Enable

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

We are a professional data management company with a primary focus on data recovery.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Enable?

We had separated from an existing company and started our own entity. We needed to start from scratch, setting up a new business entity, establishing an online presence, and employing SEO [search engine optimization], which is what Enable was engaged for.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

I worked with three people from Enable's side. Our scope was to come up with everything from logo design, business-perspective development, and a good flow for our website. What I envisioned for myself would not necessarily translate well to other people, so I've trusted Enable's judgement on this regard.

How did you come to work with Enable?

Enable is a local company. I live in Front Royal, Virginia, and searched for web design companies in the Northern Virginia, DC, and Maryland areas. I was confronted with either high-pressure sales tactics, a lack of callbacks, or even rude hang ups. Enable had very good reviews on Google, and their principal called me back right away. I was able to sit down with them and explain my frustrations, Enable listened to me, and came up with a plan.

How much have you invested with Enable?

The cost of Enable's ongoing work fluctuates between $100 and $800 per month because it depends on SEO and other services. The upfront price was $4,600. The overall cost so far has been under $10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Enable at the beginning of May 2016. By the end of the month, we had a rough draft done, and the site went live by the end of June. Since Enable listened to my requests, they were able to translate them rapidly. My biggest frustration is with businesses who don't listen to what the client wants and only try to push what they think a project should be.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

Data recovery is not the type of service which can necessarily generate repeat customers. It took a while for us to get started, but Enable was patient about explaining the process of moving up in Google ranks and driving traffic to the site.

How did Enable perform from a project management standpoint?

Enable reports what is working and what is not working on a monthly basis, and suggests changes and edits to the website in order to facilitate more traffic. We have calls or meet face-to-face, and go over the best approach for the site. We communicate primarily through email, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings. I appreciate the fact that Enable's principal will be honest with me and tell me when I'm going offtrack, but he will implement my decision if I choose to override. This kind of wisdom is invaluable.

What did you find most impressive about Enable?

Enable can deliver quickly. When we first launched the website, there were services and avenues that were not included. When we discussed new offerings, Enable was able to implement a finished product in 30 days.

Are there any areas Enable could improve?

I don't know what that would be. If I had experience with companies similar to Enable, I could perhaps name something.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with Enable?

I recommend that if the client has a vision or idea, they should take the time to discuss everything with Enable, but be open to what the team will suggest. They will do exactly what the customer wants, but taking advice from others will be the hardest thing to do in these situations. I enlisted Enable for their expertise in developing a website, so I should probably listen to their advice when it's offered.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the president of my law firm, Minick Law, P.C.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Enable?

Our firm’s web presence began about five years ago, and it has been through multiple facelifts since then. Part of the problem was that I used multiple companies, and each one of their facelifts then became incongruent with other parts of the website until it started to look jumbled and inconsistent. We also have a massive amount of content on our website. I think we have close to 200 blogs that we’ve written and a number of pages that are connected to the main page. It was a massive undertaking to redesign the site.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’ve done a couple of projects with Enable. The biggest project was having them revamp our website from an aesthetic standpoint. They’ve also managed our social media accounts, and they’ve done other work to improve other aspects of our online presence.

During the most recent redesign, Jeremy did a good job of making sure that everything was consistent throughout the website. He also added a lot of natural breaks, especially on our home page and our practice area pages. He did a great job of breaking up all of the text that was there before into pictures, videos, snippets of text, and one-liner reviews that you could click to see the full reviews. Enable made it a much more visually friendly website. His facelift makes our website cutting-edge in terms of how we appear online.

Enable also has been in charge of our social media. We have six office locations for the firm, so we have six Google My Business pages and six Facebook pages. Enable has created content and then re-posted that content to the website. They’re also engaging in the Facebook and Google+ communities to generate interest in those posts. They’ve been in charge of our social media longer than they’ve been in charge of the website.

How did you come to work with Enable?

