The WP Minute+

Toby Cryns (00:00)
Welcome to another anticipated episode of Whose WordPress Agency Is This Anyway? Starring the legendary Kurt Von Ahnen and myself, Toby Krines. ⁓ I love the intro. ⁓ Kurt, ⁓ tell me a bit about these mercenary WordPress types and how to avoid them.

Kurt von Ahnen (00:12)
Dude, I'm having so much fun with this.

actually have a co-worker in the space that keeps using the term mercenary and now become part of my language because we'll be talking to someone and someone will be like, I can help you with that custom page for $2,900. And we're like, what a mercenary. Holy crap, you shot high. ⁓ It's ⁓ just super, super interesting to me. And I've talked about this in like, ⁓ let's say like you're in a post status agency, you know, live zoom or something like that. ⁓

you know, you get into the, maybe you're in a WordPress meetup on Zoom or something. And I'm thinking, it's like, how many times do you sign into one of these Zoom things and all of sudden, you know, the chat's going off and it's a private chat. And it's like, hey, if you ever need anybody for this, this and this, keep me in mind. And you're like, why am I being sold in an agency group chat about other agencies? And then it's, hey, I'm promoting this. Hey, I'm promoting that. Hey, we've got this new product you should check out. And I'm like, this is...

Totally like not the place to do that. Like that's just in my thinking Other people might be fine with it, right? Like I'm thinking there's probably people listening right now. They're gone. Dang That's a good idea. I should jump on some of these zoom calls and sell in the chat But then what I get to is those are also I don't want to call them like the same people because they're not the same people but it's like similar instances I think of like a mercenary type is like

I think you and I started to talk about this. Like, how do you know when to hire or when to fire, bring people on? And it's like you hire somebody and things are going well. And you're like, Oh, Hey, um, I was going to do this meeting with the client. Do you want to take it instead? They take the meeting with the client, blah, blah, blah. You're like, Hey, what are the notes on that meeting? And then you get ghosted. You don't hear anything. And then all of sudden you find out your client is now working directly with the person you had on your contract, you know, and you're like,

Toby Cryns (02:06)
Interesting.

Kurt von Ahnen (02:10)
I went and sourced the client, I built the project, I proposed the project, I sold the project, and now I've lost the client to the person that was supposedly agreeing to work with me. Right? Or it goes the other way, because clients are feisty too. ⁓ This has happened a lot. Now, I have a certificate in leadership and speaking, and I have a certain cadence in my speech patterns. I think that lends...

Toby Cryns (02:20)
I see.

Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (02:37)
I think people think I'm smarter than I am sometimes, Toby, just being honest. So I have contract.

Toby Cryns (02:41)
I believe it, yeah. People think you're

very smart.

Kurt von Ahnen (02:46)
No, no, no. mean, it's not fake humility. I'm being very realistic, right? I think sometimes a contract will hire us as the subcontractor, which I'm totally fine to do. I don't mind subcontracting. In fact, I actually kind of like it. I like when someone else is in charge of selling and getting the customers and negotiating and all I got to do is execute. Like, I kind of like that. But then they're like, could you jump on this meeting with the client? I do the meeting, and then I get the weird like,

the web form submission through Manana no mass that says, Hey, what's the process on working with you directly instead of with so-and-so. And this has happened like six times in the last year for me. And so I'm like, these customers actually think they're going to cut out the middle man and save a dollar or do they just want to talk to me direct? Cause here's the deal.

I could just go to the contract and say, Hey, your customer wants to deal with me directly. If you want me to take over this account, I will, but for an extra 500 bucks or an extra 1500 bucks or for whatever, like I'll manage the client if you want me to, but I just want to be compensated for that management, you know, cause originally I was hired for tasks. It's a weird conversation, but like people and what's, well, now I'm going to really take a risk of on, on insulting people.

Toby Cryns (03:48)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (03:57)
I actually said to one of the clients, said, that's unacceptable. That's an unacceptable model for us at Manana Omas based on our business ethics. We always retain a customer in the status at which we gain them. So if you're a customer of XYZ in order for us to keep working with you, you have to remain a customer of XYZ. Right. And they're like, well, what if we cancel that account and we come directly to you? I'm like, no, like, no, because you only found me.

through X, Y, Z. So from a position of business ethics, I won't step out of that arrangement. And I know that other people will. And I just find it a very interesting conversation. Like how do you future proof your agency and grow your team when there's always that kind of like hidden fear in the background that you're giving these people on your team access, direct access to your clients. And it's very easy for them to say, I can just cut out the middleman and make it myself.

Toby Cryns (04:26)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and I think it's even tougher when the client is asking for it. That first thing is situational ethics for whoever is there. If you're a contractor, can you steal the business? And then you go, let's say you can. You go, is that right? That's kind of the question, right? Is it right and does it make sense for my business to steal the business? ⁓

Another thing you brought up is kind of like these tough conversations. ⁓ It's I have found it's not the tough, tough is probably the wrong word, but just uncomfortable. And it could be something dumb. Like I have to like ask for something I'm embarrassed to ask for or like ⁓ or the harder one is like when I have to like have like a very thoughtful conversation. It's really like the thoughtful conversations for me that are tough, not to have them, but to plan for them.

And, and like, so when someone maybe steps out of line in the sense that they're now trying to change the terms of the contract, maybe knowingly, maybe not knowingly, ⁓ just through a request or whatever, going through a chain of command differently, like you gotta like slam the, this is the hard part for me is like, you really have to slam the brakes, take an hour, examine all the contracts, examine the communication and be like, what's going on here? What are their intentions? What are we?

you know, and then you're like, now you have another hour of phone calls coming to sort it out. And you instill like, you have other work to do. And this was just kind of like thrown at you by somebody. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (06:23)
Well, it's the reason it's on my mind so much is because Manana No Mas moved to Kansas. We're doing well locally, regionally. We already have national business. like, so we feel pretty confident in what we do. But I think I told you before, like we are seriously like we're already in conversations with the city and the community college and all this stuff. We want to launch like an apprentice program to teach.

younger graduates like, how do you launch your own agency? Cause the schools aren't saying, here's how you launch an agency and do business. They're saying, here's how you program stuff, right? Here's how you get ready for your next class in school. They're not saying here's how you get ready to leave school and grow your own business. And so we're looking to launch this apprenticeship. And my idea is my particular region of the state,

A is a nice place to live. The quality of life is great, but the cost of living is super low and the internet's fast. So by all rights, this should naturally become a tech hub of like a bunch of agencies doing a bunch of work. Like it should just be that way. Like that's the way I see it. But then there's always that weirdness. Like in order to do an apprentice program, we're going to have clients. So that client's going to belong to somebody. Right. And then you have all these apprentices coming in and it's like, the apprentices

gonna like get full of themselves and try and steal all the clients instead of going to get their own? Or like how's that gonna work?

Toby Cryns (07:41)
Yeah. I'm dealing with a situation right now and it's pretty much what you said, but a different scenario where like there's an agency that is, ⁓ their clients are bigger than mine. And they're asking me questions like, hey, how do you do this? How do you do that? And there are people I've known for a long time because they want to, they basically, I don't know that they want my clients, but they currently,

sell other services and they want to sell web dev, which is what we do. And I'm like, if I start teach how, at what point, when I start teaching you all this stuff, do you take my clients from me? And there's a real risk of that. that, it's, it's a tough, it's tough, but I also want them to be successful. And like, you know,

Kurt von Ahnen (08:28)
Yeah, I really, there's a big part of me that really doesn't believe that anyone is stealing anybody's piece of the pie, right? I always think, hey, as an agency owner, it's my job to bake more pie. Like I just need to make more pie. ⁓ There's enough work for everybody. ⁓ But that said, sometimes it's easier to get the work that I've already got. I don't need someone coming and taking the work I've already gotten.

