 As you can probably see, this is quite a packed room so if there's an empty chair beside you, could you move into it please so that we kind of get everybody all seated. If you could do that, that would be wonderful. Thank you very, very much. Hello. Hello. My name is Rhys. I'm going to be your emcee for this room this afternoon but you don't want to hear from me. You want to hear from Nemanja. Nemanja Alexic is Product Marketing Manager at Managed WP and GoDaddy. He helps organise World Camp Belgrade and is on a personal quest to help the WordPress community charge and on his fee for their services. Here today to talk to you about building relationships on our website, big round of applause for Nemanja Alexic. Thank you so much for coming. Mike is okay? Can you all hear me? Fantastic. So like most stories, this story starts with a girl. So some 20 years ago I went to Montenegro on a summer holiday and I met this girl and she was fantastic and I felt for her right away and we got together pretty soon. Unfortunately it wasn't a long time relationship so we broke up but we stayed good friends. Unfortunately for me I was, can I say, a young idiot. So I was really, really like into her and she was really, really young. We were both around 16. So what happened is whenever she needed a confidence boost she would call me up at like 3 a.m. and I would respond right away and say, hey, what's going on? Can I help? There were also like some things like whenever she needed a favour, I would like get into a taxi, drive across town and like help her whatever she needed. So at some point I realised that like she's taking advantage of me and she's a bad person and I got to break off any contact with her. So that was my conclusion at that point and if I had to sum it up with one sentence that's, I was doing everything I can to make her happy and getting a little in return. So some of you might be asking why did I get to this talk instead of going to Gutenberg or some other better talk. The point is coming so bear with me. I'll take a note of that. Replace just one word in this sentence. Does this relate to your business in any sense? So a lot of times and this is including myself because I used to run a maintenance gig on the side. A lot of times I would feel that I was bending over backwards. Is that the right term? Yeah. For my clients and all I get is like cussing and like criticism and like no respect at all and that's when I realised it wasn't my friend's fault the reason why we're having a bad relationship. It was mine as well because I taught her that it's totally okay to call me at 4 a.m. It's totally okay to ask for anything she wants because it's totally okay for me to give everything without asking nothing in return and that was the reason why it was such an unhealthy relationship and I see that happening all the time when it comes to web developers because unlike plumbing business or car mechanic we don't have that much experience to hand over from one professional to another. There's not much structured learning when it comes to a web development business. A lot of us learned from our own mistakes and learned online and well basically learned the hard way. So why should we talk about relationships in web development? Well there are two basic reasons for it. Number one, healthy relationships drive growth. So we did a survey back in 2017. We asked around 1500 web developers across the world like what's your main growth driver and the result was really interesting. We realised that 39.6% of our users drove growth by new design and development services. So basically that meant that they already knew a client and they built a new website for them either replacing the old website or creating a completely new business that that person owned. 31.1% came from support and maintenance services for this client. So once again this is an existing relationship. They were adding up to that relationship taking it to the next level basically kind of like engagement and only 20.6% actually came from finding new clients. So that was a real eye-opener for us because that means in total we got 70.7% of business coming from existing clients. Another big thing is that we need to realise that healthy relationships are not a one-time transaction. So what does that mean? You sit down with a client, you agree on a job, a one-time transaction would be that you just want to tick off all the boxes and get rid of the website and move to another project. That is a mistake because you're not building a relationship. There's more that you need to invest when you hand over that website. It doesn't need to just tick the boxes. You need to make sure that your client will understand what he or she is getting and will be happy with this transaction and will be happy to recommend you to their friends or family or other people because we know from experience that word of mouth is the main business driver for us. So if we look at relationships as something beyond the one-time transaction we get to these numbers. So I don't know how many of you know what Managed WP is. It's basically a service for people who run multiple websites for multiple clients. So on average a Managed WP user has around 20 clients at any given point. So we help them maintain these websites more efficiently and when we ask them how much do you charge for your service the people who run multiple tiered maintenance and care business they give us their top tier and the bottom tier fee and are you all familiar with the term median? Cool then I won't go into that. So the median top tier fee was $135 per month. So multiply that by 20 clients and you've got a solid business going. Multiply that by 150 clients you're doing really good. The bottom tier was $47 a month. Now when I say maintenance and care there's a lot of different definitions you can set up your business any way you want but the main point from here is that these people charge their maintenance month by month year by year so they have a steady recurring revenue coming in. So if we take a look at an example where we would have like let's say a $500 is for each project that you do and you do 18 projects during the year you got this line chart of revenue where you get $500 in January 1500 in February but then you get nothing in March so it's the famous feast and fan mind business cycle. You stop working you stop eating but if we add maintenance to that line chart it gets more interesting. So let's say that for the second conversation everybody who gets your website also signs up for a maintenance plan for $50 a month. We suddenly get this red line where the recurring revenue is slowly adding up and by the time we get to December 2018 we actually see a difference in the revenue so if you just do the $500 websites