Avoiding the time sink

Speaker 0 00:00:00 If you Google agency Mavericks, the great migration you, I there's an entire blog, post and email templates and a complete turnkey system to get your existing clients onto care plans. Speaker 1 00:00:14 If you have a vision for the agency you want to build, then we want to help you build it. Welcome to the agency hour podcast brought to you by agency Mavericks. Speaker 0 00:00:23 Hey ladies and gentlemen, there we go. I'll unmute the microphone. We're having all sorts of technical difficulties here today, but that's okay because my hair looks fantastic. I'll put a little bit of extra effort into it this morning, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. So hopefully, uh, the style will override the lack of substance that we've got going on here. My name is Troy Dean. Welcome to another episode of the agency hour podcast. Now we usually live stream this into our group, the digital Mavericks Facebook group. However, I think the internet angels have been listening to us because we recently decided that we were going to start live streaming this onto our Facebook page. And so therefore we hadn't made the decision to do it yet, but we'd been talking about it. And what happened yesterday is for some reason, stream yard decided that it just would not let us schedule a live stream into the group. Speaker 0 00:01:10 It said, no, no, that's all over. You can't do that anymore. So we are now live streaming this episode onto the agency, Mavericks Facebook page, have no idea what that's gonna mean for engagement or your experience as a listener, but we will find out. So please bear with us as we continue to experiment and iterate, uh, in an effort to try and produce engaging educational, inspirational content for all you agency owners out there listening. If you are listening to this as a podcast, then congratulations. Thank you for finding us. We'd love to know how you found us. Uh, we think it's a miracle when people discover us and start consuming our content, we have no idea how it happens. So please let us know so we can do more of it. Subscribe, like share, do all that kind of good stuff. And uh, if you're not in the digital Mavericks Facebook group, you should definitely come and join because it is awesome. Speaker 0 00:01:58 It's full of agency owners. It's about 12 and a half to 13,000 agency owners in there at the time of recording this episode. And they're all, we're all helping each other, grow our agency so that we can live more life and avoid burnout out. And having said that, that's a nice segue to introduce today's guest, who also happens to be our platinum sponsor for MACOM, which is coming up in a couple of weeks in San Diego. We'll talk more about that in a moment, but ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the show. ACTHA chowder from blog vault, WP remote. ACTHA welcome to the show. Speaker 2 00:02:31 Hi, Troy. Uh, thank you for having me. Good to see you. Speaker 0 00:02:35 Absolute pleasure. It's good to finally connect you. And I have been playing messenger conversations for, I don't know, the last year or so, and, uh, it's good to finally now connect, uh, almost in real life and have you on the show and we are gonna meet up in real life in a couple of weeks in San Diego when you're out there for word camp us and also very kindly sponsoring our Mahan event. Speaker 2 00:02:54 No, absolutely really looking forward to, to seeing you in person and, uh, yeah. Finally getting a chance to, to hang out together and that hair is looking striking for sure. It's Speaker 0 00:03:05 Looking striking isn't I did put a lot of effort and I must manage your expectations. I'm far better on camera and the podcast than I'm in real life. So don't be disappointed when we meet in real life. <laugh> so Speaker 2 00:03:15 I'm, I'm not this blurry in real life, so <laugh> Speaker 0 00:03:21 Excellent. I love it now for those, for those that don't know, I just wanna talk a little bit about your journey before we talk about your company and your products for those that don't know, what, how did you get into this WordPress slash web agency space? What was your introduction into this world? Speaker 2 00:03:37 So, you know, uh, I'm as much of an outsider to this space, as you can imagine. Uh, so I'm, I'm an engineer. I used to work as a software developer for over for, for almost seven years. And, uh, then I noticed that, uh, someone on the internet had a broken website, uh, actually broken blog. And I thought that's, that's a problem which I can solve. And, uh, uh, and that's how I got in. And frankly, I didn't even know what I was doing. Maybe even now I, I many times I feel, I don't know what we're, what we are doing. So <laugh> so yeah, so that's how we, that's how, that's, how we got started. And it's been a long, long journey since then. It's been almost 12 years since we rode the first line of code. Wow. We solve the problem. Speaker 0 00:04:20 So, so you, so you started out doing services like as an agency fixing people's websites, building websites, or did you just start out with a, with a plugin and product from day one? Speaker 2 00:04:31 No. So we started off as a product, so we, we, we, I could run an agency to save my life, frankly. That's a tough, tough job, you know, and, uh, it's, it's a very, that's a stressful job. So we, we, we converted mostly from our product from software product angle and building, uh, building products. Speaker 0 00:04:51 And so what was your, your products you have there's, there's a few products. You have, you have mal care blog, vault, WP remote. What was the first product that you took to market? Was it blog vault? Speaker 2 00:05:01 Yes. Uh, it was blog vault. So, uh, blog vault was the backup product. So I'll just give a quick history. What happened was there's this, uh, and I think many from many people in the audience would know there is, uh, the founder of, uh, stack overflow. He would run a very popular blog called coding horror for, and it was basically targeted engineers and he had that website crash. And I was like, if, uh, if, uh, the person who made stack overflow, which basically is, you know, the Bible for almost any engineer today, uh, is, uh, it cannot maintain his blog and doesn't have great backups. Maybe there's a problem there. And so that's the first product we created. And then that led us to then we did it for over a few years and we realized that a lot of times people were using their backups was to recover from hacks and malware attacks. And we thought there are all security plugins out there, security products out there. So why are they still using backups and what's going on there. And then that got us into security that led to mal care because we, we realized that there's a need for something better. And then, and that finally led us to UHP remote, which, uh, which is where we realized that a lot of people doing a lot of these things were agencies Speaker 0 00:06:23 And have lots of sites across lots of clients. And so for those that dunno WP remote is the one dashboard to manage all of your client sites. It plays in a similar space to manage WP and main WP, which we'll talk about in a moment. I wanna come back to blog vault for a second because there were, this is, this is I'm, I'm always curious about this entrepreneurial hunger and this mindset, right. There were lots of backup plugins around, you know, 8, 9, 10 years ago. There there was. Why did you think that you could come in and have something different to offer the market? Didn't you just look at it? Cause I, I like, I would look at a lot of plugins and say, well, I'm not gonna start, you know, a plugin like opt in monster or convert box because those guys have got that market cornered and there's no room for a new player. How did you, what was the thinking that, you know, there's definitely room for a new play here. I'm gonna come in here and shake things up a bit. Speaker 2 00:07:13 So, uh, I think it was, I, I, I don't even think we, we thought it through very much. We thought it was a, it was an interesting site project. The one angle we didn't know that we are going to do differently is we realized that as we started exploring the space, because so first we started like, okay, fine. Why didn't he have great backups? Why didn't, uh, Jeff have great backups? And then we like, okay, what does great backups mean? So we didn't even actually know what grade backups meant then. And then what the hell is, what is the software that they he's using to make a