 I'm going to start with the opening remarks. My name is Tiffany. I'll be the room lead. I'll be hosting the morning session today. We have Andres over there. He is our room assistant, and he's going to be on the camera. On behalf of the organizers and volunteers, we thank you. We would love to welcome you to Vancouver Word Camp 2023. I will also like to acknowledge we are gathered today on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples, including the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Saleh-Waututh nations. The theme of Word Camp Vancouver this year is Connected Again. This is the first Word Camp Vancouver in four years, and as a WordPress community, we are finally able to reconnect at Word Camp, and we're very thankful for it. Show of hands, who here is their first time here at Word Camp? Okay, keep your hands up. For those who have been here, look around, and please make the effort of welcoming these people, meeting these people, making them feel welcome at our WordPress community. Word Camps have a code of conduct to provide a friendly, safe, and welcoming environment for everyone. This means being considerate, respectful, and collaborative. If you have an issue or see an issue with the code of conduct, please reach out to one of the volunteers or the organizers. The organizers will be at the registration desk. There will always be one there. We offer coffee and tea in front of the theater of C-300, and that's where the sponsors tables are. This is also where lunch will be served. To connect to Wi-Fi, use the UBC Visitor Network and scroll down and agree to the terms. And while you have your phones out, reminder to turn your phones onto silent or vibrate, just to respect our speaker today. Finally, we would like to thank all of our sponsors this year, and in particular, our Gold Sponsors, Affinity Bridge, Blue Host, Go Daddy, Jetpack, Simple Hosting, SiteGround, and WeGlob. WordCamp is an all-volunteer conference. None of the speakers, organizers, or volunteers are paid to be here, so when you get a chance, please thank them for their time and effort to make this happen. Our first speaker today is Mike Shishka. The title of his presentation is Beyond Code, Creating Value Through Outstanding Customer Experiences. Again, it's Beyond Code, Creating Value Through Outstanding Customer Experience. Please welcome Mike Shishka. Hey, good morning, everyone. Switch over to my... Well, good morning, everybody. Welcome to WordCamp. Excited to be with you here today and tell you a little bit more about myself and my agency and our journey over the past 15 years of doing work in website design development and marketing and some of the things that we've learned about customer service that I think were pretty instrumental to our success. And then there's no secret that we have a new competitor out there in the form of a robot. So this has been something that's on my mind a lot the last year, so I wanted to leverage my... What I've learned about customer experience and where I see that going with some of the new opportunities and challenges that are coming... Is there a remote mic, by chance? Okay, hopefully that's better. I like to walk around, so... Great, so my name's Mike Shishka. I'll put this up at the end as well if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn. I would love to do that. If you'd like a copy of the slides at the end as well, I'd be happy to send them off to you. They're mostly just some kind of aids to go through the talk today, but if they're interesting to you, I'm happy to share them. So I come all the way from the foreign land of Redgear, Alberta, and it's been really great to be visiting Vancouver this weekend, meeting up with some of our remote team here. And yeah, there we go. So a little bit about me. This is my wife, Allie. We work together at the company so I could do a whole other talk about what that's like. She's our operations manager, so she's really instrumental in project management and creating that back end experience that ultimately our clients might not see all the details of, but definitely impacts the work that they do. We don't have any kids, except these two right here. So on the left, this is my dog, Logo, and on the right, this is our Chihuahua Pixel. So these are our fur babies, as you would say, and this will come up a little bit later. So in addition to building websites and writing content and doing this kind of work for our clients, last summer I embarked on one of the biggest projects I've ever taken on. I've worked on some pretty big websites and that was building a new deck. And why I'm showing this to you today is because I don't know how to build a deck. I definitely don't know how to build a deck like this, but through the process of talking to some contractors and seeing what construction prices were like over COVID, I thought to myself, you know what? I think YouTube can teach me how to do this. And we're a year into the project now, summer too. It looks much more along than this one, but I think this for me was one of those things that really shows you that you can do something that you've never done before and you can do it like a professional can if you're willing to take the time and to learn. My neighbor was a construction foreman for 40 years now retired. So he gave me lots of advice over the fence. And one of the things he said to me is he said, Mike, an amateur will take four times as long to do it, but it might be a little bit better than the professional. And that's because you don't know what the tolerances are. You don't know where the margin for error is acceptable. And I think this is a