So you run that business for a while and then eventually you, you meet your wife and you decide to start a business together. Take me through that. That trajectory.
Peter Krzyzek: 11:30
Sure. Around when I had my first company doing these small website things, fixing computers, that was late high school, I think I incorporated it shortly after I turned 18, because I don’t know if you could incorporate before 18 or not, by the way, incorporated that. That kind of just went on for a few years, not doing too much living with my parents and my expenses were nearly nil, but my profits were nearly 100%. Yeah, great stuff, but I didn’t see too much forward beyond that. At that point, I still didn’t know much about sales.I knew a little bit about how to talk to people about what the technology is doing, and at least with the people, my network, they saw me as an expert. So I’m like, okay, what can we do more? Eventually, I met through networking and all those fun things. Met what? I Ended up being my business partner on a second adventure that sadly, most of us have probably experienced. These partners don’t always talk to each other well. We’re not eye to eye on things. One person wants to go left, one other person wants to go right. You say pens as a person says pencils. Yeah. You can’t win sometimes. Didn’t work out. Idea might be great. You might have a cure for cancer. But if you can’t bring it to market because people are clashing with each other all the time, nothing’s going to happen. Yeah. And that second company ended up being a complete flop. But then eventually I did meet my wife. It was a whole fun story about that. I have a long story short. She hates it when I put it this way, but she stalked me for a while and then she hates a word like that. So eventually we met up, and at that point I found that she is a very creative person. She at that point was a junior graphic designer. And I thought, well, you did do design and I can’t. I could barely open up Photoshop without it blowing up on me. But I can code things. Why don’t we put these two together? You can design websites, I code them. So we started freelancing together a little bit, and that started going better and better overall. And after a little while we’re like, well, wait a minute. This stuff is kind of working well. We really should do the whole company thing on it. One, we can write everything off on taxes and that one the hard way. and we just started marketing everything together. She brought the brains, I brought the brawn and did.
John Corcoran: 13:54
It was one plus one equal to three. Like, what was that? You know? How was it? Did it? Was it a lot better working together?
Peter Krzyzek: 14:02
Haha. Oh man. Lots of ups and downs and all around. I think now it’s one plus one equals 100 million. Back then it was more of we’re trying to get to one and she and I didn’t have equal parts on anything. And we kind of just run around like headless chickens. She talked to a few people, brought some design things, and then said, Peter, take care of this client. I don’t know anything about design. How am I supposed to build a relationship and run that client account? I couldn’t, I’d bring in some techy thing and then pass it to her because it was either more creative oriented overall, but it was still tech.
She didn’t know what to do with that at all. It was trouble in the beginning. Slowly and surely, we started getting into the rhythm of things, getting more out there, bringing in more clients, and we started kind of settling in terms of process. But it wasn’t easy, as some people have learned. If you live and work in the same place and live and work with the same person, you are not, in the best of ways, bringing relationship problems from personal things into work and work problems vice versa. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes it gets ugly. Yeah, yeah.
John Corcoran: 15:22
And then does that seep into like the other members of the team, like. Oh, mom and dad are fighting again.
Peter Krzyzek: 15:32
Back then. Yes. We have brought ourselves to the team in not the best of ways. We’ve lashed out at the team before. We’ve lost productivity and clients because of disagreements. Not or worse yet, disagreements I think are fine because generally that can be talked through. But before you gain, I’m just going to call for great self-awareness about who you are and what your relationship is. The worst part is not the disagreements, but it’s not seeing eye to eye and not being able to communicate those differences and come to some sort of agreement on what things are or aren’t, and those cause the biggest problems. Should we hire this person? Should we not hire this person or this person is not doing well? We should fire them. Like, no, this person is great. I’m definitely going to keep them. Should we keep this client? Do it. Do this project. Oh, a great one was we were working on a small little creative adventure. It was going to be a little mockup of a graphic design for a website that we were helping on a little bit. We had completely different ideas on what the design should be towards the web stuff, and how to put everything together. Did not. Yeah, it did not go well, but from there we learned How to communicate a little bit better and how to figure out how to talk to the team. Nowadays, we try not to bring mom and dad issues to the team and we’ve been mostly successful, but also we’re honest with the team. If we’re having problems, we tell the team, hey, Mom and Dad are fighting right now. It’s not your fault. We’re going to resolve this. Yeah. Just know if either she or I are a bit snippy. You know why? And honesty has been. What’s the word? Freeing. Really? Yeah. About everything.
