Pappalardo Digital is now Flying Leap Studio.

I’ve been waiting to write those words for a long time.

In January of 2016, somehow ten years ago, I filed our articles of organization with the secretary of state and launched what I thought at the time would be… a cute little side project building websites and running some marketing. That next year, by job was eliminated. I like to say that I automated my job away, and while that’s not entirely accurate, it is fun to say. Regardless, about a year after starting this side hustle, I did find myself without a job and decided to make a go of this whole marketing agency entrepreneur thing.

I had gotten some experience at the agency I worked at with setting up and managing HubSpot, which is one of the more popular CRM and automation platforms out there. I decided that I wanted my little baby agency to become a powerhouse HubSpot marketing agency one day. We did pretty well with it for several years (in fact, at one point we were the highest tiered HubSpot agency in the state). In a lot of other ways, I floundered around a bit. I tried unsuccessfully several times to build a team and scale, and I found a lot of opportunities for growth as a leader – which is a gentle way of saying that I was bad at it.

I also learned a lot about myself and about professional boundaries – what types of work do I say yes to, what type of work do I say no to. Gradually, over several years, I found my lane. I learned about myself that I’m a process guy. I don’t love marketing activities, but I love creating the process of marketing. I love the technical setup of a CRM or an automation tool. I love when clients say, “This probably isn’t possible but…”. And then we do it.

I don’t remember the exact date, but I think it was 2021 when we split ways with HubSpot. They’re a great software, but man, they’re expensive. We onboarded clients to them in the late 2010s at $800/mo (which felt expensive then!) and those same clients were now paying $1500 or $2000 per month. It was too much. Around that time, they made some significant changes to their partner program, which made it clear they were prioritizing high volume agencies, which we aren’t and have never been. Never will be, either. After a bunch of tough conversations we left their Partner Program, which was really scary to me because a lot of my identity had been tied up in being a HubSpot guy.

God, 2020 was an awful year, wasn’t it? I was working with about 5 clients, which was about our max at the time. When the world came to a standstill, so did my relationship with every one of them (thanks for coming back!). Personally, I was going through a divorce, so my income was it. I had to make some sort of gamble and quick. There was a development company I had my eye on that was building CRM and automation software that was similar to HubSpot, and they were working with agencies to allow them to roll out their own CRM/automation platform. HubSpot was getting prohibitively expensive for my clients, and it was also limiting the types of clients that we could work with.

They had to be able to afford HubSpot AND still have budget to work with me. The gamble was that we could work with smaller businesses with smaller budgets, make a big impact for them, and create more structure in our buildout process.

I named the software Leadli, and it changed the business.

At the time, it was a reaction to a very weird economic environment. In hindsight, it allowed us to create a service that we could define and then sell the same thing over and over and over. Rather than saying yes to everything and being a jack of all trades, it allowed us to have a fairly narrow path of what we’re doing with a client. That allowed me to start building a team in a way that I had never been able to successfully do. It was around this time that Adam and I started working together. I had some overflow work at the time, and he had a contract fall through, and now he runs his own consulting business and leading all of our Leadli buildouts.

Over the next several years, we pulled together the rest of the team – Sara, who’s a master copywriter and digital strategist, Whitney, who handles our support inbox, and most recently Maddie, our project manager. We have a really great team, they’re smarter and better than I am in all their respective areas, and I’m really proud of everyone and the work we’re doing. As we started looking ahead at the future, a few things became clear.

1) It doesn’t make sense for the company to be my name. As a team, we’re way too collaborative for that. As a client, you probably work closer with Adam or Whitney than you do with me anyway. Plus, my last name is weird and long. And fun.

2) I’ve never liked the name Pappalardo Digital. I got laid off one day, and then next day I was filling out a form and put down Pappalardo Digital with no thought. I’m not proud of it, I don’t use it, and a lot of our clients call us Leadli because that’s the thing they log into every day.