good lesson in us taking on new things that we don't know how to do yet. And it's very possible, especially with YouTube. So I run a digital agency called Reaction. We've been around for about 15 years. We've got a core team of about 10 people and then we work with a network of contractors and freelancers. So call it about 15 to 25 people at any given time. And we design and develop WordPress websites. Sort of. So I was at WordCamp US a few weeks ago. This was in Baltimore slash DC. And I was at WordCamp and I was in a circle and I was talking to a group of other agency people, developers, and the common question comes up, oh, what do you do at Reaction? And I said, well, we design and build WordPress websites. Kind of a standard answer when you're at a WordCamp and you also feel like your guard's down a little bit because you're not pitching a client, you're just talking to your peers. And I was at WordCamp with a friend of mine, Jason Nickerson. He's pretty well known in the WordPress and hosting community, runs a fractional marketing company now. And he said to me, as soon as I gave that answer, design and build WordPress websites, he said, Mike, that is not true. I looked at him and I said, really? Okay. And he goes, no, what does your homepage say that you do? And it was like, right. We don't just build and design WordPress websites. We help our clients make big things happen online. And I realized that this can be a fluffy marketing statement and maybe your business has your own version of this. But it's really important because designing and building WordPress websites is not what we do. It's how we do what we do. We help businesses solve problems. We help them achieve their goals. That is what we do for them. WordPress is just how we do it. And how we do things changes over time. It evolves, new technologies, new platforms come about. And in reality, clients don't really care how we do things. It's a bit important. But they really care about what we can do for them. So I wanna tell you a little bit of a story here. Some of you may have heard this before, but this is a story about the Ritz Carlton and a stuffed animal named Joshy. Now, I stole this story from Scott Stratton. If you haven't heard of this guy, he's a Canadian author and marketer. He runs a podcast now, it's awesome. And Scott Stratton, he wrote a book back in 2009. So this is just a year after my agency opened. He wasn't super famous yet. So he came to Red Deer to do a full day marketing workshop. So I sat in a room with maybe 30 other business owners and got to spend the day with Scott. And he told us this story of Joshy from his book on marketing. So basically the story goes like this. A family, and the reason I'm lifting this story from him is not because this was the only example I could think of, but this was a story that I still remember to this day, almost 15 years after hearing it, and I still think about this a lot. So it was really impactful to me. So this family goes on vacation, they stay at a Ritz Carlton, and after they leave, they come home, they realize they left their son's favorite stuffy Joshy behind at the hotel. Now, I don't have any kids, but some of my employees that do have told me that when your child leaves their stuffy or their security blanket behind, this is bad. It's like realizing you left your phone somewhere. So the parent did what I think any responsible parent would do. This is probably what I would do if I had kids. They lied. And they said, nope, Joshy isn't lost. He's having an extended stay at the hotel. And this was good enough for the short time. So the dad quickly jumps on the phone and he calls the Ritz Carlton and he's not only hoping that they'll help him find Joshy, he's hoping to help collaborate this lie as well. So they find Joshy in the lost prevention, lost prevention, or they find him in the lost and found and they take Joshy on a tour to help build up this story of his extended stay. So here's a photo that the staff took of Joshy enjoying some extra time by the pool. Here's Joshy having a round of drinks with his friends at the bar. He managed to get in a couple rounds of golf over this time but unfortunately Joshy doesn't have any money. So in order to pay for this extended stay, he had to work and log a few hours in lost prevention to make sure that his bill was covered. And if he's gonna be an employee of the resort for this time, then he's gonna need an ID card. So they went ahead and created a badge for Joshy. So they took all these photos. They included the ID card. They sent it back to the family. And now not only did the son get his Joshy back, but all these photos, the ID card, and this memorable experience around the extra stay that Joshy had. So this isn't just a cool story about a lost stuffed animal. And if you've ever left something at a hotel, which I have and you've called, it's not always easy to get that item found. And if they do find it, they probably want your credit card so that they can charge you for sending it back to you. And it's not a problem, but if you've had to go through this experience, it's not great. And I had to call and follow up quite a few times just to make sure my item was sent back to me. So what this story really taught me almost 15 years ago was that it is possible to create an exceptional customer experience that offers an ads value over and above the product and service that you just sold or delivered to your client. So it's the way you deliver it, the experience that someone has that can add sometimes exponential value to what you've done. So this was something I thought a lot about in the early days and still think