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Hosted by Toby Cryns and Kurt von Ahnen, the Agency Action Podcast (Part of the WP Minute Podcast Network) dives into the real-world ups and downs of running a WordPress agency. Each week, Toby and Kurt share open, honest conversations about the challenges and victories that come with building client relationships, pricing projects, finding the right tools, and growing a sustainable business.
Whether you’re just launching your agency or refining your systems, you’ll get practical insights from two agency owners who live it every day—along with stories that remind you you’re not alone in this wild WordPress world of global teams, AI disruption, and constant change.
Follow the show and explore more at TheWPMinute.com/podcasts
Toby Cryns (00:00)
Welcome to another episode of the Agency Action Show starring Kurt and Toby. I'm Toby, along with Kurt. ⁓ Kurt, I have a question for you. Hypothetically, you have a friend who wants to get out of the WordPress development business and you've known them for years and you know kind of what they do and their clients kind of align with yours in terms of the work.
Kurt Von Ahnen (00:06)
And I'm Curt.
Toby Cryns (00:29)
And they say, hey, just want to get out. I just want to gift this business to you for free or for $1. You can buy this business. Is this a good gift or a bad gift?
Kurt Von Ahnen (00:42)
That is a really great conversation. And I want to say right up front to anyone listening to this show, I'm probably not talking about you. ⁓ This is coming up a lot right now, Toby. ⁓ The EM-Dash release on April 1st had a bunch of people hitting the panic button. The Matt Mullenweg calling someone a parasite again for buying a plugin has caused a little bit of a panic.
it seems like there's these little ripples along the way where more and more people now are saying, man, I've been doing this for 10 or 12 or 15 years. And I just, I just want to get out now. Right. But they don't really have an exit strategy. And because they don't have an exit strategy, they go to the next best thing, which is I don't want to abandon all these customers. I'll just give this to someone else to manage. And I guess the real question is like, how do you figure out if you want it? Cause it's like, do I.
If I can have an extra 15, 20, 50 customers right away, I think I'd be crazy to say I don't want 50 new customers, right? But you have to look at the situation and go, well, what processes are in place? What services were provided or promised? How much did it cost? ⁓ What level of hosting? Like if they were a hosting company, like, okay, were you, were you reselling shared hosting? you on?
Toby Cryns (01:50)
Mm-hmm.
Kurt Von Ahnen (02:10)
private VPS servers like like what what level of service was offered and how does it match with your existing you know offer I think is really important I think if you just automatically say yes to something you you might be setting yourself up for more heartbreak than than success
Toby Cryns (02:21)
Yes.
Yeah, and part of that equation, I think would be like, how much time and energy is gonna be required of me just to onboard your business? So if it's like two or three clients that have very simple or very like, clear deliverables, okay, that's like, let's say they're just hosting clients and they're just gonna say like, just take over my hosting account and go, all right, I think I can do that. I'd probably pay for that without thinking too hard.
Kurt Von Ahnen (02:54)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (02:59)
But if it's more like ⁓ I've got clients and I know I have friends in the business who I know how they interact. My friends are good people, but I know they're like very hands on. They answer the phone all the time and their clients expect a certain level of service that's different from what we expect. And you go, ⁓ let me think about this a little bit if I want to accept this gift.
Kurt Von Ahnen (03:24)
Yeah, I think that that's like super, super important in terms of like you do SEO, like this is perfect example. You do SEO work. Okay. I know a lot of people that love SEO work. I know a lot of people that run from SEO work. I know a lot of people that scam SEO work. Like they think they do SEO, but they don't really do SEO. Right. And like, it's so amazing to me that there is a complete disconnect in that, that little vertical, right. That we call SEO. ⁓
There's like, yeah, I installed Yoast and I threw in a couple of keywords for you. Right. And then there's the, I'm actually creating content and driving your long tails and I'm working with you on LLM and all like, so like there's this whole other level of SEO. And when you say, yeah, I'm going to take over these projects or these things for these customers. What you have to know, like what level of service was being offered and for what value if
somebody was paying for basic SEO, meaning like a Yoast install and some keyword optimization. ⁓ and then you come at it with like, I'm going to give them the whole train, you know, I'm just going to bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And they're paying a hundred bucks a month for it. You're going to find out that you're going to surpass in cost what you're receiving in revenue pretty quickly. Right. And, and so it's like super important to understand what you're getting into.
