Future-Proof Your Agency

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Join us as Miki, CEO and co founder of Endeavor, shares her journey in tech agency growth, AI's true impact and breaking barriers as a woman leader. Don't miss this inspiring and insightful episode. Hello everyone, and welcome to Schmidlst. I'm your host, courch Schmidt.

I am so excited I've got my new friend Miki here. Riki, how are you doing today? Good? Thanks for having me.

I'm excited that you're here. So Miki, tell my audience a little bit about the work you do and who do you work with. I am a co founder and a CEO of Endeavor. Endeavor is a development agency, so we only focus on technology work, so we don't do any Unlike the traditional full service marketing agencies, we don't do creative work.

We partner with other agencies we need to do it or work with clients, design team or UX team directly. So we purposely just want to focus on technology. So that's what Endeavor is. We work with.

We traditionally worked with a lot of digital enterprise level digital media companies, and we shifted our industry a little bit a couple of years ago to outdoor brand. We're bringing our experience from enterprise level digital publishing to these outdoor industry. It's very cool. So you talk about focus, was that kind of the goal from the beginning when you started this was to stay in that lane because it's hard for people that are in the service business right.

People ask for a lot of things and you're like, ooh, I do I want to leave that money on the table. Was that very purposeful from the beginning. Yes, and then we wanted to keep it that way so that we focus on what we're good at and also want to be known for that as well. Yeah, because you hear a lot of advice out there is niche down, nichedown, niche down, and some people just have a really hard time with it because just like I said, it's really hard to have somebody show up and say take my money, do the UX for this whole thing, or build build something outside of your comfort zone.

So speaking of your comfort zone, does that niche also go down to the types of stacks you work in as well. Yes, we actually experimented a little bit, so that's where our distraction came from. So you are doing a lot of different things in stat wise because technology, so people were not familiar. It can be very different.

Like just because we do technology doesn't mean that we do everything in the world. There's like very close type languages. If people we are familiar with technology, there's that' stuff, there's different languages and when you pay the different language is different stacks that comes with it and their different skill sets are required to support all different types of stats or technology or even like where you host or where you do other things can be very different depending on what you choose.

So we specifically do a lot of open source CMS related and also platforms. So these days it's not just website that you have. You have all this inervation from like CRMs and what else and whatnot. So we try to stay in open source area.

There might be some other things that we can consult on in high level, but technology wides we wanted to keep it that way and for a long period of time. We also very niche down to WordPress for a while, but we opened it up because now low Press still handles forty three percent of web so it's still very very big market. So we have this vast majority of our clients still prefer and want to keep word Press, but there are other CMSs we're familiar with, but we try to stay in within a similar stack so it doesn't go too much outside of it so that it's easier for us to keep despertise and resources and all those good stuff.

Yeah. Makes sense. Yeah, because a lot of the agencies that I work with, it can be challenging if you are behold it to one particular stack. Even WordPress being as big as it is, it's had a lot of challenges over the years recently and can make you wonder has this a been a good choice to pick as our horse to ride?

Yeah, and especially when they pick certain directions on even like whatever they want to do. Sometimes that doesn't necessarily mean that it's benefiting our clients either. Right, it's their choice, but doesn't mean that they have to stick with it. Then we'll have to help them re evaluate it to see if this is a right fit.

The physically fit for you. We do have a lot of experience in different ones too, so we can give recommendations on what's going to be the best route for them to go forward. So that's why when we initially there are a period of time that when we decided to just to or press that one of the reasons why we stepped out, we're going to actually open up to two other things as well, because sometimes the direction doesn't match with what client. Yeah, I got to talk about the elephant in the room.

AI. So how has AI affected your shop as a development? Has it replaced all the developers and all of them don't have jobs now and it's just AI doing building all this stuff by itself as we promised. Not really, because we as a technology agency, we experimented a lot with by coding, by cooding those figure and unfamiliar coding with AI.

But we've done a lot of different iterations of testing as well as trying to spin up different types of sites, testing those out, and I even tested out with a different industry as a three D animation. How to replace it? Does it really do the good job? But it always end up with maybe it'll all change down the line, but right now it doesn't replace it because it just gives you a very very fancy, smart prototype.

