welcome to the WP Minute.
Ministry. Thank you so much, Matt. It's my pleasure to be here. The pleasure's all on this side of the table, just so you know.
we were just chatting before we hit record. apparently we met at Prestige Comp, which happened eons ago. So you've been in this game for quite a while. so for folks that don't know, what is it that you do in WordPress?
yeah, I've been in it for 20 years, I think now. I think WordPress is 21 years old or something like that. but I, I run an agency called the Mighty Mo. Been doing it 18 years at the Mighty Mo WordPress. For the first few days we were doing flash and I. About one month into the Mighty Mo, Steve Jobs came out and said, flash is dead. And so I'm like, okay, flash is dead. What's next?
So I, started doing WordPress, right, that I had actually tried Jula and Drupal on, dream Hosts one click install at that time. And I couldn't figure it out. I was not like a trained coder by any means, but I knew like HTML and FTP and I knew Flash, but WordPress, I could get going and then like. This is what the amazing thing about WordPress was to me, was that like you could go in edit code, in like your template.
Once you figured out where the theme was, you could like edit it and see the change, which was like revolutionary, you know, like it was so cool.
I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile, so the mighty Moe. I'm seeing you started out as developer, then went to CTO, then went to president.
Yeah. You know,
explain that one to
there's no explanation. I've owned the company the whole time. I think it's been like my idiot attempt at marketing. Like, and, so I, I have, there's no good reason for me to be, I'm, I've, I'm legally the president of the company, but, sometimes I've been afraid. I think like just owning a business, I'm always afraid of like. like. what I'm thinking, like what, when people talk to somebody, am I better off being the CEO president or am I better off being like, no, just talk to me.
I'm a regular marketer guy, like at the company, and I, I just like that entry point. I'm never sure like what's best, you know?
Oftentimes it's best not to even tell anybody what you do in the tech space because then they start asking you all kinds of questions to see if you can solve their pain points. at least that's what I
you fix my wifi
yeah. No, man. I do websites and I'm barely str, I'm barely holding on with that. I re, we connected because I recently put out a, a, our weekly newsletter. And, oftentimes, the WP Minute newsletter, I'll have like a, a little, opening, salvo, a little personal message and really starting to get stuck in with ai. And I'm really starting to wonder how this is impacting small business. what I call small business web design agencies. You might have a different label for it.
I think there's ultimately two camps. You are either deathly afraid of this stuff, or, or you don't think anything is happening. At least that's what I see on Twitter. Either people just brush this off as like, ah, it's not even really a thing. Or people are like, oh my God, we're all gonna lose our jobs. I'm hoping to be somewhere in the middle where we can find efficiencies with this stuff, leverage it, at least for the next few years. I, I don't really have a crystal ball beyond that.
And I'm curious, your take on your, you know, two decades in this space, is it impacting you? Are you think, how are you thinking about this impacting your business, if at all? Where do you sit with AI in your agency?
One year ago I was scared to death, so scared that I hired a full-time SEO guy who still works for the Mighty Mo. But we branched off, we're like, we're gonna sell marketing services rather than development services. 'cause I was so scared of ai. This was a year or so ago and we've since sold some SEO and we're kind of, it's been a neat journey. Like be like, okay, now we're doing SEO too. Cool. but what I've learned, like I've spent. So here's an example.
I'm building a project management plugin with ai, with chat GPT, basically, and co-pilot. And what I've learned in that is like AI is a decent, like junior level dev assistant and like maybe mid-level, like it can help you, like organize your thoughts and your code, but like I'm no longer afraid of it. Like, so it saved me hundreds of hours so far on this project, but someone without deep WordPress knowledge would've never been able to build this.
Base, pretty basic plugin that I built with it and you know, like in a hundred hours time using AI exclusively, you know, so I'm no longer afraid of it. It's changing the industry though, without a doubt. Like, and I think too, like, like it's, I think, well first of all, I think I adapt or die. That's, and you know, because you've been in this so long, I have so much respect for people like you who've been in the game any game for 15 years. You know, you have to adapt. And if you don't adapt.
You're gone. and so yeah, it's changing. Like I see, like, so I deal with small businesses and small nonprofits, and I've done that for 18 years at the Mighty Mo and we, we are losing very new businesses. To AI and Wix and Squarespace, without a doubt we're losing them. like they're no longer calling me to build their sites. And when I talk to them and I'm like, yeah, it's gonna be like 10 grand, they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I was thinking like 300.
And I'm like, well, like we're not a great fit, probably. and so that's a common conversation with, you know, incoming leads. But the people who, still wanna hire us, if you picture this, like let's say you're a marketing. Mid-level marketing manager at a small to mid-size company. So you're an employee and you're gonna put your career on the line. You're gonna hand your career to someone like me or to ai. The problem with this is if you hand it to me and you pay more, but like I'm now the.
The, if I screw up, I'm the fault. I'm at fault, not you. If you hire AI to do it and they screw up, you're at fault as the marketing manager. And so like, I think like these, there's like a very human thing, like these mid-level people who work at the employees part of their game is like offshoring risk to others. So they can survive in that role and get promoted. And like AI does not, is not good for them. You know? 'cause then they're putting their butts on the line.
