 Welcome to how to grow your support to become a cornerstone of the business. I hope everybody's having a good Drupal con We are with Calamuna. Some of you may know us. We have the big balloon out there in the convention thing We're the makers of like Calabox calisthenics cala theme Cala everything. We're a bunch of rabble rousers. We're a diversified team mostly. I live in Southwest, Florida We have an office in Oakland, California. We're all over the place all over the globe actually My name is John Willett. I'm the senior developer and support manager and my main job is to de-jank the jankiness in your janky websites I've been doing this for 22 years And here's my Padawan Katie I'm a junior developer with Calamuna. I've been working with them almost two years now and I work out of our Oakland office And I got put on support very quickly into my tenure at Calamuna And John Willett has been a great manager and senior developer there So you know the whole point of this, you know, why are we going to do support for clients? You know and it all falls back to about four years ago when I started with Calamuna We were like a four-man agency. They hired me because I had sales experience And you know our initial thrust was just to be an agency to do project-based work And at the time everybody wanted to convert their Drupal 6 sites to Drupal 7 And as we're out there banging doors down we're like you must convert your Drupal 6 site to Drupal 7 And people are like that's fantastic but we don't have $50,000 you know They're like why can't you just help us? Why can't you just help us support the site? And we said sure, why not? And that's how our support programming program kind of came to be And in that time over the years I mean we have found that you know most sites aren't built very well They're architecturally a hot mess on the back end You know it seems like eight different people have decided they wanted all the things And what that leads up to is like the usual end user that we're building the site for can't use their site They just don't know how And that's fine I mean and then they hire people like us where we come in and we fix a lot of these things And usually a lot of our typical support clients just don't have a budget to have an internal dev team It's cheaper for them to spend $30,000 to $50,000 to hire experts instead of paying $70,000 to $100,000 for an internal dev team So you know when doing this we've also developed like what type of person can do support? Not everybody can do support, we're a special breed of people Multi-tasking is huge, if you can be on Slack, your email, Entertainment Weekly and enter emails at the same time While writing code you're made for support You know you have to be self-taught, autodidactic and confident You can't be like oh my god why is this client asking this, you know you just do it You gotta have a good energy about them, you know yourself Unfortunately a lot of people can't do that and that's fine, you know not everybody can do all the things And another great thing as Katie had mentioned is that it's great for Junior Dibs And I'll let her talk So my experience with support I think was a really important part of building up my skills as a Drupal developer Because working support you get an experience with like a huge variety of sites Instead of just working on one or two projects for months at a time You're getting into the weeds with a bunch of different sites Learning about different Drupal distributions, different modules Encountering new things every day depending on what you're being asked to do So it's a really good opportunity to just very quickly explore what's out there in Drupal If you're new to Drupal or a new developer The other thing about support is you know sometimes clients ask for really like specific esoteric things But a lot of times what they're asking for are just kind of basic things Updating modules, patching modules, you know things like that That you can really quickly build up your skills in those basics working support And it's also really good for those kind of I guess we sometimes call them soft skills But the kind of stuff that's not just sitting there writing code or sitting there installing modules Things like interacting with clients, learning how to ask for clarification when you need it Learning how to estimate your time that for me at least was a huge thing When I began support clients would ask me how long do you think this is going to take They would submit a ticket and they would want to know like basically how much are they spending On getting this fixed, is it really going to be worth it for them And so I had to learn how to look at a task and think to myself okay how long is this going to take me Like I'm going to need to do this research, I'm going to need to do this And learn how to do that and with support you're having to do that a lot So you build up that skill very quickly as well And finally it is also support makes a great sort of playground for training And for doing sort of code review with a senior developer I mean first of all you're working usually in the front end and the back end When you're doing support because your client might ask for anything Maybe they need a little CSS fix here or maybe they need you to fix their permissions Over there and you have to be ready to jump into either of those pools And so we've sort of developed a program of training where basically you know You get asked to do a support task and as a junior dev And you take a crack at it if you get stuck then you would go to your senior developer And since all of these tasks are fairly you know contained and self directed It's very easy to be like look I have this issue I'm not really you know I got this far with it I'm not really sure what's going on here And get that you know senior developer to help you out there And lastly I also find that working support I really like it because Even early on as a junior developer before I had a lot of the big skills that you need It was easy to feel like I was actually contributing to the team And that I was actually helping our clients because you know They would submit tickets every once in a while that's like I can do this I know how to do that yes fix this view got it And just feeling like you're a valuable member of the team is super important As a junior developer and as someone who is still building up those skills A couple other things too I mean mentorship is huge As senior developers if we're not mentoring the next class then you're doing it wrong You know with Katie also too is like every Friday we have a training session We do code review there's a lot of like ins and outs that we've developed Over the past four