If I Could Turn Back Time  🔗 **Source:** [If I Could Turn Back Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ar4qSVuFodQ) > [!note]+ Document Notes > > [!info] Generated analysis — not the author's words. Sections below are machine-written > > from the captured source. Only text inside `> [!quote]` blocks is verbatim from the author. > > Do not quote or attribute any other line to the named author. > # 🏷️ Title: If I Could Turn Back Time (Agency Edition) > ## 🧭 Table of Contents > - [[#🔗 References]] > - [[#📝 Summary]] > - [[#📖 Main Content]] > - [[#📚 References|📚 References (Section 6)]] > - [[#🗣️ Paraphrase]] > - [[#📰 Newsletter]] > - [[#✅ Action Items]] > - [[#🧪 Hypotheses]] > - [[#📊 Methodology]] > - [[#❓ Questions]] > - [[#🔮 Future Research]] > - [[#💡 Implications]] > - [[#🧠 Learning Styles Assessment]] > - [[#📊 Accessibility Assessment (WCAG 2.2 AA)]] > - [[#🌍 DEIB Assessment]] > - [[#✅ Logical Validity]] > - [[#🛡️ DARVO Analysis]] > - [[#🎯 Conclusion]] > - [[#🔄 Refactor Appendix — If I Could Turn Back Time (Agency Edition)]] > ### 🔗 References > - Kurt Vonan — co-host, principal of Mañana No Más (manananomomas.com) > - Toby Cryns — co-host, principal of The Mighty Mo (themightymo.com), also referenced as "Toby Crimes" in the auto-transcript (mis-hearing of "Cryns") > - John Maxwell — leadership author, cited for the "replace yourself with someone 80% as good" delegation principle > - SendGrid (SenGrid in transcript) — email deliverability tool referenced as a competence litmus test for outsourced vendors > - LifterLMS — LMS plugin referenced in the dual-payment-gateway support incident > - WooCommerce — e-commerce plugin referenced throughout (both hosts serve WordPress/WooCommerce clients) > - South Valley Economic Development Center, Albuquerque — small-business incubator referenced for the "building yourself a job" anecdote > - "Meeting agendas" / EOS agenda — referenced as a callback to a prior episode in the same podcast series > ## 📝 Summary > - **What happened**: Two WordPress/WooCommerce agency owners (Kurt Vonan of Mañana No Más, Toby Cryns of The Mighty Mo) hold an unscripted, recurring-podcast conversation reflecting on what they would refuse to sell or do differently if rebuilding their agencies from scratch today. > - **Why it matters**: The conversation surfaces recurring failure modes in service-agency economics — scope creep on legacy-site work, founder bottlenecking ("secret sauce" and "one-minute manager" syndrome), pricing/margin blindness on subcontracted work, and the emerging problem of AI-generated RFPs devaluing human sales effort. > - **Stakeholders**: Agency owners/founders, agency sales and support staff, agency clients (especially those who shop around for cheaper vendors), and by extension anyone running a services business dependent on founder-delivered quality. > - **Risks**: Founders who stay the "secret sauce" cap their own growth and burn out; agencies that quote site-remediation work without firm boundaries absorb open-ended scope risk; agencies that don't niche or product-ize support risk commoditization; unchecked, AI-generated RFP volume could erode the value of genuine human sales effort industry-wide. > - **Bottom line**: The strongest through-line is that successful agency growth requires founders to convert themselves from doers into replaceable processes — and to draw and hold firm boundaries (on scope, on cheap work, on rescuing botched third-party work) rather than solving every problem personally. > ## 📖 Main Content > ### 🗒️ Notes > No on-screen timestamps are visible in the Reader UI, but the transcript carries per-word `data-rw-start` offsets in seconds; approximate segment starts are given below using those offsets. > - **~0:00–1:30 — Cold open: "What would you refuse to sell?"** Kurt says he'd stop selling site audits and rebuild quotes on existing sites — calls it "playing in other people's gardens," since inherited custom fields/CSS create open-ended scope risk. He'd only do fresh builds going forward. > - **~1:30–4:00 — Toby's counter-answer: process over refusal.** Toby says he wouldn't refuse a category outright, but would refuse *selling without a firm process/boundaries*. He'd reposition his own process and tooling as the sales pitch itself ("you need us for our process and our tools") rather than a concession to the client. > - **~4:00–6:30 — Cheap work as a relationship gateway.** Both agree cheap/discounted work for *existing* clients can be fine if there's a repeatable process behind it; the danger is pricing something too low with no process to "jam it into," which is where past pain came from. > - **~5:00–9:00 — User support as an underrated profit center.** Toby recounts a live launch-week story: a customer couldn't find a lead-magnet email (landed in spam); the team proved via screen-share and SMTP logs that everything worked, resolved the customer politely, and used that proof to pre-empt any invoice dispute — "easy money" and justification for years of recurring billing. > - **~9:00–12:00 — The "secret sauce" founder problem.** Kurt admits he still personally runs the first week of every launch's support because he wants to control tone/voice and be ready for escalation — and explicitly says "I realize that's wrong," since it keeps him hands-on when he should be running sales meetings and generating revenue instead. > - **~12:00–17:00 — Delegation and the John Maxwell 80% rule.** Toby cites John Maxwell: if someone can do a task 80% as well as you, replace yourself with them — "bar none." Both admit falling into "one-minute manager" behavior (knocking out small tasks personally instead of delegating), at the cost of funnel work, new sales, and "networking backwards" with existing clients for referrals. > - **~17:00–24:00 — Profit vs. enjoyment vs. peace of mind.** They interrogate whether agency decisions are driven by what's profitable or what the founder personally enjoys (e.g., Kurt's launch-week involvement is emotionally satisfying but not itself profit-generating once the sale is closed). Kurt frames his current life stage as optimizing for "peace of mind" over pure growth or revenue; Toby struggles to define happiness at all, floating (and doubting) the idea that happiness equals "a lack of responsibility." > - **~24:00–30:00 — Growth math and subcontractor margins.