{"id":2666,"date":"2021-06-22T09:55:04","date_gmt":"2021-06-22T09:55:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/elementor.com\/academy\/?p=2666"},"modified":"2023-02-21T11:14:43","modified_gmt":"2023-02-21T11:14:43","slug":"interview-with-wpelevation-ceo-troy-dean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/elementor.com\/academy\/interview-with-wpelevation-ceo-troy-dean\/","title":{"rendered":"Interview With WPElevation CEO Troy Dean"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"2666\" class=\"elementor elementor-2666\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-66a6547e elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"66a6547e\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-settings=\"{&quot;background_background&quot;:&quot;classic&quot;}\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-2fa1eeed\" data-id=\"2fa1eeed\" data-element_type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-13b7b06d elementor-widget elementor-widget-video\" data-id=\"13b7b06d\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-settings=\"{&quot;youtube_url&quot;:&quot;https:\\\/\\\/www.youtube.com\\\/watch?v=lsEi3DjvWkU&quot;,&quot;video_type&quot;:&quot;youtube&quot;,&quot;controls&quot;:&quot;yes&quot;}\" data-widget_type=\"video.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-wrapper elementor-open-inline\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-video\"><\/div>\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<section class=\"elementor-section elementor-top-section elementor-element elementor-element-130db669 elementor-section-boxed elementor-section-height-default elementor-section-height-default\" data-id=\"130db669\" data-element_type=\"section\" data-settings=\"{&quot;background_background&quot;:&quot;classic&quot;}\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-container elementor-column-gap-default\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-column elementor-col-100 elementor-top-column elementor-element elementor-element-7a65a1b3\" data-id=\"7a65a1b3\" data-element_type=\"column\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-wrap elementor-element-populated\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-6f38dcc4 elementor-tabs-view-horizontal elementor-widget elementor-widget-tabs\" data-id=\"6f38dcc4\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"tabs.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-tabs\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-tabs-wrapper\" role=\"tablist\" >\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div id=\"elementor-tab-title-1861\" class=\"elementor-tab-title elementor-tab-desktop-title\" aria-selected=\"true\" data-tab=\"1\" role=\"tab\" tabindex=\"0\" aria-controls=\"elementor-tab-content-1861\" aria-expanded=\"false\">Overview<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div id=\"elementor-tab-title-1862\" class=\"elementor-tab-title elementor-tab-desktop-title\" aria-selected=\"false\" data-tab=\"2\" role=\"tab\" tabindex=\"-1\" aria-controls=\"elementor-tab-content-1862\" aria-expanded=\"false\">Transcript<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-tabs-content-wrapper\" role=\"tablist\" aria-orientation=\"vertical\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-tab-title elementor-tab-mobile-title\" aria-selected=\"true\" data-tab=\"1\" role=\"tab\" tabindex=\"0\" aria-controls=\"elementor-tab-content-1861\" aria-expanded=\"false\">Overview<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<div id=\"elementor-tab-content-1861\" class=\"elementor-tab-content elementor-clearfix\" data-tab=\"1\" role=\"tabpanel\" aria-labelledby=\"elementor-tab-title-1861\" tabindex=\"0\" hidden=\"false\"><p>In this video, we chat with Troy Dean, CEO of WPElevation, and discuss topics related to growing your business as a WordPress professional.<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-tab-title elementor-tab-mobile-title\" aria-selected=\"false\" data-tab=\"2\" role=\"tab\" tabindex=\"-1\" aria-controls=\"elementor-tab-content-1862\" aria-expanded=\"false\">Transcript<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<div id=\"elementor-tab-content-1862\" class=\"elementor-tab-content elementor-clearfix\" data-tab=\"2\" role=\"tabpanel\" aria-labelledby=\"elementor-tab-title-1862\" tabindex=\"0\" hidden=\"hidden\"><p>the thing is that if we solve a problem<br \/>here in the business then chances are<br \/>there are going to be lots of other<br \/>people around the world looking for<br \/>though a way to solve that same problem<br \/>hi Ella mentors in this video I go<br \/>in-depth with Troy Dean of WP elevation<br \/>as we discuss growing your business as a<br \/>wordpress professional and other topics<br \/>as well thank you for having me on it&#8217;s<br \/>a pleasure to talk to you again well I<br \/>have so many questions and I also got a<br \/>few questions from our community so I<br \/>want to jump right in let&#8217;s do it we<br \/>kind of I think our story how we met is<br \/>is kind of funny because actually<br \/>totally cold cold cold you try to get in<br \/>your podcast because it&#8217;s it&#8217;s such an<br \/>amazing program that you&#8217;re running and<br \/>and later you started making videos of<br \/>other Elementor to my surprise so can<br \/>you tell me how did that develop yeah so<br \/>you so it&#8217;s pretty interesting because I<br \/>had only recently discovered Elementor<br \/>and I kind of knew of it but I hadn&#8217;t<br \/>used it and so I started using it and<br \/>instantly I was impressed with its ease<br \/>of use and and the power and the<br \/>flexibility of it and so you know it&#8217;s<br \/>kind of funny when you start going down<br \/>a rabbit hole everything in the universe<br \/>kind of seems to conspire to help you on<br \/>that journey my wife is a psychologist<br \/>and she calls it that they call it the<br \/>attention bias so if you buy a new<br \/>Volkswagen all of a sudden you&#8217;re<br \/>driving around and all you see is<br \/>Volkswagens everywhere right<br \/>and so I discovered Elementor I was<br \/>using and I was playing with it and then<br \/>you reach down and you you said hey I<br \/>think I&#8217;d be a good guest on your<br \/>podcast I&#8217;m like this is perfect timing<br \/>I had you on the show and then I just<br \/>wanted to start in the interest of<br \/>complete transparency I wanted to start<br \/>teaching our team internally here how we<br \/>could start using Elementor to do some<br \/>things on our website that we&#8217;ve been<br \/>wanting to do one of the big problems<br \/>that we were trying to solve internally<br \/>here was the the speed of iteration<br \/>between us having an idea<br \/>getting it designed and then actually<br \/>deploying it on the website would take<br \/>could take you know ten days to two<br \/>weeks and that&#8217;s just because we&#8217;re a<br \/>slightly larger organization now that I<br \/>literally am NOT allowed to log into w<br \/>WP elevation website and start<br \/>installing plugins or doing things<br \/>because I generally break stuff and so<br \/>the team have locked me out so I saw<br \/>Elementor as a way of going wow