419 - Managing 500+ Maintenance Plan Sites with Jake Kramer

I’m not gonna lie…I needed this chat. In an era where there’s so much emphasis on growth plans (like SEO, CRO, Email Marketing, Ads, Social, etc), it’s easy to second-guess yourself or just abandon web design completely if you prefer to just build awesome websites and support that work.

Well good news, just offering high-converting web design + hosting and maintenance plans is still a VERY VIABLE model in 2026 and beyond.

Jake Kramer of Artillery Media (along with many members in my community Web Designer Pro) are proof.

Jake and his partner John, along with their lean team, are currently hosting and maintaining 500+ websites with their plan, using the same toolstack I’ve been using since 2015. Divi website builder + SiteGround hosting. 

We get into how they’re running and managing things practically in this one so if you’re interested in simply designing sites and supporting clients month to month but not becoming a full stack digital marketing agency, this one’s for you.

Note: I don’t disparage anyone wanting to get into growth plans or digital marketing, and that is a faster path to revenue growth but if you’re more in the “slow and steady” camp, and you’re ok with delayed gratification, website design + hosting and maintenance plans are still a great way to go.

Head to the show notes to get all links and resources we mentioned, along with a full transcription of this episode at joshhall.co/419

Transcript

Can Designers Skip Marketing Services

Josh Hall 0:00

Have you done any sort of like growth plan or digital marketing plan for your clients to help them grow their websites? Whether it's SEO, whether it's lead generation, converge rate optimization, email. What's that look like in relation to how you're doing your maintenance plans?

Jake Kramer 0:17

Oh, such a great question. Man, we've been down this road a million times. Like you take two steps and then you step back. I didn't like that experience. And then, you know, you get your energy, you're get your excitement up again and like, oh, we could really help people and we could really uh charge for this. So this would be a great recurring revenue uh option for us. And then you run down that path and then oh, I didn't like that, and then you run back. That's kind of how it's been for us. And what I mean by that is we are designers. We are really good at designing web pages. Um, sometimes graphics, if you really, really need it and you and you're nice to us, we'll help you with graphics, but otherwise, web pages and locos. We do a lot of branding things now. So design is our thing. So, what does that mean? That means we could do SEO, we could do ads, we could do campaigns, we could do email campaigns for clients. Just wasn't our thing. We just didn't like it.

The Classic Web Biz Model Still Works

Josh Hall 1:16

Welcome to the Web Design Business Podcast with your host, Josh Hall. Helping you build a web design business that gives you freedom and a lifestyle you love. Hey, friend, it's so good to have you here. And I have to admit, I am feeling very good after this chat. This chat was needed right now because before we dive in here, I grew my web design business with two main services website designs that were charged anywhere between 2,500 and 10,000 on average, and then maintenance plans that were around 99 bucks a month. I did SEO growth plans occasionally for clients who needed it, but that was the core of my business. And I think a lot of people feel like that business model is over. But Jake, who's my guest in this episode, and his agency, Artillery Media, are living proof that that model is very alive and well. Okay, it is and can be very lucrative, and it is sometimes the best fit for people who don't want to be a digital marketing agency. Now, there is nothing wrong with having marketing services and growth plans for your clients. I think it's very viable for a lot of people. Um there's a lot of Web Designer Pros who have more advanced SEO plans and CRO, conversor rate optimization, and email marketing plans, and those can actually get you a lot farther, a lot faster, but they often come with more team expenses and time. Um so the cool thing about what Jake and his agency, Artillery Media, have done is they've taken the model that I built up to six multi-six figures, and they're doing it years later and are very balanced. And yes, it does take time to get to this model. Uh, this is a delayed gratification model, but Jake and his agency are managing over 500 clients on their maintenance plans. And with an average price point of $99 per month, I'll let you do the math. Pretty cool. And they're having a great time doing it. So, Jake, it was great to catch up with him. I've talked with both Jake and John, who is his partner in Artillery Media. Jake was actually on it early, early on the podcast in episode 49, talking about how they practically sell and offer their maintenance and hosting plans. So we didn't cover too much of how they sell it. So highly recommend that you go back to that one if you did not hear that interview. Again, if you're a newer listener in the last five years, I don't blame you because that was from 2020. But the cool thing is, it hasn't changed at all. They sell their hosting and maintenance plans exactly like they did six years ago. And now they have 500 plus clients managing their through hosting and maintenance. So it can be done. If this is your preferred model, like it honestly kind of is for me, then the good news is it's still very viable. It does take time to get to this point, but you'd be shocked at how fast you'll go and how quick those recurring revenue clients compound when you just serve them well and have fun and just build awesome websites and do hosting and maintenance. So here we go, my friends. Jay Kramer, Artillerymedia. You can go to artillerymedia.com. They also have a new podcast called Slow and Steady. And if you would like to check that out, we'll of course have that link in the show notes for this one, which is gonna be found at joshhall.co slash 419. So head there after this. Here's Jake. Let's hear about managing 500 maintenance band clients. Jake, good to have you back, man. Five years later. Five years later. But uh it's great to reconnect, dude.

Jake Kramer 4:45

That's right. Still rocking and rolling.

Proof Of Scale: 500+ Maintained Sites

Josh Hall 4:47

You were on in episode 49. We were just chatting. I can't believe it's been that long. It feels like it was just a couple of years ago, but episode 49, we talked about selling website hosting and maintenance plan back in that episode. And actually, I recently looked through Buzz Sprout, which is where I host the podcast, and that episode is still one of the most popular episodes. So I know, right? I figured now, six years later, almost five and a half years later, we could have a bit of a round two and talk about your guys' maintenance plan because it's at such a large scale. And um one thing that I was about to say before I hit record is I just I have so much appreciation and respect for folks who stick with their business. And you and John with Artillery Media, I mean, you guys I you know you've innovated, but you've stuck with what works for a long time, which is not the case for a lot of entrepreneurs. So good on you, man.

Jake Kramer 5:43

Yeah, well, thanks. I appreciate that. Yeah, John started Artillery Media 2006, that's when he bought the domain name. And then we met in 2012, 2011, and then we've been working together full-time since 2014, and so we are well over a decade grinding this out together, over 500 sites hosted. I shared some snapshots of some stats on my socials the other day. I think it was like almost 800 domains, five hundred over 550 sites hosted, uh, 213 five-star reviews on Google. We're still waiting on that one-star review. It hasn't happened yet, but we're anticipating, you know, like the numbers are too in our favor. Uh, but it's been a it's been a great ride. We have a process that works really well, makes people really happy. We hold each site and each client with an open hand. Super transparent pricing. Hopefully it's as fair as I can make it. And then month to month, no contract required. It's your site, you own it. Use us if you like us.

