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 and yeah a couple employees were a little apprehensive about it at first but it's one of the best tools that we have because it's how I can judge productivity how I can judge coaching how I can see our labor dollars per client it's all there and disclaimer a couple of the features are a little too big brothery for our style and that's cool we just don't use those features um Rome is a new one that our entire team is completely obsessed with it is basically a virtual office for your team a team member can come up and knock on my office door as if we were in the same physical building and just talk to me no more you know messing around with setting up Google meets and figuring it all out it's just marked right up Eric I gotta talk to you about this thing cool done carry on with your day and it's a game changer it's beta testing right now and there is a bit of a waitlist to get on it but it is some of the best communication we have had in a long time this one is also awesome and I'm sure you've all thought about it like you know is AI just gonna take over the world and I my company will become irrelevant but that's the wrong approach we have been using AI to make our stuff our team more productive and more efficient and you've heard about all the standard ones obviously but one that's definitely worth considering is Jenny AI because it doesn't just do your writing for you it writes along with you like a writing assistant and it actually makes your writing better and Okay so we've talked at length about hiring getting people in the door what if you actually want them to stay afterwards at Dingus and Sassy we have a come as you are a policy and we're one weird die job away from hiring the entire rainbow let's be honest but it's not that we're trying to seek out the weirdos in the room it's that we have an internal referral process and a culture that attracts well Punk kid stunk in 2002. even go as far as letting somebody be themself in a client call we don't care as long as they're respectful so if you have green hair face tattoos and you want to make fart jokes all day long cool as long as you're good at your job and it's hard to directly correlate that to staff retention but I think it's fair to say the more somebody can be themselves in an environment the happier they're going to be genuinely stand up for your staff we will fire clients we don't care at the end of the day A bad client contract isn't worth losing staff over so I would way rather just fire the client and at the end of the day there are more nice people out there than awful people so we don't have to fire clients very often but our staff know if we need to we have their backs and it'll be done so you never want to be the smartest person in the room and our company literally weeds out Egos and we are more than happy if the next person who comes in is better smarter more intelligent than the person before them or us because honestly in a lot of environments somebody challenging the way things are done is seen as like a threat to Authority in our company we'll pay you a bonus for it every time a team member brings us an idea that we actually end up implementing we give them cash for it and another thing that we're doing to keep our team is global shares so obviously we know stock options great tool for employee retention a lot of us talking about that this week but we tried to figure out how to do it globally and we found Global shares it was just required by JPMorgan so it's actually free to use and your employees in any country can log on and check on the status of their stock options at any time so every single rule like I said earlier in your company needs to directly contribute to your company's growth our CEO received this message the other day and I think it's awesome this guy is web developer he's never spoken to a client before he's not client-facing in any way shape or form but he gets it and how so how do you embed this level of growth this mindset of growth into every level of your organization one celebrate your wins with everyone involved we're super public about all of our wins and we'll tag everyone from the original person who brought in the sale to all of the day-to-day operations people who are getting the work done for the client this creates a great understanding to the entire team of what is actually needed to make a win possible two build into your pay structure at the end of the day I've already talked about we do pay out on bonuses we do pay up bonuses on great ideas but we also pay them out on referrals reviews upgrades testimonials the things that directly contribute to our company's growth and third hire competitive people even our basic administrative roles are still tested for competitiveness because at the end of the day competitive people never stop striving to achieve to outdo themselves and to win so add this all together and you've got people being socially financially and intrinsically motivated to help build the company with you all right well in the last 20 minutes you heard a lot of information but here are some things that you should tattoo onto your eyebrow balls so you remember them later one stop hiring to make your business school Prof proud know that you can't fix people and that's okay but you should be continuously improving your hiring practices so that you hire better people go International with it and be smart about it because you need to stop restricting Yourself by geography training hiring it's all going to take iteration and it's okay to eat once in a while as long as you get better two keep your people I'm never getting a real job again who are we kidding and most of my staff agrees so light that client contracts on fire before they cost you your good people and I know it's ingrained in every single one of you Founders out there to work your butt off to do to take it all on make sure it happens but eventually you've got to take your skates off coach from the bench and your team's gonna be better off for it so hire better players than you ever were and finally make sure all those players every person on your team that their roles their incentives and their bonuses are reflecting what is the most important to you and your business happy clients retention and Company growth thanks guys [Applause]