Kurt von Ahnen: Hey everybody.
Welcome back to another fantastic episode of whose WordPress Agency is this.
Anyway, my name is Kurt Van Onan and I'm here with my wonderful co-host, Toby Kres.
And, we have a ton of stuff to go through today.
I hope that you find it fun.
Toby, welcome to the call.
Toby Cryns: Thanks, Kurt.
So, a friend of mine was conversing with, I was conversing with him earlier today.
and, He, the way he explained, I, I am, I'm interpreting here, but he blew a big
sale, like a big sale by my standard, like the dollar amount was more than
I've ever charged, put it that way.
and how he blew it, it made me think like our businesses are defined by sales.
There's.
Nothing else that defines it more than sales.
did you sell or did you not sell?
And it, it occurred to me that I've done what he did probably many times.
And the gist of it is like usually like, not always, but usually like
the more bureaucratic the organization that you're dealing with, the
more meetings you're gonna have.
Yeah.
Just in the sales cycle, the more they're gonna ask of you to, for
free stuff before they actually pay you or sign any agreement.
Free time, free RFP responses, free ideas.
And so he's gone through and he's been, communicating with
me for months now about this.
'cause I, I had actually sent him the lead months ago.
'cause I didn't, I didn't wanna do it.
I, I know that that's a thing.
Like, I was like, I don't wanna go to these meetings.
So I gave him the lead.
That's a lot of baggage.
Would you like to do it?
Yeah.
But it was a good lead if you're into that.
and so.
I, I'm guessing this was like the sixth or seventh meeting that he's had with them.
And, the gist of it, this is how he explained it to me.
He is like, I think I blew it.
and I'm interpreting he sounded like he went in there tired and ornery.
And pissy.
Mm-hmm.
Have you ever done that current?
Kurt von Ahnen: Well, I have, you know, it's, it's amazing because,
being in business for decades.
Lends a lot of expertise should we say, right?
That, that people new to, to industry don't expect.
I have a saying in my training and it is focused on the relationship and the
transactions will naturally follow.
If you are so focused on transaction, you'll blow the relationship and the
relationship is what makes the sale.
So I always say focus on the relationship and.
The transaction will naturally occur and yeah, if you're ornery, if you're
tired, if you're tired of the BS and another free meeting and a, you know,
what probably happens, especially in these big situations is you end up
spending a bunch of time with soldiers on the ground and you never get to, to
meet the general and get the approval.
It just seems like it goes on and on and on.
I have shortcut this immensely in my last 15 years of business.
I ask people straight up, Hey, is the decision maker in this room today?
Are, are we moving forward or not?
And I set my expectations accordingly.
but that's part of the relationship.
If you are hungover, if you're sick.
If your kids kept you up all night, if your spouse had you in the hospital,
you know, for, I had a mountain bike race last weekend, two weekends ago,
and it was a husband and wife coaching duo, and the woman of the couple had
an, an appendicitis had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night.
Well, I didn't, we didn't need either one of those coaches coming
to work with the kids that day.
You know what I mean?
Mm-hmm.
You haven't slept in mm-hmm.
40 hours.
cancel the appointment, reschedule, put, make sure that you can show
up in a good frame of mind, because if you are not in the proper frame
of mind, you're gonna blow it.
Toby Cryns: Yeah.
And I think like I.
That's, so that's something that I continually learned.
It happened to me earlier this year, and thankfully I had somebody set me straight
before I attended the meeting because I was like, ah, we're not, it's one of
these things like, we're not quite ready.
It wasn't even like that was in a bad mood.
It was just like, we're not quite ready.
And my, SEO guy, it was an SEO pitch.
He's like, Toby, let's cancel the meeting and postpone it till we're ready.
Like, and, and he was totally right, you know?
Yeah.
And I think.
What you said is spot on.
You're probably better off canceling and rescheduling
Kurt von Ahnen: And there are so many ways to do that where
you keep pride as a thing.
I.
Right, and I always say, you should put pride in your back pocket.
Humility is much more attractive than pride, but still there.
You don't wanna look like a moron, right?
So in your case, like you're preparing for an SEO pitch, you're not quite ready.