Toby Cryns (04:47)
Yeah. And also if somebody, I've run into this like on Facebook marketplace where like somebody's selling a guitar and they're basically listing it at retail cost. And I'm like, I'm only going to accept this if it's steeply discounted. And, but they're saying, well, if it's steeply discounted, I don't want to get rid of it. And like, there's some, like, if someone's giving you a business and I've run into this too, where like a friend was
He actually had a very well-rounded hosting business, but he priced it in a way that didn't make sense to me. ⁓ And he ended up just giving away the leads, not the actual business. But he's like, hey, I'm telling his client, he told his clients, I'm getting out of the biz, here are some contacts for you. And I talked to a couple of the people and it was just like, not a good experience for me and they didn't hire me. ⁓
So part of the, as you think of it, like how hard is it to sell your business? If you're giving it away, it's probably not a very sellable business.
Kurt Von Ahnen (05:53)
Yeah. Yeah. So, so that takes us to you and I have discussed this before, so I don't want to beat it to death, but we've, we've talked about like, what's your exit strategy? How do you, how do you set up processes and how do you document yourself so that you have a sellable business and you have something that has an exit strategy? So that's that, that's one thing, right? But when you look at the acquisition of another business, so let's say, let's say they weren't even going to give it to you. Like they want to sell you their business for a hundred thousand dollars.
and you go, okay, what's that look like? ⁓ What are the things that you would look at, Toby? If you're like, I'm going to acquire another agency because I want to shortcut my agency's growth. What do you think you would need to look for?
Toby Cryns (06:40)
I would look for ⁓ profitability first. Like, what's it going to cost and how quickly until I recoup that. when my friend was trying to sell me ⁓ his business a couple of years ago, that was the main point of contention for us. like, I think it's worth like, I only want to take this on. I'm not saying it's worth that. To me, it's one year of, as long as I'm making a profit one year from now from the purchase, I'm okay with that.
he was pricing it like a SaaS product where there's like lots of models, but the idea was like, well, 3X, the top line and da-da-da-da. And I'm like, that's very different from profit. So that's my first thing. How quickly can I recoup the profit? If it just continues, not even accounting for the effort and energy and expense of just acquiring it and onboarding it. ⁓ But then the next thing, of course, is like, okay, what...
Is, does this transition look like, is it a complex transition or not? Like I was a guy was trying to, a different guy was trying to sell me a hosting business a couple of years back. and I was on a call with him and seems like a legit business that had like, you know, I could have taken it on, but I didn't even understand. It was like kind of complex, too complex for me to understand. He's like, I got customers doing this, customers doing that. I'm like, I just don't.
Kurt Von Ahnen (08:03)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (08:05)
understand
these different hosting packages and I'm pretty well versed. So I, at that point, I'm like, I just, I just don't can't do it I don't even understand. I understand hosting. just don't understand how you're doing hosting.
Kurt Von Ahnen (08:20)
think that's an important consideration. That falls to me under like services rendered versus services promised. perfect example, I'm helping out another agency now with a project and every time I talk to the client they go, the back end is just so slow, the back end is just so slow. And then you do a page speed report, you know, and it's a 91 or a 93 or whatever. And then you work on the website and it actually does feel slow, right? And you're like, it does feel slow.
And then you talk to the customer and they're like, I really feel slow. And you're doing amazing work for them. And the, the website's great. And, and, and like, you know, the function is great and the automations are great and all these things are great, but in the back of their mind, the website's still slow. Right. And so again, I go back to like services rendered versus services promised the sites there. It works. It's hosted. It's what's promised. ⁓
but the customer expects more and that falls into like the satisfaction level of the clients. with the knowing that every time I talk to this client, they mentioned how slow the site is. At what point do you give them more PHP workers or more, ⁓ hosting resources, or do you try to optimize different elements on the website in pursuit of performance to try and get this thing to, to work the way that they expect it to. And
you know, if you were to adopt, if you were to adopt a profile of like 200 customers and they all came back with something slow or something doesn't meet my expectations, you've adopted, you've adopted a bad egg for your basket.
