[00:00:00] Karim: Agencies have big plans. Sadly, along the road they make mistakes and often they fail, but not every agency fails. Some of them succeeds.
[00:00:12] Karim: You mentioned that you turn creativity and execution into a standard operating procedure. turning
[00:00:24] Maciek: creativity into procedure that sound impossible, and to say it, it's true, it sounds impossible.
[00:00:34] Karim: Honestly, the way you do that is by constantly. Questioning if you're on the right path.
[00:00:45] Karim: One of the things that we're most excited about is how the Laravel Project and the WordPress project could progress in parallel in the next few years. They choose it because they want to own their own roadmap. They want to own their own data. They wanna understand where they're going and not have to be beholden to any one SaaS platform.
[00:01:09] Karim: It's a mindset. It's not about the weakness of. Open source. It's about the weakness of how you set up open source.
[00:01:17] Maciek: But quite behaving like a star top,
[00:01:19] Karim: but a startup within an enterprise organization. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly.
[00:01:29] Karim: We have to stay ahead of that maintenance. We need to stay ahead of that next release, do release planning, understand what's coming down the roadmap. Understand what their needs are from their partners, and that's how you create something that goes from maintenance to long-term strategy.
[00:01:53] Karim: Hi everyone. At the beginning of every agency. Those agencies have big plans, sadly, along the road. They make mistakes and sometimes they even fail. But on the other hand, not every agency fails. Some of them succeeds, for example, like crowd favorite, and that's why today together with Kaki, we will talk a bit about how to build an amazing agents.
[00:02:26] Karim: hi Kareem. hello, could you start with, think a bit about yourself?
[00:02:34] Karim: magic, thank you for inviting me. good morning. I'm Ka Maki. I am currently CEO of crowd favorite, well known in the WordPress world as the agency that started working to really scale and expand WordPress. Alex King, our founder, founded it with the express idea of scaling WordPress for the enterprise.
[00:02:57] Karim: I was lucky enough to start working with him, in 2012 and in 2013 we were working on projects together. In 2014, we merged our agencies together.
[00:03:09] Karim: Okay. And I think that our first question will continue this thing because, like I said during the intro at the beginning, every agency has big plans.
[00:03:22] Karim: And what were the. At the beginning of Crowd Favorites Row,
[00:03:28] Karim: crowd Favorite was actually my fifth agency. I had started four agencies before that and probably made just about every mistake you can make, crowd favorites. Our big plans were that Alex had created a very well respected agency at Crowd Favorite around working with WordPress and the enterprise.
[00:03:53] Karim: My agency, also had, some great enterprise contracts with, WordPress and how to develop WordPress even further past where it'd been known just in the publishing and educational circles at the time. And together we were gonna take it even further where he could really focus more on the technology because he was a very, deep engineer.
[00:04:20] Karim: One of the first people. To work on the WordPress code when Matt and Mike forked it, and then unfortunately he relapsed into cancer and within two years, unfortunately, he passed away. So the best plans don't always work out because we did not have a chance to really realize where he had a vision to take the next generation of the advancements of WordPress core.
[00:04:47] Karim: Really put the open source project, but the team persisted and we worked hard and today we still carry out the same mission within the WordPress world and beyond in open source.
[00:05:00] Karim: I can imagine that Alex, passing away was, one of the biggest pivotal. Moments in, in the history of the company.
[00:05:09] Karim: How did you, manage? Because,
[00:05:12] Karim: moments like that you just have to take as they come. As I said, Alex really had a very set vision of where really WordPress should go in the future and how the core of WordPress needed to stay dated and moved forward to really be performant. And it was very unique.
[00:05:30] Karim: It was very in the direction that he had always been going. So we really just had to focus on where. Where can we go with what we know and where we have And, we have an incredible team. We, have some folks that have been here literally since 2008 at the moment. Yeah. some of our oldest members, our tenure is usually about seven to 10 years as a standard here at Crown Favorite.
[00:06:00] Karim: So the team really just came together and figured out where we could go from here.
[00:06:06] Karim: Alex was more focused on the technical aspect. You are more focused on the business one, and I think that one of the biggest problems that a lot of agency have is the fact that they focus too much on the technological aspect.
[00:06:19] Karim: I know this because I had a tiny agency at some point, and I do remember how, I love the technological aspect. the business one was. Just wasn't my thing. But I also know that CRI current favorite is really great at bridging this gap. So you are doing a really great technical application website, whatever you are working on for a client.
