I’ve got an on-line friend in France, an entrepreneur named Aurelio Volle, who runs a company called WP Umbrella. One of the things I appreciate most about Aurelio is the tag line on his LinkedIn profile:
Building in public the company I wish I had when I was an employee.
That’s a really bold statement and a grand ambition! I especially appreciate that he’s building it public.
WP Umbrella is a management tool for agency folks who manage a lot of WordPress sites. I hope to do enough business one day to need a tool like that.
Aurelio posted on LinkedIn recently “Here are the 5 biggest mistakes I made building WP Umbrella (and what I learned)”. It was mistake number one that really caught my attention. That won’t surprise many of you.
Not hiring fast enough for customer support: Before Boris Zarev joined, both Thomas and I spent our days handling support tickets. This slowed down new feature releases and platform improvements, while also compromising the quality of support for our users.
I thought, “I can save few $k month, and it’ll only take 2-3 hours a day for support.”
The reality? It doesn’t work like that.
Support is always a priority, and it disrupts everything else. The lack of focus was total.
The importance of support cannot be understated. And when it isn’t done correctly, everything is disrupted and the lack of focus is total.
I work in higher education where I support professors in classrooms and I often illustrate the importance of my role in what they do by asking them to think of a favorite TV show. Most scenes will have between a few and several actors in them, but it’s what goes on behind the camera, the lights, the sound guys, show runners, producers, directors, camera guys, boom operators and dozens of other roles that I don’t even know the name for that enable those actors to be in front of the camera. For them to shine at what they do, shaping young minds and future generations, they have to be well supported.
The same is true of the agency folks. They need to be well supported so the can build websites that shine which is why they use tools like WP Umbrella.
And for Aurelio to make a tool that enables the agency folks to shine, he needs to be well supported. The cascade goes on and on.
When companies don’t get support right it’s like erecting scaffolding on shaky ground, if they aren’t very careful the whole thing can crash down around them.
I hope that more companies come to this realization and begin to prioritize support as they have at WP Umbrella. Having good support enables so many more good things to happen.
Leave a Reply