Toby Cryns (10:04)
Yeah, and it's gonna be really hard for you to know that going in.
Kurt Von Ahnen (10:08)
Yeah, it would be really, really hard to know that. and at what point, let's say they, let's say you acquire or you adopt something that on the surface seems profitable. But once you start looking at customer satisfaction issues, you realize you got to pay an extra 25 or 30 % in resources to get it up to snuff. Well, that comes right off the bottom line for you. That's, that was the profit you were looking forward to making.
Toby Cryns (10:36)
Yeah. And it kind of raises this other question, like buying a business that requires the owner there is a really tough sell. this is kind of the type of business that you and I are like, I don't know. The problem is like, once you get beyond that, the costs go skyrocketing potentially like, ⁓ it runs without the owner. Well, the owner doesn't need to sell it then so he can just sit there and wait for years for an offer. ⁓ but that's.
Kurt Von Ahnen (11:02)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (11:05)
I think even if you go smaller, like a coffee shop, picture this coffee shop on the corner, we're closing, we're selling our coffee shop for $15,000. I'm like, maybe I'll just lease the space and take over your coffee shop with and just give it a slap a new brand on it. That's free. know, I mean, there's some cost to that, but like, I don't then don't have to buy your business. And that's kind of like similar here. Like in theory, like I would rather just buy the leads from you. If you were going to give away the
the business, like what I really want is the leads to onboard them into my system.
Kurt Von Ahnen (11:40)
Yeah, that's so you bring up an interesting topic, right? So let's say, you know, it's 150 customers. And when you talk to those customers, you're like, we can migrate. So maybe that's the discussion, right? Absolutely. We could migrate your package over to our system and it looks like we could keep your costs relatively the same. That would be a way of like, okay, well now I'm keeping everything similar.
Right. And I'm adopting them and I'm putting them into my systems and I'm going to have a, I'm going have an onboarding conversation with them to kind of regear or reset their expectations properly. like, yeah, we do support. We do support ticket based support, or we do email based support. You know, we, don't do 24 seven on call support, right? Like, like you could set those expectations during that onboarding process. And then you give them the option to.
They could shop you, could go move there. They could migrate to WP Engine or do whatever they want to do. But in that case, I could see where you're definitely taking the leads and then giving them the opportunity. You could migrate into our system. We could rebuild you a new project if you're due for a rebuild. could, you know, all kinds of things. Maybe, maybe what you are talking about makes more sense than just a simple acquisition turnkey thing. Maybe it would make more sense to say,
Toby Cryns (12:56)
love that.
Kurt Von Ahnen (13:07)
Hey, I'm glad that you've had good service through so-and-so for the last five years. ⁓ If we move you to our system, this is what we'd be looking to do. And this does this to your costs and then give them the choice to move over.
Toby Cryns (13:19)
seems like a win-win. So let's say your friend has this business that he wanted to give away because it was too complex to sell. So he's like, just take it, enjoy. But what if instead you're like, how about this? I'm going to give you X amount per deal that we close. You funnel them all to me, say you're closing, but here's a guy and I will cut you a deal where I'll give you the first year of whatever, X amount of dollars per client that we sign up.
That seems like a really interesting win-win. It's more profitable for the friend. It's more profitable, you know, like the clients are coming on in a way that like makes sense.
Kurt Von Ahnen (13:58)
Yeah. What do you think you would do? Because you and I have talked about processes.
How would you, how would you like evaluate their process and then even think about taking the risk of adopting their processes over some of your own.
Toby Cryns (14:21)
I don't know that it's possible. this is what happens every time a small company gets absorbed. just, the small company's culture goes away. You know, I don't.
