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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 exciting episode of the Agency Action Show with Toby and Kurt. I'm one of your co-hosts, Toby Cryns I'm here with Kurt von Ahnen Kurt, quick question for ya. Have you ever considered hooking Claude up to one of your websites or AI up to one of your websites?
Kurt von Ahnen (00:17)
Yeah, I we gave up the ghost a show or two ago about how I redid the Manana no Mas site using Claude connected to WordPress. but this was a different this was a different task. I I wanted to and and I and I wanna I wanna I wanna say up front, no shade to Elementor. If you love Elementor, that's your thing, your decision. I personally am like, you know what? I only have a few sites on my Elementor account.
I don't want to keep paying for this year after year after year. I don't even I it's on projects I'm not even really leveraging. So I said, I'm gonna get rid of Elementor. I'm not gonna renew my subscription this year. And so I hooked up Claude to a site that was Elementor powered. And I said, Claude, our task today is to just go through this website that I haven't looked at in years, and I want to convert it to a simple site using Astra theme by itself without a page builder.
And I wanna figure out how to make this website look similar in appearance, but get rid of Elementor. And Claude said, I'm just the guy for you, buddy.
Toby Cryns (01:15)
Well and that begs the question, is Elementor going bye bye? You know, like the I I think like when people when it comes to tech sector jobs, especially like let's say WordPress jobs specifically, the whole this AI thing is it's gonna upset everything. Like it's gonna change everything, I I believe. That's what I'm seeing. You know, like here you go, even if it's not perfect, you go like
Like I'm already seeing the this very small jobs disappearing, you know, like or disappeared. They don't exist anymore for the most part.
Kurt von Ahnen (01:45)
I think
there's a there's a difference though, right? 'Cause 'cause if if you're familiar with what you think you should see at the end, then then you have a little more confidence playing with the tool, right? Especially if it's something that's gonna drive revenue or something like that. admittedly, this is a test site for me, right? It's it's it's a personal project, it's not a customer project. So I'm like, I can play on this. If I blow it up, it's not the end of the world.
And we have a backup. So I'm always real clear on this, like staging sites, backups, absolutely, right? Best practices. But Toby, there were so many interesting things that happened in this process. So Claud says, Yeah, let me check out the website and its structure and you know I'll report back to you. And then it says, Well, you've got seven pages plus this, plus this, plus this. I go, Okay, great. And then it says, we noticed a lot of bloat with Yoast. And I go, well, can we fix that while we're in there? It says, Yeah, let me take a whack at that too. And so it goes in and it takes out like four.
400,000 entries from from Yoast. Turned out that I had a plugin that was like automating, it was putting in podcast episodes on a RSS feed. So I set that up as an automation. But what that plugin did is somewhere along the line, it started adding all of the plugins, not all the all the podcasts all the time. So let's say you and I had a show on like how not to use AI as an agency. Well, that show was in that website like 47 times.
Instead of just the one time. And so I said, my goodness, can we deactivate that, delete it, and then and take that junk out? And it said, We can totally do that too. He said, Let's do this. Let's just leave one episode, one copy of each episode on the site so people can still see it. Well, that's a great idea, right? It's a boom. And like Claw just kept working through it, Toby. And it redesigned all the static pages with you know the Gutenberg block editor and in Astra. It
kept
A lot of the same design and styling cues. It kept all of the copy except for the stuff that was outdated. And it asked me if it could update the copy to the current year. I said, sure, go ahead and do that. it always asks you, you always have to give it permission to do the next step, you know, and it says, be careful, this is dangerous. You don't what you're doing. And you click it and you say, Well, let's just pray. And everything worked. And and so tomorrow, my my goal is this. I'm gonna let it sit overnight.
Tomorrow I'm gonna sign back in again and I'm gonna do some like page speed comparisons. What was the page speed before when the website was burdened with a bunch of, you know, legacy code and nonsense in it? And what does it do, you know, reformulated, cleaner, no page builder, and a lot of that bloat missing? Like I'm really interested to see like what do we gain in performance and almost wondering if that's like a packaged offer to customers.
Toby Cryns (04:21)
Yeah, well the last question, how do you make money when the whole world changes? Who knows? yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (04:26)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (04:27)
But we gotta figure that out. But I I just think this is and this is a reaction to what you just shared. AI, well, first of all, high level. AI is coming to WordPress. Vebecoding is coming to WordPress. The MCP stuff is already built in.
We're one or two steps away. And these are, by the way, AI is writing and implementing all this stuff. So this is coming faster than we probably know because AI is writing it, writing the integration
Kurt von Ahnen (04:50)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (04:51)
codes. Once we're able to plug Claude into WordPress using the builder that already exists in WordPress, I'm talking the Gutenberg or whatever, you know, the stuff that comes with WordPress core, once AI plugs into there and can get 80% of the way of what Claude can already do without WordPress.
