How Liam Dempsey Powers Agency Projects with Gravity Forms
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Matt:Liam Dempsey. Material changes over the course of ten years, agency owners, that's how we'll jump into this episode. So, what has what's the biggest change for your agency over the last ten years?
Liam:And the biggest is really no code. In the early days, it was child theming. It was custom theming. It was Underscore's theme. It was child theme of Genesis with code on top of that.
Liam:And with the rise of reliable, flexible, scalable, no code solutions that we just don't do much custom development itself, you know, a few lines and a functions file or a small, very purpose built plug in that's two, four, six, eight hours of a developer's time, nothing significant. And the benefit of that is that we're able to turn around solutions for clients, for businesses, for nonprofits really quickly. Hey. Of course, we're coming to you really like we have this big thing going on next week. How can we highlight on that homepage?
Liam:Well, we could add a new row that just highlights that to your homepage. You know? We we'll follow the design. Here's a rough sketch of it. You know, I can get that done late tonight, early tomorrow morning depending on the relationship and the need and the and the budget.
Liam:And it's done, and it's on production. And, you know, so it's it's been really, really helpful for that to be able to respond to clients very, very quickly in ways that kinda they find very, very valuable and therefore then they come to rely on. And that'll be designed more because they know that we'll deliver quickly and and in a reliable, professional way.
Matt:Maybe we'll get deeper into AI, but one of the things that I hear in the discourse of WordPress and, building websites for clients is, hey. AI is gonna take up all of that, brochureware type of sites. Right? Clients will able to do this themselves. Heck, they might not even need WordPress depending on, like, what WordPress does with AI.
Matt:But I'm curious, from what you see even in today's world where you oftentimes, I hear people say, oh, you gotta sell the bigger customer. You gotta sell the bigger project. I think there's this layer of trust that clients are looking for where it's one that's just like, I don't wanna do this. Even if AI can do it for me, I don't wanna do it. I don't wanna do it.
Matt:And I just need somebody to that I can trust to do this. And I think well, I know that that there is a there is a business there because you're proof of it and so many others are proof of it that you don't always have to pursue the big client, the complex projects. I would steer away from it if I was back in the agency days myself. I did it. I did it.
Matt:It's not fun. It comes with many more problems. Yeah. Sure. So what's your take on, like, AI in in that entry level site for a customer, and how you see building a scalable business through just, like, rolling up your sleeves and putting out a good product and not going that super big custom complex project?
Liam:So I'll start with the AI. And and I think there's always scope for new tools. Right? I mean, this this year, it's AI. Previous years, there was no code.
Liam:Previous years, it was know, just think back and look at what it was.
Matt:NFTs? Right.
Liam:Well, whatever it might be. So, you know, as a smaller business, as an aging professional, I have to stay close to what the new tools are. Do I need to be bleeding edge? No. Do I need to be cutting edge?
Liam:No. But I I need to be close enough to know that I can get cut. And so, you know, how are we using it? Not as much as other agencies. We're not using it to to to build themes or to build the entire website.
Liam:I don't think AI's there yet. Given the no code proficiency, if we can get good at one particular suite, and certainly we have our preferred suite. There are a lot of good ones. We have ours. Then then probably by the time I and my colleagues mastered the prompts to get the kind of consistent outputs that we need, we could probably have a handful of things built.
Liam:To to that scale, no. Not really. But, you know, we don't have to learn as quickly, necessarily. And then I think building on what you said around the client doesn't wanna do it. Yes.
Liam:They could. They don't want to. Could I have AI do my books? I have no idea, but I don't wanna do it and I don't wanna be responsible for it. Right.
Liam:To some extent, don't wanna be legally responsible for it. It's very nice to say the accountant told me to sign here and I can't be an idiot about it. No taxes this year. Well, that can't quite be right. But, you know, like, hey, taxes are a little bit lower than last year.