you end up with $9,000 and zero revenue in January but if you add up maintenance to that you get $14,500 and in January even if you don't touch another new project you get $14,000 of recurring revenue so there is money in that. So that covers the reason why you should care about relationship but now we're going to talk about what it actually means to be somebody in a good relationship and why you should care about both being a professional and caring about a relationship with your client. So number one and it's often overlooked is being a professional. So does anybody here have kids? So how many of you if you when you choose a babysitter go for the cheapest like if you see somebody like half the price of everybody else would you go for that person? These are probably the people who don't have kids anymore. So we expect from a babysitter to have some sort of standards and we need to have confidence that they will do their job. So all of you have one thing going for you in 90 something percent of cases your clients are approaching you and not the other way around which means they already have an expectation that you can get the job done. So you got a good thing going for you because you don't have to persuade them from the start you just need to justify that expectation and what does that mean actually being a professional? Well for starters here's an example I used to have a client that I was friends with so whenever he would call up I would drop whatever I'm doing and fix his problems. So it was like a he calls me up and at six in the afternoon he said hey if you don't mind something's wrong with the site can you take a look I say sure I pull out my laptop fix the problem all good. Next time he would call me at eight p.m. no problem and then I got a call at like one a.m. he's like hey what the hell is going on with the website he's got some weird characters and an Albanian flag all over it so his face his website was defaced and he was panicking and he was calling me up in the middle of the night. Needless to say I think I was charging around ten to fifteen dollars a month for this service so yeah getting a phone call at one a.m. that's probably not worth it so it was again my fault that I kept answering his phone so what I should have done is the next time he called me at six p.m. I'd say okay I will make an exception I'll fix it right away but next time I will answer you within 24 hours can get it sorted within 24 hours if he calls at 1 a.m. I'll be like no I'm not answering this I'll call him at 8 a.m. or 7 a.m. tomorrow in the morning and be like okay let's get the job done. So another important thing when it comes to professionalism is over promising and under delivering it's like the standard demo of everybody who just getting started with business like can you do this yeah sure no problem and then you realize that you have no idea what the spec is so you go back to your client and say hey we're going to need another thousand dollars or like two more people or I'm just going to drop this work so that's bad it's like if you have to choose between over promising and under delivering or on the other hand under promising and over delivering your clients will always be more happy with the latter option and the one thing that was also often overlooked is contracts if you're a professional and if you want to be treated like a professional get a contract and I even talked to some businesses that state that they don't want to work with anybody who doesn't have a contract because that also shows the level of commitment and professionalism that person has because let's let's face it if you got two options one option one is like get a verbal agreement and then your client starts messing with the scope of service they start postponing payments and all sorts of bad things can happen and on the other hand you got paper that says you do this you get paid if the client tries to make any fuss you say hey you agree to this if you don't like it my lawyer will get this fee paid so you're not getting out of this so contracts are big part of being a professional so the next next thing when it comes to building relationships with clients is to set expectations so cool thing about clients is they already trust you that you know your thing and the even cooler thing that you can do is actually involve them in the process and help them understand that building websites is not black magic so you sit down with them you explain first like what your process is and you most importantly help them understand why they need their website for so if somebody is coming up to you with an unclear idea they just say hey i want to build a website everybody's building a website i need a website you need to sit down with them and first talk about what our website really means for them business because if you don't if you just create some website and launch it they might be disappointed they realize they would realize they would be angry at themselves but they would also be disappointed in you because you created something that they don't need and doesn't work the way they envision this so in a way they will shift the blame to you but if you sit down and help them understand what the right website looks like they will be grateful for it and they will come back another big thing is walking them through the process so like if you have the whole process nailed down like the discovery design and everything they should understand it because they are also a part of that process so if your client and in most cases this happens if your client needs to provide the copy they need to understand why it's them that's giving it and not you making up lorem ipsum across all the website and in the end launching it with like four pages of lorem ipsum text because your client's never going to go and update it after the website is live so you need to include your client in that process and also they need to understand is what happens when they don't hold up their end of the deal so if there's no copy you would just say okay we will stop at stage five and we will not launch the website and I will get paid either way because there's a clause in my contract that says you need to pay me within three months even if you are delaying the completion of the project so they need to understand that they are also part of this you're in this together that's basically the definition of relationship and number three and this is really important if you want to talk about website maintenance support so expectations from people who don't really understand how websites work is that you get a painting nice pretty painting that you hold up and everybody admires you and you they're super cool you're not building paintings you're building machines a website is essentially a