How to Balance Managing Hundreds of Web Sites and Avoiding Burnout

Marcus Burnett:
Welcome to another episode of WP Agency Tracks here on Do the Woo. Today we’re diving into what it takes to manage hundreds of websites as a solo agency owner. We have a special guest with us that we’ll get to in just a moment. My name is Marcus Burnett. I work at Bluehost, and with me, as always is my wonderful co host, Cami McNamara. How are you today, Cami?

Cami McNamara:
I’m doing great. It’s not raining in Seattle. And for those who don’t know who I am, I’m Cami McNamara. I own WebCami LLC, also a solo agency of one. And I also author a newsletter called Web Designer Habits. So that’s all about me.

Marcus Burnett:
We’re at the end of quarter one of this year already. How has your quarter gone so far?

Cami McNamara:
It’s actually been really a good quarter. I just added three new clients last week and I don’t know, I’m busy. It kind of started out a little bit slow, but I’ll say that it gained momentum as we hit the end of February and early March.

Marcus Burnett:
Yeah, I think busy is the name of the game. I’ve had some, some changes around my position at Bluehost and acquired a team of folks and so there’s been a lot of onboarding and just a lot of change of schedules. My calendar looks like a unicorn puked on it. Do unicorns puke rainbows too? I think, anyways, it is just so many different colors and all over the calendar. So right there’s a massive juggling act happening, but it’s all good. So we’re going to get through it. Everyone’s life is super busy. That is just the name of the game. Who do we have with us today, Kami?

Cami McNamara:
Well, I’m super excited to introduce my very good friend Philip Levine of South Florida Web Advisors. Philip is my hero for managing websites because he manages hundreds of websites as a solopreneur and I just feel like he’s going to share so many good nuggets of wisdom with us for anyone who is just starting out and maybe they are only managing a couple of websites, but they have a goal of really increasing that. So I’m really looking forward to hearing what Philip has to say today.

Marcus Burnett:
Pressure, Philip.

Cami McNamara:
Yeah, no pressure. But Philip, give us your elevator pitch. Tell us about you, your business and your kind of your origin story.

Philip Levine:
Sure. I’m Bill Levine. I’m the president and owner of South Florida WebAdvisors. I’ve been doing website design and development since 1997. This is all that I’ve been doing. I really have a passion for this. My background is in management information systems. So it allows me to know a little bit of everything. Marketing, a little bit of business, a little bit of finance, everything, all between computer science, everything. Today I focus specifically on WordPress websites. While I can do HTML and other sorts of websites, I’ve found from a scalability perspective, just to focus on one platform has really allowed me to grow the business, especially as a single person business. And I just have fun doing this. I get up every morning, it doesn’t feel like work. I have about 150 direct clients and then I have about a half dozen agencies that I am their tier two support for. And that makes up about another, oh, four to 500 additional websites beyond my direct ones.

Cami McNamara:
Wow. Yeah, that’s impressive. So Philip, when did you transition from like building static HTML Websites to WordPress? When did WordPress come into the mix for you?

Philip Levine:
So prior to using WordPress, there was a software company that I was actually working for doing their support that they had a CMS product. But even there it was really niche and I found that in the early 2000 and tens, probably around then I was switching from that just back to doing static HTML sites, maybe a little bit of PHP includes, but I was doing mostly brochure sites. I didn’t necessarily need a full CMS platform. And so I think it was around 2011, 2012 that I really started going very deep with WordPress. More so because I didn’t want to have to deal with front page. I didn’t want to have to deal with. Oh, if I’m on the road, then I got to first log into a server and find the HTML files to make an update. I want a platform that I could just log in. So I was using it really as an alternative to a client side editor. I was just using it as a web editor, but still pretty much doing basic brochureware sites. And that’s how I got started with WordPress and taking those concepts and applying it to the WordPress platform.

Cami McNamara:
Wow. I’m blown away at like 500 websites. I’m still thinking about that. Philip. I also used front page in the old days, which really brings back memories of frustrations.

