We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Zach Sean. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Zach below.

Hi Zach, thanks for joining us today. Talk to us about building a team – did you hire quickly, how’d you recruit the first few team members? Any interesting lessons?

When we started Avengr, it was truly just the two of us – my partner Drew & I. We handled everything, from the admin work (setting up the business, taxes, etc) to the sales process (networking events, cold emails & DMs), to the nose-to-the-grindstone of actually doing the work.

As a creative “agency” (a bit of imposter syndrome at the time being only two of us), we specialized in photo/video content and web design. We had our own lanes, where I handled the majority of web design projects, and Drew handled the majority of photography and video work, but we collaborated a lot. There’s a lot of crossover in what we do, and our brains work differently which gives us a lot of perspective.

It took maybe 5 or 6 months of working like this and business picking up to realize that we couldn’t scale this way – just the two of us. Drew especially was spending a lot of time editing videos for clients, and while he had gotten pretty efficient, we knew it was time to start building our team. So, our first hire was a video editor.

This hire was a gamechanger. We got incredibly lucky with our first video editor – he was already very skilled, but more importantly, extremely committed and driven. He really set the stage for what a new hire could look like that also spoiled us a little bit for future hires. He’s still with us to this day, about a year and a half later.

Hiring our first video editor freed up hours from our day. The amount of relief that this provided once trained can’t be understated.

From there, we went on to cycle through a handful of additional video editors, hired on secondary videographers, and also have a team of 2 social media managers, 2 website designers, 2 developers, an outbound sales manager, and a rendering artist.

We’ve learned a lot about hiring, management, and delegation over the last couple of years.

The hiring process can take many forms. We’ve found amazing team members through contractor placement services, LinkedIn job posts, and even reaching out to people who have worked for companies we admire.

Going through resumes, we’ve learned to be very efficient. It’s important to remember that these are people and deserve a chance, but you start to develop a sense for red and yellow flags that become apparent pretty quickly. A quick tip I’ve learned for hiring anyone in a creative role is that the resume doesn’t have to be fancy & aesthetic, but if they clearly put effort and thought into the visual component and it looks bad – move on. I’d rather look through a cookie-cutter resume than one that didn’t hit the mark.

During the interview process, we look for a handful of things. There are some things that depend on the role, but the core principles to us are finding people who are driven, do what they say they can do, and are highly trainable. We’re not always looking for someone who’s already the best of what they do, but we are ALWAYS looking for someone we believe can get there.

If I was started again today, I’d be a lot less precious about waiting to hire. When I first started, I thought we didn’t have the money, or it was out of our reach, but with contractors/freelancers and a million different sites out there, it’s more accessible than you think. The contradiction is that I do believe it’s valuable to work in a role before delegating it so you fully understand what it takes, and how to set expectations. But don’t be so precious about every part of the process – learn to trust others to take what you’ve built and run with it.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m Zach Sean, and I started Avengr in early 2022 with my business partner and one of my closest friends, Drew Watson. We create websites and video content for small to midsize businesses and creators.

My story, while fortunately not filled with a lot of tragedy or particular hardship, still spans back a bit. My first toe dip into web design was actually with MySpace back around 2007. I would spend an unfortunate amount of time playing with the HTML, embedding widgets, creating themes, you name it. Once MySpace had run its course, I switched to other platforms to scratch my creative itch – builders like Blogger/Blogspot and Weebly. I loved building these “websites” and starting blogs, even if I didn’t have anything to write about.

I also had an early obsession with social media. Not from the perspective of wanting to be an “influencer” (even though that idea didn’t even really exist yet), but the psychology behind social media, the tech behind the platforms, all of these things fascinated me. I was an early adopter of Facebook, an early adopter of Twitter (although I didn’t truly recognize the value of that platform for me until much later), and I couldn’t name the dozens of other platforms I used that no longer exist.

Throughout school, I was in and out of different bands. The way my brain works, presentation matters – a lot. I became the guy in these bands that was building the website, setting up the social media accounts, creating the logos, designing the t-shirts and album covers. I wasn’t particularly good at it at that point, but everyone starts somewhere.

