say. On top of that, people want, they want that long form content too. So on the content writing perspective, more and more requests for blogs, I think people still see the value of that. And that's, you know, because that's where SEO comes in and then getting found and then creating inbound opportunities, um, for that long form thought. Ah, leadership.

Speaker B: Yeah. I'd love to ask you more, uh, personally, your vision for creative chisel and what you're hoping it becomes. Because as a founder, myself and I know a lot of other entrepreneurs, typically you start a company or a business with an idea of what it could potentially become, and then as you actually start doing the work and you hit reality, it kind of shifts a little bit, but ultimately still have a North Star of here's my revenue targets and here's how large I want my team to be, and here are the reasons why, and here's how that translates to my quality of life. And I would just love to hear if you're willing to share how you think about your own goals as an entrepreneur and founder. Building a team, building an agency that you hope continues to serve your clients at a high level. What does success look like for you? What does growth look like for you? How do you kind of measure internally the goals that you have and set for yourself?

Speaker A: It's such a good question. I, I really love it because to be honest, the heart and soul of why I started a company was to create a company that people liked working at. So, yes, we can talk all day about like, there was an opportunity to scale services and move away from all these pain points that I talked about kind of at the beginning of the conversation. But one of the biggest things that I hadn't talked about yet is I just think that so many people go to work and deal with unnecessary politics at the workplace, unnecessary, um, stress and things that, uh, we just, like, we all hold inside of us, we take home with us, we take it into our personal life. And so success and growth to me looks like continuing to healthily build a company where people are happy at their jobs and like, their job isn't Their only thing they're able to legit have like a work life balance. People talk about work life balance a lot, but I, I really mean that. Like, I don't want to work all day. I don't want to be on zoom all day. Like, I want to be able to be lazy. To me, that's success. I don't want to worry about the future. Right. In terms of like financial future and things like that. So I want everyone on my team to be able to feel comfortable financially and also enjoy their work day, get a lot out of it, but then also like leave work and feel good about leaving work and um, shutting their laptops. I also want clients to have a really happy experience with us. That's really very important to me. Like, I think we can touch our clients in a really positive way and create just exceptional, you know, um, opportunities for them to have a better time in their day at their jobs. And so that's really like, you know, it's not a revenue. I've never once set a revenue target, which sounds a little reckless, but I don't know, it seems to keep working and I seem to keep just focusing on, like, do good things for good people. And I kind of feel like it starts to work its way. It's worked its way out.

Speaker B: Yeah. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And on that note, I would just love to hear your approach to client acquisition, um, and how you think about finding, vetting, wooing, even your ideal clients or the clients that you want to build long term relationships with. What are the pieces that go into that? Whether it's outbound, inbound, content marketing, B2B, cold outreach. What are all the things that are in the mix for becoming found and being known by the type of clients that you want to work with?

Speaker A: Yeah, I just actually wrote an ebook on, um, this that we just put up on our website. Um, I'll send you the link to it. It's called.

Speaker B: Yeah, we'll put the link in the show notes for people.

Speaker A: It's called Marketing as dead and trust is your new pipeline. I know, it's a little saucy.

Speaker B: Uh, does it have a tombstone on the front?

Speaker A: It does, yes. How did you guess?

Speaker B: Because that would be the perfect design asset to complement that juicy headline.

Speaker A: That's the way we went. It says rest in peace, traditional marketing. And what I mean by that is I think that the, like, buy me, buy me, buy me, buy me, buy me stuff like it's just getting tired. Sure. It still works. For some people. But I really think doing what you can to build trust with audiences in whatever way that you, wherever you show up, is the number one thing that is going to build a sustainable business. I do and focus a lot on getting up to events. I go to a lot of conferences. Some people are like, oh, I hate going to conferences. I'm like, I love it because you actually get to meet people in real life. And I think that that's where the secret, you know, sauce is, honestly, in a lot of ways, even if you don't bring home a deal from every conference or, you know, sometimes you go to these events and than the sales managers are like, how many leads did you get? Well, like, I, uh, went out, I had dinner with people. Like, I built relationships and my whole business, I believe has built on me spending a lot of time building relationships. And so I do think now we're getting to a point where we are growing. I'm starting to think a little bit more about outbound. I do think cold outbound is important. I think that you should be really thoughtful about how you start that cold conversation. And I think if you create really valuable content, that's helpful, but it's not real salesy. And you regularly put that out on the Internet. And you put it out on the Internet based on where you think your audience hangs out the most. I think then when you do that outreach and it's cold, but people go look you up, they'll say, oh, uh, this person's not a hack. They seem kind of cool, you know, they seem like they know what they're talking about. Like, I'll take their call, you know, because when people reach out to me cold, like I don't just reply to them right away. Like I go research the person, I look them up, I'm like, is this a scammer? Is it, uh, someone real? Who are they? And so I think content marketing is incredibly important for inbound and outbound and just overall trust building and relationship building 100%.

Speaker B: Well, Taylor, where can people go to learn more about you, connect with you online and learn more about your agency and what you do at Creative Shizzle.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, go to creativeschizzle.com that's S H I Z Z L E. Uh, creativeschiselle.com you can find me. I play on LinkedIn a lot, so that's probably the best way to find me. Uh, look me up as Taylor Shanklin Wilson on LinkedIn. You can also just reach out to us, drop us in on the contact form on the creativeschiselle.com if you want to see us, and if you want to follow me personally on Instagram, where I'm a little bit more like, you know, what's your life like? A little more there, to be honest. Um, um, my. My tag is GoWithTaylor on Instagram.

Speaker B: Nice. Well, we'll link all that in the show notes, make it real convenient for anyone listening that wants to go connect with Taylor offline or online, rather. Uh, but, Taylor, it's been a blast. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate it.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me. This is a lot of fun.