Ep 121 – Shawn Johnston, Forge & Smith – Profitable by Design: Streamlining Dev Without Cutting Corners
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Featuring: Shawn Johnston, Forge and Smith
In episode 121, I sit down with Shawn Johnston, founder of Forge and Smith and creator of Refoundry—a low-code WordPress platform that’s transforming how agencies build and deliver websites. We talk about how Shawn cut delivery time by 70%, turned profit margins around using the Profit First method, and transitioned his agency toward a scalable, productized model. He shares insights on navigating developer pushback, balancing client empowerment with agency control, and preparing for evolving tech shifts like AI in web development. Whether you’re struggling with project bottlenecks, shrinking budgets, or scaling challenges, Shawn’s story offers a clear path forward for building smarter, more profitable systems.
Key Bytes
• Refoundry cut Forge and Smith’s development time by 70%, transforming profitability.
• Adopting Profit First changed their approach to pricing and overhead limits.
• Client empowerment through low-code builds loyalty and drives referrals.
• Transitioning leadership allowed Shawn’s team to grow into bigger roles.
• Technological shifts (like Webflow and AI) demand constant agency adaptation.
• Productizing an internal tool opened new revenue streams beyond services.
• Balancing developer pride with client needs is critical for successful adoption.
• Early lessons in print taught Shawn to anticipate and embrace industry change.Chapters
00:01 Introduction to Shawn Johnston and Forge and Smith
02:11 Moving from freelance to full agency and early challenges
04:39 Implementing Profit First and shifting to scalable systems
06:38 Why Refoundry: Bringing low-code to WordPress
08:22 Cutting development time and improving project profitability
11:23 Developer pushback and prioritizing client empowerment
14:44 Evolving Refoundry into a product for other agencies
17:03 Transitioning leadership and building team collaboration
24:17 Preparing for tech shifts like AI and staying nimble in delivery
28:30 Rapid fire questions and final reflections
Shawn Johnston is the founder of Forge and Smith, a digital agency that’s launched over 500 websites in the past 13 years. After hitting the usual delivery bottlenecks and burnout cycles, he built Refoundry—a low-code platform for WordPress that helped his team cut build times by 70% and scale without sacrificing quality. Now he’s on a mission to help other agencies streamline delivery, boost margins, and build systems that actually work.
Contact Shawn on Forge and Smith or Refoundry.
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Steve / Agency Outsight (00:01.396)
Welcome to Agency Bites, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. I'm Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the agency of their dreams. This week, my guest is Sean Johnston from Forge and Smith. After running into the usual delivery bottlenecks that a lot of agencies experience, including burnout cycles, at his agency, they built Refoundry. It's a low code WordPress platform that cut build times by 70 % and helped his team scale without sacrificing quality.
Now he's on a mission to help other agencies streamline delivery, boost margins and build systems that actually work. And I'm excited to get into it. Sean, thanks for joining me.
Shawn Johnston (00:40.241)
Thanks for having me, Steve. I really appreciate it.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:42.926)
Yeah, so give me kind of the backstory on the agency and you launched it and kind of what some of those hurdles that you experienced were early on.
Shawn Johnston (00:53.558)
Yeah, we, we, Fortress just grew out of my freelance career. So I started freelancing about 16 years ago. And then it just sort of emerged from that. Not, not by accident, but kind of organically. so we, we've, we've been building WordPress websites now for, 13 years and counting. And, you know, back when we started WordPress development was
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:14.776)
Mm-hmm.
Shawn Johnston (01:21.344)
all theme-based, everything had to be done in there, and then advanced custom fields came out and that kind of changed the game. And then sort of things evolved from there, but somewhere along the way with the launch of things like Squarespace and Wix, customer expectations on the other side in terms of flexibility started to shift. Project budgets kept falling, costs kept going up and it started getting harder.
to turn a profit and, and, yeah, about five or six years ago, we started this process of productizing our offering and trying to find a way to spend less time with, while creating sort of better results. And so, yeah, the, the end result was we needed to find a different way to do development. And I think we've, I think we've done it. So, yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:11.616)
Along the way was your team delivering in a profitable way was where project deliveries, you know, like you mentioned bottlenecked and log jammed and frustrating or was like, Hey, this is good enough, but because the world is changing, we've also got to change.
