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
Transcript with speaker labels
Lee:
Welcome to the WP Innovator Podcast, the podcast for web designers and design agencies, exploring the world of WordPress and online business. And now your host, Lee Jackson.
Lee:
Hi, and welcome to episode number 71 of the WP Innovator Podcast. This is a poorly Lee. But today I wanted to share something with you cool, and it’s a prequel. Yep, you may remember episode number 64 with James Rose, who you will have probably met in the Facebook group from Content Snare. Now, before I carry on, if you’re not a member of the Facebook group, head on over to anglecrown.com/group, and you’ll find some great people in there. So this is a recording that me and James did about six months ago as a project, and it’s all about him, his business, and his background, and it’s utterly fascinating. So like I said, it’s a prequel. It’s a recording we did before even episode 64. But this is gold, and I just wanted to share it with you, especially with me being ill and being unable to record a whole load of other episodes at the moment. I thought it’d be great to share one from the archives. So this has never been heard of on the WP Innovator Podcast. So guys, sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.
Lee:
We have in the house a lovely Aussie of the name of James Rose. Mate, how are you doing?
James Rose:
Yeah, not too bad, Lee. How about yourself?
Lee:
I’m doing all right. I was worried when I kind of went for the Aussie that you’re going to tell me actually from New Zealand or something.
James Rose:
Ah, no.
Lee:
Because I can never tell the difference. Don’t punch me.
James Rose:
With an English name.
Lee:
With an English name. Yeah. Wasn’t it James Cook who discovered? Oh, it is, isn’t it? Did you see that? That is just a history buff in me just wanting to get out. That’s the other podcast I want to start.
James Rose:
Is it really?
Lee:
Actually, you did say that, didn’t you?
James Rose:
Yeah, and a science one. I’m a total geek, mate. It’s just, I don’t know how I actually found time to get married. But this isn’t about me. This is about you, obviously. So, James. Well, all right.
Lee:
So me and James, we’ve been connected with each other on Facebook and on Twitter. And James is the co-founder of, and I’m going to struggle to say this now, Actura Technology. Now, if you can try and say that three times fast when drunk and successfully say that, then I think there should be a prize. You specialize in WordPress and also Ruby on Rails. And you’re based, obviously, in Australia with that wonderful accent. And you work with client websites to build automated marketing funnels to make their websites do more selling. That sounds really cool. I like that last line there. So, mate.
Lee:
I think you sounded more American there.
Lee:
Yeah, that was exactly what I was trying to achieve.
James Rose:
Yeah, good.
Lee:
Yeah.
James Rose:
Okay. Yeah, you never know. Some people try to do accents and screw them up. The only thing I can do of Australian is like, good day, mate. You all right?
Lee:
Easy enough.
James Rose:
What about that’s not a knife?
Lee:
That’s not a knife. That’s a gun.
Lee:
And put another shrimp on the barbie and whatever other stereo. I think we’ve just defended Australia.
James Rose:
I don’t think that’s possible.
Lee:
Oh, okay. It’s all right. I just think I’ll just call it a pommy or something, isn’t it? Being English and all that jazz.
Lee:
So, all right. Anyway, so that was my introduction to you. Do you see how professional that was? This is why people enjoy this podcast. So, there was the amazing professional introduction. And so, in short, between all of mine and James’ chatting, James runs an agency and you guys specialize in WordPress. So, how about you give yourself an introduction to say hi to everyone and just tell everyone a little bit about you, maybe a bit of a personal information. I don’t know, maybe how old you are. You’re looking like you’re 21 on the picture I’m looking at. And anything else that you might want us to know?
James Rose:
21. That’s the best compliment ever. I don’t know what picture you’re looking at.
Lee:
The Skype one.
James Rose:
I took 15 years.
Lee:
Yeah, right. Don’t worry.
James Rose:
Yeah, it is probably 15 years old. No, I’m 29. Very close to 30. The dreaded 30. So, you know, it’s the year of 30th. So, we’re all sort of packing it now that we’re all old and we’re on our last run.
Lee:
It’s all right. I’m four years in. It’s okay the other side, mate. Don’t worry.
James Rose:
All good. Yeah, so we started in software. That was, well, actually, even before that, I was a control systems engineer. I used to sort of make machinery run, you know, basically industrial programming. And while I loved it, I hated working for idiots, essentially. Cleaning up after other people’s work. So, I ended up starting a software business with my manager at the time. And it was in SEO. I don’t know if you remember article rewriting? Spinning?
Lee:
Nope.
James Rose:
Oh, man. It was kind of like a SEO strategy that was all the rage. Oh, 2011, maybe. And it’s kind of black hat now. So, that’s where we started. We wrote this article with Spinner and it became a pretty solid thing.
Lee:
Is that trying to, like, make the same article sound different multiple times?
James Rose:
Yeah, basically. Cool. It does what it says on the tin. I get that.
James Rose:
Yeah, it’s super sketchy. Like, you know, in hindsight, it’s like, oh, man, of course that was going to go away. But at the time, we were like, you know, everyone’s doing this and all the software sucks. So, we’ll just build one that’s better and money.
Lee:
Yay, money.
James Rose:
Yeah. So, that’s how we learned, like, we asked web development and marketing all over that process.
Lee:
Wow.
James Rose:
But, yeah, it’s kind of just winging it, you know, because we were engineers, had no goddamn clue when it came to marketing.
Lee:
So, that was fun. Build it and they will come or not come.
James Rose:
Yep, been there.