First of Claude's in for reckoning too. But like, I mean, the the when we can do this in WordPress, the whole game changes. And anybody who's currently making money designing WordPress sites, building WordPress content, creating plugins, creating plugin integrations, creating API connections, all those jobs. I don't want to say all gonna go away, but for the most part, well, I don't even want to say for the most part, but all those jobs are gonna face.
trouble being real paying jobs. You know, you're gonna have you're gonna have to navigate to figure that out. And and I think there will be jobs. It's just it's gonna be a different world. And that's coming soon, I think.
Kurt von Ahnen (05:43)
I'm still a big advocate for a human in the loop. Like when Claude says, I need your permission to exercise this task or this skill, right? Like, well, I should probably look at that. Like, what it's so if it's asking me to do something, it must there must be some kind of consequence on the back end of that decision, right? And so I think I still want a human in the loop for for a lot of the steps and the things that happen. But the big question is.
And I and I think I hit you with this before the show, but it's like, I see people on X all the time. We're looking for a custom developer for WordPress. And I'm like, for what? Like, what do we need a custom developer for? What do you what do you what do you think the role of a custom developer in WordPress is now?
Toby Cryns (06:23)
So the Mighty Mo is currently hiring a developer, a WordPress developer. We want a seasoned WordPress developer. We're
Kurt von Ahnen (06:27)
Ding ding ding.
Toby Cryns (06:28)
paying good money for that. we're having trouble finding it, you know, like it it's it's the same old problem. But in terms of the job, the job is changing in in ways that we can't foresee. But what we want is somebody who's gonna come in, leverage AI heavily, and be customer facing, really, because what we're seeing now is like we're not sure we need a project manager anymore.
Like,
Because like the first of all, the customers coming in with requirements written by AI. We can be transparent and say, we're gonna take those, plug those into our AI and like build a demo app for you and you'll have it tomorrow. And this is a role for a developer to inter you know, interpret that, make sure that what's built roughly matches the spec. And by the way, that's a conversation with AI. Hey, does this thing I built match the spec that their AI submitted? Like we're getting there.
And at some point the human could I'm not talking about taking humans out of the loop yet, but you can see a scenario where the humans are no longer in that loop. but right now there's a it's it's it's a value, you know, there's still value in that. And we still have project managers, but I'm actually like thinking that there's a world in the near future where a lot of that conversation is just more direct developer to client.
Kurt von Ahnen (07:39)
The way that you describe that, and I can see why it's hard to find the right person. So, by automotive background, technicians want to be technicians because they don't like people. They don't want it, they don't want to be service writers, they just want to work on the car. Do you think custom developers in the WordPress space are kind of like in that category, right? Where they're like, Man, just give me the task, just give me the project, I'll execute the code. You can you can do whatever you want with it when you're done. But I do not want to talk to Emma Sue about her.
Crochet knitting business.
Toby Cryns (08:06)
Whether they want to or not, it's a skill set that many people lack, is that like holistic project mentality where you're like excited and you can like see around the corners and and it's particularly with a small agency, especially when we're thinking about getting leaner and meaner with these new tools, you really need people who who can see the project for what it is and not necessarily like what was told to them or you know, not taking orders, but kind of
Creating the story and the path and the workflow.
Along these lines though, I had two calls this week from existing clients whose marketing teams built AI apps using Claude or whatever tooling they're using. And these are marketing people, not techies, but they built full, you know, fully functioning demos of the apps they want. And I had two this is literally two calls this week, different clients. and the first one I just got an email because I was like, I can take this across the finish line. It's sitting up at like
Claude.ai slash app slash whatever. It's on some wonky URL. And I was like, I can take this across the finish line, integrate it with your website. Here's the price of that. The first one responded with, we'll just keep it on this wonky URL and link to it from the site. Second one, I'm there's 50-50 at this point. I just talked to them before this call. I'm like, they could do the same thing. And like at that point, they don't need me, except maybe a few hours here and there to like, maybe to tidy it up.
you know, like to fix some API issue or or just to like do work that they don't have time to do. But at that point we're taking it from a twenty to forty hour project to like a three to five hour project. And I go, how does that change the Mighty Mo if all our clients are bringing in three to five hour projects versus twenty to forty hour projects?
Kurt von Ahnen (09:45)
Yeah, there there's still that consultative expertise that's that's needs to be sold. So I have clients, and and it's interesting because you and I have clients on like totally different spectrums. So I have clients that are heavily involved in AI, but it's from a content perspective. And they're literally sending me like here's my conversation with you know Chat GPT yesterday, and they're sending me pages and pages and pages of content, you know.
we were thinking that the we we had a new idea for the centering of our marketing campaign, right? And it's like, fellas, we don't even start the marketing till next month. And and you hired us to do it. Like, so now what do you want to do? Do you do you want to drive? Do you want us to drive? Like what where are you going with this? But they're so wrapped up in using AI that they have, I mean, if if we still printed stuff out and put them in file folders, they have a whole file cabinet.