Shawn Johnston (02:26.966)
Yeah, I mean, the first eight years, kind of, sorta, you know, we thought, or at least I thought the model here was burn until you scale and then profit will come. And, you know, got ourselves in some debt. I read a book that was actually super formative called Profit First. And that was sort of started this whole idea of like,
If I have to start from a profit first mentality and I create a limit on what my overhead can actually be, like how do I work within that? And it really just came down to spending less time doing repetitive stuff so that we could spend more time doing the actual strategy, what we're actually being paid for. And so...
You know, that started with systemizing our UX library. So starting with a consistent component library and then harmonizing those components with our build systems. And that, created some traction and proof from profitability. And then was just, it was just leaning harder and harder into that until we got to where we are now, which is, you know, being able to deliver projects in 70 % less time than we used to from a, from a developer perspective and 30 % less time overall.
And that has really moved us into a place of actual profitability, which has been revolutionary for us anyways.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:57.132)
Yeah, that's a huge cutback. 70%. I work with a lot of agencies who struggle to deliver websites, whether it's Squarespace or Webflow or WordPress or anything in a really profitable manner. But like those are big margins that you've carved out and you've reverse engineered it. Thanks, Mike McAlwitt's profit first huge fan. You know, love that. But but it sounds like you're super like devout to it. Like, but start with the profit in mind. A lot of
Shawn Johnston (04:18.381)
Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (04:25.486)
lot of firms will say our profit first means i'm charging thirty grand i've got to put you know x percent aside and they're not really reverse engineering their scopes and budget based on what they want to carve out for profit first. I got to that's like a really clean way of doing it.
Shawn Johnston (04:39.66)
Yeah, we found...
Shawn Johnston (04:43.83)
Yeah, we found that actually we were charging enough. mean, a lot of times we end up sort of charging what the market can bear. And that's based off of who we're talking to, what we're offering, you know, what the what type of leads we get within that spectrum of pricing. So a lot of times you're charging enough, you don't you don't have a cost problem or a pricing problem. A lot of people have a have a delivery problem or a systems problem. And that's that's something that we've
really dialed into over the last five years and just iteratively improved all of those friction points until we have something that is, there's no point in the process where we're reworking anything from a previous step. You mentioned Webflow. That was when we really started taking a hard look at low code and...
being a WordPress shop, WordPress is still the most popular CMS, runs 43 % of the internet. We weren't ready to give up on it, but we really saw what Webflow is doing and what type of enablement that creates, not only for the customers or customers and being able to do what they want, but our external team so that more people could get involved to remove developers from the bottleneck issue and from resourcing projects effectively.
That was really the brainchild or the impetus point for what became Refoundry was, could we bring low code implementation like Webflow into the WordPress world? And we saw Gutenberg being an opportunity for that and that's sort of what we did. yeah, we always joked internally, if Webflow and Figma could have a WordPress baby, it would be Refoundry.
Steve / Agency Outsight (06:38.03)
interesting vision. why not? was other than WordPress owns, you know, massive part of the internet and I think something like more than 60 % of the top 100 visited websites are built on WordPress. Like, so they've got a massive foothold. Other than that, and in the ecosystem that's involved now, why not just jump to a web flow? Like, what was the mindset behind building out your own low code product?
Shawn Johnston (07:01.474)
Yeah, I mean, to some degree we had built a really strong reputation in our area for being WordPress. And so, a lot of our leads and referrals were there because of WordPress. So that was part of it. I think that, I mean, the primary reason why we've always focused on WordPress is that it's trusted, it's understood.
Steve / Agency Outsight (07:17.816)
Gotcha.
Shawn Johnston (07:27.93)
I'm not presenting a CMS to a potential client that they've never heard of and then trying to overcome that hurdle to convince them it's the right thing for them to do. Like is WordPress the greatest CMS on the planet? Not really. But I don't have to work very hard to sort of present it to a client as a viable option. In a lot of cases, it's the only one they wanna work with. So yeah, you're comfortable with it.
It was just a question of like, how can we leverage this trust and gain the opportunities that low code and themeless implementations would create for us in a way that will allow us to focus on what people are actually there for, which is the strategy, the design, the implementation of something that they can evolve and own on their own in an empowered state. That was why.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:22.518)
Yeah, and I love that you you put the emphasis on let's spend more time on the things that are quote unquote more valuable like strategy and content and conversion and not custom hacking away at some special feature that we can do on a low code version. Yeah.
