an entire rootless journey with powerful insights
For many years, Lysa has worked in the capacities of a web designer, project manager, SEO guru, marketer, and social media maven, and feels like it’s now her time to focus on growing her own business at a higher level.
Lysa participates in many roles in her company but mostly strategy, sales, and operations. Lysa oversees all client accounts and actively participates from a high level to ensure the customer’s success. When it comes to the future and growth of a business, Lysa thinks ten steps ahead and has her clients’ strategy planned for the next few years. Her motto is: It always begins with your website.”
Ladybugz Interactive Agency offers services above and beyond web design. From branding and design, SEO, and social media marketing to custom WordPress responsive websites and eCommerce stores, Ladybugz Interactive is a full-service web and digital agency that can help your business strategize and succeed. The agency focuses on web design and digital marketing services mainly for B2B industries such as biotech, non-profit, education, construction, professional services, and manufacturing.
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Unlocking the future of innovation! Rootless Blueprints revolutionizes the way industries evolve, condensing a wealth of research and knowledge into a single paradigm-shifting package. With a comprehensive collection of insights, strategies, and blueprints meticulously curated for a specific industry, this groundbreaking resource provides unparalleled guidance, empowering businesses to navigate uncharted territories with confidence. Say goodbye to countless hours of scattered research and welcome a new era of streamlined growth.
I think rootless means having an idea that doesn’t really stem from anything, not necessarily rootless as not being a rooted person or anything, but having an idea that isn’t really something you were rooted towards in the beginning. I think that a lot of entrepreneurs have that rootless feeling about something they do want to start just stems from something, but it’s not maybe what they were trying to do, it’s not what they planned to do. So I guess that’s kind of how I feel about ‘rootless’. – Lysa Miller
My story begins in a small town in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. I’m Canadian. I came here in my mid-twenties for an opportunity to work for a small agency during the .com boom. So I went to work for a small agency in Portland, Maine, and I literally learned everything under the sun from selling all kinds of Internet connectivity to services and servers and firewalls. I also got to work on some of the very first big e-commerce projects and brands that never took off because it was too early. So, that was really cool. And from there I went to work at CBS Interactive and I was a UI UX designer there and that was fun. But then when I decided to have kids, corporate got really tight about 1099s because that was the gig economy back then. Everybody was doing what we’re doing now, basically. So, a lot of those big companies cut out those jobs and you either had to work for them or they could only keep you on for so long. So, they committed to keeping me up for a year after and then I had built up enough of a business to start Ladybugz. So, my previous agency had gotten bought, so I took some of those clients with me since they weren’t big enough for the company that bought them. So, I did have a book of clients, and so I just continued to grow Ladybugz as I had kids. Then, about seven years ago, I got the company to start to really grow and started to double every year. Then, I merged with another agency because I thought that’s what I should do when I got to a certain point. That was a great experience in terms of learning business things and learning different things about different people and the types of people I wanted to work with, the types of clients I wanted to work with.Then, during COVID, I decided that I wanted to be my own boss again and build my own agency based on a lot of the stuff that I originally started out with, but adapt it as a hybrid model of that and understanding people’s needs for very flexible work environments and then also giving more opportunity to more people to work on big projects and do cool stuff together. So yeah, that’s basically my long journey of 50 full years. – Lysa Miller
Yeah, it was definitely scary because I was young. I was probably only 30 or not 30 yet. Earlier you and I talked about how specifically millennials and even the Zillenials don’t have the same needs as Gen Xers who are home with kids or with parents or whatever. We want to be at home, whereas these younger people don’t want to be at home. So I also didn’t really want to be at home when I went out on my own. So I think I had the fear that I would be home all day. I lived in the country, so that was probably one of the hardest things I had to overcome. Also, it was because I am really an extrovert and I used to love being with people. Covid has changed that a little bit, but I think that was part of it. Money was never really a huge fear for me. The work’s always been there. What I think that allowed me to do is if I wanted to make more money at certain times or if I was less busy with my kids, I would be able to scale up and scale down many times during that freelance time, because that lasted for about ten years until I took Ladybugz to the next level and start hiring people, etc. – Lysa Miller
So there’s a fine line between knowing your worth and thinking you’re worth more than you’re worth. I kind of see that on both sides. I’ve seen younger entrepreneurs think they’re worth what they’re not worth and I’ve seen people with lots of experience that don’t think they’re worth what they’re really worth. I built my new agency on that. I built my agency on paying people what they’re worth, not how much I want to make from their services, not from what I think they’re worth. Our model allows them to define what they’re worth and we built that into the pricing. So, you know, the current agency I have now, I call it Ladybugz 2.0, is really an interesting hybrid kind of cooperative model. It’s a model made for COVID and beyond. – Lysa Miller