So if you have to actually put security into a performance into it, all the things that you require to maintain production ready site, it's not there yet, so you need someone overseeing it. You granted that it will make a lot of tedious and then preliminary job faster, so it expedites a lot of different tasks that was time consuming before. So if you use it correctly, it supplements the development, but it doesn't replace it, and then you still need a lot of overseeing to make sure it's actually following the directions one or two.

It doesn't go crazy with their all this like hatchworks. So it feels I think that I was joking to my co founder about this, where like it's it feels like you're working with a lot of junior developers, but they're not necessarily talking to each other, they're not learning, it's just every time I give a task, it's just the size of different people. So it almost felt like you're working with outsource companies that communication is an issue. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah, it's at best state. Unfortunately, Unfortunately for a lot of agencies who are doing that or developers, but there it's not replacing it. And I even also recently we were trying to we're talking about we need to be ready for not replacing it completely because these bigger companies may think that they can just replace junior developers, but the senior developers or senior software engineers are fine because they still have to oversee all these but there will be period these junior developers and software engineer has to replaced the senior role.

If you replace the juniors with AI, where you going to get these people. So we need to be thinking of as the leaders of the industry and also for the junior developers coming out of it, you need to be prepared for that for the later features. Maybe right now it might be cost saving, but down the line, maybe five years later. Even like the short is that you might be running into all these issues.

Yep, and we are wedged in between this. I find it challenging in other agencies too, where you've got these technologies and then you've got the client needs and you're the pressure point is always your sandwiched in between these two things like what the technology will allow and what the clients actually want to be successful and you're trying to you're trying to bridge that gap always, right. Do you find a difference between the types of clients you work with, maybe larger clients versus mid sized clients.

In my experience, more enterprise or big giant clients seem to be usually a bit more mature in their technology, whereas mid sized clients you have to you might have to hold their hands more. What you been your experience and in the types of clients you find success working within the types of clients you seek out. Yeah, I think you're exactly nailed it because we especially for me, I can't speak more my cop we work with a lot of bigger clients, so we're so used to it. So at one point, I remember specifically when we had when we had the smaller sized client, it was we didn't actually count it to count the amount of handholding that was required for them, not just because they're like not just because they are not intelligent or not, but it's more like they're just not familiar with it process wise.

And then some of the things that we do naturally, as as building a system for enterprise client might be a little different. And sometimes they the small smaller clients, they don't necessarily care that much either. It's not necessarily it's less cure. It's more like the processes, all the steps that are involved.

They might need it, they might not need it. You can skip through it. That was a little bit of a lessons learned for us too, that we don't have to exactly replicate what was working for enterprise client to the smaller client. And also all the educational point too, because they might not necessarily know some of the things that we assume that they would know.

So there are a lot of those. Yeah, it's different. I prefer to work with enterprise level clients because we're more familiar with it. But it's like we just need to baked in some time and educational points and then a little more handle it and holding a little more explanations to the smaller clients.

So now it's a little easier. But there was much but the period of time that was like it was learning that I was like, oh, like I thought this was obvious, but obviously obvious to me, obvious to certain group of people, but not to everyone else. Yeah, yeah, very common. Again, these more smaller to mid sized clients have needs as strong as enterprise clients do.

But they just don't have the experience, and that that alone can be challenging for them, along as the same with bringing in service providers. But it's it's no difference. If you've never built a house before and you need a contractor to come in and do it, you're still you're still going to be learning on the job quite a bit, you know. And that's exactly like a great analogy because you're building a mansion versus a small house.

Obviously it's going to be a very different things that they're going to need, so you don't necessarily have to apply everything that you did building a mansion to a smaller house. So yep, it's very similar to that. Yeah, it is the you know, the house building analogy is something I've used for a couple of decades now because it's about the closest thing I could find too. What it's like software develop you're okay, Yeah, it's the closest analogy I've found is software development because again, you go down to the size of screws versus nails, and there's so much detail that goes into it, and developers make so many choices in the micro every ten seconds, every twenty seconds, as they're producing things that could affect ten months from now.

You've got to be you've got to have good processes and checks and balances to make sure you're producing what you said you were going to produce right right here. Basically, Yeah, how is I wanted to ask about that too. Is that the way that you're building software is it? Are you running more of an agile sort of approach to things or are you doing two week sprints and those types of things?

