Building Your WooCommerce Agency Stack

Judd: So my name’s Judd Dunagan and I’m founder of Bright Vessel. Been a WooCommerce expert since 2015. Also, a WordPress VIP partner and been working at WordPress since 2000, gosh 2007, I think it’s been that long. So pretty much a WordPress fanatic junkie. I love WordPress. It’s built a great business around it. Love the community of working with people so it’s been a wonderful experience for me. Throughout my journey I’ve built two other brands, Bright Hosting as well as Bright Plugins. We built one of the popular pre-order plugins as well as deposit plugins for WooCommerce. And I would say that primarily right now, we work with, well, both B2C as well as B2B clients, but more heavily in the last two years with B2B clients and have a great team. Love my team. I think they all might be watching right now in Slack making fun of me. That’s what they’re probably doing. And I’ve known Carlos for a good 20 years now, not related to WordPress originally, and now both of us are in the same kind of area. So I’ll let Carlos jump in here with his stuff.

Carlos: Thanks, Judd. That’s a great intro. I don’t know if I can top that. Next time I want to do the intro.

Judd: Yeah.

Carlos: All right, well everyone, I’m Carlos Caneja. I am CEO and founder of brightcode. We are also a web agency that specializes on e-commerce, specifically WooCommerce. I myself have been around the IT, specifically web industry, for near nearly 20 years. The first half of that was mostly in the hosting environment, so like the backend data center monkey kind of person. But 10 years ago I jumped to the forefront more into the design and development world. Been using WordPress for about 10, 12 years. Remember WooCommerce when it first started, it wasn’t much at the time, but we kept it under radar. And as the community grew and the extensibility was there, just like the WordPress platform, we adapted the platform and started to develop more and more with it. WooCommerce Agency program came along and I believe Judd and I basically joined around at the same time.

Judd: I’ll be honest, I saw you joined, then I joined.

Carlos: Is that right?

Judd: But I was like Shaw Shank Redemption, the guy Michael Testo, I think his name was way back when, he wouldn’t let me in. So I emailed him I think every other month for a year asking him, he’s like, “You don’t have any WooCommerce sites.” And then I finally got a couple and I was like, “Just come on, let me in.” And then he let me in. But you definitely had the glory days that when it first came out, I came in as a silver partner back then.

Carlos: Let me tell you about that. We went from building basic turnkey e-com websites and basic WordPress static, what I call a static site. A static site meaning there’s zero transactions. There’s no fancy workflow, there’s no API integration. It’s just a 10 pager that you put up in WordPress because it’s easy to update and it’s easy to SEL kind of thing. But we went from that to encountering these complex issues that people were bringing to us.

We went to school, meaning we paid to learn in some ways. At the very beginning and we’re talking six, seven years ago. And by any means, I don’t want to tell you, we came in and we knew what the heck we were doing. We kind of knew, but in terms of budgeting, that was always our hardest issue because of how we were positioned or performing before. So then we started to adopt project management software. We started to adopt sprints with clients. We tried to frame things properly and say, “Hey, your prerequisites are A, B, and C. If we go outside of that, we consider that out of scope so you will be billed more.” And that’s just how it all started.

Judd: Yeah, I think when I look back, you don’t really realize how far you’ve gone until you look at the past. Because I always say we’re a hot mess. But then you look behind, it’s like, “Oh, we were a hot mess.” But from a project management standpoint, we used Freecamp is what we fell on. I did Jira, I did Trello, but Freecamp… One of the reasons too is I got a lifetime deal. I’m one of those lifetime deal guys so if I find platforms that gives me a lot of time deals-

Carlos: I know you like that.

Judd: I love it. So that one worked because it was a Basecamp with a Smartsheets plus a Trello combined. And I didn’t use it until four years after I bought the lifetime deal. So I was in Jira, which clients hate Jira. I never could get a good client into…

Carlos: It’s so funny because obviously, let me see how I can preface this. So there’s a lot of project management software programs out there, and at the end of the day, I always say it’s Cola versus Pepsi. They all kind of do the same, just which one? It’s not different than any ERP or a CRM. Which one is slightly different that’s going to benefit you most in terms of functionality? So you have to go and assess all these different platforms, then you have to migrate to them and you have to make sure you make the right choice.

