# Getting Started Selling WordPress Maintenance Plans

Channel: Jeffrey @ Lytbox
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjLUawyerk0
Duration: 58 min
Language: English
Words: 9130
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/EjLUawyerk0

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[0:00] all right so we're here on called number eight is for a wordpress maintenance plan and we're gonna go step-by-step on getting started with offering your clients these plans but first before we start you need to ask yourself a question why should you be offering WordPress maintenance plans and you got to really think about it why would you want to offer these plans the thing you got to first realize and know before you start these plans is you got to understand and believe the value of the maintenance plans you got to really see how this is going to be helping your your clients how this is positioning you in a way to be to be

[0:40] able to offer more value to your clients so you got to have to believe in it it has to like come down to the heart because if you're going to talk to your clients about these plans you got to like really sell them on it so the first thing to do while trying to figure out the value of these plans let's take a look at what are the common problems that clients have you know one of the biggest problems we found was when a website was completed clients are just often left alone with the website and then they tried doing everything themselves that's when they started

[1:19] making mistakes that's when they start breaking things and that's when they start getting frustrated and then after time the website is sortsa you know it starts to have hiccups it starts to slow down it gets really messed up bugs start to come up they don't know what to do with the bugs they're getting frustrated with it and they kind of like they're just they just they're dealing with it but their frustration is just building up on it and then they got to go find a new developer and whenever you're finding a new developer really this goes with any kind of a service provider whenever you're trying to go find a new person

[1:58] it's it's a it could be a headache you got to talk to quite a few of them you got to figure out who you could trust and then there's a big risk of having poor work done and then of course at you know if you don't take care of the secure things are updated a good chance that the website will get hacked so these are the problems that I was facing and one of the reasons why we also started these plans because I got tired of her clients leaving us we had spent all this time and care into building a website for them they put a lot of love into it and

[2:35] we'd be very detailed with it and then they would come back six months later a year later that would be frustrated they would sometimes blame they would think that it wasn't done well and everything would be messed up sometimes they had a few developers working on it you go in the back end and now it's a mess and same thing with what new businesses with new clients we actually got a lot of business this way one of the common problems we'd found with new clients coming to us was that they came and the web sites were just a mess in the back end it was a mess you would see you

[3:12] would see like the bad habits of three or four web developers in the back end and there is no other option but to do complete rebuilds so these are the problems I looked at for our clients and it's important to empathize with them you got to put yourself in their shoes and look at it from their perspective now if you build websites for your clients and even though if you build it really clean very well and you just give it to them and let them be on the way and the year goes by and it starts messing up it's out of date bugs start coming up from the clients point of view

[3:51] they're gonna they're gonna go from being happy with the website and then that could quickly change and I'm sure if you I'm sure we've all been in a situation where at first we were happy with something and then after a word had it for some time we started noticing all the flaws in it take themes for example if you go like on theme forest and you look at themes and you buy a theme based on the reviews most of those reviews on the themes usually are after like the first week or two or month of action using the theme but anyone that's used a theme for maybe six months starts to

[4:29] really see how well the theme is really built so you got to put yourself in their shoes and look at it from their perspective now we got to get into the solution how could we solve these problems for the clients first one I mean this is it right here in the main the main solution to it is offering a wordpress maintenance and care plan being is you gotta realize and you got to believe that this is actually needed it doesn't matter how busy the client is online it doesn't matter if they're getting 10,000 views a day or or 500 visitors a week they need maintenance on it or else

[5:11] a website is going to break down it's kind of like a corn this is the analogy that I use with our clients that a website in a way is like a car the car you have to keep it you got to give it oil changes you got to rotate the tires after a certain amount of time but if you keep driving that car without maintaining it it's going to start it's going to start degrading it's going to start performing better and it's going to eventually break down in certain areas that will cost more money so those first that was the first part you have to believe in these plans and see how

[5:48] this is going to help your clients but now we got to see how it's going to help you in your business