Liam:Great. I can sign that. So that's really where where l b design comes in is that we want relationships where our clients, our clients' leaders are intellectually engaged in the projects, but that they trust our expertise and leadership. So they can tell us about their industry. They could let us know what what's the right way to say this, how they think about things, but then we can bring our marketing, our design experience.
Liam:And over time then, it is all about trust. And, hey, Liam. We know you don't do this. We need this done. It would save us a lot of time finding somebody if you would do it.
Liam:Well, I don't do that. So it's useful. I'll do it if you ask nice, but I'm gonna charge you more time than if you went out to the marketplace because where it takes somebody who knows what it's doing gonna be four. It might take me 8. It might take me 12.
Liam:I don't know. That's fine because then I don't have to spend that $5.08, or 12, says the business owner. So I I think you're right. I think there is a lot to be said for acting in a transparent way, being candid about things, and and and letting people know that we're eager for clients to stick around for years. And most of ours do.
Liam:And I I do a lot around the sales side of that. We we don't have to get into that now, but Mhmm. But just kinda pitching on the transparency side of things. You know? Are there other people who make better websites than me?
Liam:Absolutely, there are.
Matt:Sure.
Liam:But Yeah. You know, but we trade on on on on quality and transparency.
Matt:I think where where you might be going with that too, on, like, the sales side is because I think this often gets overlooked, especially for the the amateur a amateurs. I guess I can use that phrase, amateur agency owner, who might be listening to this. Like, they're just starting their agency. They're starting their freelance practice. They wanna grow to an agency.
Matt:And oftentimes, they can get encumbered by thinking of, okay. God. I gotta do this. I read online that I have to do this 10 to $20,000 project. Okay.
Matt:What goes into a 10 to $20,000 project? Start doing all starts thinking about all of these things. Then they go to sell the customer with this big heavy quote proposal. And, they don't they're not completely comfortable with it as the freelancer. The the agent the the customer can clearly see it on their face.
Matt:Right? I again, I've admitted to this because I've been there in my early days. Like, I'm trying to pitch you this big project. I hope you can understand what I'm telling you. And they're looking at you cross eyed like, I don't even know what if you know what you're talking about.
Matt:And what that leads to is why you lose a client. You spend all that time, all that effort to try to build this big proposal to land that big deal when maybe you probably could have sold them like, how about a $3,500, you know, portfolio site, brochure site? And then you upsell later later on. Not in some kind of, like, poor sales y way, but you could look at the customer and go, well, I understand you might need ecommerce in the future. So but instead of me just wrapping this all up in this big proposal right now, maybe I'll sell you the site for $3,500, let you know ecommerce is a possibility.
Matt:But then a year later, knock on your door and say, hey. Are we ready for that to extend to ecommerce now as an example? Right? Like, selling low, get landing the customer, and then having a full healthy cycle of of upsells and add ons if you want. Like, if that's the kind of business you you you want.
Matt:So all of that is to say is, like, I don't think the customer or the client always needs to, accept big massive projects. Right? You could sell them something that's just super valuable, gets them 80% of the way there, and, you know, you'd have a better, less stressful agency. It's the way that I see it anyway.
Liam:Yeah. I couldn't agree with you more. I mean, one of the things that I ask my clients is, like, what if we built that? Could you use it? Do you have time to run it?
Liam:Like, I wanna blog. Well, how often are you I mean, that's so simple.
Matt:That's not a
Liam:big e commerce spend, 15,000. You know? Are you ever gonna blog? Well, I might want to. Yeah.
Liam:I know you might want to, but why pay for us to do it if you can't? Know, if business is booming, you're like, hey, guess what? I've hired some new people. I've got a little bit more time. I wanna grow my reputation with the industry in the sector.
Liam:I'm gonna start to blog and do videos now. Great. Well, now we'll take the time to invest in that. So I think I think you're onto something there, and that's the, you know, the value of no, we won't sell you that. Or at least we we recommend against that.
