Note: This transcript was auto generated then some poor soul sat and listened to it, and followed through correcting any mistakes they spotted. Please however expect human error and shout if you spot an issue. Email: lee [fancy curly symbol] trailblazer.fm.
Verbatim text
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to episode number 117. This is your host, Lee Matthew Jackson.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And on today’s show, we’re going to be talking with Ed Ellingham, who has had a very consistent mission in life. That is recurring revenue, and he has been in businesses and launched businesses that have that at their heart. So sit back, relax, get your pen and paper out, and enjoy the ride.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
This podcast is brought to you by the Agency Trailblazer community. Is agency life stressing you out? Then it is our mission to help you build an agency that you love. We’ve created a community which includes the Agency Reset Roadmap that will allow you to get your agency back on the right track. We also have lots of no-nonsense, straight-to-the-point, easy-to-consume workshops. We have a thriving community of other agency owners, and we all wrap up every month with a mastermind call with myself and sometimes a special guest, where we unpack your questions. For more details, check out agencytrailblazer.com.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to a conversation with me, your host, Lee Matthew Jackson Jackson, and the wonderful Mr. Ed Ellingham. How are you today, sir?
Ed:
Doing good. Yourself?
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m doing all right. I really am. And just, listeners, so you’re aware, the little turtle has made a sacrifice today for the benefit of this podcast. Ed has a little turtle whose name is?
Ed:
Peaches.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Peaches. What a cute name. And Peaches has a water feature, I believe, that was running in the background. So it’s been temporarily turned off. Peaches is without her water feature. So thank you, Peaches. This is an episode dedicated to Peaches.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So now that we’ve got the funnies out of the way, Ed, would you like to just let everyone know who you are, where you hail from, what you do, maybe even throw in what your favorite color is or movie, anything like that? An interesting fact about yourself.
Ed:
Well, the agency we run is Cloud Nine Communications, and we’ve recently launched a new, it’s not really new, but it’s kind of a new branded product for us called CloudCare WP, which is our care plan solution. And that’s kind of what we’re doing right now. We originated from, we originated, we started as a phone company, actually. I left my job in 2014. We started the business, actually, it was 2015, I left the job. And what I was doing there was all IT stuff, and it was management, is what I would do. And I’d manage these guys that handle IT things. We’d have these different problems and issues that would come in, and we would solve them. And that’s really what we did. And we got into VoIP phone systems.
Ed:
So cool, yeah. I got really into that and saw, I liked the recurring revenue model of it. It was really appealing. So I left there to pursue doing this, and I made sure I didn’t burn any bridges. You know, we still have a good relationship. But left there to pursue doing VoIP phone systems.
Ed:
And I kind of, our local area is kind of old school, like where you give somebody a credit card and they’re going to do like the big crank swipe thing, you know, like in the 90s. And it got to the point where, you know, I’m trying to sell this phone service to people. And it got to the point where I’m, I’m going to these businesses and I’m saying, you have internet access, right? Inter what? What is this heresy? So, I mean, it got to the, I’m trying to sell that.
Ed:
Well, in the background of it all, you know, I’ve got a couple of people that came and they’re like, hey, you know, you know about computers, you can build us a website, right? And I’m like, well, those two things have nothing to do with one another really. But yeah, you know, I’ve been building websites since Notepad was the tool of choice. So I’ll build, I’ll build you guys a couple of websites. So, you know, built a couple of websites and it wasn’t really intended to be the thing we were going to do. But, you know, then the next project came and the next project came and I started digging into this and diving into this industry. I love doing design and I love creating things. And I love it when people bring these oddball things they need a website to do to me. And I got to figure out a way to make it work. And it just snowballed. I mean, after three years, we’ve got probably three phone customers and about 50 web customers.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
From phones to the internet. It’s still kind of related, isn’t it? Because originally we were all like sending the internet down the phone line, weren’t we? The phone lines were the original internet, weren’t they?
Ed:
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So, I mean, and that’s kind of the way it went down. You know, it’s not the way I intended it, and, you know, it goes from web design to where you’re learning to be a marketing guru, and, you know, I’m not going to say I’m bad at it by no means, but it’s not really what I like to do. I like more of the technical aspect of it. And I do enjoy the design part of it. But really, I like it when my favorite thing is when a client comes to you and says, I need the website to do this obscure thing that aligns with my goals for my business. And I love that and coming up with a solution to solve that problem that they have, that need for them.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now, it’s fair to say you absolutely love solving problems. Does that reflect in your personal life as well? Are you like one of these Sudoku guys? Crosswords or whatever it is.
Ed:
No, no. My goal as far as hobbies outside of work would be to, like, shut it off. You know, I just kind of like to just mellow out and not really do much of anything. You know, watch TV, maybe read or something. Yeah. That’s kind of, you know, your mind is always focused on your job. You know, you’re running a business. There’s no clocking out at the end of the day. So whatever I can do to take my mind off of it, I do like to fix things. I’ve never called anybody to fix anything for me like ever. You know, I love tearing things apart and making them work again.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, I found I do that quite a lot recently. I published on my Facebook status, like, over the last six months, instead of paying people to come out and do stuff, and instead of spending time on my machine outside of quote-unquote work hours, I’ve actually been doing things like I’ve taught myself how to use the old film cameras, and I’m now processing my own film. I fixed a door the other day. I replaced a lock. I’m like manning up here. This is amazing. I mean, I know that’s terribly sexist, but you know, you know what I mean? It’s like I’m doing all these manual things that are completely non-related to the digital world, because I think you can just become overwhelmed, and I’m pretty sure the internet’s addictive.