James Rose:
Yeah. And then, anyway, when we started trying to look for something else to do and started networking, first time we spoke to anyone in the offline world or, you know, in real life in the first three years of business, we started networking. And every time we told them about software, they’d assume we were web developers. You know, like normal people do that. They bunch together web and software and IT.
Lee:
Yeah.
James Rose:
And you can also fix the – yeah, you can fix computers and photocopiers. You probably know why the toaster’s not working.
Lee:
Yeah, pretty much.
James Rose:
Yeah, I get it.
James Rose:
Yeah, so everyone would just go into these tirades about how much they hated their web developer. And, yeah, so we thought, well, we’ll just do that and not suck at it and hopefully get some business. And I guess the rest is history, as they say.
Lee:
And that’s pretty much what our whole business has been built on is just not sucking. That’s really cool. So, I mean, your company kind of motto or mission is build sites that don’t suck.
James Rose:
Well, yeah, if you look at our main tagline on the website, it started as a joke and I told people it. And then it became our real tagline, which is web developers that respond to emails, finish the job and don’t suck.
Lee:
I like it.
James Rose:
Yeah.
Lee:
No, I did test you the other day. I sent you an email. You’re still not – no, I’m joking with you, man. I wouldn’t –
James Rose:
Oh, my – well, that’s just rude.
Lee:
I love your story, though, mate, because you’ve gone from somebody – you’re programming in the industrial world for idiots. And I find that quite funny. I can just imagine there’s, like, job advertisements, like a requirement for idiots at such and such a company. Please apply here. And you kind of then pivoted into, all right, well, let’s do what we do for idiots but for ourselves. And suddenly when you go out and meet real people, you see that actually there’s this whole other need that people are talking about that you hadn’t even thought of. And you’re like, cool. Well, let’s go solve that need instead of doing what we think we want to do. And there you go, off into the web world, creating sites that don’t suck.
James Rose:
Yeah, but, you know, at the time we didn’t realize how many web developers there are and how brutal the space is. But I guess we’re getting there.
Lee:
Well, how much hair have you got left, I guess, is one of the questions.
James Rose:
Well, I’m still 29, so two years I probably have none left.
Lee:
Whoa. I’ve got plenty now. Whoa. Well, there’s a question for you then. You know, you entered a marketplace. You’re hearing people say, my website sucks. You’re then saying, okay, right, we can come and help you. How did you stand out from a very crowded market space?
James Rose:
You know, this is a hard one, right? Like, I’m sure you get asked the same all the time, like, how are you different than every other web developer out there? And, you know, for me, it’s always been that, you know, I guess it’s the personality in it that, you know, especially that we have, you know, this main tagline, pass it across our website, that we don’t suck, which is pretty rare for a web developer, right? Because most of them are like, oh, we make quality websites and we’re cheap websites or something like that. And we’re dedicated.
Lee:
Yeah.
James Rose:
Just stuff that no one gives a crap about. And in the end, like, I’ve always kind of struggled with it. You know, the fact that, oh, you know, the only thing that makes us different is that we don’t suck. But what I’ve come to learn is that that is a pretty damn good quality that most businesses don’t have anyway. And it was kind of made more obvious to me. I went to Tropical Think Tank last year, or sorry, this year, Chris Ducker’s event. And Peter Shankman was talking and, you know, he said, I’m going to paraphrase and probably screw it right up, but he said something along the lines of, you know, we’ve got to be as kind of one level above crap and you’re better than most people.
Lee:
Which is sad as hell.
James Rose:
It is sad, but it’s totally true, isn’t it?
Lee:
Yeah.
James Rose:
It’s insane. In fact, one of the most popular types of business that we receive here and then build up relationships on afterwards is that we’ll inherit a site that’s at some stage in a build. And it’s just all gone to part with whatever developers or whichever company has been working on it. And then we’ll just swoop in and save the day and improve everything or just rebuild everything from scratch because it’s just going to be quicker and easier because they’ve, I don’t know, done some. Something that we can’t even understand how they even thought that was web development. You know, and then at that point, we’re then therefore seen as the heroes because we’ve been able to deliver.
Lee:
Actually, I’ll tell you one thing. I once inherited a website. I hope the person who built this is never listening. But what they’ve done is they’ve actually done all the HTML inside of the text tab of the WordPress editor.
James Rose:
Yeah, wow.
Lee:
Yeah, exactly. And like they’ve done all these designs and layouts, which basically meant that the client could not edit anything unless they switched to the text tab. And if they forgot to not switch to the text tab and then hit update, obviously WordPress strips out certain things. And then your website, oh, it’s just a nightmare. So there you go. True story. I just probably need a hug or something. Just bring back memories.
James Rose:
Do you want a story?
Lee:
Yeah, come on. Come on, mate. Make me feel better.
James Rose:
We had one about a month ago where we’d picked up a site that had plugins from the WordPress repo modified. Core WooCommerce modified.
Lee:
No.
James Rose:
The storefront theme was modified instead of a child theme. It was just like stuff like that. It just went on and on and on and on and on. It was like, wow, how did you guys decide this was a good idea?
Lee:
The problem is the clients don’t know as well a lot of the time. They only know when it comes to the point of, okay, we need to upgrade or we need to add a new feature. And then that person who’s botched it together probably recognizes they’ve botched it together and they kind of just kind of disappear into the ether.
James Rose:
Yeah. You know, like the penguin from Madagascar. You saw nothing. And then off they go. And it’s then over to people like us to kind of save the day.