What you just said reminded me of it was a really, I'm a lifter LMS expert, right? And so a really large agency, I'm not going to mention their name was like, Hey, we need help in describing lifters benefits on a live call to the client. ⁓ and it was arranged for me to be the, the sales engineer on the call. So

I think of being a sales engineer as I'm just there to answer functional questions about what the platform is going to do. Like that's that to me is where that's like, there's a line, there's a line. ⁓ but as the call develops, other people in the agency that maybe should have taken more of a leadership role in the call kept deferring questions and commentary to me and

I'm trying to be polite because now it's live. We're in front of the client, you know, and I'm answering the questions and I'm being engaging and I'm being somewhat entertaining, right? Cause I'm, giving situations and story stories to go with the answers. And, ⁓ and a couple of times the client would say, well, what, do you feel about maybe this for prerequisites or how do feel about this for quiz? you know, scoring. And then I would say,

You know, like waiting for someone to answer and they will okay Kurt. Would you take that? Sure. I'll take that one, too ⁓ But it was the week because I could feel on the call that there was a transition of trust From the people I was supposed to be helping To me. I didn't want that position of trust. They're not my client I'm not this isn't my role My role was to be here to answer some questions about the product not to put on a sales and marketing hat and run the call

Toby Cryns (10:01)
Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (10:22)
And so it was a very strange situation, but I can see that happening a lot where like people aren't recognizing their roles. It's like, it's to me, it's the difference between doing something by accident and doing something on purpose, which is a very philosophical line of thought for me and everything I do. But if you did it on purpose, if you, if you put that call together, if you ran that agency and you put that call together, you would have an agenda.

you would do something on purpose. You would come into the call knowing like A, B and C is going to happen. These are probably the top 10 questions they're going to ask on this call. I want to make sure everyone on this call has a, a pre-planned answer for these top 10 questions that might come up. Like there would be like some prep time. There would be something there. And instead it was more like, ⁓ Hey, we're just going to figure it out and see if we sell this contract by accident. And that that's a weird situation for me.

Toby Cryns (11:12)
Yeah. That's

what it felt like. Cause it seems like a purposeful conversation. And by purposeful, mean intentional on the sales teams and they don't let the conversation land in your lap. They're like, that's not where we want the conversation to go. Like we have a different place where it's going and we'll help it go there. And that's the talent, talent and art of sales, I think.

Kurt von Ahnen (11:35)
Yeah, yeah, that whole, I'll just ask you, because I think that's kind of the direction we're going now. Thinking about your agency and where you're at now, I mean, you think you're doing pretty good, Yeah, I love your humility.

Toby Cryns (11:46)
⁓ I don't know.

Kurt von Ahnen (11:51)
But I gotta ask, like, did you fall into it? Or did you very purposefully go, you know what, I'm gonna run a WordPress agency, I'm gonna do X, Y, and Z, and I'm gonna execute in this way.

Toby Cryns (12:00)
very much fell into it when you frame it like that. ⁓ There's a correlated question of like, it's a question of should we niche down? Should we niche down? And that's one way to go, but I am the opposite of niching down except that I do WordPress. WordPress is my niche and maybe not WooCommerce if I can help it.

Kurt von Ahnen (12:14)
Yeah, niche down. The riches are in the niches.

Toby Cryns (12:28)
I was on a call yesterday with ⁓ a local business that owns two physical retail stores that sells t-shirts and hats and pants and stuff. ⁓ And they're on Shopify. And five years ago, I knew Shopify. We were probably like the most knowledgeable Shopify agency in the country at that point in time because we were, because of the situation we were in, it wasn't, that was also by accident by the way.

It was just like, we had to learn it for this client that was paying us a bunch of money. ⁓ But that was five years ago when we ended the contract. And so I'm telling them, I'm like, God, I would love to help you. ⁓ And I'm wise enough now to be like, I'm not going to help you. I'm sorry. But I would love to. But it's just not a perfect fit. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (13:16)
It's not a good fit.

Toby Cryns (13:21)
I think like when I think of by purpose or by accident, as I get wiser, there's, I don't know, more intention, but I wouldn't say like I'm super intentional about all sorts of stuff in the business, you know? ⁓ I am, however, this is like another frame of reference. Like when I think of niching down, what that means, it means like, like to me, when I, not that frame, but like how I structure my business is not to niche down, but it's like, how do I, ⁓

spread out the risk amongst more clients, more customers. That's really how my business has been built over the last decade is like, how do we do more customers concurrently? ⁓ if one leaves us or one industry shuts down, like during COVID, there were whole agencies that just disappeared because their clients were in a, let's say they were a place that needed to be in person, whatever that company does, like, ⁓ you know, they fired their agency.

These are event planners as the classic example during COVID. If you were an event planner, you probably did not exist after COVID as a business.

Kurt von Ahnen (14:20)
Yeah.

No, true, true that I use the, ⁓ on purpose or by accident scenario when I'm teaching service writers in the service industry for automotive, motorcycle Marine. You know, I'm like, Hey, cause I'll say you do this on accident or on purpose. And they're like, ⁓ it's like a weird question. And I go, okay, let me rephrase it. When you were in third grade and the teacher said, what do you want to be when you grow up?

How many of you said I want to be a service advisor to motorcycle dealership? You know, and none of the hands go up. And then I say, well, you know, you're all in this course to get better at it. So how many of you think you're already pretty good at being a service advisor? And you know, 80 % of the hands will go up because that's just, that's what happens in a group dynamic, right? The 80, 20 thing. And then, um, I'll say, well, that's interesting because if you think you're good at it, but you did it by accident, how good would you be if you did it on purpose?

And so as I'm creating this apprenticeship program and thinking about what would it be like to purposefully get out of school and launch your own agency, it changes the whole dynamic. Like I think about all the things I fell into as I launched my agency, you know, by accident, you know, like

Toby Cryns (15:23)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (15:29)
Naming it was the first thing. I went through three different name changes. I went through logo changes. I went through You know branding and style guide changes. I went through like you described changing whatever work It is that you actually want to do, you know, do I want to do startup retail? Do I want to do e-commerce? Do I want to do, you know blogging and feel-good sites like it's ⁓ It's really interesting. And so this whole idea of doing things on purpose to me is a big big deal

Toby Cryns (15:56)
Yeah. And this brings me to another question I've been asking myself. ⁓ When you think about intentionally building a business, there are these systems that you can plug your business into. One is called EOS. It's a very popular one. If you go to LinkedIn and search EOS implementer, you'll see a thousand people in your existing network that are consultants for EOS. It's kind of like a Ponzi scheme, but I've done versions of it at the Mighty Mo and ⁓ it can be really helpful.

I could see a scenario, this is the trick. Like, I don't think it works for like people at the beginning stages, cause you need sales. The first question is, do you have any sales? But if you have sales and you're doing the work, then you can start adding systems. that's like, EOS is a very purposeful way to think about your business. ⁓ If you're not doing a system like that, there's probably a lot of accidents happening.

