The Challenges and Strategies of Running a Ecommerce Agency

Robbie:
Hello and welcome to another agency chat with Do the Woo. I’m Robbie Adair of OS Training and Media A team, and joining me again today is Robert Jacobi. How’s it going, Robert?

Robert:
Hey, Robbie, year’s almost done. I don’t know when this will be coming out. Probably right before New Year.

Robbie:
Maybe so. Maybe so. And you’re not done traveling yet, right? You’re still traveling this year?

Robert:
I got one more.

Robbie:
One more. I thought I was done and here I am. I’m actually traveling at the moment, and so I thought I was done, but I am not. That’s just the way it goes though. Clients just decide, Hey, you know what? Let’s do this in December. That sounds fun. Sure. Today we have Sarkis. Please didn’t want to say this wrong. I just put an L in it. See, I knew I was going to do it. Sarkis is with us with ITQ Commerce. So tell us, how is your day going?

Sarkis:
I’m definitely not traveling, that’s for sure. So good for you. I’m definitely stationary and in the same place I was this morning, which is a good thing. But yeah, everything’s going well. Getting ready for Christmas, a bit like yourself, expected it to quieten down, but people seem to want things done quicker and closer to Christmas than ever. So yeah, it’s a busy time at the moment, but glad to join both of you today.

Robbie:
Where are you located?

Sarkis:
Based in Cascais, which is a small town, 30 minutes from Lisbon on the coast in Portugal.

Robbie:
Oh, all right. Oh, well you’re over there hanging out in Portugal with Bob. I love it.

Sarkis:
Exactly. Yeah, I’ve just learned that he’s up in Porto, so we’re going to have to meet up now since we’re so close.

Robert:
Yeah. How did you not realize that the WooCommerce, king of Porto did not live so close to you?

Sarkis:
They’ve been hiding. They’ve been hiding. They’ve come out of hiding now, which is good.

Robbie:
That’s right. You have to know, you be in the know, know where Bob is. He’s very secretive like that, so not secretive. Bob is everywhere. Oh, goodness. So you were saying though that yeah, client work has not slowed down. I’m curious what you’re seeing with your agency since pandemic. Have you noticed that there are no times a year that are slow used to? I had certain months. I knew it was going to slow down. I tell the team, Hey, we could take off some time this month, whatever. I can’t do it anymore. Every time I try to do it, it’s like a client comes up and goes like, Hey, we need this done now.

Sarkis:
Yeah, I think, well, the pandemic seems like a long time ago now, most of our clients are based in the uk. We are expanding into the Iberia region. So Lisbon area, specific parts of Spain, but majority of our clients are still based in the uk, and it does tend to be quiet in the uk, sort of June, July, small bit of August time in terms of new work or new projects with existing clients. Everyone seems to take their foot off the gas and then leading up to Christmas, it’s the usual getting stuff done and maybe not planning as well as they should do and getting things done in a rush. But then after the 20th of December, everyone goes quiet for two to three weeks and you don’t really hear anything off celebrating, or businesses are just doing what they’re doing and selling online, and there’s no changes going in, no problems arising. So yeah, we do have small periods. It’s not busy. But yeah, we’re sort of branching out our business into different areas of e-commerce because we realized a few years ago, even before the pandemic, that you would see those dips up and down through the year because you were maybe just focusing on one element of the business or one revenue stream, so to speak. So yeah, it’s busy. Small little periods of quietness, but not enough quietness at the moment, to be honest.

Robert:
Too much quietness is, that may be a better way to think of it.

Sarkis:
Yeah, too much quietness is sometimes not good. But then if you’ve got processes in place and you’re servicing your clients the right way and doing the work in an efficient manner and planning it ahead, then you can get periods of quietness where everything’s working well and your customers are still growing. So keeping them along their path of growing online, I guess, building their revenue.

Robert:
So we kind of skimmed over tq and you, boy, I loved that rhymed. What makes ITQ special and what’s your overall but also day-to-day role there?

