2024 in Review: Growth, Challenges, and Vision at One Firefly with Taylor Whipple

Automation Unplugged 284 is a special end-of-year episode with One Firefly's own Taylor Whipple, CFO. Join us for a show that dives into One Firefly's 2024 highlights, our biggest successes and challenges this year, what the future holds, and more!

This week's episode of Automation Unplugged brought to you on Christmas Day, is a special end-of-year episode where I am joined by our CFO, Taylor Whipple.

During this episode, we’ll cover:

2024 year end wrap up of Highlights for One Firefly.
One Firefly’s greatest successes and biggest challenges this past year.
What the future holds for One Firefly as we look into 2025.

Transcript

Ron:

Hello, hello there for this special Christmas edition of Automation Unplugged, so Merry Christmas to you all. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Holidays. And although we are not recording this live, so don't worry, we are with our families today, but for some of you, that might be, enjoying this content, either listening to us or watching, over the holiday break.

Ron:

, we hope you enjoy this special episode. And today I'm joined by Taylor Whipple, partner in crime here at One Firefly. He's our CFO. He's, he's been with me building this business, for many years now, well over 11 years, might be I'll actually ask him, put him on the spot and he'll tell us probably exactly how many days he's been here.

Ron:

Some days are fun, some days are hard, but that's business. And Taylor and I have done a wrap up episode. Once before , we're looking to do this on the regular now. And so for today on Christmas, we're dropping this show to you and we're going to give you a wrap up of 2024 for One Firefly.

Ron:

We're going to tell you, the ups and the downs and how things went and, give you a little bit of a preview into 2025. So let me go ahead and bring in Taylor. And get this started. Mr. T, how are you doing?

Taylor:

Fine. Pleasure to be here. Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Hope everyone's having a great time off, taking some time off work and spending some great time with their families and friends.

Ron:

Oh, Taylor, this is dropping on Christmas day, December 25th, what will you be doing on Christmas day? What are you doing today? Cause we're not recording on the 25th, but the 25th, what are you actually doing?

Taylor:

So I'll actually be braving the elements up in, I guess, Western Rhode Island where my wife's family lives. We're going to go up there for Christmas. We're going to spend some time in New York city prior. So we're going to. Do some shopping and some restaurants and good food and all that good stuff.

Taylor:

And then we're going to head up to Rhode Island for actual Christmas day and spend some time with her family. And, being from Florida, I can take the cold for a few days, but , afterwards I'm always happy to come home , to the warmth. So. It'll be nice to get a change of scenery.

Taylor:

So it'll be, I'm looking forward to it.

Ron:

That makes sense. And this year for my family, we're going to be laying low here in Florida, staying warm and, last couple of years, we've done some traveling during the holidays and, we just decided, particularly with all the, work travel this year.

Ron:

This was, it feels like one of my busiest travel years in a , long time between all the shows and events, I just, I asked my family graciously if we could lay low and relax a little bit and everybody bought in and now everybody's super excited about just chillaxing and, and maybe reading a few books, watching some movies.

Ron:

We've actually. Checked out the, some of the shows that are happening at the performing arts center in Fort Lauderdale and down in Miami at the Adrian arts center. So we've got, we're going to be attending the. The Dr. Seuss musical and the Christmas orchestra groups that, that travel through town.

Ron:

They're going to be down in Miami. So we're going to, we're going to do some of that stuff and hopefully catch a good, a few good movies. God willing, there are good movies that haven't, I haven't paid too close attention to what's actually in theaters, We'll, we'll be checking that stuff out soon. So T a couple of years ago, actually have a date here, back on show one 99, December 30th, 2021.

Ron:

, so almost three years exactly ish, you and I recorded a wrap up of 2021. And, I, it'd be kind of fun to go back and check that out. Actually. I haven't listened to that since we recorded it live, but obviously that was a whole different world. The whole world was dealing with COVID the, zombie apocalypse was, amongst us.

Ron:

, how would you, what's a snapshot feeling you have of what the last three years have been like?

Taylor:

There's certainly during that time, there was a great deal of Uncertainty. Both in terms of the economy and just, going through something like the pandemic and relating it back to our business and our industry in particular, just a lot of turbulence, a lot of uncertainty.

Taylor:

And I think at that time we were looking at it, like we're going to, from a contingency planning standpoint, try to make sure that we're covering our, all of our bases, because none of us knew how that was going to turn out. And I thought we did a pretty good job of that. And in fact, I think if anything, it helped us strengthen those muscles a little bit, like Sort of looking at the analysis.

Taylor:

Okay. If this happens or this transpires, what would we do in those situations in order to keep serving our customers and keep thriving as a business? And, I can remember , a lot of, late nights, in those years, a lot of worry, ultimately, we're very thankful that we were able to not only come through that, but to actually thrive and continue to grow.

Taylor:

And to help our customers grow, which we're very thankful for, but it was a very challenging time. No doubt.

Ron:

20 that time, 2021, December, 2021 to the president. That's three years, how has One Firefly changed? Like, I know approximately, but in your words, like, have we grown 50 percent and we grown a hundred percent or like, where, where are we at?

Ron:

Yeah,

Taylor:

I think , our three year growth average, is around 150 percent or so something of that nature. And so I've been really, I think beyond just the nbers, I think we've continued to mature as a business in just the way we operate, there's, I think with any growing business, you experience growing pain and , you come up to a certain level and then, you, to, in order to get to the next level, you have to sacrifice and kind of learn what works and what doesn't work.

