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Verbatim text
Lee:
Before we start today’s show, let me share with you something super exciting that we are launching. That’s an event here in the uk all around helping you transform your agency. So if you look back over the last year, maybe two years, and feel frustrated that maybe you’ve not moved forward, then this is the event for you. Check it out over on Agency Transformation Live. That’s Agency Transformation Live. We have got speakers from all around the world here to help you plan your next 90 days, your next three months, your next year, whatever that needs to be to help you get the level of transformation that you need in your business. That’s AgencyTransformation live. We’ll see you there. Welcome to the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. This is your host, Lee, and on today’s show we are talking with my mate Justin Meadows and he’ll be sharing how he has switched things around and is focusing primarily on support as well as productized builds. So, folks, sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Welcome to a conversation with me, Mr. Lee Jackson. And today we have flown in specifically for you, Mr. Justin Meadows, all the way from the land of Australia.
Lee:
How are you, mate?
Justin:
Pretty good, Lee, how are you?
Lee:
I’m alright, I’m alright. For the benefit of everyone listening, it’s like 9am for you. So you packed the kids off to school so we could do this and I as the old man had a three hour nap before this call.
Justin:
But to be fair, it’s later in the.
Lee:
Day for you, so that is true. Yeah, my wife, once a week she makes dinner and she made like this massive like chicken pie and veggies and everything and I was just so sleepy after that. I was like, I’m going to be no good to Justin if I don’t have a three hour nap. So here we are. I’ve got the coffee. Do you start your day with coffee over there?
Justin:
Absolutely.
Lee:
Yep. I’ve already had not a beer then like the adverts was.
Justin:
I was think I’d love to, but yeah, probably. Probably would affect my productivity.
Lee:
That’s true. And it’s definitely not Fosters either. Fosters have been lying to us, haven’t they?
Justin:
Absolutely not.
Lee:
Australians like it. Yeah, no, I kind of worked that out after a few Australians on the podcast. They’ve all had the same opinion about Fosters. So I think Fosters are lying to us before we crack on. And folks, we’ve got loads of cool content to go through with Justin, so hang about. But this is really a novelty for me. I live in a very Small island which is all falling apart right now. Theresa May has literally just by the skin of her teeth survived a vote of no confidence. This episode goes out in two weeks. I don’t even know if we’re gonna be called England anymore. But you know, it’s a tiny island and yet an hour’s drive for me is a massive facing and I just like to stay in my village. So me and Justin are chatting, he’s like oh yeah, I live in Melbourne. And then tell me what you then confess to me.
Justin:
Well, yeah, I’m not actually in Melbourne, I’m near Melbourne. So I’m up in the mountains just out of Melbourne. But it’s three hours drive for me to get into Melbourne and which not.
Lee:
Only blew my mind, but then what.
Justin:
But then I’m actually. Yeah. So this afternoon, a bit later on today I’ll be driving down to Melbourne to have dinner with some, some awesome folks that also online marketing and doing a lot of cool stuff. So I like to catch up with them for dinner. We do it once a month and I’ll just duck down there, have dinner with them and then drive back home.
Lee:
And it was the fact that you told me you were going to duck down to Melbourne, which is only a three hour drive away and we’re one of those people that we would pack, we would need to plan at least three stops along the way of that three hours. You know, need to have a break, have a, have something to eat, etc. To get to the end location. So it actually take us four to five hours to get to that three hour location as well.
Justin:
To give you some perspective, I actually a couple of years ago lived on the opposite corner of the country in a little town called Broome. And when we moved from Broome back to my town, Mansfield, it took us seven days of driving like 10 hour days. Like we were just driving nonstop and it took a full week to get from there to here.
Lee:
I actually have no concept. I can’t even imagine it. I literally can’t. England is so small in comparison and like the longest time I’ve been in a car has been eight hours but that was because there was like 20 traffic jams. Folks before we carry on, if you want to find out some more about what Justin’s business is, check out. Tuned WP that’s T U N E D tuned W P Because we’re going to be unpacking his entire business model. He’s going to tell us everything that he’ll allow me to ask him at least which is fine. But first, mate, what I’d really love to do is to jump in a time machine back when you maybe had a karoo cut or unless you’ve always had that gorgeous long mane of hair. And I’d love to find out how you originally got into the world of the web, if we may jump that far back.
Justin:
Yeah, I actually got introduced to it through a friend of mine who was, yeah, started learning about all this stuff. He’s always been a bit of an entrepreneurial type and he said, you should really check this stuff out and showed me a few things and I started learning SEO. He said, you know, actually I did this on a beer website. So I thought, you know, he’s like, you know, just start building a website. What’s something you’re passionate about? I’m like, I love beer. I can talk about beer.
Lee:
First stereotype of the day. Check. Yep.
Justin:
So I made this beer blog and it worked really well and I implemented all this SEO fundamentals that he was teaching me and that sort of thing, and it ranked really well. So I’m like, this is awesome. I’ve got this cool skill that I can, you know, help out businesses with. So I started from that angle. I quickly learned that they needed to improve their website in order for these SEO things that we were doing to actually have a good effect. So then I needed to work out, all right, how do we rebuild their website, how do we give them a great design and all this sort of thing? So I quickly sort of found that that was actually a better business model for me. I’ve built out a team and I had a team back then that were helping me with the SEO side of things. But it was really hard to teach, to hire other people and teach them SEO and to get them to do it effectively. But it was a lot easier to find people who are great developers and build a team of developers and they’re all better at developing than me.
