Tech-driven productivity boost for web agencies

Music

Sandra: Hi everyone, and welcome to the fifth episode of Greyd Conversations. Today again is a really special episode with three renowned CEOs of the WordPress ecosystem joining me to discuss how technology can be and needs to be the driver for productivity in web agencies. Welcome with me, Vito Peleg, co-founder and CEO of Atarim, Aurelio Volle, co-founder and CEO of WP Umbrella, as well as Greyd CEO Mark Weisbrod, for whom it is also the first time on this show. So welcome everyone.

Today we’re going to talk about productivity and efficiency in web agencies and why this year it’s more important than ever to put together the right tech stack. I think that at least two of you have an agency background themselves, and all three of your companies offer agency tools that tackle different productivity challenges that agencies usually meet. We will talk about this in more detail later. But, for starters, I’d like to invite each of you to introduce yourselves and give a short summary of what your companies do. Let’s start with Aurelio.

Aurelio: With pleasure. Thank you, Sandra. So I’m Aurelio. I’m the co-founder and CEO of WP Umbrella, which is a WordPress management tool that helps agencies manage multiple websites regardless of the hosting provider from a single place. We basically allow them to do their bulk updates on a hundred plugins on hundreds of websites in just one click. We do backups. We manage backups and install backups. We do many, many things, basically. Also, we cover all the scope of what’s called WordPress maintenance. And based on what people do with WP Umbrella, we automatically send to their clients very good-looking PDF reports to help them prove the value. In a nutshell, that’s what we do. And as of today, we are installed on a bit more than 40,000 WordPress websites.

Sandra: That’s impressive. Thank you very much. Mark, you are next on my screen.

Mark: Yeah. I’m an agency owner or was an agency owner by accident. I’m more an entrepreneur and economist by heart. Greyd is a suite, a software suite that enables you to build websites very efficiently on the Site Editor. But furthermore, it enables you to build very complex websites, hundreds of websites, so multi-site systems. For example, if you think about a franchise system like restaurants, think about you want to change something on a pattern centrally and roll that out to hundreds of restaurants. With Greyd, you can do that with one click. And from the other side, think about a store manager who just wants to change something on his very specific site, not on the others. He can do that also with Greyd, and he doesn’t need any technical or developer skills. Therefore, we created a suite. And this is very new to WordPress, because in the past we had all those plugins, all those builders, whatsoever, but with Greyd, you have it all in one product.

Sandra: Thank you. And last but not least, Vito.

Vito: Hi, I’m Vito. I’m the co-founder and CEO here at Atarim. We help design teams streamline their delivery process. And that means everything from gathering content, approving designs, and providing ongoing support to clients, stakeholders, but also collaboration within the team. Our goal, or what we are able to do, is reduce between 50 to 70% of the time that it takes to deliver any design project in the space. Currently, there are 51,000 teams using our solution with 1.4 million of their team members, stakeholders, and clients. I’ve known the guys here from events before, and it’s great to be here on the show.

Sandra: Thank you. I think we could summarize that all of your software solutions help agencies streamline workflows, automate tasks, and in general increase productivity and efficiency, which will be today’s topic.

So, yeah, let’s start with last year. 2024 has been economically challenging for many agencies in Europe. This year might be even more. And, unfortunately, this economic pressure has also forced a lot of agencies that we know of to actually close their doors.

Mark, you just published a recap blog article of 2024 and wrote about how this highlights a critical truth: that in today’s market, efficiency and automation aren’t just nice-to-have features anymore, but in fact, are survival tools. Could you please elaborate on what you mean by that?

Mark: I mean, as an economist, I’m not just looking at the WordPress community, I have the whole economy in mind. The last ten years were a golden age for Germany. It was kind of nice. And especially during the Corona time, when basically every digital business just skyrocketed. And that time ended. Personal costs are expensive, but furthermore, the labor market is empty. But with creating websites, we are in a global market. So our competitors are not just in Germany or France, they are in India. And, for example, I get emails and offers from India, Bangladesh—you name it—every day.

But still, German agencies are building websites with the same tools, with the same technology. And they want to compete with countries and companies that are way cheaper. So if you want to survive, you can’t compete with staff costs. You need to be more productive, more automated, etc. So if you’re an agency, in my point of view, you have to develop further, or the most part of the agencies will die. Because the old business model—I think that’s gone forever.

Sandra: Possibly, yeah. You already mentioned cost. A promise that all of your solutions have in common is that you try saving your customers time, and you know, time is money. So being able to finish projects in less time is cost reduction. Aurelio, what would you say are the typical cost drivers in web agencies?

Aurelio: There are many, many things. Of course, administrative tasks. But basically, it’s only a matter of ratio between cost and money—that’s named productivity. And in what Mark has said, I think we need to distinguish two things. There are things that we can easily replace and automate, such as WP maintenance, to turn this activity, for instance, into a profitable source of income. And on the other hand, you also have high-value tasks that you cannot automate.

To complete what Mark said, I think agencies need to work on those two pillars: being better at things that are very valuable, and automating everything they can where they could be replaced by AI or by cheaper workload. And so basically, it is only about return on investment of your actions. And for instance, on administrative tasks, on updates, plugins, you name it— as soon as you are a business owner, you know that these kinds of tiny constraints offer absolutely no value. And nowadays, almost all of them can be automated.