Judd: Oh, yeah. Because it takes forever to migrate.

Carlos: And the level of effort as you grow to migrate from one platform to another. We use teamwork right now, I can’t even imagine using something else. Just to give you an idea, we went from Basecamp, which was-

Judd: I liked Basecamp. It was a good one. I liked it for a bit.

Carlos: It was so simple. It was also very limited. Remember it didn’t do any reporting.

Judd: I needed a Gantt chart, it had to have a Gantt chart. And I need something that my clients could go into and see, have that transparency, but also not be overwhelmed by it. And Jira I felt was, I never could get one client to sign into Jira. It was just too complex. And I’m big on transparency, so each client has a Slack channel that we do retainers for, they get real time support so they’re always talking to us. So I have that communication as well as the support portal, which has Wiki docs for them, any code docs. I think Agency’s, and you probably can agree with me on this. Every site that I’ve gone behind, almost every, I would say 95% of them don’t have code notes, especially if there’s customization. The developers never ever outlined anything. So if you take over a project, especially if it’s a hot mess website with 50,000 plugins installed, customization all over the place, we try not to say, “Hey, you have to rebuild your site.” But in a lot of cases, if they want to expand and improve it, they have to rebuild it in that case.

Carlos: Well, yeah, they have to, but up upfront they don’t want to hear that.

Judd: So I think any developer agencies out there that really want to provide a good customer service, they need keep good records of everything from time to, we have a bug report, all that kind of stuff for every site. So that way, if they ever leave us, they know that they have that information, which they never do. They see how organized we are compared to the last agency, they’re like, “Oh, okay, these guys got their stuff together. We’re happy with them.” But even if they had to leave, they can take all that information with them.

Carlos: Well, why don’t you take us through your tool set. I mean, I’ll do the same thing. I like being transparent. Tell us, “Hey, this is why we use X, Y, Z. this is why we migrated, here’s the pros and cons,” that kind of thing.

Judd: Sure. So I’ll go with the management of things. We use Slack of course, because that’s our communication. Honestly-

Carlos: What did you use use before slack?

Judd: Slack? Oh, nothing. I’ll be honest, we used Google Chat, but no one used it. I guess it’s been about six years that I’ve been using Slack. But prior to that it was Basecamp where you could talk in Chat in threads, but I didn’t really have a communication software that was for clients. Usually it was weekly meetings.

Carlos: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Yeah.

Judd: And what Slack has done is to allow me to not have weekly meetings, to have the client continually talking to us so that maybe we have a meeting, if it’s a project, maybe one meeting per month if we have to. But more or less we’ve gotten through an entire project, not having a meeting with the customer just because they had a channel to speak with us in. So we can always do a huddle or jump on quickly to talk to them but we didn’t have to do weekly meetings.

Now I’m not saying that I hate meetings, but I hate meetings. There’s so many meetings and I have a coffee cup somewhere that says, “This could have been sent in an email.” I worked for several companies that basically it was meetings all day and half the time I didn’t even know why I should have been in the meeting, when I was working in big corporations. So I think being able to have productivity up where less communication, or more quality communication between client as well as the team. So Slack was that. Freecamp is our portal that we use. As far as billing, we built our own, just-

Carlos: Hold on, let me understand that. What you mean by portal? That’s like…

Judd: So Freecamp. That’s like the client portal. So that’s where we do our project management, keep all of our passwords-

Carlos: What’s being worked on and what’s active, what’s needed, what’s in QA, that kind of thing?

Judd: All of that. So each client has their own project basically and inside, there’s everything from start to finish that we’ve ever done for that client.

Carlos: The milestones are there. And Judd, that came after Jira for you, right?

Judd: Yes. That came after Jira.

Carlos: And why’d you get away from Jira, it was just too complex?

