Day 4 Kickoff

Agencies rarely operate in isolation – they build, deliver and grow inside the ecosystem of products and services they rely on. Yet most treat product/service communities and agency programs as secondary, rather than recognizing them for what they are: environments that already support the full marketing and sales funnel.

This panel explores why active participation in these communities matters and how, by giving first, agencies can strengthen positioning and grow their businesses more effectively.

Join us for a conversation between product, partner and agency perspectives, moderated by Raitis Sevelis from WPBakery, with insights from Ivana Ćirković also from WPBakery, Svilena Peneva from NitroPack and WPEngine and Bogdan Radusinović from Melograno.

The guessing is over, now it’s time to find out who got it right!

Join Bud Kraus as he reveals the winners of his mystery voice guessing game. Tune in to see if you cracked the challenge and whether you’re walking away with an iPad or AirPods Max.

Don’t miss it!

Mark Szymanski is an educator, strategist, and builder based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

He started building websites with WordPress in 2018 and has spent the years since serving clients through his one-person agency, Motive11.

Over the past several months he’s pivoted hard into AI, expanding well beyond WordPress into new tools, new stacks, and new service areas, learning faster and shipping more than he ever could before.

Now he’s focused on two things: helping his clients adapt so they don’t fall behind, and helping other independent builders do the same.

He shares what’s actually working (and what isn’t) through his YouTube channel and his community, Modern Builders Society.

This session explores how web hosting, often treated as a purely technical or secondary decision directly impacts two critical aspects of an agency’s business: client retention and recurring revenue.

Drawing from real-world observations on the infrastructure side, the talk highlights a common blind spot: agencies are frequently held accountable for performance, uptime, and security, even when they don’t control the hosting environment. This creates hidden risks that can damage client trust and long-term relationships.

The session introduces a simple, practical framework outlining three common ways agencies approach hosting—avoiding it, reselling it, or fully owning the experience—and explains how each model affects both client satisfaction and business growth.

Attendees will walk away with a clearer understanding of:

Why hosting plays a key role in how clients perceive agency performance

How lack of control over infrastructure can lead to client churn

How agencies can reposition hosting from a cost center into a value-driven, recurring service

The goal is to provide agencies with a practical mindset shift and a decision-making framework they can apply immediately to improve both retention and revenue.

Most bad clients don’t surprise you. You just ignore the signs. This talk breaks down the patterns, red flags, and decisions that lead to difficult projects and shows how to avoid them before they start. If you’ve ever thought “we should have said no” – welcome to the club.

Attached I’m also sending you a pic. I hope it’s not too bad and you can sue it.
Let me know if you need anything else.

Olly Feldman is the Head of Global Sales at Hosting.com, overseeing enterprise sales and account management teams across EMEA, North America, and ANZ. With over a decade in the hosting industry, Olly partners with global brands and Agencies to bulletproof their high-traffic platforms. He specializes in delivering the speed and resilience required to transform peak-traffic surges into seamless commercial successes.

The only constant in your business isn’t the strategy, the stack, or the team; it’s the why underneath them.
In this candid session, Raquel moves from the question most of us avoid (who am I, actually?) to the business case for answering it: the boundaries that hold because you know what you’re protecting, the decisions that come quickly because you’re not weighing other people’s opinions of you, and the steadiness of being someone, not just doing things.

Jonathan Watson shares his 25+-year journey that began on a Hollywood sidewalk in 1999 when he bought TheOneRing.com while waiting in line (for days!) for The Phantom Menace. After over two decades stuck in a unfocused agency grind, his passion ended up being the key that opened the door to a better future for his business (and life!).

Agency owners will hear why embracing their own unique passion might be the best path to finding a more profitable and less stressful future.

We’re in the middle of a massive tectonic shift: in the agency business, in WordPress, in the web, in marketing as a whole. Few, if any, understand how advancements in AI will ultimately reshape our worlds and our livelihoods.

But there ARE shocking parallels from the past. This paradigm shift may not be as unique as we think.

In this talk, we’ll look to history to see what guidance we can take from similar technologically-driven paradigm shifts of the past. Some of what we discover might just surprise you!