Sandra: Automated and also at least centralized, isn’t it?

Aurelio: Indeed.

Sandra: Vito, with Atarim you are focusing a lot on the entire communication part of the daily agency business. Is that a cost driver, too?

Vito: 100%. In fact, what we found, and this is a very easy experiment that we can do, because everyone here has built a website in the past. Generally, when someone goes on to build a small business website, like a five-page website as an example, if they do it on their own, it’s going to take 3 to 5 days, tops. Sometimes even one day for some folks, especially with modern tools like Greyd at your back.

But to deliver this to a client—that’s a completely different game. So the same work that took three days now, on average, becomes 4 to 6 weeks, which is an inherent increase of 520% to every type of delivery or every type of design that needs to be delivered and collaborated on with clients. So we focus on these 520% in increased delivery time, which is insane.

With AI, this is probably going to get more into the 1,000% increase because the creation time is going to get squashed by another 90%. So, definitely, this is our game to chip into this part of the flow. And while I agree, and we also automate many of the daily workflows and the admin tasks within the communication, project management, and client experience through our team, I am a huge advocate for actually maintaining those human touches. I think that this is going to be the place where agencies will thrive, especially in the upcoming years.

So while I agree that there’s much more competition coming from offshore organizations, but even from directly here on your computer, where you can go to try DIY your way into something that is cohesive, professionals can create a website. That’s not to debate. You know, it’s not that hard to create a website with today’s available tools if you have the know-how and you understand the theory behind it a little bit. But in terms of time, it’s not a big undertaking.

The service delivery is where problems often arise but also where a lot of the opportunities come from to build relationships with clients that are then long-lasting for many, many years. And, basically thinking of that initial experience with the client more as just the first step towards a long-lasting relationship, where we exchange value.

And I think that this is what we see with many of the agencies over the past couple of years. Instead of trying to go wide… there are some, you know, the white-label services, the different types of operations. But most agencies that want to increase their prices, increase their profitability, actually try to focus on a small group of clients that they can provide very specific value to at scale so that they can increase their intake of that client over time.

And that’s especially important in the world of the agency space, where profit is usually extremely slim. And there are all of these fluctuations of feast and famine that happen often in our space. So, with this, it’s very important to make sure that you have this backlog of work that you can bring up to the table, that you execute on that fast with modern tools. But also that you are able to deliver that quickly, because that’s basically what’s going to get that client coming back for the next project, as well as that client referring you to the next client that you will have right after that.

So, our main focus is on that service delivery. Make it human. But fast.

Sandra: I really like that perspective. Speaking about human, what about personnel? This, I take it, is also a huge cost driver, isn’t it?

Aurelio: Sorry, I didn’t catch that, that last one.

Sandra: Personnel, staff cost. Mark, this is probably a question for you. I think this is also, in most agencies, a huge cost driver.

Mark: I mean, I would like to double down on the human experience that we talked about. Yeah, personnel is expensive. And as I said, the labor market is empty. But furthermore, highly qualified developers, for example, at Greyd, we need highly skilled developers because technology-wise, we are pretty edgy. And those people, they don’t want to do boring jobs anymore. They want to do interesting things.

Because of that, we can hire on the market pretty easily because we let them do interesting work. So if you want highly skilled people, you give them interesting work. And basically, in most cases, that’s productive. You automate the rest of it, and then you have a human experience.

On our side, on the software side, our people like their jobs, so they stay, and that is a good human experience. But furthermore, our customers know they don’t have to update 200 websites at the same time. They can do that with one click. And that is also a human experience. So out of their time, they can do something interesting.

A marketing guy today has to do things that, a couple of years ago, a developer had to do. And we have to go in that direction even further, so people feel happy with their jobs.

Sandra: Yeah, absolutely. I really like that. So it’s not just that you want to save costs. It’s also that you might need to increase efficiency to be able to offer a much better experience to the customer and also to maybe focus on certain niches that enable you to charge higher prices because the value is higher.

One thing that I often get asked by people, for example, at WordCamps or other events, is maybe this is not an issue for everyone. Maybe there are agencies out there that, at least at the moment, do perfectly fine. And they might ask themselves, do we really need to go through all this trouble? Do we really need to grow each and every year? Can’t we just move on like we have and be confident with the customers we have? Do we really need to grow all the time?

Vito: I guess I’ll be happy to take that one.

Mark: Depends on your answer.

Vito: The way I look at this is that if you’re not growing, you’re dying. And this is true in economics. I am sure we’re going to get an agreement here as well.

But the point is that you can get to a place where you’re providing for your family. But that’s more on the financial side. It still doesn’t mean that you’re not going to grow. You need to look for the next challenge, the next thing that is going to excite you to actually do what you do most of your time during the day, which is here and working. That, you know, brings fulfillment.

I’m a strong believer in this – that what we do, that we create something out of nothing, is what brings us happiness in our work. And if you get stagnated, then this doesn’t happen. You just get into the rat race. And then nothing really good comes out of it in most cases.

So I would always aspire to grow. If not financially – and some people feel comfortable on that side, and that’s totally cool – it doesn’t mean that we can’t grow in what we do and expand new opportunities that are happening around us. Especially in the time we’re living in, this is even more important than ever, to make sure that we stay cutting edge in our approach, in the way we work and the work itself.

