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A Josephine County native for almost 30 years, Christy Kiltz takes us on her journey from moving to the area from Colorado with her husband, to taking a chance and starting her own local web-based business and it’s continued expansion.
If you own a business, chances are you have a web presence.
Join us as Christy shares valuable tips online and why it’s essential to build relationships with your customers, no matter what field you work in.
Checkout Design! by Kiltz – https://designbykiltz.com/
Video’s Christy Mentions In The Podcast by Simon Sinek and Donald Miller below!
Focus on your WHY – Simon Sinek, Start with WHY – https://youtu.be/u4ZoJKF_VuA
Build your Brand Story – Summary of Donald Miller’s StoryBrand book – https://youtu.be/FkCMhhJaSSk
Show Notes
From Colorado To Oregon: How We Ended Up In Josephine County
Why I Started A Local Web-Based Business
What We Help Businesses With
Empowering Business Owners to Accomplish Their Dreams
Christy’s 3 Things You Need For A Successful Website
COVID Impact: In-Person Teamwork & Working From Home
Web Tech & The Value Of Building Relationships
Understanding Solutions & Pain Points of Niche Markets
Expanding Our Team in 2021
What Design! by Kiltz Offers That “The Big Web Hosting Companies” Don’t
Transcription
Christy: Understanding customer service skills and customer skill level. Sadly, many in my profession has led me to the tagline of, anyone can code few can take care of people.
And it’s like a dance. A true partnership dance you’ve got two people out on the dance floor, one’s leading the others following, and depending on the dance, who is leading and who is following switches.
And so that’s where we truly engage in that partnership with people.
Intro: There’s a place in Southern Oregon, filled with gorgeous natural beauty, friendly yet independent people and a mild, comfortable climate.
That place is called Grants Pass.
These are the stories of the people that live and work Josephine County. These are the movers and shakers that make this place of the best.
This is Grants Pass VIP.
Brian: Christy Kiltz is the website designer and owner of Design! by Kiltz.
She provides the full coordination of online services to bring you the best possible solutions for your business. Working with you to develop a successful concept and focus for your website.
Christy takes the goal you create with her and brings it to pass.
Despite her company, she really isn’t a true geek girl. She loves the outdoors, camping, hiking, and water of any kind, and can even survive a weekend without a computer.
In fact, among Christy’s favorite things include getting away into the beautiful mountains of Southern Oregon with her hubby or taking a drive out to the coast.
Christy Kiltz, welcome to Grants Pass VIP.
Christy: Thanks, Brian.
Brian: Yeah, it’s great having you here.
We’ve got a little bit of history, we’ve worked together in the past and I just want everyone to get to know you a little bit better.
Why don’t you let us know about who you are, and a little bit about where people might know you from?
Christy: Where people might know me from, we’ve actually lived here in the Grants Pass area for close to 30 years now, somewhere between 25 and 30 years.
And early on I worked at the YMCA. So I was all things aquatic so lifeguard swim instructor everything else. And the kids that I taught how to swim now are probably in college or close to it.
But that is where some people know me from, but I’ve also been a member of the Grants Pass Chamber since 2004, joined after David Tally, actually, Tally Media Group and with the SBDC invited me to join.
And so the chamber has been my family ever since then.
Simply being a part of the business community in many different ways, served as an ambassador on the membership committee over the years, a long time ago, they actually had a website committee too.
So just being an active part of the community is pretty much where I’ve gotten to know the Grants Pass community and branched out into surrounding communities as well.
Brian: How did you end up in Grants Pass, to begin with?
Christy: I was working a dead-end job in Colorado, I was doing tech support for HP at one of their call centers. And I was trained on every single printer that HP ever made.
My only step up was to become a line supervisor and I didn’t want to do that, because they got the hot calls. And they had to keep everybody else in line.
So between that and then my husband did construction and he is from Portland, Oregon. He simply wanted to you know, we’ve never been back to Oregon since we got married. And so we decided to move to Southern Oregon.
