Addison McKissack

Much like life, the one constant at CI Web Group is change. In my (almost) 3 years of working here, I’ve seen:

3 web builders.

2 client communication hubs.

2 project management tools (not including the hundreds of Google Sheets).

6 role changes (that’s one roughly every 6 months).

And hundreds upon hundreds of tweaks, changes, and updates to our processes.

That amount of large changes is not normal.

At least, anywhere else that wouldn’t be normal. At CI, it seems like change is at the core of what we do.

I used to think I was someone who wasn’t great with change. I have always been flexible, and I can make almost any situation work out. But big, ground-shaking, major change? No thank you. I liked being comfortable and always knowing what would come next. And these changes weren’t always big; at first, they started small. We had a game plan, so they felt less daunting. Things were rolled out with plenty of time and planning to cause as few growing pains as possible.

Then, we made the (necessary) switch out of WordPress into Webflow. That made sense; there were security risks for our clients, and the upkeep was astronomical. What made it hard wasn’t that we were learning a new system and a new way of building sites — we did it while we moved into a brand new project management system. And the goal was to get these new technologies adopted and mastered as soon as possible.

Every day felt like I was drowning in new information, and while I was picking it up quickly, it never seemed fast enough.

My team shrunk from 6 to 2, and then I had a whole month of just me handling over 140 projects. I was stressed beyond belief and at my utter breaking point. I was at the point where I was starting to look for other jobs because I just couldn’t take the stress.

Thankfully, we got out of that hole. It took 3 months, new processes, a new manager, and a lot of therapy to pick up the pieces of that chaos, and we got back on track and comfortable with Webflow. Things were good.

Then along came the wider adoption of AI and the idea of Hydra.

That changed everything yet again.

Thankfully, this time, we had the basics. We had the foundational knowledge of what makes a great website. We had the technology. We just had to figure out how to use the knowledge and the technology to get from point A to point Z as fast as possible.

It’s a running joke that we have been building the plane mid-flight. But that’s truly how it has felt over the last 5 months. We were evolving so fast over the last few months that a site that would’ve been miles ahead of what we built in Webflow and was light-years ahead of the average WordPress site realized it wasn’t up to snuff just a month later.

But that’s what evolution is. It’s taking what works and keeping that while throwing out the rest to build it back bigger and better.

Granted, we did the majority of that evolution on the web side of the company over a six-week sprint, which was brutal. Our small but mighty team of designers and developers pulled all-nighters and worked every single day without fail to get hundreds of sites rebuilt in Hydra. After all, what’s the use of building the highest performing sites we’ve ever seen if only a few people have it? We were done with WordPress and Webflow, and it just didn’t make sense to keep having those sites. But we didn’t want to lose the clients we had. People who have put their trust in us for the last decade to do what’s best for them and their company. So, we rebuilt it all.

That sprint was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I was working 80-hour weeks and wouldn’t be seen anywhere without my laptop, with at least six agents running. My social life was dead in the water. I was coding poolside on the Fourth of July while my family had fun. My fiancée was very unhappy with me throughout it. She asked why I was working so hard and burning myself out until the wee hours of the night over and over again.

All I could say was that this was going to help a lot of people.

Which, I know, sounds silly when you’re talking about a website. It’s not like we’re curing cancer or saving lives. But we are making people’s lives easier. We’re helping our clients have some of the most profitable months they’ve ever seen in their companies’ history, meaning they can hire more people, they can give back to their community more, and they can be there to help their neighbors when they need it most.

I had never really thought much about the trades before I joined CIWG. When the AC goes out in the middle of summer, we just call our HVAC guy, Ron, and he’d come and fix it. I never needed to know what he did or even what unit we had out there — just that it worked. The trades are what keep all of us comfortable. They make sure our pipes don’t leak, that we’re warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and that we have a roof over our heads that’ll last through tornado season.

What I do brings my clients to their friends and neighbors who need their help.

So, even as things got hard, and we made another change to a process or another complete rebuild of a website that was built only 6 months ago, I would go back to the core of why I do what I do and why I work so hard. It’s to help the people who help others every single day.

That’s what keeps me coming back, excited to work every morning. Despite all of the changes and the stress, it’s worth it in the end because we help the people who put their trust in us.