Sarkis:
Yeah, so ITQ is about 25 years old now, 23, 24, 5 years old. So we’ve been going for a long time, and we’ve seen many different e-commerce platforms in that time, and we’ve obviously moved with the times and moved on to developing and working with customers and other platforms. Obviously WooCommerce being one of them. I’m one of the founders. I joined the business about 10 years ago, but I’ve been in the industry for about 15. I joined about 10 years ago. I had another agency which we merged together with ITQ, and it just seemed like a good fit. And yeah, we’re growing, everything’s going pretty well, acquiring new customers. Our goal is definitely to not have quantity, but rather have quality of customers for sure. And my role in the business, apart from being one of the founders, I run the operational side of the business. So I look after all the developers, all the testers that we’ve got, and then some of our heads of deliveries as well. And yeah, I get stuck into the technical elements of things to make sure that sites are operating functionally for our customers and putting the right technical solutions in place.

Robert:
But you don’t come in as a developer per se, when you talk about making

Sarkis:
No

Robert:
Sure the tech is appropriate. Okay.

Sarkis:
No, so I’m not a developer. I’m actually an accountant by trade, so my degree was in accounting and finance, so it helps me look after the numbers. But as I said, I’ve been doing this for about 15, 16, 17 years now. So everything I’ve acquired is through working in terms of not sitting in a university classroom, be it. So I look after the technical side of things. I help bring the scoping together, so I listen to the clients and either what their pain points are, what’s going right with their site, what’s going wrong with their site, and then I’ll find the right solutions to, well, I’ll find I’ll the right technical solutions to help them essentially. And then I make sure my team deliver on time to budget and also help plan a roadmap of work for our clients over a period of time. So we’re more proactive than reactive. That’s how we like to operate.

Robbie:
So you do other commerce, I see you’ve got Shopify and obviously Woos, which is why we’re talking to you, Magento. What is your percentage of WooCommerce versus the other e-commerce platforms?

Sarkis:
At the moment, it’s about 20%, but it’s growing. I have to say. We’re getting a lot more inquiries for Woo. We’ve got a good partnership with Automatic and we’ve built up a partner page on their site. It’s taken some time to get some traction, but I think that’s also because Automatic are doing a lot of good things in the background to try and help promote the platform and perhaps give people a bit more of a different perception to what it possibly has in the industry. Well, some people’s opinion, but yeah, we’re seeing a lot more inquiries. We’re also seeing a lot more inquiries from the states, which is great. And they have existing WOO sites, usually they have issues with it, and we have to come in and find out what those issues are, what’s causing them, and then again, putting the right solutions in place to not make their day-to-day life more difficult than it needs to be.

Robbie:
Cool. So are you finding anyone that’s asking to switch from WOO to another platform? Curious?

Sarkis:
We haven’t for a while. We’ve had a few prospective clients that have come to us. They’re on a other e-commerce platform, so not any of the ones that we work with, which is WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify. And we always try to look at things with a very transparent and holistic approach to make sure we’re putting them first. And we’re very platform agnostic, so we’re not going to favor one over the other because then people might just get a bad experience and end up courting the platform crap, when in my experience, it’s not the platform that’s the problem. It’s either how it’s implemented or it’s just not right for the business in question. And a lot of people might not think that way and they’ll just blame a platform and say it’s crap just because they’ve heard it from somebody else that it’s crap and without actually understanding it properly.
So we do get situations where we have to do more than one proposal. So we’ll do a proposal for WooCommerce, we’ll do a proposal for, say Magento as an example, and we’ll do a five-year plan to show them what it’s not only going to take to get them onto that platform, but what it’s going to cost them to also service the platform for three to five years. And just with the basic stuff, get on a proper hosting platform that is tailored to the platform you want to build your online shop on. But then also, don’t forget the housekeeping updating plugins, updating themes. It looks very easy. It looks like you can just press a button and it’s okay, and everything’s going to work fine, but a lot of them have dependencies, either they just have dependencies on the theme on the infrastructure, the PHP version, whole host of stuff, as you both will know, and it can vary, often break site.
So a lot of people, a lot of people have this concept that it’s easy, but it’s not. So we try to always pitch fair and transparent view of the world when it comes to that type of scenario. But the majority of our WooCommerce, getting back to your original question, we inherit them. They already have WooCommerce sites, but they’re really struggling with either performance or their current agency, and they just have problems everywhere. And again, I don’t think it’s down to the platform, and we very quickly uncover that when we do an audit with them. But yeah, majority are already on WooCommerce, and if they do move away, it’s because their businesses potentially outgrown it. But yeah.

