The WP Minute+

Kurt von Ahnen (00:01)
Hey, listeners and viewers, welcome back to another episode of Whose WordPress Agency is This Anyway? My name is Kurt Von Ahnen. I'll be one of the co-hosts today, and Toby Crines, my co-host, is with me again as well. Toby, how's your week?

Toby Cryns (00:16)
going great. know, something came up that I had a question about though. was really curious about this and I know, it just popped in my head, maybe you have an answer. Kurt, when should an agency owner beg their clients to stay out of AI?

Kurt von Ahnen (00:20)
He goes right into questions. That was great. I got a question.

Immediately. I'm such a hypocrite on this. I'm all over the place on this topic. I am. I have no consistency whatsoever. I'm a hypocrite because I use AI. I do. I use AI. But I wouldn't hand a gun to somebody at a range that had never had training on how to use a gun. You know what I mean?

Like I used to teach people how to ride motorcycles for the MSF. And I also used to have my own road racing school. I would not take somebody who hadn't been through rudimentary training to a racetrack and say, this is a motorcycle. Good luck. And I think that's what we're doing with AI to a certain extent. I think we have created through different channels, through different communications that AI is this magic automatic.

Wonderful tool and it's not it you have to manage it have to use it like a tool you have to be a craftsman To a certain extent and people don't understand it and they're coming up with weird results And they're trying to give it to me to make magic with it, and I'm not doing it

Toby Cryns (01:39)
You don't like that, huh? Don't like when people hand you AI crap that doesn't work. They want you to fix it.

Kurt von Ahnen (01:45)
I literally have a new client meeting this afternoon. I can't make this up. I can't even make it up. And they watch my stuff. So this will be even funnier. They reached out to me and they said, hey, I've been watching your stuff. Hey, I saw that thing you wrote about AI. And then he says, my girlfriend wants to make this project. And I don't want to disclose what the whole project's about. But she wants to make this project. And I go, OK, so you're going to want something that

takes a group of people, segments them, pairs them, does this, gets results, does some kind of evaluation, gets results from those pairings and then automate some kind of messaging after that. And he goes, yeah, you act like you know what you're doing. You know, she said she has the backend mostly figured out, she, but she couldn't get the front end to work. And I was like, really? And how did this magic, magic backend come together? You know, and of course nothing works.

They've got snippets of code from this, from that, from the other. Maybe they're building something for a mobile app on one screen. They're building something for a PC app on another screen. They're in some kind of SaaS. You know, like if you plug this into Kajabi, this would work. Well, guess what? You don't have Kajabi. Like, what are you doing? AI is grabbing these snippets of code from all over the place. And if you don't know what that code is, you're just handling a bowl of spaghetti to some guy and saying, here, make magic happen. That's not

It's not gonna work.

Toby Cryns (03:08)
I think too, like maybe it's like the old, takes 20 % of the time to get 80 % of the way there. And then like they hand you that 20%. It's not working, but it's still going to take 80 % of the time to get it working, let alone sold.

Kurt von Ahnen (03:24)
Well, see, that's the other side of the conversation, Toby. That's where the real disconnect is. Because they give me that product, and I go, OK. Because I've had this conversation with people. I go, OK, so we've got this. We've got this. This is a good starting point. I see what you're trying to do here. Blah, blah. I can share this with the team. And they're like, well, I'm going to need you to sign an NDA. An NDA in what? You've got nothing that works. But whatever.

Right? You need me to sign an NDA. Great. Let's take a look at this. And then I go, OK. So we're probably looking between 150 and 200 hours to sort this and make this into something that's not only manageable and functional, but somewhat marketable. Right? And so, yeah.

Toby Cryns (04:07)
Quick question, if I can interject, did

they ask ChatGBT to sign this NDA? did they? They just gave it, no? interesting, okay, huh.

Kurt von Ahnen (04:14)
Yeah, I don't think so. I don't think so.

You know, and of course, chat GPT just takes all of their inputs and turns it into their large language model, right? But when I say we're looking at 150 to 200 hours to take this bowl of spaghetti and straighten it out and make something that's not only functional, but marketable and based on our agency rate, here's your dollar and

to watch their head explode is like, it's crazy. so your question is when should an agency owner beg people to stay out of AI? For me, it's immediate. It's immediate. Because I'm like, all you're doing is creating yourself this unrealistic expectation. And then when I hit you with the proposal, you explode. Because you go, well, I just did all this part for free. And you're like, you just did all this that doesn't work for free. Now you're asking me to make something work.

and making something work takes money.

Toby Cryns (05:10)
Yeah. So, let's think.

Kurt von Ahnen (05:12)
But then you know the offer that comes next.