Lee:
Yeah, indeed. Good analogy, the penguin.
James Rose:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m glad you saw the film. So, hey, one of the things I noticed in a website when I was looking at it the other day, and I really like this, is convert your website to WordPress. So, do you get many inquiries on that?
James Rose:
We used to. Specifically for certain platforms. Like we just found we ranked well for certain platforms. Like if they searched convert whatever it was to WordPress, then we’d rank. It doesn’t seem to happen as much anymore because everyone’s already on WordPress. But in our early days, like of websites, which is probably three, four years ago now, it did. We got quite a few. A lot of – I find inquiries that come from SEO and stuff like that are pretty unreliable anyway. Like they don’t have a huge conversion rate. So, it’s pretty minimal on the grand scheme of things.
Lee:
Okay. And I’m glad you said that. You know, I’m starting to wonder whether SEO is dead. And if there are people who are specialized in SEO, then don’t shoot me. But, you know, when I’ve driven traffic through Google, I’ve always found it – you know, like you said, it doesn’t really convert very well. I’ve found I can’t really convert any traffic I get through SEO. Whereas if I am doing stuff through social media, then I can generate leads very easily and also make business through social media. What are your experiences as an agency for generating leads online? You know, is SEO still good for you?
James Rose:
Well, no, right? But that’s because we’re an agency, right? I think SEO isn’t dead. It’s dead for certain spaces, you know, like – I mean, like accountants and agencies and insurance brokers and these very much referral-driven things, you know, where someone goes, oh, who knows a good web developer on like a Facebook group or who knows a good accountant? You know, you don’t – it’s very rare that I know someone who’s Googled an accountant and gone to the closest one and just gone, that’ll do, you know? So I don’t think SEO – like I know people that actually rank very well for, you know, like WordPress development or web design in some capital cities in Australia. Yeah.
James Rose:
And the stories they tell me about that, you know, how many tire kickers and stuff they get or just so many awful clients that come through those channels, price shoppers, you know, all that kind of stuff. It just sounds horrible to deal with. So I think it really depends on the space because we have some software, right, that’s a side project and we rank really highly for that and that’s where all our business comes from.
Lee:
No way.
James Rose:
So it works sometimes, right?
Lee:
Yeah.
James Rose:
Well, tell us about the software. What’s the –
James Rose:
Oh, it was kind of a side project that came from a website build we were doing where they needed to – they needed to generate invoices. What was it again? There’s recurring payments through Stripe.
Lee:
Yeah. Are you familiar with Stripe?
James Rose:
Yeah. I am indeed.
James Rose:
Yep. And they wanted to generate invoices in Xero whenever there was a charge and then to reconcile them properly.
Lee:
Ooh, cool.
James Rose:
Yeah, basically we found there was no way to do it. So we used Zapier to create the – Zapier? I don’t even know how to say that.
Lee:
No, me neither.
James Rose:
Yeah. To create the invoices but then there was no way to get the transactions into Xero so we built this thing called Silver Siphon. And now if you Google basically anything with Stripe and Xero in the name, we come up like either two or three above Xero.
Lee:
Oh, you’re right underneath. Look at that. How cool.
James Rose:
Yeah, man. So that –
Lee:
Epic.
James Rose:
That is just our source of traffic, right? Like SEO has just killed it for us.
Lee:
That is so cool. You created something. And so does that drive – so does that drive web builds as well or is that mainly people using the software?
James Rose:
Yeah, it’s all just people through software. It’s just a side project. I think we might have got one out of it when they saw a signature or something one time. But yes.
Lee:
That is so cool. I love this. And I’m loving all these testimonials as well. There’s nothing like testimonials just to really build credibility, isn’t there? With lots of attractive people in circular images. None of them look stocks.
James Rose:
Yeah, no, I like it. This is epic. Nice.
Lee:
Yeah, number two. I mean, I remember I launched a product years ago and it was a Twitter management software. I mean, I’ve since converted it and it’s now a plug-in, which seems to sell quite well. But back in the day, I created this huge software as a service and kind of built it and then did nothing with it. Like, no one came. I just built it and kind of sat there waiting for everyone to start buying it and nothing ever happened. I don’t think I ever sold one. I gave loads of free accounts away.
James Rose:
Yeah. That’s a classic mistake.
Lee:
That was easy. I built it.
James Rose:
Yeah, exactly.
Lee:
That’s so cool. You are literally. So I’m searching from the UK. I’ve put Stripe Zero and you are right underneath Zero. You’re number two there.
James Rose:
Yeah.
Lee:
And that is pretty damn epic. That’s kind of like I had lots of other questions and now I’m just kind of in awe of this. So I noticed that you’ve got the, again, on your website, you’ve got this, you’re on demand web guy. Is that something you guys would do to kind of help get you in the door with someone who’s got an existing website?
James Rose:
It’s twofold. So the first part is a lot of our existing clients go onto it, right? As you know, we’re all about, everyone’s about recurring revenue now. So a lot of our website clients will go onto one of those packages afterwards. And then sometimes, yeah, it does go the other way. Like it’s only sort of really taken off in the last couple of months where it goes the other way, where people come on board from their original, you know, they’ve just had a site built. They’re not really sure what’s going on with other developers and they come on board on one of those packages. So that massive screw up story I told you just before, yeah, that was one of those.
Lee:
Oh, right. So you’ll come in and you’re like the website doctor or something. So here’s what’s right about your site. Here’s what’s shaped about your site.
James Rose:
Oh, man, I’m going to have to beep that out now, aren’t I?
