The WP Minute+

Toby Cryns (00:01)
Good afternoon, good morning. Welcome to another episode of Whose WordPress Agency is This Anyway? My name's Toby Kreins. I'm here with the memorable, the legend, Kurt Von Annen. How's your day going, Kurt?

Kurt von Ahnen (00:17)
Toby, it's awesome to be here. I thought you were going to do that movie. Good afternoon. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good night. That's a fun movie. That is a really fun movie. I thought we would dive in right away, just go right into the meat of stuff. And let's talk about what it's like to build an agency. And I'm in the middle of making a course, actually, about how to launch an agency. And one of the things that I struggled with, and I think others do,

Toby Cryns (00:22)
Yeah, love that movie.

Yes.

Kurt von Ahnen (00:46)
And now I'm going to ask you, how did you, when did you, did you ever overcome that feeble sense of, do I own an agency or am I really unemployed?

Toby Cryns (00:59)
I think, yeah, it's a great question. think, ⁓ I don't think I felt employed initially. We'll start there. I mean, I think that maybe the point where I start to feel, where I felt employed was maybe when I started paying myself as a W2 employee. so maybe it was more like a process change. I was like, okay, now I'm an employee of the mighty Mo. I have a...

Kurt von Ahnen (01:05)
you

Toby Cryns (01:27)
paycheck that's landing. pay myself once a month a certain amount and I think that's helped. It's also helped my wife to kind of think of it as an employment situation because she's like not worried, not thinking she knows that some amount of money is going to land and the insurance is going to be paid. And I also pay some of our bills because like my cell our cell phones and certain internet gets paid for because I have a home office and stuff like that.

Kurt von Ahnen (01:56)
Thank

Toby Cryns (01:57)
And so there's a lot of that that kind of adds up. do feel there's something about ⁓ feeling like, it's not that it's not going to fall apart at any point in time. Like it's not just like on the brink all the time. Like that I feel like there's some permanence that exists that would be similar to having a job at a company.

Kurt von Ahnen (02:23)
To me, it's amazing. Like, if I opened up a machine shop, let's just say I took out a loan for $6 million, you know, and I had a building built, and I put a bunch of machines in there, and I ordered a bunch of, you know, half million dollars worth of steel, and I put some employees in there, and what are we doing? I don't know. We're making bridge plates or something, right? We're making something.

Everyone's gonna look at that like as they're gonna talk to look at that. He's an awesome founder You know, he's adding jobs to the community, you know, look at a really cool new building and There's the sense that That's employment like it's that that's a real entity. It's a real thing And then there's this this weirdness that happens when you work in the digital space Like when people are like, that's cool that you have that hobby building websites and all but are you gonna go get a job?

Toby Cryns (02:56)
Ha.

Kurt von Ahnen (03:18)
And I just, it's curious when I talk to different people, when did that vacate? When did that go away? Because now we moved here from California to Kansas and there's people that run the entrepreneur groups and stuff here in Kansas. And they introduced me to other people like, he moved his agency here, right? And it's like, I'm just working out of my home office. If I was still with friends that knew me from when I was younger, they would still think I was working on my hobbies.

Toby Cryns (03:39)
Right.

Right.

Kurt von Ahnen (03:47)
I meet

strangers and they treat it like it's an entity. It's an entity. It's a real business. it's interesting how that changes. It changes the way I communicate it to new people, the way I talk to clients, the way that I interact with others is different now. And it's weird because I've been an agency since 2008.

Toby Cryns (03:52)
Yeah, well.

Yeah. And I think if maybe for a lot, I think for the outside world, something changes when you have a physical location, like a storefront, like we can't even be in like the neighborhood business association because I don't have a storefront. If I hung up a sign, then I could join their organization. But without that, I'm just some guy in a basement. And ⁓ the chamber of commerce is so desperate that they will let me in thankfully, but. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (04:26)
Bye.

You're just some weird dude.

Toby Cryns (04:40)
But it's a similar thing where like, I think ⁓ they're not sure where to put it. And we bought this house recently and one comment from one of my aunts that Lisa's mom, my wife's mom, ⁓ it's one of her aunts, ⁓ she was like, what does Toby do? Like, I mean, I've been married a long time, 13 years.

Kurt von Ahnen (05:04)
What did he even

do?

Toby Cryns (05:07)
Yeah,

it's like she couldn't believe that I could afford a house with Lisa, you know, like

Kurt von Ahnen (05:15)
I find the whole transition really unique. And I have a corporate background. so going to my way back machine and rolling the time machine back, I can remember driving through traffic, getting to the office, being frustrated, hanging out with people I didn't even like all day, and thinking, I can't wait till I can work from home. I cannot wait until I can work from home.

And then I left the job. Then I started working from home. And I was married, two younger children, stay-at-home mom, that whole thing. And I got to be honest, it didn't take very long for me to say, I can't wait till I can rent an office. I can't wait till I can rent an office. I can't get anything done here. I got to get out. I got to go. I got to get where the people are. And the year that we rented our office, I literally more than doubled the business. And then when I changed from

Toby Cryns (05:41)
Yeah.

huh.

Yep.

Kurt von Ahnen (06:08)
My old name to my new name, is Manana No Mas, that was like 2008 when things became official. We tripled our business that year because we changed our policies. But I think that's when I began to run it like a business, like I was employed, like the mental shift. I think that's when that happened.

Toby Cryns (06:27)
What was the biggest policy change that you think influenced that bottom line change?

Kurt von Ahnen (06:32)
The biggest policy

change that we had was we no longer did things by deposit or on good faith. We said we're the business. Like, we're the business. We have the office. We have the deliverable. Like, I have the reputation for being on time and on budget. So if I say I'm going to make this happen in 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, it's going to happen. There are no more 50 % deposits. Pay the rest when it's done. Everything's paid up front, and we execute.

Now, if people are on monthly maintenance agreements and stuff, they pay the month in advance of those services being delivered. So we still have some recurring income. But for big projects, it's all up front. And it's been that way since 2008. And here's where I literally justified that. Because we had a ton of half-done projects and nobody was paying for stuff. People just didn't have the income. And when you're working in the startup community, that's fairly common. People are bootstrapping this thing. They don't know how they're going to make things happen.

And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I am a startup business. Well, like when this happened, right? I'm a startup business. How am I in a position to lend money and services to all these other people? I'm not. And if they can't pay me now, what makes me think they're going to pay me in 30 days when I'm done? Like, if they can't pay their project 30, 60, or 90 days in advance, they're not qualified to be my customer.