Full of AI conversations and ideas. And what I'm seeing with them, and what they voice to me, is we're actually filling more of a business consultative role with them. They have taken in so much information from so many different sources, and they've consulted so many gurus and experts that they had to pick somebody they wanted to rely on. Luckily for us, they picked us. And so we do a weekly meeting with them. And part of that meeting is just fleshing out the nonsense and going,
Discard that, discard that. You don't want to do business with that person. You don't want to bring the SaaS platform in. You're already built on WordPress. Bam, bam. Like going through things and just getting rid of the noise for them so they can focus on the core. And and I think that's a valid service going forward. Is I think so many people will go down these rabbit trails and get lost. And it's going to take an expert in the space to go, let's focus on what's important for this, not what's a distraction.
Toby Cryns (11:31)
Yeah.
And and what are they willing to pay for that? That's kind of the the longer term question that I wonder at like the Mighty Mo level. Like that's not a developer role that you just described. There is a similar yeah,
Kurt von Ahnen (11:42)
No, that's a consultant, yeah.
Toby Cryns (11:44)
there is a similar developer role. Like on the call that I had yesterday with this person who brought the AI, I was like, so you have this info coming in.
We're gonna need a database to store this info because you wanna grab partial entries of this form, this marketing intake form. And then we're gonna need to connect it to an API to send the transactional emails. Even if you are the only one receiving them, we need to do that. And like we're gonna need a GitHub and da-da-da. And like this was all beyond what they wanted to talk about. Cause they're just like, no, we have this tool and it's fine. And I'm like
Kurt von Ahnen (12:17)
What are you talking we
already have this tool?
Toby Cryns (12:18)
Yeah, it but if they wanted to get serious, then that's where it it becomes potentially a 20 to 40 hour project for me to make it all work at the end. But maybe that's where the money is. Maybe like they'll re and we don't know. This hasn't fleshed out, but maybe we'll reach a point where the marketing teams are doing all that work and I can do 10 40 hour projects for them, just porting stuff and making it all connect and thinking more strategically about the tech stack and stuff like that.
Kurt von Ahnen (12:43)
Yeah.
Yeah. The the No, you go, you go.
Toby Cryns (12:45)
I was actually sur sorry.
I was surprised they said no in this case. and I I wonder, like, I I don't have the full context of their conversations internally, but you know, if you're a marketing team at a you know $10 million company and you have a important intake form that
is now no maybe maybe they figured out how to make it do because maybe my question prodding, maybe I should have charged them to ask those questions, you know, like because
Kurt von Ahnen (13:10)
Ha ha ha.
Toby Cryns (13:11)
maybe my questions gener maybe they took the notes from that and said, hey AI, do what Toby said.
Kurt von Ahnen (13:16)
It could have. It could have. I I've found that it's that's that fine-tuning stuff that's still really, really messy. You end up with extra steps or extra tools or extra subscriptions to things and you're like, why why do I have all this? Why do I have this baggage? it's like with the hosting that we provide. We provide a lot of licensing to different tools through the hosting. And so our customers aren't paying for the hosting and six subscriptions, right? They're just they're just paying us.
And I think teams that work with AI find themselves in these weird spots because before I started connecting AI directly to the WordPress website and working that way, I was trying to work in the AI chat window, right? In the browser. And it didn't matter if it was OpenAI, if it was Claude, if it was Perplexity, if it was Grok, it would always say, well, try this tool, go to this website, download this thing. You probably need the pro version. Do the and by the and you're like, okay, and you follow that and you go, well, that didn't do exactly what I wanted.
But you've already given somebody else your credit card and signed up for something. And now you've got a tool you forgot about because you're still building something. And I see a lot of people going down this pathway. I had a meeting with a client just today who didn't remember a subscription that she had with Site Ground. You know, and we were we were talking, she had stuff in GoDaddy, and then she she went to find what she was looking for in GoDaddy. It wasn't there. And then she goes, it I think it begins with an S, you know. So I haven't signed into it in years.
And sure enough, it was in SiteGround, but she had completely forgotten she had that account. And obviously paying for it every year.