this is<br \/>going to be such a great way for us to<br \/>quickly iterate on ideas and and so then<br \/>I started making videos to show our team<br \/>how we could use Elementor to do some<br \/>things and also I wanted to really I<br \/>wanted to produce the highest quality<br \/>WordPress training videos that I&#8217;d seen<br \/>so we&#8217;ve got a lot of equipment here in<br \/>a great studio and a great videographer<br \/>nice cameras nice lenses I wanted to do<br \/>something that was just a little bit<br \/>over and above the usual ScreenFlow that<br \/>everyone was kind of used to and so we<br \/>just and I said well I&#8217;m gonna start by<br \/>you know showing people how to use<br \/>Elementor to train our team and then<br \/>we&#8217;ll just share it on YouTube and then<br \/>we started sharing it with you guys and<br \/>and that whole thing is now kind of<br \/>snowballed into its own its own beast<br \/>and and we&#8217;re producing those<br \/>high-quality how-to videos on a regular<br \/>basis now yeah well you&#8217;re exploding I<br \/>mean the rate that you&#8217;re producing new<br \/>material and follow up what&#8217;s what&#8217;s<br \/>current is it&#8217;s really amazing and it I<br \/>think it&#8217;s a good it&#8217;s something that<br \/>it&#8217;s true of course to companies that<br \/>are starting to be bigger like yours but<br \/>also to small you know freelancers and<br \/>agencies that are just starting out and<br \/>they need to be as relevant as possible<br \/>because that&#8217;s how they compete with the<br \/>big companies yeah so yeah yeah<br \/>absolutely and and I mean and and the<br \/>thing I&#8217;ve always adopted this approach<br \/>that if we if we if I&#8217;m going to make a<br \/>video to train one of our team members<br \/>how to do something then I may as well<br \/>make that video the best I can make it<br \/>and share it with the with the wider<br \/>community because if if my team member<br \/>wants to know how to do that then there<br \/>are going to be thousands of other<br \/>people that want to know how to do it as<br \/>well so why just make a video for<br \/>internal purposes we may as well just<br \/>record it and publish it in fact we just<br \/>spent the afternoon at our branding<br \/>agency&#8217;s office on the other side of<br \/>town here in Melbourne doing a two hour<br \/>workshop on on how our our messaging is<br \/>going to change moving forward as we<br \/>change our business model here at WP<br \/>elevation and so we took our<br \/>videographer along with us and we all<br \/>put microphones on and we filmed the<br \/>whole workshop and he&#8217;s going to cut<br \/>that up into a series of you know videos<br \/>and we&#8217;re going to share that with our<br \/>community because I want the rest of our<br \/>team to see the workshop and also want<br \/>all of our customers and I want you guys<br \/>or on all of our partners or what the<br \/>whole WordPress community to see what<br \/>we&#8217;re doing here<br \/>that&#8217;s for me that&#8217;s always been the way<br \/>I&#8217;d learn it is I learned out loud and I<br \/>think it&#8217;s a great way to learn because<br \/>it it forces you to really up your game<br \/>and it keeps you accountable and if you<br \/>do it in public then you kind of can&#8217;t<br \/>you can&#8217;t pull the wool over your own<br \/>eyes for very long you know what I mean<br \/>because you&#8217;re publishing it out there<br \/>on the Internet yeah I think it&#8217;s for us<br \/>it&#8217;s it&#8217;s a huge what you&#8217;re talking<br \/>about is like I would categorize it like<br \/>whatever you&#8217;re already doing like<br \/>publish it to your audience and make it<br \/>something that is something you&#8217;re<br \/>marketing so I think for us it&#8217;s it&#8217;s<br \/>you know feature releases we release it<br \/>a feature we&#8217;re working on we&#8217;re going<br \/>to document it and make our marketing<br \/>around it in a correct but I think<br \/>that&#8217;s it&#8217;s something like documentation<br \/>like everyone is now like a documentary<br \/>of his own trial on business so yeah I I<br \/>have my help helped my wife with her<br \/>business recently she&#8217;s starting she&#8217;s<br \/>also starting a business and I&#8217;m<br \/>noticing she gets a review and I&#8217;m going<br \/>to write a post about it and help her<br \/>like it&#8217;s something that I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s<br \/>going to be taught some time like how<br \/>are you going to document your life and<br \/>document your business<br \/>innatron yeah and if you&#8217;re right and<br \/>the thing is that if we solve a problem<br \/>here in the business then chances are<br \/>there are going to be lots of other<br \/>people around the world looking for<br \/>though a way to solve that same problem<br \/>right so it&#8217;s really simple if you just<br \/>you know do some basic kind of<br \/>optimization of the YouTube video or the<br \/>post on your website to tap into the<br \/>right kind of keywords so that when<br \/>someone in the<br \/>future is searching for you know how to<br \/>program a pop-up opt-in box in Elementor<br \/>they end up on YouTube there&#8217;s one of<br \/>our videos because we&#8217;ve used the right<br \/>keywords and but the other the other<br \/>trick is I think if you can make that<br \/>documentation entertaining in some way<br \/>that&#8217;s the next n yeah you get what you<br \/>get more buy-in from your own team<br \/>because you&#8217;re not just giving them<br \/>boring documentation so they&#8217;re enjoying<br \/>the process and you get more buy-in from<br \/>the community and you you end up with<br \/>more leads and more customers yeah and<br \/>if you make it funny it&#8217;s even better<br \/>because people love ya yeah of course of<br \/>course yeah that&#8217;s a huge thing and I<br \/>think for our audience is something I<br \/>mean we kind of share a similar audience<br \/>I mean I know from talking to a lot of<br \/>our community members people that get<br \/>drawn to Elementor are usually<br \/>freelancers and you know small agencies<br \/>and that&#8217;s kind of the people that go to<br \/>your course so can you tell us a bit<br \/>about that audience and I you call them<br \/>web consultants and how you reach from<br \/>one like being a small web designer to<br \/>developing to a bit web consultant and<br \/>sure so I think the definition for me of<br \/>a wordpress consultant is someone who is<br \/>building websites for clients using<br \/>WordPress as their main weapon of choice<br \/>but someone who is maybe who is<br \/>interested in not spending the rest of<br \/>their life actually on the tools so<br \/>they&#8217;re interested in the impact or the<br \/>end result that this website has on<br \/>their clients business and most of the<br \/>people that join our program are are<br \/>interested in how the website fits into<br \/>the overall business strategy for the<br \/>client most of our students are not just<br \/>developers who are turning Photoshop<br \/>files into WordPress themes they might<br \/>start off doing that<br \/>they very quickly