Growing Agency Success With People-Centric Values and Open Source Education  ## Document Notes ## Highlights - **Long-Term Platform Focus Scales Agencies** - RT Camp evolved from helping early bloggers to working with large global WordPress clients since 2009. - Their long-term focus on WordPress enabled deep technical specialization and growth. Transcript: Rahul Bansal So we have been a WordPress agency since 2009. We started with smaller projects, more like helping early stage bloggers because WordPress was mainly a blogging framework in old days. And over the time, we grew up to take bigger clients and now working with some of the largest companies globally within the WordPress space. ([Time 0:00:45](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b16f4138-58c6-4786-865c-abfe0abc31c7)) - **Accessibility Intersects SEO And Power Users** - Accessibility overlaps with SEO and power-user features like keyboard navigation, so it's multi-benefit work. - Rahul adopted keyboard-first workflows from personal preference and saw broader usability gains. Transcript: Anne Bobolet Because if I think of this from my perspective, I've been in WordPress since 2007. It was only six years ago that I discovered how important it actually is. What about you? Rahul Bansal So, how do I put it? Like the legal side I discovered little late like but early on so how do I put like we ended up having some focus on accessibility without realizing we are doing accessibility work. For example so accessibility is usually low on priority list unless it's legally required we try to educate client but in the end they are the one who calls the shot so it's their budget Their site so they will have final say but then seo is always top on their list and some part of accessibility like semantic marker image alt, and many attributes kind of help accessibility. Some part which are not SEO friendly, like keyboard navigation, helps accessibility, but also helps power users. ([Time 0:02:51](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e7c8b8f8-2b59-4e02-a64b-ee574ec87e48)) - **Open-Source Your Training Materials** - Publish open training material and let students learn without lock-in to grow the talent pool. - Send trainees to contribute to open source so they learn community skills and gain practical exposure. Transcript: Rahul Bansal Yeah so um do i put like as i mentioned like we were uh focused on small businesses in early days so there were like naturally constrained to like how much we can charge and then by that effect How much we can pay so we so in early days we ended up going to these colleges education institute to hire fresher and train them on WordPress. And there was one more reason, like when we started, WordPress was very small in the market share and the number of opportunities it had. So finding people who knew WordPress engineering, like the theme and plugin development already was very hard in India. And then we were growing very fast. So for multiple reasons, ended up we being more aligned to the like the academics. So we have the network of 900 colleges right now, like which we built over the 16 years. And every year we send WordPress courses to many colleges, which some of them teach WordPress development as part of their curriculum. So we end up getting a lot of students in the ecosystem. Many of them join RTK ambassadors. We also have a paid training program. By paid training program, I mean like college students usually when they're still in college. So in India, common system is four-year engineering course, which is divided into semesters. And in the eighth semester, like the last six months, students are expected to work in corporate like some kind of internship or some some other thing like that so we came up with this Paid training program paid internship where people get six months uh like full-time paid job to learn wordpress we train them very well like to like theme plugin development architecture Everything. It's a comprehensive course. The course is in public domain from a long time released under the Creative Commons Zero license. So this course has become very popular over the years because the course has no strings attached. People can enter the course, wordpress as long as they love it and leave whenever they want without having to face any kind of penalties or any kind of separation fees so so this kind of Gives student a chance to explore wordpress and the course also includes contributing to the wordpress course So as part of the course, we send the students to the WordPress core itself, Where they work with other core commuters. So this overall is a very nice experience. And this not only gives them the exposure to the WordPress, but also exposure to the open source. Something which we a lot. We believe that students need to have a buy-in and passion for open source. And that's only when they can contribute better. So every year we get 100,000 applications. We are not that big. We end up hiring sometimes 80. This year we aim to hire 100 people from the colleges. And we teach them WordPress without any lock-in or any kind of expectation that they have to work for us. They can join our competitors. ([Time 0:05:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/e42537a5-30b1-40b6-9e87-0442bf9f4b0e)) - **CC0 Course Copied — And Welcomed** - An Indian company copied RT Camp's open training and an employee complained to Rahul about it. - Rahul reminded them the material is CC0 and encouraged reuse to spread skills across companies. Transcript: Rahul Bansal An Indian company, like copied our training program completely and hosted internally. And one of their employees figured out, like, hey, this is an Articam's training program, which is their kind of learning from the intranet. And so he reached out to us trying to complain about his employer. And we told him like, hey, we release it under Creative Commons. So whatever your boss is doing is perfectly fine. You're more than welcome to learn it in your intranet, more than welcome to show up at our site. We don't ask for registration. And then I kind of reach out to, so there's a WhatsApp group of Indian businesses. Like I