Yeah, so this is something I talk about a lot when people ask me “How do you find new clients” or “how do you recommend freelancers find clients?” I think you find clients by doing great work. So focus on doing that, doing work you really love and the clients will follow. I know that’s easy for me to say, but people do refer people based on experience and trust, and it just takes one person to tell one person to tell one person. That might be slow going in the beginning so if you want to add other things into it, you can do that. Other marketing things, whatever your expertise is, you can use that. If you’re a marketer, obviously you can use that but if you were a painter or something like that, you could use more social media or join networking groups or referral groups. There’s lots of ways to grow outside of being great at what you are but really the foundation is being really great at what you do, love doing it and I think that’s the secret sauce to having a really great business. – Lysa Miller
So, I know a lot of people say to jump in without a plan but looking back, I think that having a plan can make you a lot more successful, a lot faster. So the first time, when I grew my agency, it just grew out of naturally doing what we did, marketing and social media. However, this time we were able to actually figure out how we wanted to grow, what that was going to look like, how we were going to build profit into the agency, and what our goals were financially. So, we set the business up to do that right from the beginning. So, I think planning and figuring out, knowing how much profit you want to make, for example, and how you get there and the type of clients you want, how do you position towards those clients. You can’t come into an industry and claim to want to work with big brand clients and have no experience because that’s just not realistic. However, you can work your way up there, you can start to work with small clients and then you can maybe get a little bit of a bigger client and a bigger client and work your way up there and position yourself. That takes time and work. Another other thing is that if you want to do bigger projects, you do need a team. It’s hard to have an agency and hire a team and do projects. So, you kind of have to work towards that where you have enough of a budget that you can hire people in and have them do projects where you can do it how I’m doing it. I have the kind of a cooperative model where I bring people in; they might be freelancers or they might work for me exclusively on a W2. It doesn’t really matter, but we come into the project and we price it together so that it meets all the goals of the company that we want it to meet. The number one goal is making it affordable for the client, making it profitable for the company, and making it worth the employees time and money to do that job. So those are all the things that I considered at this moment that have made me grow a lot faster than the first time and even the second time. – Lysa Miller
I think it’s about the quality of the projects that you produce and making sure a quality assurance is done, making sure everything’s really technically sound. The more you can make the client happy, the happier the client is, the more credible you are. So you don’t have to do the best, most beautiful website on the planet. I mean, that depends on the company and the budget and all that kind of stuff but what you really want to do is give people a really great experience and meet the expectations or exceed the expectations that they had going into the project. So I think that’s the best way to build credibility. – Lysa Miller
We’re not branding experts, but we brand-build. That doesn’t mean we build the brand itself, but we build the brand once the brand is already out there. So coming in and helping somebody with their messaging and their brand and do a bunch of research is probably not really in our wheelhouse. We’re coming in to clients that already have a brand. They might be looking to update the brand or up level the brand and that’s where we can help. In a lot of those cases where it’s about work we don’t do, we’ll bring in another agency partner to really do a great job at that. So just building on the brand in general, there’s just lots of different ways to do that. So, we really take a multifaceted approach in how we do marketing. A lot of clients might just want Google ads or social media or just content or just video. We try to look at what is the best way to get this client’s brand leveled up and it’s all related to their goals. So, it’s about defining what their goals are and how we can meet those goals and coming up with a multifaceted plan that really gives them growth. – Lysa Miller
