Today we’d like to introduce you to Neal Quesnel.
Neal, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
My partner, Chris Merrill had a great little business called Super Webomatic where his team would build websites for a low-fee flat rate. The structure of that business was designed to build websites, not continuously update and maintain them.
Chris started to receive a lot of requests for website related tasks around updates and maintenance, but he couldn’t fit those tasks into the process flow and his staff wasn’t structured to address those one-off tasks. He talked to a number of agency owners and web shops, who also had the issue. Either they weren’t designed to take on the tasks or they didn’t want to do the tasks in the first place.
One thing led to another and Super Webomatic closed up shop.
From the ashes of that business rose WhatArmy. We’re set up to handle those tasks that no one else wants to do. We maintain, update, and secure our customers websites. It’s been a ton of fun as the business has evolved over the past 6 years.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
I don’t think it’s ever a smooth road getting from point A to point B, whatever those points may be. Maybe it’s getting your first customer, to getting to $1 million in revenue, to $10 million in revenue, to $100 million in revenue, they all have their unique challenges.
One of the biggest issues that we face every day is educating the customer to the point where they understand why they need to get out in front of security vulnerabilities. Our product has a ton of value and can easily save our clients thousands in cleaning their site up from a hack, for example, but a lot of the time companies roll the dice and hope a security breach doesn’t happen.
Another challenge as we were growing was staying true to who we are and what we offer. We had a solid base of revenue, but also wanted to grow so we took on some projects that weren’t in our wheel house to give us some extra cash to fuel the growth. Those projects don’t always work out well, because just like Webomatic, we’re not built to excel in those types of projects. Every time we have a project that’s a bit outside of our wheel house we have a list of trusted partners that we refer those projects to.
Please tell us about WhatArmy.
We focus mainly on WordPress and have recently started working more with Shopify websites. We offer a monthly security, maintenance, and monitoring plan that makes sure that your site is up to date, backed up, and we receive alerts when something changes on your site that may be malicious.
In addition to that we help our clients on add/change/remove tasks, where if they need to change content, add a blog/form/landing page, or want to make some structural or design changes to the site that we’re there to take care of those tasks. Most of the people we work with are marketing leaders within their company, so this allows them to focus on doing their job better while we take care of the technical tasks.
When our customers first come on we’ll work with them and create a roadmap to get their site up to our minimum standards, as well as take their website marketing plan and put a timeline to that, ensuring that we enable them to meet their goals.
We have a small team of 10, who are almost exclusively remote, yet we all work seamlessly together. Team is very important with a remote/unlimited vacation policy, so ensuring that everyone is bought in to the success of the company is very important. Our team is great, everyone understands their role and how they can impact the business.
We have one employee who has been riding her motorcycle across the country for the last year and another who regularly travels to Chicago and works there about half of the time. It’s a great dynamic.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I would have put a bigger emphasis on hiring the right sales team. Finding great sales talent is tough, a lot of them can talk a good game, but when it comes to execution, they’re lacking.
At this point we’ve adjusted and focused on a process to find the right folks that fit into our culture and can sell our product, but it didn’t happen right away. As a growing small business every hire is important, and if you make a bad hire it can be a setback.
Pricing:
- Customer Hourly Rate – $125
- Non-Customer Hourly Rate – $175
- WordPress Support Plan – $100 – $250/mo per site
Contact Info:
- Address: 142 Great Rd Bedford, MA 01730
- Website: www.whatarmy.com
- Phone: 413-563-4310
- Email: Go@whatarmy.com
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