Yeah, I, you know, ever since I started podcasting, when I ran my agency, it was to learn how to run an agency and quite literally see, you know, what the market was doing. Like understand how people were selling sites and you know, what the, what the landscape looked like. The thing back then, when I was, when I started the mat report, whatever, 15 years ago, it was, oh, what are we gonna do about the $500 website? Right.
That was like a question that I had on repeat on a lot of my, podcast episodes. 'cause you know, that was the thing, like when I started my agency, people would come to me like, I got 500 bucks. I'm like, 500 bucks. Like, what's happening here? Like, what do you expect to do? And you know, fast forward 20 years later, it's almost like the same concern. you know, so it's like we've seen this hype cycle come around, right? Small budgets.
Then theme forest people are like, oh, I could just buy a theme. You can't do it for a few hundred bucks. And then the the adoption or the rise of like, say like Elementor beaver builder Divvy, and people are like, oh, we got this page builder. Like, can't you do it for 300? But now it's like, we've got ai, can't you just do it for 300 bucks? So I'm trying to temper that expectation. Maybe an expectation is the wrong word, but I'm trying to temper like this outlook for ai. Like, okay.
Let's all just exhale for a second. I think professional services is still a thing and what it might do is maybe bring down the real high end. I. To us, you know, the Tobys and the mats of the world who are running just a good solid small business web design agency. Right? Maybe, you know, our friends at the higher end might see a, a bit of a hit, and those bigger brands might reach out to you and I or those of us listening, going, you know what? We've got a, we've got a big budget for you.
Small budget for us.
Yeah. Yeah.
Let's work together. have you seen any of the market shift? It sounds like the entry level is shifting, but have you seen any of the higher end of the market shift to your favor?
Yeah. So at least one of your podcast guests who owned a big agency in Minneapolis has gone through this, and I know this because I know some of the people work there and I worked with another agency in town who was getting these high level, you know, I was collaborating on, on big. Corporate clients with them.
And I know for a fact that they, both these companies are, who are like in my way, getting way bigger fish than I could ever get and I ever wanna get maybe, but like they are firing people. Like they're, they're, and I, that's how I know they're getting squeezed because, and my, my hunch is that like. A lot of the work that these high-end companies do is prototyping, like prototyping. Hey, we have an I, like, you know, I'm Target Corp and I have this idea, can you build something for us?
And you have a lot of con and now they just go to like potentially, I mean, I could see a scenario where to prototype, just like, let's say give a small team at Target, like you guys go to this AI tool and build something in the next six weeks or whatever. Like. To me that seems really reasonable. Like from Target's perspective, and then you bring that to the agency, maybe. yeah,
yeah,
but the, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Toby's saying Target, 'cause target's pretty big in Minneapolis, right? Yeah.
Yeah. They're the biggest.
Yeah, I remember at Prestige Comp, it's also very cold where you are and
it's cold right here. Where I'm at right now. I'm in the basement.
and I remember walking around and you have a just Skywalks, right? Is that what it's called? And they're just skyways and they're connected. they connect to all these buildings downtown. And I remember, being like, ah, I need to, I need to, work out, but I, I forgot my gym clothes. And somebody was like, oh, there's a target right across the way. Just walk over here, you know, take a left, do a right, go down these stairs. And I did that. And I'm walking around, I'm like.
It says Target, but what's up with all these offices? It's like, where's the store? Right. And it was just like the corporate headquarters. And I'm like, and they're like, oh no, the, the, the, the store's down, down the
Yep. Uhhuh.
so it's deeply rooted down there. I've been practicing and demonstrating the power of something that you just said, which was, prototyping. And this is where I see the advantage of. AI for WordPress, at least now in the, in the short term, is to build on top of WordPress. So I recently did a video of just building with Bolt, something that connect your traditional headless WordPress, something that folks would've knocked on our doors.
10, 15 years ago to say, please build this headless WordPress. The budget's 50 grand or a hundred grand. Can you do it? I did it in minutes with Bolt building a React app and just leveraging the wonderful WordPress rest API. I'm not a developer, I'm just a power user, right? I kind of know the stuff, so I know what to ask for, and I was like, man, this is really powerful and. The positive side of me is looking at WordPress going, there's definitely an advantage here.
WordPress is great for publishing. Whether you agree with Gutenberg or not, it's still a great publishing platform. And now with ai, we can build stuff on top of it to extract that data, right? Build those apps we've always wanted to build, but have WordPress as the backend. Do you have any future? Forward, thinking about those opportunities with WordPress that aren't websites like something else we can do.
Well, yeah, I mean, I told you I'm building this project management app for one, but, so I've built it with all, with core WordPress functionality. No, no React, no modules, nothing like that. It's just, just straight up, you know, API, not even a, not even the W-P-A-P-I, we're talking a plugin and a theme and, I think that, and I'm planning on releasing it as a SaaS, like on top of WordPress. Running a plugin and theme in some sort of, you know, multi-tenant, blah, blah, blah.
but I just, I think like when you think of WordPress, headless, I mean, endless possibilities. Think of this like I was thinking today, I. The WordPress dashboard is so confusing. Onboarding is so confusing, and I submitted a ticket to WordPress core, three years ago to add a button. So you go to post, you can add new pages, add new, I wanted a a, a menu add new. And I've submitted a ticket earlier this week. I got a reply saying it's been merged into another ticket.