Robert:
So what would be some of the, I guess points that for a new customer that they would come in with X, Y, Z as sort of business criteria that would say WooCommerce is the solution.

Sarkis:
So what would be the criteria for that?

Robert:
Yeah,

Robbie:
Well, why would you sometimes recommend Woo over Shopify or Woo over Magento? What would be some things you think Woo does much better?

Sarkis:
Yeah, I think from just a personal opinion, we would take it based on the business’s maturity and how long they’ve been in the game because I’ll give you an example, and I don’t want to talk about another platform on this podcast because we should be focusing on what the podcast is about. But as an example, if somebody wants their store in Magento, there’s a level of investment that they need to know about upfront. And if they’re not willing to make that investment upfront, then they should forget about it. And sometimes people will just go and choose a platform because someone else has chosen it and think, oh, we can build it, and then when we build it, the agency can hand it over to us and we can manage it ourselves and it’s all fine. So when it comes down to selecting the WooCommerce platform, we really look at, well, two things, the maturity of the business and how well do they understand the e-commerce ecosystem and how well are they committed to whatever platform they choose?

Because pretty much with any platform, maybe apart from Shopify, but that also has its drawbacks depending on what type of business you are, every other type of platform needs upkeep. You need to keep the house clean as we call it. There’s a certain base level of keeping the plugins up to date, keeping the theme up to date, keeping whatever you have integrated and built it on, keeping it up to date. And they need to buy into that as a philosophy of running your own line shop to really be invested in it. So if they don’t want that, there’s no point in trying to get them onto WooCommerce or if they don’t have the budget for it, there’s no point in getting onto WooCommerce because what’s going to end up happening is they’ll probably select another agency, do it cheap and cheerful and get or into all sorts of problems and then turn around and go, oh, WooCommerce is crap.

We should have gone with Shopify when really they didn’t think about what they needed to invest to make it work for them as a business. So the maturity question is one of the most important aspects of when we’re looking to get someone onto something like WooCommerce, and we invest a lot of time in that. We do like a clinic approach where we have an initial call with the client for like 45 minutes. And to be honest with you, after that first 45 minutes when we put the phone down, US founders and we can look at each other and go, if we try and get these people on WooCommerce, they’re going to be a nightmare. They’re not going to want to pay for the upkeep. They want to going to try and do it themselves, and then they’re going to turn around and tell us the platform is crap that we should have advised them on something different, or they’ll come across in the right way and they understand what it takes to run a good store.

And so that maturity piece is number one. And then the second piece would be looking at functionality and scope of what they’re actually trying to achieve. And we usually look at three or four different markers when it comes to that. So are they primarily B2B focused or D two C focused as a business? And depending on their questions, are there the right plugins out there to facilitate that? Another question we ask is, do they want to go multi-country as well? So do they want to manage everything? Do they want to manage their whole business from one dashboard, but be able to have a site in America, have a site in Europe, have a site in the uk, and push different content to those platforms? And that along with scope and functionality and the maturity question gives us a very good feel to if they’re suited for WooCommerce.

And then the fourth item would be integration. So if they’re looking for some very custom integration to be done, WooCommerce is also a very good solution because you can get access to the code, and if you know what you’re doing, you can pretty much extract as much data as you want from it and shape it into whatever you want in terms of what the client wants for either reporting or for pushing data to another system. So we look at those four main criteria, but we always start off with the maturity one because that for me is the most important.

Robbie:
And you said you give them a picture of what five years of maintenance would look like. Do you find that most of your clients go with you guys four or five years of maintenance if you do a new build?