about today. So this is a picture of myself in the background. There's Lisa, she's at the conference with me here today. And this is a photo back from our early days because this is where our journey begins in 2008. That is me sitting in an iMac box having some probably non-alcoholic drinks at work. So back in 2008, let me paint the picture for you. This is the era of glossy buttons. Everything was shiny. Skeumorphic design was in. Can we make it look real? Like it's really a notepad on your phone. Reflections were everywhere. You guys remember the iTunes library, all those reflections, oh yeah. And you had to make rounded corners by slicing up a table and using image sprites. And this is a seven slice table, but if you wanted to do an offset shadow, you needed to do nine slices and it was kind of annoying. CSS3 was coming out around this time with border radius, but it wasn't widely adopted yet so this is what we had to do. It kind of sets the stage for where we were at from a web development perspective. And just a few months prior to me starting the agency, Steve Jobs had unveiled the first iPhone in end of 2007 and he showed the New York Times website on there. And if you notice something, it's not responsive. And there's also five columns. So this is the state of the web. Glossy buttons, reflections, slicing up corners in your tables and looking at five column websites on your phone. It was early days. And just a few years prior, we were still convincing people that the internet wasn't a fad. And in 2008, a lot of the websites that we were building for companies, it was either the first website they ever had or the website they had was built by a friend or a friend's kid and this was the first website they were getting from an agency or a professional company. So there was a lot of education that had to go through this process. And even today, the web is much more mature, but your customer purchasing a website from you, this is likely still maybe the first time they have ever bought or gone through the process of building a new website. And even if it's not, it's probably only the second or third. This isn't something that somebody, it's like buying a house. You tend to not buy a bunch of them throughout your whole life if you're the average homeowner. So I wanna talk a little bit about what the competitive landscape looked like for us back in 2008. We had maybe three or four local competitors. These were marketing companies primarily that got into building websites in addition to the marketing work that they were doing. But we started hearing a lot of things from our customers, about the clients we were getting, about their experience with these other local competitors. And some of these things unfortunately are still true today. And it's things like not answering the phone. And when you are saying to your customer that we are a business and we are professional, most businesses answer the phone. Also not responding to customer emails within even a day or two. It was just pretty common practice to send an email to your web developer and you might wait an entire week to hear back from what they said. And if this, I do think still happens a bit today, but in 2008, this was pretty normal. There was often very long periods of time between when you did sign a client, between those client touch points. And there wasn't a lot of proactive communication about the process or what was being done or what was gonna happen next. So you have to think from a client's perspective, you're buying something that you've never bought before. It costs a lot of money. It's gonna take a lot of time to complete. And you don't actually know what the outcome is gonna be. And neither does the person you're hiring to do it. That sounds really mysterious and scary. And then when you add on slow response time to an email, weeks and weeks without hearing from them. There's this idea that in the absence of information, people will fill that gap with the worst things they can imagine. I haven't heard from him for two weeks. He probably took my money, moved to Belize, and I'll never see him again. Maybe he's just working on your homepage. But you don't know, so you'll make something up. And we also found a lot of times where the client was left either hanging at the after the project was over. Here's your website, here's your files. We got it up and running for you. See you later. And part of this comes from the need to move on to the next project. And you've got another client there waiting, ready for your time and attention. But there can also be some friction and frustration at the ends of these projects where you're trying to get this online and when it's done, you just want to be done. So this is what the project lifecycle looked like back then. I think it's pretty similar today, but this is what we were seeing. There was often a kickoff meeting, and then you as the web designer or the web design agency, you'd kind of go into your cave for a few weeks and you'd be doing your magic and working on some very mysterious technical stuff. And then a few weeks to a month later, you would emerge with a homepage mock-up. And it was amazing. And you'd send it to your client over email and say, look at this, it'd be a JPEG. Look at this amazing JPEG of your new homepage. And the client looks at it and they go, why is my business all written in Latin? And I didn't know that we sold rocket ships. Why are there pictures of rocket ships everywhere? And they would email you back your feedback and you'd go through rounds and rounds of design revisions on that homepage back and forth, back and forth, and you'd get the feedback and