It is so much better to just call the client and say, Hey, I know we had an
appointment scheduled, but I really want to value your time and I don't feel
like we're properly prepared to execute this meeting at a high level right now.
Can we reschedule so we can be.
You know, more cognizant of the time you're investing with us and make sure we
really bring the value and they're gonna go, how are they gonna argue with that?
Right.
They're gonna go, okay, that was transparent, helpful.
They thought about me.
Oh, perfect.
And then you buy yourself the time and then you come in
and knock it out of the park.
Toby Cryns: Yeah, I think the, the, maybe the moral of that story is
like, you might lose one out of a hundred doing that, but like.
You're probably only putting yourself in a stronger position.
Kurt von Ahnen: Yeah.
Yeah.
And I wanna be more, more forward.
I think here, Toby, I can tell that you're a person that is, insightful and
self-reflecting and these types of things.
I am too, to a certain point.
And I think when we tell somebody.
Hey, I just really wanted to bring some value to you and I'm not sure
we're at our A game right now.
Can we reschedule so that when we see you, we bring our A game?
I just have a feeling that your a game when you show up prepared is
probably a plus, plus plus compared to the competition in your area.
Toby Cryns: And that's a great point.
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen: And, and if I'm just being blunt, part of the strength of
dealing with Ano Nomas is that when Ano Nomas has a meeting to show you
something, I'm showing you something.
I'm not wasting your time and talking about, well, what
if this and what if that?
I'm saying you, we did your needs assessment.
These were the results of the needs assessment.
Here's a statement of work we agreed to, and here's our first version.
In a lot of cases, our first version, the customers go Holy crud.
'cause they're used to getting jerked around.
Toby Cryns: Mm-hmm.
Also, if I could push back a little on this, all that is true.
And yet I found myself on a sales call just a week ago where I was
like, what was the topic of this call?
Like, why am I here?
And it was a legit call, like that was scheduled and I was just not prepared.
and I feel like on shows like these, like it, it's easy.
Like what people say is like oftentimes like.
We're perfect.
We never screw this up, but I just wanna throw that out there.
I was on a call.
It went okay.
could have gone way better had I been at all prepared.
it just, it was one of these things that was like, oh, I'm supposed to
be at a meeting in five minutes.
Who's this person?
Like, I just screwed up that way.
so I don't know.
I just wanted to share that if there's any, like, I don't know, inexperience,
sales, the WordPress agency owners like.
Sometimes you're, you're, you have to show up, you know, like just by,
malfeasance on your, your end, you know?
Kurt von Ahnen: Well, what you're describing though is really the difference
between being an entrepreneur, right?
Being an an agency owner versus.
You know, someone in a cubicle, in a corporate setting, right?
If, if I can, I don't have nightmares about it or anything like that, but
when I worked at Suzuki, that was a big corporate office, you know, and there was,
they had 14, I wanna say 14, 14 meeting rooms in that place, you know, and you
had to book a meeting room and then you had to, you know, you had to, you had
to be there at a certain time and get out at a certain time and this, and you
had to execute this and execute that.
but what I learned about working there was I.
They judged you more about how you executed the meeting process
than the actual work that was the result of the meeting.
It was, it was so bizarre.
Yeah.
And then you flip the script and you go, well, I'm an agency owner now, right?
Mm-hmm.
And so, yeah, I'm efficient with the meeting, but where my margins come
to life is when my processes, you know, form a, form a process that
makes, makes a deliverable happen in a timeline that is much more
condensed than what the client expects.
Right.
Yeah.
And that's where the margins come to life.
Toby Cryns: Well, you bring up an interesting point, like if, if I
was trying to land a job with Suzu, Suzuki or some big organization,
pretty much every big organization, I think is kind of what you described.
Like they care more about appearances Yeah.
Than about, than the actual, the other stuff.
Yeah.
you should keep that in mind too.
Right.
Kurt von Ahnen: Yeah, yeah.
Show up on time, be prepared, present well in the meeting.
And then after the meeting, you know, I focus on knocking it out of the park.
I've got some really great processes that I use to run our bus project,
manage what we do with our, with our different players on the team.
And, I, it's funny because people say, what do you really do?
And I say, and I'm like, well, I'm really a project manager.
