Dave: Hey everyone, Dave here with another episode of the Philly Tech Entrepreneurs podcast. Today I’m speaking with Zach Johnson Medin, who is calling in today from Lancaster, PA. He’s gonna be talking today about being a designer, transitioning into freelance work, his previous work experience at an agency, and wherever else the conversation goes. Zach, how are you doing today?
Zach: I’m doing great, Dave. How are you doing?
Dave: I’m doing very well, thanks for asking. Always love to hear a little bit about your background. You’re a young dude, so let’s kind of hear about how you started to get in the space of design and some of your early work experiences.
Zach: Yeah, so I grew up in the Pocono Mountains, so I was really into drawing as a kid. Kind of naturally carried that into graphic design as I started looking at colleges. Made a little bit more sense as something that I felt was a little easier entry to go into and justify to myself why I’m going to college. So, I went to a year at Temple University down in Philly. That was a little bit of culture shock for me, so I moved back to Marywood in Scranton for the remaining years. While I was doing that, I interned at an agency up in Scranton and then immediately went into that agency working for them after school. So that was a really pivotal experience for me because it was kind of what I thought I would be doing after school. It met all the criteria – it was really creative, really fast-paced, and kept me mentally occupied. It did kind of burn me out at a certain point, you know? It’s a lot of work and a lot of time spent going between different projects. You’re not like seeing one project all the way to the end, usually they’re kind of cut up in different pieces. So that was interesting and a really good pivotal experience. What I found though was that I wasn’t really satisfied with the level of quality that customers were getting for the price they were paying. You know, you look at your own billable hours and see the markup that’s going into your work. At the time, I had come out of an internship position, so I was getting paid like $15 an hour and seeing that getting marked up to, you know, 200 plus dollars an hour for different things is kind of an odd experience.
Dave: Yeah, you see the business, oh okay, so this is what people are willing to pay for the work that I’m giving. How long did it take, about, you know, give or take, how long did it take you to get burned out at the agency?
Zach: I mean, it was probably about a year and a half of doing work. And what it started looking like was I was taking on personal projects as well, so that probably didn’t help. But I think, yeah, depending on what your culture fit is, I’m not a very “Work Hard, Play Hard” type of person. I’m more like steady work, steadily play, steadily, like, intermittently. So, I need that time to get out and not think about work all the time. And I found I wasn’t getting that.
Dave: Yeah, makes sense. So, about a year and a half into the agency, or perhaps a little longer, where did you go from there? What was your transition?
Zach: Yeah, so after working at the agency for a while, my wife was actually in occupational therapy school at the University of Scranton, so she was graduating. So it kind of gave us a point to like, okay, maybe we don’t want to live in Scranton anymore. So we moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania to see some friends. We have a lot of friends down here, just a cute little city, nice little marketplace in the center. You can walk to get all your groceries, all the hippie-dippy kind of stuff, you know, you need. And it helps that it’s an up-and-coming place, so design is kind of needed. And actually, before I went into a position at a fly fishing shop for more design-focused stuff, I actually worked house painting because my dad was a house painter and that kind of gave me some space to kind of think about, okay, what do I want to do next? And while I was doing that, I was freelancing a little bit. And eventually, I reached out to a fly fishing shop near me, kind of proposed, hey, I see that you need some design work, maybe you need some email work. And it happened that their person who had been doing that for several years was leaving. So we kind of came up with a customized solution where I would come in, do some marketing help, a little bit of everything, touch up their campaigns. And that happened to be right before COVID, so it happened to be a really good time for them. And we started creating campaign calendars, some ideas for what we would do in the future, and creating that consistency. Like, okay, every time we have a sale, we have to post it on email, website, and blog, not just like one of them. And it’s just funny those things where like you come out of an agency where those were like the religious texts that you have to do these things and you go to a smaller company and they’re just kind of doing whatever works for them. So, you kind of help them integrate like some kind of structure. And then COVID happened and it kind of blew up. So, we kind of found that after that, we really needed that structure and then needed to hire some more people. So, we looked at hiring more people for the e-commerce and making sure that their orders were going out the door on time. That was a big problem we were having during COVID. And yeah, just learning about e-commerce from that level and small business where every day is completely different. You come in and maybe the whole government’s shut down or maybe an email server went down or something like that. And just learning how to think on the fly was a big skill because I think in an agency, I spent so much time looking at a to-do list that was already provided for me. And coming into a position where it was me and one other person at the beginning of the day and we had to kind of suss out what things were, it felt like a triage unit of like, you pick out what needs to be done first and then fix it and then go on. And I kind of liked that aspect of working with a small business.
Dave: Very cool, yeah. Thinking on the fly at a fly fishing shop. It’s nice to be able to get the experience of the agency and then internally at the small business. In some ways, you know, you’re doing similar-ish things but the framework is different, obviously. The attention to the client detail is very different. At some point, you decided to sort of transition out to your own. So, tell us about the founding of your media company and kind of what that transition was like.
Zach: Yeah, so as COVID started to taper and I was doing more of an administrative role of not having to be in the stores all the time, I started working remotely a lot more and needed to work in a co-working facility. So, I started working downtown at The Candy Factory and really started seeing a lot of other entrepreneurs. The owner there is a graphic designer herself, so she kind of was a good person to see doing work and see how someone could do it full time. And I think that’s something I had never really thought about. So, from there, I got a SCORE mentor and they give you free mentors with tons of advice. I meet with him monthly and we kind of go over at the time what I needed to do was go over finances and really justify to myself, okay, this could be financially feasible. So, he helped me kind of pull out a business plan, put that together, and a financial projection of the next year if I were to do how many things, how much would they cost, and how many would I need to do. And that was something that really helped me because I nailed the creative side, had that part down, but really didn’t have the business aspect down. Are you still meeting with that mentor or how did that relationship kind of mature?