Taylor:

And I think that lesson is learned really across the business, really from products and services that you offer to How you manage people and how you focus on sales and marketing and how we're positioning ourselves within the industry. So lots of lessons learned, I would say. And, it's not obviously that we figured it all out at this point, by any means, we're still continuing to learn and grow and challenge each other.

Taylor:

But it's, it is neat to look back and think about, man, the way we were doing things and we were operating now, it's very different in many ways compared to two, three years ago. So very proud of that aspect.

Ron:

Yeah, I, I agree. Well, let, let's jump into it. Our amazing team in Alison and Rebecca have, taken some of , you, they interviewed us and they took some of our notes and , they at least gave us some background art.

Ron:

, that I, I'm going to put up on the screen and actually , you and I will kind of use it as some talking points, but , our goal folks, for those of you that want to hear how, how the past year has gone for One Firefly, then you're going to, you're going to stay tuned in or watching us and , we'll take you through, what the last year has been like for us and, and what we see ahead.

Ron:

And, so let's, let's jp right into it. And, the, the first thing I'm going to focus on here is some of the growth and innovation, the idea that One Firefly, consistently dedicates, Dollars, you could argue, dollars out of our cash flow. We see this as a regular place to invest in research and development r and d, in order to continue to keep our products and services at the forefront.

Ron:

, we're actually going to be doubling down even more next year. And , we'll kind of close out with some of those ideas, but just this past year, we significantly upgraded our web product, Mercury pro, if you aren't aware of what those innovations are, reach out to us. But I mean, we redesigned the way we've approached the homepage of , those Websites, we've designed dozens and dozens of new pages for the product for websites.

Ron:

We've redesigned a pages that are commonly used like blogs or solution pages, and, and, Testimonial in insertions into pages, galleries, case study, pages, product pages, manufacturing. I mean, there's just so it's such a bounty of new innovation. Romy's been running that effort for us.

Ron:

She's one of our senior designers on staff, and she's just been doing an amazing job, under Aaron's leadership, pushing that forward, this was the year of SEO, so I'll just, I'll give my two cents there. Taylor for many years, we won Firefly would offer, I would call it a light SEO search engine optimization configuration of a website.

Ron:

And we would also offer blogging both as an instrent to activate an email strategy for clients, but also as a nominal way to show up in search. And in 2023, we learned that probably wasn't going to work anymore. And so I don't want to say we took a flyer. I think it was rather calculated, but , we put a lot of time, money, and energy into building out an entire capability and team to offer, I think some of the best in class SEO services.

Ron:

Available in North America, but we're doing it pointed just at the integrator. Do you want to maybe share from your perspective, kind of the risk assessment we took also the threat and opportunity as we were looking at going down that path?

Taylor:

Sure. I mean, ultimately at the end of the day, we want to make sure that any service or product that we're providing is having the intended impact, which is to help our clients continue to grow and be successful, and we're up against several different challenges, right?

Taylor:

We're up against, some macroeconomic factors. We also have, the Google AL algorithm and search algorithms that continually change and morph. And so, we're trying to do our best to stay attuned to what those changes are so that our products can be as optimized as possible to have those intended impacts.

Taylor:

And so as Ron was saying, we, I think we discovered that our previous strategy doing blogs and doing some of this content, it was still working, but it wasn't working as, as an, as optimized as it , could be. And so I think that led to that sort of reinvention of that service and how we're going to have that intended impact.

Taylor:

And that came at a considerable investment of time, energy resources, but very, very proud of what we've. Managed to accomplish. We've also, I think, struck a nerve when we ended up launching that in February, we could see that there was plenty of demand from integrators across North America, much more than we had forecasted as a matter of fact.

Taylor:

And so

Ron:

we, how much greater did we, without saying exact sales nbers, how many times did we exceed the forecast? I want to say

Taylor:

it's probably like off the top of my head. It's like five or six times greater. Which is, it's, it's pretty neat to see. So

Ron:

that's a pleasant miscalculation.

Taylor:

It is, once in a while, those happen.

Taylor:

, it's not a miscalculations aren't always pleasant, but when they do happen, we certainly appreciate it.

Ron:

Yeah, I agree. So , that was in that effort, by the way, folks, that all, that investment started well back into spring of 2023.

Taylor:

Right.

Ron:

So it, I mean, it, it's been a solid year and a half plus of, investing time and money and we're just getting started, so it's, it's exciting where that effort in terms of building One Firefly into a best in class SEO firm.

Ron:

, it's exciting where we're at, but it's also super exciting when we look into the future to see where we're going to continue , to deliver services to our clients, this year we also did a complete software backend swap on our review champ service. So for those of you that are active with us in driving reviews, we have a slick piece of software that you can run on your phone and it lets your team invite your customers to, to leave your reviews.

Ron:

, it's really a. It has a strong tie into an SEO strategy. You want to be driving those Google reviews. And, this was the year we had to do a complete backend change over in software, for lots of reasons I won't bore you with here, but it was, It was not a, a quick change. It took, I would say quarters of research and R and D to come up with the solution and then quarters, a better part of three quarters to actually roll out the changes across our whole customer base, Katie on our team's been managing that.

Ron:

, and it's just, it's been a superb rollout. I mean, if anybody using review champ, the swap over should have been frictionless and in fact, a lot of the new bells and whistles of that software are just super slick AI functionality and a lot of, a lot of neat benefits. And then amplify people, this is going to become, even a greater part of our focus and energies in 2025, but amplify people in 24.