[6:00] you're gonna be adding a whole lot more value into what you give your clients you're gonna be positioning yourself in a way not as a designer or as a developer that just comes in and builds a website flips a website and then leaves and it's on to the next client and the next client when you're building these plans and presenting them to your clients you're positioning yourself in a way that hey we're gonna build this site but we have something else online because we want to help you take care of your site we want to help you manage and maintain your site so that way it runs

[6:35] well it stays performing and driving your business and you could also focus on your business without having to worry about it so you're positioning yourself as more than just the regular web designer or developer or agency you're positioning yourself as someone that cares and it's going to be there for your clients this is huge of extra value that is being added and then you're gonna be building long-term client relationships and these relationships they are going to lead to more work and more referrals you're not gonna have any more of a client that has a site that leaves for six months or a year that starts dealing with bugs

[7:15] getting frustrated and questioning the integrity of the site and how well was really built because that questions gonna be out the way cuz you're gonna be there making sure it's okay but it's you're gonna get a whole lot more work I mean some clients might not be so busy with the website but the majority of them are going to need constant updates and this is gonna bring you a steady stream and then you're going to have the extra income with building your mor and that's going to be your monthly recurring income and haven't that that having that income coming in that's asset number that you know you're gonna

[7:57] get this every single month so you're now you're given a number that you're gonna give every single month you know I'm gonna get this amount of money every single month whether I get a new job or I don't you are also gonna probably end up getting more ongoing work and changes as well top of that so already now you're gonna be making more money inside your business so those are the three big benefits out of this and now we need a start so we're to start so you want to take time and choose the services you want to offer you won't don't want to just rush into it what you want to do is

[8:37] start by writing down everything you think of offering research look at what other designers and developers are offering once you have a full list pick and choose what you're comfortable doing and what you think would be the best benefit to your clients so this is the process that I did when I started off I wrote literally a list about this long just everything I could find spend time going online and and I found other websites other agencies and other freelancers that offer the service specifically WordPress maintenance plans and you could google it you could really take time and find a lot of websites with it and I created you know I saved the links

[9:22] for all the websites and I went through all of them they're all different all of them offer different services they all have a little bit of a different structure to it so I wrote down everything out of it and that was my starting point right there I wanted to see what was possible so after you got a list now you have all these things that you're looking at that you get offering it but we first got to start with the essentials every single plan has to have four essential elements to it in order to keep a website healthy and to keep it so you are actually taking care of the

[10:00] website and are being responsible and accountable for the website all those other things all those things on the list those are all going to be extra bonuses on top of it and those are going to be updates to plugins themes core WordPress it is going to be the security monitoring it's going to be automatic backups and it's going to be uptime on and let's go ahead and take a quick dive into these so first one on the updates don't be scared don't be scared to update make sure they're updated always backup before you update you're gonna be safe with it but you want to make sure

[10:44] no matter what you're doing regular updates either weekly or even or either monthly or weekly on the updates now security this is a big one right here because I think it's something that can be easily overlooked and you don't want to do that because you don't want to take the chance and it's happened to me where we are maintaining a site we're responsible for it and it's gone in hacked even with all the security we'll put in place and it does happen but you want to make sure you limit that as much as possible and protect yourself and then be ready in case something does happen so first off we gotta make sure

[11:26] I'm sure it's just about bulletproof don't take any chances realize that all web sites are constantly being targeted bots are constantly crawling looking for them so we gotta set it up just remember to keep in mind that you're responsible for the site's overall security take that time to properly set it up so if you get a new client that's on your maintenance plan you're gonna have to set up their security we don't want to make sure that you're using a good security plug-in we're using for our security ID themes Pro and then use a firewall on top of that and that's where we use wordfence for our firewall

[12:09] there's a few other different options as well out there this is just what we're using run regular scans we have scans running on all of our sites daily if something happens and goes down I'm getting emails about it so I could react to it right away change your WP admin login this is a 1 this is a very common way to get your website hacked choose a different login what we do is we choose another login the extension to log into the backend and we have our own custom one that we use for all of our sites make sure you got a SSL and set up that