Dave: Yeah, so I have a new mentor now, so they kind of pass you off between different mentors depending on what you need. So, at that time, I really needed the planning aspect. Now I kind of need collaborative aspects and different parts. So, that’s a really, that’s an amazing program. My great-grandfather was a SCORE mentor, so that’s something like, it’s funny, someone recommended it to me and I was like, oh, I actually know what that is. Yeah, so from there I started working part-time at the fly fishing shop because they didn’t really need me as much and started being able to take on more clients. And what I found was as soon as I started making more time for my own business, all of a sudden I needed more and more time. And so, eventually, I tapered off with working with the fly fishing company. That was a really good and lucky place to be in where they were okay with that and it just worked out in good timing. So, I always like to say that like that was an extremely lucky position to be in. I know everyone doesn’t have that. But yeah, from there I started working more and now I’ve been doing it for about a year and a half. It kind of started with logo designs and really focusing on the visuals and then we were kind of talking earlier about how it developed from not just needing a logo. What I found is you hand over all these logo files and a lot of people don’t know what to do with them. Maybe they know how to put them in Canva but they don’t know what to do with logo brand guidelines and how to apply them to different mediums and how to put them in their website and how to use it on email marketing. So eventually, I started kind of transitioning it into a more recurring model where I give them a logo, we work on some website stuff, and then we transition into a monthly marketing thing where we meet up once a month, talk about what they need. And those kind of all vary in their size and involvement depending on how much a small business needs. Some people just need direction and you to cut out all the pieces and tell them what to do and some people need you to cut it out and then do it for them. So yeah.
Dave: Yeah, I love what you kind of said there. It’s almost so subtle you could kind of miss it completely but basically how you kind of added this recurring revenue to your services, almost like productizing them. It’s something I’ve been writing about recently on my LinkedIn so it really kind of perked up when you started, you know, specifically in like design and development. It’s one of those services that always feels very, very project-based, you know, you kind of like, someone requests a task or something, you do it and then you’re done and you got to find new clients, new projects, etc. But adding this like marketing strategy component, sort of understanding the overlap between the skill set that you have and what the ongoing needs are to start to kind of add that recurring revenue is super important. It’s, you know, I also do have a marketing agency as well and most of our services are productized. So, that’s cool that you kind of figured out how to incorporate that into what you guys are doing.
Zach: Yeah, and it’s definitely like a hard, I think it requires a lot more education and that’s why it’s harder to get to that point and I still struggle with it today is like it’s easier at first, it seems easier to give them just a product because it looks like it’ll solve the problem. But a lot of times it doesn’t because a lot of times the problem that they are facing at that point. So, for instance, I had a customer that came to me and they were like, we need a logo design. And when you start probing, you realize they needed the logo design because they were getting a sign redone. And why did they need the logo redone is because they didn’t like the sign anymore and they were afraid that it didn’t represent their company. So, then you start prying into that and you’re like, well, what other pieces are the logo representing? And they’re like, well, we have this old website that we’ve hated forever and then we have all these marketing materials that we know we need to be doing stuff but they have a bad logo on them so we never use them. And so you’re like, that’s the problem right there is they’re just not using any of this stuff because of the logo. So then you realize, okay, it’s a hard thing to do because to do it right and to actually care about the people is hard instead of like just giving them the Band-Aid and then you can, I mean with products you can kind of give them the Band-Aid and not have to deal with the repercussions. What I found with the monthly retainer is now you have to come up with a solution that works continually because you’re going to meet with them monthly and you don’t want the same problems coming up every month because that looks really bad on you. So, it creates a little bit of like responsibility on your part too and I think people like that, you know, is even though sometimes it may cost more, it really helps both of you because then they also know that you’re going to be there every month because that means they you have a reason to come back to them and you have a reason to provide them with better service. So, I feel like it’s a better contract.
Dave: Yeah, a much better model, very well said. Yeah, the logo is sort of, you know, it’s what they think maybe they need but it’s not maybe what they actually need and you kind of have to have that dialogue with them to really kind of uncover more under the hood and when you do you kind of see a lot of the potential and it’s just like, it’s just really good business, right there. So, what’s kind of next for the media company? I’m kind of in a phase of trying to figure that out, honestly. I’m always conflicted by knowing that I need to work with other people and maybe hire someone on to help me and providing the best quality that I can. I think I’m a little bit of a control freak and like I like to see everything that’s going out and relinquishing some of that control. So, I’m kind of between whether to scale down my current capacity to make sure I can keep at capacity and up prices a little bit or hire someone else on and keep those and just get more clients. So, I’m kind of between those two. I’m sure you have opinions about that and like, yeah, it’s an interesting place. You’re trying to see like, will these clients keep coming, you know, and make sure you can do that and keep it sustainable.
Dave: Yeah, I do. Let’s, we can chat off the podcast, you know, it’s, I hate to sort of like, put that information behind closed doors or whatever but I’d be asking you things that maybe were like a little PR sensitive so um, you know, that looks like a great place to kind of wrap things up. Appreciate you kind of sharing the journey here, some insights about transitioning to freelance work, about productizing the service. For people that want to learn more about you and your biz, where do they go?
Zach: You can go to gumptiondesign.co.
Dave: Awesome, thanks so much, Zach.
Zach: Yeah, good talking.