Ron:

Really started to stand on its own. So, I mean, Taylor, we, we put out, we're not known for being terribly conservative and we put out, goals to hit this year and we've really started to, to accelerate in the second half of the year. You want to maybe add some, thoughts on that?

Taylor:

Yeah. It's been really neat to see, quite frankly, and that's another area where we, again, we've continued to invest and bring on talent, within our organization with tremendous years of experience.

Taylor:

, Sam, for example, who, who leads our Amplify people team comes with decades worth of experience within the recruiting space that really help us. Ensure that our, our service, within Amplify people is going to be as effective as possible. And we're starting to see, some of the fruits of that labor, I think with any new product and service, and especially something that's pretty innovative in the sense of where we're not working as a traditional recruiter.

Taylor:

, there's going to be, again, some growing pains and things of that nature, but I'm very, very proud of, what we're starting to see and starting to accomplish, starting to help, our dealers get the talent they need, when they need it. So it's been great.

Ron:

I, I completely agree, one of the big initiatives is this goes way back in time.

Ron:

Even I would say maybe to around 2017, 18, when, when Firefly started to. I would like to , think out of the box and approach manufacturers about creative ways to, help drive their message and agenda, but leverage the channels of access through the integrators, the integrator has their customer base, they are trusted locally in their marketplace.

Ron:

They have their own, communication channels like email and social media. And how can you help a manufacturer get that message out through the dealer's channels and ultimately drive visibility, brand awareness and lead gen to the integrator. So if the integrator gets that, they get to close business or grow their, their brand equity locally in their marketplace.

Ron:

So that's And the manufacturer gets to feel very efficient utilization of their dollars versus maybe some of the old school methods of co op or MDF, where marketing development funds, where maybe a dealer gets money and maybe they go and buy t shirts for everyone on the staff, or they throw a big party for everyone on the staff, but that doesn't necessarily drive business.

Ron:

It doesn't drive it for the manufacturer. It doesn't drive it for the dealer. So this year was another year of growth. For One Firefly in this regard, this effort's led by Jessica Weiss on our team. And she's, she's got some awesome people on her team, including, just Jessica Telles and, and now she's working with Kendall on our team to, to oversee and overall drive those strategies.

Ron:

But we've, we've now a partner with nine different manufacturers this year. There's manufacturers that kind of ebb and flow and come in and out of this program, or versions or all these programs are custom. By the way, and Sony's been with us for a good while now. I think this is the fifth year of, of Sony.

Ron:

Collaborating with us. It's been an awesome year for our collaboration with Savant, and really savant driving their power initiative with , their batteries and their smart breaker systems, it's been a lot of fun. Taylor, at a high level, from a business standpoint, I'll say from a financial standpoint, like, is, is this business growing at One Firefly and kind of how do you see it today and where do you see it going in the future?

Taylor:

Yeah. So this year actually will be a great growth year for our corporate programs, division. And I think we're going to see around 20 percent growth year over year. And we forecast that that's actually going to continue to grow even higher, more than the 30 to 50 percent next year. So really excited.

Taylor:

I do think it's, again, it's a win, win, win in the sense where we're helping the manufacturers and the dealers, and of course, we're, we're here to facilitate those connections and, and help, them grow. Get their goals in a mutually beneficial way.

Ron:

So this is a, this is fun team. This is an example, team, customer, audience, anyone checking us out, checking out this conversation.

Ron:

This is really neat because this really started as a twinkle of an idea with Taylor and I just brainstorming. Maybe we could create a new revenue source for One Firefly and help everybody involved. In other words, create the idealized win, win, win. Right. The wind for us, the wind for the dealer, the wind for the manufacturer.

Ron:

And I would challenge the wind for the customer, the end customer, because they get to be made aware of, technologies, solutions, brands, maybe if they, they might not otherwise, That might not otherwise have occurred, so it's, it's really cool. And it's, it's, this business has been grown this side of one Firefly.

Ron:

I mean, this has grown every year since inception. Is that correct?

Taylor:

Yeah, that's right. We continue to bring on more and more, clients, more and more manufacturer partners as well. And obviously we're staffing up more with that team internally too. So it's exciting.

Ron:

Super cool. So overall, the big number here, it's exciting and it's, it's awesome.

Ron:

And , we're, proud, but it's also a little bit less than we've done in the past. And that is our year over year growth this year. One firefly grew 13%, Taylor, where does that rack staying, rack? , what am I trying to say stack rank against , previous years and why do you think maybe it was , it was what it was.

Taylor:

Yeah, so this is definitely a lower pace of growth Compared to previous years in years past we would historically see anywhere from 20 to 30 and sometimes even 35 Plus percent growth year over year. Obviously that becomes harder to achieve the larger you are, right? So there's just some things that go against you in that sense.

Taylor:

But , we're also dealing with other macroeconomic factors, industry specific challenges as well that I think, have, have played a part of this, growth rate, but I think all in all to, to what you mentioned earlier, Ron, like, I think it's still something to be very proud of.

Taylor:

We liaise with many other marketing agencies within our space to try to get a sense of like, Hey, how are they doing? They're not necessarily in our industry, but just, they're, they're working or doing similar things as us, many of them by and large are either flat or down in terms of revenue.