3) Because people associate us, the team of consultants, with Leadli the software, it’s made positioning weird for some of the higher level services that we want to offer. I’ve wanted for a long time to have a service offering that installs a process for marketing and sales in a client’s business. Like I said earlier, I’m not interested so much in marketing activities as much as at a 30k view helping entrepreneurs document and optimize how customers happen in their business. This service wasn’t going to happen until we had a brand for our consultancy that was clearly positioned.

So… Pappalardo Digital is now Flying Leap Studio.

Why Flying Leap Studio?

I really like the name Flying Leap Studio. A flying leap is a leap of faith. You may feel uncertain about the outcome but you’ve weighed the costs and you feel you’re doing the right thing. It’s what happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing. And as a business owner, you’ve had to change, you’ve had to adapt. You’ve made flying leaps. Some have paid off big. Others maybe haven’t. I think the name Flying Leap Studio speaks to the time in most businesses lifecycle when they choose to engage with a firm like ours. They’ve tried to force things to work for long enough and they just can’t do it anymore. It’s time for a flying leap.

What’s not changing.

First of all, if you’re worried that we’re going to jack prices up on you, we’re not. We’re making zero pricing changes for existing clients with this rebrand. This is about us positioning ourselves better, not squeezing our clients for more, more, more. That’s not us.

The team isn’t changing. We’re not adding people or removing people with this change. You can expect the same people, the same high level of service, and the same level of expertise.

What is changing.

There are a bunch of minor changes with this, as well as one medium-major change.

1) Our websites and domains and such will begin reflecting flyingleapstudio.com instead of pappalar.do. Pappalar.do has served us well for 10 years, and it’s time to say goodbye. We’ll create a forwarding rule so that if you email us at our old email addresses, we’ll still get it, but gradually get used to sending to brian@flyingleapstudio.com, support@flyingleapstudio.com, etc.

2) We’re launching a new service called Growth OS. This is a 16 week project where we will work with you to get very clear on:

your positioning (who you serve and how you help them transform)
your messaging (what’s the problem that they’re trying to solve and the new way you have of doing things)
your growth engine (how the heck customers happen)
your scorecard (what metrics do you need to be tracking in your business)
your ideas (and how to decide if an idea is good or not)
your quarterly big 3 (each quarter, what 3 things in your business should you be doing to grow)

This isn’t something I dreamed up in my bedroom, either. Although that would be fun.

This is a licensed program through the team at DigitalMarketer.com, which is responsible for training some of the biggest and best marketing teams in the world (Uber, Shopify, Keap… at one point I think they were training the teams at Google and HubSpot). Ryan, the founder wrote the book Digital Marketing for Dummies back in the day. These people know their shit. What I like about them is that they’re process people. People think of marketing as magic, and they really should think about it as a process.

These marketing and sales processes really come down to one of four categories:

Attract – how do people find out about you.
Convert – how do you get the first sale or meeting
Ascend – how do you increase lifetime value
Systematize – how do you do this whole thing automatically and on repeat

That’s what we’ll help customers set up through the Flying Leap’s Growth OS. We have an assessment that you can take that will grade you in each of these areas. Then if you want, we can have a conversation about your grade and whether you’d be a good fit for the Growth OS.

And that’s the end of that sales pitch.

I want to end by saying thank you. Thank you to the clients over the years. I’ve learned so much working with you all. Thank you for trusting me and us with your challenges and with your businesses. Thank you for listening to all of my wild ideas and maybe even for saying yes to some of them. For those of you that have been there since the beginning, thanks for hanging in there through all the changes.

I want to say thank you to my team. I’m inspired by you, I am proud of you, and I think you all kick so much ass. I know I’m not a perfect leader and it’s not always roses, but there is no other group of people I’d rather be running this thing with. Thank you a thousand times over.

Thank you for 10 years, people. Here’s to 10 more.

Let’s go make shit.