Judd: It was like Basecamp, Trello, Basecamp, Jira. And then it went to Freecamp. Or no, it went to projects.co was the one I used. Live Chat, Chat Live Agent, I think it was another one. Just a few failed attempts of getting my team to jump over to one. And then them, “What are we doing?” So Freecamp was where we landed. And I think it takes about two years, in my opinion, to really settle into a project management system.

Carlos: You really nailed it because at the end of the day, these SaaS applications, they’re built for the masses. They’re not built just for one specific company. So there’s a lot of customizations. There’s a lot of different ways to set up workflows and templates. And you have to grow with it and say, “Okay, we’re going to do it this way.” And you do it that way. And on your next revision you’re like, “Oh, if we do it this way, it’s actually optimal.” And whatever the case is in terms of setting up a project, I don’t know, login time, doing QA, QC, whatever the case is.

Judd: And I think highly important, which I’ve done tons of them, is doing standard like SOP, standard operating procedures. I bet I’ve outlined so many procedures. And it’s funny because a lot of my team is saying stuff on here, so they know how it’s, “Follow the operating procedures,” because sometimes they’ll deviate but it’s very important. And then I think your team will evolve. Once you have more managers inside your company, they’ll start to come up with ways to make that whole process better. So today if you’re starting to build a team, it’s very important to outline how the procedures in your head should work, but then allow your team to improve them. And I’m very happy to say that I’ve been able to pull back a bit on my own to start doing things that I’ve always wanted to do for the business. And that is doing more just acquisition, outreach, things that I like to do. And I used to love building websites and…

Carlos: I can’t build a website anymore.

Judd: I can do front end, back end, I’m behind on. My team takes care of that. But I think the front end side, I still love it and that’s something I try to get in every once in a while and play around. But when you’re managing a lot of people, it’s really hard to keep your own self up to date on all the new stuffs.

Carlos: And when you’re managing and you’re under stress, because there’s always fires, you lose that creative process. You can’t make good decisions from a creative standpoint, I feel. I don’t know why, I just feel like that part of my brain shuts down when I’m on that fight or flight mode because this project isn’t being finished or this client is having issues with X, Y, Z integration. You start to focus and stress about that and that shuts off that creative part of your brain.

Judd: So we took an influx of projects, which you’ve helped on a couple of them and what I found is… So here’s how I broke it down with one project, have a creative director, handles the creative side of things; have a technical director that’s going to handle the technical requirements and ensuring that the developers are doing that. And then I also have a project coordinator that will manage the timeline and the communication back to the customer. So every Friday, Isabella, her responsibility is to reach out to the customer, let her know with links all the deliverables that we’re working on, if they want more information, we can provide it. And one of the reasons is that the client, if you don’t talk to your client or send them updates weekly, you know what they’re going to ask for? A meeting.

Carlos: Oh, well, yes, that’s true.

Judd: You’re going to have to sit down and explain everything. Now you still might have to have meetings with the client, but I think every Friday, having that wrap-up of what we’ve done for the week really truly helps.

Carlos: No lie. It also keeps the engagement going and it also helps out the backlog. “Hey, we’re going to need X, Y, Z as well.” “Sounds great. Not a problem. We’ll put that in the backlog.”

Judd: Yeah, I just learned this recently too, just by better, because I’m very agile in our proposals. I don’t have some strict proposal that a normal client, they can’t understand it. It has to be pretty simple. And then also, that’s one reason I love WordPress and WooCommerce too, is because typically either we’ve already built what’s needed or there is a tool out there that’s already-

Carlos: I agree.

Judd: So what we try to do is not do customization. However, we found that if there’s an opportunity for customization, that’s when we might turn it into a plugin ourselves and then put that on Bright Plugins to sell it there. In that Scope Creek situation, it’s diligent to address it at the time they ask, because if you don’t say anything and all of a sudden you have a, two weeks down the road, you’re like, “Oh yeah, we’ll look into that. We’ll take care of that.” Or whatever you say, anything like that, next thing you know, “Oh, why do I have to pay for it?” And you have to explain it to them, it’s not in the proposal. And in my proposal system, it shows me every time a client looks at the proposal. So I know if they’re questioning requirements-

Carlos: Software, what do you use for proposals?