blog? So actually we were that much of an outsider that we didn't even know, uh, maybe would've come across WordPress, but I was as far as removed from WordPress as possible. So we were discovering all of these things and we, we were just exploring, frankly, I still had my day job and which was enjoying very much. Speaker 2 00:08:02 Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, uh, I was very much focused on that in the evenings. I would, uh, mess around with trying to figure out what's going on here. And we realized that the one thing we did realize was that we knew that it cannot just be a plugin. It has to be a full service because that's the experience. That's what will make it, uh, uh, really easy to use. And first of all, we came at it from a ease of use perspective. And later we realized that for great, highly reliable backups, uh, you just needed it to be a completely end to end solution with the service, with data, you controlling the way the data gets stored, et cetera. So that start, that became the differentiator at that point of time where everything else was a plugin. And, uh, that was a good and a bad thing, but that at the end of it was the differentiation factor. Speaker 0 00:08:55 And at some point you, you pretty early on in the journey, you decided that it was gonna become a WordPress product, right? It, it, it, it wasn't a backup solution for Megento or DRAL or Jula. It's a backup solution for WordPress, is that because WordPress had so much market share that you figured, well, if we're gonna do this and we're gonna serve the biggest part of the market, then we're just gonna focus on having a WordPress solution. Speaker 2 00:09:22 And, uh, <laugh>, you know, again, initially we, we like fine. We, first of all, we did, we didn't know anything else. So we are focused on WordPress. Then we realized that there's something called Jula. And, uh, Dr. So we are we wondering whether to create plugins, whether to go in that market. And we just did not know the real, the realities we did not know. So we created a Jula plugin, but we just, and we had a few people use it, but we, there were first thing just seemed so much more, uh, there was so much more activity happening there. And over the next few years, our next couple of years, WordPress just took off and I can tell you that it, none of it was planned. We just started by riding the wave, essentially mm-hmm Speaker 0 00:10:06 <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I do wanna come back and talk about, um, the topic of this, uh, of this show, which is about avoiding the time sink and how agencies can prepare for a rainy day. But before we get there, I wanna talk about the journey of, you know, blog vault was the first product. How long before you realized that there was a need for something like mal care and, and was mal care, the next product that you launched? Speaker 2 00:10:30 Yeah, so I think it was about three to four years or three years into it, or four years into it that we realized that mal care was a, that malware was a problem with WordPress and security was a problem with WordPress, which was not solved well enough, uh, already. So because you know, this big brands were there, there word fans, there was fully there, it security and security and actually a security outsider then you, or if you don't, uh, know much of security, seems like a very, very complex topic from outside mm-hmm <affirmative>. And, uh, so we were also very, very, again, of entering into security because, you know, you have these folks who are like security experts, who, who are, you know, these people sitting in basement, you know, kids who are geniuses and stuff like that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and we were, we were not that for sure. Speaker 2 00:11:24 Right. So, uh, uh, so we, we, we are, we are very ready of what's going on, but we also realized that the problem is not getting solved, uh, uh, as it should be. And we started exploring how to solve it. So because people would get hacked and they would recover, they would try to restore from a backup. And then we, you know, restoring from a backup from when you are hacked is actually not a good idea. And we can talk about that. Uh, actually we should talk about that a bit down during this, uh, this, uh, Speaker 0 00:11:59 I do that all the time. I used to do that all the time until I, until I kind of realized that the thing that caused the problem was probably still in the back. Right. <laugh> so, Speaker 2 00:12:06 But that's definitely one of the problems, but also what we realized is that people just were not realizing when their sites got hacked. So they were sites would get hacked six months ago for like six months back. And they would not realize it for all this file. And because we had the history, we would go in and help these customers out. They're like, no, you see, you see that, that the hack is sitting there. Like that file, that malware is sitting six, six months ago. And it just got activated now. So you're noticing the problem today, but it has been around for a long time, and I'm not even talking about the vulnerable time talking about the site itself got infiltrated mm-hmm Speaker 0 00:12:41 <affirmative>. Speaker 2 00:12:42 So that's what actually, that's the problem that we started trying to solve, because you had all of these other security solutions and all these people are paying a lot of money to on those security solutions. Speaker 0 00:12:53 Hmm. And then, and then at some point, because I think I discovered you through, uh, through WP remote, right. I, I had ki I was, I kind of knew about blog vault. The name was familiar. I hadn't used it. I had no idea about mal care. That was, I didn't even know that existed. I thought security was the only real security plugin. Uh, but I went looking for an alternative to manage WP full transparency after GoDaddy bought managed WP. And I just watched the experience and everything just tank. And I just wasn't happy. And I was also hearing lots of feedback from customers of ours who were using managed WP, who were complaining in our groups going, oh, this is just a turd now, what do we do? What should we use? And I, as part of serving my audience and also looking for a solution for myself, for my own sites, not for my clients, because I haven't done agency works since 2000 and I don't know, 17, 2018. Speaker 0 00:13:55 So I was just looking for a solution for my own sites. I went searching and I remembered vaguely. The guys from human made, had built a solution to manage their client websites and it was called WP remote. And then I came across this blog article that blog volt had acquired WP remote. So I went down that rabbit hole discovered WP remote. I think I reached out to you. We had a conversation I'd started using WP remote. I love it by the way. It's fantastic. How did the, and we talked about this before the show. Talk to us about what happened with the acquisition of WP remote. And why did you think again, like, why did you think, well, there's a need here in the market. There are already some big players in the market, infinite WP, main WP managed WP. Why did you think that you could then come in and offer something different again? Speaker 2 00:14:42 All right. So it's, so the, the, the WP remote acquisition story is actually very interesting and, uh, maybe we'll will delve two minutes into that, like how that really panned out. And there is an Australian angle to that too. Hmm. So that's a very, that's a very interesting one, but, uh, again, the, the, the need itself for something like this, we started noticing because we had agencies who would lose their backups and they, they realize that blog world is the, uh, has a, is a great backup solution on, or mal care is a great security solution across all their sites. So they would come in and they'd start adding all their sites to it. But occasionally we would have customers leave us and they would be moving to manage the blue P uh, and we would ask them, what's going on there? They're like, see manager has built this. Speaker 2 00:15:33 And this is a few years ago. They built a solution which lets me manage all the sites. And that's a key part of, uh, of, uh, the overall solution that I need while your backups are fantastic and everything else. But we have to, uh, we want to consolidate in a single tool. And that's when we started building the updates, cetera into this, into the system now, as we were doing it. And even today, we faced a lot of, you know, we are still