realized that in order<br \/>to build a sustainable business<br \/>long-term they need to be adding more<br \/>value to their clients businesses and so<br \/>that&#8217;s part of the process that we take<br \/>them through now I think the reason that<br \/>elemental I think the reason there&#8217;s<br \/>such a good fit between what we&#8217;re doing<br \/>and what you&#8217;re doing is because and<br \/>I&#8217;ve thought long and hard about this<br \/>Elementor as fantastic as it is as a<br \/>page builder it still requires the<br \/>end-user to have gone through the<br \/>learning curve of mastering a<br \/>self-hosted WordPress installation and<br \/>that is going to eliminate most hobby<br \/>bloggers or most people who just want to<br \/>start a blog I mean if you just want to<br \/>start a blog you got a wordpress com<br \/>right and you can just start a blog of<br \/>wordpress.com or you can even start a<br \/>blog weeks or Squarespace and it&#8217;s<br \/>really easy there&#8217;s not much of a<br \/>learning curve but if you want to start<br \/>a hosting if you want to the flexibility<br \/>of installing your own plugins and you<br \/>want to really extend the functionality<br \/>of your own website you&#8217;re gonna have to<br \/>get your head around a self-hosted<br \/>install of WordPress and that is quite a<br \/>learning curve and so what happens is<br \/>the people that get through that<br \/>learning curve they end up with a<br \/>specialist skill set that they realize<br \/>is then valuable and they can<br \/>effectively sell that skill set to other<br \/>clients and they can start building<br \/>websites for other clients now Elementor<br \/>fits in to that equation because I I see<br \/>Elementor as a great way of optimizing<br \/>the manufacturing process if you like of<br \/>a website so instead of having to you<br \/>know start a theme from scratch and you<br \/>know build a whole bunch of you know<br \/>funky custom post types and do a whole<br \/>bunch of you know functions in the PHP I<br \/>mean you can literally I was just<br \/>talking about my designer this afternoon<br \/>at the branding agency he&#8217;s been playing<br \/>with elemental and Astro for the last<br \/>three weeks based on the videos of hours<br \/>that he&#8217;s been watching on YouTube and<br \/>he said dude I can build a website<br \/>they&#8217;ve always outsourced their web dev<br \/>to developers he said I can now build a<br \/>website for clients in-house without<br \/>touching any code I said exactly I mean<br \/>if this was around 10 years ago and I<br \/>started out<br \/>it would have been a whole other<br \/>ballgame so I think as much as I think<br \/>Elementor is great for WordPress users<br \/>who are not building a business doing<br \/>this for other clients they&#8217;re typically<br \/>not our target audience our target<br \/>audience other people that have realized<br \/>okay now that I have this knowledge and<br \/>I&#8217;ve done it for myself<br \/>here&#8217;s an opportunity to do this for<br \/>other people and actually build a<br \/>business building WordPress websites for<br \/>clients and realizing that the WordPress<br \/>website is just one part of the overall<br \/>solution that they&#8217;re providing because<br \/>typically when you launch a website for<br \/>a client within the coming weeks the<br \/>first bunch of questions you&#8217;re gonna<br \/>get is okay why am I not coming up on<br \/>page one of Google yeah so now all of a<br \/>sudden we&#8217;re having a conversation about<br \/>their SEO strategy and oh you know what<br \/>do we do with email marketing and so now<br \/>we&#8217;re having a conversation about their<br \/>email marketing strategy so can you talk<br \/>a bit more about beside about the skill<br \/>set of those people besides building a<br \/>self-hosted WordPress installation which<br \/>is something you can learn probably in<br \/>less than a day so what kind of skills<br \/>do you need to really start your<br \/>business going in terms of getting<br \/>clients and having an overall effect so<br \/>you know you need so this vividly Shay<br \/>but you know we have two ears and one<br \/>mouth right so you need to be a very<br \/>good listener you need to be able to<br \/>understand for you need to be able to<br \/>figure out the type of client that you<br \/>want to work with and and so I have a<br \/>very simple criteria for for working<br \/>this out right if I think about all the<br \/>projects that I&#8217;ve done over the years I<br \/>asked myself this question when I look<br \/>back at every product I say was it fun<br \/>that&#8217;s like the number one criteria for<br \/>me was this a fun project to work on yes<br \/>was it profitable sorry that&#8217;s the third<br \/>question was it fun as the first<br \/>question the second question is did I do<br \/>good work yes was it profitable yes if I<br \/>yes to all of those questions I say<br \/>right that&#8217;s the type of client I want<br \/>to work with in the future it&#8217;s their<br \/>fun to work with I do good work and<br \/>they&#8217;re profitable so therefore let me<br \/>tell you the types of projects I don&#8217;t<br \/>do I don&#8217;t do ecommerce anymore because<br \/>I&#8217;m not very good at it I will freely<br \/>admit I am terrible at WooCommerce so I<br \/>don&#8217;t do it anymore<br \/>right I don&#8217;t work with companies that I<br \/>that I have no passion for what it is<br \/>they&#8217;re doing like I couldn&#8217;t work with<br \/>a company that just makes steel pipes<br \/>for plumbers for example because I don&#8217;t<br \/>there&#8217;s no fire in my belly I don&#8217;t care<br \/>about that at all right what I love<br \/>about how you you describe this is that<br \/>you come from a more holistic approach<br \/>and that&#8217;s kind of how the place I&#8217;m<br \/>going I&#8217;ve I&#8217;ve been in there you know<br \/>in the this industry for a few years now<br \/>and I know there are types of people<br \/>there are I would categorize them as you<br \/>know maybe data-driven or SEO oriented<br \/>you having a lot of names but the idea<br \/>is that they&#8217;re eager to use as many<br \/>tools and analyze things methodically<br \/>and there&#8217;s a place for that I mean<br \/>that&#8217;s terrible I&#8217;m a Singh Lee helpful<br \/>but I think there&#8217;s another type maybe<br \/>that are more the fit for web<br \/>consultants that are more interested in<br \/>they don&#8217;t want a million tools they<br \/>don&#8217;t want to you know analyze<br \/>everything that I wise they were more<br \/>interested in strategy and in business<br \/>so how do you see the the difference<br \/>between those approaches yes so I think<br \/>the the question that you need to ask<br \/>yourself is am i creating the most value<br \/>that I possibly can for my client and so<br \/>that&#8217;s why I don&#8217;t work with companies<br \/>that I don&#8217;t find interesting or<br \/>exciting because I&#8217;m not adding the most<br \/>value because I&#8217;m kind of bored right or<br \/>I don&#8217;t do e-commerce cuz I&#8217;m not very<br \/>good at it if I&#8217;m adding the most value<br \/>to