Lee:
I was going to ask you what your swearing policy was.
James Rose:
Well, all I’ll do is I’ll just put an E for explicit if we get too crazy with the language.
Lee:
Seriously, because I’m holding back a lot.
James Rose:
Oh, mate. I’m so sorry. I drop swear words a lot.
Lee:
Well, I try not to just in case people listen in the car and they’ve got the kids in the car. And the other thing is I understand that iTunes can get, like if there’s one swear word and you’ve not put an explicit on there, on that particular episode, then you can potentially lose your podcast on iTunes. So I’m like, oh, my gosh. So I don’t mind if people swear. I just have to make sure I either decide to beep it out or I put the E for explicit if there’s like a thousand swear words in there. I think I only had to do that for one episode. So, so far. So we’re good. We’re good. We digress. Because the reason why I asked as well is like that’s one of the ways that we’ve been able to get in with quite a few companies is they’ve approached us saying, you know, we’ve got this site. It’s running really slow. We’ve got problems with it, et cetera. And that’s usually turned into we’ll have a look under the hood. We’ll say, hey, look, here’s all the problems with your website. And then, you know, that usually becomes a build from scratch because 90% of the web builds that we’ll get have been done, you know, through a freelance developer who’s more of an implementer than an actual web developer. So they’ll have used a theme, they’ll have installed some plugins, some of the plugins might be horrendously out of date, i.e., sorry, for example, not actually updated anymore. So probably not even compatible with 4.6 as of the point of this recording. I think it’s 4.6 at the moment. Or likewise, you know, you mentioned they’ll have done some core editing, which is never cool.
James Rose:
Yeah, and you know what, I think what you guys do is very effective, you know, because there’s so many, you know, shonky developers out there. And I think, like you said, implementers and the other thing are designers who don’t understand the development side of things. And they try to do it themselves, whether it’s, you know, using Divi, I think is one of the common ones and stuff like that. And I think by working with designers like you guys do, it helps sort of create a bigger impact on the web development space. Because it blows my mind how many people are very upset with their web developers.
Lee:
Yeah.
James Rose:
And, you know, it takes someone, you know, like rather than you creating a new website here and there, that’s, it’s a bit, you know, a bit better sort of thing. You can work with designers to create lots of websites that are a lot better. And hopefully, I don’t know, over time, it becomes, we get rid of this awful reputation.
Lee:
Indeed. Well, it takes it for us. It takes the stress out of the design aspect out. Because, I mean, if someone does want us to design a website and they come to us, we tend to then pass them on to a designer and then that designer then brings it back to us for the development side. And that just takes the stress because we are, at a core, developers and that’s what we love to do. And I knew I wanted to start an agency, but the idea of starting something where I thought I also had to produce designs for clients kind of scared me. Because I tried that when I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, back in 98, you know, when it was cool to, I don’t think it was cool to use the internet. No one knew who the hell it was, did they? I was building websites back then, trying to design.
James Rose:
Wow.
Lee:
That was awful. I’m 34, you wouldn’t think so, you know, from my picture, you’d think I was 48 or something. But, yeah, back in the day, I realized very early on I’m not a designer.
James Rose:
Yeah, and most people don’t understand the difference either, right, between designers and developers.
Lee:
Exactly. And I feel like I can’t tell people I’m a web designer because I feel like I’m not. Although, over the last few years, I have got a bit better at design. I think I’m probably just more self-critical now than anything else. But do enjoy the development space the most. So, what do you do with Ruby and Rails as well? Because it’s always, in my head, it’s like you’ve got WordPress on your website. You’ve also got Ruby and Rails on your website. And they feel like two totally separate things. How did that happen?
James Rose:
Yeah, so we’ve always loved, because like I said, we started in software, right? And so we’ve done a lot of work in Ruby on Rails for various clients, just sort of like small web applications through to really big ones. And that started because, well, one, we built Silver Siphon. That’s in Ruby on Rails. And another app that’s sort of in development. As well as I contracted, like about a year ago, I blew my knee in a freak trampoline accident.
Lee:
Sorry. Was this like a kid’s trampoline now? Or is this professional trampolining?
James Rose:
You know, you know, one of those places where they have like loads of trampolines around the place? And you go.
Lee:
We used to go there and practice our snowboarding stuff. We had like a foam board that you can, you know, practice things on.
James Rose:
Yeah. One day it just popped. Anyway.
Lee:
I think I’m going to puke. No, sorry.
James Rose:
But yeah, so I, at that time, I was like, I was approached by the company I used to work for to write a web app. And I thought, you know, why the hell not? I’m going to spend all day on my ass every day. So I’m going to have all this spare time. So I actually wrote an app for them. And then eventually we shifted to them contracting our company and hiring other developers. And that’s where we’re at now. So, you know, obviously, like you said, they’re so different. But we manage that pretty well because my business partner handles all of the Ruby on Rails stuff now. And I handle WordPress. So it’s essentially just like two businesses in one where we pass, I guess, leads between each other, really.
Lee:
That’s really good. It’s nice as well that you’ve got the business partner because you can share things like the workload. I remember when I first started Lee Jackson Dev, it was just me on my own. And Karthik started with me. But he was predominantly just coding, coding, coding just all day. And then so was I. And I just found it so hard to have no one else to kind of share the responsibility with or just be able to bash things across to. So what’s so? Sorry, I’m really grilling you today. But I just.