Toby Cryns (05:16)
that

Kurt von Ahnen (05:16)
This is such a great idea. I was really just looking for a partner, somebody that would be willing to do this for sweat equity. And I'll give you part ownership in our product and how we sell it. I'm willing to give you 10%, bro.

Toby Cryns (05:20)
Yeah, of course. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓

huh. Yeah.

Wow, that's a good percentage. Yeah. Take that offer.

Kurt von Ahnen (05:33)
10 % of nothing ain't gonna bite my family any eggs.

Toby Cryns (05:36)
I wonder like 10 % of that company might be worth like 10 hours of me working with their chat GPT and trying to get it work. I'd be like, maybe I would take that. If I can get this done in 10 hours with your GPT, maybe.

Kurt von Ahnen (05:55)
All right, well, think we've kind of killed. You know what? I'm going to put it right back to you. I think you're picking on me with this AI subject, because you know I have AI fatigue in the worst way. What's it like on your side of the state?

Toby Cryns (06:08)
I'll tell you what, I spent four hours the other day with somebody who's deep in this stuff, just trying to stand up an app using, let's say, Vercell, like one of these AI clients, just trying to get it to like sync with my Gmail, because I wanted to pull my Gmail data out and then build like a CRM basically, like a really basic CRM for myself.

seems really easy, but then we're doing it and I'm talking to this person, they're like, yeah, oh, you want actual Gmail data? That's really hard to figure out. Like, what? But this is like what I need. This is like, why would anyone want anything else? And it's same, by the way, the same experience with trying to connect it to WordPress. It's like, well, your routes aren't correct. And you're like, well, how do I tell you what the routes are?

Kurt von Ahnen (06:54)
Yeah. Yeah. And with ChatGPT, you have to be like, you have to have the conversation on three different planes, right? So you have to be like, ask me the question that would best help you to help me. Like, this is

Toby Cryns (07:06)
Right.

So here's an interesting question though. Like, like, let's just look at it like, okay, can we convert that to a client? What might that look like when the person comes with this like 200 hour project, but really they have a budget for 30 hours? How do you convert that into a client? Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (07:27)
I don't.

I just don't. I used to see, and that's the difference between being a seasoned agency and being someone that's launched and always looking for that. You know, you got to find the next deal. You got to find the next deal. You got to find the next deal. Once you have some skin in the game and you've been at it for a while, you can say, that's not a really good fit for us. And then magically, like we discussed in another episode, when you have the courage to say no, something better always comes along.

You just have to have the courage to say no and the strength of position to wait it out. You know?

Toby Cryns (07:58)
Yeah. I wonder

though, like, let's say I'm someone without any coding ability and I'm like starting an agency. Maybe I would take that project. Like just being like, yeah, my, my process is I go to chat, GBT and say all the things and cross my fingers and.

Kurt von Ahnen (08:15)
Yeah, but that's a lot of prayer and crossing fingers and a lot of time on a keyboard that may or may not come in a, because at the end of the day, whatever money you collect from somebody to execute, if you fail to execute, they have recourse against you. So how much free time can you give away?

Toby Cryns (08:30)
Mm-hmm.

Maybe. I think there's possibilities there for the right, know, cause let's say you're just billing. Let's say you sell it as hourly hypothetically. You're like, you're not a seasoned agency. just like, Hey, I'm going to invest 30 hours in your chat. GPT client. You're going to have the record of everything. We'll see where we get. could, I could see that.

Kurt von Ahnen (08:43)
⁓ okay.

Yeah, I'll help you get to the next step.

Toby Cryns (08:55)
Yeah, right. Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (08:57)
and I'll still give you something that doesn't work. ⁓ man. All right. So let's go to another question. Let's say that you do that and you end up having the week from hell. How do you get over the week from hell?

Toby Cryns (08:59)
Yeah.

Uh-huh.

This is the great American question. This is the work-life balance question. So I was reading a book, can't remember what it's called, but the gist of it was like, you're better off, if the issue is like, you're just doing the too many hours in one thing that's like killing you, you're better off doing like, let's say you did 60 hours of chat GBT stuff and you hate it. You hate it every minute of it. Like you're better off just saying, I'm gonna do 10 hour,

Five hours of that a week, one hour a day, and it'll take me 10 times as long or whatever. That's the proactive way. Now that's not what happens to me in real life. What happens to me in real life is, like yesterday, I didn't work at all, because I had life just coming at me from a hundred different directions, and like I had work to do. And so today I woke up, like, woke up early, got up at 5 a.m., went straight to work. I missed a thing that I wanted to do with my son, and you know,

I think like,

like part of it for me is like I don't know how to avoid it like maybe you do but like I think step one is just recognizing what just happened and I don't know I don't know what to do from there what do you think

Kurt von Ahnen (10:25)
I come from, you know, my background in power sports and Marine and mechanical things. And so I default to more of an analytical mind space where I go, okay, let's do a root cause analysis. How did that happen? You know, so when things two nights ago is perfect example, two nights ago, I'm like, all right, we have a client, we're going to upgrade their server. It's going to be, it's a migration within the same host, but it's going to change servers.

blah, blah, right? Should be easy. Should be easy. So I get the host and I start to say, Hey, I need you to move this from here to here. Now in big boy land, that should be all I had to do in big boy land. It should be, I need you to move this from here to here. And I need you to send me a text message when it's done. That should be it. Toby, I was up till two o'clock in the morning.