Kurt von Ahnen (16:36)
Where's the money?

Yeah, the people that made Basecamp wrote some book and the know the Coleman's are into it. So Jason and Kim Coleman with Paid Memberships Pro, they tweaked a version of that and that's how they ⁓

That's how they grow. That's how that's how they orchestrate changes and plans and strategies there and at lifter LMS because you know, they have interest in lifter LMS too. And so it's been interesting with my work at lifter to see, wow, when someone comes in with, and this is not a shot against Chris, Chris is incredibly, you know, frontal cortex oriented. ⁓ but to come in with like a plan, ⁓ like a purposeful plan on, this is how we're going to implement a process. This is how we're going to.

move things forward at a quicker pace because it's going to be on an agenda, right? It's going to have a sense of accountability and timelines. That's really cool. And so I'm all about process, all about process. ⁓ Sometimes I have a hard time buying into someone else's process. And I think that is the issue. What do we call that? Sprints and runs and what were the agile? Agile.

Toby Cryns (18:03)
Yeah, sure.

Kurt von Ahnen (18:05)
I worked at a large corporation that was not agile. And the guy that ran the office, an office full of like 220 people at the time, literally was having coffee at a coffee shop and overheard two middle managers talking about the benefits of being agile. This guy came back to the office with over 200 people in it.

and had a group meeting and said, from this point on, we're going to be agile. And that's how this, this, and this works. And I was like, this guy doesn't know what agile is. And then he started with like, well, you're going to do a standup meeting in your, in your huddle, you know, every morning and you're going to this and you're going to that. And I'm like, you're adding a bunch of agile like activities.

but the culture of the business is still not agile. know, and so it's very, ⁓ I have a very difficult time not being judgmental in those situations.

Toby Cryns (18:43)
huh. Right.

I think a lot of these systems, Agile included to a degree, like they try to like put metrics to everything. And I think like I've talked to people who have been acquired and then they're jammed into a system like EOS or the one you're describing. And by the way, EOS sounds just like the one you described. It's probably a second, a different Ponzi scheme type of situation. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (18:59)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (19:16)
It would not multi-level marketing. That's what it is. Not Ponzi. They're selling a product, but you know, they make money the guy above them makes money the guy but it's like that ⁓ But they get jammed into it and similar where they're like, whoa like This isn't working for us. And and I always felt like with EOS when we did it we always did like ⁓ our own flavor of it because it was just like too heavy-handed for me like and

Kurt von Ahnen (19:42)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (19:43)
I don't know, and I'm the boss, I'm like, if it's too heavy on for me, that's all I need to know.

Kurt von Ahnen (19:48)
If the boss can't follow it, they can't expect anyone else to. And that was at that larger corporation. was like the guy that was in charge of this whole thing was the one breaking all the rules at the top anyway. And at one hand, you go, well, he's the boss. can do whatever he wants. But on the other hand is, if you put something in place and you can't even follow your own rules, what makes you think anyone else is going to follow the rules for any length of time? Just because you're giving people paychecks doesn't mean you're going to get

Toby Cryns (19:59)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Kurt von Ahnen (20:15)
you the, the, the letter of the law, like what you, what you crack down on. ⁓ It's gotta be an internal culture thing. It's gotta be, it's gotta be sold and believed.

Toby Cryns (20:25)
Yeah. One thing I like that the Basecamp people do is they have six week, they call them something else, but it's like six week projects and you have to launch in six weeks. That's the only, the only like requirement, whatever the thing you're working on, it's got to be done in six weeks. And so they use that as like the driver of building stuff. Like, Oh, you have a cool idea for a future. Can it be built in six weeks? No. Well then.

reshape that idea. Maybe it's still a similar idea, but a smaller one. And I kind of like that. It gives the people that are doing the work the power to design it in a way that makes sense. And then they have a deadline and...

I kind of like that as like, ⁓ a less heavy handed approach to like, so like, let's say you're, ⁓ I might even work something like that might even work in your incubator there for like people who want to start agencies. Like, okay. Where do you need to be? Let's say six weeks from now, if you're starting a business, how much money do you have in the bank today? How long will that last? How many sales, how much money do you have to have come in in the next month to make this work? You know, like,

All right, how do we get that money? know, where do we start, you know?

Kurt von Ahnen (21:37)
That is so funny that you phrase it that way. I literally had a conversation today with somebody where I was like, you know, I wanted to prove a point and work on my son's car and, do it DIY and the car should have been junked. It's a $500 car. So I put, you know, about $2,500 worth of my labor into like rebuilding this car timing belt, water pump.

Valve adjustment, the whole thing. And I'm mechanical, I can do those things. But at the end of that project, all that time had been spent, right? And I thought, if I hadn't spent that time selling three more clients.

I could have just bought the kid, you know, a new used truck or a new used car or whatever. could have had said, I could have said, hey son, here's $10,000. Go buy a used car. Like just the reality of like you're trying to make a point.

And it was a good point, right? Because it's for my kid. want to show him, hey, if you do stuff on your own, if you're self-sufficient, you can save money. You can do these things. Like all those values are there. But at the end of the day, when you're thinking about it by yourself as an agency owner, you're like, why in the world am I out in the driveway rebuilding a Honda Civic when I could be selling another $12,000 website?

Toby Cryns (22:42)
So this is, that's a great point. like, let's, I'm going to push it back to the WordPress space. Cause I've talked to friends and colleagues over the years who want to start WordPress plugins to sell, you know, that want to make, basically want to transition from a WordPress services to WordPress plugins. I'm like, I have that exact same thought process in my head. I'm like, okay, you're going to sell this plugin for 50 bucks a year. ⁓

What's your average project right now? ⁓ $5,000. Okay, so that's a hundred of these plugins. I think I got that math right. ⁓ Is it gonna be easier to sell one project or 100 plugins? And I'm like, for me, I don't know how to sell one plugin, so I'm just gonna go sell a project. Because frankly, I would love to be a plugin company, but like, it's a whole different skill set.

Kurt von Ahnen (23:31)
I on my timeline my very near future timeline is gonna be a product release. I'm gonna enter the product market with a plug-in ⁓ But my model is like I'm an agency first like I so very much to your methodology It's like revenue first Like it'll be cool to have a product

But revenue first, I got to keep the agency floating. got to keep things solvent, right? I got to keep things going. And then the idea is like, it's going to be a freemium model. So there's going to be a lot of people going to jump in for free. I'm not going make any money off the stupid thing. And it's going to take time, just like my e-learning project that took years to launch. It's going to take time for people to use the product and go, you know would make this product awesome? If it connected with LinkedIn, if it connected with this, and then.

We create those connections. They become premium features. And then that's what gets sold as the the add-on to that, right? And that model works. I've seen it work for lifter LMS, but lifters also got what 11 years in the game, right? A couple thousand clients, you know, a fair, fair amount of premium users. And so you go, okay, well that I can see that where that works, but I don't see where in this economy you can launch a product or enter the product space.

without the safety net or the, you know, the crash pad of, of revenue from another source.

Toby Cryns (24:50)
Yeah, I don't see it either. ⁓ Not to say you couldn't get lucky, you know, like with something. Somebody's gonna get lucky. Sure, that's gonna happen. But like in terms of designing a business around it, it's, you know, your odds are way better in the, you know, services space.