Justin:
So it’s. Yeah, it’s. I found it really leveraged and that worked for me. The other thing is I’m a full time single dad and I live in a small country town, so it’s really hard for me to get in front of clients. Like, it’s a three hour drive to Melbourne and I needed to work out a business model that was leveraged enough so having a team and building a team of support that could work on people’s businesses, where I do a lot of the overseeing and the initial consultations and that sort of thing, but then I can Hand it over to the team. And they’re awesome. I’ve got a really. I love my. Love my team. They’re awesome. Bunch of ninjas. We’ve got 15 guys now. And yeah, they just. They take it from there and run with it and they do a great job.
Lee:
So that you call them ninjas and you almost sounded choked up when you were saying how awesome they are. That was beautiful. So is this a team all based with you locally or are these folks all around the world?
Justin:
Yeah, they’re overseas, so actually they’re all based in the Philippines.
Lee:
Riding ho.
Justin:
Yeah, so. And that gives me a good excuse to go over the Philippines every now and again.
Lee:
So. All right, so first of all, started off, obviously you’re like, beer. Someone’s like, dude, you really need to get into the web. You discover SEO, which is something that’s difficult to scale. Although we do have an old episode, I think, where one guy worked a way of scaling that and teaching other people. But you then found your kind of passion, I guess, is being able to build websites for other people who desperately needed it. You’ve got this amazing team that you’ve been able to train up and build up, which has been cool. And obviously the excuse to go the Philippines. My big question is then, because I’ve never had any luck with anyone in the Philippines, is how did you get 15 people in the Philippines?
Justin:
Yeah, it’s a question. I get a lot and actually a lot of them have come through referrals. So either working with other business owners who then decided that they don’t want to do web development anymore, or they don’t need their web developer anymore. So they’ve said, I’ve got this great developer. Does anyone need one? And I’ll be like, yes, I’m always looking for good developers. So a few I’ve got through that way. And then also through the small team that I had, I’ve found a lot through their personal connexions. So I’ve got a lot of. I’ve got husband, wife, I’ve got two lots of brother sisters in the. In the team and that sort of thing. And other people have just been referred through, you know, people that they’ve worked with in the past or that sort of thing. So that’s been the best way to find people who are really awesome.
Lee:
That’s really good. I have the same experience, so with the folks that work with us in India. So we’ve got a few people that work down south velour area in India, which is just up from Chennai, but It was for us it was just finding that one first person who was a legend. Actually funny story, the first person we found definitely was not a legend but he also introduced us to his brother who was a legend. So I was always grateful for the one non legend for the legend. And then from that, you know, he was then responsible for helping us find other employees, etc. So he would actually interview people and we would find people. Now we’ve got some great friends over there in India which is freaking awesome. But I think I never have a real answer for it. I feel like it’s kind of luck to find the right people and then once you’ve found the right people, they attract more right people. I’ve never had anyone offer me their developer though. I’m kind of jealous of that.
Justin:
Yeah, I mean I’m in a forum community with a. Yeah. A lot of similar kind of business owners. Businesses and so that comes up every now and again. I’m always got my eye out for it and I jump on every opportunity because I know that it’s always one person. That’s awesome. Can make such a huge difference to your business.
Lee:
Absolutely.
Justin:
Yeah.
Lee:
You know, you know I found really inspiring as I hear you talking about this and you’ve. You found this team through groups of people with similar business. I don’t really know any other industry other than web development where we all get together like me and you right now could be competitors in theory, you know, because I sell support, I sell websites. But look at us, we’re chatting on the podcast, having a great chat and you’re like people are sharing developers and sharing information.
Justin:
Absolutely.
Lee:
It just kind of boggles my mind.
Justin:
Yeah. You mention it. Yeah. It doesn’t happen or you don’t see it in many other industries. Yeah, yeah. I absolutely love it. I love going to. That’s, that’s why I’m heading down to Melbourne. The Sarvo. Yeah, it’s chatting with like minded people and you don’t need to hold back. You just, you know, teach them all the things that you’ve learned and they’ll teach you and you always find out some great little tips and share this. There’s so much opportunity and market out there that even people I work with, some people who are. Yeah, very. We have a lot of overlap but we’re different enough that we can refer people to each other for our, to our strengths and that sort of thing.
Lee:
So yeah, yeah, it was just a tangent but it’s just something that made me think again every time I’m presented With it, yet another person says, oh yeah, and I’m part of this group of other developers. It just again, just reinforces how cool that is and also how kind of actually mind boggling that is as well that we’re in such an industry that we can be like that. We’re not all kind of hating on each other, we’re actually helping each other. And I love that.
Justin:
Yeah, for sure.
Lee:
So SEO beer SEO website for other people. That’s great. But things have changed. That was predominantly. Was that through Evergreen Profits? Predominantly, originally.
Justin:
Yeah, yeah. So Evergreen Profit was my brand originally and that was focused on white label wholesale development for other agencies. So that, and that was again because I needed to have a leveraged business model where I could make connexions with a few agencies and then that would bring in, you know, lots of work over time. I, I didn’t need to always have to be going to clients because it’s very hard for me to do that with my time constraints and location constraints. So that business model worked really well for me and that allowed me to grow the team and grow to the point where we are now. But I’ve also been getting lots of people referred directly to me. They’re like, oh, have a chat to Justin. He can do these things for you, he can look after your website, he can build you a new one, that sort of thing. And so I would just look after these people that referred to me because referrals are absolute gold. It’s really where we get a lot of our business and I think for any business really that’s. You should always be looking to increase your referrals.
