how 4 agencies are streamlining their operations for...

HOW 4 AGENCIES ARE STREAMLINING THEIR OPERATIONS FOR GROWTH

SCALE YOUR AGENCY, RULE THE WORLD

Even if world domination isn’t on your bucket list, making your agency more profitable should be.

You have an agency. It pulls in x profit a year. You would like to increase that number.

There are many ways to create a more profitable agency. Some choose to specialize in a vertical. Some choose to build out multiple agile teams. Some swear by senior project managers and big builds. Others focus on long-term support. Any way you go, productivity is important, but it’s not as important as you think. Of course you want to do more work, grow your team, and get more efficient. But just as important as increasing billable hours is eliminating the hours you’ve been writing off.

This is the challenge faced by Drupal and WordPress development shops. Your clients’

success depends on a host of typically non-billable tasks: troubleshooting environments, configuring infrastructure, maintaining servers. As you grow, so does the chaos:

• How long does it take a new developer to ramp up on a project?

• How many hours does a PM burn collecting information from disparate systems for a status update?

• How quickly can you respond to a cry for help from a client who launched last year?

• Anyone remember how to access that site?

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SCALE YOUR AGENCY, RULE THE WORLD.

1. BIG COUCH MEDIA: GREAT VELOCITY (With a virtual team that manages itself)

It’s the most obvious way to scale. Do the same work, but faster. It’s possible even if you have a virtual team. Read how Big Couch Media launched six client websites in three weeks—without needing to manage servers. Performance boosts for clients, productivity boosts for the whole team. .

2. KALAMUNA: EXTREME VALUE (Thanks to automation and streamlining)

Creating value isn’t always about doing better work. Sometimes it’s about not doing the work that doesn’t add value. Learn how Kalamuna used automation to multiply work for one client across 20 sites. They’re saving two hours on each initial project spinup. One person can easily support twice as many clients as before. Read how they freed up their senior developers for the high-value work—while getting more done. Page 10.

3. INCLIND: BUILT TO WIN (Speed and availability are automatically built into every site, without stress or server admin)

Yes, big websites crash sometimes. Usually when your clients need them most. Before your agency can truly scale, every website must be built to automatically withstand traffic spikes and perform at top speeds. At all times. Learn how Inclind got out of the server admin business, and got back to focusing on clients. Their developers no longer spend 8 to 12 hours a week managing servers and updates. Page 16.

4. COALMARCH: WORLD’S HAPPIEST TEAM (and clients)It’s intangible, but morale can make or break an agency. You’ve got a great team. Take a good thing and learn to make it even better. Read how Coalmarch freed its developers from spending two hours of server admin work for every new site, and is saving $600 a month after migrating 52 sites. Now they have the world’s happiest team. Page 22.

You’ve come to a crossroads. Most clients have no idea what goes on behind the curtain. But if you were to stop doing these things, the whole process would break down. How can you stop doing what’s necessary, but not profitable? We asked four agencies to share how they solved the scale problem and got streamlined for growth.

Discover the common elements of a scalable agency in these firsthand accounts from team leads at Big Couch Media, Kalamuna, Inclind, and Coalmarch:

CASE STUDY #1 BIG COUCH MEDIA SCALE YOUR AGENCY WITH GREAT VELOCITY (Because your virtual team manages itself.)

It’s the most obvious way to scale. Do the same work, but faster. It’s possible even if you have a virtual team. Read how the virtual team at Big Couch Media launched six client websites in three weeks—without needing to manage servers.

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HOW WE LAUNCHED 6 WEBSITES IN 3 WEEKS

John Studdard is a principal and co-founder of Big Couch Media, a full-service digital agency that handles Drupal development, design, SEO, PPC, search engine marketing, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, and data feed management.

A MARKETING COMPANY THAT DOESN’T MARKET ITSELF

Yes, we’re a marketing agency that doesn’t market itself. We’ll be seven years old in November, and our business has grown completely organically. All of our business leads come through LinkedIn and referral. We started out doing strategic marketing consulting. This evolved as our clients kept asking for implementation. Now, as a full-blown digital agency, we do Drupal development and design, plus internet marketing. Our referrals have incrementally moved us up the food chain on project size and scope. It’s been a right place, right time kind of thing.