Shawn Johnston (08:37.646)
Yeah. Yeah. Like if you look at an average project that we were spending, maybe 250, 300 hours on, and you remove just the repetitive development and sort of designing from a white screen, which just unnecessary. There's only so many ways to structure content on the internet. We all do it in similar ways. So just removing that, we were able to cut easily 100 to 150 hours of just repetitive work from each project.
Um, so rather than just take that as profit and keep delivering the same way, what we did is we, we reached that 25, 30 % profit margin we were looking for, and then took the rest of that time and turned it into more content strategy upfront, more copywriting to provide some support, more, um, emphasis on interactions or, you know, special, um, sort of design pieces or functionality that we didn't always have time to do profitably before. So.
we were able to sort of take some of that profit and turn it to like a 20 or 30 % increase in the overall quality of the product itself and the process that customers went through. And that's led to significant improvements in retention, referrals and reviews. Happier clients are better for everybody.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:49.954)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:56.534)
Yeah, keep them longer. Are you guys niched in any industry or is it you're known for WordPress and that's kind of where you play?
Shawn Johnston (10:04.46)
Yeah, WordPress in particular, we're just sort of a well-known agency that focuses on that. As far as industries, we've always been pretty agnostic. It's a little boring to do the same sort of work all the time. So we always say that good user experience is universal. So we're really just interested in helping people understand the audience, tell a story, move people through that content, ultimately get them to convert.
So we do a lot of nonprofit work. We do quite a bit of sort of professional service work. We do a lot of work in education and research, some retail. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (10:46.47)
Okay. The argument that I get from lot of agencies in the process of niching down is, we'll get bored if we just do higher ed or fintech or whatever. And that kind of same argument crossed my mind when it came to developers using low code. Was there any pushback from your team as far as, no, we love custom coding everything, even though it shits all over the profits or...
Shawn Johnston (11:10.626)
Yeah, wasn't without its pushback. mean, and there's two sides to that question. There's like our own internal learning on a tool that we were building for ourselves and potentially for others. So there was some pride mixed into that. But we're also working with other agencies on Birdaroo Foundry as their...
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:23.214)
Mm-hmm.
Shawn Johnston (11:35.17)
their build tool. So we launched ReFoundry as an official product in January and have been onboarding agencies to sort of take the same journey that Forge did. And there is oftentimes developer pushback. And I think the message that we sort of internally and the message that seems to really resonate with agency owners that we're talking to is build tools aren't for developers, they're for your customers.
Steve / Agency Outsight (11:45.4)
Mm-hmm.
Shawn Johnston (12:05.08)
how you want to craft your CSS just doesn't matter. The market's moved on from that sort of thing. We have to really focus on ultimately how the product performs, how fast it loads, how much Google likes it, how well it tells the story, but ultimately how it empowers the customers to own that website going forward. They don't want to have to go through you. They like the option of being able to work with you to evolve things. But if they want to add a section to a page or
change the colors of some buttons or update their typography, they really don't want to have to go through you. And if a low-code implementation gives the customer that type of power, I will sacrifice what developers want every single day. We want everyone to be happy and be a part of the same process, but ultimately, agency success and client happiness is really the main piece. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:57.39)
And they go hand in hand. So if you're making your clients happy, the agency is successful. But that leads me to wonder when you started implementing refoundry and cutting your delivery time by massive margins, did you let go of people? Like what happened to your team?
Shawn Johnston (13:01.516)
Yeah. Yeah.
Shawn Johnston (13:13.206)
Yeah, there was a bit of churn. It was, you know, we were able to deliver more projects with fewer people and less intermediate, more junior. And so some of the original intermediate level development team that was doing sort of all that hand coding, some we moved to our engineering team to continue pushing ReFoundry forward and some others.
just didn't want to build that way and sort of moved on with our blessing. And it was just a natural part of the evolution of the agency and how we deliver our work. So yeah, there is, if you're just looking at sort of the practical realities or the practical opportunities of running an agency, we deliver on average maybe 45 to 50 websites a year. And that used to take...
a team of four intermediate developers and that now takes a team of two junior front-end developers in and just some engineering output for some advanced stuff from time to time.
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:26.028)
Yeah. When you started to build out Refoundry or like I had the idea of it and mapping it out and building it and testing it and iterating and things like that. Was the idea of productizing it for other agencies there yet or was that down the road after like, we've got something here. Maybe other people would want to use it.