Liam:Right? You know, we don't think that's right. You know, if push comes to shove and you wanna pay me to do it, if it's Yeah. Legal, moral, and ethical, I'll do it. But Yeah.
Liam:But, you know, I think you and I have been around long enough that we've built functionality for clients that never goes anywhere because they don't have the capacity. And so, you know, we push back. They say, no. No. No.
Liam:Okay. We build it. We deliver. And then it just sits there. And then they come back a year or two later and say, you know, we probably shouldn't have.
Matt:I'm wondering in your business, there's this thing that, I haven't put a perfect marketing phrase to it yet or like an acronym or anything like that. But one of the things, when I was running my agency and using Gravity Forms many, many years ago, Gravity Forms often has like this. We have like the stair step approach. Whereas, like, if you're a freelancer, you might just buy our $59 entry level license, and you're just putting up contact forms. Pretty easy.
Matt:You just want it nice and trusted plug in, getting the updates from a team that you trust. And then you suddenly get a customer who's like, well, I need to do, Mailchimp or Brevo or ConvertKit. And then you look at Gravity Forms. You go, okay. The middle tier.
Matt:I'll upgrade my license, and now I can I can serve this set of customer? And then suddenly, got a customer as your agency grows and you get bigger customers. Somebody says, well, I've got Salesforce integration. Like, where does Salesforce come? How, you know, how do you well, then you get the elite license with Salesforce and, like, all these other, like, top tier add ons.
Matt:And Gravity Forms can kinda grow with your, with your agency. Not trying to turn this into a direct ad for Gravity Forms, of course, but how how has Gravity Forms grown with your agency? And are there any, like, case studies or customers that you've been able to, like, build around build a solution around because of the add ons of Gravity Forms or how you've, like, connected the dots with, like, Zapier, Mailchimp, Salesforce, stuff like that?
Liam:Yeah. So, you know, in advance of this conversation, I spent some time thinking about Gravity Forms, my relationship with the tool, and the manner in which I've used it. And I I I was delightfully reminded that I've been a Gravity Forms customer since twenty thirteen or twelve years ago. And to give a little shout out to Brad Williams, we're, you know, WordPress meetuping locally, He was talking about it. I'm like, it's a $100.
Liam:That's kind of a no brainer. Let me just buy it.
Matt:You know?
Liam:I I trust Brad. He's much more of an advanced developer than I'll ever be. Let me just go buy it. And you're right. You know, I got it because it was a good form.
Liam:And, I mean, now we're using it for donations and some ecommerce and some email subscriptions and some I use and even use it on my own site to accept the occasional credit card payment for a smaller job from a new client. I just send them to a a hidden page, and they're enter the enter your name, enter your invoice number by hand, and put your credit card details in and pay me. So it it really is grown has grown a lot. And and not just the the plug in itself with all its own add ons that that the team at Rocketgenius, the Gravity Forms makes, but the community around it, the folks, the the the Gravity Wizzes of the world have have been huge. Gravity Wizz has been a big, big part of of our usage.
Liam:I I was checking on them, and then I got Gravity Forms in 2013 and Gravity Wizz in 2014. But in terms of using it then for clients, I have one client that I've worked with for ten or eleven years now. They're a local day care provider and hugely respected in the community. Been around for thirty years. And they're not tech savvy, but they are not tech averse.
Liam:And they appreciate the value in investing in tech, but their first solution is not, I need a better tech system. But they say this isn't working. Let's spend the money. So a great client, exactly what you want. Somebody that's not gonna sign a check on everything, but when it's time, they're they're willing to have a conversation about that.
Liam:So they've been they were using a third party summer camp registration tool. That that tool was old, like like 1999, February, 2001 tool. And it was powerful, but it was old. I mean, it looked old. It felt old.
Liam:It was clunky. But the tool itself made all its money on the back of payments. So when you registered for the camp, the the SaaS took their cut. For whatever reason, my brilliant client wasn't was able to just tell their customers, the moms and the dads and the parents and the caregivers sending their children to their camp, don't pay. Bring a check-in after you register.
