Dans cet épisode, nous parlons avec Ronik Patel de : Différences entre l’embauche d’un développeur WordPress et d’un développeur PHP…
What those php developers are building it’s not necessarily wrong but it’s it’s it’s not according to the standards or how the wordpress at least wants its developer to use its platform Hi everyone and welcome to another episode of the high level spotlight sessions where we showcase awesome marketers doing awesome marketing today i’m joined by ronic patel he is the founder of unlimited wp which provides unlimited wordpress support uh and tasks for digital agencies at a fixed monthly cost
Ronik thanks for coming on thank you for having me i’m excited i’m excited too i love wordpress i you know i used to run an agency that was a wordpress shop um where secretly talking about uh opening up wordpress hosting at high level we’ve got our wordpress
Plugin uh we’re big fans and uh so i’m excited to talk to you and i feel like as an agency the idea of having somebody limited work of support is very enticing how are you able to pull this off tell me first take me back how did this get started
Well the short answers uh would be years of hard work uh and the the long answer would be we started out like any other agency that i work with right now where we do about everything like you know if you ask us to do magento well yeah
We’ll help you with magento we may not know a few things but we’ll learn overnight and we’ll help you with it i ran agency initial almost five years like that well we’ll help with anything uh we’ll work with our team no systems no processes we’ll we’ll figure it out right and then
You look at your balance sheets at the end of the year i didn’t make much money this year or didn’t make anything and then no wonder why right and we joined this coaching program i got a mentor started really learning about what other agencies are doing what’s working what’s not working
And this is about like four or five years ago that the first i heard like you get had to find your niche you have to work within one market and uh miraculously you’ll scale that’s what i thought that okay let’s find a niche you know so we
For it just happened to be we like working with other agencies because we never i mean it’s not that we don’t like working with the clients we just like working with the agencies better than to work with direct with the client uh so it’s like you know doing a white label work so
We’re like okay let’s try there first if that doesn’t work out we may try other niche the the mentor at the time i was working with said that he tried 13 different niches before he found his so i wasn’t sure how many tries we would take and i’m glad to say that after
Four or five years we’re still in that same niche but initially we didn’t do it the way we are doing it right now it was like okay we’ll work with agencies and we’ll help you with anything and then over the time we realize like anything we can’t be expert at
Everything so let’s focus on something now i’ve been a big fan of wordpress for a long time so it was a little natural and we we were doing a lot of majority of the work on the wordpress anyway so we thought okay let’s kill all the other technology and we’ll only
Take wordpress forward and only agency forward so not like focusing on the specific industry but also specific technology because wordpress itself is so huge right there’s the ecosystem is just getting larger and larger day by day so i thought like there’s no way that i could have
Systems and processes and train my team in a way where we could be expert at drupal and magento and joomla and wordpress all so then it was natural to select wordpress but then we ran into this other sets of problem is even though you have those but you
Still got to do sales and proposals and stick to the scope and you know issues with the hosting uh things going out of scope tracking hours billing that was still a very traditional agency model and and to be honest we were fed up with it i’m like somebody’s got to do something about
This model you know even internally uh we were growing but like growing very slowly uh and there were these issues i’m like okay this is it’s for me it hasn’t been about money this business it’s always been about let’s figure out a model that we can scale where you know ultimately to the
Client we are delivering what we are promised on like delivering even more but at the same time where something that i could manage have fun running this agency and not be putting out fires every day right uh so it started out with the system i don’t know if you’ve heard eos
A book called traction uh by gino wickmann it talks about this system and we started to implement that system and we we started realizing the holes in our not holes at the beginning we realized there is no system and once we started having systems we realized the holes in it and
One of the we did this vision traction uh you know vto type of quarterly boards and one other thing that was kept popping up on the board was that we want to have reoccurring revenue we want to have recurring revenue right because nobody wants to uh every month
Find new clients it doesn’t matter how well your marketing work as an owner you’re always afraid that i might what if it doesn’t work next month right so you’re also we wanted reoccurring uh so back in 2019 when we rebranded our name into unlimited wp we were 20 reoccurring and 80 was just
The project work that you get month to month and we made a three year goal to reverse that to do 80 reoccurring and then we started thinking like how can we do this and from those discussions within three months we led into this model of what is unlimited wp
