WordPress Tools for Your Agency

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Verbatim text

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to episode number 124 of the Agency Trailblazer podcast. This is Lee. On today’s show, we’re gonna be interviewing my mate, Roby, and we kinda get geeky today. We are deep diving into things like development stacks and all of that good stuff. But even if you’re not geeky, don’t switch off because there is some juicy WordPress and agency goodness inside. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride. 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.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
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 noble 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 agency trailblazer.com.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to a conversation with myself, mister Lee Jackson, and mister Roby Lawrence. This is the WordPress website you were looking for. Roby Lawrence, how are you today?

Róbey Lawrence:
I am fantastically.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s awesome. We’ve just had great fun in this Zencaster, haven’t we? Like, working out, we can press buttons and making sound effects, and then you suddenly played this amazing music because you’ve got some, like, cool setup a bit Troy Dean esque where you can play exciting music. What was that music you were just playing? Can can you share it with us? I wonder if it’ll come through.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. It was called, Funky Loop, but you can be the judge of how funky it is. How’s that? That is funky. Am I totally funky right now?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s just the best thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I just wanna go it’s like, welcome to the agency trailblazer podcast. It might be just such good music. My dear, I caught what do you think of what you’ve

Róbey Lawrence:
Oh, yeah. I have. Yeah. I’d I feel like just ripping out the drum kit and jamming along. Really?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, that’s beautiful. I do miss the old WP Innovator kind of upbeat, but I quite like the dramatic new Agency Trailblazer music. Although now I’ve heard what you’ve just shared with me, I’m kinda thinking, you know what? That actually has the potential to be the new singer.

Róbey Lawrence:
Just add a bit of add a bit of funk Function loop

Lee Matthew Jackson:
in there. Yeah. Yeah. It’s really cool. Oh, and you also had a really well timed, tudum tsssh. Can you share that one with us? Are we close? Yeah. That is so cool. So that I could actually elevate, as it were, the podcast by kind of bringing all of these tools in and then just throwing in random random loops and random from whatever you call them, little thing.

Róbey Lawrence:
Has a sound board.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’d be amazing. What? I don’t. Oh, no. No. No. No. No. No.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
No I mean, I’ve told them your name. I suppose that’s good enough. They can go ahead and Google you. Yeah. How much do you around chatting. Yeah. He’s on Google. So, yeah, what’s the letter like, mate? Roby Roby is from beardedfriend.com.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Go and check out the website. Absolutely love the logo. Although, you’re not quite so bearded at the moment because you did shave for charity, so you are a legend. That’s awesome. You’re also the cohost of WP Bosses, a podcast for Australian WordPress people. And can I just say, Australia owns WordPress? I feel like it. You’ve got, like, some of the coolest WordPress people down in Australia, so I’m kinda well jealous. And you’ve had some great guests on there, including mister Troy Dean himself and mister ACF.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’ll talk about that in a minute. And, Robbie Robbie, for I’m gonna do that a lot on it. Mister Robbie or Robbie Wan Kenobi, is also the founder of the WPBABA, which is the WordPress maintenance and security. So that’s my kind of boring introduction with regards to all of the different things you hail from. How about you say hello to everyone and tell us a little bit about your beautiful self?

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. So Robbie one Kenobi, one Kenobi isn’t actually technically in my name. I just use that to help people pronounce it Cause it’s not Robbie it’s. Yeah. Anyway, you get it. Do you, do you see what I did there with the WP Barber? Cause it’s like maintenance. The WP Barber is the maintenance side of my, my business. Bearded friend is building the websites.

Róbey Lawrence:
The WP Barber is maintenance.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So you grow the beards, like like, kinda building the beard, the website, grow the websites in your online presence. Yep. And then you maintain it with the barber.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. Correct. Because because barbers maintain beards.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s actually very beautiful.

Róbey Lawrence:
Thank you. Yeah. So I’ve I’ve probably been using WordPress for 3 to 4 years maybe. I come from an IT background, used to, fix Jane’s printer and fix Bob’s email accounts when they stopped working. And I could only do that for so long. And so I, I, I had a fondness for open source or, free software because that’s the kind of person I was at the time. Anyway, that’s how I found WordPress. Started just playing around with it on my own computer.

Róbey Lawrence:
And then I, I started looking at everyone’s website in in our town and realized, yeah, I could I could probably improve upon some of these things, you know, make them a bit of a prettier place. And so that that kind of inspired me, I guess, to move into to WordPress and web design. Yeah. And, I’ve worked for, for a couple of agencies in my beginning and that, that kind of, I think I had authority issues or, or something, but I think working for myself is where I sit best at the moment. So so that’s currently what I’m doing.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Can we unpack the authority issues a little bit? I don’t mean to make you cry. I’m this isn’t I’m not like a shrink. I’m just resonating with them right now. That’s all.

Róbey Lawrence:
No. Yeah. Yeah. Let’s unpack.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Let’s unpack that. Like, because I think that a lot of entrepreneurs are kind of highly unemployable because of I don’t know if it’s an authority thing necessarily. Was it an authority thing where you didn’t like being told what to do? Or was it more the fact that you had great ideas, but felt like you just could not pursue any of them because you were forever blocked, as it were, by those managers or those people in charge?

