 The thing is with the WordPress maintenance, what makes it work really well is process, is building a process where it's automated, where you are doing minimal work on it and you have everything working on its own. That is the biggest goal to it because if you don't set it up right and it starts eating up all your time, then it's really going against the whole purpose of it, is taking your time and keeping it away from growing your business. The goal of WordPress maintenance is, this is working in the background. It's almost 100% automated. It's taking minimal of your time and you're able to still focus on the rest of your business. So you got the rest of your business here, little bit maintenance here, but that little bit is you take time setting that up and building it. And once that's already built and the value is there, your clients are set, it's not like something that's like cheap. You don't have to feel bad like saying, okay, I'm going to sell you. It's $100 a month and we're going to do A, B, and C, but the A, B, and C only takes you three minutes a month. That's not to feel bad over because it's a process of you putting that into place. And then it's also what happens when something breaks, your expertise and your skills. That comes into play and that's where really it pays off for the client and the value is in. I could either run through it, I got my notes on it, I just wasn't able to put a deck or to put it together in a way that I feel would really help you build that process and plan. So I'll leave it up to you. I could go ahead and go through it and talk about it and maybe just hit the surface of it. We could do a deep dive later or we could go ahead and keep this as a group call, just talk about the opportunities and what to look for in our market, what to look for for getting new projects, and then we could go next week into a deep dive into the WordPress maintenance or we could go ahead and test the surface. I'll leave it up to you guys. I'm totally open and I do feel bad about not being able to do it right now, but it was out of my control. Can I say something? Yeah, go for it. Okay, Jeff, first of all, I do appreciate that, you know, I'm sure you might have given it a try to do it because it was the plan, but there is a very famous code which I remember when you were speaking and when you said it, and it states, nothing is under control and that gives me peace, you know? So saying on that, I think I would love to hear from what other people have to say about it, about what they feel about today, but I aligned with you on this. I think we can talk about what we are talking and keep this WordPress call for next time, if possible, maybe rather the next Thursday if possible for you to put up things together and get it sometime in between week, like with your Sunday, in next week or days. It does work with you and the other people because I think everybody is home and everybody will be able to join in for the call. So if you can do it early on Sunday, Saturday, today is Sunday, sounds good. If not, my suggestion will be to maybe keep it for next time so that it can help people make more use of it, rather than just touching the surface and you know, waiting for the next week to dive deeper is my suggestion, but there are other people and I would love to hear what they are going to say about it. Cool, thanks Rajab. Anyone else have any feedback or anything about it? Like I'm totally open. I'm here just to help. I'd love if you could just do like a quick overview because one of the challenges I'm facing with maintenance is sometimes it's kind of a mixture of, you know, the automated side of the maintenance and then you got the support requests and whether, you know, you would separate those out into two things with a budget of say two hours a month, you know, and some of that is the automated maintenance and some of it is, hey, can you do this? Can you add that? And then the next question would be, do you also suggest having some kind of a bit of like content marketing where you're, you know, making suggestions or you're creating content for the site as well? Perhaps doing that yourself or managing the outsource of that. You know, it kind of feels like there's three things. There's the automatic maintenance, there's the support request and then there's creating content. Okay, how about we do this? Next week we'll do a deep dive. Like I'll have the slide content, all that stuff ready. But for right now we could just do Q&A on it. So I know a lot, I already know a few of you on this call right now are currently working on putting a maintenance plan together. So how about we just do a Q&A like this for like the next, I don't know, like half an hour or however long you guys got questions for. And that way you could at least work some of the things out right now. And then next week we could come back and go more in depth. Hold on one second. So first one, I'm going to hit question one and this is the biggest challenge and this is what could really eat up the time a lot is the request from clients, all those little requests, all those, you're in a project and you're in the zone and you're getting another email, another message. You got to stop everything and it disrupts the flow. Something that could take 30 minutes, clients don't understand. That takes you hours actually because it disrupts your whole flow. And it messes things up and throws you off schedule. And then all of a sudden you're working late and it gets in your personal life. So