told them, we don't have any sign-up registration requirement on our training program. You're more than welcome to scrap, copy. If you want database term, I can give you database term. Or if you want people to just visit our site feel free uh we are not asking them to register so we are not tracking your employees so uh so so this kind of openness is uh is missing in the large Corporations where everybody is trying to solve their own problem uh this is probably more like paying it forward like we we took a lot from open source and we want wanted to give as much As back so we've made training program open source so first we made training program open source then we also made training video open source so our training videos are on our youtube Channel um we also again told people like if you want to download from YouTube and upload in their private Vimeo, whatever account, we are cool with that. ([Time 0:19:28](https://share.snipd.com/snip/abc600b1-4d2b-4224-b9ea-85c100e4ad7e)) - **Train Communication Alongside Code** - Teach communication, empathy, and how to ask 'why' as part of technical training. - Encourage juniors to question use cases to deliver better engineering solutions. Transcript: Rahul Bansal If you remember, I mentioned in our training program, we also cover non-engineering aspect, like the communication style and soft skill empathy. So that actually helped us bridge the gap between, I would say, East and West. So we rarely run into those issues. First, like me and the other seniors, we have grown over the time. So we kind of, we got time to get used to it, like the holidays, the cultural, the nitty gritties, the linguistic things. Like in US people discuss politics very openly in work culture and they can be still respectful even with each other even if their political views differ. In India it's less common like discussing politics at work is very rare. Unless you are a really good friend then you go for a tea or coffee and you discuss it there. But usually in common gathering, like people avoid sensitive discussion around politics, religion, and many other things. So there are cultural differences for sure. But then how we, so the kind of, I would say, so the people who join RT Gamberley learn and bridge the differences over the time. And we put our learning into our internal training course. And that is where, so we have like a teachers in training course. Like they kind of take this like communication exercises where they kind of try to make this student ready. ([Time 0:23:30](https://share.snipd.com/snip/4abba59c-461b-431f-8eb8-7a6616eae6ef)) - **CSV Export Revealed A Missed Integration** - Rahul described a project where engineers exported CSVs nightly instead of integrating with MailChimp. - Asking why revealed a simpler direct integration and improved the solution significantly. Transcript: Rahul Bansal Like a project had a waitlist feature like e-commerce project we were building and they had a huge waitlist. Their product was viral. There was always like waitlist. So the client when they sent a task like this is very early like I think 2010 or 11 that hey can I get and the waitlist was built using gravity form something like that yeah it was gravity Form very early days of gravity form and we were like so the request came that can we get a CSV dump of all the people who signed up yesterday like every so we created a cron job and every uh Like 4am in every morning we were sending email addresses in a csv format that signed up for uh like or like in the last 24 hours so out of curiosity i asked like what are you doing with this CSV dumps? And they said oh we are importing them to MailChimp. I said do you know from Gravity Form we can send directly data to MailChimp? They said I don't know. So this is what happens when you don't question like so what they said was technically doable, nothing wrong in there could be other reason for having csv dumb but their use case so by Asking their use case we could give them better solution and this is something we we created as a part of cultural framework like our communication framework like always ask next question Like why you want something like try to understand the use cases, try to understand the impact of work we have. ([Time 0:27:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8e3fe9ff-dd86-4d22-96d1-56fb85435350)) - **Roundtable Culture Lowers Hierarchy** - RT Camp enforces egalitarian 'roundtable' discussions to remove hierarchy during technical problem solving. - They treat conversations as merit based so every voice can propose solutions. Transcript: Rahul Bansal So we are an engineering heavy company. So we have these, we have substantial projects where client come with designer and they have their own vision, which we appreciate, admire. But at the same time, like again, accessibility and other things, engineering constraint, core, we assess the impact of the design. And early on the project, since we made the culture of proactive communication, we reach out to designers, sometimes in the client designers in the same call, and we try to find a middle Ground like, hey, can we make few changes where your aesthetic will look almost same or similar, but engineering performance and accessibility will be much better. And they appreciate it because it's not like... Sometimes people have limited understanding. So they know design, they know conversion, they do things in their way. It is our job to tell them like, hey, there are three ways to do this thing and the way you're suggesting can harm core web vitals or performance or user experience. And if we do it slightly different, like some minor changes in effects or animation or like things like that, it will turn out to be nice. And sometimes we build it at our own cost, demo it to gain their confidence. And then the designer will say, yeah, this is perfect. Like this is perfectly acceptable. Perfectly acceptable deviation from my original vision. And that's how we score win. Like if we just listen and follow orders, then we will end up harming the client's interest. And at the end of the day, designer will feel bad because they have taken a project which will