Now uh nobody was doing that model we have sort of like mixed bunch of different ways you hire your subcontractors you’re like okay if you hire it on upwork this is the flexibility you get right if you hire your uh another agency to do this is the flexibility you get
Or if you get a vetted developer their services who could get you a vetted wordpress developer right if you what are the pros and cons of that and you’re like okay let’s make a list of all that and if we try to combine with what we
Were doing what can work how can we scale and that’s where we came up with this model where it really helps the agencies as well as help us and and that’s where this model was born couple years ago and i’m glad to say since then uh so 2019
Around july time so almost two years now uh we are 100 reoccurring so we didn’t even needed the three years but i would say that the whole eos and the vision exercise uh made us realize that if you want to do that we have to change our model so we don’t do
Proposals or scope or type like we don’t do anything the way we have structure about model is like you basically get a wordpress developer every single day for like two hours four hours eight hours in that increment you get that help and then we provide it to you yeah so it’s all reoccurring
Super excited with this model so you said a couple of things that i want to point out that i thought were great points one is obviously recurring revenue and that’s why we rolled out sas mode recently we’re really trying to help agencies pivot to generate more recurring revenue through white labeled sas
As opposed to just relying on monthly service work like you pointed out the second was i think it’s important you touched on something that that i know to be true which we found out or i found out personally long ago when we were building our dev team is that there’s a real
There’s a really big difference between a true wordpress developer and a php developer who says sure i can work on wordpress right and i feel like when you go to upwork or these places fiverr or whatever you’re gonna find people in that mentality like sure i
Know php i can help you with wordpress and when you have a developer like that do something in wordpress and then it breaks or there’s a problem and you have a wordpress developer come and look at it they’re like what the heck is this like why would anybody do it that way
Inside of wordpress so i feel like if you’re building wordpress sites for your clients it’s important that you work with people that are true wordpress developers right so i love the fact that you guys said hey we’re not going to take magento we’re not going to figure out magento stuff anymore we’re
Not going to work on this or that we’re going to focus on wordpress and become experts at that specific ecosystem which i think is really important now talk to me about like i feel like the the common question or hang up is how could it be unlimited what does that mean like
How could are you just my dev team now or like and i think it’s like no no no it’s it’s unlimited but we have to prioritize things right so is that how it works i i submit hey here’s a task and then if i submit two more
You just go in order or talk to me about the flow of things i’ll get into that but i do have one more comment on what you said about like you know hiring a wordpress developer versus just hiring any developer i think the the root not a root cause of
That is the wordpress has been always marketed as a blog that you can even start right as a direct client it doesn’t take much to so even the in the developers community there is always that notion that how anybody can do wordpress right so there is
Any no developer is never going to turn down a wordpress work right if they work on different platforms they’ll always say yes to wordpress so i think that that’s one of the problems uh and we’ll get into i’m not sure if you’re getting uh into that but like you know different ways of
You build these websites and there’s just so many ways to build it so what those php developers are building it’s not necessarily wrong but it’s it’s it’s not according to the standards or how the wordpress at least wants its developer to use its platform so you know i’ll talk about that
Let’s scrap that question that i asked you because i think we’ll get to it but basically there are a couple of ways to build a wordpress site right the first is you you go to themeforest and you buy a theme and it’s like oh that looks awesome my client loves it
Let’s buy that theme let’s upload it and we’ll just tweak it for them right the second is uh let’s choose a builder like divi or something like that and we build sites on divi for our customers and then the third would be just like custom building wordpress sites which is um so
Those three options are pretty different right and i feel like the first one sounds great because you see these beautiful looking sites on on themeforest or whatever but you very quickly run into walls when you try to customize them according to your clients wishes right so
Which of those paths do you like when you’re working with an agency which one do you hope that they’re uh doing with their clients i think the the all three have their own pros and cons it depends on what you’re looking for you know uh there are clients who are looking for