Toby Cryns (07:52)
Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (07:59)
And when I had that realization, we literally tripled our business.

Toby Cryns (08:04)
Here's the thing that kind of like, I was talking with somebody who owns a small business. She has probably eight employees and she got stuck because ⁓ she wanted to be a good boss and she was paying her employees when the, and she kind of like business got really good and she started paying her employees a lot of money, you know, like probably more than they would get elsewhere. And she treated them.

Well, she had good vacation policies. But then the business was tanking, not maybe tanking, I don't know, but it was going down enough to where she was like, I'm feeling squeezed and I've stopped taking a salary. I was like, so the question that came up was to me, like, what is a good boss? And I was like, first of all, I was thinking like, you know, that's conversing with her. I'm like, you know, there's lots of ways to be a good boss. Salary is...

Kurt von Ahnen (08:35)
Huh. ⁓

Toby Cryns (09:03)
one lever you can pull. ⁓

How do you approach that? How do you approach your relationship with your employees? ⁓ I believe most are all are contractors, which is a whole interesting thing in and of itself, is being a boss. And what does that mean, to be a good boss?

Kurt von Ahnen (09:19)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Most of mine are contractors. I'm thinking about the one person I routinely go to for tasks that I pay on an hourly basis. Technically, guess I would say that's an employee, but they're not on a W-2. They're not. I'm just not doing that. And some people would say, well, then you're not a real business. Then we go back to that. We go right back to that.

Toby Cryns (09:48)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (09:52)
I literally work in a feast or famine way. So I have a lot of small projects that I kind of fill the gaps with and I have people on staff that can execute those small projects pretty quickly at a good margin and they're very happy to do it. Like they're not even looking to work for me full-time that way. They're not. They think of it the same way. Like though this is a cool small task Kurt's got for me can knock this out in addition to...

this other job that I have. And it works out for us, it's just a perfect, like the puzzle pieces just fit. So why mess with it? Like, why screw that up? And then the other side of our business is this, we're always looking for that big, you know, e-learning kind of conversion site to take somebody from some custom built SCORM website that's bankrupting them on the back end. We like to take them, put them in WordPress, save them a ton of money, and we're actually able to do the project and make a decent margin on it. And those are big projects for us.

⁓ But I only get one or two of those a year. So it's feast or famine. And so that feast or famine mindset puts me back in the contractor role.

Toby Cryns (10:56)
So how do you manage your cash flow? ⁓ Can you give us like a high level? Do you like, I could imagine, you need to save money, right? Like you can't just like be like, great, we're rich again. Let's spend it all.

Kurt von Ahnen (11:07)
Yeah, you can't spend it.

Yeah, no, you

can't spend it. You can't spend it. And you have to operate with a certain level of confidence. And that goes back to how we opened the show, right? There's a certain level of confidence that says, we execute this really well. And we know that we have top of funnel activity to keep that always working in the background. So even when my staff is, should I say staff? contractors, people, when my team, when my team is executing on those things through the funnel,

and works coming out the bottom of the funnel, I'm still at the top of the funnel looking for the next job, the next referral, the next whatever. Big or small, my job is to keep that top of funnel working.

Hence, that's why you see so much content from me online, right? If you follow me, you're looking at a lot of lives. You're looking at podcasts. You're looking at the office hours I do with Lifter. But I'm constantly scraping off of that and filling the top of the funnel. And you talked about that before. You said that you like to focus on sales.

Toby Cryns (12:10)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and ⁓ I was thinking a friend of mine recently had an ⁓ agency contract. he had a he does agency like ours, but he had a high percentage of his revenue. Let's say 50%. It's probably more than that was from one agency that was paying his agency. And that went on for years. And so he built up his team. He was fired by that agency or at least scaled back or something. And he was just sharing with me that he had to light all his employees or

Kurt von Ahnen (12:28)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (12:38)
Maybe all, I think he did that all his employees go, cause it was that they were all being paid. Yeah. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (12:40)
That big of a deal.

Toby Cryns (12:48)
And we've talked about this a little bit, but I think like for me in my business, I try to avoid, I've been trying to avoid that scenario for years now. And so like, I've been trying to build a very shallow and what do call it? Wider pool of clients that are each paying a little bit versus like a few that are paying a lot. ⁓

Kurt von Ahnen (13:07)
Yeah.

Yeah,

do you want to go wide or do you want to go deep? And that's strategically, that's why I only take two, maybe three of the deep projects a year and then I pepper in the rest with the, from width, right? So width is stability and deep is profit if we think of things in those terms.

Toby Cryns (13:31)
Yep.

And I, ⁓ and it can be very profitable. Don't get me wrong, but, but then your it's feast or famine world, like we're talking about. And most high paid consultants experience this all the time, like not only in our industry, but any industry, like they get paid a ton. had a friend, you know, brought on site at Amaco. He's getting paid 200 bucks an hour for 80 hours a week for two months.

Kurt von Ahnen (13:38)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (13:55)
But now he's gotta find a new Amico. And there's not too many Amicos in the world, like there's only five or something, you know?

Kurt von Ahnen (14:00)
No.

No. And you see that a lot. and unfortunately, in these markets, there's a lot of ⁓

you know, animals of prey that work in these markets, right? So if you're a coach, consultant, you know, if you're in that area, there's tons of marketing sent to you on a nonstop basis, right? Like, you know, are you tired of not getting the right clients at the right time? You know, give us $5,000 and we'll show you our patented system on blah, blah, blah. And it's like, no, this is just junk. Just go do the work, you know, network.

Send the emails. Do the things that you think annoy people, right? But you're going to get to the right people. Get that top of funnel going. And always have something working in the background. You've always got to go ahead.

Toby Cryns (14:49)
Yeah, and I think that, yeah, the,

the coda for this ⁓ colleague of mine who is that is that like, once he realized he was, didn't have any work, he went out and started networking and then he, now he has plenty of work again. Like this, that's a challenge that I hear all the time from agency owners, the smaller agencies that don't have a dedicated sales team. Like, ⁓ so how can we like build resilience in that sales process? That top of funnel, you know?

Kurt von Ahnen (15:01)
Yeah.

I go back

to process. You nailed it. You said process, right? Process is everything to me. And I think that that's where most agencies honestly fail. Like they just don't have process. don't. So for me, time blocking is huge.