years so that we can create the new class of developers And that they're actually getting the right tools and they're being taught correctly And it's great that I see that the Drupal org has a mentorship program too And if you have the skills that I recommend getting involved Alright so let's talk about some fun stuff Alright so how did a developer like myself become like involved with sales Well about 15 years ago the market crash 9-11 happened All these weird things like kind of happened and I got laid off I was I'm originally from New Hampshire and I was working out a Cambridge Mass And the whole area just died it just died And I swallowed my pride because I had a young daughter and a mortgage And I became a healthcare headhunter And I hated myself every day you know I went to work and I was like But you know I had bills to pay But in there when I walked in you know everybody was like sitting around Monster and career builder LinkedIn didn't exist yet And they were just like waiting for like people like us to post their resumes And everybody would contact them at once and I was like this is not the way man And I saw the old-timers like sitting off to the side Didn't make any calls and they billed higher than everybody else So I'm like I'm going to learn from those dudes So I went over and I talked to them and they told me about cold calling And how to do stuff like that and I was like I'm kind of an introvert And I don't really want to talk to people But so I'm going to find a different way And I combined technology and my ability to write scripts To scrape the internet and find things and stuff And I became the best builder in the office until I could get a job back as an engineer again And everybody hated me it was awesome So when I came to Kalimuna four years ago They hired me to do sales and basically you know I saw the same thing I saw that Drupal was easily identifiable I had been working with Drupal a couple years prior to that But I mean when I went I was kind of like do it all WordPress, Joomla, all that stuff, typical agency type things And so since Kalimuna was Drupal focused you know I was like alright let's figure this out And I stared at like the CMS and saw that you know Drupal has certain meta tags or body tags And I wrote this giant program and basically to scrape the internet and find Drupal websites You know there's a lot more to it but I'm not going to get into it But with that you know we send out about 2,000 emails a month to people we've never talked to before We have a vetting process where we you know look at every site We have a lead generator that uses Salesforce to find the right people to talk to But it's all there you know and the main thing about this and the reason why you do it is you're not in competition with everybody else And that's the biggest thing about sales in general is you don't want to battle on an RFP That's not fun I mean you do it sometimes because you know that's just the way this industry works But you know and you'll see in the numbers here that a lot of our business comes from cold calling And it's I mean it's really emailing now I don't pound the phones I mean people would get annoyed if you actually did that But I mean so once you do that once you find out how to do that You know your revenue source will explode You know I'm not going to give you like distinct lessons on sales but I will tell you this When you send out a cold email to a prospective you know lead Don't be like we work with this company and that company we're the greatest and you should work with us Because they don't give a shit alright Then what they want is they want you know you want to have like an open-ended conversation To kind of like be like alright you know what's up you know we do Drupal We see you have a Drupal website let's talk And like an informal type of thing And you'd be surprised I mean when you take that kind of approach More people will respond than like we work with Pfizer and Verizon and blah blah blah Everybody seems to work with them with all the emails I get too so And it's funny though I get the emails from like other agencies and I respond What is a Drupal you know so but you know we use different tools Obviously I've mentioned Salesforce and things like that We also use a tool called Send Bloom Another thing is too things like MailChimp constant contact a lot of people block them So you don't want to use tools like that Use a tool that natively send your emails out like Send Bloom is a very good one That's what we use and then that way it looks more real Like if you have that like that when you send the email and you all know it If you use like SendGrid when you're using a Drupal website when it comes by that You don't want that you want to make it seem like you're actually emailing them Alright so with all that said and done this is our total client base For support only so as you can see almost 40% of our clients Come from our cold calling source on the support side alone You know a lot of people know us since the main companies in the Bay Area So we do get a lot of referrals and word of mouth things and stuff like that And as you kind of grow up with this community people like swap business and that's cool It was very weird for me at first growing up in the Boston area Where like every company was your enemy and you must destroy them But once you actually kind of get into the gist of it it's pretty cool Alright as a total company we bring about a little over a quarter With our Cal Elite program of all the business of Calimuna So who do you want to go after and this is always a tricky question You know we as Calimuna are like kind of big in the university space You may know Andrew Malis who's kind of big in that whole thing And we focus on nonprofits and some tech companies and things like that So we've found after doing this after all these years that those are the best people to go after Because they have budget, they have the money to spend And it's just a good type of working relationship I mean you want those people who have enough money but don't have enough money to hire a dev or two And you can get the bigger clients I'm not saying don't But if you want to have a nice cash flow where like 40% of your income doesn't come from one client Don't ever do that But that way you have multiple clients with the multiple revenue streams And that's what you want to aim for So this is like a loose terms and also too You want people who want to adhere to your process You don't want to be like my boss wants it now, now, now, now, now, now I don't care about your boss So we're providing them a professional service You don't go to a lawyer and be like give me this, give me that, give me