A website tomorrow like you know they want something done tomorrow and then there are companies like i recently read hertz the rental car company they spent 32 million dollars on their website project and it took a two years to get completed or something so you know there are those
Case scenarios too like how much are you getting into that process or what you really hope to what your client will get out of it right like if you have a client let’s say a pest control client that comes to you they don’t care about website they just
Want an online presence they have a very low budget as an agency you don’t really have a lot of option you’ll try to teach them different things that hey let’s sit through let’s go through this our discovery process let’s learn about who’s your target audience or what are
Your future campaigns that you plan to run on your website so we can incorporate all those things from the get go as you build your website well you know i’m not saying most pest control guys but a lot of them would say well i don’t know that doesn’t make sense i’m too
Busy right now just build me something here’s my budget right in those cases it’s so that the agency’s fault it’s that agency client everything is like you’re thinking what’s the the fastest way to get there and that’s why the theme forest then becomes immediately that attractive
Uh option that hey let’s just get it now that’s the pros that you could get it immediately get started with the website they’re not all badly coded uh however a lot of them are so that that option really depends on who do you go with to get that
Uh theme ready-made theme that you’re purchasing so what we advise i’m glad that you pointed that out because a lot of them the truth is are really either badly coded or full of bloat right full of so much code that’s not needed and things like that and that’s why i’m
Just going to interject here with my personal opinion as an agency if the client if that’s the type of client they don’t have a huge budget they need something immediately that’s where i love our websites high-level websites because in my mind don’t ask the client anything
If you’re dealing at that level of a budget you just tell them hey here’s the option we’ve got a proven template it’s ready to go and it will save you a lot of pain i promise you that because if you try to give creative control to a client with no
Budget you are in for a long road but talk to me about it will never stop are you guys what do you do when you run into a situation like that where somebody’s submitting task requests for a theme for a site that was poorly coded so we unfortunately we would still go
Ahead with it with a disclaimer and a warning to them what we’ll do is we’ll quickly open up that theme forest page and check out their ratings and see uh what were the recent support tickets because all that’s a public information just click on their support tickets and just see
How engaging the developers are to you know any site doesn’t matter which platform or how you build it is always going to run into issues right like recently instagram changed their something in their api that stopped some embeds if you had used certain plugins right so there’s always
Doesn’t matter have you coded you still have to maintain them so you want to see who’s behind that premium theme that you’re about to purchase if you find people they have a lot of ratings a lot of sales if you see them engaging in the support forum then go with them because
We’ve seen a lot of the it’s the problem is not only the code if the bad code you could still work with it but at least if there’s an original team behind that still releasing updates and the security release once that stops and couple that with the bad code
Now redesigning is your only option right so that site would probably get 26 months and i i was talking with somebody about this yesterday um wp engine for example awesome company they provide amazing support they’re wordpress hosting only right they actually don’t allow you to run certain plugins
Yep so that right there is an eye opener for a lot of young agencies that are starting to get into website projects it’s hey there are there’s a lot of bad code out there and if you are saying oh sure we’ll do that for you because your client found some
Plugin that they think is going to you know be some magic tool for them uh you could run into some serious problems and it’s gonna cost you pain and money and time and all those types of things so you definitely it’s a great point you wanna be cognizant of who’s behind that theme
Or that plugin are you going to be able to get support from them directly if not you know what’s your plan and so do you help agencies navigate those conversations of like hey this was built 10 years ago it’s no longer supported by the developer
You know you’re going to have to have a conversation with your client about alternatives because making this work is just not going to happen definitely like we absolutely do and all of our team is trained to if it’s a let’s say themeforest theme check it there if it’s a plug-in then go
To wordpress.org and same thing you can check the reviews and things there and like i’ll tell you inside story like we are also part of that problem like years ago when like we were a bit younger than what we are doing right now we did foolish
Things as in saying to our team like hey we want to see who can fastest like put their plugin on to dot org right for their you know promotions or whatever or even hiring we would challenge them to build something and put it on the wordpress.org and they would put it