Toby Cryns (10:52)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (11:17)
Bloody eyed, just looking at the screen. And then of course I'm clearing out my Slack while I'm trying to chat with this guy that, you know, Hey, the website's not up yet. What's up with the SSL security? How come the SSL security didn't migrate over? What's with this? What's with this? Well, it's supposed to take a minute. It's propagated. Let me, you know what? I'll look up manage my DNS for you since you apparently don't know how, right? And I'm, and I'm doing it. And I'm thinking, what did I get an apprentice? Like what is happening? And it just spooled out of control. And the later it got, the more irritated I got.

Toby Cryns (11:34)
Right. Right.

Uh-huh.

Kurt von Ahnen (11:47)
And you have to remember what Thursdays are for me. Thursdays are my public speaking day, right? That's I have a live at nine. I have a live at 10. I have a live at 11, one at 12 and one at two. Like I am on zoom all day. So I'm up till two the night before dealing with this. And then, and so through that process comes the root cause analysis, right? How did I, how could I have planned this better? Why did I choose to do this Wednesday evening?

you know, maybe next time I'm going to do like what Toby said in the last episode, do something straight up at noon. I'm just going to shut you down at noon on a Monday. ⁓ But, but it's that root cause analysis, right? So it's like plan for the worst. And then when it goes better, take that as the bonus rather than plan for smooth and then get upset when it turns to crap.

Toby Cryns (12:21)
Yeah. Yeah.

So I had this thought in reaction to what you were saying, Kurt. Sometimes what I'll do, it's kind of like self therapy, because the question is like, okay, you've kind of discovered the cause, that takes some space to do. And then you're like, what do I do with that? One thing I do sometimes is write a blog post about it. I try to find that nugget, and then I'll be like, here's what happened. Here's how I'm gonna try to do better next time. And here's how it relates to the bigger world at large. Maybe you can try this. Here's an example from...

Star Trek that describes this, you The other thing I'll sometimes do is I'll just jot it down as like a note in like my Google Keep, just whatever notes app. And then I'll, the idea is I have a running list of things I'm gonna talk with my business coach about. By the way, plug for Score, it's a federal program, free business coaching. Amazing, I've had the same business coach for seven years maybe. We talk once a month.

Kurt von Ahnen (13:17)
you

Toby Cryns (13:31)
and it's been amazing for me. can't recommend it enough. know people have had, know, it depends who you get. so what I'll try to do, if you don't find one, you can always hire a coach. You could hire Kurt, for example.

Kurt von Ahnen (13:39)
Side note,

I made the website for the Albuquerque branch of score.

Toby Cryns (13:45)
There you go. Oh, there you go. So you know about it. I'm a huge fan of score. It's free again. If you need a business coach or you're curious about if you need one, go there, try it, see how it goes. But so I'll bring that stuff up with my business coach. We'll talk through it. And that's always nice too. It's like the business coaching to me is like therapy for business. Like it's like I go there with my business problems and we rarely talk. Sometimes personal stuff comes up, but usually in the context of business and

It's really helpful. So I do like my normal therapy and then my business therapy. It's like great. So.

Kurt von Ahnen (14:20)
breaking things into pieces. So go ahead. No, I, I feel like I'm stepping on, on, on your talk there, but when you meet with these coaches, are you guys discussing marketing techniques and hiring and firing and what inventory looks like and all that kind of stuff?

Toby Cryns (14:22)
Yeah, and yeah, sorry.

Yeah,

it's all the things. So basically the question that he always asks is like, what's going on today in your business? know, like, what's on your list? And so it could be all that. I talked to him earlier this week and we talked about hiring firing, like parameters for like, hey, let's say we're hiring, I'm thinking about hiring someone. What should I be thinking about? And we talked a lot about marketing. So I'm doing a lot of like LinkedIn marketing. And so we talked a lot about that.

and then just like, so here's an issue that we could talk about. So, there's this idea in business, it comes from, I read it in traction. I'm sure it exists in other business frameworks, but the gist of it is, right person, right seat. So you're going to hire good, you hope to hire good people that are good fit with your company. Then you hope they have the right skills for the job that you offer them. And sometimes you have a great fit, sometimes not.