James Rose:
No, no, no. It’s cool. It’s a rare opportunity to actually get web developers on the podcast because we tend to get a lot of people that do services for web developers, which is great. But, you know, it is really fascinating to learn from other people how they work. So I’m going to keep grilling you. What’s job on time? Because that’s also on your website. It looks like a really nice scheduling software.
James Rose:
Yeah. That’s a funny one. There’s like a lot of internal conflict with that one.
Lee:
Okay.
James Rose:
No, it’s not that bad. It’s basically, that was the other app I was saying that’s in development. So when we, that actually stemmed from about the same time that we started building websites because I was looking for some software to build. You know, I was trying to find a problem to solve with software. We ended up finding the problem of shitty web developers.
Lee:
Oops.
James Rose:
Yeah, carry on. But that was a problem that came up quite regularly. And so we built, we started building something to fix it. And I’m kind of part of me, I don’t have the time to deal with it anymore. So I’m just like, I’m done. But my business partner is like, no, we like, I’ve got so many people that want this and we can make it work. So that’s, he’s basically running with that. My business partner, Mark, is running that at the moment. And we’ve got some local people sort of involved with it. It’s not like big at all yet. Like not on the level that Silver Siphon is.
Lee:
Yeah.
James Rose:
But yeah, maybe one day. Maybe.
Lee:
You never know. I’ve made sure I’ve signed up for it to have a look and check that one out. So, oh, Bootstrap. I recognize this.
James Rose:
Yeah. It’s probably not even the live version. I think all of the new stuff’s on a staging server at the moment.
Lee:
Oh, is it? Okay. I was just, I’m in now and I’m in the Bootstrap. I can see the Bootstrap layout. I like that. Although we tend to specialize in foundation nowadays just because it’s a little bit lighter.
James Rose:
So much better.
Lee:
Oh, hey, mate. I feel like we just bonded there.
James Rose:
Yeah, no. Bootstrap was used for that and I didn’t really enjoy that.
Lee:
No, man. Yeah. I like foundation. But I’ll tell you what, my business partner found one recently called Semantic UI.
James Rose:
Yeah, I’ve heard of that.
Lee:
Yeah, and they’re really loving that. All the development team are hacking around with that at the moment for a new client site. And it seems pretty cool.
James Rose:
It does. It seems to be quite lightweight. That’s what I like, though. I like anything that’s lightweight or modular. Whereas I did feel like Bootstrap was a little bit bloated from the get-go. And also looks a little bit dated because out of the box, they used to have the gradients. Didn’t they? And the shadings and stuff like that. Which kind of made it look a bit dated and a little bit semi. Everything we do is foundation. But yeah, always open to new frameworks. So I’ll put that one in the link. That’s a good idea. So it’s semantic-ui.com. And I’ll make sure I put that in the show notes as well. Which is freaking awesome. So over the last few years then as a web agency, what has been your biggest challenge, mate?
James Rose:
It has by far been process and project management. Like trying to get things, not so much automated, but into process documents and stuff so that it makes it easier on the team. And keeping on top of everything, right? So when you first start out, I think this is a drama that most web guys have or any business. You know, you can sort of handle all the concurrent projects just in your head. And then as it grows and there’s so many things going on at the same time, you know, you need to keep clients in the loop. You need to keep on top of progress on things. It’s just so much, right? And that’s easily been the biggest problem we’ve had.
Lee:
I can totally connect with that. Especially the in-your-head thing. You know, I did spend the first year and a half with everything in my head. And it was when I was starting to drop balls left, right and center that I kind of realized I needed to start writing some stuff down. So you struggled with process procedure. Is this still an ongoing battle or is this something that you feel like you’re starting to get on top of? And kind of what have you been putting into place to deal with all this?
James Rose:
Yeah, so only very recently are we starting to get on top of it because basically in the last six months, our business has just gone through the roof. So it was one of those things where it just expanded way too fast for us, our current systems to deal with. And we were on, you know, Trello. And that was pretty much it, right? And we did everything through Trello. And that just, yeah, we outgrew that very, very quickly. And I would have spent two months trying to find a new project management system that worked for us. I tried just about everything, eh? Like, you know, simple stuff like Asana through to Teamwork and Basecamp type things and Wrike and Wrike all the way through to Jira and Confluence, which is the Atlassian products.
Lee:
I really don’t like Jira. Carry on.
James Rose:
Oh, my God. It’s so confusing.
Lee:
Yeah, it’s by far the most powerful out there that I could find. But, oh, my God. The user interface drives me nuts. Like, what? Sorry if anyone from Atlassian is listening, but what the hell were they thinking? The whole thing. It’s just so confusing. Every time you want to do anything, you’re like, where would that be now? Where the hell is the save button? Oh, wait, you don’t call it save. You call it updateify. What? WTF? No, they don’t do that. I’m joking. But, yeah, it feels like rocket science using that sometimes. I’ve got a few clients that use it. So we have to log in and update things. And I’m like, how do I see what’s assigned to me? I’ve forgotten. And then I have this really awkward call or I’m on YouTube again. I’m just so glad you’ve echoed. This is like the bonding over foundation thing again because, oh, my God. Like, I’ve wanted to scream about Jira for so long. We actually still use it for the Ruby on Rails side of things because I think it works really well for custom software dev. But, yeah, for the website stuff, we had to drop it because I was ready to kill someone.
Lee:
Have you landed on something that you feel like will work for the next few months last year?
James Rose:
Yeah. Nothing was perfect. I really, really liked Podio because of the task template. Sorry, not task templates. The automations and workflow stuff is essentially like because I know you’re an active campaign and so am I.