you'd go, oh, I don't know. And then you'd do the feedback and you'd eventually get them to approve a homepage. Then we get to the point where, do you guys remember, we'd say, please send us your content. And then the waiting game would start. We'd be waiting and waiting for that email. And you'd follow up. How's the content coming? So we're still waiting for content. At a certain point, you'd just say, you know what, we're gonna just start building it anyway. So you'd start the development and you'd build the site and you'd send that client a staging link and it's all full of placeholder content. And the client looks at it and they go, now we got over this Latin thing. Why are there still rocket ships everywhere? And the answer is, well, you didn't send us your content. So that this would motivate them to start getting you their content because now they can see a webpage up. They start sending things, you trickle in, they add it to the website. And there's this back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until you get to the point where the website finally feels like it's ready to go live. And then you launch the website and you think, thank God it's over, we're done. And you've got other clients waiting to go and then you know what happens? The post launch revisions. Oh, my customer looked at it and they noticed this or I forgot to add this full of point on. And CMSs were not incredibly advanced back then. So a lot of these updates just came back to you as the agency or the web designer. And again, you're trying to move on to the next project at this phase. You're trying to get those revisions done, but then this is where that cycle of not answering the phone, spending a week to respond to the email comes in. And to me, as a new business owner, starting this agency and hearing this from my clients even starting to see us doing some of these things ourselves, it became very clear that our competitive advantage was not going to come in the form of writing better code or delivering a slightly more polished user experience than our competitors could. Our advantage was gonna come in the form of providing an exceptional customer experience. So what I did is I started to break down what does this mean in terms of pain points for my customer? Well, it's slow communication. It's rushed onboarding. Large gaps between touch points. Feedback was not efficient. And most clients are not writers, photographers, or SEO experts. They're not actually qualified to give feedback on most of the things we wanted feedback on. And when you add in all of that point about not knowing the process, not knowing what's happening next, it creates a lot of frustration. The end result might still be amazing. Great website, the customer can be happy. The website can even make amazing results for the business. But their memory is gonna be about the process they went through and what it was like to work with you. And there were many clients that would finish a website with another agency, and then just wanna move it over to us because they didn't wanna work with that company anymore. So we knew that a five-star customer experience was gonna be critical to our success. So what does an elevated customer experience look like in the context of an agency? Well, for us, that meant having a really tight sales process because this is where you have the opportunity to set the standard right from the start about what that client can expect when they're working with you. If it takes two or three days to respond to a sales inquiry, how long is it gonna take once you've actually been hired? So responding to sales inquiry same day incredibly important. Sending the client an email ahead of that sales call of what we're gonna talk about and what they should be prepared to talk about. Explaining that this is not the sales call, this is just the introduction and here's what's gonna happen next. Talking to them about the timeline of when they're gonna receive the proposal from you. Even if it's two weeks from now, tell them that and then deliver it. What you're doing is you're leaving little breadcrumbs right before they've even hired you about what it's gonna be like to work with you, how quickly you're getting back to them, you're demonstrating how organized you are, how you can do what you say you're gonna do when you say you're gonna do it and this is all in the discovery phase still but you're setting up, you're setting the stage for what this is gonna be like to work with you. So then we really focus quite a bit on our onboarding process. So not just the onboarding call, so sure you can, we've changed up this process over the years, sending questionnaires, trying different methods. What you actually do is not the most important thing but having a thorough onboarding process gives the client the opportunity to feel like you have learned everything you need to know to be the best salesman in their company. That's really what they're expecting. If they want their website to sell products, get registrations, collect donations, you have to become that company's number one salesperson and having a quick onboarding meeting and then jumping into the homepage design does not demonstrate that you understand their business. And honestly, even if you've worked with clients in the same space and you know their industry and their business, going through these motions isn't always for you, sometimes it's for them to make sure they have the opportunity to share what they think is important to be contributed to their project and it will surprise you what you hear sometimes. So this is where we started adding stakeholder interviews and