And that was one thing I talked about with my business coach. And Kurt, you do a lot of, you have a good portfolio of developers and designers that you work with. I think most of them are part-time, right?

Kurt von Ahnen (15:38)
Yeah, I don't have any full-time or any W2 employees.

Toby Cryns (15:42)
So how do you think about this? Like let's say somebody's not, have you ever experienced a time where you had a great person but they weren't the right fit?

Kurt von Ahnen (15:52)
Yeah, yeah. A couple of times, you know, and it's, I want to get this out of the way real quick. A lot of agency owners, when you talk to them, they'll say, well, I just, I feel like I can't get any of these contractors to take ownership of the project. And it's like, well, of course not. They don't own the, it's not, you hired them to do a task. What ownership do you think they took in this? Like,

But by the same token, that comes into the pay scale too, right? I'm not paying you as if you found the client, you know, and mortgaged your house to grow your own agency and are out there, you know, risking reputation to do these jobs. All you're doing is a task. So I'm not paying you $150 an hour to do something. I'm paying you maybe $60 an hour to do something. And I don't expect you to have ownership of it. I expect you to get the task done, right? And so...

it's just having that very super realistic expectation. And so I have had some that not only didn't take ownership, but just, was like pulling teeth to get the product. And that's where I'm like, okay, if we're not going to work well together, it's not going to work. Right. The other side of the coin is people that take too much ownership of the task. Well, I really need to meet with the client directly because I have some questions on button. No, you know,

You don't need to. I've got it. I'm not looking for conflicting messages going out to my clients. I'm not looking for anything strange. I just want you to do the task, right? And then the task is this much. And so I've had experiences with both of those where either people weren't connected enough or were too connected. And I had to say, Hey, you know, you either have to, I either need you to back off of this a little bit, or I'm going to have to find another provider.

And of course, their instant response is, I'm just trying to show that I care. I'm just trying to deliver the best. And I get that you are, but you're not a partner. You're someone doing a task. And I, and I need you to recognize, conversely, I subcontract for a fair number of people. And it's funny because they'll say, Kurt, I need you to join the sales call. I need you to be on this zoom thing. All right. You're going to be our sales engineer for this project. And I always very plainly say, look,

This is your rodeo. You're running this thing. I'm there to answer questions. That's it. I'm not there to pitch, to sell, to give numbers. I'm answering technical questions and that that's my role on this call. And I think it's really important just to define what the roles are, what the expectations are, what the deliverable deliverables will be. And then it's easy for me if they they if they fail in those regards, then I just hire the replacement.

Toby Cryns (18:38)
There's, this question of ownership is really interesting to me because I've, I have been in a position where, you know, there have been times. say I've learned my lesson many times. So these days I'm pretty good, but, there was a time when I was working subbing. I was working for an agency as a contractor and I was in-house. This was early in my career. and I didn't speak up enough.

And like I wanted to, but I was afraid I would like annoy them. And then the lesson I learned in that was like, ⁓ if you have questions, you have to ask them. And if you don't ask them, people assume, you know, the answer. And so I just kept getting behind and behind, and then I'd ended up, I'm sure they ended up just being like, I'm glad the contract is over. Have a nice life. You know, like.

Kurt von Ahnen (19:06)
Thank

Yeah,

but there's an interesting thing that you, that you just brought up, right? If you have a question, need to answer, ask the question, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. To me, it comes down. It's a, you know, location, location, location. So if I have a question, cause I'm sitting in on the meeting with the client and the person I'm subcontracting with, I'm not asking that question.

I'm asking that question when it's me and the contractor together and I'm going to say, Hey, I'm going to need some clarity on this from this meeting. didn't quite understand. Can you give me, you know, your, your perspective of this? Right. I tried, I try my best to keep my trap shut in front of clients because I have a natural leadership tendency. And what happens is just through communication in a meeting atmosphere.

the clients tend to gravitate towards me as like the project manager. I'm not the project manager, I'm doing a task. And so I really try to keep my trap shut and I save my questions for one-on-one with the actual provider.

Toby Cryns (20:14)
Right.

I second that. So let's say you're a contractor, you're in a meeting. Ideally, like, I think your perspective should be like, just shut up and listen. Even if you have questions, write them down on paper, ask your, whoever's hiring you later. Cause I, would, yeah, exactly. I was in one of those calls. I remember the room, it would have been like 2013. I was, it was an agency in St. Paul, Minnesota. And with some like millionaires, they were like a car club or something that was the client.

Kurt von Ahnen (20:35)
Maybe slide it across the table.

Toby Cryns (20:51)
And they gave me a budget. They're like, Toby, we need you to do X, and Z for like $3,000 or something. And I was like, OK, no problem. And then I was on the call with the client. And they're like, we need you to do X, Z, and ABC. And I said, well, that's not in the budget. And then I remember after the call, the guy that hired me was like furious that I said that. And I was just like, just a good learning experience.