Justin:
But that’s sort of muddied up my marketing messaging on my website because some of it was for marketing agencies, but I was also getting people who wanted to work directly with us. So I’ve built out that new brand around people working directly with us as I guess retail sort of as opposed to the white label stuff. And that’s tuned to WP.
Lee:
That’s awesome folks. If you also check out greenprofit.com that’s the, that’s the original business. And like you said, you’ve, you’ve launched then tuned WP and very similar model to what we’ve got with Angled Crown. We are a white level WordPress development team for agencies. But like yourself, we’ve had this weird experience maybe over the last two to three years where we do tend to get a lot of people now, even though they know we are working with agencies, they just want to work with us directly. Anyway, although we don’t offer design, so we always have to say, well, you know, here’s some designers we know, go and check those guys out and then come back to us. Yeah, I really cannot design and I don’t have any amazing designers on team and everyone who works for me will listen to me and they will not be offended that I just said that because we’re all developers. I hope they won’t.
Justin:
It’s good to stick to your strengths as well.
Lee:
Absolutely.
Justin:
Yeah. I’m guilty of trying to do, over the years, trying to do too many things and, you know, I think, all right, I’ll build out this. You know, I’ve had a few. Couple of people ask me for this service and I just go and start working out how we can deliver that. And then after a while I look back and realise I’ve just wasted so much time on this and really, we’re not awesome. I would have been better just, you know, just sending them to someone who’s going to be awesome and be able to deliver that properly or, yeah, work out something else.
Lee:
I think that comes out of a couple of things, doesn’t it? It’s either this wanting to help everybody, which is one of my biggest weaknesses. I always. I never really like turning people down. It’s not that I want their money, it’s that I feel like I want to help them and I get excited about whatever it is they want to do and then kind of jump on that and waste hours and hours and hours on trying to do it. But then sometimes the. The other thing I found as well would be a bit of fear for me as well, where I’m thinking, oh, man, I’ve got a. I’ve got a gap. I need to fill that financially, so I’ll just take on some ridiculously stupid job that I really shouldn’t have taken on.
Justin:
Yeah.
Lee:
And years in, now, you focus down on tuned wp. And this is interesting for me because, you know, we’re. We’re all development agencies and yet you’re going all out and leading with support.
Justin:
Yes.
Lee:
What led you to do that and what were the. What were the fears? What prompted you to do it and what were your initial fears in doing it?
Justin:
The thing that prompted me to do it was the rollercoaster of projects. And I’m sure you’re familiar with it, where, you know, you get a. You have a handful of big projects come in and then you’re spending all your time working on those projects and you do no more marketing and that sort of thing or you slow down on the marketing or just seasonal. That’s. I don’t know if it’s as strong in the uk, but certainly in Australia everything shuts down in January because January’s summer. It’s, it’s just a holiday period between Christmas and Australia day, which is the 26th of January. So that’s one month where most industries in Australia shut down. There’s just nothing going on. And so no one wants to start thinking everyone’s on holidays, no one’s thinking about their websites or starting new projects or that sort of thing. So it really is a very quiet period and it’s hard for me to have a large full time team that I’m still paying wages for. You know, I need to have something for them to do. So having that baseline of support that we can work on is really a strong cash flow thing for me.
Justin:
And, but yeah, working on, you go through cycles with projects where you have heaps of work on and then you’ll have nothing fail.
Lee:
Feast and famine.
Justin:
Yeah, that’s it. And so that, that hurt me. So I’m like, right, I really need to focus on the support things and grow that side of the business so that it’s providing me a solid baseline of income and work for the, for the team and that sort of thing. And then the projects can be on top of that.
Lee:
So you still do the projects, but the now core part of your business is actually leading with that reoccurring revenue, which is those support packages.
Justin:
Yep, absolutely.
Lee:
So from the launch of TuneWP, how did you kind of, how did you pivot? How did you start to get these new clients? Because I imagine right now there’s a whole load of WordPress developers, design agents, etc. Listening and thinking, well, that sounds beautiful, but how do you start getting these support contracts in? How long does it take? What’s, what are your methods? So could you share with us maybe a little bit of how you got all that started, how you started selling?
Justin:
Yeah, now to be honest, most of my, most of these new clients are coming in through referrals. So I’ve got a lot of people who refer to me. I’ve got a lot of affiliate partners for that service. And yeah, by just always going out and meeting people, good, solid network, looking after our clients so they, they refer other people to us and that sort of thing. So referrals is, is a big chunk of where we get our new leads from. But I also, I love that, but I also am a bit, you know, I feel Vulnerable, because it’s not something where I have control over that, over that lead generation or not direct control, you know. So I am building out content marketing, doing regular performance tips, so giving tips on how people, people can improve the performance of their website on a range of different areas. And we’re putting those out onto LinkedIn, you know, all the social media platforms, uploading them natively and sticking them on the blog and doing that sort of thing. And I’ve been getting a lot of great feedback from that and people getting in touch with us. And the thing that we.
Justin:
Yeah, the sort of, I guess the lead service is that having a website audit so we can look through your site and see how it is performing across a bunch of key areas and give people feedback and then that and decide if they want to jump on our support plans or just get us to fix a few issues and take it from there.