my clients and and I geek out over<br \/>the data sometimes and I love doing<br \/>conversion rate optimization and<br \/>all that kind of stuff but I<br \/>particularly like doing things like<br \/>conversion rate optimisation for<br \/>charities or nonprofits who are trying<br \/>to raise money for a cause right because<br \/>there they have more of a social<br \/>conscience they&#8217;re not just selling<br \/>widgets out the back of the factory so<br \/>the question you gotta ask yourself is<br \/>am i creating the most value possible<br \/>for this client because the truth is the<br \/>only way to position yourself as<br \/>different from everyone else and the<br \/>only way to I think to succeed this is<br \/>controversial then but the only way to<br \/>succeed as a wordpress consultant is to<br \/>actually stop selling WordPress websites<br \/>you got to change the conversation you<br \/>change the narrative so WordPress is<br \/>part of what we do but we are providing<br \/>you with a digital solution a digital<br \/>business strategy and it includes<br \/>WordPress and internally we have the<br \/>conversation about the tools that we&#8217;re<br \/>going to use to deliver that product or<br \/>that strategy to the client in the most<br \/>efficient and cost-effective manner and<br \/>that&#8217;s where something like Elementor<br \/>fits right in because it helps us speed<br \/>up our development workflow but I&#8217;m not<br \/>having a conversation with clients about<br \/>Elementor I&#8217;m not even having<br \/>conversation with clients about<br \/>WordPress I&#8217;m having a conversation with<br \/>clients about what it is they need is<br \/>there a good fit between what they need<br \/>and what we do really well and what we<br \/>what we enjoy doing and if there is<br \/>great then let&#8217;s work on this project<br \/>together and let&#8217;s work as a team and<br \/>let&#8217;s knock it out of the park I think<br \/>that&#8217;s smart because there&#8217;s now a<br \/>proliferation of I would say two types<br \/>of ways to succeed okay so there are you<br \/>know the the gurus that are more<br \/>self-help oriented you know you have<br \/>your Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins and<br \/>Gary Vishniac and all those and on the<br \/>other hand you have the technical you<br \/>know teachers that are more inside the<br \/>WordPress community they&#8217;re teaching<br \/>everything like I think people had a son<br \/>of course and I think you&#8217;re somewhere<br \/>in the middle that is very much needed<br \/>because it balances both needs you do<br \/>need to have the right motivation have<br \/>the right mindset to succeed but you<br \/>also have to okay you have to start<br \/>working and<br \/>installing and doing all those technical<br \/>things yeah balanced yeah I mean if it&#8217;s<br \/>interesting I have been called the Tony<br \/>Robbins of the WordPress space before I<br \/>have been referred to that and that&#8217;s<br \/>okay I&#8217;m gonna take that as a compliment<br \/>I&#8217;m probably a little less kind of<br \/>rah-rah that than Tony Robbins but um I<br \/>think it is all mindset for me I mean I<br \/>went from you know building websites in<br \/>my bedroom for $1,200 which in Australia<br \/>by the way if you build a website for<br \/>$1,200 you know you&#8217;re gonna be hungry<br \/>and be poor very very quickly it&#8217;s not<br \/>sustainable Australia&#8217;s quite an<br \/>expensive country to live in so I just<br \/>want to acknowledge that for some people<br \/>listening to this they might think wow<br \/>$1,200 is a lot of money for a website<br \/>in Australia it&#8217;s not and I went from<br \/>building websites for $1,200 and in my<br \/>spare bedroom and very quickly got to a<br \/>place where I was building websites for<br \/>actually touching the code because I was<br \/>in you know hiring developers and<br \/>project managers to work with us on the<br \/>projects and the way that I did that was<br \/>I I wasn&#8217;t delivering anything different<br \/>in fact I realized that you have to work<br \/>as hard to build a five hundred dollar<br \/>website as you do to build a five<br \/>thousand dollar website the difference<br \/>between the two is the client that has a<br \/>five thousand dollar website actually<br \/>has a business model and has the<br \/>capacity to get a return on that five<br \/>thousand dollar investment and values<br \/>that $5,000 as an investment whereas the<br \/>person building a five hundred dollar<br \/>website or paying for a five hundred<br \/>dollar website typically speaking<br \/>they&#8217;re taking that money out of their<br \/>own savings account to pay for this<br \/>website because they have some idea that<br \/>they think might fly and they generally<br \/>don&#8217;t have a business model that&#8217;s going<br \/>to support getting a return on eating<br \/>more than five hundred dollars and just<br \/>because those clients exist and I have<br \/>empathy for them and I want them to<br \/>succeed doesn&#8217;t mean I have to be the<br \/>one to build the five hundred dollar<br \/>website I can refer them somewhere else<br \/>to get that job done I can tell them to<br \/>go to up work I can tell them to go to<br \/>you know codable not that they&#8217;re gonna<br \/>get a 500 on our website of codable<br \/>either but I can tell them to go to a<br \/>marketplace and or to you know manage<br \/>the project themself or to go two weeks<br \/>or Squarespace and just do it themselves<br \/>right so so and I heat us a lot ah you<br \/>know I feel sorry for this client I&#8217;ve<br \/>only got five hundred dollars and I know<br \/>I can help them you can but you can&#8217;t<br \/>stay in business helping clients for<br \/>$500 websites right in Australia you<br \/>can&#8217;t and in fact I would say most of<br \/>the developed world you can&#8217;t stay in<br \/>business if you&#8217;re building websites for<br \/>didn&#8217;t change the only thing that<br \/>changed was the conversation and the<br \/>quality of the client that I was talking<br \/>to and the quality of the client changed<br \/>because I started putting out content<br \/>educational content on the Internet<br \/>he&#8217;s a radical idea but I started<br \/>putting out educational content videos<br \/>on the on the internet and people<br \/>started calling me up and emailing me<br \/>saying hey you seem to know a thing or<br \/>two about this digital marketing thing<br \/>can you help us and I said yes I can and<br \/>we started working we started filtering<br \/>out clients you know and eventually we<br \/>got to a point where we had an<br \/>application form on our website and we<br \/>stated very clearly we don&#8217;t do websites<br \/>for anything less than three thousand<br \/>dollars and then it was five thousand<br \/>dollars and then it was seven thousand<br \/>dollars and then it was ten thousand<br \/>dollars so that was a period of time<br \/>that we we iterated on that but it all<br \/>started with us putting out the right<br \/>type of content to attract the right<br \/>type of clients to us rather than just<br \/>saying yes to anyone who walked