An Agency Story
An Agency Story
The Accidental Tactic That Flooded His Pipeline - Mountaintop Web Design
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Company: Mountaintop Web Design
Owners: Josiah Bussing
Year Started: 2013
Employees: 1-10
Ever felt like you accidentally backed into entrepreneurship? That’s exactly how Josiah Bussing’s journey began. In this episode, he shares how helping his dad fix a website sparked a passion that became Mountaintop Web Design and how he plans to grow his agency while staying rooted in value, ethics, and continuous improvement.
Inside this episode:
- A different way to think about your interview questions.
- Why you should never undervalue vacation as a leadership test
- The difference between providing a service and solving a problem
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel:What do Girl Scout Cookies, terrible websites, and 5:00 AM work sessions have to do with building a digital agency more than you think. Welcome to an agency story podcast. I'm your host Russell. In this episode, I'm joined by Josiah Bussing, founder of Mountaintop Web Design from building his dad's website out of necessity to bootstrapping a remote first agency. Josiah's journey is equal parts heart hustle and humility. If we dive into what it really takes to transfer entrepreneurial drive into a scalable team, why hiring well beats trying to force culture, and the hard won lessons of building systems that let you step away from the business, even if just for two weeks. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I've got Josiah Bussinng with Mountaintop Web Design with us here today. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Josiah.
Josiah:Great to be here. It's a privilege.
Russel:it's a privilege to have you. I do always just start off with an introduction, what does Mountaintop Web Design do and who do you do it for?
Josiah:We are almost a full service digital marketing firm. We do things like website design, WordPress websites, ongoing care and maintenance, website hosting, search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, those sorts of things. We don't do social media, so that's why I say almost full service, because that's separate area that we really don't want to get into. We focus more on, like, aligning our customers with the problem that they're solving for their customers. Search intent. If somebody's, for example, looking for a local furnace repair company, aligning that company with that search is where we really focus. That's where we're primed to help our customers. Who do we help? We help everyone from coffee shops to HVAC repair. Cyber security consultants, realtors. We serve a huge spectrum of clients across a whole bunch of different industries. It adds a unique challenge, but it's also fun because you can see the difference, like, the different solutions you can implement from industry to industry.
Russel:Beautifully put, coming off some of our conversation that we said we should have hit the record button before, so we're going to get back to some of those nuggets, but coming off a two and a half week stint with some family vacation, you said everyone's alive and well, that's always a good sign to hear, but it sounds like you had a great Thanksgiving.
Josiah:Yeah, correct. One of the benefits of working with a fully remote team is you can pick up and move your office to wherever you need to be. I am normally in the Denver metro area with team across the country. For the two and a half weeks around Thanksgiving, just because we booked some time with family, we picked up and I moved my office to Michigan. It's just nice where you can take some time off and work and play and shift your schedule around as need be. It's a great benefit of the flexibility that you have here
Russel:Wonderful. I got to take advantage I do that a little bit, but I don't think I've ever gone anywhere from two and a half weeks and just said, yeah, it was a, uh, remote vacation like that. Maybe a reminder, anyone at home, if you're working remotely, go, go jet off somewhere. Maybe not, for some of you, not family. Don't go stay with family for two and a half weeks, but, um, but, uh, yeah, that's a great idea. Great reminder.
Josiah:Or find someplace, you know, like a work vacation, right? A tropical beach place or remote mountain lodge, something, something a little more relaxing, maybe.
Russel:But then, tell me this, do you get, do you get upset? Like, oh, I, you know, I want to go be skiing or I want to go be on beaching. I don't want to be working. Has that ever, have you done that? Is that a conflict at all?
Josiah:Haven't done that one yet. I'm sure I would definitely struggle with that. I think my challenge is I want to learn to take more time off where I'm at those places and just not working. That's the goal I'm working towards.
Russel:Although, maybe I'll say, and I think this in a couple instances I've done, it is more motivation, like, oh, I'm going to get up early, I'm going to knock everything out so I can be done by one, versus, oh, I have the whole day, and I'm going to take the whole day to get work done if I'm at home. And then we were talking about, uh, before we also hit record, you were interrupted by a pesky salesperson. I'm sure there's a marketing lesson in there but we were just lamenting about pesky salespeople.