Kurt Von Ahnen (14:32)
Yeah. Yeah. But
unfortunately that's could be some of the charm that kept them going. So let's just talk in broad terms, right? Like you've gone public before saying that you're a beaver builder kind of guy, right? And, but this, this agency did strictly everything in Elementor. And so now you're looking at, I got to take in all these websites, but 80 % of them are built in Elementor. ⁓
Toby Cryns (14:37)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
Kurt Von Ahnen (14:59)
That would be a process adoption in itself right there.
Toby Cryns (15:02)
Yeah.
Same with hosting it like I could see that being an issue with hosting. I think like, in a case like that, let's say we did absorb a bunch of clients who were on a different WordPress platform, like Elementor or something. I think we could absorb that. don't think we would, we would might need, well, here's the other, the next thing we'd probably need if we absorbed, let's say 20 clients, we'd probably need another developer. So let's just start there too. Does this business
come with help that we can plug into our, if it does, ⁓ tell me about that. And what are you paying those people? Where are they located? What are their expectations? ⁓ If you don't have them, that means you're doing all the work and, or at least all the ⁓ managing of the work and.
Kurt Von Ahnen (15:37)
Does this business come with anybody?
Toby Cryns (15:58)
We need to hire someone to do what you're doing.
Kurt Von Ahnen (15:58)
Yeah.
So I've seen more than a few people on X and like in post status posting up, know, about, you know, dash or, ⁓ lovable or these other distractions in the space. And more and more people seem to be like sampling other tools than just WordPress in the agency space. There's nothing wrong with that. Like I'm not, I'm not trying to brand or label people or whatever, but it's causing people to say, you know, I've been
I've been putting too much of my life for too little profit into this space. And I feel like there's this opportunity in this other green pasture. And so I'm seeing people start to make some leaps and it's going to create opportunity for people that stay behind as a WordPress focused, you know, facility for that. That's the way to say it. And there is an opportunity to kind of build and turn that. But then comes the comes the question of like, how do you propose that to, ⁓
Let's say small agency acquisition, 15 clients, just super easy, 15 people. When you say, when you, when you onboard those customers and you say, Hey, I understand you've been with so-and-so for two years, right? ⁓ but this is the way we do it at Mignon and Omas. We, you know, we have, we have hosting, we we're going to migrate you to our hosting. your package looks like it'll work fine. You've got these tools. I would recommend changing to this, that, or the other.
you haven't updated in a long time as far as content. ⁓ do you need help with content? Are you going to redo some content? Are you going to add courses? Do you have a membership or community tool that you want to implement? ⁓ you know, you start to go through kind of like your checklist of like, Hey, you were, you were here. Do you want to go from here to here with your project and where the work we can run you through the steps to do that. And it could become a real sales opportunity, but, I think that it is a,
I think it's a very sticky road to go because I think if you try to upsell everybody, you're going to have a certain amount of ⁓ attrition.
Toby Cryns (18:08)
Well, yeah, and if you try to migrate, especially if you don't have, it'd be one thing, let's say you onboarded 15 WordPress customers ⁓ and you have all the hosting DNS and WordPress logins. That's one scenario. The other scenario is you don't have any of that. It's a way bigger project in the sense of a community, because let's say we have all that. We can just say, hey, we need to schedule a call. There's going to be
Kurt Von Ahnen (18:23)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (18:34)
Five minutes of downtime next Thursday when we migrate the site and da, da, da, da, you know? So like it's, if we have all the stuff, we don't need them to do anything except take a break for five, you know, for while we're doing the migration ⁓ versus a scenario where we don't have any of that. And now we're like having meetings and they're like, this is just more frustration for them and more headache for them. But the other question about upselling, which you bring up like, yeah, great opportunities to upsell, but.
Kurt Von Ahnen (18:43)
Yeah.
Mm.
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (19:03)
Upselling takes time and energy and understanding too. And you go, do we have someone to do that? When's that going to get done? And I know a lot of agency owners where that would never get done, that task, the upselling.
Kurt Von Ahnen (19:17)
In, the business framework, you know, we always say that we, don't always say we should always say, you know, it's cheaper to sell an existing client than to try to land a new client. Where do you think an acquired client comes in at?