Róbey Lawrence:
All of the above, I think. I, yeah, I just I didn’t really agree with, or not that I didn’t agree. I just thought there were better ways we could do things when I was in those agencies, but I wasn’t, I guess the people in power weren’t really interested in hearing my ideas. They, they wanted to make all the decisions and and just tell me what to do in at the end of the day.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Yeah. I I found the exact same problem. I mean, I was in corporate when I I mean, back when I when I was in IT as well. I was because I’m same same sort of journey as you. I was in a corporate scenario as well. So you imagine how big these IT departments get, and you’ve got presidents and vice presidents and all that sort of stuff and senior management and all that jazz. So I was very much bottom of the chain, had lots of exciting ideas, but you always felt like the ideas that you had were kind of lost in, you know, people would say, oh, no.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We can’t do that. And then, you know, 6 months later, your amazing idea would suddenly appear as one of your managers, and you’d be like. So eventually, I I had to leave, in IT. And then, agency life wise, I I can imagine. I guess the smaller agencies are a bit more open to pursuing ideas, because a lot of us will come to points where we’re looking at the pipeline going, yeah, we do need to fill that up a little bit, and Roby here has got a great idea. But, were were they the smaller agencies, or were they bigger agencies like big teams?

Róbey Lawrence:
They were kind of smaller. I mean, the the the last agency I was at, they were more of a, lead generation company. So websites was kind of like a a side to their their business that wasn’t a main focus. So it’d be like the, the process was basically the designer meets with the client. And then they come away, choose a theme of theme forest, modify the design a little bit, give it to me and say, this is, make it look like this and make it do these things. And so, because they were all theme forest themes, they, they were all different theme forest themes. So every website was different. So it was hard to develop procedures.

Róbey Lawrence:
And it just, yeah, just got, got a bit too much in the end. And I, I, I just had to, to go on my own.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, it’s a really good point as well that with the ThemeForest themes. I mean, it does get a bad rep, and I give it a bad rep, to be honest as well, because I’ve had that exact experience. Like, lots of lots of different types of themes and very inconsistent with regards to quality as well, which has always been a struggle. And I think you’ve nailed it there with regards to having some sort of way of building sites where there is a process, where you’re aware of all of the the tech, you know, what you’re working with. There’s no surprises every single time. And, it does frustrate me when I I see agencies just pushing out randomly chosen, ThemeForest themes. I mean, it’s okay if you’ve had experience with it and the client’s kind of aware, but we we’ve we’ve heard stories of, like, agencies in London kind of flopping clients off with theme forest themes for a £100,000. And I’m just like, I want to cry.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. Wow. I think the theme forest themes are fine for, for your mom and pop shop who maybe have a little bit of design and can do it themselves, but not when you’re churning out heaps and heaps of them. You gotta standardize on something.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because then they they’ve got this support problem with, excuse me, with lots of different, setups. Well, let’s get geeky then. What’s your dev stack? Because, like, we we’ve just we’ve just gone we’ve gone super geek now. So you’ve gone from frustrated with multiple different ThemeForest themes and, you know, no consistency. I assume you’ve developed a a method. Share your dev stack with us.

Róbey Lawrence:
So at the moment, it’s not it’s not really that geeky. I think a a lot of people do it. It’s we we use local by flywheel to start with, or I do anyway, until we need other people to start chipping in. So my wife, does the design now, which is far better than when I did the design, because now it’s 5 times better and 5 times quicker.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Awesome.

Róbey Lawrence:
And so from from local, once I’ve done all the basic setup, I then put it on a host and we use, Divvy currently.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I know a lot of people who love Divvy. That’s interesting.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. There’s a lot of love and there’s a lot of hate for it. It’s the tool that we’re using at the moment. We’ve developed a bit of a a workflow and found a a suite of, plugins to to do everything we needed to do at the moment. That’s that’s not to say I’m not looking at other things out at my peripheral vision. But that’s, yeah, that’s currently what we’re doing. And of course, we use advanced custom fields. Amen.

Róbey Lawrence:
And I I, I actually use I I use advanced custom fields with a, a plugin called custom content short codes. And so that allows me to build out page templates using the Divi builder. And so we, set up options pages for clients for maybe complex designs that, you know, we, they need to be built with HTML and CSS, and we don’t want the user going in there and

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Breaking it.

Róbey Lawrence:
And messing things up when they need to change it. So we make that a custom field in an options page, and then we just pull that data into the the Divi template with those shortcuts.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I love it. That’s brilliant. I I love the way you say data as well instead of data. Let’s, let’s just have a little chat about ACF as well. How did you find ACF? How long have you been using that?