CASE STUDY #1, BIG COUCH MEDIA: SCALE YOUR AGENCY WITH GREAT VELOCITY

http://www.bigcouchmedia.com/

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A MARKETING COMPANY THAT DOESN’T MARKET ITSELF

We started going through a growth spurt, bringing on a lot more clients. It became exponentially more painful as we got more projects and more teams going. Here’s how:

1. CONSTANT SERVER CAPACITY ISSUES.As our customers grew in size, I couldn’t put more than three websites on a particular server. Even with only two clients on one box, one client’s issue would impact the others. We started breaking servers apart, then spinning up new servers. Migrating existing sites between servers. IP changes, DNS changes. Constant thrashing and moving resources around.

2. UNPAID INFRASTRUCTURE.We had our own infrastructure on Rackspace, where we managed seven of our own cloud servers. Most of our clients had no idea of the effort, time, and costs that were going into maintaining a kickass hosting platform for their production environments. I was about to hire two people to replace me. One for server management and one for code management. I needed to get out of the trenches so I could grow my business.

3. WORKFLOW CHAOS.We’d been using Aegir, the Drupal open source platform management system, for five years. But the way our Aegir environment was configured didn’t lend itself to using Git source control in a normal workflow process. We started to get into this mode of constantly moving sites around, and having multiple instances of it cloned here, then having to do manual merges of code.



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4. VERSION CONTROL HINDERED OUR GROWTH.Our server environments were too complex to replicate on local development environments. It had pushed quite a bit of the work to local development environments. These were riddled with their own sets of challenges. I’ve got one developer on Windows, one developer on Mac. They’re trying to suck down the same version of a website off a Linux server. Configurations like Memcache and Solr became very complicated in the development environments to replicate the server environments.

People were overwriting each others’ work, introducing old versions, losing productivity. I had to become a change control manager, which isn’t what I ought to be doing as a principal of the company. We mitigated this by having a very aggressive backup strategy on our servers. We were backing up our Drupal instances not only daily, but also intraday.

5. ACCOUNTABILITY WAS CHALLENGING FOR A VIRTUAL COMPANY.It was the classic problem. Our remote developers would say, “Oh yeah, I got that working in local, but haven’t pushed it up yet.” There was no way for us to validate that. We would have to wait. If we were lucky, everything would be great. But in many cases, they’d be like, “Oh, I don’t quite have it working.” This was starting to affect our project schedules.

6. PROJECT SCHEDULES STARTED TO SLIP.We finally reached a tipping point when we had 13 concurrent projects and four teams working. Our project schedules were slipping because of all the things that were changing.



HOW OUR AGENCY FOUND ITS GROOVE

Without Multidev, I would’ve hired two people to replace myself—one for servers and one for code management. Now, we’re able to scale and still manage the team. Our margins are fatter. Here’s how:

1. BIGGER, BETTER CLIENTS.Historically we had smaller projects. When we started closing bigger deals, the size and complexity of our projects went up significantly. Using Pantheon lets us handle multiple projects without missing a beat so we can keep building our roster of clients.

2. WE MIGRATED 40 CLIENT SITES IN 45 DAYS.We migrated 38 client websites to Pantheon in 30 days. It took two weeks to wrap up the last two stragglers. With all our sites running on the Pantheon platform, we were able to shut down all but one of our Rackspace servers.

3. OUR AUTOMATED SCRIPTS DID MUCH OF THE WORK.The first couple of clients required manual testing and work in the areas of ecommerce, SSL, and Apache Solr. We also had to adjust our pricing a bit on the sites that required SSL. But then we were able to automate most of the rest of our sites by writing our own migration scripts. The scripts took stuff out of the old system and formatted it to migrate to Pantheon. Want to swipe our code? Contact me.