I go, great, something's happening. I go to that ticket, 11 years old, and it's, and there's been no conversation for 11 years. And I'm going, this is just an add new menu button. And so like, if you think of this WordPress dashboard, so confusing. I go in there, I'm in there hours every day and sometimes I have trouble finding the plugins menu on the left side because I'm like. Gosh darn it. Where is the plugins on this site?
'cause like it's pushed up or down and there's colorful depending on the site. So like, I'm just thinking like, let's just say you wanted to attack Wix or wordpress.com as like a SaaS app, like endless possibilities like just headless WordPress. Yeah, we're just gonna build a way better ui. And maybe it's less feature rich, but it's like way better like,
Yeah, I wonder, you know, Matt Mullenweg has often said, or at least a few times, said that he's always seen Gutenberg as a bigger open source project than WordPress. And even with the temperature of WordPress, in the room these days, and, you know, some of the Matt Mullens decisions, I, I am still trying to unpack that because I think for one thing, like a lot of the things he says as say positive, um. outlooks for WordPress.
I, he's always pro, like I, when he says those things, he's always projecting. So like, WordPress has the operating system of the web, which he said, you know, many, many, many years ago. Like, I think we're finally kind of maybe seeing that. And then when he said, Gutenberg as a bigger project than WordPress, I was like, how? In the back of my head, I'm like, why, how do you think of that? But now maybe with like AI and what WordPress might morph into, which is like.
Just a database of content that you can publish in. I'm like, well, maybe he's onto something with a Gutenberg
Can I, can I just weigh in there? Because, Matt's been an inspiration to me personally. I've never met Matt. I've worked directly for Matt, but I've never met him and so I, I've only interacted with him I think twice in my life, but I followed him and he's been an inspir inspiration for me.
I started out, when I came to moved to Minneapolis in 2003, I stumbled into WordPress that led me to the open source community, and Matt was truly a leader of the open source community back then and probably still is today. What I think Matt. He's been inspiring to the community too, like whether or not you, like Gutenberg or whatever. That was like a, a tipping point where a lot of people got excited and a lot of people got pissed. But I was, I go, great, you have a vision, let's go.
I, a couple weeks ago or months ago, he was at, I think Word, word Camp Japan. And somebody in the audience was like, Hey, what's the future WordPress? And he, his response was, it was really flip. It was just like, oh, ai. And I'm like, that's not a. Anything to grab that's not inspiring. It's not interesting. It's not a feature. It's not like I would've loved for him to be like, we're gonna make it so you can click any block in WordPress and use AI to generate content.
Like something like that would be really interesting. Like, and I just think that right now, like you just described, a future of WordPress that is. One possible future of many, but there's no clear direction. Everybody has a different direction. Like juiced is forming this new nonprofit thing, and I'm going like, this isn't a direction for WordPress. This is like something nobody who uses Word, like no end user cares about your like nonprofit or organization that's gonna govern WordPress.
Nobody cares about that out in the wild. Like, you know, people like you and me might care about it, but. When Matt did the, breaking changes for WordPress, really with the Gutenberg editor, I go, that's a vision. At least, you know, and, he, and and by the way, he did that years ago, probably when you were getting started with the, the update to the dashboard when they moved the navigation from the top to the left side. And,
yeah.
there's been other things in there like, auto push updates. Like, I feel like anytime you have friction, you know, you're like, at least you're onto something with some meat. Like,
yeah, yeah,
it comes to features mm-hmm.
Yeah, I mean, you know, my feedback with that, like anything where the, where the real issues are just human issues. It's not the software or the feature. It's that nobody will take charge to make a decision, like we have to move forward. So. Somebody has to make a decision. And obviously we. all thought the organization was structured slightly different, than what has been exposed through all of this stuff.
and up, but up until that point, you're, you're thinking like, okay, well who else is gonna move this thing forward? On one hand, we can't say things like Wix and Squarespace and all these other platforms, Webflow are eating WordPress' lunch and be upset about that, but then on the other hand, do nothing about it. Right. And then just like drill into a more, you know, developer focused, you know, sort of mindset. Like, oh, we don't need all these tools.
We, I mean, God, you and I heard this when. Same thing when like you saw a theme forest or you saw page builders. You're like, nobody wants this stuff. This is all done wrong. This is not how you build a website. and then literally it's how you build a website,
I, yeah. Yeah, that's a great analogy. 'cause I actually see AI as comparable to theme builders like Beaver Builder Elementor, because it. Immensely changed our workflows, but in some ways it made us more valuable as developers, like at the same time, because anytime end users get confused, I see dollar signs, like, you know, like, and you know, and AI is just a tool that we're gonna use and it's gonna change things. but a, we, you know, AI needs us more than we know. We need.
AI needs us more than we need ai. And, we're, and so like, as long as you're willing to like. Figure it out as a business owner and, you know, get a little lucky, hopefully with the direction you go, you know, I think we'll be all right. You know.
So, aside from the project that you're working on, well, let me take a step back. What's, what's the size of your agency? How many folks work with you? How many contractors? How do you structure the agency?