What we originally moved for didn’t really work out. But we stayed and put roots down.
Brian: Oh, wow.
So after going through all that, why here?
Christy: I think we just kind of landed here and haven’t moved, and especially as I built my business, really taking care of the local community. The majority of my customers are from Grants Pass med for the Rogue Valley.
And so because I did so much in person face to face, I never jumped into the big pool of just the nationwide web developer, you know, internet find me online type of thing.
So it was truly working one on one with people direct face to face, everything else and why move because then you have to start over. So it just made sense to stay.
Brian: So with your background and everything else, what led you into this line of work out of all things?
Christy: I kind of actually stumbled into it.
I was looking for a career change back in 99 and I was working with one of the counselors at RCC, and they have a program where an employer can have a student work for them.
You actually pay CWE credit, but you get on-the-job training and the position was for administrative assistant for a web-based company.
So it’s a one-year certificate program, you know, I took the job, I went to school for a year. And of course, I had to learn HTML, there were no wizzy waves, there were no you know, Dreamweaver, there was nothing to make it easy.
We learned how to code took several classes that were specific to the job that I was handling. And the lady that I worked for was an entrepreneur herself.
Within six months of graduating, I was actually taking over webmaster-type duties there. And then she encouraged me to start my own business, as well.
I can’t say that I was one of these young people of, Oh, I want to start and build my empire! It was more or less just stumbling into it and 2003 or 2004, I think is when I took the first marketing class and business plan class and that type of thing. And it’s been growing and learning ever since.
Brian: And for people that don’t know you and your background, and what we’ve already talked about so far, what are the type of things that you come in and help a business out with?
Christy: I’m going to say all things online, you know, truly, from day one, and you’re young enough, you may not remember, but the DOS days before we had windows.
Brian: Oh yeah.
Christy: Okay, you know, either that or you work the head to work on a really old system.
When you think of typing your documents, and at the command line, and you hit the wrong key and you lose your document. That’s why that web hosting was set up at the beginning.
It did no good for me to create your website and say go find hosting, because how are you going to manage it, it was really a geeky process at that point. And truly back then there was more of a black box because you had to have a certain level of technicality.
So I provided hosting services from day one.
The first client got their server setup and everything else, and that has grown. So really providing web hosting, email, and of course, email today has really grown into office 365, where you don’t have to have server-based email.
And then, of course, web design, and web maintenance. And early on, one of the biggest challenges that people came to me with is they could not update their own website.
They would send a small change to the webmaster and it would take three weeks and they get a huge bill. My goal from the very beginning was to create a system so that people could actually manage their content online.
And I actually programmed a very simple content management system, absolutely nothing like what you see today. But people could go into an admin area, update their content, change out their picture, if it was a landscape picture on the right side of the page, it needed to stay a landscape picture, and it was coded into the right side of the page. But they could still update content.
And after a few years of developing that, that’s when some of the very simple content management systems came out. I migrated more to an open-source.
And of course, WordPress finally grew up for the average person and was usable…kind of 2010, 2011, that’s where I started working with WordPress.
I’m not going to say we’re a WordPress only shop, because if you need strictly e-commerce, and WordPress isn’t going to work, we’ll put you on an e-commerce system. But we use WordPress because it is so simple to use.
So it was just it was truly taking care of people.
And then as search engines became more complex, as the online marketing world got more complex with social media that started what 2005, 06, 07?
Somewhere in there, people needed help not just initially, it was how do I set up, you know, an account or a page or something like that.
But it does no good to have an account and have no marketing plan behind it.
Again, from the beginning, it was encouraging people, look, build out a marketing plan, have a plan of what you’re going to say, here’s how you need to say it so that you’re engaging your audience, and then go do it. You know, then that account that you set up will actually do something for you.
But if you just set it up and start throwing stuff in that direction, you’re not going to get results.
Brian: It’s really important advice right there.