what we do is first in our plans, I've seen people offer like X amount of hours, like we give you two hours inside the plans. Every time I see somebody do that, they go through, they go through hell with it. You know, like I think that right there opens up a box right there for scope creep, I think it opens up a box for those little tiny nitpickings that take up all your time. So we do not give hours inside our maintenance plans. What we do is we give an hourly rate. So by being on our maintenance plan and we, I have something I call unlimited support that I give to our clients. And the unlimited support is we allow clients to make request no matter the size. And if it's a long, like it's under about 10 hours estimate work, we can have it done for them in three to five hours because clients not on our maintenance plan, if they hit me up and they say, we need, like, I just like the other night we actually had this happen. I had somebody call, they're like, nobody's getting our invoices. I'm like, you guys said you're going to go on our maintenance two months ago, you have a giant e-commerce site where you get 10,000 euros on sales a month, your side's going to break without maintenance. And they keep asking me, I'm like, I told him, like, I can't do it because it's not meeting our minimum requirement. We have a minimum level. It has to be at least $300 worth of work for me to go in it. I'm not going to go into someone's site for 30 minutes. That refuses to go on our maintenance plan. So the maintenance plan and our unlimited support gives them that. And I use that as a selling point. So I tell them, like, I tell the clients, like part of our maintenance plan and allows us to act more as an extension of your team. And it allows you, like, whenever you need something that's small or minor, something quick update, you have us to help out with that. But we can only help if you're not on our plan. We can only do it if it's on a bigger scale, because it actually costs us more. So that's the first one of how I deal with the time. And I tell them, we got a three to five business day turnaround time. I'll only do one day if it's a big emergency. If it's something like super important, like, you know, like a checkout button is not working, I'll jump in there right away and take care of the client. The second part of that is if you're running an agency, find yourself a developer dedicated to just your maintenance plans. That has been the key to us being able to keep doing ongoing work. We have one guy, one of our developers, he's really good. He's available. He's like a freelancer and we've built a process together. I've taken time to build a process with him. And so our process has been built so well now that I get requests from clients. It takes me about 10 minutes to form, to put it in a way that we communicate, we use Trello to go ahead and give it on to him. I set him up on our harvest so we could keep track of time and invoicing. And then it's done. And then it's out of my hands and he just takes care of it. And I don't do any of it. So, I just want to know the scope of maintenance because I'm new in this industry. As far as I know, it's only update the plugin, update the team, and security backup. But I want to know the scope of the maintenance. All right, cool. Scope of maintenance. First, Clement, let me answer John's second question. And then we'll get to yours after that. Let me write it down. Well, John, did that answer your question right there for question number one? Yeah, that was really good. So what I heard was you don't do you don't do an alley charge. There's just an alley rate and you have an unlimited support package, which so requests can be whatever size there is. And you've got a minimum level of engagement of 300. And you say that you act more as an extension of your team, which I really like the way that was framed. And it's three to five business days turn around and one day if it's an emergency and having a dedicated developer, which I think is great, actually. And also with the three to five days turn around. That's only if it's estimated under 10 hours. If it's over 10 hours, then we're going to price it out and not do hourly and then give a proper time frame. And is the unlimited support. Do you have like a tiered level of packages? Or is that just the one that you want to get them on to? Unlimited supports on all of our we have tiered. We have three tiers. Unlimited is on all of them, but then the highest tier gets priority where we do WhatsApp. Thank you. Cool. And what was question number two? Do you have? It was about what ways of ways of supporting them with content marketing or creating content for them. Sometimes there seems to be an opportunity to perhaps do social stuff for them as well or to outsource that. So more about awareness for them. So more about awareness for their company. So I'm just currently looking into that because I did niche down for our just design and focused on that. But currently I am starting to offer like SEO startups and stuff like that, but I'm keeping it separate. I want to keep that stuff completely separate from the maintenance plans. I think the key to it is building a process. So you get the process for the maintenance plans. But then when you build something for say SEO or content marketing or social media to build a process for each one of those. And that'll help streamline it. And with the different tiers, what does that kind of look like? You said you had a minimum level of 300. No, the