Róbey Lawrence:
I’ve been probably only a couple of years. I actually came to know we, where I used to live in the Gold Coast in Queensland, we had a a group of 4 of us. When I say us, that’s me and, Nick, Tracy, and Paul. So they’re the other hosts on WP bosses. And we actually used to go and co work at each other’s houses. So once a week, we’d, we’d all be at my place or we’d all be at Nick’s place and we’d rotate around and we’d just work on our own thing, but in the same place, so that we’re not all just working by ourselves at home and our dining room table. And it was through that and through discussions about, best practices or how do you do this? I, I was introduced to advanced custom fields and then saw the power of it and went, okay, why have I not been using this before? And, so that’s, that’s that’s where I met advanced custom fields.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. It’s a phenomenal tool. I mean, I remember trying to make custom fields and everything on my own for probably a couple of years, and then I found ACF. But I also had this kind of inbuilt kind of snobbery with regards to using third party tools. You know, development back background, I wanted to code everything, but then I kinda realized that it’s gonna take me hours versus putting things together really quickly in advanced custom fields. I just had to eventually admit defeat and stop trying to do everything myself, and go ahead for with advanced custom fields. It’s the same with post types as well. There are now frameworks to quickly fire those up.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I use the, custom post type. I have to put it in the show notes. But basically, it’s a visual way of building up the post types. But what I like as a geeky developer is right at the very end, I can then just export the PHP, put that in my theme, and disable the plugin, which is pretty damn cool as well. So it kinda gives me the speed with regards to quickly putting together the post type with a whole load of checkboxes without having to think about the code. And then I get to export the code at the end, which I can then still read, understand, I can comment in it, and then I can kind of do what I need to do. Yeah. The other cool thing I just wanna drop on on ACF, guys, is, if you’re not aware in multisite, you can do this JSON sync.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s amazing. So you can have one site as your master, and you can set all of your custom fields up in that, and then it’ll automatically sync for all of the sites on the network. It’s freaking brilliant.

Róbey Lawrence:
Lee, why didn’t you tell me about that, like, 4 weeks ago? I I’ve just built a multisite with advanced custom fields.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Robbie, just so you know, mate, there’s this JSON sync. Oh, really? Oh, I thought

Róbey Lawrence:
I the the the way I did it, I I, created the fields, and then I exported them into the the child theme functions file. And all sites are using the same child theme. So that’s how I got around it.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, well, you can do that because you can do that with the PHP. Can’t there’s a PHP option. You can put that into your theme. But the only problem is is every time you do that, you then have to, you know, re export the PHP and paste it. You can still do it, mate. So you can comment out the PHP when you’re done. You create a JSON folder, so that’s j s o n folder inside of the theme. And then if you go and have a look at Advanced Cursive Field’s website I’ll put a link in the show notes as well for this Please do.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
For people just to go check that out. But you can because you you’ve already created them in in one of your sites, haven’t you? So once you’ve once you’d comment out that code, you then paste in a bit of code from the, advanced custom fields website telling it where the JSON field sorry, the JSON folder is. You then just go back into your advanced custom field groups. Just go into them all and save them all again, and that’ll automatically create the JSON file inside of that JSON folder, and then all of the other sites will automatically pick them up. Wow. It’s brilliant. And then every time you make a change on the master site, whichever one that is, usually root for me, The or, like, everything just instantly sees the new field or the new setting that I’ve done. Because I what was happening for what happened for me originally was that I’d years ago, I was doing this PHP thing, and then I lost the fruit site, which meant I just had a whole load of PHP, and I then had to keep editing and adding new fields in PHP, and it just created a nightmare.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And then when I realized there was this JSON, a beautiful setup inside of, of ACF, I was just enamored. Now speaking of advanced custom fields, we’ve kind of we’ve kind of deep dived in here on this, haven’t we? You you actually managed to get Elliot on your podcast, WP Bosses. How did that happen?

Róbey Lawrence:
I asked him, and he said yes.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s incredible, isn’t it? And there’s a lesson in that, isn’t there? Ask. Yeah. Exactly. With Troy Dean as well, I was like, Troy Dean’s never gonna come on my podcast. He came on episode 5. I wasn’t even established. And the I think it was episode 5. It was, like, a really ridiculously low ridiculously low number, and I think he’s been on, like, 3 times now.

Róbey Lawrence:
When I was starting WP Bosses, I actually asked Troy the best way to get people on, and that’s exactly what he said. Just ask.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cool. Oh, I thought he said that you ask everyone what’s the best way to get on. I was like, oh, that’s clever because then that way he gets on. Now we were talking before this episode actually as well. I think we’re loving on advanced custom fields at the moment, but, I’m just amazed. I I emailed Elliot probably 2 years ago because I bought the plug in. I think it was version 3, and then he launched which had lots of add ons originally. And then he went into version 4, and everything was combined into 1.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But my license just automatically carried over, And I carried on using it for another couple of years, and I’m like, this is the best thing since sliced bread. I actually don’t eat that much sliced bread, but anyway. And, I emailed him. I was like, dude, how can I give you some more money? Because I kinda feel like, you know, I’m just getting so much value, and I paid you years ago. It’s ridiculous. I actually feel like I should be giving you some more money or doing something to support you. And he was like, oh, no, man. It’s cool.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And, anyway, we’re on version 5 now, and I’m still not giving him any money. So I’ve I’ve been getting the value out of this tool for years. You mentioned you’d had a chat with him on that.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. We we felt the same way, and we asked him about it. And he said, at the time, he had no intention to change. He was just grateful that he could help out the WordPress community, and it’s it’s empowered so many developers and and non developers alike, I guess. And yeah. So he was he was just grateful for the opportunity.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So that’s kind of humbling as well because I’m always in this mindset of, you know, gotta look at my costs, gotta look at my income, gotta make sure that whatever I sell that has value, I’m getting some sort of repeat return on it, etcetera. And I’m very focused sometimes on the money and and not often very on the, just on the fact that I am helping people. I mean, he must have helped a hell of a lot of people to to not have to be worried. I imagine a lot of people have bought that plug in there. So Oh, yeah. Maybe that’s why. It just kinda boggles my mind because the quality is getting better as well. It’s it’s not like everyone bought it a few years ago, and then he’s, like, doing it for free now.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I I presume he’s getting funded because 5 is amazing. The new interface, new features, it’s phenomenal. And the documentation is amazing. Guys, advanced custom fields.com, I should have mentioned that a long time ago. We’ve been talking for 10 minutes about it. I’m sure people have heard of it, but if you’ve not, it’s amazing. If you haven’t heard of the JSON thing, then, I’ll put a link to that as well.