Josiah:The classic door to door home service salesperson that shows up and interrupts your day and expects you to give them 15 minutes of your time so that they can try and sell you a service or solution that you do not need. I was on my soapbox a little bit just talking about how it, it seems super spammy and not very helpful when you have somebody that interrupts your pattern and tries to force you into something you don't need. One of the reasons I like digital marketing is it tries to align that service with when that customer is actually looking for it and you provide a solution to that problem. That feels better and more ethical from my perspective than just the slimey door to door salesperson.
Russel:What's funny too is why, why are they, why are they selling something? If I need pest control, I know I can go look up and contact a pest control company, but what I'd be more enthralled about, right, as you see these little gadgets, they might sell on TikTok or something like that. Like a Woosama gadget, you know, 5, 000 or something like that. If someone came to my door and was selling something like that, I'd be far more likely to buy that than just some commodity of pest control. I've got two things I want to make sure we get our message out there today, Josiah, is if you're a person and you buy services from a door to door commodity, stop it. Because you're perpetuating this. Unless it's a Girl Scout or donation or something like that, stop doing that. Number two, if you're going to get in this business, sell me something interesting. Don't sell me something I'm really probably upset that I'd have to pay for it to begin with anyway.
Josiah:I would say even just a better focus on aligning, like, what is the problem that you're solving? Is that salesperson with the solution If you walk up and the person's house has gutters that are hanging off and they're broken, then yes, sell'em gutters, right? It's an obvious solution, but like, when they don't have any clue what the inside of your house looks like and they're, you know, asking, are you ready for a bathroom remodel? You don't actually even know. Why try to sell a bathroom remodel when, like, our bathrooms are remodeled? Or maybe they're not, but you would never know that. That's the challenge is can you solve a problem for the people and not just show up and try and shove something down their throat? Granted, if it's a Girl Scout, just sell me the cookies, right? I'm all for just being sold the cookies when it's the Girl Scouts.
Russel:Show up here every day and I will buy a box every day.
Josiah:That's right. Just take my money. I'll leave it on the porch. Just leave me a box
Russel:Exactly. Now they don't come door to door anymore. They just sit out in front of, like, a Walmart or something like that.
Josiah:Or you have to order it online I think.
Russel:Yeah, jeez. Made Girl Scout cookies more inaccessible. But you're perfectly right. There's a lesson for marketers out there. I doubt there's too many door to door salespeople listening, but stop, don't serve your ads to somebody that doesn't need those ads and so how can we identify who needs them? But great lesson. Let's get to some of your story. I want to hear kind of how you got in this crazy biz. I know you had a pretty interesting origin story a little bit in, in kind of your first foray into digital marketing. What was young Josiah doing to get enthralled with an agency business?
Josiah:Truth is I fell into it. The best way I could describe it is I was in college at the time and was trying to figure out what life would look like for me after going to this thing called university. I wanted, you know, so far at that point to get away from anything entrepreneurial related. My dad's a custom homebuilder. He's the entrepreneur and he did really well for a long time. But right when I was graduating high school was that 2008, 2009 financial crisis, which hit the home building industry extremely hard. Watching him go from plenty to, you know, struggling was a really difficult time so I wanted to go pre med. I wanted to go, like, med school, get out of anything economically driven. I was like, people always get sick so there will always be a need for that. Go to college, um, sign up for business classes. The only thing I can say is, like, it's more of a God thing that I kind of fell into it because I started my business 101 class and I started listening to the professor speak. I'm like, wow, I was totally meant to be here right now. I've looked back on that and just thought, man, I, if I went the premed route, like, that would be a disaster. I'm not cut to be a doctor. That's not my skill set. That's not where I'm passionate. I am truly built to be an entrepreneur. That was something I kind of accidentally fell into. But fast forward. Started figuring out the marketing side of things, that I liked business and I liked learning about business. I come home from my freshman year of college, my dad got a, one of those nasty, oh, like copyright infringement notices from one of the big companies that some of the images on his website that some other website designer had built and has since disappeared at that point. He, you know, had the 5, 000 dollar fine or whatever it was from the company. Didn't know any better, but we, we started looking into, okay, what does it take to swap the images out? We hop in, it's an old HTML website. My task for the entire week of Thanksgiving break was to figure out how to swap HTML images on the back end of a server I've never logged into. It was completely foreign to me. We figured it out. We were successful. We got it done. My dad, you know, while I was back at school finishing finals, he was just fed up with this thing I get home and he's like, I'm going to give you another project for Christmas break. I'm like, okay, whatever. I'll help you out. I grew up, you know, the son of an entrepreneur, you step in and help out where you need to. He hands me a really, really bad website builder. One of those static drag and drop original website builders of the day that, like, you drag it around and exports the HTML code. I build a website that break and start just tinkering with things like, okay, how do I get this website to do this? Going down that rabbit hole of like, how do I make it better? How do I keep making it better? Time goes on and I keep playing with this stuff for a while and I start, for him, going down the rabbit hole of like, and I didn't know what search engine optimization was. I didn't know what local search was, but I was like, okay, I've got to figure out how to get more people come into his website so I can figure out How he can grow his business and how he can get more visibility. All of a sudden, like, he starts ranking, starts getting business that start coming from this, right? I'm just, like, accidentally happening into it.