When I chose my team, I had to know I could hand things off to them and I didn’t really need to be involved as much in the company. I have spent the last year building the company and a lot of that has been trying whether something works or not, whether it is vertical. So it’s been kind of an agile process. We do an agile process for our clients, but we also do an agile process for ourselves, in everything we do. So we’ll start something, launch it, go back, fix it. We use a lot of iterative type management style where we’ll try a little bit of something, measure that and see what it looks like. What we do for our clients, we do for ourselves first. In terms of marketing, whatever we do for clients, we do for ourselves first because we want to make sure that it works. Secondly, I spend a lot of time working on the business, making those decisions on who are the clients we want to target? How do we target them? What’s our mission? How do we meet our mission? Even just in terms of how we service our clients, we have a mission internally to work with 30 to 35% of women and minority led and owned businesses. We also have another mission of wanting to work with a percentage of local businesses to help people who wouldn’t really get agency level services in the price range that we’re able to offer them at. For example, we work with a moving company that’s been with us for a long time, but she wouldn’t be able to go to a bigger agency and get what she gets with us. She’s getting a really high quality service at the price tag that we’ve been able to offer. So we’re not really trying to undercut any other agencies. That’s definitely not what we’re trying to do but what we’re trying to do is service a market that has a certain affordable budget, meet their needs within that budget and operate as a lean company which is able to do that and still be profitable, still pay people well, still gives people flexibility and all that good stuff. So that’s what that’s what we’re doing for ourselves. – Lysa Miller
We don’t go after big clients, that’s not our market. So, we’re not looking for enterprise clients. We might have a few to support, they might be enterprise wise, but they might have an early growth mentality where they really want to be doing a lot of cool marketing etc., but for the most part, we have a niche of early growth companies and that it’s not really always a price tag. It’s about where they are in their journey of growing as a business. We like that and that’s what excites us. I’ve always been told I’m an early growth person, that I’m scared of getting too big or whatever. It’s not really true. I just really enjoy being part of that whole process and watching a company go from doing really great to doing amazing and knowing that we help bring them there because at some level, they start doing so well that it doesn’t really matter what you do, it’s already kind of going. So, being a part of that transition, of going from growing to being in stealth mode is super fun and I think my team really likes that too. – Lysa Miller
So it’s not that I don’t want to hire junior people, it’s just that we’re small, so we can’t really afford to put resources towards that right now. Maybe, eventually we’ll get there. Basically we have experts, so there’s not a lot of management around them and what they do and a lot of them have been either freelancers for agencies or for themselves for many years. So, for them, I think the biggest draw was obviously the addition we did to their income because they had freelance businesses and over COVID that dried up a lot. So, we were able to give them projects when things were tough and I think that they appreciate that. I believe that created a lot of loyalty right there. I think the second reason is the amount of autonomy that we give people like allowing them to run projects, to make executive decisions and me being okay with what they decide even though I might not agree with them but that doesn’t matter because I don’t know best. I might have made the wrong decision too. I’m the business owner, but I’m not the expert at everything that they do. Consequently, I think that giving a lot of autonomy, giving that financial reward that they can control works. I also think that the way we use the agile process, keeping all the team members involved in the project the whole time is essential. In that way, they’re always learning. Every time we do a project, everybody learns something new and that’s not like watching a video on LinkedIn; this is real live agile learning. Again, I didn’t really know anything about agile before I started doing it and we mostly use it for software development, but it’s kind of a philosophy that we’ve implemented into discovery, design, development, where it all kind of happens at the same time. So, you kind of complete pieces of the project and then you go back and you can fix it. It actually allows you to make a mistake and that’s okay because everything’s built for you to be able to go back and do that. So, I think the learning process for me has been amazing. Some of my team members have never gotten to do this before and think it is awesome and love it. Another thing I love about the agile process is that the client is involved in the process the whole time. I’m not saying they’re not involved in projects but because it’s such an integrated process with the team, they feel like they’re part of the team. I think at the end of the process they feel like they did the work. I don’t care that they feel like that. I want them to feel like that is their baby, they worked with my team and they put their baby out there. I suppose that that’s really important to clients. I want to say that I feel like that’s probably one thing that I’ve seen really different compared to when I had my agency the first time. I mean, people loved both agencies I worked at, but this feels a little bit different for some reason. it feels like we’re a family; not that you want to get too close with your clients and I don’t mean that in a personal way, but I feel like they work with us. We just had a client write that in a review. She wrote that we are literally an extension of her team and we are a team. That’s kind of a cool feeling, especially if you’re a lone marketer or you’re alone in the marketing department or you only have one person. The cool part is that when you do a great job, they’ll go to their boss and say that they just launched a new website in four weeks. Boss is impressed because that’s pretty awesome. They don’t have to say that the agency did it; they say they did it and that’s incredible. That’s what you want people to feel like. – Lysa Miller