Róbey Lawrence:
Do we need to do that YouTube disclaimer thing and say this is not a sponsored ad?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, it is not a sponsored ad, but, clearly, this is a podcast with 2 ACF fanboys on it. So, you know, sorry. We could we could definitely have the Divvy versus Beaver Builder argument just to kind of balance everything out, Should we?

Róbey Lawrence:
That let’s do that later.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, while you’re feeling a bit emotional, you might might make

Róbey Lawrence:
you cry. We can make

Lee Matthew Jackson:
you cry.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. Yeah. You might do.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, on on Divi though, and I’m not definitely not gonna slack this off now because, actually, you know, each tool has its own merit. Each tool is good for whatever, you know, whatever site you’re building. For some people, Divi is the way to go. For some people, Beaver Builder is the way to go. I I’ve got clients I wouldn’t dream of giving Beaver Builder to because they wouldn’t know what the hell to do with it. But Divi’s gone through an iteration. You’re on Divi 3 now. Have you guys moved along to that, or are you still using the back end interface?

Róbey Lawrence:
No. We’re we use the the DB theme, which has the page builder built in, and we’re we’re running the latest version on all of our sites.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So you’ve allowed your clients to go front end from the backend, because originally it was all done with blocks. Wasn’t it in the in the actual page editor?

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. Which is, you can still do it both ways. And I actually still just use the backend. I’ve, I like to be precise in everything I’m doing, you know, use pixels and, and not just drag things and go, oh yeah, that looks pretty good. It’s, yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Hold a piece of paper up to the screen. Like I

Róbey Lawrence:
did get you ruler out. No. So, yeah, I, I still build on the backend. I guess just cause that’s what I’m familiar with, but even so they haven’t forgotten about the backend. It’s, it’s getting all the improvements and feature updates and it’s getting quicker, more responsive. They’re adding shortcut keys and, and all the, all the cons. I’m I’m kind of hoping that they slow down and it doesn’t turn into a big visual composer bloat.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that’s another company, isn’t it? They’ve done that kind of one off payment and then, like, you get the value from from forever. So it was an elegant themes behind it on there.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. So there’s there’s still the, still the yearly renewal, though I think they still do offer the lifetime license. They’re one of the few companies that still offer that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. I I bought the lifetime license, like, a lifetime ago. So, yeah, I’ve I’ve got Divvy that I can use if I want to.

Róbey Lawrence:
Does that mean your lifetime licenses nearly expired?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I don’t know. If you got it a lifetime ago. It feels like a lifetime ago. I don’t know. You’ve kind of blown my mind.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. Sorry about that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s alright.

Róbey Lawrence:
I don’t have any I

Lee Matthew Jackson:
think it was, like, $79 or something ridiculously low at the time. I And I was just, like, this is a no brainer. I don’t

Róbey Lawrence:
have any mind blown sounds on my soundboard. What about what about?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Is that Homer Simpson?

Róbey Lawrence:
I don’t know. I I couldn’t actually hear it, but I think you could.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Okay. That’s well, I hope it came through the track, but that definitely sounded like Homer Simpson. I I kinda feel, like, I feel let’s talk about lifetime licenses as well then. We’re we’re going everywhere. I like this. This is great. It’s probably kind of coffee induced as well because I’ve been you’ve probably heard me slurping on my coffee, because I literally got out of bed and then came and interviewed you. So on the lifetime license thing as well, I kind of feel guilty about the lifetime licenses that I do have, which is probably why I emailed Elliot to say, can I pay you more money? Because I know it’s a great concept, it’s like, I never have to pay for this again.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But if I’m getting value out of something year upon year upon year and I’m not paying any more money, but I’m still getting stuff from it, I kinda feel a bit bad. So it’s the same with Elegant Themes. You know? I don’t use Divi, but we do use Monarch for, the sharing, you know, the social sharing. And we also use the pop up plugin of of which I’ve gone blank on the name all of a sudden. But we that was it. And we use it for a few clients that, like, just need their hands holding with regards to pop ups, and they just need to fill in some fields, and Bloom’s perfect for that. It’s not like a a crazy visual editor like the Thrive one, which is really confusing. Bloom’s just nice and simple, fill in the blanks, pick your template, jobs are good, and off you go.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So, you know, and again, I’m getting all this value from them, consistently for years and and never paying any more money. I mean, I could actually choose. You know, I I say this. I could actually choose, couldn’t I, to go and subscribe to, their yearly plan as well, couldn’t I, instead of claiming I feel guilty and not giving them any more money?

