Comments on: How to Scale WordPress Maintenance Tasks at an Agency Level

By: David Olsen

David Olsen — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 18:54:51 +0000

Great and useful read! I’ve been in the webhosting industry for ages and we’ve been offering support for our WP clients that many times has stretched way out of what is common. This has lead me into the process of thinking about starting a similar service as WPBuffs, where we are located. We’ve been using WHMCS as our main tool in the hosting business, both for sales and support. But this doesn not seem to be a well suited tool to develop such a service, except if we also plan to offer hosting and to be honest, I am not sure if we want to go that way with this service. But I am a bit bewildered in the jungle of tools/plugins available. We would need a support platform and I see you are using teamwork. No experience with that, so I’ll have a look 😉 And as far as I can see, you’ve developed your website in WP + Woocommerce and just add the services as digital products? Got plenty of experience with those two tools after running and online store for some years. Could you give some pointers on other tools you utilize other than managewp and blogvault? And do you use both of these? (Isn’t that kinda overkill?) Sorry for all the Q’s, but so many tings I am wondering about after browing and testing so many tools/plugins/etc to day 😮
Thanks,

David

By: Joe Howard

Joe Howard — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 21:31:01 +0000

In reply to David Hurley.

Totally, David! We actually don’t do any website builds at WP Buffs but a lot of people do and tag ongoing support plans on as well.

You can build the care plans into your proposals and get them excited about the long-term relationship you’re trying to build. The best customers want to partner with a company that will provide them digital value for as long as possible.

Boom!

By: David Hurley

David Hurley — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 18:16:50 +0000

Hey guys – this is super important. Actually – our services now revolve around an all-inclusive plan where the maintenance, support, updates, customer service is the focus. Recurring subscriptions is a lot better than finding one-off clients. If you do things right, you can build the website as the top of a funnel and then recommend different one-off services or additional subscription offerings to add value to their online presence. We’ve been building out this model for sometime now.

By: Frederic Sune

Frederic Sune — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 18:18:58 +0000

In reply to Joe Howard. Thanks Joe!

By: Joe Howard

Joe Howard — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 20:25:45 +0000

In reply to Frederic Sune.

You’re very welcome!

Yes, documenting and systemizing a process for this stuff is the only way to scale a productized service effectively. A lot else has to go right, of course, but this will be the foundation that often dictates how much success you can have.

You got this, Frederic!

By: Joe Howard

Joe Howard — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 20:24:18 +0000

In reply to Dan Neumann. Booyah! Thanks so much, Dan. May the force be with you :)

By: Frederic Sune

Frederic Sune — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 11:41:25 +0000

Thanks Joe for sharing this information on recurring revenue. We are already doing it but we definitely need to improve our processes and document it.

By: Dan Neumann

Dan Neumann — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 19:40:21 +0000

A lot of great info here! I especially liked the parts on automation and MRR focused communities. I didn’t even know communities existed. Great write-up!

By: Joe Howard

Joe Howard — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 20:18:19 +0000

In reply to Andrew.

Great question, Andrew!

Honestly, this is one of the hardest things about what we do at WP Buffs. 99% of the sites we manage we didn’t build so we’re managing sites that vary widely in how they were built. Not to mention different collections of plugins, different themes, different hosting providers, different PHP versions, etc.

Often it feels like controlling chaos!

We don’t have an onboarding fee but I think it’s smart to have one, especially if you’re dealing with higher-level clients. This will help vet out lower-quality customers and make sure the only people signing up are serious about working with you for the long-run.

We also try to be as clear with everybody signing up (direct customers and white-label partners) about the qualification to be on a certain plan. WooCommerce sites always go on a certain plan, as do websites with custom themes or custom plugins. Make it clear there are different levels of care plans depending on the complexity of the site and that should help. Feel free to check out our pricing page for an example here 🙂

May the force be with you, Andrew!

By: Anthony Tran

Anthony Tran — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 21:04:42 +0000

In reply to Cay White. Woohoo high-five Cay! =)