If any of you guys missed that, be sure to re-listen to it, especially if you’re a business owner because that’s also a common mistake that I found over and over again, when working with business owners.
In fact, a lot of the things we share similar stories in a lot of ways. I kind of fell into the field that I’m in and went more in the direction of helping businesses with their strategy because that was the thing that was fouling them up by the time they got into the details of building a website. All the rest.
So, out of all the things that I know this is this might be a difficult question to answer because of all the different things that you cover.
But out of all those things is there a common top-selling service you provide or the most introductory thing that you come in contact with the most often, when dealing with business owners?
Chirsty: There’s one of two things.
One, they want to get to a point where their website is stable and secure and that is where hosting services come in.
And then the second is, they might have a website that they realize is not working for them and they just need a whole new website, you know, or they have a website that has problems or challenges or, or something like that.
There are two ways to build websites, I can build it really geeky, or I can build it so that you can maintain it.
And many developers out there, build it really geeky. Which means if you really want to change anything on the website, other than just the words in that certain box on the page, you have to engage them.
And a lot of people want the freedom to do it.
Truly at the heart of everything we do, we’re here to empower people.
You have a dream for what you want to accomplish online, how can we come along beside you, and empower you to be able to accomplish that dream?
Some people, honestly, they want to be able to take it and run. They just need training, they need a few, you know, adjustments, or maybe we put in a page builder or something like that, so that they can really work with their content.
Other people, yeah, we need to do a rebuild.
But in the end, we set them up for success if they want to do everything they can, or, again, we’re by their side, providing that ongoing partnership for whatever is needed.
Brian: No makes sense.
Out of all the things that you’re doing on a day-to-day basis, what are you most excited about today?
Christy: I love engaging people and helping them dig into their business and helping them really understand what their core is, who their customers and how to engage.
Because there are three things to a successful website, on the big picture.
One, you need to have that engage with people. And if you have a good website that is engaging with people, it’s going to be focused on your why.
I don’t know if you’ve watched Simon Sinek, Start With Why TED Talk.
Brian: Oh, yeah.
Christy: On YouTube?
Brian: Yeah.
Christy: Excellent. People don’t care about the what and they expect you to know that how, what they care about is the why.
So if you can identify the why you’ve got it.
The second thing that really goes into how do you talk to people is to have a brand story.
And a brand story is all about, you’ve got a character that has a problem, a guide comes along, shows them the solution to the problem gives them a call to action shows them what’s going to happen if they don’t take that call to action and then shows them what success looks like.
Many different authors and people out there talk about the brand’s story. But again, any good movie that you’ve had any good books that you’ve read, it has a good story to it and it really follows those seven pillars.
And so we work with people to focus on the why to build their brand story, to think like a customer and provide the information for them.
Because it means so much more if you really talk to your customer, like you’re having a conversation.
I mean, if you have a storefront, and somebody walks into your store, you really don’t go up to them and say, welcome to our website, we’ve been in business for 24 years, and we’re so proud of XYZ.
You just don’t do that, your customer would stare at you and turn around and walk out the door.
So instead, you’re inviting them into this conversation. And that happens on your website, it doesn’t have to happen on the phone or on the storefront, because your website is that first conversation that you have with people.
So engaging, and I love helping people through the process to identify those things and putting those steps together we have as a part of our deep dive process that we take people through before we ever start a website.
So if somebody comes and says, You know, I know I need a new website and everything else. I say, Okay, this is what we do and this is why we do it.
And I’ve had so many people tell me, Wow, I haven’t thought about this aspect of my business for so very long. Or, I don’t know the answer to that.
And just asking questions and going through the journey, you know, take a deep dive into your company, do you really understand your company’s why?
Take a deep dive into your target market?
Do you really know who you’re selling to because everybody is not your customer.
And then in the third session, we build a bridge between the two and that’s called engagement.