Russel:I know you're a little older than teenager mindset here of like, you know, son, go build me a website. Oh, dad, but I'm hearing a lot more passion, so this doesn't sound like a parent to do list that you did begrudgingly. And who better to have success for than, than your parents.
Josiah:I like a challenge and I think I like figuring out things like that. I think somewhere in there, it's scratched that itch that entrepreneurs have of like, I think I can do something with this, right? You start figuring it out because that was, that would have been 20, trying to think here, 2017 or 2018. I played around with his stuff on the side for a while and started just kind of helping him as I had free time in college. I don't think he even paid me for it, which is fine. That's what families are for, right? But eventually, like it, it really put this idea in my head of like, I think I can make some money doing this. At that point, like, I was in college. You don't need much money when you're in college. You just got a little bit of groceries and some rent.
Russel:Oh, I know. If today Russel could live on college Russel budget frugality, uh, I'd be in such a much better place.
Josiah:Oh, man, it'd be great. Your budget is so small at that point. You got roommates, no concerns, no mortgage. It's great. But that, that sort of idea got planted, right? I sold my auto mechanic on the idea of a website. I think he took a flyer on me just knowing me and I, he's, I sold him for 250 bucks. I'd build a new website and walk back in a few weeks later after hand coding the whole thing. I taught myself to code during this time frame, took all the photos on my, my iPhone back in the day, because, you know, that was all I had access to. Wrote all of the text, built all of the pages and I think I blew him away. Cause I think he was expecting, like, a really crappy website built by this, like, 19 year old kid and, like, built like a five page website that had, like, a list of his services. I was just trying to figure out like, what do customers want to see when they're looking at this website and how do I put it on the website so they can find it? You just figured it out at the beginning from using some basic empathy and figuring out what do people want to see? Needless to say, I made no money on that project, but it really set me off on that journey. Here we are 2024. We just celebrated 11 years. I did it on the side for a long time. I took a job because I was, you know, getting married coming out of college, I needed to be able to provide for the family. Just did it on the side as a part time thing and started putting some fundamental, like, building blocks in place of things like recurring revenue and building, like, consistent customer base that then would refer us to other customers. That just started growing things. 2020 hit and that was really where things took off and went to the next level where we could blow it up. We basically got to the point where I was working a full time job during the day and working a full time job at night and in the morning. I'd be working from like 5 AM to 8 AM on my, you know, my gig. Popping into the day job, working there until lunchtime, taking the 30 minute or hour long lunch and flexing that when I had a client meeting, trying to, like, balance both worlds as best as I could, because I didn't want to take away from my day job, right? That would be wrong, but then hopping back in and working, you know, the day job in the afternoon until 4:30 or 5 and then from 5 until 10 or 11 or whatever needed to be done for that project to get done.
Russel:That's a tough schedule. Was it the extra income? Was it the, the skill acquisition or was it, you know, that you knew this was eventually going to turn into a business?