Toby Cryns (14:43)
Yeah. Well, on the consulting, I mean that's something like a this is kind of what you're talking about. Like there there is room for consultants to help organize this stuff. I just I think at the point where we're business consultants, it's a very different business than I currently run. even though we do consulting. But like here's an example too. Just this morning, I'm at a doctor's office waiting for my wife to wrap up procedure and
I had a client on the phone and he's like, Hey, can you I can you make this gravity he doesn't know any he didn't know it was gravity farms, but he's like, We have this payment form. Can you have it pump out an invoice ID for each submission? I was like in my head, I'm like, I could probably code have Claude code that up and right now. And so I'm on the phone, I had have tell Claude like, Hey, create a plugin that does this. So just give it a quick prompt. And it did it in one swoop. Like, but if you consider that, that's like a 10 hour project two years ago. Like
Kurt von Ahnen (15:36)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (15:37)
and I just did it. I did it for free in this case and maybe I could have charged, but
Kurt von Ahnen (15:41)
But that see,
now you're hitting on the same question that I know other agencies are gonna want to know, like right now. The answer to this question. What's the answer to this question? Again, I go back to the car business. If I want to put brakes on the front end of a Ford Mustang, it's two hours in labor plus the cost of the brake pads. Boom. It is what it is. And then let's say that a new technician works on that car and it takes them three hours to put the brake pads on and resurface the rotors. It's still gonna cost the customer two hours.
But when they go to an experienced technician, right, when they go to that master tech that's got the giant toolbox and all the air tools and all the stuff, he can knock out those brakes in 12 minutes. He's still gonna get paid two hours to put those brakes on. And that's where the hell the whole AI question in the agency space kind of cycles around that, right? It it's it's it's like, yeah, you whipped up something, you know, took a phone call, whipped something up, but and you did it for free.
And you know, my heart goes that way too. I'm I tend to be real generous and help people on really quick things. But somewhere we have to recognize like there's a value to that. And we we have to go back to that value-based pricing so that we can say, hey, you know, it might take someone else, I don't know, two days, three days a week to knock something like this out. I could probably get your result by the end of the day, but it's gonna be 300 bucks. Is is it $300 important to you? And then you have something to work with. I
I s and I'm I'm not beating you up. Don't because I do it too, Toby. I I get on a call with somebody and sometimes it's easier just to do it than to sell it. But at the end of the day, you know, we still have to have the value for what we know. And that's where so like I'm in the Lifter LMS space. I can make a Lifter LMS framed website like with my eyes shut. But other people coming into the space that are brand new, even if they're agency owners, it could take them a week or two weeks to build out.
you know, the scaffolding of a Lifter LMS website. And so do I charge for a day or do I charge for two weeks?
Or is it I'm just charging for expertise and it is what it is?
Toby Cryns (17:35)
Right, right.
One thing I I wonder, like
And this is
Well, part of the problem here is is is the scaling that. so at some point, here here's a fact that might or might not be true, but this is my experience. Most people who are marketers, who are marketing professionals, are a hundred percent fine with the generic designs that AI pumps out. They look at what
Kurt von Ahnen (17:55)
Yes.
Toby Cryns (17:55)
AI pumps out, they go, This is better than the my web guy just did. And I've heard this story many times. Not necessarily from us, but like
I was talking to a guy in my coworking space and it took three years and he's like, and then I went to Lovable and then I pumped out something that was better than three years of work. Like,
Kurt von Ahnen (18:10)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (18:11)
and it's so it's like in that world where perhaps the work is devalued and maybe commoditized and you know, you go like, I'm not saying there's not going to be work in that consultant space and doing and and also doing the high-end designs, because AI can only do what's been done.
Like it does like here's what 80% of websites look like, and here it is.
Kurt von Ahnen (18:32)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (18:33)
And people go, great. But like,
Kurt von Ahnen (18:34)
I'll take it.
Toby Cryns (18:35)
yeah, exactly. And it's it's gonna be tri I mean it w it's always tricky. So I I think like the experienced people hopefully hopefully as long as hopefully we'll figure it out. Like I don't know though. I, you know, like there are whole industries that are
gone, you know, and I I, you know, one the fear is that this will be one of those industries that's gone, but we don't know that yet. It's you know it's way too early to know. As much as people have been saying coal is dead and oil is dead, yeah, there's still pretty robust oil and coal industries. And they now
Kurt von Ahnen (19:06)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (19:06)
they're digging in Nebraska instead of in you know Texas, but like they figure it out. And you know, I wonder like that's the big unknown is like will it be something that
our whole profession is just in rubble, doesn't exist, or is it just something where we have to adjust and we'll figure it out and it'll be great, you know.
Kurt von Ahnen (19:22)
Well, let's let's evolve this conversation. All right. So we're talking about AI, the influx of AI. We we talked about pricing, how's it worth, what's your time worth to you? Talk to me about when you grow your agency, Toby. When you grow an agency, in the back of your mind, you're probably thinking, I'm gonna save some of that valuable time for myself. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna hire people and I'm gonna create time. I it's gonna simplify things for me. I'm looking for simplicity.
When do you lose that? When when is w as you're growing and you're the expert in this space now on this call, as you're growing, when do you get like less time, less simplicity, more headaches? Like, talk to me about kind of what you're fleshing out here.