Sarkis:
Yeah, definitely. Our churn rate is pretty much non-existent, to be honest. We do lose clients like every agency does, but again, we try and give that three to five year view. We take everything into account. We take into account even the transactional costs. So what payment provider would you like to go with, and then what’s your average revenue? What do you want to grow by every year? What’s your business plan then? So we build that into the plan. So it just gives them, if you’re going to build a site with us, it’ll cost you $150,000 x marketing over the next five years. I just made that number up by the way, but it’ll cost you that much over five years. That is what you need to invest. If you want to, well run WordPress WooCommerce website that’s well oiled, finely tuned, and won’t give you technical issues and will help you grow. And so we like to be transparent with all of that because again, if they don’t buy into that somewhere along the journey, they’ll turn around to you and tell you the platform’s crap. And that’s not just WooCommerce. You have them bought into that so they can get a good experience.

Robert:
How did you learn that lesson? Because I’m loving that as a initial sort of gate for evaluating whether a customer is a good fit

Sarkis:
Through a lot of the mistakes, basically a lot. And I think sometimes what suffers from, and I know this is not the question you asked, but I’ll sort of get there in a roundabout way. I think sometimes what WooCommerce suffers from is that when you say WooCommerce, people think WordPress, or when you say WordPress, people think, oh, we can have an online shop on that, but they don’t realize that they’re two distinctly different core bits of code that can coexist because they’re obviously built by the same company. But I think because of that attachment, a lot of merchants or business owners have this attitude that it’s a do it yourself, that it’s a do it yourself type of platform. And in some respects it is. But I think if you’re trying to grow a serious online business, then you should be taking WooCommerce as a serious e-commerce platform and not as a, I can just buy a theme, install a few plugins, and I’m going to make half a million dollars a year.

And I think, and because of that, we picked up a lot of customers that had that attitude of we can do it ourself. They may be doing half a million a year, and they may have got completely lucky in getting up to that number, but they still have that attitude of, I can do it myself. What do you mean you want to charge me a thousand dollars a month just to support my site and keep it clean and do the upgrades and do that type of thing? It shouldn’t cost me anything, and I should be able to host it for 20 bucks a month, and it should be lightning fast and it should be able to handle a thousand concurrent users, and everything should just be perfect. So we inherited a lot of those type of customers because we were growing and because we wanted to learn, I don’t like to use the word what we were picky with our customers, because you can never be picky with a customer.
You always have to speak to a customer, understand what they’re like, and then make a conscious and balanced decision about whether you are a good fit for each other or not. But I think at the beginning, we inherited quite a lot of the do it yourself type of attitude, merchants, and it just became painful. And it was like, these guys are not serious about growing. They just want to sit in their corner and earn what they earn and do everything themselves and not pay for the expertise or the support that’s needed. And so that’s how we got to where we are today. That maturity question is super critical.

Even if somebody tells you they’ve got a 50 grand budget to do a simple online shop that’s only got 50 SKUs, they could be completely immature and just have more money than sense, and you’ll end up building it and not building a relationship with them.
And they’ll probably turn around in two years and say, WooCommerce is crap and want to spend a hundred grand on Magento, but get the same results because of their attitude or the maturity type of thing. So it’s such an important point, and I think it’s why sometimes WooCommerce gets that, and I was saying, it’s got a bad reputation at all just on the ground when you speak to a lot of people, they think it’s a do it yourself, and that’s changing. The mindset’s definitely shifting. But yeah, learning from a lot of clients that gave us a lot of headaches, a lot of headaches,

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Robbie:
So that’s funny, you kind of bled into what my next question was going to be, which was I was going to ask you, what are the top two or three things that you think commerce could do better or could change about the core product itself or their image? So you talked about that a little bit there with the image. I totally agree with you on that, by the way. I mean, we’ve talked about this with other guests too, that we really think that we should step up. Its marketing a lot of times, like you’re saying, the people that are out, not in our world, they’re just doing their businesses and they’re seeing what their other businesses around them are using. And so they see these tools, and yes, WooCommerce does have that as the, oh, it’s just this is something you do yourself. You don’t go to an agency to pay for. That is changing, I do believe as well. But it is interesting, I think that Shopify, by just being able to do commercials, Squarespace by doing commercials and things like that, they make themselves look broader and reach a broader market, a broader audience. But let’s talk about the actual core product itself. What would you like to see Woo, add or change?