Sandra: That’s really a nice one. And I think also an issue that many agencies face is that if they want to do bigger things and they want to go to the next level and maybe tackle enterprise projects, that usually requires hiring more people. Because there’s a lot more processes, a lot more work to do. We just talked about those more people. You might not be able to afford them, or you might not be able to get the people that you need on the job market actually.

Vito: I think that if your goal is to grow, hiring a team around you is one of the best ways to do it. Not only that you’re bringing a few more brains into the game, but you also create a level of accountability to other people’s livelihood and families. That puts you in a place where failing is very low on your list of priorities, you know?

Mark: Indeed, indeed.

Sandra: And from time to time, those people that you hired, they might also be asking for salary increases or inflation.

Vito: Yeah, absolutely.

Sandra: So today’s topic is not just boosting productivity in general but also how technology is the key driver to do that. Do I really need to invest in all those great tools out there? I mean, we’ve talked about Greyd, Atarim, and WP Umbrella today as examples. I mean, those tools cost money, too. And especially in the WordPress ecosystem, people sometimes tend to be hesitant when it comes to investing in technology. Mark, I think you know what I’m talking about.

So what’s your statement on that? Is technology the solution to scale and to become more productive?

Mark: I mean, parts of it, yes. In the last couple of months, especially at WordCamps, everybody talked about the enterprise realm. Why? Because those are the big projects. And those are often complex projects. And today, in Germany, it’s hard to sell a website for €5,000 and earn money with that.

So, as Vito or Aurelio said, you always aim for bigger things, for more revenue. But that is complex. You see those big systems, those multi-site systems that you think bring more revenue. Yeah. But it’s also complex. But it means long-term investment for the customer. It means maybe ongoing revenues from maintenance retainers. And then you need software like WP Umbrella and Atarim.

It also means you can plan your revenues. It means more security for your company and your employees. That’s totally fine. That’s nice to have. But you have to qualify for that. And that is the problem. If you want to qualify for that, you need complex software to do that.

We talk to a lot of agencies because those are our customers. And in the last couple of months, they all say, “I want to have maintenance retainers.” That is nice, yeah. But then you have to do the maintenance. And that is still hours that you have to spend. And you need those tools to be productive. And they cost money.

You need to spend that money. From my point of view, you need a scalable hosting. You need software to build websites efficiently, no matter how complex they are. Because if you build your own custom code, etc., you won’t earn that much money with that.

But then you need a tool to manage any number of websites efficiently, and you need a tool to handle all that communication layer. And basically, this is why tools like WP Umbrella, Atarim, and also Greyd are absolutely necessary.

You need that combination. You need the human skills, but you also need the toolset to do that. If you have very complex systems, you can’t maintain hundreds of websites. That’s just not possible.

Aurelio: And I think it should not be seen as a cost. It’s an investment.

Mark: Yeah.

Aurelio: And, I mean, we have affordable products, from what I know of your pricing, guys. And I think agencies need to realize that. Most of them already do. There is the cost of the software. There is the time it is going to save you. But like Vito said, there is also the burden, the mental load that’s going to be taken away from your hands if you start using the right tool to automate and remove these repetitive tasks.

In the end, it’s all about the value that these tools allow you to deliver—to yourself, to your team, or to your clients. For instance, our product costs $2 per month per website. That’s like 25 bucks per year. If you are an agency and you are not able to afford this, it means that your WordPress care packages are way too cheap for your clients.

And I think this is also something in the WordPress ecosystem that needs to be worked on. I mean, we are all pirates. We all started in WordPress almost by accident. We spoke about this, Vito—you know, most people who create an agency didn’t plan to. You start building a few websites, then you do five, then you do ten, and suddenly, oh shit, you need a developer. Oh shit, you need a marketing person. And then your team grows, and you end up with an agency.

And sometimes I think people lack the confidence in their expertise because they started this way. They probably need to increase their pricing and be confident in the quality of the services they are delivering to their clients.

And this is like a green loop where everybody wins in the end. You are using the right software. Your clients feel good because they know they are being taken care of by capable hands. And that’s how it should be. Don’t see software as a cost—see it as an investment.

And just one thing I want to add: if you want to sell to enterprises, they know what software costs. They buy Salesforce and other tools. They don’t care about the cost in the end. If you are too cheap, that is also a sign that you are not part of the game.

Mark: Yeah, that doesn’t make sense at all.

Vito: I want to echo both of what you were saying. What we see, as we serve everyone from freelancers to enterprises, is that the larger the organization, the more understanding there is of what we call an “ROI multiplier.” It’s basically what we’re trying to provide to our users.

For example, within a demo, when we do a pilot, we quantify this into actual monetary value to show them, “Okay, we’re going to 17x your investment on the software,” in terms of wages saved, time saved, and so on. It brings a different type of conversation into the game.

But I think at the beginning – and I think we’ve all been there – many people don’t associate their time with actual tangible value. Who here hasn’t downloaded Adobe Photoshop back in the day from a sketchy site, just to avoid paying 30 bucks a month? Then it crashes every 20 minutes, and you lose all your work. Just to avoid that payment.

At that point in our journey, we still don’t associate our time with actual monetary value. But once that starts happening – and again, this comes back to the point of hiring some folks for your team – then you start to see the economics of it clearly.

You realize, okay, I’m spending this amount of money per hour for this person, and I expect to get this amount of money in return for their billable time or their general salary at the end of the month. Then the next logical step is: How can I get them to be more effective with the time that I’m already paying them for?