Yeah, and that's another thing, like we've grown and I wanna say 2015, I had a CEO and I. had like, I dunno, five or six or eight full-time employees, something in there. Now I scaled back for a number of years here. I was like just me. Then it was me and one other developer, and then it was me and a SEO guy relatively recently. In January, I hired six part-timers. 'cause I'm like, I'm getting, I don't wanna be the main point of contact every time.
And so I hired a bunch of people to kind of just, so I hired a project manager who is just, I mean, I, I can't, I don't know if everybody's gonna get this lucky, but. To me, the project manager has the, the work that she's doing is changing my business, like in really profound ways. and, and I'm seeing able to see opportunities that I didn't see before. And this is just since January. And just, the talents and skills and just efficiencies and whatever. what was the
project, man. I, I remember the project manager role at my agency being one of like the hardest, at the, at the stage of the business that we were at. Again, this is a different era of like building websites, but like that. Investment was hard because it was like, oh wait, wait. We should really be hiring another developer or another designer like, 'cause then we can do more projects. But then the bottleneck was always either myself or I ran the agency with my father.
So it was either ahead time or my time. And what were we doing instead of selling, we were managing the projects. But it was one of those really difficult decisions like bring somebody on board that isn't immediately a billable. You know, a billable, role, more of like that management role, but wow, once you had the person in place and they were up to speed, it was just infinitely better.
Well, let me ask you, 'cause a few podcasts ago, you, you had, reminisced about when you brought on, so project manager's one thing, but you brought, said, you brought, it seemed like you said you brought on an account manager and that's really scary for me right now. Like, how did that work? You know, tell me a little bit about that.
He was a, he was multifaceted, Dan, so he was a project manager, but then he would also, you know, because we were a four five person shop and servicing mostly small businesses at the time, you know, so your margins were very thin as, you know, with like payroll and all this stuff. so then e eventually what as. He got better in, in the role and we understood the projects that we were, we were delivering.
he would also go back to the customer and say like, Hey, it's been a year since we've chatted. you're on our monthly maintenance and, and, support plan. Like, What else can we do for you? Right. So it was just like a very incremental thing.
you know, but it's a, it's a utility person and it's very hard to find, It's very hard to find that role in, I guess, any business where you can also like think as a founder, and understand, you know, what the client needs at the same time, and then get this technology thing. I mean, you don't have to be deep in any of it, but you just have to understand that world and that what makes, that's what makes a great project manager or slash ae.
I. think too, like all this, you know, when you're running a business, every hire should point to more money. Like at the end of the day, like in theory, one thing that was mind blowing when I hired my project manager, so I was doing the work and I would do so much, so many favor, not favors, but yeah, you're an existing customer. Sure. I'll just do that. I'll take me five, 10 minutes. No, you know, I wouldn't charge. Once the, the project manager came on, she's like, so they want this work?
What do you want a bill for it? I was like, what? Oh crap. And so like, she's basically paying for herself, but just by asking that question continually,
That's an under that, that's something that goes under the radar. And I tell this to a lot of, You know, freelancer friends that have reached out and they're like, Hey, just like struggling to get this business. And it's like, well, how many websites have you, you know, launched for clients and whatever it is, 5, 15, 50. You simply just have to ask, right? Because you ship them and then You think, okay, they're shipped. Now I I need to go find a new one. And it's like, well, you don't have to.
You could.
can
Make sure that they're paying you in some consult consultive, fee, whether you're actually maintaining their site or you've got them locked in for a few hours a month to just talk about their sites. You should be having those conversations because the worst thing not to go on a soapbox, ran because this is, this is your interview. but the, but The worst things that can happen to an agency is when. That customer.
If, if they're paying you monthly and you are not talking to them and you're not reaching out, that's the worst thing. Because if they're running into an issue and they're not telling you about it, the worst thing is, is like they start asking somebody else, like, Hey, this guy, we've, we've been paying Matt a hundred bucks a month, 200 bucks a month, whatever it is. And I have this freaking problem. He's never asking me, I don't know how to talk to him. I don't know how to explain it.
And then they go and they find somebody else, and then suddenly you get the, the phone call or the email like, Hey, we're canceling the account. And you're like, whoa, whoa. What happened? I thought everything was good.
yeah. Well there's there. Yeah. As soon as they talk to someone else, you can almost guarantee that person's gonna say, oh, that's way too much.
correct,
No matter what. Doesn't matter what it was.
correct. And you know, that's an interesting thing because I think.
I think
We, and I'm not in the agency game, but I, I talk to people all the time about it, but w we have this unfair, we're in this unfair position where, just like you said earlier, Squarespace user says, ah, wasn't it only 300 bucks to do this? I think when you think of yourself as a, as a consumer, and you have to hire a plumber, a landscaper, a contractor, whatever it is. Y you're exposed to that more often, like the customer's exposed to that.
Like, I gotta find somebody local to come do this thing for me. And what we, we learn the lesson of, you get what you pay for a lot faster in the real world. Where in the web world, it's only like, you know, if you're a company, it's like every maybe three, five years, you're thinking critically of, okay, we gotta redo this website. So you're not exposed to those lessons of you get what you pay for. You just go, we need to do this thing. It's a task.