So I have a certain amount of my week that is for sales, for outbound marketing, for those things. If you allow the feast or famine, ⁓ we got a big contract. We got to knock this out real quick. If you allow that to become 80 % of your week and you focus on getting that done or pushing the project through, you fail at what your agency is going to do when that project is done.

So you only, even if you get the huge big project, you can only dedicate 40, 45 % of your time or energy to that project because you owe it to yourself to time block your week and dedicate enough time and energy. And the energy is the big part. You can't do it when you're tired. You got to do it when you're fresh. And you got to make it the best calls, the best networking. You and I, we see this all the time, right? The people that come and go from networking events or from entrepreneur

Toby Cryns (16:00)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (16:30)
more things like, hey, where's Bob been? I haven't seen him in a while. And then all of sudden, Bob shows up, and he's starting shaking hands and buying drinks. And you're like, oh, Bob's broke. Bob probably should have come.

Toby Cryns (16:36)
All right.

Yeah. ⁓ This is interesting. this

idea of like building that process and doing it while you're fresh, not while you're starving, ⁓ leads me to another thought of a question. It's like, how do you turn off the business world and take holiday time to invest with your family? Or maybe you need to go on a solo camping trip where there's no internet.

How can we, how do we do that?

Kurt von Ahnen (17:11)
Truth. If you're always panicked about cash flow, if you're always panicked about money, if you're always focused on transactions, you're going to be a very unhappy person. I listen to a lot of Joe Rogan and that kind of stuff. And you'll hear Josie all the time. I know a lot of rich people that are miserable. And so if that's your goal, I guess you can pursue that.

But it takes discipline. You've got to be able to pull back sometimes and go, this isn't healthy. I've to do something. I've told you before, I'm big on the mountain bike thing. I need the physical activity. And that kind of re-centers me, refreshes me, and launches me for whatever the next task is. But I think, for instance, my kid is volunteering at a camp for the summer. And me and my wife are.

Packing up the camper van, splitting on Friday, and we're gone for the weekend. And I'm not emailing or calling nobody. And this is going to come out after I'm gone. So I can say it now. There's no warning. I stopped giving customers warnings that, I'm going to be out of pocket for three days. No. Because then everybody calls me the day that I'm leaving and tells me, I had a question. No, you didn't have a question. You just thought I was leaving town, and you panicked. And so now I just go.

Toby Cryns (18:08)
Mm-hmm.

I do think like whatever your perceived damage is from that, and we all kind of, I don't know about you, but I experienced some like fear that my business is gonna tank. if I'm not there on Friday, my business will be ⁓ harmed for good. ⁓ So I do a couple of things. I would recommend that I try to do it, not always, but first of all, it's gonna be fine. Let's just start there. It'll be fine.

Kurt von Ahnen (18:57)
Thank you,

buddy.

Toby Cryns (18:59)
But

if that's not enough, what I like to do is write a list. have, okay, let's say I take next week off and I'm gonna decide today, it's Monday, I'm just gonna say next week I'm taking off come hell or high water. What I would do is like have a piece of paper, three columns, the worst case scenario, the best case scenario and the likely scenario. And the worst case is always like, yeah, my business will fail. This person's gonna tell everyone I suck. I'll get 10 bad reviews on Google.

⁓ The best case is like nothing happened at all and the likely scenario is usually something close to that best case Except like I come back. I have some complaints. I have to like massage some relationships, you know It's usually the best the likely case is usually way closer to the best case than the worst case

Kurt von Ahnen (19:31)
Nothing.

Well.

And there's so many other things from an agency perspective that you can do to start building that before it comes to a head. If your customers are emailing you directly for things, that's a red flag. Like, create that support account, use a SaaS platform, do something. Have a process that's like, this is what you do if you need support. This is the process if you have a question. And I tell people right up front, use the support link on the website, because when you use

the support link on the website, that gives the whole team visibility to your issue, and you're not depending on me to answer your email. Right? And I'm very clear with customers up front. Now, am I the team? Am I the team that's answering those support calls? Typically, yeah. Duh. But.

If I'm to take a week off, I'm probably going to take a contract and say, hey, you know what? Let me just give you two hours a day to take care of the support tickets that come in or don't come in. And if anything super important, you know that you can text me.

Toby Cryns (20:51)
This is interesting. ⁓ You could, in theory, you could train your clients to not get real-time support. ⁓ Unless they want to pay for urgent real-time support, none of them will, by the way. You might get someone, but then the expectation is something not real-time. I wonder if that would, let's say, not you, but somebody is freaking out, I want to take time off. Even one day, a lot of our

Kurt von Ahnen (21:04)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (21:20)
colleagues have trouble with and I'm like, okay, yeah, if you build a system that ⁓ where your clients normally get one business day responses, let's say, and then then you can take that time.

Kurt von Ahnen (21:30)
Yeah.

You have to train

people to get used to the 12 to 24 hour response time. Even if I see it come in, now be very clear, I have emergency boundaries, right? If your website is down or you can't take revenue, that's an emergency.

You can text me, you can call me, whatever. But if it's I want to change the title on my call to action square, that is 12 to 24 hour support. You put them in the ticket and we make it happen in 12 to 24 hours. And like I said, if you set the process, you could have a team member babysit that third party, whatever tool it is.

because it's not your personal email. It's not coming to you. And even if I was paying someone, because I hear this like the four hour work week comes up, pay a virtual assistant to go through your emails before you get your emails. That's not reality. Reality is my phone's going to get the notification, and it's going to distract me from the love and energy I'm supposed to be giving my family in that moment. And that's when things get wonky for me. So I train them to use the support link. My email and my text messaging should be customer free.

Toby Cryns (22:38)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (22:48)
unless it's an emergency.

Toby Cryns (22:50)
And maybe

at least as important is this thing you just kind of brought up. You need to train yourself and put down the damn phone, turn off the internet, whatever it is. Like this is the hardest part, I think for us agency owners. Um, and me too, like, this is the hardest part for me. Maybe I don't want to, but like it's hard and I don't know why it's hard because there's no reason I couldn't just turn off the phone. And oftentimes I'll have, when I do that.

Kurt von Ahnen (23:02)
It'll be tough. Yeah.

Toby Cryns (23:20)
It's not like I miss it being on. just for some reason, it's like, was thinking like, it's just hard to take that step. And I don't know. It's, I don't know why. Do you ever, do you ever turn off everything? When, how often do do that?

