Interview with Modern Marketer – Randy Milanovic

I never chose it. It chose me. I began my career as a freelance graphic designer, was lured into agency life and 60+ awards for our work. I truly loved the work but hated the business model, so left to start my own visual communications firm in December of 1999.

That’s where I learned the business side. Hardly inspiring. Yet, the creation of the work had a certain allure. Our work changed lives, usually for the better. But it came at a cost. When clients asked for logos or brochures or websites or trade show booths, we created what was asked. It was a great way to pay the bills, but that’s all it did.

In 2009 I was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. To the surprise of many, including my doctors, I survived. Being that close to death brought a realization that although I’d been servicing clients and earning an income for the past decade, what I’d really been doing was taking orders. So, upon my return to work nearly a year later I sat down with my team and declared that we would stop taking orders and start providing leadership. The pivot meant a new business model, and along with that, a new name, Kayak Marketing, named after my preferred physical fitness activity as I was recovering and rebuilding my post-cancer strength.

With the launch of Kayak, my team and I introduced a coaching program and made it a requirement of engagement. We adopted elements of Simon Sinek’s “Why” approach, wrote a few books on everything from creating better business websites, to SEO findability, and UX. All of which delightfully reached #1 in Amazon in several languages. The approach was one of sharing.

Our approach to lead gen is a mixture of mapping personas to behavior traits, intent, and roles. We refer to it as ‘flow’ in our program. It’s been so successful that we’ve engineered a WordPress theme to deliver it, and a Site as a Service to host it called Flowww Sites. Flow helps businesses generate high quality leads, and create advocates.

The focus on transactional thinking is a challenge. Conventional thinking has it that the goal is to sell or otherwise convert the visitor into buying. While I agree that is a fundamental goal of business, I feel the approach is short sighted. It overlooks visitors who are seeking information. It’s my experience that visitors discovering knowledge without expectation effectively champion your products and services to their decision-makers. That’s powerful. And all it takes is to take an abundance mindset over a scarcity one.

I’ve always been of a mind to help others. We fashioned our services at Kayak around helping people grow so that they could help their businesses grow. Under that model, we’ve managed to build a business with $50-100k engagements.

Since 2011, at those types of budgets, we found it near impossible to serve small businesses. Often, we give services freely where we can.

Then back in December a year ago, Gutenberg was introduced to WordPress which kicked off a chain of events that led to us creating a WordPress template. We saw an industry-wide lack of migration path between the Classic Editor and Gutenberg Editor.

In creating our theme, we managed to reduce the transition effort, cost, and stress from an anticipated multi-week ordeal, down to roughly 3 hours. A bit of tweaking later and we reduced the vast majority of effort to under 5 minutes to set up and under 10 minutes to recreate.

I considered putting the Theme on one of the theme sites or selling it one-off But found the value of a theme to be – at best – $80. Abandoned that approach quickly and decided to offer it as a service. Site as a Service (SaaS).

With the launch of the service (flowwwsites.com) we realized we could essentially provide web hosting, technical maintenance, security, backups, and the theme for pennies. Which in turn meant we could help the smallest of businesses as well as larger ones.

Also with that realization, a different door opened – global markets – with an agency level website – to all businesses for literally free. We settled on $100/yr, per subscription.

Just for fun, I shared my insights with successful businesses people twice. The first one asked if he could buy 1,000 subscriptions to give away to his contacts. The second offered to sponsor Sites at $100,000 per year for 10 years.

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