[12:46] two-factor authentication it's a pain to use but it is a lifesaver it really helps it might be one of the best new ways of protecting the site and then also add an audit plugin see uh we had all these in line well we had all these in line and we still got a client site hacked recently this happened just about a month and a half ago and I believe the hack was actually targeted by one of their competitors and but because we had everything in line because we had the regular scans going on we had constant email notifications so when it did happen I had an email come in right away

[13:30] was able to jump on it and get it fixed before sensitive data was taken before anything got really bad so it's able to jump in on it with the audit plugin that we have on it I was actually able to track down where it came from what started it and what was done on the website because when something like this happens and I didn't add this in the slide but when you're doing your contract you have to make sure to tell your clients were going like in your contract that this is what we're going to do to protect your site but nothing is 100% and even like you could use

[14:06] PayPal as an example because PayPal was just recently hacked so anything really is hackable but we will do our best and if something happens we're gonna go ahead and fix it and that's where the value came in so when our clients website got hacked we're able to jump on it right away early morning jumped on it spent about four hours on it and was able to find the hack fix it revert backups make sure everything was clean go through the audit was able to actually give an accurate reports where our clients had a report that they could take to their shareholders with the whole account of

[14:45] what happened now that was a pain for me to have to do but that was what I was getting paid for all those months I mean the client paid us for about a year of maintenance and they paid a lot of money and this is where the value came in that they had somebody to call that was that can jump on it and that could get it fixed right away all right so let's go to backups there's a few ways of doing backups you can use a backup plug-in that automatically generates it you can use hosting that has automatic backups and you can use WordPress management platform and we're

[15:29] going to talk about that later on set call about the management platforms and those also provide automated backups and then there's another kind which I do recommend as well there's a backups that you're getting locally on your computer then there's also the cloud and off-site backups I recommend having both of them just to be extra safe uptime monitoring this right here is crucial to have what up okay so uptime monitoring is going to alert you if your website goes offline and this happens usually due to hosting and server issues you may be on the shared server your site might be going down often and you might not even know

[16:20] about it by monitoring a flaw uptime you can make sure your server is running optimal now you never want to be in a position where your client calls you up and says hey how come our website is down because that will not look good for you because it's your job to make sure that it's running smoothly so what the uptime monitoring does it lets you know the second it goes down well if we have our setup right now if the site goes down for two minutes I get an email notification and it tells me it's down then I know I need to take a look at I

[16:56] find out what's going on in fact also this is how we found out a website got hacked before as well by make by the alert for the uptime and also never know about your hosting especially if you're using hosting like likes I crown or GoDaddy or any of these shared hosting because sometimes what what happens with these shared hosting is they cram so many websites into one server and you might have like one website that is spiking heavy that's kind of like massive traffic and that is taking all the resources away from the other web sites and that could cause your website to go down or to perform

[17:37] very poorly so by having this in place you can make sure that you know if you keep getting alerts like it's down for five minutes and it's backed up down for five minutes then it's back up now you know there might be an issue if the server and you got to get a hold of your hosting company and figure this out and there's some tools as well to use for this you got managed WP jetpack and then the other managed WordPress management tools we use man manage WP for hours and all right kind of going off of I think I might have put this in the wrong order

[18:20] right here but I think this also ties in to the uptime because ok yeah this is on the wrong order right here do you know we're gonna go back to this one right here for the hosting this is for the extra services right here they do we hit them all backups security updates ok yeah that was it for the big four right there ok so we got our big forum update security monitoring backups and uptime monitoring so before I keep going does anybody have any questions want to jump in right now with anything

[19:07] all right I just gotta unshared I want to make sure we're still online and everything's still going fine I've had a few technical difficulties in the past and made mistakes we're recording all right cool good to see everyone still there all right so let's go to the extras so those four right there they have to go into all plans you need those right there they're essential now there's one that uh that I get a lot of questions on and that's if you should be offering hosting with your maintenance plan and I think if you are either if you're gonna so it is ideal to either provide the hosting or to set up their

[20:04] hosting with the reseller program such as flywheel this way you can ensure their site is on a proper hosting and being managed we never leave a client's what we never leave a client's website on a host they chose that we cannot house for and the reason why we never just leave a client's website on their host is in the past we just have problems with their hosting that has caused that just caused a lot of headaches has caused their sites to go down as cause their sites to not perform well and we know that our hosting works very good and we have everything set up so it's optimal so part of us what we do