Kurt von Ahnen (25:06)
I'm going to take a risk and mention his name because I think he's great at what he does. Sometimes I don't like the way he communicates, he's... Kevin Geary and his launch of Etch was pretty spectacular to watch. ⁓ Cause he had, I don't know if the numbers are right or not. Really hard to say on the numbers. To my knowledge, there was something like 800 or a thousand people that bought into the pre-sale of Etch.

at seven or $800, you know, for that page builder, because you would get lifetime access to it. And I'm one of them. I was like, fear of missing out. I was like, crap. Like I think, cause I know Bricks is awesome. And then he's saying this is going to be better than Bricks and he had other products. So he had ACSS and he had, frames and those were fairly popular and reliable. And so everything said, okay, this etch thing is going to be okay. I'm going to give it a shot. Now newsflash.

Toby Cryns (25:38)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (25:57)
I'm trying to use that right now and I feel like a baby in a crib. it is the learning curve is huge for me. But when I look at his version of product space.

I mean, he didn't even put the product out yet. And by all accounts, if you do quick math with who's on the zoom call versus who paid 800 bucks, he's doing pretty good. You know, that was, that was revenue flush from the beginning, but then you have to walk that backwards and go, he's not some unknown dude launching a new plugin. Yeah.

Toby Cryns (26:24)
Yes, that's the thing. And let's take

a step further back from there. How long did it take him to build said plugin and where was he making his money during that time?

Kurt von Ahnen (26:35)
Yeah,

yeah. And he did agency work and he did other stuff. So, yeah, I very much agree with you.

Toby Cryns (26:40)
Something funded

that plugins development and he didn't enter it ground zero. He had you mentioned bricks That was a very popular thing for a while. Here's an example of ⁓ I have a friend of mine There's a plugin he owns called he built and this is his business shop WP shop I think is what it's called. His name is Andrew. You can go WP shop.io ⁓ The plugins called shop WP. I'm guessing that domain was taken but the URL is WP shop.com.io

Kurt von Ahnen (27:09)
We always keep it simple.

Toby Cryns (27:10)
Yeah. ⁓ but I want to say 10 years ago, he started, he came to me, he's like, Hey, have this idea for a plugin. Should I do it? I go, no. And I share it exactly what I just shared with you. ⁓ I'll tell you, like, I don't think he would mind me saying, like, it hasn't been easy for him by any means to get to a point of, I think he might be the only employee or something close to that, but he's making a living on it, but it's taken.

I mean, I don't know for sure, but years before, and I don't know his financial situation, I can't imagine that he wasn't being funded some other way, maybe he has a spouse or who knows, like something was paying the bills, maybe he was still consulting at that time, something was paying the bills while he was going for it. And in my view, this is kind of a unicorn situation, it still took him five years to, I'm just guessing, but like based on what I've...

would assume like five years to profitability, let's say, to where he's like, okay, I can kind of make a living here. And we're not talking millions, we're just talking like, okay, I can pay for my mortgage and, you food and

Kurt von Ahnen (28:13)
And then all it takes is for WordPress to make it part of core and like WordPress 9.6 or something. Right. And then like your, what happens like you're done.

Toby Cryns (28:19)
Yeah.

Or

I mean, shop of WooCommerce for, there was a solid business in Jiggo shop that WooCommerce forked. And that was the end of a business. hired, you know, some guy owned Jigga, the Jigga shop, company developing it and selling it. ⁓ somebody owned that. And that's the scenario you just talked about, like, now, WordPress, you know, Matt Mullenweg owns the e-commerce now. Sorry. He just like has your code base. Cause that's the license and.

Kurt von Ahnen (28:37)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (28:50)
He hired a bunch of your employees and what are you gonna do about it? Yeah, mercenaries, that's right. Yep, I was hearing today too, like ⁓ chat GPT, ⁓ bunch, ⁓ whatever the guy from Facebook, Zuck, the Zuck hired a bunch of their like brains, like their big brains away. It's just like, no, you work for Facebook now. And then chat, apparently chat GPT is like feature set is decreased.

Kurt von Ahnen (28:53)
mercenaries. We're right back where we started.

Zuckerberg.

Toby Cryns (29:17)
noticeably since that point in time and like Claude is now the leader, know, like there's all this and who knows maybe Facebook's working on something interesting who knows but

Kurt von Ahnen (29:25)
I tried their llama and I was not impressed with the llama. ⁓ I tried Claude recently and I was very impressed with Claude, but I gotta say that grok 4.0 is kicking butt, man. Grok 4.0 is pretty awesome. Which is weird because I'm the guy that said AI was the devil three weeks ago.

Toby Cryns (29:28)
Hmm.

Speaking of AI...

Okay, was one question. What's your fear level today? That was three weeks ago. That's a long time ago.

Kurt von Ahnen (29:48)
I have been left so, and I said three weeks ago, I'm a hypocrite because I use AI almost every day myself. ⁓ I was on a call yesterday with a client who shall remain nameless. And as we're talking about their website and plans for the next week, like what are the next four tasks we need to knock out over the next two weeks or whatever. ⁓ he's like, yeah, I added a chat GPT to the site to automatically populate.

Alt image text or something like that.

That sounds harmless. It sounds harmless. But it's like, as a person that is supposed to being paid to develop their website in a pre-launch kind of quasi-launch situation, like they're in a soft launch testing, not really open to the market yet, right? They got a few students, not a lot of students. It's like, you just plugged in AI to your website? Like, we didn't discuss this strategy beforehand? ⁓ It's just weird to me that...

people that are not developers that are not coders that are not fully aware of what they're connecting to are connecting to things. Now, what'll be interesting is what happens when, cause you've heard about where people connect AI to their websites and then the website gets over crawled and then they end up with like a $10,000 server bill or something crazy. Like I don't even, I'm not even open to that conversation. I didn't put it in there. You put it in there. You took it upon yourself.

I guess the good news is that we're the subcontractor on the project, legally I guess it's not even my concern. But the whole thing, my fear level for AI is still pretty high, even though I leverage it myself in many occasions.

Toby Cryns (31:25)
Yeah, you know, I heard an analogy. This is somebody who's an optimist about AI, but the gist of it is, there's probably some truth here as well, like he's like, ⁓ remember when spreadsheets were invented and accountants thought they were all going to be out of jobs? All it's done is made everybody really good at numbers and it's driven more work to the accountants because like...

Kurt von Ahnen (31:43)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (31:51)
It's just like increased their value because now they have to be more experts and you

Kurt von Ahnen (31:56)
I am so sold out on the idea that it's going to take time. might be two years. It might be three years, might be five years. People that become noted experts in their fields are going to be the gold at the end of the rainbow. Like people are going to get so ⁓ AI fatigued with regurgitated AI type answers that they're going to be like, screw this. I just need to talk to a human being that knows what's going on. You know,

And then, so maybe four or five years from now, we're those geniuses that get to make the harvest then, but the harvest isn't now.

Toby Cryns (32:27)
Yeah.

Well, and I think I was mentioning that client earlier that I spoke with, that they wanted me to fix their Shopify stuff. And really what they needed was like some like Shopify connection stuff to like tick tock. then I dug deeper and what they really need are sales and the people that can make sales happen are AI won't, I don't think AI is going to be able to help with that. Like you're still going to be in a dense forest of people trying to sell like

Kurt von Ahnen (32:53)
The AI equation for sales to me is becoming very muddied. There's a bunch of these consultants saying, well, SEO is dead. then when you, if you ask, ask AI a question, like what's the best, what's the best pizza place in town, right? It'll tell you, it'll say this or this. It'll give you like one or two things. Whereas if you search pizza in town, you'd get.