Ed:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So if you spend too much time on it, it’s a bad thing.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So let’s go slightly off, kind of off the direction that we’re going in, and let’s just unpack that a little bit further. Can you just highlight some ways that you relax and some ways that you do shut off away from technology, bearing in mind that emails come through to your pocket, telephone comes through to your pocket, and you’ve got the computer in the same house, just a laptop, whatever you’ve got. What are some good ways that you would shut off?
Ed:
The only way that I shut off is probably when I’m asLee Matthew Jacksonp.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, dear. So you’re the worst person to ask for advice. I’m addicted to it. You know, it’s when you’re running your own business, and you’re trying to grow it, and you know, it’s not like you get another email, and you’re like, oh, it’s like you get another email, and it’s like, what part of the adventure is this going to create? You know, what new journey might this email entail? And usually it’s, you know, somebody saying, can you move this to two pixels to the left? You know, or this color is wrong. You know, silly things that come through, but you know, it’s always kind of exciting. It’s like, for a moment, what is this going to be? So, you know, I like the rush of it. I like growing it, and I like being overwhelmed with it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now, I’m going to confess right now, and I’m pretty sure there is a large percentage of audience who are going to agree with me, but I often do not feel like that. I want a piece of that. I want to feel excited when I open my email, because sometimes when I see an email is coming from a certain person, I’m already like, oh.
Ed:
No, that never changes. There’s definitely an email list, and my phone goes off, and I look at it, and I’m like, oh, God. What minor thing do you think is going to change your life for me to do right now? That’s an emergency. And should have been done three days ago, apparently.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Okay, so I’m glad that you’re – okay, good. So there is a bit of balance. Now and again, you do have that feeling. I feel a little bit better now, because just the idea of you bounding happily towards your emails every morning and, like, having a mini party when one came in, I was just thinking, I wish I could tap into that. That would be amazing.
Ed:
That’s called satisfaction in the workplace. First thing I do when my eyes open in the morning is I look at my phone to see what happened overnight. My favorite, of course, is where we use FreshBooks for our billing, and I love seeing all those FreshBooks emails that come in of this person paid, and it feels like free money, you know, like, hey, I got money while I was asLee Matthew Jacksonp. This is fantastic.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I like that. I like that model indeed. And that’s because these are retainer clients as well, aren’t they?
Ed:
Right, exactly.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Because you’ve committed to all of these. Well, actually, let’s unpack that a little bit more. Instead of me telling everyone, why don’t you tell everyone? So obviously, you started off in phones. We’ve then gone to you building websites, which you do still do, but you’ve shifted over a lot of your resource and time into pushing the new brand of CloudCare WP, which is your maintenance support package. So just walk us through kind of how that happened, and then we’ll kind of do a deep dive into it.
Ed:
Sure. Well, more of kind of how it happened is, well, my background, like I said, you know, it’s kind of in recurring revenue, and my old boss, he loved it. You know, recurring revenue. He said other business would come to him and be like, wow, you mean you do a job for a client once, and then you just keep getting paid? Like, they thought that was amazing, you know, and he would praise about it. I worked for a wireless internet company is where a lot of my background comes from. And so when I started this, I, of course, was looking for that. I wanted that recurring revenue, and I found it by doing care plans.
Ed:
We joined WP Elevation pretty early on, and they pushed the care plans, and all these people were like, you know, these agencies that are on there are like, wow, this is great. This is fantastic. A recurring revenue stream. And I’m like, wow, you know, I was in business for like two months before I figured out that I want a recurring revenue stream, you know? So I was already doing these things. But I would definitely say that WPE has helped me polish it, for sure.
Ed:
But the way that we started focusing that into CloudCare is we already love doing that work, and we already had a really great product together for it. But what I was finding myself is, you know, those emails I rush to every day and kind of excited to see what people need and what’s next and what’s going to happen. And we’re finding that I’ve got these projects. I’ve got a whiteboard full of projects, and I’m not getting to them fast enough. You know, they’re getting stale. And what it is is we have so much client inquiries coming in all the time that it becomes difficult to keep up with the projects.
Ed:
And, you know, you’ve got a $6,000 project sitting here, and I’m being interrupted by these little client projects, which actually is what I enjoy more anyway. So, you know, as we talked about it, it’s kind of like, you know, there’s got to be other agencies that are experiencing this, you know, where they’re working on a project that’s going to be a big chunk of their income. And they’re dealing with these minor things that a lot of times, you know, you’ve got these marketers, design agencies, they don’t really, they have issues sometimes solving a lot of these problems, you know?
Ed:
So they’re spending four to eight hours of their day, possibly trying to solve my clients migrating a website over. I ran into this issue, or I’m trying to move this box. And then they spend two hours trying to do something with CSS that they’re just not comfortable doing, you know, it’s just kind of outside of their wheelhouse. And we kind of feel like, it’s like, you know, we could probably help with this. You know, we don’t, we see that if we partner with agencies, we’re not just solving the needs of their clients, and they get a recurring revenue, and they can work on their projects. But, you know, when they’re building it, we’d like to be kind of a partner there where they’re stuck, and they’re trying to migrate a website over, and they need a little assistance.