minimum level of work say like say if a client like we do a project for they don't want to go on our maintenance plan. You know, they just want to take their website and run and then they come back and they're like, hey, we need this picture switched out. And this is like, you know, like that that's more like the minimum, even though I mostly always do it. But I always, I still don't like look at I'll do it for you this time. But you know, we do have a minimum level of engagement for these kind of tasks. We, you know, if you want to get our maintenance plan, we could do it, but usually we wait till we have a bigger, you know, like a longer list of tasks. That's worth us taking our time to fit in in our schedule. Yeah. And, and can you share what the kind of costs are for those different levels or what that might look like for, for your agency. Sure, hold on one second. All right, let me know when you can see my screen. Can you guys all see it? Yes. Now we did a rebranding ourselves. I haven't yet added it to our lightbox. This was our old brand right here, but we still go off of this. So we have $100 for a starter plan. That's just the basics. Then it goes up to 220 and then 350. And I'm told it's still low. I think that it could go a lot higher and I probably will be raising the prices coming up soon on it. And then if they want WooCommerce, WooCommerce only is allowed on our pro plan or advanced plan. I won't add Woo. If they have a WooCommerce site, they can't go on our starter plan. And then they have to, you know, there's additional charges for, you know, how big their Woo store is because that takes additional work right there. And a follow up question. What do you do about reporting? So that's, yeah, that's inside the automation. So the automation that we use, I use managed WP and actually Bua, she does all of our reporting. She does all of our updating. She does all the maintenance, you know, like she does it all and she sends out the reports like the reports are all automated. Everything is like done on a schedule and it's, it's really cheap. Like you pay for just what you use on it. And how does that fit in with the automatic, the unlimited support that you mentioned? What do you mean? Oh, you said that you have like unlimited support. So would you do request whatever the size as long as it's under 10 hours from those tiers? I saw like 100, 250, 350, I think. Yeah. Is that per hour or is that for the support for the month? No, that's just for the month. Yeah. So if they, if they said we need to add a new section needs to be these kind of pictures and you know, that's going to be eight hours work. Do you just tell them that's going to be eight hours? Is that how it might look like? Yeah, well, I'll build them additional on top of it. So they get the, the one like say they had a starter would be $100 plus then they pay the extra eight hours as well. Right. And do you call that the unlimited support? No, the unlimited support is being able, being there and ready at any time to help them out, even if it's something small. Right. Okay. So to stop someone saying, can you just do this? You say there's minimum of 300 pounds for small jobs. But there is unlimited support through these plans. Yeah, got it. That number actually changes. I just threw it out there. It depends on the client. You know, I don't have a set number in there. Some clients that they're super hectic, dude, it's $1,000 for a minimum. You know, so like, I gauge it based on the client, but I make sure I use that minimum. And that's the selling point. The selling point is, you know, the unlimited support is, you have us there at any time, any time you need updates, you need something changed. You know, we're there for you and we'll get it done within a few days. You know, you don't have to go find another developer. You don't have to take that chance and yeah. That's where the big value is. I mean, how many people here have gone on a website, and it's just like destroy looks like a Frankenstein creation in the back end. Like, you know, it's like, you can tell there's been five developers in there that all did their own thing. I have question. Sure. Can I first get to Clements and then I'll get to you boy. Yeah, yeah. Cool. So Clement asked scope of maintenance. Can you can you clarify a little bit more like what you're looking for about that. Oh, I think you did about the services offered in a right like, like security. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm just like remembering right there. Alright, so basically the scope. You have to have the basics and all of them, which is like the security monitoring the backups. Let me see the updates. I think that those are like the big three updates security and backups. So those are like the main things right there. I'm going to go back and share my screen again. So the thing is when you're looking at the scope that's something you need to determine. And the process when I was building our plan was I did a lot of research on what other people were doing. And I really I checked out hundreds of websites of people offering services, and nobody offered the identical across the board. Some people offered hosting some didn't. Some people offered e-commerce support some didn't. And it's really I think up to you what you want to include in it, like for example for us. I make hosting mandatory, and I chose to make it mandatory because I felt I have better control on keeping the health of their site as long as I control the hosting. But