in that transition phase is we realized that we need a sec separate brand for the product. Speaker 3 00:16:06 Hmm. Speaker 2 00:16:06 Why? Because, because people would come in our global webpage and you had, fortunately we have updated the homepage, uh, a few weeks ago. Mm-hmm <affirmative> would say that we are a backup solution. And a lot of everything is written around, backups it on the internet. So people would discover us under backup context. And whereas people are looking for a manage to alternative mm-hmm <affirmative>. So if you're, if you're looking for a manage alternative and you land it on blog, you'd hear, read everything about backups. And it's, it's a very confusing story. So, which is why we realized that we needed a brand for, for, uh, for, uh, for, uh, our agency product mm-hmm Speaker 3 00:16:45 <affirmative> mm. Got it. Speaker 2 00:16:46 And, uh, whether to start it from scratch, we saw that and we realized that a, uh, human made was looking to sell it. And, uh, I knew the human made folks, uh, I'd met them at a few word camps. So I, I reached out to them whether they're interested in selling it to us. And while we were discussing this, you know, uh, I remember sending them a mail and then I, I like, okay, fine. Maybe they'll get back to me. And they got busy, I got busy. And because I did not reply back to them, they thought I'm not interested anymore. I mean, they, I did not follow up. They thought I'm not interested anymore. And in the meanwhile, this Australian agency was swooped in and they purchased WP report from, uh, from human made. Speaker 3 00:17:32 Huh. Speaker 2 00:17:34 And so that's just a case of, you know, this follow up thing and which, which is, which is a lesson, which I need to just learn every day. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that following up is, and, and something, which we actually there's so many angle. So many times I can imagine, I can understand that a following up is so important in as an entrepreneur mm-hmm <affirmative> and as an agency owner also, I'm sure you must, uh, you must be talking about it like all the time, often Speaker 0 00:18:01 Time, and it's not that, not that people it's, it's not that when, when, when you send an email to someone and they don't respond or a direct message or a LinkedIn or whatever, and they don't respond, it's not necessarily that they're not interested. It's just that they're busy and they've got so many other things that are on top of their agenda. So following up is if you can do it in a polite, friendly, strategic way, following there's a real art to being able to follow up with people without being annoying and realize that they do need reminding because they're busy doing a million other things. Right. And if you don't, then you miss out on the thing that you wanted to buy. Speaker 2 00:18:35 Absolutely. And it, it burned me to no extent that we dropped the ball on that. And that follow up is so important. Even with me, like, you know, that's hundred things going on and you just, uh, on unable to prioritize everything. So there is that already email sitting on your inbox and then with, if it comes up, if it bubbles up, because there's a reply on it, it gets done. Or maybe you just then at that time, you are able to prioritize it. So, so yeah, so that's, uh, that's what happened. And then we, I would keep looking at WPP mobile, still investing in blog world. Like I find maybe we'll build a brand later and just keep investing and building the product out. And we we'd started getting a lot of agencies starting to use under the BlogWorld brand. So we would get all of these people with 500 websites, 300 websites switching from, uh, from, uh, uh, manage the bluep to our product because managed WP started entering a status. Speaker 2 00:19:32 You know, they just stopped evolving mm-hmm <affirmative> uh, and, uh, so all these customers would start, uh, uh, uh, using, uh, switching over to WP two block world, actually, essentially then mm-hmm <affirmative>. And, uh, and I, I would keep keeping a tab. I would keep a tab on what's happening with the WP remote, just, you know, as we are, as an entrepreneur, you know, when something enters your head, <laugh>, it's all, it, it stays around. So, uh, uh, it, so I would, and then I noticed that the product was just sitting there. So while manager bluep was sitting doing nothing, uh, WFE remote was also, uh, just static essentially with no changes coming in. So that's when I tried to reach out through human made folks mm-hmm <affirmative> to, to the new owners, to the previous owners. And they were like, yes, we are, uh, we are happy to let go of it. So we again came to an agreement and finally the Ruby remote brand landed on our, uh, on our, uh, uh, yeah, we were able to acquire it. Great. Speaker 0 00:20:39 But you were, you were telling me pre-show you just acquired the, the brand, right. You didn't actually use their code base. You didn't use their product, you just wanted the brand positioning, but you basically rebuilt the solution from, from the ground up Speaker 2 00:20:53 A and that's, that's correct. So we, we did acquire everything though. We didn't use any of it. Right. So we transitioned the customers out. So frankly it was a very, very expensive and convoluted domain name that we purchased <laugh> at the end of it. But, uh, you know, sometimes just getting an established brand or salt helps you. And that, that I think, uh, looking back, I would still repeat it. Speaker 0 00:21:17 Well that's well, I can tell you that's what brought me into your ecosystem. And that's what got me to start recommending WP remote, because I knew that WP remote brand, I knew that it had been attached to human made. I knew that there was, there was trust there. Initially. I was like, this is interesting blog vault of, of purchased it. Uh, I, I got involved and if, if I hadn't, if I didn't, if that connection wasn't there and that established brand trust wasn't there, I may not have ended up a customer and, uh, an advocate. So, uh, so that strategy worked well played. Um, and so at the moment, I just also wanna talk about the final product in your, in your suite, which is airlift, uh, which is the, which if you, which is new I'm, I'm imagining, I think airlift is relatively new. Is that right? And can you just walk us through exactly what airlift does? Speaker 2 00:22:01 All right. So airlift is actually just new and we are, we have, we are, we have got a few customers, but we are just totally rolling it out. So, so, you know, uh, BA backups in security are important. And we, we also realize that agencies really suffer with our websites. Actually, one of the other big problems they suffer with is performance mm-hmm <affirmative>. So, uh, speed is an ongoing challenge. And again, there are so many plugins and services and everything else out there mm-hmm <affirmative>, but, uh, you know, a, uh, a slow website, everyone still complains that their website is slow mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so we were, we like, okay, fine. We understand this. Uh, we, uh, we, we want to make website, like we want, our basic premise is that we want a one click solution to the most trickiest problems around our website faces, right? Speaker 2 00:22:51 That's the, that's the whole premise of the company. And, uh, so while we, and speed became that one problem where we are like, okay, yes, this is a problem which we can solve where we will. Our goal is to make a website fast with a click of a button. And that's what air lift lets you do. So what we have done is we approach a website, almost like how a speed, uh, expert would do a performance expert would come in and do. And then we have deconstructed and we use our systems and we use our knowledge from almost a million websites that we have to figure out what optimizations to apply to our website in the manner that, uh, it continuously keeps that website, uh, uh, makes it as fast as it can be. Speaker 0 00:23:36 Hmm there's I just wanna go back a few seconds. You said the whole premise of the company. Can you just repeat that? Just wanna park here for a second, just reiterate that for us, us again. Speaker 2 00:23:46 All right. So, so, you know, websites are super important and, okay, so now, now we are getting into the company philosophy, but websites are super important. Again, I don't need to tell you you or your all, all the people here that we all, uh, almost, uh, yeah, we'll all almost live and die by this right. Websites are critical