machine that generates money and like every machine you need to get it to a mechanic you need to take care how it's working if it's not working optimally you need to tune it up so your clients need to understand there's some sort of support and maintenance that goes into that website and if they're not willing to commit time they need to commit money so it will work now that that's probably the biggest challenge because a lot of people aren't getting any revenue out of their website so if let's say you have an artist that just want to want to create some small portfolio website like two pager three pager they don't get any money out of it so it's not likely you will sell them a maintenance contract and that's okay you don't need to have everybody on the contract but if they're building e-commerce website and they're coming up to you and saying yeah i want this website like to generate ten thousand dollars each month in sales then it's actually a good negotiation point for you because you would say cool so you expect ten thousand dollars each month so what happens when that website breaks when you stop getting that money so how much is it worth to you to keep that website going and growing so that's the conversation that you also have to have with your client and with that i'm finishing my unusually short talk i was i'm just hoping that you weren't that bored and i would like to hear any questions regarding website maintenance client communications anything that you have in your mind just throw it my way my name is nemenya alexic i work for manage wp and join godet is part of the acquisition and i love wordpress thank you thank you very much okay so we have quite a lot of time for q and a this uh there's a question right at the back first and then we'll we'll come at the front oh sorry we'll we'll go to the we'll get we'll get to the one in the back sorry hey nemenya is that one really good talk thank you very much for sharing that really interesting about the perspective about relationships rather than websites you mentioned obviously that managed wp can help with a lot of those maintenance plans what kind of margin would you put on what managed wp would charge me compared to what i would charge the customer well it will depend on what your business model is what kind of services you sell but essentially what i've seen is large-scale agency using manage wp for free and then also some other are using a full scope of our services which will probably come down to like let's say $1.5 per site per month something like that so it depends on what you actually need but you can also use it fully for free so that's cool right there's a question at the back over there oh yeah um i just got a question about that that very shady nasty world of asking new clients for upfront deposits and expectations and stuff like that and the background to my question is i'm in a facebook group with 2500 freelancers and a lot of them do word press sites and stuff like that but um they're all horrified of the fact of asking for an upfront payment from a client and there's another group of us that smugly say we always do that but what's the industry standard from your 1500 surveyed people well that part wasn't covered it was like more a general approach but i would definitely agree with the latter group because these people run a business so they understand the concept of like giving something in exchange for something it's the developers that are usually too mortified to ask for that money so that that's kind of like a wrong approach and the best advice i can give it this scenario is the one i got way back in the day if you think that you're under charging for your services just next time you have a project just double what you think you should be asking just try it and a lot of people actually were surprised that the business owners would just say cool yeah and then they would double that service and they that would keep on going until they get like to an actual fee that they need to charge so asking upfront is it's not a dirty word and trying to get an honest fee for your work is also like something that a business owner would expect because it goes back to what i mentioned with the babysitters like if you if you babysit a kid for like one dollar an hour or 50 cents an hour then nobody's going to take you seriously okay so any more questions there's a question i'll i'll jump down again there's been a user of managed wp paid version for about the last four years and i use it to maintain about 24 client websites i would i think i'm just wondering what it might be useful for you to tell everybody here the the nitty gritty of managed wp and the sort of tasks that it undertakes to make life easier sorry can i just repeat the question because it may be a bit quieter the back of that's okay so basically um you just tell us all about managed wp and what it what it what it what it achieves sorry that's a really quick way of doing it this lady in the front said it a lot more eloquently but yeah i did not plant this woman so when we try to talk about managed wp and its sister service the go daddy pro program the easiest way is to break down your weekly routine so a web professional usually spends it's his or her day on several groups of tasks that's building websites managing maintaining websites managing clients and netflix so uh managed wp was actually acquired by go daddy with the specific uh issue in mind and that's managing websites more efficiently so our service helps you keep your websites on one place so you just install a worker plugin on each website and it connects to our server so when you log in you see like 75 plugin updates on 14 different websites you see that two websites have a malware on it one website has a vulnerable plugin and four websites are performing rather slow according to page speed so it helps you figure out what you need to do first and it helps you do that job efficiently it's mostly around getting to your website with one click and automating a lot of your work like backups performance and security checks uptime monitoring and cloning and migration where you can actually set up a staging environment and clone between that and live one within like three clicks and two minutes there's more to it but i don't want to go into an integrated because i'm not trying to sell you managed on repeat there's a there's a sponsor stand yeah yeah go ahead if you want to know go another word of the sponsor stand uh anybody else at all this is the question of the front hello nice talk um so you're saying not to undercharge but the thing is when you're starting out you don't really know exactly what to charge and the thing is businesses do shop around and like previous persons are like 2500 freelancers of all people to