** They discuss how growth changes agency economics non-obviously: hiring means you must sell 2.5x more at a 40% margin just to net the same take-home; subcontracting a $10k job for $6k nets $4k for coordination — which can be a good margin, but founders resist accepting that framing. > - **~30:00–33:00 — "Building yourself a job" vs. building a company.** Kurt recounts an Albuquerque small-business-incubator phrase distinguishing founders who build a duplicable, hireable business from those who "build themselves a job." Notes that many agency owners in their circles would bankrupt themselves personally if they scaled a team, because they can't sell at a level that supports both staff and themselves. > - **~33:00–43:00 — AI-generated RFPs and the asphalt/road anecdote.** Both report a rising share of RFPs are visibly AI-generated (encyclopedic bullet-point requirements, questions from people with no domain knowledge), while their own responses remain deeply human — creating an asymmetric-effort problem. Toby now sometimes replies bluntly that a request "appears to be AI generated" and offers a real conversation instead. Kurt shares a possibly-apocryphal anecdote: a government road-building RFP asked for "asphalt," a bidder delivered literal crushed rock (technically asphalt aggregate) instead of a paved road, won on price, and got away with it because "that's not what the bid was for" — used as a metaphor for exploiting literal RFP language versus genuine need. > - **~43:00–52:00 — Cheap outsourcing gone wrong.** Kurt describes a long-term hosting client who balked at his (already discounted) quote for added services, hired a cheaper unverified vendor who broke the client's forms (didn't even use the site's own form tool) and didn't know what SendGrid was, then came back to Kurt with an "emergency." Kurt held a firm boundary: offered to quote the repair or hand over a full backup for migration, but declined to fix it for free, explicitly framing it as "this is the result of your decision." > - **~52:00–58:00 — Product-izing boundaries: the Welcome to an exciting episode of the agency action show with your stars Kurt Vonan and myself Toby Crimes. Kurt, let's say you had to do all over again. Let's say you had to rebuild your agency from scratch today. What would you refuse to sell? I feel like this is the antithesis of what we discussed the last time we met. Last time we were like, "These are all the things I would do." And now it's like, "Wow, if I didn't have to do some things, what would I what would I pull the the rug out from under?" I'm gonna tell you, I've really grown to dislike the whole idea of doing a site audit to sell a job. Like, so I I don't know that I would ever get involved again in site audits or even quoting a rebuild for a website. Like I think a new website like a new website is is I should say I wouldn't say like a remodeling job. you know, you get into someone else's playground and start messing around and find, oh, well, I didn't realize they had, you know, these custom fields or or these these, you know, custom CSS blocks or any it it's I think what I wouldn't do is play in other people's gardens. I would just do fresh builds and no more sales off of site auditing. >> Interesting. I actually think I might do the opposite, honestly. Uh, but the one thing like in terms of not selling, there's this idea of like random one-off chaos. the idea that like someone comes in and I don't provide them with a firm procedure and process and firm boundaries and we still struggle with this and we're always trying to like like I'm pushing my team continually like how can we better define these boundaries so we don't get stuck in this thing again and it it seems to like just be a moving target in some ways but I think also we're tightening it up every time we do it and so I think like that would be especially given what I know now I don't think it would be possible to do this when I started because I didn't have the experience but now that I have the experience and the knowledge, I would come in with a much more firm process and probably sell less things that, you know, my offering when I started would probably be very specific and I'd say, "Here's the tools I use. Here's our process. Would you like to hire us still?" You know, and you know, actually the process and the tools would be a selling point. It wouldn't it wouldn't be like a request. It' be like, "You need us for for our process and our tools." Yeah, it's such an interesting question because on one hand you and I have had very distinct conversations about we are sales companies like we need to sell like so you know we're not about saying no we're about trying to find a way to say yes but then there's certain boundaries and like for me I found that like as an agency when we take on um reconditioning someone's previously existing website I have found that there's usually lots of pitfalls that we fall into but then maybe maybe reexamine examining that is the answer, right? Because now I'm trying now I'm trying to put my Toby eyes on. My Toby eyes would be like, "Hey, just tell the customer right up front there's going to be hidden pitfalls in this thing and let let's just uh let let's plan on scaling this this project out an extra 10 or $15,000 and if you've got the budget to handle that kind of stress, we've got the we've got the uh energy to put into it." Maybe that was maybe that's my downfall. Maybe I maybe I was trying to sell to exacting and not account for the pitfalls that would happen in those projects. And so I could definitely see where maybe there's not a lot of things I would say no to. For for instance, a lot of us, a lot of people are going to listen to this. At least I think they're going to listen to this. Let's hope a lot of people listen. Share, follow, all that thing, right? Subscribe. But they're going to say, "I don't want to do cheap work anymore. I don't want to do the cheap stuff." And I I have a sneaky suspicion that you're like, "I'll sell cheap stuff." I mean, I think like the cheap stuff, if it's a gateway to more better stuff, like better relationships, I'm open to it with the current client. Like, I know a lot of agencies just say no to the cheap stuff, even for existing