Just say yes, because like it's the agency's job to figure out the budget and to iron out details and to follow up with questions and.

Kurt von Ahnen (21:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, I'm notorious for saying, because I take a ton of notes. I use a remarkable tablet for like every conversation I have. And so I take a ton of notes. I write everything down. And if I'm in that situation, I'll say, all right, I've made a notation of your most recent requests or your whatever. And I'll discuss that with the provider. We'll make sure it falls into your needs. And then they're like, OK, yeah, yeah, great, great, great. And then I go back to the guy that hired me and I go, your client has expectations up here and your budget is here.

Maybe I just don't understand something. Can you give me some clarity on, you know, how are you going to compensate me to do all these wonderful things?

Toby Cryns (21:53)
⁓

There's also a thing as an agency owner where it's okay to let things go. You have questions, you don't need every question answered. You don't need every detail ironed out. You can finesse it later a lot of times. A lot of times someone will say something, like, that doesn't fit at all, but I'll just deal with that later when we...

When it comes up, when I deliver the design, I'll be like, you know, we couldn't do the thing you wanted. So, and usually, I mean, if you do it right and you're an artist about it, it's going to be great.

Kurt von Ahnen (22:28)
Yeah, well, it just comes down to communication, clarity, and managing the project. I'm looking at our time. I think we have enough time to talk about it. You would put a note in here about project management. how do you, I'll defer to you. What kind of questions do you have about project management?

Toby Cryns (22:45)
I mean, so I think I'm a decent project manager. However, I hired a project manager in January who's light years better than me at project management, just a fact. And I was like, it turns out I don't know project management. And she is now rebuilding our whole project management workflow and we're changing tools. We use Basecamp, we're switching to ClickUp and doing a number of things. But part of what was really cool was like,

Kurt von Ahnen (22:58)
Ooh!

Toby Cryns (23:12)
my whole life, my whole working life, 20 years, like I've had a hard time like communicating timelines and deliverables and what's late, what's on time, like that sort of thing. What do we need from you and when? And she came in day one, and this is gonna sound dumb, but she pulls up notion.com and she's like, hey, I built this out for you and it has everything you've been talking about wanting. And I'm like, that was like, you know, a couple hours, let's say a day of her work maybe. I'm like, thank you. You are a good project manager.

Kurt von Ahnen (23:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

here's a dashboard. Fill in the blanks.

Toby Cryns (23:43)
Right. I think project management is one of the least celebrated, wrongly so. Like, it should be highly treasured and highly celebrated in our industry and culture, whatever.

Kurt von Ahnen (23:55)
I am a better project manager than I am developer. And I tell people that all the time. I mean, it's not a pride issue for me at all. Like there's a lot of great developers out there and here's the great news. I'm a really good project manager. So if I get into a project with a client and it needs some other features, I'll hire the developer, right? Like that's how my agency works.

I, again, with the background in power sports and Marine and all that, and, and, know, having to release things on a corporate schedule, I got really used to managing that way. And when I was the, publication and training manager for Suzuki, Suzuki of America, I had a team of six people and we did e-learning recalls, service manuals. I mean, it was like all this stuff.

And then I started using these tools where I would track the time that each person spent on each task. Now they hated me at first. The team hated it. You're micromanaging me. I'm not micromanaging. Here's the deal. The company every year asks us to do something, right? And if we have an established track record of how long things take, we're able to give them an actual budget to do things instead of like winging it, right?

because the vice presidents would love to wing things. They would start every conversation with all you got to do is, all right? So I would say, well, all we got to do is refer to when we did this last year and it took 200 hours, you know? And so I took that experience and I rolled it over into my own agency. And so every task that we do breaks into like, there's projects, there's milestones, there's Gantt charts to tell us when things are due, when it's done. We tell clients like,

Toby Cryns (25:21)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (25:35)
You have to have your logo and your about us paragraphs to us by such and such a day in order for us to build that. And then we hold to the deadlines and to the budgets by monitoring that time really, really closely. And if the client changes the statement of work, we're able to go back to that project management tool and we're able to say, Hey, you know, we allotted you 75 hours for this project. You're at 60 hours so far, and now you're adding this new content.

So we either need to disallow this new content because it goes past this statement of work. We need or we need to extend the deadline or we need to talk about extending the budget, you know, which is it you'd like to do. having that project management software in place for me gives me the strength and confidence to have those conversations with justification. Whereas without that tool, I'm really just saying, gee, it'd be really nice if he gave me an extra five thousand dollars this month. And that's

That to me is a weak way to have the conversation.