Philip Levine:
Exactly. And one of the things I will say though is from a conceptual standpoint of when I was doing sites, I was doing things with frames where you’d have a frame for the navigation, a frame for the header. And today we have header P footer, php. And while you don’t have frames, conceptually, you still have individual pages for those areas. And even if you’re using a page builder, whether it be I like Elementor Kami, I know you like Bieber builder, but regardless of which builder you’re using, it’s still conceptually, those foundations of how you build a website still apply. And Cami, I love the fact in your Facebook group when you posted last week about how if you know how to design in from 2005, that you can build a great website in 2025. And it really talked about the fact that when all the great new server side technology from a search perspective, from an optimization perspective, the AI and the engines can’t actually find it, they can’t read it because of how the pages are generated, whereas if you have the concepts of just doing includes and so forth, they can read that. So I just thought it was, you know, the more that we change, the more we come back to our roots of coding.

Cami McNamara:
Yeah, that kiss, keep it simple. You know the rest.

Philip Levine:
Yep.

Marcus Burnett:
Yeah. It seems like at some point, you know, you were basically building your own WordPress type CMS and then WordPress came along and was like, here’s what you’ve been doing, but it’s created to kind of match that for you and some additional bells and whistles when it comes to editing and extending and adding plugins and that kind of thing. So.

Philip Levine:
Exactly, exactly. And I will just say when I was looking and saying, well, wait, what is the right platform? I looked at Joomla. I looked at Drupal because. Because again, they were all open source, they were all out there. And I took one look at the admin side of it. I didn’t even necessarily look at all the deep functionality. And I said, from an admin perspective, I said, these may be just as powerful, but if I have to give my client access, my client knowing who my clients were, I said, they’re not going to be able to figure this out. They know how to do basic email, they know how to do some basic word processing. And just the logic, I said, as a developer, I got it. I understood It I don’t want to say that their products are right for a certain audience, but for the sort of clients that I work with, I just said this isn’t the right fit. And that’s why I said WordPress really can solve that.

Marcus Burnett:
Yeah, that makes sense. So you switch from static HTML sites to WordPress sites, you’re kind of picking things up a little bit. I want to talk about how you got to volume. Do you feel like that number gradually crept up or did you just wake up one morning and you’re like, oh my gosh, I have a couple hundred sites here. I’ve got to figure out what to do with that. Or was it just kind of a gradual process over. Over the years?

Philip Levine:
It really was a gradual process in terms of for my direct clients, the way that I grew that was through networking groups, whether they were prior to Covid and prior to Zoom and that they were actually all in person and also through the Chamber of commerce, I’d say probably 90% or more of that 150 are all businesses that are within a 20 mile radius of my home. So a lot of these folks are folks that I see when I go food shopping or I go to the mall, I’ll see them out and about. And that is really my bread and butter. That is, you know, the majority of my clients that you know and it’s worth now I don’t do any advertising anymore. I’m still many of the chambers that I’m involved with I’ve done through barters because they needed help and so I’d have a membership that way. But it’s like I just get referrals and that’s how I grew it in terms of the agencies I have been given support. It’s people who I’ve networked with where they’re like hey, they need a server admin, they need a tech person, they’re fine with selling. And that was just sort of a relationship of from the prior company that I was with and just kept those relationships over the years and expanded upon and that’s how I built out that side of the business as well.

Marcus Burnett:
Kami, you’ve mentioned before too. I think the Chamber of Commerce being a great source for finding new clients, especially local in person type things, seems to be starting to be a pattern I’m noticing for getting some new work.

Cami McNamara:
Yeah, I am a big believer in person local networking and I’ve been a member of my local chamber and a business networking group called BNI for 15 plus years and for me it’s still the main source of all of my incoming referrals.

Marcus Burnett:
Yeah, I think the one, I don’t know, hesitation concern that I would have is that, you know, there’s not enough work there. And here we are talking about someone who 90% of their work is from the Chamber of Commerce and they’re managing hundreds of sites. So yes, I mean, obviously there’s enough work there, right Phil?

Philip Levine:
Oh, absolutely. And where I found that, and this is true with the networking groups and Kami, I’m sure you can talk about this in DNI is that you find a. What’s typically called a power group. So for example, I have probably four or five IT folks that are in the area that I work with because I don’t, I want to stay away from the hardware side, but I don’t want to deal with the IT side of it. And it’s like last week, one of the folks that I know that does it, he had a long term customer that their website had gotten taken down because they were getting it through a product professional services agency and their relationship, they were changing and that got taken down. He’s like, look, I’m not doing websites. This person needs help. Can I connect them? I’m like, hey, that’s great, right?

Cami McNamara:
Yeah. I also have a power team. You know, it’s a marketing manager, graphic designer, copywriters. It runs the gamut of people who would be helping somebody prep for getting a new website. Those are the people I tend to work with the most.