Josh Hall 6:51

So please still do. Heck yeah, dude. Let's dig in. 500 plus maintenance plan clients. Is that hosting and maintenance included?

Jake Kramer 6:58

Yes, sir. We bundled them all together about 2017. We actually just released a podcast episode on our um on ours. I don't even know what you call it now. I'm new to this podcasting thing, but we just talked about this with a little bit more details. But uh, we we're kind of revisiting the origins of maintenance, and then that turned into hosting, and then hosting and maintenance and support and security and training. We can help you with it all. So the origins of that started with John back right as WordPress was like beginning. He's a what does he call himself? A designosaurus? Designosaur. That's what he calls himself. And uh I think that's funny. He started building WordPress websites way back then, and one of his sites got hacked. That's when he learned about maintenance, doing it the hard way, and then teaching me. And then we moved over to uh hosts we really like. We use SiteGround. I know there's a million options, just like themes. No, we'll see.

Hosting Philosophy And SiteGround Setup

Josh Hall 8:10

That's who I still use, and they're a sponsor for my event. So we're sticking with they're a partner of mine, so we're sticking with SiteGround, baby. They're doing it.

Jake Kramer 8:16

And you know what about SiteGround? And you know what about SiteGround is like it's the people, man.

Josh Hall 8:22

They are great, yeah. And that is and it worked, it's so steady. Like, I've been using SiteGround since 2015, over 10 years.

Jake Kramer 8:31

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, the people they just fit our culture for sure. The support is amazing, it's uh great, easy to use.

Josh Hall 8:40

Let's talk about just let's just rant a little bit on hosting before we talk about heck yeah, because it's so important with maintenance plans. I'm sick of watching web designers nickel and dime good hosting to save $100 a year and then have so many issues that are costing them thousands, thousands of dollars in the long run. It drives me crazy. I see people be like, Slate grounds, like it's like you know, 300 when I could get it for 225.

Jake Kramer 9:06

I'm like, I mean, you don't want to wrestle that. Yes, there are of that.

Josh Hall 9:12

Yeah, there's other options, but choose what's like it's the foundation of everything for web design.

Jake Kramer 9:19

It really, really is. And trust, trust me. Well, don't trust me, trust John. He's he's done it all. Uh, I've I shared this on our pod too, but I have only ever installed Divi as a theme. What? But I've done it 550 times, hosted, probably over a thousand times now, not hosted, helping friends and sites that have left and all that stuff shut down. Um so again, like you said, like sticking with one thing. Hopefully, Divi5 is is amazing because we have a lot of eggs in that basket, baby. Yeah, I'm sure it will be though. John has been on it with like Superfly and uh all the products there and making sure that Divi5 is is is gonna be kind of the next evolution that we hope it is. But anyway, John talking about the maintenance plan of uh yeah, getting hacked once. Okay, let's try GoDaddy, let's try Bluehost, let's try this, let's try that. And for so for him, and so then for artillery, you know, design is really our focus. Strategic design is what we say. And so designers are pretty much who who we hire. So for design focus, strategy focus, copywriters, you know, we don't have any put huge air quotes here, but full stack devs on our team that you know are are are focused at that. So with that context, SiteGround is so perfect for us because you know, Artillery, we have many, many, many cloud hosts uh accounts, and then we put about a hundred sites per cloud host. Sometimes we we learn on our first one like if you pack a cloud too too much, no matter what, that it eventually stops working. That seems like easy math. But the way that we thought, anyway, I digress. We started splitting them up, we started migrating our sites to kind of have this even spread across all of our clouds of you know, about a hundred sites per cloud host, and that allows us to scale that cloud up as the sites grow. And we get nice easy reminders when, like, hey, suchandsuch.com on cloud artillery cloud four is at, you know, they just added a bunch of photos or whatever, and now they're at this much space. And we like you said, we don't try to nickel and dime anyone, and we try to prevent that at all costs, but that gives us a good hand on like, oh, we need to bump that cloud storage up just a little bit more. And so we don't have it, gives us a lot of good controls when hosting that many sites because we can really see exactly which sites are getting which usage. If we bump the storage on the whole cloud, it's really simple. There's easy auto-scaling, like it just gives you a lot of control. And then on top of that, we do like the expert care stuff through SiteGround. Love paying for that. Oh my goodness, they're so incredible. They'll do anything for you. Come to your house, help you out with uh any troubles you're having, you know, like they they raked my my leaves. No, I wish. I'm just kidding.

Josh Hall 12:26

They'll help your hosting, they'll help your website, and they'll help your plumbing.

Jake Kramer 12:29

Yeah, that's exactly right. They can do it all. Love Site Ground, seriously.

Josh Hall 12:32

Because it was kind of like a concierge. I don't use that personally because I don't have the need for it right now, but it's kind of like concierge support.

Architecture At Scale: Clouds And Splitting Loads

Jake Kramer 12:38

Yeah, like sometimes, like, okay, like let's say you're you're running um, I don't know, certain gravity forms or even certain um like settings within image optimizations that isn't quite what you're hoping, or or you want to like dive into the nitty-gritty of page speed score and start like getting really good uh handles and optimizations, like you can use credits on a lot of that. As well as what what Clara does, who's our support specialist at Artillery, she's about to celebrate five years with us as well, which is exciting in in like November. But what she does is she has the expert care help with a lot of like site launches. We launch about two sites a week now. We're last year we did 94 websites launched, and so she has a nice process for it. And at this point, it's kind of nice to just like queue up some people at some projects, you know, for the site ground team and then more of the easier launches we just handle. They're just so great and they never miss. So you're that's kind of how we use them.

Josh Hall 13:48

You're relying on the Consier support as almost like an addition, almost like a wing of your team for the for the internet stuff.

Jake Kramer 13:55

Yeah, because they're the best. You know what? Am I gonna go hire some ding dong when you got site ground? No, just kidding.