Toby Cryns (26:35)
Yeah, I also think that you bring up a great point. like one, the obvious way to use time management is the up work way. You worked X hours, you get paid for Y dollars. ⁓ Then there's this idea that you did, you talked about, it's like a budgeting tool for the future. Like there's this, I use it, and I'm sure you do too, like in the present as well. Like, so we will sell hours sometimes, but we very rarely like, we usually work.

Kurt von Ahnen (26:44)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (27:01)
quite a few more than we've sold and we don't bill them extra. And the idea is like, I know in my head, like, I have a feel for like, this might not be a great way to run a business by the way. But what I try to do is like align what I believe the client's expectations are with the amount we're charging. And so some of the time like, I have conversations sometimes with my project manager where she's like, should we bill for this thing? I'm like,

Kurt von Ahnen (27:03)
Then you're sold, yeah.

Toby Cryns (27:26)
Let's pull up the hours from last month. They paid for 10 hours, we worked 12. Yeah, let's bill for that thing and let's bill like in a way that really makes sense for us this time. know.

Kurt von Ahnen (27:37)
It's really hard to build based on clients expectations though, because it's up to us to set the expectation of the client. So that is a very difficult conversation. Clients expect everything, everything. And I've noticed on projects, extended larger projects where maybe someone else is running it. Maybe you're subcontracting.

Toby Cryns (27:46)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (27:59)
someone else is running the project and they go, well, this didn't work out right. We're just going to need to fix that. this is different. We're going to need to, you know, Hey, the client gave us this content. That's subpar. We need to re-edit all this content. Right. And, and I'm going, well, that's 40 hours. That's 50 hours. That's well, we're just going to need to suck that up. Well, what happens is six months into the project, you've sucked up a hundred hours worth of free work. And now the client

has morphed their expectations into, I'm not going to give you another dime and this thing's going to be perfect when it's done. And they've given you subpar content to start with. So you got to be really, really careful about scope creep, expectations. Every now and then you got to circle the wagons and go back to the original document and go, let's review the original scope of work. This is what was promised. This is what's been executed so far. This is what's left to do.

you know, in this status meeting, is there anything you would like to change or augment? And then when they say, yeah, I want this, this, and this, OK, great. That steps outside that scope of work. We're going to need to look at either the deadline, the budget, or both.

Toby Cryns (29:05)
I think there's a tendency, well, this has been my experience and I think it's been a lot of my colleagues experience, but probably not all. That the people who are delivering the work are ill-suited and maybe even the people who own the company are ill-suited to have those hard conversations with the client. ⁓ And I think like, and we've talked about this, like once I involve my project manager in

Kurt von Ahnen (29:23)
Yes.

Toby Cryns (29:30)
client communication about hours and stuff, it got, we made way more money. It's cause I'm just like, you have the hard conversation. I'm afraid to like, and.

Kurt von Ahnen (29:35)
Yeah.

Yeah. Well,

it's hard because, and I'm just going by personality types, right? There's the four main personality types. And so you could be a leader, you could be an entertainer, an analyst, you could be someone that's more emotional. And so typically artists, creative types tend to be more emotional and more people pleasing. And so they'll be more flexible. Whereas someone that's more in the leadership or analyst mindset is going to be like, this is very A and B, black and white.

We're, we're, you know, we can be as creative as you want us to be, but it also extends the black and white area of the spreadsheet. So, so what do you want to do? And I think that that is, and it's really important to have those conversations like on purpose throughout an extended project, right? Like 25 % of the way through 50 % of the way through 75 % of the way through, because guarantee you by the time you get to 75 % of the project, the clients morph their expectations based on looking at.

50 other websites. I can't tell you how many times I'll be almost done with something and I'll be like, all right. And they'll say, we got this one extra page we need to design. I go, OK, great. I'm going to create that based on the look of the existing website. We're going to stick with continuity and we're going to build this for you. And I'll send you a sample on Tuesday. And then I send them the sample and I don't get any feedback. And then a week goes by and I go, hey, you didn't give me any feedback on that. And they go, well, could you look at this other website I saw? I really like the way this one's laid out.

And it's like, wait a minute, we already built you 75 pages for this website that looked this way. And now you're telling me to look at something completely removed and distanced from the project we've already built. So do you want to change the look and feel of the whole project or just this one page? Or do you want to take my advice and just stick with what we built?

Toby Cryns (31:08)
Mm-hmm.

I think I'm I'm trying to like, I'm more having that conversation. It's the two hours beyond that I have trouble with emotionally.

Kurt von Ahnen (31:35)
You

Yeah. Well, I can certainly take a look at that other website, but that's probably going to add another six or seven hours of design implementation to the project. Are you prepared to add $800 to the invoice?

Toby Cryns (31:55)
Yeah, and it's not, I think like what it is is it's...