Jeremy is my brother. He worked at my firm for about two years before going out and starting his web company. He had done some work with social media with us before he left. After he left, I used local companies to build the website. They were all good at what they do, but we knew that to make the website great, we’d have to make it consistent throughout. Most of the local designers would fix a page here and there, but they wouldn't make sure that everything worked together and communicated well regardless of where you were on the pages. The look was inconsistent and choppy, and it looked like a bad brochure. However, the website was ranking well, so we didn't have that concern.

One of the other reasons we wanted to hire Jeremy is because he has designed multiple websites using the Divi theme. At one point, I was trying to decide if I should keep Divi because it required a lot of information and could potentially slow down the site. But because of how the theme is being utilized now, it definitely seems worthwhile.

How much have you invested with Enable?

I would say we’ve invested somewhere in the neighborhood of $15,000 with Enable.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working on the website around the beginning of November 2016, and then we went live right at the end of December or the beginning of January 2017. The project probably took about eight weeks from the point of “Let’s make this happen” to when it went live.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

The new website has only been live for a couple of months, but a couple of attorneys in the Asheville area say they have been massively impressed with its look. Most people in criminal defense are handling their firms on their own, so a lot of times they’re building their own online presence or hiring somebody to set it up. They treat it almost like a brochure. Our website feels extremely interactive in comparison to the general market for criminal defense in the western North Carolina area. I’ve heard comments about how engaging it is and how it calls for interaction.

Jeremy has made the website more of a long-term project, and I believe he’s taken the same approach with a number of other clients. That, to me, is something that is valuable. Instead of fixing and changing things here and there once in a blue moon, he approaches the website in a way that makes it consistent over the long haul. The designers I’ve used before would charge a flat fee to do a certain amount of work. Jeremy approached the website from the frontend: “This is how I want to structure things because it’s going to take a while to get all of this working together and looking the same. We want to make sure that we stay consistent moving forward in terms of future posts and future information that we’re trying to share.” He has a real goal in his design process, and he wants to know what you're doing as a business so that he can translate that into a coherent presence online. Our website now flows from one place to the next.

It uses a WordPress and the Divi theme, which was initially started by another local web designer who underutilized it. I look at the backend of the website pretty regularly to see how things are appearing there, and it’s much more detailed and broken down now. The coding that is being used is much more intricate. Before, we would just plug our text into whatever the theme was doing to generate the backend code. Everything is now coming out much more consistent with the Divi theme.

We’ve also ramped up our social media recently, and Enable has been involved in that process. I regularly get comments from friends, family, and clients as well as other professionals in the community about the amount of information that is going through our social media. We have a lot of information to share because we have so many blog posts. Other attorneys in the area have commented on how timely and consistent our posts are. We don't post something now, then nothing for a month, then three posts at once, and then nothing again. Jeremy does what he calls “motivational Monday,” which is where he shares a quote and a picture on Mondays through all of our social media channels. The post also includes a shot of the attorneys from our firm in the background. We write a blog post about once a week.

How did Enable perform from a project management standpoint?

One thing that I appreciated about Jeremy is that he set up specific deadlines for us to give him content, and then he gave me a detailed plan of how the information would go live. He followed through on his end. There were probably a couple of times that I did not get the content to him in time, and it slowed down the process by about one to two weeks. There was a good amount of back and forth on what we wanted the website to look like during the eight weeks of the project. He built everything so that it wasn’t live, but we could still look at it and tweak it before it went live. When the website finally did go up, every page went up at the same time. Afterward, there was probably about two weeks of making sure that everything looked correct. Everything was clean though.

We generally have a phone call every Friday or every other Friday to stay up-to-date on projects we’re working on. Typically, I will send an agenda about what we’re each supposed to be working on next to keep everybody on track. I’ve done two longer term monthly marketing plans with Enable. Jeremy provides a lot of details to explain what he’s going to do. I think my frustration with some of the companies that I've worked with in the past is that there is this promise of, “We’re going to work on your website,” and then it’s hard to track what the design company or the search engine optimization company is actually doing. You start to wonder as a business owner, “Are they actually spending time every month on my behalf?” Jeremy has been good about breaking that down and showing you exactly where he’s spending time, what is being done, and projects that are being worked on, so you can see a visual map of how the company is working for you.

