If you’re interested in building reliable, sustainable and scalable recurring income as a web designer, one of the best ways to do so is to create a monthly hosting and maintenance plan. In this episode, we’ll hear from Jake Kramer of Artillery Media on how his agency have brought 150+ clients onto their hosting and maintenance plan in just 2.5 years!
In this chat, we cover:
- How to package and display your maintenance/hosting plans
- The tools behind a successful plan
- How and when to bring up pricing
- Sales methods and strategies for recurring services vs one time services
- How to up-sell services to clients for ongoing work
- What to do when someone declines your plan
And so much more. Enjoy and if you haven’t yet started your own maintenance plan or want to take your current one to the next level, let’s do it together through my Website Maintenance Plan Course.
Connect with Jake:
Links mentioned:
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts:
Episode presented by:
Learn how to build recurring income RIGHT NOW by offering your own website maintenance plan!
• Put an end to the "feast or famine" of web design
• Create consistent, stable, recurring income for yourself every month
• See how to craft your own plan that's based off of what has worked for me
Now my maintenance plan is right on target. Not only has it paid for itself but it pays for itself each and every month. It was the perfect investment for my business. Thank you Josh for putting this together and teaching it in a way that anyone could follow!"
John Bendever
Thanks for having me, Josh! Hopefully your listeners will get something valuable out of the conversation 🙂 Cheers!
Great interview, Josh and Jake. A lot of good examples and metaphors (Jake). I really liked your approach to getting clients excited about building and maintaining a website.
Josh, you mentioned a book called “Book To Sell”. You didn’t mention the author or where we could purchase it. I didn’t see a book by that name on Amazon! I’m very interested in reading it.
Thanks so much!
Hey Jamie it’s in the links mentioned above. No worries though, it’s actually called Built To Sell by John Warrillow. You will NOT be disappointed!
Great work gentlemen! Recently launched my Digital Growth Agency centered around maintenance and acceleration(SEO). Jake made an amazing reference to using the metaphor of car insurance for the maintenance plan. And as an owner of an agency named “Diesel Branding” who also uses a lot of car references that was a golden nugget.
Excellent podcast with so many golden nuggets on how to create, sell or upsell plans, pricing strategies and scalable resources. I already have Care Plans in place and Site Audit add-ons but will definitely be adding Hosting & Maintenance packages going forward. Thanks Josh & Jake,
The is very educative, thanks Jake and Josh!!!
Hey Josh, huge fan of your blog + podcast. Just listened to this episode which was stellar! I am a Divi WP builder and have my own agency that offers web maintenance plans post-launch. 80% of my clients sign up but for the ones that don’t, I was wondering if you had any advice about how they should update their Divi moving forward. I have a lifetime membership so def don’t want to give them access to it. Should I charge a one-off if they want their theme updated? Have you run into this issue before? Thanks!
Hey Angela, yeah for any clients who pass on the plan, we always offer to do updates at a higher hourly rate, typically when they come back for little updates and additions. It’s a great time to up-sell. The big thing is to have some sort of disclaimer for them to sign off on if they neglect your plan so they know they’re responsible for updates and know the potential risks of not going with the plan. I can’t tell you how many clients I landed on my plan months or even years after they initially declined 🙂 So keep that door open!
Thanks Josh, that is stellar advice! Keep rockin’ it. I will def add the disclaimer within my workflow.
One more follow up question – if you build off your Divi lifetime plan, do you let them know they won’t be able to update the theme themselves? Or do you purchase their own one-off Divi theme?