long-term clients. And if we have a process for it, like I'm totally open to doing the cheap stuff. And I think, >> yeah, let's let's break the ice and then upsell something down the road. >> Yeah. And I think where I've been burned in the past is like where I don't have a process for something and I sell it for too cheap and then I feel like this is blown up and I didn't like have a process that like they could jam into for the cheap stuff. And you know some of the other things we have in our spreadsheet that the users can't see or that our listeners can't see like site rebuilds, hosting, site audits, copywriting, social media services, user support. I think like for me these are all things that reputable agencies can sell but it's you could pick one of these and have a very successful career even today with AI and all that like you got to figure it out of course but I I do think there's value when I think of niching down I think of it more like in product niching down not like audience niching down >> yeah it's so interesting that you mentioned the uh the user support we just launched a project this week and our agency provides the user support for this client cuz they pay for it. And uh so it's a launch and immediately somebody tried to sign up for the lead magnet. Everything in the website worked. The the forms were sent, the the site tour was sent, how to log into the course that was the lead magnet. All that was sent and we have proof that it was sent through the SMTP tool, but the customer couldn't find it. It's in the spam box. It's it's somewhere, right? It went somewhere other than the inbox. And so our team jumped in, you know, and took a screen share video, showed that everything worked, showed that they were actually the automation worked, they were enrolled in the course. We answered the customer very politely with like, "Hey, sorry you're having a problem. You know, I'm part of the team. I'd love to get you. Here's here's a video on how to use the website. Here's how you get to the course. I've already confirmed that the automation worked and you're enrolled in the course. All I got to do is change your password and log in." Boom. So, they're handled. But then we sent, you know, confirmation that everything's working and that everything that the agency built is working as it should and sent that to the customer. And I don't think we'll ever have a problem getting that invoice paid moving forward, right? Like it launched this week. Here's how we took care of your customer. Here's how we prove the website's doing what it's supposed to do. Boom. Everything's justified. And we could send that invoice for the next five years and I don't think that it's ever going to get paid late. And it's just easy money. One question I have about that is, and this was another thing that we could potentially put on the removing from the, you know, the thing we're not going to sell this anymore, and that's you as the secret sauce or me as a secret sauce or somebody who owns the company as a secret sauce. So my question is, how much of that user support process were you deeply involved in whether it's creating after the sale basically is what I'm thinking like after the sale, how much input did you have in the product that you're delivering? >> So I have team members that I pass these support duties to. So everybody everybody that is a as a player on the team gets one of these packages that they manage. So they get the notifications, the responses and all of that. That said, I'm still the secret sauce on the first week of a launch every time just because I need to see it firsthand. I want to make sure I'm I'm integrated in the process and I'm fully knowledgeable in case there's some kind of customer follow-up meeting that has to happen, something goes wrong. And I realize that's wrong. Like I realize I probably shouldn't be that guy. I probably should have a really good number two or a really good number three on the team that fills my space in in that kind of a role because it's very hands-on and I shouldn't be hands-on. I should be very hands-off. I should be I should be running more sales meetings and generating more revenue rather than following up on a on a user support email. But I feel like I'm really driven to be involved in that first week of a launch. >> Here's a question. This builds on what we talked about last week. And so if you're listening now, go back to last week and you can hear all about meeting agendas and this is directly related to that. So this is an alternate reality where you you have a big hand in launching the product. You sold it. You kind of lay out the path for like how it's going to be delivered. You hand it off to your team. There are agencies out there. I know them. I know the founders. And they would say, "Let's let the chaos happen. I'm going to put it on my team. These this person or two or hey, you're in charge of the count." like it's just one more responsibility. I don't know and you know you're you as an owner have to be okay with that discomfort that you're going to feel and the idea in related to meetings agendas like the EOS agenda for example that we talked about last week has a space for that feedback for you to hear the issues and >> and so the the question you know you said I know that's wrong and that made me think because I'm not saying I I wasn't putting a value judgment on it for others or anyone really but like what you said you did you said that was wrong for you that came out of you know I think I heard you And so, you know, I just wanted to point out like there's a reality where a founder has to be, you know, in order to to take extract themselves. They have to be comfortable with the chaos and disorder that will happen without that. >> There's there's a John Maxwell principle um that says if you can replace yourself with somebody that does something 80% as good as you do it, you need to replace yourself with that person. Like, bar none. like like you realize they're not going to be exactly like you, but if they can do it 80% as good as you can, you need to take yourself out of the process. And uh the last few, you know, larger enterprise level deals that we've rolled through, man, I have I have recognized going through it like I I'll and it's always like I'll