So you’ve got your company on one side of the river, your target market on the other, you’ve got to build a bridge between the two.
Once we have those pieces in place, then we can build a website that is engaging and as you start throwing more time and resources to get visibility.
Okay, so you get your website up, it’s engaging now you can truly work on visibility. And that has to do with marketing that we’re familiar with.
Let’s build your email list.
How are you going to use your email list, putting together a marketing plan truly. Social media is engaged in all of that.
And of course, the search engine aspect of it is all about looking at your content, is it optimized, looking at keyword phrases and that type of thing, making sure that technically your website meets what Google needs.
Third, strategic content.
So there are keywords out there that people may not even realize that they want to rank for or need to. So we do keyword research.
You take those key phrases, and then you write content to match that. And that’s called strategic content.
Of course, building links is always a part of that.
But it doesn’t pay to work on visibility if you don’t have a website that is engaging and honestly helping people walk through that process and understand that process in English. Without a whole lot of tech terms.
I just love doing that. You know, you have light bulbs come on, you have people really digging and finding things that probably were dusty and hidden in the corner for a long time.
Brian: That’s great. That’s really good stuff there.
Commercial: Okay, let’s take a break from that conversation. I wanted to bring up a question for you, during these crazy times, do you feel like your business is indestructible? Most people don’t?
And if not, the real question is why?
And what can you do to make it as indestructible as possible?
Well, that’s the basis of my new book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.
Let me talk about what we discussed in the third chapter.
The third way for you to Amazon proof your business, which is be different.
In the third chapter, I go into, really, how do you put yourself out there and be seen as unique, where you really don’t even have competition. And there’s ways of doing this. In fact, I talk about two specific books that you should go out and get.
And these are difficult books to read.
These are fun books, books that will inspire you and give you creative juices necessary to be able to really stand out and be different, you don’t have to be wacky, you don’t have to be outrageous, but you do have to appear different. And if you can appear different from everyone else out there, not only will you not have the competition of amazon.com, you won’t have any competition.
But I also have eight other ways to Amazon proof your business, basically the idea of making it competition proof to even someone as big as Amazon.com.
So if you’d like to get your hands on a free copy of my book, go to AmazonProofBook.com sign up and you will get a free copy and get the chance to purchase a physical copy of it for a special price. In addition to that, if you happen to be in the Josephine County area or nearby, and you’re looking to have a speaker come and discuss these type of issues with your organization, club or group of friends, then I have a limited calendar that I may be able to fit you into.
Go check out BrianJPombo.com/Speaking and fill out the application. We’ll be sure to get back to you on that. And now let’s get back to our show.
Brian: For those of you listening, we’re recording this in late August of 2021. And the reason why I bring that up is because I wanted to bring up the question of what we’ve gone through close to two years now, of a pandemic situation, we’re kind of going through the the secondary situation to where masks are being required again, and so forth.
How has this whole situation affected your personal life and your business?
Christy: Personal life, I’m gonna say it actually was a plus.
Pre-pandemic, I was involved in a number of different organizations, and I found myself out of the office, generally two days a week. And those days were either down in Medford or Ashland.
So of course, pandemic hit, all of that went virtual and I wasn’t having to be on the road and travel so much.
The second aspect, I’m going to say has a plus and a minus because I miss being around my team. And I have a team that’s kind of spread across a number of time zones now.
But just being able to be in the same office with somebody else and turn around and ask her or interactor that I missed that aspect.
But being able to move our offices home has been a plus in many different ways. So in that sense, it was a plus.
And last year was almost a double whammy because the pandemic hit, everyone was holding their breath until July or August and just we were planning on rolling out some advertising in April of last year.
Well, needless to say, I mean, you just go heartless and send out your advertising anyway, nobody’s listening.
Brian: Yep.
Christy: And then they say, Well, obviously this person doesn’t really care about where my business is at, why should I do business with them?
So we held off on that in July and August we thought, Okay, so we’ll start up in September.