4. THEN WE DID 6 LAUNCHES IN 3 WEEKS.We’re already attracting larger, more complex projects, and I can easily scale up my team. Our velocity and project size are both up. We did six big launches in three weeks recently. This never would have been possible before Pantheon. I’ll never do that to myself again. But the fact that we were able to pull it off was a huge win for us. There is no way we would have been able to achieve that if we had been in our old environment. The ability to do quick updates, to push code quickly, to determine what’s changed—this allowed our team to scale in real time.

5. I’M A BOSS AGAIN (ADIOS, SERVER MANAGEMENT.)I’m now officially out of the hosting business. I don’t have to manage my Rackspace cloud servers. I don’t have to do Heartbleed patches to my servers. I’m not spending weekends tracking down Chinese hackers and spambots from Russia who were bringing my servers down. All of those day-to-day server management issues have gone away for us.

We went from seven servers to one. And we were able to downgrade that server as well. Pantheon eliminated my whole Rackspace bill! I am out of the server management business.

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https://www.getpantheon.com/multidev

http://www.bigcouchmedia.com/contact

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6. BUILT-IN VERSION CONTROL. VIRTUAL TEAM MANAGES THEMSELVES.You’d never guess I have a virtual team now. In the Pantheon environment, my developers don’t need a manager. They can self-manage their own code publishes. They’re not struggling with the environment. A straightforward admin interface shows them, “Hey, this code’s changed. You need to push it from dev to test.”

7. NO PRICE INCREASE FOR 90% OF CLIENTS. PERFORMANCE INCREASES FOR ALL.For 90 percent of our clients, there was no change in cost. They actually saw a 30-40 percent performance improvement. Over the years, we had developed a pretty robust, Drupal-optimized infrastructure. There wasn’t a lot of room for improvement. We had our Rackspace infrastructure pretty tuned out. Now, instead of a page taking 6/10ths of a second to load, it loads in 4/10ths of a second. That is directly attributable to being able to use Redis caching on Pantheon. Page load times affect a site’s conversion rates. As page load times go down, conversions go up. So any improvement in a site’s performance has the potential to grow the business, too.

8. ALL LOCAL ENVIRONMENTS WELCOME.I don’t have to worry about what my developers run on their local machines. They can be on OSX, Windows or Ubuntu. Multidev gives everyone a consistent environment on the server, while allowing them to branch out and make their own changes.

9. EVERY WEBSITE GETS THE SAME POWER TOOLS.We’ve enabled Multidev on about half of our sites. In the past, we would have needed each client to agree to a Business or Enterprise plan. Now Multidev is automatically included. This gives us a huge amount of flexibility.

10. UPGRADE SITES IN MINUTES, NOT HOURS OR DAYS.I don’t have to worry about sites hogging each other’s resources. If I need more resources for a particular site, I log in to Pantheon and bump them up. In a couple minutes, they can handle more traffic and load.

HOW OUR AGENCY FOUND ITS GROOVE


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“You’re paying $150 a month for your smartphone. Wouldn’t you do the same thing for the website that runs your business? You’ll get everything you’ve been getting with us, plus this additional capability.”

It’s a pretty straightforward, relative-value argument I borrowed from Halid at Pantheon.

A couple of clients balked and asked for the files so they could find hosting themselves.

In response, I helped them understand everything that would be required to migrate their site and to

ADVICE TO OTHER AGENCIES

get the same level of performance as Pantheon. They would need this much memory. A separate Solr server. Memcache to maintain page load time. Etcetera.

Most people have no idea how much work is involved to keep their sites running so smoothly. Once they understood the work they would need to do after moving their sites to traditional hosting, they changed their minds and decided to stay with us.

If you want to attempt a large client migration and free your agency from server management, you’re going to need to convince the boss—your client. Here is the more-or-less verbatim script I used to convince 90% of my clients to switch to Pantheon:

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CASE STUDY #2 KALAMUNA SCALE YOUR AGENCY WITH EXTREME VALUE (Thanks to automation and streamlining.)

Creating value isn’t always about doing better work. Sometimes it’s doing less work. Learn how Kalamuna used automation to multiply work for one client across 20 sites.