Toby Cryns (20:01)
Yeah, so the Mighty Mo has been growing over the last couple of years in both in terms of total clients, you know, the size of projects, our team has been growing. we're hiring right now, we're hiring designer, developer, project manager. so three different roles right now as I'm speaking. one interesting thing, and this is for me, like
In terms of my time. My goal is that it gets simpler and easier and better and profits go up. But what I'm finding for the last year is none of those are true. it's not simpler, it's not easier, and profits are down. not to say we haven't been successful, like the the overall numbers are up. It's just that I'm like, okay, we we have a new paradigm that we need to figure out how to make profitable. And so like
Basically we're spending a lot of money and hopeful with the goal that like hopefully we can get leaner and meaner and you know, figure that out from the profit perspective. But it's been a struggle, man, like for me personally. as somebody like I really am passionate about delivering for my clients and like I really wanna I my standards are like way up here.
terms of what we deliver. And it's been tough bringing on new people. you know, part of what we're trying to do is figure out who is on board, who's the who has the right mentality to make it at our company. And it's been interesting. You know, we've been really clear or hopefully really clear with just letting our teammates know like what's expected and what's expected today is different than what was expected when they were hired probably.
in terms of like their time and what they're working on. And we've had we've lost some good people because like, you know, we've been clear. We're like, hey, here's where we're going now. the work that you were doing is gonna change or, you know, we're gonna change it to something else. So we've had people leave for those reasons. we've had people we've been scammed by, you know, we hired a person who was almost certainly working 10 other jobs, you know, based on the type of work he was delivering and
And things slip through the cracks too. That's one one thing that's been really painful for me to learn is like I've had to adjust my expectations and now I fully expect stuff slipping through the cracks. And what that means for me, because I'm just like kind of I really want to deliver well, is that I have to invest way more time figuring out what's slipping through the cracks and holding people accountable and
we've made some very specific hires in the last few weeks here. in reaction to some of what I was seeing in terms of stuff. Really, it's communication that's slipping through the cracks. some work though, too. But and so we made some really hires. They were really expensive hires, but the goal is to bring on people who can who get it, who and you can get it. It's different at the Mighty Mo and up compared to other companies, but we need people.
Who bring an urgency, you know, a desire to really get it done and to organize stuff. And a lot of people do just want to show up and take orders and have a to-do list sitting for them when they get in. Just tell me what to do and I'll do it. And there are great developers. And this gets back to what we were talking about earlier. there are great developers out there who just wanna be told what to do and they can deliver amazing stuff. But that's not exactly what we need. We need people who can
You know. I'm curious to too about about your your hires. you know, how how how do you look at hiring when when you're even if it's contractors, how are are do you generally hand them a to do list or or do you kind of expect them to come with questions?
Kurt von Ahnen (23:22)
So it's it's been very, very interesting, Toby. I'm in a different position just because of structure. And so I tend to give out tasks. I tend to be the guy that runs the agency, the guy that's the project manager, and then I tend to delve divvy out tasks on different projects. And then to your point, it's like I think it's actually in one of your notes, it's like you
You can hire for the task, but you can't really hire the judgment. You're trying to be able to you're trying to develop people and pass the ability to use sound judgment in making decisions, but sometimes you just don't see it. And so what happens is we work on a development URL and then I gotta validate and verify everything. And if everything meets my standard, then I say, okay, now we can push that to production, right? it adds a lot of steps. And in some cases, like we talked about with with you making that tool for somebody.
It's like sometimes it's easier just to do it myself and get it done than it is to divvy it out and then check on it later. But if I don't do the divvy it out and check on it later, I end up with weird things. I end up with like someone sets up Fluent CRM Pro, but doesn't have like a sending email address or their company name in it or anything, right? They just blank. Like what well, yeah, anybody could yeah, anyone can download and like install a plugin. You gotta configure the dang thing. or
Again with the CRM, they they put in the CRM, but they don't attach an SMTP. So that's great. The tool's there, but it doesn't do nothing. It's like that website we were talking about I made in Lovable three weeks, a month ago, whatever. And I said, Yeah, it made this really cool looking form. But then it said right in the chat, this form doesn't go anywhere. It's that's the stuff that I run into when I bring people into the project that don't have a relationship one-on-one with the client. And quite honestly, they're just looking to do a task and get paid, right? They're not
looking to put in the extra or to have that buy-in with Manana Namas. And so that puts me in that position. I would love, and you and I have discussed this, I want to expand and bring in like real apprentices locally where I can see people face to face, sit across from them at a workstation and be like, this is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. This is how we're doing it. Here's our I think I told you this on one of our episodes. Anything that's new to our company as far as a
standard operating procedure, we video capture that through screen shares and through Zoom training calls. And then we make them part of an invisible course in the back of Manana no Mas. And so when we hire a contractor, like how do you add a hosting package on our server? Take this lesson, boom. This tells you exactly what to do. And now I need you to start a hosting package for this account. And then they can do it, you know, because it's all right there. But it's been a struggle. It's been a real struggle. And
I fear, and I have a feeling it's maybe maybe it's a maybe it's an echo of what you've talked about. I fear that I bring on this local team and I give them stuff to do and it doesn't create the time or the freedom for me to go get new customers and have sales calls. I feel like it's gonna create a thing where I'm I'm double checking people's work and still answering questions and problems that they should be self-empowered to do.
