#160 – Rahul Bansal on Success in Enterprise WordPress  ## Metadata - Author: [[WP Tavern]] - Full Title: #160 – Rahul Bansal on Success in Enterprise WordPress - Category: #podcasts - URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/b017cb96-b9ee-4b2e-b347-a01d29a31245 ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Enterprise WordPress Rigour** - Enterprise WordPress demands rigorous security and scalability beyond typical sites. - Every plugin and theme must be thoroughly audited to prevent vulnerabilities and performance issues at scale. Transcript: Nathan Wrigley Become enterprise WordPress? At what point do we cross the Rubicon where a site is, I don't know, big enough or your agency is working with a different type of client. Can you define what you think that means? And I'm sure that if you're on the cusp of being an enterprise agency, this is something that, you know, may be slightly confusing. Rahul Bansal Firstly, there is no formal definition to that. Many agencies believe they're serving enterprise space when they're not. Some people are actually serving enterprise space, but they don't realize it. So in my opinion, it's where the requirement changes a lot. Like for example, if you're building a small WordPress site, which I don't consider as an enterprise site, we will be tempted to pick first theme and plugin that matches our need. Like if it works, if it gets the job done, that's it. But then in enterprise space, there is a lot of security and scalability concerns. These two concerns are very big. Something might be working all right. But then when you look at the code, you realize that there will be going to be security issues or there could be scalability issues. Many times, indie developer person, they design small WordPress plugins. They don't have data or big enough site to test it on a large installation. So those things are not tested on a really high traffic website. So enterprise can mean really high traffic website with a lot of scalability requirement. On the other hand, the traffic can be less, but the security requirement can be enormous. Consider the White House website. It was on the WordPress with the previous administration and it's again on the WordPress with the new administration. So in both cases, I don't think Whitehouse like a website we can classify as a very high traffic website, but it is a very sensitive website. It would be a lot embarrassing if that site gets hacked. So every piece of code that goes into Whitehouse website, which your agent is working on it will be thoroughly checked for security attack, for audit, for all the compliances. And this additionally ([Time 0:05:18](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c4a4188d-cc61-4b80-a46c-1327a4064055)) - **Unexpected Enterprise Breakthrough** - RT Camp unexpectedly entered the enterprise space through a demanding client in 2010. - Their initial skepticism turned into a long-term major revenue stream after overcoming extensive audits and pricing challenges. Transcript: Rahul Bansal Yeah, it all happened unexpectedly. I started as a professional blogger. I used to make money from advertising, affiliate marketing. So it's like I wasn't doing anything remotely related to agencies. So one thing led to another and then I started freelancing. Then even after freelancing, when I started RTK as an agency, I was coming from blogosphere most of my initial client were bloggers like independent bloggers somebody wanted a theme Somebody wanted a plugin somebody wanted a sidebar widget sidebar widget used to be a lot more popular in those early days of blogging like people used to have myspace like experience On the web like lots of widgets email suspicion form this pop-up so in fact the first enterprise client that walked into overdo that's why i said like many agencies don't even realize When they mingle with enterprise space i kind of felt very irritated because they asked so many questions they got our reference from linkedin we had zero we were not even using enterprise Word anywhere in our branding marketing anywhere at all but back in 2010 also we made a good name for ourselves. So anybody who shouted, hey, any WordPress references, our name used to pop up on social media. So we got that. And they sent us a very large procurement checklist, which we never heard of. All our projects were like email exchange, two, three emails, money via PayPal and emails used to be content. Like whatever you committed on email is the contract. And suddenly there come like this long pdf excel sheets with check boxes do you have a data storage policy this policy that policy if we end up filling this we are not going to make any profit With this project so then uh one of my teammates like let's price in that let's price in and see if they can afford it so we literally added another zero to our pricing, literally like five Times, 10 times. And we said like, hey, this is our minimum. Do you want to go ahead? I said, sure, like this is peanuts. And they were worried, like, do you understand the project? You're quoting very less. Your starting point is way less than our internal budget. So they came to our office. They