Taylor:

And so I think all things considered, we'd consider this a pretty positive year.

Ron:

Yeah. As I look out at the industry and the conversations, I'm in conversations either with manufacturers or with dealers, At least five days a week, sometimes six days a week, throughout the year. And this year certainly feels like it's been, it's been more challenging.

Ron:

, I, in, in my opinion, it's really because, the industry was on this awesome sugar high in 2020, 21 and 22 due to all the COVID money, all the , liquidity inserted into the marketplace, something like half the money in existence has been printed by the federal government, federal reserve, just in the last couple of years.

Ron:

And, a lot of that money floating around ended up getting zeroed in on home construction projects. And a lot of our industry custom integrators benefited from that. And we're, it feels like we're going back to maybe more of a normal status, kind of like. Everyone imagine what is 2019 and prior like, and then add on top of that, a presidential election year

Ron:

Just all of the uncertainty of who's going to go into office.

Ron:

, it's just, it's been a wonky year, so there's pockets , of dealers doing really well, particularly your luxury dealers that are really focused on the Uber luxury side of things, there's no secret. The rich are getting richer. And so those people are spending on their projects.

Ron:

And I would say doubling down and even expediting, the size and scope of their projects. But a lot of the middle market and a lot of , the, the lower end of the market has been squeezed. It's been a tough market. I mean, inflation's real. And, it's either inflation or just people being cautious about the uncertainty of what's ahead.

Ron:

It's resulted in some dealers, I've heard this more times this year than maybe ever, flat is the new up a lot of dealers calling this year, a flat year, like that was success, and they, they, in many cases had to fight hard to get back to flat year over year, 23 over 24. So.

Ron:

We'll call 13 percent a win and we'll go back to the drawing board to do more next year. For sure, this year we did, we got some pretty cool hardware here. I'll blow it up a little bit, Taylor, we, we got our fifth year in a row of Inc 5000, that's. That's neat, for what it's worth, that's neat.

Ron:

So what does that mean? , what had to be accomplished for that to be true?

Taylor:

So the Inc 5000 looks at your three year growth rate. So over the last three years, how much did you grow? And then you compare that against other, Businesses in the U. S, and so obviously in order to maintain that level of growth, us growing as an organization.

Taylor:

It's one of our core values here at One Firefly. And so there's that is a mantra of sorts. And so we put tremendous focus time, energy, attention and resources towards, doing more that is providing more services, providing, a better experience for our clients and ultimately trying to serve more clients as well.

Taylor:

And , all of that, I say results in growth when you do it well, because you, you have to do, you have to perform at a high level for people to keep coming back and to retain those clients and to, have a positive customer experience. And so now to do it five years consecutively. I think , you had even maybe done some, run some nbers there analysis, Ron, I think it's a very low percentage of customers who are able to sustain that over a five year period.

Taylor:

, it's very, very challenging.

Ron:

Yeah. I, at least according to chat GPT, so take that with a grain of salt, only about 4 percent of businesses that have achieved, Inc 5, 000 status have done it five years. Now I have to go back to my stats because I don't know if that's five years at all or five years in a row But regardless it's rare air and , we're proud of it We also acknowledge it probably doesn't mean a great deal to our typical customer.

Ron:

I don't know that they care I'm, not even going to say they should care But at the end of the day if you don't toot your own horn who's going to toot it for you? And so it's the same thing we tell all of our clients. Why go enter a CEDIA award or an Avixa award or an NSCA award or a Lutron award. It's to enter so that you can be recognized and then you can toot your horn.

Ron:

You get to put it on your website. You get to put it in your proposal and you get to say, Hey, we are amongst the best of the best. And, and so we're practicing what we preach. We're eating our own dog food, as they say. And, and so on that regard, we also did apply our amazing marketing team did enter us into, a national tech company, best places to work, from a publication called tech national.

Ron:

And in that competition were the likes of Apple and Google and Salesforce and all of these bigfalutin companies. And would you believe it, that one Firefly ranked number 19. So not only did we make the top 100, but we made the top 20 as the number 19 best place to work, Taylor, I'll just, rather than saying what did it mean to the team, what did it mean to you?

Ron:

For us to be recognized in this way.

Taylor:

Well, it's something I'm very proud of, Ron and I've been running this business for a while now, over a decade. And so we've certainly learned a lot of lessons in that time, but I think one of the most important ones has been just when you have a positive company culture.

Taylor:

It makes everything else much easier to accomplish. And so we've also put a lot of, effort into crafting and cultivating that culture and well, what is that type of culture that we want? And, what, who are the type of people and what kind of core values do we want them to have?

Taylor:

And so we, we've, it's taken some time to get there over the years, but I'm very, very proud. Of what we've built. And again, we're certainly not perfect, but I think we're doing a lot of things right. And I think this award also confirms that.

Ron:

Yeah. Taylor, does that mean that we are an easy place to work for, like in your eyes, does having a great culture mean you're slack or easy to be,

Taylor:

we have low standards

Taylor:

By no means. No, it's, I think it's, for me, it's, we have very high standards. Right. We, we try to be as objective as possible with all of our, our metrics and our KPIs and our performance evaluations and things of that nature so that it's, as transparent as can be across the board so that people are bought in and that there's alignment with what we're trying to all mutually achieve.

Taylor:

So we push each other, we challenge each other, but we also, do have fun. And we also have an environment, one that is remote in nature, which I think is also becoming more unique as well as many companies start pivoting back to the office, but we just also hire good people who are, who are positive and enjoy what they're doing and are friendly and kind and nice.

