Building an Agency as a Blessing: Ryan Crozier on Agency Boon

Ryan Crozier is the founder of Agency Boon, a creative agency in Bucharest, Romania that builds WordPress and HubSpot websites for US small businesses and nonprofits, most of them on the StoryBrand framework. Gray MacKenzie hosted, with Andrew Dymski introducing the episode. They cover StoryBrand site pricing, why overflow work from other agencies didn’t hold up, how a nonprofit ended up owning an agency, and four tools Ryan’s team uses.

Where Agency Boon stands today

Gray asked for a 30-second summary of the agency as it stood at the time.

We’re a creative agency based in Bucharest, Romania, but our team is really all over the place. We have a lot of remote workers here in Romania. We also have global team members, Pakistan, Philippines, and then we have a whole team in the United States. Our primary customers are US-based small businesses, small, medium sized businesses, nonprofits, like probably many agencies listening.

(Listen at 01:15)

Ryan said design is what separates them from a typical outsource shop: a StoryBrand guide or copywriter sends the wireframe and copy, and his team handles design and build.

What a StoryBrand website costs and how long it takes

Gray put Ryan on the spot: what would it cost if ZenPilot hired Agency Boon to rebuild its own site, strategy through launch? Ryan started with copy, since a StoryBrand guide’s core skill is copywriting.

I’d say 2,500 bucks to get a brand script out the door, another 2,500 to get a homepage copy. This is the thing with StoryBrand, right? It changed the copywriter’s ballgame, because most agencies listening are like, $2,500 for homepage copy? What the heck?

(Listen at 07:24)

For a typical five to seven page site with all the copy handled, he guessed $10,000 to $15,000. Then he gave the agency’s own averages.

Our average web builds between five to 10,000 for a simple five, six page site. We’re using the Divi framework, but it doesn’t look like a Divi site when it’s done. Let’s say it that way.

(Listen at 08:41)

On timeline, he plans for two to three months. The build could be done in two weeks, but client feedback stretches it out.

Why overflow work from other agencies didn’t hold up

Agency Boon started as an outsourcing shop for other agencies. The name is a pun: boon means a timely gift or blessing in English and sounds like the Romanian word for good. The problem was that small agencies rarely had a consistent pipeline to feed them.

We were their overflow. And I’ve struggled to build a business on overflow. And so when things were difficult, we ended up having to move more directly to customers, which meant we had to add team members in the States to actually guide the customers better.

(Listen at 13:08)

What he offers partners now is a dedicated team member.

Sure, you can hire somebody in San Francisco… Good luck retaining them over about 12 to 18 months. Or you can hire a developer in Romania. He works for us, and so there’s a loyalty factor, and there’s a quality increase, because it’s not just a random freelancer that’s going to drop you for an extra five bucks an hour… He’s part of your team. So I said, our team will wear our t-shirts, but they’ll wear your hat.

(Listen at 10:39)

A nonprofit that ended up owning an agency

Ryan has a pastoral degree, not a business one, and he was open about what that meant for how he handles money.

Our mission is so social. I didn’t get in business to make money. I’m very poor at that. I’ve given it away a lot, and I’m learning the money in and of itself is needed to retain in the business to grow the business. I have a pastoral degree, Gray. I’ve had to read the business books, let’s say it that way.

(Listen at 11:52)

The Romania connection started with a church missions trip in 1997, when Ryan was 12. At 17 he felt called to live there, and ten years later he and his wife moved, before knowing what they’d do. The cause he landed on was human trafficking prevention (Romania, he said, is the number one source country for trafficking victims in the EU). He started a nonprofit, hired a part-time web developer to run awareness campaigns, then a designer. Then fundraising stalled.

We were having a hard time fundraising. There was like nobody wanted to fund this at the time. And so I said, well, what if we just sold some services on the side to fund our nonprofit? And so that’s how it started… And forever, it just funded our nonprofit. So our business started being owned entirely by the nonprofit.

(Listen at 25:11)

Four tools Ryan recommends

Gray closed with his usual tools question. Ryan admitted he’s “a tool freak” and that it’s hard on the rest of the team. His first pick was for wireframing.

We utilize Draftium, D-R-A-F-T-I-U-M… It is an online wireframing tool for content, basically. You can drag blocks and you can change it. So it gives you black and white, simple wireframes that are already built out live on the web. It’s really nice for clients to be able to visualize a real site and pull it up, and for you to build it really quickly.

(Listen at 27:35)

The other three: Miro (formerly RealtimeBoard), which his team has used for years as a shared whiteboard with clients; Loom; and Droplr for screenshots and file sharing. Ryan also mentioned Boonforce, Agency Boon’s Salesforce implementation division.