Liam:And it came up a few times with the SaaS, and the SaaS is like, we're big enough. We don't care. Keep using it free. We're not gonna kick you off. We're not gonna support you, so don't call us for support, but we're not gonna kick you off.
Liam:And, eventually, they and I kinda talked to them about to my client about this. Like, it's clunky. It's old. Do you like using it? No.
Liam:It's a headache, but it's free. And so but, eventually, they they just got frustrated internally. They weren't getting pushed back from their from their parents, but they were getting internal just not worth it. So why don't we use Gravity Forms? Why don't we create a form?
Liam:We'll mirror all the good things about the current SaaS, and we'll keep it simple. We don't want users to register. Great. That keeps it really simple. You know most of the families that are coming in.
Liam:Great. We don't have to allow them to save their form. If they wanna make changes after they've registered, they shoot you an email, great. We'll keep it simple. You know, we could we could have it so they could save their their application.
Liam:They could come back a week later, but we don't have to. We can scale it as much as you want. And so we we got that all together and launched in time for their summer camp registration, and it sold out within a day. And I was pretty nervous just because I had never done that with Gravity Forms. Reliable pull tool, but, you know, the first time you go to the cliff's edge with a good hand letter, you don't know.
Liam:Right? But it worked. Gravity Forms worked. Gravity SMTP worked. Gravity Wiz, we did the nested child forms.
Liam:It all worked and then pushed the data right into to Google Google Sheets for the for the child care to use, the child care center to use. So it was just brilliant, and it was great to be able to do that and no parent complaints, which I thought was a huge win. Yeah. No parent compliments, but I'll take no complaints over no compliments any day of the week.
Matt:Yeah.
Liam:Yeah. And that was great. And then just one other one other solution where we used it is a an Irish dance company and an Irish dance academy. They're probably one of the most well known in the world. They're out of the Midwest.
Liam:And they came and said, hey. We've got two weeks before our busiest season, the academy did. And I said, basically, can you build us a site? And, do I have to? They're like, yeah.
Liam:If you would. But one of the things that they wanted to get to the Gravity Forms is they wanted people to sign up for free trials, and they didn't wanna push them into their clunky third party class management tool. They wanted it to make it nice and easy. So that was a really clean, simple Gravity form with simple on the front end. It had a lot of choose your school and then choose the dates and times and conditional fields.
Liam:And lots and lots of conditional notifications, and it worked great. And it was launched on time, and I haven't got the official numbers yet, but they anecdotally are very, very confident that the number of free trials, which is their, you know, their their pipeline really bumped up this year because the form was so easy to use. The site was so easy to use. So Gravity Forms is really, really helping me and my business. It's like what I talked about earlier about no code.
Liam:You know? Yes. You can include some snippets of codes and add on to the like, and I've certainly relied on Gravity Support for that. But but just drag and drop and no code and the like, it's just a fantastically powerful scalable tool. And I'll stop talking before it sounds too much like an advert.
Matt:Yeah. Mean, one of the biggest challenges one of the greatest things about Gravity Forms is to be able to solve solve situations like that for your customer. But it's also it's really hard, at least, you know, my own opinion, and joining Gravity Forms a couple years ago is to, like, how to tell that story to unlock the magic. Right? So I'm part of a nonprofit that, my my friend started, and I do all the air quotes IT stuff, which includes the WordPress website and, of course, Gravity Forms for, donations.
Matt:And we run this three on three basketball tournament once a year, and there was some software that he looked at to help run the tournament. It's all they do is, like, tournaments, not just for basketball, but tournaments for other, like, youth sports and stuff like that for nonprofits. And they wanted, like, $700 a month. Wow. You know?