[20:45] over here is hosting is required if someone wants to be on our care plan now if you don't want to deal with the hosting I strongly advise getting a reseller program for one you're gonna make sure that they're on a good hosting fly will is one that's really good for WordPress and it does well with elements or as you know as well but then you're also making sure that you're making that extra money on it so either one I think is okay but if you can't do hosting yourself I think that's optimal because I think that's best because you got full access and control and can ensure that the

[21:26] website will perform well a few other options after you've researched other websites offering WordPress maintenance plans you'll see the possibilities that you could do here's just a few of them right here like you can do performance monitoring broken link monitoring Google Analytics reports client reports SEO keyword rankings comment management you can do spam management there's a lot of things that you could add into the plants that you can do extra and these are how you build your pricing tiers so it's good to have options and three like the rule of three just works it works well you have three different pricing tiers you start off at the base with the

[22:13] basics and then you build it up to the ones that need more extra work on it and that have the bigger budgets for it and then you have the extras that you could use to add more value to get the bigger plants so how do you select your prices how do you and how do you decide how much to charge and this isn't easy I wish there was a simple answer to this but it's not that easy you have to consider your cost you have to consider your time how much are you going to be investing in plugins and what is your current market you have to research

[22:54] other prices and how these will fit into your target audience and then add extras for the unforeseen the thing is though the more value you offer the more you can charge so if you are going to add a long list of things to your plants then definitely you want to charge more you got to consider your target audience who are your customers are they small local independent a store owners that you know only use their website minimally or are you working with e-commerce clients that have high traffic on the website so these are going to determine the prices and then you also got to look at what

[23:35] are the competitors prices as well you definitely want to charge more but what I advise is what I would suggest is start off with a number for your three tier plants when you get that number together add another twenty thirty forty dollars on top of it so add extra to whatever number you charge add more on top of it and then go ahead and start there and then after your first couple clients see how what's going see if you need to raise that price up we're already getting ready to raise our prices on ours and it took me a while to come up with the cost owners I really

[24:13] had to like look at it I had a look at our clients I had a look at what kind of clients we have and I had a look at the value of the how much does it really cost and just to give you an idea the cost that we do we start off at $100 and we go up to three hundred and fifty dollars a month for our maintenance plans and I feel we are chair charging way too low I think I should double our numbers to be honest with you but we'll take it a step at a time one of the things too is how much are you going to

[24:44] invest in your plugins and I didn't make a slide on this for the plugins but if you're gonna run maintenance plans it is a good idea to start looking at investing into the plugins you're going to need for example we get WP rocket and we pay a year for it and that's for all of our clients websites that are on our plans we have I deems Pro and that's also for all of our clients websites we have Elementor Pro we have all these agency licenses and they're unlimited websites and they're for a year and we spent thousands of dollars a year on these plugins so when I started the

[25:23] pricing a lot of the normal prices for for when I saw like the average price range what I saw for WordPress care plans was anywhere from like $30 to like $60 a month for like starting and I couldn't go that low because we invest so much money into our plugins and that's actually one of our selling points with our clients one of our selling point you don't have to do this you could try to get your clients to buy the wrong plugins that's totally fine but I just like to take the headache out of it and just charge more money so what we looked at was okay we

[25:59] need to make at least $50 profit you know okay we'll see on our basic plan we need to make at least $50 profit on our basic plan that that's profit now for our managed WP we're gonna pay $10 a month for that website for the plugins as constant maybe around 20 to 30 dollars a month for it and then for my time on it and I had to like put all those numbers together so I went from 30 or one from 50 up to 100 and we're getting ready to raise any gigs I still feel is too low so that's how we came up with choosing the price anyone have any

[26:41] questions right now on this on the pricing or anything so far is any is everyone hearing this okay cuz somebody just like give me a yeah all good so I know like it's a playing through okay yeah yeah oh good really clear okay cool thank you for that so the goal with building these plans and setting it up is to have minimal effort with maximum results and to automate everything you want this thing to be automated fully in the background you do not want to spend that much time and just to give you an idea of how much time we spend on our maintenance plans we span minutes a week