CASE STUDY #2, KALAMUNA: SCALE YOUR AGENCY WITH EXTREME VALUE

HOW WE USE AUTOMATION TO LIBERATE DEVELOPERS AND EMPOWER NEWBIES

DRUPAL FOR THE FEW?

Mike Pirog co-founded Kalamuna, an Oakland, CA web agency focused on empowering organizations and individuals with easy-to-use websites and products. In addition to building great websites, Kalamuna is also building a team of rule-breakers who want to change the way web development is done.

While Squarespace and WordPress allow you to spin up a reasonably functional website in just a few clicks, Drupal isn’t so easy. If you want to see a website, you’ll need to hire an agency like ours to do some prototyping. This extra step gives Drupal a pretty big barrier to entry. There are only so many Drupal developers to go around. At Kalamuna, we believe Drupal’s destiny lies in lowering this barrier to entry and empowering newcomers. That’s what we try to do.

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http://www.kalamuna.com


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WE BUILD PRODUCTS SIMPLE ENOUGH FOR ANYONE, POWERFUL ENOUGH FOR DRUPAL PROS

Most Drupal products are designed to give other developers a kickstart. At Kalamuna, we believe Drupal products should grow the community. We build fully-baked products simple enough for anyone to use right out of the box, but powerful enough for us to use internally.

You can download Kalabox and set up a modern web server with Drupal power tools and a native Linux machine. Users don’t even need to know what Linux means. Just click the button, and it works.

We’ve been using Pantheon to build products like these, as well as to build and manage our clients’ websites.

SPINNING UP SITES WITH PANTHEON ONE

For example, building turnkey distributions is one of our areas of expertise. We’ve been using Pantheon One to allow clients like Arizona State University to easily spin up similar-use-case sites. ASU WebSpark is a quick and easy way to spin up an ASU-branded Drupal site. WebSpark sites are responsive and mobile-ready out-of-the-box, featuring a number of style options and tools to make layout and content creation a breeze.

We’re already using Pantheon One to allow clients to scale their website development efforts. Now Pantheon One for Agencies allows us to scale our own client service as well.

Here’s how we used to do things before automation saved the day:


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BEFORE AUTOMATION:

1. MINOR UPDATES REQUIRED EXCESSIVE FORCE.For most of our support clients, keeping websites up-to-date used to mean going into each website, one by one. This required a reasonably competent developer, and took 1-2 hours. As you can imagine, good developers would rather be doing other things. Worst-case scenario, something breaks. The update pathways don’t work. Then you’re looking at 10, 20, even 30 hours. It doesn’t make any sense to have a good developer go in and click a button.

2. 2-HOUR FIX. MULTIPLY BY 20 SITES.In the past, I’ve spent 1-2 hours fixing something on one client’s site, then having to repeat the process all over again for every other client site. If you do this for 20 sites, that’s up to 40 hours for one simple fix.

3. SPINNING UP NEW SITES TOOK TOO LONG, EVEN WITH A DISTRIBUTION.Before, we would instantiate a Panopoly project and connect to our feature server, which involved 2-4 hours of setup time. Cash-strapped clients can’t afford to pay us to do that.

4. SUPPORT WAS PRETTY GOOD, NOT “OMG!!!”Clients need two kinds of support. Updates to make them feel safe, and emergency fixes: “I’ve lost my mind, and need to have this fixed right away!” For our most basic support offering, we used to spend the vast majority of our time making clients feel safe with system and security updates. That’s fine, but it’s not going to make them fall out of their chairs with gratitude and excitement. We want to focus our support hours on things clients can see and touch, not on things with less perceived value, like security updates.

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AFTER PANTHEON ONE FOR AGENCIES

After a couple weeks of daily use, we decided to move all our clients (about 30 sites) and people over to Pantheon One for Agencies. Standardizing on Pantheon allows us to give clients ridiculously awesome support, without chaining good developers to their desks.

Here’s how:

1. STANDARDIZING=FASTER TIME TO MARKET.We’re saving about 2 hours on each initial project spinup, thanks to the starter kit we can keep on Pantheon. Our common codebase applies to 95% of our sites, and includes lots of apps. The more we refine, the more we save and can do awesome things. We use Panopoly and extend that with Kalatheme, another easy-to-use and powerful Kalaproduct. We save tons of money on these normal tasks, so we can focus on that extra little piece that makes a project different and special. The savings will increase as we build it out.