Taylor:

I think when you kind of combine all of that, it's, you get a special place to work.

Ron:

I agree. I could wax more philosophical on that, but I know we want to get to a few more topics here and everyone doesn't want to hear from us for hours, or maybe they do and they've landed in the right spot, all right.

Ron:

So Taylor from, I have a slide here, the insights from the CFO, what, what are some of our biggest successes at One Firefly and what were our, some of our biggest challenges all focused really on the past year, 2024.

Taylor:

Sure. So starting off with the successes, there's two that come top of mind. And one, I already alluded to earlier in a conversation, which was being able to continue to grow.

Taylor:

In spite of a very turbulent time, turbulent economy. I think you used the word wonky, Ron. And , that's how it felt over the past year. Just when you started to feel like, Oh, maybe things are turning, you're dealt with another sort of challenge. And we sort of saw that across the board.

Taylor:

And now again, we, there was never any, doubt in our minds that we would not continue to try to push forward. So I think that's also something to be cognizant of is just, when, when there's a challenge in front of you, it's just, okay, how do we go around this? How do we pivot? And again, going back to our earlier conversation of, just from contingency planning and kind of what the COVID years especially taught us is that, there's going to continue to be obstacles, but it's just a matter of how do you work around them?

Taylor:

How do you pivot your strategy? So that you're ultimately, trying to accomplish your goals in our case, trying to accomplish more growth. So just again, continuing to grow in spite of all that turbulence, I'm , very proud of, I'd say the second one as well, we've mentioned earlier, which is our SEO launching that SEO service, what that's meant to us as a business, but what also it's meaning to our clients and the results that we're starting to see.

Taylor:

In the form of, higher search rankings and positive impacts on their business, that's , really exciting. And again, I think that, it's something we've definitely struck a nerve within the industry by launching that, and I think you're going to continue to see us put more investment in time and energy.

Taylor:

Into making those as, as best as possible for next year.

Ron:

I'm not going to, diminish Taylor. The fact that I love capital L O V E the ability to bring a product to market or a solution to market in terms of SEO. That I feel our methods and approach are best in class. I would put the approach that we're executing for our clients to help them show up and dominate page one of search of the effort , we're executing today in 2024 is as good as anyone in the country from any agency

Taylor:

agreed.

Ron:

And we couldn't say that in all of our years in the past. And, but we absolutely can say it today and that's awesome.

Taylor:

Yes. Very, very much agreed. Very proud of what our team's been able to accomplish. It's also neat to see us just internally grow that team and to bring new experts on to help challenge our approach and to keep refining that.

Taylor:

I mean, we're, I think that's. With anything that we're doing across one Firefly, there's a spirit of continual improvement and innovation. So it's not just, we're going to set it and forget it. And that's the product we're going to continually learn, respond to again, changes in algorithms, things of that nature.

Taylor:

To make it the best it can be.

Ron:

Is there anything more T you wanted to mention in terms of challenges for 24? Or is it really the wonky turbulent economy?

Taylor:

The wonkiness, especially as a CFO or financial professional, we like to know what is coming or do our best to. Pride ourselves on the accuracy for

Ron:

Speak to that for a minute , because we do practice this art of forecasting.

Ron:

And even, I'll use a fancier term within our forecast design sensitivity analysis into that. So we, things go well, things don't go well

Ron:

Any business operator listening in, can you talk a little bit about how we think about that and how we design our future?

Taylor:

A hundred percent. So it really starts with data.

Taylor:

And so looking at your past data and for us, there's a nber of different variables, but probably the largest in terms of forecasting is sales. So we look at sales across all of our products. And now being in business for over a decade, we've got, years and years of, of data to see, all right, in which months or which seasons were we the best at this product?

Taylor:

And what happened when we launched this new website product and what impact did that have? And then we're trying our best to analyze moving forward. Like what could we expect? And we obviously pair that with other variables too. Maybe there's, there's pricing, there's promotion, there's other components that we can factor or change, various industry events from a marketing perspective, like Cedia and things of that nature.

Taylor:

So , we do our best to factor all of that in. But at the end of the day, there are other factors that are perhaps unseen, industry forces, macroeconomic climates that can make things more challenging from a prediction or forecasting standpoint, and so I think going back to the challenge nature of this, what we, when we might have like, let's say, forecasted 100, 000 in sales, One month, it might've been 50, 000 and another month it might've been 200.

Taylor:

And it's like, well, where is this coming from? It's just really throwing off, any sort of model that maybe we had seen in years past. And so again, that's just where we have to also adapt and be as agile as possible. It's very challenging from a production standpoint too, because. You want to make sure you have enough staff on hand to service that work, but not too much so that you're impacting expenses and, your cost of goods.

Taylor:

, it's a delicate balance between, sales and production. And in our case as well, having recurring clients, we want to keep those clients happy and not canceling. And so looking at the rates of churn and attrition, things of that nature, there was no shortage of challenges this past year, but, yeah, I think , we're utilizing this as an opportunity to make us stronger and improve our models, improve our, forecasting abilities.

Taylor:

And, yeah, I think , it'll, it'll ultimately help us in the end.

Ron:

I love it. I love it. All right, let me jump forward, there we go. So our team grew this year, I'll just, I'll share some of the stats. So we grew in 2024, we added about 10 percent to our team, so approximately we were started the year around 70 people.