you can see, there's a long list of stuff we could offer. Let me just go down to like our big one right here. We got cloud based hosting we use digital ocean. They have an account manager VIP unlimited support they got like a WhatsApp like to me. Emergency e-commerce. Instead of doing monthly site reports that can get daily or weekly site reports or daily backups. We have over percentages on discounts on the hourly rates. So one would be five one would be 10 one would be 20% off. Uptime monitoring. Oh yeah, uptime monitoring is key also if you're going to do this. That's up there and the ones that are necessary. So security uptime backups and updates and the reason why uptime monitoring so important is you need to know if something goes wrong with the site. If something goes wrong, you'll be notified if you're monitoring the uptime. You don't want to be in a position where a client's been paying you a couple hundred dollars a month for like a year, and then they go on to their site is down and they don't know what's up with it. You know, it won't make you look good but by having the uptime monitoring. If it goes down you get notifications emails, and you could jump in and see what's going on with it. You can do other things like SEO key monitoring, leak monitoring, managing comments. So there's all kinds of things you could do. It's really up to you and what you want to add to it. And I think that right there is where you know why you need to take time on building these you can't rush it. You can't build a plan like this and in just one day. You really take time to thoughtfully consider what what is viable for you. You might not want to do hosting. You might not want to give CDNs. Choose each one and just keep making your list and find out how you can make this more valuable for your clients. Can I make a little suggestion about that comparison table, having looked at a few others. Sometimes when I've seen them, you kind of have the same bit of copy across all three. And then as you as there's more features, those are just done in bold. Or they're just done slightly differently so you can easily as you're scanning see the difference between them. I'll send you an example. It's really thorough, especially on your pro plan. And I like the idea of offering discounts on development services. I think that's that's really good. Actually, I heard someone else offering, they said, you know, it's 115 hours for development. But if you're on our pro plan, it's 100. You know, so immediately you can see the value, you know, so if it's 10 hours a month, you know, you're already making a saving by being on the maintenance. Definitely. And you're putting yourself in a position with clients that are that are heavy online that are they're doing heavy work, and they got a lot of work. Some clients, they don't need a lot of work done, but some of them do. Some of them are really busy and if you position yourself right, and you get in there and you become their go to like this is great recurring revenue. It's really, if you don't have a pro like right now if projects drop, it's like you don't have to worry because you still got the income coming in from this. I like that bowl though I'm going to run with that one. All right, cool. Clement, did you have anything else. Did that help out at all. All right. Boy, what's up man. My question is, do you offer your service to a new client that doesn't build a site with you or some someone else. That's a tough one. I haven't yet, but I wouldn't be against it. If I were to do that, I would first need to inspect the site and make sure it's in good health. If it was in good health. And if it was like develop properly, then I would be open for it for sure. I definitely be open for it. I shouldn't even be sugarcoating it. I 100% like would be open for it. You know, I would take 100 websites that weren't built by me and put them on my plan. And second question is about how you manage the license. If the clients comes up with some plugins that have an issue with updating or a license for that plugin that you cannot go with your plan or your process about maintenance. Also like say a client like they have a WooCommerce site and they got one of those weird WooCommerce plugins that they got and then yeah. Right. They would have to purchase it. You know, like we offer, we have a library of plugins that we use in our life. That's another selling point that I have in our plans is they get licensed while they're in our plans so they're all underneath our license they don't have to worry about it. This is why I need to raise the price to right here. But but if they had something else that we didn't use or they needed a special plugin just for them, even if we did get it, it's the client's responsibility to pay for it. For sure. But I'm sure if they're paying us a couple hundred dollars a month for maintenance and probably hundreds more for monthly updates, they could afford you know, another hundred $200. For example, that if clients use the license from previous developer. For example, how to deal with that. Just be honest. Be honest and straightforward. Like we need to switch it over you have something it's out of date you need to get a license. And if you don't it's going to harm your silence going to cost this amount. If you know what, if a client is trying to be cheap over like a 50 60 $70 license. I don't know if it's kind of client I want anyways. You know if they start acting like really picky like that that's already a huge red flag to