not achieve the success they intended to do. So there are things about... And there are many decisions like this in a large project where collaboration is required. And collaboration can only happen when we treat each other equal. Something we installed in our company's name. So the RTKM's full name is Roundtable CAM and Roundtable is literally come from the roundtable from the British history. Like everybody who sits around it are equal. ([Time 0:34:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39f6e289-d09d-48d2-887a-3157320928db)) - **Model Boundaries To Prevent Overwork** - Limit workweeks and avoid signaling weekend availability to prevent overtime culture. - Schedule messages and model behavior so employees don't feel pressured to work nights or weekends. Transcript: Rahul Bansal Weekend, but I hold them. I schedule Slack messages to go on Monday morning. Because I don't want people to see me working on weekend. I'm not working, I'm just browsing internet, sharing some links. But I want to avoid that also. So creating that culture requires a lot of thinking, I would say, and micro decisions and micro behavior. So creating this culture has been my best experience. People have built much bigger companies in India in much shorter time. So size of business, number of people we hired, big logos we want, those are secondary. At the center of it, the culture we built, and we have extremely low attrition rate, something I'm very proud of. A reason is that because Articam never had any layoff, like no layoff in COVID, in any up and down in market. Once we hire people, it's like government job. Their safety we manage to build. So that is my favorite part. ([Time 0:41:08](https://share.snipd.com/snip/46ac7672-b101-41df-a231-fbf7e392ae30)) - **Safety Drives Ownership And Passion** - A people-centric, no-layoff culture builds loyalty, ownership, and better long-term delivery. - Rahul links low attrition and passion to feeling safe and valued at work. Transcript: Rahul Bansal A reason is that because Articam never had any layoff, like no layoff in COVID, in any up and down in market. Once we hire people, it's like government job. Their safety we manage to build. So that is my favorite part. The people-centric nature of RT Camp. Anne Bobolet Yeah, that's... I'm literally, you probably noticed, I'm a bit lost for words because I am so incredibly impressed to hear these things. It makes me so happy. And I really hope there are other agencies and companies in the WordPress community in India that adopt this, wow, how would you say it? This philosophy this this method um because i think it makes the world a better place in general and also people fail to understand sometimes like oh look i won't fail to understand this Rahul Bansal Sometimes i would look the people aspect of it servicing so any kind of consulting business is people's business in my opinion in the end no matter I might be going on sales call closing A deal but it's in the end the client will be spending more time with my engineers so if my engineer love my client and my the projects I'm bringing to them they are going to do much better And the only way they are going to love it is when they love arctic camp first like when they feel like it's their home it's their place uh so by so people-centric business is also uh like Moral society economically is the right way to build things like uh rather than exploiting people uh them love the place you are building. You have to make some, like, adjustments. But in the long run, they are worth, like, because there are many projects I am not even involved at all. But I see the passion in which engineers are delivering. The passion comes from ownership. And you can only own a place where you feel you belong there. ([Time 0:41:56](https://share.snipd.com/snip/39e57317-24a0-4cb2-a1b8-da128e4e987b)) - **Market By Teaching, Not Just Selling** - Use educational content—sample SOWs, discovery reports, migration guides—to build trust with prospects. - Let prospects self-educate and contact you when they recognize your competence. Transcript: Anne Bobolet Now, the way that the company is as a culture, how does that affect the way you do marketing for RT Camp? Aviral Mittal Yeah, that's a great question. I think I'm so glad that we started with our training program. If you really look at it, we sort of approach our marketing as a training program, but for prospects in a way that, you know, when on the supply side, like we need to have engineers, we need To educate them on how WordPress works, how to follow best practices, etc. In the similar way, a lot of our content, a lot of our outreach is around educating people on how WordPress works, how it is the right platform for them, and how we are the right agency for Them. And you, you know, you will be able to see that in small things, like, for example, in many cases, we would, we would put out our sample SOWs or sample contracts, you know, or even sample Discovery reports. Or we would publish a detailed guides on migrations from different platforms, what kind of things that you need to take care of. ([Time 0:50:32](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8acf9fd2-6a4a-47d7-afdc-e578b6d5e5d8)) - **Low Visibility Hides Deep Engineering Strength** - RT Camp is less visible because they subcontract work under NDAs and have fewer outspoken employees. - Their engineering strength often powers other agencies' case studies rather than their own brand. Transcript: Rahul Bansal And that is something we are working hard to change. But while we do that, engineering is our like big strength. So if anybody has a complex engineering project, anything like large-scale migration to fixing something that has been like fixing somebody else's mess, we shine in those projects. Anne Bobolet Yeah, that's really good to know. Rahul Bansal And one more thing we are less known is because we work with a lot of other agencies through subcontracting. And in those projects, we have strong NDAs. And it works for us. It's not something we take negatively. We give a lot of our engineering force to other agencies. 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