this doesn't have to be crazy complicated or really this big process. You have the kickoff meeting, you ask for two or three of the most important people in the company for me to talk to. It's usually another salesman, it could be the owner, it could be someone who works on a production floor or delivering the service and have a 15 to 30 minute chat with them. Ask them about their job, how do they get new customers? You build your own questionnaire, but for the client, the company hiring you, they've seen this sales process, they're feeling really confident through the onboarding, you're talking to their employees so now they feel like okay, well, they're getting, they're doing their due diligence, I know whatever they come up with, at least it's gonna be rooted in some actual knowledge about our business. And at the end of the day, what we're really doing here, yeah, we're collecting some research to help the project, but we're building confidence with the customers, really what we're doing. This one seems obvious, but sending regular status updates is critical and what regular means, you get to set that expectation. If it's every two weeks, you tell the client it's every two weeks and that's when they get their status update. Might be every week, it might be once a month, the frequency doesn't matter, but establishing what that frequency is and sticking to it is what's important. And whether you're behind or on track, this gives you the opportunity to create those regular ongoing touch points with a client and you can template these and if you're doing a website project, that's your main thing, you're gonna find that the status updates after the kickoff, after the discovery process, after the design, they're kind of similar. So you can build even a bit of a templated status update flow that you can send to really save you some time. And these status updates don't just have to be what we're working on. This is your chance to say, and here's what you should be working on. So right after the kickoff, have you started collecting some photos? Have you got your sales brochures put into Google Drive for me? You can be giving the client their action items here too and you can start seeding in little bits of education. Next, we're gonna be working on your site's development. Here's what we're gonna be doing. If you're interested, here's a bit of information about that. You might not read it, but you're providing this experience to them that everything is so organized, everything's been done a hundred times before and you just have to come along for the journey with us. It's the confidence that's being communicated here. So this is another thing that we learned, not as early as we should have, but we never ever send work over email. We always present it. So whether that's in person, in a video call, or just recording a quick little loom screen capture and sending it off. It is very important to not send work through email because you don't have the opportunity to explain your rationale and to sell it. And if you've ever heard the term voices from the shadows where your work is shared with other people at the company that you never had a chance to talk to, well now they're looking at your work and making feedback and criticisms and comments about it, but they never got to hear the rationale. So even just recording a little video can then ensure that when that proof or that staging link is being sent around, that video can be sent with it, providing context to everyone who reviews it. It's also just really good to get your face in front of the client as much as possible so they feel comfortable looking at you, hearing your voice, and that actually goes a long way in building that rapport and the confidence. And we also now always include time in the budget for content interviews and writing. Even if the client thinks that they can write their own content, we still include time on the budget for this because we know it's gonna have to be reviewed. We know that there's gonna be feedback that we have and I make it very clear to my clients if you're gonna write the content for your website then for that portion of the project, you are on the project team and you work for me and I'm gonna direct you with what to do and I'm gonna give you feedback. And the client goes like, whoa, really? But think of the confidence that builds and then they usually go, oh, well, if it's that serious, maybe you should do the first draft and I'll review it. I'm like, yes, you should. And we not only embraced, but we started to encourage those post-launch updates because this is where you build reoccurring revenue. You get the client on board with changing the website after it's finished. You're building the idea, you're planting those seeds that the website has never finished. Oh, you forgot to send us something? That is so awesome. This is a great example of how your website can keep growing with your business. Let's get that new page added. It's gonna take four hours. It doesn't have to be free. It doesn't have to be included in the original project scope. In fact, it can help to get that client on board with more updates. So let's look at this competitive landscape now 15 years later. Well, we have remote agencies like Reactions. We used to have three or four competitors in our city. Now almost every agency is potential competition. There's freelancers. There was always freelancers, but there's more freelancers than ever and it's easier to find and work with them as an individual company. These aren't bad things. These are just, that's the competitive landscape. There's global talent, the ability to go to other countries