John Corcoran: 17:17
And you mentioned that your initial struggle was that you would bring in a tech client, which wasn’t a fit for her. She’d bring in a creative client, which wasn’t a fit for you. How did you figure out who was the right fit for your combination of skill sets and what the company did?
Peter Krzyzek: 17:36
I’ve been saying this a lot, this meeting, but we didn’t for a long time figure this out Slowly and surely, this is kind of one of those answers. We fell into it. Where we realized what seems to be working best is when we do have projects that we both are excited about, and it has a full website rebuild and a whole brand redo that eventually helped us figure out that, okay, if this person is asking for just tech, she’s never going to touch it. Peter, are you going to handle it fully by yourself because you know your tech? And if it’s a graphic design thing, just graphic design. Bring up a brand doing their social media decks and all those fun things. I’m never going to touch those. That was it back then. But if we had something to talk to in the middle, we did. We slowly and surely figured out how to communicate needs, requirements. Who’s going to do what and what process. But it was honestly a big learning thing. Lots of ups and downs, lots of disagreements and what order things go in. What quality controls do we have? Do we even want to do quality or are we going to focus on speed? As we all know, it’s that little triangle thing. Do you want something cheap, fast or good? Pick two. Right. Right. We couldn’t agree on that back then, even as I was honestly through, funnily enough, not through couples counseling, but through the next best thing through couples counseling books. She read a book literally called I believe, How to Talk to Him, and she gave me a companion book, How to Talk to Her. I don’t know if those were the names, but essentially that’s what they were. So her book was a book written by a woman and one that has learned how to talk to men, especially their spouses, really, really well. And how do men think about how they overall approach topics of logic, discussions, disagreements?
For example, as an East European man, discussions and disagreements are things you just keep talking through, even if it includes yelling at just how you do it for her. If yelling is involved. Whoa! Stop! It’s done and completely shut down. So we had to get over a lot of those because communication, honesty is really just what’s going to get you through this. And that’s what we bit by bit. And it wasn’t one of those we’re going to have one discussion. Everything is fixed. It’s still an ongoing discussion on how to make our sop’s and processes better. Whom are our ISP’s very directly? We’ll figure it out. How?
John Corcoran: 20:16
How do you keep business from getting into your personal life on the weekends and the evenings and stuff like that? How do you cut it off?
Peter Krzyzek: 20:25
I love that question because we have a very simple answer. We don’t.
John Corcoran: 20:30
Do you? You don’t. So you might be out, like going for a hike on the weekend and be like, oh, by the way, did you finish that client thing that I asked you about?
Peter Krzyzek: 20:38
Exactly. This business is our baby too. I don’t know how else to put it. Our work is our life. Not to say that we don’t have a life outside of work. We do. But we realized the whole idea of work life balance is impossible. Maybe for some people it’s a thing. They can just put a line down the middle. For us, we tried and struggled so much to get that realized. It’s just not going to work. So why fight something? And we did talk about work things and private time anyway. But we’re just like, no, we have to put these two apart. Completely apart. I said, you know what? For us, it seems more natural to just talk about the things that we’re going to talk about. And she and I are passionate about what we do, so why not talk about it? Yeah, there are times to not talk about it, obviously. But for the most part, when we did talk about work on hikes last night we did. For those of you who know iOS, you have a level ten meeting. We weren’t able to do it early in the morning, so when we went to walk the dog after we picked up the kid from school, there were level ten meetings while walking. Okay. Sure. Yeah. So we lived through arguing about those things and just figuring out ways that work for us. And again, I want to emphasize that it is for us. Yeah.
John Corcoran: 21:57
It’s what we’re.
Peter Krzyzek: 21:57
Right. Integration.
John Corcoran: 21:59
Yeah, yeah. It’s what works differently for each couple. What was the project that shall not be named.