Ed:
Well, you know, the way I see it is, we’re already doing business together. I’m happy to help you. You know, we’ve got a recurring revenue that’s going to help me justify the cost of me helping you. And I see this potential there. We try to create kind of more of an all-in-one solution. And I don’t want to make it sound like it includes a kitchen sink, because I kind of feel like when you do everything, you do nothing.
Ed:
But one of the missing, the first thing we did when we got into web design, because of my background, was we launched a server. I mean, that’s just what we did. It just made sense. And then I got so busy with web design, and this kind of goes back to what I was talking about, that I took that and I migrated over to Flywheel. Of course, lots of people are familiar with Flywheel, and it’s a fantastic host. But once you reach, you know, over 30 sites, it gets really, really expensive.
Ed:
So I’m like, okay, well, you know, we have this problem where we need to have more control over the server anyway. We want to have that control, but we don’t always have the time, kind of going back to web agencies need and help with this stuff. You know, if the server goes down or have any issues. So we partnered with a web host, or not a web host, a server company, basically, an IT company that manages the server 24-7. So if there’s ever a server issue, we’ve got it covered.
Ed:
So we’ve kind of built this whole solution that includes, you know, hosting with, you know, 24-7 monitoring on the servers. And it’s all WordPress optimized, and we added hosting. And then, you know, we have our regular care that people expect. But then, you know, we added, you know, image compression features. You know, we want to make it so we have all these tools in place for our customers that they get a better solution overall. You know, we include WP Rocket. We set every website up with Cloudflare. So we tried to really take our care plan and make it so it was just really hands-off for whoever takes it. You don’t have to worry about hosting. You’re not going to have to worry about migrating it to different servers. Or if you want to keep your own hosting, that’s fine. We just like to have that control because we can kind of manage it better.
Ed:
So we just, that’s kind of the route we get. And we may decide later that there’s more things we need to add. For example, we just added SendGrid to our plethora of tools. So any website that we manage, we set up a SendGrid, and it improves the email deliverability. So there’s all these little working pieces that can be added to create more value for your customers. You know, you go to your customers, you say, take a care plan with me. We include things like SendGrid to make sure that when your forms are filled out, it’s going to make it to you and not be lost in transition.
Ed:
So I’m sure there’s plenty of room for us to improve as far as adding more things to make it an overall better solution. But that’s what we’ve been working on is trying to make it very complete, very hands-off where you don’t have to deal with it. We get the ticket. We take care of the ticket. The website just works all the time.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s like everyone’s dream. And I mean, you kind of got into this because I remember chatting to you a few days ago and you said something quite astounding to me. You have 100% take up with your clients on care plan.
Ed:
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
You know, and I see people mention that and I’m very, I try to be very active in Facebook groups, obviously, and you know, people are like, hey, what do you guys do for care plans? How much do you, they ask these questions and they usually say, how many clients do you have on what’s your, you know, you get like 10% of your clients take it or five, you know, no, 100% of my clients take it. You know, I’ve had one client that she had like an IT background and she’s like, you know what? I want to manage it myself. And I get that kind of like that hobbyist, you know, I want to take care of it. We can do that for you. It was probably like maybe a week later and she’s like, my site’s hacked.
Ed:
So her, her website, there was some plugin that she had on her old website when she took over the new website and put it on her host, which was Bluehost. And the website got the WordPress website basically got overlaid and there was an old plugin in there that already was hacked. So basically the new website wasn’t even hacked. Her old website was hacked.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Nice. So within a few minutes, she was, she got you back up to 100 percent.
Ed:
Yeah. Well, and the way it went is she called, and I’m going to screw up the name of this. I want to say it’s called SiteLock. So she called Bluehost before she talked to me. SiteLock said, we’ll never know how they got in. We just take over your website. It’s like $150 or whatever the cost was. And she’s, well, I spent six hours digging through the files for one to prove that it wasn’t my website that got hacked and to dig in there and find out where it really came from. And it took me quite a while and I found it and figured it out, never charged her for it because it was a freshly launched website. But I’m like, you know, we monitor for these things. You know, we make sure that everything’s secure. So yeah, it’s just one of those things, you know, you want to take care of it yourself and kind of give us limited capabilities.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And I’m sure people have experienced this. You know, you get somebody that once somebody starts throwing WordPress terminology around, that’s a client, it’s terrifying.
Ed:
Well, a little knowledge is extremely dangerous. And we’ve, we’ve seen clients do that. You know, they’ll take over. I mean, we work obviously with agencies, which is great. A lot of the agencies just do as they’re told and they’re wonderful clients. But we do have some agencies that have people inside of them who are kind of semi-technical, who have some experience of WordPress and who have really butchered some of the sites that we’ve produced, adding lots of extra features that they feel, you know, they can save money. So they’re going to do this internally. And then when you look at what they’ve done afterwards, you weep.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
However, there is something that is burning on a lot of people’s mind right now. I can just sense them. We’ve just learned from you that you have a hundred percent uptake on your proposals. What is your, sorry, on your care packs. What is your process there for? And I just gave it away. What is your process there for ensuring that your shiny new website client moves onto a care plan once the site is live?