Róbey Lawrence:
I suppose you could. You do want that, you do wanna know that the products you rely on are gonna be there in the long term. You wanna make sure that they’re sustainable.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Exactly. And and like reaching out to Elliot, I also want them to know that how valued, their work is as well, which is phenomenal. I think, I heard Toolset are phasing out their lifetime license. I heard there’s a big flurry of people trying to buy their lifetime license for Toolset before it expires. I think that’s, like, $500 or something like that. That’s Toolset’s like an ACF alternative, which also just post types and layouts, and, they’re selling theirs for $500 lifetime license. So, I’m not gonna buy it though because, you know, I’m an ACF guy, so we’re all good.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m also a beaver Thema guy. ACF and beaver Thema work amazingly well together as well. That’s with the beaver builder, ecosystem.

Róbey Lawrence:
So does Beaver Beaver Thema does is that so you can build page templates with the page builder?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Exactly that. So you’ve got your Beaver Builder, obviously, for the modules, the layout, so dropping stuff in. You’ll have advanced custom fields for your your actual fields, or you can use pods. Pods is brilliant as well. So you can create all your custom fields, and you can create post types and all that jazz. And then in Beaver Themer itself, you can create your headers and footers, so you can just insert things wherever you want. So that’s cool. That that does that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
A bit like the old Beaver Tunnels program. But then you can also then, do all of your archive pages and your loops, and everything like that as well. So for example, inside of the agency trailblazer community, we’ve got a post type for lessons, and then I’ll go into BeaverThema, and I’ll I actually design the entire layout, you know, the pagination, what each block’s gonna look like, etcetera, the title, all of that good stuff. I can integrate with, all of the custom fields that I’ve created, etcetera, and it’s just all visual. And the cool thing is as well for us developers is you can override their default blocks as well, and they give you output HTML mixed with special short codes, which have if statements inside of them so that you can then say, you know, if this ACF field is filled in, then show this little section here. So I did that yesterday when I realized that no one knew because all of our icons look the same inside of the library. No one knew what’s no one knows what’s new content and what isn’t, so they might think it’s not being updated. So I just slapped I just slapped a new field in ACF in.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Took me 5 minutes. I went into BeaverThema, went to the, the archive for lessons, and then just tapped in another short code saying if, new is checked, because I just did a checkbox. I was feeling lazy rather than trying to do some code about dates. Then, you know, if it’s checked, show this, little bit of HTML, a job done. And now a few of our a few of our elements are all labeled as new. So it’s a really, really powerful application. And, again, you can you got the best of both worlds as well with Beaver Builder. I’m trying to sell you on it, mate.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think you may have noticed. I’ll put my, I’ll put my link in the in the show notes. But, also, with the beauty of Beaver Builder is you can you can have the best of both worlds. If you’ve got Beaver Builder and Beaver Themer, that means if you wanna give your clients the back end experience of filling in some fields with ACF, then you do that. You give them those interfaces for the post types, and then, Beaver Thema looks after the output. So instead of you coding a theme, you you lay it all out in Beaver Thema. You don’t give your client access to the Beaver Builder Builder role. You just say, right, you edit your pages in this fashion.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You go in and you fill in these fields for every staff member, and they will output in glorious in a glorious design that we’ve done for you on the team page. So you can literally go to that granular level, which is pretty awesome. And it, for a lot of developers, it takes out most of the code. That also scares a lot of developers. And for me, myself, and our team, what we do is we actually build most of the theme in HTML, etcetera. And then we only you we don’t use Beaver Thema for actual production sites because I’m a little bit scared to rely on an entire ecosystem for a client site. So we still build everything ourselves and use Beaver Builder for dragging and dropping of modules, etcetera. But if you’re doing a minimum viable product website or like I did for the Agency Trailblazer podcast, we’ve got sorry.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
No. No. The Agency Trailblazer community. We needed to build a a a a minimum viable product to see whether or not people were even interested in being a part of that community. Clearly, people were, which is mind blowing. But, you know, at least for me, as I’m time poor on my own things with regards to client things, Beaver Themer is perfect for those sorts of sites, you know, to to push together. And a lot of people as well you’ve mentioned the kind of mom and pop and small businesses. Again, BeaverThema is perfect if you’re a web developer who needs to kind of do an entry level website but wants more control and wants to avoid going down the ThemeForest route, then, you know, BeaverThema gives you all of

Róbey Lawrence:
that power. Yeah. That I I forgot to mention that’s that’s actually another thing I do in my workflow is I don’t generally, I do sometimes, but usually I don’t give my clients access to the Divi builder. They just get the options pages. They can obviously write blog posts, etcetera, but the majority of the pages either have their own options fields on them, or their own custom fields, or we just have the options pages and they don’t actually see the builder. The builder is just there for me to, to quickly build the site layout, I guess.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s I think it’s quite important to, for certain clients to do that because if you give them the full power of Divi or Beaver Builder, they’re gonna butcher your site, and you’re gonna have a site that you’re not proud to show off. Whereas if you can remove their stress and your own stress by saying, fill in these fields, and your website will look as we all agreed, then job done. Everybody’s a winner, in in my eyes. And that’s, you know, that’s only for a certain type of client, but there are many clients who don’t understand branding. And they’ll go ahead and do Comic Sans red, centered, slap bang on the middle of the home page with some special offer, and you’ll just cry.

Róbey Lawrence:
At at their auto auto play, radio jingle on the site.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Does anyone use marquee anymore? Do you remember that one?