Marcus Burnett:
Yeah. So managing all of that by yourself sounds like a lot of work. I imagine you have some tools and processes in place. Can you maybe talk about some of the systems or some of the pieces of software or whatever you might be using to, you know, help do that work? Or maybe there’s some, maybe you have some automations to help do some of that work.

Philip Levine:
Yeah, I have a lot of automation. And it’s interesting. In the WorldPress ecosystem, I would say that there’s probably four or five different management tools for doing plugins, backups, et cetera. And since 2012 I have probably used each and every one of them. At one point I started out with Infinite WP, then I went to WP Remote again. This is before many of these different companies got acquired. In around 2017, I guess it was. I got introduced to main WP and I actually met Dennis and the team from the area when they were at Word Camp Orlando. So I got to meet them because they’re based out of the Central Florida area. And then actually I ended up switching over to manage WP and this was right around the time that GoDaddy had acquired them because again I was doing a lot of things with GoDaddy at the time and they had a lot of nice integrations with their platform and for the most part, knock on wood, it’s been working well. However, in the last year, various reasons, I decided to go back to MainWP, which is a self hosted platform and I’m just about finished switching to the other platform. But that is something that I really try, you know, I don’t like switching platforms and I try to avoid that. But that is something that I’ve learned over the years is that every six months or so I go out and I evaluate what else is out there, whether it be a management platform, whether it be hosting, whether it be a forms plugin. I look to see what else is out there because so much of what we do is evolving so quickly. I want to make sure that I’m using the best of whatever is out there. So I’m always looking. But either main WP or ManageWP, their tools do the backups to do the plugin updates. That is what allows me to scale. That being said, I do not, with the exception of maybe three plugins, do not have anything set to automated. I go in on a daily basis and click the updates because it’s too easy for things to break and this way I actually know what things have been updated because otherwise it’s like oh, that was updated two weeks ago. I didn’t even realize that. And I like reading the release notes to see what has been changed.

Marcus Burnett:
So you say you like to read the release notes. Do you find yourself picking a plugin and then saying, you know, I’m going to update all hundred sites that have this plugin and then move on to the next plugin. Or do you go kind of site by site and say based on the.

Philip Levine:
Plugin side of it? So I usually will sort by the ones that have the largest number of sites installed and do that one first and move it to down to the one that’s just like on one or two sites.

Cami McNamara:
That’s exactly what I do too, Philip. I move plugin by plugin and I’m updating my own website first and making sure everything goes okay and then leaving the troubled websites till the end. The ones I know need a little extra but you know, it’s still an automation because we’re in there and we’re seeing all of them at once versus the old school logging in one at a time. Which I remember as a nightmare.

Philip Levine:
Exactly. Exactly. And one of the things also is that I’ve really tried to standardize on about a dozen or so plugins that I, in essence, have on every one of my sites. Now. At one point, I looked and did an audit that said, show me all the plugins across all the sites. And I think I had something like 1700 different unique plugins, because just across that many sites, you have a lot of things, whether it be a chatbot or an integration with something. And that’s where, then again, I try to clean things up. One of the things that I think is a little bit unique about me, and especially since I work with a couple agencies, is I have some sites that I’ve inherited where I didn’t necessarily set up the plugins by default. I’m not the one who built out the site, but I’ve taken it over. Now when I do that, I will say, there are times where I’ll say, no, I’m throwing out your forms plugin. I want my forms plugin, but I will work with what’s there. I know that there’s a lot of agencies who say, no. If we’re taking on your site, you have. We have to rebuild it to our standard. And my feeling is, look, if I got to take over a site, I’ll start with what they have, and then I can build it in time. That’s just the way that I decide to do my business model. But again, that can be depending on what people are looking to do. That can be a great way. I know one of the people that’s in Cami’s group with me on Facebook, he just will do sort of like breaking fix. He doesn’t build new sites. He just takes over things. So he knows a lot of different plugins. And having that allows you to be able to troubleshoot different things in different ways.

Cami McNamara:
Yeah, David does do that. He’s local here, and he and I are referral partners for each other. It works out great to have somebody that really focuses on doing a fix can end up being an enormous job. So. So tell us about your care plan offering, Philip. I’m curious how you position that. And do you have a different version for the agencies that you’re doing work for versus. I mean, is it a wholesale versus retail situation? Tell me about that.