I'm a much better project manager than I am a website designer.
You know, it just happens.
I work in the web field, but I'm able to orchestrate people from all over
the globe on these different things and have everything fall together
like a Lego set so that the project is complete when it's due and under budget.
So that to me is what people are really coming to me for.
all that creative stuff and all that weird talk that people are having
now about vibe coding and all this stuff, I think that's like superfluous
to what we actually deliver.
Toby Cryns: That's interesting.
Like, was talking with another friend this week about, he's dealing with a,
a crappy project manager on a agency.
He's working, he owns an agency.
They're doing work for another agency and he was like, this is the third project
manager I've worked with at this company.
The first two were great.
This one's new and he sucks, and like.
I used to think project manager not long ago, like five years ago.
I was like, Ugh, I would hate to be considered a project manager.
They make less money.
They have no power.
They get all the pressures, but I.
It is, it is true like it is if you're an agency owner, it's one way
you can make your mark is like, if you're a great project manager, you
don't have to be great at coding.
You don't have to be great at a lot of other stuff, especially if you're
going for these bigger contracts.
'cause it's more about the process than it is about the deliverable.
Kurt von Ahnen: Like, yeah.
Yeah.
I can't tell you how many times, especially in the enterprise marketplace
of the bigger ticket jobs, and this is.
We talked about this on a couple episodes ago where we said sometimes
the more money, the easier the job.
some of these enterprise jobs, I'll say, oh, well we're working on this
design nuance, or We're, and, and they just go, yeah, we don't care.
Where are the courses at?
You know, where, where's the function?
So how do I change a member's grade?
Like that's, that's what they care about.
And they don't care about, you know, this widget, the shade of blue on this button.
They, you know, the, you know, this has a drop shadow.
Like, they don't care about any of that stuff.
It seems like they might down downstream, but to launch the product, they're
more like, we're on a timeline.
We made a promise this would be ready to go by such and such a date.
How we coming?
And it's, it's the small projects.
You know, where people have no paying customers yet, they're launching
their first course, and they're like, I really wanted a different shade
of blue with a drop shadow, and I want a higher radius on this button.
And you're like, your course isn't done yet.
Right.
You're selling a course, but you don't have any course content.
And like, yeah, but I really want the website to have a certain look and feel.
Toby Cryns: Right?
Yeah, totally.
Well, and and, and anybody who sells.
Every day knows, like all, none of that stuff matters.
None of it matters.
Like, like it's what you're saying, like, do they trust me or not?
Kurt von Ahnen: Like Yeah.
so I know we're off the rails, but on a percentage basis, what the
clients you work with, how many of them say, wow, I really need to
customize the, the, the checkout page.
Toby Cryns: Close to 0%.
Oh, yours?
Because the convers conversations don't go there.
How about you
Kurt von Ahnen: like, it's in the, in the courses space?
I ca Well, 'cause I do support for lifter LMS, right?
So in the courses space, I, I need to customize this.
How do I customize the checkout page?
How do I customize the login page?
And I'm like, if you've already sold the course,
what, what is it about the checkout page that you think is gonna change
their mind about buying your course?
Right, because the, the page was designed to convert so other people that are
smarter than you, that, that, that have paying customers, develop this.
And you are brand new to the space.
You don't have any paying customers yet, but you want to customize
all of these, you know, dynamic.
Pages that are, they're templates.
They're, they're made a certain way on purpose and, and it's,
the responses are always unique.
I'm always amazed.
'cause I, I always say, what about, you know, what about the login page makes you
think someone's gonna ask for a refund?
They already paid and, and ran
people.
Toby Cryns: You're, it's not your, it's not your pricing.
It's not your login page.
That's the problem.
It's the login page.
Kurt von Ahnen: Don't sell.
It's the login page.
They, they bought the course and, and the course has value, but this
login page is just too much friction.
It's too much friction.
Toby Cryns: Yep.
Yep.
That's funny.
Yeah.
I, I always think like, just in general, any question, any tech question, I'm
always like, how is this making you money?
If we do.
Like, how does this make you more money if we fix this?
Like, and you can put, insert any question in there.