Josiah:I would be lying if I said that I knew it would eventually turn into a business. I think for me, for a long time, especially from like 2016 to 2018, I didn't actually think that I'd be able to make enough money doing this to actually even provide for myself, let alone a team full time. I hadn't figured that out yet. I think part of the reason was I was charging way too little money for a website, wasn't building any recurring revenue into it, had no sort of ongoing services and wasn't doing additional things. I hadn't figured out the model quite yet, I guess is the best way to say that. I don't know how to describe it besides the fact of I fell into it and then I just want to be a really good steward and deliver a lot of value when that comes in. People would be referred to me so you wind up with five projects when you're used to only doing one. Okay, well, I want to do a good job with each of those. I want to do what's right by that customer, by that client. It just grew out of that. And then that led to obviously to more referrals and more referrals led to more clients coming in. I think it is more of something like I fell into it. I don't know that I was ever very intentional about that. That's something that I think if I, you know, knowing what I know now, going back 10 years, I, life would look a little different. But I mean, it just kind of was like, hey, I want to do the right thing. I want to take good care of these clients and serve them super well. I think until 2020, maybe late 2019, I always thought that like, I knew I was an entrepreneur, but I figured I had probably 15 years of miserable and, like, making money and buying the house. All of those like, the typical American dream type scenario. I didn't think that I would be an entrepreneur until late forties, early fifties. I figured it was some far off pipe dream. I didn't think it was anything that could ever, like, happen to me, let alone this early.
Russel:You probably didn't have time to think. You're running 5 AM to midnight. There's all gas, no brakes, uh, on that kind of schedule.
Josiah:It was, one, so 2020 we actually, the funny thing about this is like halfway through 2020, my wife and I were having a baby in August of 2020. We had the COVID baby and we knew life was going to look different. I intentionally tried to put brakes on the business. I was like, okay, as of July 1st, I am not taking any more customers. I told all of my sales leads at that point that I'm not taking any more customers after this day because we're having a baby. I need time to deliver these projects before we have the baby so I don't have stress in my life. You can see where this is going. That backfired miserably. I figured, like, I'd gather one or two clients, life would be good, finish out those projects, move on. I think every single client that I was talking to or potential client I was talking to signed up at that point. So now I'm buried, like trying to go into sleepless nights being and, the father of a newborn trying to help out and take care of the little baby. That was like, the point where, like, you could just really see, like, things take off and go in the right direction for the business specifically. Towards the end of 2020, early 2021, my wife and I looked at each other like, we can't keep doing this. This is unsustainable. This is not healthy for us. It's not healthy for our marriage, for our relationship, for our kids, our kid at that point. We're like, okay, what, what do we have to do to take this thing full time? We started, like, running the numbers and it's like, okay, well, here's our number. Where are we right now? We're like, we're only 500 dollars a month off. It's like, I think we can make that work. It's like sneakily snuck up on me that it, it had gotten that big just because I had been so focused on just delivering value as opposed to watching the metrics associated with that necessarily. April 2021, hopped in full time and things just blew up from there. Started hiring a team three months later and we got a bigger team now continually adding people, um, trying to figure out how to free up my time and get more results and better results for customers.
Russel:Wonderful origin story there. You walked yourself right up to having a full time uh, compensation and replacement of income in your business, which so great. Wasn't a big risky leap, but as you're sharing that, maybe just folks listening, that could be a great sales tactic. Tell all your prospects tomorrow that you're not going to do any more or take on any more work. Right? Turn the tables, somebody try it. Somebody tell me how it works.
Josiah:I thought you were going to go the route of like, you just got to have another baby and then tell your, tell your sales leads you're having a baby and you can't go there, right? It's an expensive way to gain sales leads, I guess.
Russel:But maybe you're creating your future army of business operators You can just go all in on that effort. You're running an entire business around baby making. That could go down a track. When I hear about this dedication to burn yourself in the midnight oil of getting this client work done, that you have a passion for, really just ask, how do I do better? How I provide more value? Do you know where that comes from or just what, why is that such an important question for you?