that They'll tell you to pound sand, you know And also too, one of the main thing is and you'll see some future numbers here That they always have an open project space Like you want a support to go into a project space You want them to give you hundreds of thousands of dollars That's the end goal of all of this Alright like I mentioned before who you should not focus on I mean we're kind of like a unique organization We don't want people that don't jive with us Like we're not going to work with certain clients And I'm not going to name names because that's not cool But you know it's just like you don't want that brand associated with your brand And that's what it comes down to Just don't get business for the sake of business And that's general in any industry you work in They're too big to fail You know if you work with a company that gives you like 20 million a year in billing But they could give you know two craps about you You don't really want to work with that Because you're going to like fall into their processes And you lose your identity and you don't You know it's not fun, it's not fun man because I've worked with it You know and it's just it's not a good feeling And again I mentioned before Where people who don't value your professional opinion I mean we you know especially as you get doing this for a while I mean I'm very good at what I do And you know people can see that And if they don't value like what you have to say Why work with them you know Another thing my least favorite client is Hey man we need this done to our website How much is it going to cost? 18,000 Ah never mind Hey man we need this done to our website How much is it going to cost? 9,000 Ah never mind Don't work with those people because it's annoying You know you spend all that time estimating Not that it's a ton of time But you're always like in that like hamster wheel And that's not cool Okay he's going to talk a little bit about keeping the clients So we don't tend to have a lot of turnover With our support clients because they like us And a lot of that really just has to do With communication So it's important to like be quick In your responses on support Even if you're not necessarily going to get To a task right that second I think most clients want to know that you're sitting there They've read your email That you know that they want something And you're going to get to it And in the same vein They also want to know that you're checking in When you need clarification That you're managing their expectations For when this task is going to be done What it's ultimately going to be And all of that So it's important not to just get a ticket in And start working on something And not talk to the client until it's done And be like oh look here's this thing you asked for And it turns out oh actually you know This part of it is wrong Or this isn't exactly what we wanted Or if you needed clarification To make sure that you get that So that when you're going in and doing these tickets That you're giving them ultimately what they wanted And finally of course Your clients want to know that you're competent And that you're good at your job So it's important to know what you're doing And when you don't know what you're doing Make sure you find out what you're doing And use best practices So that down the line they can look back At work that you've done and be like yeah Like this is going to be sustainable This isn't just a quick fix That is going to break two months later And you're going to have to go in and fix again Like the two biggest complaints I get like when a client switches shops Is one is time Like you know we're all busy You know we have a lot of support clients And you know it's even hard for me to be here right now And you know I still respond though I respond to every ticket Almost a minute it comes in That like hey man you know I'm here Or you know I can't work on this right now When do you need this by And that's huge because And not just an automated response Like thank you for submitting a ticket Someone will get back to you soon And another thing is to The operate and the silo That's huge like a lot of people complain about Like they'll give someone like a marching order In a small project and they'll never hear From the agency until it's done And they'll be like this is not what I wanted man You know what is this And that's bad Alright so bad clients Bad clients do happen and they've happened to us The unrealistic demands and the erosion it causes You know we have clients you know where they'll just be like Give me this now now now now now I don't care we're the only client you should have And what that happens is you know The person working with that client becomes sad And then their sadness spreads throughout the whole agency And it becomes you know very hard to deal with And it's like And then you know and we'll talk a little bit Like you know a little bit later About a client who kind of did that to us But you know and what it comes down to is I mean no is a big word in support You have to learn how to say no Like don't be afraid to say no And people respect you more when you do that If you're not a pushover And when that happens there's several routes You can go down And usually it's like let's have a talk Let's talk about how we operate again You know because I mean people are on board And I'll show you later but it's just like People have personalities and that's just the way they are And you know usually they have a talk And then from there you decide one of two things We can have another support person Work or we part ways And don't be afraid to fire a client It does happen every once in a while Just because they give you money But they make you miserable Why be that way? It's just not cool Alright so now we're going to get down to the brass tax Actually fun fact I thought it was tax My whole life and then Katie corrected me And it's actually tax with a K Go figure Alright so actually how we offer our support We have a couple different ways The main one we try to do is retainer And we can usually offer a lower rate And the main thing is that that's great For a lot of our university clients And people like that Our tech clients and not so much They're more time and materials Even our non-profits sometimes as well But the good thing about a retainer Is it offers a lower rate The bad thing is use it or lose it Like the old school like minutes plans And we're not rigid on that Sometimes we're flexible and we'll be cool But I mean in general that's the rule of thumb Another term you'll see here A bunch of times is flex projects Flex projects are not quite full projects And they're not really like bang it out Support stuff, it's like under