Pivoting from remote-first to an in-office environment with Brian Patterson of Go Fish Digital

Maren Kate
Welcome to from 5 to 50, the podcast dedicated to helping startups and founders survive and thrive through the early stages. I'm your host, Maren Kate, and let's get this show started. I am here with Brian from Go Fish Digital. Brian, thanks so much for being on the show.

Brian Patterson
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Maren Kate
Absolutely. First off, when did you found Go Fish Digital?

Brian Patterson
So this is always kind of an interesting question because there's a couple of different dates we could go from. I think 2005 is when I first started doing this kind of work on nights and weekends. And nowadays, I think they call it a side hustle back then I think we call it a passion project. I really love the internet. I was doing kind of the opposite of it as a day job.

Maren Kate
What was that? What was the opposite of the internet in 2005?

Brian Patterson
In 2005. Slow-moving IT projects. I was an IT contractor for the FBI.

Maren Kate
Interesting

Brian Patterson
Yeah. Certainly interesting topics and projects but very behind in a lot of ways, technically. And what I think I saw with the internet was we could build websites really fast and we could create things that didn't exist a few days before. Whereas inside of bureaucracy like the FBI that would take years to do.

Maren Kate
Absolutely. So when do you consider the actual founding date? When were you incorporated?

Brian Patterson
2005 would be kind of the side hustle, 2009 was incorporated, 2011 I went full time. So depending on, I mean just to be honest and for other entrepreneurs out there, depending on the situation, you can kind of choose where your origin story is. You know, if we want to talk about longevity we've been doing this for 14 years, right? If we're talking about fast growth it started in 2011 in terms of when I went full time. So you have some options in terms of how to position the story in your favor.

Maren Kate
Okay, so just in 90 seconds or less, tell our audience the founding story or the why behind why you started Go Fish Digital.

Brian Patterson
Yeah, so you got a little bit of background with the FBI. So, in parallel, while I was doing that, it just so happened that a person who I would end up sitting next to at the FBI doing the same type of work was also doing exactly the same thing. He was super smart and technical and helping small businesses build websites and get an online presence. And we both worked in Washington, DC at the FBI but we lived in the suburbs, we both had families, and we had a long commute. So we essentially decided to ride together and essentially had an hour and a half in the car where we just talked about this stuff and decided we were both doing it on the side and we really liked it and decided to form a company together. And so then that ride became an hour and a half or two-hour business meeting every day where we could work on the business. And it was something that we're really passionate about. I think even if there was no money involved we probably would have still been tinkering with things on the internet. So it was great to do something that we actually really loved.

Maren Kate
Okay, explain kind of what you guys do; what the problems you solve are?

Brian Patterson
Sure, yeah. So we started out in those early days as a web design company, that over time became kind of a commodity. You know, everyone could build a website in some way or knew someone or someone's nephew that could do that. What we found is when we were building websites, the question we got time and time again after it would go live is okay, great I have a website now how do I get people to it? So early on, we started tinkering with search engine optimization. So helping sites rank better in Google for the key terms that they really care about. And we got good at that. And then that really became the core offering. And for a long time, we stopped doing websites because they were hard, they take a long time to launch. No one’s ever totally happy with it in the end. It ends up being a lot of cooks in the kitchen. We've recently reintroduced that. And over time, we've added in a lot of services to where we consider ourselves a full-service digital marketing agency. We do SEO course content marketing, reputation management, link building, pay per click, copywriting, everything you can think of in the digital space. We only like to offer services that we know we're really good at and so until then, we don't say we do it.

Maren Kate
I love that. It's kind of the opposite of maybe like the Silicon Valley startup. Are you guys bootstrapped, self-funded? Do you have investors?

Brian Patterson
We're bootstrapped so we never took outside money. We've had conversations and opportunities over time but it never seemed to make total sense for how we wanted it to grow, which was kind of organically and naturally.

Maren Kate
Okay and then tell me about the current size. I think when we were emailing you said you guys are 35 people?