What did you find most impressive about Enable?

It’s hard to talk about how much Enable has impressed me without sounding biased because Jeremy is my brother. But I think one thing he cares about is trying to get to know the company that he’s designing for before he just jumps in and builds them a themed website. He puts in a good amount of research and legwork into feeling out the company and the company culture before going to work on a website design strategy or a social media strategy. They do a good job of trying to get into the heart of the organization.

Are there any areas Enable could improve?

Not really. Jeremy has been doing this kind of work on his own for several years, but Enable is a relatively new company, and he’s trying to figure out how to grow it. I always feel like once you start to grow your company, sometimes it becomes hard to keep the same consistency in terms of delegation and how you're doing things. Jeremy seems to be doing a good job of that. I think he has several people working for him part-time, and he’s in the process of bringing on a full-time employee, but he needs to make sure that his own company culture is not changing as it’s growing.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with Enable?

I can't give any recommendations to prospective customers. I think everybody’s different on that front.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the president of a healthcare institute.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Enable?

We hired Enable to help with website development for both companies.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

I don't know exactly what technologies Enable used to build the websites, but I do know that the websites are built on a Google platform, and they designed the websites from scratch based on our input. We provided a kind of storyboard of what we thought the websites should look like page by page. That gave them the design guidelines, and then they built the websites to those specifications. We needed to have a definitive listing of our products on the websites, because we have educational courses that we offer through the institute, so those products had to be presented in a way that included video clips and stuff like that. There was a fair amount of specificity based on what we needed to have done. Enable first built the websites, and then I further engaged them for other marketing support activities like SEO and blogging.

How did you come to work with Enable?

I found Enable online. I was pricing out website design and development, and I was looking for a combination of quality and price, and Enable seemed to have the best value proposition I could find. Most of the other vendors in their space charged $10,000 to $50,000 to build a website. Enable’s price was substantially lower than that. On their website, they had examples of other websites that they’d done, so I reviewed those, and then I called them a couple of times to find out what they were up to. I was satisfied with what they shared with me, so I went ahead and hired them.

How much have you invested with Enable?

Between the two websites, I probably invested a little less than $10,000. It was probably about $3,500 or $3,600 per website. If you're in the market, you understand that’s an incredible deal for a fully functional website.

What is the status of this engagement?

I was in contact with Enable in August 2016, and I think we had our website fully functional around October 2016, so it took a couple of months.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any evidence that would demonstrate the productivity, quality of work, or the impact of the engagement?

I get a lot of anecdotal feedback on how professional and well-done our website is. It represents our company well. We don't see a lot of traffic fluctuations unless we’re doing e-campaigns or advertising, and then we’ll see associated spikes in traffic as we drive volume through the website. I have seen an increase in our social media traffic. A lot of people want to join my network on LinkedIn based on the activity that Enable’s doing. We do have a monitoring system that allows us to see what’s happening behind the scenes on the website, and our marketing guy monitors our SEO outcomes. We pay Enable a monthly amount for an SEO, blogging, etc., package.

How did Enable perform from a project management standpoint?

Enable is phenomenal when it comes to project management. I know how difficult it is to cover all the bases when managing projects, and Enable does a great job. They have a system to interact with the client and lay out the action items and timelines and who’s responsible for them. Their system is predictable and well-run.

What did you find most impressive about Enable?

I found three things impressive about Enable: They’re responsive, they’re good at what they do, and their prices are great. For the quality they provide, their price point is as good as you can get in the market today, in my opinion. I think Enable has the opportunity to offer full package marketing as opposed to website SEO and the other services they currently provide that support small business. A lot of small business owners are looking for turnkey solutions, because they can’t afford to have their own internal agency or hire an external one.

Are there any areas Enable could improve?

For what they’re offering, I can’t think of any ways Enable could improve.

What tips or recommendations could you share that might increase the likelihood of success with Enable?

I would advise businesses working with Enable to be clear about what they want to accomplish and why. The clearer you are, the more Enable can help you. If you're vague and don't really know what you want, it’s going to be hard to assess the outcome and their value.