25 listings right and so everyone goes well SEO is dead just ask AI it gives you the question it gives you the answer But then if you go back and you ask AI Hey, thanks for the recommendation How did you come up with that recommendation? The number one thing it lists is search engine results So SEO is not dead

Toby Cryns (33:20)
Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (33:33)
but now your SEO has to be geared towards that AI discovery, right? And then, so you have to be like AI discoverable, which is like what we're working on for Manjano No Mas right now. And it's taken months to improve our ranking with AI, months and months and months. And we keep chipping away at it and we keep getting better and better, but...

Toby Cryns (33:47)
Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (33:52)
For me to know that that's going to equate to sales and revenue downstream, it's the conversation you and I had last episode when you were like, Hey, I do all this stuff, but a friend of mine owns an agency and he doesn't do anything and he's doing just fine. It's like that whole, did we sell ourselves a bag of nonsense or do we really need to do all this work?

Toby Cryns (34:03)
Mm-hmm.

Well, and there's always going to be a need. Trust might be the commodity that is sold, like, because you can't trust AI for as far as you can throw it. And, know, with your bad knee, you shouldn't be throwing anything. And I was thinking about ⁓ if you go to the Mighty Mo, we have an article with Joe, Joe Dolson, who runs the WordPress accessibility project. ⁓ And in that conversation, he talks about

Kurt von Ahnen (34:16)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (34:39)
So was like, hey, can you guarantee that a site is accessible? He's like, I can, but only if the client has zero access to edit anything. And so therefore he has clients, I assume that like, he's like, yes, I will guarantee your site, but you can't touch it. Which is kind of, ⁓ I don't know, maybe applicable to this AI thing. Like your guy who plugs AI into the site, are you kidding me? Like at that point, it's kind of like, if anything happens,

Kurt von Ahnen (34:48)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (35:07)
I can't be responsible, like...

Kurt von Ahnen (35:09)
I've had multiple clients, you know, we'll have a support thing like fluent support. use fluent support quite a bit. And, ⁓ by the way, at Manana NoMouse, we manually answer all of our support requests. I want to be super clear about that, but I have multiple clients saying, ⁓ is there a way to, ⁓ attach, ⁓ AI to this? And I'm like, so I immediately go to

Well, let's take a look at the depth of your knowledge base or your, what are you going to train it on? And they go, what do you mean? And I go, well, this is support for your business, for your brand. You don't want it pulling support answers from your competition's brand, right? That doesn't make any sense. Like, like, Hey, I don't know how this Toyota works. And they go, well check out these features from Subaru. Like that doesn't make any sense. So you have to restrict what it's trained on. So then you need an unbelievable amount of content.

pre-existing to train it on to answer those support requests. I have multiple clients like, I don't understand why I can't just plug that in and make it easy. I'm like, I'm, I, my AI fatigue in these arenas is palpable. Like I actually catch myself sometimes I go, okay, don't answer right away. Take a breath. Take a breath. Cause it are.

Toby Cryns (36:20)
Yeah, you know, there's I think like I work with small businesses and I don't really see it. Maybe I see zero real like public facing use case for AI for them. Like I could see a scenario where they're using AI to manage some business process stuff. Hey, we're going to use it to generate some text that we're going to then edit and use on the website or ⁓

You know, I was talking with a company that's working on an internal customer relationship management system. go, that makes sense. It can read all your emails. can like generate like a list of to do's for the day. Like that's kind of cool. ⁓ but I, that's even probably a bigger company than most of the ones I work with that are just like, like if I haven't had anyone ask actually, which is kind of interesting for that, but I can see that scenario. Hey, can you like have AI do, do our support, ⁓ chat bot on the site? I would be like,

Kurt von Ahnen (36:56)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (37:13)
Just answer the phone.

Kurt von Ahnen (37:17)
See, you're, really hitting the key point there though. It is, it's all perception. It's all perception. And we've mentioned this before, like people assume big companies have all these things and they think they need all these things and they don't realize that that's not reality. Like someone goes, ⁓

my God, we launched our course last week and we had like 20 emails come in with questions and so we need to automate these responses. And I'm like, if you're running a business that you think is going to create you a six figure income and you can't answer 20 emails in a week, you shouldn't be in business. Like

Toby Cryns (37:48)
That's a good point.

I also think these website chatbots, they exist pretty much. ⁓ Now I'm talking about, go, let's talk about apple.com. They have one. It's horrible. But like horrible in the sense like you would get your answer way faster talking to someone. Like the whole point of that chatbot is to pad their bottom line. It's not to help you faster. so if you're a small business and I always think small businesses

Kurt von Ahnen (37:52)
People hate them.

No, it's not to help you faster.

Toby Cryns (38:16)
You need to answer that phone and sell because they're just going to find another company because they don't know you. don't, know, if somebody's on your website, on your chat bot, you're in trouble.

Kurt von Ahnen (38:27)
In our business consulting lanes, when we talk to businesses, our, our like patented line is you have to focus on the relationship over transactions. If you constantly focus on transactions, you won't build relationship and then everything's gone. If you focus on relationship, the transactions happen naturally. You don't have to focus on the transaction anymore. And so yeah, when you're a small business, I agree. Answer the phone, answer the email, have the zoom to zoom if you need to. ⁓

Heck, I got a client right now. can't figure out how their Cloudflare connects to their URL. We've already done it twice, right? But now they're having issues again on another issue. So I'm like, hey, if you need to jump on a Zoom call and do this on a screen share for 20 minutes, we'll knock it out.

Toby Cryns (39:11)
Well, another thing,

this brings me to another thing I wanted to talk about today, which is upsells, because that happened to us just this week. said, hey, your site's down. It's not a client of ours. They had contacted us on your site. You know, our site, something's broken on it. Like, yeah, it's down. Like, where are you hosted? We don't know. I don't know. And we finally figured out, it's GoDaddy. I go, okay, it looks like the DNS is pointed at Cloudflare. Do you have a Cloudflare account? We don't know. And so like what I ended up doing was upselling them, because I'm like,

we can solve all these problems for you. And there will never be any of these, we'll never ask you this question if you just hire us to manage hosting and DNS and whatever. ⁓ They ended up saying yes, they got the check today. And like, it's like, great. ⁓ It was an easy upsell really, because it was just like, this is, we can solve this need for this amount of dollar, all these headaches will go away. And my question is kind of like, ⁓ as you're building,

a project for someone at what point and when do you I imagine upfront you're kind of talking about hosting and maybe hosting pricing maintenance but at what point do you reengage those upsells if they are not ready to buy at the beginning because it's too early.

Kurt von Ahnen (40:18)
Will we ever?

