Returning to Agency Life? Listening to Your Inner Voice

Bob: Hey hey, BobWP here. I’m with my distinguished cohost, Brad Williams. Hey Brad, how you doing?

Brad: Hey, look at me. I’m distinguished.

Bob: Yeah, really. It happens every once in a while.

Brad: You might be the first person to say that about me, Bob, but I appreciate it. I’m doing great. How are you doing?

Bob: Doing good. I feel like I’m having double vision here, kind of bizarre. Nobody else sees the videos, but thought maybe you could introduce our illustrious guest?

Brad: Yes, our illustrious guest. My evil twin, all the way from the Netherlands, Mr. Remkus. How’s it going, man?

Remkus: Good, man. How are you all?

Brad: Doing great, doing great. You are the evil one, right? I think we established that.

Remkus: I think we’re going back and forth on this. One of us is at one point, we agreed not to share it, but it’s going back and forth.

Brad: I think it depends on if I’m in Europe, I’m probably the evil one. And if you’re in the US, you’re the evil one.

Remkus: Sounds about right.

Bob: So we’ll see how that works with the podcast. Because what role will you play here being online?

Brad: No, we’re both good, Bob, because we’re at home. So yeah, Remkus, we’ve known each other for a long time. I don’t remember when we exactly first met, but it’s been-

Remkus: Tybee Island, 2012.

Brad: Okay, yeah. I was about to say about 10 years. So, that’s about right. Wow, is that 10 years ago?

Remkus: Yeah, that’s crazy.

The circle pivot

Brad: So, tell us Remkus, what are you up to? I know you’ve had some big announcements lately, so why don’t you give us a little rundown of where you’re at these days? What are you you working on? What are you doing?

Remkus: Yeah, for the last almost two and a half years, I’ve been working at Surfboard, premier hosting company, high focus on performance. And as part of the management team. Let’s say, in the stages of going from a startup to a scale up, so lots of things happening left and right. And as much as I loved doing that, there was a little part of me that wanted to have my independence back. Which is, if you don’t know, I’ve had a WordPress agency since 2006. And yeah, it started itching, wanting to be the master of your own ship again.

So, about a month ago we came to an agreement, a very friendly one where I am to go on my own again, so rebooting my agency. And the focus that I want to have as the main, this is what I do now, is the whole performance side of things. Which is becoming more and more of a complex matrix of things to fix. I had a focus on it previously, specifically on the more complex type of sites, be that either news publishing sites, or community sites, or e-commerce, WooCommerce sites specifically. Getting them to scale is not easy if tons of people are logged in, because then you can’t rely on the good old, let’s just cache the heck out of it and hope everything goes well. So, I’m very eager to pick that back up and start making waves again in that direction.

Owning an agency, working for someone, back to owning an agency

Brad: Yeah. You have a interesting path through different, I guess, your career and being on your own. Because you had an agency, and then you worked at Yoast for a little while, right?

Remkus: Yep.

Brad: Yoast SEO, everyone’s very familiar with. So you were working in a product space, and then you moved on to the hosting, with Servebolt in the hosting space. And now you’re back in the agency world, running your own ship. So, you’re kind of bookended in the agency space. It’s an interesting kind of, I guess, cycle back to where you started in a sense, right? And not one that you typically hear. I feel like usually when someone exits the agency or client services space, they’re gone.

Remkus: Yeah, and that most certainly is a large trend. You see it happen everywhere. The larger the hosting companies, the bigger the product and agency companies they’re gobbling up. It’s the trend of the last, I would say three, four years. So, I’m not against working at Servebolt, as the hosting company. That in itself isn’t a problem for me. It’s more of, let’s call it a deeper desire to be on my own two feet again, just do what I envision to do, have my own focus instead of being governed by an outside focus. There’s nothing negative about it, for me, it’s a very personal thing. I feel like I’m more at ease, more at peace, more in the direction that I need to be, if and when I’m on my own. And it’s a combination of a whole bunch of small things, there’s nothing large happening. But it did make me pull the trigger on exiting.

Brad: Yeah. And it’s funny because I feel like people go from running their own business to working somewhere because they’re tired of that. They’re tired of it all being on them, in a sense.

Remkus: And that’s exactly why I did.