were placed in India. Luckily, they were in the same city. They came to our office to audit us physically. They put like remarks, like don't have fingerprint scanner in your biometric sensors in your office entry. There is no employee log. We are not storing any of your data. So this office is not the building where your data will decide. Your data will decide on AWS or all those cloud servers. And then they got convinced WordPress was very small then. And we were the only known agencies which was fully committed to WordPress at that point. So they didn't have choice two, three. So they kind of crossed the fingers and gave us that project. It took six months to close. I was very pessimistic. It's only after two, three years we realized that they become our largest client by a huge margin. All my blogger friend put one side and the single client one side. And that revenue was growing very nicely year on year renewals they had this returners everywhere they were renewing without asking questions so i realize it it's very hard to win these Big clients but once you are in it becomes very smooth journey hence power like after that point and then i think 2014 around after two three years data when i saw that this client was consistently For last three year in row our biggest client zero sales effort zero account issues no negotiation on pricing and everything was smooth so then I thought like we should go into some enterprise Space and luckily around that time I had a call with Chris Lema Chris Lema used to available for consulting calls on clarity I'm not sure that's still. And I still remember it was exactly 33 minutes that I talked to Chris. He repositioned RT Camp. In 33 minutes, he gave me some amazing breakthrough idea. And after that call, first time we told ourselves, we are enterprise WordPress agency from today. Until 2014, we were not identifying ourselves or branding ourselves as an enterprise WordPress agency. That moment was the first time when we put in bold letters on our homepage in SEO meta everywhere we added we are enterprise, enterprise, enterprise WordPress. Nathan Wrigley Can you remember ([Time 0:14:48](https://share.snipd.com/snip/04bacee4-715e-49a3-8921-fc7c5d2f46e5)) - **Growth of Enterprise WordPress Market** - The WordPress enterprise market exploded with WordPress’s maturity and increased global use. - Having prior enterprise success stories aids in winning new clients today despite increased competition. Transcript: Rahul Bansal Now in fact just imagine wordpress market share when we were building first initial websites there was not even custom post types that were present in wordpress so all the wordpress Plugins we used to do a lot of hacks there was not standardization so a lot of things happen with wordpress as a platform wordpress evolved the market share has become so big it's easier To say and we have so many samples right from White House to large publishers. And globally, it's not like just the American companies are using WordPress. India's second largest publisher also uses WordPress. So does Al Jazeera in Qatar. So there are many big websites all over the world. So it makes WordPress easy to sell. The market is big. There is a precedence where you can pitch somebody. This is WordPress used by so-and I believe that no matter which lead you are dealing with, say if you have a lead from a certain industry, a certain geography, you will find a WordPress Success story in their geography. You will find WordPress being used by your prospects competition. That makes it easier to sell WordPress. So yeah, the competition is more because opportunity is bigger. The pie is a lot bigger. Otherwise, we would have stuck to the same size. Every year, we are adding more people because we are able to get more work for them, even with this new agency is coming up. In fact, it's easier to build WordPress agency or any kind of enterprise-grade agency now because the recipe is quite clear because we can look at how other agencies are doing and we Can take some lessons from them. At that time, we had no ([Time 0:22:09](https://share.snipd.com/snip/53dae874-0c48-42a8-a2e1-0c79ca969dcc)) - **Gutenberg Empowers Enterprises** - Gutenberg editor’s intuitive block system is a game-changer for enterprise content creation. - It balances powerful features with long-term maintainability and security for large organizations. Transcript: Nathan Wrigley And pop store that it really doesn't matter if it goes down a bit. What are the one or two things which you bring out when an Enterprise client wants to know why WordPress? Rahul Bansal Difference between a product company and agency. A product has a landing page which is more similar, it caters to a lot of people but agency pitch is tailored for every client, every prospect. So our first goal is to find competition. So which are the competitors for this particular client, prospector client and see if you're using WordPress. If your competition is using WordPress you will feel a lot more comfortable going after it because nobody wants to be first, especially in large enterprises. Another way we define enterprise is that when you are not buying from out