So even if you’re small, the same calculation still applies. You just need to apply this to yourself.

Just to finish on one last thing: When we first launched Atarim, back then it was just a WordPress plugin, I made it my goal to talk to 100 agency owners or freelancers and just see how they were working. What is their workflow? How do they handle their day-to-day?

And one of the most interesting things that I found from that experience is that, when we did the calculations, most freelancers I spoke to were actually charging around $5 to $7 an hour for their time without realizing it. Because they hadn’t gotten to the place where they understood profit margins, project efficiency, or the real value of their work.

They just wanted to build beautiful websites. So if you want to make something beautiful, it needs attention to detail, and that takes time. But all of that back-and-forth communication, project revisions, and scope creep eat away at the profitability.

So I echo what Aurelio said – people in the WordPress space are definitely undervaluing their own time. It’s a good exercise to look at your previous projects and quantify them. How many hours did this actually take? How much of my focus went into this compared to any other tasks I could have been working on? Was it profitable?

Most times, the answer is no. And that’s why, as people grow, they start to see the value of software. That’s why enterprises see it as just an exchange of value. “I’m already spending money on labor, so how can I get more out of that by investing an additional $1,000 to $10,000 to $100,000 a year in a piece of software that will accelerate them?”

Aurelio: I can add something to that, and then I will stop hijacking your flow.

It’s a mindset shift. When we started WP Umbrella, we were handling customer support tickets manually through Gmail. It was insane. As soon as we started making money, we started investing in proper tools.

My co-founder is a true entrepreneur—he’s all in on productivity and tools. Meanwhile, I was more hesitant. I had that typical “let’s be cheap and save money” mindset. But since I changed this mindset two or three years ago, everything has become much easier. Because now we make confident decisions, we invest in the right tools, and we operate more efficiently.

It’s like flipping a switch. You stop seeing things as costs and start seeing them as investments in your future. And my time is precious.

Vito: And it’s not an irreversible decision. If the tool doesn’t provide the value you expected, then cancel it.

Mark: Yep, absolutely.

Sandra: You’re right. I’m really happy about how this conversation is going.

This is exactly the kind of discussion we want in Greyd Conversations. I want people to engage, debate, and share perspectives.

Maybe to give our listeners a clearer picture of how this all works in practice, we could go through an example project and show how web development would look if tools like Greyd, Atarim, and WP Umbrella were involved.

Let’s say we have a mid-sized agency hired to relaunch an enterprise website. It’s not just a simple landing page—it has complex integrations, maybe with a CRM system or syncing content from the company’s support tool. And, as with enterprise projects, there are a lot of stakeholders involved, all wanting a say in the process.

How would such a project look with these tools involved? I take it the agency would start with a design proposal?

Vito: Probably. I think the way that we’re set up here is exactly how the workflow would go. It starts with Greyd, goes through Atarim, and then finishes with WP Umbrella for the maintenance component. So we have creation, collaboration, and maintenance – basically the full workflow.

Mark: Then I would start, I would say, because basically, we do it that way with your software, too. I mean, in the beginning, you get a kind of Figma design, and they show you what they want to have. Then you talk about functionality and so on and so forth.

But let’s start with that. We would start with creating the global design system in the Site Editor. So we represent the brand and everything we need. And we can control that across the whole website and also the multi-site system, whatsoever.

Then we would create post types, taxonomies, patterns, templates—the whole site structure. Yeah. In big projects… At the moment, we have a big project with a huge German customer, also with Atarim. Basically there they have 150 microsites. So, we created a global design system and then a central library with all the things that you need.

And from that point on, if we have that, we would roll out all the patterns, the design patterns, etc., to all those websites. And then you have those websites and then you would maintain the content.

And for example, the content is global. So if it is a post that should be on all of those 150 websites, you would then start with rolling out all that content to all those microsites. And what is fine with Greyd, I mean, we have it all. We have one UI, we have a form generator, a header builder, a pop up builder and whatsoever.

It’s one UI, and there you could build that whole website with the whole content, roll it out, make it dynamic, whatsoever. So, we would start with a Figma and end with a system of websites. And then the next one, please.

Sandra: I was just about to say this sound like the one example that Vito said before: If you’re on your own, you can do this in a couple of days or maybe with this size of the project maybe a couple of weeks. But then the customer comes in.

Vito: And then it goes to months.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Vito: So so this is really where we come in. Atarim touches a few different touch point within the delivery, process. It starts with the intake. So even before we have a design, we need to understand the client requirements. What are the things that we’re actually building? What are their goals? Who is the audience?

What is the style that we’re going to be leaning towards? You know, all of these different pieces of information that we need to collect, historically, and in my agency back in the day, we used to have a Gravity form on the website that was collecting this information and, magically, it just stayed on the website. So no one in the team actually knew what was going on.

Because it was just in a different environment. So that’s why we decided to bring like an intake process into Atarim, so that we can centralize. And we can see that across the three companies, that we have the similar mindset of centralizing our components into creating more of a seamless experience.

And I also think that, this is just an aside, that this is one of the interesting ways that software is evolving over the past few years as people are leashing down, their thinking more in these opinionated software, if you will.

