A Day in the Life of a Web Design Agency Owner

— Hello everybody and welcome to Flow Ninja. As you can see our team and our new and the old logo here. And in today's video, I'll be going over how it actually looks like to run a big agency like Flow Ninja. So, Flow Ninja actually has about, let's say, 50 full-time employees. Plus, we have some freelancers. We are in the process of acquiring another agency. So, together with that, we're going to have 65 plus people. I think we have even more, maybe, because we have about 75 email addresses in the Google Workspace. And with that comes a little bit of complexity. So, this week is probably my busiest week in the, let's say, overall quarter, in the overall 3 months, because I have reviews with my team. So, usually on Mondays, I have only two meetings, and then I have the rest of the day for myself. But today, I have a few meetings. I have an emergency finance update because, you know, the whole world is falling apart, so we need to figure out should we change anything in the agency. I have quarterly reviews with two of my team members. And then finally, to end the day, they have our program starting because we have a release that invites only program together with Flux, which we're going to be starting off later in the day. And this is going to be pretty interesting to see how it's going to work. So, you can go ahead and review the calendar here. So, it's like first, C-level with chief product officer. Then after the tension meeting, we're going to go into deep deeper into that. I have one-on-one with my staff operations manager, finance month's review with a project management team lead, 6-month review with a sales manager, and finally, the program kickoff at 6:00 tonight. So, it's going to be a fun week. You can see that already next week, I have almost nothing, which is how I like to have it. But this week, we're going to be able to crush through it and get some more work in. So, for the first meeting, we have How do you call your role? Chief product officer, CTO, COO? Yeah. Everything apart from sales and marketing. Everything in Flow Ninja. Everything in Flow Ninja, so he actually manages my life to be a lot easier because he manages the day-to-day operations, the technical aspect of implementing all the projects because I'm traveling, I'm building up the sales and the marketing team and finances. So, we have our responsibilities split maybe 50/50. And right now, we're also in an interesting time with AI because we're figuring out how to actually start doing a web design with AI and how it can support us in the process, not overtake everything. So, we're probably going to be talking about that. We both have a need to get into the YouTube hype and to understand what we can actually do for our customers. But it's going to take more time than what you see in YouTube videos to actually get some measurable results from leveraging AI into your processes because it's not as easy as putting up a prompt if you're working with customers who are making millions and millions of dollars on a monthly basis. So, you need to be really specific about how you implement that into your processes in order for everything to work. So, we're on the second meeting for today. Today, we're going over our weekly meeting where we just discuss about any of the problems that we had the last week with our customers. We're discussing how we're going to be solving them this week. We have numbers for each department, so we know like where the places where we have problems. And this way, we can ensure that even though we have, let's say, 50 plus clients, we really know are all of them on track, doing well, and do we need to do anything in order to fix them. So, on the call, we have Alexander, our finance manager. Natasha is our project management lead, our like client delivery lead. So, with that said, Natasha, anything you'd like to share? Everything all right, no problems. Yeah, I mean I mean We don't call them problems, we call them challenges. So, yeah. Is there a number of challenges this week? Uh Maybe one. Maybe one. That's going to be a miracle if everything's going well before that. And we have Mihai, our sales manager, our engagement lead, engaging with our customers, current ones and new ones. The one wearing multiple hats. No issues here. So, it was a good week. I was out, but the team handled everything, so The good week comes out. out like, yes. Or you just don't know if there were problems because you were I would know. You would know. — [music and singing] — We have enough time, so I kind of woke up at 9:00 a. m. this morning. So, unfortunately, I'm only now eating breakfast, but at least I had a good night's sleep, so that's good. So, we have our third meeting for today.