Lee:
Another bonding.
James Rose:
Yeah, because I heard that in a previous podcast. I was like, nice one. But you can essentially do the same kind of stuff in Podio, like automations for project management, which is awesome. But in someone in our space, we’ve got a lot of standard task templates, right? Like, I don’t know, like setting Google Apps up for someone or you’re setting up a new website, you know, might have some standard plugins and stuff. So we’ve got these like task templates and Podio doesn’t have that, which just killed me. And it’s per user pricing, too. So it ended up really expensive quickly. But what we fell onto was teamwork. We were kind of half using that before and ended up coming basically full circle and back to it. And it’s amazing in almost every single possible way except for the lack of Kanban, which is how we try to do everything, right? Like the JIRA interface or the Trello type system. And Podio did a good job of that. But, oh, man, I just wish teamwork could get onto that and that’d be the perfect project management system.
Lee:
So I think what you need to do now is create a little idea request and then let’s circulate the link and get everyone in the WP Innovate podcast to go vote it up.
James Rose:
Please, please do. I think it’s actually it’s already on their request. For us, we’ve kind of settled on FreedCamp for now. Not because it’s free, because it freaking is free. But for now, it does what we need. We just pay a little bit for space. I quite like that idea, you know, where you’re paying for space, et cetera, rather than a per user cost because it just kind of spiral. Basecamp have kind of annoyed me because we’ve been Basecamp users for so long, like since, you know, before Basecamp was even cool. I’ve been a Basecamp user. And Basecamp 3 looks beautiful, although it just kind of looks like an even prettier Basecamp 2 with a few extra bells and whistles. But they’ve also changed the pricing model, so it’s getting more and more expensive to use it.
Lee:
Yeah, which kind of sucks. And I don’t particularly want to spend all that money when I know there’s still quite a lot of problems with it. I mean, if they develop Basecamp 3 to be the answer to all my problems, I would not have thought twice about paying a bit extra money. Because it’s not a significant amount of extra money. But to pay more money and realize, you know what, this is just like a re-skinned version of Basecamp 2 with a few extra bells and whistles. I just felt a little bit frustrated by that. So we’ve actually been, we did teamwork. Teamwork’s beautiful, especially with regards to the Gantt charts, because that is invaluable to be able to do things. And you can edit the Gantt charts on the screen. But for now, whilst we’re still kind of working out where we need to be, we’ve kind of switched over and imported everything into Freedcamp. Because that allows us to operate in a Basecamp-esque sort of way. It’s also got things like all your subtasks and everything. And like I said, it’s a low cost and easy to export when we want to then move and settle on something else. We also use iTask 3, which is actually desktop software.
James Rose:
What?
Lee:
Oh, my gosh. What?
Lee:
But it’s so freaking easy to use and fast. And we’ve got the main save file is shared on Dropbox so that, you know, we can open up and edit whenever we need to. And the way the licensing works as well is you, like, have to close out and open it on another machine if someone else wants to use it. So you’re not, like, going to break any files. But it’s just really nice and clean. And it’s pretty. And it does really nice printouts. And it does all of that automatic calculating. So, for example, on Teamwork, if you were to set a whole load of tasks and, like, tasks that require another task to be complete, which is cool. I love that about Teamwork. But they don’t automatically move the dates along. Or at least if they do, someone tell me and I’ll move to Teamwork. But with the proper project management software, you get that automatic calculation. So if you say this is going to take 10 days, that’s going to take three days, and that’s going to take eight days. But this can’t start until that’s finished. Then if that doesn’t finish for another two days, all the dates of everything following will automatically be moved along two more days. So that you can then give your client a project update to say, right, Mr. Client or Mrs. Client, you failed to deliver those pieces of information we needed, which has pushed this one task on two days. Which therefore has an effect for everything else, which means your project’s now going to go live on that date, unless we can claw any time back by doing something else.
James Rose:
Yeah, that’s a pretty important feature, yeah, that Teamwork doesn’t have. You’re right.
Lee:
Yeah, so there you go. So if there’s a link for that anywhere, guys, let’s upvote that as well.
James Rose:
Does FreedCamp do that?
Lee:
It doesn’t. That’s why we’re doing the both. So that’s why I’m paying very minimal amount for space on FreedCamp and then using our iTask software. But yes, we really do want to find that kind of catch-all project management system at some point that does all of that. I feel like it’s a big ask, probably. But being able to do all of your Gantt charting and everything like that and tasks and subtasks and automatic calculations and all of that good stuff would be amazing. And I would pay like £100 a month or more for that.
James Rose:
Indeed.
Lee:
Exactly. You know, I would not think twice if I could find that. I just had a look at FreedCamp now. I don’t even know about it. And I’m like, oh, man, this looks great.
James Rose:
Oh, no, what have you done?
Lee:
Well, I guess my advice is don’t go there. If you’re already using Teamwork and it’s working for you, just stick with it.
James Rose:
Yeah, I just wish I had Kanban. But you know what? On the whole Teamwork thing, they’ve just released some new version, TKO or something they’ve called it. But they’re saying they’ve switched to Knockout.js. And they’re saying that now it’s going to enable them to implement all these features more quickly. I don’t know how true that is. But we could see them starting to pump out, you know, these highly requested features. Hopefully soon. Fingers crossed.
Lee:
Please. Well, you never know. We might be doing a whole episode in the near future all about teamwork and your recent discoveries that you can share with us all. That’d be awesome.
Lee:
So, mate, you use WordPress, yeah? Just double checking.