Matt:And they took the fees, right, of all this stuff. And I'm like, I can just build this with Gravity Forms. And in fact, the requirements that that we had, at the nonprofit, or the nice to haves, I guess, is like, okay. Hey. Parent comes to the website.
Matt:They wanna register up to four kids for the team. Right? Not just one, four. They might have siblings. They might have friends.
Matt:Right? And then notes for each each child, select what size shirt they need, like, skill. Like, there's all this stuff that is not that won't be inherently built into, like, what I'll call, like, a boilerplate GoFundMe. Right? Like, GoFundMe is great, massive, big distribution.
Matt:A lot of people know about it, brand recognition, etcetera. But it's just go the GoFundMe way or nothing. Whereas you can go to Gravity Form and artfully craft, a solution that hits exactly what that organization needs. Because, yeah, they don't wanna have to log in to WordPress to get that information. They wanna pipe it to a Google Sheet.
Matt:Makes life a zillion times easier for them and easier for you because then you don't have to train them on how to, like, get entries. So it's it's it's magical, but, I don't have a real direct question here. It's more of a soapbox moment for me to be like, this is a difficult thing on the marketing side to be how to tell this universal story of like, you could solve anything. You just gotta dive in and start, you know, using it. But it's one of the great things about Gravity Forms.
Liam:I think to use your example of that 700 a month. Right? I had a a nonprofit centered around trying to address what they call census gun violence. The founder's daughter was shot in a road rage, racist race driven, racially motivated road rage incident. And they do a commemorative memorial awareness raising walk every year.
Liam:And how do we register people to get that? Because we wanna give them a t shirt. You know, they they register. They pay a registration fee. We give them a t shirt.
Liam:And can they have an orange t shirt or they get a purple one and what size? And, you know, that's gravity form for the few add ons. Right? And, you know, that's 700 a month for that SaaS you were talking about. Well, you know, you do that twice, maybe day, day and a half to get this all up and running in Gravity Forms for year one.
Liam:So it's not a nothing cost. But then year two is, like, an hour or two because we just update the dates and then Yeah. More. Okay. Let's turn the form back on and, you know, change the notification and kind of thing.
Liam:So that kind of, like, yes, there's a cost to doing business, but then it becomes a manageable cost. You know, we get two registrations, three registrations next year. For your walk, we have hundreds of people, and you've paid for that form again. So it it is it is a great tool for businesses of all sizes, but but but particular smaller ones because Yeah. And if that's $700 a month, SaaS goes belly up.
Liam:If because they're charging 700 a month, they might. Yeah. That's what they don't have a solution.
Matt:Yeah. It was funny. I remember that conversation. He was like, oh, but they're gonna they give us a free website. You know?
Matt:And I'm like, oh, yeah.
Liam:They better.
Matt:Yeah. Yeah. They better. Yeah. They better.
Matt:You know? And then you look at the website, and you're like, dude, I can do this with WordPress. You know? And, so anyway yeah. It's Yeah.
Matt:But you're absolutely right. You have to build up front. There's no doubt about it. Like, when I built the three on three tournament registration in sales form, it took a while. Right?
Matt:It's, you know, four four and I trust me. I had a lot of feedback for the product team. I had somebody who had to, like, build this really complex form with, like, conditional logic and variable pricing and lay all this stuff. And, but this year and and we also do a golf tournament, which I also built out last year. But the golf tournaments, it's already running.
Matt:It's already live. But, man, it felt just like you said, it felt amazing to log in. They're like, alright. We're gonna turn the the golf tournament registration on again. And I just went in, duplicate form, change the date.
Matt:This is now 2025, and I'm like, wow. Like, this this was nice, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I wanna I wanna talk about I wanna I wanna keep it into the realm of nonprofits because we we have a lot of nonprofit customers here at Gravity Forms, and I know there's a lot of folks listening to this that service nonprofits.
