Building a WordPress Care Business Foundation

When I was a small boy, my dad decided to build a storage shelter. Nowadays, you can just buy one from Lowes or Home Depot.

We lived in an unincorporated area outside of the small town where I grew up. Our house was on a small creek where my brother and I would catch crawdads. We weren’t catching them for a boil.

Ah, the rural country life.

Back to my story.

My dad decided we needed a storage shelter. We had a small house with a carport – I’m not sure there were garages yet.

We had a pretty good sized garden, and he needed a place to store tools for the garden and other outdoor projects.

The first thing that he did was pour a foundation.

I remember being mesmerized as a kid at the concrete truck coming to pour the concrete.

Even more, I remember being mesmerized as they smoothed the surface to be a solid concrete foundation for this storage shed.

Once the concrete was dry and the foundation set, he and some other family members went about building, basically, a tiny house, to serve as our storage shed.

It goes to reason, if we are building something, we have to have a foundation. We have something upon which everything else is supported.

Setting up a WordPress Care Support business is the same way. There needs to be a foundation, building blocks, to set up that part of your business.

Here are five building blocks for setting up your WordPress Care business.

• Centralized management
• Flexibility to Scale
• Regular communication with clients
• User management for reports
• Ticketing system for extra tasks

 

Centralized Management

Crucial to the process of managing multiple WordPress installs is a centralized management. One of the things that make this kind of service so helpful is the ability to log in from one dashboard.

Simply put, it saves time.

A lot of time.

How many times have you spent the entire day logging into multiple WordPress websites to check to see what needs to be updated and execute backups?

A centralized dashboard optimizes this process.

In fact, the more tasks you can accomplish from your central dashboard, the better. A central dashboard is what makes a product like MainWP so attractive. For a yearly membership that is very reasonable, you can get all the extensions you need to run one of these services entirely.

There will still be other tools you will need, but MainWP includes the integration with most of the best tools for accomplishing those tasks.

Flexibility to Scale

I don’t recommend you starting out with a premium support product. Consider starting simple with a minimum viable product, and, as you are more comfortable, expand.

This requires the flexibility to scale your service offerings. You can probably start by offering the most basic tasks without anything other than the MainWP plugin itself. It simply depends on what you choose to offer at the beginning.

A minimum viable product is a term used by Eric Ries to describe the most basic iteration of a product. It is a term often used in Lean Startup circles.

Leanstack.com quotes Reis:

“A Minimum Viable Product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

Certainly, the term is a fixture in the Startup world, but the principle applies here as well.

Offer the most basic service, gather user feedback, and adjust. Later you can offer various other services.

Once you begin adding services, you can scale your offerings and add more tiers of support.

Regular communication with clients

Communication is at the heart of a relationship. If you build a community of customers for your WordPress Care service, then communication should be the center.

It is easy for us to get caught up in the day to day tasks and fail to communicate.

That is why it is important to put in place a process for regular communication.

Here are three ways you can have a process for communication.

First, a regular email to your service clients should keep the lines open. Letting your clients know the latest news about your service offerings, delivering tips for their business, offering resources they can use, and communicating new offerings build that relationship.

Second, a blog where you can communicate directly with the community is also a good idea. A blog allows you to deliver longer posts with more in-depth information. This is what Dennis did with this post.

Third, promoting on social media meets the demand of a more social media-based society. Some people almost exclusively want their information on social media. It helps to cover the basis.

If they need more support, you can always direct them to an email or support ticket page.

User management for reports

Part of the necessity of communication includes regular reports. Anytime someone is paying a monthly service fee, it is beneficial to send a periodic report.

It helps the client see that he or she is getting quality service and establishes you as a premium provider.

Some of the things you may include in the report are backups performed, plugin and theme upgrades, analytics, and uptime monitoring.

Reports are a value add for your client, and they differentiate you as a professional compared to other freelancers.

Ticketing system for extra tasks

Since you are doing an incredibly good job keeping up your client’s website, he or she will undoubtedly ask you to do additional jobs.

That will get confusing if you are juggling multiple clients.

You will want to create or establish a ticketing system to handle additional tasks.

Ticket systems can be accomplished with your website, a contact form and a helpdesk solution. There are several popular third-party cloud-based helpdesk software.

Additionally, several WordPress plugin tools are available to help automate these tasks.

Some have used other tools such as Trello to create their ticketing system. The most important thing is to build a process and use that process.

This will allow you to track and complete billable tasks outside your WordPress Care service.

Wrapping it up

It always pays to plan ahead. Diving headlong into an activity with no preparation is a recipe for disaster.

“Failing to plan is to plan to fail,” right? Ben Franklin supposedly said that.

Consider these five building blocks when setting up your WordPress Support Care Business.

What did you consider before you set up your WordPress Support Care Business?

What things did you put in place before getting started?

Let us know in the comments!