Would you consider them a new client or an existing client? Like, I would think the sale would be easier. It's direct referral.
Toby Cryns (19:39)
I think.
I think like the upsell opportunities are a lot greater with a new client. Is that kind of your question? Like, because I'm coming at it with a fresh perspective. ⁓ let's say they have already been working with such and such for the past few years, but I do SEO too. And that guy didn't do SEO. Maybe they did some other stuff and they can come on and I can be like, look at this new fancy thing that we can do for you. And I think that's probably a good upsell scenario if you can manage those conversations. What do you think?
Kurt Von Ahnen (20:04)
Yeah.
If it's a direct referral and to your point, if we have the DNS settings and the passwords and all that stuff, right? It's like, we already have everything we need to move you. I, you know, I have a great working relationship with so-and-so. This is going to be great. It's going to be awesome. We'll move you right over to me. It's almost like they're an existing client. It's like that relationships in place, which makes them prime real estate to upsell to like, I don't think I could like double the hosting fee, right? Like I don't want to tick them off straight out of the shoot, right?
Toby Cryns (20:44)
Right. Right.
Kurt Von Ahnen (20:47)
So, so I don't think I'm going to say, well, you were paying $55 a month for hosting, but our entry level package is one 10 a month. Like, I don't think that's going to work. Um, but what I think would work would be like, to your point, right? Like, so. You know, were you, I don't show that you had an SEO package with your preexisting provider, right? Who was doing SEO for you? Oh, you weren't having it done. Okay. Well, that probably speaks to the traffic and that speaks to the bandwidth I'm seeing on the reports and that's.
You know, what if we were to help you with your SEO and your traffic? What if, you know, do you have a CRM tool that you are connected to for your business? Okay, well, would you like a CRM in your website? You know, do you feel like you have enough traction in your business to consider community? ⁓ so I think there is some real upsell opportunity. I, but I just think to your point, it would take a lot of time investment to explore all those opportunities. And unfortunately, you don't have a lot of time to do it.
Like I think if you migrate, once you migrate the customer, you have to have that upsell conversation within two weeks. Like you can't let it sit on your server for three months and then hit them up for upsells.
Toby Cryns (21:58)
Right. Here's another interesting scenario, just building on this 15 clients coming over. If these 15 clients are part of like your ideal customer demographic, ⁓ we are right now, I'm going to pay thousands of dollars over the next, many scores of thousands of dollars, probably over the next few months, just acquiring ⁓ conversations with people through cold outreach. ⁓
Kurt Von Ahnen (22:23)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (22:25)
If I can get 15 conversations that are like of that caliber, that's worth scores of thousands of dollars.
Kurt Von Ahnen (22:34)
Yeah, yeah.
It's very interesting to me because I feel like, especially now, and I'm sure that this happens in waves, right? But from what I'm seeing from comments and, you know, what you see people posting, ⁓ it just feels like we're on a wave right now where there's gonna be the opportunity to acquire some clients. And I don't know that the value of the client is actually being considered in that consideration. Like, to your point,
How much so the cost of customer acquisition? I don't think a lot of agencies even calculate it. Right? How much do you spend? Like are you doing paid ads? Are you doing SEO? Obviously you have your own website. You you have all these things in place. So if you take your, you know, cost of running your business and you separate that by the number of clients you have just for just for very simple math, you'll be like, oh, I spend, you know, $1,200 for every new client.
That means every client that you get direct referred to is worth that. That's a $1,200 referral.
Toby Cryns (23:43)
Yeah, totally. And I think like part of, part of why that's not valid is a lot of particularly small agency owners aren't paying at all for those SEO, you know, they'll pay for the ads maybe, but, ⁓ but they don't, they're just not paying for that. They're doing it all themselves. They're doing their social media. They're, you know, I don't want to, they're not even doing cold outreach, but paid ads and go into events and stuff. I think like the, whole idea of acquiring company, the
You don't even get into the math until you like are paying someone to do these functions. Like it's hard to even comprehend the math, I think.