Brian Patterson
Yeah, I think we're just about, I think we are at 40 now. So, depends on how you count it too. That's 40 full-time and then we have some part-time and turns always around. So we're probably close to your 50 number or getting there.

Maren Kate
So what I'm really curious about, we’ll dig into this in a few minutes, is you guys started remote, and then you went in house. And also just like the growth. There's a lot of things I want to touch in. But just to kind of give the audience context, are there any growth numbers you can share to kind of get a better understanding of where you guys are at? Revenue, users, anything like that?

Brian Patterson
Yeah, so Inc. 5000 makes a lot of that public, which is great, it's out there, our growth. We do between 50 and 100% growth over the past three years. I think this year we’ll, or I'm sorry, 2018 we’ll have done a little over 5 million or approaching 6 million in revenue. So it's been a fun ride. I think we're definitely not like one of those software startups where, you know, just hockey stick straight up in the air. In a services business, especially an agency, good conservative growth is probably the safer thing to do.

Maren Kate
Yeah, absolutely. But still, you said 6 million, 40 people, that's super solid.

Brian Patterson
Yeah, it's been exciting, for sure.

Maren Kate
Cool. So taking that into the portion where you talk about that growth from 5 to 50, I mean, I'd love to understand when you guys started growing and your thoughts on remote work, your thoughts on in-house, and how that evolved for you?

Brian Patterson
Yep, so it ties back to those long car rides that Dan and I had back in the day and just absolutely hating it. Just we felt like it was, you know, our value and everyone's value in contracting and consulting are butts in seats. It's how many hours is your butt in the seat and then we can bill for those hours and that's your value. So, there were people who didn't really do any work but they were billable, and they sat in the seat, and the company made money off of them. We kind of wanted to flip that on its head and pretty much everything that we did in contracting we kind of wanted to do differently. We were pretty frustrated. We look back at the time fondly in a lot of ways but also we learned a lot about what we wanted to do with our business. And so the reason that we started remote was one because we felt like we could have done the work that we were doing at the FBI at home. There's certainly security implications there but every other contract that we worked on for the FBI we could have done from home. There was no reason for us to have used 10% of our day in a car to get to where we were going. We could have used those two hours, been billable at home, and done really great work for them. So the working from home, we really value that. We also wanted to just hire the best people that we could and where we could find them. And so we were in DC at the time and there's not a lot of digital marketing in the DC area. That's changed a bit over time but we wanted to find great people and didn't matter where they were. And so that's how we initially were hiring.

Maren Kate
Now when you say, “didn't matter where they were” was that anywhere in the world? Was it anywhere in North America?

Brian Patterson
Yeah, anywhere in the US really is where we were targeting. But we would have hired, if we found someone great and they were traveling all over Asia, as long as we can make the time zones work with client calls and stuff we probably wouldn't have been opposed to it. But it just so happened we had people from coast to coast in the US.

Maren Kate
So you grew to what? How many people were you when you were still fully distributed, fully remote?

Brian Patterson
I think we were at six or so when we started tinkering with co-working space. And that was a very informal thing where I think we went to an event and someone's like, “Hey, we'll give you a couple of months free of this space” and we're like, “oh, cool, it'd be good to have a space we got all come together and meet when we felt like it”. And so we found we were doing really good work when we came in the office together. There was an energy that is hard to replicate over a Google Hangout. You know, there are conversations that happen that don't happen over hangout because they’re not, the Hangouts tend to be formally scheduled, just sitting next to each other and so we thought there's something to this. We probably should do it a little bit more than we currently do.

Maren Kate
And then fast-forwarding to today, who's in office? Who's remote? And how does that work?