Lee:
That’s really good. So predominantly referrals, but I know exactly what you mean. It’s like, this is great. We’re getting all of these referrals in, but it’s completely outside of your control. Yeah. You know, it’s like, will these dry up all of a sudden?
Justin:
Exactly.
Lee:
And then what do I do? So I need a plan B. Yeah.
Justin:
And I found that happens like, like I was saying about in January here in Australia. I don’t. I don’ I’m not getting any more referrals, you know, and I’m just like, okay, I need to get more business crap. How do I do that?
Lee:
So for us, our quiet times are December. December, January kicks off. Everyone’s like, new Year, new start. Yeah, let’s all start building websites and it goes crazy again. But for us, it’s December and because it feels. It’s only 30 days, but it feels like the longest time ever. And I’m always getting that little niggle in the back of my mind. I’ve not had any emails for. Actually it’s not happening this year, but normally I’ve not had any emails this week. I’m a bit worried. I like what you’re doing, though. Content marketing, putting time into that. It’s not a quick method. So creating a blog, putting stuff out on LinkedIn doesn’t feel like you’re doing too much and then people give in too early. Whereas if you are consistently putting out some sort of content, regularly sharing stuff on social media of value, then yes, it will take time. But at least then when those quiet moments come for Australians, at least you’ll still be getting emails from all around the world from people who are consuming your content, who need some sort of service. And I noticed that you’ve set up a number for the US and the UK as well, right up there at the top of your website, which is awesome.
Justin:
Yeah.
Lee:
For anyone who wants to do something like that. How have you set that up?
Justin:
That’s actually Skype numbers. Nice. Just use the Skype number. And that all just comes into my mobile. So that’s. Yeah. But we do have quite a number of clients now overseas. We’ve got a range of countries actually. We’ve also got Jamaica, Dubai, New Zealand, Canada. Yeah, so there’s a. There’s a range of different countries, but I just. Yeah, by putting those numbers up there, it makes it clear that, yes, you know, we can service you in the UK and we have a 24 hour service, so we are set up for giving support to people all over the globe.
Lee:
So, yeah, that’s intense, man. Call that number, see if it’s you that answers in the middle of the night.
Justin:
I probably won’t.
Lee:
I’ll be like, Ashley, actually, everyone listening. Be nice, don’t call him. Now that we all know it goes through to your mobile. Prank calling you. FAKE AUSTRALIAN ACCENT how you going, mate? Is that you again, Lee?
Justin:
Yeah.
Lee:
No. Oh, mate. Okay. All right. So I do have obviously more serious questions now. So one of the fears that I’ve heard from other people and myself about taking on supportive websites is when I don’t build the website or when other people don’t build the websites, you can sometimes inherit a monster I visual composer with 89 different plugins, WordPress 1.0 installed or whatever, you know, all right, I’m slightly exaggerating, but it’s just a beast. And it also comes with tonnes and tonnes of issues. Have you had that? How do you manage that?
Justin:
Yeah, we have had some monsters handed over to us and that sort of thing. And it is, it is a. It’s a headache. But also, you know, someone’s got to look after this poor client that has this horrible site. And the other thing is that the first thing we do is we do an audit. The very first thing we do is we, you know, scan it for malware before we move it onto our service. You know, we’ve got to protect the integrity of our service. So we do that. But we also run through a full. That audit service that I’m talking about, we run through that for every new client so we give them some feedback on. These are all the things that we think your site needs to be Improved on or we need to fix. And that some of that can be covered by our unlimited support, which is part of the service, but some of it will be outside of that because that only covers minor changes. It doesn’t, it doesn’t include everything. And if we need to spend 10 hours, you know, fixing up the site, then we do need to charge separately for that.
Justin:
So it can, it just creates extra work for us to do, which is, which is good. So although it’s, it’s a, it’s a headache dealing with those sort of sites, you know, it’s not that bad as long as you’re, as long as you manage it well, I think.
Lee:
So the importance is do the work first so those, those audits have a look at it first before you’re moving it on and taking it on, fully explaining to the client. Okay, we can, you know the good news, we can take on your website as part of our service. However, we do need to do the following. These are covered under the support contract. However, this particular plugin hasn’t been updated for three years and you’re gonna need a bit of custom code that’s gonna take two or three hours and that’s gonna cost you. Xyz. Are you ready to rock and roll? Client gives you the thumbs up. So it actually creates opportunities as well. We’ve actually ended up rebuilding entire websites just because it was actually quicker using Beaver Builder than it was to even bother taking their website on. Because I’m like, seriously, do you use any of these plugins? They’re like, oh, no, it’s just a five page website. I’m like, right, we’ll replicate your design and then we’ll get you on our server. They’re like, oh, thank you, thank you so much. Because like you said, we kind of have to save people, don’t we, when they are stuck with these monsters of a website.
Justin:
Absolutely, yeah. Someone’s got to look after them. And it might be a bit of pain initially, but then they’re like, oh, thank you. You know, they’re really grateful client, they’re going to stick with you. They turn into the sort of people who refer other clients to you and that sort of thing. So I’m always looking at the long term relationship with all of my clients and you know, quite often we do need to go through a bit of short term pain to fix them up and get them on the right track, but it’s always worth it.