And so, yes, you can integrate, you can do that, but you can actually have like the whole thing hosted in one place. So that you can just streamline the experience instead of involving a billion different tools. And for the delivery process, for example, most agencies that we talk to, use between 7 to 15 different tools to deliver the project to their client.

This includes Google Docs and spreadsheets and Zoom calls and emails and Slack messages and Whatsapps, and then let’s go to Figma and then let’s go to this, Google form. And, you know, everything is just completely fragmented in terms of the client experience.

And even from when I first realized that, I was thinking about myself with something that I don’t feel comfortable, as you here, which is more on the financial side. If my accountant would have told me that I need to switch between 15 pieces of software within the first six weeks of our experience together, or even if they didn’t tell me, but just try to take me through all of that.

Obviously, I would resist. And it would take a lot longer than just create a seamless experience. So, the way that we tackle this is through visual collaboration and workflow management. So once you have the intake form coming in, and you don’t have to have the client fill this out. Especially for larger projects you might use that as a process, as a system, that you have the same questions and you interview the client and just type in the questions, just so that you make sure that you have everything nicely organized and you ask the right questions systematically.

So then you don’t need to come back and say, wait, can you… you also send me the target audience? Oh, you don’t know who the target audience is? Then let’s do another call and do that. So everything nicely organized. We have some templates that we share as well for that.

After this process it goes into the design. And once we have some sort of a design, it needs to be approved. And that’s where it goes to the visual collaboration element. With Atarim, you have the ability to click any part of any design or websites to leave a comment where the request is, that basically provides or leans into the human experience of how people leave feedback, which is 3 to 5 words.

And this is really an interesting point that we found, is that most people naturally, that’s how they provide feedback. For example, “make this green”, you know, this should be bigger. So they point and say 3 to 5 words. And instead, what we expect as agencies is long form discussions on this page.

When I scroll down to this section, on the left, there is a section that was saying this. And here’s a screenshot. Here’s the URL. I was on my phone. No one does that. It’s always 3 to 5 words.

And that’s what creates a bunch of the back and forth. Let’s get on a Zoom call and wait, are you on your phone? Are you using Internet Explorer from the 90s? So what we did is, we basically leaned into that experience of 3 to 5 words. Everything else is augmented and and automated around that experience, so that when the person receives it, they still have 100% of context and clarity.

But then, when you’re also designing, you also have the concept of content. Someone needs to review the content, make sure that it sits nicely. No orphans anywhere. That it’s correct. You know, especially when you’re working in enterprise, everything needs to go through multiple stakeholders to approve.

Can we say this? Is this how we should say this? Is this what we are saying about this? You know, all of these questions are vetted, and the larger the organizations are… So that all happens inside the interface. And then we have the dashboard, which is where people actually manage all of these flows.

So all of these pieces of communication. So we have like a Kanban system, but also a way to distribute this to any system. So for example, when you get a message, it sits inside Clickup or JIRA, Trello or whatever. We then automated screenshot, with the screen size, with the URL and the 3 to 5 word message that, with all of the augmented context, gives you everything that you need.

And after that we go into it. So let’s say we went through the revision rounds, went through the content process, which is way, way shorter if you do it in a visual and streamlined way. And then you go into maintenance, which is where Aurelio comes in. So, most of our users, keep either the WordPress plugin installed or, they keep, they have that Atarim project still live after the project was launched, so that there can be an exchange of ideas and requests coming from the clients or from team members, for people that review the content on an ongoing basis.

That is complemented by an inbox that is kind of like Zendesk or like Aurelio was saying, that instead of using Gmail to manage all of your communications, which is, a recipe for trouble already, you know, you want to make sure that you have a place where your team can come in, where you can assign team members, you can set statuses, tag things around, and all of that.

And that’s how we approach the maintenance aspect. After the creation. And then it goes to that would WP Umbrella.

Aurelio: Or you’re so good at transitioning, guys. Well, without a proper tool actually you cannot make or sell WordPress. I mean, you can, but then it’s not profitable. Because what’s the process using the tool? So, you log in to every website and you push the update button of every plugin, and then you need to have a backup plugin, because it’s WordPress, and anything can go wrong.

And so we need a backup. And the issue is, you probably need to install this backup plugin also on all your websites. So it’s another plugin to update. And then most of the backup plugins will leave very heavy zip folders on your server, which is so awful for your website performance.

And then if you are doing just that, which is about updating the website and keeping a backup. You are just doing the very basic of maintenance, and you are already losing so much time because you don’t have enough of you. You don’t have a way to do bulk actions. You are not doing any kind of reporting. And this, in my opinion, it makes WordPress maintenance not profitable.

And I am always shocked, because we are a new product. It was created like three years ago. And most of our clients, they are coming from existing competitors. But still, from time to time, we onboard a new client with hundreds of websites. And it happened to me like last week.

It was a French agency and they were paying two persons just to do updates, click the cash and check that the websites were not broken. Every Thursday and Friday. Like a full time job. Can you imagine how boring these jobs are?

Mark: And on a Friday that’s even worse.

Aurelio: And then a Friday. Exactly.

Vito: Yeah, yeah.

Aurelio: I mean, so many things went wrong. But still, I mean, if you just do updates and backups, you’re already losing money in my opinion. And with the right tool, you can also have uptime monitoring and so you know before your clients that this website is down.