The workflow is nice. You can instantiate our Kalamuna base distribution, a Panopoly subdistro and burgeoning Drupal.org distribution called HotSauce! Then you go through the install profile, clicking the features and the theme you want to have. That saves time later in the project. It also allows us to do instant prototyping for clients, turning high-level specs into a prototype within 3-4 hours. More importantly, anyone at Kalamuna can do this—not just our developers. That’s a huge value add.

2. OMG! SUPPORT, NO ADVANCED DEVELOPERS NEEDED.This one-click update functionality make our lower-level support 50% more efficient than before. One person can support 20 clients now, instead of just 10. Many tickets concern common problems that are shared by clients on our base distribution.

Whenever we see a support request that’s an auto-update, it gets kicked to one of the five people who didn’t used to do that sort of thing. People who don’t have solid levels of technical competence can go in and click the button. It’s really fast. If it fails, they tag it for escalation to an actual developer. It really makes the workflow better and more efficient, presenting huge savings for us. Because our lower support is so efficient, we’re now able to quickly resolve the support tickets that matter most to our clients on a day-to-day basis. We’re resolving these mid-to higher-level tickets 15% faster.

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people, so they can get a feel for Drupal. Even project managers can step in.

4. UPDATE TO THE 10TH POWER.Because we’re standardized on the Pantheon platform, a fix for one client often improves the other clients’ websites, too. As we make improvements to the base starter kit, everyone benefits.

3. FREES UP OUR DEVELOPERS.I think the biggest value isn’t in how much time we’re saving, but in whose time we’re saving. Now we can send out an email to anyone who’s available to do a one-click update. This frees up our mid-level and advanced developers to focus on problems that make more sense to them. Not only does this make our team happier, but it also gives us a pathway to bring in other junior

ADVICE TO OTHER AGENCIES

If you care about doing great work, then you also care about saving money on repeatable things. Good clients hate inefficiencies just as much as we do. Standardizing saves you money so you can focus on things that make your work great. That’s the most valuable thing about Pantheon One for Agencies.


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CASE STUDY #3 INCLIND SCALE YOUR AGENCY BY MAKING EVERY WEBSITE BUILT TO WIN(Speed and availability are automatically built into every site, without stress or server admin.)

Yes, big websites crash sometimes. Usually when your clients need them most. Before your agency can truly scale, every website must be built to automatically withstand traffic spikes and perform at top speeds. At all times. Learn how Inclind got out of the server admin business, and got back to focusing on clients. Their developers no longer spend 8 to 12 hours a week managing servers and keeping sites updated.

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CASE STUDY #3, INCLIND: SCALE YOUR AGENCY BY MAKING EVERY WEBSITE BUILT TO WIN

HOW OUR 10-PERSON AGENCY SCALED BY MIGRATING 75 CLIENT SITES

Inclind’s team provides professional Drupal services for regional and nationwide organizations. We serve as our clients’ technology partner, helping them navigate the ever-evolving web world. With more than 15 years in the game, we’re always ready for a new challenge. This is the story of how we’re streamlining our operations with Pantheon for Agencies by migrating 75 Drupal and WordPress websites.

Shaun Tyndall is founder and director of Inclind, a boutique Drupal Shop with gnarly problem-solving skills.

http://www.inclind.com/

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WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH TRADITIONAL HOSTING?

We used to manage clients’ sites on a single-server environment or on a couple of different servers. Here’s why traditional hosting wasn’t sustainable:

1. TRAFFIC SPIKES AFFECT EVERYONE.Our sites were all hosted together. So a spike in traffic from one site affected all the others.

2. DEVELOPERS LOST SLEEP, LITERALLY.Our team used to spend 8 to 12 hours a week managing servers and keeping everything updated. And these weren’t regular working hours, either. These were the most inconvenient hours—like when you need to get up at 4am to put the site into maintenance mode and do an update.