Josh Hall 14:01

Well, that's awesome. This is a good context because this is the foundation of hosting and maintenance plans, is really good hosting. And uh Psychound is not a paid sponsor for this episode. We're just users of it. Um, let's dive in because I know we have limited time on this one, Jake. Let's get let's just do like a fast action lightning around on your maintenance plan now. And again, for those who want the full story of how you guys created this and where you were at five years ago, episode 49 is still very worth going through because I know you dig into that story a little more. Yeah. But the cool thing is, is now I don't think too much has changed in the process, maybe just additions, but now it's at a different scale. So today we're recording on January 29th, 26th. How many sites do you have today that you're hosting and main maintaining?

Jake Kramer 14:48

Yeah, we have about 502 that are like live and and functioning out into the under the great unknown. But we have in our site ground account, we have about I think like 570. Um but 500 is a good number for 2026 on like paid live sites that are out there in the world that have been built by us.

Josh Hall 15:12

Not just development sites or staging sites and stuff like that.

Jake Kramer 15:15

Yeah, like we bought we bought some sites from some designers that that had Divi. Um, by the way, we are buying Divi sites, so reach out if you've got some. Uh like child themes and stuff. Shameless plug. No, like clients. Like um, so uh a guy in um in like a small town in in our state, he just wanted to go do some other things. He actually wanted some um, anyway, doesn't matter, but he sold us like 27 of his clients. It was very transparent, very well done by him. I mean, we communicate with the clients, there are a lot of small town businesses anyway. But all the sites were built on Divi. He used SiteGround too, so it was like, hey, we'll pay you X dollars per client. And then he let all the clients know, hey, I'm stepping out of the business, I'm gonna be selling your account to artillery. That's great, man.

Launch Workflow, Backups, And Client Access

Josh Hall 16:08

That's a great little additional wing. I didn't really think about that. But now, as web designers, I mean, we've seen some web designers from years ago in the Divi realm or other big page builders retire. And it's like if you don't have a secession plan, that's good to know that you guys sell those things to artillery.

Jake Kramer 16:23

Well communicated to your client, I always say, right? Because, yeah, like you say, like they're an asset. Uh, we have infrastructure set up to provide a great service to them, to continue to help them with all their website needs. Uh, hopefully not website woes. But all that to say, yeah, we have about that many in our stack. Let's do a quick kind of quick hitter of our stack. So, yes, site ground's the beginning. We love making sure that the site ground speed optimizer and the site ground uh security optimizer are on. There's a couple, you know, small little settings that will go in, but go in there, play around with those settings. John always says this. He's like, hey, every time I get a new piece of software, I like to go into each setting and just change every single setting to just understand it. And so at the scale that we're at, like, you better go in and tweak all those settings to understand um what each little one does. And by the way, a lot of questions to the you know, big site ground exec support team that we use those credits on are kind of those more important questions about you know, some of those SG optimizer fine-tunings with Divi and anyway. So, site ground. And then on top of that, we use Infinite WP. We still use it, still love it. They're great. They gave us a great deal when we renewed. Um, so that is our dashboard. You know, we're musicians at artillery, so we like to describe it like a MIDI keyboard. Nice, you know, all the goodies are on at SiteGround, but Infinite WP allows us to put a plugin on each site and then control it through one dashboard. So we just hit it once to update all the sites on WordPress, just hit it once to update gravity forms, plugins, uh, that kind of a thing.

Josh Hall 18:13

So are you doing reporting through that as well? Like monthly reports or anything like that?

Security Stack And Update Process

Jake Kramer 18:17

We uh we don't send out any monthly reports to the client. We tell them if you ever we get we give them act, okay. I'll back up. When we launch the site, we tell them, hey, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, here you go. Here's your admin access to the site. And I you and we always record about a three-minute video. Hey, congrats on the launch, uh, Jake or Clara or wherever else. Uh, here's how to log into your site. Oh, make sure you go to your forms and and here's how the entries are working, because the notification sometimes gets gets stuck, especially recently in the recent WordPress uh update. Jeeish Luish, that's caused a lot of troubles for a lot of people. Um, and then hey, here's how to quickly edit a page and here's some other things on the site. So we try to quickly show them, hey, this is your site. It's not a magical mystery box. Like it's it works like a design tool might, you know, and here's how to change some stuff. But note that artillery, we are logging in every single day. We're updating the plugins and the themes, and we're making sure that things are running properly and we're pinging the site, making sure that domain hasn't expired or a credit card wasn't lost somewhere in the triage, making sure that things are running like we would every single day. And then every single day, Site Ground and we are creating a backup of the site in case anything does happen. Like imagine you could clone your car every time you went to the grocery store in case it got smashed. Hey, no worries, go throw that version away. I got an I got a clone in my garage. I'll just use. So peace of mind. And by the way, we also make up a backup of every save on every page. So you go in and Donna, uh no shade, no shade to Donna, who works at you know, dot com, whatever, goes in and makes a change. Well, then we can just revert it back to the artillery version if if Donna doesn't like it, or if Jim goes in and messes it up, that Donna, whatever. So backups on backups. Hey, you go ahead, go in here, kick some sand around. You can't mess this thing up. We got your back. Visit our support, ask any questions. Hopefully, most of them are on the gold plan, which includes an hour of support a month. So that's when we actually will have a human, Clara, log into the site, help with any questions that they might have, adding blogs, changing, swapping photos, adding content, that kind of a thing. And then we still use WordFence, good old WordFence. Man, we love uh them on top of SiteGround security. We use WordFense as well.

Josh Hall 20:50

I did not like WordFence. Sorry, you didn't like it. No, I thought it was bloated and I had a bunch of issues. I was used to using security for the firewall.

Jake Kramer 20:58

Um we use security for artillerymedia.com. Okay. And I love security.

Josh Hall 21:02

And look, with like with Siteground security stuff, I don't need I actually don't use security or WordFence now with both joshhall.co or webcenterpro.com. I found that SiteGround better knock on some wood, I guess, but I haven't needed extra firewall protection with that.

Jake Kramer 21:18

I I agree. The only thing that so we have like the free version of WordFence, and we essentially just have one setting that's like, hey, if you're trying to log in with a username or password more than one time that's incorrect, it locks you out for five minutes.

Josh Hall 21:32

Can't you do that with uh SiteGrounds um security?

