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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
Kurt von Ahnen (00:00)
folks, welcome to another agency action show. Toby and I have gone over some notes. We got a we got a hot one for you today. Toby, welcome. Tell me about your week, man, and I'll have a question for you.
Toby Cryns (00:10)
Thanks. Week's great. Let's get to it, man. You know how I yeah, I like getting to
Kurt von Ahnen (00:14)
Well,
Toby Cryns (00:14)
it.
Kurt von Ahnen (00:14)
well, my question is this, and and it's a struggle for me, so I wonder if it's a struggle for you, and I wonder if the listeners struggle. Would you rather trust AI to sift through your email as a business owner, hire a virtual assistant, or assign it to like a team member, like a like a like an apprentice or something? Or do you just prefer to slog through the spam and the mess yourself?
Toby Cryns (00:35)
I'm struggling with this right now. Like my inbox is wild. It's a crazy place to live right now. And I actually have span like triage happening through Google Workspaces built-in AI stuff. It's pretty good, like it compared to what it could be. It does a decent job. But I think like what I'm realizing is like the question is really like.
What jobs is AI gonna take? Like, like, cause I could hire like a in theory, in theory, AI is doing the work of a VA right now in my inbox. And yet I missed an email last week. And so I'm like, I think I need a human to go through this and be like, this one seems important, Toby. Why didn't you respond to
Kurt von Ahnen (01:17)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (01:17)
this? Like,
So I I I think like it then it's becoming a problem for everybody with spam and stuff 'cause AI seems to have exploded spam in ridiculous ways. And so like part of it is AI is now like dealing with AI problems and we still need humans to deal with the human problems.
Kurt von Ahnen (01:35)
Yeah. So this very transparently, this is a personal struggle for me. And I sampled, and this is this is my fear. So so my fear actually kind of came true for me a little bit. I sampled, I used my tool Magi and Claude to build a filter in my Gmail. And so I said, go through this Gmail account and what do you think you should handle for, you know, how would you handle this spam problem? And it came back with like this great plan, right? Hey, Kurt, we'll connect to your Slack.
And we'll slack you every day and let you know what we've moved around. What is spam, what is a newsletter, what is because I was just getting tons of stuff. What's promotional, what's this, what's that. And we'll just put the the important like person-to-person stuff in your inbox. Well, it's granted, it's not my day-to-day email account. This was a sample project for this AI tool to do. Toby, I've pretty much ignored that email address now. Like it's not like like.
I every now and then I look at my Slack and it goes, yeah, I got a lot of notifications there. So I open it up and it's it says, Yeah, we move these hundred messages, we move these 90 messages, we move these 72 messages. I'm not reviewing them. I'm going, good job. Right. And then
Toby Cryns (02:39)
Right. Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (02:41)
there's an email in my inbox from my wife. So it's good that I didn't miss that one, right? She was sending something important to us about our vacation trip. So that was there. And there's been a couple of things that have popped into the inbox that I think should be in the inbox.
But my fear is if I were to turn this loose on the Manana No mas email account, like Kurt at Manyana Nomas.com, if I was to turn it loose on that account, would I lose the important person to person stuff I'm supposed to see? Like, hey Kurt, you know, we we run a school with three thousand students and we're looking to migrate our e-learning website. You might be the guy. And if I don't answer that email, you know, that's 70 or 80 grand out of our out of our revenue stream.
Toby Cryns (03:18)
Yeah, and I but I
it doesn't it seem though like the the problem is really like you still gotta check your email. Like to me that's the core problem. Like it's not it's it's like filtering, but I still gotta do the work. Like
check,
Kurt von Ahnen (03:31)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (03:31)
respond. And even if it's drafting the email, I'm like, it helped me draft it, but it's not what I wanna send, you know, like and then you go like like this is kind of the thing about hiring employees too, by the way. You go like,
Does AI get it eighty percent of the way there? And am I comfortable with the twenty percent of crap that it's gonna do, that's gonna cause me problems? Just like an employee might. Like like you know like
Kurt von Ahnen (03:53)
Well, so that leads to the other option, right? So based on what your time is worth to you, would it be worth you to pay somebody ninety minutes or two hours a day to filter your email for you as a person?