Kurt Von Ahnen (24:24)
I don't want to put numbers in your head, but I'll just tell you when I'm thinking about staff for something, you know, right to my mind immediately just comes the number 60,000. You know what I mean? Like that's going to cost me $60,000 to have that done.
And now whether I have somebody offshore, onshore, remote in my backyard, whatever in my head is like 60 grand because when I'm thinking of new services to offer or new things I've got to put into my agency, I just ask myself, is that going to create enough revenue for me to afford to pay someone 60 grand to do it? And that's in my mind that that's just like the number and it's changed over the years. I mean, it used to be 40 grand, but now in my mind it's like, could I pay someone 60 grand to do that for me?
And if I do the quick math and go, I could pay someone 60 grand to do that. Well, then it makes sense to execute and move forward. And I know that that's a arbitrary silly way to think of things sometimes, but if I was going to acquire 20 new clients, you know, would I, would that be enough revenue for me to say, well, I need to pay someone 60 grand to babysit those accounts.
Toby Cryns (25:33)
Yeah, there's this other part of this, is speed. If you acquire 15 customers, you get those tomorrow versus in six months from now, even if you can get it cheaper through social media and whatever. But, what value is there in having that tomorrow?
Kurt Von Ahnen (25:52)
Yeah. So you really have to offset, you know, the teeter totter life, right? So, ⁓ opportunity versus obligation, right? So with every opportunity come certain obligations. Are you in the position to fulfill the obligations if you take advantage of the opportunity and that, that becomes a real test to, ⁓ you know, internal fortitude planning strategy, you know, brain power, just to put things in place. I would be curious.
Let's let's so let's roll things back, right? Because our first question was someone wants to make a deal with you to acquire gift, small payment, whatever. And the first question was, do you want it in your mind? Would you rather onboard 20 customers over six months or onboard 20 customers over a weekend?
Toby Cryns (26:49)
Yeah, it really depends on the service, but if it was hosting, I would say let's get them going immediately. If that was it, like hosting done. If it's ongoing projects, yeah, we need time, know, one a week maybe, and let's maybe one every two weeks and let's maybe more than that because like we might need onboard staff to manage this transition and the, know, all those other things come into mind. Like, do they have a team working on this? Can we just like start paying them and
Kurt Von Ahnen (26:56)
Ching!
Toby Cryns (27:19)
keeps going or. ⁓
What other considerations as you consider like...
Yeah, would you rather have it tomorrow or one a month for the next 15 months?
Kurt Von Ahnen (27:44)
Yeah, that's, that's, that's a really tough question because if you do a company acquisition, I mean, that's a light switch. It's, it's on like you're, you're, you're it's, it's put up or shut up time. And, ⁓ I was part of the still it's a lifetime thing. I'm part of the John Maxwell organization, the John Maxwell team and, ⁓ Paul Martinelli, when he ran the John Maxwell team, he used to have the saying that was, sometimes you got to jump off the cliff and build your wings on the way down.
You know, like you just say yes, and it's going to work out. Like you got to figure it out. But my trick with thinking about these agency acquisition things, ⁓ I've got a friend up in the Northeast who's got a small agency and, and, and talk sometimes about reducing, either his workload altogether or going into another field, right? Like I'm thinking about taking a job. I don't think I want to run this agency thing anymore. ⁓ so he's thinking about
bailing out of that. And part of me is like, Hey, you know, I'm those are the grindstone man, like I'm, I'm waiting here when you're ready to let go. I could take care of that, but it's, ⁓ build your wings, build your wings on the way down. It's like, if he said, I'm out this weekend, like, Hey, you know what? My hosting bills come and do, I don't want to pay another bulk payment to the host. I'm just going to bail now. Right? So I'm out. I'm going to tell my customers on Thursday that the hosting expires on Friday.
Right? I could literally say, dude, slow, slow your role. Let's, let's instead of pissing off a set of pissing off a handful of people, let's just make this happen. We'll transition them to my server and we'll onboard them and we'll let them know that we're here to take care of them and that we're upgrading their service.