Over a couple hours, under 50 hours You may call it sprint work, we call it flex projects And we offer that a lot And you'll see in our numbers And then finally emergency support We don't have too many clients to do that But you know our rate is almost double If you want us to be like on call And every once in a while we do have a client That does take that up Usually a global client and things like that Alright, so this fun diagram Is how we get clients on And I had mentioned the whole sales process before And once we get a client You know there's an agreement There's a whole bunch of documents That happen in our master service agreement And our statement of work And all that fun stuff And we do it all through Ecosign Nothing is faxed anymore And then once we actually get that all You know the I dotted and the T's crossed We bring them you know through our onboarding We have certain documents that is an Alasian Like this is how you fill out a ticket You know this is our processes This is how you do stuff And every agency has their own home grown version of that And then we introduce them to Zendesk And Zendesk is our main support ticketing software And we usually give them onboard them And show them how to use it And we have documents for all that fun stuff And if you haven't used Zendesk It's basically what I just said A ticketing system, it's great We've been using it for three years now Alright, so when stuff finally happens This is usually our workflow They'll put in a ticket through Zendesk We have one point of contact usually Don't let clients email you or anything like that I mean you can email clients to talk with them But not for like work work Because you'll just get lost You'll get a thousand emails and be like I emailed you that one day, I don't remember So, you know, have them come through Zendesk And usually right away is, you know I'll identify if it's a project or not Because I mean we have our clients Most of the time, like if it's like a big task Or most everything put them through Zendesk And if it's a support ticket We parse it out and fix it right away Now, when it comes down to like Exploiting whether it's a project or not We use two tools, post-fact For our flex projects we use Trello Because it's very quick and simple to use And then we offer our big full projects To go to the agency side, they use JIRA And every agency does their own thing These are the tools that we've kind of matriculated Over the time, we originally only used Trello Years ago and we kind of grew from there But that's what we usually do And everything this whole time Goes into our CRM And everybody uses different CRMs But usually you can have workflows And Slack too, everything goes to Slack now And notifications of the ying-yang And all the fun stuff, so Alright, so like I mentioned When people put in a Zendesk ticket We usually have two or three senior people Who are the gatekeepers And everybody that works at Calamuna Support Has a client that's assigned to them And the way I set it up Is that we'll have one major person On an account and one minor person So that you have a backup And in that way the client knows you And you don't have like a bunch of people Different people working on a client Because it gets confusing and everybody's website's unique And it's better to have people who know The site to work on it So usually what happens is There's a couple of us And we'll parse that ticket out It's usually always me And we send those out to our support people We also have a support account manager And they're the type, they're the person That goes and they like shake the trees You know, to get more work Keep the clients happy, project management stuff There's a lot of meetings that Is involved in that role We kind of matriculated that about a year ago And it's been actually doing really well It takes a load off the developers So they don't have to have those meetings All the time with the clients And things like that So they can actually focus on their work And then once we get a ticket And it kind of falls back to what I was talking about before You know, we look at the complexity We'd be like, alright man, do you need this now Or when do you need this by This looks more like a flex project Let's put you into the space You know, or if it's like a timely issue Like, you know, usually what I tell our Clients is to put like urgent In the ticket title So that way I know it's important However, they kind of use that Like everything will become urgent So, you know, kind of play with that delicately You know, so all the time though No matter what is communication Communication is key with all of this That, you know, when someone puts in a ticket You just ask them, when do you need this by You know, and a good client will know That you have other clients Be like, I'm working on this one thing For this one client now You know, it's cool if I do this later today Or tomorrow And most of the time they'll say Okay, alright, now the biggest thing That I mentioned too is we want Support clients to become agency clients On the project side Flex projects or full-fledged projects I'm not afraid to tell a client What's wrong with their site Like I'll be like, huh You know, I'll look at this And I'll be like, there's just so much Jankiness and I don't And that's fine, man I mean, it is what it is, you know And also too, I mean The master manipulator role You want to kind of drop hints Ah, we had this client that, you know Did this over here with Salesforce Or Marketo and it's really cool You know, and they'll be like Yes, I like Marketo I should have that too, you know And I mean, the main thing is Always do a good job, you know I mean, you don't You know, we go to Walmart Because we have to, you know But I would rather go to like a mom-and-pop Because they actually care Be the mom-and-pop, you know Be the people that care about their clients And do a good job for them And, you know, pay attention And, you know, some of my clients Are my friends, I mean For my 40th birthday And bought me an iPad I mean, it's just like, you know I mean, iPad Pro, you know So, you know But I mean, you know I mean, because we're helping them I mean, they have business to run I mean, a lot of the Like some of the business that we work, you know They're the boss too Of their department or division Or company And they just want a reliable Good company that won't screw them over And treat them well Another thing, like I just mentioned Too, it showed the other sites the fancy sauce When we take a lot of support clients And we convert them to projects You know, they will show clients Be like, hey, this site is using all Panelizer with IPE And it's really cool And, you know, I know