Peter Krzyzek: 22:10
That one. So this came at a time when we thought we were growing. And at that time we were. But it was one of those things where you jump off the deep end in real life. If you jump off the deep end and you don’t know how to swim, that’s a very bad thing. You don’t want to do that. And we did. And we sank.
John Corcoran: 22:28
So it’s a big project that came along and you kind of bit off more than you could chew. Okay.
Peter Krzyzek: 22:34
By far we were going to be creating this absolutely wonderful community for entrepreneurs by entrepreneurs, specifically in the women in the women in tech world. We thought that building a community website would be easy. Throw in a few plugins to make the designs work. Oh yeah, they want these custom features. Oh they’re easy. We can totally do that. And for anybody who’s been in tech, that’s not what you want to say. Because something that’s easy logically, for example, logging in, that’s especially in the enterprise world, that is a very, very complex process. It’s not just a username password. There’s probably 50 different systems that make a login work securely. And on that project we completely overestimated what the true scope was. We overestimated what our skills and abilities were for that timeline for the project. And it didn’t help that that particular client always had changing requirements. One day they want the videos here, another day they want the videos that way. Oh, hey, you’re doing the login. Why don’t you make this other login thing work as well? Oh, now we need invites. Now we need a two step process for this thing. And these things kept changing and evolving. And we’re just getting frustrated because our rates back then were a lot lower than what we should have been charging either way. But it’s one of those budgets that ran out like ten months ago. What? I’m not going to be doing this thing. And they’re like, how dare you? You signed the contract. You have to do this. Like, no, this is getting ridiculous. We’re just done. And so sadly, that ended on a very bad note. And I feel that while I still call it The Project That Shall Not Be Named, it’s a great thing to learn from. And it is one of those things that it’s a bridge that should be burned because it’s just you’re not going to come back from it, so might as well just put it behind you and learn from it.
John Corcoran: 24:26
Yeah, oftentimes, you know, you can point to some new system or process or tool you put in place. And it came because of a bad relationship with a bad client that, you know, didn’t work out that well. Let’s talk about a more positive one. You had a manufacturing firm, and maybe this is more indicative of the type of work that you do right now. Manufacturing firm with a million different products that you helped with a total revamp of their branding. And let’s talk about that, because I’m sure that happens a lot where they’re like a manufacturing company or industrial company or something like that, that hasn’t done a good job of really communicating who they are to the world.
Peter Krzyzek: 25:06
Manufacturing, production factories. It’s not seen as a pretty nor glamorous world. Here’s our product list. Are you going to buy it or not? You’re like, yeah, yeah, what more do you do? Yeah. And that’s the general way a lot of people approach that, including that particular business. So they were getting really frustrated with it because not only was their website pretty much useless, they used it as something they have kind of just on the side, and once in a while they might refer a client to there just to download one of their fact sheet PDFs. And that’s it. Yeah. It wasn’t used in their sales process. It wasn’t used in their branding. And they were getting frustrated because their salespeople had to do so much extra work just to explain the things they already know and like. It’s one of those that could have been an email type situation. Like, hey, you know what? We’re done. It doesn’t represent who we are. It’s at that time, 2023. No, we just have to redo the whole thing. So we got on that project and we revamped everything. Brand new colors that are indicative of their personalities, their strong, fierce personalities, the quality of the communications teams and relationships they build. And interestingly enough, the funniest part I found is a little while earlier I mentioned that do we want to do quality? They were very, very specific on who they are. They’re not the bottom tier, but they’re not the top tier either. They know very well who they are. They’re mid top mid tier and they’re never going to change. Like don’t you want to be better. They’re like no this is who we are. The branding we have doesn’t represent them like and that’s what we made it towards. Exactly who they are. They look great for who they are and how they market themselves. Now they have marketing funnels that actually are cohesive. There’s a good path to any of the content that’s clear, concise, and actually makes sense. And their salespeople can say, hey, you’re interested in product XYZ. Hey, here’s how to find it. Just click here. It’s right there. You want the fact sheet? Oh yeah. That’s a little bit down below if you want some technical things. But hey, here’s how the product looks. Here’s how you can use it. Here’s everything else you might ever need. You want to talk to us. We can help build out the proforma invoice and go from there. But beyond that, everything’s for you now. And since then, their website has been growing with more and more use, doing better on the search engines, helping them with their sales, marketing funnels, and soon to be helping them search through all million plus SKUs they have.