Kurt von Ahnen: Well, and I feel like, and I gotta remember that we
are making a show, Toby, you and I are making a show that is for, agencies,
people that own agencies, and a lot of these agencies are making marketing
products, brochure style websites.
So maybe they're not all about conversion.
Maybe they're not all about how many people get to the checkout page.
A lot of websites don't have those things.
Mm-hmm.
But then it, it still comes to light of, you know, how much of your time as an
agency owner is driven by nonsensical nuance as opposed to core features
that drive functionality and make your site do what it's supposed to do well.
Toby Cryns: Yeah.
And, yeah, exactly.
this kind of brings up another, thing that I've been experiencing.
I'm selling my, I have.
I have an old house, a house that we just moved out of that we're
selling and we're having like, emotional, we're in like an emotional
low 'cause nobody wants to buy it.
And we're like, why not?
It's a great house.
and it reminded me of, there's this idea, I think there's a book called The Messy
Middle, but the idea that like when you're deep in a long project, the middle is.
Mucky or messy.
Like it's just, and I was thinking like Frodo on Mount Doom, if you read
Lord of the Rings, this isn't in the, the movie, I don't think, but like
he's sitting on Mount Doom with, with Sam Wise and he's like, we're in the
middle of a great story and yeah, we might die, but isn't this cool?
Isn't this cool?
and I was thinking like, I think all businesses on all big projects, they
get, it gets really messy and mucky and.
It, it's hard for us as like the delivery people to see through it, but I was
curious, Kurt, from your perspective.
You know, I think in general, businesses try to, help, like part of our job is
to help our clients not see the muck and to kind of like steer their eyes
to the things that are important.
But how do you communicate?
The mucky muck with clients and how do you help them see through the
muck in the middle of a big project?
Kurt von Ahnen: I think that's an unfair question to ask me if
we're thinking about parlaying this information to other agency owners.
know, because I authored the book on leadership and stuff like that, so I
come down to, I have some, people say scripts are nasty, like salespeople
that use scripts, like that's nasty.
But what I call these is like.
verbal muscle memory, right?
So I have this verbal, verbal muscle memory that I use with people.
Let's say I'm in the middle of a project and it just seems like you get
to, like, you got the website, so you got the WordPress tools in and you got
the, the plugins in, and you've got the basic formatting and configuration
done, and you're starting to put in the content, and then the, the client
just starts getting like all fractured.
Like they're just all over the place.
And that's kinda that mucky middle thing, right?
a lot of times.
And, and this is, this is the reason that I stopped telling
people I was a WordPress agency.
I'm not a WordPress agency.
I am a business consultancy.
And so I say, well, let's get, let's get down to brass tacks.
What is it that you truly deliver as a business?
What are your core ideologies that you deliver as a business?
How do you deliver those, those items, those goods or those services?
Right?
And then as we build the product to message those items out.
If they start getting all weird and distracted in the middle of the project,
I just say, Hey, hey, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Let, let's gather up.
Let's circle the wagons and let's focus again on what your core deliverables are
and how this website communicates that.
And then I say, my goal is to get you published as soon as possible.
And we can always augment, modify, and change as we go, but let's get you to a
launch date as quickly as possible with a minimal viable product so that we can
start to communicate with your audience.
And that seems to get them back on track.
Like, 'cause then I go, so let's get back to what are the minimal
viable requirements that we need for this project to launch?
And, and that gets 'em refocused and we just start to get back on point.
And it's, it becomes a, like, smart goal setting, right?
is it strategic?
Is it measurable?
Is it achievable?
Is it time related?
And I just, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
Right?
Toby Cryns: yeah.
And I imagine it's also like self-talk, like Kurt, you know?
'cause they're asking all these weird questions maybe in the middle and
you're like, Kurt, what's the goal here?
You know, sometimes like, what are we trying to achieve today?
Kurt von Ahnen: Yeah.
What, yeah.
'cause it so many times I was just, I mean this is so uncanny, but I was on a call
today with a client and they're building a membership learning website and they were.
These membership tools are very confusing because they install a membership
tool and most people don't recognize there's nothing in there to manage
members in a membership tool like these.
I shouldn't say membership tools, the community sites.
Mm-hmm.
So fluent community, body boss, all these things.
