Running an agency solo can come with it’s fair share of difficulties.

In this session, Rosie will share her secrets to growing a one woman agency within a focused niche and how thrive your business through learning, collaborating and pivoting your services and offers to suit your customer base.

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Rosie Robinson: Founder, WUF Design

Rosie Robinson runs WUF design, making awesome websites for pet businesses. Rosie has been working within the pet industry for over 16 years now. She built two six-figure dog walking businesses and then transitioned to website design full time.

Maddy Osman shares battle-tested lessons learned for creating consistent, high-quality content at scale. Developing a proprietary style guide that bridges the gap between what humans want to read and how robots process information is what made it possible to scale The Blogsmith to a team of 25+.

If your team hasn’t yet established baseline style rules, you won’t want to miss this actionable session.

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Maddy Osman: The Blogsmith

Maddy Osman operates The Blogsmith, an SEO content agency for B2B tech companies that works with clients like HubSpot, Automattic, and Sprout Social. Maddy’s background in WordPress web design contributes to a well-rounded understanding of SEO and how to connect brands with their target audiences online.

Providing clear, responsive, and friendly support is hard. Providing clear, responsive, friendly support for a free product on a public forum is even harder!

In this talk, we’ll walk through tips, tricks, and workflows to help you provide high-quality support on the WordPress.org forums for plugins, themes, and general WordPress questions.

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David Mainayar: Co-Founder at PeachPay

Co-Founder at PeachPay and with a background in economics, David has been obsessed with WooCommerce ever since he discovered its transformational potential for the entrepreneurial underdog.

It’s about time that I answered a question that I’ve been asked a lot about How to Get Clients. The methods that I reveal here are FREE and easy to implement. They can also be applied to any industry – and not just Web Design Clients.

I discuss low income models using Fiverr and Upwork to gain reviews, and how to scale up with better proposals, pricing ladders and pricing strategies to reach your dream benchmark.

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Imran Siddiq: Director, Web Squadron

I help small businesses and agencies launch, grow and scale their businesses with proven advice and results-focused WordPress plugins.

Are you hoping to enjoy more flexibility and freedom that comes with living a location-independent lifestyle, building a profitable online business, making the most of the places you dream to be, and having the opportunity to do what feeds your soul?

Most people dream of having a business that goes where they go, but they don’t know how to make it happen. Here’s the FAST way to build a portable business – Foundations, Automations, Systemized, Travel-Ready.

Lee Drozak will share her most important lessons learned while living on the road and running a successful WordPress-based business. She’ll draw on her 30+ years of working remotely and tiny house/RV living.

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Lee Drozak: Agency Consultant

Lee Drozak is a digital nomad experiencing flexibility and freedom. She’s also a Website Marketing Fixer for Solo Agencies and Service-based entrepreneurs, helping them build a profitable portable business that meets them where you are! Drawing on my years of experience in website design and marketing while living remotely gives Lee the perfect perspective to help you grow your location-independent business.

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Anne-Mieke Bovelett: Accessibility & Possibility Advocate

Anne-Mieke Bovelett runs an internationally focused web agency in Düsseldorf (Germany). She’s a passionate accessibility advocate. One of her favourite things in life is teaching web designers how to convert an inaccessible design to accessible profitable design, torching all myths around accessibility..

Websites have a job to do – whether they’re powering a brand of five employees or an enterprise of ten thousand. Sites need to be fast, secure and scalable. They need to convert visitors into leads and leads into customers.

They need to connect to the wealth of other tools and software your clients are using. In short, a website doesn’t end with the website. Miriam Schwab from Strattic and Greg Karelitz from HubSpot discuss frequent challenges facing agencies and the power of static hosting and cloud-based CRM to set your clients (and you) up for success.

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Greg Karelitz & Miriam Schwab: Director of Partnerships, HubSpot & Co-Founder, Strattic

After years of dealing with the ongoing struggle of keeping client sites secure and performant at her agency, Miriam realized that these issues could be solved in a radical way by converting the sites to a static, Jamstack architecture, and founded Strattic – an end-to-end static hosting solution for WordPress websites. Greg is the Director of Platform Partnerships at HubSpot and works with 1,000+ software companies to help them build high-quality integrations with HubSpot.

After nearly a decade in Managed WordPress, GoDaddy has had quite the ride. In this session, we’ll share the history of our experience – good and bad, what we’ve learned and the investments we’ve made as we look to the future.