with different labor markets and rates and you're not getting subpar work. You're just working with somebody who you never would have had access to before. We have no code site builders and they're getting kind of good guys like Wix and Squarespace, like they're not terrible. This is competition for us. There's industry specific and more productized solutions than ever and now we have to worry about robots. So when I think about my journey building the agency, customer experience and how even the process of building WordPress sites has changed and now I think about AI coming into the mix. I think about it in a few ways. So we've got AI being integrated into plugins themselves. You've probably seen, Yoast now has AI suggested page titles and meta descriptions. That's pretty cool. It's helpful to the user, but I see some other interesting implement implementation of AI within plugins to help with the setup or the configuration. And this is taking the technical expertise out of the process and it is giving more capability to clients or to freelancers or people that you might be competing against. Code co-pilots is a huge thing in the general development world using chat GPT or specifically tuned models to help write code, but co-pilots that are specifically trained on the WordPress codex, the VIP development standards, those are starting to come out and some of these co-pilots even have integration for very specific plugins. So if you use ACF and Ninja Forms on your website, well, your co-pilot knows that and they're gonna, when you say, help me write a form on a page that has these things, it's gonna give that to you with ACF and a Ninja Form. The CEO of GitHub says that by 2030, 80% of code will be written by AI. So what that means is not, doesn't remove developers from the equation, but it moves them up the value chain. A team of 10 will now be a team of two and those two people will not be writing code, they'll be reviewing code. AI is like a huge wave coming in and web developers and people in the digital industry are sitting on the beach. Some are building sand castles and getting a tan and other people, like me, are looking up YouTube videos to try to learn how to surf because we know this is coming, we don't know how to do it but we want to have a surfboard so we're ready to catch the wave, whatever that means for us. These no code and low code builders that are out there, they're getting good, as I mentioned, but they have a unique advantage to integrate AI because their ecosystem is closed and they have much more control over the code base. Imagine a situation where you're a small business and you need a landing page. So you say in your little Wix or Squarespace bot, I need a landing page to promote my sprinkler blowout services for the fall. Here's my pricing and I want to make sure I include a picture of this and that. And then the AI will respond and say, are there any specific keywords you want to offer? Is there a call to action? Here it is, okay. Here, let me show you three different examples. Which page do you like best? And you'll be able to then say, I like the banner from this one and the CTA from this one. And clients will be able to Frankenstein their own sites. And if you think, wow, maybe one day that'll happen, but AI is pretty bad. Have you seen some of the stuff that it produces? I like to say AI is 90% accurate. You just don't know which 10% is wrong. So that might be true, but to think that we came from a time of slicing up our tables and now the internet is literally in every lamp and light bulb in my house, we've come a very long way in a very short time. So to think 10 or 15 years from now, the things aren't going to continue to change is just not the case. So this is where the necessity for us to move up the value chain comes in. So our clients, they know their business better than anyone else. They know what problem they have or they know what goal they want to achieve. We need to prove to them that we know how to solve their problem or achieve their goal. Not how we're going to do that, but what we're going to do for them. So I'll kind of wrap up here with this idea that AI is very unknown and facing the unknown is scary. And sometimes doing new and exciting things are scary because they've never been done before. And you need bravery in a sense of adventure to want to capitalize on this movement. And I think that's really good because there's this quote that fortune favors the brave. So I want to feel like I'm a brave AI adventurer. Okay, so what's next? I don't know. I was gonna hopefully if someone here knew the answer but nobody does and that's kind of the cool and exciting part of it. So here's what I'm doing right now in my agency. I'm continuing to focus on those fundamentals. Client response time, lots of touch points. I want to out educate my competition through the process. And I want to make sure that my clients leave this with a great experience because I know for at least the next few years using AI and these different tools isn't going to come with a great customer experience. It's probably going to be quite frustrating. And if you don't know how to pull all these pieces together as a client then these tools are just creating the how, not the what. So I am right now trying to find ways to use AI to complete more of my personal daily tasks to make me more efficient. So I have time to think about those fundamentals. We're now in the stage where we're using it personally each team member. So now it comes to how do we incorporate this into our standard operating procedures? How do we make AI tools and prompts a part of how we work, not just