Judd: Oh, okay. Yeah, so Better Proposals.

Carlos: Because I mean, in terms of running an agency, what’s out there? This is the best time. Every tool you can think of agency-wise is out there. Do you remember Webcast One by chance? They were based out of Boca Raton. It was a guy by the name of Rick Waters who ran it. And he was literally one of the pioneers to start a web agency in the mid to late nineties, I would say. And at the time, I remember, because we used to do some of their hosting, so we were always in communication and they were next to us in the building we had our office in. But they had no software, the project management software, they had to build it themselves.

Judd: Oh yeah, there was a .net, God, this is like 2002. There was a .net free open source way back when… I tried to use it. It wasn’t called a portal. It was, what do you call it? What’s the word? Intranet, it was an intranet system.

Carlos: Or like a Wiki.

Judd: Yeah, something like that. But yeah, Basecamp is where I fell even after… I worked at vitacost.com, that was a company I worked at. They didn’t even have a project portal or project tracking. I’m the one that brought in one, which was Basecamp at the time. They wanted to do Trike.

Carlos: Trike I never heard of. Yeah, we used Wrike for many years. Let me give you my timeline on project management software. So obviously we started with nothing and we were like, “Hey, this is out of control,” because we’re getting more projects, our company’s growing, there’s more people involved in projects so we need something where we can communicate. Email just falls apart fast when it comes to managing a project. So we started with Basecamp, which is super easy to use, but Basecamp had a lot of features that were missing from an agency standpoint. There was no reporting, you couldn’t really time log. There was no, what is it, Gantt charts. There was none of that. It was timelines. So from there we moved over to Wrike. And Wrike was an awesome tool. Here was the problem with Wrike, for me.

Judd: You had to host it?

Carlos: No, mine wasn’t hosted. Mine was a SaaS.

Judd: Oh, we hosted ours. That’s where I think, yeah…

Carlos: I think at the time they offered both flavors. But I know we had the hosted version and I know it took us a while to get it configured because it was very vanilla out of the box. It wasn’t tailored for any specific industry. And I guess at the time, all the software was new so they hadn’t created any verticals where you can use Wrike to manage your lawn business or your web agency, whatever the case is. We used Wrike for a long time. It took us forever to mold it to us. But then Wrike called us up one time and they’re like, “Hey, we’re changing our pricing structure. It used to be a dollar per seat per month, it’s going to be $30 per seat per month.” And we’re like, “Well why are you doing this?” They’re like, “Oh, well we want to focus on the enterprise.”

Judd: Yeah. And that’s one of the reasons I think we purchased the, because you could buy it back then, the source code. But I felt the problem was is getting everybody on board and liking something. And then when I was at Vitacost, they didn’t like it that much. So I just went to Basecamp because it was easier. Plus the approval process, I’m a big guy, that’s where you say you asked for forgiveness versus permission. So when I worked for corporations, that was me. I just went and did things. And that was one of them. I’d have to get IT’s permission to do any kind of install and with Basecamp, it was just cloud. So David Zucker at the time, he was the same thing, “Ask for permission.” That was my boss, awesome guy. He’s like, “Go ahead and get that product.” So that’s how we moved fast.

And funny with that company, Vitacost, when I was there 2012, they were on .NET 1 still.

Carlos: Wow.

Judd: So it was .NET 9’s out. But they customized that website so much that it was still .NET 1. And this guy Boris, he was the only guy that knew how it works. So he was like this, “No one’s going to know what I do here because I’ll never be let go.” He’s probably still there to this day, which is kind of funny. But yeah, I think when you’re in a big company, especially if you have multiple departments, getting everybody to be okay with something because not only did I have to get marketing on board and the creative department on board, I had to get the IT department to work within the same system too. We did a great job. And I think at the time it was all creative material that we were pumping out for all these different categories. I think we did 336 pieces a month and I had to increase it to like 1200, so 1200 banners and all sorts of stuff. I will give Basecamp credit, it was one of those ones I was able to get approved. Everybody got on board and we were able to get everyone to use that and that’s how we increased the production of creative stuff. So I do like Basecamp,

Carlos: Is basecamphq.com still around?