complete something, I'll do something and then I'll go why did I do that? Like I should have delegated that, you know, I should have taken that email and forwarded it to a team member. I should have, you know, added it to we have a project management software. So I I should have delegated that task or assigned that task in that management software and instead it's almost like I became the the uh the the one minute manager, right? Well, if I could do it quickly, I'll just knock it out. Well, I end up just knocking out a lot of things and I should be focused on the funnel, new contacts, new sales, marketing, networking, you know, and to be clear, networking backwards like with existing customers, you know, are are you still happy? Is everything great? Who do you know that we should know? You know, and try and grow through referral that way, too. Which if you're busy doing tasks, you're not doing that. >> Yeah. Even those one minute tasks like that one minute you could spend, and it's never one minute, by the way. 15 minutes. >> It's never a minute. for that 15 minutes or 30 minutes could have, you know, imagine the sales opportunities you could have generated just through like or the relationship building and the value of >> this segus perfectly into our next question though and that is is your agency so this is like to the people that are listening right like share follow is your agency making decisions based on what's profitable or based on what you really enjoy doing and that's that's a struggle >> yeah I think it's a common struggle I was conversing with someone today who owns like a number of very successful businesses and he was telling me like I'm going to hire a a web devel or a developer to manage one of my apps and I asked him straight out I was like are you doing this so you cuz you hate your business basically he was like I don't know maybe and I think this is a problem that it's like I experienced it too it's a struggle and it goes back to what kind of like earlier what we were talking about there's like this point where you have to delegate and at the point you're delegating do you even like yourself do you like your work? Do you like your job? And I think people get stuck there sometimes. And I'm I'm I deal with that question regularly in myself and in my heart. I'm trying to figure out like what is it that I need to be doing to live a happier life? I know that I have issues because I will see my wife load the dishwasher and not be satisfied. Like like I know we can load that dishwasher more efficiently. Like it's I know that I have issues in this space. And so like when I said I like to run things for the first week, it's like I want I know the I know the voice. I know the character that I want to come through that I want to be portrayed in that first support ticket. You know, I know what I want to convey to the client to show them that the website works and all the hard work we did and the design we did over the last 4 months was correct. And I struggle with giving that over to somebody else. And then I have to ask, is it because I'm obligated to or do I enjoy it? And that's the that's the the crux of it, Toby. I enjoy it. Like I enjoy making the screen share videos and showing off the product and hey look, we did this and it works. Like those are great win celebration moments and I really enjoy it. But to your point in that question, does that drive profitability? And and I I'm on the fence about whether it does or doesn't. I think it makes customers really happy and that could net referrals and help grow business in that way. But in the moment, does that activity generate profit? And I'd have to say it does not, >> right? Because you've already sold it. >> I've already sold. >> You should be like, you can make way more money selling the next thing to that happy customer than doing the actual work. And I think there's this thing that this is the hard part probably of what we're talking about. When we talk about delegating, it seems easy. Like you can make a task list, but to truly delegate, you have to be very comfortable letting the other person do it their way. And you cannot like jump in when they ask for support. This is my experience anyway. This is what I try to do. Like, Toby, what should I do here? I always try to be like, this is this is the best. >> What should you do there? >> Yeah, I don't know. What should you do there? Oh, that sounds good. Go do that. Even though everything in my brain's telling me that's a horrible idea. Don't do that. But the crazy thing is is that a lot of times the thing that I thought was not a great idea works fine. And maybe it's, you know, like and but it's very uncomfortable to let them do that thing. And I think it's it you know if we were to like judge like net positives on the business it's probably I mean it's almost definitely a net positive for the mighty mode to you know let people do things their own way let our team create like so I don't get deeply involved in process anymore like I put that off to our project or our operations person had a great conversation with our sales guy today where he was like well and this is an ongoing conversation where I'm like I need to get out of being a blocker on stuff and he's like how about this you don't talk to me at all I'll just do the sales. I'm like, "Sounds great. How can we what do you need to make that happen?" And he just kind of outlined it to me. I'm like, "Okay, let's do it." And I know like it's not like I'm not fully comfortable with the risk, but I'm 80% comfortable with that risk and and he the sales guy has kind of communicated that he is aware of the risks and that's probably all I can ask for any from anyone. >> Yeah. Yeah. That is super interesting. Now, when when we're talking about, you know, is it profitable or do we enjoy doing it or any of that kind of takes you back to the root question, right? Like when you're trying to optimize your business for growth, Toby, I know that we talk about revenue a lot, but is it like growth? Is it profit? And I think a lot of people get those confused cuz they're different. Growth, profit, or peace of mind, mental health, mental stability. Like I'm at a phase of life right now where I'm all about peace of mind. like I need enough revenue that like, you