Olga has built her entire client base online — SEO, templates, Zoom calls with strangers who found her on Google. Wayne gets the majority of his work through local relationships and referrals. Neither of them had really compared notes on this until now.
In this episode Olga asks Wayne to just explain it — how does local networking actually work, how much time does it take, and is it worth it for a web designer who isn't naturally a glad-hander? Wayne breaks down the approach he stumbled into almost by accident: joining a local business association, eventually getting on the board, showing up consistently without ever trying to sell anything, and watching trust accumulate until people are three beers into a happy hour telling him they hate their website.
The core insight is simple but easy to underestimate: in-person trust builds differently than online trust. When someone meets you face to face, knows your personality, has seen you show up month after month with no agenda, the moment they need a website you're already the obvious person. You don't pitch. You don't hand out cards. You just become the website person in the room.
They also talk about where local networking goes wrong — the BNI-style referral groups that feel like speed dating, chambers of commerce so large you could network for years and barely scratch the surface, and the exhaustion of trying to attend every event in town. There's a sweet spot in community size, and Wayne has a pretty specific take on what it is.
In this episode: why Olga finds in-person selling awkward and what's behind it — how Wayne's local strategy started out of loneliness, not a plan — the right community size for meaningful relationship building — how long it actually takes before referrals start coming in — why showing up without an agenda works better than any pitch — business cards and why Wayne still has most of his 250 — BNI and referral groups and why they felt gross — chamber of commerce vs. smaller local business associations — meaningful conversations as a trackable sales metric — and why the moment someone says \"my nephew built my website\" is exactly when you want to already be their friend.
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