Toby Cryns (04:07)
Yeah. Yeah. And I'm I'm paying through the nose right now for project management. Like I hired a company in town that charges a ton of money for project management. And I'm going under on these budgets for projects, but I'm like, AI and doing it cheaply just was not getting it done. And like I'm paying the penalty for my idiocy. You know.
Kurt von Ahnen (04:29)
Yeah. Yeah. Oddly enough, directly after recording this episode with you, I am starting a project management contract, a new contract for us where we're onboard like we do it all. We're onboarding the client, we're managing the project. We, Manano Nomas, is not actively building the project. The cut the client that I'm subcontracting under, they have a tech team. They have people that do all this stuff on their team. They just they don't have anyone on their team that can be customer facing.
And so they hired us to do all the customer facing, update, and supervise the project and make sure it runs on time stuff. So
Toby Cryns (05:02)
Mm-hmm.
Kurt von Ahnen (05:02)
so this is like this is like subcontracting for somebody that wants to be a future Toby. Toby's like,
Toby Cryns (05:07)
Right.
Kurt von Ahnen (05:08)
I wanna off I want to offboard myself.
Toby Cryns (05:10)
One thing I'm struggling with and this whole AI thing, I'm getting pushback particularly from this team that they brought a designer in. really great people, by the way, like just top-notch people, like professionals, but where I'm running into a little bit of friction, it's not even a problem, but I'm like trying to understand if there's savings to be had by improving their workflows and because I'm like, how how are you?
Leveraging AI in your design process, because I would love to squeeze these 10 hours I was going to pay you into five hours I'm gonna pay you. Like, and it's interesting, and I'm running into my my my native team, and you know, my team here, like that's full time too, where like I'm realizing they're just not leveraging AI in the way that I think they need to be. And I'm going.
deeper and deeper. I it's not that I like trust it. It's that I feel like I have no other choice as a business owner. Like if if I want margins, I gotta go there.
Kurt von Ahnen (06:03)
Well, I feel like we're kind of cresting into this transition of conversation. But last episode you and I talked about me kind of breaking out of my shell and vibe coding a couple of projects. That one that I said I'd report back on, we we pulled Elementor out of the site. We removed a bunch of bloat from the site. The the my main goal with this was it can I make the site more
efficient, right? Like I was worried about like page speed and bloating and that to be clear, this was like an abandoned website, right? So I'd I gotta be really clear with people. I'm not blaming Elementor. I just Elementor is heavy and I won't pay for it anymore and I want to take it out of my sites. Dude, we went from a 56 to a ninety two for desktop page speed reporting. Like that's crazy for me that that that's a vibe coded improvement where the website actually looks better. Like subjectively the website looks better. It performs tons better.
And page speeds up and I'm not having to pay for a page builder now. Like it just did it.
Toby Cryns (06:58)
Well, consider this too. this is an experience I'm having this I had this week, conversation I had this week with my internal one developer who's working on a very complex WooCommerce project. I s he goes, because one of our tasks as we take on any project like this is like, hey, we have 30 WooCommerce extensions. Do we need them all? Like that, what are they doing? And my direction to him, and I'm gonna check in with him, but like, I was like, let's custom code everything that's non
Core. We're gonna keep WooCommerce. We're gonna keep the Stripe add-on. Any payment add-ons, any checkout, very specific things we'll keep. So there might be four or five shipping. We'll keep their shipping API stuff with UPS. We're not gonna mess with that. We're gonna use official WooCommerce stuff or whatever. But I'm like, these other 25 plugins, let's create, let's build it ourselves. Use let's create a custom plugin with however we want to do it. There's many ways to do it. But like
I think this is this is the core thing that happened in my brain that's a shift from last week. I think we're gonna build a better site by build rebuilding those plugins using AI and saying, and so we're not building like we're not set, we're not looking to sell it and feature bloat it. We're just saying, no, we need like a fly out cart. When they click the cart button, it pops out. And so that's just a prompt to AI at this point. And I'm like,
And let's say it's a plug, it doesn't matter how we structure it, maybe it's up 10 plugins, but these are like highly efficient, optimized plugins that we are gonna manage. But like AI is gonna manage it. It's not like and by the way, this is because my my developer pushed back. He's like, Well, we're gonna up have to update these and you're gonna trust AI. And I'm like, these plugin developers are trusting AI to update their stuff. It's not any different, like it's just less bloat.