And of course, last September, is when we had the bad fires, not just in Southern Oregon, but throughout Oregon. And so again, it was kind of a double whammy of just when we were getting ready to do an advertising blitz.
In both cases, it’s like, again, am I going to advertise, I don’t even know if the people have a business.
Seriously, I mean, the fact that here are our communities in Southern Oregon, people lost their businesses, and I care more about people than where they’re at.
So with that, again, we held off.
So last year was a tough year.
What I’m finding this year is, even though we’re going into a second wave, is in many cases, people have learned how to work through and live with the pandemic, you know, we’ve gotten used to, Okay, if you’re going to get a vaccine, get your vaccine, if you’re going to be inside, understand being safe, be you know, inside all of these different things we’ve learned to make those adjustments.
People are more interactive now to marketing than otherwise. So this year has actually been a good year for us.
Brian: Fabulous, all good stuff.
Your background, being in this profession for as long as you have been, is it something you recommend to others?
Christy: Absolutely.
And I’ll say absolutely not just, you know, if you want to be a tech-head and geek and just go build websites, or just do SEO, great, go do it. Because the need is out there for people truly, want to have a skill but I’m gonna say the important piece that you need to pair with that is understanding customer service skills.
And the customer’s skill level of sadly, many in my profession, has led me to the tagline of, anyone can code few you can take care of people.
Few can take care of people, that is an important piece. And that’s actually where we shine, we put focus on customer service and being that partner with the customer.
So we don’t come and tell you what you need. We help you discover it, we help you create it, we help you through the process to make sure that it will be successful once it launches.
And it’s like a dance, a true partnership dance, you’ve got two people out on the dance floor, one’s leading the others following and depending on the dance, who is leading and who is following switches.
And so that’s where we truly engage in that partnership with people.
Brian: Oh, that’s fabulous.
If you and I were meeting again, maybe talking again a year from now and we went to look back over what had happened over the past 12 months, what would you say would have had to have happened for you to feel happy with your progress both professionally and personally?
Christy: I’ll say professionally, we are actually growing into a niche market of vacation rental management companies, it doesn’t mean that we don’t want anything else to work with other industries.
But really tapping into a single industry allows you to really understand the pain points, and then really dial in the solutions that you offer.
So a year from now, I would like to have a number of those clients, more of those clients than we already have and have kind of a marketing, I hate calling it a marketing machine because that just feels so cold, you know, but having a marketing system in place so that we can effectively reach more people in that industry.
Brian: Make sense.
What are the obstacles standing in your way of getting there?
Christy: Time.
You know, time and honestly with our team in the last two months, we’ve brought on three VA’s.
So we went from a core team of four to now with VA’s, we have seven, plus our Dev team and SEO team.
The fact that a lot of this marketing, the expansion still, you know, rests on my shoulders is just the time that I have and of course, I delegate what I can, but it’s just having enough time.
And then of course learning what I don’t know. I don’t know. And then of course it means going through and updating processes, changing things, creating things that don’t exist.
Of course, there are tools out there on every single level to help that but it still takes that time and thought process.
Brian: As we wind down our conversation a little bit here, are there any questions I haven’t asked you that you’d like to answer?
Christy: I’d like to focus back on the web hosting for just a moment.
Brian: Sure.
Christy: Instead of just saying, okay, we do web hosting. Why me instead of GoDaddy, or Hostgator, or Bluehost, or any of the other giants?
We bundle security in with our hosting packages.
So if you’ve got a WordPress website, we are actually set up to be able to do redundant backups. The other thing that we include for everybody, regardless of what kind of website you’re running, we include nightly backups on the server at no extra charge.
Many companies, you’re gonna pay extra for backups.
Think of backups as a safety net, you know, we keep your plugins up to date, all of that stuff, we do what we can to secure your website, your hosting account, and then having a firewall of course on the server and then including one in your website.
So we do everything that we can do to lock the doors and keep the bad guys out.