Kurt von Ahnen (23:22)
⁓

I love it. Yes. ⁓ Every

night at a specific time, my phone goes off. And every morning at a specific time, it comes on. I don't deal with anything at night. I have a nighttime thing. And then ⁓ when we go mountain bike racing, and I'm camping with my son, and we're at the races,

I use the phone to take pictures. Other than that, I don't do anything with the phone. You know, we're gone.

Toby Cryns (24:04)
There's way to think about this. Think of yourself as a retail establishment, your Target, your Home Depot, whatever. not gonna, you called them at midnight. Nobody's gonna answer the phone at Target at midnight. But if you're there in business hours, they will address your question in real time and you'll have to get in line. ⁓ There's a good lesson just in that practice you just described.

I'm gonna start doing that.

Kurt von Ahnen (24:34)
I didn't used

to do it. I didn't used to.

I'm being blunt and honest, when we started in New Mexico, every broke startup business that didn't pay their invoices on time, that still had a problem with their website, I would do it whenever. 8 o'clock at night, 9 o'clock at night, 4 o'clock in the morning, like whatever. Because I was so afraid that they were going to say something negative to someone else in the business community that was local, let alone that they hadn't paid their invoices or compensated me yet. But I was just always in a panic, always.

And I made everybody's problems my own problems. And it wasn't until I got a little older and a little more seasoned in the game when I realized, wait a minute, this isn't a curt problem. It's not that I'm not empathetic, but I'm not sympathetic. Like, hey, I can empathize with that. You know, within the boundaries of our scope of work, I'll take care of that for you. But outside of that, nope. You can pay me more, or you can find another provider.

Toby Cryns (25:30)
There

are so many emergencies. should say ⁓ emergencies are relative to the person. It's totally subjective. I think like as an agency owner, and I need to think about, I'm gonna think about this more, this is really interesting. I might change my policies on this. So I'm like you, I'm like if you have a website down, email or a.

Kurt von Ahnen (25:41)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (25:58)
Revenue interrupter email me immediately like text me call me stop by my house, whatever But as we're talking about it, I'm thinking like I have no clients right now that would whose business would be noticeably impacted if their website was down for Between 5 p.m. To 7 a.m. Or you know 5 p.m. To 9 a.m. I Mean, maybe someone would lose a sale But their business would not

Kurt von Ahnen (26:21)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (26:28)
be impacted. probably wouldn't lose them as a client if I jumped on it at 9am and was like, ⁓ I see your websites down. Let's address that right away.

Kurt von Ahnen (26:37)
Yeah, no, I'm totally.

And people are going to hear this and they're going to think, oh, well, I wouldn't want to use money on a little monster. Their customer service must suck. Quite the opposite. Because we have set the proper expectations. Our clients know what to expect. They know what an emergency is. And they know the process for non-emergencies. And they know that we take care of everything in a timely manner. So we don't ghost anybody. We don't ignore anybody. We treat everybody with equity. mean, it's not that, right? So don't misread what's being said on the podcast. What we're saying is, for your purpose,

personal mental health, you've got to some boundaries and then you have to have the discipline to respect those boundaries so that you don't alienate yourself from family, from yourself, from all that other stuff.

Toby Cryns (27:21)
And I think, you know, I think of, so I just went through the process of buying a house and I think I've been trying to figure out like our guy, I would not recommend our realtor, but he was only available like eight to five or nine to five central. And it was like a real frustration for me. And I've been trying to figure out, did it impact the sale at all? And I don't know if it did or not.

It might have, but maybe not. And similar, was like for the Mighty Mo, like does that availability impact our customers' businesses?

And I would guess in both cases, probably not. There's probably edge cases where it might, but like.

Most stuff happens between nine to five in the world.

Kurt von Ahnen (28:16)
Most stuff does. ⁓

Toby Cryns (28:18)
Certainly

most eyeballs on a website are happening between nine to five.

Kurt von Ahnen (28:23)
I even have customers in different time zones. Well, I'm sure we all do, right? And so sometimes I become a little more cognizant, right? Like, this website's in the UK. This website's in Italy. This website's in, but ⁓ meaning the business is based there, right? But when I look at the analytics and I look at the traffic, that's where I start to, I'm not going to say poo poo the business. That's not my job. I'm not being judgmental. But if you've got,

A lot of these startups, they only have 50 or 100 visits a month on the website.

You have to get realistic with it sometimes. Like when we build an e-learning website for a new course creator, there's actually a course on Lifter LMS that's like, do you get to your first 10 paid students? Like that's a huge milestone. And so people are going to hear this podcast and they're going to say, well, that's horrible. I thought they'd have thousands of But where do those thousands of people come from? You've got to get started somewhere. And these websites don't have the traffic. And so when we say that it's a non-emergency,

emergency, it's because it's true. It's not an emergency. What, two people didn't see the website when they logged in on Tuesday? Like, it's not the end of the world.

Toby Cryns (29:38)
Well, as we're talking about building our agency or building it, making it more resilient, one question that comes up regularly is meetings, just in general. And one question would be like, do you ever feel overwhelmed by meetings? the follow-up to that, or maybe the question that should come first is, do you even need the meetings? But let's start with, do you ever feel overwhelmed with meetings? Because I think like...

I think our audience and the audience of OneMe is curious ⁓ in the sense because I feel overwhelmed at some days.

Kurt von Ahnen (30:13)
you ⁓

The only time that I really feel overwhelmed by meetings is I have a couple of people that we subcontract for. And one of those has a calendar where they set the security settings to where I can't sync that calendar with my calendar.

So my overwhelming, my stress comes from, let's say you and I have a podcast scheduled, we're going to do it Wednesday at 10 o'clock. This particular contract is going to have a client that schedules a meeting Wednesday at 10 o'clock. It just always seems to happen that way. And so then I have to do that antiquated back and forth email like, I'm sorry, there's a conflict at that time. Can we meet at 9 or can we meet at 11? Now, well, I really needed to meet. No, no, no, I'm not available then. Well, your calendar says you are.

because it's not synced with my other calendars. I'm sorry. That's the only real stress I have.

Toby Cryns (31:13)
This is quite,

well, this is interesting in light of what we've talked about.

It seems to me that like that scenario of sharing that level of access with my calendar or your calendar should come with a premium price tag. And there's other things too, perhaps that fit in that. Like I think like as an agency owner, if something's really bothering you, you might want to put a premium on it. Like whatever the thing is.

