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

Scott, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s talk about keeping costs under control when growing. How have you managed to keep costs from getting out of control?

I am, sometimes to a fault, always seeking to eliminate middleman functions in our businesses. The benefit of having an in house programmer, is if you or your client pay too much for a service or utility, you can just create it.

In our earlier years at W2 Marketing, I had to red flag myself, considering whether my time becoming more valuable, or if my inherent need to save overhead, could impact the quality of what we produced. Also, if I cant cut out the middle man while executing on the best part of myself, I’ll call red flag.

The opportunity of being new and small (aka slow) allowed me to accomplishing this by investing my time into my knowledge.

Practicing code, reading docs, practicing code, reading docs, and breaking everything I coded made me an ace. Its important to understand that my time was what led to this explosion of growth while I launched headfirst into my new vocation. To enjoy solving problems was all it took to remain dedicated.

There’s a myriad of actions we an take to outpace the costs associated with our growth. Automation is what I can do now with our businesses and our clients. it solves the volatility problem in turnover. Hire for what we believe our expressive abilities as humans can contribute to our missions and leave the grunt work to the machines.

We are creators using our skill in design or background in our specific arts. This is where I want to reinvest in my company. The creators.

In 5 plus years, data storage will become a growing concern for me, internally, for our clients, and on the open web. AR, VR, and 8K video are already a challenge for everyone that wants to compete in marketing and advertising. That technology doesn’t come cheap in storage, or bandwidth.

I’ll need to re-immerse myself in networking development to prevent our growth dollars from being consumed by hosting and cloud companies. Hopefully this time I have more than myself. I’d have a working budget.

Hosting, Networking, and Data warehousing solves my scaling problem while literally competing with “J-bez” out of my home office. Knock knock my imposter syndrome at the door.

Did he just tell us to “Buy AWS services until you become AWS yourself”? Yes, I did, simple right?

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.

25+ years in restaurants and retired during lock down at 39. What a great way to make money as a youth bussing to cooking to bartending and have an outlet to make a salary as a GM and ultimately an Area Director in several US markets, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Denver. I didnt love it on the way out. I loved the hourly experience. I was eroded in the salary experience. High demand, bosses’ reviews, unnoticed vigilance, spiteful competitive coworkers. Ultimately, my need for my time outgrew my desire for ladders.

The opportunity led to taking a risk, but were also lucky in how well positioned we were when covid forced me to pause . We had already bought a home from our dedication to the grinding lifestyle. We knew Wix, we knew WordPress, I was basic in HTML, CSS, and had some experience with using Apache to host websites. The final years of my middle management restaurant career I was developing company training programs in the cloud, but using WYSIWYG editors. It worked, but my limited scripting abilities were definitely a wall in web development. This also was a lucky fire lit inside me on the way out.

Covid winter:

We created W2 Marketing LLC. The demand for services quickly got me off lock down unemployment. My wife was developing our workflow on the fly while I would spend nights and weekends coding and learning javascript, and co-oped responsibility homeschooling our daughter with a neighboring family’s daughter. I handled billing, accounting, operations, and closed on some basic web projects within my abilities.

I was able to level up our productivity. I used my newly acquired skill of Node JS and MongoDB’s API to automate my own billing and invoicing with a fully functioning admin panel and client dashboard. This released me from billing, invoicing, and emailing clients, and pushed me fully into Web Dev for W2.

I made a goal in 2022 to use my experience of full stack development to invoice for 20% of our companies gross revenue. I had accomplished it through the demand for business solutions. Before I knew it, I was creating web applications for multiple companies, getting to execute my vision, hardening my security measures, upgrading, and maintaining my developments.

Today, I solve problems for our clients and can say, “Yes I can do that, whats the question?”.

I value the lifestyle and location we chose to settle in. We get to walk our daughter to school daily. We get to make our own schedule, and choose to take on new clients.

I think we all know that we were not meant to drag our hours through a place called work. We, as workers, hold our skills and talents in the highest regard, and our time had very little relationship in what we produced, we were all just forced to be there, at work. Candace and I created W2 to become the change we want for ourselves and every laborer in this world.

Create! Start something! Anything! Now!

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

We were absolutely overextended when we bought this home. If I had remained a salary employee after lockdowns lifted we may not have kept up with the out of control costs we see in 2024.

We needed to host airbnb’s just to rent out an attached apartment on our home. We purchased in a location that was central to our city hospital, the university, and downtown. and accidentally stumbled into having a pretty high demand rental.

Ultimately, we did not fully like this scenario. It was to meet ends. After making a goal to increase my share of our young company’s revenue, We chose to pivoting away from rentals completely. I moved into the apartment and began utilizing it as my primary office. This leap required more risk. I extended more and more credit, while I built my esteem up into being a legit partner in my own company running my own leading edge tech.

As someone who was once a novice in tech, Its hard to see your marketability. As you gain your confidence, you learn how valuable of a skill set you have obtained. It helped my confidence in letting go of a 3rd party controlling our income.

Short of taking $10k in credit limits, Our company was almost completely self financed. This maneuver we needed faith in our business, but this action also boosted our intents to a higher level.

I feel we are lucky in a lot of ways. but we needed to make a change, we made it. there was always something that made us feel like it was the right decision. If that feeling wasn’t present, there was ZERO red tape to pivot.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

10/10 our clients. We consult and advise to advertise your buiness, but never ourselves have advertised or even needed to market ourselves.

Culturally, we enjoy removing the smoke and mirrors, revealing to our clients of how the internet works. We don’t claim easy things hard, and we make our clients very happy by actually following through and maintaining our company to provide a beneficial service. Consistency is key in client retention, and so is marketing. Be Consistent!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.w2marketing.biz
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/w2marketing
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/W2MarketingBiz

Image Credits
Scott Wallace ~ DubSquaredMedia & W2 Marketing LLC