Mm-hmm.
Just find the cheapest bid.
Yeah.
Am I crazy about thinking of it like that? Like we don't, we just don't get those reps in with our customers
Yeah. But I, I, think there are some customers that'll never come around to paying. Like, that's, that's a fact. But the ones that learn the lesson, they touch the stove, they learn it, they usually make really good long term customers. I find, also like there was a, this is just the more examples of how AI will not be helpful and how we will still continue to exist, a few years back. There's a, a, a, deodorant company called Lumi Deodorant.
and they have ads on TV now and stuff, but like there's, they're, operations officer, CMO came to me, just called Outta the Blue 'cause I do WordPress. And they were like, you know, locally local kind of. And so they found me. They called and like I started helping them. This is like just an example of like, again, how. We're gonna have jobs if we can adapt. And like, so I just started, they're like, Hey, we need to like import some users. I was like, okay, whatever.
They had WooCommerce and bottom line is like, it ended up being, they were, it turns out they were just like having way too many website sales. Like that was their problem. That that and the CEO came to me and she's like, should we close the site down? Like it's just a huge headache and failure and I'm looking at it. Like, and she didn't have the purview. I, I mean, she did business wise, but like, I'm looking at this like, you have no idea how unique your situation is.
Like, but anyway, bottom line is like AI would've never, they probably wouldn't. Right now, they sold for who knows how much to, the, some huge company, you know, now they've been bought and sold a couple at least once. but like, huge payout for them at the end of the day. But like. AI could not have helped them. You know, like, and I don't think a big agency would've been helpful either. Like, it was just so happened that I was small enough with a nut of experience.
'cause like I came in at, I wanna say it was like, for two grand a month, I think I can help you for the next six months. And I was way off by that, by the way. But like a big agency, two grand is not gonna get you in the door, you know? And so it ended up being, I ended up. Coming on as CTO after a while and was just like, we're gonna re, we need to rethink this whole thing.
and we ended up moving to the Shopify, but like, I think, I think there's green, you know, as green pastures as there ever has been in this crazy world,
Yeah, sure. another lesson that I, I find interesting that I think, at least from my experience, interested to hear your experience, but I think a lot of agencies after X amount of years, and, and this is something that evolves, like I think in the early days you're learning this every month and then it stretches to every six months and then every year, then every other year, and then every five years and maybe every 10 years. But you start to learn like a process of what you can deliver. Right.
Earlier when we started the show, you said you focus on a lot of small business and nonprofits. I love the nonprofit, vertical because even that is huge, like nonprofits for who, like what are they serving? Like is it donations? Like what's it look like? So I'm curious if you can paint the picture of, what your process looks like when you're selling to a customer. Is it.
it
A, b and c pick this mis Mrs. Or Mr. Customer, like pick one of these choices. Do you have a wheelhouse where you say, Hey, we're really good at nonprofit donation websites, but if you wanted us to build a membership site, we don't do that. Like, that's not in our wheelhouse. How do you like, refine and and fine tune your your machine at the agency?
machine is way overstating what it is. it's really me taking, so I always, I always try to get on the phone with people. First of all, it starts with an email. I. Usually, our, our main marketing channel is SEO. And so, and it has been forever. And so we get all our leads from SEO pretty much.
and so an email comes in, sometimes they'll call, and I try, at this point I get so much spam email and phone that I kind of ha I let it go to voicemail first, kind of, you know, or let the ai, I use an AI on my Android phone to screen them. That's another example. that's a good use of ai, like, and how I use it in my daily workflow. But, You know, I, I get the package thing.
we used to sell packages and we've been testing it out with SEO, but what we do now is like, really, this is, I don't know. I don't know how other people do it really. Like, for me it's, it's totally arbitrary. Like really at the end of the day, I'm trying to get a sense through conversations like how big of a project are we talking? And part of that is the technology and the, you know, the requirements.
But the other part is like, how many layers of bureaucracy do we have to fight through to approve? Some text, you know, how, how, how easy are you to converse with, like, are you putting up a fight on everything I say, or are you like, ah, Toby, that's brilliant, let's do it. You know, like to me tho there are costs that I add arbitrarily based on my feeling about, so like, I was talking to someone the other day, this is like a week ago, and, I got a sense right away.
And so I was like, yeah, usually our budgets are let's say five to 10 grand, whatever I told 'em. Very small, non-profit, for-profit, but they're like kind of a startup locally here. It was clear right away that that was off the table. And so I was like, well, I also do this other thing that is actually really cool and it's way cheaper, but it's different. And the, the gist of it is I'm gonna sit down with you.
For five or six hours total over a few weeks and we're gonna build your site together and you control how expensive it is because there are lots of shortcuts we can take, a lot in that process. And they, they did that and I actually met with them yesterday. It was fantastic. And like, so me as like a small business owner, I have that. Flexibility to kind of like do that. And I'm always looking, I'm desperate to close deals all the time, and I always have been. And this is like a fear of dying.