Ed:
Yeah, you know, people know they’re going to need hosting, and us having hosting built into the care plan has a lot to do with the amount of people taking the care plan. We don’t really present it as an option, and I don’t feel like we’re swindling anybody. You know, we’re not making it seem like they have to take this thing in the sense of we’re just trying to upsell them. But the bottom line is if you want your website to be maintained and managed and online, and we take care of what we do for our clients is we take care of the domain registration that they don’t have a domain, we take care of setting the email up, we take care of setting G Suite up or whatever it is. We have the hosting. We just handle it 100 percent.
Ed:
So when they’re, they see it as this is what it’s going to cost for us to just take care of everything for you so you can run your business. It’s really never been a problem. We just say, this is the cost. And if somebody says, well, I don’t know if I need that, that’s fine. It’s just we find that most business owners make more money doing what they’re good at than struggling to do what I’m good at.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly. It’s often an easy sell in that sense of if you can charge your client $125 an hour to fix their furnace and it’s going to take you four hours to do something that’s going to cost you to pay me an hour for, how is that cost effective? You’re going to pay me $125 an hour and you’re going to lose four hours of $125 an hour. So, you know, a lot of people are just happy to have you take care of it. And a lot of times that’s just how it is. They, they’re, they’re kind of afraid to mess with it. They’re kind of afraid to touch it. And most of our clients, they don’t even log into the website ever. They want to do a blog post, they email me a Word document. That’s just how it is.
Ed:
I’ve had a client when I first started, that’s like, I want to be able to have access to it. I sat down with her for like 15 minutes and she’s like, I don’t want to touch this. It’s just, you know, and it’s not that intimidating. It’s not that difficult. And that’s kind of what I see a lot of these agencies do is they have these clients and it’s not a problem until it is where something breaks. And I’m getting, you know, these errors and I’m getting a database connection error, and, you know, we migrated the website over and now none of the pictures are loading and, you know, everything’s kind of works fine until it doesn’t. And that it doesn’t part is what we’d like to be able to help more with, you know, when things go wonky. If I don’t know how to fix it, I’ll figure it out.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
You’d like to mitigate as in help it not happen. But if it does happen, you get excited by the challenge of getting that result.
Ed:
We took over a website recently that the guy that set it up for the client had installed a plugin. I didn’t even know this existed. He installed a plugin that totally makes it so you’ll never see a WordPress update in your life. It just totally removes WordPress updates from WordPress.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
What?
Ed:
So this guy’s WordPress website had never had an update in like four years.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
No way. Did you not take a screenshot?
Ed:
I was like retro. I would love to have seen a screenshot of that. It’s like WordPress 3.9.2 or something like that. It was bad. It was old and it was running WooCommerce. Or 2.9.1 or something. Yeah, it was. And I’m looking through because when you first take over the website, you’re like where everything’s up to date. Like what’s going on here? And you’re looking at the version numbers and well, these things don’t make sense. And finally, I realized that there was a plugin in there that was literally designed to make sure that he was never aware anything was out of date.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s insane.
Ed:
Yeah.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now, one thing that’s really spiked my interest, especially over the last few months is there’s a new European directive. It’s GDPR. It’s talking about protecting data that you have on people, but also going to that extra level to ensure that your site is secure or the systems that you are using that house personal information are secure, are protected, are encrypted, etc. So I don’t know if you guys are really aware of this in the USA, although it probably will end up impacting you, especially if you do work with anyone in Europe, etc. But I’m thinking, you know, if you’re listening as an agency and you are in Europe, especially it’s probably something that you need to be looking into. Obviously, GDPR is something that we all need to be looking into with regards to our websites, the data that we have and that our clients are holding on their clients. But equally, GDPR might be one of those ways of encouraging your clients into making sure that they are keeping their websites updated, etc. This could be an extra source of revenue.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
However, it’s always better to sell it up front like Ed’s done right in the very beginning in the proposal. I will build your website and your ongoing cost of that to ensure it is hosted and maintained and you are looked after is going to be XYZ per month. So if you can build it in from the beginning, perfect. And that’s something that we started doing last year, which is just building everything in from the beginning to make sure that there is no hassle and everybody understands where they stand.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
But at least things like GDPR, this is a great beginning, I think, for people to start that conversation with their clients and say, okay, GDPR is about to hit. We all need to be compliant. And one of the ways that you can protect client data, especially if you’re taking inquiries from a form that’s going to store phone number, personal information about people, then it’s definitely a kind of a point of conversation that we can be having with our clients now to start to encourage them to protect their websites because it’s in everybody’s interest to make sure that plugins are up to date. I mean, I remember a few months ago, Yoast, there was a vulnerability in Yoast, wasn’t there? And I know loads of sites that got hacked because of that, because people weren’t running their updates. And it’s frustrating. Just a simple process of doing a quick update can just keep you protected.