They don't have tools that manage the membership side of it.
And so you have these tools and they're like, so how does
someone get to the newsfeed?
How does someone, I don't want those people to get to the newsfeed.
They didn't buy the membership.
And I'm like, that's 'cause we need a membership tool to be able to manage who
gets access to what levels of the site.
And you have to break all that down and the customers start getting like,
poof, like fireworks have gone off and the A DH D's kicking in and they're
just picking stuff outta the sky.
Yep.
And that's when I go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
We gotta slow this down.
Let's put in a membership tool who gets access to the community site.
Great.
We'll run that by tags.
We'll run that through the fluent CRM.
We'll do an automation.
We'll send an email and they get access to that link.
Perfect.
We're done.
And then they go, oh, how did you do that?
I've been doing it for 22 years.
You know, let's, let's just get you to the next problem.
This one's solved.
Toby Cryns: So you've just been describing some really smart
decisions you've made, just like a process for smart decision making.
But what's the worst business decision you've ever made?
Kurt von Ahnen: I'm not gonna share her name because I don't wanna get sued.
we all do it.
I think no matter the size of your business, you're tempted to
do it like you talk to a client or you're referred to a client.
So in this case, I was referred to a client and I didn't wanna
look foolish in front of the person that made the referral.
I wanted to honor that person.
And so I gave them too much time on a call and I gave them too much free
information, and then they decided I was a genius and wanted to hire me, and
the needs assessment wasn't really fully done, but I threw a number out there
like, yeah, I can make it happen for this.
The person that made the referral.
Actually side stepped part of the project.
And so I should have been going through that person and they should have been
the point of contact for the client.
But what happened was the client ended up being a direct point of contact
with me and then tried to like, after the fact say, well, I was under the
impression it was gonna this, it was gonna, that it was gonna, the other
thing, and here's the truth of it, and I'm just gonna be blunt and say it.
We needed the money.
Right.
So I was like, ah, do I give this person their money back and tell 'em to hit the
skids or do I keep the project every time?
You have that doubt, this is coming from me.
Give the money back, figure it out some other way.
Give the money back.
this woman was incredibly unethical.
I wanna put this in my disclaimers.
I want to do this.
I, I'm gonna take this material from this person's website and
embed it in my own website.
It's like horribly unethical things.
And I'm like, I can't do that for you.
And then every time I would call her unethical for something,
she would get more angry at me.
so I built the website.
It was fully functional, fully operational.
I gave her access to the website.
And then she disputed her fee with Stripe.
And Stripe took all the money.
So I did months of work.
I took hours and hours and hours of Zoom calls I never should have taken.
And I worked with somebody that I thought was a horrible, horrible person.
And I did it all in good faith with a smile thinking at least I'm
getting paid and we need the money.
Mm-hmm.
And at the end, she stole the work, stole the money, and Stripe never gave it back.
Yeah.
So that was my worst decision because I knew I shouldn't have worked
with the person, but I did anyway.
Yeah.
How about you?
What's your worst decision?
Toby Cryns: Yeah, I think, it's similar actually in the sense like,
it's like, you know, once you have an established business and you're
like doing okay and you think you can make it another month without a
whole problem occurring financially,
Kurt von Ahnen: you're gonna buy meat instead of just beans.
Toby Cryns: Yeah.
Yeah.
but like, so I was working, the, the gist of it is similar, but
like I did it for the money.
Like, and I, I shouldn't have, like I, I knew in my heart, in my head that in I was
at a, a point where I could have walked away and I stayed on for another three
months and took on a huge responsibility.
You know, just basically continued with a different responsibility on a, and.
Like I re it, it didn't, you know, it was just kinda like, yeah, the money was good.
They ended up paying, but like, at the same time, it was like
a regret.
And this is the, the lesson of a money ball too.
At the end when, Brad Pitt's, I don't know if it, again, it might just be in
the book, but like basically Brad Pitt's sitting there, uh uh, and the gist is
like, you shouldn't do it for the money.
Shouldn't do it for the money.
Yeah.
Doesn't matter how.
And he got offered millions and millions, not Brad Pitt,
but his character in real life.
Billy Beam got offered millions of dollars to skip.