Jake Kramer 21:36

You can plug in? You can. But why have one plugin, Josh, when you can have two plugins?

Josh Hall 21:42

Uh spoken just to spoke up to WordPress Pro.

Jake Kramer 21:46

No, just kidding. Just kidding. No, there's some other there's some other settings that that uh John uses through that and some other like things that we can look at and some other settings that that Clara likes to use. So we've had this conversation internally, but I do get what you're saying. It's an extra.

Josh Hall 22:01

Look, dude, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. That's I couldn't like I'm so moving into all the dad cliches because they're all true generally. Like, yeah.

DIY Shift, AI Builders, And Why Humans Win

Jake Kramer 22:11

That's the thing about I I hold this all such with an open hand. Like, like one of my best buddies in the whole wide world, Divi guy, WordPress guy, local business. He helped the business here in Lincoln move. He was a he was on the C-suite. He was the VP of marketing. He helped them move from nothing, employee number seven, to two billion, a double unicorn. And then he took an exit and now he's starting this other startup with his brother. And I'm giving him the whole thing. I'm hooking him up with just like all kinds of landing pages and stuff. And he he knows the name of the game. Like he's totally savvy. But he just switched over to um like not Replit, the AI thing, but something similar to that. And and so like guys who who totally get it and want to move at the speed of light and don't have to kind of clunk around with um a tool that you don't know, and if you really understand what you're doing, like those AI sites, oh man. He said it best. Like last night when we were playing COD, he's like, he's like, Jake, don't kill me. I went over to this replit like AI thing. But he's like, hey, right now, I just need we're running tons of Facebook ads. So their specific niche of business is like, hey, we need we need lots of users, and we're ton we're we're funded to get tons of daily active users. So they're cranking the ads, like tons of ads spent. He's like, they need to land on this site, and it's just like it's just like just quickly in and out of the landing page, you know, like two seconds they're gonna be validated through the ad, and then they're gonna enter their email through our app that is on a completely separate system. So like it might as well just be raw HTML, you know, like as fast and as smooth and as inside outside as you can get. It's like a video and enter your email and done. And I'm like, dude, for that, AI is totally the way because you can make some tweaks, some changes anyway. All that to say, like there's a million ways to skin this cat called the Great Why World Wide Web. And uh I'm yeah, I'm always excited to hear about new ways to build sites, new ways to do things. And John put, and to kind of wrap up this whole maybe segment or or rant, you know, John said it well in one of our episodes too. Like you gotta, you gotta pick something to scale, to be scalable, to be where artillery's at, you know, 500 sites hosted. We cannot do that if we've got a bunch of random themes, some clients in Webflow, some clients over here. Like you just kind of have to pick one. And Divi is the is the best to get us there. It's like a minivan, you know, like no shade to minivans, but it's not a sports car. I know. Who doesn't, right? Especially us dads. I'm trying to get Haley on the minivan train, but you tell there's so many cup holders.

Josh Hall 25:13

She can have a coffee, she can have multiple coffees, she can have water, you have a you know, a hydro drink, whatever. Um so many room for activities. So many room for activities, yeah.

Jake Kramer 25:22

Oh, I know. Anyway, there's there's to wrap it up. Like there's so many ways to do this, and I love learning about them.

Josh Hall 25:29

Well, this and this brings me to something I wanted to ask you, and I I will recommend because we're not going to get into the actual selling of your plan. I want to dig into some more specifics at this scale. Episode 49 is where we really talked about how you sell it. Has real quick, has anything changed with how you sell the plan, or is that pretty still standard?

Jake Kramer 25:45

Pretty much still standard. We itemize talking to the talking to the client. Um, you know, our process is like, hey, fill out this form. It's really simple, gives us the details. I'll top on a call. I go through some slides about like, hey, this is just how we build, how we price, I send them a proposal. The hosting's in there. It's essentially assumed at this point. It's sometimes I don't even cover it. It's just in the proposal, like, you gotta have this. And I feel like now, fast forward from 2020, it's been an easier and easier sell. That can be multiple things. It can be number one, I don't even it's just like, oh yeah, you you gotta have it. Like the lights gotta be on, right?

Josh Hall 26:25

That's what I wanted to ask you, which which is are maintenance plans an easier or harder sell in 2026?

Pricing, Itemization, And Project Ranges

Jake Kramer 26:34

Easier. Oh man. Way easier. It's not even it doesn't even feel like a sell anymore. It just feels like okay, people expect recurring costs now with websites. That is just expected. I feel like that's kind of gone mainstream, I guess. Um, so I just say I kind of phrase it like this like, hey, there's no recurring costs with artillery, nothing you can expect, like like retainer fees or anything. $99 a month for hosting, maintenance, security, support, training. That includes one hour per month. It's everything that most of our businesses need. If you ever go more than that, we'll have a conversation about how we need to adjust, or maybe you purchase like a bucket of hours or something from us. Like we just had a client do that. They had a bunch of marketing spend, they wanted to spend it. I raised my hand and said, How about a bucket of support hours? So that's kind of how we do it still. Hey, your site needs to be on, running, maintained, secure. People kind of get that. And having humans that they can go visit or call that can help with each and every little piece, I think they kind of understand. Hey, I can go over here and get the results I want, but I won't have the human. Or I can have artillery for a pinch more.

Josh Hall 27:50

I have my suspicions as to why it's easier to sell now, too. And by the way, I'm overseeing so many Web Designer Pro members who have maintenance plans and they're selling them just fine. I have a couple members who do have two, 300 plus maintenance plan clients as well. Not anyone to your scale, but they're doing like multiple hundreds of maintenance plans and they're still selling. My intuition tells me, to your point, Jake, yes, people are used to recurring subscription and it's almost expected, especially if you go to any AI builder or DIY platform, it's a subscription. None of those are one-offs. Additionally, I think the DIY market has changed dramatically.

Jake Kramer 28:29

I agree.

Josh Hall 28:30

Back 2018, 19, 20, it a lot of people were designing their own sites and doing it all themselves. And I think because the the internet is so noisy, there's so many options, there's so much overwhelm, there's so many builders. I think it's way harder. It's hard enough for a web designer to decide their tool stack, let alone a business owner who's gonna try to do it themselves. And I think business owners are now more so than ever. And you are a prime living example, you and John and your team are an example that business owners just need a small team or a person to do this stuff. And yes, and that's why I like I feel very, very strongly about AI not taking over web designer jobs, is because yes, it's going to evolve and be a very incredible tool to build sites pretty quick, or at least the foundation, but it's not going to take over this stuff, the like the ongoing and being able to make sense of all the aspects of web design. So that's my intuition is the DIY market has changed dramatically. People are so overwhelmed, they just want a web person or a web gal or a web guy or a small web studio. And yeah, I'm glad to hear that my intuition is what you're living out.