I think that most of the relationships I’ve built have been through trust. I might have met people networking and stuff like that, but I think they are more built through actually putting effort into those relationships. You can go to a networking event and get someone’s card and like never talk to them again. However, I think I’ve always gravitated to people in general and I’ve always been able to kind of always be the life of the party and keep that going. Even at my last agency, I would always have these parties and invite our clients and our partners and others. So I’m a community builder, I guess, just by nature. I put importance on building a community because I feel like for me, not only did I make relationships with those people, but I helped them make relationships with each other. So, instead of having a direct relationship with people networking, I created a web of people who are all interconnected, which makes it feel like I’m always connected with them. Does that make sense? I have this friend, Morgan Latimore, and I introduced him to this other friend of mine and then they started working together and then I introduced him to my designer Frank. In that way, I created a circle of networking so that I’m not always the person networking but when he’s networking with those other people or working with them, it still kind of comes back to the relationship that I built with him. That is just an example because I just had Morgan’s name out there because he’s awesome and he’s a coach on this platform. – Lysa Miller
I think one of the things you can’t do is have preconceived ideas. I believe if you’re passionate about an idea and you have a vision about it and it’s something that you want to pursue, you can’t you can’t let other people change that idea. You have to align with people that are really into that idea. It can happen that people’s ideas change and that’s all fine but you really have to go where your passion is. I hear you talk about this a lot Greta on podcasts. I’m sure when you started business you were probably discouraged a lot of the time but you stuck to your mission and your vision and it took a while. So, you need to be patient but you also have to trust yourself. You can’t have any preconceived ideas because it kind of stops that chain of where you can go. You can go anywhere you want to go. I mean, look at all the people out there right now who never worked before and or took a coaching course and have become top coaches. Think of all those people that never even imagined they could be where they are right now. So, you have to have unlimiting beliefs about yourself and what you can do and you can’t let those outside voices label you or define you. I don’t know if that makes sense but I have ADHD and I proudly have ADHD. I might drive a lot of people crazy, but other people also thrive off that because they can’t do that. They can’t multitask or think or have ideas and my whole life I’ve been labeled as lazy, unorganized and unfocused. All those ideas that people have told me my whole life, I believed those about myself. I really did. Sometimes I still believe it because I’m not organized. Honestly, I’m probably ten times busier than most people. I’m a single mom, I have a business. I drive my kids everywhere. A lot of ADHD people are like that because they tend to overtake too many tasks. It’s not that they’re not organized. They can’t humanly do what they take on. That is the biggest misconception of ADHD. However, when they are focused, they can do more than most people. You can read all kinds of books about it or go into coaching groups about it. They call it “The gift of ADHD”. I think people with ADHD can pivot and not get sucked into one thing and only do that one thing. They tend to be more risk takers and risk doesn’t seem to affect them as much as somebody else who can’t handle risk. So, there’s definitely benefits to that. However, the labeling part, especially your whole life, is very difficult. I tell people all the time to not label me or put their opinion or value on me. Just don’t have an opinion because that just puts it out in the universe and it’s not a good thing for anybody. You need everyone to believe in you. You need to surround yourself with people who have unlimited beliefs. I’m not saying that unlimited belief has to do with you going to be a rocket scientist in light of the moon. Nonetheless, if you look at somebody like Elon Musk, so many people must have told him he was crazy his whole life and he’s a zillionaire right now. So, think about that and don’t ever limit anybody about who they are or what they can do. The limitations you put on other people are really the limitations you have about yourself, and that is something. Don’t let people do that to you. – Lysa Miller
I think that one of the wrong decisions I still make a lot is choosing the wrong clients because I want to help people. I argue a lot with my operations sales operations director about stuff like that because she’ll say I’m undervaluing the service or being too nice about that. So, you have to be careful about being too nice and also respect yourself and watch out for people who will take advantage of you. If you have a contract with them, they’ll try to get you to go back on it. I’ve definitely chosen some clients over the years that have not always been the best clients. I’ve never really had anybody who’s been a total nightmare, but I’ve learned to be very mindful about who to work with in terms of clients and in terms of my team. I’ve also had people come work with me, learn everything from me, and then go somewhere else and that’s fine. It’s just this time around, with this agency, I don’t have time to deal with that. I’m supporting all my contractors’ outside businesses, plus having them be in Ladybugz and that’s what they want. They’re not really coming in and saying they want to learn all your secrets and then go elsewhere. Again, people do that all the time but I think I want to be a little careful with that now, because we are so unique about how we do things and that makes me a little bit more cautious about how I talk about how we do things. I have a lot of ideas and I’m not scared to try different things, I’m not scared to say that I’ve failed sometimes even this year with this agency. Nonetheless, I think that you just need to be mindful of who you’re around and make sure that they have your best interest in mind. Our customer success manager always says to our clients all the time that it’s her job to make sure you’re happy and her team is happy, because that’s the job and it’s true. So you just have to surround yourself with really great, trustworthy people. – Lysa Miller