Lee:
Sure. And also, you know, some of that pain you don’t necessarily need to charge for because what you’re getting for it in the long term is maybe two or three years worth of monthly income. Income, if not forever because they love you so much. So that’s another way of looking at it as well. So there is that initial pain, there’s that fear, etc. But also the value of that client over the long term may feel like a low value per month, but actually over the years, wow. It’s a way of. Because we’re often thinking, oh well, maybe we should build a cheap website platform that people can pay us a low monthly cost to have a website. But actually this is another way of getting people who may not be able to afford, you know, a full development house, etc. To be able to get on board with you as well, which is cool. Now, I am interested in asking you about unlimited support because my sister in law gave me the new phrase about two months ago saying oh, that made my bum wink. Which I just think is the best phrase ever. But the idea of offering unlimited support quite literally makes my butt wink.
Lee:
How the hell do you manage, you’re charging like $150 or something like that a month. And I know my, you know, I know my past customers who, if I’d have said unlimited support, they’d have gone cray cray. So how do you manage that? How you establish what is a minor update and how do you stop them from Giving you essentially 20 minor updates in one day?
Justin:
Yeah, so I mean when it comes down to it, most of the business owners, they’re too busy to be sending us 20 minor updates a day and they might, they might go through bursts where they are quite demanding and they do want to make a lot of changes to their site or they do have, you know, they’ve got something going on, they need to do a lot of support and. But that’s generally balanced out by quiet periods where they don’t need us very much. So sort of on balance it evens out. The other thing is that we, the way I define unlimited support is it’s any batch of tasks that they give us that’s going to take an hour or less. So because there is that, you know, uploading one product to their shopping cart is probably, you know, not going to take very long at all. But if they give us 100 products in one hit, you know, we have to treat that as one task, you know, and that might take couple of hours. So we need to charge separately for that. So yeah, it’s any batch of tasks that’s going to take an hour or less.
Justin:
If it’s going to take more than an hour, then we quote for that separately. So that’s how we sort of manage and don’t get really taken advantage of. But also we have a good relationship with most of our clients and they don’t want to take advantage of us. They understand and they see the value in what we’re providing. So it rarely comes up as an issue. There’s sometimes when I need to just have a chat with them and say, look, you’re asking a bit much here, or why are you doing this? We need to just charge a bit more for it, that sort of thing. But on the whole it actually works really well.
Lee:
That’s good. One thing I’d be interested in understanding as well then is I presume you, your team have maybe that same feeling when you press the update button, especially with WordPress 5.0, because everyone was freaking out. It was essentially the replay for me of Y2K. Basically nothing happened and everything was fine and no one died, which is incredible.
Justin:
Yeah.
Lee:
But, you know, how do you, how do you manage that side of things? So when you’re doing things like your monthly maintenance, your updates, etc. And something happens, I plug in for whatever reason, doesn’t work, etc. What do you do? How do you manage client expectations on that sort of thing? Because, I mean, we’re getting techie now and clients don’t necessarily understand that, especially because you’ve moved. Not necessarily working with agencies anymore, which might have more of an understanding, but you’re working with the end user, you’re working with personal brands, etc. Who don’t necessarily understand what a plugin update means and why a plugin may have stopped working, et cetera. So how do you handle all that sort of stuff?
Justin:
Yeah, so the first thing is we have a pretty good process for running those updates and the maintenance. And, you know, the first thing we do is actually manually look at the main pages of the site and make sure it’s all displaying properly and then you’re freshened up on that website. You. This is how it’s supposed to look and then you take a backup and then you look at the updates and then after you’ve done the updates, you have a look at the site again and make sure it’s all fine, clear the cases. So, yeah, and if you do run into issues, then we can quickly roll back and that’s. So that’s the biggest thing we can do. And then we can work out, you know, how get around that issue or what needed to be done to fix it. So that’s. I think that eliminates most of the problems just having that process in place. But also, yeah, with some updates, like for example, with the 5.0, we simply just haven’t done it yet. You know, it’s there, but it’s not a security patch. There’s no urgent need to update it right now. So we can just wait until the other plugins have sorted themselves out and they’re ready to be compatible and there’s no issues.
Justin:
We don’t need to be the first penguin to dive off the iceberg.
Lee:
Is that an Australian saying? Wait, wait a minute. You don’t even have penguins in Australia. Yeah, we do.
Justin:
Melbourne’s got little fairy penguins. Yeah, absolutely.
Lee:
Really? Yeah. I learn a new thing every day.
Justin:
We don’t have icebergs, though, that’s for sure.
Lee:
Well, yeah, I’d hope not. You’re absolutely right. I’m glad you said this, though, because, you know, if it’s not a security update, you don’t have to jump on it straight away. WordPress 5.0 is a major release, it’s a major change, but it’s not actually a security update. And 4, 9, 8, 1 point, whatever it is, I don’t know, I’m making it up now, but that very last version, before it switched to 5, is actually going to be maintained for some time to come. So if there is a vulnerability that shows itself within WordPress 4.8 or 4.9, I can’t remember what it was now, 4.9, wasn’t it? So if it was a. It’s the vulnerability that shows itself up in 5.0 core, as well as being in there in 4.9 and actually 4.8 and 4.7, I think they will, they will patch that and provide the update for that version of WordPress. So if you need to, for a client, for compatibility’s sake, continue to run 4.9 for even another three months until all of the plugins they’re using are brought up to date, then that’s absolutely fine as long as you’re keeping your eye on those incremental security updates, which is something else that clients won’t necessarily know.