Judd: I don’t know, I think they changed it from to Basecamp though. I think they got rid of the HQ if I recall. I don’t know. I have to look it up. CRM-wise, I use Salesflare. That’s another app Sumo deal. That’s a great little CRM, it’s not complicated because… HubSpot was one that I liked, but it is extremely expensive if you want to grow in it. You could spend up to $30K a month as a big enterprise company, which is just too much money, in my opinion. You could build a CRM in a month for $30K.

Carlos: Yeah, I understand.

Judd: So Salesflare is one that I use for a CRM I liked a lot. I think trying to find too, stuff that ties into a lot of different systems because that’s where we wanted to go with things. I did use for our subscriptions, WooCommerce subscriptions, but found that with the hosting side and the hosting management side, I really had to build my own platform for that. So if someone signs up, they have in their account all their tickets, everything’s in one place, which I showed you the beginning of that, we’re still working on it.

Carlos: A centralized dashboard essentially.

Judd: And then Mihi saying, yeah, Mihi is my, he’s the guy that takes care of all of our servers so they don’t blow up. He’s awesome. He said, “Think about sales Salesforce pricing.” So Salesforce is good too. I worked in Liberty Power with Salesforce way back. I don’t know if you guys… What do you guys use for a CRM?

Carlos: You know what? It’s funny you mentioned that. We don’t really have a CRM platform. We used a lot of the Fresh line of software. So like FreshBooks, Fresh CRM. When we start these outbound campaigns, we tend to use Freshsales. Really what we do now is, a lot of our CRM, a lot of these automated tasks, they get done through our ticketing system, Freshdesk. If a sales lead comes in and I reach out to them or somebody reaches out to them, you can do it a specific way and it’ll just drip out CRM.

Judd: Yeah, I used to use Active Campaign for that. So if they fill out, select a certain thing, it then filters and sends them three different types of messages and stuff. Does Freshdesks do that now?

Carlos: You can if you want. Yeah. Judd, here’s the pro and con with it. It isn’t designed for that. Freshdesk at the end of the day is our support, so it isn’t designed for that. But what was happening for a while, Judd, as we grew as a company, is that everything we had a need for, we adopted some type of software and before you knew it, we had all these different softwares we were using and different places. We were using Teamwork and FreshBooks.

Judd: Yeah, I know you mentioned FreshBooks. I went to QuickBooks thinking that that would be better for my company. It was such a journey to, or pain in the butt to just migrate your account. So now I’m stuck there and I want to be back at FreshBooks, but just to get back there with all the accounting and everything, it’s a bear. So that’s another reason why I built our own system.

Carlos: It’s like I was saying with the project management software that the more you grow, the more you’re locked into these cloud softwares. It’s the necessary evil. It’s a low startup cost. You get great functionality, you don’t have to manage anything, it’s all in the cloud. But as you grow and you want to move it somewhere, or you want to customize something that’s where you become limited.

Judd: Yeah, because my bookkeeper was in QuickBooks, so I just wanted to have better data intelligence just about all what’s happening, and just never really got there with that. So yeah, that’s why we built our own tools so that I can figure all that stuff out. And that’s the thing too, is when you look at, we have a lot of management accounts where we manage hosting and all that kind of stuff. And when we get to a point, you have to start really seeing what is making you money and what’s not making you money. Because there’s some clients that you don’t make money on at all, and if anything, they cost you and so you have to make that determination. I’m at that point, just trying to make sure that everything we have is profitable because team group, and one thing I love about Slack and having channels for clients in Slack is that if there’s an issue, we usually know before them, but if anything, they’re reaching out to us in Slack and saying, “Hey, we’re having an issue,” and we’re on it immediately versus a ticket.

Carlos: That’s right. There is a problem with that, I feel like, scalability.