I can’t guarantee that they won’t break a window and get in. But if we have a safety net called backups, then instead of me saying, Oh, you didn’t pay for backups, so sorry, we’re gonna have to build your website over from scratch.
It’s just a matter of me going back in time, and restoring that backup.
And that many times, it’s still a stressful situation but it’s not an anguishing if that’s the term situation for the client and for me.
Brian: Oh, that’s a really good point.
Because I think so often, people don’t draw that distinction. And I’m happy that you brought it up because they don’t draw the distinction of what makes you clearly different and unique from the perceived competition.
And anybody that has ever dealt with one of the larger companies that does hosting realizes the headaches that’s associated with that, and having somebody local, and somebody that you can get on the phone and talk to in just clear one on one English without having to know all the technical details is really advantageous.
So thank you for that.
Christy, what can people do who want to find out more about you and what you prove all the services you provided Design! by Kiltz?
Christy: I’m going to say take a look on our website.
Of course, we’re on social media, on Facebook as well. But take a look at our website designbykiltz.com.
And I’m sure you’ll include a link to that in our information as well.
But take a browse, we’ve got, you know all the different ways that we can partner and work with you. There’s a whole lot more than what we had time to look at today.
But there’s the ability you can book 30 minutes, let’s explore with me. And so there’s a link on the website where people can do that.
Brian: Fabulous, yeah, we’ll definitely have that link in the description.
So you can check that out at our website, regardless of where you’re hearing this over at GrantsPassVIP.com.
Thank you, Christy Kiltz so much for being on Grants Pass VIP.
Christy: You’re welcome. Glad to be a part.
Brian’s Closing Thoughts: It was great having Christy on the show.
Like I said, we had worked previously before and I really like getting more in depth with people that I don’t normally get a chance to. So that’s really fun.
Christy made a lot of great points and does a great job representing herself and her company.
Some of the things that she pointed out is some stuff that I definitely want to back up and say how I completely agree with one is her discussion of, Start With Why, the Simon Sinek talk, which was also a book.
She is sending me the link, and I’m going to have that in the description, you should go and watch that talk. It’s a quick one but it is so deep with its simplicity.
And so important to anyone that is trying to get their idea out there, whether it’s an idea about a business, a nonprofit, a cause that you’re fighting for anything at all if you’re trying to reach people, you really have to be in touch with the why, more than the what or the how so important, really good stuff.
Secondly, her discussion of brand story and the Seven Pillars that she takes people through is really fabulous.
Understanding the power of story is something that just cannot be emphasized enough.
It’s something that I’ve been studying for years, on how to do myself in my business, and also things that I’ve been helping other people with also so it is definitely something I can highly recommend.
Toward the end of our conversation she brought up what made her substantially different in the world of hosting.
That is so important to be able to do if you’re out there if you’re a person that’s trying to get a point across, you have to take in mind what people perceive as your competition, and then go about obliterating the fact that they are competition by showing how unique you are showing how different you are for what it is that they provide.
Not necessarily that they’re bad. It’s just that they provide something completely different.
She did an awesome job at doing that. I love the fact that she has a deep dive process for taking people through.
That’s what makes Christy I think really unique and definitely one of the shining examples of people that are doing a great job here in Southern Oregon that you can either meet in person or reach out to on the phone, which is really really valuable.
Outro: Join us again on the next Grants Pass VIP brought to you by the team BrianJPombo.com. Helping movers and shakers in Southern Oregon and beyond stand out. That’s B R I A N J P O M B O dot com.
If you or someone you know would like to be a guest or sponsor on Grants Pass VIP, go to GrantsPassVIP.com/Contact.
Guests who appear on the show not necessarily endorse the opinions of the hosts or sponsors. The music is FunShine, Kevin MacLeod. Our host is a Grants Pass resident and business strategist Brian Pombo. I’m Executive Producer Sean E. Douglas. Until next time, live Rogue and have fun.