Kurt von Ahnen (08:40)
Yeah. So I'm going to tell you why I struggle with with that. And and this is just again, you and I are just two different people, right? I vibe coded a an add-on for Fluent Cart to meet a customer's request. They wanted a wish list. And they wanted the wish list to A, B, C, all these things. And we did it. And we didn't even charge them for it. And I'm going to be honest about that. For me, it was like a learning thing for me. I just want to say, okay, can we really pull this off? Can we?
So we checked off all the boxes for the client. And then the client had the stones at the end of that to be like, I wish the heart was a different shaped heart. I wish the button was a different
this. I and I was like, you know what? I I'm out. I'm done. We're just gonna go back to buying the add-on. It comes with all the stupid options. Yeah, it's 79 bucks a year, but it comes with support. And then I can just tell these customers, this is the way it comes, this is it, this is what you got. But but
I go back to it in WordPress. Nobody ever seems happy with what comes out of the box in WordPress. If they were in a SaaS platform and they went to Gajabi and said, I don't like the shape of the heart button, Kajabi would say, tough. Give us 247
Toby Cryns (09:40)
Right. Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (09:43)
bucks a month. for us, we're always like, well, it's WordPress. We can tweak it for you. And I just don't have the stomach or the attitude to keep like tweaking these custom requests all the time when there's so many good products out of the box that work.
Toby Cryns (09:56)
Let's talk about that a little more. Like, what are your trigger points in working with others? maybe we can just talk about that generally for us and have things we might hear other people talk about. I hear a lot of
Well, there's the customer facing side, which is interesting. So you describe something customers face that a trigger point for them. Hey, the heart isn't rounded enough. I get it. But there's also like team related stuff. What what's like a give me a c a a trigger point for you or maybe something you've heard about, you know, recently that is interesting to you.
Kurt von Ahnen (10:28)
As you know, we have a contract model. And so a lot of times we get pulled in for segments of jobs, right? so I guess the trigger point is they don't hire us for all of it. And we so we say, okay, we can do this much. And then they bring in someone else. And you know that they're they probably made the decision based on budget. It's an assumption. They probably made the decision based on budget, right? Because they didn't hire us for the whole job, they hired us for part of the job. And then they introduce me to
You know, that warm introduction on the email. And and I don't know why this drives me so so crazy, Toby, but it does. They'll say, Hey, this is Bobby. We hired him to do the XYZ portion, you know, that you're not gonna manage. But you need to add, you need to know them to because you're managing the whole project, right? And here's their contact information. And it'll be like Bobby at Yahoo.com. And I'm like, well, if Bobby doesn't have a real email address, I don't think Bobby should be handling anything on the project. Like I and I just I I kind of get my feelings hurt.
And and I'll I'll say directly, like, you know, for what it's worth in this project management, you know, phys position that we're in, we're not responsible for the timeliness of Bobby's work. Like if Bobby falls behind, we're gonna report that to you and you deal with Bobby. Bobby's not my employee, you hired them. I'm very specific about it. Like when they bring in people from Fiverr, like when I see Gmail addresses, Yahoo addresses.
Like a Yahoo one, dead giveaway. Ayo, I saw an AOL, like a freelancer using an AOL email address. And I thought to myself, do they
Toby Cryns (11:51)
I might trust an AOL.