The life of an agency owner and listening to yourself

Brad: Yeah. There’s definitely pros and cons of that. Because I love, obviously I’m in the same situation. I have my own company, I have for over 10 years. And I love it, and if I were ever to consider doing something else, it would have to be an insane opportunity. Because the value of me being able to set goals for myself, basically drive the company forward in the way that I think, and with my partner, at least the way that we think makes the most sense. It’s hard to give up. But then there’s the stressors that come with that, so it’s a balance, I guess.

Remkus: It is. And at the time that I started working for Yoast, I was done. I didn’t care too much about the agency life. I had good clients, I had fun projects, but there were quite a few reasons why I was burned out, because I think in the sense I was. And Yoast, from Yoast SEO stepped up to the plate and helped me out in a great many ways. And that was my exit, that was perfect. That was exactly what I wanted. And I did that for two and a half years, then found greener pastures. I’ve done that for almost two and a half years now. And yeah, I feel the reasons why I wanted to not be on my own, they’re essentially no longer there.

So listening to your own thoughts, like the little hints that you give yourself, but you just ignore because you’re on a path, and you’re going and there’s direction, and you just keep doing your thing, it’s hard to pick up those signals. So, I’ve been working hard on listening to those signals, more on the intuition side of things. And when those signals keep popping up more and more, I have to respect that, as difficult as it may be. Or I have to at least start giving it attention in, what does this signal actually mean? Am I still doing the things that excite me the most, or am I just having fun, or am I not having fun at all? And those are tough questions to ask when you’re on a moving train. But at a certain point, you have to listen.

The burned out state I was in, I didn’t listen. And now I’m listening, and now I’m super convinced that I can find a mode where all the burnout elements are no longer there, or properly mitigated, so I can have fun again at the thing that I like doing. And what I like doing is scaling sites. The gratification in making a site that has a lot of potential, but is not living up to its potential, actually do what it’s supposed to do in the best way. So yes, I’ll build sites. Yes, I’ll start from scratch and stuff like that. But my focus is going to be on, hey, you’re running into stuff that’s stopping you from excelling. From simple server performance, site performance, or even business performance side of things, all the way to whatever comes after that. And that’s what I like to do, that’s what I’ve always done. What I’ve never done is make that a core focus, which is what I’m doing now.

Bob: Yeah. I like that, because you were talking about the inner voices. I’ve been doing this self-employment thing for 30, 35 years. And there was times I was always tempted, should I do this, should I do that? And even I believe about six, seven years ago, I actually applied for a job after that long. And I think I did it for all the wrong reasons. I was just looking, I maybe told myself, “Oh, maybe I’m a little burned out,” or whatever, but it was more stability, “oh, I just want that stability there.” And I didn’t get it. And afterwards it was almost like I was relieved. Like you said, that little voice told me that, “Nah, you didn’t really want to do this after that. You’re stuck in your ways.” And yeah, it’s a big one.

The agency reboot or startover

The one thing I wanted to ask you is, and you touched on it a bit starting over, because you’re rebooting, but you’re really starting at scratch again because of the timeline you went through. So, it’s almost a mix of rebooting, like yeah, I’m back with my agency, but here I am brand new. So, it’s a real interesting dynamic there.

Remkus: So, one of the things I kept having was the business entity of my agency. I had still some small clients in there, but I think the trend of what we see happening in not just the WordPress space, but the general web development stages of a company going through their stages of maturity, you see that finding your niche essentially, is where it’s at. So, what are the things that excite you, and what are the things that you are really good at, are ideally the same thing. And those have always been the things for me. But I’ve never really, at least not on the website, had a high focus on it.

So I started doing WordPress end of 2004. I was sick and tired of Joomla sites that I was creating for clients, found WordPress and then kind of played with it. And then what was it? 2005, when pages were added? The end of 2005, 2006. So pages were there, and I was then like, “Okay, dear client, you’re not asking me to do this, but I’m going to do this for you. I’m going to switch your site from Joomla to WordPress. And I’m not going to charge you for it, because it’ll make my life much better.” And that’s essentially how it started.

Niching down

At that time, anyone really diving into WordPress templating and understanding how that thing worked, could make a good living. Because at the time there weren’t that many doing this. Now as time progressed, there’s a great many more people joining the same space. The market is a lot bigger as well, obviously. We’re at, what is it, 43% now? But what I’ve noticed is that over the last say, six, seven years, you see a strong focus on, “What is the niche I want to be in?” For most agencies. So the allegorical, “I’ll just build your site, I’ll do your SEO, I’ll do your content, I’ll do your social media marketing,” all that type of stuff. Those types of agencies have either grown to being as large that they still can do it, and those are relatively cheap sites. It doesn’t have to be a small niche, but at least a subset of types of sites they enjoy to work with.