Lee:
If they’re not on a care plan, they might try doing things themselves and then everything will break. And a great example is Advanced Custom Fields. So right now Elliot’s been working his backside off with his team to try and ensure that Advanced Custom Fields is up to date for Gutenberg. But Gutenberg was not even finished until like a day before 5.0 was released. So he’s like, if you have to upgrade, then instal the classic editor or risk the beta version of ACF which is kind of not ready for production. I’m really sorry, we’ll be as quick as we can. So. But at least he was honest and he was out there about it, so. Because if anyone has upgraded and they’ve got advanced custom fields right now, as of this recording at least many of the interfaces won’t work correctly inside of Gutenberg for the custom fields you’ve created, especially if you have like sections and tabs and also any field groups you’ve created will all appear on some post type. But without the fields it just is a complete mess. And if obviously if you instal the beta, it’s a little bit of a worry, so you can instal the classic editor to get around it.
Lee:
But actually it was probably worth people not upgrading. I mean we tested our own sites and upgraded our own sites just for giggles, knowing we could roll back. Thank you WP engine for the staging environment. But yeah, absolutely, that’s absolutely important. Now one thing that I saw on your website, which I was about to watch, a cool looking video, was a pre tuned website and I want to know what that means.
Justin:
Sure. So that’s where we’ve been working on, you know, hundreds of sites over the years and we realised that, you know, we don’t need to be starting from scratch every time. So what we did was right, how can we work out? Because going full custom just requires a lot more work. So it is a lot more expensive and we don’t want to work with themeforest themes and pre existing themes most of the time because yeah, there’s a number of issues but the biggest thing is that quite often you’re trying to customise it and bend it to do something that’s not built to do. Customers, clients will look at it and go, oh yeah, that looks cool, but I want to do this and that and that. And then you’re like, well, we’re better off just starting from scratch. So what we did was we’ve worked on our own sort of base framework layouts that we’ve got for most, for the sections of the pages and then we have a few different variations. So for the header, for the, the feature area, for your, you know, services sections, that sort of thing, we’ve got a few different options to choose from and then so you can just select which kind of layouts you want for your, for all the sections of your homepage and then we’ve got those preset in our design PSDs so we can style them to match your branding and match.
Justin:
We do a. We still do a full custom design but it’s based on those framework layouts. So it’s not as. It’s not going to come out perhaps as awesome as going full custom with your design, but it does get you a really nice design. And these layouts have been chosen because they’re things that work well from a user experience and conversions and that sort of thing. So we’ve thought about the different layout options and you’re going to end up with a website that performs really well. And that’s sort of the analogy with the tune up and the pre tuned is we’re like a performance car and under the hood the engine is the same as in any one of the other engines but you get to choose the modifications and the paint and the, you know, all the. That sort of thing. You’re getting your own website but under the hood it’s. It’s the same high performance website that we’ve developed I guess. And that’s.
Lee:
I really like the concept mate. Sorry Karin.
Justin:
Yeah, we are actually using Beaver Builder for. And Beaver Themer for that as well. So that makes it easier for us to build it out.
Lee:
Absolutely. Folks, if you check out tuned wp.com and you click on pre tuned websites you can see that. Now what I like about this mate as well is let’s face it, the cost of entry for people getting a website is plummeting but not necessarily to the advantage of the people getting those quote unquote cheap websites because they are actually probably getting a website built by someone who doesn’t know how to code, who has bought a themeforest theme and then has simply installed every plugin on earth to make the website do whatever it is the whim of that low paying client is so they’ve actually got something that is not great. So you’ve been able to put together a package where it’s still compared to say a complete custom from build 10k plus site. You’ve been able to compete at the lower end while still giving them that kind of higher quality. So here is some pre done designs which we can evolve for you within this framework with your brand. We will then still build the website for you and obviously you’ve then been able to streamline that process in the backend using Beaver theme, Beaver Builder et cetera and the client then gets a custom designed website for a smidge of the price of which assumedly you Will also onboard them then into one of your support plans as well.
Justin:
Absolutely.
Lee:
It’s so beautiful mate. Yeah, yeah. I can, I can feel you nodding, going yeah man, I love it, I love it. And you built it so that means you can support it dead easy because there you go. Now that’s phenomenal. I do like that concept. So it’s, it is like a templated approach but it’s that, it’s that good mix of both.
Justin:
Yeah, I sort of found that I needed to build out that middle ground because going full template I wasn’t happy with the results that we were getting for people. But that and I did know that full custom was price prohibitive to a lot of clients. So I needed to find something in the middle. That’s sort of what I’ve done.
Lee:
That’s really good. Now the other side of things is you offer custom sites and the thing that surprised me I think was for the custom sites you were still. I mean I understood you put your prices down there on the pre tuned sites because that’s something that’s pretty, you know, pretty much rinse and repeat. You’re giving those same sort of experience to different people. Now you do do your custom sites and it says here that you’ve got your custom site for a price of this you’re going to get eight designs. Package will be essentially ten grand as of the time of recording in USD. So could you kind of explain because for me a custom website I think that how long’s a piece of string for the price? So how are you managing people’s expectations on a custom site and being able to then publish a price? Because I would have put like from.
Justin:
Yeah and that’s probably, it’s probably more accurate to say from. Because I don’t think I’ve actually sold any at exactly that price.
Lee:
Well not.