Josiah:I don't know where it comes from. I just know that it's been there for a long time, right? it's something that it's a, it's a benefit and a curse simultaneously. The brain doesn't shut off and it's, it makes it hard to put healthy boundaries in place where it's like, okay, it's 5 PM. I need to go be with my family and spend time intentionally with them there when your brain is just like constantly trying to solve problems and figure out okay, where's the weakness? How do I make it better? As I can remember, it's there. Even things like when I was in high school playing football, we sold those, like, discount cards, right? I'm competitive. That's probably part of it, but it's not necessarily like that bravado thing of I want to be the best, but I feel like I'm competing more with myself of like, can I do better than I did last time? Even with, like, the little thing of selling those football cards back in the day, like, I didn't even know that it was a thing. We were supposed to sell 25. The first year I think I sold 45 and I got it was like 40 or 50 bucks as like a reward from the football team, like, to incentivize people to sell things.
Russel:Think of all that money you made. It's like, here's 40 bucks, kid.
Josiah:Oh yeah. I figured out how to, it's probably just, like, that entrepreneurial, like, tick of, like, how do you get in front of customers and figure out who your better customers are? Cause I figured out very easily that it was like, okay, if you go to doctor's offices and law firms, you walk in and you talk to whoever the partner or the owner is, they will buy a card for every one of their staff on the spot. So instead of going door to door and selling one card at a time, you walk into an office and in five minutes, you've sold 10 cards.
Russel:Definition of work smarter, not harder. Wonderful. Genius.
Josiah:I guess it's always been there and I, I don't know where, I mean, my parents have always probably just done a good job of teaching us to do what's right. Work hard towards things and so it's probably just an outflow of that, but it, it definitely is something that is very present in my mind.
Russel:I'm just curious. As time has gone on and right, you've grown your business. It sounds like an obsession, not in a good sense of the word of this is constantly something you're thinking about. Have you been able to even translate that or bake that into the culture beyond just you and your mindset, but put that into practice throughout the overall business?
Josiah:One of the big things that I think my team hears me talk about a lot is the value that we add to clients. We were talking about this a little bit earlier, possibly even before we hopped on the podcast here, but just that question of how do we continue to get better results for clients? Not being satisfied with the status quo. There's got to be a healthy boundary in there somewhere and I'm working to define that internally, but like, we'd never want to be an agency that just takes money from people for the sake of taking money from them. We've all heard the horror stories. We've all heard about those agencies that do that. We want to provide a lot of value. I think it's something you hire for. I don't think that's something that you can necessarily teach as part of, like, a culture. I think it's something that, like, those people that you would hire that fit your model and, like, your team culture will bring with them that desire to improve and to do better and to make improvements to things. I'm going to brag on my team. For example, I hired a website designer earlier this year, and you know, she came from another agency and when she came in, she helped us build a project tracking spreadsheet that will help us get clearer and better results from both the website design process and the QA that happens after it. She just built it. She didn't ask for permission. She just came in and said, hey, this is something I built because I think it would help us. She presented it to me. I loved it. It's been one of the best things that we've implemented this year because it's helped us get better, more consistent results. But I think that comes down to, like, you have to hire the people that have that, like that same driver, that same, like, passion for making things better. It is definitely a big current inside of our organization, because it is something that we talk about. It means sort of nothing's off limits in terms of work that's being done. We are willing to question anything and try and make even things that are working work better next time.
Russel:I kind of say this half jokingly, actually half not, um, but you know, I, I'm definitely a big believer, you can solve a lot of challenges in your business by hiring well. There's certainly ways you can, you can bake it into the culture, but a great start is, right. Finding people that it's already natural to their culture, but an interview question for people is how many discount cards did you sell in your school or sport fundraiser when you were a kid? Tell you everything you need to know.
