Sozo Web Agency
Strategy, design, and development focused on bringing life to your business.
Background
After a successful career in sales more than 15 years ago, Sozo’s founder Renan DeBarros began his own entrepreneurial journey by developing his first Sarasota local service business.
The single biggest challenge he encountered was the lack of competence and professionalism in the arena of generating leads online, and cultivating these leads to turn them into sales.
Fortunately, his love for technology propelled him to invest all of his capabilities to learn the trades of design, development, and marketing. By divine provision, his love for marketing succeeded his desire to continue operating his local service business and, after a speedy sale of the business, he began helping other business owners to achieve their online and branding goals to generate leads and close more sales.
Experience
As a full service graphic design and web development agency, Sozo has grown from a solopreneur status to an international design agency with development teams abroad and local staff.
Throughout our evolution, we have continued to cater to long-lasting client relationships by becoming their own internal resource for all multimedia needs.
Philosophy
We don’t believe in shortcuts.
At Sozo, every successful project starts with an intensive information gathering and planning phase that pays off tenfold once it’s time to execute the end product.
We take a hands-on approach with our clients by becoming part of their internal marketing team. Our focus is to provide an all-inclusive marketing solution for years to come.
A letter from our founder
If you have been operating your business for 5 years or more, you’ve already beat the odds.
Only about 20% of businesses make it past their first year and 50% meet an early death due to failure or closure within five years! By the decade’s end, only 33% survive as successful startups, so there’s still a hill to climb.
There are many reasons businesses fail. However, there’s no real mystery to the root of the problem in most cases: finding more customers who are a perfect fit for your services and getting them to “sign on the dotted line.”
When building my first service-based local business, I decided to go against what others in the auto glass industry were doing. Rather than poaching for new business at gas stations and car washes, I decided to develop an online lead-generating machine.
My immediate problem was the lack of professionalism and attention to detail of local web designers. Everyone I seemed to have run across would claim that they knew what to do, but few did it right.
Having grown up in a household of multimedia professionals (my father operated video stores in Brazil where he ran a video production agency in the ’90s and my brother would teach me the ins and outs of the internet world since the days of Netscape—which included building webpages using HTML), I dove into learning web design and online lead generating systems (things like Local Listings, backlinking, and search engine optimization ‘SEO’).
Within a very short amount of time (in not much more than a month), leads started coming in online while spending zero dollars on online advertising. I was beating my competition to the first page of Google organically!
This was just the beginning of a year and a half journey that led to the sale of that business. I just wasn’t passionate about running a contractor-type business that required constant fights with insurance companies to survive. But that website is still producing organic leads today!
Since then, I began pursuing what I love: helping businesses grow.
I helped to double the annual revenue of a 7-figure Sarasota local fence business within 9 months (mostly through sales management and customer service), and developed an amazing home cleaning business with my mom that now brings in more than a mil in revenue annually. I give her total credit for the hard work in managing the business, while Sozo handled all of online advertising, client acquisition, and lead generation.
Now, we are thankful to say that we have helped many local Sarasota businesses to reach their client acquisition goals.
Not just by building beautiful websites that convert traffic into paying customers, but by building brands that homeowners can relate to and trust.
And I feel like our journey has just begun.
Our team is more capable than ever to take our clients to new heights and to help them dominate the local market in their industry.
Renan DeBarros
El Presidente
Sozo Web Agency