There’s agencies that only do WooCommerce, there’s agencies that only do news publishing sites, there’s agencies that only do NGOs. So, those are different types of markets. And I’ve always done the mix of those, but I have always had a profile of let me take care of the more complex sites. I’ve had many befriended agencies who have forwarded sites to me. Like, “I’m not sure if I should be doing this one, so why don’t you do this one?” Most of my work was by word of mouth instead of being found on the internet for some reason. So, I’ve never had to have a strong focus on my site to, “This is what I’m about.” And as I’ve mentioned in the conversation before we hit record, I’ve given myself a full month to actually have a proper site, landing pages, everything, conversion minded, all those things. So Brad, this is my official, I will have a different site in a month.

Brad: You know, you should check out WordPress, because you can launch sites very quickly on that platform.

Remkus: Yeah, yeah.

Brad: You ever heard of it?

Remkus: I have, I have.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Klaviyo and YoastSEO

Brad: I love the idea of niching down. We’ve seen it the past few years with agencies, like you said, find that area of focus that truly excites you, and then go all in. Because from a marketing angle, and like you said, if the website is a vehicle to bring in your ideal client, if you’re in the situation where that needs to happen, it does make it easier. If you only work on WooCommerce, and that’s all you talk about on your blog and all you talk about on social, the traffic’s going to come, the projects are going to come around WooCommerce eventually. Or performance, in this case.

So, I think it definitely makes the marketing and even the sales side of it, I think, a little bit more targeted. Certainly more targeted, and hopefully a little bit easier in a sense to find those ideal clients, and those clients that you’re actually going to be passionate about, versus just another client that maybe you don’t really care about, but you need a paycheck. So, I love that idea.

Remkus: Yeah. So, I’m doing my best to not end up with those types of clients. And I hope to be in the position where I can be turning down, doesn’t sound very nice, but letting them go gently. But yeah, there needs to be more than a little bit of a match between what I like doing and what the client actually needs. Yeah, I’m rebranding in terms of focus. And I think the catchphrase I’m going with now is WordPress performance specialist, or WooCommerce performance specialist, something along those lines.

Keeping WooCommerce in the forefront

Bob: So, looking at these last, the break you took and your involvement with the different e-commerce publishing, it sounds like you’re upping your game on the e-commerce side of things at this point, getting back into the agency market.

Remkus: So, I’m making it a visible primary focus. It’s always been. If I did 10 sites, let’s say, I’d say four to five have been WooCommerce always. And I think the switch that I’m doing in WooCommerce itself is more, or less just building, more building, and maintaining and optimizing. So, the building part can be a rebuild, most likely it will be. There’s always been a strong focus on e-commerce. Even before WooCommerce was there, I already had e-commerce sites running. So, what was that called? Shopp, with double P?

Brad: Yeah, that’s old.

Remkus: Never really got anywhere, but it was there before WooCommerce. I’ve even had Jigoshop shops.

It’s all about performance

Brad: Yeah, yeah. I think, another great thing about performance and SEO falls into this bucket, and security too, is it’s ongoing. You’re never done, it’s never a set it and forget it, you’re scoring all hundreds. You could score hundreds across speed tests, and come back a few months later and be scoring terribly. You always have to monitor it, and take action and steps to keep your performance in check. Because it does over time get worse, for whatever various reasons.

Remkus: Yeah, it most certainly does. I’ve had clients who just keep installing every single thing that they find mildly interesting in terms of, “Maybe this is something for me.” But performance is an interesting thing because most people see performance as, “Does it just work fast for me?” And the great distinction between what I see as performance, and what the general public sees as performance, for me the raw, uncached site needs to be performant. And if that’s performant, then anything else you do after that, from any version of caching that you do, any implementation of CloudFlare, NginX, proxy caching, all of those things, those are extra. Those are just stuff that makes it even nicer. But the raw, uncached site needs to be as performant as you can possibly make it.

