Recurring Revenue with Joe Howard

On this episode I talk to Joe Howard, the founder of WP Buffs, a productized service offering WordPress care plans. He's also the co-host of the WPMRR podcast and runs the WPMRR Summit. Joe is all about recurring revenue and if you're interested in how you can start to implement recurring revenue into your business you should listen to this episode.

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

This week, I'm super excited to talk to Joe Howard about MRR or monthly recurring revenue. Joe knows a lot about MRR. He's the host of the WP MRR podcast. He also runs WP MRR summit, and he's the founder of WP buffs at productized services business that brings in you guessed it monthly recurring revenue.
You can find Joe on Twitter at. Joseph H. Howard and his business on WP buffs.com. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites. We've got your back with the recipes for all the common workflows that the WordPress developers need making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines.
It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve. And it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast, we'll double the amount of free deployments in your account. Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com.
I started this episode by asking Joe what comes to mind when he hears the phrase billable hours. Joe, what comes to mind when you think about the word billable hours? Ooh. It makes me think about how I need more billable hours. It makes me think that I'm trying to get billable hours somewhere. Man. I got to keep getting more billable hours to keep powering what I'm doing.
Recurring pain. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It makes me think like, okay. If I'm focused on getting. Billable hours. Like there's a lot of pieces of my business. I got to focus on too. It's like, I gotta get more billable hours and then I actually have to execute those billable hours. So it's like, I kind of do some sales and I have to like actually do the operations of my business and then I have to, Oh, there's all the admin behind it.
How do I invoice them? Like, do I have to like follow up on the invoice? Is that all automated, like kind of makes me think about like freelance work and how there's a ton of stuff to do around being a freelancer. You have to wear a lot of hats. It's not a fan. I wouldn't say I'm not a fan. I'd say, I think there are a lot of challenges around being a freelancer.
I know a ton of freelancers who do great work, who run super scalable businesses by themselves. You know, maybe you'd call them like solo preneurs or like just, I don't know if they'd probably call themselves just freelancers and they run super successful businesses just by themselves. Maybe a couple of contractors.
I'd probably know a lot of people who run those freelancers and very, very small businesses that are more profitable than businesses with say like 10 employees that. Maybe the media would say like, Oh, they've got 10 employees or 20 employees. Like, they're a bigger, better company now. It's not really how it works.
You know, if someone else who runs a small business, you know, as well as I do, that's not really true, but I'm definitely a big fan of focusing more on a monthly recurring revenue and like subscription models. Pricing models, business models, as opposed to focusing on billable hours. I think if you can run a business where you can, you know, charge $500 an hour and easily get, you know, a ton of hours every month, that's great model, nothing wrong with that.
But I think it's a little bit less stressful, a little bit more. Scalable. If you were trying to like grow your business, or if you're just trying to like want a small, comfortable business to set up a product, or maybe a productized service package plans, whatever that provides ongoing value for people.
So it's something you're doing kind of month over month, so you can say, Hey, charge them every month. Now you're providing value over the long-term for people, which is good for you and good for them. And you're able to jump into the subscription model, which makes it a little less stressful to run a business.
When you kind of can predict your revenue a little bit, as opposed to the billable hours thing where it's like, all right, I got this many billable hours. Okay. I got to get 20% more mobile hours next month. Like, how am I going to do that? Well, if you're a subscription model, you know, your churn. You know, your growth trajectory.
So you kind of have an idea how much money you're going to make the next month. So you can predict who can I hire? What's my profit margin going to be mixed a little less stressful. I think. Yeah. I talked to Brian castle about productized services on this podcast and it sounded to me like, You know, the recurring revenue part of it is a really key to basically why it allows you to just focus more on the business side of things.
And like, once you're kind of close to sale, you can focus more on the delivery and you don't have to sell new people every month. Yeah. Shout out to Brian. Brian's one of those productized service guys and just like startup guys who I follow online. I love all this stuff. Productized course stuff that I followed for a long time, as someone who kind of like started doing this stuff after him, he was kind of, and those people who was that kind of, one of those people who I was like, I got to follow this guy.
Cause he knows a ton of stuff. Um, runs a few successful, small businesses doing this kind of work. I would say this subscription model is super helpful. In terms of, especially like a productized service. So like my business does WordPress care plans, you know, branch, you know, you do WordPress work as well.
This subscription model for me is easier than the website building. We do WordPress care plans. So we're managing WordPress websites and we have a white label program. So we work with some agencies and freelancers as well to help them. Make one monthly recurring revenue too. And I used to build websites.
That was tough for me to kind of scale that and grow that as a business, people have done it before very successfully, right. There are a lot of agencies that do website builds and are super successful, but I just kind of couldn't crack it. So I figured it out. Let's do management instead, and that actually worked way better for me in a way better for us as a company.
So I'd say focusing on that, it can be easier than a lot of ways. Yeah. So you were touching on it there, but like, I'd be curious to know a little bit more about your background and kind of your journey into recurring revenue because you guys, you mentioned you started out with more of like a traditional freelance or agency route.
Yeah, definitely did the business model. Yeah. I...