Process and I stole this process from Chris at lifter LMS. So I got to give him credit I used the three tiered pricing model in the proposal. So I have the good better best proposal, right? I have the good which is the this is the bare minimum to get you off the ground with what you're Envisioning right better is hey, there's a couple of automations in here or there's a couple of extra tools in here that make things a little cleaner a little easier or maybe it's a Maybe good is we're gonna build off of a templated starter website and

is going to be a semi custom, you know, we can adjust the format for you or something like that. Right. And then best is going to be, Hey, this is going to come with the hosting. We'll provide the plugins. We'll do the maintenance on a monthly basis. We'll, we'll develop the website for you. have so many hours of custom development factored in every month for special projects, like whatever. Right. Like, so I have a, I have a, Hey, this is for the guy that is worried about the budget. This is for the guy that's kind of in the middle and has some of their options open. And then here's

my as an agency, shooting for the moon and I'm trying to make a home run, right? And it's amazing. Sometimes they just go, Hey, I'll do that home run thing. But what happens more often than not is we'll have a meeting afterwards and they'll say, Oh, I didn't realize that you could broker the plugins for us. Like we thought we were going to have to manage that. If you could do that, that would be great. And I go, okay, we can manage that for you. Okay. When do I have it? Usually after the proposal is sent.

Toby Cryns (41:37)
When do you have that conversation? When in the process, yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (41:44)
So the proposal gets sent with the three pricing options. They schedule a follow-up meeting to negotiate. That's what clients usually do. They want somewhere between the middle project. They want somewhere between level two and three, but they really just want to pay somewhere between level one and two.

Toby Cryns (42:00)
Sure. So

I guess specifically I'm curious, do you lock them into a hosting contract, an annual or monthly hosting contract at the beginning of the project?

Kurt von Ahnen (42:11)
Yeah. Yeah. Almost all of our websites now are on our hosting package. So if it's not like, I just turned down a job that was on GoDaddy two weeks ago. The lady was referred to me from Lifter LMS. She gets me on a zoom call. I said, Hey, let's talk about your project. And as we're talking about the project, she says it's on GoDaddy. She, ⁓

built the way they finally got the website the way they want it. And they don't want to change the website. She's using a theme I never heard of. She's got a couple of custom fields in play that I've never, you know, that I'm not sure how they're set up. And then she's like, so I don't want to make any changes to this, this, this or that. I don't want to change my hosting. I just need you on a very restricted budget to make my LMS portion of my website amazing. And I'm like, you don't get to demand amazing on the LMS side when your website sucks.

And you're adding all these tools to a hosting package that isn't going to be able to, to foot what you're anticipating. Right? So it's like, like, I think it's great for proof of concept stuff. You know, I use blue host for like 16 years. I've used go daddy, but, they're great for proof of concept or smaller projects. But when you put in a heavily dynamic plugin, and then you try to add tons of concurrent traffic in there at the same time,

those budget servers don't work. Like you gotta be on something more robust. And she made it very clear. She had no intentions of moving anything or changing anything or adjusting the theme or getting rid of Divi. I don't like to work with Divi either. And so I was like, ⁓ this is not a good fit for us. Good luck with your, good luck in your quest. ⁓ So when someone talks to us from a startup position,

We offer the hosting, we offer the hosting with maintenance. We update all your plugins every month. We have a certain amount of plugins that we can offer because we have, you know, unlimited sites, agency licensing to do that. So we go, hey, like that's our deal with Lifter. So if you want to Lifter LMS website and I'll do the hosting, I'll update your plugins every month. You don't have to worry about subscribing to Lifter because I'm carrying it for you and I am your source for support. That means you don't get support from Lifter. You get support from Anan and Omas and that's part of your hosting package because we include the hosting and support.

Toby Cryns (44:15)
That's interesting as an upsell. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (44:18)
And it keeps the recurring coming, right? So my goal is, let's say I sell a job. Let's say another agency wants to sell a Lifter LMS powered website for $22,000. And then I get a chance to bid on it and I get to see that bid. Sometimes that happens, right? I go 22 grand, whew. But then I look at it and go, hey, you know what? I can do that same job for 19.5.

but we'll take care of the hosting and maintenance for you on a recurring basis on a monthly contract. It'll be a hundred bucks a month or, ⁓ what am I, what do I want to say? It's gonna be a hundred bucks a month or a thousand dollars for the year if you pay annually, right? So we give them that, give them that discount. And then amazingly they'll see that it went from 22 grand to 19.5. They're thrilled. They're like, you got the job, but I'm going to make.

thousands of dollars on the back end through the hosting, the maintenance, and you know this as well as any other agency owner, over the course of time, there's going to be things they want to change, update, move, and those are all going to be micro projects that are going to get quoted and approved and done.

Toby Cryns (45:16)
Mm-hmm.

Yep. I think one thing that ⁓ I was reminded of as you're sharing all that is maybe for me the thing that resonated most was the three options because I've realized... ⁓ So I haven't been... What I've been doing is like, and I'm trying to change this to the three option model, and this is just recent because I was just getting so sick and tired of writing contracts.

And I think we talked last week or the week before about the most recent contract I wrote up. I was like, I'm not even gonna write a contract. They asked for a contract. I'm just gonna send like three options. Yeah, which option do you like? And so I ended up sending that and I could see a scenario. so like with those longer contracts, I always had hosting as a line item. And there I was like, I don't need hosting. Like, of course.

Kurt von Ahnen (45:49)
Send an email. It'll be this month.

Yeah.

Toby Cryns (46:06)
They just don't understand it. like, if I just included it, that's interesting. And like option B or the silver or the gold, wherever you put it.

Kurt von Ahnen (46:14)
Well, trying to be an expert in everyone else's server is too exhausting.

Toby Cryns (46:18)
Ugh, yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (46:19)
I used to have customers on cloudways on blue host on go daddy on all these things. And I got to be like, you know, this is ridiculous. Like every time on cloudways, I had to go in and play with the, email add on for them. Right. Because no one can ever figure out how email works. And then, when you take a look at the, the other platforms, you know, it was like, I got to increase PHP memory. I've got to increase. When you pick your own provider and you become a hosting reseller of whatever you pick, I don't care who you pick WP engine,

Toby Cryns (46:22)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Kurt von Ahnen (46:49)
or whatever, ⁓ you become an expert on that server and you become comfortable with the setup in that server. All your other problems are gone. Like, so, so now I have things I can do with what I've chosen as a server. I don't even give my clients access to that stuff. Like if I wanted to, I could have unlimited emails for their URL. get this, I got that, I could do the other. And it's like, no, as an agency, I'm not, I'm not entertaining that.

Toby Cryns (47:08)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (47:12)
As an agency, if you want to run your email, can do that through Google Workspace or MX route or whatever. I don't want to manage your email because when that goes south, it seems like the easiest thing in the world, but it's the most confusing thing to fix and it's most time consuming and ridiculous. So just add it to the DNS settings and let them port it wherever they want.

Toby Cryns (47:13)
Do you sell? Yeah.

So this is an interesting, as we talk about upsells, I've been for years going back and forth. I don't sell email, but I've been debating it. know agencies in town that do. And I think of that like seven bucks a month, they're paying Google for five accounts. That's 35 a month. like, it's kind of good money for doing nothing unless something goes horribly wrong, which, that's the thing. When it goes horribly wrong, now you're an IT company and not a web dev company. that's IT is a totally different.

Kurt von Ahnen (47:51)
and that's was horribly wrong.

Yeah.

Toby Cryns (47:59)
beast, you know? Yeah, yeah. Oh, what computer are you running? You know, what software is installed? You know, like all of a sudden you're in like, and but that thinking about, you know, if I was getting started today intentionally, maybe I'll do this. I don't know. I've been having conversations with a friend who's in the IT biz. And I'm like, there's some really good money to be made in IT. And by the way, AI won't touch it for a long, long time. Like AI makes it worse, makes it even more valuable maybe like.