of your pocket. In a large organization, your job is not to save the money or find cheapest solution. Your job is to deliver result so that it can go very nicely in your annual review report. I still believe people, especially in enterprise, are looking for safety as a first, because they know that they have budget to build anything under the sun. So usually we say less like WordPress can do this, WordPress can do that, because for everything that WordPress or any platform doesn't do out of the box, they have budget. What they need to know is that it's secure, it's safe, it will scale well. And if some government approaches us, so we show that public subversion fund that they're managing, so that client has a special permission with us, like we cannot refer them publicly, That government agency, but we can refer them to other government agencies in private conversations. So that is how we convince like, okay, this is similar people to you who are using WordPress. And I think safety is still the first thing that people are looking for because it's not even wordpress it starts with open so there is something somebody did some marketing where people Believe or have this misconception that open source will be easy to hack because you can see the code you can easily hack that is our first step if client mention it explicitly we go all In. Even if client doesn't mention it, if the prospect says that we are looking for eating interest, we still verify. Are you sure that you're sorted on WordPress being safe? Any concerns, any doubts? And then features, because WordPress has no match. And I'm not saying this as a WordPress agency. The Gutenberg editor itself alone is miles apart. If you go to any other platform, their editing capabilities are nowhere close to Gutenberg editor. Gutenberg editor demo itself is a deal breaker in many cases. We just show them Gutenberg editor and they like, wow, is this possible? Is this thing real? Is this some mock-up? No, this is website. After the call, we are going to send you a URL. Go and try your hands-on. This is no fake, that vaporware demo where you see something on my screen, but in ([Time 0:24:10](https://share.snipd.com/snip/654d9ab6-f6f0-4e68-9096-53270d0d8142)) - **Invest in Talent Training** - Train WordPress talent via rigorous paid programs using public courses and mentorship. - Continually invest in employee skills to meet enterprise level demands and sustain growth. Transcript: Nathan Wrigley Next employees? Because I'm guessing at the level that you're now at, you must have some fairly exacting specifications when you put out a job description. And WordPress is becoming an increasingly JavaScript-based thing, a lot more technical difficulties. Where do you find your talent and is it becoming harder to find? Rahul Bansal This would be unique to literally us. We have what we call our own training center, where every year we take some 50 students from college who recently graduated every six months we take 25 to 30 students from colleges we Put them through six months of training like a complete they get paid to learn wordpress for six months they have no obligation to continue with us they can join our competition they Can do anything with the wordpress but we really get this training And this job is very popular in India. So this training we run, the pay scales are very popular in India. So last year also, we had some 90,000 applications for 60 positions. We literally have to build a platform. So we have a campus adding platform. Its name is Chitra Gupta. Chitra Gupta is basically responsible for managing the ledger of your good and bad work. So in Hindu mythology, so we build a Chitra Gupta which basically scans your GitHub repos and assigns your grade. And those 90,000 people gets graded. And then we interview from top to bottom until 60 positions gets filled. So last time we had to introduce only 1,200 students by the time 60 students got selected. Then we put them to the six month training. Our course is public, so people know what is going to be in the course. And so we find a lot of passionate people. Many times by the time they join our course, I've already gone through it from the public website that we have learned at RTKM.com. From there, they already have checked it. And then we put them through the six-month training. After that, this thing we started this year only. After six-month training, we put them six months into the WordPress. So WordPress core has a mentorship program running on for new contributors. So this year we enrolled 10 people managed by Automatic and Google employees, senior employees. So they are mentoring these people further. So first year we invest them heavily. Zero revenue, only investment in year one. And then from year two, we start getting like some client work done from them. And this is something turned out to be very great for us from last three years. At some point, we felt there are same number of people switching between agencies and net new addition to the WordPress worker pool was getting stagnant, especially around COVID. I felt the way people used to discover life with WordPress or a professional life with WordPress