James Rose:
Yeah, sometimes.
Lee:
All the time. Is there any plugin? It can be more than one if you want. Like if you’re just a plugin junkie. But are there any plugins that you would recommend other agencies like yourself go check out because they’re phenomenal?
James Rose:
Yeah. This is a hard question because there’s so many, right?
Lee:
Yeah. You can’t say Yoast. I think we’ve had that now nine times.
James Rose:
Yeah.
Lee:
And Beaver Builder, I think you had a whole episode on Beaver Builder. I think I talk about that every episode. Obviously, Gravity is just like the absolute, one of the best plugins we just use constantly because of the active campaign integration and stuff. So, I’m trying to be slightly different. Thrive Leeds is awesome. Are you familiar with it?
Lee:
I am, yeah.
James Rose:
There you go. So, that’s probably… Crazy guy with an accent who does those videos. The guy with the accent.
Lee:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. He does those cool videos and then you end up buying because he’s such a good convert. I’m not going to lie. I didn’t even watch the videos. I think the autoplay got me, but I had enough recommendations that I was ready to basically buy straight up, give it a go. But, yeah, it’s awesome as far as lead gen and opt-in stuff goes. I’m not a big fan of that page builder, to be honest.
Lee:
No.
James Rose:
But the leads component is unreal. How do you use it then? So, because we’ve had people mention it before. I think it’s been mentioned at least once. But how do you as an agency use it? Do you use it for the pop-ups or do you use it for the page generation?
James Rose:
Yeah, we’re in the middle of some experimentation, actually, at the moment, using Beaver Builder with Dam Buster to go full page and Thrive Leads as the opt-ins. We’re just kind of playing around with it at the moment. Potentially a good combo, especially for the custom-built landing pages. I think if you’re doing – you don’t really care about the design of landing pages and you’re just happy to use a pre-built template, then Thrive Landing Pages or Content Builder, whatever they call it, is the way to go. Because you can just install it and knock something up within like 20 minutes, right? And you’ve got an opt-in with a pretty good-looking landing page. It’s supposed to convert, you know, built by conversion experts and whatever. So I think that’s when it’s good to use the Thrive Page Builder and Leads combo. But if you want something custom-designed, then, yeah, I mean, like I said, we’re experimenting. We’ve built one page with it so far with the Beaver Thrive combo. Yeah, it seems to be working pretty well.
Lee:
That’s good. Well, we can keep my eye on your website and see what else you’re up to then. That’s pretty cool. All right, so Thrive Leads, we’ll get that in. Thrive, if you go – I think it’s thrivethemes.com. They’ve got a whole load of themes, which I’ve never used the theme. So I’ve certainly used the Content Builder and I’ve used Thrive Leads itself, which is pretty powerful. Although, I don’t know, I still don’t do a good job on my own website. I’ve got all this amazing content and I still have never settled on a final lead generation tool. I tend to generate most of my leads through landing pages. So I’ll just use Beaver Builder with the Active Campaign integration. And I’m sending people to landing pages through social media. So that’s how I generate most of my leads. But I haven’t done anything with pop-ups or any decent call-to-actions on my website. I mean, if you land on my homepage, I’m looking at it right now. I mean, how can people sign up to anything? I’m ashamed of myself.
James Rose:
You even have a good lead magnet though, your secret plugins thing.
Lee:
Yeah, I know. It’s not even on the homepage. I know. We’ll fix that. I’m so sorry, mate. Thanks for bringing that to me. Yeah, because Thrive is pretty good in a lot of ways because you could just say, I want to put this opt-in on every blog that’s of this category. And stuff like that, you know. And then you could put slide-ins or after content opt-ins or in the second paragraph opt-ins on certain blog posts. So you can use your existing content pretty quickly. You just set it up and let it run. I feel like I should recheck it out. I just remember getting frustrated because it felt, it was about a year ago, it just felt really bloated at the time. And I don’t know whether they’ve improved it at all. But at the time with the content builder as well, it just felt huge and unwieldy and slow. So I kind of…
James Rose:
No, it is.
Lee:
Yeah. Okay. It’s one of those things that’s kind of like take the good with the bad. It’s, you know, as a developer, those kind of things kind of make us antsy. But it’s one of those trade-offs, right? It’s like, oh, it just does a good job of all these things. So I will use it for now.
James Rose:
Yeah, I get you. It is hard, isn’t it? I mean, because like as a developer, we want everything to be perfect, which, you know, nothing ever can be. We have to accept that. But at the same time, we might be looking at things like Google Page Insights for our speed and that. And if we think one plugin’s causing the problem, then I’m one of those people that’s just going to itch at me now for the next few weeks until I solve that problem. And it ends up me like being a diva and uninstalling it and saying, get out, get off my WordPress installation.
Lee:
Yeah, I know that feeling well. Although, just double-checking your website, good speed ratings, mate, even though you’ve got Thrive installed. So high five. Unless you’ve not been installed on there.
James Rose:
I don’t think that. That site’s actually really slow. It’s kind of embarrassing. I don’t know how. It’s actually sometimes loading pretty well.
Lee:
It’s loading well for me. I’ve got 80 out of 100, which is not terrible.
James Rose:
Yeah, I mean, the cache is kind of saving it at the moment. The host is kind of going downhill. And you’re going to – you might – don’t yell at me, please. But it’s built with a theme forest theme with Visual Composer.
Lee:
That’s okay.
James Rose:
Which we built years ago.
Lee:
Oh, you’re referring to an episode where I probably talked not very nicely about it.