3. DOWNTIME HURTS SALES.Every Monday, 10,000 of Washington Green Grocer’s customers would receive an email blast announcing Green Grocer’s List for the week. Their site used to go down when everyone tried to view and order at the same time. We knew there had to be a solution that didn’t hurt sales.

4. NOT SCALABLE FOR AN AGENCY.Multiply the above problems by the 75+ client websites we manage, plus new clients coming in, and we knew it wasn’t going to work for us. We had to get out of the server admin business, and get back to focusing on our clients.

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WHY PANTHEON

Even though migrating all our clients would be a huge undertaking, it made sense for us as an agency looking to streamline our operations. Here are the top reasons why we made the shift:

1. FLEXIBILITY FOR BOTH WORDPRESS AND DRUPALOur primary business is with Drupal, but some clients also have WordPress projects. Pantheon One for Agencies lets us manage and run all sites from one centralized location. Having that flexibility really makes sense.

2. STREAMLINES OUR AGENCY FOR GROWTHPantheon One for Agencies gives us an overarching view of our entire portfolio. We can build, launch, and run all our clients’ sites from one dashboard. Being a partner also helps us attract clients by increasing our visibility to prospective clients throughout the region and nation.

3. INOCULATE AGAINST TRAFFIC SPIKESArchitecturally, Pantheon provides an environment where each site lives in its own container. Sites don’t affect each other. This gives us a really high level of comfort on behalf of our clients.

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HOW WE’RE MIGRATING 75 CLIENTS

We are in the process of migrating 75 sites over to Pantheon. Organization has been a challenge because our clients and their websites are so diverse. But our investment is already paying off. Here are a few pro tips from the process so far:

1. FIRST, MIGRATE ONE SITE FROM EACH CATEGORY.Every site is different. Some sites use Cron or other custom modules and don’t exactly fit into the way Pantheon’s platform operates. In our initial phase, we migrated a site from each category to try to understand the complexities of the migration and the impact to the development team. Now we have strategies to easily deal with complex sites, thanks to support from the Pantheon team.

2. RUN COMPLEX SITES IN PARALLEL BEFORE MIGRATING COMPLETELY.Complex sites require testing to ensure the functionality continues to behave as expected. We run these sites in parallel to make sure they do behave as expected before we actually complete the migration.

3. WE CAN MIGRATE A WEBSITE IN 15 MINUTES.After some training to learn the ins and outs of Pantheon, we can now package up a site and migrate it to Pantheon in 15 minutes. Terminus (Pantheon’s command-line interface) has been an awesome migration tool. We’re knocking out about one website a day now.

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THE RESULTS

Since we’re such a client-focused firm, any win for our clients is also a win for us. Our team loves it, too. Here are a few highlights of what’s happening so far.

1. WEBSITES SCALE WITHOUT A CRYSTAL BALL.We no longer need a crystal ball to predict how much traffic a client’s website will get, and when. Most of our clients have no idea we moved their sites to Pantheon. They just know that things are working. We didn’t need to warn them about several hours of downtime. We knew they wouldn’t have any. Most people don’t care where their sites are hosted, so long as they work.

2. A FASTER WEBSITE IS A FASTER BUSINESS.After we migrated one client, they were so happy with the new performance that they emailed us to say thanks. Administrative tasks used to take their team 15 seconds to execute. We didn’t have flexibility in the old platform to upsize them dynamically. It would have taken hours. In Pantheon’s environment, we just click a button and move them up to the next level. Within an hour, the same administrative tasks were only taking 5 seconds.

3. “OH! THIS MULTIDEV THING SAVES SO MUCH TIME!”Our guys are used to moving websites locally and having a development workflow sans the flexibility of Multidev. When you introduce it to them, it instantly clicks. They go, “Oh, that’s so easy! This is going to save so much time!”

4. DEVELOPERS RECLAIM 8-12 HOURS A WEEK.Pantheon saves our team 8 to 12 hours a week. Being able to spin up a new site without dealing with server administration world is great for our team. As it pertains to security updates, there are certain projects we’ll be able to pull in upstream code changes without there being any downtime, because of the way Pantheon handles their upstream code changes.