Philip Levine:
Sure. So for my direct clients, I, in essence, just have a turnkey offering. It’s including the hosting, it includes the site updates and backups. It’s just a turnkey offering, flat monthly fee that I Bill them quarterly in advance. And this way they don’t even have to think about it. It just runs and works and they’re good to go. For the agencies, it’s really more rather than doing a model saying, oh well, it’s going to be X dollars per site. It’s really about the relationship. Like said, okay, well what are you looking for? How many sites are you going to have? And again, I come up with a flat monthly fee. Now I’ve had people over the years say, wait, a flat monthly fee? How can you manage that many sites and have a flat monthly fee? And I’ve said, look, I’ve gone through and I’ve analyzed a site and one client, let’s say they’ll contact me in January and then maybe again in August and then in October. And if I look at the amount of work that I’ve done for them over the course of those three months, and if I build them at minimum an hour each time, more likely to two hours depending on what they had, I said, at my hourly rate, you’re going to have the same amount of cost as if I was like, if I broke out the hosting from what I call the professional services side of it. And so they’re like, oh, okay. And then I get very little pushback on that. Now I will say I have raised my prices a few times over the last 10 years. That’s the other way that I’ve been able to grow the business is just not necessarily having to take on more clients, just increase prices. And I’ve tried to increase old clients as well. So I have a client that’s been with me for 10 years. I said, look, you’ve been with me for 10 years. I do have to raise your price $5 a month. And more often than not, they’re fine with that. One of the things that I’ve learned in business over the years is that if somebody pushes back over a $5 a month increase, they were going to leave me at some point anyway. It was just that this is what made that happen. And it’s like, okay, fine, so it’s one less low end client that I have and I bring in that next one and it more than makes up for it.

Cami McNamara:
Right?

Marcus Burnett:
Yeah. I think people ask you how you can charge just a flat fee. I alternatively would say, how could you manage at that scale having, you know, all variable fees, all sorts of different numbers month to month? I mean, you would spend at least 50%, if not more of your time just managing your billing, invoicing. You don’t have time for that when you’re doing all of this maintenance work by yourself.

Philip Levine:
Exactly right.

Cami McNamara:
So Philip, my nightmare, when I think about the scale that you’re working on, is having a whole bunch of incoming requests. Or let’s say you have a couple of websites that get hacked. Basically the S hits the fan all at the same time. What are you doing to handle that? Do you have a ticketing system? Do you just work 24? 7? Tell me how you handle those incoming requests from all of those clients.

Philip Levine:
Sure. So first off, between the backup solutions that I have and again I I have N plus one redundancy on my backup. So I don’t just rely on one backup system, I have multiple backup systems. Because God forbid a backup system fails, I want to make sure I have a secondary one. And while I may not keep 30 days on every single one, that’s one way that I address that. So then I have security plugins like WordPress and security. So that way again, if something should get compromised, I have some tools in place and I will say the attitude is it’s not if your site gets compromised, it’s when it’s getting compromised. And I have had sites get compromised in some instances. What I end up doing is I delete the whole site and just restore it from backup and get it cleaned up. Now to your question of well, how do I manage as things are coming in? I use my inbox as my ticket system. I’ve tried over the years to switch to a ticket system but I find I end up spending more time trying to manage because I still have emails coming in, whether it be sales or others. I still have other emails coming in and having to switch back and forth between two different systems. It just, it was more time and effort than just using my inbox. And that’s the way that I manage it. As I said a few minutes ago, most of my clients, I hear from them once a in a periodic time. So it’s always a moving window of what clients I’m hearing from and it’s just as things come in, I take care of it. I block kind for the different build out and projects. But I found over the years, as I said most of this, having a lot of brochureware sites, it’s, that’s the other thing that allows me to manage it. And I intentionally have sort of shied away from. I have a few e commerce sites, but I really have shied away from them. I have a couple agency sites, but I know my limit in terms of how many of those I take on. And at this point in business I’ve really been able to say pick and choose what sites I want to take on. For somebody who might just be starting out. When you’re really hungry and you got to say, look, you take everything. Yeah, there were times where every site that walked in the door I would probably take it. But even there I said what’s best for the client. There’s been sites, I’ve said, you know, a DIY platform, a Wix, a Weebly, a GoDaddy site builder makes more sense. And I’ve said, you know, come back to me when you’re ready. And that’s how I’ve also been able to manage that. So that way again, God, something really does happen and I’ve had a data center go down on me. I just work with the clients and again I communicate to them and that’s how I’m able to deal with it.