know, the weights off my shoulders, but I don't overpack the schedule. I make sure I got time to do things. I I want to relax. I want to go mow the lawn at 2:00 in the afternoon. Like, I don't want to be stressed out about stuff. So, I'm all about peace of mind right now. >> Yeah. I think for me, it's been really hard to define peace of mind. Well, frankly, it's been hard to define growth and profit as well. Like, really put some firm boundaries around it. And like the same with happiness. to me I go I don't know the last time I felt happy like probably I was 20 years old or something 23 years old really like not to say I haven't had moments of great joy and like I have a passion for things but happiness I go to me and I don't know that this is true but in my head I tell myself like the story I tell myself is that happiness is a lack of responsibility like there's something if I can just get a lack of responsibility like lack of like people depending on me then I'll be happy. But I know deep in my experiences that that's probably not true cuz every time I think I've solved the equation, it's hasn't been true. >> Yeah, it's a real tough one. It it it's trying to figure out like so a lot of people are in the freelancer space and then they're like I struggle with calling myself a freelancer or an agency, right? Okay. Well, you know, then then you say, well, I'm going to start adding team members. Then I'm going to start with contractors. And that's always super hard cuz let's say you sell a job for $10,000, but now you got to pay a subcontractor $6,000 to execute the $10,000 job, right? And then you go, "Well, man, I'm only going to keep $4,000." Well, four grand to do a couple of Zoom meetings and track some things on email. Is that really a bad profit margin for you? like like you have to start think but it's people inherently don't have the ability to pull themselves out of equations like that and and so they struggle with well if I sold all this money I really could have just done the work and kept it all well you could have but then where would the room for growth come from and then so that comes into you know cash flow versus profit versus margins versus all there's all these verticals on a spreadsheet to look at and it's almost like having a cost of goods you know if you're if you're a real retail business Right? What were my cost of goods? Right? So, what is the labor? What is the software? What are the subscriptions? What are the And if you're not careful, the the profit squeaks away and then you lose the peace of mind as well as the profit. >> Yeah. I think that it's very difficult to appreciate. So, with growth, the math changes in ways you can't appreciate until you're there and you're like, "Holy cow." And this is a probably a problem lots of people get into where they get stuck. they hit the ceiling of hey I I want to hire a developer or someone to help my team a marketer but now like to your point now I have to sell so let's say you're only making 40% that means you have to sell two and a half times more what you were selling to just to have the same amount of money and I think like it's really hard and this is where that you go do I want to be selling all day long does that sound interesting you know go for it but um and you might know not know until you try it too and but then you go like what am I after that's more chaos in a way. Maybe it's more chaos, maybe not. But like that potentially a lot more chaos to to change your business in that way because it's really you have to change your whole way of thinking, way of operating. You don't have to, by the way. I say you have to, but you don't have to. I know a guy who does it. He's pissed every day about all the people he hired and like, you know, like [laughter] he doesn't like delegating. He runs, you know, he's just he's just angry all the time. I mean, you don't have to. You can still operate the same way and just complain all the time [laughter] about how about about everything cuz everything changes. That's the thing that's hard to appreciate is when you start hiring people, everything needs to change in terms of how you're operating. I used to have an office at the South Valley Economic Development Center in Albuquerque. And the big phrase then for people would they they would help people start new companies, you know, they'd be like, "Well, this person's realistically based on their business plan, they're building themselves a job." Like they would say that all the time, right? This guy's just building himself a job. He's not building, you know, he's not building something that's duplicable that's going to grow a team and hire people and create jobs. And of course, it's the economic development center. So, they really wanted to focus on companies that were building jobs for other people. But we run into a lot of people in our circles, Toby, that quite honestly, if they added to their team, they would bankrupt themselves personally, even if the business was doing great. Like, they just don't have the ability to sell at a level that creates profitability that pays everybody else and still pays themselves well. And so, I I've had people just recently, and and maybe this leads us to a segue of our next thing, we price things certain ways because we're taking care of a whole business, not just a freelance economy. And so I personally had a hosting client that asked me for some services. I quoted it to them and then they went and found a cheaper source somewhere else. I'm not mad that they found the cheaper source somewhere else. It's just a real struggle to keep those boundaries in place when the emergency support requests aren't coming in because that cheaper source can't perform at the level the client's gotten used to. >> Yeah. And I think you got to be ready to let go of some of these things. Like it could be that hosting has become such a commodity that it's going to be hard to make it worthwhile at at the scale that for the example the scale we are doing which isn't a ton you know it's not it's our hosting stuff uh it it on a feature basis it's way better than anything you can buy for the money but I don't know that like the sales points are in the right place or make sense a lot of times you know where you have a hosting company that