His thing was he skipped college and went straight to the pros.
But what he really wanted to do was go to college and party
and play baseball in college.
so, yeah, if you can swing it now, I'm not saying sometimes you need
the money and you, you know, you do the best you can, but, I think
you gotta at least listen to your.
Head and heart in those cases.
And maybe that when you feel that maybe it's like about setting better
boundaries around the project.
Yeah.
When you feel that.
Kurt von Ahnen: So I'm gonna hit you with a personal question.
Hindsight being 2020, if you look back, did you need the money?
Toby Cryns: No, not, oh, you mean, for that project specifically?
Exactly.
Or No, I didn't.
I didn't.
Kurt von Ahnen: And that's exactly where my head goes.
So when, so in the moment, we panic and, and we don't allow ourselves to
make calm decisions, and that's when we make bungled decisions and moves.
So when I look back on this project, this project, by the way,
full disclosure, was only $3,000.
the amount of Zoom calls alone was worth $3,000, let alone the woman was doing.
This woman was so greedy and so crazy that she was, she was like a lunatic.
The reason I knew that she was gonna ask for a refund was the last
Zoom call I had with her was in one of those pay by the day motels.
Like she turned on the zoom call and there was like a tornado
had went off in this hotel room.
And I'm like, what happened to her office?
Where's her house?
Where's where is this woman?
You know?
And I was like, oh, she's broke.
And now she's gonna ask for her money back.
Right?
But it's like you see it and you know it.
And I foolishly stuck with the project and looking back, hindsight being
2020, I didn't need that $3,000.
I didn't need that $3,000 at all.
Yeah, we just talked on our last episode about how sometimes you fire
customers and, and when you let something go, something better comes along.
Mm-hmm.
And right after she got all of her money back from Stripe, I landed like
three great jobs right after that.
Yeah.
And I had the opportunity to take great jobs before that
if I wasn't working with her.
Yeah.
You know?
Mm-hmm.
We gotta patient and we gotta make smart choices.
Toby Cryns: And this, this leads me to, A quote, somebody said maybe a
week or so ago, it says, at what point do you say even your husband couldn't
take your BS and then set them loose,
even your husband couldn't take your bs.
Kurt von Ahnen: Would you ever say that to somebody?
Toby Cryns: I wouldn't.
Would you, Kurt?
Kurt von Ahnen: No.
No.
I, I might rephrase it some, but but I, I wouldn't say that.
yeah, when people act nuts, when they act.
Disconnected and, and crazy.
You gotta circle the wagons, man.
And you gotta be direct and be a leader and say, Hey, as, as someone
that's managing this project, I feel like we're off the rails a little bit.
We gotta gather this back up.
I've worked with projects before.
I have seen, I worked with a wonderful lesbian couple.
They were hilarious.
And, we, we didn't align on certain beliefs and stuff,
but, but they were hilarious.
Like they were, they, they were into other like.
I'm a Christian, they were in other kinds of religions and things and and then they
ended up breaking up through the deal.
But I saw it happening, like I saw like, oh, they're not gonna make it.
and it's weird when you're just a web person and you're working
on a project with a couple, you can tell something's wrong.
I was doing one on a beautiful couple from, Texas and.
they had someone in their family had gotten injured and that postponed
the project for a little bit.
And then they're an older couple.
One of them started getting a little more sickly, and I was
like, this ain't gonna work.
This ain't gonna work.
And we were so close to launch and it never launched.
Right.
divorces, deaths, strokes, heart attacks.
I've seen it all.
Oh, yeah.
The divorce ones are hard because it's like mm-hmm.
Who's in charge of the project then?
Right.
From a selfish perspective, who's, who am I sending these invoices to Every month
Toby Cryns: there's an agency in town that's going a bigger,
a bigger, agency in town.
They're going through a divorce thing with their two co-owners.
I mean, the owners are married, they're, you know.
Yeah.
And, and the, I only know 'cause my friend was an employee there and like.
He's like, it's weird man, because like one spouse will come and tell him to do
something, the other spouse will show up a minute later and be like, don't do that.
Do this, don't do that, do this.
He's just like, I'm in the middle of a freaking divorce thing now.
Like, yep.