Cami McNamara:
I feel like we’re twins. Philip, every time you say something it’s like I use my inbox for my tasks too. But do you outsource anything at all? Like it’s just you. I mean this is so inspiring for those of us who want to increase the number of websites that we manage.

Philip Levine:
You know, I’ll get phone calls usually like once or twice a week of an, you know, a blind agency calling out. And again, I’m very certain it’s offshore. But they’re like, oh, don’t you want to outsource your work? We can do it at 25 an hour. I’m like, no. They said quite frankly, trying to outsource at this stage would actually create more work because I had to put together the processes for the people I’m outsourcing to. If you’re going to say look, I need help with this, it’s one of those things. I’d say it’s almost better if you plan that up front and find somebody outsourced to up front because that way you build that into your procedures. It’s like you mentioned before, Billing and accounting. I use QuickBooks online. I have memorized transactions for everything so that way it runs automatically quarterly. The only time I really need to get involved with it is when I onboard a new client and then once a week when I’m taking care of my aging or collections that I go in to send reminders. Generally speaking, I don’t have to really touch the accounting side of it cause it’s all automated.

Cami McNamara:
Oh, that’s great. That’s great. So if you were looking back Philip, and thinking about lessons that you’ve learned that you could share with somebody who’s just learning to do this, what would you do differently? What positioning would you do to make this be attainable for anyone who’s thinking that they Want to manage 500 plus websites?

Philip Levine:
Couple things. One is processes and templates. I have a template for my proposals. The other thing is don’t be afraid to try things. Not everything is going to work. I at one point was trying to get business through fiber when I was just starting out the business in 2014, 2015 and I put up a thing, a gig on Fiverr. You know, just A website review, 5 bucks I’ll review your website. And I think I sold two of those. So don’t be afraid to try things, but learn from what you’ve tried. There are people out there who do nothing but fixing of websites that get hacked. For some people, that’s what they love. And find something that fits your passion. I know there are folks that Cami that you and I work with, Marcus, I think you’ve seen some of the posts that there are folks who just like working with education sites because that’s what their passion is. There are folks that just love working with the Divi builder because that’s their passion. So find what you really get excited about and that’s what helps. And because that way it doesn’t feel like work.

Cami McNamara:
Yeah. And I know Philip, because we’re friends, that you really have a great balance in your life. You’re a family man, you’re a Disney all the time doing things with your family. How do you avoid burnout with this level of clients under your wing?

Philip Levine:
That is one thing that I will admit I am the worst at. And my wife and I joke about it because she’s a workaholic just as much as I am. That really someone is saying, okay look, it’s 6:00 at night, I’m going to go off the computer or we’re going up to Disney for the weekend. Yeah, I got my phone but Guess what? There isn’t anything. None of my sites are that mission critical. Unless it’s like a major, oh my God, this is completely down. If there’s a, you know, a photo to swap out, it can wait till Monday. And that’s really where I really said, look, there are times where I just take time for myself. Saturday mornings I’m on the golf course and I have my phone with me. And again, if there’s something really like urgent fire drill that I got to address, yeah, I’ll take care of it and then get off the computer again. But that’s how I had that balance. Like just say, look, there are times where I need to really lock down and focus on things. And then there are times where it’s like, look, no, I’m stepping away, I’m done for the night. Thank you, bye.

Marcus Burnett:
Yeah, I think that’s something that’s like become a bit more of a realization lately. As you know, especially post Covid, we’re all constantly sitting in front of these screens. A lot of our in person meetings have become zoom meetings and we’re, you know, even more screen time and all of that. And for the most part, none of the stuff that, well, any of the three of us are working on is saving lives or you know, that mission critical like you said, and can wait. It can wait a few minutes, it can wait a day. You know, none of the stuff that we’re doing is going is a life or death situation for the most part. I mean, none of it’s life or death. But you know, there are the instances where like a commerce store goes down and that needs to go up. Means it needs to be back. All sites need to come back up quickly. But you know, they’re losing money in a commerce store for every minute that the site is down. And those things are more critical than others. But again, at the end of the day, nobody’s life or is on the line for any of this stuff.

Philip Levine:
Exactly.

Marcus Burnett:
And everyone can breathe.

