David Feldman With 3 Owl

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio brought to you by onpay Atlanta’s new standard in payroll. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Atlanta Business Radio. And this is going to be a fun one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor on pay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have David Feldman and he is with 3 Owl. Welcome, David.

David Feldman: [00:00:42] Hey, Lee, great to be here.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:44] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about 3 hours. How are you serving folks?

David Feldman: [00:00:49] Sure. So 3 hours is right at the intersection of design and technology. So we’re there to imagine your brand build out your brand guidelines, translate that into a beautiful website or app design, and then code it all in-house and measure the results afterwards. So we really believe that having all of that handoff within one company yields much better work.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:11] And the folks who aren’t doing it that way, how are they typically doing it? Are they just cobbling together kind of resources to do each of those things kind of in a siloed individual manner?

David Feldman: [00:01:22] Yeah. This comes up a lot when we’re pitching branding work, for example, we’ll pitch against a branding agency and the potential client will say, so the branding agency is going to find another shop that’s going to take what we did and try to turn it into a website. So I think there’s some cobbling together. We just have a deeper understanding of how it all connects. So even early on as we’re working on the brand, we’re thinking about things like ADA compliance. Is the color contrast going to work on a button? How are these patterns and backgrounds going to scale on mobile devices? So I think there’s just that understanding start to finish. So very early on in that branding process, we’re already thinking about a final digital product.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:01] Now. Is your solution best for kind of startups who have a blank sheet of paper they’re working off of, or are these already established brands?

David Feldman: [00:02:11] Now we’ve gone both ways, and the process, the branding process for us always starts with a daylong workshop where we really learn a lot about the business. If it’s an established brand, we usually are not working with the people who are as close to it as founders or working with marketing directors or working typically at SEO or SEO could be in that meeting too. So really taking a step back and working on a on an entity that the client is not as deeply connected to. But we’ve done everything from renaming organizations that have been around for a long time, so you can’t be too precious about it or tinkering with and improving existing businesses like Fortune 500. On the startup side, we’re usually working with founders, so they’re very, very close to the business. So I think it usually takes a lot more care. Again, that brand workshop means we really deeply understand what our client wants rather than diving right into a website, we know what their goals are. We also know what they’re going to be pitching to potential investors, what current what their current market is saying. So I think process wise is the same. We definitely know there’s more handholding with startups, but it can also be a lot more fun with startups.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:26] Now what’s your back story? How did you get into this line of work?

David Feldman: [00:03:31] I graduated in 2008, which was a very tricky time to graduate. I took a job at a large marketing firm and very early on was not feeling it. I just remember looking down the long corridor and seeing my career path essentially laid out in front of me, like side office, corner office, big office at the end of the hallway. So I never corporate life was never for me. I ended up going off on my own and just doing a lot of independent contracting work and doing really just about anything marketing related I could get my hands on. So that was taking photos, video building, websites, copyrighting designing. I was really into all of that, doing it for very much bottom barrel pricing, but I learned a ton in those first few years when I was getting started and I realized pretty early on I didn’t want to become this really awesome independent contractor and specialize in anything specific. So I made that first decision, I think two years into running my business, to hire a full time designer, and I barely had the funds to do it, but it was that leap of faith that I took that we would grow. So I never looked back from that. I always wanted to build a company and not just be an independent contractor. So that’s always been the goal is really find people who have common values and find people who are experts in their field and luckily can direct a lot of it because I’ve done a little bit of all of it, but I’m certainly not a master at any of it.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:00] But it seems their heart is in this kind of scrappy entrepreneurial entity. Your book that’s just released Small by Design and Entrepreneur’s Guide to Growing Big While Staying Small. Talk about that and where that philosophy kind of ties in to what you were saying.

David Feldman: [00:05:18] In March of 2020, I was at a crossroads with my company. We had actually grown to be a little bit less small by design that I wanted to be. I had a lot of full time employees, a lot of juniors on my team. And the the profit was or the the revenue was going up or the costs were as well. And I realized that the company was not operating in a way that made me happy. And when we hit the when we started seeing, I think the NBA season canceled and the world really changing, I saw an opportunity to really take advantage of that moment and made a really hard decision and fired most of my team except for the senior folks, and decided to rebuild and really embrace being small. So we work with a lot of full time contractors. Some that we’ve had for six, seven plus years have a smaller team that is more senior level. But a funny thing happened, I think a month into the pandemic. We had a couple of clients come to me and say, Hey, we are we’re looking at firing or agencies of record and moving forward with you guys on all of our marketing work because we like how small you are.

David Feldman: [00:06:29] And I realized there’s this paradigm shift happening where when we stop pretending to be bigger than we are and actually embrace smaller clients, really liked it because they saw the extra fees they were paying to big agencies. Process is taking a long time, etc. So once we started owning it, we started getting more work and better work. And I’ve really built the agency around it and realize there’s just a lot of learnings and principles that have happened since. We’ve really rethought the agency to be small by design. You know, we can scale up as needed when bigger projects come in because we’ve got an amazing bench of part full time and part time contractors and we need to be small. We’re small. So it’s really it’s made me a lot happier and we operate so much more efficiently and our clients feel it too. It’s translated in our prices and our turnaround times and quality of work.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:18] So if somebody listening says, You know what, that really resonates with me, I’d like to, you know, kind of have the small core and be able to flex larger if need be. How would you recommend them going about doing that? How do you kind of, you know, get that true north, get the people on board, the key people that enable you to scale when you have to and then to cut back when you need to as well.