shop around with so i don't know if you have any advice on uh determining a kind of price point when you're just starting out that's a good question and there's no easy answer for it i saw some people doing some work for free like just a few couple of sites so they can set up their portfolio but in general i would say if you're not certain about what kind of price you should set you should try doubling it and seeing if it works if it happens that everybody's turning you down then you can scale back but in my personal experience and for what i heard in all the conversations and facebook groups it's not likely that it's going to happen because if you look at an estimate for a website um what in the u.s they call a 500 dollar website in Serbia we call uh 50 euro website so you can get a quote for a same website from uh 50 euros all the way to 1000 euros depending on depending on who's offering it but if you're a business and you're like choosing who you'll go with if you're serious about your website you probably go with the high end because you'll assume that more expensive means better easier process and better outcome so yeah double whatever you think it is and see if it works well the worst that's going to happen is you lose one or two projects but you're still starting out so cool there was a question over here oh yeah there's a question down here i'll i'll reach down thanks for your talk okay angry be angry thanks for your talk um he talked about contracts do you have a generic contract do you tweak it for individual clients what do you recommend in terms of that that isn't going to cost you a fortune in legal fees so just to make it clear uh legal fees fees aren't a dirty word and they the lawyers actually are worth their money but of course a lot of people aren't ready to like when they're starting to pay for a contract so down the line i'd recommend getting somebody like a legal expert to come up with a contract but in the meantime there's and i'm forgetting the exact website but there's an open source project for the contracts so a lot of people got together and created like a generic maintenance and development contract that you can get from that website and you can use it i can't remember the link right now but i'm gonna take a look at my browsing history and find it and i'm drop it i'll drop it on twitter so you'll be able to see if i could jump in there it's called the contract killer um is is that's what is not exactly but then one is good yeah okay okay right okay so there are a couple what uh should be very very clear at this point that none of us are legal in any way shape or form or any sort of like have any sort of legal background so uh yeah you're on your own with that um yeah any more questions at all there's a question towards the back hang on i'll uh i'll jump through uh and regarding the contracts and lawyers i recommend a talk by um i forget his name but he's very famous designer his talk is it's a dirty word so i'll say Mike Montanero and f you pay me so it's a really great explanation why lawyers are worth their while thank you hi um i've got a question about your client who um you were charging only ten dollars a month and he was calling you at one o'clock in the morning how do you reset that relationship to something that's more appropriate that's a tough without upsetting them that's a tough one and um you will upset them in at least some extent especially if it's not one client but 20 30 clients um ideally you'd sit down with them and explain the reason like it's not nice to say hey you're not paying me enough to uh answer you at one in the morning but a good thing would be for starters if you end up in that situation you don't answer that phone but you call them right away in the morning and explains like hey i apologize it's late i usually turn off my mobile devices and uh dedicate my time to my family but here i am now i'm 100 percent with you and i'll do anything to get this problem resolved because in the end that's what they want they don't want to talk to you at one in the end they just want to get their problem fixed so if you set the guidelines and the rules in probably 80 percent or 90 percent of the time they will be happy to stick with their rules because they would expect that you would stick to them as well i hope that helps any more questions this question at the back there hi thanks for the talk it's uh more of an advice thing um i kind of run a facebook group of 27 000 website users and the main question is contracts and how to not upset customers and pricing so your advice has been great but it is a very difficult area and i wonder whether wp engine or sorry wp manage will put in some links or resources to your dashboard to say go to contract killer or you know to resources that have got things that will answer these kinds of questions you know the the pricing thing for instance it's a business 101 question how do i price my website or how do i price my services how much does my rent cost how much is my heat like power you know multiply that by say 10 and you will have your hourly rate so you know maybe you guys can work towards helping us as developers and say here's some resources don't know um are you a current Spanish wp user uh yeah so you might have seen this annual survey that we sent out and one of the questions was how good was our blog is it like worthwhile recommending or not so unlike the rest of the service which got stellar uh ranks the blog was like uh nps core of like minus five so it's not horrible horrible but it's like most of the people are like meh so what we decided is we need to we needed to get a dedicated person involved so we hired an editor that will be uh rambling uh writers at both freelancers and users and internal writers and we want to focus more on exactly the thing that you mentioned so like actionable advice like problems that you all brought up here the problems that i mentioned like getting all these links getting some advice so you could actually have something as a takeaway from each article so yeah you need it we need it as well and everybody will benefit from it and we are working on it great thanks right it's there any more questions speak now we have got we have got a couple minutes but if not uh big round of applause for Nomania Alessig so you got me thinking um if anybody here is actually interested in sharing their story and sharing their advice that they usually learn the hard way just reach out to me either on twitter or on email my email is actually nomania at go daddy dot com it's cool when you're the only one with that name so if you think that it's worthwhile sharing drop me a line and we'd be happy to feature your story somewhere we got a couple of blogs so we'll figure something out right okay