James Rose:
Oh, I don’t think any developer talks nicely about Visual Composer.
Lee:
No, exactly. No one does. No one. In fact, that seems to be the most inherited problem we have as well with third parties.
James Rose:
Oh, yeah. By far. Yep. And we’ve got – it’s one of those cases, you know, like you never have time to work on your own stuff. We’re halfway through our new website, but we’ve had to devote everybody to client sites.
Lee:
Yeah, exactly. Mate, you’ve been freaking awesome. I’ve loved learning about your business and all the different things you have going on. What we like to do to wrap up every episode is have some sage wisdom from you, Mr. James Miyagi, on something – yeah, no pressure, mate. But is there a little bit of sage wisdom that you’ve gleaned from your many, many, many, many, many, many, many years as a web agency that you would like to share with all of us web designers, developers, agencies, and WordPress geeks that you think is just going to be either life-changing or just super helpful right now? I’ve really built this up now, mate. So, over to you.
James Rose:
Yeah, clearly. And to put it down to one thing, that’s like kind of difficult.
Lee:
It’s all right. What you could do is give a really wordy answer and people would be like, ah, yeah.
James Rose:
Honestly, it just comes down to automation and process, I think, is the most important thing in any business, especially if you want to scale it. It’s how you – a lot of the people, the businesses that people complain about, like they’re not getting back to them, they’re not communicating and stuff, can be sorted out with process, right? If you’re using a good project management system that ties in with your marketing automation system through Zapier or whatever, you know, like just automating as much as you possibly can without being a douchebag.
Lee:
That is really good. And I’ll echo that, automating. And the don’t be a douchebag, I presume, would mean like don’t automate every single response to everything so that your clients think they’re talking to robots.
James Rose:
Yeah, that’s right.
Lee:
So a lot of what I’ll do is actually use ActiveCampaign to send me a reminder or send someone on the team a reminder to personally email someone.
James Rose:
Good.
Lee:
Rather than just send them the same crappy email.
James Rose:
No, that’s good.
Lee:
Yeah. So, I don’t know, just like little touches like that I think makes a big difference. But, yeah. I mean, you can automate lots of stuff, right? It doesn’t have to be marketing as well. It can be like creating processes. Anything you do more than once should be recorded and, you know, do a video screencast and write it up. And so you don’t have to do it again. You can offload it to someone else.
James Rose:
Exactly. I mean, we do something with code snippets as well internally. If we’ve created something like that was quite clever, we’re like, oh, we need to remember that. I mean, it’s not quite automation, but it’s at least storing everything in the same place.
Lee:
How do you manage it?
James Rose:
Well, we use GitHub. So we’ve then got stuff in GitHub little snippets. We don’t make them live because a lot of these are client sites. So we don’t want client’s code kind of visual. So they’re all private repositories for us. But we’ve got a whole load just all in files so that we can grab them as and when we need them.
Lee:
Which is kind of nice because then if there’s a bug in one of our snippets, that can get fixed as well. And we’ve got kind of the history of it, which is cool.
James Rose:
Nice. Yeah. GitHub’s freaking amazing. And they changed the pricing model. It’s nuts. It was going to be like I was paying 50 bucks or something like that a month. And then suddenly they changed it so that it was like 10 bucks a month and unlimited projects. So, yeah.
Lee:
That’s nice. Yeah. I was like, yeah. Oh, well, thank you. Merry Christmas. So there you go.
Lee:
Very good. Mate, you’ve been a legend. Absolute legend. How can people connect with you and then we’re going to kick you off?
James Rose:
Facebook.com slash James Rose page is my page. Or just go Jimmy Rose for my personal.
Lee:
All right. Are you on the Twittersphere at all?
James Rose:
Yeah. Underscore Jimmy Rose. I believe. I should know this. Underscore Jimmy Rose.
Lee:
All right. We’ll Google you and we’ll find that out. And I presume you don’t have a MySpace account anymore or anything like that or Bebo that we can send people. I’m joking, mate. Don’t worry.
James Rose:
Did you actually want to know if my old one’s still active now?
Lee:
If you find it, let us know. We’ll put it in the show notes as a joke. That’d be epic.
James Rose:
I doubt that’s hilarious.
Lee:
Mate, you’ve been awesome. Have a freaking awesome evening.
James Rose:
Thanks, Lee.
Lee:
It’s the evening for you. It’s only starting my day here. I’ve got to crack on now. I’m just not going to get up at 4 a.m. for active campaign consultant training. Yay. That sounds epic. Enjoy, mate. Have a good one.
James Rose:
Thanks, Lee. Cheers. Bye-bye.
Lee:
So there you have it. The end of number 71 and the conclusion of the prequel. I hope you enjoyed. Be sure to check out contentsnare.com. And again, head on over to the Facebook group, anglecrown.com forward slash group. And you’ll find James in there. And he has his own group as well. I’ll make sure I throw that one in the show notes. So if you’ve got this far, congratulations. And I would humbly ask if anybody gets value from this podcast, do go and head on over to your iTunes or is it Apple Podcast now? Whichever it is. And do leave us a glorious five-star review. If it’s any less than five-star, then let’s just keep that our secret. But it really does help us. It helps build credibility online. And it helps us to continue to build on the momentum that we’ve already got going here at the WP Innovator Podcast. So I would super appreciate that. And hey, any new reviews, if we spot some, we will make sure we read them out on the upcoming episodes. All right, guys. Have an awesome day. Keep innovating.