me. I don't do it. I have my license and I license our stuff I invest into it so if I'm investing in my business and this client isn't willing to invest in their business. Maybe they're not ready. I'm glad we got to talk about some maintenance because I love this topic. I love WordPress maintenance. The thing is, I was against it for such a long time. Like from the very my first years are doing this and I had a friend that used to tell me is like dude it's like you got to get these plans get people on a plan. I'm like no, I want to be able to charge $10,000 a website and like my my goal was like to I wanted to just get better so I could charge more. And I didn't really see the value in it but then I came to a point where like I wanted to charge $10,000 a website I wanted to say no to these websites I was saying yes to. And I found the solution and I saw that this was a solution that if I were just to get 10 or 20 websites on a maintenance plan with us. Then that would cover everything for the month and I could be more picky and choosy and I won't have that worry or stress going on. Sorry. Just circling back to manage WP. Does that cover most of the things that you need to do, or do you have extra plugins for automating some of the maintenance. I know you're going to go into a deep dive on another call. It covers everything. Like everything I'm offered in here I mean some of the things like a CDN is in the hosting is all within the hosting and we set up, but everything we got is fully automated in here. So even like the comments and spam monitoring. That's inside there. Let me see the site reports is inside there. The updates is inside there. The link monitoring is in there the uptime monitoring, even the analytics is inside there that you could show clients inside your report SSL certificates that comes inside the hosting. There's other things like the plugins license speed optimizations. We keep an eye on it and that that was a little bit tricky right there because we can't keep always working on it, but it all depends on the website. We just make sure it's running at a good speed. And yeah, everything's everything is automated, except for anything we have to do physical work and then that goes to our developer that we have dedicated to this. So you say say this is set up with a client and you've got them on this package and they they contact you and they say, Oh, there's something wrong with the site. This isn't quite working. You know, there's some kind of display issue. Maybe it's something that they've done through editing content. Do you then say that's going to be X amount of hours or do you just try and do it first and then tell them if it's going to go over the time. Yeah, I just try to do it first. I don't I try to build if you build trust with your clients, you know, from the very beginning, it's not it's never really been an issue. Because we've like with one client, they've given us a load of requests and at the end of the month, we just tell them, right, you know, you've gone over two hours or something. And that always causes a sting. And I've got an appointment with them just to to kind of renegotiate the maintenance contract just to say, well, look, you know, it's going to is kind of coming in at roughly five hours, not the two hours that we talked about. What do you think about that? Why are they, why are they like, why are they questioning just two hours of work? Well, I've, we've always had this problem with the main contact there works. He's got a bit of a scarcity mindset. You know, so I can see on social media he's kind of posting going into budget shops and saying what a bargain he got. You know, so it could just be not such a great fit. It sounds like he's trying to get a bargain out of you and trying to play. I mean, that's what it sounds like. It's been very transparent and we've, you know, we've had the relationship with the, with the MD for, you know, seven or eight years. And it's always this kind of frustration of, oh, that's a lot of money, you know, this kind of stuff. Well, it's not as if we're lying about the time we're spending on it. You know, it makes me want to just say it's going to be 1000 when it's only 500 just for the hassle of the, you know, the bartering. I don't know if I got like an answer for that one, like, because I don't want to like tell you anything wrong, like I don't know how your relationship is with them, how important they are to your business. You know, I don't want to like say like I fired them, you know, I don't know how important or how much money that they're bringing in. One thing I do know is I know I never charged people enough. I never really charged people for all the emails I do for the research I do, and I know I should be doing that. So I'm pretty sure none of us here are charging people enough. And I had one person once say before, he always says, if you ever get frustrated with a client is because you're not charging them enough. Yes, I was just going to say the same thing I remember that that if you are having a frustration, you are not charging them enough. Yes. I was just going to say the same thing at the same moment, Jeff. Yeah, you summed it up so that rings through my head too. And anytime I'm like, oh my God, they keep calling me like they keep going they keep going asking for more. I'm like, damn, I'm not charging them enough. I should have doubled my price. It would have been okay. Just on that point actually. Christo talks about, you know, you should, you should look