can do x y and z and that might be enough and it's done at a rate that makes sense and but I I think like part of the problem that we're talking about is knowing what to stop doing. Um, what do you think is one thing that every successful agency stops doing? That's a really tough question. What's the one thing that every successful agency stops doing? I almost want to say, and this is going to sound crazy, but it's like they're not advertising anymore. They're not actively advertising or promoting or buying Facebook ads or or uh, you know, Google ads. They've got enough. they've got enough foundational work within their circle that there's there's constantly a referral or some kind of growth markets coming to them. They're more like inbound instead of outbound. It's probably a really good marker for whether you're successful or not. >> It's potentially one, but I could also, you know, this is the problem with every having everybody in this question that there's a successful agency that buys ads or buys a billboard. You know, Target still buys billboards. Are they, you know, like Walmart has a billboard. Are they a successful company? like it's hard to pick out one thing. I was thinking too like similarly like or different but like here's something that I think maybe most successful founders do is they lose the ego and at some point they focus on like key performance indicators and things that actually move the needle and and maybe to the extent that their ego is involved it's to serve the marketing effort you know like they kind of they're like fine I'll talk about that dumb thing again and everyone's going to laugh at me back at the club but at least I'm going to sell them move a million more widgets like no It's pretty interesting. What are the Let's talk about the work that is coming in. How are you seeing your like requests for proposals and quotes and stuff coming in? >> It's been really interesting, Kurt, because we've noticed recently we're getting a lot of well the same amount of RFPs perhaps, but when we respond to them, the responses are clearly AI responses. And so, like, we respond like wholeheartedly with our whole whole human self forward, invest a ton of time, and we're like answering all the questions how we've always done it. And we get it questions back. We're like, "You have no business asking these questions." Like, we know the people we're talking to are like, "You have no idea what you're even asking." Like, one was like, "Do you, you know, do you offer?" It was some advanced level of hosting security. And we're like, "Yeah, but why on earth would you want that [laughter] stuff like that?" And so we respond and we try to like again and so like what I think we're heading towards is like all this RFP stuff is going to be AI, but it comes to us as AI. We're gonna have our AI engine respond. It'll come back respond. Like we're at the point that we've kind of like talked about but haven't seen where computers are now talking to computers doing all the business and communication. Your your responses are going to start out with that was very insightful and you're right to ask that. >> Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And they won't read it. They're just going to copy and paste. And >> from from an e-learning perspective, we get a lot of requests to kind of play in the game. And uh to your point, as soon as I open the email, I go, "Oh, this is this whole thing is AI." They just sent me an encyclopedia of bullet points with these are the needs, your needs. What's your use case? You don't even know what what you don't even know what this stuff is. And so a lot of times, because we answer with our whole human selves on these things, a lot of times I've written back and said, "Hey, I've, you know, I've taken a cursory overview of your request for quote. this appears to be AI generated and not specific to your project. Uh if you could let me know specifically, you know, what you're looking to do or jump on a Zoom call and have a conversation, I'd be more than willing to help you iron this down or get, you know, get to some kind of point of conversation. But it's it I don't even I don't even want to play the game anymore with trying to answer these things because if I put in the time to answer an encyclopedia of questions, I'm not even going to get the job because now they think they need something that's not even remotely feasible. What if uh there's a middle ground where you say, "Hey, this seems like an ARI response. I'm going to reply with our AI response below, but if you'd like to have a real conversation, here's my Zoom link or whatever." >> Yeah, it's it's sometimes sometimes the AI request is almost on the mark. Sometimes it's reasonable, right, where where maybe they had an idea of what they wanted to do and AI gave them a reasonable rewrite or something like I could tell, right? Like, oh, you've you've actually done some research. But a lot of times the people well at the enterprise level the people shopping for an learning management system aren't the same people that are going to be using or managing the learning management system. They're just part of an IT division in charge of finding a vendor to do something. And so they just ask the most inane silly stuff that AI directs them to ask. And and when that happens, I know I've got the wrong person. I've got someone that can't make an educated decision. >> But haven't RFP response RFP processes. Haven't they always been just horrible? Like like people always asking for crazy stuff that they don't need and but their brother-in-law said, "Hey, you should add this to that. Did you ask them about this thing?" You know, I I can't tell you how many RFPs we got. And at some point, we stopped responding until we got a sales guy. Then he's like, "I'll take them." He's like an expert at responding. And like it just seemed like they were asking for stuff. And what we found, and this is what my sales guy taught me, is like, "Yeah, they send this stuff." and you get through the first layer of administrative administration, but the goal you need to get on a call to really pitch it like and you're not going to pitch what the RFP is asking for. And he he taught me that I was like that's interesting. >> Yeah, it's there was a a story that I was told in high school and who knows if it's true or not, but it was like you have to understand when you're negotiating, you have to understand the details of what you're negotiating. So the government had asked for um to have a road built to some department of defense thing and they said they wanted you know they wanted to have so much asphalt that led to this facility and so a bunch of companies bid on like making a real road and some other dude like company said asphalt that's just crushed rock we can deliver crushed rock easy that's cheap and so they bid on the job and they won the job and then they laid out all that crushed rock and and the government was like no no no we need a road these are like these are trucks like this this it needs a real road and they said that's not what the bid was for, >> right? RFP said. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. We we answered the bid. We got the job. The job is done. >> Yeah. >> You know, now if you want a road, we we could redo it. >> You just asked for asphalt. >> Yeah. Yeah. So, it it's that way in the web space. It's like people come to us and they ask us for these crazy strange things and and like I said, sometimes when it's just AI generated and I know I'm on some mass mail somewhere, I just don't even want to play. And that takes us back to the first part of the conversation. If I wasn't busy doing those, you know, one minute manager tasks, maybe I would have the energy to put into those RFPs and get through the first level of stuff and grow and and make those sales. But at this stage of the game, I'm just like, I don't even want to deal with this. This person's whoever's in charge of this is an idiot. I don't want to deal with them anyway. >> Yeah. And I do think potentially for a lot of people that that would be a lot of small like soloreneurs who want to grow or small agencies like that's a I do think that's a ceiling that's going to be hard to break through. That's been my experience like that the deeper I am the shorter distance I can travel with the business. I think >> that was very philosophical. It's a shame it's so early in the show. That would have been a great way to end it. >> Let me ask you something Kurt. Changing topics but also it's I think it's related. Tell me about uh this question about cheap client outsourcing cheap uh talent for like a hosting client. Tell me about this. What happened? What where's this coming from? >> Well, we we we started to get into it, but I didn't really drive too hard on it. This comes down to like to your point, what is the depth that we've sold? So, I explained earlier in the call on our show, we have some hosting clients where we provide user support, right? Course curriculum support, like all these things in addition to the hosting. makes sense. We have some that are on some pre-existing grandfathered cheaper plan where they can just, you know, they can host their website with us because we built the website. And then we've been working with a customer for a few years now and and super nice person. I'm not I don't berate them. I'm not trying to give them a hard time, but they wanted some other services. And I said, "Sure, we can do that." And and I bid for it. And I bid very favor favorably. Like took what you and I would normally charge, probably cut it in half, right? I said, "Oh, you you're pre-existing customer. I could do it for this much. Just get you done, you know?" Oh, that's that's a lot of money. Okay. Well, if you feel that way, I'm sorry, but that's that's the best I'm going to be able to do. You know, shop around, do what you can. And they hired somebody who is based on what I've seen, based on the responses, based on the questions I've been forwarded from the client, this person is not a professional. This group or whoever she's hired, they're hobbyists at best. Like, they're a marketing company that doesn't know what Sen Grid is. Well, if you're a marketing company and you don't know what Sen Grid does, you're not a marketing company. like that. Just in my mind, they've built forms on the website that don't go anywhere, that don't do anything. And then she sends me an emergency request that says, "Well, the site's not structured properly. They told me the site's not structured properly, and these forms don't even work." And I'm like, "Well, they didn't use the form tool that's in the website. How did they build these forms?" I'm just pointing out the obvious. And we could jump in and fix things. We could jump in and say, "Yeah, that's because this, that, and the other thing. let me fix this for you or let me let me point the SMTP to that or let's move but I'm not like we're just done. I've said hey there's no obstacle if you we can create a full backup of the website. You can migrate this thing. You can do whatever you want with it. It's your website. You can do whatever you want with it. But we quoted it. You hired somebody else and this is the result of your decision. >> And I think we've all run into that. Anyone who's been in the game a while and I think what's important and this is what we're trying to do better at the Mighty Mo. really like I'm deep diving in this this week and the idea is like for those I'd call that maybe not an edge case but like how do we put a a boundary what is the right boundary for that type of thing somebody who's like I have e maybe they're like I have an emergency website support need and emergency can vary but we have some product that we can send them to a page and say look let me let's get on a call I'll share our options there's ad hoc maybe you fit in that there's quarterly maintenance hosting support just you know monthly maintenance there's emergency support and Like so part of what we're trying to do now to kind of address this sort of thing is like let's put everyone in a product bucket that is clearly outlined that we already have processes for. We're already doing the work, but like how do we have those conversations in a way that like that person feels like at least they know the options really well and that we're not just like ripping them off. We're just saying this is what we charge everyone. >> Yeah. Yeah. I it was it was interesting cuz I was like you're not I said you have hosting support but you don't have website