Philip Levine:
Exactly. And most of my clients, like even the associations, yes, they might have a meeting that they have registration for, but it’s not a, it’s the people coming to it are members of the association. There isn’t a registration fee or anything. It’s just people signing up. So again, it’s not like if it’s that mission critical and anything that I have that is time sensitive, I make sure I put that on my calendar. I have a golf league that I manage, they have a monthly tournament and that we open on a specific day. So that one yes, that I will block on my calendar to know when the registration is opening and that way I know that when it’s opening I’m good to go at that point. But that’s where I monitor it. And this is actually a great example of this particular golf association. I moved their site a few different times. I had them on AWS and now right now I have them on Liquid Web which has been great. But what we had happen was they have about 150 members again once a month they have everybody come on the site pretty much all at the same time. And what was happening was because they were all logging in because it’s password protected and filling out a form, I was maxing out my PHP processors on the server. Memory was fine, disk space was fine, but the server was between CPU and PHP processing was coming to an absolute crawl where you know, and to the point I couldn’t even reboot the server because it was that intensive. And so I ended up switching over to Liquid Web finally because Liquid Web, in case you weren’t aware, Liquid Web on their managed WordPress platform called Nexus on their larger plans, how about 50 php workers per site with burst capacity up to 60 as soon as I. And from a non technical perspective people like well what does that mean? And it just has to deal with the queries to the database and how pages are served by the server. And what I found was that now when we go live with the registration I’m getting around 30 to 40 php workers processing. So that’s 150 people coming onto the website using 30 to 40 php processes. And in the off time, in between things I’m using on a daily basis, maybe between two to five at most at any given time. So it really gives me that burst capability and I don’t have to be technical, they take care of the server. So that’s one of the things. Anytime I’m dealing with a hosting company these days, that’s one of the things I ask them is well, what sort of, you know, PHP processing? I don’t. Memory is important. Cpu. Yeah, but what PHP processing am I getting? And they’re like oh, we need to check on that for you. And I can tell you it has been a lifesaver for some of my sites now that I, and I have a nice graph that I can look at to see what it’s doing and it just, it makes me able to scale again for some of these sites that get a little bit more traffic.

Marcus Burnett:
Yeah, that goes back to that tooling and checking in, you know every six to 12 months, seeing what else is out there. Is there a new player that has, you know, new offering that would match up or have somebody, you know, added something or streamlined something over the course of the year that now makes that a better solution for you? I mean that sounds so ultra important when you’re dealing with it all on your own, is to have the right tooling in place for every little bit of the process. If it has the right tool or the wrong tool is going to make a difference in how manageable any of that is at that scale for you as a solopreneur.

Philip Levine:
Exactly, exactly. And one of the things to that point that I would say is very important to me is the support that I get from the providers that I’m using, whether it be hosting, domain support, plugins support is one of those things that’s very important because when I’m reaching out, it’s not usually on a, oh, how do I insert a graphic? It is, it’s usually a bigger issue. And so by knowing that I have support teams behind me that can, you know, be responsive, that is, that builds my confidence in using a product. And it’s like to do a plug here really quick. Gravity forms and GravityKit, I get great support from them. And even to the point I had a zoom call last week with Zach, the president of GravityKit about some of the things that they’re doing with some of their elementor add ons and whatnot. And he was asking for my feedback of how I use it. And I love giving feedback to these developers because I look at it from both my perspective as an agency owner and, and also of the one off website owner who only is doing one or two things and what are both of those needs. So I’m giving them both perspectives and every agency, any developers that I’ve spoken to have always said, oh wow, thank you. This is so helpful because they’re seeing from both sides of their audience of who’s using their products.

Marcus Burnett:
Yeah, you’re coming up on 30 or so years of doing this thing in the web space. Besides the like HTML static websites to CMS type changes, what are, what’s kind of like the biggest change or a couple of the biggest changes that you’ve seen in the industry since you started.

Philip Levine:
Well, I would say it’s sort of been a pendulum that has gone from hiring a webmaster to doing it all on your own and not hiring any outside firm to then being somewhere in the middle where that you want to hire somebody but still want to have access and it sort of has swung back and forth a few times. And I really think that we’ve come back into the middle where people want to hire an agency because they don’t want to have to deal with it, but at the same time they want to know that they have access. So if they want to go in and tweak something, make an update to a page or something, that they do have that access. And so we’re in that middle frame. But that’s sort of what I’ve seen cyclical over the years of that change of, you know, I talk to people who are like, oh, I don’t want access. Just take care of this for me. And then it swings back the other way. No, I don’t want you to do it. I want to do everything on me.