Toby Cryns (29:30)
Yeah. That seems like a win-win too. And it could be a scenario where you're just paying commissions to this guy still. Like, it could be just a really good scenario for that guy. ⁓ One thing that you kind of brought up that I think is accurate, like in terms of the wing, you call it like getting your wings, which is a really nice way to say, we're running a really S-H-I-T show. Like, that's the reality when you onboard 15 in one day.
Kurt Von Ahnen (29:55)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (30:00)
That's what it is. It's like, ⁓ we have no idea what we're doing with 15 customers in one day. It's never happened before. ⁓ that sort of thing. And so you call it getting wings. I call it welcome to the show. ⁓ And it's real light. Like it's going to be really uncomfortable. And we are experiencing that right now at the mighty moat. We've been growing and I had a conversation today with my, one of my teammates and we were just talking, it's been a really frustrating week for a number of reasons.
Kurt Von Ahnen (30:14)
Welcome to the show.
Toby Cryns (30:30)
They were like, part of this has to do with the rate of growth that we like are just not managing our resources optimally, you know, and that's the reality of it. And we're like, well, let's figure it out. Like, and so we've been building because we're in this show, like we're rebuilding this week. We've been spending a lot of time just rethinking processes and like, okay, we've got to let's just rethink this. like next time this happens, it's better. And
But it's really uncomfortable right now for us. But I think in two weeks it'll be way better.
Kurt Von Ahnen (31:06)
In terms of, because you know, you have to mention AI in every show if you're going to if you're to hit the algorithm. ⁓ I think AI has wickedly changed the name of the game and things like, you know, process development and, you know, building agents to do certain things. And and I get the feeling you and I are in the same ballpark as in like, yeah, we want to have staff to manage certain aspects of our agency. But there's also some automation that we could put in place.
And I feel like that's going to be a big component of acquisition in the near future, because let's say someone does have, you know, a decent role of clients, but they have them on some kind of like thing they built with chat GPT in 2023, you know, and you're going to be like, I don't want to try to manage that. Like I'm going to have to pull that out of there and then re engineer.
you know, how certain functions or features work. I just think that there's, there's a lot of those build it and forget it kind of moments where I think that's going to rear its ugly head in two to three years where you're going to have a bunch of outdated stuff and you got to figure out how things would really work in your systems.
Toby Cryns (32:22)
That's a great point. ⁓ It could also be an upsell. It depends if it's a SaaS service. If it's kind of transparent to the customer, if the customer doesn't know it exists, then yeah, it's probably just going to be an expense for you because now you're basically running a SaaS service. ⁓ But SaaS services have upsides too that agencies don't. Like, hey, we get X amount per month. We have this many users. And here's the software and the database. Enjoy. And so there's pros and cons to that.
The con is what you described. Like it's going to need a complete revamp really soon. Congratulations. That's, you know, a hundred grand that you're going to have to spend. especially with your life, this AI stuff, it's yeah, it's come on. It's full of security holes that aren't being patched and all that.
Kurt Von Ahnen (32:58)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's really going to change the face of things. I was talking to a, ⁓ an SEO expert that, that also does a lot in the AI space yesterday and their approach. It was like, spend two hours a day creating skills in Claude that do this, that, and the other thing, you know? And I was just thinking to myself, like, what happened to the good old days where we just worked on customers projects?
you know, and executed. And I guess in his framework, it makes sense, right? Because if he's optimizing for one, he's optimizing for many, right? It's a one to many situation where he's taking care of duplication efforts and creating efficiencies for himself. But I think it's really hard to try and expand or grow or onboard people to those systems that you built custom. Because the learning curve is always present, like whatever you build that's new.
If you try to give that to somebody else, there's always that learning curve on the back end.
Toby Cryns (34:12)
Yeah.
learning curve for you, for the customers, for your team, especially if it doesn't come with the team, you're kind of like left hanging. A lot of times the owner who built the software will hang around for a few months and then they'll be gone. Congratulations.