[00:06:45] Karim: But it's not just about building this, it's more about how the client will benefit from it, how his business will
[00:06:55] Karim: solving the business need. Yeah. I bring my 30 years of internet experience in, I've always loved technology. I haven't written code in years, but I, used to, and I've never really fell into the trap of loving the lines of code.
[00:07:15] Karim: I loved the solutions it brought, so one of the reasons that, that I've persisted in this business is because. The approach, everything we do as we're trying to solve a business need with technology, we're not trying to figure out how to apply a specific technology. And that's the trap that most agencies fall into is they're like, how do I fix everything with my favorite tools?
[00:07:45] Karim: And while, Crowd favorite was founded on WordPress. Even before I joined forces with Alex, he was working on PHP projects that had nothing to do with WordPress, where WordPress quite literally wouldn't solve the application need there. There are limits to WordPress still today. There's a lot of limits to WordPress.
[00:08:10] Karim: Today, we have a lot more tools on how to fix that and how to deal with that. But if you look at any technology problem and say, I'm gonna solve it with whatever hammer I like, instead of trying to figure out the best tool, you're always gonna end up with the same situation, which is you end up compromising what the client need.
[00:08:30] Karim: So if you stay focused on the client need and you're willing to say. I use a broad range of tools rather than one tool you can do much better. So at Crowd Favorite, we've really honed Alex's original message over the last 15 years to be one of, quite literally, we solve business problems with open source solutions.
[00:08:54] Karim: Now we've chosen open source solutions, not as a technology, but as a cultural approach to business. We feel that our clients should own their own data. They should own their own roadmap, and in today's world, in today's world, it's dominated by SaaS platforms. It's the only true way to own that roadmap, but there's a lot of open source code out there.
[00:09:21] Karim: There's a lot of open source solutions out there, not just WordPress. And by merging WordPress with others, by sometimes not using WordPress at all. We have lots of projects where we don't use WordPress. it actually makes sense. Yeah. So that's how you need to approach things. Don't make the mistake of saying, Hey, let's just figure out how to apply a tool that we know.
[00:09:45] Karim: I, I, remember that once my, luckily not the client, because, the question she asked, in the in, in the email was, can we build a Facebook-like website using WordPress? yeah. But, I can imagine that, that many people would try to kind of band WordPress, to build something, but we know that sooner than later it will fail.
[00:10:14] Karim: Miserable. You mentioned open source that, you are very much, And that's great because I, totally agree with your approach that, owning everything is the only secure way to, to have the plan B, plan C to have backup of a backup, everything.
[00:10:34] Karim: but professors also has a lot of cons.
[00:10:38] Karim: We, hear a lot, a lot of voices, especially lately about problems with financing. A lot of developers are experiencing burnout. In the open source space. So what are the biggest challenges for companies like you that very often live thanks to open source? How do you give back or help
[00:10:58] Karim: the whole movement?
[00:10:58] Karim: Those are a few different questions. Let me see. Where can I, start? I'll start with how we approach it, For instance, we have some projects that have nothing to do with WordPress because as you said in your example, some of your listeners will know who the Emmys are. They're an award, awards entity here in the United States that they do, television and film.
[00:11:25] Karim: they approached us a few years ago and said, we need to do an entire system that helps us with the entire process of running. The award voting submissions, all of that, we're lucky enough to have spent the last few years building a complete bespoke system from the ground up. You can't do that with WordPress.
[00:11:47] Karim: We've used a lot of WordPress elements in the backend interface because WordPress has become the standard of, do you want to edit a website easily? A lot of people feel good about that. Inter that interface, a lot of people are familiar with that interface, but we actually use Laravel and we've been using Laravel in mixture mixed environments with WordPress for over 10 years, where WordPress needed a little bit of a performance kick.
[00:12:21] Karim: But in this one instance, it didn't make any sense to actually use WordPress at all. So we used a, Laravel based solution. And one of the things that we're most excited about is how the Laravel Project and the WordPress project could progress in parallel in the next few years. There's a lot of things to answer your next part of the question that Laravel is lacking.
[00:12:48] Karim: It's a developer's tool, but it lacks a lot to be really as friendly as the WordPress world is today. And on the other side. WordPress has a lot you could learn from the Laravel project. So by looking at how these two projects come together, we really get excited and that's where we're really interested and we're really doing a lot of cutting edge work these days.
[00:13:13] Karim: Some of our best clients. For the part of your question where you say, what worries us, is the future of open source. Staying open, staying in that sort of open verse. More and more projects are talking about the privatization of open source. there's, no such thing as just bad investment period.