Because there will be some unique need that we saw on some client project so we had idea about it and we had somebody else to build a plug-in just to you know see if that person is capable of that we used to hire like that
So we ourself have asked people to put a lot of those plugins that i’m sure that they are not even looking after them right it may solve your problem with your clients problem and you may think oh this is what exactly but i do check carefully when it was last updated it
May be four years ago so you know those are the things you definitely want to avoid uh and we would flag it so we internally then keep a list of like a trusted plugins trusted themes uh if you tell us a scenario that you know i’m working with this type of
Client then we would have like okay well you know if you are going premium then let’s at least do like avada or x theme or n fold those are premium themes but still the teams are like behind them those companies are getting acquired now so they’re doing some serious business so
Those are the themes you want to go after because some serious companies those are somebody’s businesses it’s not just a fun hobby project that someone has put out right so those are the products we would educate the agencies we work with to go on if this is considering all if you
Want to use those premium themes let’s talk about builders what’s your favorite builders to work with the favorite one it’s the right now it’s it’s hard to say like we’re liking this oxygen builder it’s getting a lot of traction right now it’s so funny i was hoping you would say that
Because well i was curious if you would say that because i left our agency like two years ago now and we were using oxygen and our dev team was like this is amazing this is gonna change everything and they were so excited about it so in the back of my mind i was
Curious i wonder if he’ll mention oxygen if it’s still like leading the way it’s so the most popular if you ask me it’s elementary like most of the work that at least we get uh that it’s in its own element uh but oxygen is not for all agencies it does
Work very differently than any other page builder i think they’re trying to solve the problem that is with the other page builders and if you notice in wordpress ecosystem every three four years there’s a cycle like you know like you use a visual composer and then bakery and dv had its time
And then beaver builder and now it’s elementor and next yeah like brizzy or oxygen you know and though i would add this just this morning in our team’s like channel there’s some heavy debates going on that are we ready to push agencies towards gutenberg or not because wordpress itself is pushing gutenberg
A couple of years ago when we were writing blogs about it we ourself were saying that wait it out wait it out wait it out and like okay so is that a time now to say and like literally this week we are deciding that we’re gonna push agencies now
Go towards gutenberg over the other plug-ins we’ll build some recent sites and with what google is bringing up their web vitals from this month on if your site doesn’t have a good good performance score it’s going to start impacting your seo so this is going to become a really serious
Thing uh this morning we had a site that gets like a 98 score on those and it was built using gutenberg it definitely seems like that it’s getting there so it would be a good time now anybody listening agencies it is a good time now to start looking into gutenberg now
It’s not what it used to be a couple years ago there’s so many third-party peoples that have created blocks and add-ons and the the whole ecosystem of gutenberg i would say now it’s getting to the point where pretty much building any site you could still build on it maybe few things still
May not be possible on it that you may have to custom code it or build your own custom blocks that’s why people don’t build it because nobody wants to invest on building custom blog you’re waiting for you know this theme authors plug-in authors to come up with some ready-made blogs i think
Now they’re in a blog we just came up with this uh theme was key and it’s like a thousand blocks and i looked at it i’m like yeah there’s this we could pretty much build anything with it so i would say guternberg is like coming into that mix now
And wordpress clearly saw that the page builders is what people you know because clients can use it agencies are using so they definitely wanted you know like manage that because with the page builders every few years is a different page builder so i think this is their
Attempt to sort of like okay not mess around with page builders we’ll just have our own system that’s more supportive of the the rest of the mission that the wordpress says the future it has right so i would say like taking some serious look to any agency owners now
Uh into gutenberg on top of any other page builders you would see that this page builders are also now publishing that oh we are compatible with gutenberg and we are discussing like does it make sense that if you’re compatible then why would we you know use that and a good turnover
Yeah like let’s make it simpler so i think there’s gonna be some uh even for oxygen everybody who’s gotten so popular right now i think they’re gonna have some serious challenges in next two three years as gutenberg gains its traction interesting so talk to me about i mean
We don’t have to go into the third option of custom coding your own uh themes and whatnot but i think what people would probably most want to hear at this point is how does it work do you guys have a platform that you built where basically i log in and i create a
