Inbound Web Design Processes and Culture Code

Patrick Biddiscombe is the CEO of New Breed Marketing in Burlington, Vermont, a HubSpot Diamond partner that was one of four in the world when this was recorded. Gray MacKenzie hosts the interview (episode 20 of Inbound Agency Journey), and Andrew Dymski introduces it and joins Gray for the recap. Patrick covers his path from unpaid summer intern to CEO, how New Breed launched 52 COS websites in a year, and what writing a culture code at 20 people taught him.

Six months of inbound on themselves before selling it

New Breed partnered with HubSpot in 2011, after Patrick introduced himself to Brian Halligan at an early INBOUND conference. They didn’t sell the service right away.

We did about six months of inbound on ourselves before we brought it to any customers, and really just perfected us, and what I always say, dogfooded on ourselves. And that was immensely valuable, because we found out all the little quirks behind the machine, right? And we’re able to dial it in before we brought any customers. And that really helped us with any churn issues that we may have had of bringing out a new service.

(Listen at 05:43)

52 custom websites in one year, one a week

Last year we launched 52 websites on the COS. So one a week, which was an interesting sprint. And we’re working with a lot of HubSpot’s enterprise customers, so these are a lot of large 200, 300 page sites that we’re building on there as well.

(Listen at 09:01)

Gray asked what kind of team makes that possible. A director of customer success hired from a large Burlington software company rebuilt the process for volume.

Every one of our sites is a custom website… Every customer who’s doing a site with us gets a growth strategist as well as a web strategist to oversee the site, and then a web specialist who’s more of a project manager to make sure all those details.

(Listen at 10:25)

A copywriting team paired with clients by vertical writes most of the content, an SEO analyst sits inside that team, and a five-person design and development group builds the sites. Patrick says they’re on pace for another 50 to 60 in the year ahead.

Nothing is sacred, including the founder’s process

Patrick oversees what New Breed calls the revenue team: sales and marketing combined, which is also what the agency sells. In the previous year he hired a head of content, a director of customer success, and a director of operations from larger tech companies, and let them rebuild the web process from the ground up.

Part of our culture code is that there’s nothing sacred. There’s no process that can’t be improved. And just because the founder did it, or the CEO did it, doesn’t mean that you can’t go and completely overhaul it if it’s going to deliver a better product and a better experience for the customer.

(Listen at 12:57)

He calls it a big leap for a company that had mostly hired straight out of school and grown people up. Patrick is the example: intern to CEO in eight years. Past a certain size, he says, you need people who can plug in within their first month.

Write the culture code early, then hire and fire by it

It was probably around 18, 20 people that we took on that initiative. And I wish that I did it when it was the 10 of us. I wish that we did it before we even started the business… It just makes so much sense to have it in place, because then you hire by the culture code, versus how do you get people that you’ve already hired that are great people but maybe don’t fit all aspects of the culture code.

(Listen at 17:29)

New Breed followed the framework in Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness and added items of its own. Patrick’s case for doing it early is that culture becomes a hiring filter instead of a management problem: a New Breeder knows from day one they were hired for fit as much as skill.

Something I really recommend, depending on your agency’s size: get it done sooner than later. You’re not too small to start. And if you’re already starting to be bigger, then it’s still not too late. But just understand that if that’s the case, you need to hire and fire by the culture code.

(Listen at 18:45)

Recruiting runs like a sales funnel

Recruiting is the struggle Patrick names when Gray asks what’s at the top of his fix-it list. Burlington has tech talent but isn’t a major metro, and New Breed had gone from 10 to 30 people with employee referrals as the biggest source.

Going back to the culture code, the biggest thing that we’ve leveraged so far is employee referrals, right? So if you think about it, your persona is kind of the makeup of the five people you surround yourself with. So our goal has been to figure out who are those five people you surround yourself with? Are they in a similar industry? And most likely they’re going to be a culture fit as well, and then hire those people.

(Listen at 23:47)

One employee alone had referred eight hires. Patrick also goes through employees’ LinkedIn connections with them, looking for similar personas, then asks permission to passively recruit. He thinks of recruiting as a sales funnel: wide at the top, interviews in the middle, culture at the bottom. The newest experiment is inbound recruiting, content aimed at people who aren’t job hunting yet.