How do you go from dropping out of university and paying bills by doing odd freelance jobs to running an award-winning WordPress development agency? 93Digital founder and managing director Alex Price is here to tell us how.

After breaking into the world of freelance development at just 19 years old, Alex has rapidly expanded his one-man WordPress business into a thriving agency in the heart of London, where a team of developers and designers create websites for such high-profile clients as Amnesty International and the University of London. Having built his business from the ground up, you could say he knows a thing or two about scaling.

Importance of Starting Slow

While it’s safe to say that he didn’t specifically dream of being a WordPress developer as a child, ever since childhood Alex has valued his independence pretty highly. He was eager to gain financial independence even as a teenager, and that’s how he found his way into web development—something he was good at, he enjoyed, and most importantly, something he could do on his own to earn money.

He started out doing small, simple jobs for seven pounds an hour on elance (now Upwork) and other freelancing platforms to gain experience, climbing what he calls “a very slow ladder” from basic jobs to the kinds of five- and six-figure projects his agency tackles now.

Getting Specialised

In the beginning, Alex tried all kinds of different content management systems, but he found that he kept coming back to WordPress, even at a time when professional WordPress specialization didn’t really exist yet. He found he liked it, his clients liked it, and it was on the rise as a platform, and so he decided to make it his specialty.

Trying to be all things to everyone is something Alex says can stand in the way of growth for a lot of agencies. He credits his decision to specialize in WordPress early on in his career with a huge portion of 93Digital’s growth and success as an agency.

Getting The Right Support

Alex considers himself a marketer almost as much as a developer, and his success in marketing his own work has been key from the very beginning. 93Digital’s tagline is “The London Wordpress Agency,” which has actually been with the business since it was just Alex on his own. He didn’t begin to genuinely grow his team until after he won a £21,000 contract about four years ago, using the profits to hire two full-time employees only when he knew he couldn’t handle the workload alone.

Since then, the agency has grown organically with its workload, with a staff of 15 that includes developers, designers and project managers. He’s since taken the time to put together clear job descriptions and expectations for the whole team, as well as to develop an easily accessible knowledge base to keep everyone on the same page. He’s also learned not to hire on skillset alone, and says that cultural fit and values matter just as much as expertise in finding a good team member.

In his early twenties, with no real roadmap to follow, Alex drew a lot of support from communities like the Agency Collective, a group featuring a lot of other WordPress developers and other people in similar boats, which helped him stay on top of things as he forged ahead.

Attracting The Right Clients

Incredibly, most of 93Digital’s biggest clients, even early on, we're just cold leads who filled out the contact form on Alex’s website. They came to him, a success Alex attributes to the website itself, his strong SEO and use of content marketing. Even now, the agency relies heavily on word of mouth and reputation to bring clients to them.

When the clients arrive, Alex and his team use a range of flexible approaches to decide which customers and projects are a good fit. The estimated budget isn’t a major factor, but the type of project and the sense of chemistry with the clients definitely are.

93Digital doesn’t take on just any project. They’re well-positioned enough that Alex and his team have the ability to turn down work that doesn’t interest them, and they do.

“We had the opportunity to probably grow faster than we have, but in my opinion, off the wrong kind of work,” Alex says. “I never wanted to build kind of a sweatshop of designers and developers churning stuff out for the sake of it. The types of projects that engage me are the ones where I feel like we're making an impact and we're solving a challenge.”

Maintenance And Support

One of the biggest challenges of scaling up his agency has been managing ongoing maintenance and site support after projects are complete. Alex says this is where having project managers involved has made a difference, and he’s recently had to expand his operations to include a dedicated developer to handle ongoing maintenance and support for existing clients.

He stresses that development and maintenance are almost two entirely separate processes, but you need to run them parallel to each other if you want to run an agency. It makes up no more than 15-20% of 93Digital’s revenue, but it’s an essential service to provide for clients.

Here are a few of his tips for making the support aspect of WordPress dev a little smoother:

• Explain it early. Don’t leave your clients (especially clients with smaller businesses) with the impression that a website is something they can build once and forget about. Maintenance is a given!
• Build it into your contracts. Make it clear in writing what kind of tech support and long-term maintenance is included and what will cost extra down the road.
• Manage expectations. Let your clients know that the internet moves fast, things change, and they will need something fixed or changed in the future.
• Empathize.

Advice For Young Alex

When asked what advice he’d give to his younger self, Alex says he’d want to back himself up more, and have confidence that he’d figure out what he was doing. He also wishes he’d had the foresight to keep some kind of diary as he went, so that he’d have an easier time now looking back at the rationale behind all the decisions he made along the way.

All in all, he’s glad he took the business risks he did at such a young age. “When people are young and there's so little to lose,” he says, “the amount that you can do and learn, and the amount that you can thrive when you actually have no choice but to do so, is amazing.”

Tune in to this episode to hear how Alex uses common values to keep his team focused, how he goes about hiring, and thoughts on Gutenberg, where Automattic is taking WordPress in the years to come, and what that means for developers like us.

Resources:

93Digital

The Agency Collective

Alex Price’s Twitter