Enterprise Coworking Community Spotlight: Tom Young, Intuitive Websites

This month Lauren connects with Tom Young, the Founder & CEO of Intuitive Websites.
 
At Intuitive Websites, we are a group of strategic digital marketing specialists, high-end designers, and top-notch developers ready to market your company and your website. The excellent ROI? Now that’s just the cherry on top. If it’s possible to live and breathe strategic digital marketing, we do it. It’s something we’re incredibly passionate about, and good things happen for our partners because of that. Like what, you ask? An industry-leading online presence, consistent lead generation, and an audience happy to engage with your content. We come together to support each other when deadlines loom and capitalize on our cross-functional skill set for the greater good—read: your bottom line.

Transcript:

Lauren: [00:00:04] Hello, and welcome back to Enterprise Coworking community Spotlight. This month, we are talking to Tom Young, the founder and CEO of Intuitive Websites. Tom, thank you so much for sitting down with us virtually and talking a little bit about your company.

Tom: [00:00:19] It's a pleasure to be here and to see you again, Lauren.

Lauren: [00:00:21] Yes, always great to see you. So let's get into it. Our first question is just to tell us a little bit about intuitive websites and what you guys do.

Tom: [00:00:33] Sure. Intuitive Websites is a digital marketing agency based in the tech center in Denver, and we provide WordPress and HubSpot websites along with a full complement of digital marketing services, which include things like SEO, Google ads, content marketing, social media. And we're also a HubSpot Platinum agency. We're one of the fastest growing agencies with HubSpot right now in the U.S. about to go from platinum to diamonds. So we're growing very fast and because of that, it's enabled us to to really open up a whole new suite of services around using HubSpot and marketing automation. So in a nutshell, that's what we do. And our goal really is to help clients have great websites and also have great marketing. So they use us for things like lead generation. They use us for the ability to close more sales because the website helps their sales team close sales. They also clients hire us to get their brand out online, and they also hire us more and more to help recruit team members to their company because the best candidates for job openings are looking around online, looking at websites before they apply, even for a position. So those are some of the things we do in some of the outcomes we get.

Lauren: [00:01:52] Oh, yeah, you do it all very essential. So how long have you guys been in business?

Tom: [00:01:59] Well, I started working in internet marketing in the late nineties when the internet was brand new, and I noticed that websites didn't do much back then. They were basically a few graphics, maybe a photo or two and basically all the websites back then talked about how great the company was. And I launched a website to help sales people and help sales managers. It's still out there. It's called Sales Training Plus, and I loaded that website with content informational content, which later became a book called Intuitive Selling, which is also available on Amazon and still out there. And I realized, wait, wait a minute. People go to websites because they want content. They don't want to just look at pictures or look at graphics. And so this was in the late 90s. Very few people were doing this. And so around 2000 to 2004, I started offering website design and development services, and then we started doing user testing and in user testing, we would watch people on websites in the early 2000s. And what struck me was just how simple and easy people wanted it to be online. Their experience, right? And what we found is that marketers weren't doing that. They were making it complicated. They were making it hard to understand. They were making navigation difficult, messaging difficult.

Tom: [00:03:13] So there was a lot of confusion. And so right around 2000, four or five, I found this domain name. I really liked intuitive websites because people in user testing would say things like, Gosh, I wish this website was intuitive. Why do I have to think so hard trying to figure this out? And so I got the domain intuitive websites and started the company Intuitive Websites in 2004 around user testing and we did. One of our biggest contracts was with the ski resorts in Colorado with interest. So think Copper Mountain and Winter Park and so forth. And then we did resorts in Canada and around North America. And I had an opportunity to watch people funnel around websites for hundreds of hours in and all these things stuck in my head and I realized. I want to build a company that makes websites that people can use that people get information from and that they help companies grow and market themselves. And that's how Intuitive Websites was formed. And so back then it was really just me and a few contractors. And now we are about 15 employees with another five or six contractors will probably be at about twenty to twenty five employees by the middle of next year.

Lauren: [00:04:25] It's amazing growth. What makes intuitive websites different from other companies in the field?