in the<br \/>door I totally agree that content is the<br \/>the right way to I mean when you&#8217;re<br \/>focused on the right audience on the<br \/>you&#8217;re trying to achieve the the top of<br \/>the of the mark you&#8217;re gonna have to<br \/>attract attention<br \/>other than cold calling and and and<br \/>selling them and I think content is<br \/>great i I think actually that that video<br \/>is great because I&#8217;m seeing people that<br \/>started out people in our community like<br \/>dave roy and adam Pricer and ditch and<br \/>yourself the achievements they&#8217;ve made<br \/>in video I don&#8217;t think that you can<br \/>compare it to any other medium but the<br \/>thing is because I&#8217;m having a lot of<br \/>conversation we<br \/>people from our community some people<br \/>find it hard to be on camera mm-hmm so<br \/>how do you bridge the gap someone who&#8217;s<br \/>eager he has everything one stood to be<br \/>to be the best success that that he can<br \/>be yeah yeah how can you give them the<br \/>the what can I do if they don&#8217;t have the<br \/>natural you know the they don&#8217;t look as<br \/>well on screen like you do and and speak<br \/>well there&#8217;s a couple of things first of<br \/>all you know never come here where you<br \/>are today with where someone else is<br \/>who&#8217;s been doing it for 10 years right<br \/>that&#8217;s a rule number one never compare<br \/>yourself to anyone else because I will<br \/>watch videos that I make now and compare<br \/>them to videos that other people are<br \/>making who are in much larger<br \/>organizations with me was much more<br \/>revenue and much more resources and if I<br \/>spend too much time comparing what I&#8217;m<br \/>doing now with what they&#8217;re doing I just<br \/>feel bad about what I&#8217;m doing and I get<br \/>depressed and then I don&#8217;t want to get<br \/>on camera right because I feel like I&#8217;m<br \/>not as good<br \/>so never compare yourself to anyone else<br \/>the second thing is the only way to<br \/>overcome the only way to get better at<br \/>anything is practice right so give<br \/>yourself permission to make a video and<br \/>then never show anyone and know that<br \/>when you first start making videos and<br \/>you watch them back you are going to<br \/>hate them and you are going to suck at<br \/>it<br \/>right so give yourself permission to<br \/>suck at it and the third and a Jif but<br \/>just keep practicing and keep doing it<br \/>and the third thing I&#8217;ll say is this and<br \/>I actually heard this on a podcast by<br \/>Amy Porterfield she said every time she<br \/>gets self-conscious about making video<br \/>one of her coaches said to her you have<br \/>to remember it&#8217;s not about you it&#8217;s<br \/>about your audience and you have a<br \/>message to share so if you don&#8217;t make<br \/>this video you are doing your audience a<br \/>disservice by keeping your message from<br \/>them so just get out of your own way for<br \/>a minute and share your message with<br \/>your audience so they&#8217;re the three<br \/>mindset tricks that I would you know and<br \/>I haven&#8217;t always been this confident or<br \/>this relaxed on camera when I first<br \/>started out I you know like<br \/>I wasn&#8217;t very good at it and this is<br \/>taking me a long time to get this<br \/>confident nice relaxed well that&#8217;s a<br \/>great answer and it raised an another<br \/>question for me is people starting out<br \/>and just you know maybe they made a few<br \/>websites for their family and they<br \/>they&#8217;re thinking about maybe I can do<br \/>this for a living maybe I can quit my<br \/>job as a waitress or whatever and and do<br \/>this for a living when you want to<br \/>create content that&#8217;s great if you have<br \/>clients and you as we spoke you can talk<br \/>about it if you&#8217;re trying to create<br \/>content from from scratch from zero if<br \/>and you don&#8217;t have clients I think what<br \/>usually people do is like okay let&#8217;s<br \/>risk keyword research everything that&#8217;s<br \/>related to WordPress let&#8217;s start writing<br \/>about it or you know and it&#8217;s kind of<br \/>you know they get lost because of course<br \/>it&#8217;s overwhelming and it&#8217;s not genuinely<br \/>coming from a place that they have<br \/>experienced for so yeah what kind of<br \/>advice would you give them well I&#8217;ll<br \/>tell you exactly because we have just<br \/>been through and it feels like you&#8217;ve<br \/>set me up here to answer this question<br \/>but I just want to tell everyone we I<br \/>did not know you were gonna ask this<br \/>question right we have just been through<br \/>this keyword research exercise here<br \/>ourselves and we&#8217;ve spent a lot of time<br \/>and a fair bit of money going over the<br \/>keyword research and here&#8217;s the thing<br \/>that I have found and here&#8217;s the thing<br \/>that I fundamentally believe about the<br \/>WordPress space and about digital<br \/>marketing in general when it comes to<br \/>keyword research one is it&#8217;s a it&#8217;s a<br \/>it&#8217;s a lovely little bubble for all of<br \/>us to live in but that&#8217;s what it is it&#8217;s<br \/>a very very very small bubble so if you<br \/>start doing keyword research around<br \/>WordPress for example you&#8217;ll find there<br \/>might be a handful of keywords that get<br \/>any kind of search volume a month right<br \/>that is worth mentioning right there&#8217;s<br \/>there&#8217;s there are lots and lots and lots<br \/>and lots and lots of keywords that get<br \/>hardly any search volume and there&#8217;s<br \/>very few keywords that get a lot of<br \/>search volume and I can tell you the key<br \/>word that gets the most search volume in<br \/>the WordPress base is WordPress login<br \/>because people you mean you you just<br \/>think that through to its natural<br \/>conclusion right people have got a<br \/>wordpress site they go to Google and<br \/>they go WordPress login there one and I<br \/>had a log into their WordPress site yeah<br \/>I think most of those people are on<br \/>wordpress.com not wordpress.org so<br \/>that&#8217;s interesting second of all this<br \/>space is changing so quickly<br \/>man that by the time you figure out a<br \/>keyword that&#8217;s worth ranking for it&#8217;s<br \/>done it&#8217;s moved on right so I think for<br \/>me anyway our approach now is to produce<br \/>content that we need answers for<br \/>ourselves because chances are that if we<br \/>need the answer then other WordPress<br \/>consulting firms need the answer to<br \/>produce content that is shareable that<br \/>people will want to share so it&#8217;s got to<br \/>be high quality it&#8217;s got to be<br \/>educational and it&#8217;s got to be<br \/>entertaining sometimes we get all those<br \/>three right sometimes we miss the mark<br \/>but you know I think we do a pretty good<br \/>job and then we reach out to the people<br \/>that we mention in those videos and we<br \/>say hey Ben we thought you might like<br \/>this video about using Elementor to<br \/>build rapid prototypes and you know feel<br \/>free to share it