Simplicity Over Add‑Ons: Support Plans

Jake Kramer 29:45

So true. And then if you can make sure that, you know, the good old story brand stuff is still very relevant. I know he just revamped his book, but it's all about okay, do I understand who I'm talking to in the sales conversation? And do I understand what their problems are? And can I position my services as a solution to their problems, not just like, oh, here's a thing. So, for example, you know, whether I'm talking to a 65-year-old lawn maintenance uh sprinkler guy, or whether I'm talking to a 33-year-old marketing director at a tech company, they both kind of understand now, like, yeah, there are ways I can push a button or talk to a thing and get this done. But I want to make sure that when someone goes to the spot, like you said, there's so much noise now. Like, I want to make sure, is it the best it can be? Is there like a formula that we're following? Is is this really well thought out? Or am I or someone else just kind of like, oh, I like that. So is there strategy behind what we're doing? And I feel like we talk about that a lot. And then when I get on to the actual conversation with them, we talk about that too. Like how there's a formula that actually makes a website work. Turns out this has been studied. Turns out you have two seconds to build trust. You want to answer three questions in those two seconds. Next up, there's a section. And guess what? Apple does this, Target does this. Every Fortune 500 company now follows this exact same framework and method and model. And so I feel like if you can kind of position that, like, hey, the tool doesn't even really matter anymore. Like Divi5, WordPress, it'll all eventually get to equatable, the same like speed, whatever, where the differences will be so marginal. The AI will eventually get there. Same thing with any way to build a website. But are we building our websites with best human practice, best SEO practice, making sure that we're positioning our things in the right order, making sure that those things are well structured. I think that piece is what people are maybe understanding more out of the box. And it doesn't, it's not that hard to kind of convince them of like, yeah, websites are done a million ways, just like a car, but do we want to have someone who does this all day, every day? And I I feel like people are are much much more into that idea of just like, yeah, you're the guy, just take care of it for me.

Josh Hall 32:16

Yeah, and I think um just put a cap on this point, like what I'm seeing is most of the builders, most platforms, even like Wix, which was for years the DIY builder, they're moving towards really pushing Wix Studio, which is not for DIYers. Even Divi, as you know, like when when John and I got into the Divi world around the same time, he was a little preceding me, Divi was kind of known as like the DIY builder for WordPress. Yeah, yeah. Divi5 is anything but a DIY builder for WordPress. It's very like pro-driven.

Jake Kramer 32:51

It's like Photoshop, it's like Figma. Yeah, it's like that's and that's the other thing about these DIY things now, to your point, is it's like they're so, I don't want to say bloat, but like the the dashboard, it looks like a spaceship. And so when people get in there to start editing their site now, they're like, oh my gosh, there's too many options, I'm afraid. Boom. Versus like the builders back then were like a big blue button, click it. Now choose three options.

Josh Hall 33:15

Spot on. The spaceship analogy is spot on. I actually I think AI builders are replacing DIY builders. I think that's what's happening.

Jake Kramer 33:22

Yes, yes.

Josh Hall 33:23

Um, but you get to the point where, like, yeah, there may be some like super quote unquote simple landing pages and sites that AI is fine for. But if you're a pro business and you need long-term scalability, manageability, all this stuff, it's crucial. So, real quick on that, Jake, um, what's what's your your average price point for projects, which makes $99 a month a lot easier to sell? Are you guys still is five to seven K like? Yeah, that's good. That's healthy.

Team Roles, Tools, And Support Flow

Jake Kramer 33:53

I itemize everything. So we start about $2,000. If you want to work with our design team, if you want John, good old Johnny Boy on the project, it starts at $5,000. Then who's writing the content? Are we? We itemize for that. How many pages are we doing? We itemize for that. Um, about $300 per page if we're building a really fancy page, about $100 per page if we're just cloning that page and going on. So at this scale, I've itemized things down that are very, very specific, but very helpful for our team. So our proposals are very detailed. AI's really help with that too. A before and after site map, exactly the pages we're gonna do. Yeah, most of those projects are about in that range. Um, we can help you for like 2,000. We can help you for 20,000. Depends on how many pages we're building and you know, how many mock-ups we're doing, how many versions we're doing. Um, and I and I try to educate the client through all that, but yeah, we itemize it all. That's about our price point. And um, let's see, our smallest little project that is just a knock, knock out of the park, little local uh drywall patching company that just does buku numbers. It's called uh Patch Pros. It's in Lincoln, and it's just like the guy for like drywall patching. There's like not even another option. It's like, yeah, you need just call patch pros. And it got sold to uh another family, and they're they're literally just if they were Nick, my buddy, it would have just been done in AI, you know. It's literally like, hey, we want to follow the story brand formula. It's one page, just needs to be fast and snappy. And oh yeah, patch pros, I'm on the site. Oh yeah, this is professional. I must be where I'm supposed to be. Click, then you're there. $2,000 to follow the story brand process, write the content, design, develop, ship, and then $59 or $99 a month to host and maintain. So $59 is our hosting, maintenance, security, um training, not support, because if you want support, $99 a month for us to log into your site, make changes um for an hour a month.

Josh Hall 36:01

So we roll it. Do you have more um robust or complex support plan options other than just the retainers and bulk of hours that you might sell?

Choosing Focus: Design vs Growth Services

Jake Kramer 36:11

Um, we so okay, so here's the trap that we almost fell into is the add-on trap, right? Like, hey, uh if you want AI on your site, like that's an extra $5 a month. Or hey, if you're really cranking out a ton of stuff and you're doing a lot of traffic, like that's extra amount. Or, or hey, if you want compression, you want to beat this, like that's an extra amount. We tried that for like a couple years and it was just like a mess. We just didn't like it. And so transparency just always wins. It all it makes the business owner feel like, hey, you're not just trying to nickel and dye me. It makes you feel like you don't have to keep track of all these different packages and how do they fold in. And so what do you do instead? Um, instead of all those add-on traps, you just have a conversation over time. You know, if one site starts to one site out of 50 or 100 starts to have more traffic, I'll usually have a conversation with them. Say, hey, here's actually what our plan says. Here's where you're at. Um we usually charge more for this, but what do you think we should do about it? Like, do you do you wanna up like $10 a month to like account for that? Or do we want to like do some type of a trade or do you want to trim some stuff back? Like there's a ton of options. Here's where we're at. Where do you think we should do? And here's what I think we should do. You know, usually I give them that. So you do that usually works really well too.