[27:34] literally we don't spend hours we spend minutes a week it's running in the background the time comes setting this up setting your plans up and then setting everything up to be fully automated and first before we go too much into it this is a common mistake right here that will hurt your automation big-time so avoid this mistake do not include hours of work in your plants this will eat up your time and the goal is to automate and spend minimal time maintaining and managing your client sites as an alternative set up an hourly rate for small fixes just for clients on your plants and make this

[28:17] an exclusive offer so what I mean by this is you'll see on some people's plans that feels able to do backups will do security will do all that stuff and will also include two three hours of updates and content and blog posts every single month and this will get you in a jam right here because the client then is going to expect two hours of your time and it's gonna take away from the automation right here and you're not really going to get people I mean maybe if you're charging the client for those two hours included but from my experience and from other people's that I've talked to that have plans going

[28:59] whenever they offer these hours into it is when they start to run into this is taken too much time away and the reason why - you want to automate everything is you don't want this taking your time you want to be able to focus on your business and on your business growth you want to focus on your current projects you want to focus on your marketing your branding you don't want all your time going in two hours because if you got like ten clients or 20 clients now on your maintenance plan that all of them are expecting two or three hours every single month it's going to just eat up

[29:35] your time right there and it's going to become a headache it's gonna stress you out and then you're gonna wish you've never done this so what we do is and this is worked right here first having these plans does bring in the recurring business and you wanted to bring in the recurring business what we do is we have in our plans for anyone on a plan they get an hourly rate a special rate and they get a discount on an hourly rate and it's only for like tasks that are under ten hours if someone has a big job that's like gonna be 20 30 40 hours estimate then that's going to be a

[30:11] separate project but if it's under 10 ten hours say they need sliders change you need the images replaced they need to add a new section on their homepage we already have it set up where we'll do that for them with the three to five business days turnaround time and only our clients on our maintenance plans can do work under 15 hours and what I mean by that is if somebody does not get our maintenance plan one of our clients they have us build a side we design that we build it we offer our maintenance plan and they choose not to they cannot come back and ask for small tiny changes

[30:51] because that just kids in the that just gets in the way with with the day-to-day work that disrupts the process and other projects but for clients or our maintenance plan we have something set up just for them and the reason why we do it just for those clients too is we know their sites we know these are the sites were managing so when we have other developers and other team members go in they already know the sites it's not like just you know random a site that we did a year ago that comes in for two hours we're working on sites that we work on every single month and that we

[31:27] know inside and out and it's all about building a process and to automate everything now what you want to look for is you're going to have to have a website management system and with that website management system is basically it's like a dashboard system where you could connect all of your websites all your WordPress sites and from that one dashboard you could do everything on it you could set up you can do your updates from that dashboard on all the websites you excuse me you run your security basically everything we talked about can be done from that dashboard and it could all be automated we use manage WP and

[32:18] what manage WP we connect our website there and then we set up our backups we set up our our security monitoring we set up our uptime monitoring we set everything up so it's automated it's automatically working the only thing that we do every single week is we do manual backups just because we would want to check it out but when we do the back that's all we do is click one button and it backs up everything I mean I mean updates we just clicked one button we don't have to like go in and like take time like it does not take that much time we just go in

[32:55] and back and update everything and then we also make our reports for our clients so one thing we also want to do in it which is really good it's a have a report for your clients every single month but you also want those reports you have to have automated as well because that could take a lot of time if you make them manually and with these systems right here they all have them built in they're all built for this and you can automate it 100% an additional automation so first the automation which is like the technical part which is like the updates backups security monitoring performance monitoring even Google

[33:46] Analytics reports even SEO keyword ranking what else a broken link monitoring uptime monitoring all those could be done in one of these platforms but there's one other thing that I would suggest and this is a good opportunity and that is this is a chance for you to grow your business and this is an opportunity where you can actually hire somebody and start building your team so looking to scale your business it's a great opportunity to consider hiring a freelancer or a contractor specifically for your maintenance on clients with ongoing work this is a chance to build your team and grow your business so what I mean by this is let's say you got 10