with your audience and<br \/>then you link back to us and that is our<br \/>organic SEO strategy I have done a lot<br \/>of work on keyword research in this base<br \/>and I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s enough search<br \/>volume around particular keywords to<br \/>produce content for keywords now that<br \/>doesn&#8217;t mean that keywords and SEO is<br \/>unimportant I think once you&#8217;ve produced<br \/>a flagship piece of content you can then<br \/>optimize it for certain key phrases and<br \/>keywords and you can produce a whole<br \/>bunch of other satellite content that<br \/>points back to your cornerstone flagship<br \/>piece as the authority piece and that is<br \/>definitely a strategy worth pursuing but<br \/>if you look at the the the top WordPress<br \/>ranking articles for WordPress related<br \/>things its general they&#8217;re generally<br \/>ranking for digital marketing or general<br \/>digital digital business terms not<br \/>WordPress specific terms so I don&#8217;t know<br \/>if that answers your question but that&#8217;s<br \/>kind of where I stand on the whole you<br \/>know keyword research<br \/>that I want to strengthen what you&#8217;re<br \/>saying I think that if you&#8217;re doing<br \/>content that you&#8217;re engaged with then<br \/>your content will be richer because<br \/>you&#8217;ll have the examples<br \/>it&#8217;ll just you&#8217;ll be aligned with what<br \/>you&#8217;re doing and that way your content<br \/>will be better so people think about how<br \/>can I create great content okay it needs<br \/>to be three thousand words with media<br \/>with images no it has to be it needs to<br \/>align with what you&#8217;re passionate about<br \/>and hopefully you&#8217;re passionate about<br \/>your work if nothing change your work<br \/>but correct oh then then leverage that<br \/>that&#8217;s wrong and so I think you can<br \/>optimize a post with making sure you&#8217;ve<br \/>got you know images with alt tags that<br \/>you&#8217;ve got you know subheadings that<br \/>you&#8217;ve got you know bullet pointed lists<br \/>that the the post is readable that it<br \/>flows well that it reads well that it&#8217;s<br \/>entertaining that it&#8217;s engaging I think<br \/>you can do all of those things with a<br \/>post but I don&#8217;t think you should start<br \/>producing content just to satisfy a<br \/>keyword search I think you should<br \/>produce content that you are genuinely<br \/>passionate about and then optimize it<br \/>for any relevant keywords that people<br \/>might be searching for because the other<br \/>thing the other thing to bear in mind is<br \/>that every day I can&#8217;t member what the<br \/>percentage is but every day there is a<br \/>ridiculously high percentage of searches<br \/>done in Google for the first time ever<br \/>so that is no one has ever searched for<br \/>this before every day there are millions<br \/>of searches done in Google for the first<br \/>time yeah so it&#8217;s impossible to stay<br \/>ahead of that curve I I had to I have to<br \/>ask you because it&#8217;s very interesting to<br \/>me I think there&#8217;s something similar<br \/>between how Elementor grew and how your<br \/>company grew and will keep growing in<br \/>the fact that you have a lot in the<br \/>WordPress community you have a lot of<br \/>like plugins that are owned by you know<br \/>someone one single developer and they&#8217;re<br \/>constrained they&#8217;re not built as a<br \/>company meaning they&#8217;re not built to<br \/>scale and they don&#8217;t give both in terms<br \/>of branding and in terms of actuality<br \/>they don&#8217;t give that the feeling of<br \/>here&#8217;s a company who is behind this and<br \/>you can feel<br \/>safe with it so can you speak about what<br \/>it&#8217;s like I mean it&#8217;s a broad question<br \/>because I&#8217;m also interested in how you<br \/>actually manage to to to create this<br \/>this feeling of it&#8217;s a company and we&#8217;re<br \/>you have a global company with employees<br \/>around the world audience around the<br \/>world yeah I mean it started out we had<br \/>a plugin called the video user manuals<br \/>plugin which is a plugin that puts a<br \/>bunch of video tutorials in your clients<br \/>dashboard to teach them how to use<br \/>WordPress and so we start and we have a<br \/>free plugin called white label CMS which<br \/>allows you to completely white label<br \/>WordPress so we started building an<br \/>email list just two of us myself or my<br \/>business partner started building an<br \/>email list off the free plugin and then<br \/>started building a list of customers off<br \/>the video user manuals plug-in and after<br \/>a couple of years we spent no time on<br \/>that man we spent like a couple of hours<br \/>every Tuesday morning on skype just<br \/>having a chat about things and having a<br \/>look at our Google Analytics and they&#8217;re<br \/>not really doing anything and not really<br \/>knowing what to do next but after a few<br \/>years I want to say like maybe three or<br \/>four years the video user manuals<br \/>plug-in was doing about a hundred and<br \/>twenty grand a year in recurring revenue<br \/>and so we looked at it went wow like we<br \/>spend no time on this thing at all and<br \/>it&#8217;s doing a hundred and twenty grand a<br \/>year in recurring what could we do if we<br \/>actually paid attention to this and and<br \/>and put some effort into it so we<br \/>started for the first time ever we<br \/>started emailing our list and asking<br \/>them what they wanted and they<br \/>overwhelmingly came back and told us<br \/>that they wanted business coaching they<br \/>wanted to learn how to grow their<br \/>business they wanted to learn how we<br \/>wrote proposals they wanted to learn you<br \/>know people would people knew that I was<br \/>involved in the video user manuals<br \/>plugin they would go check out my<br \/>website they would have a look at some<br \/>of the clients I&#8217;d work with that say<br \/>how do you land these clients how do you<br \/>run the meeting when you first turn up<br \/>what questions do you ask addy write a<br \/>proposal how do you do you keep talking<br \/>about prototypes what are they how do<br \/>you do them you know how do you get your<br \/>clients on maintenance plans and how do<br \/>you get referrals and all these<br \/>questions kept coming in via email and<br \/>I&#8217;m like you know what there are enough<br \/>people asking the same questions that we<br \/>can<br \/>turn this into a course or a business<br \/>coaching program so in 2013 we launched<br \/>and five years later we&#8217;re now eight<br \/>full time staff and another twenty two<br \/>contractors around the world who touched<br \/>the business on a almost a daily basis<br \/>we have videographers video editors<br \/>copywriters you know blog writers<br \/>project managers coaches mentors SEO you<br \/>know we have a chairman of the board we<br \/>just appointed a chairman of the board<br \/>to basically help mentor you increase<br \/>the frequency of your courses right yeah<br \/>so we we yeah so we we up until recently<br \/>I were up until