Josh Hall 37:39

So more of a custom approach to anything above the 99.

Jake Kramer 37:42

Yeah, like we have one, actually, we have five clients on what we call our prime plan, which is $300 a month. And that essentially is just like hosting and then a bucket of hours. But then we have a food blogger who does Buku numbers that that like gets, I think her site gets like 200,000 visits a month or something. So so she has to have her own artillery cloud server. Same thing with we host and manage uh prey.org. How about that for a domain name? Wow. It's like worth like 1.4 million. It's a it's a big church in on the East Coast. Uh, good old Divi, good old WordPress. But they're on their own site ground server. And so we could have done the whole nickel and dime, try to figure that out. But I was just like, hey guys, your site's doing crazy numbers, insane numbers, well beyond average. Um how about you just buy your own server through us? We'll just charge cost. So they pay $99 per month for their own cloud server, and then they pay our gold plant, which is like the maintenance, the support. So yeah, they're paying $200 a month, but they're like paying for their own supplies. So we kind of gave them the wholesale rate and they felt like we kind of hooked them up, which we did.

Josh Hall 38:58

Two quick questions here, Jake. I know we're tight on time. I'm so I apologize. I was running a little behind today on this one.

Jake Kramer 39:03

Uh, no worries. We can we can roll a little bit.

Josh Hall 39:05

Do you have a hard stop right at news?

Jake Kramer 39:08

No, I'm okay. It's just my our team meeting. I'll tell them I'll be a little late.

Josh Hall 39:11

Oh, we're for the great and powerful Josh Hall. We got a couple more hours, then we're good. That's right. Did you guys ever venture into or have you done any sort of like growth plan or digital marketing plan for your clients to help them grow their websites? Whether it's SEO, whether it's lead generation, converge rate optimization, email. What's that look like in relation to how you're doing your maintenance plans?

Jake Kramer 39:38

Oh, such a great question. Man, we've been down this road a million times. Like you take two steps and then you step back. I didn't like that experience. And then, you know, you get your energy, you're get your excitement up again and like, oh, we could really help people and we could really uh charge for this. So this would be a great recurring revenue uh option for us. And then you run down that path and then oh, I didn't like that, and then you run back. That's kind of how it's been for us. And what I mean by that is we are designers. We are really good at designing web pages. Um, sometimes graphics, if you really, really need it and you and you're nice to us, we'll help you with graphics, but otherwise, web pages and logos. We do a lot of branding things now. So design is our thing. So, what does that mean? That means we could do SEO, we could do ads, we could do campaigns, we could do email campaigns for clients. Just wasn't our thing. We just didn't like it. We couldn't find anything that we liked. So we have contacts, uh, every little nook and cranny of every little service that you'd want. Our thing is hey, is that person an expert at their craft, photography, videography, SEO? I have a guy who just does schema now. Like that's all he focuses on is like web schema. He's like the guy. He's like there when it when it was started. Literally, he was in the room when it started. What a great contact. I know.

Josh Hall 41:02

So if every web designer needs a schema nerd in their corner, David, who is like, yeah, yeah. I was like, what the hell is schema? And he's like, oh, dude, let me show you. Oh, dude. Oh, this is go back the curtain on this. It's like the matrix.

Jake Kramer 41:16

Yeah, like it is like the matrix, man.

Josh Hall 41:18

And AI is gobbling that up. Uh-huh. You didn't know this world of numbers behind the screen of the internet, yeah.

Jake Kramer 41:25

Seriously. So, what does that mean? I hope to be everyone's website fiduciary. I love that word.

Josh Hall 41:33

That's cool.

Partnerships, Referrals, And Staying In Lane

Jake Kramer 41:34

Um, let's have a conversation about it. What are you struggling with? Oh, do you think Facebook ads would be really killer for you because you're a tech company and you need to grow a ton of daily active users? You should talk to this guy. He's great at Facebook ads hacking. I'll build the landing page. I'm not going to charge you for that contact introduction, but I'm sticking with what I know hosting, maintenance, security support. Your website's gonna be fast, it's gonna be secure, it's gonna be awesome.

Josh Hall 42:00

Yeah.

Jake Kramer 42:01

And from there, let's have a conversation.

Josh Hall 42:04

This is so good, Jake, because it it reinforces what I've been saying for years, which is you can have an amazing business just being a designer, a really good designer and supporting your clients. Now, the caveat to that is at scale with this model, with a $5,000 average price point and $99 per month, it takes a while to get six figures and multi-six figures. But once you're at scale and you have your systems dialed in, it can be a wonderful breezy life and you can have a very modest team like you guys have built. So one I I've had to be really careful on trending on this because uh I I'm at the same time a proponent of helping clients build their business via their website with some sort of growth plan, which could be again SEO, could be local SEO, could be national SEO, could be long keyword research type stuff, it could be converted optimization, it could be lead generation with email. It absolutely could be ads and marketing, could be strategy, but that's only if you want to have like a couple dozen clients. So I kind of feel like the way I've seen the industry go, and this is important for this with maintenance plans, is I think you kind of need to decide do you want to go the artillery route and eventually have hundreds of clients paying, you know, two, five, ten thousand and have a maintenance plan and stop there and constrain yourself from being a digital marketer consultant and have a really good business model that's stable, knowing it's gonna take time to work up to that. You and John didn't start this and make you know $250,000 a year in six months. It takes time to build that up. But once you get to that spot, you guys can scale like you've done. Or if you need to make a lot more money faster, you need to have high end websites andor some sort of growth plan to get you there. But I do love that both work. You know, like you really web designers can choose which route they want to go to. Or you can have one particular, like I have a student, April, who loves email marketing. That's her growth. She doesn't go far into SEO, doesn't go to conversory optimization. It's email marketing. She loves it. She's great at that. Sam, one of my members, loves local SEO. That's his growth plan. I have some members, we have a member doing cover optimization, and she loves that. But it's not email marketing and it's not SEO. So I'll stop there, but I just wanted to say I really appreciate hearing that you guys have dabbled into that world and realized this is what we do. We like it. It works. We're making a lot of money. Everyone's happy. Life is good.