Ed:
Oh, yeah. Yeah. And, you know, mentioning a plugin like Yoast, I mean, that’s a major plugin that’s on so many WordPress websites. So it’s not like you just have these, you know, hokey plugins that have 400 people that have installed them. I mean, you know, you get these are major players in the WordPress community. Everybody is capable of being vulnerable.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Absolutely. It’s insane. And again, with GDPR, if you are based in Europe or you’re in the US and you are dealing with European data and or European clients, you probably want to start looking into this because it’s definitely something that you should be, I think it’s a responsibility, I think, as developers, as designers, etc., to ensure that our clients are protected as best as we can. I mean, we’re not legal experts, so we can’t provide our clients guaranteed compliance, but we can at least help them do all of the due diligence that they need to do to make sure that their websites are protected, that the client information that they store in those websites, e-commerce websites, forms, all that sort of stuff is equally always protected as well.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And obviously, there’s the no-brainer as well that downtime means that people cannot be purchasing products or cannot be engaging with your website if the site is down for any reason or is hacked for any reason. Actually, I remember just a few weeks ago, there was a, I think there was an AppSumo offer. Was it AppSumo? Or there was an offer on one of these lifetime deals for a CRM and the corporate site was hacked. And everyone was like, well, I’m not going to sign up for this lifetime deal of an amazing CRM.
Ed:
Wow, no, I didn’t see that.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, man, I probably shouldn’t name names because it would probably be really mean. But, I mean, it’s not a major CRM. It’s like a, it was in, I’m a member of one of these deal groups on Facebook. And I just remember looking at their corporate site and their corporate site got hacked. And everyone was like, well, if your corporate site has got hacked, how on earth are you going to protect CRM data? I mean, this is financial information. This is really in-depth information on our clients. That is some scary stuff.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
On security then, Ed, have you got any advice other than obviously running regular updates, which is not necessarily the only, you know, it’s a way to help mitigate people hacking in. But what other steps would you recommend that agencies go to to start to lock down and protect WordPress websites or websites in general?
Ed:
You know, updates are always probably the key thing. And, you know, one of the first security things you want to do, and it’s not really a security thing, it’s just insurance, is, you know, have consistent backups. You know, nightly backups going on. That’s kind of the best way to protect yourself at the forefront of it. But, you know, having active security plugins like WordFence and having it configured correctly is obviously very important.
Ed:
What we do is on the server side of it is where we try and have most of our security. And we use, it’s called Immunify 360. And I’m sure it could probably be added to most servers, Linux servers. And it provides a lot of the stuff that, like, your WordFence will do. So it’s, you know, it’s doing malware monitoring and all that. It’s good to have something like that. You want to, you know, some of the things that you would want to consider is potentially changing your WP admin to something else. Don’t use the username admin. And I’m just pulling these out of the top of my head because, you know, it’s not like I’ve got a list here. But, you know, things like that, we see a lot of brute force attacks. And those brute force attacks are generally focused on using the username admin or root.
Ed:
Yeah. So, you know, that’s a core way to try and avoid that stuff. But usually when we see people get in, you know, they’ll lay malware down where the malware scanner will detect that the malware’s been installed. But usually how they get in is from lack of updates. You know, that’s a very common way to get in. Something hasn’t been updated. Something is vulnerable and has left some kind of exploit open.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Is that one of the reasons why you guys also operate with the hosting as well? Because you guys can keep the server software up to date? Because it’s not just a WordPress plugin, but assumedly there are risks if you are not updating the server you are hosting on. So if I was running a really old version of CentOS, maybe CentOS 4 or something like that, and had never touched it for years on end, then I’m leaving myself open. And of course, you’re at the mercy of your web host, you know, that’s the start of it all if your web host gets taken down.
Ed:
And that’s why we talk a lot about being cautious about having… I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus, but let’s just say these really large web hosts that are charging a dollar a site a month or what have you. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. For them to turn a profit, you know, it’s kind of like simple math. Like if you have to make… I’m just going to throw a number out there. If you have to make $1,000 a month off of this server and you’re charging a buck a month per site, then you’re going to throw 1,000 sites on the server.
Ed:
You know, and some of the problems is if you have a massive amount of sites on a single server, well, to me, it’s a numbers game. You know, you’re that much more likely for a site that’s on that server to become vulnerable, to go under attack, to have a DDoS attack on it. And you just make yourself more vulnerable in the sense of numbers. You know, if there’s more people, it’s kind of like Windows. Most viruses and stuff is written for Windows because that’s the majority of who’s using it. So it’s like you’re just adding more vulnerability to it. By doing that, I get customers that are on like Bluehost. I’m not knocking Bluehost, but for some reason that seems to be what I come across.
Ed:
I’m migrating people off of a lot, and they have like PHP version, I don’t know, but it’s, you know, like really old versions of PHP. The way you come across it is, you know, you take over a website and you start installing your software that you, your normal stack on your care plan. And you start getting these red flags popping up and then you start looking into going a little bit deeper, which is normally your next step anyway. But you can’t install some of your plugins because you find out they’re running PHP version 4.something. And it’s so old that it’s not even compatible with the tools that you’re trying to install to start initiating your process of taking over that website.