It's the ability, it's like stepping, taking the time to step back. And maybe it's like the, these 10 hour projects might just be a bad fit for this, cause you're like, we're only, it's only 10 hours. Like, and I have to spend two hours having a conversation about hours. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (32:15)
Yeah.

Well, that's the other side though, right? Like if you use real project management software, for instance, I use, I don't even use a WordPress product and it's not a commercial. I use SweetDash. SweetDash is a SaaS platform that does all these cool things for me. does invoicing and proposals and contracts and all these things. And so when I use that, when I'm building a proposal, even if it's a 10 hour project, I'm going to build in two extra hours for meetings.

and it's going to become part of the proposal. Like I expect I'm going to have to meet with you. So, and I have to compensate myself for that time.

Toby Cryns (32:49)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's a great point. Like, and that I don't do well. It's like everybody should include, let's say it's 15%, whatever that markup it is for like meetings and admin, just your own admin, even if you could even bill more for the project manager maybe, but like, I don't do a good job of that. And I would love to do a better job. And you're totally right. I think you like every...

Every time you interact with a client or don't interact, you're communicating something. And I think like.

If you're getting started, that's probably one great lesson to think about. Or even if you're experienced, I try to think about that all the time, regardless, I think.

Kurt von Ahnen (33:33)
When

I am executing in my other world of business consulting, I try to train leaders on this whole idea of emotional bank accounts. And I did not make this theory up. I don't know who did, but I teach it a lot. And that is, like you just said, every interaction, positive or negative, is either an emotional deposit or an emotional withdrawal in the big relationship that is business. And so if I

If I go somebody that is an, that, is an emotional withdrawal. If I give somebody a proactive, you know, call or email, I'll tell them the status of the project. That's an emotional deposit. And so the whole idea through the relationship and managing the relationship with my clients is that I want to make as many emotional deposits on purpose as possible because sooner or later I'm going to have to make a withdrawal and I want to make sure that my account doesn't go negative.

So when I got to come to somebody and say, hey, you asked for this extra thing, it's going to be an extra five hours, that's going to be 800 bucks. I just want to make sure we have the budget before we implement. That's an emotional withdrawal. So I want to make sure I've made enough emotional deposits in the relationship that I can confidently go in and make that withdrawal.

Toby Cryns (34:42)
Mm-hmm.

Yep. I'm going change the subject a little here. This is more technical, but also related to project management. When do you grant admin access to people outside the agency? Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (34:59)
I was hoping

you would tell me.

Toby Cryns (35:02)
HAHAHAHA

Kurt von Ahnen (35:06)
For me, I would love to get feedback from everybody else on this. Toby, to be honest with you, you could go into post status and see 75 different opinions on this topic. You're building something for a customer. WordPress is all about ownership and flexibility. And so the obvious answer that a lot of people have is, well, it's their website. You've got to give them access right away.

And then the other side of me is like, I don't even know if I want them to have admin access after I give them the site. and I already know what Kevin Geary thinks. Kevin Geary thinks that if you have a client that needs admin access, you don't have a client. Like he believes he builds the sites, he maintains the sites. He is the professional working for them. They're running their business and he's running the site. And so they shouldn't need admin access. Like that's one of his theories.

At least that was one of his theories eight months ago on a podcast. So, so I really struggle with it because let's say you build, let's say you build a dynamic interactive website. It's got e-learning, a CRM tool, the event manager. It's got all these things that are interlinked and crazy, right? And it's all based on like roles and tags and automations and all these things. And then,

The client goes in with admin access and goes, gosh, I really don't use all these tags all that much. I think I'll just delete some of these. And then all your automations break. ⁓ Where does that fall? Right? So then you're like, ugh. You know, I could go back and I upload a backup and restore everything through a backup. But then I lose, it's a dynamic website. I lose all the transactions between the backup and today. Right?

Toby Cryns (36:32)
Mm-hmm.

Right?

Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (36:51)
And then other people say, well, you should back up every 24 hours. Okay, great. But let's say the backup is 48, 72, 90 hours old, and it's a website with 5,000 members in it. There could be 250 transactions that get lost and you don't, can't have that happen.

Toby Cryns (37:09)
Yeah.

think like to me, one possible way to look at it is like, got to cover your ass as a agency. And if it hasn't been delivered yet, like let's say you're contracted to deliver a site that works. I mean, my gut reaction is like, you got to keep them out of it because it's your butt on the line. But I also break that rule sometimes like.

Kurt von Ahnen (37:16)
Yeah, if you break this.

Yeah.

I've noticed that every time I have a rule and I break it, I resent the idea that I broke the rule.

Toby Cryns (37:40)
Yeah. You know, earlier you were talking about setting expectations and that's probably the answer here. Like you gotta, whether you're saying they never get access or they get access after you launch or whatever it is, like set the expectation, you know. Cause the expectation could be whatever you decide it is as long as you're firm about it.