Ron:

We're ending the year around 77, 78 people, we also did, something we have done, I think everyone listening probably knows this, but we're a fully virtual team. So we've got staff located throughout North America, got staff in the United States, staff in Mexico, staff in Colbia. Now we have staff in Eastern Europe.

Ron:

And so , we're an international team. And so one, and yet we have what we believe to be a great culture. A great place to work, a, a representation of that so that it's not just cheap words is , we measure it because we measure everything that we want to monitor and that is what is the sentiment from our team about their level of happiness , at, being here.

Ron:

Cause we believe that happy people take great care of their customers. So we want our team to be happy at One Firefly 'cause they're gonna take great care to all of you. And so we measure that. It's called ENPS. And NPS is Net Promoter Score. ENPS is your employee net Promoter Score. And it's an anonymous survey.

Ron:

It's a standardized test. Anyone listening, not test, but survey, anyone listening could do this within your company. And you could then compare your scores against, people within your industry and, to understand kind of how's your company doing. And , our score is 74, which is, apparently according to any research that you all could do and that we've done, apparently that's super duper.

Ron:

Anything above 50 is, considered excellent. And by the way, it's a plus 100 score to minus 100 score. So it's a 200 point score. And, And so ultimately you'd want people to be net promoters of the business and recommend friends or family to, to participate or join One Firefly. And so , that's pretty neat.

Ron:

And one of the things we do every year as a remote culture is we, we get together, we gather for an annual team event and this past year, we did this, We have a nber of our team in Mexico. And so , we've had, we had lots of events in the U S so we let's do an event in Mexico. We went down just a little bit North of Cancun and Riviera Maya.

Ron:

And, it was, it was a lot of work and a lot of , fun, just being people having time to spend with each other, which, everyone sees each other through a computer screen, but it's just a different, A different level of interaction when you're in the same time and space as people. And, it was just some awesome training.

Ron:

We had some special speakers, both virtual speakers and live speakers and trainers. And, all in all, it was at least according to our surveys, our best company. Event we've ever had, so Taylor, it costs a lot of money to do an event like that.

Ron:

Anyone that's listening that says, man, when fireflies splurging, they're clearly charging too much that they can afford to go take their team on a luxurious vacation.

Ron:

, what would you say to those people? What, why do we do this? , and was it a luxurious vacation?

Taylor:

Well, it certainly would say it's not a vacation first and foremost, it's. A team event. And yes, we do have fun. But as you mentioned earlier, Ron, we're also there , to work and to learn.

Taylor:

So a lot of those sessions are, bringing in experts, outside experts to help us improve, help us get better, help us learn. Absolutely. There is a fostering of the camaraderie as well. And that is , really important. Especially when you have, as you mentioned, team members working remotely. Who don't always get to a chance, have a chance to see each other in person.

Taylor:

So that trust building, you think of different people working in different departments who may occasionally need to work together, a lot of that ultimately goes back to influence the client's experience with us and into our products and services and helping us get better. So it is a tremendous investment for sure.

Taylor:

But it's one that we've seen pay dividends year over year in many different ways, including NPS, including employee attrition as well. But I also like to think including just really , the helping the spirit of One Firefly and having that flow through two things like the customer experience and to our products and services and just helping us get better in general.

Ron:

I agree. It was a lot of fun, sharpening the blade is language we use here at One Firefly, it's sharpening our team so that they can ultimately be better for themselves, be better for each other and be better to serve our clients. And so we've just, we had lots of opportunities to send our team to trainings, to certifications.

Ron:

, again, bring in outside speakers, obviously AI is changing the world. So we've had, guest speakers , and training with our team going through AI, course and curriculum, including Taylor, a bunch of us, five of us went to the MAICON, conference in Cleveland, what was that this past September?

Ron:

Maybe what was a takeaway from that event? Cause you were at that one.

Taylor:

, it was really interesting to hear just, the various use cases for AI. I think a lot of us think of AI as chat GPT, right? And you can go on there and you can ask it a question and get an answer. The reality is that AI is being implemented in a spectr of different ways.

Taylor:

Across various types of businesses and all of those were not at least prior to going to make on acutely aware of. And so getting a chance to just get exposed to what's out there, the different type of technologies that are possible. So it was pretty mind blowing. I think you and I sat in a few things, Ron, where it was just like, wow, this is, I didn't even know this type of technology existed, but, this is the future.

Ron:

, leadership round table, what is this here at One Firefly Taylor?

Taylor:

So the leadership round table is really something that we've developed to help empower our leaders be better at leading candidly. And that involves, we've always had a, an executive management team we call EMT. So a lot of our, our most senior leaders, and we've always.

Taylor:

, met quarterly and weekly as well in terms of dealing with various readings and, and tackling different challenges, et cetera. But we've got another layer of teammates who you could call the middle managers, I guess, for lack of a better term, who are managing others. They're maybe leading a department and we've attempted to try to gain more alignment between our senior leaders and those leaders as well.

Taylor:

And a lot of that has to deal with us, round tabling. Different, different topics and discussions. We're also trying to bring more transparency around the business and where we're exceeding and where we're maybe having some challenges and need their help on and trying to gain that alignment.

Taylor:

I would say it's, it's been a very fruitful process and still, I think we're one we're refining, but it's, it's getting better and better and it's, it's neat to see those leaders. Become more empowered to make their own strategic decisions.

