Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Annie Davis. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Annie, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Owning a business isn’t always glamorous and so most business owners we’ve connected with have shared that on tough days they sometimes wonder what it would have been like to have just had a regular job instead of all the responsibility of running a business. Have you ever felt that way?

I can say without a doubt in my mind that I’m much happier as a business owner. I spent the first few years after high school trying out various jobs in various industries. I was fortunate enough to work my way up to earning a solid living at a young age, as well as work alongside some incredible people. However, despite checking many boxes of what I had always pictured success looking like, I distinctly remember sitting in the break room at my job one day and realizing with complete certainty that there was no way I could work a 9-5 job for the rest of my life.

Sitting in that break room in Draper, sipping lukewarm coffee, and having as much of an existential crisis as one can have at 21 years old, I had no idea that the world of small business – let alone entrepreneurship – existed.

It wasn’t until the following year that I happened to start working at a small “mom and pop shop” website development firm as a part time project manager, and through many 80+ hour works weeks and sleepless nights, I worked my way up to the position of CEO. In 2018, I took a chance on myself and decided to start my own firm, Davis Designs, and I’ve never looked back.

The simmering feeling of equal parts uncertainty and excitement that I get as a business owner keeps me engaged and passionate about the work I do. As an adult with ADHD (which is surprisingly common in the world of entrepreneurs), that sense of excitement and constant change is crucial for me – because in my world, nothing crushes my creativity like stagnancy.

Annie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m the founder and CEO of Davis Designs, one of Northern Utah’s leading website development and marketing firms for small businesses. Since 2018, we’ve been fortunate enough to work with hundreds of businesses from coast to cast (although most of our clientele is based here in Utah).

While we refer to ourselves as both a website development “and” marketing firm, website design and development projects make up the majority of our work these days. We have a fantastic team both on shore and overseas, most of who have been with us since day 1. Our strength is providing professional, high quality websites for businesses that have been around for 5 years or less, and have under 25 employees. While we’ve worked with nationwide chains as well as individual freelancers over the years, we’ve found that our niche is undeniably those smaller businesses who are too busy and overwhelmed to build a website on their own, yet aren’t ready to pay $10,000 and up for a solution.

One of the aspects I’m the most proud of is our client referral rate. We stay extremely busy and have been waitlisted for new projects 3 separate times this year alone – and over 90% of our leads are referrals from existing clients. We don’t spend any time or money advertising to attract new clients. Instead, we allocate those resources to going above and beyond for our existing clientele and giving them the best possible experience from day one through the entire project. While that wasn’t an intentional move in the beginning, and it goes against best practices in marketing, it’s worked out well for us in our niche.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Prior to starting Davis Designs, I oversaw operations for another local web development firm. I didn’t have kids at this point in my life, and I made it a point to travel as often as possible since I worked fully remotely. I remember joking with a good friend of mine as our plane took off to Cancun that “things were going too smoothly at work recently” and I just had a gut feeling that it would hit the fan during this trip that I was looking forward to so much. She laughed and said “unless your lead developer calls and quits, I can’t think of anything else that could happen that you couldn’t just hop online and solve.” As we flew to Cancun, I tried to reassure myself that she was right, and I was worrying about nothing.

Fast forward a few days and I was walking on the beach, enjoying a beautiful sunset when my phone rang – and it was my lead developer. When I answered, my heart both swelled and sank – he had been offered an incredible opportunity at a competing firm, with ample room for promotions and a very generous salary. I told him he would be out of his mind to not take the offer, because even through the crushing stress I felt during that moment, I knew he had long ago hit the ceiling of what we could offer him at our firm at the time. I was simultaneously thrilled for him and petrified at what waited for me when I returned to Utah.

Of course, it all ended up working out in the end. That developer helped us find a great replacement, and the whole experience ended up being a great learning opportunity for me. Since then, I’ve always made sure to have a thorough understanding of what everyone on our team does, so when I find myself in a situation where I need to hire for a technical position, it doesn’t feel so foreign to me. Oh, and our lead developer who accepted that offer? We still keep in touch, he’s now a software engineer at a genetics company – and I couldn’t be more proud.

How do you keep in touch with clients and foster brand loyalty?

This is something that I feel we’ve gotten a lot better at over the years. In the beginning, it was natural to stay in touch with my clients because not only was our workload smaller, but I personally interacted with each client and thus formed many long term friendships with them.

As we’ve grown and hired additional team members, we’ve worked really hard to maintain a high level of transparency and communication with our clients, which has kept our client retention rate well over 90%. One of the principles we really stick to is our “no surprise invoicing” policy. We quote our website development projects at a flat rate, and what you see is what you get. In fact, there have been a handful of times that we actually over quoted a project, and when it took less time than we anticipated, we mailed our clients a hand written check for the difference. On the other hand, there have been a few times where we realized down the road we should have charged more, and while we communicated this to our client, we remained committed to our policy.

The money we’ve lost by sticking to our word on this policy has been more than made up for by the hundreds of referrals we’ve received over the years by clients that are eager to spread the word about how great their experience was. All of this has also helped us maintain a perfect 5 star rating on Google since day 1, which wasn’t something we planned on or sought after. We just truly love our clients, and want them to be taken care of!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://daviscreate.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davisdesignsllc/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daviscreate
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/davis-creative-designs
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-F6xzV5Nd5c5Q8DG9LaS-Q
• Yelp: https://yelp.com/biz/davis-designs-sandy