Leading, Empowering, and Inspiring, Episode 138

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Howdy everyone! Welcome back to officehours.fm. Today I have Joshua Strebel. He’s the CEO of Pagely hosting which is the first host to enter the managed WordPress hosting space. Joshua? It is great to have you on the show!

Joshua: My pleasure Carrie. Thanks so much for having me.

Carrie: Absolutely! So there are lots of things that are different in that territory that we can cover today. Forgive me in advance if we hop around a bit. This is my first time having on the show and I’m going to try to squeeze as much information from you in 30 minutes as I possibly can.

Joshua: All right. We’ll do our best.

Carrie: So for folks who haven’t met you or come across you, can you give a little background of who you are?

Joshua: Well, I’m in my late 30s. I’m a husband and father of two small boys. I am the co-founder with my wife Sally of Pagely. We do managed WordPress hosting. It was kind of a new and novel thing 8 or 9 years ago. We put our nose to the grindstone and did this. Now it’s kind of commonplace and I would wager a huge benefit to the WordPress ecosystem.

Carrie: Absolutely! You and Sally are also the founders (I guess you would call it) activity directors of the PressNomics conference?

Joshua: Cohosts I guess you would say.

Carrie: Yes, cohosts.

PressNomics

Joshua: Yeah. That was a random idea I had one night talking to JR Meda at Sucuri. Wouldn’t it be cool if…and then out of that came PressNomics. Sally does all the planning, organization and speaker selection. She probably doesn’t get the credit she’s due but all the great times we have at that event are largely in part because of her.

Carrie: It’s an awesome event. I am looking to returning this year for my third PressNomics. Those of you listening to the show, if you head over to officehours.fm, look for this episode with Joshua Strebel. I will have all the links that we mentioned on the show including one to PressNomics (which you can probably just Google). Anyhow, it’s a fantastic conference that really brings the cream of the crop of WordPress people together. Then they let people like me slip in just for the cost of the ticket. Joshua? We mentioned that Pagely was the first to enter that managed WordPress hosting space. Did you actually create the term managed WordPress hosting?

The origins of managed WordPress hosting

Joshua: That’s really funny that you say that. As a concept, which later became managed WordPress hosting, that was sort of our idea. We decided and already had the idea that there could be a way to systematize WordPress installs and make things a little better from the client perspective. To be frank, we didn’t know what it was. It was kind of like this website builder, managed service thing. I can’t quite remember exactly where we heard the term. I don’t know if we coined it or not. I don’t want to take the credit for it.  Sally’s looking at me like yeah! We might have come up with that. So yeah. Now it’s called managed WordPress hosting.

Carrie: Awesome! Pagely already existed as a host and then you switched over to managed WordPress. Were you just putting all your eggs in that managed WordPress basket or whatever you were calling it that point?

Joshua: Well, it happened a little differently. We were actually a client services agency doing design work, SEO, marketing, and development. The idea was to systematize some of that website production work and website hosting work. That led us to this product, which at the time was called Flair9.  A couple of years later it became Pagely when it was relaunched. The impetus was how do we go from serving 3 clients a month with a lot of labor, a lot of time and a lot of energy (where the start of every month you had to go find more clients) to putting the energy into systematizing something that’s more repeatable? So more of Software as a service (SASS) or a hosting service, you know? Once you get that customer on you get that revenue month after month. Then you build upon it. That was kind of the impetus that got us in that direction. Clearly, WordPress was young but it had a lot of potential. We saw that as a better future for us where you build upon something month after month rather than starting at zero every month.

Carrie: Absolutely! I’m going to have to fire my research assistant for getting those details wrong.

Joshua: (laughing) No worries.

Carrie: It’s actually me. I will wait until after this interview to fire myself so we can still get this episode done. So there are maybe a dozen prominent names in that managed WordPress space. Are you like ha, ha! You are all following what we’re doing. How do you stay true to what you’re doing but also seeing how they’re innovating with maybe trying to take some of the best stuff and bringing it over to Pagely? Maybe not, I don’t know.

Joshua: That’s funny. It’s a personality quirk of mine where I am very antagonistic to followers. In terms of people that took our idea and maybe improved it or not and some made some very valuable additions…I am very antagonistic in general. I’m just like whatever. Come up with your own idea, goofball. Quirk aside, there is a lot of value that these other companies have all brought. Over the 8 or 9 years that this industry has shaken out and matured, it certainly has stratified it a little bit. So I think it’s pretty clear if a client comes to Carrie (or any of your listeners) and says I need to host a WordPress site that looks X. Well there’s a company that probably serves X very well. There’s a company that serves Y, Z and Q. As the market has matured (this sounds so cliché) there is enough room for other players to serve their individual niches. With Pagely, in the beginning, it was so new there was only one market segment. That was this is what we do and we’re going to charge a little bit more than the going rate at the time. Now there’s a budget section, a value add, a small business section, and agency section.  At the top, there is the enterprise, big custom stuff. So over 8 or 9 years, that’s where Pagely has moved. We went from the bottom all the way to the top (which was very risky) but we pulled it off. Now we feel like (if it’s a pyramid) the top of the pyramid is now level. Pagely and WordPress VIP are the two most capable, scalable solutions serving the very top of the enterprise, big publisher, and big brand market. There is plenty of room for the rest of the stack for everybody else to slide in and find their niche customer segment.