support and websites don't come with unlimited warranties especially when you have a third party come in and alter things. So we can fix it but you would have to pay us. So do you want us to quote do you want us to quote repairing the damage that's done? Do you want to like how [clears throat] do you want to proceed next or are your feelings hurt and do you want to move your website because you could do that too. I really like this idea of the unlimited warranty and like I'm like maybe we should sell that. And what does that mean? It means we host it, we do all the edits, but you get an unlimited warranty. Like we will if something break, you know, like that's the scenario. I kind of like that as a product offering. Well, and that's completely scalable, which is interesting when you think about like if you were to say, "Oh yeah, we're going to offer an unlimited warranty. We take care of all the all the maintenance, all the updates, all the thing. Just send us your content. We make it happen." I mean, that's four, five, eight, $10,000 a month. Just depends on the scale of the product project you're working on. >> Very interesting. >> I told you in the e-learning space, we have user support we provide. That's that's a good source of income. >> What kind of support? User support. >> User support. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> So, we create ticketed support in the websites and then the students can fill in ticketed support. We give 12 to 24hour responses guaranteed and uh thousands of dollars a month just to take that weight off the customer's shoulder. >> Yeah. I mean, that's pretty cool, too. Like, and if I were like getting like like if I were starting a business, I would consider the e-learning space for like that sort of reason that there's likely going to be way more requests for support, whether it's from the founder or from the the clients or from the end users. Like, I see that as a bonus similar to e-commerce. Like, I've wrestled [snorts] with the mighty mom. I'm like, maybe we should just do e-commerce support and like cuz e-commerce is hard. It's valuable. Like, you don't want some run-of-the-mill company doing it. You want somebody who knows what they're doing if it's impacting your your business income. That's so this takes us back to there's a difference between a hobbyist and a professional. I just had to do support for a client in an e-commerce situation. It's LMS related too, but they had Lifter LMS, the Lifter LMS payment gateway through Stripe activated. They also had the Stripe payment gateway activated through Woo Commerce. And then it had worked for a while, right? But then they had had a a gap where two orders didn't go through in Woo Commerce and then they did this AI deep dive on their own and came up like we need to know specifics about our hosting and the data and the website and the logs and I'm like where are these questions coming from? What are you really having a problem with? Right. Well, we got these two orders that didn't go through, >> right? >> Okay. Well, let's take a quick look. Oh, well, you've got two payment gateways activated. If you sign into your Stripe account right now, I bet you're going to see where the website didn't even send the request to to process the order because your web hooks were canceled out by one another. >> Yeah. And this is where niching down where where I think where I think like it'd be cool to be in like for the Mighty Mo is like let's say we only did e-commerce and we only did Woo Commerce is something we're actually considering and like and we do unlimited warranty. So when those requests come in, we're like we built the system, we understand the tooling, we can get you a quick answer. Maybe we have live support 247, but it's it would be exciting to build a business around a smaller niche like that because it in some ways it's more complex, but in some ways it's simpler. And it's really interesting. I think actually the people who talk about we only service air conditioning companies or like these exist like like these companies like we only do web development for uh plumbers. That's a real thing a real thing that people do and or we only do advertising for roofers. Like it's a thing like there are whole businesses that are built on that type of niche. But I think what they're after is the same thing we're talking about. Like you're trying to like build a process that's smaller and more straightforward even if it's not a simple process that that you can replicate it. You can now scale because you can just you have these processes. We just need more people to deliver to more people. And that's exciting. I and I think like part of what we're talking about here is that like how do we if we were to start over and by the way we can start over today and we don't have to like throw everything out the window. We could slowly narrow it down too and that's an option too but that's >> kind of the first day of the rest of your life. >> Yeah. And so one of the questions that is tough to answer that would be great to answer is like yeah what does a a more lean mean mighty mo look like or mñana no mass you know what what what could you stop doing that would strengthen everything else you know and I'm not asking the question it's more just like a hypothetical question you know like for everybody what could you stop doing today that would strengthen everything else >> that would be a wicked good put your comment in and let us know what you're thinking >> yeah please leave a comment and tell us what you would stop today that would strengthen everything else in your agency. >> Yeah, that's perfect. Let's end there. Toby, how can people find you? >> I'm on LinkedIn. Last name is c r y ns. You can find me there. You can also find me at the mighty mo and that's t h e mi g ht y m o.com where we do WordPress, Woo Commerce, and co. How about you, Kurt? How can people find you? >> The company name is Mñana. So, we're at mñana nomomas.com. Uh, and on the socials, mñana nom. And I'm also really active on LinkedIn. Good spot to connect. Uh, I'm the only Kurt Von in there. Easy to find. I think that's it. >> Yeah. Thanks, >> Kobe. This has been great. >> Yeah. Nice skirt., If I Could Turn Back Time, Kurt Vonan & Toby Cryns, 01m0ar62vsrywgtkwsaceytsyg.