We’ll also share where we see the future of Managed WordPress heading and the role GoDaddy is excited to play.

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Lax Mariappan: Backend Engineer, WebDevStudios

Lax Mariappan is a Backend Engineer at the WordPress agency WebDevStudios. Lax enjoys fixing bugs, maintaining and migrating websites for enterprise clients.

Everybody tells you to test, but nobody tells you WHAT to test and HOW to test it — and you feel like you’re just throwing money out there… Try an Engineering Approach to Marketing.

It all starts with one simple “High Impact” Test that lays the foundation for massive, big wins. It gives you a simple method to take the guesswork out of your marketing…

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Erin Athene: Co-Founder and CEO Mint C.R.O.

Erin Athene co-founded her first $20 million tech company in 17 months, and is now the co-founder of Mint C.R.O.,™ providing an Engineering Approach to Marketing.™ Her mission is to empower business owners and marketers to take control of their customer acquisition and revenue, using a Proven Growth Formula.

Providing clear, responsive, and friendly support is hard. Providing clear, responsive, friendly support for a free product on a public forum is even harder!

In this talk, we’ll walk through tips, tricks, and workflows to help you provide high-quality support on the WordPress.org forums for plugins, themes, and general WordPress questions.

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Bethany Chobanian Lang: Support Lead, 10up (Contracted To Google)

Bethany Chobanian Lang has spent the last seven years working with WordPress as a project manager, developer, trainer, and in technical support. They are currently a Support Lead at 10up, contracted to Google to manage support for two plugins, Site Kit and Web Stories.

ou are never just building a website – so stop getting paid like you are.

In this session, we will dig into the nuts & bolts of creating a magical client experience that unlocks the ability to successfully increase your prices. We will touch on value-based pricing, simplifying your pre-client journey, designing a more streamlined process, and the mindset around undercharging in the first place.

You will walk away feeling uplifted and encouraged to review your own client experience and pricing. There is no “one-size-fits-all” solution, but rather we will discuss how you can create a higher-level client experience that aligns with YOUR business. If you are tired of feeling overworked and underpaid, you will want to attend this session.

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Sam Munoz & Karyn Paige: Founders, Making Website Magic

Sam Munoz & Karyn Paige are the dynamic team behind Making Website Magic, a brand focused on uplifting and empowering women web designers and developers. As Compassionate Disruptors, they consciously interrupt and release conventional practices if they are rooted in harm, center humanity, and inspire new paradigms for the women they serve.

Your client may not be on an upcoming episode of Shark Tank, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to prepare for a surge in traffic to their site. Tom Fanelli, the CEO of Convesio will explain a proven process for ensuring success when preparing for a high traffic web event.

From planning to the most critical part, load testing, to handling issues the day of the event, you will get the blueprint to making sure your client’s event is a success.

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Tom Fanelli: CEO/Co-Founder Convesio

Tom is a founder of Convesio which is next generation of managed WordPress hosting; the first self-healing, autoscaling, platform-as-a-service for creating and managing WordPress sites.

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Raitis Sevelis: Product Manager, Visual Composer

Raitis is a product manager at Visual Composer Website Builder. He has been around WordPress for 10+ years and is an active member of the WordPress community. Before joining Visual Composer, he worked as a freelance UI/UX designer for various digital agencies and world-famous brands like Accenture and Mercedes-Benz.

The story of how we grew and evolved the Nerdery from just a few programmers, to a team of over 500 Product Development specialists doing $85M in annual sales in just 14 years.

We’ll go through how the team evolved over time, how we built our go-to-market strategies, what I’d do different, what I’d do again and more!

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Tom O’Neill: Previously the CEO of The Nerdery

Tom O’Neill was previously the CEO of The Nerdery, a digital consultancy providing custom software development. During Tom’s tenure, he grew The Nerdery from 5 to 500 Nerds with offices across four U.S. cities. Tom has a passion for helping consultancies grow profitably while building strong cultures and teams

After nearly a decade in Managed WordPress, GoDaddy has had quite the ride. In this session, we’ll share the history of our experience – good and bad, what we’ve learned and the investments we’ve made as we look to the future.

We’ll also share where we see the future of Managed WordPress heading and the role GoDaddy is excited to play.