to any business mm-hmm <affirmative> and, uh, uh, you, but, you know, making a website effective and running and keeping it, getting the most out of a website, frankly, is a very, very difficult job, right? And the most, uh, actually this is something which, uh, I've almost adopted from a really good friend of us, but, but this is what we call like the Maslow's hierarchy of need of a website <laugh> okay. And right at the bottom is, is security and, you know, just presence. And that's, that's, that's a problem, which we are, we have solved to a great extent with backups and security on top of it comes speed and performance. Speaker 2 00:24:40 You need a website. So once it's running up and running, then you talk about performance, right? So, and that's the problem we are solving. Now, once you have performance, then comes usability. And finally on top of it comes conversions. Mm-hmm <affirmative> usability, conversions and traffic. So we, hopefully over a period of time, we will make everything so easy that for any business, their website covers the entire pyramid and with a click off a button so that the other angle of it is we wanna make it with a click off a button and enable agencies and website owners to get the most of a website. So that's the overall premise that we are chasing. Speaker 0 00:25:20 I love this because it, if you look at the products that you've got and the decisions that you've made to either build products or purchase domain names, or go after a particular part of the market, it's all very much in alignment with that sense of purpose, which is, and it's all over the four different sites, blog, vault, WP, remote, uh Macare and airlift that messaging about making WordPress maintenance or security, fun, and easy and accessible. And one click that messaging is really consistent across the different assets that you've got. And so that I'm imagining makes it having a really tight purpose and a tight vision. Like that makes it easy for you guys to make decisions about which products and, and, uh, which, uh, incentives to go after in the future. Speaker 2 00:26:07 Oh yes, absolutely. And it, it just gives you the, it gives you a sense of purpose. It helps you build a team. It helps you encourage everything. So it makes the company, yeah, it makes the company much, so much more fun to, to build, frankly. And it has taken a long time to get to this point. And a lot of this, like the vision overall vision is not, you know, we adapted it, but it also comes from this really great agency called, uh, valet mm-hmm <affirmative>. And, uh, they were very early in the maintenance space. And I remember their founder talking to me about this and that thought stuck with me. They ated from a different angle mm-hmm <affirmative>, but I was like, this is what, what essentially what we are doing also. So we adapted it from, from a perspective of having our servers do a lot of hard work, making it one click, but that's the overall purpose that we are chasing. Love it from a website's perspective. Speaker 0 00:26:56 Do you know, do you know Kimberly lap Perry from valet? Speaker 2 00:26:59 Oh, absolutely. She's so lovely. They're they're like the oldest customer of one of the older customers of us as a Speaker 0 00:27:07 They're in, Kimberly's a Mavericks club member. They will be at Mak in San Diego in a couple of weeks. So, uh, look at, this is for me, very strange that these different worlds of mind that you guys know each other, so I'm really excited to hang out with you. Speaker 2 00:27:21 Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if, uh, I don't know if Kimberly's a better friend of your other mine though. <laugh> Speaker 0 00:27:27 I'll rest you for it. <laugh> Speaker 2 00:27:30 She? That's so lovely. I, the, the entire team is so fantastic and they just stuck around and gone back. So yeah, it'll be, it'll be fantastic to you to hang out, actually, all of us together, very Speaker 0 00:27:42 Much looking for. So for those who are listening, we're going to word camp us in San Diego, which is September nine, 10 and 11. Uh, we're hanging out there. Um, ACTHA messaged me on messenger recently and said, Hey, are you gonna be at word camp us? Uh, I'd love to meet up. And I said, yes, I am. In fact, we are running an event. Uh, the week after word camp us is our Mav con event. Are you gonna stay around? And he said, yes, I am. And I said, well, you should come along. And then we got chatting. And then we talked about sponsorship and then ACTHA came along and grabbed the platinum sponsor. So they are the big sponsor at, uh, at, uh, Mav con. Uh, and we are very grateful for that. Um, our sponsors are very dear to us and that they are what allow us to make our events, uh, even more amazing. Speaker 0 00:28:23 And for tho, and by the way, I don't recommend products because people sponsor us. I've been recommending WP, remote and blog vault in our channels for a long time before you guys became a sponsor. So if everyone listening here, I'm just gonna give you this, shout out. Now, if you haven't used WP remote and blog vault, go and check it out because I I've used just about every product on the market. And I don't recommend products unless I actually use them. It's just a philosophy of mine. I won't take affiliate commission or sponsorship for a product that I don't actually like using myself. So, uh, go and check out w pyramid and blog vault. And there'll be more about that coming up over the, over the coming weeks. We'll talk more about that because I genuinely believe it is part of the, the arsenal that you should have as an agency owner. Now, I do wanna talk about, you've obviously seen inside a lot of agencies because a lot of your customers are agencies. And one of the things that we wanted to talk about is how agencies can prepare for a bad day. So I just wonder if you can kind of talk to us a little bit about some of those challenges that you see across your agency clients, Speaker 2 00:29:27 Right? So, so again, if you, if you see our product portfolio and the stuff that we do, we do come across, you know, backups is like for the worst day of, of, of our, you know, website cycle. But, but that also got us thinking as to what really happens in, from an agency's perspective, what are they dealing with on an ongoing basis? And as the conversations we would have, and we realized that over a period of time and almost any profession, especially as an entrepreneur, you, we do have problems, which we fi we do fire firefighting on an ongoing basis. And, uh, what are the different problems that an agency faces, especially from a website perspective, because the, uh, and, and we realize that there are, there are like a bunch of things, right? And, uh, uh, and some of it are simple. Some of it is complex. Speaker 2 00:30:15 Some of it happens often. Some of it is rare. Some of it you think is rare and we have still seen happen. So all this combination happens. Right. And, uh, uh, let me tell you upfront that client not sending you, uh, their, uh, the content is you've just signed up for the profession, live with it. That does not count as the, as a Misha at all. So, uh, we are not going to cover that, uh, as part of this. So, so yeah, that's just that just hazard of the profession. And, uh, we, we need to figure out, yeah, right. We need to live it Speaker 0 00:30:56 Hundred percent. I had a conversation with a new Maverick yesterday, who, who was saying, you know, one of the big challenges I've got is getting content from, from clients. And I said, yeah, what, what, he, he has a large it company, but they've started an agency within the it company. It's relatively new. And I said, yeah, welcome to our world. I said, there are two ways to get content from clients. One is really painful. And the other one is you just do it yourself and you charge them for it because waiting for content from clients is just gonna destroy your business a hundred percent. Speaker 2 00:31:24 Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, so that's a, that's a disclaimer, which should go right up front, because if people are looking for a solution to that big problem in this, you can turn off, Speaker 0 00:31:39 Had some other, I have some other ideas, which we'll talk about. One of our other sponsors at Mav con is in this space. So we can talk about that on another show, but yes, blog vault and Macare and WPI motor not gonna help you get content from Speaker 2 00:31:50 Yes, absolutely. Uh, yeah. That's not, that's not, we are not magicians. Yeah. <laugh> yeah. But so, yeah, but you, that, that simple things can be, you know, you forget a password and you, maybe you're not getting a mail. So that's an easy problem like that when I'm sure you must be facing that often enough and you'll take, you'll do so you'll use, and the solutions are also not that complex. You know, there are a bunch of password management solutions out there. You manage WP dashboard, main WP dashboard, or WP remote dashboard give you singles, you know, so easy ways to solve that problem. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> like, uh who's uh, how do you manage it? How do you maintain the security aspect of like, from a password management perspective, you have one password, last password, stuff like that. So simple things I wouldn't, I wouldn't even call it like a, but those annoyances happen, but if you're working with a contractor, what happens there? How do you handle that situation? Simple things. Are you, don't, you don't those small things will disrupt your day to day functioning or a male comes in. And unfortunately, those things can't wait, you know, Speaker 2 00:32:54 Because your colleague is stuck on something like something so trivial or your client is stuck on something so trivial mm. As it that, so those, those, those, those small issues are there, there are simple solutions for that. And then we go to more, more something which happens a lot more often, for example, uh, like updates, how do we handle updates? What goes wrong during updates? Now those are, those are things we need to now start preparing for now. And I'm sure, uh, you are, you will have very, very strong opinions as to how do you plan for things like this, but that's, mm-hmm, <affirmative> things that go wrong over here needs much better planning Speaker 0 00:33:31 Based. I, I hire someone else to take care of that problem. Action. That's my solution is I just hire someone to take care of because I don't wanna do anymore. Speaker 2 00:33:40 Absolutely. And you need to, but you, you, even, if you hire somebody to do it, you still, uh, you know, and I'm sure a lot of people watching this are, are the people who get hired to solve the problem for yeah. For, uh, for that specific problem for the businesses that they're helping and, uh, uh, and dealing with all eventualities from things like, you know, uh, a plugin I have actually, there's so many things that you need to deal with over around updates. Uh, simple thing is like, okay, fine. An update is, uh, not, uh, you know, uh, an update breaks, actually, not, there's not the simple one, but it actually happens that an update does not go through properly mm-hmm and something has gone wrong during an update and for maybe a site crashes because of it mm-hmm or some, the, a site breaks in different ways because of it. Speaker 2 00:34:29 How do you manage that? And that itself is a very, very big topic because how do you identify what's, uh, uh, whether the site broke because, uh, how do you, how do you deal with that eventually that, okay, fine. If the side breaks, uh, how do you test things? How do you, so those are, those are use cases that we, we really need to think very deeply about because on the surface, a lot of these things, things, uh, you know, a lot of from, as an outsider, this business looks, oh, yeah, that's very easy. I'll just go click, uh, click the update button. How difficult is it? There are these solutions out there, but yeah, uh, uh, again, uh, as people who have experienced this and do this often, we realize that no, no, there's a lot more going into it. I need to plan every, you know, I, we need to plan out the eventualities that happen over here. Speaker 2 00:35:20 For example, there are simple websites, there are more complex websites, but they still need to be tested. How often do we test it? You know, but the client is not paying me enough. So how, uh, do I, should I test it? Should I not test it? What aspects to test, to know whether the site is breaking, but the easier ones are. And in fact, while I call it easy, it's still not easy. Especially if you're using a remote dashboard is identifying when actually a site is completely crashed, uh, after an update, because sometimes the plugin update might happen and you don't know whether it, the site is up or not. And now there are tools even managed WP or WP remote, let you do that. And then you start expanding into things like, uh, visual regression testing, you know, and, uh, then you go further, you can talk about, oh, you can think about automation and you need to plan this out. Speaker 2 00:36:11 So as an agency, those situations that they occur, how do you plan it? And how do you plan it for clients at different levels? So you have clients which are, uh, which are not paying you that much on a monthly basis. And we, I'm sure we all have clients of that kind, but, uh, and we, and it's a, it's a good, sometimes it's good to have that mix of clients also. Uh, and there are others who are running million dollar, uh, eCommerce stores, commerce stores, and there, it requires a completely different level of testing. So how do you manage that situation, that to discover itself, whether something is broken or not mm-hmm Speaker 0 00:36:51 How does, how does WP remote not to park too much in the product, but how does WP remote handle updates and, and actually checking? Well, I've had e-commerce or we were selling tickets to an event. And the, one of the plugins that we were using was a ticket printer was to actually print a PDF and email it to the client. And that broke. We updated it and it broke halfway through a launch. And so people couldn't buy tickets to the end. It was awful. It was horrible. It was worst nightmare. Um, and we had no idea that was happening because the orders were still going through, but people weren't getting their tickets. So it was a back and we, and people started emailing us saying, I haven't got my tickets. And it was an absolute shit show. Um, how does WP remote manage the updates of plugins and how does it mitigate those kinds of issues? Speaker 2 00:37:31 All right. So the, the, you know, but the most interesting one, what you used here was like, it was a shit show, right? It becomes a nightmare. And it escalates really, really quickly because when things stop breaking and especially just imagine your, your client, they are on your bank and they can disrupt your entire day mm-hmm <affirmative> <laugh>. Because, because again, I'm sure that like, uh, in your courses, you must be, you speak so often about, you know, just managing it and being, having that, having a rhythm, and it can break your rhythm completely. Mm. Doing these things can completely break your rhythm. And then that will make this business ineffective actually, mm-hmm <affirmative> so we need to, again, I'm just harping on it, but it just, the, the, the emotional aspect of it and the business aspect of it is super important because we want to make we, and we need to build processes to make this, uh, uh, you know, as, uh, uh, as smoothly running a machine as possible right now. Speaker 2 00:38:31 Uh, okay. Now coming back to WPA robot. Uh, so the, and again, we have a long, long view of this as to what we want to achieve with WP remote on this. And, uh, so what we do is we, we, we let you take a backup before doing the update. So you have your basis covered mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, uh, we will give you like strong alarms and alerts if an update fails. So we'll, uh, review that we let you do visual testing and that also across multiple pages and will alarm you, as soon as we see a problem over there. Obviously, if a site goes down, we will alarm you about that too. But eventually, and this is something which we are building towards. There are two things we are doing for, as you start expanding into better websites, right? More important, more complex websites. Speaker 2 00:39:15 So the number one is, uh, is things like form submission. So we'll automatically be able to identify forms and do some of that testing. So we believe that across, uh, all the websites we have, we can do automate that for you. So we will do the form testing, we will test it out, and we will tell you that, okay, is that form working or not working? Hmm. Right. That's one. And then we can go expand into commerce stores and e-commerce, and a lot of it can be automated without you doing any of that automation. That's again, something which we are, we think of, you know, the whole company