So you don’t get a phone call from a very angry customer telling you what the fuck, why, my website is down, what are you doing? And so you are discovering the issue. So we have the right tool, you can also be proactive and tackle the main pain points in the relation with your clients. Then of course comes the reportings, the security, etcetera, etcetera.

If you don’t have a WP management tool, they probably don’t really understand and see the benefit of WP maintenance and its value. Because if you obtain monitoring, safe updates, automated backups, security monitoring, automated reporting, it’s such a nobrainer to update something and earning like 2000€ per year of recurring revenue based on WordPress maintenance.

And it’s so easy to do so, in my opinion, and I know it exists. But if you don’t have a good WordPress management tool, you actually cannot make any profit out of maintenance. And if you don’t make profit, since it’s not the most fun activity in the world, you are just wasting your time and your money.

Sandra: Absolutely. And I think this is not just relevant in our example project, where we have one customer with a lot of sites. I mean, we sometimes have cases where one project involves like up to 1000 websites.

Imagine updating and bug fixing and whatever on 1000 websites alone. But it’s also for smaller agencies who maybe have smaller projects, but then they have different customers. And even if it’s just 10, 20 customers, it’s still 10 to 20 websites that need all these maintenance tasks to be done.

So, we already covered the website building, we covered a little bit of the maintenance already. I think the Go Live itself is also something that causes a lot of issues, for the agencies. This is also something that all three of your tools can help with, isn’t it?

Mark: Yeah, definitely. Yes. Going live, especially with big projects, it’s a pain in the ass. And no matter how good your product is, it keeps your developers awake at night. Therefore, I mean, if you want to manage a lot, you have to do that from one point. We created the Greyd.Hub for that.

The Greyd.Hub basically is a dashboard where you see all your projects. And that could be one project, multisites of one company, or you could be a small agency with ten different projects, for example. Yeah. And as the site editor is about reusability and use patterns again and maybe from different themes or so, because for example with Greyd you could use the Ollie theme on Greyd because you like that.

And we created the Greyd.Hub, where you basically can import and export design settings, databases, contents, plugins. And when you think about importing and exporting plugins, you always think about WP Umbrella, because that’s only makes sense.

And you also have a staging system. And for example, if you think about, you have to go live with 10 projects today, you would need more than those two developers on Friday, because all those projects basically go live on Friday. We know that too. And that is always a problem.

But with Greyd, you could do that in one minute with the Greyd. Hub. And for example, if you have a problem with one plugin, with WP Umbrella and with our Greyd.Hub, we know where that plugin is used. And then we can get rid of the problem very fast.

So, you don’t just manage the process of maintenance and the process of communicating that WPUmbrella and Atarim do. You also need to manage your whole websites systems itself. You have to keep them in one spot because, for example, if you use ten patterns for five different brands and projects and something goes wrong…

Basically that what you said, Vito, that this is too small, this is too big, that pattern is broken. We know that. Yeah. And if we see that on Atarim, we know where those patterns are used. Maybe in one brand, maybe on different ones. And we can fix it in minutes.

And that is the thing that you need there. Because if you use things globally and on the enterprise level, you have to do that. You have to move it fast. And you can’t say I fix that problem on one site, but it occurs on 500 different sites. And if you want to maintenance that? Puh…

Sandra: Yeah, absolutely. And I also I mean, we talked about discovering the value of what you do. And I think, a lot of these, especially these maintenance tasks, the issue that you have, when you charge them is that the customer, they often don’t really see or understand them.

And I really like, what you said Aurelio, that those tools, or your tool especially, also enable you to create individual reports automatically, that are, I think, especially for such enterprise customers, that’s something that is really important to also showcase what you are doing, but without creating additional effort just to creating all those reports.

I think this is also a thing that a lot of agencies can refer to, like creating all those reports for the customers itself is a task that can take hours every month.

Aurelio: Inded.

Sandra: You wanted to add something?

Aurelio: No. That was just a very shy “indeed”.

Sandra: I think we kind of already covered my next question. Let me ask it anyway, in case anyone wants to add something. We talked about, there are different processes, depending on whether you are a large scale agency and tackling like enterprise level projects. Or if you’re a solo freelancer or just a small agency. Would you say there’s a difference in how important scalability is, depending on the size of your agency or your business?

Vito: So, the way I look at this is that the processes are actually not that different. The depth of the systems is where the difference comes in. And so like the stages are almost always there. And if they’re not there, then it’s a sign for trouble ahead. You know, things like going directly into building the whole thing, you know, that’s a no go.

That would be a mistake if you’re doing it as a freelancer, which many of us, I’m sure have done. Like, okay, I got what the client did. Let me just build it, you know, and then come back to the client is like, wait, no, this… And then you go a few steps back. Same thing on product.

I’m sure that you’ve seen this within your product teams as well. When a designer or developer gets excited and builds a feature, and sometimes it’s like, oh, that’s very cool, but sometimes, like, why weren’t you just doing what we have on the roadmap, you know?

Mark: Yeah.

Vito: And so, the stages are always there, whether we do it or not, at every different level of scale. What I would like to encourage, and this also connects to what you mentioned before, Sandra: regarding the launch, this is another example of that. The launch is just a process that needs to be executed on. Now when you’re doing it as a freelancer, most of the times it would be just you looking at it and going through, clicking around.

I’m not saying that all of them, but as you’re getting started, let’s say not freelancer, because some freelancer might be doing the same thing for 20 years and extremely proficient in what they do. But as you’re starting, a lot of times you just look at the page and it’s like, okay, this looks cool. Let me click this button. I find it’s worked, let’s send it over.

