By Adam Weinstein
I’m not a digitally savvy person, which is why people I’ve known and loved looked at me like I was crazy when I said I wanted to start a digital marketing agency. But truthfully, I didn’t think I would ever need to get into the weeds in terms of the technical stuff. That mindset almost killed my chances from the get-go, but luckily I found MacPilot — a $40 app that unlocks the power of your Mac — instead.
Building a digital marketing agency without digital know-how
I didn’t just blindly assume I wouldn’t need a background in computers or programming to start my agency. I had a philosophy of delegation, was an expert in sales, and happened to have a lot of contacts in the world of hotels and hospitality.
Building off those preexisting industry connections, I helped family members get connected with highly knowledgeable social media producers who gave them brand identities, followings and, eventually, new customers. After finding success in that realm, members of my family members’ teams began to ask me about building websites, executing email campaigns and more. From there, I recruited more specialists in each field, and slowly built out my agency.
The client list kept growing, and soon enough, I had the makings of a healthy and sustainable business. I hired a team of those specialists to work for me full-time. Then I rented some office space, bought everyone computers, and began pursuing the dream.
Creative outsourcing of tech tasks
On the creative side of things, my team was really quite capable. For technical issues, we outsourced bug fixing, website building and all of our development needs to a partner company. This strategy worked for client issues. However, it left us without much direction in terms of dealing with in-house issues, of which there were a lot.
I bought our team a nice collection of Mac desktop computers, all of which were new and worked great. But without fail, somebody had some sort of productivity backup every single day. We always had to download new platforms and software for customer interfacing, and so often my team would run into error codes. We quickly began running out of space, filling up our hard drives faster than would make sense to us, then backing that data up and filling up the space all over again.
These piling maintenance issues dealt a real blow to my enthusiasm on any given day. We had loads of work coming in, and going on calls and ideating projects was exciting. But spending a lot of time helping people click around, getting them on the phone with Apple support, and troubleshooting these problems became a major distraction. When I realized this was all taking up so much time that our creatives were starting to push deadlines, I knew something had to be done. That’s where MacPilot swooped in.
Enter MacPilot: a well-loved, affordable, utility app
I knew I couldn’t keep calling customer support lines for help. Those conversations too often led to upsells where my team would need to buy a new product or feature just to make the last one work properly. Instead, I looked to our friends at our partnering development company — the one who handled our IT needs. They said without hesitation that MacPilot was the way to go.
I did a bit more research, and it turns out that our partners weren’t the only ones with this level of enthusiasm for MacPilot. The software is designed to help people easily access their Mac’s most helpful and hard-to-find features. Tech Journey wrote, for example, “MacPilot is the Swiss Army knife that does all the user interface customization, combining with custom system tweaks and under-the-hood maintenance in a single, convenient package.”
How MacPilot streamlined operations
Affordable in addition to well-praised, MacPilot felt like a great place to start my quest. And it’s also where I was lucky enough to end my search. Our team’s subscriptions to MacPilot (which the company covered, of course), made it easy for us to get around those error codes that had been bogging us down. We also stopped running out of computer space so often by getting to see our RAM bus speeds and what unnecessary programs were holding us back.
Easy-to-run common maintenance scripts for launch services and prebinding come with MacPilot, and regularly fitting those into our workflow increased productivity immensely. Now, all of my employees have relationships with their MacPilot program — each with their own customized dock with spacers and smart-stack menus. They know the list of network ports and key combos to visit when they hit a bug, and we can all better communicate with our developers regarding problems that are over our heads.
Since this turnaround, I’ve been curious what would’ve happened if I hadn’t found MacPilot. The truth is, since our problems required us to maximize our Macs specifically, I think we would’ve continued to struggle. We might even have failed without it. And that would’ve stunk. Luckily, though, we survived — and MacPilot is definitely one of the key reasons why. The MacPilot Lifetime License is on sale for just $39.99 (regularly $99) for a limited time.
Buy from: Cult of Mac Deals
Prices subject to change.