Matt:We're in the sense of, like, WordPress, man, WordPress is still not easy. Right? I like, we look at our for a nonprofit, that I'm a part of, you know, the my my friend's wife, her best friend, they're, like, fairly like, they get it. Like, they're not like, what's the Internet? Like, they understand how to, like, get around, like, Google Docs and stuff like that.
Matt:It's not, like, totally foreign to them. But there's still a particular challenge of, like, posts, pages, front you know, why does it say categories up here? It's like, well, that's just that's because it's a blog and there's cat well, can we rid of the cat no. It's part of the theme. Like, this is just how, like, blogging WordPress works.
Matt:I'm a little fearful for the ease of use for for WordPress, especially in the face of AI and these other platforms. Is there anything you do in particular to soften the blow of tech challenge when you're working with nonprofits, especially those that might have two or three people jumping in and making a newsletter, making a blog post, uploading events? Like, how do you, like, soften the blow of that tech? Or is that where they just, hey. We're gonna we're gonna pay Liam to do this work for us.
Liam:Well, it's definitely some of both. But I think, you know, if we think to the trades as an example, you know, plumbing at its simplest is there's a pipe that comes into your house, and then you connect that pipe to various places in your house where you want water or not. And it at kinda theoretical level, it's very simple. Right? And I think WordPress is the same kind of way.
Liam:We're just building a website that does all these neat and different things. And at one level, yeah, you just create a page, you create a post, you do this, you do that, and you publish it. But but, you know, my example of plumbing is a lot more involved with that. And if if you think that's a a good description of plumbing, please don't work on your own house. Because it it it's it's the nuances.
Liam:It's the subtlety. So I I I don't think WordPress is unnecessarily complicated because it does a lot. The no code solution o allows people like me who don't write code to build pretty complex, pretty exact websites. But there's a lot of dials and a lot of levers and a lot of settings that need to be adjusted ingest adjusted to get right. So I think it it has to be complex in some way.
Liam:You know? It's not just gonna be walk into the room, turn the light switch on. There's more to that. As far as working with clients, a lot of what I do is around education is how often are you gonna do this. Right?
Liam:If you're gonna be in your website every day, I'll show you, and then you'll remember because you do it all the time. If you wanna publish three blog posts a year, send it to me because it'll be you know, I'm already doing the maintenance and the support on the site. It'll be faster and easier just like, you know, Excel. If you do one thing a year in Excel, it's really, really complicated. If you're in Excel all the time, it's super easy to do it.
Liam:So I I do that. I do a lot of little screencast videos for folks who wanna do stuff and who are in it regularly. Show them in thirty seconds, show them in two minutes, and then just leave that video on and they bookmark it and come back to it, and then they have it. And I try to do it in a way that I can share it with other clients so I don't have to do Matt's charity specific. You know, if I made it for Matt's charity, I could send it to Elizabeth's charity and just pretend that I'm saying Elizabeth instead of Matt in the video.
Liam:Here you go. And and then that kind of economy of scale, I do it once, you know, until the UI changes and I have to redo the video.
Matt:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Liam:But that's kind of how I approach it is is how often do you wanna log in and, what's the best use of your time.
Matt:Liam Dempsey, you can find his agency at lbdesign.tv. Type that into the URL. Liam, anywhere else you want folks to go to say thanks. And you also do the WordPress meetup question mark? Should people join you over there?
Liam:I absolutely invite people to join the Philly Bergs WordPress meetup. I founded and ran that for twelve years, and that seemed like enough. So I I turned it over to a couple of really wonderful people, and they now run it day to day, week to week. So, yeah, Philly Burbs WordPress meetup. Burbswp.com is a great place to find that.
Matt:That's it for today's episode. If you could do one more thing for me today, share this episode on social media, your favorite Facebook group or Discord channel. Spread the word about this podcast. It really helps. If you haven't added Breakdown to your favorite podcast app, point your browser to gravityforms.com/breakdown and click the icon of your app to add us and listen to us every two weeks.
Matt:Okay. We'll see you in the next episode.