And a wonderful example of a client that added a plugin thinking, “This is a great feature I’d like to have on my site,” that totally screwed up the performance, because their uncached version was just not good enough, is that plugin added a cookie for every single visitor. Meaning if you don’t know, if you have a cookie present for that site, your cache is invalidated, cache doesn’t work. So they would have all of their clients, and it was a respectable large site, large shop, they would have all of their clients uncached browsing through their site, and doing campaigns on top of that. So yeah, the site went down all the time. Wonder why? Optimizing in that kind of direction is where my expertise lies. And understanding, okay, this is the feature that you want, but let’s find the way to do that in the most scalable way, in the most performant way. And it’s not one step forward and two steps back, essentially.

Brad: Yeah. Clients can definitely be their own worst enemy sometimes. And I think the easiness of installing a plugin with a couple clicks, very much like installing an app on your phone with a couple clicks. But obviously a plugin can impact the entire site, and not just, an app not working on your phone is probably not going to affect your entire phone. So, I feel like people are in that mindset, “Let me just try something. Oh, it didn’t do what I want.” Maybe they leave it, maybe they don’t. Why are they adding it not through a GitHub repository or something?

Remkus: Yeah. So in an ideal scenario, and when I say ideal, this is what I find as this should be the standard. But using a good repository, deploying two servers, not having your client touch anything on the server, is where I think it needs to start. And that’s for the simple reason of you are hiring me to be the expert in this, so let me be the expert in this. So if you want to add a functionality, I know it’s cumbersome, I know it has a longer turnaround time, but send me your request and I’ll look at it, and we’ll figure out what the best way to go forward is.

That requires a different mindset. From the client’s perspective, I realize I’m making hand gestures, but nobody sees that. But so the client needs to be educated, and we all know this to be true. But I really do think that if the goal is to have your site be as performant from both the actual speed perspective, as well as the business perspective that comes with it, then you need to start removing your hands away from server management and site management as a store owner, if that’s not your forte.

Brad: Yeah. And the good thing too, that really helps with solidifying how important performance is, yes, it’s important for your users, it’s important for user experience. But now that ranking on search engines, performance is such a major factor, that has basically opened everyone’s eyes that it has to be important and it has to work more for… It’s more than just how quickly it loads for you necessarily, it’s like, is it usable? And just the impact on SEO, I feel like it’s given everyone almost the okay to, “All right, we need to invest more in this. Great, our site looks awesome, but it also needs to be faster, or else it’s not really accomplishing our goals, and it might be hurting us.”

Remkus: Yeah. For a long time e-commerce stores were about, does it look nice? And then some effort went into how do I present my product? Okay, great. Some effort went into, how do I do the most convenient, smoothest purchase checkout? And then it went silent for years on, okay, I’ve done what I can do. This is my store. Dear clients, start visiting.

Brad: Start buying.

Remkus: Start buying, yeah. And then there’s this push from Google to say, performance is a ranking factor. I do want to add that what is fast, is a difficult question to ask, because Lighthouse is not the answer, Pingdom is not the answer. What are all those tools that you can use to measure your performance? There’s a great many different ways of measuring what actual performance is. Some of those tools will tell you, “Yeah, your site is doing great.” And other tools will tell you that same site in the same state, “Yeah, there’s a lot to be improved here.” So, it’s almost a minefield of options and possibilities that combined, can ruin your site for the actual visitor. But for the metric that you’re using to measure it, yeah, you’re doing great.

Knowing what performance is

Remkus: I just wanted to add that that’s a very important component, which is Google is saying you need performance, great. But what is performance? And there’s a lot that you can do in that direction, just to make sure that what it is that you’re delivering is actually ticking all the boxes, instead of focusing on one metric that doesn’t necessarily mean the world. Lighthouse is great to start, it’s a good indication of what your site does in a browser, but it’s just a metric. It’s not the metric, not the end all, be all.

Brad: Well, it’ll definitely tell you when your client uploads a 50 megabyte image in a hero. Wow, you took a massive hit on performance this month.

Remkus: It still happens, every now and then.

Brad: It does still happen.

Remkus: Someone will say, “I don’t know why my image loads so slow.” And I go, “Let me have a look. Oh, there you go, your page loads in about at 200 MB.”

And what’s up with AMP

Brad: Yeah, it happens. And that’s the stuff when working with clients, client services is the training aspect of it. And if they don’t have that level of understanding, there’s of course tools and services you could tap into it to force that in a way. So, they don’t necessarily have to know, “Hey, go optimize your images in Photoshop,” or something. Most people don’t know how to do that. But there’s some great tools and services to automate that type of stuff. Yeah, so definitely a deep topic. There’s so many other things we could get into, like Amp.