Kurt von Ahnen (11:53)
think it's cool? Like, are they trying to show that they're so long in the tooth that they know everything about the internet that they have the original email address? Or are they just so out of touch that they they're just winging it? Like I can't even explain it, but it's a trigger point for me. If you can't.
can't represent yourself like a professional in the space, I have a hard time bringing you onto the team.
Toby Cryns (12:13)
Okay, here's here's my trigger point that's going straight from that. I did two interviews today where I interviewed, I'm looking to hire project managers. We I I interviewed two, and this is second or third round. I I can't remember which, but like this is the final interview basically. They're meeting the boss, me. And neither of them went to even this extent with a cheap button up three button shirt, you know, zildan, whatever shirt.
They're just doing t-shirts. And I'm just like, I need to put you in front of my clients. You can't even cut like I I don't know what's going on with the t-shirts. And I did we did a client meeting earlier and everyone's wearing t-shirts. I'm like, what the heck is going on? Like I just think.
Kurt von Ahnen (12:56)
Course I'm saying that wearing a rock
I'm wearing my nice T shirt today.
Toby Cryns (13:00)
Yeah, yeah. And I just think like
of all like I don't think a t shirt matters and at the end of the day, but it might it might get in the way of some client communication. Like we we want it
Kurt von Ahnen (13:11)
If you're applying for a job
Toby Cryns (13:12)
well yeah, yeah. Well let's say that. Yeah. But like
Kurt von Ahnen (13:15)
Yeah.
Toby Cryns (13:15)
our goal when I talk to clients, I don't want them to think about our t shirts. That's so the only reason I wear this is so they're not there's no chance they're gonna say, he had a t shirt on. You know, that's the
Kurt von Ahnen (13:26)
Yeah. So
that's so interesting because so let's say I'm doing content for Lifter LMS on a Thursday. Chris wants me in a t-shirt. Like he wants me to be laid back, relatable,
Toby Cryns (13:35)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (13:37)
right? Like like he wants that image. when I am doing a training session for the Marine Retailers Association or the Power Sport Academy, it's a button-down dress shirt, collar, sleeves done, the whole thing. You know?
Toby Cryns (13:49)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (13:49)
And and because the audience
If someone's paying me forty five thousand dollars for training, a professional should probably show up to give the class. You know, and and I know a t shirt doesn't necessarily represent the brain or the person, but it can be perceived as such.
Toby Cryns (14:04)
Well here's the thing, it doesn't even matter what it represents. We're talking about t-shirts instead of the great job they're doing. This is the problem. I th I I
Kurt von Ahnen (14:12)
Yes.
Toby Cryns (14:13)
remember the t-shirt more than I remember anything the person said.
Kurt von Ahnen (14:16)
Yeah. I can see where that could be a I could see where that would be a trigger point. So speaking about professionalism, you and I, we we do a lot of work on the web, right? So so you buy software, you pay the money, you swipe the credit card, and then they send you an onboarding link or a support link, and it takes you to either a Facebook group or like a school account. I have one that took me to a school account because they had like they had like a couple of courses like how to use it.
And then like the news feed or the social feed to like actually ask questions. And I thought, on one hand, that's creative, right? It's creative and it's affordable. But on the other hand, man, I want like ticketed support. I want to know that I'm talking to a real team.
Toby Cryns (14:58)
Yeah, like this is the thing that people don't understand or maybe they're not thinking about. It's the same thing. Like here we are talking about this email account. We should be talking about the service, you know, like and I think like people take offense to this, like wear a shirt. And and this is the truth. Like, I don't like use a real email account because you don't want people saying he has a Yahoo account. Like, you know, like
That's the worst that's the last thing you want someone saying, like
Kurt von Ahnen (15:27)
Yeah. Yeah, do you have any more trigger points?
Toby Cryns (15:30)
this might lead us down more of the the vibe coding stuff. yeah, well as a business owner, I've been running into some personnel problems. I'm really working hard, like investing tons of time, huge money in building accountability on our company. And part of that is hiring this local firm that.