Kurt von Ahnen (31:44)
Yeah, so I have a thing where you can schedule a meeting with me, pardon me, 30 minutes, no charge, 30 minutes, first 30 minutes is free. And then I had a client under a statement of work that kept using that link to schedule meetings like just whenever and I was like, hold on. So after like the fourth time, I was like, are you scheduling these meetings so that you feel better about the project?

Like, I just need to know why we're having this meeting. I just need to know what's going on. I said, well, you have access to the platform. You have access to the Gantt chart. You have access to see our notes on what's been done. We try to communicate in very transparent way. And then I went back to, your proposal stated that we planned on six meetings for this whole project, and you're currently on meeting five.

So are you prepared to have one more meeting before we launch? Or do think we're going to need more meetings than that? Because we'll have to have a discussion about the rate. And all of sudden, we didn't need any more meetings. It's understanding what people, just because I have a link, doesn't mean you get to use that over and over and over again.

Toby Cryns (32:47)
Mm-hmm.

Well, and it's interesting too, like, let's say there's a price to those meetings, those extra meetings. What dollar amount is going to vary by customer, like the dollar amounts, the pretty low, probably like, let's say you charge $15 per call, like, which is pretty low. I bet you, you could cut off half the calls that you get if you just, know, like, Oh, is it a $15 important? No, no, no, no, it's not 15. Well, if it's not $15, I don't want to talk about it.

Kurt von Ahnen (33:11)
No.

Yeah.

⁓ So I started selling Manana No Mas as a consultancy and not as a web design house.

And so the consultancy is where the value is. And this is, very straightforward about this. I started to realize that these startups and these other corporations, they were getting me on calls and they weren't asking about the website. They were asking about, you think this is good marketing copy? Do you think this is going to convert? I was thinking about hiring this go high level expert. What would you do? What would you do for the search engine optimization thing? ⁓ And I'm like, you know what? It's agency.

straight agency rate. You want my consultative time on a call in a meeting and they're bringing people and they're recording the session and they're taking notes. They're getting their value but I tell them it's straight agency time.

Toby Cryns (34:17)
This is interesting, something I've been thinking about. We talked a little bit about it last week. So you're an agency owner, so you own an agency with valuable processes and people. ⁓ However, ⁓ particularly maybe as a consultancy, is your business saleable? Would anyone ever buy it without you in it?

Kurt von Ahnen (34:40)
That's the rub, isn't it? That's the hard question. And I see it's one of our notes. And I was thinking in the background, like, how are we going to work this into the conversation? But my company name used to be Von Annen Designs and PR when I very first launched. And then it wasn't even a year in, I don't think. And someone said, what if you ever wanted to sell your business? Would you be wanting to sell your name? And then I was like,

You know what? I don't think so. And there's a guy in town that has an insurance company. His name's David, but the insurance company's name's something else. And I'm like, that's just weird. You're someone else's name to do business forever. And so the whole story about Manana No Mas is pretty entertaining. I won't share it here because it takes too long. ⁓

I lost my temper one day and I yelled at someone and said, Manana No Mas. And then the guy running the office said, that'd be a great name for your business. And I was like, all right, that's what it is. And it's been Manana No Mas ever since. And now I can't change it. It's too old branded. But it's going to be for sale. And I don't know, because I'm 57 years old.

Toby Cryns (35:41)
Yeah, yeah, you're stuck. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (35:50)
And we bring in revenue. And we have demonstrable revenue. And we have demonstrable process. I'm really hitting hard on process. seems like this episode. But I'm in the middle of creating training for this, right? And so I'm thinking about all the different processes and how we've built this over time. Other agencies.

you know this because we talk to people. We go to events. We ask people, how do you do this? And they go, I just kind of this. I just kind of that. And it's like, no, if you don't have process, you don't have anything that's measurable or duplicable, which means you don't have anything you can sell.

Toby Cryns (36:23)
And so one thing that we've talked about is really weird about the web, most of the web agency, WordPress agencies for sure, but most web agencies, they're not founded with an exit in mind. And so one thought exercise that would probably make your business real a lot stronger, even in the short run, would be like, how can I restructure this business so it's more saleable?

⁓ And there's this great book. It's called Built to Sell. And it's a fictional story, but it's really illustrative of this idea. This guy had a design agency and he was making a bunch of money. ⁓ the idea was you start with the end in mind. then, and I like, like, I don't have a plan to sell the business. However, it would be nice.

and I'm getting old too! Every day I'm older. So what's what do you think is like one thing if someone's like been running an agency for a few years what's one thing they might do to make their business more sellable? Like one tactical on the ground thing.

Kurt von Ahnen (37:23)
Thank you.

⁓ I'm going to say it like it's one thing, but it's not. And that is documentation. You know how you're doing something. ⁓ So this is an analogy I use for a lot of different scenarios. But have you ever seen the show Hoarders before?

Toby Cryns (38:07)
No, but I've heard of it.

Kurt von Ahnen (38:09)
So people live in an unbelievably cluttered home, right? And clutter is not even the word.

people die in a pile of their own trash and excrement in a house that one day they saw empty and said, what a beautiful home and bought the home. Now, over time, something happened psychologically to them where they just never cleaned it, right? They just kept amassing stuff until they became a hoarder and that's what happened. But they never had that goal when they started. And so I think running an agency is a lot like having the potential to become this hoarder.

focus on, what was the snapshot of who I was when I started this thing? And what's the snapshot that I want to be when I finish this thing? And what are the steps to get to that? And so if we don't put documentation and process into place and we don't discipline ourselves in that way, we end up with a hoarder kind of thing. ⁓ I'm very big on missions and visions and all that. I know what kind of work. I know what kind of client I want. I know the types of projects I want my

my agency to do. We could say, ⁓ we make stuff for the internet for everybody. But then we become that hoarder. We end up with a license to every single plugin on the planet. We end up not really understanding our skill set or where our strengths are or what tools are required for our business. But if I take out of the 65,000 plugins in the repository, if I pick 20 to 25 of them, that become my core tech stack. And I can make something that is duplicable and a process.

us. To make other customers happy, I have a product.

Toby Cryns (39:48)
think like it can feel overwhelming to think about the end, but one way that I like to think about it is like, would I like to be in 10 years from now? So right now I'm 46. I would get out a piece of paper. ⁓ When I'm 56, I would like to be living in Minneapolis. by the way, I start that with ⁓ I'll have a kid who's 24. I'll have a kid who's

21 I'll have a kid who's 16 and my wife will be how old she'll be and ⁓ I'm like I and so some of my things are like if I were to write it today and I try to write it I should do it more often but I probably do it every few years when I start to feel like I'm off track and by the way I don't know that I'm off track I just start to feel it like and I have an illustration I can give in a bit if we want but But I do that exercise. I'm like, okay in ten years. I see myself in the same house. I'm in

Kurt von Ahnen (40:23)
Yep.