How do you modify it for different clients? What do you have a standard process, what works for you and what hasn't worked for you? So we modify for per clients. So, like you said, because now we have not just the enterprise client because life to keep sprints, but it's not always two weeks either, depending on what client needs are.

So like sometimes it's like a month sprint, sometimes it's tweaks sprint, or if it's like a project set project to leading to a maintenance, it just became like a project and then maintenance mode. So it really depends on the engagement and also for the clients too, it's ongoing feature development and maintenance, and we try to keep sprints model duration. Mine is just a little bit because it's it's easier for everyone pretty much stakeholders us or like even like the producers whoever are involved.

It's easier to keep it that way. But yeah, it really depends on the client and size of the project that that we deal with that how we actually shape it. Yeah, it sounds like you've learned that flexibility is probably the best option there, right. What about in terms of just general growth and marketing in the way that you've grown the business, what is what are things that have worked and what things haven't worked, and what things are you looking forward to?

What's been success for you in those areas. Marketing was one of the biggest challenge before, especially for me, because I was not familiar with it and we were very heavily referral based, so we didn't pay too much attention to marketing. Like I granted that referral is also part of marketing, but we didn't think it that way because it just came so naturally because people we work with liked us, and our thing was like, if you do a good work, people will like us and they'll continue to find us, which is absolutely true, which has been a truth for a long time.

But there are the times that the economy wasn't that great, and then there are different restrictions and the companies that I work with, and also one thing was the people who work with move on to a different level or different companies, and that just became a dried up pipeline at one point. So a lot of different things happen, not outside of what we are familiar with. And we started to do some marketing big but since we're not experts on it, we hired people, but it's very difficult to find the marketing agencies that understand another agency or what we want.

And also the lessons learned from me was that I didn't know what I'm looking for. That actually is biggest hurdle to get the right marketing because I don't know what I'm measuring, I don't know what I need to be doing that I don't know if they're doing the right job or a good job, or if they understand what we need. So there were a few different iterations of failure with hiring outside agencies, and then we learned through that whole process, so it's getting a little more adjusted.

I still feel like it's one of the things that we still need to hash out to be in a place that I wanted to be. We're learning and adjusting, learning as just at the point at the moment. Yeah, it makes sense because agencies are bad at marketing agencies because they're very bad at marketing themselves, and then working with other agencies, it can be even bigger disaster because they try to apply similar things at work maybe in other industries or other types of product based marketing, and try to apply to a services based model and it just it just doesn't work the same.

And I work with a lot of agencies on their marketing and I hear a ton of horror stories. And again, I've built my own agencies over the years, I've tried and failed so many things. I didn't get good at marketing agencies because I was good at it. I wasted a lot of money and made a lot of mistakes.

That that story resonates with me that what you're talking about is that it's an expensive lesson you have to learn because you think that somebody's got to have this figured out, right, because there's in the continental US there's thirty to forty thousand agencies registered as registered businesses. Now, again those are all different sizes from small to very large or whatever. But you would think out of all of those somebody had figured out, but not really a lot of people, miki, because eighty percent of agencies still get most of their business from referrals.

Yeah, so it was it was actually a lessons learned also eye opening moment that how bad they can be, and they can be really bad, man, be really bad, but I'm sure they're good at other products. Yeah. Yeah, that was very humbling and eye opening moments for me. Yeah, exactly.

The piece of advice for anybody listening. If you want to see how advertising or marketing agency is going to market, you look at how they market themselves first and do an audit of that because that's probably what they're going to apply to your agency. And if you like that, great, like go for it. It worked.

But if you don't, or if it doesn't make sense to you, then it probably doesn't make sense for you. So with those challenges you've had growing a business, all of those things, but on top of it, being a woman in a technical space, there's not a ton of peers for you. How challenge has that been challenging as well? Yeah, it has been.

I think now it's a little better because there are more women technology related leaders and then people or then also now I think there are more women in this industry. But even when I started, I felt like, even even in school, in engineering schools, it's so rarity. I think I was used to it. Then.

I was like women also minority, and like that went to school that I was a very minority and it was common for me. So I always call took that as a challenge that I need to overcome. So I guess I didn't know that was a good mindset at the time growing up, but that that probably was a mindset that was correct to have. Also, I like to be completely frank, I like it because it gives you a little bit of advantage because you're different.

