Blogging about the conference I want to attend this year because I don’t have the bandwidth to put it together. Let’s call it AgencyCon.
The key idea is to bring together a bunch of agencies that build on top of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and whatever other frameworks. Personally, here’s what I’d like to get out of it:
- Learn how others are turning their agencies from guns for hire to experts in developing particular types of projects. For instance, with Human Made I would love to see more inbounds that refer to the product work we’ve done (e.g. Happytables and WP Remote) and want to hire us for similar. Rather than just doing work with a particular type of tool because you’re good at it, we be doing more work that we have proven ourselves leaders of.
- Hear horror stories of situations other agencies the gotten themselves into, and want for no one else to ever repeat.
- See the cool projects other agencies have been building but can’t publicly discuss. I want to be inspired.
Ideally, it would be a two or three day retreat-like event in some great location. Solid presentations, but lots of time for networking. I’m a fan of conferences as a model for continuing education largely because many of us are making this up as we go along, and they’re high-bandwidth opportunities for sharing knowledge.
Let me know if you know of any events like this, or are up for planning it yourself. I’d really love to see this conference happen.
Sounds like a strategy camp many dev providers should be having internally but get distracted by busy-work and don’t do. If turning it into a conference helped everyone “remember” to do as much it would be really positive for the WP economy.
Regarding your 1st topic, often it feels like too many shops never evolve past the hustle for work stage. But those who do have a specialty and communicate about it do (anecdotally) seem to do better long-term than generalists. Plus specialists seem to have fewer horror stories just from the nature of specialized work.