Ron:

Agreed, around that idea of us all getting better, one of the things, that I think has really come top of mind.

Ron:

I'm going to challenge Taylor for you and me as, as leaders in the business is for so many years. And for frankly, my whole professional career, I've considered myself. If you said, what industry are you in? I would say I'm in the custom integration industry. And, those are my people, the people listening, the people watching.

Ron:

I, those are my friends. Those are the people that , I've spent so much time with. They, they've watched me grow up right, right out of college, and yet I think , the epiphany was as, as Taylor, you and I have tried to really dial in to run a better organization, just a better business. As we started to ask the question, well, what's normal?

Ron:

What should we expect? What is, and I'm going to throw out some fancy terms, like , what LTV to CAC ratio should we be aspiring towards, right? What churn rate should we aspire towards? How much should we be spending in sales and marketing? , how should we be structuring this team or that team? And the reality is most of what our industry knows as One Firefly has been born organically.

Ron:

Like we did it because you and I , and Kendall and Andrew and Cameron and name a bunch of the other great people on our team put our heads together and said, well, this probably makes sense. And we built that capability from the ground up, brick by brick, as they say, but, what we've really gone out of our way to do a lot more in the last year, and I'd say the last couple of years.

Ron:

Is to go out and connect and socialize and spend time with other agency owners. And just as integrators go to Cedia or they join a buying group to socialize and network with other business operators, because their problems are probably similar to the problems of the person across the country and they can learn from each other and help each other grow.

Ron:

It's also, there's a lot of value in a business spending time with someone, maybe that's a little bit bigger than them. That has maybe solved that problem. They did that. They solved that a few years ago and they could maybe shortcut you solving that problem. If you ask the right question and you're in a good experience share situation.

Ron:

And so we've, we've done a lot more of that. And, we have more of that planned for 25. But, it's just, I guess a recommendation I would give to anyone listening is if, if you're out there under the stresses of running your business, I just know that you are not alone. There are so many people out there fighting the same battle.

Ron:

There a thousand, maybe 10, 000 that have fought the battle before you. And if you're just bold enough and brave enough to poke your head up above the foxhole and just look around, you'll find that there's people willing to help. And, we are getting better at doing that, I'm in a couple of different masterminds with agency owners, Taylor, you're in a mastermind and have been so for the last year.

Ron:

Kendall, our head of sales is now socializing , and masterminding with the head of other, agencies to understand how they operate. Tina, our people operations, leader is actually networking with other HR leaders and , that mastermind was born out of our EOS group, it's just, there's a lot of value to, to network and fellowship with others.

Ron:

I mean, Taylor, I just, I don't want to go too deep on this, but , What's your take on what it's meant to you to be doing more of this?

Taylor:

It's been really Insightful, I guess is the best way to describe it As you mentioned, Ron, do us trying to do things organically all the time? It's kind of a breath of fresh air to come in and just get right to the point or deal with folks who again, have either dealt with that problem before or are currently dealing with it and to be able to collaborate with them directly.

Taylor:

It's been a really neat process.

Ron:

I concur, we are an EOS shop here at One Firefly, as you probably all know, and EOS stands for entrepreneurial operating system. We, we went fully in, in the, the fall of 2019 and it's been nothing short of life changing for me personally and for the business.

Ron:

, in so many ways, but I'll just, there's a shot for folks that are looking at the screen. You see a picture , of some of our EMT members at some of our various events. We, we normally will travel at least we try to two or three of the quarterly, sessions to go somewhere interesting around the country to get away from the office.

Ron:

Get away from family, get away from business and just solely focus on, the business as advisors. And that's the modality of a quarterly planning session. And, and those meetings are really key. To us continuing to take on big things , and push forward and grow and challenge ourselves.

Ron:

So it's just, I think this was a great year , of quarterly planning sessions. Actually, the week that you and I are recording this right now, Taylor, this is our annual planning session. So maybe focus on that T what, what's going to happen later this week for us. We're going to spend a couple of days together and what, maybe what, take the audience through , what are our goals and how does that work?

Taylor:

Yeah, for sure. So in our case, we're going to meet here locally in South Florida. So, myself and Ron are based here. But a couple of our other staff members are going to fly in and we've got really a day and a half of facilitated discussions around annual and quarterly planning. So that's where we look back at, because we're at the end of the year, we look back at the year and we, see where we've fallen short of some goals, see where we've exceeded some goals.

Taylor:

See what. We need to change and get ourselves ready for next year. We also recalibrate those goals as well. Were they the right goals? Our implementer who helps us, Caesar, always encourages us to be working as a consultant. So working on the business and not in the business. And that's really impactful, especially when you're meeting in person to not be kind of in the weeds all the time with the sort of day to day, but looking at it on a more macro level.

Taylor:

And when you're doing that, you can come to, I'd say, more insightful, goals and solutions. They're always great.

Ron:

I agree. It's going to be an action packed week for sure, AI, anyone paying attention? Anyone that has, doesn't have , their head stuck in a hole in the ground knows that AI is changing the world.

Ron:

And, God help you , if you're doing like I'm doing, which is paying attention closely to the podcast and the trade, the videos and all the updates and the seminars, because it's, it's, it's one of the faster technological changes that have ever faced hanity. It's. It really is that big.

Ron:

That's, it sounds pretty, like a bold statement, but it certainly feels that way , and for us as a business that, there are opportunities both in our products and processes to implement not only ai but also automations. A lot of automations by the way, don't even require ai. It's just , there's really cool software that can help you automate things and do things a little bit faster, more efficiently.