David Feldman: [00:07:44] For it to truly feel like a cohesive company. Start with your values. We did this in March of 2020. The team that I had left, we would sit in the park six feet apart and just talk about what went right with real and what didn’t. And really just when the team would start small, we were able to talk about everybody’s personal values. They were all really aligned and we use those to build out to the values of our company. So that’s that was the baseline. And we knew that any hiring decisions we would make would be based on shared values. Same with what kind of clients we bring on. We can tell early on if a client is going to be a good fit. Same thing with contractors. So that’s the baseline. So that way it still feels like very much a cohesive team. The second layer was really getting our processes tight, so having a tight onboarding process, a very well outlined branding process, website process. So it’s really repeatable. So when we do need to bring in an outside resource that we need to bring in a contractor, we just plug them right into our system. So that’s why it still feels really cohesive and it’s really about growing big while staying small. The systems are tight, the values are there, so we can scale up and it still feels very much like 3 hours. So that’s the advice I’d give everyone is start with the values, build your systems and then plug people in versus trying to adapt to the values of your contractors or clients. Does that can that can really set you off track.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:06] Now how do you make it kind of less transactional for the people you bring on a contract basis? Because it’s easy to say plug and play, be part of the team, but when they’re not really part of the team and they might have three other projects going simultaneously, how do you get them to kind of emotionally buy into what you’re talking about?

David Feldman: [00:09:27] You know, there’s a chapter in my book called Elasticity is Essential, and it really talks about how we get our contractors aligned with us. I’d say our least involved contractor is still 50% with three owl. I will invite them to events. The three outputs on course share our values with them. I’ll also just open up about where three owl is at financially, what we have coming down the pipeline and also build relationships with those contractors and ask them how their business is doing, how we can help connect them to more work so they start to see it as a partnership. I know that I’m succeeding with a contractor when they win a new project, not with three owl and call me up. It’s want to celebrate and say, David, I’m so excited I got this project. I want to share it with you first. And at the same time, I will. If there’s a project that comes across three Owls table, that’s not the right fit for us. I’ll just pass it over to one of the contractors. Always give them first rights of refusal so they see how invested I am into their business and I see them come back and invest in mine. I’ve seen us putting together proposals and I’ll reach out to one of our contractors and say, Hey, would you can you help me write out this section around your specialty? I’ll pay you for your hours, and they rarely ask me to pay them for the hours because they’re so bought into getting into work and really believing in what we do. So very much important to me never to treat a contractor like a vending machine, but really make them feel bought into what three owl does. And knowing that we have their back as professionals outside of contractors helping three owl.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:03] Now, you mentioned also one of the things that happened when you made this switch was that you were getting better clients. What is a better client look like for you? Like, what are the qualities of a great client?

David Feldman: [00:11:18] It’s a client that trusts the work that we do. I never want to have a client that’s paying us to argue with us. So we’re seeing that we have clients that have really impactful work for their company, and these are digital transformations where you have a multi unit restaurant switching to a major new online ordering platform that is going to create an entire shift and in their operations in their marketing dollar usage. So when we have projects that are going to impact the client to that degree. They’ve been coming to us for those projects and our existing clients too. They are seeing how quickly we get work done. And we’re also because we’re smaller, we really keep our finger on the pulse of what’s happening with the client. So I’ll send an email saying, I remember a conversation we had a few months ago about how you’re looking to switch to this this loyalty vendor. Here’s an interesting article I found about it. Let me know if you want to talk. So they also see that we’re never transactional with them. We’re really thinking about their business, and we can do that because we have those real conversations with our clients. So they’re really happy that they’re not paying extra dollars for a fancy office because I think clients can feel that and they get access to leadership like me or creative director or development manager. If they need to talk to people who are high level, we’re one email away.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:42] Now when you’re working with a new client, are they typically kind of biting off the whole big project or are they coming in with a small project to kind of just get a taste of what 3 hours can do? And then that just expands organically over time.

David Feldman: [00:12:58] It depends on the size of the company. If we’re working with a very large company, it’s usually one project and I will always earmark that project as an opportunity to impress them. The biggest clients we have worked with have been the ones that, for example, we had a major restaurant brand that wanted to have direct to consumer e-commerce sales and their existing agency said, You can’t do this in ten weeks. And they came to us and I told my team, if we knocked this out in ten weeks, do you know how many opportunities this will open up for this one client? So we did it and we have become the digital agency of record and they’ve connected to a lot of other clients of that size. So on that very large end, no, I just see the opportunity to do great work and impress them. If it’s a smaller sized company, typically the project will be brand website, etc. because they don’t have other agencies they’re working with. So it’s either a big project for a smaller client or a starter project that’s smaller for a bigger client, but always, always hoping to convert that into something bigger.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:00] Now, who should be reading your book?

David Feldman: [00:14:05] I’ve been thinking through this a lot. I actually have my book launch party on Saturday and I got that question about if somebody is working at a bigger company, does the book still have any validity? So I’m seeing really three audiences. If you’re a small business owner, like if you’re if you’re looking for a life of abundance, if you’re looking to figure out how to run your business without your business running you, this book is definitely for you. I’m also hoping that people who are leaders at large companies read the book and just see that they should give a chance to the smaller companies. They could really make an impact. And then I was also thinking a lot about big companies tend to create small teams within their company. So why you might be working for a Fortune 500 company, you’re likely still running a department. So I think this is a great book for folks who are overseeing smaller teams and there’s still a lot of learnings to run your team in a really nimble way. That’s really impactful.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:02] So if somebody wants to learn more about three aisle the agency or get a hold of your book, what’s the website?

David Feldman: [00:15:10] 3 hours agency is our company URL and if you want to read more about the book, it is small by design dot co. The ebooks are available now and paperbacks will be available June 28th.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:25] Well, David, congratulations on all the success. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

David Feldman: [00:15:31] Yeah, thank you so much.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:32] All right. This is Lee Kantor all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.