Could we, Maybe, this might be the, the all we have time for today.
We left a cliffhanger last week.
the question was, is managed WP dying, but over the course, the course of the
week, I kind of was thinking about it more deeply and the question is not for
me, it's not so much is managed WP dying.
That's a question I have, but like the core of the question is
at what point as an agency owner do you jump ship on a technology?
That is no longer getting the job done for you and you have, knowing you have.
And so examples for me over the course of time, 15 years ago, host Gator.
I jumped host Gator to someone else.
And, you know, divvy was a core development tool I used to use.
I no longer use it.
we currently use Basecamp for project management.
We're switching to Clickup and All of these are big processes, have big
processes along, along with them.
'cause we have employees and a hundred websites that we're migrating in some
cases and, you know, so when, how do you think about infrastructure change
like that, like tech infrastructure?
Kurt von Ahnen: You mentioned one that scares the, the, the
life outta me and that is.
If you as an agency wanna migrate 50 or a hundred or 200 or 400
websites, from one host to another.
And I'm gonna go back to, hey, if these are brochure websites and you can do
like, you know, WP Vivid, vivid, WP, whatever, and just migrate simple
sites over, like that's okay, great.
Perfect.
Whatever.
Have a great day.
Enjoy yourself.
If you're doing projects that have.
you know, shopping carts, courses, you know, e-learning systems in them,
community sites, dynamic content where like, this person paid a subscription
at midnight, but the website was turned off at 1202 and then turned
back on at six o'clock in the morning.
And then.
All of those transactions for those eight hours don't get recorded in the database.
Right?
And then you get all these support emails.
It just, managing it is crazy.
'cause then you end up having to say, Hey Mr.
Customer, we're gonna be doing some site maintenance, quote unquote, and
you're gonna be down for 24 hours.
And then you gotta pray that you can get everything done in 24 hours.
it is difficult.
And I'm gonna go one step further.
I have been working in a host lately.
I can't explain it, Toby.
Everything is just more difficult.
Everything is more difficult, and it's, it's a co-hosted, not co-hosted.
It's a, it's a co-managed situation, so we're basically subcontracting
on this and it's like everything needs an external crown job set up.
Everything needs PHP workers increased.
Everything needs, it's like what is happening, like the sites
don't seem to function well unless we dot every I across every T.
Whereas in other hosts, I go.
Slap up the website, put in the tools, add an SMTP, Bob's
your uncle, we got a website.
and it's, it's just not the same with other tools.
And you as an agency man, you gotta know what you're getting into.
You can't just say, you know, how many sites for how many dollars a
month and how do I access support?
And then move everything over.
You gotta know what you're really stepping into.
Toby Cryns: And, and I think there's a, a, a pretty big difference.
So like a lot of those migrations probably.
Need like an internal person?
Yeah, like ideally it would be like some employee at the
company that knows the system.
and a lot of times in agency land you don't have that we're like external.
We're like just like, yeah, we're gonna migrate the site.
You know, we don't know, we don't know the business processes as deeply.
I moved, migrated, so I used to work at Lumi deodorant and I was
their CTO and I managed a migration of 300,000 WordPress users.
to Shopify users.
And these are paid subscriptions and stuff?
Yeah.
we did it at noon.
This is a funny story too.
I'm, I it was my choice.
I'm like, we're doing it at noon on a Friday and here's why.
And yeah, no noon on a Monday.
I think it was a Tuesday.
I'm like, we're doing it.
And this was pre-planned and, and it was intentional.
'cause like how many times have you experienced maybe like, we
need you to do this at midnight.
And you wake up at midnight, you do it, but you're groggy, you miss
something, and then you go to bed, and then in the morning there's
more problems because you miss those eight hours or whatever, 1700 emails.
yeah.
And so I, I, I still get flack from it, from the Lumi team because I'm like,
no, we're doing this at noon on Tuesday.
We're gonna have a good plan.
I'll be fully ready to go.
You'll be here to notice any issues.
We have everyone on the phone, like at the distribution center, like, but that, like
for a lot of these, I imagine a lot of the sites you would have to migrate if they
have a lot of like thousands of users.
You've, it's really tough to do externally as an agency.
Kurt von Ahnen: Yeah.
