How Dingus and Zazzy CEO Jon Sturgeon grew Dingus and Zazzy to $9.9M revenue and 108 customers in 2024.

well they say you should dress for the job you want right for those of you who are wondering who let a small child in the Unicorn onesie on stage you can blame the organizers because they knew exactly what kind of shenanigans they were gonna get and I you should see all the rejected titles for this talk I can't believe they actually still let me on stage for those of you who don't know me my name is Becca Kingsbury I'm a co-founder and CEO of Dingus and zazzy we took everything that people hated about the standard marketing agency we productized it and we turned it into a flat rate unlimited subscription our clients subscribe month to month contract free for unlimited marketing work and I mean if you're curious about that actual stuff or boost right out there if you want to come say hi after this um all this growth I'm gonna walk you through though wouldn't be possible without awesome Financial Partners and think about her good Lord did we do the research and we ended up going with founder path and I'm so glad we did because they don't well they let us be ourselves and they don't question the weird things we spend the money on like okay everybody look underneath your chairs please somebody's got something underneath their chair Ready Set Go foreign has a 250 Lego card underneath their cart there we go amazing congratulations please go build something weird with Legos um they don't question when we want to spend their money on this kind of stuff and that's why they're awesome so over the next 20 minutes I'm gonna run you through all the times that we absolutely ate it I'm gonna talk to you about how hiring the proper business school way is dead it's dumb it's become obsolete I'm going to talk to you about how gen Z North Americans currently have this luxury of job hopping to get the next highest paycheck and how going International ethically is the best way to scale and get employees that actually care and finally I'm going to tell you about how we design every single role in our company even the most entry-level roles to directly correspond to our company's growth so we started out just four of us working in this tiny little Harry Potter closet and two years later we're now at over 140 people in 29 different countries and somehow I'm not dead yet but as you probably might have guessed we're not actually a SAS company sorry but we are SAS plus and we also come from a major SAS background we actually just opened our own private Equity Firm and we're in the process of acquiring other SAS companies we've actually acquired three already and our mission is to essentially take over our own vertical integration and monetize it so we fell on our face more times than I can count when we first got started we thought in order to have the most productive employees they had to be right in front of us so we tried to hire locally don't do it we're a cool fun company full of zany weirdos so let's seek out and hire zany weirdos that won't cause any problems right um we just got feelings to make hiring decisions we figured you know they seem to have the right credentials their interview was okay that should be good when we really like the people we did hire in the end and when it didn't work out we didn't let them go we tried shoving them into other roles that they still weren't a fit for it was like a bad boyfriend we kept seeing all these red flags at these people and being like but he'll change right so when we started out like I said we were trying to hire all in one place but there wasn't enough candidates nobody wanted to commute there was only about a million people in the city so the talent pool was super tiny it was during covid so nobody wanted to come and hang out with us and have fun and we were experiencing so much job hopping every opportunity somebody had to make a tiny bit more money they were gone I'm sure we've all been experiencing all of these issues but we were bringing in a lot of Revenue and we were scaling and we we didn't have a choice we had to challenge our own assumptions and we had to go elsewhere we had to go International so when's the last time one of you thought about Romania Namibia or Trinidad honestly when we watched launched hiring ads in some of these places we get over 400 applicants a day and if your next thought is okay but how are they what's the quality that's where this comes in we truly believe that no matter who in your company is hiring a candidate they should almost always come to the same conclusion because it's not about gut feelings it's about data and that's why we personality and skill test every single applicant and then we go into our interviews already winning because we know that they've passed the test they are most likely a skill fit and a personality fit for our company I will warn you guys it's about two grand a year but it's absolutely worth it there are cheaper versions out there but I wanted all of the data I could physically get so that we could make the best decisions so since pivoting to a worldwide Workforce we actually have fallen in love with so many different countries our top four places that we have employees right now are Brazil Colombia Trinidad and South Africa and honestly South Africa would easily be my favorite country to hire in but they get a ton of load shedding for those of you who don't know what that is it means they lose power for like hours and hours at a time non-stop every other day but for the hard-working English-speaking amazing people that we find there it is completely worth buying the odd power generator or inverter to get that great employee and now we have like now we have the best possible scenario because our recruiter in-house builds us weightless we curate waitlists for every single one of our roles based on our projections and when we need somebody our recruiter has them ready to go and to be honest there's no way we'd be able to build those kind of wait lists if we were doing this just in Canada so that might this next thing it's going to sound like a luxury but as soon as you can stop hiring as a Founder your time is way more valuable doing what you're actually good at building your business so as soon as you can hand it off to somebody else and we did actually try handing it off externally and it wasn't for us and that's okay but we have a full-time in-house recruiter and she sends about a thousand messages a day just on LinkedIn um for those of you who have never heard about the LinkedIn recruiter platform it's awesome it is 10 grand y not including ad spend but you can select all and message hundreds of potential candidates at once and let's be honest you could use your personal LinkedIn account send 80ish messages a day probably get blocked for spamming and lose your account for gosh knows how long um the one thing to note though on this platform super helpful their setup process for getting somebody involved with this is archaic so if you actually need access to the LinkedIn recruiter platform please come talk to me after this I'm just going to introduce you to the right person so you don't have to jump through all the hoops so I painted this pretty gorgeous picture of how awesome our team is and they are I love our team but there are three hard truths that we had to learn one expect good people to change even your best people we don't know what our employees are going through personally on their day to day and if somebody is an amazing hire and you want to keep them around it's up to you as the employer to adjust your expectations not lower them to make it work two not all promotions work out sometimes when you promote somebody they just fall flat on their face so we don't do that anymore we instead promote in an interim role so if somebody can go in they can try out the role and we can really see if it's going to be the right person but also they're going to see if it's right for them and our employees know when they are trying out an interim role they can go back to their old job at any time they just have to say so because consent matters and three Fire fast I know that sounds harsh but honestly if you feel that gut feeling that Somebody's gotta go don't wait please just get it done it'll feel like a weightlift a weight is lifted off of your shoulders afterwards and if it doesn't you fired the wrong person but unfortunately like I've had to do my fair share of removals let's be honest but looking back I knew every single one was the right move for our business and again it's like a bad boyfriend they're not gonna change so you need to just hurry up and move on so training hiring building a business it's all iteration right and our training academy was no different at first when we were hiring somebody new it was Trial By Fire come in here's some tasks let's go figure it out it didn't work it doesn't work so we decided to try and build a dingus Academy like a full farm team where we could bring people in build up their skills and then call them to the big leagues when we're ready for them unsustainable flop we have now integrated this like 12 more times it is a shadow of what it once was but it's actually sustainable and productive and we're going to continue to improve it so a few tools that are going to make your guys's lives easier going internationally having big teams one is time doctor um it's at the end of the day we're not a VC funded operation so we really do care where our dollars and cents go so this is how we know what people are working on...