Kurt Von Ahnen (34:29)
So as we near the end of this conversation, I don't think we've provided any answers at all, Toby. I think we've left everybody hanging with questions. ⁓ If you have an opportunity, if you're an agency and you have an opportunity to acquire a business, ⁓ either very, very cheap or at a fair market value, ⁓ the question is, how do know if you even wanna do it or not?
Toby Cryns (34:55)
So please, are you asking me or are we leaving that as a football? Yes.
Kurt Von Ahnen (34:59)
I think we're, I think we're going to leave this as people comment, comment, like, share,
follow all those things, but send us your comments. How do you know if you want to acquire another person's business? How do you like for you? Is it the number of clients? Is it the pricing or is it margins? some people aren't very big on pricing. They're really big on margin, right? Which is another conversation altogether. ⁓ services.
Like, do you want to expand your services or do you want to contract your services? ⁓ I have certain things I do for my clients that I consider just part of the package, Toby. And I know for a fact that there are agencies out there that don't do what we do. Like, we give them security reports every month. We do just certain touches that I think add a little more like ⁓ confidence to the customer, right? So there's a couple of things that our agency does.
And I'm not saying that it makes the site faster, better or anything like that, to me, it lends the customer confidence. So they go, Hey man, I know Manana Nomasa is handling our stuff. get a security report every month. I, know, I know what my bandwidth is. know my traffic. Like we, we give that to them. Right. And I know there's other agencies that don't. So if I took over someone else's existing business and they were priced, let's say that their hosting was $15 or $20 a month, less than my package.
But I'm already doing that stuff as part of my package. I gonna, am I automatically just gonna, as a point of habit, as a point of my process, gonna do that and offer that anyway at the reduced price for them? Like, am I gonna grandfather their pricing in, or am I gonna have a talk with them about, I could give you apples to apples, but realistically, we're an apples to oranges kind of transition, and it's an extra 20 bucks a month for hosting.
Toby Cryns (36:49)
⁓
Yeah. These are all great questions. We'd love to hear what you, the audience, you listener thinks. How would you price your own agency and who might buy it? That's kind of the big thing with any sale. Who's going to pay you for that service?
Kurt Von Ahnen (37:07)
That, you know, that is such an interesting question too, right? If you were to sell, who would you sell to? Like, like we all know web dev studios is this, you know, giant agency thing. Maybe they could acquire people up left and right, but, realistically, how would you make yourself attractive to a web dev studios for acquisition in the first place?
Toby Cryns (37:26)
Yeah. And a lot of, ⁓ hires are just acqua hires when you hear of like, you know, Google hire Google bought this company, what they really want is the people at the company. And yeah, there was a competitor of ours that, ⁓ was trying to buy the mighty Mo and we went pretty deep on it. And what they, didn't even want me, they just wanted. Like my team basically, and the processes we have.
Kurt Von Ahnen (37:37)
They want to shut the company down.
Yeah.
it's so interesting. I do have a really good, really good e-learning ⁓ expert on my team. And I got to tell you, if someone wanted to buy us, I think access to her would be 80 % of the value of our company. I mean, she is just brilliant. She's one of these people that I can talk to her about something. I can give her an outline.
Toby Cryns (38:11)
Mm-hmm.
Kurt Von Ahnen (38:18)
And she's the only person I've known in my entire life that can graphically bring to life something you've told her. It's just like, I can't do it because I'm not creative like that. She is just amazing what she does. But she does eat a lot of gummies.
Toby Cryns (38:26)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Now, well, yeah, got to
invest in that then.
Kurt Von Ahnen (38:36)
Yeah.
All right. Well, folks, this has been the agency action show. ⁓ Toby, Toby Krines, how can people reach you?
Toby Cryns (38:45)
You can find me on LinkedIn or at themightymo.com. That's T-H-E-M-I-G-H-T-Y-M-O.com. Kurt, how about you? How can we find you on the internet?
Kurt Von Ahnen (38:56)
I'm on LinkedIn as well. I'm the only Kurt Von Annen on LinkedIn. It makes me easy to find and my company is Manana No Mas, manananomas.com. I'd love to see you there. Folks have a good one.
Toby Cryns (39:07)
All right.