I I'm really their task is basically like whip these projects into shape. That's what I'm paying them for. because the projects are months behind it time, you know. I'm just like, and they're only managing a handful, and we have a score of projects, you know. and I'm trying to whip our team into shape in the sense like whip into shape's the wrong word. I w the what I'm trying to do is just create accountability accountability in a way that we need it.
That I need it to be. Like, you promise something, you do it. And don't our team has been relying on project managers to like be like, did you deliver this? Why is this late? Did it? I'm like, no, no, no. You need to tell the project manager why it's late three days before it's late. You know, that's what I'm trying to create. And I'm just running into friction and it's it it's it it hurts, man. It really does. Cause like
consider this scenario that happened twice today. Yesterday, I sent
Kurt von Ahnen (16:43)
Today.
Toby Cryns (16:43)
an email, and this is like an escalation. Hey, shape up or ship out email. and it was it was along the lines of you need to every task you work on needs a comment if you worked on it. Like if you worked on it today, leave a comment. Just say what you did. It could be
Three words, you know, made 50% progress, you know. That's it. Like it doesn't have to be a lot. and you have AI to help, by the way. We're we're gonna click up. You can just tell click up to write it. I'm not asking for much here. Like, so I then last night, I'm all pissed, or maybe it was this morning, using AI, and this is the vibe coding thing. I vibe coded a system, an app that goes to click up and pulls the report for me.
Here's the employees. Here's what they worked on yesterday, but they logged time on. did they leave a comment? And these two employees that I just emailed yesterday, they had huge things that they and I so I I the app supplies me the text. It says copy this, paste this into the DM for them. I DM'd each of them, and like I'm like, don't push me, man. That's where I'm at. Don't push me.
I'll show you how it is.
Kurt von Ahnen (17:50)
Don't push me.
So you'll be back to hiring either more staff or more AI.
Toby Cryns (17:54)
Yeah, and I'm leaning into AI at this point. Like I'm like not the not w that that we won't have staff, but like just kick ass staff plus an AI support, you know.
Kurt von Ahnen (18:04)
So and and I I don't want to blow us up on time too much, but you and I have mentioned AI three, four times today. At at what point do you and we could maybe we maybe we cover this deeper in another show, but just just to kind of like lay the seed, right? How much is AI oversubscribed? Like when do you when do you pull the plug? So i in my own case, I was thinking about it. Like I thought, I just had Magi, right? Because Magi gives me access to all the tools in one account.
But then it it didn't connect to the MCP. It didn't connect, you know, Claude to WP vibe. It didn't, you know, and I ran out of credits and ended up buying a couple of lifetime deals on Pixa and Flomatic. So so I have those as backups if I need them. But then I really started thinking about it, Toby. And it's like, well, I pay every month for Canva. I pay every month for Descript. I pay for, you know, X Premium. And I got Groc access. And I and I dabble in all these channels.
And then it makes me, well, wait a minute, what happened? Like, how did this get so upside down? And when do we stop? Because
Toby Cryns (19:03)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (19:03)
I have fear of missing out in a really big way. just ask anyone that tries to offer me a lifetime deal. those new grok bots look really interesting, but to use the grok bots, it's a separate grok account. You have to have the grok super duper, whatever. and then when I was doing the research on grok bots in grok, it said.
No, this wouldn't replace like Claude or Gemini or Perplexity. You would still keep those things. This would just add, you know, features and functions to existing AI accounts and things.
Toby Cryns (19:29)
Right. Right. Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (19:33)
And I'm like, well, how much of this am I going to subscribe to and keep paying for?