Josiah:Just going down that rabbit hole a little bit, one of the things that I do differently after watching and being in a typical corporate world where they hire people based off of what they think are best practices, but it really is just whatever bad corporate mold that they have. They all ask the same questions and it's always the same questions that everyone's prepared for, which are questions like, tell me about yourself. What are your three strengths? Really basic questions like that, that everyone has a canned answer to. I sort of looked at that and I said, okay, we need to do something different if we want to hire differently than getting corporate lookalikes. One of the big things that I've focused on, and I'll give a plug to Patrick Lencioni, and a lot of the questions that he asks as part of his ideal team player and as part of his books, but I asked very unconventional questions as part of the interview process. I do that intentionally because it filters out a lot of people very quickly and it helps me find, like, what I would term as A players. I really like our team, I'm very grateful for our team. I would say that they're A players because they get a ton of results and we're a small scrappy team. I ask questions like, what's the best mistake you've ever made? That's been a fun one that I like because it captures both a humility and it also, it also shows does that person have the ability to assess something that they've done and see how it's made their life better? I didn't know it would do this, but it also weeds out a lot of people that give really bad answers. That are just not cultural fits. I had one guy that I was interviewing. He literally bragged about no call, no showing work. He goes surfing and it's I'm all for work life balance, but, like, you got to show up when you got to show up. That's part of the gig here.
Russel:All common sense is not so common. Honestly, I think sometimes it's not even the cliche question. It's what is, what is the answer you're looking for in how you're looking at that question? I actually like a cliche question. What do you do in your personal time? Not just cause I'm trying to fill time, but I want to see like, you know, they have something else they're passionate about or that they're curious about. Can they show kind of some of that notion of, hey, yeah, I, I'm into leather work or something like that and I make wallets and it's like, okay, well, they had to go through a process to learn that. They're not apprenticed, they didn't learn that in college. They know how to, say, be curious and then go apply a set of skills to act upon that curiosity. They don't know what the right answer actually is so they can't gamify the system, um, by your kind of prototypical corporate response. Anyway, good stuff. Awesome. I want to switch gears too, because I know this is a, maybe one of the more harder challenges in the agency world that that you'd shared earlier. You obviously have a lot of skills, talents, abilities as the owner and right, as you're growing a team, you're not only trying to hire other folks, but you've got to do some level of transfer of that, what you're capable of onto other people and with a whole system and that everything comes up on the other side, uh, as good as we'd hope or expect. It sounds like maybe that's the road you're on currently. What's that like?
Josiah:To explain the road I'm on, I want to kind of explain like how I would describe my goals. This is a little unconventional. For me, my goals are not necessarily monetary goals. That's the backend. How do you achieve it? For me, I want to be able to take a two week vacation or four week vacation and everything is just done, right? That's the one thing that you sacrifice when you take and work as an entrepreneur is a small business owner. You don't get the traditional vacation where you can check out. You can punch the clock out and you're done for 2 weeks. You have that where you just wear it. I think we as humans need rest and relaxation. If you go back to biblical times, like Sabbath, that, that rest is good for us. It's been proven to spur creativity and help with better results. We need to build that into our lives. For me, that's like, my ultimate goal is being able to get to that two to four week mark where I can just have things done. That means I have to put all of those roles in place. Sales, accounting, marketing, account management, all of those pieces where I can step out of that day to day. I don't have to do those roles. Somebody else can fill in for me. That said, part of that is like, trying to scale the agency because that's it takes revenue to cover those costs and the expenses of hiring the people and the talented people that you need to do those things. That's the journey I'm on at the moment is trying to figure out, one, who's the next hire? How do you train them? How do you help them do well and succeed in their role? How do you help them do better than what you did? That's the tough thing. You had sort of hinted at it, taking all of that knowledge transfer and then putting it into somebody is really difficult. Especially like, right now, I'm working on the project management side of helping boost that side of things and helping my project manager see the connections between projects of, okay, this happens and now we need to do these four other things here that I've just picked up from the last 11 years of doing these things. How do you teach that in a condensed format so that within six months, right, that project manager has that same skillset? That's the big challenge I'm working on.
Russel:Again, I said, not, not uncommon. I think can be one of the hardest parts about this. I think sometimes that is just, you know, we can all forget if we've gone on a journey and we've learned all these things. It's very easy to forget all the things we actually learned and just recycling to a very granular level of what are those, what are also those things that we need to transfer? The way I always like to describe it is there are gaps, and they're going to get filled one way or the other. We've just got to really get granular about some of those details to fill in the gaps. But it makes me think of, there's a good, um, actually had a previous interview on the podcast with Jack Skeels. He wrote a really great book called Unmanaged that gets to the, the heart of some of these things. I think it helps our mindset of the apprentice model of, you know, we think back old school times, right? A blacksmith apprentice or something along those lines, like, they spent a lot of time side by side, learning all those little nuances about, I don't know anything about blacksmithing, but you know, how to hammer it and set the fire and blow on it. I don't know what you do. But we have to put our mindset in that almost apprentice like model. Not, you know, we're going to document it and they're going to read the document and know everything they need to know or something along those lines. I don't know what, what does apprentice model conjure up in your mind?