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Chris LaNasa: Senior Director – Global Partners Product Marketing, GoDaddy

Chris has 25 years of technology services experience spanning telecommunications, IOT and Web Presence. His focus has been on launching new disruptive businesses and developing the product strategy,

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Melissa Love: Founder, The Design Space

Melissa is a website designer and brand specialist for small, creative businesses. She is the founder of WordPress theme company, The Design Space, which makes excellent design affordable, and she’s a WordPress nerd who has taught thousands of entrepreneurs how to build their own beautiful websites, through her online membership, The Marketing Fix.

This is one of the most insidious problems that plague our industry, it can delay some projects by years, it ruins client relationships and can cause projects to cost us more money than we are making from it.

Over the past 3 years, we’ve worked alongside 1000’s of agencies just like you, and we’ve been running our own for over a decade.

Learn why this happens and the steps you can take to kill this problem for good!

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Vito Peleg: Co-Founder, CEO. Atarim

Hey! Vito here, I built my first website 20+ years ago as a teenager for my skateboarding crew from high school, I later started freelancing and grew my London based agency to a team of 12 while organising events and touring the world as the leader or a rock band. 🤘

There are six key principles to keep in mind during the buyer’s journey.

We’ll explore how winning the race to object or embracing silence, among other principles, can put you in the driver’s seat during the sale.

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Shannyn Lee: Managing Director, Win Without Pitching

Shannyn Lee is the Win Without Pitching Managing Director and an unstoppable force of human empowerment. She spent a decade in senior marketing and communication roles in Fortune 500 companies before moving to a business development leadership role at a well-regarded Seattle design firm.

Are you an agency or freelancer responsible for implementing CRM projects for clients, or do you want to start offering CRM implementation as a service?

Traditional CRM implementations can take months to show ROI, and the cost of implementation is high for both you and your client. If a client doesn’t see results fast, you risk damaging the relationship, or even losing their business!

After working with thousands of small businesses and agencies, I’ve identified 5 easy ways to create near-instant results with CRM so you can prove ROI to clients fast!

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Adrian Tobey: Founder, Groundhogg Inc

I help small businesses and agencies launch, grow and scale their businesses with proven advice and results-focused WordPress plugins.

This session will be about the future of WordPress as an enterprise solution, and what this means for agencies, creators and outside companies participating in this space.

If you’re an agency or a creator and you’re looking for where your next audience or your next customer is going to be, I challenge you to think upstream with me towards enterprise clients.

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Spencer Forman: Founder WPLaunchify, LaunchFlows, Kapsule Consulting

Entrepreneur, Attorney, WordPress Strategist & Marketing Automation Expert

As an owner of an agency, I have met many other agency owners who really struggled with knowing their numbers.

Coming into this business from a finance and marketing background, I had many tech struggles that the community helped me with and I, in turn, started helping them understand their money/cash flow. I will share the same easy to use method I taught them!

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Nev Harris: Agency Consultant, nevharris.com

I show agency owners where the profit is hiding in their business. I went to Pitt and Duquesne, and earned an economics degree and an MBA in Finance. I’ve owned an agency the last 7 years but have always been an entrepreneur.

Deployment automation (or CI/CD) is overlooked by many agencies. This is a mistake, that can cost them money and reputation.

While CI/CD is not a silver bullet it can make your products less error-prone. In my presentation, I will explain what is CI/CD, who benefits from it and how to start implementing it.

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Maciek Palmowski: WordPress Developer, Buddy

I’m a WordPress developer working at Buddy as a WordPress Ambassador. After hours I spend most of my time trying to find interesting news for WP Owls newsletter or cycling.

The web design world is a place of limitless possibilities. As great as that is, as a web design service provider, it can be daunting and clients can expect the world of you.

If you aren’t careful, you can be stretched too thin, providing services to clients that you don’t even want to provide in the first place.

In this presentation, Hans Skillrud, former owner of a 12 person web design and software development company (and now cofounder of the Privacy Policy generator company Termageddon) will speak on why saying ‘no’ to clients oddly makes your firm more profitable while significantly reducing the risk of burnout.

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Hans Skillrud: Vice President, Termageddon

Hans Skillrud is the cofounder of Termageddon, an auto-updating Privacy Policy generator design specifically for web agencies and their clients.

With 1 out of 4 people in the U.S. living with some kind of disability, agencies must make sure their clients’ websites are accessible.

