SparkReaction from Side Business to HubSpot Gold Agency with Josh Ames

Josh Ames co-founded SparkReaction, a HubSpot partner agency in the Des Moines area, with his business partner Brian after three years running HubSpot in-house at a cloud computing company. Gray MacKenzie hosted this interview, episode 3 of Inbound Agency Journey, and co-host Andrew Dymski joined him afterward for a debrief. Josh covers the year SparkReaction ran as a side business, its website and blogging processes, and why hiring locally in the Midwest is its biggest problem.

A year as a side business, on purpose

Josh and Brian worked together at the cloud computing company and joked about starting an agency for local businesses that needed inbound marketing. Then they did it, though not the way most agencies launch.

We actually ran the agency part-time while still working the full-time job. We did that for the first year of SparkReaction, and then about a year ago, we finally decided to jump in full-time. It got to the point where we knew in order to grow the agency to what we wanted, we needed to start focusing more time on it… All of our growth started happening probably the last half of last year, and it’s just been on a hockey stick trajectory ever since.

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Gray asked whether he regretted waiting. Josh didn’t. They quit once the agency could cover a few months without the day jobs, and he doesn’t think quitting on day one would have worked for an agency starting from zero, with no client base to convert the way a traditional agency has.

Local hires only, which makes hiring the hardest part

SparkReaction decided at the start to build a local team and culture: everyone is in-house, no remote employees. When Gray asked what the agency was struggling with, Josh named scaling and hiring, and tied it straight back to that decision.

Being in the Midwest, we always laugh because it always seems to take longer for stuff to get to the Midwest, whether it’s music, fashion, inbound marketing. We’ve seen it has taken a while to really start to pick up here. And so from a local talent pool of people that already have experience with inbound marketing and already have experience with HubSpot, it’s a very small pool, if any.

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Most applicants are students about to graduate, so the question is who can be taught inbound. In January the agency hired an inbound marketing consultant for SparkReaction’s own marketing, an idea Josh credits to John Bonini at IMPACT, and that role is starting to cover internship and onboarding processes.

Website projects start with personas, not design

Josh does all of SparkReaction’s HubSpot COS development himself, and the agency was about to hire its first full-time developer. They had just closed their largest COS website project to date, for a local client. Gray asked what it takes to be good at COS work, and Josh answered with process rather than code.

We really lay out, even before we engage with a client, what the different milestones or phases of the project are, from making sure that we really understand the buyer personas before we even touch anything that has to do with the design of the site, understanding what their inbound goals are to make sure that when we do start working on the wireframes and the design that we’re accounting for what’s needed from a conversion standpoint.

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From there: wireframes, client approval, design, then back to Josh for coding and QA. The designer joins the earliest prospect conversations and splits wireframing with Josh, so animations and module behavior get discussed before anything is mocked up. In the debrief, Gray called this his big takeaway: GuavaBox built good-looking sites early on with no strategy behind them.

Eight tasks for every blog post, planned a month ahead

SparkReaction stays about a month ahead on client blogging: when this was recorded, April’s posts were scheduled in every client portal and the team was planning May. The planning meeting reviews which past posts got views, covers keywords, and settles the next month’s titles.

We put all of those titles into our project management software and each blog post has eight individual tasks assigned to them between us and the client. So for instance, once we have the title for the blog post, it’s then on one of our inbound marketing consultants to create the outline. That is an individual task. And then a separate task is going to be to submit that outline to the client for approval.

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The client gets a couple of days to approve the outline, the consultant about a week to write, the client a couple of days to review, and the approved post is scheduled in HubSpot with 15 to 20 social posts spread over the next three months. Two months before the interview, the team changed the cadence.

What we’ve actually done in the last two months that seems to have worked really well, both internally for us and externally for our clients, is we’ve actually split the month in two. So everything’s basically on a two-week cycle between creating an outline and then having the final blog post approved and scheduled to go live.

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Client approvals are a hurdle, and the team was still debating whether to keep moving when a client falls behind. The split month is partly a hedge: when everything was batched at the start of the month, one late approval could leave a whole week with no post going live.

Josh also runs a 15 to 20 minute daily team meeting and a longer Monday planning meeting, both started that year, and named QuoteRoller and UberConference as his most useful tools. In the debrief, Andrew noted that SparkReaction was a HubSpot Gold partner at the time.