[00:13:41] Karim: There's good, there's some investors are better than others. Why does the enterprise choose open source? They choose it because they wanna own their own roadmap. They wanna own their own data. They wanna understand where they're going. Not have to be beholden to any one SaaS platform. More and more platforms these days are starting to talk about privatization.
[00:14:01] Karim: For over the last decade, there's been a lot of platforms that were open source that started to, whether they publicly say it or not, they're less and less open source. So the idea now is how do we move that forward? We need to move that forward by securing the supply chain. We need to move that forward by, having code signatures.
[00:14:23] Karim: We need to move that forward by ways that we can guarantee that the open web will survive any one entity needing to go in any one direction. I feel like that is the, thing that, that needs to be worked on the most, and that's not a technical thing. That's literally a, an aspect of the open source community coming together and deciding what's important for itself.
[00:14:49] Karim: it's partially funny, partially very real comic. And there is this stack of Dominos and there is this one little tiny block at the bottom described as this one package maintained by, by one guy in Kentucky or something like this. And that's open source and. That's one of its biggest problems. The whole supply chains, when Open source pro project projects relies on other open source projects and relies on and so on, and securing the whole supply chain should be like the critical mission for the upcoming years for everyone using open source?
[00:15:26] Karim: Absolutely. But even that one developer in Kentucky, in your example, can choose to reach out. To companies like yours and say, Hey, what do you think of my piece of open source? Is it secure? They can reach out to CloudFlare and others and say, Hey, I wanna make sure that my code is available throughout, no matter what happens to my personal host, that kind of thing.
[00:15:52] Karim: It's a mindset. It's not about the weakness of open source, it's about the weakness of how you set up open source. Right?
[00:16:02] Karim: true. Out of curiosity because while we are talking about open source, I already know that you are using WordPress and you're using Val. What other open source technologies, are in your, stack?
[00:16:17] Karim: we play around with just about everything that we can get our hands on. I. these days we've also been playing around with some of the open source initiatives that are starting to come up around AI and others, but I leave that mostly to the technical team these days. I, focus more on the business strategy of how we're making sure that those packages are the cure and can be relied on for years to come.
[00:16:42] Karim: So I'm looking at the sort of the, more the business aspects of it from the technical ones.
[00:16:47] Karim: Okay.
[00:16:47] Karim: But in short, if there is a. Good open source solution, you'll use it. Absolutely.
[00:16:56] Karim: Absolutely.
[00:16:58] Karim: So now let's change the topic to something different because we are not here just to talk about open source even.
[00:17:04] Karim: it's, a very interesting topic and probably we could spend half an hour more, while, going through your real website and through Cloud Favorites website, I saw that you very often mention two terms. One of those is composable CMSs, and the other one is digital experience platforms.
[00:17:29] Maciek: Could you tell
[00:17:30] Karim: a bit more about this because, and how can other agencies use this?
[00:17:36] Karim: Think about this. Absolutely.
[00:17:39] Karim: digital experience platforms were, was a term that was coined, by Gartner, a few years ago. Adobe experience Manager went to Gartner and said, we are more than just a content management system, and how do we get that across? And they said, when you think about personalization, when you think about large data models, when you think about integrations, really that is a digital experience manager.
[00:18:05] Karim: We don't just publish websites, but we want to manage the experience with our customers. Customers, And. It caught on for a little while and Adobe and other companies started advertising these as monolithic systems, obviously, because that's their best interest. But when you look at it, when you decide to use a product, all these products keep going more and more horizontal because other products have new features.
[00:18:36] Karim: They want to add that same new feature so they can. They can basically check the box of yes, we have that feature. So they got wider and wider. And as you can imagine, not everybody can vertically go as deep as everybody else. So you ended up with basically, procurement in the enterprise saying there are 10 choices and all of them check all the boxes, but how deep are there good solutions?
[00:19:05] Karim: So that was an opportunity for us. This is 10 years ago now. We started saying to our customers, if you want the digital experience platform made, if you're looking for the, experience of putting together all these, features, why do you have to limit yourself to only choosing one company?
[00:19:25] Karim: Use the best of breed. Some companies use HubSpot. Some companies use Salesforce. why do you have to change to use some other piece? Why can't you choose the best in breed of each one of your. Particular vertical SAEs and use them together? the obvious answer is your marketing teams would have to quite literally have 18 tabs open to manage a marketing process because they're using 18 different platforms, and no matter how much they advertise that their APIs hook up well with other platforms, you're still managing 18 tabs and 18 processes.