This is not simply a matter of being ADA and WCAG compliant. It is good business as web accessibility can deliver better results and enhance search engine optimization.

Join us to hear more about how web accessibility can work for your agency and your clients

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Rafi Glantz: Senior Partner Success Manager, accessiBe

Rafi Glantz Senior Partner Success Manager Rafi is one of accessiBe’s leading partners manager, helping agencies bring web accessibility to their clients.

Have you wondered why brands get involved with the WordPress project and the community and events surrounding it? It may seem obvious, but it’s not for the all the reasons you might think.

In this session, Adam Warner will share his experience representing various brands in his WordPress and web designer and developer advocacy career, the reasoning behind why they get involved with open-source software and communities, and the outcomes that community support and participation provide for both end users and the companies themselves.

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Adam W. Warner – Global Field Marketing Sr. Manager for GoDaddy Pro

Adam’s professional title is Global Field Marketing Senior Manager for GoDaddy, which basically means he runs and participates in events in the WordPress space specifically. 

He is also a long-time WordPress community member. He found WordPress in 2005 and I’ve done a lot of different things with it!

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a single freelancer, or running a digital agency – everyone wants more revenue. But what if the problem isn’t getting more leads?

What if the problem is how you’re thinking about your offerings? What if a single paradigm shift will enable you to drive more revenue to the bottom line?

That’s what we’ll look at in this talk – with real-world examples of agencies that drove hundreds of thousands of dollars to their bottom line once they made the switch.

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Chris Lema – Vice President, Products & Innovation at Liquid Web & Nexcess

With more than 15 years of writing, speaking & coaching, since 2005 Chris has been working with startups, with software companies, and in the WordPress ecosystem helping teams and companies grow.

Elementor has become the leading website building platform in the last couple of years and with good reason, it provides a plethora of features to make building top quality websites a simple task.

In this talk, Ben will take you through the hidden gems and features within Elementor to not only guide you through using the platform to build better websites, but also how it can be used as a great business tool to streamline your agency workflows.

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Ben Pines – Head of Web Creator Program at Elementor

Ben is Elementor’s Evangelist and Head of Web Creator Program. Ben has been with Elementor since it’s launch, back in 2016, and is constantly thinking of new ways to empower the work of web creators from around the world.

Experts all agree that a successful project is one that is completed on time, within budget, with an end-product whose features meet the client’s business requirements, without sacrificing profit. They also agree that the major enemies to project success are always scope creep and project delays.

In this session, Beth will discuss how using a change budget along with a solid change control procedure can ensure that each and every project meets the criteria for success – on time, within budget, while retaining your project profit margin. It’s MAGIC!

Beth built her first WordPress website in 2009 for a side business, was immediately smitten, and soon began building websites for other small businesses. In 2016, after a long history as an IT Business Analyst, Instructional Designer, and Project Manager, she left the corporate world to become a full time WordPress Coach and Designer.

Soon after, while attending WordCamps and seeing how folks struggle with project management, she decided to share her knowledge to help others by forming the WP Project Manager’s Academy. She now enjoys providing real-life project management skills training to all types of WordPress practitioners (designers, developers, consultants, project managers, and agencies).

WordPress Security is a critical component in the life and work of every WordPress professional, but it’s often a confusing and difficult aspect when building a website.

Not just for you, but also for your clients. In this talk we’ll discuss strategies and tips to help you approach security within your own work, and also how to better communicate the importance of security with your clients.

Paul GoodChild is the Founder of ShieldPRO and iControlWP. As the co-founder of iControlWP, Paul’s role is lead of client relations and support. Balancing technical expertise with a user-focused perspective offers unique advantages in delivering a product and services that customers actually need.

Having recurring monthly/yearly revenue in your Agency is paramount for success. Waiting for that next big project to keep you a-float is a surefire way to either stop you from growing or at the worst you shutting your doors.

In this interview, Sam will provide some tips and advice on how to sell care plans and how to run this type of business remotely to ensure you always have the revenue to keep growing your Agency.

Sam Mulaim is an entrepreneur and the founder of FixRunner WordPress support- one of the leading support services in the industry, Prior to FixRunner Sam use to own & run over 100 affiliates sites that generated 6 figures in monthly income. You can find FixRunner here >> https://www.fixrunner.com/