at look at the client how much, you know, what's their income and and adjust it accordingly. I quite like that, you know, so that you're, you're being more reasonable with clients that can't necessarily afford it and for clients that can, you know, they don't balk at these big numbers. Exactly. The biggest headaches are going to be clients with a very low budget because they're going to try to get as much as they can. And also the person that said that statement is Chris though. Yeah, that's who said that. And I learned most of my stuff through there. Because you're part of the pro group as well, aren't you, Jeffrey? The pro group, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just about to say, like, have you heard of the pro group? Oh man, that makes four of us in the pro group inside this group now. Really? Usually, Lauren, do you know Lauren in the pro group? No. Okay, she's been in there for a little while, but she's also usually inside these calls too. Yeah. That's cool, man. We need to have a phone call sometime. I'm trying to connect with more people in the pro group. For everyone else, the pro group is like if you go on YouTube and you look up Chris Doe or the future without a E, that's Chris Doe runs this one group and it's a paid group. It's kind of like this. In fact, it was one of like the things that sparked me to do this, you know, when I was in the, like, I've been active in the Elementor community for a while now. And, you know, I stopped like really participating inside the group because I felt it grew so big and there's some negativity going on. And I felt like, you know what, instead of having negativity inside this group, we should be giving support to this group because Elementor has, you know, it's a tool that helps people get a quick jumpstart into web design and development. Instead of putting people down, instead of saying, oh, you don't know how to program or code, you're not a developer, like some of these guys in their talk, I'm so against that. I think that's like so negative. And that's not how that's not what we should be doing. We should be supporting and helping each other grow and realize that, you know, it's different now. You don't have to know, you know, all these languages in order to get into this career. You need to know how to solve problems. That's what it comes down to. It's not the tool you use. It's not what code you use. Can you solve a problem and help people? And that's what I saw inside that group. I saw a problem and I wanted to help. So that's why I started this group right here. And I get all the good stuff though from the FuturePro group. I'm not going to front. Well, thanks very much. I've had a ton of value from today's call. This is the first call I've been on with you. It's been, it's been really good. Thank you. Thanks. I appreciate that. I've got to get going. So thanks everyone. Nice to meet you all. Cool. Nice to meet you. Good to meet you, John. All right, so guys, before we end this call, is there any like last questions or anything? Yeah, just a quick thing, Jeff. I was looking forward for the last couple of calls we had since we started the first one. Is there a place you have been able to, or you have been able to combine those PDFs? We are expecting any possibilities on that. That's it. Yes, next week, 100% for sure. I've already built it and I'm even making a tutorial on what I built on it. Like, like, okay, so I put it on our website, but I wanted to do something where it was only members that could access it. But I wanted to build it with Elementor. So basically, I built a membership section on our website without a membership plugin using only Elementor and Elementor add on. So I'm going to make a tutorial, but yeah, yeah, I was geeking out over it, but next week for sure we're going to have is going to be a resource section is going to have all the PDF downloads, and then we'll keep adding to it. Like, I think, well, some of the things I plan on adding to it later on as we continue and as we grow and as we evolve in this because like right now as we're talking about like maintenance but like later on I could see us looking at like positioning contracts templates, all these kind of things. So I look for also putting a place where we can put these templates and we can put these other resources that's really going to help people out. Yeah, sounds sweet. All right guys, well, I'm really grateful that you guys are all here and you know participating in this. And if anybody has any feedback, any suggestions or questions, you know, go ahead and post it inside the group or reach out to me at any time. And with that, I'm going to say, I'm not good with it. Thank you. Thank you. It was great and I feel grateful to be a part of this group and connecting with the other members and look forward to be again soon sharing the valuable information with everyone and get the insights yes. Yeah, it's really good seeing you guys here. And also at gosh and Jerson is good. Good meeting you guys. Thank you for sharing and looking forward to next week. Ah, cool, cool man. All right guys will stay safe stay positive and do get ready. It's about to get busy in our industry. It's about to get really busy so get ready. Be prepared. Look at how you can offer more value. What are the solutions? What are the problems so you can give those solutions and get ready. That's all I could say. All right guys. All right. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Everybody. Bye guys stay blessed. Stay.