Today we’d like to introduce you to Ezra Vaoifi.
Hi Ezra, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
My wife Sabrina and I both studied Entrepreneurial Management at the BYU Marriott School of Business, and it was one of the hardest, most rewarding experiences of our lives. We were full-time students, raising our daughter, and Doordashing 8–10 hours a day — driving about 100 miles for roughly $100 a day just to get by. It was a grind, but we were determined to build something meaningful.
Before transferring to BYU, I was playing sports at the University of Missouri, and in my free time, I’d taught myself how to build simple websites. Years later, during one of those long DoorDash days in Provo, I met a plumber and asked if he wanted to run Google Ads. He told me he didn’t even have a website. On a whim, I told him I could build one for him. I charged next to nothing for it — but I was thrilled because he said yes, and that one “yes” meant I didn’t have to DoorDash for three whole days.
That one small moment changed everything.
After that, we officially started a small digital agency offering “everything” — logos, ads, SEO, social media, branding — you name it. But we quickly realized that by trying to do everything, we weren’t truly great at anything. So we made the tough decision to cut away all the extras and focus solely on what we did best: web design. That’s when everything started to take off.
Our company, Walt & Gordon, was born from that focus — and from a belief that entrepreneurship isn’t about selling, it’s about serving. We had just come off a painful failed startup that had, for a time, replaced our income before collapsing completely. That was a really difficult chapter for us. But through that failure, we learned one of the most important lessons of our lives: success comes from adding real value to people’s lives, not from chasing trends or comparing yourself to others. When you focus on helping others, everything changes.
That’s been our approach ever since. Three years later, we’ve grown into one of Utah’s top web design agencies, building story-driven websites that actually help small businesses grow. Every client we’ve ever had has come through SEO and word-of-mouth — never paid ads.
A quote we live by is, “Entrepreneurship done wrong feels like sales. Entrepreneurship done right feels like service.”
We named our company after two dreamers who inspire us — Walt Disney, whose imagination and perseverance remind us to dream big, and Gordon B. Hinckley, whose faith, optimism, and work ethic keep us grounded. Their examples capture the balance we try to live by every day: dream boldly, but serve humbly.
Today, Sabrina and I work together full-time, helping other entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life through storytelling-based websites that reflect who they are and what they stand for. Our mission is simple: to empower people to provide for themselves through entrepreneurship — by building websites that bring their vision to life and show the world what they have to offer.
I graduated from BYU Marriott in 2024, Sabrina followed in 2025, and our daughter Kalani (age 4) insists she’s “graduating soon too.” She’s a redhead, which completely surprised us — but that’s kind of the perfect symbol for our journey: unexpected, challenging, and better than anything we could have planned.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has not been a smooth road, but it has been fun. Some of the struggles along the way were failing our first business that replaced our income. We had multiple failed ideas that never really gained any traction, but this one in particular did, and the day it failed was really really hard for both of us. We had to go back from having our income replaced to Doordashing full-time again.
And you can imagine how difficult it was Doordash for 10 hours a day, on top of being two full-time students at BYU, and a new parents. Life was difficult, but looking back. It wasn’t as difficult as it now sounds like it should’ve been. I feel like that’s where our faith and optimism helped us quite a bit.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
We saw a need for better websites universally. Most websites are ambiguous, confusing, hard to navigate, and aren’t structured to convert. Human beings are story driven. So our websites are story focused, and we consider ourselves a story architects. We really try to craft the story that each of our respective clients has to tell. No one ever started a business for a boring reason, so we bring that story to the forefront, and we resonate with their target audience. And once their audience feels resonated with, reaching out and connecting with the business owner or purchasing a product or moving forward seems like the logical next step, for many of them. It definitely at least ups the likelihood that they will get involved, because they feel the story loop has been opened, and the trust factor has been heightened. People don’t want to work with people they don’t trust, so we try to get the world to trust our clients through their digital storefront, which is the website.
Are there any important lessons you’ve learned that you can share with us?
One of the main lessons we have learned is to add REAL value. If you do something well enough, the public will pay you back for it.
If your product is gimmicky, or if it doesn’t add real value, it likely won’t catch on or last long. We find the problems our customers and clients are going through, and we solve them. And we try to help all of our clients articulate through their websites that they have a solution to their potential customers problems. That’s all businesses about: serving other and solving problems. That’s what we have learned.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://waltandgordon.com