Tom: [00:04:36] Well, I think some of the things that I just mentioned are critical, the fact that we've been in this space for so many years, there's very, very few people in the U.S. that have the level of experience I have in digital marketing, and it's really just a matter of I started in the late nineties and most people started in 2010 or so I just had, I have all that background and experience and we've developed a process and we call it our four step process for digital marketing. I wrote a book on that process called Winning the website War and we use this process. And the first part of it is strategy. And we find that that many website companies and many digital marketing firms wing it when it comes to getting websites done and built, they do what people think looks good at the time. Using sample size of one demographics, which is basically one person, has an idea and they do it. Well, we're very strategic in our approach and we have a process that we follow, which includes competitive analysis, data and reports and really trying to get a sense of what our clients are trying to accomplish. So all that strategy then rolls into content and communication and inbound marketing and websites and then data to monitor the ROI. So because we have this process, that's a huge advantage for us and we're going really fast. In the last four years, we've been growing at about 50 percent. And one of the things that's really kickstarted our growth is that we've been able to find some excellent senior team members, people you've probably seen around the office carry on the few who's our operations director, Adrian Collins, who are creative director. The three of us have really been able to scale this company and then bringing in additional people. That's really what sets us apart and what has made us successful?

Lauren: [00:06:20] Yeah, awesome. Definitely a competitive edge.

Tom: [00:06:23] Yes.

Lauren: [00:06:25] So why did you guys choose enterprise coworking?

Tom: [00:06:29] Well, it's a great question, so I founded the company in Colorado Springs and worked in CO Springs for about 10 years and realized it was a challenging environment to build a business in because CO Springs is is not as enterprise friendly because it's mostly defense contractors, the military and so forth. And I thought, Well, I want to have an office in Denver, and we wanted a co-working space because we love the extra additional space that comes with that. The meeting rooms, the conference rooms, the training rooms, the lunch area, all that. And we heard about enterprise developing a building in Greenwood Village and we actually got in there when it was still under construction. And so we were one of the first folks to sign a lease. And we thought it was great because we had our pick of offices that we wanted and we got in there early and it was great. We loved the location just off by i-25 I can get from my home in CO Springs. I can get to the office in forty to forty five minutes, so that's fantastic. And if we want to go downtown, it's an easy commute there too.

Lauren: [00:07:38] Excellent. Yeah, we are so glad to have you guys in the space for this long. So our last question. Speaking to our viewers, is there anything else that you would like them to know about you, about intuitive websites?

Tom: [00:07:54] Sure, we have several partnerships that we take advantage of and have been really, really good for our business and anyone that wants to network with me on how we got these partnerships and how we're involved in them. Feel free to reach out. So one of our partnerships is with an organization called Vistage, and Vistage is the world's largest CEO roundtable organization. And so I'm a speaker with Vistage. I've been speaking to those groups now for 20 years and about half our clients, roughly our Vistage members. And so I know there's a lot of folks in the enterprise community that are looking to grow their companies and want access to CEOs, one access to decision makers that can hire them. And so if you're interested in learning how to do that with the Vistage. 

[00:08:40] Organization, happy to meet with you, a network. We also are part of what's called Chief Outsiders and Chief Outsiders is the largest fractional chief marketing officer CMO organization in the U.S., and so can also give you insights on how to connect with those groups and insights on how to create partnerships for growth because digital marketing can be really quickly seen as a commodity. And so what's interesting about our business is that we rarely work with any companies that find us through SEO or Google or anything like that, because it's the wild wild west out there. But we develop partnerships with referral groups and referral organizations, and then that leads to word of mouth and that leads to referrals within that organization. And that's what you need to do, especially when you're growing in such a highly competitive space like website development and digital marketing.

Lauren: [00:09:35] Yeah, that's amazing.

Tom: [00:09:37] Yeah, and I think, you know, a lot of I know that for me when I started my business and I was, you know, just getting started with a lot of folks in the enterprise community are like this, you know, a lot of folks feel like they've got to pound the pavement and go to networking events and meet people and so forth. And what ends up happening is that you waste a lot of time doing that because you're just not in front of the right people. Now, you might feel like it feels good, right? You're meeting people and it feels good, but it's not getting you to your business goals. So one of the things that I encourage people to do in addition to creating these referral networks is write content, express who you are and write that content and place it on your website. Place it on LinkedIn, place it on a blog on your website. Do email marketing because that's how you attract folks that will become your clients is through that content, through your depth of knowledge and how you communicate yourself as a thought leader. So happy to talk with folks at enterprise coworking, more about this if they'd like, but that's some of the key things we do.

Lauren: [00:10:39] Excellent. That's amazing advice. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for sitting down with me today and telling us a little bit about Intuitive websites. Thank you for being such a great member of our community. We are so lucky to have you guys here. If anybody wants to know more information about intuitive websites, you can visit their website at Intuitivewebsites.Com. Thank you so much.