your content editors Have a lot of trouble And you should use it And they're like, we should use it Here's money, you know So, that's it And just to show you conversions 40.63% of all our Flex projects Come from support And a quarter of all our agency projects Come from support So it's a fairly big You know, by doing this You know, we help the other side of the business Alright, so now we're going to talk about our clients And the reason why I'm doing this Is to show you the typical clients You should go after Who you should target, you know And the usual end results So we have this one university They've been with us for a while now They have a small, you know, marketing team It's just a couple of them And, of course, they're universities So they have an IT team and that's it They usually do a support bucket Of 150 hours a year And they've gone through a couple Big projects with like We just redid their entire setup We broke it into four sub-sites And an intranet And it was a huge project It was a big revenue source for Kalimuna But it came out of support And also, too, they referred us To their nonprofit wing And they turned into a humongous client, too So that's the type of university client You want to get Because if you do a good job For these smaller When I mean like medium-sized university I'm talking like 3,000 to 5,000 students Their endowment isn't like billions But hundreds of millions Because they will give you the money They will pay attention to you And that's what you want All right, I'm going to tell you about a bad client Many moons ago We had this client out of I think it was Denver or Boulder Some place over there And every time we did something for them Whether they signed off it or not The CEO wanted it redone Like it was just like I don't like this, redo it And they wanted everything now, now, now The CEO wants it now, now You have to do this for us And even when we got pre-approval Like they fought us on every invoice And that's just horrible It's not a cool thing to deal with And the final straw was this And I remember it quite clearly Because we were making their site responsive And we redid all the stuff for them Like we had design and stuff And their marketing person came in the morning She's like, I hate all of it, redo it And I had spent Like this was like the second design too And the second time we had trouble Like the first time we were like All right, we're just going to do this And I had spent all weekend I worked like 60 hours redoing This whole thing over the weekend Non-billable, don't ever do that And they came in and they were like No, and we were like, gone You know, you're gone It was our first big lesson Like as a company, like You know, we should have got lawyers involved And things like that But I mean, it does happen Not that it happens a lot But it does happen And there were a good example of that So a much nicer support client That we have currently And have been working with for quite a while Is a small California-based nonprofit And this is a good example Of like a type of support project That's a little bit smaller So you're not necessarily going to get All of those opportunities for bigger projects But with this client Basically we're just communicating With one marketing person And since they only have Around 60 hours of support a year It's super important for us To be very communicative with them And to tell them, okay This thing that you just asked for You know, that's actually going to take Maybe two to three hours Which for them could actually chip Into their support hours enough That they might, you know Want to rethink whether or not That's worth it for them So with this kind of smaller client It's important to just keep them updated About how these tasks are going And whether or not they want to Expend the money to do these things Because they don't necessarily have The money to do everything they want to do And we want to make sure that We're providing them the value That they really need So we get pre-approval for each task With this client Another client we have Is a California university Who we've been working with For almost two years now And this is an interesting case Because they have a contract with us That's one contract for the university But we work with a variety of their departments So we're actually in contact With a bunch of different people Who don't even necessarily know each other And doing a lot of different kinds Of stuff for each of these departments And their sites are kind of Just all spread out everywhere They have sites that are hosted on Pantheon Sites that are hosted somewhere else Sites that we as their support people Only have front-end access to Which can be kind of a challenge Because they ask us to do something And it's like well We don't necessarily have the keys To do all of that But I mean This client is like We work well with them I think we're able to adapt To kind of all of their different Workflows and their different requirements And all of that And they work with six month retainers And usually around 150 hours a year Six months, that's what I said And then this client Is kind of a sad client story That ends happily Because Before I worked at Calamuna We had this client And basically there was A personality conflict With one of their contractors And John who was mean And they just didn't really jive There was just Not really on the same level They were pretty problematic client I think there was even talk Of we were thinking of ending Our contract with them And this is a good example Of how sometimes just Giving a different support person A chance to work with a client Can kind of save a relationship Because now they're Still a client with us After two years basically And we work with them on a lot of Flex projects They love us now basically And the other thing with this client Is that This is kind of a Theme in some of our clients Where they are on Drupal 6 And as we all know Drupal 6 is Dearly departed At this point But there's a lot of clients who They don't have the money To go forward with Upgrading to Drupal 7 or Drupal 8 And so having those Drupal 6 Sites on support You're basically just shoring up That system for them Even though like really You know We do want to eventually Migrate them to Drupal 7 But a lot of clients don't have the time Or money to do that Speaking of Drupal 6 We're having a party tomorrow Come by our booth We're having a funeral march down to the rusty nail It's a Drupal 6 funeral Come by the booth Get some tickets Fun time This is a Boston based tech company They were kind of a startup fishy Type of thing And they've been with us for a while We inherited their site It was a brand new Drupal 7 site at