Brian Patterson
Yes. So how it evolved was, we decided we're going to have an office and set some standard parameters around that. A lot of the big ideas we had early on at the FBI, we had in terms of when we were working there and kind of formulating what we wanted out of a business. Maybe they turned out to be great ideas and sounded good but were hard to replicate as a business grows. One of those was, you work when you feel like working during the day, like what works best for you. And then we had to pull back on that because we found we had someone who was kind of nocturnal and so we would sometimes lose a day because we couldn't answer a question or get back to a client that day with what they needed because that person wasn't there. They didn't work at the same time as us. Sometimes that helps you but most of the time it ended up being a little bit inconvenient. So we were like, “okay, let's standardize on core hours” and so that was kind of an eight to four things, what we've landed on. We still do that today. And then you can work before and after that but you generally should be available 8 to 4. And then we didn't want to completely eliminate the work from home aspect of what we do but we wanted to kind of bake in working in-office as well to get a lot of that value that we got from being around each other. So where we settled is three days a week we all work in the office and then two days a week we work from home. We have a DC office and we also have an office in Raleigh, North Carolina that I work out of and we let each office kind of figure out together what works best for them. So in Raleigh Monday and Friday we all work remotely. In DC they are remote Tuesday and Friday. So it has worked well in that people get that balance, that work-life balance I think people strive for. A lot of people value working from home and having flexibility. You know, if you want to travel, you can travel and squeeze a few extra days out of it. You don't have to come back Sunday night. You can come back Monday night or whatever the case may be. But it has worked out really well for us finding the right balance. And for the folks who were remote we didn't take that away from them. They're grandfathered in, they're sort of legacy remote employees or remote team members and it's part of our culture that they are where they are.

Maren Kate
Yeah, it's interesting, in doing research before we got on the phone, I noticed you guys have a perfect score on Glassdoor, which is actually very rare, and it looks like you have about seven jobs that you're hiring for right now, all in Raleigh, Digital Marketing Associate, PPC Associate, Project Manager Intern. And then I was also looking at your blog, which is funny because you guys just had a post that says, How to Work From Home Effectively, and you posted that April 30th. We literally wrote a post and posted one super similar about The Pros and Cons of Working Remotely the same day, so it was funny. I sent it to my team. My company Avra, we’re a completely distributed company and most of the businesses I've started had been that way but at the same time when we travel, I travel a lot, I love going to co-working spaces and meeting up with the team. I do miss that face-to-face sometimes.

Brian Patterson
That's funny, we should cross-promote each other's blog posts.

Maren Kate
Yeah, seriously. Well, you know what, honestly, I'm just gonna be completely honest, I read through yours and I was like, “well, you guys are the experts at SEO and backlinking”, I was like “damn it, this is really good”. You put a lot more meat in some detail links so I made some notes.

Brian Patterson
That was one of our grandfathered in our legacy remote team members, Mia. She was one of our early team members and she's great. She works out of her home in Nashville, Tennessee, but also comes and visits us in the office. But that's worked out really well for her.

Maren Kate
That's awesome. We'll put a link to the blog post in the show notes. So in terms of, I mean, there's two things I want to ask you. I'm going to jump into SEO first. So I think what's fascinating is when I was looking through your site and everything, I'm curious what size of companies you work with now. But if you're a founder and you're in that 5 to 50 growth range, what are your best suggestions? How would you, if you were just chatting with someone over coffee, what would you tell them to do to really make sure that they're optimizing their search engine strategy?

Brian Patterson
That's a great question and one we get a lot. You know, I think a lot of business owners and entrepreneurs generally have an intuitive sense of what their customers are searching for so in general, it’s pretty obvious. The place where that gets really hard is if you're inventing an entirely new space. For example, if Airbnb would have come to us, or let's say, Uber came to us back when they weren't a thing that everybody knew and they were like, “we want to rank for ride-sharing”. You know, that's hard, because no one was searching that back then or no one is trying to rank for it.

Maren Kate
Wouldn’t it also be easy though, to rank for it, if you're the only one using the keyword?

