Being a WordPress Agency.
Not being content with being “average” is deeply engrained in us.
We’re not satisfied being “just another WordPress Agency” – we want to be the best digital agency in the UK that focusses on WordPress.
This becomes an obsession, an client-centric need to deliver the very best we can within the budgets our clients have. This invariably centres around a number of core areas, so these become our core obsessions:
- Support. Support. Support. We dealt with 2,500 support tickets in 2014 so it’s a major challenge to ensure every client has a wonderful experience. We strive to respond quickly, flexibly and with care and attention.
- We love WordPress. Whilst most agencies were still banging the “hand-built” drum we had already moved onto the WordPress platform. We took a lot of stick from so-called “techies” who didn’t seem to understand the wider implications of open platforms. We banged the WordPress drum a lot in 2014, attending and sponsoring events around the globe.
- Eat what we cook. We’ve invested 1000’s of man hours into own digital presence to ensure it stays up to date, relevant, balanced and informative. In fact, the content and our approach to the digital world is the number one reason for our selection as a supplier/partner.
- Ignore the money. Working well with clients brings reward, mutual benefit, advancement and then, finally, money. We choose who we work with very carefully to ensure our values match and we can enter productive mutual relationships.
- Quality shines through. We understand what’s required to be a quality digital agency and avoid over-stretching the company or our partners. Stressed delivery and support is the fastest route to failure and recriminations. It’s a modest, and steady approach to growing the business sustainably. We’re looking forward to entering our 3rd decade.
- Honesty and transparency. It’s easier and simpler playing with a straight bat, despite sometimes leaving us open to plagiarism. But we’d rather openly share who we are, how we work and why we do what do than closet our team and processes away in walled castles.
- Agile is best. Change happens so fast it’s churlish to expect every project and relationship to be set in stone. We embrace and encourage change and evolution – it makes for a fantastically satisfying existence.
- Mobile is king, queen and prince. It’s five years since we went “mobile first” and the world really has moved on, much faster than we predicted but we’re proud to have a 100% mobile enabled client base and even prouder that were the first national agency to adopt and complete the roll-out of a single responsive solution (WordPress) in 2012.
- Cloud. Everything we do, without exception, is delivered over the cloud. From accounting to project management, tools, apps, asset management, reporting, monitoring, HR, communication, expense management, support and development methodologies – all are 100% cloud enabled.
- Be the best. We pay the best in the industry and that helps us get and retain the best brains. We work the fewest hours (on average, 25hrs a week) and wear that as a badge of pride; what we can do in 25hrs it takes most agencies 40hrs plus. We charge more for this than many other WordPress agencies, but why should clients have to compromise and choose a busy, overstressed and under-skilled agency stocked by juniors and sweat-shop development labour? No siree! that’s not for us … or our clients, they want quality delivery on time.
- Gazing at the horizon. If there is one thing guaranteed in the digital space it’s this; “the future is coming and it’s very different to what we have now. And it’s coming a good deal quicker than you think.“. We spend 25% of our resource budget prototyping new stuff, processes, platforms and ideas. It gives us our edge, and explains why we’re able to continually reinvent ourselves and stay out in front. We wouldn’t have survived 20 years in the digital space without this approach.
- Collaboration and sharing. We lucky to work with some of the most interesting people, whether they are clients, developers, marketers or designers they all share the same mutual work ethic and we create a framework of tools and processes to maximise it’s effectiveness and that empowers everyone in the mutual teams to do great work that everyone contributes to and can be proud of.
2014 has been a great year for our obsessions as we’ve been fortunate with our clients and partners to live the dreams, our core values if you like. We love our obsessions (and understand that not everyone will agree with us) and they will continue to drive us in 2015 and beyond … I wonder what that will look like?