now we&#8217;ve been having<br \/>three launches a year in June we&#8217;ll have<br \/>our fourth launch for this financial<br \/>year our financial year in Australia is<br \/>July to June and we&#8217;ve also been putting<br \/>the price up and the reason that we&#8217;ve<br \/>been putting the price up is because we<br \/>have more staff and more coaches and we<br \/>create more value in the course and we<br \/>have greater support mechanisms for our<br \/>students and the truth is now that these<br \/>business on a on the on an operational<br \/>level the business runs almost without<br \/>me I occasionally will run a coaching<br \/>call and and and and help people through<br \/>the questions with with Simon the other<br \/>coach here in Australia and so we&#8217;ll<br \/>help our students get through the<br \/>blueprint but the marketing side of<br \/>things the operations the customer<br \/>success manager our customer support<br \/>tickets that&#8217;s all managed by the team<br \/>so my job now is to help grow the<br \/>business and help expand the business so<br \/>that we can help more people but I&#8217;m not<br \/>actually on the tools&#8217; doing the things<br \/>that I was doing three years ago which<br \/>is a good thing Ben because up until up<br \/>until a couple of years ago if I got hit<br \/>by a bus<br \/>then all of our students would be at<br \/>risk because I wouldn&#8217;t be here to help<br \/>them right and so part of me really<br \/>wanting to build some structure and<br \/>build a team in this business is to<br \/>de-risk the business a<br \/>against me being the only key person of<br \/>influence so I can now step away from<br \/>the business if I get sick or I got hit<br \/>by bus I could be away for the business<br \/>for six weeks and the business still<br \/>creates value for its customers and<br \/>still generates a profit for the<br \/>business which is a good player that&#8217;s a<br \/>good space to be in so how do you manage<br \/>your time like how do you focus you make<br \/>a dangerous assumption that I know how<br \/>to focus and that I know how to manage<br \/>my time Ben I do have a lot on my plate<br \/>it&#8217;s a it&#8217;s a daily practice trying to<br \/>work out what to prioritize I mentioned<br \/>before we&#8217;ve disappointed a chairman of<br \/>the board here and his role really is to<br \/>mentor myself and my business partner<br \/>through this next stage of growth so<br \/>that we can so that you know he can help<br \/>us help keep us accountable but you know<br \/>what it&#8217;s really simple<br \/>until you complicate things right yeah<br \/>there are you know what I mean they were<br \/>really only like there are really only<br \/>like three things that you need to be<br \/>focused on everyday at this stage you<br \/>know for me and and like so every day if<br \/>you get three big tasks done you know<br \/>you should go home right and I look at<br \/>the areas of the business and I said<br \/>okay how&#8217;s marketing doing how are we<br \/>doing from a marketing standpoint how<br \/>are we doing from a customer service<br \/>standpoint we call it customer success<br \/>so our our existing customers happy yep<br \/>that&#8217;s customer success marketing is are<br \/>we attracting new customers to the<br \/>program yes and then the third question<br \/>is how&#8217;s the team doing is everyone<br \/>happy on the team that&#8217;s cool the<br \/>they&#8217;re kind of three big questions I<br \/>think about everyday you know they&#8217;re<br \/>the three things that keep me awake at<br \/>night that&#8217;s cool and how do you follow<br \/>up on your on your cousin and your<br \/>customers your students and what kind of<br \/>results are are you seeing that&#8217;s that&#8217;s<br \/>a great question man so we&#8217;ve got a<br \/>couple of metrics here in the business<br \/>that we use to measure there I&#8217;m just<br \/>waving goodbye to our customer success<br \/>manager Jean who&#8217;s walking out the door<br \/>we have a couple of metrics that we use<br \/>in the business here to measure how well<br \/>we&#8217;re doing<br \/>in serving our customers one is the Net<br \/>Promoter Score which is you probably are<br \/>familiar with it but for those that<br \/>aren&#8217;t it&#8217;s a very simple question it&#8217;s<br \/>a one-question survey you send your<br \/>customers and you say on a scale of 1 to<br \/>friends to WP elevation the usual nip<br \/>primer and you can score anywhere from<br \/>minus 100 to positive a hundred that&#8217;s<br \/>the scale where your score can see<br \/>depending on whether people give you you<br \/>know what score they give you and if you<br \/>want to learn more about that people<br \/>should Google Net Promoter Score cuz<br \/>it&#8217;s actually quite a there&#8217;s a great<br \/>science behind it and I really believe<br \/>that it&#8217;s a good metric to let you know<br \/>how you&#8217;re tracking with your existing<br \/>customers so these the benchmark for a<br \/>business like ours which is kind of<br \/>business-to-business coaching and<br \/>education the benchmark for our business<br \/>is around about 40 so if you&#8217;re getting<br \/>about 40 out of anywhere from minus 100<br \/>to a positive 100 if you&#8217;re sitting at<br \/>positive 40 then you&#8217;re on track our<br \/>current Net Promoter Score is 84 so I<br \/>know we&#8217;re doing really well and the<br \/>people that say that they wouldn&#8217;t<br \/>recommend us the reason that they say<br \/>that is because they don&#8217;t want their<br \/>competitors to find out about EE<br \/>application right so the other metric<br \/>that we measure is our course completion<br \/>rates out of out of all the people that<br \/>join up for our course what percentage<br \/>of people actually complete the course<br \/>within three months of joining and we<br \/>know that most online courses have<br \/>course completion rates of around about<br \/>anywhere from two to ten percent in fact<br \/>the more people that you have enrolled<br \/>in the course the lower your course<br \/>completion rates so some of the<br \/>brilliant master master class and I<br \/>didn&#8217;t finish there you go there you go<br \/>so the really large universities that<br \/>put their courses up online they have<br \/>completion rates of about two percent<br \/>and that&#8217;s because the online<br \/>environment you can&#8217;t replicate a<br \/>classroom by just putting it online<br \/>there are things that you need to take<br \/>into consideration and it all comes down<br \/>to the user experience although the<br \/>customer experience the student<br \/>experience and so we work really hard to<br \/>nurture our students through the course<br \/>a lot of people sell an online course<br \/>and then when you enroll they&#8217;re like<br \/>hey thanks for a match I&#8217;ve got your<br \/>money and I&#8217;m gonna go sit on the beach<br \/>we know that when you enroll in our<br \/>course that&#8217;s when our work begins<br \/>because you&#8217;ve trusted us enough to make<br \/>an investment in the course it&#8217;s now our<br \/>responsibility to make sure you<br \/>implement and you