And then, all of these problems come in after. The way we approach this as the agency and also now within the product, is: a pilot has a checklist before they take off there, and they have been trained for many years. The level of responsibility that they had to acquire to actually fly people in the freaking sky is extremely high.

And yet they still go through a manual checklist every time. And manually check things off, literally to make sure that everything is done, properly. And they don’t miss anything. They don’t rely on their memory as pilots. And that’s also true for doctors or any other high stakes kind of operation that is out there.

So if we want to ensure quality, we have to map it out. And most people eventually do it. So why not just do it straight away? And I would like to encourage whoever is watching, go to Chat GPT and ask it to give you a checklist for your next launch project or your next going live kind of sequence. And it will give you the small stuff that you need to do.

And so really, you’re set. That is mental load. I mean, you don’t need that list in your head. You don’t need it, and you need to be able to be creative and productive. You don’t need to have that list. Just follow it.

Mark: That’s basically the first thing that I say to young people that we hire into the company: spend your time with creative and important things and the rest of it, follow a plan. If you don’t have a plan, you won’t succeed. Start now. Yeah. Some people don’t want that. But you really have to manage to follow a plan. Stick to the plan and then you raise quality with that.

Scalability is everything. And you don’t need a lot of processes, but you need to have some, and I think it’s the difference between successful agencies and the people who stay pirates, if I can say, you know.

Aurelio: And I always say, it’s it was easy to create WP Umbrella, you know. Make a WordPress management tool where you can do a few updates, and do some stuff that works on 500 to 1,000 websites. But the challenge is to make, for WP Umbrella at least, to make 40,000 backups between midnight and 4 a.m.. How do you do that? And if you don’t have clear processes, if you are not very sharp on what you want to do, what matters, what doesn’t matter, and you get lost and I think, no matter the size of your agency and maybe you are just getting started, but if you don’t have processes, you are going to be lost.

And I think what Vito said with the flights, it’s a perfect example of what people should do without starting something. Okay. Why do I do this? What do I need to make it to success? And when you have a plan and when you can execute a plan and then things are going to be okay. Because we are not saving lives, which is also something which we should not forget. You know, we are here to deliver…

Mark: It’s pareto. Basically, in every project, 80% of the problems are the same. So you could get rid of them. Last year, I was on a podcast, an Austrian podcast. It was basically concentrating on pirates making WordPress business and how can they earn money? And they all talk about scaling.

And I said, yeah, the day has 24 hours, a week seven days. If you want to sleep, make the best out of your hours, and then you have to become a businessman. Yeah.

Even if you have a small business, you have to become a businessman. Yeah, you said it, Vito. It’s getting deeper, but the rules are the same. And you can’t change those, right? Not that easy. Not many people come and change the rules, not many. You know, we call them Einstein and stuff.

Yeah. You have to stick to the rules.

Sandra: And I mean this whole you have have to be in control of the processes and scale and all this sounds overwhelming, but we basically just covered an entire enterprise example project and we were just talking about three tools making life easier for you. And basically you don’t need much more.

It’s like Mark said before, you you need to be in control of the hosting. And this might probably depend on the kind of project that you’re building. You need to have a great tool to actually build a website, and to be able to build any kind of website. You need to be able to automate as much as possible and centralize all these maintenance tasks and things that you have to do on any number of website.

And you be need to be in control of communication. And that’s basically it. It’s just four things. And if you manage to get a tech stack that combines these processes and makes them efficient and products that work together in a really good way, then that’s actually it already. Then you just do what you’re good at and create, great designs and build complex stuff and, yeah, just excel at that.

Vito: I would like to add this, that, you know, you can buy the best guitar in the world. You still need to learn how to play it. And this, I think, is true for all of our systems as well. But for every new technology that you want to implement, every tool that you bring into your stack, you know, spend time understanding what value the tools you acquired can provides to you and your team.

Like, you know, I say this to our team, because we build a product. And so, the way that I look at this is that we have a bunch of people that wake up every morning, think about the user and try to create something that is going to save them more time every day. We’ve been doing that for five years.

There’s a group of people that think about people’s processes and flows and try and actually do something about it, you know? While most people, and you know, if I look at my own self with other aspects of what I do, I just work on autopilot in most cases, you know, and I just repeat the same repetitive processes, the same kind of things, like for example we open Zoom.

So, to open Zoom, I need to go to my calendar and I click the calendar link, and then it opens Zoom and it opens in wrong user and I click the dropdown… It’s already down to like click, click, back, back, to open that Zoom call instead of just one click. And I do that a couple times, if not a dozen of times a day. But this is an example of how, as a user, I don’t appreciate how to look into Zoom a little bit further to try and see how I can actually streamline the process, because they probably already figured it out.

They have a bunch of people sitting there every day thinking about how to make my life easier. All I need to do is listen and learn the tool and actually master it like you would master, a music instrument, so that it can provide you the utmost value of it. So whatever tool anyone is using, look around and you’ll probably find a few other examples that can scrape time out of your day and add more value to your life for sure.

Right now, even with the tools you already have.

Sandra: Okay. Thank you. I think we have time for one last question. Maybe, before wrapping up for today, we talked a lot about scaling and cutting costs and all that. What key performance indicators should agency track to actually measure if they’re improving on getting more productive, becoming more efficient?