Ed:
And you got to immediately dig deeper and start upgrading things that are at the core of the server. And it’s just nice. We have all of our websites on our server where we can manage, you know, make sure the operating system is up to date. Make sure that, you know, whatever dashboard you’re using, which we prefer Plesk, making sure all that stuff’s up to date. And we have more control of that.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s a really good point, especially on the shared hosting. The fact is if someone else is being attacked by bots and that’s going to use up the server resource, that’s going to potentially bring the server down, if not get hacked, and then even just downtime is detrimental to running your business. But don’t invest in the $1 hosting and then charge it on. It really doesn’t work. And I was kind of shouting amen because I made that mistake. I mean, I used to go and buy the eBay deals where I would get lifetime hosting, unlimited reseller for £30. I don’t know what the hell. I mean, I was 18 when I was doing it. So maybe that’s partly the reason why. But anyway, and obviously those websites would go down and it was ridiculous. And I don’t know why I ever thought that was a good idea. But I would definitely recommend investing in hosting. People like Flywheel. Yes, they do get expensive the more you have, although you could always open another account. I don’t know if that’s against their terms. You’ve got WP Engine. But also, I mean, in the UK, there’s a very good host called Guru. You can fire up like virtual servers and have a few clients on that or have one client on that, depending on the size. And again, in the USA, there are lots of different hosts. So you’re very lucky to have a partnership with the company that you mentioned. So you’ve got your own server there or your suite of servers, in fact, where you’re able to get access and make sure that everything is up to date.
Ed:
It gives us a lot of flexibility.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly. I really like that. Always staying with, you know, some kind of, and the term managed hosting is kind of for subjective because you may not even use it to manage your WordPress website. But usually you see that term and it kind of creates a little bit of a buzzword that you can look into and see that it’s probably going to be maybe optimized for the CMS you’re using, which in our case is usually WordPress. You know, your WP Engine and your Flywheels, they actually get cheaper the more websites you add. But when you start growing into the 50 website range, it starts to make you, you kind of reach that point where you’re like, okay, well, if I do this myself, I can provide the same level of service at a more, you know, affordable cost. And that’s kind of where we reach.
Ed:
Yeah, there’s only so many $99 a month that you can keep adding to your account.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, I think it’s $99 and you can do a few accounts, I think.
Ed:
Yeah, I think where we were is we’re about to hit the $350 a month range where it allows up to 50 websites on Flywheel.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Ed:
And that’s where we’re like, you know, we’d like to have more control anyway. And to be honest, and I’m a huge Flywheel fan, so I mean this with no negativity. But once we migrated all of our websites over and onto our own server, we actually ran speed tests to make sure that we weren’t making a horrifying mistake. And everything was faster, you know. So it’s not that Flywheel is slow, but Flywheel is growing. They’re all growing. They’re all becoming more massive. And it just puts more of a toll on resources. So it is kind of nice to be with a little bit of a smaller group and be able to handle things that way. So it helps improve speeds. We’re on like a 10 gig link for our servers. Then we’ve got all kinds of backup and redundancies in place and stuff. So it’s very, very similar.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
So would it be fair to say then, kind of over time, you seem to have this pattern of kind of pivoting. Of pivoting for good reason. But I mean, you’re doing VoIP. You’re doing phones. You were asked to build websites. That kind of ignited your passion for problem solving. But again, you are now kind of going down a path which I think and I suspect is going to lead you to be out and out 100 percent care plan, like support and maintenance. Am I right in saying that’s the route you’re going? You’re not necessarily going to be building lots of websites anymore. But you actually want to set yourselves up as the care guys. That’s a terrible, I don’t know.
Ed:
And you know, there’s a few companies in the niche that are doing this. And I’m sure they all do a great job. And we just, it’s what we think we do best. But don’t you think there’s, don’t you think there is so much more room? I mean, how many websites are there on WordPress? 30 percent of the internet, that’s millions. So there is enough market. I feel like a lot of small businesses get stuck in the mindset of the size of their area and they really forget how big the world is. You know, you tell somebody 30 percent, I don’t think they understand how large of a number 30 percent of the internet is.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yes. No, even I don’t. I couldn’t even begin to tell you.
Ed:
Oh, I couldn’t give you a number. I feel like it might be a quintillion. That’s a big number that I can think of. That’s a lot of websites.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, it’s massive, you know, and WordPress is just so flexible. That’s what makes it so amazing. I mean, the common theme here, though, is that you’ve kind of gone, you’ve gone from like a retainer style business to building websites, and you said it yourself the other day when I was chatting to you and you said better to have a retainer than nickel and dime for the time.