Brian Patterson
It would be easy to rank for it, it just wouldn't have a lot of value because no one's searching for it. So in a new space, in an invented space, I think traditional marketing is probably a lot more valuable than SEO. But for most businesses we work with it is much more well defined. For like a GEICO, they're going to want to rank for everything insurance-related. For a Marriott, they're going to want to rank for everything hotel-related. The things I think that are key for someone who's interested in doing it for their site are some really simple things like when you're creating a page on your site, what would you want that page to rank for? And then use those words on the page. It sounds obvious, but I think when you start working on a website, you're like, “oh, I want my site to rank for this” so you start saying your site generally whereas at the page level is really where the magic happens. And so at the page level, you want to do the things that are going to matter. And there are some great tools. I think a lot of people use WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin, if you follow a lot of the checkboxes there you're gonna get a lot of the things that you need.

Maren Kate
Yeah, I just got Yoast so now I feel good.

Brian Patterson
Yeah, Yoast is great. And so between WordPress and Yoast, you end up with a pretty good baseline for SEO and for Google accessing the site. And then from there, it's all about other websites linking to you. So many people have heard about backlinks and the value of them. It's often debated but the essence, the truth is that Google is still heavily dependent on that third-party validation that your site or your content or your brand is good. And so if you get a link to your site, from, you know, the Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal, that is really a safe signal for Google that you're probably not a spammer or a scammer, right? And so doing the things that can get you those links, very difficult, you know, it's hard to DIY that I think, for that tier of links, but for the next tier down, most companies can do things, or be interesting enough to get a blogger to talk about them or write about them through relationship building or offering them something.

Maren Kate
Got it. That makes sense. So in terms of the types of companies you guys are helpful for what's the size? Is it like a Marriot? Or is it like a 10 person startup?

Brian Patterson
It's everything. You know, we certainly enjoy working with some great enterprise clients like Marriot, Geico, New York Times. We also work with a local dentist and kind of everything in between. We try not to be too good for any type of business. I think, as long as it makes sense from an ROI perspective, and that the service they need is one that relates well with something that we offer, I think we generally can find a good solution.

Maren Kate
Is there a minimum spend?

Brian Patterson
Yeah, and it depends on the service. So with SEO, there's going to be a higher minimum spend than with other channels. For an instance, we do influencer marketing and that's actually a great one for companies who are trying to build awareness for maybe a new service that people aren't aware of, that example I gave earlier, but with that one, that's going to be a lower-cost investment because you can really scale that up or scale that down. We can just work with one influencer every two months or so, for example. A little bit harder to do that with SEO.

Maren Kate
Okay, that makes sense. So you're scaling from just the two co-founders to 40 people and growing right now. What did you wish you had known about that 5 to 50 stage? If you could wave a magic wand? Or what would you tell yourself?

Brian Patterson
That's a good question. There's no huge thing that I think we missed. There's certainly lots of little things but there's also I think we've gotten here through a lot of trial and error and testing and doing things our own way that have really helped us out so I think the big thing is just going with your gut. So a lot of the things that we do are maybe counterintuitive, or not obvious, or is an idea that we had and we could have just said, “yeah, that's an idea” and moved on but instead we did it. So for example, you mentioned Glassdoor, and we are super pleased with it, and we know that everyone's experience varies but, at least to date, the people who have chosen to share their experience has been positive on Glassdoor, super thankful for that. But the things that we have decided to do as a company are to be really employee-friendly, and employee-focused. We want everyone to feel like they have a say in the company. Initially, we had the idea to be flat, like we were going to be a flat company. Well then we get some feedback that like, “I don't have enough guidance”, or “I don't have enough training” and so we had to implement some layers of management. But that didn't mean that the people who maybe had managers over them didn't have a voice or a say in how the company operates or grows. We treat everyone's feedback equally and fairly and value it. And then little things like, we had the idea that you want would be cool, we're a creative agency, people get creative ideas from a lot of different places, we should help encourage that. Let's pay for everyone's Netflix, let's pay for Spotify, for a magazine subscription, a newspaper if they want it, you know, some things that get the creative juices flowing. There's things that I think good ideas spawn from when you have access to those. So I think the big thing that I probably, you know, early I would have told myself is go with my gut. Do and try things that are unique or different. Be willing to fail smartly so if it does fail, it's not going to cost the company, you know, tank the company but you learned something from it. I think that probably would be the lesson.