Sarkis:
I think they’re starting to do that a bit already. Again, there’s loads of great developers out there in terms of developing plugins for WooCommerce, but I think in the past there were probably more cowboys than serious, serious plugin developers for WooCommerce. And it’s changing already, even just in the way that we do our proposals these days, it’s much easier for me to have confidence in some of the plugins that I’m coming across. And I think Woo, have tried to, they’ve changed that a bit in the way that you’ve almost got a woo, but you don’t almost have, you have a page of all the WOO plugins that you can get all in one place. You can search, you can filter. Whereas before it felt like you just had to Google it and click on the first five links, and they were all different companies doing different things, and it didn’t really give a sense of community or more importantly, a sense of confidence that these things will actually work and you’re not just going to pay because most of the root plugins are cheap in comparison to other industries, right?

Where you’re paying 150, $200 a year, maybe $49 a year, $79 a year, those are quite the popular price points. And sometimes cheaper comes across as it’s not as good. But actually you can start to see almost like a spider web building where you are searching for different plugins now and you can see common names of development companies coming up all across the piece. If you’re in B2B, you see one company has developed 10 different modules for B2B. If you’re in loyalty, you see the same. And it gives you the confidence that you can go to one or two providers to really give your merchant a lot of power and a lot of functionality all in one place. And you can speak to one person or one company about it rather than having to speak to four or five or 10 or 15 different people, which could be a one man band on his own somewhere.

And they’re very disconnected from the platform itself. So that’s one of the things that is one of my items that I would’ve liked. If you asked me two years ago, a year ago, what is one of the things I’d like to see is that more that sense of community and building a network that are completely connected to WOO and that are part of this world of Woo, that just gives you, as an agency and a merchant, just complete confidence. And that’s one of the things I’d like to see improve, but it’s already improving and you can already see it making the right steps. But I think it’s fundamental because WOO can’t exist on its own, and it’s never going to go off and develop new plugins and new functionality for a whole host of different areas of e-commerce. They don’t have the bandwidth to do that, and its probably not part of their business plan. So they need third parties. They need communities to buy into it.

Robbie:
So do you do any customizations yourself that you then maintain?

Sarkis:
Yes, we do. Yeah. Yep.

Robbie:
And have you guys been trying out ai, because we’re seeing this now all over the web that it’s like, well, as opposed to buying this little plugin that only does this, I went as chat GPT, and it wrote it for me, and I’ve put it in there and then I’m thinking, did they check this thing? Is it secure?

Sarkis:
Yeah. So yes, we are looking at different elements of ai, but again, I just feel that it’s a very casual word that’s just thrown around without people really thinking about it. And you speak to so many people, you go to some of these conferences where you do some of these face-to-face events and you meet people that just talk about ai, but they don’t actually tell you what they’re doing with it. They just like to use the term. I mean, some of them, fair enough, they may know exactly what they’re talking about, but they don’t really tell you about what they’re actually doing with it. So the approach we’ve taken is that I think one of the most important areas of AI is the data and the ability to use it to gather intelligent data to, well, not intelligent data, just use it to gather data to help make better decisions essentially.
And that’s how we’re trying to use it. We’re not trying to use it to do 40 hours work in 10 seconds because you don’t really know what you’re getting for that and how it can be implemented and that type of thing. And so when it comes to customization, what we try and do is we try and take a plugin that already exists that people are familiar with and customize on top of that. And then we may use some tools, some clever tools in between to shorten the work but not to do the work, or we will just completely customize it from the ground up with a scope of work written and documented as in, this is the problem, this is the solution, or this is what we would like and how we’re going to get there. And then more importantly, how do we maintain it going forward? Is it going to be too expensive to maintain given our business and revenue and that type of stuff? So that’s what we try to do. So we either use a plugin or we customize in the ground up and the AI element, we simply use it to gather more data and interpret data to help us build those customizations in a way that best suits our customer, best, suits their customer as well. So they’re getting the best experience

Robert:
Just to stay on the fun AI topic, which I love how you said people don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s like when people say blockchain, it’s like, okay, so what are you doing with that? But I digress. Are your customers asking for advanced AI or some kind of AI on the front end for their customers?