philosophy. It ties into that, and we have all the infrastructure to do stuff like that. The second part we do, and this is actually a big feature, which we plan to cover, which will be releasing soon, hopefully is, uh, this thing where we'll create a staging site for you on our systems, do the updates over there. And we'll also take care of, you know, stage. Everyone says that, do us greatest staging. I do updates there, but almost we never end up doing it because it's an extremely time consuming process. Mm-hmm Speaker 0 00:40:23 <affirmative> Speaker 2 00:40:23 Right. Because creating a staging site, taking a backup, refreshing it, spinning up a St site, all of that takes a lot of effort. So we will do all of it for you, do the visual regression testing over there on the staging site. And over a period of time, uh, uh, run the forms and everything else, do those tests on the stating site. And then, uh, tell you whether, if everything has gone smoothly or not, and whether to apply that same thing or gone again on the life side mm-hmm <affirmative>. So this is a feature which is ready, and we need to just start rolling it out. So that's, uh, that's something which we are very excited about. And we'll also take care of like, you know, the premium plugin licenses. Mm-hmm, <affirmative>, we'll automatically handle that for you. That's the other sticking point. And that's something which we'll handle. So we'll take it from the life side, take the package and apply it to the, Speaker 0 00:41:17 So, wow. Let's just hang on a second for the uninitiated, for the people who haven't been down this for the people who haven't been punched in the face with this very issue in the past. Let me just unpack here. This is gonna save not only a lot of time, I've spent hours in the past, emailing a plugin company, several of them actually asking them if I can please authorize my license on a staging site. Oh, no, I'm sorry. You are using two of your active licenses. You need to buy more licenses. I'm like, I need to, I need this for five minutes on a staging site to check that it's working. And so not only is it time consuming, but it's expensive because you end up with more licenses because you're testing stuff on, on staging sites. So you just said that you will transfer the, the premium plugin over to the staging site so that you can check the staging site with the actual premium plugins activated, because I've been caught out in the past. You tested exactly Speaker 2 00:42:16 That. Speaker 0 00:42:17 Got it. Wow. Okay. Speaker 2 00:42:19 Yeah. So there's a lot of work that goes into building these things and, uh, which is why, you know, we are also, so this feature was actually ready maybe nine months ago, but just tweaking it to perfection takes a lot of effort. And that's what we have been doing. So, uh, uh, that that's something which we are doing and making that the, uh, the premium plugin feature and, uh, premium plugin update. And we have done all of that. And that's something which is going to come out again. And it's, again, tied to our philosophy of one click. How do you make the whole process of running a website? Easy. Speaker 0 00:42:54 That's great. I, I just logged into my, uh, WP remote dashboard now, full transparency. I've only got a handful of sites in him, my own personal sites that I manage, uh, and a, a website of my wife. So I not using this for clients, but I logged in and it's got my sites here. And it says warning next to the sites that have warnings, because I haven't updated my plugins because I'm a lazy son of a bitch. And, uh, I need to get onto it, but it tells me the plugins updates available, the themes that are updates available. And it tells me what the warnings are, that there are outdated plugins and vulner vulnerability issues that I need to fix. So the interface is beautiful. Uh, I love it. I've really been enjoying using it. And, um, I'm really encouraging everyone to go and check out WP remote. Speaker 0 00:43:35 Not because ACTHA is a sponsor, but because it's a bloody good product. So go and check it out. Um, talk to me, one of the things that you must have seen is a lot of agencies. I, I felt this way when I first started out, I knew that there were plugins that needed updating. I knew that there were security vulnerabilities in a website. If we didn't update the plugin and we didn't keep WordPress up to date and we didn't do the backups, but the clients had no idea and they weren't prepared to pay me a hundred bucks a month to do that work for them because they didn't understand it, but I felt so I just would end up doing it for free. And I, because I was an idiot and I didn't know what I was doing. And also there was no one like me around back then to tell me not to do it right. Speaker 0 00:44:18 That I should charge for it. And there were care plans didn't exist. That wasn't a thing, right? How do you, and maybe you don't have an answer to this, but I'm curious, like how do you have that conversation with a client and say, how do you show them the value of backup security, plugin updates, all that WordPress updates, all that kind of stuff and get them on board. Cuz I know it's the fastest way to build recurring revenue in your agency. And recurring revenue in the agency is the fastest way to actually steady the ship and avoid that least in feminine, uh, kind of cashflow that most freelancers and agencies go through. And so you must have some insights from the agency clients that you've worked with. Speaker 2 00:44:58 Right. So, you know, frankly, uh, it's such a tough, tough thing to do and you guys must be commended for, because you essentially created the industry <laugh> I can. So, uh, and again, I'm not trying to, <laugh> you not trying to, uh, what do you call that? Uh, you, you know what I mean to say, you're Speaker 0 00:45:22 Not, you're not blowing smoke up my eyes, I Speaker 2 00:45:24 Think. Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was just, yeah. Blowing, blowing, smoke up your ass. I was just a bit very of using those words because I, I wasn't sure how polite or impolite that is. It's fine. And Speaker 0 00:45:36 I way, I'm totally gonna quote you from now on. I'm gonna say ACTHA from WP. Remote said that we invented the care plan industry. Thank you very much. I'm gonna quote you on that. Speaker 2 00:45:45 Yeah. And it's such a key part, but it, and you know, there are people who defend reports and stuff like that, but so much of it is happening in the background that, so, and I've spoken to so many agencies and so many people around it. And I know this, this, the hosting bit is one, which is, you know, there's a good and a bad people will be like, no, you should not host your website if you are asking for more trouble. But hosting is the easiest way to get like, okay, fine. That's a value which everyone understands. People know that websites can't exist and know they need some of physical server and people need to stay for it. And you are managing this entire thing. So hosting is one which way, which we have seen people solve the problem. And I think that brings us to airlift. Speaker 2 00:46:26 And this is the philosophy. This is the, also the hypothesis is, you know, customers love fortunately because of Google mm-hmm <affirmative>. And because of the amount of noise that's gotten created because, you know, around SEO and speed and something which is so observable people, uh, are understand a fast website, okay. And people understand the need for a fast website. And what our fundamental premise is that we will keep the, we will make the website fast for, uh, uh, you know, through a service. And, uh, the agency can showcase that thing that see, as long as you're subscribed to my care plan, your website will be fast. So it becomes a lot more visible thing to showcase along with everything else that you're doing, because security is a, is a very big thing. And that's a problem which we face ourselves. Even backups is a big thing because, you know, we put in so much effort in making things more secure, we put in or, and improving mal care as well as our backups. Speaker 2 00:47:32 But a lot of even agency owners or even sophisticated business businesses like really large fortune 500 companies, they don't realize the amount of effort we are putting into blog world and mal care the products, how we are making it more secure. Whereas if we know is much easier because there's an external validation that happens when we make the website fast. So that's a problem we are solving even as a