Marcus Burnett:
Own because we’re legally obligated to talk about AI at some point during every episode. Do you feel like the pendulum is swinging even further back towards the kind of do it yourself mentality with people having access to tools and things that they maybe didn’t have with AI coming in and handling some of that stuff?

Philip Levine:
Not so much in part because my experience with AI and talking with others that have used AI is it’s a great starting point, but it doesn’t pick up all the nuances that are specific to one person’s business. It’ll give you a nice framework if you don’t know where to start from, but it doesn’t necessarily give you that what is right for my business or, you know, what’s unique to my business. And that’s where having an agency owner like myself, like Kami, where we’re subject matter experts, we’ve seen this across different industries and we can give that guidance. So again, AI is great from a content writing perspective and I feel bad and Cami and I both know a few content writers and I feel bad for them because that’s where AI I do see is that it’s giving people that initial starting point of what to write. And I will say there is. I have a personal injury attorney that I just recently a launch to site. He focuses on nothing but effectively assisted living sort of cases, whether it be medication issues or neglect issues, but just in nursing homes, assisted living facilities. And he gave me like a list of like six bullet points of subject areas. And I went into Google’s AI Gemini or whatever was being called a few months ago and I in essence said I need some bullet points about personal injury and this topic and nursing home and it gave me a nice, you know, Here’s a definition of this topic. Here are some things to watch for. And I put it in and he’s like, this is great. He gave me one or two minor wording tweaks, but it gave us what we needed. And he was looking for a brochure site, so it was perfect for what he needed. And it didn’t read like AI. It read very natural. And again, I said, look, this is AI generated, just so you know. And he was fine with that. And he said, look, that’s exactly what I would have put into an email if a client was asking me. So I said, great. More complex site. I don’t know. That would really work as well.

Cami McNamara:
Yeah, yeah, I think AI in terms of being a solopreneur and managing a lot of sites, you know, we all think about it in terms of building websites, but what I’m finding that it’s helping me the most with, as an agency owner, is creating my responses to client emails, to rewriting my processes, my SOPs, and really building an email template program that saves me just hours and hours of time. And I do use it for some CSS coding help when I need it, and fixing a problem that I’m finding. I’ve recently been learning Squarespace, and I’ve been finding it really helpful to come up with a CSS code that I need in there because it’s kind of a new space for me. But I feel, I know the day is going to come when somebody’s just going to sit down and say, build me a landscaping website. And right now you can get a good starting point for something, but the Internet’s going to be filled with nothing but the same stuff. And I feel like having a designer or somebody like that, a professional, because the person inputting into AI, if they don’t have the knowledge to put the right stuff in, they’re not going to get the right stuff out. So I still feel like we’re needed at this point, but we’ll see how. We’ll see where we are in 10 years. Philip.

Philip Levine:
Yeah, I will say one thing with AI that I’ve actually used on a few different sites is I went into Google’s AI. That’s really the only one that I’ve used just because I do so much with Google, is I actually had it write me a plugin for WordPress for Elementor, where, for example, I use the ASCRA theme with Elementor. And I wanted the ability to tweak some of the Astra settings, like whether or not to hide the title and whatnot. While I was in Elementor, I didn’t like having to switch screens back and forth, so I went into, into Gemini. I said, Write me a WordPress plugin for Astra and Elementor that can do XYZ. And it did give me most of the code. There were some, just some pseudo code in there that I then had to tweak and I know enough PHP that I was able to then go and tweak it. But at least it gave me something that now saves me, you know, five or ten minutes on each site. And it’s a small lightweight plugin and I’ve had to do a few of those different things for me and this is great. I had it build me an iframe widget for Elementor. I have a couple sites that still do some iframe things and rather than having to do iframe code and whatnot, I just put in the URL into the, into the widget setting and it actually builds the iframe code. Whereas most of the other plugins are so code heavy that they have 15, 20 different files. And I don’t need all those options, I just need where I want to build open iframe, maybe frame, border equals zero and things like that. And it just, it’s lightweight and it just, it works.