Sarkis:
Not in the whole. I think if they do ask, it would be down to search and personalizing search and the results that come back from that when it comes to looking for products and helping build a more intelligent search history so that when the customer comes back, they automatically get engagement from the site that they’re perhaps more familiar with. And then that obviously gives them a bit more confidence to continue shopping online. But a lot of our customers, a lot of our merchants, sorry, in terms of our ideal customer, they’re usually founder, their family run businesses, or we can basically pick up the phone and speak to the owner essentially, or one of the founders. So it’s a very personal relationship. They know their products inside out, they know their business inside out, and they really take the time to talk to us about their business.

So they’re not looking for, and I’m not suggesting this is what you are asking, but they’re not looking for something quick to just suddenly give ’em a 20% boost on revenue that can be driven by some sort of AI tool. They’re more focused on keeping their customer happy. So we try to introduce little things here and there to just top up the experience instead of just sort of revolutionizing it and scaring all their customers away. And search and customer engagement is definitely one of the areas that we try to focus on. But again, none of that’s really possible unless you’re feeding the right data or getting the right data to make the right decision. So again, for us, it comes back to the data and how it’s analyzed.

Robbie:
I know right now, like you said, you’re probably not getting a lot of those requests from your customers, but as Amazon starts rolling out more and more of their AI tools on the front end that the interface that people are seeing, I think that’s where we’re going to start seeing more requests. In the WOO world too. One of my favorite things that Amazon did this year with AI was summarizing the comments. Because I mean, everybody goes and looks at all the comments when they’re looking at a product to go see does this fit, does this, whatever does fall apart? And so you’re having to dig through all these, and most of them are just angry rants, but you’re trying to get real information out of those. But now with the new AI summary where they summarize all of those for you, it makes it very easy.

And you can even ask it questions and it’ll go search through those comments and go, oh, well yeah, no, this person said that. They used it for the, oh, okay, great. And then now they’ve got the new AI for trying on clothes. On a model your size, you can pick the model your size, and then it changes the model to a model that fits your size, and they put that same shirt on ’em. It’s pretty amazing some of the tools that they’re rolling out this year. But I do think that the more of those type tools that people get used to, then they’re going to want them on their stores as well.

Sarkis:
Completely agree. Completely agree. Yeah. It is something we’re thinking about just it’s like, where do you start?

Robbie:
Exactly.

Sarkis:
How do you know what’s the first thing your customer’s going to ask for? Because they’re going to be bombarded by 20 million different tools. And you’re right. And as that gets introduced slowly from IT, tools will start to be built that will feed off, that can suit a particular vertical. And I think that’s where it become easier to make decisions for our merchants, where it’s like, if you’re in fashion, you can use these tools. If you are in food, you can use these tools. They’re all probably built from the same stuff, but they’re just sort of modularized into smaller components to make it easier for a merchant to digest and make a decision, I think. But yeah, it’s a good point. It can be a bit overwhelming. Like I say, people talk about AI all day long, and the blockchain one is a great example. It’s so true.
I met someone the other day as I go, what do you do? He says, oh, I’m in blockchain in crypto. Okay, what does that mean? Are you buying and selling it? Do you own a product that helps move it around? It’s like be a bit more specific about what you do. And if you’re so vague about that, there’s too many vague things out there about AI that it can get overwhelming. So yeah, I think that needs to happen. It needs to be compartmentalized a bit more simpler for merchants to actually understand how it can help their business. And then you’re right, we’ll get into the I want that. How do I get that? How do I get that on my site type of thing.