Shawn Johnston (14:44.652)
I mean, the original plan to some degree had been, I've always taken a ton of inspiration about 37 signals did with Basecamp in particular. Was that the plan for the agency all along? Not really, but when we sort of hatched this brainchild of replicating what Webflow is doing within the Gutenberg framework of WordPress, and we were able to apply for and receive some government funding.
to try that out. Once we reached a point where it's like, this is actually going to work even better than we thought it would, yeah, then the goal at that point was it was a path to productization and launching SaaS and sort of launching this product out of our service agency, which hasn't been the easiest journey, but it's been a lot of fun. So yeah, it wasn't necessarily the original idea, but it was like not an idea either. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:39.517)
Yeah, yeah, I think what 37 signals do with base camp inspired a lot of shops to be like, hey, there's the thing that we want to build or there's a thing that we can't find a solution for let's build it. Right. And that's kind of what their, their, I guess methodology was, but they got completely out of the service space and focused on building software completely. So, so is that the path forward for you or are you going to stay in the client service space as well?
Shawn Johnston (15:57.614)
Yeah, they did. Eventually. Yeah, that's right.
Shawn Johnston (16:07.63)
I mean, yeah, time will tell. think, I mean, for me personally, I've been doing service work now for 16, 17 years. I would enjoy a change of pace, but you know, Forger Smith is, it's my baby. I've poured my heart and soul into that thing for a long time. So no, I would, I don't think I'd ever be happy with it just disappearing. I'd love to be able to.
Steve / Agency Outsight (16:11.918)
Hmm?
Shawn Johnston (16:37.882)
have that continue to live on, under team leadership. That's a part of what we've been doing for the last year and a half is just slowly transitioning day-to-day operations, and leadership to the team and away from, from me. And that's, that's been a very cool process allowing, me to take up less space so others can, take up more space and, and learn together. So yeah, ultimately I'd be pretty sad if it disappeared entirely.
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:03.342)
Yeah, I love that from just like a leadership point of view of like, how can I back out so that there's a void that other people can kind of feel into and doesn't need to be all about me as the head of the spear or, you know, leader of whatever and, and let other people take the charge and act in a creative role or elevate them to, you know, CEO or whatever at some point. Yeah, I think that's really it.
Shawn Johnston (17:26.018)
Yeah, I we've got a really good leadership team. I've worked with some of them for 10, 11 years. And so they were sort of ready to take on more and be a part of larger discussions. was daunting at times. Doing it as long as I have, I'm a source of easy answers. So sort of weaning them off of easy answers and encouraging everybody to work with each other to come up with their own answers.
has been a lot of coaching, a lot of mentoring, a lot of reviews. We're actually very focused on a lot of touch bases, a lot of conversation, a lot of reviews, a lot of that kind of collaboration. it's been an interesting process and it's been ultimately quite successful. And that has a lot to do with sort of this unknown or unexpected.
improvement that low code has sort of provided our internal agency is that moving a project along now can go through several streams. It doesn't all have to go through one technical stream. And so that really opens up multi-team collaboration through a process, even late stage processes, or even being much more receptive and open to late stage changes because you can create large change within a project without a ton of effort.
And it doesn't all have to go through through technical individuals. So that that itself had already started a lot of multi-team collaboration. So this sort of transition was a natural extension of that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (19:07.438)
Does your team still go through the Figma design wireframing process, or are you doing it all in a browser? How has your process in your internal systems changed and refined, other than just, here's a new way to build out?
Shawn Johnston (19:24.854)
Yeah, I mean, I think you're always limited by the expectations of the customer and their ability to understand what they're looking at. As much as I absolutely love the idea of doing things in browser, it's a slightly messier and much more sort of sprint-based iterative way. And I imagine there would be a way for that to work. The types of people we tend to work with are a lot of in-house teams, marketers, those sorts of people. They're not
high tech, so it's harder for them to visualize and the executive decision makers or sponsors behind them find it even harder. So yeah, we're still delivering sort of high fidelity in browser mockups through Figma. I think everybody at this point is using Figma. Brilliant tool. So yeah, what we have is a UX library of components, very kind of tailwind.
style and those components actually pre-exist in refoundry as well. So we're working with the same modularity and then design freedom is encouraged. So the UI expression of a brand is not really structural, it's just space, content and color. You can adjust those levers all you want without greatly affecting the framework underneath it. And so
Steve / Agency Outsight (20:28.014)
Mm-hmm.