John Corcoran: 27:32
Now that sounds like a massive project alone right there.
Peter Krzyzek: 27:36
The branding was massive in and of itself because we also did, funnily enough, underestimate how many pages of content they had. They end up having close to, I think, 400 pages of pure content. Wow. A lot of text, which now is not just pure text, it actually is readable rather than novels and novels of document technical documentation. So that was a fun one. And now the upcoming product that we have for them is something that a lot of manufacturers have product finders, but they’re working in their own weird ways, or they’re overly animated. And good luck finding not only the information you’re looking for, but how it looks. And now I want to build my invoice from this thing. Click. Off we go. They made this thing also not for consumers. Joe Schmo, as you and I know, you’re sure we can go on there and search, but it was made specifically for their clients, which are not the people getting the homes or buildings or whatever. It’s the general contractors, it’s the engineers. So the search is made specifically for them to make finding everything quicker. Oh, I did this previous sale with you guys. I want the exact same thing again. Okay, here you go. It’s in your profile right there. You can log in. Just click buy again and off we go.
John Corcoran: 28:54
We you know we people talk about the Amazon-ification of, you know the buying experience. We’re all kind of used to buying a product from Amazon and having relevant searches or being able to find previous products that we purchased. And it’s like, you know, we’re holding other companies to that standard. We kind of expect that that’s going to be at the fingertips and available to us.
Peter Krzyzek: 29:14
And it does make sense, though. Love or hate Amazon and ignore the politics and weird things that’s going on with Amazon overall, they know search because Amazon is not an e-commerce retailer company. They are a technology and data company. More so they’re an advertising company. They have Amazon AWS to support all their search and advertising, and they have the e-commerce store, which is how they started to really fund a whole bunch of the consumer stuff and build the brand up.
AWS wouldn’t exist without the storefront, and their advertising wouldn’t exist without either. So they know data. And why don’t we learn from the best? Because yes, people do expect to be able to find information quickly, easily the relevant things, and store their data in a reasonable, mostly private, private ish way. And I think that just makes logical sense for most things. Yeah. If Netflix didn’t save any of your insights or profiles or your views.
John Corcoran: 30:11
They’d be just generic recommendations. Yeah. Exactly. We kind of grew to appreciate that kind of personalization. I think we will even more in the years ahead. Okay. At the risk of asking a question that could open up an answer that I’m sure could be hours long, I was thinking about You having a manufacturing company come to you and they’re saying, like, you know, our website doesn’t represent us. It’s not really reflective of our brand. Where do you even start with that conversation? What is your process like to help a company figure out how to express their brand when they’ve done such a poor job of it? It just seems like that’s such an overwhelming task.
Peter Krzyzek: 30:50
It can be as it grows and scales, though. We always start with. I think it ends up being four. Very simple question: what do you like and why? What do you like and why? Of course, but what do you not like about what you like?
John Corcoran: 31:06
About your current brand or your current business? Anything. Anything about you.
Peter Krzyzek: 31:10
Current brand, about things you see out there in the world? If you’re an e-commerce retailer, you like Amazon, great. Why do you like Amazon’s things? Great. Now what do you not like about Amazon? Because we know you like them already and you want to be like them. But what do you not like about them? Now, the flip side of that, what do you specifically not like? What do you definitely never want to be towards like or have and why now? My favorite one. But the thing you don’t like. What do you like about them? What can we learn from them? What can we use from the thing you don’t like? And we start there because that opens up so, so many questions and that starts leading us on the path of all right. We talked about these things that you want to go towards and or go away from right now. What are your measurables that you’re going towards? Okay. You’re going to try to hit this revenue goal, the conversion rate improvements, more SEO or whatever. And all right, well then how do we take this and align it with those. Well this won’t help. So here’s the priority we’ll focus on initially. And from there we take it literally one step at a time. Sometimes going forward. Sometimes we start with the end goal and go backwards. But for us, it ends up being just a little process of asking questions. Those four questions and then more questions and we try to keep them open ended. Kind of like what you had here. But just funny enough, the best way is just to take somebody out to coffee and just have them start talking. There’s so much you can learn about what they’re going for, what they like, don’t like, and who they fit into. Because a brand isn’t just, let’s make us look good. And my wife would crucify me for saying this thing, but looks on a website don’t really matter. It could be the prettiest thing, but if it’s not relevant or useful or interesting or hard to get through, who cares about pretty? I’ve seen horrible, ugly websites that convert crazy. Well, and we’ve all seen those long form sales letters. They’re ugly. But my God, will they convert?