get results so our<br \/>course completion rates at this at the<br \/>moment are about sixty-five percent so<br \/>the course complete the course within<br \/>three months they graduate they get<br \/>their certificate they print it out they<br \/>take a photo and they put it in our<br \/>Facebook group and it&#8217;s an incredible<br \/>sense of reward and it&#8217;s a great big<br \/>virtual hug that the community gives<br \/>them to congratulate them for completing<br \/>the course now to follow that through to<br \/>its logical conclusion to answer your<br \/>question some of the results that we get<br \/>and I can speak you know firsthand<br \/>experience whenever I travel and I meet<br \/>people who have been through the WP<br \/>elevation program usually this the story<br \/>and I can tell you an example of Chris<br \/>and amber Hines who I met at WordCamp us<br \/>in Philadelphia a couple of years ago<br \/>and Robert and Alyssa Simmons who I met<br \/>in our mastermind in Miami last year<br \/>both came up to him when they met me in<br \/>real life and said I want to thank you<br \/>so much because as a result of going<br \/>through WP elevation the husbands have<br \/>been able to quit their full-time job<br \/>work from home in the business full-time<br \/>with their wives and they are living the<br \/>dream because they get to spend all day<br \/>everyday at home with their wife and<br \/>some in some cases their children<br \/>running this business from home and<br \/>they&#8217;re not trudging off to a job that<br \/>they that makes them miserable anymore<br \/>I can&#8217;t put a value on that I don&#8217;t know<br \/>what that&#8217;s worth but I know that that&#8217;s<br \/>what gets me out of bed every day that&#8217;s<br \/>the success stories in that yeah it&#8217;s<br \/>totally satisfying and and that is worth<br \/>more than any amount of money you could<br \/>put in our bank account yeah that&#8217;s<br \/>amazing<br \/>I think we can kind of wrap things up I<br \/>want to ask you what you&#8217;re currently<br \/>working on and what you want to share<br \/>about what&#8217;s new yeah so<br \/>you know when we when we launched the WP<br \/>elevation course when we&#8217;ve remodeled it<br \/>and relaunched it three years ago it<br \/>what people were logging in and they<br \/>were blown away by how beautiful the<br \/>interface was and and how amazing it is<br \/>and it still is when people log in for<br \/>the first time now it&#8217;s amazing<br \/>if you&#8217;ve for me I see it every day and<br \/>for me I&#8217;m like ah okay what can we do<br \/>next like how can we innovate how can we<br \/>make it even a better experience so I&#8217;ll<br \/>give you one very specific example that<br \/>we&#8217;re working on if you watch one of the<br \/>videos in one of the modules in our<br \/>course and you&#8217;re like and all our<br \/>videos are pretty short by the way<br \/>they&#8217;re only about you know 8 to 10<br \/>minutes each but if you watch a video<br \/>and you&#8217;re like halfway through it and<br \/>the doorbell goes and you&#8217;re like ah I<br \/>gotta go I&#8217;m gonna watch this later and<br \/>maybe you leave the house and then you<br \/>get on the train and then you open the<br \/>website on your phone at the moment you<br \/>kind of got to go back and watch that<br \/>video from the start again right so<br \/>we&#8217;re working on and I know this can be<br \/>done and we&#8217;re exploring different<br \/>options now but I want to improve the<br \/>experience so much that when you get on<br \/>the train and you play that video it<br \/>just picks up from where you left off<br \/>menlik&#8217;s yeah right exactly like Netflix<br \/>right and and and there&#8217;s there&#8217;s a<br \/>whole bunch of other things that we&#8217;re<br \/>working on which it really are designed<br \/>to allow you so we&#8217;re working on some<br \/>ideas for some SMS BOTS some chat BOTS<br \/>and also we&#8217;ve we&#8217;ve built the first<br \/>prototype of and I haven&#8217;t never<br \/>announced this publicly been so this is<br \/>a coup we&#8217;ve we&#8217;ve actually built the<br \/>very first prototype about our very own<br \/>desktop app which is not available just<br \/>yet but the desktop app will kind of be<br \/>like Google Drive or Dropbox and so for<br \/>example when one of our community<br \/>members writes a new proposal template<br \/>for you know marketing funnels and they<br \/>contribute that to the program and it<br \/>gets approved and it officially gets<br \/>added to one of our official resources<br \/>then it automatically just syncs to your<br \/>desktop and you go oh wow WP elevation<br \/>there&#8217;s a new marketing funnel proposal<br \/>template instead of having a login of<br \/>the members website and get the updates<br \/>and go find it we can just stream these<br \/>documents directly to you to your<br \/>desktop so they&#8217;re the kinds of things<br \/>that we&#8217;re constantly thinking<br \/>how we improve the experience for our<br \/>students and how we help them implement<br \/>what we teach them so that it&#8217;s not just<br \/>information it&#8217;s actually implementation<br \/>I love your strive for perfection it&#8217;s<br \/>really admirable and how can people<br \/>reach you and you know start the course<br \/>can you share yes so the best place is<br \/>to come over to WP elevation comm or hit<br \/>us up on Facebook we&#8217;re very active on<br \/>Facebook and we monitor our our chat and<br \/>our messages very very diligently WP<br \/>elevation comm slash Facebook you can<br \/>check out some of our livestream videos<br \/>all the website WP elevation calm at the<br \/>moment I&#8217;m not sure when this goes live<br \/>but we are open I think the first week<br \/>of June so come you know end of May<br \/>early June you&#8217;ll be able to enroll in<br \/>the program that&#8217;s cool Thank You Troy<br \/>it&#8217;s been fun and enlightening I&#8217;m sure<br \/>we&#8217;re going to do a lot of more things<br \/>together so until next time thank you<br \/>everyone and this you see you later<br \/>awesome thanks for having me Ben<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Overview Transcript Overview In this video, we chat with Troy Dean, CEO of WPElevation, and discuss topics related to growing your business as a WordPress professional. Transcript the thing is that if we solve a problem here in the business then chances are there are going to be lots of other people around the world [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_theme","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Interview With WPElevation CEO Troy Dean - Academy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/elementor.com\/academy\/interview-with-wpelevation-ceo-troy-dean\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Interview With WPElevation CEO Troy Dean - Academy\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Overview Transcript Overview In this video, we chat with Troy Dean, CEO of WPElevation, and discuss topics related to growing your business as a WordPress professional. 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