Róbey Lawrence:
Unfortunately. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, I remember. Not unfortunately. I still use it. I don’t use it. Just

Lee Matthew Jackson:
to confirm. Good. Good. Good. No. That’s I’m proud of you there. Yeah. No worries.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. I saw no Marquees on any of your websites. So speaking of websites, wpbaba.co. Sorry. I can’t say it. I or I say barber. Barber. But I sound posh.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Barber. You said barber. Wpwpbaaba.co. Guys, check that one out. So, obviously, build websites. What happened? How what blah blah blah blah blah blah. I’ll leave that in. That was quite, French.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Why did you start the WP Barber, and why did you brand it separately from the bearded friend? You’ve already alluded to it a bit, but tell us a bit more.

Róbey Lawrence:
I think the decision that I made to put it under its own brand was, I guess I wasn’t it’s a very good question. At the time I

Lee Matthew Jackson:
like how you’re kind of building up a little bit of time for you to think of the answer. So I’m just filling a little bit for you too. I could sing a song.

Róbey Lawrence:
No. It’s okay. The I think the original thought was in case I ever wanted to offload that as a as a business, it was its own self contained thing. And I could do that whilst keeping the website building thing. It was kind of like an experiment, like you were saying with the, you know, you build a prototype for agency trailblazer and see if it ticks and it does. So it was kind of a similar thing. And I think since we’ve had it, it’s, it started to really tick for us. It was, I guess it was also cause I wanted to, I like creating playful brands.

Róbey Lawrence:
So that was another really good exercise. So it’s, asked me again in 12 months, I’ll book my, my podcast, session. Now Ask me again if 12 in 12 months, if I still think it was a good decision or not.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I I I don’t know. I think it’s a good decision because you you’re taking out you’ve got you’ve got 2 key businesses, 2 messages, and sometimes it’s hard to try and fit both messages on the same website, I think. And, being able to have 2 separate brands people understand which are clearly connected through the branding. I think it does make sense. I think in 12 months’ time, you’re gonna tell me it was a good decision, personally.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. I think that was that was actually one of the other points is we were we thought if we’re going to do this, we may as well do it on a larger scale. And so I think having it as a separate brand, we can market it as just care plants. And so we can then market it to people who haven’t necessarily come through bearded friend or who we haven’t built their site for. It was just, I guess another, like you said, different, different marketing approach, targeting people that already have good websites, whereas bearded friend is targeting people who need good websites.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Nice. Good. Now do you I don’t know if you listen to ed, who also runs a similar operation with, Cloud Care WP. And he was saying that when he builds the, well, he’s now actually going away from websites in its entirety now. But when he was selling websites, he was actually building the care plan in as part of the quote as well and managed to get a 100% take up on his care plans. Do you guys have you guys been offering care plans as an afterthought? I like me, until I heard Ed’s program. Or or have you been, kind of trying to trying to get care plans in kind of early doors as well?

Róbey Lawrence:
We were trial and care plans through bearded friend originally, but that was more as an afterthought. Yeah. Since we’ve started the WP Barber, we’ve just been including it in in all of our proposals slash contracts.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s good.

Róbey Lawrence:
And and we get not not a 100%, but pretty good take up on it.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. We we started literally, 2 weeks ago. After recording and making his podcast live, I was like, oh my gosh. I’m missing a trick here. Because, you know, it it it’s harder to sell it later because they’ve already invested a whole ton of money. So they’ve already felt that pain, and they’ve gone through the process of building the site. And then it’s at the point where, alright. Cool.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Can I can you give me a whole load more money now? Because I wanna look after your website. And it kind of doesn’t doesn’t seem to work as well. So I actually did build it into the quote the other week, and they’ve gone for it. So we’ve just been setting that one up. So I think there’s something to be said to building it in. Equally, equally, having something separate though for people with this WP Barber website, it makes sense because you’re gonna have a lot of people who do have websites in existence, especially people personal brands, entrepreneurs who maybe have dabbled in WordPress and put something together themselves, or they’ve invested in a site, and it’s not been looked after for, you know, a couple of years, and they’re recognizing that they just need some help. Have you have you got any particular target audience for the WP Barber?

Róbey Lawrence:
At this stage, not really. I think we’re because it’s it’s kind of a year and a half old, that brand, I guess. So we’re kind of at the early stage where we’re just taking on anyone, basically. And then when we start to, I guess, fill up a bit more, we can start being a bit more picky.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And, guys, you gotta check out the, excuse me. They gotta check out the pricing page. Just click on pricing at the top right hand side. I absolutely love your plan names. You’ve got the beard balm, of which I put some on this morning, really nice with menthol in to help wake me up. So there’s the beard balm. There’s, just a trim option, so that’s best for small business. And then I’m not sure about this one.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You got the cutthroat option.

Róbey Lawrence:
That’s that’s for those that are serious.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But I just have a vision of someone bleeding out. So I’m not sure I wanna go for that particular package. Okay. And pay $200 a month for the privilege.

Róbey Lawrence:
No. No. Fair enough. Good feedback.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cut throat. Is that that’s okay. Do people take that one up often?

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. We’ve we’ve had a a few sign up for that recently, actually.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Wow. Yeah. They’re, you know, they’re badass people, aren’t they?