[34:34] websites on your plan right now like you what's even though smaller let's say you just and you got just three websites on your plan so you got all three of those websites they're connected to your management system you're able to span you know 10 15 minutes a week taking care of that and making sure it's all good but then you also got those same clients now that they are going to be coming back to you wanting more work that's for sure so you got to expect that I've prepared for it by hiring a freelancer or a contractor um you can start building your team slowly and not

[35:15] too fast it takes it takes time to develop that skill to develop that skill and experience with working with another freelancer a contractor but it isn't something that's just really simply just hire someone till a B and C go ahead and do this and it gets done it takes time to learn how to because it's more project management at this point and just like it's so time to learn how to build a website it takes time and practice to learn how to hire someone and to have you know to manage them on a project and it's a lot easier to get to hire someone to start off small and what

[36:02] I mean by that is if you hire someone for a big project it could turn into a headache because you don't know how that person works you don't even have a system or process built with them your relationship hasn't been built with them yet and you have to build our relationship and process when you start off small like this it gives you a chance to really build that relationship and what you want you want just one person you want somebody that you could build an ongoing relationship with and maybe after a few months you guys get to know each other better there's expectations for both sides it

[36:38] takes time for them to get to know you and what you want and what you're really looking for as well and you have to get people that opportunity one of the common mistakes I know that I made when I was new in hiring people was I have really high expectations really hi I'm super detail-oriented I look at every single little pic so I look at you know every single line height letter spacing like I'm really picky so to hire somebody that that we don't know each other yet and to expect them to live up to those expectations was actually uh a mistake that I made in the beginning you have to

[37:19] be able to learn how to build that relationship and both sides have to be teachable the developer that you hire they got to be teaching books they have to understand what you're looking for but myself as a person hiring a contractor freelancer I also have to be teachable I also have to be willing to learn them and learn like their strengths I gotta learn their weaknesses areas that you know we can look at to fix and and and we're not fixed but to improve so by starting up small and hiring someone for small jobs just for your maintenance you're building that up and this is a great way to start scaling

[38:03] up your business we have someone that just helps us out and that has worked with us for a while now on our maintenance plans and we have built such a good system together and the way we work together just works so well now and it took a few months to get there but now that we got there like all that time that I invested into working with the other freelancer to the other developer it all came back and it's all paying off because now I'm able to get requests from clients I'm able to spend 10 15 minutes setting everything up and my guy is good to go he's ready to go and we're

[38:44] in sync with each other and we work really well and we started off small but we keep building up and now we're working on bigger projects more work every single month that gets bigger and bigger and I look forward to now I also feel comfortable and confident on sending him very large projects and also look at him now higher as being part of our company as well so just to wrap all that up this is a good opportunity to start to scale your business to look at hiring to develop those skills on project management and building a team all right so this is the end of is just a wrap-up right here just

[39:31] to like just go through like what you will get out of offering this maintenance plans you're going to be getting an opportunity to skill your business by building your m RR once you have a big enough monthly stream revenue stream now you can pick and choose your projects and spend more time in your business growth also there's no more free work on clients requests small fixes and you will have a system in place also most importantly you're giving your client something they will need and they do need to have something in place like this all right so let's go ahead and break to Q&A I'm going ahead

[40:14] and stop sharing my screen right now and we're going to open it up for open participation or any questions let me see how that stop sharing

[40:38] my throat's a little dry right he's talking for so long yeah hi-def clementa what's up man are you doing yeah I'm good I already typed the question on the chat and you read it yeah the proposal and then decided to use many WP p WP oh okay and also the maintenance proposal template let me see here let me pull up something now try to find one of our older proposals so when we give a project proposal we put the maintenance plan in the proposal and let me show you how I position it right here all right just give me one second all right cool here's one that we did I'm gonna share