Ed:
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, a lot of my problem is I just want to help people, you know, and it’s a huge issue that, you know, you’ve got people that need assistance. You’ve got customers that call you that need help. And if I wasn’t charging them monthly, I wouldn’t be charging them. They call to pick my brain and that’s fine. I just really want to help people and still pay my mortgage, you know. And that’s where the recurring revenue model comes in. It allows you to… It gives you that freedom, doesn’t it? It allows you to always have…
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And it provides as an entrepreneur as we are, you know, we’re on that roller coaster, of course, of, you know, a bunch of leads come in, overwhelm you. You forget to market for yourself because you’re so busy handling the marketing for your customers. And then you hit a slow spot and then you’re waiting for that money to come in. That recurring revenue model, it helps prevent that. So, you know, we get slow, we still have an income, you know. So it makes a big difference.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think as well, it kind of removes that resentment, doesn’t it? Because, like, if I don’t have this constant revenue stream, you know, of I know I am going to receive so much per month from these 30, 40, 50 clients, which is my cash flow that’s going to cover my operating costs, etc. If I don’t have that and I’m working from project to project and then I do have a client that wants me to spend four or five hours, there’s two problems that arise there, I guess. Number one is I’m probably going to be unaffordable to the client because I’m going to need to charge full whack for any time that I spend. Equally, I’m going to feel annoyed by the interruption because I need to be working on a proposal or I need to be winning the next big job to ensure that in six months’ time, I don’t have a hole in my pipeline.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I mean, I was sharing the other day, you know, we always make sure that we have about six months’ worth of salary kind of put aside in the bank and operating costs so that we have at least a six month gap in case we have a quiet time. Because that’s the kind of lesson learned over a long period of time, I always wanted to make sure that we just were able to continue to operate as a business if anything really bad was to happen because we managed to weather 2008, which was the global crash. That was a scary as and since then, I’ve always made sure I’ve at least got that. But as I listen to you, I’m thinking, oh, my giddy aunt, you know, I’ve only got I would say that about 10 percent of our customers pay us some sort of retainer. There is this whole 90 percent untapped that I really should be, you know, should be getting my teeth into.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
That sounds really bad, doesn’t it? I don’t mean that violently, but you know what I mean? I mean, it’s to their benefit as well as my benefit.
Ed:
It is. You know, I mean, if they’re even if they’re a tow truck driver or a plumber or what have you, a few hours down on a website could potentially be thousands of dollars. And it could be that it happens in the middle of the night and no one’s looking at it. But what if it’s not? You know, what if it happens in the middle of the day? What if it happens on the coldest day of the year with ice all over the roads and you’re a tow truck driver and your website goes down? And it seems so minor. But if if that perfect storm situation happens, is it worth it to not pay the thousand dollars a year to have your website managed? You know, it could potentially cost you so much money. And that’s just what it comes down to. And when it’s down, do you even know? So now it’s down twice as long as you’re now monitoring it like we do. And so it for it’s it’s very much to the client’s benefit. You know, it’s it’s another income for all of us, but it it’s going to elevate what you provide to your client as well when you offer a maintenance plan.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now, one of the things that I’ve been harping on a lot about, especially in the Agency Trailblazer community, is doing what you love, having a very specific mission. And you are clear. It’s very clear what your mission is. Your mission is, is that you want to help people get you want to have their sites online. You want to take all of the stress of all of that technical so that they can go and run their business. So that’s like the problem you’re solving. That’s your mission. And you’re throwing yourself into that. You love solving the problem. So you’re doing what you love.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
One of the other things I talk about all the time is niching down. I mean, you’re now your brand is fantastic. If you want to check out cloudcarewp.com, guys, and links are always in the show notes as well. But it’s cloudcarewp.com. I think this is a fantastic brand. It’s a really good website. You know, it gives you that kind of assurance of the blues, the use of the cloud and everything. It kind of gives you that SaaS product feel. It’s great.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now, I understand from when me and you were chatting a few days ago that you are kind of trying to target a couple of groups of people as well. So you’re not trying to be CloudCare for any WordPress website in the world necessarily because that’s really hard to market to. Whereas you’re actually focused on a couple of different areas. What areas have you honed in on?
Ed:
Well, right now we’re finding that there’s a lot of potential. We refer to them as municipalities, but it’s really local government.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah.
Ed:
And as boring as the websites are, the bottom line is they’re more interested in making sure the website’s safe and secure. They’re kind of in that mindset of security and taking care of things. I mean, come on. They’re maintaining your city. You know, your mind is already thinking that way. And what’s really great about them is they have yearly budgets. So when you take on local government, municipalities, even a lot of nonprofits, first off, they don’t give you any issue at your price. They just need the solution. And for these companies, they generally have to do quotes from several other companies. But if you’re local, they don’t just do it based on price and they’ll pay you the whole year in one shot.
Ed:
So the nice thing about the year isn’t that you’re getting all the money up front. It’s that without an agreement, you have an agreement for 12 months. So whether this, if the company just changes their mind in three months, they paid for a year. So you don’t have to worry about giving people contracts, having them sign up for 12 months, blah, blah, blah. And I’ve always been a firm believer in, I don’t like, I don’t want to say I don’t like contracts. I don’t like annual agreements. The way I see it is if I’m doing a good job, you’re just going to keep working with me. But it is nice that when you get paid annually, you know that you can count on it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, that’s perfect. And then your other niche.
Ed:
We’re trying to target agencies and IT companies. And that’s for more, it’s more beneficial to us because they’re going to bring on multiple websites at once. You know, so for us, we can work with those companies and charge them a lower rate, and we can provide a certain level of service. You know, you got IT companies, for example, that they get into the DNS and they need to change things. And what they can do now is they just open up a ticket. We just take care of it. They don’t have to worry about dealing with it. They just go, hey, we need this changed. We take care of it. Plus, it’s another upsell for them to add on to. They’re already maintaining their client servers, all that stuff.
Ed:
IT companies, like I kind of said earlier. Did I just say IT companies again? You did. I’m awesome. Okay. Agencies. Agencies is what I was going for there. Agencies, we want to kind of partner with because, and like I mentioned that, we constantly see them where they’re really great at design or really great at marketing. And sometimes they struggle with the technical stuff and we want to provide a means for them to kind of lean on us when they’re having that technical issue. Even if it’s a site that’s not launched yet, you know, our relationship is built on that.