Yeah.

Toby Cryns (40:46)
I would like it to be cleaner. ⁓ whatever that means, I would like to play a gig with my cake dad band, my cover band that plays cake songs. I would like to do that. I would like to build a stronger relationship with these five people and maybe we're good friends in 10 years. ⁓ So I start making a list like that. ⁓ by the way, I would like to have X amount of dollars in the bank saved. So I'd like to start with like 10 years and it's pretty easy. You can do this.

know, it doesn't take too much energy. In fact, it can be kind of fun. And then I do five years and then I'm like, okay, one year. Where do I start? Like how, what can I change today to get me there? And there's help for you by the way, and very inexpensive help. Like there's a book called Traction that's all about this. It's a different process, but it'll, it's a process to get you to that 10 year goal, whatever your goal is. And they'll lay it out and you can even, it's a big

Some would call it a pyramid scheme, but I've done it. It's helpful. I'm not saying it's forever, but I've heard lots and lots of complaints about it, but you can just buy the book and start with the book. And there's some great ideas. And you mentioned four hour work week. you need ideas on where to start, four hour work week is probably the best place to start. If you're just like, I have no ideas.

Kurt von Ahnen (41:53)
Thank

Yeah.

with something in your answer was really important though right so it was like understanding where do I want to be in 10 years but then what does that look like if I do a split and then one year because if you constantly think five years and 10 years it's too far away and then you end up postponing and never getting started next thing you know 10 years is here and you haven't done nothing right so you want to have that one year thing so I I tend to work on short term and long term goals I use a

called smart goals, I think was what you were defining. Right? Is it specific? Is it measurable? Is it, you know, achievable? ⁓ What the relevant and time based, right? So that's smart, right? So I use short term goals, long term goals. I use the smart architecture to make sure that I can actually achieve it. ⁓ And then follow up like and you have to be able to take snapshots and milestones to be able to say, I achieved something or I didn't. And then it's okay to tweak it like it's,

it, everyone gets lost. They create this cement thing, like I'm going to be here in 10 years come hell or high water. And it's like, no, things happen. The market fluctuates. We get a different president. Things happen. Country goes to war. Things happen. So you have to be able to tweak and maneuver, but you want to make sure you're constantly going forward.

Toby Cryns (43:35)
This reminds me, um, you know, part of the traction process and is creating processes. It's like, like part of it is like, okay, you want more reoccurring revenue. What's one thing you can do to get started on that path. And I listened to a podcast on the business insider YouTube channel, but it's why massive projects like, this is the title of the podcast episode, why massive projects like California's high speed rail almost always fail.

You might be surprised that the reason is is that they're always building something completely new and If they had just gone out this is the theory so they have this basically the gist of it is California has like a massive massively over budget like numbers that you wouldn't believe beyond like basically the camp finished this huge rail line that they're building and You can see it like you see it every four years with the Olympics same problem

Kurt von Ahnen (44:28)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (44:34)
It's the same exact problem that like, if they just hired the company that builds large stadiums every day or whatever, and maybe it's not a US company, maybe it's not a local company, but you go to, I don't know, wherever they, wherever these companies exist or like the train company. maybe you met, you know, Kurt and I were talking earlier, like could be some of it, regulation gets in the way and you need to like, in order to make these large changes and processes, projects work, you need to.

you need to do the old thing again. And so I think everyone's probably really bored with this when it comes to running a sustainable agency, but what works? Just do that.

Kurt von Ahnen (45:17)
Yeah.

Look at someone that's successful and then try to emulate what they did. You know?

Toby Cryns (45:25)
And so, yeah,

an example would be WordPress. Let's say you own a WordPress agency. Just use Elementor. Just use Beaver Builder. Don't even use Gutenberg, because they're changing it all the time. Like, use something that isn't going to change, and you can move faster and cheaper, and you can have more space for this other stuff and more money to hire people. I would start with something as simple as that.

Kurt von Ahnen (45:50)
Well, and to your point, start, right? And then I'm not saying that we ever stop learning or stop growing or stop.

But with our productive time, again, I go back to time blocking. If I time block my week, I've got stuff for sales and marketing. I've got stuff for personal development. And I've got stuff for productivity, for the job, for what we do. And so that personal development time for me, I've been diving into getting better with AI. I've been diving into, ⁓ I signed up for etch, speaking of page builders. So I'm signed up for etch. I got no idea how to use etch. ⁓

to put some time aside and really dive into it, do a deep dive. I swapped from Elementor to Bricks like a year and a half ago, but that doesn't mean I stopped working with Elementor on my current Elementor sites and clients. And that all came, let's just be honest, Toby, I'm about 15, 18 years into running

What some people say is a successful agency is when I started to pepper in these extra things. You can't possibly come into the WordPress space and be like, I'm going to be an expert on everything and knock it out of the park. You've got to pick your strengths, market accordingly, and have vision and mission to make sure that it comes together.

Toby Cryns (47:09)
Yeah,

I mean, one of the most boring examples of this and it's not a success yet, I'll mind you, but the Mighty Mo now does SEO as of a year and a half ago. And it's something I could have gotten into 20 years ago. You know, I considered it. It's an old game, but it's still here. It's still as boring and exciting as it's ever been. Like nobody's going to look at you and say, wow, you're a cutting edge person for doing SEO. But I'm like, I don't know. There's a lot of business value there.

Kurt von Ahnen (47:25)
Yeah.

Well, SEO, people are jumping the gun. saying SEO is dead. And there's no way that it's dead. Because if you do research using AI, and then you ask the AI, how did you make this referral? Or how did you? Because when AI gives me an answer, I'm always like, well, where did that come from? So I say, how did you make this decision? How did you make this referral? It'll say, here's a list of resources we used. And the top listing every single time is search results.

Toby Cryns (48:06)
Right. it's right. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (48:08)
So SEO is not dead, and search isn't going anywhere, just

because you use a different tool to get to the search. But now, think about it this way. SEO used to give you pages of results. And then you, as the end user, would look at those pages of results and try and determine what's the most relevant and visit the ones you wanted to visit. But if you search with AI, it gives you two or three referrals. And that's it.

So now if you're not in the top two or three of your search results, you're not even in the game.