Toby Cryns (19:37)
Yeah. well, and you need like a constant reevaluating of the tools. Like, so like we're subs we're heavily invested in Figma right now. And I'm like, do we even need Figma? Like, I know it's part of our workflow and designers love it, but honestly, I can just go to Lovable and do something pretty good. Like, and here we are paying a hundred bucks a month for Figma. And yeah, it it's a weird thing. And like I have prep
God, I said perplexy. I am subscribed to perplexy. Forgot about that. I'm subscribed to similar to you. I have like all these subscriptions, and I'm in some ways, some days I max them out, but like even within clickup, I'm paying for AI specifically to record the meetings and like AI to do the brain thing in ClickUp. Like I'm paying for these extra add-ons. And like today, actually, just this morning, with an MCP, I connected it to ClickUp, and then I'm like,
Does this mean I can stop paying ClickUp for this? Like, you know, I don't know, but now I'm paying now I'm paying Claude for that. Like on top of ClickUp.
Kurt von Ahnen (20:35)
Yeah.
Well, and and again, maybe it's a maybe it's a discussion to go deeper next time, but I'm I'm just really curious. Are we are we being diligent as agency owners in passing along these costs? Now I know we get the time savings of using the tools, right? So I know we can maximize our time better, but but are we are we being diligent in recouping our capitalized expenses as a business through the billing cycles?
Toby Cryns (20:59)
Mm.
Kurt von Ahnen (21:00)
And that's that's a big curiosity to me. I don't know that I don't know that Munano Namasas really leverage that. I mean in some cases I think our agency rate is high enough, but in other cases I'm like, we might be half priced for what we should be charging for the for the value we're actually bringing.
Toby Cryns (21:14)
Well, kind of where my mind goes some days is like usually in the afternoons, I'll be like, if I was a solopreneur, I would be a hundred percent in on this AI thing. Like, cause then you can really leverage it. Cause right
Kurt von Ahnen (21:25)
Ha!
Toby Cryns (21:26)
now there's we're still have old pricing in place. People have some expectation of old pricing. And like I'm like, if I was a solopreneur, I could probably make way more margin like with the AI tools today. So maybe I'll do that later.
Kurt von Ahnen (21:40)
Well, you know my business model and that's a lot of my decision making sometimes. I look at my schedule and I look at the tasks and I go, I could pass that to someone on the team, or I could keep an eighty percent margin for myself. You know, and that's how we treat ourselves sometimes.
Toby Cryns (21:53)
Yeah. It's tricky. I
Kurt von Ahnen (21:55)
But that probably not the smartest. I should probably just delegate it and go sell another job.
Toby Cryns (21:59)
I think what you're getting at is there's no right answer. And that's part of the struggle that I struggle with. Like is like, this sucks too. let's go back there. That sucks too.
Kurt von Ahnen (22:11)
I keep saying if I could just make enough money riding mountain bikes, that would be that would
Toby Cryns (22:14)
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen (22:15)
be where I would go. So hey, hey man, we I know we got a lot of stuff to talk about. We we we're gonna talk about equipment, you know, A V, cameras, audio, all kinds of stuff, but that's for another show. Toby, I want to respect your time today. What's a good way for people to reach you?
Toby Cryns (22:31)
You can find me at themightymo.com, T-H-E-M-I-G-H-T-Y-M-O.com, where we do all the things WordPress, security, and SEO lead generation. Also on LinkedIn, Toby, C-R-Y-N-S. Kurt, I really want to get in touch with you. How how can I do that?
Kurt von Ahnen (22:47)
Manyana No mas is the place, manana nomas dot com or LinkedIn. I still, even through all the spam in the Messenger, I still leverage LinkedIn quite a bit. So that's a good way to make a connection and reach out. and I we said it last
Toby Cryns (22:59)
All right. Thanks. I'm sorry.
Kurt von Ahnen (23:01)
time, but let's not forget that the Slack channel to the WP minute is open.
Toby Cryns (23:04)
Hmm.
Yes. And if you're not in that Slack channel, folks, and you like are craving a connection to some heavy hitters in the WordPress community, that'd be probably your best bet if you wanted to do some deep connecting in WordPress. WP Minute Slack. Google it.
Kurt von Ahnen (23:21)
Yeah, it's a good
spot. It's a good spot.
All right. Folks like, share, subscribe, and we'll see you next time on the agency action show. Have yourselves a good one. Bye bye.