Marcus Burnett:
Making sure that all of those things work the way they’re supposed to as we start to get down closer to the end here. Philip, I do want to ask you if there. We’ve talked a lot about what you’ve done across the last 25 plus years. Is there anything that you would have done differently along your journey? Anything stand out along the way where you would have, you know, zigged instead of zagged or whatever the case is, gone a different direction, chosen a different tool, chosen a different path completely just gone with four giant sites instead of 400 sites.

Philip Levine:
The only thing I can say, say is yeah, it. There’s that old adage of, you know, when do you bring on an employee as should I brought on somebody. And I’ve looked back over the years that I can probably pick out like three or four times where I say, oh yeah, it would make sense. But then it’s like, well, but do I consistently have enough to bring on? And it hasn’t been. And that’s where I’d rather partner with an agency, not necessarily outsource, but partner with people that I know for those one off instances who we know each other’s style of business, of coding, et cetera. Naturally, the only thing that I’d say would be any different of anything that I’ve done. The other thing that I will say is that I intentionally have not gone after the really big projects because I see people in businesses that, you know that they charge $5,000 a month for all their professional services and everything. But now when you lose that one client, oh my goodness, you’ve now lost a large percentage of your revenue. Whereas here, if I lose one client, am I happy about it? No, I’m not.

Marcus Burnett:
Of course not.

Philip Levine:
But yes sir, my bottom line, it does not have as big an impact. So I’d rather have a lot of, a lot of smaller clients. Again, I’ve been raising my prices over the time to get that. But again, you also got to feel out what your market is. What works in South Florida may not work in Indiana or out in Seattle. And so you got to feel and look at what the price points you can charge in your area are.

Cami McNamara:
Philip, is there like a limit to the number of websites you’re going to be able to manage? Do you have a cap? Like, I’m just curious, like when you hit 400, did you think, oh, I can’t really? And then you hit your 500. Where is that?

Philip Levine:
Like I would say it’s more so on the direct side of the business than the agency side of the business because the agency side is tier 2 stuff. I’m not necessarily doing day to day maintenance, not like content updates. It’s more the plugins, the backups, the server side. So that isn’t as that scales much, much higher. I would say on the direct side, maybe around 200. Again, it depends on what the needs are. I’ve been bringing on a lot of homeowners associations recently and they’re very cutter. I can get the site knocked out in a weekend and then it’s, you know, one update a month sort of thing for them as they have their minutes and financials. So again, it depends on who the clients are and what I’m doing with them.

Cami McNamara:
Great. And Philip, where can listeners learn more about you? Are you doing any talks coming up? I know that you’ve done some great talks in the past. So tell us what’s on your calendar right now.

Philip Levine:
Other than my website, SouthFloridaWebadvisors.com, i don’t have anything calendared. I’ve spoken of WordCamp Atlanta before. I been at. I go to many of the WordCamps at least in the US where I can even just walking around chatting with folks. That’s really the biggest thing, I’m on a number of Facebook groups, whether it be Elementor or gravity forms Webcami. There’s also WordPress hosting. And I try to give back. That’s what I like to do at this point is I, I like giving back to that next generation and helping people who are being like, wait, what should I be doing with this? And I try to give input and being very neutral. I will give advice one way or the other, but I really try to be very neutral in my advice. That way I’m not pushing one product over another, per se.

Cami McNamara:
Yeah, I will say Philip was so active in the community that GoDaddy used to have that like, I know that there were just average GoDaddy users that thought you were a rock star because you gave so much free advice. It was pretty amazing, Philip. I remember those days.

Marcus Burnett:
Yes, I love that. Thank you so much, Philip for joining us and sharing about your experience and sharing about your. Just so much hard work that I know goes into managing all of that stuff. Appreciate you being here with us. Always happy to have a fellow Floridian on the show too.

Cami McNamara:
You’re so inspirational, Philip. I’m really, I’m just so happy that we’re friends.

Philip Levine:
Yes. I love doing this. If you ever want to just talk about things in WordPress in general, I’m always more than happy to come on and chat with you.

Marcus Burnett:
Yep, Fountain of Knowledge for sure has seen it all, I’m sure over the course of the ever evolving web over the last few decades. And yeah, if anybody sees Philip at an event or out and about, pull him aside, pick his brain. There’s so much to, you know, so much knowledge in there to pull and Philip is more than happy to give it away. Unfortunately for him, but fortunately for all of you, more than happy to share the advice. So thank you so much for coming on our show. WP Agency tracks and sharing all of that with you. Until the next time everyone. We’ll see you then.

Cami McNamara:
Bye bye.