Toby Cryns (48:40)
Well, and I was, I was having a conversation just this morning with my SEO, Guy Glenn. ⁓ cause we're planning an upsell to an existing client on SEO because, ⁓ and he, he was pitching me, he's like, put together a presentation. He's like, look, everything's going down for them. And, ⁓ and I'm like, well, and we were talking about AI results as being one of the reasons potentially. And, ⁓ he was all down, like, and he was emotionally down. He's like, we're just screwing it up. And I'm like,

No, this is green pastures. Like this new and interesting thing called AI search results, no click results is ruining everything we've ever done for SEO, anything anyone's ever done. And so let's learn it and let's sell the heck out of it.

Kurt von Ahnen (49:10)
Yeah.

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah, I've done some deep diving, again, with the time blocking. But my personal development time working with AI was, how can I best locally optimize Mañana No Mas for the startup work that we do? And the results I got from AI and the advice I got from AI was pretty incredible. Change this on your LinkedIn. Change this on your Facebook. Change this on your TikTok. I'm like, I didn't even consider that stuff.

Add this to your home page. You already have national business, so you don't need that on the home page. Now your home page needs to reflect the local stuff. Put your chamber of commerce picture on there. And I'm like, that's a good idea.

Toby Cryns (50:04)
Yeah, and I think

like when it comes to, when I think of simplifying, the simplest thing I can encourage anyone to do, who's any sort of business owner, agency owner, whatever, is you gotta sell. Like figure out what sells and do more of that, whatever that is. and in our space, like, ⁓ we have all sorts of people in our space selling all sorts of, we're all basically selling the same thing, but ⁓ describing it very differently oftentimes. And, ⁓

figure that thing out. Like you've, you've got the LMS space nailed down and, but really I could, you know, in theory I could sell LMS, but I I've never sold an LMS in all my life. I sell mark. Yeah. No, I don't mean that. Well, yeah, I could, but like, don't even pitch it. Like I'm always like, we could build that with a normal marketing site. Like, you know, it's like, that's what I know. It's boring. It's, it's something I can build processes around. you know, there's, if you can sell it, there's

Kurt von Ahnen (50:36)
Yeah.

subcontract Manana No Mas to build it.

Toby Cryns (51:02)
As long as you're selling it, there's plenty of money in it.

Kurt von Ahnen (51:05)
I've actually become really crafty at upselling LMS type services to people that had no intentions of having an LMS. Because if they have a consumer based product, say, out of the gate, you got three courses that you need.

Toby Cryns (51:13)
Exactly.

Kurt von Ahnen (51:20)
You need one so that boots on the ground, so that regional reps can sell the product. So product and feature, right? So you need product and feature training. Then you need training for the customer to know how to use the product properly. And then you need training for service people in the field to fix it when it doesn't work.

Toby Cryns (51:38)
Yep, what you're describing

is so cool. Like it's like, I've never once pitched that and I could totally see the upsell there, cause you sell what you know. And that's kind of the gist of it here. Like, okay, you want an agency, sell what you know. Yeah. If you're a great coder. Yeah. Sorry.

Kurt von Ahnen (51:53)
Sell what you know. Sell what you know. I think about

running coaches and athletic coaches have a whole marketplace that they can sell to. Again, go back to what you said. What are your strengths? Sell to your strengths. And then as you grow, you can backfill other categories.

Toby Cryns (52:11)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (52:13)
Let's switch gears. I want to switch gears because we've talked a lot about building your agency. So let's say you've built your agency. Now you've got to take revenue in.

Toby Cryns (52:15)
Mm-hmm.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, I guess.

Kurt von Ahnen (52:26)
Yeah, I guess.

broad strokes, are you a fan of banks or credit unions?

Toby Cryns (52:34)
I have both. actually, don't, I, so this might be really sad. I have no idea what a credit union is compared to a bank. I have both for my business. I have Capital One, which is probably the biggest bank in the world or something like that. And then I have our local credit union. And I don't have like a grand strategy. I just like having options. What is a credit union, Kurt?

Kurt von Ahnen (53:01)
So a credit union is like a bank, but it's owned by the members. And it's like a profit share from the members. And so fundamentally, there's a couple of things.

that ⁓ I like about credit unions. Because for example, let's say you're a small business and you, it's, their loan decisions aren't typically made strictly by what's your credit score, right? So you're a business and you're like, this is how I want to impact the community. And this is what we do with this and this is what we do with that. And then, so there's extenuating circumstances that a credit union would take a look at and go, well, based on the best interest of our members, we're going to approve this, this loan.

or

this feature or whatever. Whereas a bank's going to be like, you didn't qualify, hit the skids. So there's that, right? So it's basically like one's a commercial enterprise that is owned by investors, I guess. And then one is owned by the members.

But then I get stuck with the strength of the organization. So, and maybe I started the discussion, maybe you started the discussion, I got kind of lost in how these notes came about. But when we moved from California to Kansas, I have been, just full disclosure, I've been with Wells Fargo since 1994. But there is no Wells Fargo in Hutchinson, Kansas.

Toby Cryns (54:30)
Mm-hmm.

Kurt von Ahnen (54:30)
So

then I'm like, well, I don't want to go to Wichita every time I got to go to the bank. And so then I was like, well, we've got to start looking for a local bank. And so we've been struggling. Like, do we want to use this credit union, this credit union, or this bank, or this bank? And I'm part of the Chamber of Commerce, and they have lots of after hours events where you go and you meet these people. And I've started to make friends with people that work at a certain bank.

So do I make my business decision to bank at that bank because I bicycle with one of the ladies that works there? Or do I go to the credit union because it's the smarter deal? I don't know.

Toby Cryns (55:06)
Right.

I think like, ⁓ with a lot of us, there's no right answer, of course. ⁓ yeah. Yeah. And there's different reasons for both. Cause like, here's an example, my kids, I have two kids in the middle school across the street and one of the kids' mom is one of the front desk people there. And I tell you what, it's been enormously helpful to have a personal connection with this person because I go in there and I'm like,

Kurt von Ahnen (55:13)
This would be a poll, a poll for the broadcast. Do you prefer a credit union or a bank?

Toby Cryns (55:38)
Ansel said this and da da da and she's like, that's not how it happened though, Toby. Like, thank you for letting me know because he told a different story.

Kurt von Ahnen (55:44)
Yeah, yeah.