John Corcoran: 33:11
Yeah. What’s more,
Peter Krzyzek: 33:12
Important? Conversions and money or looking pretty.
John Corcoran: 33:14
I’m mindful of the clock. We’re almost out of time here. So two final questions. First is for a digital consultancy. I have to ask you, because we’re recording this at the end of 2024 about AI and how that’s affecting the world of the digital economy.
Peter Krzyzek: 33:30
I found that for the most part, it doesn’t. Things will change. The only constant in life is change. Really? AI is here. It’s here to stay. Whether you want to or not, some people will be affected by it negatively. Generally, that ends up being the lowest tier type of knowledge, education or whatever. Though for the rest of us, and the way I choose to see AI, it’s an augmentation tool. I Think cybernetics and sci fi and all those fun things. You don’t replace the human, you augment them. And when AI is used to augment your processes, augment your deliverables, augment and speed up maybe your overall simplified discovery phases, it can help so much speed things up, offer more value, reduce emotional weight on things. And for a lot of people, including myself, we use that as a therapist to bounce ideas off of. Off of it. See where it takes you. It might just jog some ideas. And if the branch is flowing.
John Corcoran: 34:34
That’s great. All right. My last question. My gratitude question. So I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude or giving our guests the opportunity to express gratitude, especially for peers or contemporaries or mentors who helped them along the way in their journey. Who would you want to shout out and recognize?
Peter Krzyzek: 34:51
I have three and three in mind. Mark, who brought me into AOA. He was somebody I got connected through.
John Corcoran: 34:58
EOA is an EO accelerator program, which you and I both participated in. Great program. Yeah.
Peter Krzyzek: 35:03
It’s truly awesome. You got me into that. Set me on the right path, connected with some phenomenal people. And that whole group is just. Just wow. In the best possible way. Super loving, super caring and extremely educational. Love it. Next is Tim Padgett, also from EO. He’s retired now. I call him the loving grandpa who will punch you in the gut to set you straight. He knows so much, but he will tell it like it is in a loving way, and you will definitely understand everything after he’s done with you, and you will love him for it. And the third is a business buddy. He’s down in Florida. He’s had a similar-ish agency to me, but he’s way ahead of where I am in terms of business size, and that’s fine. And he is. I don’t know how somebody could be that nice, honestly. Anytime I have a problem, he’s like, yeah, here’s the answer. Here’s some help. Here’s where you can learn about this or you’re struggling with this thing. Here’s some ideas, help videos, even let me sit down with you and guide you through this thing. Here’s how you can do these things. And he’s been my moral support and rock for a lot of things, getting me through a lot of hard times and helping me really just become who I am today.
John Corcoran: 36:12
Peter, has it been great working from Florida? Great. Thank you Peter. Where can people go to learn more about you, connect with you, learn more about what you guys do?
Peter Krzyzek: 36:22
They can go to chykalophia.com, which I know a lot of people will have trouble spelling. So we’ll probably have it somewhere in the show notes or find me on LinkedIn. And those are probably the two best ways.
John Corcoran: 36:32
And by the way, I didn’t get to it earlier, but your wife made up this name when she was bored in biology class. And so she’s just this total made up name.
Peter Krzyzek: 36:40
This is a completely made up name. Back then, she thought it sounded like one of those butterfly names, so she made it up. But to her, it was pretty. And she was a designer, so pretty things. And now we use it to say that we create extraordinary, extraordinary, difficult words, extraordinary experiences that have a positive impact in the world.
John Corcoran: 37:00
And it became her username. And then it kind of followed her through life. That’s great. I love it. Peter, thanks so much. Thank you very much.
Outro: 37:12
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.