Shawn Johnston (20:49.176)
creating sort of a flexible framework that allows us to move through content strategy into UX, into design, into build. It's that underlying acceptance across all teams that we're working with common language and common structures because we all believe that these are the best or most effective strategies, but having enough flexibility for that to be presented or expressed in a way that gets customers or our clients excited. So it's...
It's finding a way to do both things without assuming that the way to do that is starting everything from scratch, because that's just not necessary.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:27.862)
And the fact that you know your client base so well that you know this is how they receive information that they can't visualize. A lot of designers think, they'll be able to see what this is going to look like. No, you've got to actually show them. And you guys kind of figure that out. Was that part of your process of how do we refine time for delivery, is knowing really what the clients need to receive this as?
Shawn Johnston (21:39.692)
No, thank you.
Shawn Johnston (21:53.814)
Yeah, and actually augmenting that or expanding the time we spend on that was one of the areas that we were able to do a lot more time to because we spend less time on stuff happening in the back the clients don't see.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:58.818)
Mm-hmm.
Shawn Johnston (22:06.254)
So we now mock up all of the pages so they can see everything. And we allow for a level of customization across different stories. like, you know, there's sometimes just because you have to that it's like secondary or tertiary pages get quite templated. This allows us the freedom to spend a little bit more time giving things a bit of uniqueness. And then extra layers like.
like actual homepage mockups or sorry, mobile mockups where they can really see at least their homepage at a phone views. They can have a little bit of preview of that. And then interaction guides of actually being able to animate in Figma the way buttons should work or how different things should work. So you can kind of get those layers of polish that you're able to solve upfront through interactions with the client rather than later in the process when they're looking at a built site and that stuff's harder to...
effect change with. yeah, so expanding the design and strategy documentation was one of the big wins because now we're just executing something they've seen in its completeness rather than over relying on the need to visualize what a final product should look like and then having them be unhappy with that final product.
Steve / Agency Outsight (23:23.97)
Yeah, listen, I gotta give huge props to you, your team for taking this leap because it's an investment of time and sure you got some federal grant funding you said or payback funding or something like that, but agencies that are nimble enough that can commit to how are we gonna see things changing, whether it's low code through what you guys are doing and seeing the impact of the web flows of the industry to now what AI is doing. If you're not doing something
like you guys are doing at Smith and Forge to stand out, make it easier for clients to grow client retention, to increase profitability, chopping blocks are inevitable. And especially like in the next year or two, so many agencies are just gonna get cut down. And so you found a way to optimize delivery, optimize team performance and increase profitability. And those are some of the biggest challenges that agencies face.
Shawn Johnston (24:17.442)
Well, and it's increased our flexibility as well to continue to adapt. And I think that right there is the part that I'm most excited about is that even right now we're looking at ways of integrating AI to help deliver.
content delivery, content faster. We're working on a new tool that allow us to ingest a client's content and sanitize it and structure it to speed up our own information architecture process by removing this painstaking process of taking a lot of content from where it is and refactoring it for where you need it. you wouldn't be able to sort of...
try things and implement new tools and continue to evolve if you are still sort of in a structured, overly hard-coded space of doing things in these time-intensive ways. There was an experience I had early in my career. So I started in print. You remember when PDFs were invented? It was the early 2000s.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:18.093)
Sure.
Shawn Johnston (25:20.846)
So at the time I was working at a national retailer, electronics retailer here in Canada. They were called Future Shop. Best Buy bought them, you guys know Best Buy. And I was working in the flyer department. And so we'd sort of create all of the flyer layouts in application called Cork Express, if you remember that one. Set that off to pre-processing. So at the print shops,
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:44.642)
Loved Cork Express.
Shawn Johnston (25:50.722)
they'd have this elaborate pre-processing process they would go through where everything would have to get split into film and then burned onto plates. And then it was just this whole thing. PDFs allowed overnight direct-to-plate printing. And so the print shops that had bought the right equipment to adapt to this change in technology continued on. And the ones that said, no, we're going to stay with this way. We enjoy the craftsmanship. They didn't make it a year. And for me, that was like...
a really formative experience of seeing all these people that I had been working with just lose their jobs in a span of months. How fast technology can sometimes change things. And you really have to pay attention to where the wind is blowing and sort of move with it, because you're not going to be able to change it. The best thing you can do is to try to evolve with it and stay ahead.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:28.556)
Mm-hmm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:42.734)
And the key to that, think, is being nimble, right? So print shops, and I remember that, I was in the print space at the time, they needed to have the foresight to say, all right, yeah, direct to plate is going to be the way to go. And then direct to digital is going to be the next way to go. And so how do we put the infrastructure in place that allows us to change and get rid of the dark rooms? Yeah.