from one developer but from an organizational perspective. So every developer not only uses the tools but uses them the same way. And last, I am keeping my eyes open. I am trying to learn absolutely everything that I can and I'm trying to stay alert to what's happening because this could change really fast, potentially a lot faster than this last 20 years of the internet. So I hope that this talk, if there's nothing else, inspires you to go make big things happen online for your clients. And I really appreciate you taking the time to be with me this morning. Yeah, we've got a few minutes for Q&A here. So I'll definitely answer any questions. And then if we go over all, we can just hang out outside there. Do we have any questions for Mike? I'll come right. Maintaining all of this in the background? On the AI side specifically or on the business back in collaboration? Oh yeah, awesome question. Yeah, so the question was, what are the tools or the systems or processes we use behind the scenes to build this customer experience? I mean, at a really practical level, we're a teamwork.com company. We really love that suite of products. So they have teamwork projects, which is their project management piece. They have a CRM for keeping track of all your leads and your sales communication. They have something called Teamwork Spaces. That's a documentation library. So we use that to keep track of all of our standard operating procedures. And they do some cool stuff in there too, where you can mark SOPs or documents as required reading for team members. So they have to read them and acknowledge that they read that. And then just like Google Docs, you can update them within the team and tracks the revision history and all of that. So you can take what would be kind of boring company documentation and turn it into more of a living library of institutional knowledge within your company. So Teamwork is something that we use for a lot of that stuff. And then something that we should have honestly done a lot sooner is implementing a ticketing system to manage communication with our clients. And not just for support tickets, for the whole project process. I had this feeling that a ticketing system would be impersonal or would take away some of the one-on-one communication you have with your account manager or your project team. In fact, it's actually just gone one step further in showing the customer how organized we are. So of course, if you submit a support ticket or make what we call an on-demand request, that goes through the system. You get an automatic email. Of course, the status is tracked through it. So that in itself makes customers feel like you're really on top of their stuff and it's never going to get dropped. But we've even been incorporating that into the project process. So when we're in the content phase, communication around content is on that ticket. And then if the client logs in, they can sort their ticket by category and then they would see here's the seven tickets that are part of your website build, the kickoff, the design, the content development, those kinds of things. Hopefully that answers your question. I feel like I should be getting an affiliate commission from Teamwork for that. Yeah. Can you talk about your team's makeup in delivering? Do you have a ton of account management people on the team? Yeah, good question. So we don't have a ton of account management, so we're a... I call us a small-ish team. I feel like we're still pretty small. So one of the very first hires we ever made was an account manager. Because this idea of not answering the phone or responding to emails was something that just hit home. I couldn't believe that that was, you know, like I couldn't believe that that was what it took to be competitive or to have an advantage. So account manager was probably our very first or second hire. And today we actually operate with one account manager, but then we have some of our more senior people interacting with clients. And doing that through the ticketing system makes it really easy to have multiple team members contributing without anybody feeling left out, or like some comment came out of left field to the client. So our team is basically we've split it up into two groups in terms of makeup, so we have what we call the core team. So these are my full-time, salary, benefit employees, and then we have the remote team. So these are our contractors that actually do the delivery of the work that we do for clients. So the core team is really focused on this customer experience. So that's account manager, project director, senior developer, operations manager, self, and then I have an executive assistant that allows me to have a lot more of that service, provide a lot more service to my clients. So you're mentioning you have an account manager, do you also have a project manager or the account manager becomes kind of the project manager at the same time? Oh yeah, good question, because the terms account and project manager, they mean different things in every agency. So no, the account manager does nothing but service the accounts of those clients. So their sole job is to make sure that the customer is communicated with, staying up to date and what we say is you are the voice of the client on the team and that person is the one that's champion for the client at all times. So our project management is done by my wife, our operations so we consider that operations, but because we work in such a collaborative flow and we've been doing it for a while, we think that the original setup of the project, the forecasting and the scheduling is on the operations side, but once