the time And they just have like a creative director And a marketing person And a designer but no devs And we've been working with them For a long time and we've I think it's actually more than three redesigns Now but we have redesigned their site so many times It's like every few months But they also have a regular support Contract bucket with us And that's a great client to have And by using Calla Lead You can find these clients easily One of our favorite clients A client who bought me the iPad Is They've been with us for a couple years They came to us originally for Drupal 6 support And Their site was just horrible And so we basically rebuilt it In Drupal 7 With some caveats from the old site It wasn't even worth it to migrate And that was our first big project And since then we have built So many things for them They've been a huge revenue source for us For people and we just signed a contract A couple weeks ago to convert their Drupal 7 Site to Drupal 8 So it's going to be our first big Drupal 8 project as an organization And we're pretty stoked about it Alright so all this yammering on And I'm going to show you why This support matters and why this is The cornerstone of our business This was our last six quarters Of our total revenues and support Calla Care is over a quarter We consider flex projects to be 34% of the business So if that's not a cornerstone Then I don't know what it is So that's it They told me to remind you there's multiple sprints Tomorrow and please fill out a session feedback form Yadda yadda yadda If you have any questions That's it, thanks Alright So I work at a university And we do some of this kind of thing On our own as a recharge service Within central IT So we have some customers Who have developers on their Team and so We try to streamline Our sort of support approach To like you know you're going to have a Git repository and you're going to have Multiple environments and we do everything in dev And then promote it up and all that And then they come in And do something like in between Support cycles and we end up Having to you know Just commit a bunch of stuff at one time Like catch up commit since the last time We were here And it's a real mess So how do you guys handle that with customers Who maybe have their own devs on staff And are doing work in addition To what you're doing Communication is key as you know You know If that's your case and I think you need to Like pull someone in from a higher up And it actually happened to us one of our clients Where they had multiple devs It was a university and they were just Trying to get them to like a uniform Like type of deal and what we ended up doing Was we kind of went above them and been Like all right we talked to whatever Whomever and you come up with a process And a lot of universities are in the same Boat as you with some of the California Like if you ever talked to any of the University of California people They kind of had the same you know Had the same dilemma and I mean it all falls down to communication I mean if you set processes In place whether it's like your style Or even like dev practices and You would have to make it concrete And you would need approval from people above And that's about the best thing I can suggest for you Okay thanks You're welcome We have We work kind of like you do Or we have retainer contracts with clients We have bigger projects We don't have I don't think What was it the flex of Flex project yeah Could you talk a little more about Budget business wise Yeah they're also called sprints It's usually like You know it's not a full on like 100 hour project it's more like Anywhere from like 5 to 50 hours That's usually our indicator Smaller things like we need to integrate With sales force and that usually takes about 30 40 hours depending on what you're doing It's things like that a little more heavy duty But not full on let's redo the whole Site and that's what we constitute As a flex project Is it usually paid by the hour? Yeah I mean it's time and materials But we give them estimates And we usually bill out our time and materials Sometimes they do pay by a retainer They'll pay us 50 hours And of course it's avatation as an agency To like do it less than that But you know it doesn't always work out that way But it's usually always time and materials With a fixed estimate like as an Upper echelon of what you're going to do One more question We do it's sometimes hard to Use clients To pay the full cost Of doing Drupal updates Not that it's hard to apply updates But often testing or fixing Features to accommodate that Can take a lot of time It's really hard to predict How do you manage that I mean as far as Drupal Updates go whether it's core I mean we're primarily on Pantheon As an agency so the core parts They can care of module updates The way we handle it We try to do security updates when they come out Not all of them are like you must do it now Sometimes they do break sites as we all know But usually when we're working On a project and like Usually a flex project for instance It's a great time to also throw in some module updates Or fix some things in the back end And things like that So that's how we usually we don't Like we don't I mean we kind of sell Like we'll keep your site updated But when we do support it's to Like help them and fix things Not necessarily keep their site updated But once you do it once And things are kind of more Current when you update things It's a lot easier When you initially get that old site Where they're like three years out of date You would sell a package to be like We need to get your site up to date You're welcome The previous question Actually I had a lot of my own questions Starting something Starting very small Just saying okay with my existing clients I just want a package that they I'll apply security updates and stuff like that I'm curious like what's the basic infrastructure You guys like do you have like a Pingdom account like what's sort of The basic service you offer I mean the basic we try to go for Ten hours a month and it's just Basic support like I just mentioned Like since the clients we go after Aren't necessarily that small They'll have you know updates You know clients will see stuff On other sites and they'll want that And as long as it's like a small feature That's usually included If you want to sell them upgrades you can A lot of clients don't see the value in that So we try to sell them something different And then incorporate that And it usually works a lot better So I mean five to ten hours If you're just getting started is a good That's where we kind of started You may even try time and materials I know as a smaller agency that It gets you started and