Justin:
Yeah, although it is, it is fairly new might happen but. But yeah it’s just to give people an indication of what sort of price range they’re looking at and where we’re starting from and what’s included at that starting price and if there are other bits of functionality and stuff because quite often at that those kind of websites there is other functionality that’s more complicated to build and that sort of thing and that always gets added on. So yeah that’s, it’s just mainly just just to give people an indication and if someone is like yeah, that’s exactly what I need then bonus.
Lee:
No, that makes sense. And I guess that’s built up of like so much for custom design. So much for the build. And then if someone says, and I also need a jobs listing where people can submit their job postings and receive applications, then you’re like, oh, okay, well that’s not actually the start of 10k. You actually need functionality. So we’re going to need to go into a process of discovering and creating a plan for how, how we’re going to deliver that. And that’s going to cost you, xyz, et cetera. So again, it still allows people to make the inquiry because you’re saying, hey, look, you’re going to get this for this price. We can also do a lot more and we can onboard you as well, which is awesome. One thing that Ed does, Ed ellingham from Cloud CareWP is a good friend of. He’s definitely leading nowadays with support like you’re doing. But what he said for the site builds and that he actually adds the support contract on the quotes now as well. So he leads with that. And it’s the expectation that if you build a website with him, you also take on the support contract, the yearly support contract as well.
Lee:
Is that something you guys have been doing?
Justin:
Yeah, definitely. And it’s not something that we make a requirement, but we put it in there because most clients want that reassurance that we’re not just going to build a site for them, saying, okay, thanks, bye. You know, they want to know that, that we’re going to look after them after we finished building the site as well. And so I found that it like at first I was like, oh, I don’t want to be, you know, too silly. But I realised it was actually a comfort for them to know that we are going to, we have that support there for them, we are going to look after it. They don’t need to go to some other supplier for all the rest of it. We’ve got them from then on to, you know, we’ve got their back, we can look after them, help them grow their business. So, yeah, we absolutely agree. Put that in the initial proposals and that sort of thing.
Lee:
The cool thing as well about offering support to your clients is that you’ve got a client for a long time because you’re sending them regular information about their website. You’re maybe having regular interaction with them as well when they’re asking things to be updated and changed, which is something you would never do. If you just build the site for them and then they go off into the big wide world with their website and don’t talk to you again for two years. And what can tend to happen at that point is some other web developers already having a conversation with them and they’re getting a quote for them in two years when they want a new website. Whereas being in a support package, regular communications and you can actually start to unpack with them the future needs as that company grows, which is also another benefit. And so a benefit both to the client because they get regular contact with you and can evolve with your skillset and obviously a benefit to you and your business. So we’re now selling this, aren’t we? We’re selling this idea to everybody. Anyone who’s not been selling support contracts.
Lee:
I hope you are now convinced with the story of Mr. Justin and his amazing team and how they are now leading nowadays support to create a business that allows Justin to be a single dad and just duck out for three hours down the road to go hang with his mates, because he’s created a business model that allows for that, which is absolutely fantastic and inspiring. So, whilst we’re wrapping up, I do want to know some random facts. When we were at the Youpreneur summit, I think Queen came on.
Justin:
Yes.
Lee:
And you jumped on the stage and air guitar like a legend.
Justin:
I’m a sucker for Queen. I love it.
Lee:
That’s what I was going to ask you. Just suddenly this shy Australian guy just turned into a rock star and I just couldn’t keep my eyes off you. Man, you crazy.
Justin:
Look, I’m never shy of making a fool of myself. I jump at every opportunity. Yeah. Getting up and jumping around first thing Sunday morning. Why not?
Lee:
Why not? Folks, you got to check out. I’ll try and remember to put a picture. I got a few pictures. In fact, I think I got a video of you, didn’t I? I think a few of us got videos.
Justin:
There was a couple of videos, yeah.
Lee:
Yeah. There’s a few videos circulating the Internet, so we might just have to share those. So, you know this guy isn’t that lovely sweet guy that you see in his videos on tunewp.com he’s also a rock star, you know, waiting to be unleashed on the world, which is awesome. And one thing I’m interested in finding out from you, mate, is was there kind of any one thing or any one lesson? We all go to conferences. You travelled across the world to get to this conference, which is quite an investment of your time and your finances, etc. So, from the Uprint summit, do you feel you had any one particular thing that you took from it, as in a lesson, or was it more than Networking. What was the benefit for you for attending that summit?
Justin:
The biggest thing, and this became immediately obvious to me in the first, you know, first couple of sessions of the event, was that I really hadn’t been focused on like a core target market when I was working on building my own TuneWP website. It was very general and it’s one of those leaky taps for the plumbers sort of thing. I tell this to all my clients. I’m always banging on about this, but when it came to my website, I didn’t do it. And I was like, oh, oh my God, I can’t believe I haven’t got clear on who my target market is and made that integral in all of my copy and everything I’m doing on the website. I, I sort of came at it with a general idea of my target market and I was very clear on the services that I was providing, but I hadn’t really narrowed in on that core target market that I really want to serve day in, day out. You know, that was the biggest thing for me. And there was a lot of reinforcement of that throughout the event. And, you know, focusing on one thing really gives you a lot of power to be effective with your marketing, messaging and also coming up with the right sort of content that’s going to speak to that, those people and that sort of thing.
Justin:
So I found that that was the biggest, biggest thing for me. It was more a sort of a, you know, a reminder and a kick up the bum rather than learning something new. But there was plenty of other little bits and pieces that I learned as well, but that was the key takeaway for me.