I think having a local entity to do business with is really important because I'm really suffering from that national feeling, But there's also a part of me, and this might be childish, but I think to myself, I've been with the bigger bank for decades. That shows consistency. That shows so to me, right? So I don't necessarily want to close those accounts, but I need something local.

Toby Cryns (56:17)
Yeah.

Well, and I think you nail something too. Capital One has no branches that I know of anywhere. Maybe they have them somewhere. But their online tools are fantastic. Whereas our credit union, it's clearly like a hodgepodge of services. As I log in, it's like I log in, I click here to see the statements, a new window opens up with a new URL. Yeah, but they do have a branch. And so I can go into the branch and take care of stuff.

Kurt von Ahnen (56:26)
Yeah.

Nothing like that feeling of security with your thousands of dollars.

Toby Cryns (56:47)
Along these lines. sorry. I was thinking ⁓ What do you what tool do you use to collect? ACH payments these are so someone you know, you they can pay with a credit card they can mail a check to you or You could do it online. Basically. It's a check online. What's your credit cards kind of easy and well-trod? However, I've noticed that ACH H payments not so straightforward Do you do ACH online?

Kurt von Ahnen (56:47)
So.

Yeah.

No.

I do. So I have a SaaS platform that I use to operate my business with. And so I have messaging for bigger contracts. So let's be real clear. I'm lazy. I use Stripe. I didn't go crazy trying to make my own credit card payment gateway or anything nuts, right? was a Stripe plug and play, done. 2.9%, $0.30 on every transaction, whatever, fine, done.

But when you sell somebody a $10,000 package, and they're like, well, I guess I could put it on Amex silver, whatever, you're like, oh my god, what's 3 % of $10,000? I don't want to pay $300 today to make a sale when an ACH transfer is $25. I think it's $25. So I have a.

I have a SaaS platform where I can create an invoice and then give them the details to make that ACH transfer. And they'll do it from just bank to bank. And it works really easily for me. It's $25 for a wire transfer. Yeah. So they put in the routing, and they put in the account number, and boom, right?

Toby Cryns (58:12)
Mm-hmm. And it's 25 bucks? Okay. Yeah.

Kurt von Ahnen (58:24)
There's other tools. mean, there's Zelle and there's other tools to transfer things around, but they have limits. Even the ACH transfers, depending on your bank policy, has limits. So I've found that using either a SaaS platform that uses ACH as a payment gateway or ⁓ I don't want to misspeak, but I will anyway, I think Lifter LMS has the option for ACH payments and their payment gateway. And so.

Toby Cryns (58:52)
that's interesting.

Kurt von Ahnen (58:54)
I'd have to double check for limits and stuff. But then I could create a hidden membership for $10,000 and send it to my customer. And they could sign up that way. So there's all kinds of ways. then we come back to, what's the process? Is it duplicable? And then how did the

Toby Cryns (59:02)
Mmm.

Right.

Yeah, and that process you

described with Lifter, duplicable, however, clearly a hack. And I, yeah, I've struggled with it because ⁓ Stripe's ACH fee is only five bucks. However, in order to do a Stripe ACH, you need to get their info. They deposit two deposits into their account. You need to confirm those deposits. It's that process that you're familiar with. So

Kurt von Ahnen (59:19)
Clearly a hack, yeah. So it's interesting.

Yeah.

Toby Cryns (59:39)
Basically unworkable. It's like too complex. I've done it, but it's, I use Harvest, however, either, like their tool doesn't work well for ACH. And they only, it's transparent, five bucks, you paid a Stripe, they don't take anything. ⁓ So that would be ideal if it worked, but I like the idea. Maybe there's an invoicing plugin for WordPress that has a better way to do it with Stripe or some service. I don't look into that. I didn't think about that.

Kurt von Ahnen (59:42)
Yeah.

Well, if there is, it sounds like something we can cover as a follow-up in the next show.

Toby Cryns (1:00:11)
Yeah.

⁓ one other thing, just as like, ⁓ maybe this is a good way to end it, a good happy story. I was thinking, I think last time we were talking about all the SaaS services that the Mighty O most subscribes to, and it's like, I don't know, let's say 500 bucks a month, and that doesn't include hosting and stuff. It's just like, hey, we have SEO, 200 a month, this is 100 a month. ⁓ But it's probably like 10 to 20 services. And...

Oftentimes when I sign up for those, use a tool that Capital One provides, which is like a really easy way to have temporary credit cards that expire. You can have them per site and they expire whenever I want them to expire. So I always set them, if I'm like not sure I'm going to need it next month. So I did this with Canva Pro recently. I was like, I don't know, I'll try it out for 15 bucks, but I don't want to get a $15 bill next month unless I really want it. And so I use one of these. So with Capital One, it's just built in and it has a browser extension for Chrome and it's super easy, but I use that. And then I'm like,

Kurt von Ahnen (1:01:00)
Yeah.

Toby Cryns (1:01:08)
Then I get the email in a month, they're like, you haven't paid. What are we gonna do? You clearly screwed up, come on. The email from Canva. And then I fix it if I want to. So I just wanted to mention that as like a nice tool that you could have in your tool belt. I'm sure other banks have this, maybe Wells Fargo does too. So something in your tool belt that you could have that can help you manage expenses.

Kurt von Ahnen (1:01:16)
you

That is a cool tool, because getting those unexpected recurring payments that never seem to go away is a pain in the rear. A lot of these SaaS platforms, even if you cancel, they still bill you for two or three months. They're just trying to see how much they can eke out of it. They're probably going to a no-code meetup with you and getting ideas.

Toby Cryns (1:01:49)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Yeah,

exactly. ⁓ and next time, wait till you hear this listeners who've made it all the way to the end. ⁓ We are going to have book recommendations for you and they're going to be, well, I guess it could be anything, but I was thinking businessy book recommendations. But maybe we'll have other categories.

Kurt von Ahnen (1:02:13)
Okay.

I'm in, I'm in. I've got a few off the top of my head I think I can recommend.

Toby Cryns (1:02:20)
Awesome. Well, thanks everybody for joining us. This has been Whose WordPress Agency Is This Anyway? I'm Toby Kreins here with Kurt Von Ahnen. Kurt, how can people find you?

Kurt von Ahnen (1:02:31)
⁓ LinkedIn is a great way for a personal connection. Kurt Von Ahnen on LinkedIn. I'm the only one there. Easy to find. And then business is mañana no mas.

Toby Cryns (1:02:40)
and I can also be found on LinkedIn. My last name is C-R-Y-N-S and themightymo.com. Thank you all. We'll see you next week.