5. OUR AGENCY IS STREAMLINED FOR GROWTH.I foresee the support side of our business becoming more streamlined and profitable. We can manage more clients with the same resources. Our development process hasn’t changed. But we get the flexibility of knowing we can upsize smoothly. We can manage multiple sites. We can spin up development environments and collaborate in the cloud with Multidev. We get all these extras we didn’t get before.

6. WE MAY BE ABLE TO TAKE ON BIGGER CLIENTS.I believe standardizing on Pantheon will help us attract bigger clients with multiple projects—like associations and higher education. Our clients will know they’re working with a trusted vendor who can facilitate consistency and reliability. They don’t have to manage another server.

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CASE STUDY #4 COALMARCH SCALE YOUR AGENCY WITH THE WORLD’S HAPPIEST TEAM(And clients.)

It’s intangible, but morale can make or break an agency. You’ve got a great team. Now take a good thing and learn to make it even better.

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CASE STUDY #4, COALMARCH: SCALE YOUR AGENCY WITH THE HAPPIEST TEAM (AND CLIENTS)

HOW WE FREED DEVELOPERS FROM SERVER ADMIN WORK & SAVED $600 A MONTH AFTER ROLLING 52 SITES TO PANTHEON

A RESULTS-DRIVEN AGENCY FOR CLIENTS WHO WANT IT ALL

THE NIGHTMARE ON THANKSGIVING

Todd Robert is Creative Director and also manages front-end development at Coalmarch, a full-service web agency that delivers creative, results-driven marketing.

We pride ourselves on being a full-service web agency. We don’t just give you a site that looks good, a site that has good content, or a site that ranks well. It’s the full package. It’s the sum of all parts that make the experience work so well for our customers. We’re very results-driven here. I think you have to be.

So you can imagine our horror on Black Friday when developers had to drop everything to fix a high-profile client’s e-commerce site. We didn’t have any year-over-year data to predict traffic or demand, but we wanted to be proactive. So we had already boosted up everything on their site, just to be sure. They ran a couple commercials, driving a ton of traffic to the site. And the site tanked while we were all on holiday. As an agency, that’s not something you want happening to any customer. And as a manager, you don’t want it happening to your team, either.

The search for other options was on.

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http://www.coalmarch.com


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THE TROUBLE WITH TRADITIONAL HOSTING:

Before Pantheon, we had a dev server here locally. We hosted with a popular cloud-based provider for the other stuff. But it was on us if we were running out of space, if there was a traffic spike, or if a website needed patches or updates.

1. AS WE GREW, SO DID SYSADMIN TASKS.As our agency grew and we started hosting more and more people, it became pretty obvious that hosting was taking up too much of our developers’ time. We’re not a large company. We don’t have a full-time sysadmin. It was really affecting how much time our developers could spend doing what we hired them to do. (Development, not system administration.)

2. TIME-CONSUMING TO SET UP SITES.The process of setting up a website before Pantheon was pretty time-consuming. Spinning up new sites wasn’t complex. It just took time. Server configurations. Just getting Drupal up and running. We’re talking a minimum of two hours just for a basic site. It was very, very obvious that this wasn’t efficient at all. We were burning time we didn’t have.

3. HARD TO PREDICT TRAFFIC VOLUME IN ADVANCE.We spent a lot of time trying to figure out the traffic volumes each site would have. As the Thanksgiving scenario made clear, we weren’t the world’s most accurate forecasters. No one is perfect at predicting the future.

4. DIDN’T SEE BOTTLENECKS COMING.We have lots of tools in place—like forecasting, time tracking, project management—to keep our team connected. You’re never going to prevent bottlenecks from happening. But you want to see them coming and have a plan in place so they don’t turn into real problems. We needed that for our clients’ websites.

Enter Pantheon. It promised to solve everything. It was exactly what we were looking for.