Josiah:Interesting. The thing that my mind went to is that's, I think that one of the reasons that the apprentice model works is because you're doing the work together, right? I think that the challenge, especially with things with technology is it's very much individual devices with individuals working on them. That aspect of working together gets a bit more challenging, especially when you add that remote team. I think that's the thing that a lot of companies have seen like within office versus remote is when they go remote, they now have to be intentional about things like training and building culture and sharing times and like building those spaces for people to connect, whereas that used to just happen by osmosis naturally, because there was a natural rubbing of like, people at the water cooler or in the break room. My first thought was, how do we do that better than we're currently doing it? Guess there's that continual innovation and getting better at it that just pops into mind. But it's also challenging when you do have a remote team, because now it's a Zoom meeting. It's not just like sitting next to that person.
Russel:Probably really sums up a lot of things that are, are inherent in a remote environment is that intentionality of, you know, you, you can assume some things in a person environment will happen via collision and observation and seeing other people do it. But, yeah, it's hard to get in a remote environment so that requires us to be all the more intentional about those actual gaps and nuances and little tips and tricks that we want to make sure people get. It is a journey towards that round and a lot of that experience. I loved even what you shared before of just ask yourself that question. Almost to that end of, I don't know if this is how you were thinking about it, you can share, of, right. Hey, yes, I want to, or I might want to make a certain amount of money, but that's, that needs to be over here now. But a good road to that is, can I take a vacation for a month? Answering that question might help fill in some of the gaps, to even allow that to be possible. And then if that's possible, you probably have a little, pretty good, efficient running machine that maybe you can turn that into three months.
Josiah:That would be nice. I'd like to get two weeks first, right? Start small.
Russel:Yeah. Start with two weeks. Can you go out of town for two weeks and then build upon it from there? To that point, make more babies, take more vacations. That's how you grow a business. That's our takeaways from today.
Josiah:I'm an entrepreneur, so I don't think my brain's ever going to shut off. I'm not built to lay on a beach, right? I don't have desire to build this massive company and sell it for, you know, a massive exit and then just go land a beach with fancy houses. That's just not me. It sounds nice to lay on the beach for four or five days, but then I get back up and go find something to do. For me, it's, can I, can I have the flexibility and freedom of a company that runs itself, that I can then go maybe start another company, do something else service based where you can provide a solution to people and invest more time and effort and energy into, into people in that way? I'm a big fan of providing a really good, high quality place to work for people and having a good culture where people want to show up. There's a lot of really bad workplaces out there so being able to do that more and more often would be a really cool thing. Big picture, I'm not, I'm kind of holding these things with open hands, right? If it happens, it happens. If it doesn't, it doesn't. I'm working towards that. I'm trying to be a good steward with where we're at. But that, that for me is kind of the, the bigger picture and just spending time with my family. I want to be able to, you know, my wife and our kids are, my daughter's now old enough where we're starting to talk that school conversation. Can we take, our kids to go see places like Washington, DC? And like, where the battle of Gettysburg was and all of these historical places I've never been before. But can we do that as part of their schooling and be very intentional with what we're teaching them and give them a good shot of success regarding our team, though? For us, part of it is, you know, being more efficient with how we're delivering services. Continuing to get better results for clients and better, and better results is always going to be the name of the game. Obviously, we've got a big pivot that is coming with the world, with things getting automated and some things that used to take a lot of effort are getting easier, but that also means that there's more challenges than on the other side of that to solve. As we grow, just adding members of the team that fit the culture and doing that well, so that that new team ever comes in and is able to, you know, absolutely kill their job in the best way possible and take stuff off my plate and the other team members plates. If we do that enough times and get more experts in each of the different areas, we should be able to get even better and better results for our clients. I'm a fan of being a good steward of what you've been given, whether that's the eight hours of today that you're working or, you know, the team that you have, but just being a good steward with those resources.