Task or a request or something that that needs to be done and what does it really mean unlimited you know these common questions that you get yes yes so we we do have our custom project management system where we onboard agencies where they create projects and then the tasks for those project
We do all the assigning internally uh so you know getting on the way earlier in the call i talked about like we wanted to solve problems that the other ways of hiring wordpress developers whatever the pros and cons and we tried to like mix all them up so the
To answer your question unlimited we didn’t want it to be another unlimited service out there right there’s just so many popping up there in couple of years it’s going to get a messy market you wouldn’t know where to go with so we thought we’ll be transparent like we would tell you a front
Then it’s not unlimited it is unlimited in terms of we don’t care how many number of tasks you have you have one small task or five or ten it doesn’t matter what the task you have every day you’re going to get like two hours four hours or eight hours
And then you create your task would we do uh the like let’s say you could even hire a developer on upwork but the problem there is you’re working direct so you’re an agency you’re working direct with the developer so communication issues or because the developers their mindset is
Little different than how the project manager would think right they’re more logical they wouldn’t get the the point that you’re trying to drive across so that we saw clearly as a problem like no way we are pairing agency with the developers directly we want to have some middle
Uh option there that sort of manages the both end and we have project coordinators so what we do is anyone who signs up on our platform we give them a dedicated project coordinator and that that’s the coordinator who wakes up uh and sees all the tasks and then finds
The appropriate developer for those tasks so we don’t do very oh this is the fixed guy you’ll work with doesn’t matter if you have something front end or back-end php we’ll just assign this now uh depending on your task that project coordinator will find the the best suitable person so we don’t do
Like uh here’s your developer work with it there’s you’re still hiring an agency though you’re getting this fixed time every day so you don’t have to worry about scope or going out of scope or what’s the proposal on this or you don’t have to come and i say hey
This side is broken can you fix for it what’s the estimate now the truth is we don’t even know what the estimate is when stuff is broken right we have to go in there and spend some time to figure that out and we wanted to avoid that
We wanted to make so easy for agency doesn’t matter don’t worry that oh this is going to cost me this much or if you need any consultation or if you have any questions about wordpress what should i use what should i not use any client problems building new websites updating sites redesigning sites
As long as it’s a wordpress you’ll create that task and that coordinator on our end will look at that task and see who’s the best fit from the team and assign those hours at the end of the day we comment on the task so done deal
There is no other time tracking we don’t give you monthly reports on hey we did you know like we didn’t spend hours here every day you get hours so that’s why we only work with serious agencies so if you are just starting out they may not have enough wordpress work
To even keep a developer busy for a couple hours a day because our minimum starts at couple hours a day so if you don’t have enough work then you know i talk about them i stay in touch with them but not a good fit but most agencies that have more than 10 clients
Every day you’re going to have something you know this broke or let’s update their own site or let’s build a new site so then it becomes a good fit and then it’s really open like as long as it’s wordpress like we would help you and because you know other if we limit
Them within wordpress then i’ll lose the fun out of it right because we still want challenges like we don’t want that okay this is what we know and we’ll only help you with that no like throw stuff at us like oh well i never even heard about that
Let’s see you know that still happens every day and you know without that variety it wouldn’t be fun to do uh developers would get tired because you know for a lot of the developers that single uh best thing they’re looking every year is to adding more skills right and if
You just do similar things we would have a problem with hiring or retaining the our team we have 54 team members right now and we realized that early on that let’s keep that variety otherwise people are going to get tired and they’ll feel like they’re not adding more skills
Uh so we really make sure that it’s all wordpress so there’s always something challenging in the wordpress yep very cool so where should people head what’s the url is it unlimited wp if they’re interested yes that’s uh that’s the correct one and you had mentioned that you have something special for
Our community if they did want to get started uh i think it’s a first month promotion yes uh we love high level anybody listening this uh signs up on our website on the checkout right go high level and you’ll get 25 off on the on your first month awesome well
Ronic thanks so much for coming on to chat with us you’re welcome yeah thank you for having me thanks everybody for watching if you’ve got wp uh needs head on over to unlimitedwp.com and check it out we’ll see in the next one