December 21, 2016 — How to grow from a one-man-band into an agency. Taking the leap and loving it.

Building a team, how, who and what to look out for
Attracting and retaining great clients
Selling professionally and effectively
Avoiding bad clients
Managing Projects effectively
Developing a culture
Celebrate the wins
Learn from the mistakes

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December 11, 2016 — When opportunity knocks, it doesn’t always take the form you would expect. In August of 2016, I left a decade-long career as a professional chef to become the COO and part-owner of a digital agency. This talk is for would-be entrepreneurs, career changers, and just about anyone else that is thinking about taking a leap. It’s about preparing for the worst, expecting the best and trying to break free of the future we write for ourselves.

This talk is more than just a personal story. It’s a step-by-step guide through the transition of “employed,” to “self-employed,” and finally to “employer.” I’m not leaving anything out.

November 21, 2016 — One can have many reasons to form a WordPress agency. At required+ we didn’t think about becoming an agency in the first place. Initially we teamed up to build an online platform that scratched an itch in all of us, we simply wanted to try and prove a point with the idea we had. All of a sudden we were running a thriving job board for the Swiss web industry and had a beautiful side project to work on. In order to keep our creative freedom and sovereignty, we didn’t want to take money from venture capitalists or investors. Therefore we came up with a concept to keep us going while allowing space for our individual lifestyles. We started to take on interesting client projects, this way we continued to build interesting sites & apps.

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October 29, 2016 — Plugins contribute to one of WordPress’ major strengths; it’s flexibility. But as with every major strength it also comes with a few big downsides, which we’ll explore in this talk.

This is a story about a WordPress agency that wanted to do something different; write almost everything themselves. The talk explores the following questions:

Why would you want to build yourself?
What is it that you are going to build?
and How would you go about doing this?

October 7, 2016 — Agencies and freelancers exist in order to serve clients: without clients, there’d be no work. Despite – or maybe because of- this fact, we often find those same clients frustrating.
In this talk I’ll share 10 lessons learned for managing clients: during the new business phase, while projects are ongoing, and as projects complete.
Managed properly, client relationships can be tremendously rewarding and fulfilling, even if they do occasionally make you want to bang your head against a wall.

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October 1, 2016 — India has the second largest population in the world. More than a million people are directly working in IT sector.

Yet, WordPress agency or in general any software agency in India, or even in South Asia is often mistaken as that agency which does low quality work for ridiculously low rates!

When we started in 2009, it was very clear that we are not going to be part of this “race to the bottom” culture. We wanted to work on projects that were exciting and challenging. A kind of work that makes you proud at the end of the day!

I would like to talk about how we used innovative methods to hire passionate people, what challenges we faced in motivating our employees to be core contributors, nurturing a culture of giving back to open source and how it all helped us stand out.

The result – I am glad to say that I have the privilege to lead and work in one of the most talked about WordPress agencies in India today, for right reasons!

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September 27, 2016 — Agency Economics

September 25, 2016 — Best practices for estimating WordPress-based projects to be delivered to customers. Understanding and controlling scope; Methods for estimating and tracking time; Managing customer expectations; Retrospectives/continuous improvement

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