In.
Upgrading.
So if you're on certain host packages and you upgrade to a different
type of server within their system, that always amazes me, right?
Because you can just hit them up on chat and say, oh, I wanna move this website
to this other, you know, upgrade server.
And they just go, hold on, let me look at that for you real quick.
And then 10 minutes later, like, okay, it's ready to go.
Mm-hmm.
And I'm not a host.
Like I, I'm like, how did that happen so quickly?
I go into the website, everything works, everything's 10 times faster,
and you go, oh, that was great.
But if you gotta take that same project and you gotta take it from,
you know, cloud ways to Kinter, Kinter to WP Engine or whatever, it's.
It's a nightmare moving thousands of users and all their content and then
doing that whole like screenshot exercise.
Like, okay, does the homepage look the same?
Does the about page look the same?
Does the contact page look the same?
And then let's try and do a I.
You know, a make believe student enrollment with a 99% off coupon.
And so we try that.
Then we go, oh crap, that doesn't work.
What's broken?
And then you gotta go through, okay, you know, SMTP external chron, you, you
gotta make sure all the everything's in place it, and then multiply that by
50 websites in a weekend or something.
It's crazy.
Toby Cryns: Yeah.
And it's weird that the in as I thought about that, like the incentive
structure, it, it's, it's really.
The reason you need an internal person for that migration is
like they're incentivized to think through all those problems.
Whereas like an external agency like we run, the incentives are just different.
Like we're not, even if we got fired, it's probably not the end of our world like it
would be if you were an employee there.
and is they also like every minute we spend on that project is a minute
we don't spend on another project.
Yep.
And other client's not getting the attention, you know, the
phone call that they need where I'm, you know, it's tricky.
It's really tricky, I think to navigate as an agency owner.
Yeah.
Kurt von Ahnen: Yeah, it's, I kind of dread it.
It's, I remember when I went from, I used to have a ton of
stuff on Bluehost back in the day.
and I think a lot of agencies start out this way.
So if you're in that position, don't go, oh, Kurt's making me feel bad.
I'm not trying to make you feel bad.
You gotta start somewhere.
I used to love Bluehost 'cause I could register unlimited URLs and I could
throw sites into my hosting account and I could move things around.
And they were great for like, proof of concept sites.
You know, like if I, I, I could throw a lifter, LMS in there and, and I could,
you know, put in content and build a course and let people see a sample of
what something was gonna look like.
But sooner or later I had projects that had more success, more users,
and I had to say, okay, I need, I need more bandwidth, I need less caching.
I need, you know, 'cause these dynamic sites, if they're heavily
cashed, run into some problems.
And so I ended up having to move some things over to a different host.
And that to me was like, oh, this is work.
This is, this is difficult.
And so now I try really hard to do the research before the decision and
then make sure that when I make that decision, I'm locked in for a while.
Toby Cryns: Yeah.
Yeah.
That's, the scars have bred that planfulness in you.
Kurt von Ahnen: Yeah.
And then the other thing to remember, and this is gonna, this
is just agency to agency advice.
If you choose a host that has a bunch of extra bells and whistles,
just remember the people that you're developing these projects for.
They don't need those bells and whistles.
Like, I don't share everything that my host will do with my clients.
There's no way, like I'm not gonna say, oh, you could have
unlimited emails on your URL.
Like, I'm right.
I'm just not, I am not babysitting 25.
Email accounts on, you know, well, I want to have help at my URL services at my URL
uhhuh people at my u rl support at my url.
No, you don't.
No, you, you want info at your URL and that's it.
That's all you get.
That is all you get.
That's all you get what email for you?
Yeah.
You could sign up for Google Workspaces That'll run your email.
but it's, I'm very strategic about the way that I manage that because even though the
host I chose will do all kinds of really cool things, I am not giving my clients
exposure to the really cool things that I have to manage and, and maintain and,
and keep the expectation level high with.
'cause all they really wanted was the website.
Toby Cryns: Mm-hmm.
Cool.
Great way to end it.
Here, I'll take this out.
This has been an episode of whose WordPress agency is this?
Anyway, with Kurt Van Onin and myself, Mr.
Toby Kres.
we'll see you next week.