Yes, yeah, I stand out because I even Yes, I remember in some technology conferences early in my twenties, I'll actually make sure I stand out. I have my laptop covered in a pink cover, and I'll wear skirt with high heels, just walking around all of the developers just staring at me. So that I took him as advantage that I was remembered because of that. I don't know how effective that was.

I'm sure that people probably remember me later on sure. It was extremely effective. So I try to use that to use it as advantage. But the one thing I want to make sure is that if you're going to do that, if you want to stand out that way, you have to have the skill set.

Yeah, so you. Have to back it up. So I really try to focus on backing up part just to make sure that I will work extra hours to get better at get putting the skill set to where I want be. So that worked out so that it was difficult times, but because I spent time and energy on that, it didn't feel like it was a difficult time because like when you're focused on something, you don't really realize all the noise that's coming up behind you.

So I didn't even take the challenges a real challenge because I felt that's probably something that other people face too. And also I also have I think someone else I don't remember exactly who said it, but this was also a female in a very male daughter industry. She said that she knows how she is for how she feels as a woman a minority, but I also don't know what other people like, they might think the same thing. They might actually have to say problem like were the different race male or even like the white male like, they might have their own challenge because of whatever stereotype they have, So I can't presume that I had a horder challenge than they did, because they probably had a different challenge they have to go through.

So I think it's just all perspective that if you don't think it that it's a challenge because of who I am and what I am, just challenge that everyone else pretty much had every challenge that they have to go through. I think that's a very mature way to look at it. But still, regardless of the perspective, you have done an amazing job in a very white, male dominated field and you should be very proud of what you've built. And I'm honored just to talk to you because I think, again, thank you there.

There isn't enough folks like you represented in this space, and I think it's a shame, honestly, I do, because I think that's how innovation really happens in the types of work we're doing, is you have different voices from it and different backgrounds and different experiences in those things, and that's what makes that's what makes things get better. In my case, So I'm really excited that you're putting in the work that you're doing, and I think it's great. So talk to me a bit about about the work as you've been growing this company.

Is your plan to eventually sell this place or or was this going to be the last job meeki ever has? What are some of your longer term goals and how do you think about those things? It changes a little bit, but I do want to have an option to be in a place when it comes to, like down the line five to ten years whenever that either have an option to sell or stay as as a war member to see how never grows. But it not because I want to exit primarily.

But another thing is that by I remember and I also learned by joining different business groups, that by preparing for the position, you're growing your company to a place that you want it to be. So that's actually the main reason, because if in order for you to even have a position your company to be a sellable place, you have to have certain systems in place, you have to grow to a certain degree. So because of that, I wanted to prepare for it so that we are at a place that you know, stable leads and growing company that is also have a good potentials for a lot of people to well.

So that was one of the reasons that I wanted to prepare for that. And also as I get older, I probably want to in this topic but some break. But I do have afection for Endeavor as well because it's a company to be co funded and then I grew and there's like a lot of moments you probably have. You have that experience because you're already at its there's like a little bit of attachment to it.

So that's why I don't want to just say that I want to sell it. It's more like I want to have an option to see how I feel at a time, because I'm sure that i'll probably I think differently in five ten years than what I think right now. Yeah for sure, Yeah, I same experience here. But I think what the advice you just gave is so smart because even if your plan is not to sell, the intentionality that you put into making the place a sellable asset makes the place better.

And so I think that intentionality that you're talking about, I think is really smart, because some people just are not that. They're like, if somebody wants to buy it, it's twenty million dollars or something? How what like, where does that number even come from? What are you talking about?

Right? Some people are very flippant about it, but I'd like, I'd love that your advice is to be intentional about it, even if your goal, even if you're not trapesing towards like a cliff that you have imaginary cliff you've put in place or something. So I think that's super smart. So, what's some advice that you would give people in similar spaces to you in terms of what are you looking forward to and what are you watching out for in the AI the future space that we're moving into.

What are some of the things that you're thinking about, and what advice would you have for other people to keep tabs on? So I hinted in the beginning that I think we need to be prepared for working with AI and also be mindful that we're not completely replacing certain crew, because we need to be thinking about down the line, like it might be call saving now and it might be helpful now, but also you don't know yet because it's so new and it evolved so fast. You need to be aware and the constantly try to learn how you can benefit, how you can make it more efficient, but at the same time also think about the later on, especially if you're in the leadership position, that you want to make sure that you're also fostering the next generation that can leverage it correctly.

