She Picked Deck Builders and Went All In

Where She Started

April went to art school planning to be a starving artist. She learned to code websites during the 1999 internet boom, and her first job out of school was building some of the earliest emoticons and avatars for MSN Messenger.

She eventually started her own agency, AE Design Co, and by her own description they were doing everything for everyone. An international pressure calibration manufacturer. A fertility clinic. A paver company. A death metal merchandiser.

Revenue sat around $18,000 to $20,000 a month, and April is careful to point out that it was not really recurring revenue. It was hourly work with no contracts, held together by genuinely good long-term client relationships. Steady, but entirely dependent on her.

She had also hit a wall that will be familiar to anyone who builds things for a living. She was pouring herself into beautiful websites, and then watching them sit there doing nothing.

The Decision

April had joined coaching programs before. One of them was built around productizing an offer and serving clients one-to-many, and she says it was a good system that she simply could not make work, because she was not niched down. Without a niche, none of it applied to her.

So she looked at which clients she had enjoyed most and produced the best results for, and went all in on deck builders. She had exactly one client in the space. She had never worked in the industry.

What she found there was an audience whose problem mirrored her own. Deck builders sell a high-ticket service, and most of them had built a business where revenue depended entirely on their own availability.

How She Got the First Clients

Cold outreach and Facebook ads, and one habit that sounds too small to matter.

April spent her first year trying to understand her audience rather than sell to it. She made a daily task of spending fifteen minutes on social media as Deck Builder Marketers, following deck building companies, looking at their projects and commenting on their work. Deck builders post beautiful work, so there was always something real to respond to. She still does it.

Then she joined the industry association and went to the trade show, without a booth and without a pitch. She went to learn and to meet people. That relationship became one of the biggest drivers in the business, and it is now what Josh has asked her to speak about at the Member Intensive.

April is in the middle of restructuring this again, moving from three programs to phases of growth, and raising prices while adding value. That instinct to keep refining the offer rather than defending it is a large part of why the agency works.

The Part Most Case Studies Leave Out

April volunteered something in this interview that most agency owners would have edited out.

She had just come through what she describes as the toughest quarter the agency has had. There were leaks, there were embarrassments, and there was a lot of hard problem solving. Her response was to hire four new people in the space of two weeks and to tell her team plainly that it was not going to be like this forever, that it was happening for a reason, and that it would make them stronger.

This is what a real agency looks like at seven figures. Not a straight line. A business with enough structure underneath it to absorb a bad quarter and keep going.

Her Advice

The first thing April says she had to do was stop consuming content. She was paralyzed by watching what everyone else was doing and waiting to feel ready.