Carrie: I like that you said that. Even in a crowded space, there is always room to come in and play so to speak. It can be difficult, right? You have to be able to verbalize exactly what makes you different than any of these other people out there and exactly what audience you’re going after.

Find the differentiators that set you apart from the competition

Joshua: Yeah. You have your key differentiators. You also have a lot of key similarities. The trick is not being lumped in the basket with all your similarities but finding the one or two differentiators that set your brand apart through positioning. That could be branding, pricing or customer focus. I think FlyWheel is a great case study in the way they define who they are and what market they serve. They kind of got a lock on that micro-agency, small business user experience. Whether its Siteground, GoDaddy or Bluehost, maybe they have a similar competitive price point but I don’t think they have gotten close to matching what FlyWheel has been able to do from the positioning and end-user aspect of their segment. That’s a good illustration of you can find your niche even if in a crowded space.

Carrie: Yeah. Those guys are a great example. I’m sure that not everything from the beginning of Pagely to present has gone without a hitch. What can you share as the leader that has helped you guys to keep moving forward? Most companies don’t last as long as it is you guys have.

Blue Ocean Strategy

Joshua: Well, I guess we beat the odds even further in that we are unfunded. We’ve done this all on revenue. We didn’t have a few million VC to experiment with. But there is a concept called the Blue Ocean. As a company, if you’re in a crowded space (and everybody’s picked a beach head) you need to decide where the open water is. You to decide where to take your company, where the water is blue and not crowded so you can flourish. After the first couple of years of Pagely, we had 3 or 4 competitors.  We’re like ok. They’re coming in. They’re taking land. They’re being competitive on price. How do we differentiate? How do we move? Where do we find a place that we can survive? Then we moved up market a little bit. We raised our prices and start talking about different things. That lasted for two or three years and then the same thing happened. You had additional competitors come in and some of those competitors moved up. In this last year, year and a half or two years, we had to do that again. Where do we fit now? Pagely (with our team size and our growth rate and revenue) we can’t compete with the 50 million dollar that one of our competitors has, or the hundreds of millions of dollars that GoDaddy spends on advertising. We just simply can’t compete with that. We would just eventually wither and go away. We had to find the next Blue Ocean. Over 9 years we went from the bottom to the top. At the very top tier we don’t need a thousand customers a month to survive, right? We don’t need a thousand at $99 a month. We need like a dozen at a few thousand dollars a month and we’re still growing 10 or 15% a month off those numbers. Being able to refocus our efforts on a smaller customer pool, but with a greater yield, allowed us to keep our ship afloat and keep navigating as the market all changed around.

Carrie: That book Blue Ocean Strategy is a great read that you reference in there. By the way, folks listening to this, my friend Matt Madeiros, over at the Matt report recently had Joshua specifically on that topic, moving your business up channel. You guys go take a listen to that over at mattreport.com. I wasn’t paid to promote Matt’s podcast. We’re all friends here. Good stuff! So I’ve read your blog post and some other things over at Pagely. It seems like one of the recurring themes over at Pagely and your management style is to pass power down to the people that are actually the boots on the ground so to speak (the people that are actually doing the work). Can you talk a little bit about your management philosophy and how you came to that?

Joshua: Yeah. I think you can look at it from two different approaches.  It’s essentially based on a book called Turn the Ship Around! It emphasizes a leader/leader management style in terms of your entire team of leaders. It’s not a pyramid. It’s not Josh on his golden throne dictating down the masses what they’re going to do all day. It’s a large and growing team of top performers. They are all leaders of their realm of responsibility. It works out in a practical sense.  In a traditional organizational structure, an employee will have responsibility and accountability but will have zero authority to have an impact. You run into that in the case of a tech support agent where you call in and you’re like here is my problem and I need something. They’re like I don’t have the authority to do that or I’m not allowed to do that. I can’t go off script, right? So they don’t have any authority yet they’re held accountable and responsible for closing tickets and serving a customer. Well, at Pagely, in order to scale and in order to get more off of my plate, so I can focus on other things that are more about moving the business forward, I had to look for individuals that are challenged and thrive in that environment. They really embraced the ownership of what they do every day. Sometimes it takes gentle reminders. One of my guys approached me today and said here’s want we want to do. I need to get so-and-so’s blessing. I said no. You don’t need their blessing. You just communicate to them what your needs are. They’re grown ups. They will figure out how to fit that in and away they go. So it’s gentle reinforcement of reminding people that everybody is a grown up and an adult who wants to be here. It pays those dividends to our customers. When our customer calls in and they have a question, they have a concern, or what have you, they know that they’re going to help the first time, every time. Maybe the second time where there is some is some needed cross communication with the team. They may need to ask somebody for the right answer. It’s an entirely different type of customer support that we’re able to deliver because even our newest customer support agent has SSH keys to the entire stack (all 2000+ VPS servers) you can login and do whatever needs to be done. You can reconfigure and NGINX rule, you help with a plugin debug, you can log into the billing system and issue a refund or credit, what have you. The authority to actually act reinforces that level of responsibility and accountability. I think that’s is what is missing for a lot of companies. Does it work for everybody? I don’t know but it’s really worked for us. It has allowed us to grow a team and culture where everybody just owns it. They own what they do every day and excel.