So that's probably one of the things that we need to constantly think of. What will be the best way to even have a junior developer start thinking about to be prepared for all this AI replacing eighty percent of their job, especially if they're what are the ways you can learn different things to be getting into the senior role quick While you're learning all these things. There are a couple of tips that I like to try to put in to make sure to try to learn from what they could and just don't just accept it, just analyze it and just question it and see if you can learn from it.

That's probably going to be one of the good ways to learn it. And even also leverage open source too, because open source you actually can commit your code and get someone review it and you'll get the feedback, so you'll actually go through the process that you normally go through as a junior developer in a company. See, leverage all these different things so you can learn to go to the next level. That's probably the advice I'll give to junior and also even the leadership people for working with AI, especially for business folks like people who are actually trying to get into it.

I always give this, and I learned this a little later, and I thought, I wish I knew earlier. Is joined the community or masterminds with the people that you can learn from is something that I wish i'd done earlier. But I start joining and I learned so much from all these other people, and they they're still open to this concept of growing together. So you just learned so much from all these other people who for in similar position as you.

I love that because in the agency world there's a big scarcity mindset, and we don't really talk to other agency owners very much, and we don't have a strong community. You see another service industries like lawyers and HVAC people and things. They have huge conferences and trade shows and things. We don't really have much of that.

We mean have the Bureau of Digital and a few other smaller things. But I think what you just said is so important. Such great advice is stop just looking in the mirror, go out and meet with other peers. And talk with them and see what they're experiencing.

It can be very powerful. It was for me, and it sounds like it was for you as well. Yeah, yeah, it definitely was. Yeah, and yeah.

In the AI front, a lot of people are they love analogies, right, like, you AI won't replace you, but somebody who knows how to use AI will replace you. But it's also kind of like saying cars won't replace horses. Horses will just learn to drive cars, just like the same kind of it's like the same kind of analogy. I don't know, it's weird.

So we're we're in uncharted waters here, but the fact of the matter remains that I just read a report that said there's sixty billion days worth of technical debt in the world right now, like something like that, and I was like, that's a great place to start having AI fix things versus like building more technical debt, which is what it seems it's doing these days. Yeah, a cool other mat Actually, he just says something or on the it feels like it's generating more technical debt than it needs to be.

Yeah, right, it'd be great if it was more of a bottom up approach where it was fixing all the technical debt and then working its way to the top. I could see a lot of value there, and especially because you see the disruption in the markets these days were like a SAS has taken a huge hit because Claude came out and was like, hey, we've got this thing that basically does SAS in a box. And again, it's just once you get in there and start using it and you're like, yeah, no it's not really it's not.

Yeah, it's not that. It's very it's very it's cute, it's it's very cute, but for me personally, but I could not deploy this in a in a business. Yes, no, agree completely. We were like, so when you see the most oh, I just use AI to code this thing, We're like, you didn't code it one, right, you tell them to code it, but you don't have the technical knowledge or even other knowledge to know that this is production ready.

It's very, very dangerous if you roll this out as a product. All right, excite it is very dangerous. It's a hundred. It's it again.

We'll we'll see how the how the time goes on. Mickey, I really enjoyed talking to you, and I'll have you you got to come back on the show. We'll have you come back in a few months or so and talk about where AI is impacting since since it'll be a whole new world in six months. Anyways, But if I really enjoyed speaking with you, but if I if somebody listening also enjoyed, didn't want to connect with you.

Where's a good place to find you and learn more about what you do? LinkedIn. I'll have a unique name. Son is just my my full name, so you can find me there because I'm more.

That's the only social standre. I'm active one. And we also have a podcast called Boozy Browsing. It just a digital happy hour where we were sitting some drinks and then talk about all things technology or audit a life site.

So it's an interesting, interesting approach, and then we always try to have fun while we work. That's great. I love that. I love that.

Thanks again, Miki. I really appreciate you taking the time. I'm sure you're very busy, and I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge and experience with my audience. All Right, thanks for your time.

Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, we'd love it if you left a review on iTunes or Spotify. It makes a big difference, and be sure to check out Schmidt Consulting dot group for more ideas and insights. Remember, every big dream starts with a single step, keep moving forward, stay curious, and don't forget we're rooting for you.

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