Russel:Beautiful. One thing is just heard there is what is always a great reminder. The real end goal for all this has to be is create the life you want. If we can do, bring people along that journey and do good things by others along the way, then all the better. We've lived a good life. We are a business and, and that's, that really is the most important part. Great testament and reminder. All right, well, Josiah. We got to wrap up here. One last big question for you. Are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Josiah:Oh man, that's a nature nurture question. I honestly don't know. It's probably a combination of both, but I feel like it's maybe a little bit more on the made side. I would say there's, there's probably a sequences of events that happened for each entrepreneur that sort of forced them down that rabbit hole and helped them see the world in that way. And like have that, that hunger and that drive and that desire to do something different. I don't know, the part of me that goes back to the like, are they born is like, there seems to be something, I'm going to say this like tongue in cheek, but like, wrong with us, where we can't sit still and we can't like, just take the world for as it is. It's just that desire of like, I got to go start something. I got to do something different. My wife usually makes fun of me when I get too much sleep at night because like, usually there's another business idea that comes out of it. There's probably an element of both as part of that. But I do think a lot of it is like, probably when you're growing up being in the right environment where you're, for whatever reason, there's an event that causes you to have a hunger and a drive and that desire to make things better or to do things differently. I think that's like, the starting point for a lot of that thought process and for, you know, how you get companies that are innovative and new and like, problems that are being solved in a different way. There's gotta be some of that, and I'm not a psychologist. I don't, I haven't studied that, but I don't know. That's kind of my personal take.
Russel:I'm not a psychologist either, but when you hear enough from this, from similar type things from people, a common theme I hear is right, that we're a little crazy or just got a chip or two loose, uh, that allows us to do these things that as well. I think you're onto something there. But fascinating answer nonetheless. If people want to know more about Mountaintop, where can they go?
Josiah:The easiest place would be just going to our website, mountaintopwebdesign.com. All one word, all lowercase, just easy to find us or you can Google us, reach out to us. If you have any questions, happy to have any conversations there. I am here, super easy to talk to you and get to know, but that's how you get ahold of us.
Russel:Perfect. And if you just want to commiserate about door to door salespeople, Josiah's your man. He's got thoughts for days.
Josiah:Come on over, yeah.
Russel:Awesome. Thank you so much, Josiah, for taking the time out of your schedule and talking with pesky salespeople to share so many wonderful nuggets about the things you've solved within your business, the road and journey you're on about living the life you want, and some of the challenges of getting some other folks on board with this journey. Really fascinating story and really appreciate you taking the time to share it.
Josiah:Thanks for the invite and thanks for allowing me to be here and share my story.
We hope you've enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Josiah:One of the, like, the slightly humorous things that we do is somewhere in the, in our new staff members, especially if they're in design cause it's really fun to watch their face cringe, especially if you're on Zoom is to share, I'll, I'll find and share the files from our original website that I built when I first built the original Mountaintop Web Design website. That's back when really crappy website builder. I did not have very much design training. I'm not a designer, so you can imagine how that would look, um, back in 2013. It's pretty comical and we get a pretty good laugh from the team. I make it okay to laugh because I'm laughing at it as well, because we've improved a lot since 2013. Especially when you have like, a professional designer that's taken graphic design classes and understand how design is supposed to look and how a website should be balanced. Seeing the first websites that I built, I mean, they're bad. But it's, you get better, right? That's always been a fun thing that we do. Usually there's some laughter about that, and then I had a really terrible haircut back in the day. That's usually the second thing that pops up is they're making fun of the hair that I had.
Russel:There's probably got to be an office pool going around of what's the worst site that Josiah ever developed. It's good to, don't take yourself too seriously and have a good, fun, historical culture moment there to boot. That's a winning combination. Love to hear that.
Josiah:Absolutely. I think I made one of my designer's goals one year to get the portfolio on our website updated. It was all her work and not my work. It's like trying to get rid of the old stuff that Josiah built cause it doesn't look quite as good.
Russel:Campaign to get rid of Josiah. That's funny.