As I said, it's not always like this. Today, I decided to crank all of my meetings into a single day and also to go over that. We have Fetia here. She's our How do you say staff operations? So, the the role changes every week, which is not fun. — a little bit of everything, so yeah. I fill in the cracks. But because of you, I'm alive because you can handle all of the operational stuff if I'm on meetings, if I'm on different things. So, that's why clients are not waiting for anything because Yeah. We can talk together. So, what are you in charge of at the moment? Flow Comp? Can you tell us a little bit? — Yeah, so we are expecting about 400 people, and we are now organizing the speakers' travel, accommodation, and all of that stuff. So, yeah. There's a lot of operation there. And we have Flux Academy. We have to film some content for April. Yes, we're doing that at the moment. This is the second video. We have team building. We have 7 years of Flow Ninja, so we have a lot of things to cover. So, yeah. We're going to be covering those, so we're not going to record everything. But an interesting overview is like that I recorded a video talking to everybody who wants to scale the business, and it's really important to have somebody in operations. And because of that, I technically have less work because I have somebody who can take care of all the day-to-day, which is really important as you're trying to scale. So, again, like if you haven't watched that video, I think it's somewhere on the channel. Yeah, you can go back to watch it. And two of us are going to jump into work, unfortunately. So, we're recording a vlog, which you're probably going to hate. No. We need to show that we're actually doing something at Flow Ninja because I have meetings all day, and we need to basically showcase what we're doing. So, what we're creating here? What is this? Currently, we are working on a custom dashboard platform for our client with a custom site activity and a new feature. I'll show you here. The Pingdom is existing platform, but I made our custom platform for domain status. It check your domain every minute, every single minute. And if your domain is down, you will You get a notification here, yeah. Yeah, on Slack and also on mail. That's great. Yep. Yeah, that's lovely. I guess that you don't see that online that clients have really custom requests like these. No, it's our new feature, but — Some good news for today. Nina, you were in Paris. How was Paris? It was amazing. But rainy. Well, you did not post that on Instagram. When you posted about Paris, everything is like, "Yeah, it's very beautiful. " Flowers and everything. Yeah, but it was nice. We finally met our clients after uh let's say 4 years of partnership. Discussed some upcoming projects and finally got a chance to like meet in person cuz we are chit-chatting through Google Meets every week, but this hits different, and I think each partnership gets even better when you actually meet the people that you're working with. — Yeah, I agree. Well, hopefully, we're going to be doing more of that. Well, so let's see more behind the scenes. Yeah, so we are currently doing monthly optimization for our dear client, Lepaya. So, basically, we are building right now new features and new AI leadership page for our client, Lepaya. And yeah, we are currently in a phase where we need to deliver them to the client review, and as soon as they approve, they will push it live. Well, I'll get you back to work then so that we don't Thank you. And we have the last two meetings of the day. They are quarterly reviews with my team members. So, I'm a leading project management lead and client delivery lead, so like that's one role, and also like a sales manager. And I'm going to be going over their quarter, how did they do, like what were their numbers, what should we improve in the next quarter. I always like to look at them and to actually understand where they are in their career, where they're going in the career, and just to be their support, to be a person at the top of the mountain looking at them and then giving them advice about things that they're maybe not seeing without any, let's say, emotions on a day-to-day basis because they're so tied into the operations. And because of that, I can actually run my company without working 12-hour days. This morning, we came at 10:00 a. m. We're going to finish the Flow Ninja work at 4:00 p. m. So, that's going to realistically be 6 hours of work. On top of that, I have the Flux stuff, which is a different company, so that's why I need to work overtime for a different company. But realistically, even with all of these meetings, that's going to be a 6-hour workday. And over the week, I'm going to be working 6 to 8 hours. For me personally, it's easier running a bigger business. If I'm sick, I have somebody to cover me. If I'm on a vacation for a month, I have somebody to cover me. And that's been my biggest stress relief for me personally is that I know that I have great people in every single department that can cover for me and like today, working a better job than I was ever doing in the end for our customers and for our company, but also, it makes it so much more fun because I work mostly to get some energy from different people and by having a bigger

team, I see them getting houses, getting cars, getting married, getting kids and we have so much happening in the company on that aspect. We have so many Flow Ninja babies, like we like to call them. Today, I'm spending most of my time with my team members and they're actually spending time with my customers. They're spending time growing the company and I'm just guiding them and I'm just kind of positioning the chessboard properly so that we continue growing. But yeah, let me get to the meetings and then we'll circle back afterwards before the Flow Ninja Academy kickoff. So I had the final meeting of the day with our sales manager here, Yoyela. Well, we're going to be reviewing our last 3 months, I guess, or 6. Q4 Q Q1. Last 6 months of the performance of the sales team. There's been a lot of new changes. I mean, recently we also introduced, I would say, account management because it was part of a different role. So technically right now he's working on the sales side but also the account management side. So working in a small company which is a growing a lot is always fun because your role changes every 2 weeks but we're keeping up with that. So that's Yeah, that's like it's not our first rodeo so it's like, you know, you finish one thing and then another thing comes in and yeah, it's all part of the job so. But slowly I think we're getting leverage because you have three people in sales and like one in account management, two in sales. Yeah. And things are slowly starting to happen without us here. So how does that feel? Are you even more nervous with things happening without you? — It feels weird. It feels like, you know, you're just waiting for something to slip up and when it doesn't you're like, okay, this isn't new sensation and you're just waiting for something to happen and, you know, but it's actually nice. I could like the last week I could take a week off and not worry about anything that's going to happen. So that was wonderful. Yeah, you can see that. That's Technically it's always better to have more team members than less because you can have time off without the work just piling up afterwards. — As long as you set up a system that works. But yeah, if it's just anarchy, yeah. Yeah, of course. Well, uh, we're going to get back to our work. We for actual work for last meeting of the day and we'll see you afterwards on the kickoff for website strategy master. So we have just finished the Flow Ninja work. It's about 5:50. So realistically it's 7 hours of productive work today with some breaks in between, which is good, not too bad. Today is the heaviest day so the week is going to be fine. But after this we're jumping into the first program uh, which is the website strategy master because a lot of people ask me for consulting, just a general overview how we do things at Flow Ninja and how we came to this crazy company which is on track to do 5 million in revenue this year which works with all the craziest companies. So because of that I partnered with Ran and we're doing a first a small group, a small cohort where we're actually going to be working with any founders of kind of creative businesses. We're going to be working together with them to go through every single process from positioning to going live with customers and to retaining those customers in a single program. So right now, as you can see, I'm going to be going live on Zoom to do the introduction for the program. So today is the first day of the program so we're not going to talk much. It's just going to be introductions with everybody to introduce themselves to know that they're getting started in the program and then moving forward we're going to do so much more. Okay. That's a wrap. We can lucky we can finally get something to eat. Well, we just closed the onboarding for the website strategy master program. It was really fun. It's the first time in my life that I'm doing coaching for anybody and I can say that I like the experience of giving back. I've been heads down into the agency business for a really long time. I've been giving back to my team but just the thinking of that I'm working with many people who all have families, all have team members and that I'm going to be able to help them grow their businesses is really unique and special. So I cannot wait to see their results. With that said, if you'd like me to record more videos inside of the agency around something like this, we'll link down below and also we have created a really interesting quiz. You can see in the description of the video that I'd love you to take and to know the answers of which part of your design career or your creative business you should improve in order to earn more in this year.