Carrie: I think that’s awesome! I’ve worked in environments where I was empowered even at “lower levels” to make a decision that I thought was best and run with it.  I’ve been in environments where that was not ok to do. I think when you empower people you’re right. Your customers are the ones who see the benefit of that. I’m sure your team ends up being a lot happier and feeling like they have a voice.

Joshua: As a manager, it’s your job to set the North Star. You set the guiding principles. You can say here are the parameters, here’s the culture, here’s how Pagely operates and this is the North star. When it comes to decision time everybody else just says how does this fit within the Pagely context?  How does this fit with our guiding principles? As long as everybody is on the same page about those, the decisions all reinforce it and everybody is moving along.

Carrie: So I have a question for you. Maybe somebody that is listening to the show is in an environment where it is not a Pagely-type environment. Do you have any suggestions on things they can do or behaviors that could help affect some second change in that environment and maybe shift it towards what you’re talking about?

Joshua: You know? That’s a tough one because my stereotypical understanding of a traditional corporate environment does not lend itself to anything squeaky wheels, right? If you don’t fit the mold you’re out.

Carrie: Quit and go work at Pagely.

Joshua: (laughing) I’m sure there’s something. I wish I had a better answer. I just keep at it I guess.

Carrie: Frankly I’ve always left those environments. I haven’t stuck around to do much. Joshua? Let’s shift directions a little bit. Today is February 7th or the day we’re actually recording this. I say that to give listeners some context of “when” we are recording. There’s so much happening in US politics and with the inauguration only a few weeks away (social media has just been frightening wherever you fall or whatever side of the fence you’re on). As someone who has both a brand presence online but also a strong individual personal presence can you share some thoughts on how you present or how you work through all the stuff that’s going on? Do you say it from business accounts, personal accounts are not all?

Working through explosive topics

Joshua: Yeah it’s kind of a minefield isn’t it? Personally, I am very vocal on my distaste for the current direction of the administration. Some (but not all my employees) share that feeling. Some are agnostic, they go either way and some are diametrically opposed. Some feel that this is exactly what our country needed or would benefit from. Internally, we have a lot of fun, interesting and insightful dialogue. We have one company rule (in terms of political discussion) you can attack the idea, you cannot attack the person for having it. We have a lot of engaging conversations. Just this morning we were talking about of states rights versus federal mandates on education with the approval of the Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education and what that means on a state-by-state level for things. We are free to have these conversations and you can debate the merits of the idea. The only rule is you can’t personally attack the person who expresses an opposing point of view. Internally, we found balance where we have these great dialogues because we are people. Externally, I will happily go on Twitter, in public or wherever I need to be and step on my soapbox. I will say “Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona, you are a twit!” “Betsy DeVos is unqualified!” Thanks for selling our kids down the river, right? But as a brand as Pagely, where do you draw that line? Pagely is an amalgam of all these personalities.  I think (what Sally and I have come up with) it’s unfair for Pagely necessarily to take a stand because that limits the voice of the minority in our company that maybe doesn’t agree with us.  We have all these interesting positions. We have the gay position, the Persian/Iranian position, the Hispanic position, the conservative position…we have this all inside of Pagely. So as a brand I think it’s unfair to say on one hand we respect everybody, we’re all inclusive and everybody is important and then on the other hand as a company, this is our stand. We have been careful not to do that.  As a person? Yes. I am very vocal.  My team understands that as a person (just as they’re allowed to be vocal, I am allowed to be vocal). As long as we’re respectful of each other, it will work out. It’s interesting to see things happening with companies like Uber and Tesla (some of these huge brands and agencies) personalities weighed in there. They took a stand, which I respect. I just don’t know as a small unit like us if it’s an appropriate step. Does that make sense?