Judd: That’s true. If you had 4,000 clients, that would be kind of rough. We have hundreds, not 4,000 but-

Carlos: Another issue I see with that is who’s on watch?

Judd: Everyone is.

Carlos: What if it becomes like, “Oh, I thought you were handling it.” “Oh, no, no. I thought he was handling it, or she was.”

Judd: I think we’ve done a very good job of ensuring within I would say hours that that’s the longest something might not get replied. But we went fishing the other day and I’m on my phone on Slack, so I’m checking all the time. As a business owner, you’re always checking. You’re always checking.

Carlos: I love that. I love the ability to do that. I really do. Again, these tools were not there 10, 15 years ago. They’re there today and you can literally walk away and still run your business, which is great. You can be on vacation and still be available.

Judd: Yeah. One reason I like Slack, I think that it allows, as a person that’s running a business to be able to run it wherever they’re at. I bounce around all over and my team’s always, but having Slack, everybody knows if they see something up. I’d say if it’s more than 15 minutes, someone needs to reply. That’s our window of opportunity to ensure that we get back to customers. And the other thing too is, we have a lot of management plans, but I would say only 10% or even 5% of them use on a monthly basis their Slack channel. I have some that the Slack channel gets archived because they never reached out. I mean, we’ve done a great job updating the website every month, but we don’t hear from them.

Carlos: It’s so funny, when I train new project managers, I talk about customer profiling. They’re like, “Look, you have to know more about your customer.” Some customers don’t like emails, they like phone calls or vice versa, or they may like Slack.

Judd: Some just like emails though. It drives me nuts because they don’t want to get on anything. They pay by check. It’s like, “We don’t do checks.” Yeah, I do an ACH transfer or wire transfer. “We’ll just sent you a check.” I’m like, “No, you got to figure that out.”

Carlos: Oh, you don’t allow them to send you checks?

Judd: I don’t. I have one client that’s an older client, actually it’s my law firm. Blalock Walters in Florida, one of the oldest law firms, they still do check. Some clients just do check. I think a lot of law firms do checks. I don’t know why they love checks. Every law firm I work with, one, they pay by check for sure. I don’t know why.

Carlos: I tell you what, I have this client who’s one of our biggest customers, they do timeshare exchanges. They’re the second timeshare exchange in the country. Their site runs on WordPress, their booking engine runs on .NET. We manage both. It’s tied in with an AS/400. It’s a super complex architecture as it should be, it does a lot of stuff. It’s checking for points, it’s checking for availability on this account so you can do exchange on a different location for a different time of the year. But here’s the deal. They also manage all these properties and all these properties have unique website and we do maintenance on all of them. So we bill them monthly for that.

Judd: That’s a good client. That’s a big fish.

Carlos: They’re a great client. I would go work for them full time, if I was ever in a situation where I had to. But what I’m saying is we’re talking about checks. What they do is they send me a handful of checks every month. It’s like-

Judd: Oh, my God. I would hate that.

Carlos: We’ve got this huge stash. And when I get them at the office, I’m probably like, “Well, look at this guy. He’s raking in the money,” but they’re like $100 checks or $75 checks.

Judd: Oh, my Lord. I would go… And so I remember back in early 2000s that’s all there was, was checks. Remember back in the day and I’d have to go up to the bank and do all the deposits. It was such a pain. It’s worth the 2.9% or 2.7% in my opinion.

Carlos: And I’ve lost checks.

Judd: Yeah, I’ve had that happen. That’s the worst too, because it takes forever for them to give you another one.

Carlos: Yeah. So where can people find you if they want to find out more about your company and services?

Judd: Sure. Brightvessel.com. That is vessel with a V, V as in Victor and brightplugins.com as well as brighthosting.io.

Carlos: Nice. Well I only have one website, which is brightcode.io. That’s B-R-I-T-E-C-O-D-E.io. So if you guys want to find out more about our services and what we offer, you can check us out on there. And if you have any questions on any of this stuff, reach out.

Judd: Awesome.