Eventually, when it came time to go to university, I knew exactly what I wanted to do. As it turns out, Marketing is not nearly as creative of a degree as I thought it was going to be (I guess Communications would have made more sense in hindsight), however I learned a lot about the analytical and business side of the things I did. Not just how to do something, but why, and how it fit into the bigger picture of business.

Instead, after I got out of class for the day, if I wasn’t working at my restaurant or retail job, I was building. If I had a business idea, I would start building it. “What would it look like if I built an online radio station?”, “What if I started an agency?”, “What if I built a rehearsal studio?”. For that last one, I went so far as to tour properties despite having less than no money or credit. I even got a paid booking on the website I had built out for this business idea, which I promptly refunded with a note clarifying that it doesn’t actually exist.

I got my first marketing job during my senior year of university. It involved some website management, social media management, designing print materials like flyers – all the fun stuff. It was short lived, but I moved back to the Nashville-area after graduation and started freelancing.

I landed my first “real” client that summer, off of a Craigslist post of all places. The gig was to design a logo and website for a new tiny home community development. This is where I ended up meeting Drew, who was brought in as a stand-in Director of Marketing for the development. That job led to a handful of freelance opportunities, and soon enough I was extremely full-time working as a freelance designer.

Over the course of the next couple of years, I was offered a Director of Marketing position with the tiny home community developer. From the ground floor, I helped take it from a sparkle in the owner’s eye to 3 fully-sold out communities (~300 lots + tiny homes), a rental management company that did millions of dollars per year in revenue, and a handful of other ventures.

At the beginning of 2022, it was time to make a change. Drew and I had been working on a handful of freelance projects over the years, but we were busy. When he learned I was planning to leave my company, we decided that it was finally time to do this for ourselves. In February 2022, Avengr was officially born at 9lbs 8oz.

With my background as a Director of Marketing that specialized in websites and design, and his background as a Director of Marketing that specialized in photography and video, it just made a lot of sense to us. We’d worked on a ton of projects together where he’d have a photo client that needed a website, or I’d have a website client that needed video for the website. The synergy was there.

The effort was pretty quickly rewarded. We landed our first client, then a couple more, then a couple more. The business fluctuates a lot, as any business does – every time we decide to focus on a core area of our business, the other one starts to outperform and our focus has to shift a bit. We’ve since introduced additional services including social media management to add value to our clients who simply don’t have the time or expertise to devote to getting their content and brand out there to their customers.

Since day one, we’ve prided ourselves on providing value to our clients and going above and beyond. We always under promise and over deliver. With most companies, the packages you see on their website are the high end of the possibilities. For us – that’s the bare minimum.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

By far, one of the hardest things I’ve had to unlearn is perfectionism. “Perfection is the enemy of progress” – often attributed to Winston Churchill, is something I wholeheartedly believe and have to remind myself constantly.

It’s tough for someone like me to look past the possible perception of putting something out that could be better. But the truth is, especially in the creative field, we can always keep working on something. That song can be a little tighter, that mix can be a little more refined, that painting can be bolder, that blog post can be more informative.

But we have to learn when it’s okay to say “it’s good enough”. If we get caught up in the minutia of making something 0.1% better, we’re never going to launch or publish or release anything. That’s as bad as doing nothing at all.

My journey has been one of me learning when I’ve done “enough”. I can’t forever keep working on a website or logo because it’s not perfect. Perfect never comes. The curve of effort required to something becoming better is an exponential one.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

My personal mission is to build things that positively impact others. I am solution-driven, but I’m also driven by expression.

I don’t consider myself as much of a storyteller, which is typically a prerequisite in sales, music, art, etc. but I am obsessed with expression. It’s the reason I’ve been drawn to creating music & singing, as well as design and content creation.

But it wasn’t until later that I realized that a lot of what I am passionate involves building – processes, businesses, websites. I love taking building blocks and putting them together in unique ways to express something or make something impactful.

My goal isn’t to make money in the sense that I’m trying to get rich or something – beyond being able to live comfortably and provide for my family, it’s really not a driver for me. However, it’s a necessary thing to build the things I want to build.

My ultimate goal in business is to have the financial freedom that I can build businesses without concern for paying myself – instead, being able to redirect those additional profits directly to my team who benefit more from it.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.avengr.co/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/probablyzachsean/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachsean/