ACA 360: The Website That Took Many Months, Then One Weekend

“Don’t Worry, I’ve Got You”

ACA 360 was about to sponsor NABIP of Ohio’s annual conference. Its website had been down for more than two weeks.

“We were frustrated, disappointed, and running out of time,” says one of ACA 360’s partners.

They explained the situation to Matt Bradford, founder of New Era Systems.

“Don’t worry,” he told them. “I’ve got you.”

Who ACA 360 Is

ACA 360 is a compliance firm in Grove City, Ohio. Employers hire them to stay on the right side of the Affordable Care Act’s reporting rules all year, not just at filing time.

Most of the industry shows up in January to file forms, or after an IRS penalty letter has already arrived. ACA 360 monitors a client’s workforce every month, hand-reviews every 1095-C before it is filed, and responds to penalty letters when a new client arrives with one in hand.

It is expert work, sold on trust. A firm like that cannot walk into an industry conference as a sponsor with no website.

How It Got There

The partners built the first ACA 360 website themselves.

“We did the best we could on our own,” the partner says. “While the content was there, the overall design lacked consistency, branding, and a cohesive message. We knew it needed professional attention.”

So they hired a developer they trusted to redesign it.

“What should have taken weeks turned into months, with long periods of little to no communication.”

Along the way, they saw a few mockups of what New Era Systems could build. They went back to the developer with a deadline: one week, or the work goes somewhere else.

A week later, a site was delivered. It did not function properly. It was a template, half-finished, and it had clearly been made for a company in a completely different industry.

Bradford had told them he could turn a new site around very quickly. They decided to hold him to his word.

The Weekend

Bradford started with everything ACA 360 had already written. He pulled in the entire original site and, with AI assistance, reorganized it into a coherent story.

“The content itself was good. It just needed better organization,” he says. “I was able to take their own words, largely unchanged, and rearrange them into a site that was more compelling.”

“Matt didn’t need us to explain every little thing that was wrong with our previous website or walk him through exactly how to fix it,” the partner says. “He took the time to understand our business, recognize what we were trying to accomplish, and take ownership of getting us where we needed to be.”

By the end of the first weekend, roughly 80 percent of the site that is live today was done.

“I remember seeing it for the first time and being absolutely blown away,” the partner says. “We honestly couldn’t believe how quickly he had taken our vision and turned it into something we were genuinely proud to put in front of prospective clients.”

Nobody Had to Chase Anyone

“What impressed me just as much as the website itself was the experience of working with Matt,” the partner says. “He listened, understood the urgency, communicated with us, and followed through on what he promised. We didn’t have to chase him for updates or wonder whether things were getting done.”

“ACA 360 is unusually responsive,” Bradford says. “That closes the feedback loop very quickly, which allows me to move very quickly, which allows everybody to be happy because everything gets done much faster.”

There When They Needed It

Search optimization came a little later. So did the Marketplace, a partner referral hub, along with deeper CRM integration and a blog system the team uses to publish its own articles.

Each was delivered at about the same speed as the original site. They were spaced out because ACA 360 had not needed them yet. When it did, they were there.

The blog system generates an image for each article automatically. Nobody asked for that. Now that they have used it, they do not want to go back to a system without it.

The Project He Talked Them Out Of

ACA 360 has a lot of very good ideas, and those ideas can get very large, very fast.

For the Marketplace, the original vision was a system that would track a lead automatically from first contact to closed deal, with no human involvement at any step.

“That could be a very cool project to do,” Bradford says.

He told them not to build it. At ACA 360’s current size, only a handful of leads are likely to come through that program.

“When the cost of automation is orders of magnitude greater than the cost of just having a human being do it, the automation doesn’t make sense,” he says.

So the Marketplace shipped without it. Leads land in the CRM, and a person carries them from there.

“The job of a company is to make money,” Bradford says. “I want to make money with a conscience. Giving people things they aren’t ready for, don’t need, or that could hurt them later because they’ve spent too much on infrastructure with nothing to fill it, is something I want to avoid.”

It was not the only time he said no, or not yet. Bradford credits those conversations, more than the speed, for the trust between them.

What It Cost

A fully bespoke site like this one typically runs $5,000 to $7,000. ACA 360 paid less than half of that.

“Matt didn’t just rescue our website,” the partner says. “He came through for us when we thought all hope was lost, and that means more to us than he probably realizes.”

The site is live at aca360.com.

Client comments are from a partner at ACA 360. If you’d like to speak with the client about their experience, contact New Era Systems and we’ll be happy to pass your contact information along.