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WHY WE ROLLED ALL OUR SITES OVER TO PANTHEON

So far, we’ve rolled out 52 sites on Pantheon. We have a few more new sites coming up in the next month or two. From here on out, every new client will just be automatically rolled out onto Pantheon. Here’s why:

1. PERFECT FOR DRUPAL. Being a full Drupal shop here, that’s all we support. So it was very appealing to partner up with a platform that was designed for Drupal.

2. SAVES US TONS OF TIME.We handle all the inbound marketing and site improvements for most of our clients. They’d prefer that we maintain control over everything. Having our development, test, and live environments all together saves us a ton of time moving stuff around and making updates. Some clients have teams that prefer more access, and we can be flexible. Pantheon lets us work collaboratively with their team.

3. NO NEW FEES FOR OUR CLIENTS.We were already charging 52 clients for hosting. When we punched the numbers of moving to Pantheon, it worked out nicely. We didn’t have to increase anyone’s monthly fees.

4. EASY SELL TO CLIENTS WHO BUY VALUE.We talk about hosting environments in our sales process, and include them in all our contracts. So to our current clients, we really simplified the benefits to four key points: Faster speeds. Better uptime. Quicker response time from us. And scalability. These things are a given, we told them. Your site is always fast. It doesn’t take us very long to make updates because everything is in the same place. We didn’t get any pushback. People said, “Oh, OK. I see the benefit there.”

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THE RESULTS

Moving to Pantheon was definitely financially viable for us. Our clients love the way their sites perform and scale. We love knowing more of our hours can go to development, not server maintenance. Here are a few things that have happened since moving to Pantheon:

1. REALLOCATE PROJECT HOURS FOR DEVELOPMENT.Hosting is no longer a time-suck. Those hours we used to allocate for server maintenance are gone. We leave a couple hours in there, just in case. But we’ve reallocated the time available and shoved it back into more important parts of our development process. Our developers are just so happy to not have to worry about stuff like servers and system administration. They can concentrate on their development tasks, knowing there’s a super-awesome architecture behind all of our sites.

2. WE’LL SAVE $600 A MONTH AFTER WE CANCEL OUR HOSTING ACCOUNT.We just have a couple more small sites to migrate. And then we’ll be able to completely cancel our other hosting account, saving $600 a month, or $7,200 a year.

3. FASTER PAGE LOADS FOR OUR CLIENTS.One of our clients runs a large, complex real estate website. The properties hook into their back-end systems. Their site was always a little bit sluggish. We told them as soon as we migrated there would be a speed increase. I was thinking I would just take a screenshot from New Relic before and after on page load times. But the increase was so noticeable to them that I didn’t have to show them. The site spoke for itself. They were very happy about that.

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ADVICE TO ANOTHER AGENCY: TEST THE WATERS WITH LOW-TRAFFIC SITES.

We rolled out a couple very small, low-traffic sites first, just to get a taste for what that process looked like, and what tools were available after we got set up and running. You figure, if it works on a small site, it should scale up nicely. That’s definitely been the case. To be quite honest, it has exceeded my expectations.



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CONCLUSION

OK, we want to scale our agency. Now what? Visit Pantheon One for Agencies and learn more about how Pantheon can help you:

Learn more about Pantheon One for Agencies at getpantheon.com/pantheon-one-for-agencies

• Reallocate project hours for development. “Hosting is no longer a time-suck. Those hours we used to allocate for server maintenance are gone.” - Todd Robert, Coalmarch

• Attract bigger clients. “Standardizing will help us attract bigger clients with multiple projects— like associations and higher education.” - Shaun Tyndall, Inclind

• Speed time to market. “We’re saving about two hours on each initial project spinup, thanks to the starter kit we can keep on Pantheon. Our common codebase applies to 95% of sites, and includes lots of apps.” - Mike Pirog, Kalamuna

• Be a boss again. “In the Pantheon environment, my developers don’t need a manager. They can self-manage their own code publishes. The ability to do quick updates, to push code quickly, to determine what’s changed—this allowed our team to scale in real time and launch 6 big websites in 3 weeks.” - John Studdard, Big Couch Media

https://www.getpantheon.com/pantheon-one-for-agencies&#x27

http://www.getpantheon.com/pantheon-one-for-agencies

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