Shawn Johnston (27:03.99)
Yeah. And there were sort of like two primary things that I learned through the process. One is just not being afraid of change. just trying something like change doesn't have to be a scary thing. As long as you manage that change, you stay transparent. You kind of get everybody bought in. but being okay with the fact that not everybody's going to like it and that's okay. Right. The, needs of the business and the greater part of the team and how you deliver to the customers and how
Steve / Agency Outsight (27:12.344)
Mm-hmm.
Shawn Johnston (27:30.574)
how much runway you can give yourself to continue doing the work you love doing. That's what matters. And there are going to be some people that say, I don't agree. And that's OK. They're going to go on their separate way. And the ones that get it with you are going to be that much more engaged with taking those next steps. And those types of team members, as you're making these changes, are the ones that you want to focus on and the ones that
want to take a different path, it's totally fine. But just being okay with the fact that you just can't make everybody happy all of the time.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:07.948)
Yeah, poignant lessons. It sounds like you learned them early on and you kind of kept them dear to your heart. Folks, check out refoundry.io. There's a demo video there. mean, you guys have launched a ton of websites. So your Forge and Smith portfolio is primarily built upon Refoundry now.
Shawn Johnston (28:12.707)
Yeah.
Shawn Johnston (28:26.754)
Yeah, we're launching our 100th website on refinery this month, actually. So yeah, yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:30.926)
Super exciting. Very cool. All right, let's wrap it up with a couple of random rapid fire questions that my robot delivered to us. The first is, if you could instantly master any non-work skill, what would it be and why?
Shawn Johnston (28:44.834)
Non-work skill. my god. Work is my special interest. Pottery. I have always loved the idea of learning how to pot. It just seems like such a neat skill to have, you just, yeah, pottery. Yeah, definitely.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:50.638)
Hahaha.
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:03.788)
Yeah, fun. My fiance has been doing pottery classes at a local studio. It's a lot of fun. Yeah. Do it. There you go. One day. What's a lesson you learned the hard way that still shapes how you show up today?
Shawn Johnston (29:07.564)
Have fun. One day. One day.
Shawn Johnston (29:17.934)
Yeah, it's, I think that the hardest lesson I learned is that sometimes when things aren't working out the way you want, you're the problem, not other people. And really learning the ways that I as a neurodiverse people, person, receive information, understand that information and then convey it back to other people.
Just slowing down decision making and responses to things to give yourself time to sort of process it is often a lot better than reacting and answering too quickly and regretting it. yeah, that was definitely like, if you really need to respond to an email right now, just leave it in draft, come back to it tomorrow. I promise you you're gonna feel differently about
Steve / Agency Outsight (30:08.652)
Yeah, I love that. This last one is indicative that the robots are listening. So when did you realize you had to productize or systematize part of your agency and what shift did that can you did? And I mean, you've already talked through that, but if there's a way to sum that up.
Shawn Johnston (30:21.998)
I did. Yeah, the key, the first time was when I had, we had a bonfire of a project at the time when custom mint locked in. And I had a two team marketing group, in-house marketing team, two ladies, and they were just beside themselves with this.
We spent 30 grand on a website and you're telling me I can't do whatever I want. I can do whatever I want on this Squarespace site. And I was like, what the hell is Squarespace? It was in that moment. I was like, something is changing out there and I need to understand so that we don't get lost in this. that's when I knew that custom had to mean more flexible, not less flexible.
Steve / Agency Outsight (31:10.606)
and they can coexist and you've proven that. So I love that, yeah.
Shawn Johnston (31:13.336)
They're not mutually exclusive, that's right. Any well-structured system can scale to anything. And that, we've used Refoundery to build 15-page websites and 50,000 post-Bohemoths. Any system can scale if it's built for that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (31:32.418)
Sean, appreciate you joining us sharing your trials, tribulations, successes, challenges, things that you overcome. Folks, again, check out Smith and Forge, check out RefractFreeFoundry.io, reach out to Sean and book a demo. So thank you for joining me,
Shawn Johnston (31:47.616)
Excellent. Thanks, Steve.