then once they trust you You can like get a more like flat Level of billing across the board So at least your accounting is better You're welcome Hi, I run a A Drupal agency fairly new And looking to incorporate more support So I really appreciate all the information That y'all shared One thing that I am sensitive to Is I just want to protect my Co-workers and what is You know expected from the client And the way you've described You know you respond to your email Every minute and that sort of thing And then how you have sort of Most of your clients are on a more controlled support But you do offer that higher threshold What seems like a 24-7 support And I'm just wondering how that Balance works out Is that something that you know Every employee and if the junior Versus the senior person is different I'd love to hear from Katie as well About how that all plays out Do you have a lot of times On employees? Like I mentioned in the beginning Some people can do support some can't I was kind of made to do this It seemed like So you have to find that person At least for the responsiveness And things like that If someone needs to go head down For every task and needs A list of things to do They're not made for support As far as the responsiveness Of Romania and things like that The emergency support was mostly an example Right now I can only think of one client That we have that has that option And they're on the west coast And I'm on the east coast so it kind of works out You know If you don't have the infrastructure To handle a 24-7 then don't sell it Is the best answer I would also say you were saying That you just need the right person Like John definitely is that person And for me as a junior dev Under him I don't feel that stress of needing To respond to clients ASAP Because I know that he Will have my back Like if I am out getting coffee And like a client emails and it's something urgent Like I know that he'll be there Kind of as this backup person Or like if it's an email at night Like you know John is always the person To respond to that Like I'm not really expected to be That sort of 24-hour person Which is really nice Because you don't really need that extra stress As you're also building your skills And trying to learn like what is going on If I could quickly add We're his two project managers And we celebrate John's like switching monster He is like he doesn't sleep He waits So he's built like that It should be a challenge For some developers to try to fit You know their drive Their passion about development He is very passionate about that So make sure there's a right set Thanks you all, it's great Appreciate it Derek, hey guys Thank you so much first of all For what you do at Calamuna And for being that cornerstone In our support program I'm not one of those people Who's just made for support Thank you for what you do For the project side And then the support plus Flexi projects And you talked about how You have some projects where You get pre-approval for every task And being more on the agency side The full build side One of the big Things we always want to push for Is having a good discovery budget So being able to go in there And actually help them Like we just responded to an RFP And all the discovery Here's exactly what we need Now monkeys, we need some people to build it And we basically just responded And said this is shit We'll take your entire budget Do a discovery with it And then we can talk about building your website And so I'm curious Kind of on the support side How you handle that When someone is just maybe throwing tasks at you And saying hey we need this And it might not be the best idea In their best interest And that comes back to What I originally said You have to be comfortable with saying no Like this is not cool, you don't need this I mean we have one client He's like I want all the things all the time Give me all the stuff And it's like no man, you can't have that And that's what it comes down to Is the ability to say no And also too, when people start working with us In support, initially at the door We do a discovery in the kind of We can identify a lot of things That are wrong with their site So that we can let them know up front So when they ask for things We know that after we've been working them For a while that we can say no You don't need this And pretty much most clients With the exception of maybe one or two Every once in a while Will not go around you They'll just be like I trust you Once you have that relationship with a client And you're saying you don't actually want this Or this is not going to address what you need They trust you, they're like Yeah, you've done good work with us Like I know that you're giving me the truth here So Thank you, second question One of the desires that I have In helping to define some processes Is to help Bring the support side And the agency side closer together And kind of Making You know a unifying Theory of the universe that works for both You know And so can you talk about What the differences are in your process Between those two And also what your relationship is with Is there other resentments Are there kind of like Things that are Sticking points between the two parts Yeah, I mean as you know We work together I mean I've been referred to as a cowboy A lot, you know And that's cool But I mean You know as we The company has progressed We do need designer helps We do need a UX help We do need things like that And the process may be a little bit different But on straight support We normally don't use those type of people It's mostly grunt work Dev work, you know Site building, writing code It's very quick, boom boom boom We do have projects that we bring in Like a designer or a UX person Or another dev And when that happens too You know We try at least on the Flex projects When they want something that's usually More than just like Here's a wireframe redo this for us We try to do a small discovery We always try, not that it actually happens But if a client approves it But we try And we try to get that so that we have With our Flex projects through With our Trello board Our project managers try to spell out tasks As best as possible for these other people Because I'll just go go go go go go I'll blow through all the tasks really quick And some people don't work that way And I won't There's no animosity there It's just a different working style And you know Some people can jive with it Some people can't You're welcome Because it sounds like you direct all your Client requests through your support desk Is that right? A majority of them Probably more than 80% of them From the support side Right, and then you determine What kind of request If it's not a bug