Maren Kate
Okay. That's great. So final three questions. What is your favorite book or podcast from the last year?

Brian Patterson
Besides this one? So a book I read recently, that I really liked, is The One Thing.

Maren Kate
I love that book.

Brian Patterson
Yeah, so simple in concept.

Maren Kate
So simple

Brian Patterson
Probably more than most books I can think of, I find myself applying it to day-to-day work. It's just, you know, a lot of things end up in front of you. What is the one thing I can do right now that will have the most impact?

Maren Kate
I literally love it. Yeah, that's the exact same. What is the one thing that, if I do, will eliminate or make everything…. I'm going to look at…. But yeah, that book is magic. I write it sometimes in my notebook when I'm trying to think what I need to do first. What's the one thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be easier or unnecessary?

Brian Patterson
Mm-hmm. So great. And it's the message I think I needed to hear. So sometimes there's things you just need to hear at certain times. And when you're feeling overwhelmed or when it's like what should I be doing now? You know, the complete opposite. That guidance has helped me a lot. And it's really helped me put in perspective how to treat lists and creating to-do lists for myself. He gives great examples of the flaws in those and how to do better lists that sort of thing. But yeah, super, super great book. Recommend that for definitely every entrepreneur.

Maren Kate
For sure. What is the top business tool that you guys use? Not an internal tool you built but something external that you guys really rely on in your business.

Brian Patterson
Let's see. The tool that we rely on a lot, I think because I'm doing a lot of sales work these days, which tends to happen, we use it's now called Zendesk Sell. I believe it was BaseCRM before but Zendesk acquired them. It's the CRM we use. It's super simple. We tried Salesforce. It was just way more than we needed for our small agency. But we really love Zendesk Sell. As a business goal that one is a great one.

Maren Kate
And then in terms of what's the SEO tool that you recommend the most? Would it be Yoast?

Brian Patterson
So if you have a WordPress site, yes, Yoast, for sure. And I would say from a data perspective, I really like what ahrefs is doing these days. So ahrefs.com, HTML code, is a really good one in helping you. So what you can do is take your domain or, let's say, take your competitor's domain and put that into the tool and it will tell you everything that they rank for, how much traffic those keywords get. If you're doing it for your own domain you get keyword opportunities. You can see like, oh, this blog posts on remote work ranks 12th for remote work to those 19 or something like that. And then you can say, I'm going to go to that post, I'm going to optimize it to rank better for that keyword. It does this and like a million other things. But that's just like one actual example where you can see data in that tool, pop over to WordPress, make an update and potentially move from page two to page one, and actually start capturing traffic.

Maren Kate
Oh, that's awesome. I just noted that. I’ll also put that in the show notes. But it's A H R E F S like ah refs SEO toolbar. That's an amazing tool. Cool. Okay, so my last question, by far the most important, I asked everyone this. If you had to fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck, which would you pick and why?

Brian Patterson
I think I'd go with 100 duck-sized horses. Like a couple of legs sweeps, a couple of kicks, that would be more effective, more my speed than like one really big thing.

Maren Kate
Exactly. That’s what I always say and what makes the most sense but a lot of people disagree. I also think it kind of sounds adorable, like all these tiny little horses. One horse-sized duck would just be terrifying. Awesome. Brian, it was so great chatting. Thank you for sharing so much information and knowledge. So if people want to find you online, obviously Go Fish Digital, which I'm assuming they could Google and find you. And then anything else? Any other ways they can find or follow you?

Brian Patterson
@BrianSPatterson on Twitter. I'm super inactive. I have plans to get back in the game. SupBrian on Instagram.

Maren Kate
Nice. Nice. I like it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. I really enjoy chatting with you.

Brian Patterson
Oh, this was super fun. Thanks for having me.