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. They’re serious.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Cutthroat. That’s hilarious. I love it. Absolutely love it. I like it though because, again, it’s showing an understanding of branding. You’re creating a brand, and branding isn’t just about the look and feel. It’s not about replicating the color of your scissors in the the headings there, etcetera, but it is about the messaging as well and your tone of voice.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that’s why I wanted to mention it because I like that you’re you’re being quite consistent in your tone of voice, your messaging, and you’re creating a brand beyond just a logo. And you’re also very much a part of that brand, especially with the pictures of you with a beard of which I do feel I’m missing on the WP Barber. Just a little bit of feedback, you know, now that we’re doing critiques.

Róbey Lawrence:
Okay. Yeah. No. No. I’ve noted that down. But, yeah, I I do like to inject a little bit of personality into the brands.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Absolutely. Because because you’re on the bearded friend. Although, you’re further down the page, I think you should be higher up. And, just so you know, if you go to anglecrown.com, I’m nowhere on that page. And the reason why I’m saying this to you is because I’ve had 8 people now over the last 6 months hit me across the head and say, Lee, you need pictures of you on the website. And I’m like, yeah, I know, and I don’t get around to it. So I’m telling you, but I’m not telling you as an expert. I’m telling you because I’ve just been slapped across the head multiple times.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Actually, it’s probably more like 12 months now that people have been telling me I need to get pictures of myself. I did it on Agency Trailblazer, but it’s still nowhere on ankle crown because I don’t know how to fit it into the brand. I’m like, where do I put me?

Róbey Lawrence:
Well, you’re wearing a crown, obviously.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, obviously. But don’t think I’m no expert, like, trying to tell you how to build your website. I’m just just telling you what I’ve been told. Oh, look. I found a little thumbnail of you. It look cute. It look like a lumberjack on this one.

Róbey Lawrence:
Oh, is that the, yeah. The one in the check

Lee Matthew Jackson:
check shirt. Floppy hair and yeah. Yeah. Bless you with your floppy hair. I’m just jealous of all that hair. That’s ridiculous. You’re not losing any yet. Are you filled me with a bit of hope, man? Come on.

Róbey Lawrence:
No. No. Not yet. But, maybe I should have saved some and sent it over when I got shaved.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. That’d be poor beard hair on my head. That’d be weird, wouldn’t it? Your hair’s so wired. Shave my

Róbey Lawrence:
my my hair as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, okay. Oh, hey. You could’ve sent some of that over. Yeah. Bit gross. It might have been stopped at customs. What’s this?

Róbey Lawrence:
What animal has this been taken from?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Is this on the, yeah, the allowed animal list or or whatever it is? That’s hilarious. So you’ve got you’ve got your 2 brands anyway. Bearded friend, you’ve got the WP Barber. Do you have any other plans kind of to spin off any other brands, kind of on this whole kind of care, and, and barbaresque, that’s that’s a nice word, theme. Or are we just sticking with these 2 for now?

Róbey Lawrence:
Just sticking with these 2 for now and, spending, Yeah, just putting all my effort into these to see, see where I can take them. We’ve got the WP Barber at the stage where I have actually very little to do with it. It’s mostly Mel, my wife, who, who does all the maintenance stuff. We just use managed WP to do all the automated

Lee Matthew Jackson:
stuff. Amazing system.

Róbey Lawrence:
And it’s just, I’ve started getting my. Part time virtual developer from the Philippines to start doing a lot of the food, a bit of time credit in the higher plans.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Mhmm. And

Róbey Lawrence:
so when clients send through tasks, I’ve been getting the the VA to complete those tasks. So it’s it’s kind of hands off for me at the moment, generating a bit of recurring income to allow me to focus a bit more on bearded friend working on the business rather than, drowning, trying to work in the business and sustain everything else. So that that extra bit of recurring income’s helping to to spend a bit more time on the business, hence doing, just started WP Elevation, this intake. So that’s exciting.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So good. Yeah. Now, wpelevation, if you’ve not heard, guys, go over to wpelevation.com. I joined that years ago, myself, and that was just, like, lighter fluid to my business, especially when it was just me, and then kind of understanding the process of becoming a WordPress consultant, and then kind of growing it from there. I I hear you’ve started calling yourself a WordPress consultant. How does that feel?

Róbey Lawrence:
It feels elevating. I feel elevated already.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s so good. No. That is good, though. She’s like, hey. My name’s Roby. We’ll press consultant. Yeah. Gonna, like, whip out your business card.

Róbey Lawrence:
Roby. Consultant, Roby.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Roby. Slap it on the window. Slap it down on the bar. Damn it. WordPress consultant. I like it. Yeah. Troy Dean, the whole, everything they’re doing at the moment, I am just a raving fan.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
The production value is going through the roof of the content that they’re creating. The face group face group? Facebook group is brilliant. It’s it’s thriving full of people. It’s just such a great community to be a part of, especially for, you know, especially for people who are dedicated in WordPress, because most of its content’s all around WordPress and kind of growing your business from beyond being a freelancer or beyond being just a small company. So definitely recommend people check that out, WPL Elevation and their and their podcast. Hopefully, they’re gonna get you on. Have you been on their podcast yet?

Róbey Lawrence:
No. I haven’t been on theirs yet.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Right. Well, you know what to do, don’t you?

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. Ask.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yes. That should be the title of this podcast.

Róbey Lawrence:
Just Ask.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Just Ask. And then that now that’s really vague, though, then, isn’t it? I don’t know. What would the title of this podcast be? We’ve we’ve gone all over the place. This has been lovely.