This is like what
Yeah, I go into that because I, I think a lot of people don't realize that, you know, everyone online, we're all fighting for survival in this game. Like, even if you see somebody with a seven figure, eight figure agency run rate, like, yeah, agency life is fun and it can be very profitable, but it's also like one paycheck away from death. So explain What What you're, what that means to you.
mean, I don't know if this was like my upbringing, I grew up poor or whatever, but like we all kind of grew up poor. I think if you talk to people, we all grew up poor.
Yeah. Yeah.
but like I am scared to death that I'm not gonna be able to pay the mortgage next month, even though I've paid it every month for the last 472 months without major issues, you know, like, So like, here's an example. Like if you came to me and you were like very reasonable and calm and nice and kind, you're, and you, you're like, I have X amount of dollars. We might be able to make a deal. You know, like that's how desperate I am. I'm not gonna jam you into our process.
you know, but like anything, if you come in, in a way that rubs me the wrong way, well maybe we can't make a deal,
Yeah. Or add another few zeros to the end of that,
Yep. There was one, person I was co-working with that she hired me to help her. She has a, just a brilliant idea for a startup and they, she's like, I really just need this website. And it was kind of like a membership thing, so you can kind of envision that where people pay for a membership and kind of like Upwork, but for a different vertical. and I was like, yeah, I think I can do that. And I was doing this thing where we would kind of meet up. I would do it just hourly, you know?
So she was getting like a great deal. I wasn't doing a lot of scoping. We were meeting in person. I was scoping, I. Her business partner was like, what is this charge? And so after that, her costs went skyrocketed. I, I was like, okay, I can't meet with you anymore. We're gonna need to scope stuff out. We're
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
and I, ended up making more money, did less work. I made more money for less work in that scenario.
yeah.
And she, I don't know if she was happy or not as happy, but I don't know that it mattered. Maybe it was better, I don't know. But yeah,
yeah, I mean it's, you have those conversations and you know, I think I've always tried, you know, say the phrase like blue collar digital worker, where like in your example, like, you're nice, I'm nice. Here's the, like, it's all about like, what, what are those expectations? What are those requirements that you need from me?
If you are not gonna beat me up and call me on a Saturday afternoon or in the middle of the night about, you know, something that you told me you were just experimenting with, you know, it's the, the worst customers from back in the day was this, like, I have no budget. you know, I want it now. And, you know, sometimes he'd be like, okay, okay.
They, They, would like scale it back and be like, all right, you know, we're not gonna be making, you know, any money, I promise, like, you know, don't do all this thing. And then they start like going gangbusters with an e-commerce store. Like I remember vividly, remember Saturday, a particular customer from way back who did all the same. He was hard-nosed. We got along.
you know, he worked me with the budget and then my thing was like, okay, you can work me on the budget, but I'm gonna scale back support. I'm gonna scale back feature set we're gonna use, you know, I didn't tell him, but we're gonna use these plugins. I mean, I would say like, we've got these repeatable code that we could use. You know, I'm not, you know, this is way back in the day.
And that then like Saturday would come and he had like this, he was somewhere, I forget, with like in-person event and he was selling tickets to all these things and he was. Freaking out that his website was down. And I'm like, I remember you telling me that this wasn't gonna be a thing. Like you weren't gonna be making money.
Well, you weren't gonna be, you didn't require, like, you didn't wanna pay the 300 bucks a month for hosting or whatever it was for a dedicated server back then you told me you didn't need this. You know, and here we are. you just gotta have those
yeah, in the common, the common red, red, you know, we have red flags that we develop over, like, as these calls come in and emails and what the most common, immediate red flag is, this is gonna be quick and easy. Like when they're like, I need something done. It's really easy. And I'm always like, if it was easy, you wouldn't be calling me.
Yes,
was quick, it'd be done. So why are we talking?
yes. That's like sales 1 0 1. I mean, I, I can start with that. You know, I can catch myself, get like I'm talking to a contract about building like, a deck and I'm like, look, this should just be
right, right.
as if I know how to pull out a nail gun and start building myself a
exactly. Here's another example of, it can pay to be nice like to small businesses, but even big ones, but like, I had someone I brought on as a developer. I, I like, they're like really struggling. They're like a local contractor. They have, you know, a business that's been going for years, but they needed help with their website and like, I really helped 'em. I like made it way better and for a very reasonable rate.
And then we were hosting them and then I, they started calling me on weekends and I was just like, what is going on? And like, they would break it. Anyway, the, the bottom line is, They call, they, they emailed and called, this is just like a month or so ago, and they're like, we're moving to someone else for hosting. Like, and, and we want a refund on the prorated annual contract that they signed. And if they had been nice throughout, I probably would've given the refund.
Like if they had been really cool and nice. I, I mean, that's my inclination to be like, oh yeah, sure. You know, stuff happens. But since they were such jerks and they continued to be jerks, even at the end, like when demanding the refund, like it was, it was how they demanded it more than that they demanded and like, just like, no, you're under contract. I cannot, I we do not grant refunds when you sign an, you know, that was my policy, that's my policies.
I gave, just gave them the policy, you know.
yeah. Yeah. It's, yeah, and being nice doesn't mean you get, you know. Stepped on, or, you know, you're, you're, making less money because the offset is less stress is the way that I see it. Right. You want to operate your business with as least stressed as possible, making the most amount of money you can. Like, it's a simple formula. it's just, you know, it's hard. It's hard Yes.