Toby Cryns (26:22)
Yeah, I think that's the struggle with with yeah, like it's like how do you find people? Well, let me share an example. So when I one of my first jobs after college was the front desk person at the I had a front desk job and I cared passionately about that job. And like when the they fired my boss, I was heartbroken. You know, like I was really I showed up
Every day I worked nights, I worked weekends, like anything that was asked, I did. And I was making wasn't even making hourly. I was salaried. So I was working way more than 40 a week, you know, that sort of thing. And that's kind of what we need. But the problem is like I was burned. And I don't think I was ever the same after I was burned in that role. And
By burn, I just mean standard businessy stuff. They fired a bunch of people, they brought in their own people. You know, it was like the boss, you know, it was like just normal business re-org stuff, but I was just like, it really hurt. And I don't know that I could ever for someone else, I don't I always have that in the back of my mind. And I'm actually impressed by my friends who are able to keep going into the fire and giving it their all. And I don't really understand it, maybe, except that I do that every day at my own company. So maybe I do understand it.
But yeah, how do you you I don't know how to screen for what we're talking about when hiring and so even I don't think it's I honestly don't think I don't know for sure, but I don't think it's cultural. I don't think it's like what country of origin, city of origin. I don't I it's something different that we're trying to capture in a hire. And sometimes you get it and sometimes you don't.
Kurt von Ahnen (27:54)
It almost makes me think, and and and by the way, as an applicant, I hate this. I've done things before, like when I got the job with Ducati, I had to do a my goodness. My wife has ticked off the dog. I had to do a presentation through like a Zoom call, like a PowerPoint presentation and show that I could actually speak and train. And so I was able to do that. And it was cool.
And I hate asking people to do work, especially if it's like implied free work. But then I started thinking about things from from a contractor kind of perspective. Let's say I schedule a Zoom call with somebody at two o'clock. What would be the harm in signing in at two five and seeing if they had the patience to wait for me or send me a message that said, Hey, are we still meeting at two o'clock? Because then that shows me, okay, they see something's wrong and they took they took some kind of step to fix or remedy something.
If they don't have the patience and they sign out of the call, but I have an email that says, you know, Juan signed into your call, then I go, All right, at least at least I know he doesn't have patience. Right. And then but but
Toby Cryns (28:51)
Maybe.
Kurt von Ahnen (28:52)
if they but if they send me a message that says, Hey, are we still doing this call or not? I jump in, hey, sorry for being late. I was tied up on a client call. Let's get to it, you know, boom. But then I go, at least I'm talking to somebody that takes initiative.
Toby Cryns (29:03)
Maybe. I mean that's you know, this is the trouble. That's one example. Maybe they, you know, who knows? Maybe their girlfriend showed up and they went away. You know, like you just never know what happened in that moment. And this is what makes hiring so hard. And and like we have employees I'm not even sure. I don't know if they're the right people. And they've been working with me for a year and I'm trying to like define what that quality is. And I don't
know that it's objective. It's like very subjective. And it's like how they show up, how, you know, what types of questions they ask.
Kurt von Ahnen (29:34)
So this comes up a lot. When you hire somebody, whether you hire them or they're a contractor, like you're still paying for services, right?
At what point does scaling hurt you, the agency owner? Like
I had three people, it was fine. I had five people, it was fine. I had seven people, it was a frickin' nightmare. Like at some point, and maybe that's where project manager becomes general manager, right? Like, hey, I'm gonna promote you to general manager. You're now in charge of all the staff and following up with all the stuff. You're not only in charge of the projects, but you're in charge of making sure this thing goes, and that frees me up for sales calls and taking my kids to school.
Toby Cryns (30:11)
Yeah. I think this is I don't know for sure, but I think this is what I think and this is what I'm investing in right now to address this problem.