business ourselves, just from a positioning perspective. So I think that also carries forward to an agency where the agency hopefully can use that to showcase the work they are doing and make the clients stickier to, to care plans because it's a very clear thing and they don't, uh, so changes some of the dynamics and that's at least the perspective we are following over here. Speaker 0 00:48:24 One of my favorite, I wanna, I wanna come back and talk about airlift in a second. One of my favorite exercises I used to do with a client was I would ask them, what do you want people to do when they visit your website? And they would tell me, oh, it's very simple. They should visit the website. They should, you know, read a little bit about us and build enough trust and then download our free resource. And then they should go through and buy our thing or, or make an inquiry and get on a call with one of our sales team. I said, great, let's sit in front of your website and you pretend that you are brand new. And, and I wanna, I want you to do that on your website. And they would load up the homepage would take 13 seconds to load and they'd be sitting there going, oh, gee, it's a bit slow. Speaker 0 00:49:01 Isn't it. And then they would try and find a little bit of information. They would try and find the thing to download the free reason. And after four or five minutes, they were so frustrated they would leave their own website. And very, I do this with our websites all the time. I go through our websites as a customer, I call it the secret shopper technique. You kind of walk into your own shop and pretend you're a customer and go, wow, look at this is broken. Like I've been in the shop three minutes and no one said hello to me. Like we need to fix these things. So, uh, if you can get your clients to go through their own website and are trying to try and achieve their own goals that they've said, they want their customers to achieve, you end up with a laundry list of things that need fixing. Am I right in saying that blog vault, airlift and Macare are all part of WP remote that they're all kind of baked into WP remote as a product. Speaker 2 00:49:50 Yes. So it's a, it's a full, it's a single offering and it's all together. And we will, that's the, again, the premise that we'll package it all together and give it as an offering to agency customers and give more and more of these functionality to agency customers. But it's interesting that you mentioned that, that, you know, that thing a few hours ago, I was talking to a friend and he was helping me with the same thing in mal care. And I was just, you know, that pain you fail when somebody points at obvious problems with your website and you're like, you're leaving money on the table. And he was pointing these out for critical flows for us. So, so it's so interesting that you're talking about it. And about 12 hours ago, I was going undergoing that exact same process. Speaker 0 00:50:34 <laugh> um, I also wanna break down the math here for people, right? This is not a plug for WP remote, right? Let me make this perfectly clear. This is a plug to help you get more recurring revenue in your business. If you got, if you have 20 sites and you're using WP remote and you have 20, and by the way, I have no idea what the other solutions cost on the market. Cuz I don't have a look at them anymore, but I just wanna run the Matthew. If you've got 20 sites and you are on the plus plan at WP remote, it's gonna cost you a hundred dollars a month, a hundred dollars a month for 20 sites, right? Daily backups, uh, five active staging sites, one click update, single sign on a WordPress uptime monitoring daily malware scan, activity, logs, visual regression training, white label plug in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Speaker 0 00:51:18 Right? You charge one client, a hundred dollars a month. You've covered the cost. The other 19 clients is profit, right? Are you with me here, ladies and gentlemen, like the economics of scale here are ridiculously in your favor. If you even on the pro plan, which is $300 a month, if you had 20 sites, you charge three clients, right? The rest is pure profit. This is a no brainer. And this is by the way, we have a whole training on, in fact, we have a whole free blog post. If you Google agency Mavericks, the great migration, you, I there's an entire blog post and email templates and a, a complete turnkey system to get your existing clients onto care plans. Right? We wrote this, we wrote the book for this back in 2016, Christina am Romero published the article. She and I worked on this methodology for a long time. Speaker 0 00:52:14 We have a whole training around it. Uh, we had a course called the care plan master class, which I don't think is available anymore. Uh, we coach our agencies through this day in day out. Mike SPRAT in New Zealand, who's been on the podcast year, has built a multiple six figure a year business, and he's on track to do seven figures a year. He does not sell websites anymore. He just does care plans. In fact, he gives away the website for free to get people on a care plan. And his care plans are around about 200 bucks a month, right? So this is an actually this is a viable, legitimate, profitable business model. And if you are not doing, if you haven't got the bulk of your clients on care plans, you are missing out on recurring revenue and recurring revenue is the holy grail of all business models, because it gives you predictability. Speaker 0 00:53:05 It also, you can then forecast into the future. And so, I mean, we are a recurring revenue business model, right? So we know we can hire three or four people in the next three or four months because we know the cash flows coming in. We're not chasing projects to pay the bills. Okay. So get around this ladies and gentlemen, this is a no brainer and, and the technology and the price points that exist now compared to 10 years ago are completely, you know, like chalk and cheese. And that's because as aha said, we invented the care plan industry. And now all these companies like w Perry mode caught up and are offering these products at these price points, which make it an absolute, no brainer. So there you go. That's end of pitch. Right. But that's basically the pitch there, uh, get around it. ACTHA <laugh> is anything you wanna add there Speaker 2 00:53:51 <laugh> no, no, no. That's the two words have not been spoken recurring revenue as again, as I speak as an entrepreneur, and I think almost everyone in this room today are entrepreneurs, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> is, uh, is what keeps the stress away because otherwise agencies is a Fe from famine business. And this is what makes it keeps you sane. I can, which is why if right front, I said, I cannot run an agency because emotional rollercoaster totally it's it's not, it's not my of tea. Speaker 0 00:54:18 No, absolutely. I mean the high, I mean, I, I had a wages bill. I remember waking up at the start of every month at, with my agency and I didn't have enough recurring revenue and I would wake up every month and I knew that I was $30,000 a month in the red, on, at the start of the month, my fixed expenses minus my recurring revenue. I had 30 grand a month. I had to go find in projects. That's stressful right now. Yeah. My business model these days, I can tell you my expenses per month in this business far outweigh the revenue I ever earned in my agency. But I don't, I'm not stressed out at all in this business because it's a recurring revenue business model. So I wake up on the first of every month and we're profitable. I don't even have to get outta bed. Speaker 0 00:55:03 Right. I don't say that to brag. I say that because let me give you a quick story yesterday. My little boy, Oscar who's five. I got a phone call from my wife. Oscar has jumped off the monkey bars at kindy, and he was supposed to land on this soft mat and he missed, and he landed on the bark right on the, on the ground and really hurt his foot. And he screamed and he went down and teachers came running. Anyway. I had plans yesterday afternoon to shoot a bunch of videos here in the studio with max and I had to drop everything. I was out getting lunch. I had to drop everything, came back, grabbed my stuff, went to kindy, picked him up, took him to the hospital, spent six hours in the hospital yesterday afternoon. Fortunately, he didn't break anything. He's just got a really bad sprain and some soft tissue damage to his ankle. Speaker 0 00:55:48 