Kurt von Ahnen (37:59)
Yeah, it's really unique. I would say, thinking that we make this show, these episodes for other agencies, I think it's really, really interesting that there literally is an unlimited way to do things or implement things in your own business. But it would be nice if there were some kind of best practices where it was more of a uniformed experience, right? ⁓

Toby Cryns (38:22)
Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (38:24)
I get heartbroken every time I see somebody post up on Reddit or post status or somewhere. Well, sure enough, you know, I made the website and then the customer, the customer migrated it and didn't pay me, you know, and it's just like, well, part of me wants to say shame on you. Cause that's not, I don't do business that way. I, we get prepaid. Our services are all prepaid. We do not make loans to customers. Customers pay for services. And that's, that's it. End of story.

Toby Cryns (38:36)
Yeah, right.

Kurt von Ahnen (38:53)
But we deliver that policy in a way that sets the expectations and gets adopted well. And if clients don't want to prepay for services, I go back to Kevin Geary's example. They're not clients. If they don't have the budget today, what makes me think they're going to have the budget three months from now to pay me then?

Toby Cryns (39:11)
Mm-hmm.

As you say that, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I have one client that's late right now on a hosting payment and just...

Kurt von Ahnen (39:21)
Well, that's so month to month. So I have a lot of clients on hosting as well, but they pay for the month in advance. Right. So let's say they're 25 days late. I'm still not really out of pocket. I'm not out of pocket till they're 30 days late. Right. And then I, then I send them reminders and I re-up them and you know, and I send the next invoice. So now you owe me two invoices. Right. So I have one customer right now that is

Toby Cryns (39:36)
Yeah.

So you.

Kurt von Ahnen (39:49)
25 days late or some crud like that right because I send it on the first they get 10 days to pay and And then the the clock on being late happens, but realistically that was to pay a month in advance for services anyway So I'm not really out of pocket until they go past that month's line And then what happens is typically they pay the month they're late on but they're instantly still late on the existing month But then the hard decision is if that goes

Toby Cryns (39:52)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (40:19)
over 60 days, I got to discontinue services or get used to the idea I'm going to give them free hosting for the rest of their lives.

Toby Cryns (40:28)
Yeah. And the thing is, like, if this was any other company, they would just shut them off. I shouldn't say any of it. If this was Google, Facebook, name the company, Amazon, they're just shutting you down. And so like, I know what you're talking about. And I'm like, why don't we just do that?

Kurt von Ahnen (40:35)
yeah, yeah, you're done.

Well, part of that is because of this consumerism mentality that we've put out there and our fear of social media. You know, we work so hard to brand ourselves as being these awesome, flexible, you know, design on the fly agencies. And then we cut somebody off and they jump on X or Facebook and go, these jerks turned off my website, blah, blah, blah. Right. And so now all of a sudden you've worked really hard on positive influence online.

and then they get out and put up something negative. And what's amazing to me is like the rest of the world doesn't go, well, that's not normal. Why would they turn off their website? probably because it wasn't paid for. So, but, but how much, and I gotta say, if they're proactive with me and they send me an email or they call me and they say, Hey, it's been a really rough month. Could you float me for a month? The answer is going to be yes. Cause I'm paying for the hosting anyway. And I've got a grip of websites up on this platform, right?

But I'm not in business to break even or lose money or make loans. I'm in business to turn a margin. So I can't do that forever.

Toby Cryns (41:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

think maybe one of the lessons from this show today is like, notice, I'll just start there. Notice if you're getting emotional about this stuff, like if you're having a hard time being cutthroat about billing, that should be something like a red flag to like think about or converse with someone about. If you feel like somebody's taking advantage of you, that's probably something to, you know, just note and converse with somebody about.

Kurt von Ahnen (42:19)
Yeah. Well, I think if we were to come away with like, let's say that we got really crazy on this, Toby, and we said each, each episode is going to have a lesson for agency owners. The lesson on this one is you don't have to do everything yourself. If you find yourself emotional or tied up in your feelings about executing as a business owner that you know you should hire somebody to do the thing you don't want to do. So Toby, you've got a project manager. I, I am horrible at.

Bookkeeping like I just I'm great at bringing money in I'm really bad at tracking where some of it goes So I need to hire a bookkeeper

All right, someone that holds me accountable on this on the spreadsheet.

Toby Cryns (43:02)
Mm-hmm, there it is. I love it. That's the lesson.

Kurt von Ahnen (43:04)
And we'll wrap

up with that. Folks, I am here with Toby Crines. Toby Crines is with Mighty Mo. I am Kurt Von Ahnen. I am with Manana Nomaz. We're both doing this under the WP Minute flag, and we hope we'll see you in our next episode. Have a wonderful day.