It automatically is considered a Flex project I mean, not necessarily That was a very rigid type of thing But I mean Some support tickets take four or five hours And we won't necessarily put those in Trello They'll stay in Zendesk And I mean you can communicate It's like a long email where you have everything in front of you Same with Jira too And that like you know Not everything is going to be instant So I mean Some things go to Trello When they become that sprint work That Flex project where it's going to take 20 hours We don't want 20 hours worth of Thing on a long chain email Because then you lose focus On what is going on But if it's one thing Like this is broken Oh man, would you do That's usually my response And then it's going to take me three hours to fix this And That all stays within Zendesk Do you have the same rate For clients Depending on whether it's a project Or if you have a discount for Long time support packages Our rate is pretty much the same across the board And we just raise our rates So we're trying to get clients in that But it's about the same Sort of on the same lines A question about resourcing And Sort of two parts, one Do the engineers who are working in support Do they only work support Can they also work Flex projects And can they also work Bigger projects And if they can How do you manage that Context switching We call it thrashing in my place Because somebody is supposed to be working on a project And then something bright and shiny pops up In their support queue and they go Take care of that real quick because they know they can do it in an hour And then They've lost all the momentum On their project they're supposed to be working on That's a big context for us as well That problem I get pulled into projects Because I am a senior dev And That works okay for me But That falls into our resource Planning so that we have multiple people We have a very generalized Time allotment for our support And then we have extra time for Flex projects Support mostly handles the Flex projects And that's kind of on our plate Like every once in a while I just mentioned We need a designer or UX guy to come in and help us But usually most of the Flex projects are dev work and then Agency side it does happen We need the muscle like we brought in too much business Or this is a big project and We need all hands on deck and We kind of adjust Our resources needs for that There's no real easy answer to that We kind of do a majority Of our work is in the support but we do get called On deck to other places I don't mean this In a pejorative way But it's support kind of seen as the farm team To the agency side It's kind of like the Apple II versus Mac But I mean The farm team maybe I don't see myself as a farm team I see myself as a major I mean it's more like Like John has been saying It's more what you're geared towards Doing and it's They're just different That's how I feel about it anyway I like working support I like those quick tasks that you can just bang out I mean the difference between Working on multiple architectures On multiple sites of multiple different things Where you know on the agency side And everybody's good at what they do Is like you have that one singular thing That you're working on where we have to switch Context constantly like throughout the day So in your hiring process Is there some Process of kind of evaluating Whether to steer people more in one direction Or the other? I mean We have like code review process When we hire developers and other things I mean it's trial by fire Like you know we bring people in And if you can do it you can If you don't then either you let go Or you go work for the agency side I mean our turnover as a company Isn't really high as far as personnel goes But I mean we've adjusted Like we've had people that tried support And it just didn't work out And so they went to the agency side And that's fine And vice versa So it's mostly like what you're good at You don't really know until you're actually doing it What it's like so I kind of fell into this too I mean I was originally hired as a sales guy To do some dev stuff and it just kind of took off From there so I'm a support guy too So I think you guys are doing the Lord's work Thanks This isn't a question It's more of a response to the previous question Actually as an engineer who does mix Of project work and support work One of the things that's really fun Or cool about the support side of it Is that you're working with You know over months and years With the same client it really gives you A chance to get feedback The client from the end user That goes right back into the site To improve it And that additional polish You don't always get an opportunity to do On the agency kind of project Where it's you build it You send it out there And it never uses the site sometimes So it's one of the really Nice things about working at a place That does offer support As part of the package Going for a second round here Making sure I'm not Two part are very quick You shared a lot of data About where sales and all that And where your revenue is coming in So I'm wondering how you all track that And I just wanted a little clarity Referrals versus word of mouth Versus call a lead And how you differentiate what referral Versus word of mouth I mean I took this all I mean we have an accounting firm that handles All our actual, they're called Summit A lot of agencies here use it But we use Harvest As a time tracker for everything So I have admin access So I literally went through six quarters of data Manually to make all that stuff And so that's how At least the time stuff I mean I know all the clients of Calamuna There's a lot of them And I sat down with another one of the partners And we went through And we also in our CRM There's a thing of where the source was from And when we do our Cal Elite stuff Because there's a lot of importing Of CSVs from Salesforce And other things that like It gets imported that way And it automatically marks the source as Cal Elite And then if someone comes into our website Or like word of mouth Or you know that's kind of A loose category But since like we do things like Like project type space so people kind of know us That they'll give us work like because of Calibox Or things like that So that's more word of mouth Where straight up referral is you know This person referred me to you Will mark them as referral I mean they're subjective terms At least when it comes to that You're welcome If John Ouellet and Katie Poole Are the farm team then Director Epps and Rob Luch are like Little League I think I think that's it Thank you everybody Katie Poole look Look Katie, Katie look I don't know what It was just too wild