[00:20:06] Karim: How do you tie all that together? this is another example where open source really came to save the day. If you use open source as a hub like WordPress to say, I'm gonna have a central place that everything else hooks up to, and while they're their own independent sources of truth, I'm gonna collate all my information in one place.
[00:20:30] Karim: I'm going to create a separate database, even outside WordPress and save. All my own data and make sure that I have my own source of truth. Then the day that you wanna choose to move from platform A to platform B just for one of the verticals, you're in control of that and you don't have that churn anxiety of going from one platform to the other.
[00:20:54] Karim: So that's what created the concept of composable, is how do you create the best usable product for you and your organization. It isn't relying on one company out there, and today it's at the core of
[00:21:08] Karim: what we do Here we are composable, CMSs, and putting everything together instead of building one big product that doesn't do anything that great, they just have some features.
[00:21:24] Karim: But, not everything is spread. another thing that was, very interesting on, crowd favorite website, because I must admit there are a lot of interesting web, things on, the website. is the term that you, about, your delivery culture, you mentioned that local, but global delivery culture.
[00:21:46] Karim: This is, this is a very interesting concept and I would really love to hear a bit more about this from
[00:21:54] Karim: you. that also is, something that stems from the fact that for many years since the nineties, I've had the, luxury of working all over the world. Not withstanding the accent you're hearing, I was born and grew up in Italy and I identify as Roman.
[00:22:11] Karim: More than American, even with this accent. So if you think about it, just, you know the concepts of the jokes between American culture and Italian culture, really. Whenever you want to deliver a project, you have to think locally, yet you wanna take advantage of global concepts and what other countries and other cultures are doing well.
[00:22:32] Karim: for instance, our project management culture is very American, even though we deliver a lot of European projects. On the other hand, our engineering team is quite literally global spans acro around the world. So what we end up doing is depending on where the customer is based, where their expectations are, not as headquartered, but where their delivering their experience, their customers, we make sure that we pair them up with a very local presence to get that done.
[00:23:08] Karim: So through partnership, we even have project managers in MENA, in the Middle East for, there's incredible digital experiences happening right now in Saudi Arabia, in the Emirate. So we have local presence out there. We have local presence in Western Europe and Eastern Europe. We have local presence in the United States.
[00:23:29] Karim: And really when we have a client that says we have a delivery in Argentina, we will become local down in Argentina, even if we don't have permanent presence down there for that project because it makes a difference. So we're really trying to bring together the best of global practices with the idea of making sure that we're delivering culturally what the local expectations might be.
[00:23:57] Karim: And this isn't about language. This is really about delivery and making sure that everybody's happy.
[00:24:03] Karim: And the differences in some countries, sometimes they are quite small, but they, are very important for, the clients itself. Plus sometimes those are very much connected with kind of local way of doing businesses or how some things are connected.
[00:24:19] Karim: for example, in Poland, for some reason we are still fighting against amazing. We prefer our own solution. We have Allegro. And, amazing is constantly trying, but we are still using our own thing and companies that would like to help, e-commerce company need to understand this because yeah, it works a bit different here and that's okay.
[00:24:44] Karim: Absolutely. for instance, we've worked with a few financial institutions. One of them was BA is headquartered in the Netherlands, but has branches here in the United States, and it was a very different delivery, even though we worked on both sides. There's a very different delivery between both of them.
[00:25:00] Karim: We worked on a merger of one of the US' largest investment companies with a large UK firm, and again, very different delivery when they merged. very difficult. Then for one of the largest media companies in the world, when we have to deliver something for one of their theme parks in Ava, the requirements might technically might be the same as their theme park in Florida, but actually making sure that project management and the local stakeholders are happy in those two different locales can be very different.
[00:25:35] Karim: Yeah, exactly. This cultural aspect is very important and it's great that, that you're covering it. And, so we already know about this, but what else makes Crowd favorite projects different from, the others, or even what makes them better?
[00:25:55] Karim: we've, made this decision around open source.
[00:25:58] Karim: We've made this decision around focusing on our definition of enterprise companies, which really isn't based on any fortune list or isn't based on. Any type of revenue, but complex organizations that have multiple departments with different cultures. That's really our specialty. For us. Really that is what makes the difference as, we already covered, that's what we really focus on in a deep way.