was mostly through word camps or meetup groups. And when that COVID happened, we suddenly missed those years when new people didn't come to the WordPress, as many as they used to come before. So there was a gap that started hurting large agencies like us. Because if we look at a small website, then the enterprise budget appears a lot. But there's always a limit. No company approves unlimited budget for any venture. Like for every project, there's a budget. It's usually large enough, but there's always a number. And as talent was getting more expensive, WordPress was getting unaffordable at some point. So I talked to some medium publishers, medium-sized publishers, not the big ones, who complained a lot like the good WordPress agencies are either sold out or too expensive. It's like WordPress are suddenly getting unaffordable. And that is when we started in this hiring experiment where we onboard people every year. And this is what we are doing from last four years. So we have been hiring for many years, but only it was 5-10 people. This massive scale of hiring, we started from the last three to four years, and it turned out very well for us. All these people in second year clocked. In agencies, billable hours is a very big metric. And in second year, these people clocked 90%, more than 90% billable hours. Nathan Wrigley That's ([Time 0:31:23](https://share.snipd.com/snip/09a3c225-004c-4e41-b4f5-3ff2008df96c)) - **Commit Time to WordPress Core** - Allocate structured time by role for WordPress core contributions to build community and employee expertise. - Track contributions rigorously to demonstrate commitment and skill maturity. Transcript: Nathan Wrigley Yeah, this feels right this year? Because you can't measure this. And in some cases, I imagine people would think, yeah, they're probably overdoing it a little bit over there and what have you. Rahul Bansal So we have a top line mandate that, so it's like internally we divide engineers in three categories in rt cam the junior ones who are like less than two years in rt cam the senior ones like Two to five years and lead levels who are like more than five years with us the junior one we target 20 percent of their time for wordpress score and the medium level the senior 10 percent And lead level is five percent and lead level is very hard because we have very less lead engineers. The demand supply gap is more evident on senior and lead level. But then these metrics are so our structure is that we have some called business units. So every BU need to submit their 20 percent report. Not only they need to submit the R's report like they have their R's went into the WordPress core or different part. They have to compile what are the issues they solved. It's not like you're just making time entries. You have to tell in a leadership quarterly review that I have 50 people in my business units and together they clock 3,000 hours. And this is what we achieved in 3,000 hours. And this is approved. The props messages we see in WordPress like those screenshots, if our employee names is mentioned, are taken screenshots and filed into those review reports. Three people got props from my team, the WordPress core release notes, like with major releases. So those contributor lists also presented by them. If somebody is doing some make WordPress blog post or activity, those are also tracked by them. So BU heads compile this report, like bottom ups and then present in leadership meeting. So this is not accidental. Like the material ROI is very hard to measure. We cannot say that, oh, we made like X dollars because of this effort. I think as a salesperson, when I tell a client, like, I'm going to give you an engineer who knows WordPress very well, I'm more confident if that person has contributed six months to the WordPress core and their patches is weighted by some amazing people in WordPress community, especially senior ones. It's like a win-win situation for all. This gives me a very, very well-trained people to sell. Nathan Wrigley That's exactly how I was just thinking about it, this kind of win-win cycle of you put people into WordPress and obviously at a junior level, more time. I can understand that. That makes sense. Presumably the ones who are more experienced, they've got other work to be doing, but also they've probably gained a ton of experience doing those prior years of extra hours. So you put the hours in, but also they contribute to core, but they get experience back out. They'll be exposed to all sorts of different things that your projects would never have put them in front of, presumably. So they'll be touching on subject matters, getting into plugins, themes, blocks, code, core, whatever it may be, in a whole range of different ways than they would be. So like you say, it's like you slap my back, I'll slap yours a little bit. Win-win. WordPress wins, you win. Rahul Bansal There are three wins here. The person, that student who came right off the college. And usually in college, people hear, people have some negative perception about professional life, that companies are ([Time 0:40:11](https://share.snipd.com/snip/170d6c6a-6a36-4380-8b66-118f11181352))