[41:49] the screen all right see my screen again

[42:01] you guys see my screen okay all right so when we do this is a proposal we did last year and these are how our proposals look so when we do it you know you just have an opening then we have a little bit of our capabilities in there overview of the project then we do our project scope inside our proposal and you can see I really detailed it out when we do it we give our timeline inside the proposal let them know exactly what they're looking at how the whole project will look to them then we give them the cost of the project and then we add in the

[42:47] as well inside there so the maintenance is that option for them from the very beginning and then here we have our maintenance plan beside a proposal so we first you know we we break down the project and then we really go into the maintenance plan you can see like I put the entire plant into there I don't just make it small I really want to sell this plan does that help Clemente ah Clemente you're on that mute Oh chat okay cool it's that wonderful all right hey I do plan on making a template of our proposals like right now we're making a resource page for the group for

[43:40] the BBE group and it's going to be a resource page where you can download all the stuff so I will have in the short future like templates of like proposals and capability decks and you know things that I have that I could just I just want to share with you guys so I will have this sometime soon how you doing yeah from your talk I you talk about your offer your black beans right but how you deal with the themes oh so I don't buy themes I use like only Astra or hello like I don't use paid themes anymore and and sometimes every now and then there are clients that need like a

[44:37] plug-in or maybe even a theme that's outside of that needs more of a specialty especially in WooCommerce you know when you don't like new commerce sites you're going to need those X are really expensive plugins like those we do charge for you have to pay for that so if the client needs a specialty theme that's like 60 bucks then they're gonna have to pay for that

[45:06] another question do you're offered so it's like doing an audit before proposal we was that together it's like a audit before doing the proposal audit client website we don't really audit the website what we usually do before the proposal is a discovery call and like the way like it goes is like okay so this week we got a lead that came to our website so the first step when we get the lead is we set up a 30-minute call and that 30-minute call is just so like get a feel for each other get to try to understand the project better and if it looks like it's going well the next step

[46:02] is we're going to schedule like a 1-2-3 our discovery call and that is where we want to dig deep and that that's where we really find out the goals of them so I don't do more of an audit on their website I do an audit on them you know I'm auditing their goals their purpose their reasoning behind it and I'm just asking tons of questions and I'm trying to get to the root of their problem that way I could go ahead and give them a solution now one of the things too I learned to do is I don't a client might come and say this is my problem in the

[46:39] very beginning but it might not be necessary that's their main problem and if we sit there and we talk and we ask enough questions it's like you got to think of it like a therapist you know when a therapist is seen and you know with with the patient they're asking a lot of questions and they're trying to get the patient to come to the realization of what the real problem is and that's you know that that's what we do when we're doing our discovery calls

[47:16] that's your boy Clement yeah boy and girl why you decided yes minutes WP dander those like many WP oh man good question good one hand I was actually considering about going through manage WP but I feel like that might be a whole nother a call right there where we could go through setting that up so I go a managed WP because it has everything that I need in it but you only pay for what you use so what's say like okay we get this one client right here we just pay a dollar for each thing that we use and the client is only getting daily backups that they're doing security if

[48:07] they're doing uptime monitoring and if they're doing the what was the other one the backups like I'm paying only five dollars a month for that website so with the other ones the reason why I didn't go with them was it was more for the cost you know I saved more money with managed WP Anna does what I need also the client reports are like in there like it's really easy to generate client reports and it looks super professional when you give your client report at the end of the month every single month along with like their invoice receipt you know it looks good oh there's one

[48:50] thing - I just remembered right now I'm actually going through this with a client like I got a client like they're trying to sign up on our maintenance plan one thing that we do with our maintenance is I try to get them on our because I'm in Thailand and we can only use PayPal but I try to get them on recurring payments - I forgot to mention that on on the call part of the automation as well as collecting payments from clients I do not want to chase down 20 clients every single month I hate chasing people down for money even a PayPal takes a chunk of money

[49:23] out it to me it's worth it having everything automated and just automatically coming through through recurring payments and the way I do that is in my PayPal account I just go to trade about it I make a recurring payment through there and then you got an option to turn that into a link and I just send that link to a client and then they could go ahead and pay I got one client right now they're trying to get on a maintenance plan because they want us to do a bunch of little work but they're they're trying to like not use that and I'm really firm with like you