Slow And Steady: Principles For Longevity

Jake Kramer 44:28

Yeah, man, you nailed it. Really well said uh after years and years of just having so many conversations. I'm talking to you, Josh. I mean, you just you nailed it. It's absolutely right. Like you can obviously you can't be the man in everything. So who are you? Who are you? Who who? And then you know that you can essentially have two options. You can stop doing the thing that you're doing, which by the way, there's this little quote that I read that was like, you'll either like something to get to know it fully yourself, or you'll pay someone to teach it to you, or pay someone to do it. Like that's just so true. Like, either you're gonna get to know every little nook and cranny of design or SEO because that's your thing, or you'll pay someone else to do it. And like just don't try to kid yourself on that. So, where does that put me as a business owner or you, listener? Well, you can have it be your growth plan, like you said. I love that idea. Hey, this is me. I'm great at SEO, I love this thing. I've spent a ton of time refining this thing. This is my thing. We're gonna design the site, we're gonna build the site, and then I'm gonna show you the growth over time. I love that. The other option is you have a Rolodex of people who have you have had conversations with and who have you who have done work for you, and you realize that they're an expert in their field, and then you refer and take a cut of the referral. That's very fair. That's what we do. Um, you can do that way. Or the last option is you can find that referral person and you can hire them. And that is a huge risk. But if you have um the uh maybe the fire in your belly to go and get the revenue required to keep that revenue, that that specific key person on your team, um, that could be a really good option. I'll give you a quick story. Downeystrategy.com, Brittany Downey, is one of our key affiliate copywriter strategists. Like if anyone wants, usually 25 employees or more, want someone to write their content, give them brand voice, strategy, marketing strategy over time. Brittany is who you got to hire. Shout out Britney Downey. I wish I would have hired her when she was at Swanson Russell, a marketing firm in the Midwest, but I was too uh too late and she's too killer at what she does. So she went and high, started her own business, and she's an entrepreneur. She probably would have started her own business anyway. Yeah. But all that to say, those are your options. And don't, you know, don't try to be everything for everyone. Make friends in your industry because sooner or later you're gonna have them kick in over clients because this person needs email marketing and you focused on doing that. You're that guy or gal.

Josh Hall 47:12

Yeah, I love this, man. It's a really important message for people to hear, especially those who are earlier on in the journey. Um, although even maybe even more so important for folks who are established like yourself, it's like it can be so tempting, like you said, to like, oh, maybe we should do SEO plans or local SEO management, and maybe we should do conversory optimization, maybe we should do email marketing or ads. But unless you love it, it is better to just have a partner with that. And I mean, that's one of the main reasons I started Web Designer Pro. It's an instant network of partners. I should probably put that on the sales page. Yeah, make new friends, dude. You you don't even have to go find them, they're in pro. Like you need SEO people, boom. You need CRO people, boom, email market people, boom. So I love that reminder. Um, and likewise, some people really like SEO or really like email, and websites just a part of what they do, an important part, but that works too. But I I think the reality is there's so many um tentacles of a successful web presence. The home is the website. So what you guys are doing, well, you're building the homes, and then that's right, you can hire contractors for the rest. Um, and real quick, 500 plus sites. Your team, who's managing that many sites? Is it who'd you say is on your team doing that?

Jake Kramer 48:32

Yeah. So John uh he doesn't build sites with us anymore unless you pay that extra fee. So he just pretty much handles a lot of the maintenance questions and the billing. And then he is helping with a startup right now. It's called Funnel. That's a lot of fun. Um, there's a pun for it. If you go to funnel.live, you'll you'll figure out what that is. Uh, but that's what he's doing. So John and I co-own. And then my wife Haley, she's still project manager. We have a couple interns who are helping us out as we step away for uh baby number two. Yes, can we do that? Otherwise, we've got thank you, thank you.

Josh Hall 49:05

You're probably gonna come out right around or right after when when little Kramer, when little Kramer two comes. So can't wait.

Wrap Up And Where To Connect

Jake Kramer 49:12

It's gonna be fun. Uh, and then we've got Sierra, our head designer. We've got Liam on our team, who is just the absolute legend. We've got Clara, who does all of our hosting, mate, and and maintenance kind of first line of attack, and then uh yeah, she's awesome. Kind of director of client success, if you will. Gotcha. Um, like I said, Haley does all of the kind of project management for our current.

Josh Hall 49:39

So who's updating plugins and doing like the literal stuff through Infinity? Uh Clara is right now. Clara, okay. Yeah. And then support requests go through. Do you guys have a support line?

Jake Kramer 49:51

We have we use Help Scout. Help Scout. It's just goes through a gravity form on our site into Help Scout, and Clara manages it. And then if it needs a designer or needs to go up, then we just assign it in our base camp project artillery support, and it goes to either me or Liam or Sierra or and then we also have a couple other uh subcontractors locally that like we Kyle Downey, um distantly related to the previous down Downey I mentioned. Um he does a lot of builds for us, just white label.

Josh Hall 50:28

Um that family then, yeah.

Jake Kramer 50:31

Yeah, they were all homeschooled. So now they're all entrepreneurs and creative and heck yeah, dude. Makes you think.

Josh Hall 50:39

I know. I'm actually yeah, I'm hoping to have a homeschooler on the podcast here soon, uh, who my wife follows because we're exploring that path.

Jake Kramer 50:47

Um I was homeschooled until seventh grade. Haley was homeschooled until the ninth grade.

Josh Hall 50:51

Oh wow, how about that?

Jake Kramer 50:52

So we were only half-baked homeschoolers.

Josh Hall 50:54

Half-baked homeschoolers. So just because weird and that's a whole nother combo we might need to have, man. But Jake, this has been great, dude. I'm so thrilled for you guys to see your continued success, slow and steady. Um killing it. I have one final question before your team call. What would you say to the web designers who are being pulled in different directions? And are like imagine you what would you tell Jake six, seven years ago who was like, Oh, I maybe I should be ads and marketing or SEO or what would you tell them if you feel like this is the right path for them? What do they need to hear?