What the Mighty Mo, I think, needs more of is clear accountability. And this this is what are you spending your time on today? Have you communicated your availability? Like just like things that some of which can be like measured, some of which can't. But one of the things we're doing is
Getting clear on the objective metrics. So we're starting with like where we want to go. And then for each person, we're giving them specific metrics that they can report on every week. And so it might be one of the metrics for our project manager is did every client email get responded to within half a business day? That's just an objective metric, yes or no. for developer, it'd be does every task that's in our project management system have an estimated
delivery date and an estimated number of hours that it's going to require. Yes or no. And so what we're trying to do is like find the little objective metrics that contribute to the company goals, which is, and our company goals are we're still ironing them out, but the gist of it is like we want to service more of a certain type of client. We want to deliver more of a certain type of product and deliver, you know, and so we're pretty clear we have some financial metrics, but the
Frankly, the financial metrics are less interesting. It's more like, hey, who who do we want to work with? What type of work do we want to do? and I don't know, like one thing we're trying to do is build systems of accountability. And in that, what we're finding is that those are there's peep teammates that are missing these very clear, very achievable objectives that we've that we are now measuring for the last month or two.
And that's to me is communicating, okay, this person probably not the right person for our team.
Kurt von Ahnen (31:55)
Yeah. Yeah. Now with staff, you always run into this weird issue too, because you've got someone involved in a project and then you take in a new project. You don't want and you you're already questioning the staff member, right? You're like, you're like, okay, I gotta get them to finish what's already on their plate before I can let them go. And now you got another project and you're like, I didn't hire another person yet. And now you're juggling. And now you have to think, well, do I let them start on the secondary project or do I just do the project myself?
Until I find the right person or because it's it's like the timing to cut someone loose. I think about so Suzuki had a bunch of layoffs when I worked there. I was in the first round of layoffs and I remember sitting in the office and they said, Yeah, this is come to the end, we're gonna shut down your department. I'm like, we're in the middle of a few things, and they're like, Yeah, we've already considered that. It's like, all right, where's my check? When do I leave? I'm out. And sure enough, man, the phone rang like, you know, two days later. Hey, do you know where that file is? You could hire me as a consultant.
But
Toby Cryns (32:48)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (32:49)
but I told them, I said, do you want a passover? Do you want to pass down? Do you want like no, we've already considered that. You know, here's your check. Great, we're done. Ties are cut. Right. And then they wanted favors and I was like, there were no favors when it was time to let me go.
Toby Cryns (33:03)
Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. this is a real problem, even if they didn't let's say you had an employee that was not optimal, not a great fit for the company, but they're working on client work. Do you just cut them loose and figure it out? Like is that
Kurt von Ahnen (33:17)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (33:17)
a better solution than like letting them drag on, maybe handing them another project? We're frank I don't know the answer, and it probably varies by
Maybe it shouldn't vary. Maybe it should just be cut loose. Because like I feel like in those cases they always add more headaches. Like, no matter what. If it's and that's part of like the if it's the wrong person, it adds the wrong types of headaches. Like there are people that add headaches, but you're like, those are good questions you're asking that we should address. Thank you for bringing this headache to my plate, because I need to solve that. Like I'm grateful when people bring those types of headaches, but some people just
you know, I don't know if you've ever been on a call with one of your teammates or a client where you're just like, this is just slowing things down. This convert this meeting, this meeting that's supposed to be making things more efficient is making it worse.
Kurt von Ahnen (34:07)
Well, if you've got clients and staff on the same call, you you you don't just have client stress anymore. You've traded that. So now you've got client stress and staff stress. And and if it's combined like in the same environment, that can really be taxing.
Toby Cryns (34:24)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (34:24)
Like when a client says, I thought you were guys were gonna X, Y, and Z. And you're like, that was not part of that's not part of the scope, right? That's not part of the scope of work.
Toby Cryns (34:31)
Mm-hmm.
Kurt von Ahnen (34:32)
And you're on a call and someone goes, we should be able to throw that in, no problem. And you're like,
Toby Cryns (34:36)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (34:37)
and and you're like, So now I got the stress of the client with extra expectations, and now I got the stress with the with the staff member doesn't understand the scope of the project.
Toby Cryns (34:46)
Yeah. Here's a question for you, Kurt, that seems pretty relevant to maybe where you're at today. As you consider growing your agency, how do you know if the growth is a success or a failure? What metrics are you using or, you know, how are you defining success and failure?
Kurt von Ahnen (35:02)
That is a super interesting question, Toby. And I think my answer might throw people for a loop. very, very recently, a new company in the automotive field reached out to me and they wanted to talk to me about possibly going back to the automotive field. And we just had a couple of conversations, a couple of emails, a couple of resources shared back and forth. I said, Well, I wouldn't even consider it unless I was given this per this position and this level of autonomy.
And they responded back. It was crazy because I thought that would scare them off. And they said, You're exactly the person we want now. You know, we want you to consider this position. And it was interesting. I walked down the hallway and I told my wife. And my wife goes, but wouldn't you have to travel again? I said, Yeah, probably. She goes, Wouldn't it be a lot of hours? I go, Yeah, it it's a you know, it's a C level suite position at an automotive company. Of course, yeah. It's gonna be lots of work and lots of travel and but it's gonna pay, you know, this much. And she goes,
Yeah, but do we need that? And that's that to me defines where the success has come in, right? So we've created enough, I hate to say security, but we've created enough indications of security where we go, are we dependent upon other people to keep the lights on and and run the house? Okay, no, so we're in a good spot. The next level of success for me is can I stay at that level of comfort?