Kurt von Ahnen (48:00)
Did you turn it off and turn it back on?

Yeah.

Every time you break a rule, it bites you in the back. I had...

I had a friend that became a client. They own a race team. They're great people. We put their website up. They had a couple of pre-existing email accounts and I thought I can do the email. I'll just make it easy for him. And I put it in and I said, here's your email, your password, but by here's your settings. So you can, here's the web mail. You can access it on the web anywhere, or you can port it to, know, your phone, your computer, whatever. I mean, it was months, months, like once every two, three weeks. I still can't get email on my iPhone. And I'm like, why?

Toby Cryns (48:59)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (48:59)
Why am I dealing with this? I didn't even charge for it. I was just, you know, an easy add on for a friend. And it's like, and then even if I did charge $7 a month for it, I would have made $42 so far and it would not have paid for that aggravation.

Toby Cryns (49:05)
Right.

Yeah, sure.

But where it pays is the scale. Like, because many small businesses have 10 email accounts, 10, now we're talking 10 times seven, maybe you're charging 10 bucks an account, but now it's a hundred bucks a month, let's say. And pretty much you're never touching it. You're just collecting the check except when something goes wrong or I shouldn't say that because I also did IT ⁓ for Lumi when I was there at Lumi Deodorant. And ⁓ we were fully remote company and I was the CTO. So I did IT, managed that and.

Kurt von Ahnen (49:23)
Yeah.

20 customers. Yeah.

Toby Cryns (49:46)
We used Gmail, it was still a huge headache. Like, you know?

Kurt von Ahnen (49:50)
Yeah,

yeah, I'm not a fan. I'm not a fan of it. It's ⁓ man, that is so interesting to think about that. So agency is listening to us now. I mean, just listen to you and I, like, you know, Matt put us together on the show and it seemed like we were pretty cohesive. It seemed like, these guys are very similar. And then as we discuss things, it's amazing how separate we really are.

Like we do things completely different, but we each have a certain degree of success in the space. And so that's like super, it's super interesting, but it's also like, ⁓ optimistic, right? Like the optimism is I can get into this game. I can start this game. I can make something happen out of it. ⁓ for me, it's always a way of figuring out like, what are your strengths and what do want to be purposeful about developing or selling?

Toby Cryns (50:35)
Here's another, if I could advise these potential youths in your program as they're developing their agency, ⁓ these young adults. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (50:41)
You

Toby Cryns (50:46)
I think this IT idea is what sparked this. IT is boring, straightforward, and hard. And it requires a human on the phone, on the computer. I hear all that, I go, that means it's expensive and you're not gonna be fired.

Kurt von Ahnen (51:04)
I still love that commercial. Okay, click on my computer. What is your computer doing on my computer?

Toby Cryns (51:10)
Ha ha ha ha!

Kurt von Ahnen (51:11)
love the commercial. ⁓ I can see it. just, I think I have a real aversion to nonsense. It would drive me crazy. don't, I just think about my wife and kids running around the house all the time telling me, my phone doesn't work, my phone doesn't work, my computer won't connect. Hey, Roku's not coming on.

Toby Cryns (51:19)
yeah.

yeah, this is the, yeah. That's the thing

like IT more so than web dev, think IT requires a deep appreciation of customer support. And like that sort of, I don't want to say passion, but willingness to engage in customer support all day long. And your pricing reflects that engagement and you know.

Kurt von Ahnen (51:47)
But the more you talk, think about my own house. I don't have a smart house. I have an old house. I don't have a smart house, but I still have like 14 devices connected to my router. So yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe it and you know what? You could offer people like, Hey, you could be on a retainer for $47 a month and w and you will, we'll be here to answer your questions or whatever.

Toby Cryns (51:57)
Uh-huh.

yeah.

huh. I'm thinking way more than, I mean, for business, like a lot of times the, this is, if I, can advise your IT, like, it's, so in the IT space in a business situation is usually charged per seat per computer. And so you can imagine even a small company has 20 computers, maybe if they have five or 10 employees, like you're like, that's per, per computer, you know, that we're going to support. And maybe you're providing the computer that's kind of even the more.

Kurt von Ahnen (52:12)
for goodness' that's huge. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Toby Cryns (52:34)
The deeper you get, you go, we'll rent you the computer and then you're collecting a premium on that.

Kurt von Ahnen (52:39)
Computers have become so cheap lately too. Scary cheap. It's like going to Walmart and looking for a TV.

Toby Cryns (52:41)
Mm-hmm. realized

in town here, and I'm Bettschitz and Hutchinson too, like there's at least one company. I think there's more than one. Cause I was just like, I was like, what is this? was looking for a used Chromebook and I found this website of a company in town that supplies schools with used Chromebooks. And I'm looking at it going, they're making a millions of dollars off this. It's a wonderful idea for a business.

Kurt von Ahnen (53:07)
They are making millions of dollars.

There's a used computer store in town, won't name them. I looked in the window and there was like this MacBook sitting there for like 1200 bucks. And I was like, I could go to Best Buy in Wichita right now and buy a new one cheaper than that. how are they selling these used products, contracts with schools and government agencies and stuff. And it's like they're turning stuff over at like huge profits. It's crazy, crazy talk.

Toby Cryns (53:22)
Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (53:33)
So let's jump into partnerships then, right? That's a good idea to talk about partnerships and then maybe we should think about wrapping up soon. I've had a really fun time talking to you today. ⁓

Toby Cryns (53:37)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, same here.

That's a change for you.

Kurt von Ahnen (53:45)
That's not... ⁓

Toby Cryns (53:48)
What role do partnerships with other agencies play in your agency? Like, do you get business from other agencies?

Kurt von Ahnen (53:55)
I work so well with other agencies. It's easily 65 % of our work. I bet. ⁓ but I think it's the, I think it's the idea that when someone hires us as a subcontractor, I'm really upfront. Like this is what it's going to cost and this is when we'll have it done. And they know like from working with us over time, they just know it's always going to be on time and I'm not going to come asking for more money.

Like it's just, and I think that's why we keep that going as well as we do. We might not be the cheapest source in the country to get something done through, but you know that your calendar is going to make sense and that it's that the budget's the budget, right? And like I said before, ⁓ the dollar's the dollar. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as the customer says yes. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't really matter how expensive it is. As long as the budget exists, then it really comes down to the calendar and can we execute on time?

Toby Cryns (54:28)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (54:50)
So it's big for us. Partnerships are really big with us. Just like we were joking about the used computer store and the contract with the school. If they weren't in partnership with the school, they wouldn't be selling Chromebooks for 600 bucks. They'd be selling used Chromebooks for $175. So yeah, think the partnerships allow us to hold.

Toby Cryns (55:05)
Right, yep.

Kurt von Ahnen (55:11)
That training site I talked about a few episodes ago. I said, it took me five years to make a real sale on that training site. And it's that sale is brokered through another company. So we're basically the subcontracted trainer in the power sport space. I am per customer. I'm giving the training away. ⁓ I mean, almost feels like free, but we're training 10 customers at a time instead of one customer at a time. So overall our revenue.

revenue profile is ⁓ has elevated so yeah in that sense sometimes the pricing model is harder sometimes the pricing model you have to ask yourself hey is it worth it because i'm giving it away ⁓ but because of the volume in this situation our revenue still inflated so it made sense

Toby Cryns (55:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

It's interesting, is that like an asynchronous course, like a video that they take kind of situation, or are you training blended?