Ron:

It's been a big year of change. I mean, it's been a big two years of change. It started in 24, maybe just, let's fast forward T to 25. We're actually bringing a dedicated person on our team to help really systematically. Look at our products and processes, both , our client products, but also our internal processes, for us running the company.

Ron:

And they're going to help us, inject systematized review and auditing of those products for performance. Make sure we're gauging client feedback, our team's feedback. Are we operating in a best in class way? Are we best leveraging available technologies? And we're just, we're going to upgrade how we go about this.

Ron:

, from your standpoint at helping us run a financially. Sound company. Why does a company invest time and money? Cause , that comes out of your cashflow. That mean you could argue that comes out of the net profitability of a company to spend money, to do that.

Taylor:

I think ultimately from my perspective, it's really an investment ultimately in, client satisfaction.

Taylor:

We're trying to optimize these services and these products. To have a better outcome on our clients campaigns at the end of the day and whether it's an automation Or whether it's ai or a new piece of technology or a new piece of software For example, I want us to be on the forefront of that In a more proactive approach that you're referencing earlier ron with this new person and that person helping guide us through that analysis and looking at the spectr of what's available and What's coming technology obviously is always changing but empowering our team with more tools that let's say might take away some more of the maybe mundane or administrative Components so that more time could be freed up on the let's say more analytical or strategic side of the equation again that Ultimately help push the value that we're bringing to our clients in their campaigns

Ron:

If I were to smarize this for anyone tuned in, that's really trying to say, why does any of this matter?

Ron:

It's really around allowing software to help you do the things that are repetitive and mindless so that the han can do the thinking, the han can do the strategic work. And so when that's done, well, and I would say that's , our goal always here at one fireflies to do things well. It, improves the overall product and output, and we're measured by success.

Ron:

And we believe strongly that means in our ability to deliver a return on investment for our clients. And that is deliver higher quality marketing services that help them drive growth. And so as far as we're concerned, we will do whatever it takes to To improve the quality of our product so that we can improve the ROI for our clients.

Ron:

And so , we're doubling down, bringing on more staff to help us really focus on this and do this at the highest level. Which, which is exciting, this past year, is and was a great year of philanthropy. We were able to donate, $35,000 plus to different charities. We have different programs at One Firefly.

Ron:

We have a company match. So anyone at One Firefly that donates to a cause One Firefly matches them, and additionally at our team event, we did a really fun event, where we helped a local. Elementary school, actually repaint their school. So we were in Mexico, we were in Riviera Maya and the way I don't really know much about politics down there, but I know the way politics worked, at least I was educated is that the funding.

Ron:

Of getting schools brought up to speed for the new school year can be hit or miss depending on the politician and the time a year and so we partnered with a local organization that gets Both money and support to go in and refurbish schools in time for a school the new school year And so we brought our full army of one fireflies , to bear and we were able to get a, an elementary school fully refurbished and painted.

Ron:

And, it was just, it was a ton of joy, it was a little bit of money, a lot of sweat, a lot of energy invested, and, just a ton of fun. And I would say a ton of pride from myself, but the entire team, I mean, they, Taylor, they were glowing after this.

Taylor:

Yeah, absolutely. And , it's a neat experience when you get to Share in that endeavor with your fellow employees as well, which is like a totally separate non work thing that you're doing just purely , for good.

Taylor:

And yeah, it was , really special.

Ron:

All right. We're going to close out here. This was a crazy year of events, I didn't count it and compare it to the previous, but it certainly felt like the most events we have done in a long time, maybe ever, I was at many of these events, if not all the events. And, maybe that's why I feel that, but it was awesome.

Ron:

I mean, there's nothing better, than getting out , and spending time with , our customers and our friends in the industry. Our sales team was out there in force. I mean, our account executives, Josh, Stephen, and Kat, Kendall, the head of our sales and marketing team. Jessica Weiss, the head of our corporate programs team, some of our account managers went out and managed to attend some of these events.

Ron:

You see Katie here on the screen. She was at one of , our events. I see Jessica Telles on our corporate program. She was out at a Crestron event. So We put our money where our mouth is in terms of sales and marketing and getting out there , and spending time with all of you.

Ron:

We believe that's where the magic happens, Taylor from a 24 over 23. What did we do? Is there any change or anything that we did differently this year?

Taylor:

100%. Yeah. And this is a great example. You mentioned it, Ron, of trying to practice what we preach in that, we encourage all of our customers to spend a, a good portion of their revenue on marketing sales and marketing, if they're going to want to have that fuel to continue to grow.

Taylor:

So in our case, we recognize that there, yeah, there might be some turbulence in this economy. So we may need to fund sales and marketing at a higher rate than we had previous years. So for this past year, for example, we spent about 30 percent more year over year on sales and marketing. Now , that's people that's, events that's, there's a whole spectrum of different things that were due, within that category.

Taylor:

But it's definitely an area where we knew we needed to focus on again, if we're going to maintain that level of growth that we were looking for.

Ron:

What's your forecast for next year in terms of sales and marketing investment?

Taylor:

We're going to continue to pour into that more, more and more. That's right. And , at the same time, we'll also look back and see where.

Taylor:

Where it's best calibrated and what's performing well, but I can tell you at a high level We're going to be putting more investment into that

Ron:

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