Ed:
You’re already, you already have websites with us. You’re going to be bringing more websites with us. So the way that we feel that we can not charge for helping with that issue you might be running into is the fact that we have a partnership. We’ve got a recurring revenue. And again, that recurring revenue is what’s going to help us justify the cost of working with this other thing.
Ed:
So when you’re a Beaver Builder and Beaver Builder is flexible as it is, still has limitations. And that’s where CSS comes in. You can go, I need this done. Can you make it do this thing? And then we’ll be able to help and try and provide guidance. And, you know, for example, you are way more of a developer than we are. You probably do back-end development. We’re more of a front-end development as far as that goes. But, you know, we can at least do what we can to help, provide some assistance. And a lot of times it’s very minor stuff that we can help with that would save them hours of trying to futz with it.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Presumably, like things like front-end QA or something like that. So, I don’t know, updating Chrome causes a problem where the button, then you guys could be on that. Is that the sort of thing you’re talking about?
Ed:
We can help with things like that. Or, you know, we see it where people are trying to migrate a website from cheap dollar-a-month host, one of your budget hosts, and they can’t get the website to backup. We see this a lot where the resources are so tightly wound inside that server that there’s no resources to actually compress the backup. You know, we can provide that assistance and help solve that problem for them. So, we just want to be able to provide – we don’t want to just be a company that is in the background taking care of the websites. But we want to build a partnership and a relationship, and that’s just how we prefer to do things anyway.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
I like that. And, I mean, people know who listen to this podcast, if you’ve listened over the years, you understand that I focus, too, on agencies. Agencies are very much my sweet spot. Agencies are great at the design. There are some agencies, however, though, that struggle with the resource to be able to either do the back-end development or the front-end development, etc. So that’s kind of where I come in. Or, again, they struggle with maybe the knowledge of the web, and they need someone to kind of consult and help them sell particular projects. And the reason why I specialize is because it lowers the cost of entry.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
An agency will come with several websites, whereas if I am approaching lots of local businesses, it’s usually one website per local business. Perhaps the same with a municipality, although perhaps they’ve got a bigger site, so maybe they need more help. But, again, it’s still one-to-one relationship, whereas when you’re partnering with other agencies, it’s a great space for either freelancers to be in or some of the smaller agencies. If you can partner with some of the bigger agencies, it’s going to lower that cost of entry with regards to the cost of acquisition, sorry, of getting lots of extra websites in. Otherwise, you’ve got to develop all of these relationships, all these one-to-one relationships instead, whereas you could just foster that great partnership, that great relationship with the agency. You might be updating a butcher’s website and a hairdresser’s website and, I don’t know, a mystic’s website. What the heck, you know, is it at least going to keep your job a little bit more interesting?
Ed:
Yeah, no doubt. And, again, it’s kind of like you had mentioned, you know, your cost of acquisition per customer goes drastically down because you partner with one agency, they’re going to bring you multiple websites to work on over the course of time, and it helps justify your ability to help them with other things and build that partnership along the way. So it’s not, you brought me one website, and now you want me to do all these favors for you, and you’re not, you know, paying me to do it. Well, you know, it makes it a little easier to be more helpful, and that’s how I’m just wired. You know, you shoot me an email and ask a question. I’m just going to answer it. I’m not going to, you know, send you an invoice first or something. I just want to help you, you know, so that’s just how it helps justify those costs.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah, mate, you’ve been absolutely brilliant. It’s been really fascinating hearing your journey from phones to care plans, but also just to kind of understand in more detail, like some of the benefits of the recurring revenue and the freedom that you’ve been allowed to pursue the passion that you have, which is clearly problem solving. So rather than, like you said, nickel and dime for the time, building lots and lots of websites and trying to keep that pipeline going, you are actually being freed up to solve problems. You love doing that, and a recurring model is something that really, really works for you. Thank you so much for your time. You are a complete legend.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Guys, check out cloudcarewp.com if you are an agency you’re potentially interested in partnering with Ed. He knows his onions, as we would say here in the UK. I am also in the process of having some of my sites transferred to the care of Ed and his team, so I definitely recommend you reach out, strike up a relationship or a conversation with him. And if you’re thinking of doing this sort of thing for yourselves as well, then I’m sure Ed won’t mind you picking his brain. Feel free. Hey, 30 percent of the internet, a quintillion, I reckon. You know, that’s a lot of websites. I’m pretty sure Ed’s happy to share some of his wisdom.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Ed, how can people connect with you, and then we will bid you adieu.
Ed:
So, you can always just reach out, ed, at gocloudnine.net, and I’m happy to respond to any emails. Or you can always go to, you know, the website and just enter the contact us form, of course, and we’re available by that.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Awesome. Thanks for your time, buddy.
Ed:
All right, thanks a lot.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cheerio.
Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that’s a wrap. Don’t forget we have the awesome, the amazing, the smashing, the wonderful WP Innovator Facebook group over on wpinnovator.com forward slash group. If you’re feeling a little bit lonely in web life, agency life, or life in general, then we’re all over there sharing GIFs, cat pictures, talking about WordPress, talking about agency life, and generally having a wonderful time. So, be sure to hit us up there, that’s wpinnovator.com forward slash group. See you next week.