Lee:
I’m glad you did take the key takeaway as well, because with these conferences, it’s two days of a lot of information, so it can be hard to take all of that on board and being able to at least go away and then action. Something is brilliant. And there was actually a few messages, weren’t they, about that one thing. So you had. Andy and Pete were talking about, you know, do one thing really well, like the 9010 rule. Their presentation was freaking awesome. It was hilarious, funny, but also helped you.
Justin:
Exactly. It was a double whammy.
Lee:
Yeah, it was funny and so true. It was like, don’t try and do every single, like, just like, if you’re gonna do YouTube videos for your marketing, do those really freaking well. 90%, like, of your effort goes into that. And then, you know, and then maybe do some tweets and stuff like that, but, you know, put all your effort in that. But also you had Kelly Bada. She’s on. So me and Kelly recorded an episode actually today, which will be live before your episode, mate. And she actually talked about the power of one, didn’t she? As well. It was Kelly Bada, originally from Thailand, so a fantastic speech from her as well. So, yeah, I really enjoyed it and it was great for us. We hung out with Pete Everett as well. Paul Lacy wasn’t there, unfortunately, so that’s a very sad moment for us all. But maybe we’ll encourage him along next year, which was awesome. But, yeah, it was really good to hang out together. And all three of us had the official inaugural WP Innovator Agency Trailblazer, a meal in a pub, because that was all the innovators that were there, just those three.
Justin:
That was great fun. Yeah, it’s really good hanging out.
Lee:
Good times.
Justin:
Yeah. And I gotta say, I think that you’re, you know, I’m in awe of what you’ve done in terms of being able to, you know, consistently publish your podcast and do that one thing. Really awesome. I think that’s something I’m jealous of, that you’ve been putting out this stuff and I think you’re doing a bloody fantastic job. And so it’s an absolute honour to be able to jump on the podcast with you, mate.
Lee:
It’s an honour to have you. You’re a good friend. So I’ve really enjoyed it. Well, on that, then. How can people connect with you? And then we will wave you adieu.
Justin:
Yeah, well, if you like random funny memes, then hit me up on Facebook. But please do.
Lee:
This guy’s a legend.
Justin:
But otherwise, yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn, search for my name or shoot an email to supportune.
Lee:
Now then, before we go, I just have to reiterate, adding Justin on Facebook, Justin makes me look really funny, so. And he’s my secret. Like my. You are my d. I told you this, didn’t I? You’re like my dirty little secret. I deliberately don’t like your posts so that people don’t know where I got these hilarious memes from, because otherwise they’ll see that Lee liked it. And actually, it’s Justin who’s the comedy genius behind all of this. But I don’t know, do you have, like an hour every day day where you go and find a funny meme or something like that? Because you’re like, I consistently publish podcasts, but you’re, like, consistently making me laugh on a daily basis with ridiculously funny memes.
Justin:
Yeah. For me, it’s a great Downtime thing. It’s a wind down thing. I love. And this is why I’ve always loved Facebook and the Internet is for having a laugh. And so for me, I go browsing at the end of the day, winding down just to have a bit of a chuckle and get over the day. So I love just going and searching for. For these funny little things and sharing them.
Lee:
You know what is beautiful as well? A lot of these, like, dad jokes as well really resonate with me. So one of them was like, I didn’t think wearing orthopaedic shoes would help, but I stand corrected.
Justin:
Chuckle every bloody time.
Lee:
Or behind always. You never know how many hours of Peppa Pig someone has had to endure this. And he’s also got a map of Antarctica’s bay, which is like northern Bay, also the northern bay. Northern bay, north side, Northern Bay. And then what I do is I like click on them and then, you know, this little menu at the top right. Is it top right on my phone? I just download the image to my phone. And then on WhatsApp, I’m a comedy legend with all of my friends. They’re like, ollie, where do you find this stuff? I’m like, yeah, just on, you know, around.
Justin:
Yeah, Never reveal your sources.
Lee:
Yeah, no, I just have. If you’re a computer geek, one of my favourite ones most recently was where you’ve posted a picture of a really dusty motherboard and it says underneath it, the ancient city of Asus. So if you’re a computer geek, you gotta check out his profile. And thankfully, Justin does make most of these public as well, which is absolutely hilarious. So it’s facebook.com Justin Meadows. If you want to smile at day, then add Justin because he is seriously a funny legend. I could go for. I’m scrolling again. Look, this is your fault. I do this. I end up going back over all of. All over your ones. You had a picture of four turtles and it says adult, healthy, normal turtles. And I remember when I saw that a few a couple of weeks ago. And then I just had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles going through my head all day. So. No, it’s hilarious. Keep it going, mate, because you do make my day. Love it. Right, I’m gonna kick you off the show now for being so nice. This is maybe 30 minutes. What happened there? All right, thanks very much.
Lee:
Take care. Be good.
Justin:
No worries. See you later.
Lee:
And that wraps up today’s show. If you have any thoughts, any questions for Justin, then he rocks around in the Facebook group. You can check that out over on agency trip. Trailblazer.com forward/group. Don’t forget we have a live event happening here in the uk. If you want to find out more about that and get to hang around with the likes of Troy Dean, Chris Ducker and of course, Mr. Paul Lacey, then head on over to Agency Transformation Live to check out all of the details there. We don’t see you at the event. If we don’t see you in the group, then, hey, we’ll see you in the next episode.