He's got his ankle wrapped up. Now he's home from kindie. My wife's looking after him today. Yesterday afternoon. I, I said to my wife last night, how lucky are we that I've got the type of, first of all, how lucky are we that I work for myself? I don't work in retail or in an office or in a bank. Right. I could just leave. I didn't have to ask permission. I could just leave whenever I wanted to. I go pick up Oscar taking to hospital. How lucky are we that my team are doing an amazing job, delivering value to our customers. And we've got a recurring revenue business model. So I have the flexibility I don't need to ask. And it's really funny because the doctor said to me at the hospital yesterday, do you need a carer certificate? And I said, what's that? And he said, well, you might need a certificate to show your employee so that you can get carers leave. Speaker 0 00:56:33 And I said, oh no, that's okay, man. I don't need that. And I realized I'm one of the luckiest people on the planet because I have the flexibility to pretty much do whatever I want because I have a recurring revenue business model and a great team running the business. So I mean, that's why I do what I do. And yesterday I said to my wife, I feel like I've worked really hard for 15 years to get to this point where yesterday, that is why I do what I do. So I can be there for my family and not have to worry about asking permission or worry about the, you know, missing a deadline with a project or any of that kind of stuff. So, uh, anyway, that's, um, that's, that's the reality of having this kind of business model. Speaker 2 00:57:14 So Troy, first of all, hope, hopefully Oscar is doing better now and wishing him a quick recovery. Secondly, thank you. So I didn't know this, so thank you so much for doing this today. We could have, um, uh, we have, we should have re it. No, Speaker 0 00:57:29 It's fine. Speaker 2 00:57:29 Thank you again. And Speaker 0 00:57:30 He's home with mum. <laugh>, he's Speaker 2 00:57:32 Fine. And, uh, as you mentioned, uh, yeah, the gratitude of, uh, how lucky we are that's that exist, especially over the past couple of years, that's, uh, something which, uh, it, yeah. You know, we are so lucky to be doing the, and I know we are going a completely different tangent, but through COVID being able to do the work, which we love. Yeah. And being able to do it effectively sitting at our homes in a safe environment. Right. Exactly. Yeah. It is. It, it just keeps, you know, it, it just keeps coming back and you can, I cannot show enough gratitude for it. Speaker 0 00:58:04 Uh, we, we, I, the fact that you, the fact that where are you right now in the world? Whereabouts are you in the world right now? So Speaker 2 00:58:10 I'm in Bangalore, India. Speaker 0 00:58:11 You're in Bangalore, I'm in Melbourne Australia in, in a week and a half. We're gonna both be in San Diego, hanging out. We've connected here via live video conferencing, right? I mean, this is the, this is the golden era, right? We are so lucky to live in this time and to have the technology and the tools at our, literally at our fingertips to start and grow a business that you can run in your pajamas during a global pandemic, right? From the safety of your own house. I have nothing but gratitude for the situation that we are in. And, uh, and the fact that I get to connect with people all over the world, like this is just, it's, it's incredible. I mean, I pinch myself every day. I'm it? So, so grateful. Speaker 2 00:58:59 Absolutely. We, I am, uh, yeah, we are. We are, I, I consider myself extremely, extremely fortunate. Speaker 0 00:59:06 Hey, this has been super fun and it is called the agency hour and we are at the hour. So we kind of need to wrap up here. Uh, but this, I, we could, I could keep doing this for, for days and we will in San Diego, we'll hang out and we'll do, uh, a live stream from San Diego into our group and all over our social. So keep your eyes out for that. In the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, sincerely get around WP remote and blog vault, reach out to ACTHA say, hello, connect, uh, ask any questions and make this part of your business model, because it just gives you that added security. My approach is for agencies that you should have a look at your monthly expenses and you should at least be aiming to cover your monthly expenses, including your wage, right? Including all wages, including you, the business owner, cover all of that with recurring revenue. And then you wake up at the start of the month and you can say no to projects that aren't a good fit because you don't need the revenue. So make it a focus to build recurring revenue in your business and, uh, get around people like ACTHA and the products that he's got to help you do that, uh, to make them super profitable. So ACTHA thank you so much for your time here in the agency and super excited to hang out in, uh, in a week and a bit in San Diego, my friend, Speaker 2 01:00:13 Thank you so much, Troy, excited to be here and ex really looking forward to meeting you. Awesome. Speaker 0 01:00:18 Take care. My friend. See you soon. Speaker 2 01:00:20 Yes. See you Speaker 0 01:00:20 Soon. Bye for now. All right, ladies and gentlemen, that is another episode of the agency hour. Thank you very much to ACTHA and WP remote. They are a platinum sponsor at MACOM, big, big invest, a big, uh, investment for them and a huge, uh, investment for our team and for our, uh, our clients. It's helping us take the event to the next level. Uh, and we really appreciate, uh, all of our sponsors. Uh, I'm gonna forget who they are, but we have, uh, WP remote. Uh, we have E two M who just came on board yesterday as our dinner sponsor. So they're sponsoring the dinner on the Tuesday night, which means for everyone coming to MACOM the food and the drinks are on, uh, Manish and the team at E two M solutions. Uh, we're gonna feature them on the show coming up. They're a white level development agency, uh, based out of India. Speaker 0 01:01:03 They also have a great copywriting service called razor copy, which we are starting to take for a spin now. Uh, so keep your eyes out for them, uh, term again, go WP, uh, grid pain. Uh, who am I missing? Sorry. That was a secret. Was it sorry? Whoops. Who was the secret? I just let the get out the bag. I didn't know. It was a secret. Who am I missing? Come on. There's some sponsors I'm missing. Um, anyway, go, uh, check out, uh, agency mavericks.com/mav con. There are, I think still some tickets left, not many. There's literally only a handful of tickets left. The room is almost full. Um, and also, uh, someone's put a link here in the show notes agency, mavericks.com/financial spreadsheet. Go and check that out because that's a, a, a, this is a spreadsheet that I got from, uh, my friend, Chris Martine at dude agency. Speaker 0 01:01:49 And he got it from the guy that started design pickle, right? This is a financial spreadsheet that helps you figure out the recurring revenue that you need to build in your agency to cover your expenses. It's an amazingly powerful spreadsheet. You, and it gives you a super laser focus. You plug the numbers in and realize I just need to onboard two or three clients a month on a recurring revenue plan. And after 12 months, I'm having a very different experience on the planet because recurring revenues like compound interest. So go check that out. And of course my web audit is our other sponsor cliff and the guys at my web audit. So very excited to come and hang out in San Diego. This is my last episode of the agency hour for this season. I think Johnny's doing one next week. We're gonna come back. Uh, once I'm back from the states with a, a new, slightly different format, a new platform, we'll be streaming on our page and also onto YouTube. We'll have a whole bunch of new guests coming up. So keep your eyes out for that. This has been super fun, and I will see you. I will see you all after, uh, after Mavor and work camp us in San Diego until then have a great week. My name's Troy Dean bye for now. Speaker 1 01:02:53 Thanks for listening to the agency hour podcast, subscribe at apple podcasts, Spotify pocket, audible, and wherever you like to listen, you can catch all of the agency hour episodes on our YouTube channel at youtube.com/agency Mavericks. Or you can get involved, check out our free digital Mavericks Facebook group, where we broadcast these episodes live for our community every week, along with a ton of free training. We'll see you there.