Remkus: Yeah, let’s not do Amp.

Brad: Love, hate. Are we even using Amp anymore, or are we just done with it?

Remkus: I’m not, I’m not.

Brad: I was just talking to someone internally about that. And I was like, “I think we’re done with it. I need to look into that.”

Remkus: I think I saw a while ago, that even voices within Google started saying, or started not saying you need to do Amp. I’m generally not a fan of any standard or tool that Google puts out there, just given their abandonment rate over the years. If you’ve been in the industry a little bit longer than a decade, you’ve seen… Oh, I don’t know, hundreds of Google tools being introduced and abandoned afterwards. But Amp, I have always felt it was adding a complexity layer that essentially should have been solved in HTML itself. I think it could have been solved differently. The whole concept of having different URLs for the same content, just because for the sake of performance, there’s smarter ways of doing that, that doesn’t require an incredibly complex solution on site and all the relevant things that work with that site level.

I never fully embraced it. I think I’ve only done three or four sites over the years, just because the client insisted it: “I want this, so you got to make it happen.” And then I give the counter arguments, why that might not necessarily be the thing that’s going to propel their site to where they think it should or could. But if they still go, “Yes, I’m aware, but I still want it,” fine, we can build it. There’s plugins for that. So, it’s not that difficult. I just don’t think it’s adding that magic sauce as they claim to do. So long answer, but yeah, I think it’s dying. I think it’s just not going to be where they wanted it to be.

Brad: It feels like it’s in a slow death right now, is what it feels like.

Remkus: Yeah, definitely.

Brad: I think the idea of what the goals were were good, but yeah, I think the execution had political stuff that went around it, not so good. We should just go back to having a whole separate site for mobile. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Remember when we used to have a mobile theme and a desktop theme?

Bob: Wasn’t it .mobi or something.

Remkus: Yeah, yeah.

Bob: Oh, it was a nightmare. It was weird stuff.

Remkus: It’s still patchwork though. I’m actually, the one standard in this area that I’m a little bit sad about, that never got the traction that it should have had, is PWA. Because I think what it offers, what it promises it solves, essentially is if done in a performant way, and it is a standard that is at least independent of one provider, Google, has the opportunity to offer everything that we want, that is within Amp mobile pages and all of those things. The push for that, to be more integrated into how we use the web on our mobile phones, I think still has a great deal of potential. I don’t know if it will ever get there, but I still think that is the technology that made from my perspective, the most sense.

Brad: Yeah, I don’t think the tech will be slowing down anytime soon. With just continual trends across all industries, mobile usage has taken over. Some of our clients, it’s almost 89% mobile on their sites, which is kind of mind blowing in a sense. But that is the world we live in, where it’s mobile first across the board. So, we’re going to keep iterating and growing the tech, and coming up with hopefully good solutions to solve the challenges of a really complex internet, that can function on mobile devices.

Remkus: Well, look around you. As soon as you start walking outside where there’s people, you’ll see them looking on their phones.

Brad: Oh yeah, we’re all looking on our phones. Nobody’s actually looking up.

Remkus: Yeah.

Bob: Alrighty. Well yeah, this has been great. So, one month from today is when your site will be all beautiful and everything. You already said that. So actually in seven months then, we’ll have you back to see how things are going, because then it’ll have been at a good solid six months.

Brad: See if it’s really done.

Remkus: Yeah, so the goal is to have it ready before I drive off to Porto in Portugal, where WordCamp Europe will be this year. The goal is to have it ready before I get in the car.

Bob: Okay. Well, I will find you at WordCamp Europe with my microphone, and ask you what is the URL? Because everybody’s going to want to come to your site then.

Remkus: I can give it now, so everyone can fact check me. Truerthannorth.com.

Bob: Okay, cool. Where else can people connect with you, if there’s other places?

Remkus: Just Google my name, R-E-M-K-U-S. I should be pretty much on top. Remkus de Vries WordPress, it can be missed. But it’s Remkus.devries.frl, which is where my personal site is. But I’m obviously also on Twitter. I have the advantage of having a unique name, so if you know how to spell it, R-E-M-K-U-S, you’ll find me.

Bob: All right, excellent. Well thank you very much. Yeah, this has been great catching up. See you at WordCamp Europe soon, so appreciate you taking the time.

Remkus: Thanks for having me.