I’ve heard you talk about this Greta. So, what is success? I mean, honestly, success is just being happy. So do I wake up every day happy? Yeah. Do I wake up every day loving my job? Yeah. Do I wake up everyday wanting other things ,new things? Yeah. But in general, if you’re happy, you’re happy, and it doesn’t really matter what that looks like. – Lysa Miller
There are people that you love that will not always believe in you. There are people that you love that will not always take your side, say that you’re the problem and not defend you and that makes it really hard since they’re people that love you. Entrepreneurs are unique, they have a unique brain and have a lot to offer. People can love you all they want, but they don’t always get your brain. So, that is the really hardest part of being an entrepreneur. What you need to do is surround yourself with entrepreneurs that you can talk about that stuff about. For example, I can’t talk to my boyfriend about work because he goes to work, he comes home and that’s it. My work excites me and I could talk about it all day long. So, I can’t do that with him because he just doesn’t really get that. However, I can do that with my friends, with entrepreneurs at networking events. I have a group of people I can do that with. So, you just need to know your audience in terms of who you’re talking to and why. You also don’t want to come off as being braggy or only caring about your business and stuff like that. So, if you’re talking about your business all the time and you’re a parent, if you have four kids and never talk about your kids that could seem problematic. So, you just have to know your audience. – Lysa Miller
I think the greatest achievement was the fact that at 50 years old I could pick myself up and do it again because I don’t think I really wanted to. I kind of went down that road once and twice, and I just didn’t really know that I had it in me. So, I think my greatest accomplishment was being able to get myself out of that mindset and believe I can do this. It took some coaching and it just took one person to really believe in me and instill my confidence again in my work because I hadn’t been doing client work for so long. So, that is a big achievement. Physically, the coolest thing I did was being on the cover of the Boston Business Journal last year, the annual book List and they had two or three pages with my picture, etc. As an accomplishment, that was cool too. So, I’d say those were my two big highlights in my 50th year. – Lysa Miller
No. – Lysa Miller
I’m just a really great company working with really great brands across the country. You’ll be just seeing us everywhere. – Lysa Miller
I think one of the biggest things that helped me in my whole journey of kind of getting back to myself again was to do some self-discovery. I found a lot of that through meditation and really getting in touch with myself and my power. If you’re going to do this journey, you should really, really be in touch with yourself and be able to really take some time to connect with quietness and stillness and let your mind kind of manifest whatever it is you want because honestly, in the end, we’re not really in control. I find that the more I think about things, the more I meditate, I feel like I don’t even have goals really sometimes but I think about things so much and meditate on them that they seem to just come to fruition. I just think that’s the power of positivity; when you believe things are going to happen, they’ll happen. So, it might sound hokey, but it definitely works. – Lysa Miller
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Experience a world of limitless knowledge, entertainment, and growth. With its vast array of captivating content, including interviews, podcasts, research, and industry-specific courses, you’ll gain valuable insights, stay informed, and fuel your personal and professional development. Don’t wait another moment to embark on this transformative journey—unlock the power of the Rootless App and seize the opportunities that await you!
Unlock a world of captivating interviews, thought-provoking podcasts, groundbreaking research, and so much more with the power of the Rootless App! Don’t miss out on this golden opportunity to access a world of knowledge and inspiration at your fingertips. Get the Rootless App for free now and elevate your knowledge to new heights.
Discover the gateway to entrepreneurial success with the Rootless App’s exceptional courses, led by the renowned Rootless Experts from every major industry. Gain invaluable insights, strategies, and practical wisdom to excel in your entrepreneurial endeavors. Don’t just dream of success, seize it! Download the Rootless App now for free and unlock a treasure trove of knowledge that will empower you to thrive in the world of entrepreneurship.
Experience a world of limitless knowledge, entertainment, and growth. With its vast array of captivating content, including interviews, podcasts, research, and industry-specific courses, you’ll gain valuable insights, stay informed, and fuel your personal and professional development. Don’t wait another moment to embark on this transformative journey—unlock the power of the Rootless App and seize the opportunities that await you!