Robbie:
Yeah, I do Amazon, it’s kind of like they raise the bar, I feel like out there for everyone, but I think it’s good. It makes everyone woo Magento, Shopify, everyone have to raise their own bars. But in the Woo world, you’re right. Where that will happen will be the individual plugin developers probably is where that will happen. And they’ll start building these little plugins, and then you’ll have to figure out, will this work for me? Or am I going to have to customize it past that?

Sarkis:
Exactly. Yeah, completely.

Robbie:
Well, Robert, do you have any more questions?

Robert:
Boy, I don’t think we’ve seen ITQ in the Workcamp space. Do folks actually attend?

Sarkis:
No, we haven’t attended yet. We’re planning to attend next year. It’s on our list for sure.

Robert:
So Workcamp Europe.

Sarkis:
Yes.

Robert:
Alright, that’s good. I like seeing folks in person.

Sarkis:
Well, yeah, exactly. It’s always good to meet people in person for sure.

Robbie:
Does ITQ, do you participate in other communities too, Shopify or Magento? Do you participate in those communities?

Sarkis:
Meet Magento? We’ve done that a couple of times. Hoover, which is a Magento based, well, it’s a company that’s developed a theme for Magento. It’s a bit more than a theme, but it’s all to do with performance and enhancement, and they’re making a lot of moves in that space. So we’ve attended a few events, a few events from there. Shopify not so much. We tend to get involved more with partners of Shopify, like Recharge Klaviyo. I know those can work on Woo as well. But no, we haven’t done any direct events with Shopify planning to do more with Automatic next year, as I’ve mentioned. But to be honest with you, in the last, I think, I don’t want to use Covid as an excuse because everyone did that, but Covid happened, everyone had to work from home. We closed a few offices and then I moved to Portugal and we didn’t see the need to open up any of the offices that we closed.

So everyone just sort of stayed working from home with just a couple of offices open. And so we sort of got away from the culture of attending loads of events and seeing people face-to-face, which maybe was the wrong thing at the time, but we were also going through a bit of a restructure in the business to understand better our position in the market, what makes us different, and then who our customer really is, who is our ideal customer. So we spent a good year and a half reshaping all of that. And then before it is 2023 and we’re like, right, okay, we need to go out and see some people now and start meeting people. There’s nothing like doing business either with different agencies, different partners and merchants. Face-to-face is just so much better than Zoom calls or phone calls or emails or any of that sort of

Robbie:
Stuff. Agree a hundred percent on that. Yes. And we will all get to meet up. We’re Camp Europe then. Very excited about it coming in Switzerland this year, so I’m super excited. I know, but we’ll be glad to have you in the community. And quite honestly, you’ll see in the community it’s okay to talk about other products too. And we find that’s the best way for communities to grow and learn is to see what’s working in other products out there and what could we do to match that or what could we do to better that? And so I think you’ll find that there’s a lot of conversations around multiple products at these events because everyone that’s doing just what you’re doing, I feel like, or most people are, they’re trying to find the best fit for their customer or they’re trying to mold something into the best fit for the customer, which is where Woo does kind of shine, because it allows you to customize so

Robert:
Deeply. Or just know your customer.

Robbie:
Exactly. Know your customer.

Robert:
Exactly.

Sarkis:
Yeah.

Robbie:
Well, thank you so much for coming on. If somebody needs to reach you before they see you at a Word camp, how can they find you?

Sarkis:
LinkedIn, Sarkis. On LinkedIn or email address? Sarkis. S-A-R-K-I-S at Itq Digital.

Robbie:
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you for coming on and sharing your insights. It’s really handy. We love talking to agencies that work with multiple platforms because it’s always more interesting and it’s much more dynamic, I feel like, because you can talk when you know what else is out there. You can talk about what Woo shines and what Woo needs to improve. So I like that. So thank you.

Sarkis:
Yeah, no problem at all. It was,

Robbie:
And thanks for joining, Robert. I know in all your travels, it’s hard to find a spare minute to sit down with you, so I’m glad that you were able to make it today as well. I wasn’t on my own. Awesome. Well, don’t forget listeners out there, catch the next episode of Do the Woo.

Robert:
Happy New Year. Woo.