I had sales describe to me you wanna push them on price and to the point that they're uncomfortable, Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Efficiencies on the back end of the house. we, we talked about like having the conversations, the pre-sales into the sales, into the delivery process. Do you have a stack? You always use a theme and a set of plugins you use on every single project that lessens the amount of time spent, but then improves those gaps of, or that that profitability.
Yeah, I was thinking about this today. We've been very, so we use Beaver Builder wherever possible. you know, beaver Builders, if you don't know his competitor to, I know you know Matt, but it's a competitor to Elementor in Baker, WP Bakery and that sort of thing. Astra would be a competitor to Beaver Builder in theory. I. So I did a number of tests a handful of years ago, and I have a blog post. It's like my longest blog post I ever written.
It was a bunch of ab tests using Beaver verse, Elementor verse Bakery and verse Core and Beaver builder performed the fastest from a speed test perspective in that very, you know, non-scientific study, like somewhat scientific study that I ran. so we started using BeaverBuilder then and we've just continued, we have some, we, we would always start with Beaver Builder for building it.
If we have a, a customer, we do have Elementor sites that we manage, that we've onboarded, but, if we were to rebuild them, we would definitely switch to Beaver. we generally don't use Git or anything like that because, Cowboy coding is too negative. Like, not quite it, but you know, with WordPress it's like, what are you gonna put and get, you know, everything's like, you could store the database and gi I suppose, but you already have backups of that. So we use Managed wp.
so first of all, I, I tried like every backup solution I could get. I wanted like a really, robust, like a, a backup solution that would work every time and that it was easy to restore. And I tried like, backup buddy for years and, a bunch of other ones. all the ones that I could think to test. Some were in the cloud, some were not. and I even, even, so managed wp, we use them for every site. We back up everything in the cloud. We already are running, cloud backups on whatever host we're using.
We're using site ground primarily, as the hosting solution. but we're even backing up that on managed WP, just so we have multiple redundancies and whatnot. So I love managed WP and since we had that, I, we've started to use it to send reports and it's been really nice. Like, and they have, I even, they have A-A-S-E-O feature in there where you can track up to a hundred keywords. I've started selling that, like, oh, you wanna track some keywords? Great.
And basically we have two customers that are basically paying for our managed WP With
Yeah.
keyword tracking, you know, and, and I'm not doing any more work other than the onboarding, you know? So, and, and, and, and from a sales perspective that's leading to more conversations. So like, how come my ranking went down? What happened? I'm like, I don't know. Let's talk.
yeah. Yeah. That's great.
so that's on the WordPress end. You know, we use local, if we de develop locally, but usually we're developing staging sites
Yeah. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. I like the, I like that you, this is a bit of a tangent, but I like that, that you're still using Beaver Builder, and I think that they've found, they've slotted themselves into a space of like a non hype, reliable page building tool on paper. I hope that means That they're still running a successful business compared to the giants who will cut cost and be in your face with marketing and ship every new feature.
Because I've seen this year after year of like, oh, there's a new page builder out. Let's shift the whole business over there. I used Beaver Builder when I was at my agency. I could not understand anyone wanting to take that risk of like, you already have this back catalog of customers. You built this. You built sites for using X, Y, z, page builder. Now you saw another one that had two more features and you were like, let's shift the whole business over there. How does that make sense?
You know? but people do it because they're, they're after a lower price. They're after a new feature, they're just getting bored and they're not thinking like scalable business, and that's scary.
but also like the, on the cost end, like I always, like, I know because I, I have a lot of, I lead the word or I lead the WordPress user group. I meet, we, every Wednesday I get together with the, with the WordPress developers to cowork. And so we have a lot of these conversations and I'm always like surprised by like they're providing plugin licenses without any additional charges. And I'm like. Just charge 'em a few bucks and you've covered at least your fees.
Like, you know, like, there's a lot of like businessy here. Another example is like, so two ways to grow your business. One is to make more money. Three ways make more money. Well, I guess make more money are cut costs. Those are the two ways. But like, if you just look at the making money part, one way to make more money is to sell more stuff. Another way is just to increase fees. And so like a year ago I increased fees across the board, 5.7%. On all my customers without, without exception.
How did you come up with 5.7?
by 5.7% basically without doing any more work.
how did you come up to the number? 5.7%.
it seemed pretty mathy. Like it seemed like if someone pressed me, I could explain it with some bit of math. Yeah.
Yeah, but there was like probably like a bigger, like, here's the flat fee number I'm trying to achieve, and 5.7 across all my customers gets me to that number.
no, not really. IW I was really just, I wanted to increase costs. 'cause our costs are increasing and like we, we never increased cost in 18 years, 17
right. This was a question I was gonna have for you, so this is great.
great. Yeah. So we never, IM increased costs. I shouldn't say like we charged ar like I say, we've been charging arbitrarily for basically the same website for 18 years and, you know, but. On the hosting end, we never, I shouldn't say we've charged more, but we never increased cost on existing customers. That just hasn't been a thing. So, I just felt like, you know, we've been at it 18 years and in my mind I was like, my salary isn't going up.