[49:55] gotta get on this because I don't want to chase you down every single month

[50:05] thank you Jeff any other questions

[50:25] sorry do you have any clients with converting from the previous version of for pipes and I or something else to five title soon it knew no one then we've already converted all of them I haven't had any issues are you having issues with the update with the latest one some yeah yeah that's what backups are for back it up will go back to a later when we got time on it you know just want to wrap it up with this you know like I mentioned the beginning like I did not do this when I first started building when I first started freelancing or when I started building

[51:25] our agency I really wish I did if there's anything I could change from the way that I started my journey as a web designer and developer was I wish I would have done this from the very beginning because by having by having this built up you have a solid Emma are you have that solid monthly revenue come in and you know I don't know about everyone else but I've had to take on jobs I did not want to take just because I needed to get paid I had to do jobs at with clients that were way like low-balling me and like trying to get paid way less

[52:02] but I still had to like give in and go for those jobs and it sucks it doesn't feel good you know working and being undervalued it doesn't feel good taking a job with a client that you know doesn't want to pay the full price by building up that mor if you get like 10 15 clients on this you could go months without getting a new project you could pick and choose the jobs that you want you can look for that target client that you want that value when that that client that's looking for value and that is gonna value the work you're going to do and of course pay for the work that

[52:39] that you know that you're doing I mean there's no reason why you cannot build a website on Elementor and charge minimum ten thousand dollars if you find the clients that are actually doing good business that website is gonna bring them in so much more money it's gonna help their business out and by having that in place and not having to worry every single month last year just share something personal with our business last year we did a complete rebrand we did we changed our name we rebranded we did I did a lot more stepping back and looking at my direction of running a company I step back and you know I was

[53:26] I've been so much working in the business as a developer as a designer as a project manager as the guy doing every single thing to step back and to work on my business instead of in it and taking that time away and like business got slow we didn't get any new leads for about I think it was about a good three months we got no new leads but because we had this going right here we were okay like we made it through every single month we made what we needed we here a run rate for our business to keep going and that's why this is so important right here because

[54:09] they could give you that chance that opportunity to step back look at how you're running your business and really work on the business side of it instead of trying to climb where client or client where client work you know I can't stress how valuable this is right here I got I got a buddy that told me about this like a couple years ago he told me about this and like now we talk and he's got like I don't know like 30 40 clients on his maintenance plan and he's just kicking back you know he's literally kicking back and like taking a job so he wants to do and just stress

[54:46] free and that that's the goal of this

[54:54] one location sure uh can you share shares about the proportion after monthly and annual payment some from your client okay so we do get the option for annual where it's like they they pay ten months for the year to get it done annually we've never had anyone sign up manually though but I've never really pushed it either but we do get that option like I'll send a I'll send a link you see I can send it in a Facebook group you guys could check it out what we do in our plan like we have our plan detailed out there yeah it's up to you though if you want to do that or not I

[55:46] personally like the monthly it's good I like just sitting at home and I just get little dings on PayPal while my phone it's a good feeling

[56:04] all right any other questions before we wrap this up all right cool so let's go ahead and wrap it up first I just want to thank everyone for being here participating and I hope this helps if you have any questions about it while you're building your plants you know throw them aside the Facebook group I mean you could always DM e I'm always available but by throwing aside the Facebook group in the BBE group it can help the rest of the group because there's a lot of people just starting their businesses and especially during these times for anyone that might have had like a regular career and did like

[56:45] web design and look at that as being a secondary career like this is a time right now where we might be wanting to change that over and making the web design as a full-time career and by you know the rest of the group and everyone like just like if you have questions or if you have something that's working for you as well by posting in the group is really going to help everyone else learn and that's the whole point of the BBE group it's for web designers and elements or enthusiasts to learn and grow their businesses together go with that I guess we could go ahead and end the call I'm

[57:25] so bad with goodbyes I think I say that on every call I just don't know how to do the byes well thank you so much to

[57:39] everyone

[57:47] you

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