the project has started, task creation, following deliverables, comments, that actually gets handed over to the project team then. Can I ask another one quickly? So one thing we're dealing because I have a very similar agency as yours and often is we're doing work that is very custom that we've never done before in WordPress, etc. And one challenge is always kind of the over budget situation where basically you've evaluated for a certain amount of hours and then you see that your developers are working so much and like, okay, and how do you deal with this usually in your agency? How do you deal with it in your agency? Do you need me to repeat the question or did you get that? Okay, so it depends why you're going over budget. If you misquoted that's a tricky one because you have to decide as an agency are we going to go back to the client and just say we misquoted. We didn't account for these things so we need an extra 40 hours to complete this feature request. I don't think we should be so afraid to go back to our clients and just say we made a mistake and we need a little bit more money. I showed you the picture I was building my deck. Well, I hired a landscaping company to do all the rest. I did the design but moving dirt and planting trees felt like a little bit too much labor for me. So I brought in the landscaping company and they gave me a quote on everything that I had asked for and during the project they actually talked to me about how the way I wanted my trees planted so close to the fence they had to dig them by hand because they couldn't bring their machine in they didn't really account for that they just quoted me on planting seven trees and they said it's going to take a little bit of extra time and I thought that seems really reasonable you got to dig the hole by hand you can't use your tractor so sure build me some extra labor so I don't think clients are always so opposed to paying more if you can explain why the other thing is if it's scope creep so if it's because you misquoted sure you can go back to the client or you can decide to eat it but if it's scope creep this is where having really good conversations with the client about how the scope has changed since you originally started and we can go in with a change order but I like to try to push those things to a phase two because I don't like the feeling of running out of my client all the time so if we can say hey you know what that's a little bit different than what we initially planned to do so why don't we complete this phase get it live and then we'll do a phase two that includes that and they tend to be pretty receptive but I mean there's no like great it's a challenge getting onto it though as early as possible if you're in a six week sprint and you're finding out at week five you're going to be late or over budget we're not going to make it as soon as you think that that's going to happen plant the seed talk to the customer and ultimately it's going to make you seem like you're just very diligent about what you're doing I had to anyway so I'll ask a simple one as a business owner when you start a company you're at a stage where you have certain set of clients who've got you as a reference and you build those up more on cost perspective so how do you transition from your positioning as a more cheaper resource to a more efficient and a better agency to work with so the heart of your question is it how do you compete with lower cost solutions is that the heart of it you know it's tough because so my accountant is also one of my best friends and I asked him once like over drinks I just said how much would you your firm want to pay for your website he said as little as possible and he and it was like right I'm a business owner too if I was going to buy something I want it to be as less you know cost as possible you don't want to sacrifice the quality you also don't really want to overpay especially when it's a business expense this isn't like a personal luxury that you get to enjoy all the time so I think it's really focusing on and also every agency will say that they offer great service and great quality so just saying that isn't really a competitive advantage you have to you demonstrate that you've created great results for other companies in the past it's a bit of making the client question whether they would get those same results with a different solution and I also know that really well built and maintained websites don't need to be rebuilt every three to five years we have clients with websites that are ten years old and the problem is we built them too good and they don't need a new one so we're now just doing you know we might build a whole new theme but the core is still amazing and this isn't maybe a great business model if you want to rebuild your client sites every few years but actually showing someone how an investment into a good website is actually an investment into an asset for your business and smart companies are even listing their websites on their balance sheet as an asset and what a sell your company that's website is worth something not just the amount you paid for it but all the time and effort that went into creating it isn't going to have to be done by the person who acquires the business so you can actually take a bit of a confidence approach a results approach an investment approach and you start to just paint the picture to the customer that this is a really well thought through process and that other person I was talking to was just asking me questions about my brand colors awesome okay thanks so much everybody really appreciated being here have a great rest of your time at WordCamp