Carrie: Yeah. That makes total sense. Starbucks is another one that comes to mind that kind of put itself out there in terms of making bold statements. I’m curious, internally, that’s wonderful that you can have respectful conversations with each other. Are they actually constructive or is it more just hey! We have this crazy stuff going on right now and we need a safe environment to discuss it.

Joshua: It’s mostly the latter. There are some things where there is certainly a constructive outcome. I don’t think that anyone’s mind is being changed but there’s a lot of understanding happening. One of our employees would logically fall on the conservative side. One of our employees is directly affected by this immigration policy that has been a shit show the last few days. Directly, the family is affected with real life consequences. So I think there’s certainly some benefit on seeing how maybe this conservative policy that seems so abstract hits very close to home in real life. So that kind of understanding is pretty invaluable. I would consider that a constructive outcome. Are we able to lead and affect change for the 4 or 5 dozen people at our company? I think on some level yes. Everybody can go protest. I will pay them to go protest. Unless we have our hand on the lever of government, I’m not sure exactly what we can do.

Carrie: Thanks for sharing your opinions on that. It’s nice to hear of environments being creative where people can have conversations and not be attacking each other. It seems like most of what’s on online. It’s just people shouting through a megaphone and not willing to have any intelligent conversation. Let’s move on to a happier, inspiring topic. That topic is Joshua Strebel. What inspires you?

Joshua’s Inspiration

Joshua: You know? The sappy answer (it sounds so silly) just try to be a good example for my boys. I have a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old. I just try to provide them the life and experience and espouse to them a worldview that will make them good citizens later on. I was reading the Cat in the Hat book to my 5-year-old the other day. It was about money…where the money came from. the minting process, coins and things like that. Part of me was like wow! Should I be talking about things like money with a 5-year-old? The other half of me was like absolutely! Of course, I should. This is a fact of our modern life. The quicker he understands the mechanics of money and the way things work, why dad works and dad works to earn money which pays for all of these things. So when he asks me for a space station…I said, “I don’t think daddy has enough money to buy a space station.” And he asked, “Can’t you work more?” So he’s at least getting these concepts. Stuff like that does inspire me. I’m setting a good example. Sally’s setting a good example on the other side where a strong, powerful and effective woman leader looks like and a what a nurturing mother looks like. That really inspires me; the kids and the next generation. More close to home, I just want to do well. Not well financially…just do well. I want to be a good person and good world citizen. That’s the motivation that gets me up very day. How can I push myself a little further to do something else cool?

Carrie: That’s awesome. Just from seeing you and Sally and your family interact at PressNomics, it’s clear that is a priority. I would say to somebody in the broader community, it’s so encouraging to see strong families in this space. It just seems like there’s so much that’s not that. It’s very refreshing to see. So thank you. That sounded weird that I’m inspired by your inspiration.

Joshua: Thank you for the compliment.

Carrie: We’re going to wrap it up here. Where can people online reach you? I’m also to ask you if you have a favorite tool, book, podcast, article or something that has helped you recently. So let’s go first with where can people find you online?

Joshua: If you go to the Twitters it’s @strebel. That’s mostly me ranting about politics of late. Forgive me, but that comes with the territory. My blog is saint-rebel.com. I tend to write more about business things there. Pagely.com is obviously the company.

Carrie: Awesome. All right. What fantastic book, website or interview can you lay on us?

Joshua: Ok this is going to sound cheesy. I’m the king of cheese today. A couple of weeks ago we were in a sales negotiation with a large client. I have a Director of Sales. He has a team with him but I keep an eye on the whole sales process and add my two cents when necessary. We were kind of at a roadblock and we were trying to figure out how do we move this client along? How do we tweak this? It reminded me of something I got 7 or 8 years ago which I revisited. Here’s the tip. It’s a 5 cd set from Roger Dawson called The Power of Negotiation. I am sure you can get it in digital now. But it’s an audio series where the guy walks through secrets or powers of success and negotiation. Little things from eye contact, body movement and things like that, but more effectively about the win-win. It’s simple things like when a car salesperson tells you the price of the car, you flinch. Whether you can afford the price or not, you flinch because that instantly makes them think well. If that’s too much, maybe I can take $2,000 off. So you save $2000 on the purchase of the car just by flinching and making a sour face. That sounds silly, but it’s quite in depth. These skills really come in handy as a business owner whether you’re negotiating for a raise, negotiating a deal for the client or negotiating for your employees. It’s a skill we do every day so you might as well be good at it.

Carrie: Fantastic! I will be sure to link to that over in the show notes over at officehours.fm. Joshua? Thank you so much for coming on today and sharing with my audience.

Joshua: Thank you so much, Carrie. I look forward to seeing you in April. If the audience doesn’t know there are pictures of you riding a mechanical bull at PressNomics.

Carrie: (laughing) Well if you weren’t inspired to get your ticket, now you can be!