Kurt von Ahnen (56:04)
It's blended. It's a blended

one. So every two weeks I do a 90 minute session with the group. And so if you break that down over three months, I'm given nine hours of one-on-one labor away, right? So what is that nine hours? But you know, I used to charge $44,000 for a dealership to go through a year's worth of training. Now we do it in three months with six 90 minute sessions and each dealership's only paying like 2,500 bucks. But if we do

Toby Cryns (56:09)
Okay.

Kurt von Ahnen (56:31)
10 of them at a time, that's $25,000 and we do a revenue split and I'm only really putting nine hours in.

Toby Cryns (56:38)
Yeah, and my experience in Minneapolis working with Minneapolis agencies, this isn't across the board, but usually they want you to work at a pretty, well, let's say usually they wanna pay you 75 to 100 bucks an hour ⁓ for the labor. And we charge double that, more than double that per hour. And there's this thing in like the guitar industry, like let's say you're building acoustic guitars and you have a, let's say you're a.

Small builder, but you know, maybe you produced a thousand guitars last year and you have Costco comes to you. They're like, we need 900 guitars. And so you're building, but they're going to pay way less. They're going to do it at a discount. And so you're going to get like 60 % of that or whatever. Um, and you're like, so you're to make like 60 % of the revenue and you're, but you're going to tie up your whole operations in this lower value work, but the work's guaranteed. This is the struggle I have with.

Kurt von Ahnen (57:17)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (57:31)
my experience working, collaborating, you know, being a subcontractor with agencies. Have you had to, you know, adjust your pricing at all?

Kurt von Ahnen (57:35)
Yeah.

So when I have a consistent contractor with consistent work, we work for pennies on the dollar because it's consistent and it keeps our revenue kind of, kind of more flat. I very purposefully designed my overall business as multiple verticals. So I have the power sports training, the Marine training, the web work through the agency, some public speaking and things like that. So I have all these verticals and together, all those verticals flatten out our earning curve.

so that the Von Annen family can live appropriately, right? So yeah, sometimes when we do the subcontracted work, I mean, it literally is like pennies on the dollar. That's where my frustration comes in as an agency owner, because I'll reach out to people. And again, I post status, whatever. Like wherever you find these people, you reach out and you're like, hey, are you looking for some work? Because they'll post on X, hey, we're looking for work. And I go, great. know, I hit them up. Hey, you're looking for work? And they're like, yeah, but our rate is $96 an hour. And I'm like,

$96 an hour for what? Like I'm giving you the task. You didn't have to sell it. You didn't have to propose it. You didn't have to write a contract. You didn't need a statement of work. You didn't need to, you know, you don't have to follow up with the customer. All you got to do is execute this project. Like you should be able to execute that project for 35, $40 an hour. And people, when you say, could you work for $40 an hour? They lose their minds. They're like, Oh, that's such an insult. And it's like,

Toby Cryns (58:43)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (58:58)
I got a guy in Vietnam that'll do the whole job for 50 bucks. I'm just trying to be cool and keep money in the States. ⁓ that is really, really hard. You know, I've got people in Vietnam, Pakistan, Italy, France, Japan, Australia. And so I got people all over the world, you know, and I could say, could you execute this for me? And more times than not, when they're offshore, they're so happy. They just go,

Toby Cryns (59:04)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (59:23)
Absolutely. Have a tea in two days. It'll be 50 bucks. And then when I try to do stuff in America, they're like, well, that's going to be $95 an hour. It's probably going to take me seven hours. That's going to be $920. You know, it's like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. Like you're not the agency in this case. You are the provider in this case. So how much are you going to charge as a provider? And in a lot of cases, ⁓ people in America aren't flexible that way. So they miss out on the work.

Toby Cryns (59:41)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think part of it for me is like a lack of trust too. Like, cause I would, I would lower my rate if I could trust that there would be X amount of hours per month or per week. But I, I live in constant fear that if I agree to that, that they're going to go somewhere else no matter what and get it done cheaper and really cheaper. That's what they're after. Like maybe.

Kurt von Ahnen (59:59)
Notion it.

So a lot of people are after cheaper, no doubt about it. A lot of people are after cheaper. But again, if you are hired and subcontracted and you deliver on time and under budget, there's no reason for them to go cheaper somewhere else again, because they're not going to find, we've already discussed, like if the phone rings and you answer it, you're already in the top 3 % of agencies out there. You know, if an email comes in and you answer it the same day,

Toby Cryns (1:00:32)
Right. Congratulations.

Kurt von Ahnen (1:00:35)
you're already better than nine percent, you know, 92 % of the other agencies out there. So, so it's, ⁓ if you're attentive to your business and you work on schedule and on time, on budget, they're not going to shop anywhere else. You just have to get that first one or two tasks done, executed and, and, know, reconciled, invoiced and paid for cleanly. And if that happens, Bob's your uncle, they're, they're your client for life.

Toby Cryns (1:00:38)
Yeah.

Yeah. Great. Let's.

Kurt von Ahnen (1:01:00)
And if they tried something

cheaper, if they try going somewhere else, to me, I always say, don't worry about it. I had someone just the other day reach out to me. They were ghosted by a contractor and a client. So one of those where they, someone stole the other and then both of them disappeared. Don't answer emails, don't answer phone calls, nothing, right? And he was really upset about it. And so he reaches out to me he's like, I'm really upset. You know, I've been ghosted, blah, blah. And I had to say, wait a minute, hold on, hold on. When you get ghosted,

Toby Cryns (1:01:13)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (1:01:25)
It's not your fault. It's not your fault. Human tendency is when you do something unethical, you are either embarrassed or ashamed or you feel guilty, like whatever. So you don't want to conversate or initiate contact with someone that you've offended. So if someone ghosts you, you didn't do anything wrong. Cause if you did something wrong, human nature is they couldn't wait to send you a shitty email that says, you blew it because you didn't treat me right. I went somewhere else.

Toby Cryns (1:01:53)
Right.

Kurt von Ahnen (1:01:53)
Like

if it was your fault, you would get that communication. If it's their fault, they're just going to ghost you and disappear somewhere. And so I'm like, so if you got ghosted, rest assured it wasn't your fault, right? They did something unethical. They did something that they're not happy about. They have a negative feeling that is all theirs. Don't make it yours. And then just move on. And then you know what? When they screw it all up and they realize they had the right choice the first time, they're going to come back. And guess what? Your prices are going to increase.

Toby Cryns (1:02:20)
The classic Thank You Kurt. That's a great place to end actually and by the way listener if you've made it to this point You're an hour in like and subscribe where if you're If you're in a position to like and subscribe it's free and it helps the algorithm allegedly And also like we're not being paid. However, Matt will give us a good pat on the back if we get likes on this

Kurt von Ahnen (1:02:23)
Thank you for your time.

You're 92 % better than the rest of the listeners.

Toby Cryns (1:02:48)
Help us out. Yeah. So thanks everybody. This has been ⁓ another episode of Whose WordPress Agency is this Anyway with ⁓ Kurt Van Anen. I'm Toby Kreins.

Kurt von Ahnen (1:02:49)
some comments, some likes, maybe a couple of video testimonials.