By Greg Mischio

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Automation. Project management software. Email. All these tools are supposed to make creating marketing deliverables fast and easy right? Candy Phelps of Bizzy Bizzy shares with us why this isn’t always the case, and gives a sneak peak of her January 9 presentation for the AMA at Brix and Mortar.

Candy Phelps

Q: Tell us about yourself and your company – especially the shift to Bizzy Bizzy?

Candy Phelps: Bizzy Bizzy is a Madison-based experiential creative marketing agency. We help busy business owners, startups, nonprofits and entrepreneurs with their branding, graphic design and website development needs.

We were founded in 2009, formerly known as iCandy Graphics & Web Design, and rebranded in 2017 after deciding to shift from traditional creative services to working almost exclusively on our 1 Day Website and 1 Day Branding services.

We love working with small businesses and startups who are passionate about their businesses and making the world a better place.

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Q: At the presentation, you’ll be speaking about getting your head “out of the cloud”: How human contact and tangible tools will make work more efficient and fun. Tell us a bit more about the presentation, and why did you decide to speak on this topic?

Candy Phelps: We decided this year to transition from working on branding and website projects with clients remotely to offering in-person services.

I’ll talk about the inherent problems we found over the years with traditional website development and branding project management and the surprising solutions we came up with to solve those problems, including working directly with clients in real time and using physical tools for some of our work.

We want to share our ideas because these pain points are universal. After talking to other marketers and creative companies, you will learn we are all suffering in the same ways. Likewise, talk to clients who have horror stories of web design or branding projects gone wrong and you will find patterns.

The solutions we have come up with won’t solve every problem or work for every company, but we think everyone will walk away with some new ways to think about how we are providing our services.

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Q: You’ve written about technology didn’t seem to be helping in with development of branding deliverables, websites, etc. You mentioned how things used to be done more efficiently over the phone, without so many emails. How are you doing business now?

Candy Phelps: In an effort to make our services more efficient over the years, we attempted to digitize and automate things more and more. As we used more technological solutions, we started to lose touch with our customers, and we didn’t really see efficiencies in our process—just a lot more emails.

Now we have completely flipped the script and started to work in person and in real time with our clients and team. We certainly still use plenty of technology in our processes, but the majority of the project management has gone from being email-based to being real live human-to-human communication.

As it turns out, this is not only incredibly efficient, but also more fun for everyone involved!

Q: You really seem to be in touch with today’s current marketer. Do you feel people are much more focused on efficiency measures and trying to get the work done?

Candy Phelps: Efficiency has and always will be an important piece of running a successful service-based business. But due to the nature of our work and generally being a tech-friendly crowd who spends most of the day at our computers, the default has become for marketers to look to technology to solve all of our problems. And sometimes in the quest for efficiency, we forget to consider the clients’ best interests.

Just because implementing a fancy project management software makes our lives easier, doesn’t mean it’s easier for the customer.

That’s where marketers need to rethink some of the choices we are making to see if we can find a balance between the highly efficient production we need to be profitable and the high-touch service our customers desire.

Q: Finally, what are the big takeaways people are going to get from your presentation?

Candy Phelps: People will get new ideas on how to run their website and branding services with better results and how to put an end to never-ending projects.

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We’ll talk about tangible tools such as our Wireframing Kit, Core Value Cards, Font Finder Cards, Moodboard Collection and the systems and checklists we have designed to make our project management easier, our end products higher quality and our customer experience more delightful.

Candy will be speaking at the AMA Meeting on January 9, 2018 at Brix and Mortar.  

Click here for registration details!

 

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