Róbey Lawrence:
That’s a that’s a good question.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It is a great question, isn’t it?

Róbey Lawrence:
Well, at the moment, we’re both bolded bearded guys.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s beautiful. Bolded bearded guys.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But, again, that would only attract a very small demographic of of people.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. It’s do you know, actually, a funny quick, funny story. You know, how you can set up Google alerts. So you put in the keywords in Google and it sends you emails when it indexes something new with those keywords. So I put in bearded friend as my keywords and probably 90% of the Google alerts I get are, men for men ad on Craigslist.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh.

Róbey Lawrence:
So it’s really, really not that helpful from a business perspective.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
No. That’s about well, yeah. What you may get these inquiries you’re not really looking for then. That’s what you’re worried about then.

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. The wrong type of inquiries. Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Bless you. Bless you. You’re a very beautiful man, though. So, you know, why not?

Róbey Lawrence:
Oh, thank you.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s alright.

Róbey Lawrence:
I appreciate that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s okay. I used to I used to be Lee Jackson Dev as my my business name, and I’m everywhere. But the only problem is is it also used to be my username. So it also meant that, like, my old Myspace accounts would come up and pretty much everything from, like, 20 years ago. So eventually, I was like, I really gotta change. I sound like a one man band. But, also, if someone types in Lee Jackson dev, they’re gonna they’re gonna find my Myspace account with me singing on it. So, oh, crap.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’ve just given that away, haven’t I?

Róbey Lawrence:
No. Similar story with me. Yeah. Roby is a bit of a unique name. So Yeah. When you put that in Google, it pretty much just brings up all of my own social accounts, Myspace.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, mate. I hope there’s an old YouTube account of you, like, hello. My name is Robbie. I would like your breaking voice.

Róbey Lawrence:
Hello. I don’t think so. You’re welcome to talk.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Sure. It’s kinda scary. Actually, my kids are growing up in this Internet age. So, you know, they’re already creating content, you know, aged 11, etcetera. And it’s like, oh, you might regret that. Yeah. I can give you a word of advice. Don’t upload that to YouTube, please.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Okay. Yeah. I know.

Róbey Lawrence:
It’s an interesting thought. I mean, at least when I when I was 12, I wasn’t really on the Internet. But these days, it’s like everything everything you do is recorded and tracked somewhere.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, it feels like you must be younger than me now. Because when I was 12, Internet wasn’t even a word. That’s scary.

Róbey Lawrence:
I might be. I don’t know.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
A little younger. What? Still in your twenties? Yep. You make me sick. Get off the show.

Róbey Lawrence:
Sorry. No. I’m joking.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
No worries, man. Well, this has been a total random podcast, but I know people love this sort of thing. And, I think, especially, the deep dive into the dev stack that we’ve talked about, about Beaver Builder, about Divi, about plugins, lots of useful information came out from that. And, also, I do love, you sharing your story with regards to your brands and how you’ve built the 2 brands around the 2 key services that you offer. You’ve kept them separate, but you’ve also joined them with your branding and your messaging. I think you’re doing an amazing job. I’m really, really impressed as well with how you’ve been able to pull yourself away from the WP Barber side of the business. So that runs itself, gives you reoccurring revenue.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You’re living the dream there because that means you can focus on bearded friend, which, again is a brilliant business in its own right. And you’re not having to do the work all the time. You’re actually being able to think more strategically and take the time out to do things like wp elevation, etcetera. So you are totally on the right track, and please do book that 12 month podcast. Although, I’m sure I’ll be able to drag you on sooner than that for some reason, because you’re cool. But, yeah. I’m I’m excited to see where you are in 12 months as I’m sure everybody listening is. So how can people connect with you, mate? And then we’ll give you a nice hug.

Róbey Lawrence:
I’m on Google. Just just just Google Google r o b e y, and you’ll find my Myspace page. We can connect through there.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
If you if you do r o b e y, you get Louise Robby on Wikipedia. And then Martin Robbie, and then Louise Robbie again, and then the official Robby sportswear webshop. Are you any of these? Are you Louise at The Weeknds?

Róbey Lawrence:
Not anymore. No.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Robie Lawrence in Google, guys. Not Robie. And also you’ll find this handsome chap in the wpinnovator facebookgroup as well on wpinnovator.comforward/group. Little plug there. And inside of the agency trailblazer community which opens on the 16th April. Oh. If you wanna hang around with that beautiful guy that’s also a good place to hang out. But I think that’s kind of the end of the interview now isn’t it? Should we do should we do that hook thing?

Róbey Lawrence:
Yeah. Yeah. Sure.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. How do we how do we hook on on online? Have you got a hook sound effect? That sounded good enough. Have a wonderful morning, madame. That’s brilliant. And with that, I think we should say goodbye.

Róbey Lawrence:
Goodbye.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Cheers, mate. You’re a legend. See you later.

Róbey Lawrence:
See you.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that wraps up today’s show. In next week’s show, we’re gonna be talking with Chris Ducker all about creating a personal brand to help your business or your businesses, and I’ve gotta be honest, we also talk an awful lot about Star Wars. So me and Chris had a really great time, can’t wait to share that episode with you. If you are a member of the agency trailblazer community, then you can go ahead and listen to that episode right now over on agency trailblazer.com. Don’t forget if you’re not a member of our free Facebook group, head on over to wpinnovator.comforward/group. We’ll see you next week.