Vito: I mean, these are all words that everyone is using. Like Mark said, everyone wants to scale and be more productive. But what key performance indicators do you actually have to look at if you want to do that? For me, the first one is time. You’re selling time.

Yeah. So track that. Track the time.

People think of this as a negative thing, but you’re actually paying for every single minute. Might as well understand where it’s going and how you can allocate the resources better. So just the exercise of tracking time, even if it’s not for a billable experience or sharing this with clients, just internally, is going to tell you where you can place your focus to streamline more of the work that you’re doing. Where do you spend your time every day?

Aurelio: At WP Umbrella we track something else, which is the revenue divided by people. So how much money are you making, based on your number of team members? And you might be surprised to see how, by equipping your colleagues with the right tools, you can skyrocket productivity. If you think about customer support, I don’t believe in AI customer support, but I do believe that, for instance, AI can skyrocket the productivity of our team members by ten. And this is the kind of things that we are looking for. Because maybe spending like 300, 400, 500 Dollars on a customer support tool per month is actually a huge productivity and money saver at the end of year.

So at WP Umbrella, we look at the revenue divided by people.

Mark: I love that. I mean, you have to start with time, because in the last ten years, not one of my employees could exactly tell me, what is he doing all day? I mean, yeah, I did some things here and some there. But if I ask how many hours of calling customers, like those 100 customers… Basically, we did the same when we started. How many hours did you spend on that that week?

And then they give you a number. That is a feeling. And that is always so wrong, you know? And then I tell people, you have to write that down, and we have nice tools for that. You could also use Excel if you want, but write that down. Use a tool.

Yeah, but people don’t want to be totally transparent, because then they think, ah, he wants to know something that I don’t want to tell them and blah, blah, blah. And that doesn’t make sense, because if you want to do things better and most times it’s not about the conversion of the sales.

It’s about I didn’t spend time on customers. I spent time on something different. Yeah. So first of all, you have to know what are you doing? Am I doing enough? And then comes what Aurelio said. Some kind of revenue per employee per hour. Earnings per employee. And in the end it has to be something return on sales. Yeah, something like that. And you have to measure that. And this is responsibility and everybody has to know that.

And for example, if if an employee comes and wants to have a raise… A raise is not about the past, it’s about the future. So it’s about productivity. And then they could easily say, I evaluated that process. And in the future, I can talk to 20% more customers in the first round. That would be great. And you have to track time, and then you have to track combined with a kind of revenue, and then you can scale and then you can make things better. Otherwise a human brain is absolutely not able to do statistics. That’s proven. Yeah. So you have to write that down.

Vito: And you’re right, because time is is extremely subjective. You know, like I think we’ve been sitting here for more than an hour. It felt like 15 minutes, because it’s nice to talk to other folks, you know, that are doing similar stuff and have an interesting conversation. So time is just how we perceive it. And that’s why a lot of times these tasks that we say, oh, yeah, it’s going to take me five minutes, three hours later, you’re like, what happened? And it’s because you actually enjoyed doing it, which is a good thing, you know?

So maybe if we track it, we can figure out what are the things that you don’t like, that you procrastinate on, like you were saying on these booked calls. But as we were talking, I was thinking of one stat that we track now religiously, that we did not track at the agency, but actually could have been extremely transformative to understand the value of our business.

But also the longevity of our clients, which is lifetime value. It’s a very basic stats that you track or KPI that you track within SAS and within product. But in the end, maybe others did and maybe I just didn’t, but we didn’t. And looking back, I think that would have changed completely our outlook of how we were chasing after new clients rather than highly focus on our existing ones.

Aurelio: And in the same direction, something that we have started to track at the very end, but could be meaningful to track for an agency is also the number of tickets per client. Because we have a few clients, we manage like 50 websites and over the past four months they have opened like 60 or 70 tickets.

But some of them are rightfully open, you know, and some of them are just like, I think you are having a bad day. And I think it’s not like an all-in-one solution. Some clients are taking more of your time and needs to be objective values in one way or the other. You can sell even more, or you can tell them to go away, because in the end, time is money.

And if you are spending much time with a client which is not giving you enough money, then you are losing money. That’s something that you probably need to start to consider.

Sandra: Absolutely. I think we could go on for hours. Like Vito said, it just feels like 15 minutes, but we are actually already over an hour. So I think this is a good time to wrap it up for today. Or does anyone has something that you definitely want to share in this conversation that we haven’t covered so far?

Aurelio: I mean, besides thanking you for the invitation and for gathering this very nice round.

Sandra: I’m the one having to thank you for taking the time today to discuss this super interesting, topic. I mean, we’ve covered a lot of things today, but there’s a lot more to dive into. And I’m sure that we will hear more on that from you guys, during the next couple of months on some events and then also some other occasions. So thank you very, very much for today. For our listeners, for those of you who haven’t yet subscribed to our YouTube channel, please do that.

Also to make sure to not miss the next episode, which will be, again, a really great one, this time hosted by Jessica Lyschik. And she will talk to Ollie co-founder Mike McAllister about creating websites with the block and site editor. So make sure you tune in to that one.

And the three of you, thank you very for being with me today.

Aurelio: Thank you Sandra.

Mark: Thank you. Bye.

Vito: Bye.

(Music)