Like, and so at least if I do this, I can increase my salary by 5.7%, which, which my wife has been clamoring for for a decade. You know, like everyone else is getting raises. You're sitting there not getting a raise and you're the, you know,
Yeah, Yeah, that, that's smart of you because Yeah, like once again, if you go into the air quotes, real world of, of, business, food, lumber, electricians, plumbers, everything, literally going up and, you know, I feel like a lot of us web designers or agency owners I should say, but sitting behind a computer, even if you're consulting, a lot of us aren't, we're just absorbing that into our already existing margins, which. You know, it's driven by market demand. I totally get it.
More competition the harder it is, but you know, standing out is very important. leads me to, one of my final questions here is you mentioned SEO being the biggest, marketing factor for you. you have a great podcasting setup. Are you're doing podcasting content as well? Like what other factors help drive traffic to your business?
I, I, I think if anything it's Relationships that I've built over 18 years in the business. I don't think my, you know, I have some YouTube videos out there. I've done a lot of LinkedIning stuff, but the, the leads that I get that are not SEO are like an old friend who's like, Hey, I work at a marketing agency here and we need a WordPress person. so we just closed one of those.
I have a buddy who's was at the coffee shop the other day and not the other day, a couple months ago, and he just chatted up someone next to him. They're like, yeah, we need a website. And they've become a client of ours. You know, it's like that sort of,
Yeah.
I, I've been not good. I have intended to be good, but I've been failing, failing miserably at like other marketing
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's great. And referral, obviously still like the number one driver once again, is AI doing that for us. Google search isn't doing that for us. you know, it's just putting out good, a good product, having, you know, Something that you aspire to, you know, achieve, right? Like, this is, this is why you hire my business. This is how we think, this is how we operate. you know, SEO is working great for you.
but still at the end of the day, I'm sure referrals and people like trusting your work and being like, Hey, we know another business that needs something. You're the guy,
the guy. Yeah. And here's the, the, there's gonna be someone out there, of course, who, who's gonna be like, no, I can use ar ai to automate my email marketing. And anyone who seasoned to this is gonna go, not really like good luck. I mean, maybe if you had an email list of 3 million people, maybe you could land a few deals. But like, I have a buddy who works at a big, SEO agency in town, and his job is to get sales for the agency. So he's, he's marketing like B2B bigger companies.
And he was telling me like. This isn't even an ai, but I could see AI doing this. But, he was saying one of his bosses wanted him to write like copy that was like, very not correct for like, like, it was like put a big thumbs up in the subject line, you know, like that sort of thing. And he's like, that's not really like how I wanna position it. But that's the sort of thing AI will tell you to do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, that's a whole other, you know, soapbox moment for me. But like, yeah, I, I posted something the other day and somebody like tweeted back to me was like, you didn't sell me in 30 seconds, so I don't really care about this. And I'm like, guy, I've never put out anything that I've want. Like I've never published a piece of content trying to sell anybody. On anything. Like you either want it or you don't. Right.
And, and that's why I and it wasn't even a thing I was selling, I was just, it was just about one of my tutorials or something. I forget what it was, but, people, I, I just don't live in that mindset. I, and I debate this with folks like Mark Semanski and, and Kevin Geary, who, you know, might have more of like a strategic approach for creating content and doing social like. I don't,
Mm-hmm.
and I know that's like a bad thing, but my only advantage is I haven't given up where I'm not saying Mark and, and, and Kevin would, but I think folks who are just in the like, growth mindset of like optimize the thumbnail, put the keywords in, in, in the video and you know, in the first five seconds you have to punch Zoom in and zoom back out. Like, I don't wanna do that,
that, Yep. Yeah. Well, you're
want my authentic content.
yeah. And you're pointing to something that's unique in the WordPress space. Not unique, but very special about it. and that is that, the community is what built WordPress. And I give Matt all the props for that. Like he built an amazing community and continues to maintain it. And, Matt Mullen is who I'm talking about. But you too. Yeah. I'll put you there too.
So you, I mean, honestly, you're like, one of the pillars of the community, like the people who really like, gather people together to, you know, to, to think about WordPress deeply. And, one of the things that right now that our community is going through is, you know, the, this recent stuff between Automatic and WP Engine, it. It points to the strength of the community in a way. And I really hope they figure it out and can get back to building the community up.
because it's been, it's been, it's been sad. It's been kind of heartbreaking to me to, but at the same time, like I know I have two brothers I don't talk to anymore. you know, two blood brothers, and I know there's, that stuff happens in, in, it's very small and like, as I say, the community, but like, if it can happen in my family. It can happen here. And I really hope that, I, I'm really hopeful for the community that will figure it out. And I think Matt will.
I I really, it's interesting 'cause a lot of my peers here in Minneapolis that I talk to don't have, they've lost faith in the WordPress community and I haven't, you know, there's work to be done and I'm gonna do my little part to. Do what I can do. And you're, you're, you've been continuing to do that too. And, you know, without blame and without expectation, you know, I just kind of, I, I'm gonna, you know, we're still here. Yeah.
The Mighty mo.com. He's Toby. you can find him once again, the mighty mo.com. Toby, where else do you want folks to go to say, thanks?
you can hit me up on LinkedIn, send me a message. Be happy to converse there. And email's great too.