Jake Kramer 51:33

Um yeah, there's two things. Number one, good old micro, don't follow uh your passions. Follow opportunity and bring your passion with you. When I met John, I I didn't think I was gonna be a uh web designer. I wanted to be, I think I at that point I wanted to be like, who knows what I wanted to be? And who knows what I'm gonna be when I grow up now. No, just kidding. I'm a web designer. I've kind of landed on that after 10 years. But that brings me to my second point, which is okay, I met John and he really helped me down this path. But then point number two is I just really liked it. I loved it. Like, I did not think of myself as a designer when I started. I even remember remember having a conversation with John talking about like, how do you even get started designing a website? Like, I'm not a designer, I'm terrible, can only draw like stick figures. And he's like, Man, that's just like me for real. Like, let's work together. And he just he was my mentor and really just kind of pulled me along through music. So I definitely wouldn't be here unless it was like a friendship and a hobby. But that's kind of like the final little point I'll say like follow opportunity. Is it something that you actually really dig doing, like really like doing? Like, I still really like websites, it's they're awesome. And then, you know, number three is like do over time, can you see yourself um can you see yourself be getting to know this more and more and more where you can start to be kind of like a like a thought leader and and give content and give help and hold it all with an open hand? Um so find, yeah, find what you like, find find the people that you can do it with, because you gotta have multiple people in your corner, you can't do it alone. I don't know any web designers that are just doing it alone. They'll have contacts and the network and people. Um, and then are you um are are you are you able to continue forward with that in in with a like a process that is sustainable? Um so that's a little bit about my story and kind of how I stuck with it. Followed opportunity, definitely didn't follow like my passions, but I found it. Love the guy I was with, you know, I found it through my hobby. So if you're a chess player, like you'll you maybe playing chess is the greatest way to find like your next project manager because they're kind of wired like you. John's a musician, uh-huh and so am I, and so we're kind of wired the same. And he's also a homeschooled kid and weird like me. And so there you go. Does that answer that?

Josh Hall 54:22

Sure enough, sure enough, man. Again, episode 49 is worth going back to for folks who want to hear a little bit more about how you guys are selling these plans and digging into it. But this has been great, man. Really appreciate catching up and and seeing where you guys are at today and what's continued to work for you. It's like not truthfully, not much has changed, which is freaking awesome. And the world needs to hear that things that worked five, 10 years ago still work today. So it's all good.

Jake Kramer 54:45

And you know what? Like the internet moves fast and slow, and so do people. Slow and steady is still like the fundamentals of how almost everything in business works, websites included. Like, yeah, the internet they'll always be the next website builder, they'll always be, you know, a growing web flow or repli fan base or whatever. But at the end of the day, being able to own what you got and being able to trust the guy who's managing your asset, like that, I think is what people value. And that's why I love WordPress, and that's why we try to host at a at a fair rate, is because it puts the client, the business owner, in control, no surprises, and we'll help you with anything that pops up along the way.

Josh Hall 55:38

So awesome, dude. All right, I know you got to balance where should people go to connect next. We've got artillerymedia.com, and you guys have a new podcast.

Jake Kramer 55:46

Slow and steady, a podcast by artillery. We just released eight episodes, which is just the process of building a website. It's eight hours of content, uh, but it allows us to get into all the little nitty-gritty details of our process of building a website. But then we have some guests on. Josh, you're gonna be a guest here pretty soon. Hey-oh. And um, that's our podcast. Check that out. Otherwise, artillery media, give us a shout. Email me, Jake at artillerymedia.com. Would love to chat with you. And until next time.

Josh Hall 56:18

Heck yeah, dude. Till round three. We'll go tell the team I said hey, and uh tell John if he wants to some drum lessons to help him out. Let me know. I'll give him some drum lessons.

Jake Kramer 56:26

Hey, yeah, I'll make sure to give him a shout. You know what's crazy, Josh? He just told me he's like, dude, it's a full circle. Peter Furler, the newsboys guy, is now hitting up John because John toured with him for like five years.

Josh Hall 56:37

Didn't John build his website?

Jake Kramer 56:39

Yeah, yeah. John's like buddies with him now uh through funnel, the other startup he's doing. And now Peter is texting John and asking John for drum like lessons and and tips and stuff. That's great. And John John called me, he's like, dude, full circle moment. Full circle.

Josh Hall 56:53

That's awesome.

Jake Kramer 56:55

The legend himself is texting my boy Jay Wooten. That is great.

Josh Hall 57:00

Awesome, dude. Well, Jay, great catching up, man. Tell the team I said hey.

Jake Kramer 57:03

Hey, good to see you, man. Appreciate it.

Josh Hall 57:06

So good. So, so good. Again, this is just the moral of this episode is a reminder that you don't need to be a digital marketing agency if you don't want to be. You can be a web designer and focused on high-converting, well-designed websites and support and maintain your website clients month to month. And when you do that at scale, you can make a very healthy six and multi-six figure business and have a very lean, mean team. And it can be awesome. So again, I don't want to deter anyone from doing SEO plans or growth plans or any marketing if you're interested in that. But if you're down with a slow and steady growth and delayed gratification, this model is definitely very, very viable. And it still works today in 2026, just like it did back in 2016, which is the really cool thing. I I needed this. I needed their the reminder that all of this still works. So I hope this is helpful for you if you're kind of more in my camp and you don't want to be a digital marketing agency. So connect with Jake and his partner John. You can go to their website, artillerymedia.com. They have a new podcast called Slow and Steady. Speaking of Slow and Steady. And there, it'll be linked in the show notes for this episode at joshhall.co slash 419. So head over there. Be sure to reach out to Jake and let them know. Let him know that you heard him on the Web Design Business Podcast. And if this helped you, I'm sure he'd love to hear from you. And I would love to hear from you too. You can leave a comment at joshhall.co slash 419. I do read all podcast comments that come through. So let me know if this helped. Cheers, my friends, especially those of you who are a little more on me and Jake's camp. And we just want to build awesome websites and maintain them and support them. So cheers to that. All right, my friends, stay subscribed. We got some killer episodes ahead, let me tell you. So don't go anywhere. Uh why would you? You're learning how to build your web design business and have fun. What's better than that? Cheers.