And I know that this is a very strange ethereal thing for other agencies to think about. Hi Puppy. for other people to think about, but can I stay at this relative level of comfort and add people an increased revenue at a marked rate?
Toby Cryns (36:31)
Right.
Kurt von Ahnen (36:32)
And I know that that I know that sounds that sounds really selfish. But that's where I'm at. Like, do so I want to add a couple of apprentices and I I want to give them some tasks and like low level stuff. Creating the hosting packages, you know, adding WordPress, like consistently more simple things. Adding Lifter LMS is the base for most of the sites we work on. Fluent CRM is the CRM of choice, right? Like so.
So I've got processes and I want to bring people in to help with that stuff. and eventually see if they develop into like customer facing roles where they can actually sell and consult and and help fill in the blanks with those with those jobs that we built the scaffolding for. But realistically, if that creates too much angst for me and I gotta work 60 hours a week to try and teach these new people how to do what I'm trying to teach them, it then that's not successful for me.
Toby Cryns (37:19)
But what if it takes you three months, you bring in four low level employees, it takes you three months to figure out one that's like put has potential, maybe. And during those three months or four months you're working 60 hours a week, but you're like, Okay, now I s after that, now I see a path to working back, getting back to 30 hours a week, or whatever you work now, like
That's the struggle, I think, like is to define what what that time frame is. Like 'cause I think at some point it makes sense to just be like, This sucks, let's pull the plug like but you know.
Kurt von Ahnen (37:51)
That's but that's
the problem with adaptive challenges and leadership in general, right? As an adaptive challenge, you never really do have the solution. You always have an evolution or progress to make. And so, you know, if it's gonna take me a commitment of sixty hours a week over four months to to make sure I've got that one person, the end result, at the end of that four months, that person has to be good enough to train the next two or three people. Because I'm not signing up 'cause 'cause you know what happens with an adaptive challenge and and current and and and
constant progression is you go, okay, that's done. I got that guy. Now I got to get the next one. And then, it'll just be another four months at 60 hours a week. And it'll just be another six months at 60 hours a week. And then and you never pull back. Like so to me, if I'm going to make that commitment, there's got to be like the technical challenge has to be met as well. So I think in terms of like the adaptive challenge and and the technical challenge, if that technical challenge meets its goal,
then the technical challenge is fulfilled and should be able to perpetuate itself. If I'm constantly in an adaptive challenge mode in a business that's mine that I own, then I'm probably missing some processes and technical challenges along the way.
Toby Cryns (38:57)
Really interesting. Cause even like I'm only familiar with like there there's like this dream of like in these business operating system companies, let's say EOS is one, and the dream they sell is that it gets easier and easier and easier. But I wonder if the reality is that it's always an adaptive challenge and the goalposts are always moving and you know, like
Kurt von Ahnen (39:18)
They are
always moving and the economy's always changing and AI is flipping our industry upside down. And there's
Toby Cryns (39:21)
Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (39:23)
all these things. So even for me, I've got all these courses in my, you know, imaginary hidden LMS, right? So if I hire a contractor, I show them how something works. Well, dude, if if the process changed in the last three years, I gotta redo that training, right? That's another thing I gotta redo. It's another thing on my list. But in in my in my book of work.
I think of it like more of a technical challenge than an adaptive challenge, meaning, yeah, I can update that lesson and then it's evergreen till the next major change in AI happens or until we change, you know, server companies again. and so I I I try to keep the the the Kurt Burn in the Midnight Oil thing. I try to keep that at an absolute minimum. And I try to, I really try to to work within the time I allow myself.
Toby Cryns (40:04)
Well thanks. Well let's send it there. if you've been listening and you have things that are happening in your business that maybe this conversation spark, please drop a comment, YouTube or wherever you're listening or or get in touch with us. Kurt, how can we get in touch with you?
Kurt von Ahnen (40:20)
Well, I'm on LinkedIn, so you can I'm the only Kurt von Ahnen on LinkedIn. And then I am pretty sure isn't the WP Minute Slack channel still open?
Toby Cryns (40:28)
it I think it is. I i is it free still? I can't remember, but no.
Kurt von Ahnen (40:32)
I think it's still free to get into.
So if you join the WP minute Slack, you could communicate with us there.
Toby Cryns (40:37)
Yeah. and I'm Toby Cryns You can get me at themightymo.com and also on LinkedIn. Last name is C-R-Y-N-S and would love to hear from you. thanks everybody. We'll see you next time.