[00:26:24] Karim: So once you have an organization that says, we're ready to own our own roadmap, and on top of that we have a complex delivery, that is where we come in and help. Now what that means is we are very verticalized. We are technology and project management only. We don't do marketing. We don't do SEO, we don't do all the advertising things.
[00:26:48] Karim: Therefore, we pride ourselves on working very well with other agencies. So you can tell that you are a composable
[00:26:54] Karim: agency. Absolutely. I see that it's composable. Aspect runs, runs very deep. But yeah, that's true. And, another thing that, because again, going to your website constantly full of interesting things, there is this, interesting sentence that together with, with my friend Lana, we found you mentioned that you turn creativity and execution into a standard operating procedure.
[00:27:25] Karim: that's a, that's a nice sentence. And, turning creativity
[00:27:29] Maciek: into procedure. That sounds impossible, to say it, it's true, it sounds impossible.
[00:27:38] Maciek: Wanted
[00:27:38] Karim: to, yes. Really. it's good that you found that and that you called it out because it gives me, an a chance to explain it Honestly. The way you do that is by constantly questioning. If you're on the right path, if you're constantly saying, is this the right path? Checking in. Not just, you think of a project lifespan and you start with a discovery.
[00:28:05] Karim: Then you go into workshops, then you go into strategy, then you go into development. even in our development process, we are constantly prototyping at least one or two phases or sprints ahead of where the main team is going. We're constantly running into things. We're saying, can this be done better?
[00:28:26] Karim: Is there something coming out that is new? And in the enterprise, they don't want to be cutting edge. They want to be secure in knowing that it's not gonna crash. Even if they want the creativity, they need it to be secure. And when I say secure, I don't just mean security, I also mean literally in the sense that it's not going to fail them or.
[00:28:48] Karim: Have technical problems, but if you run your culture, your sprints, your planning around, always checking in to see if there's a way to be done better. If you, make that part of the lifecycle of each sprint, you end up with the opportunity to stay
[00:29:10] Karim: creative and work with new tools. Okay. Okay. So
[00:29:18] Karim: a lot of the time we run into new projects or new scripts or in the world of JavaScript, as things are constantly changing and evolving.
[00:29:27] Karim: we've run into things and it may not be ready for this project, but we still play with it to see if it's correct. We still do some, sandboxing on it because it may be ready for the next project. It may be ready for the project in which after that. So honestly, one of the things that, that our clients very quickly find out when they're coming to us new is we might not be the cheapest solution out there, but that's because we build in a lot of process and time to make sure that we're constantly doing research and development for that.
[00:30:02] Karim: That's amazing because that's also a thing that very often is connected with those big corporate agencies that very often fail, fall behind that. They have so much processes, so much everything built around their products that they can't move forward quickly. They can't change. And based on what you are saying, you are, quite behaving like a startup, but.
[00:30:30] Karim: startup within an enterprise organization. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly.
[00:30:35] Karim: Yeah, because like very often startups don't think about things like security backup and whatever. They're just pushing forward. And here it's yeah, like the middle ground, like the best middle ground, like this enterprise, the sense of security, which is very important, but still pushing forward, but staying in the stream of security.
[00:30:56] Karim: this is very important and. I do think that a lot of agencies that are still in the face of growing, they should think about this mindset because that's a really great mindset to always push forward technologically,
[00:31:11] Karim: right? And the i the important thing for anybody who is starting their journey, looking to expand their journey and their agency as not being afraid to communicate that to the client.
[00:31:26] Karim: At the end of a sprint, we will actually tell the client, and we spent x number of hours or a certain amount of time or what have you, trying this one avenue that didn't actually work out. You would imagine you're saying that you failed at something and you don't wanna look like you failed, but the customers who actually will appreciate your work, that you'll work for years with are the ones that say, okay.
[00:31:51] Karim: They didn't go overboard. They didn't go down a dead end, but they did enough to understand that this other solution wouldn't work. So they made sure that the solution that they did deliver did work. They will appreciate that.
[00:32:05] Karim: Yeah, exactly. And, it's also a great thing for the future. You know what won't work, and this is also a huge learning because during another sprint, another task.
[00:32:16] Karim: You don't have to go the route again, 'cause you already know it. I also see that a growth favorite, almost always focus on kind of those long-term relations with, clients. It's not just about Yeah, we'll build a website bot. No, it's about growing, growing together. So, I, imagine that the maintenance aspect of, of, of sub collaboration is also really important.
[00:32:40] Karim: It's not just, Kind of side project that many agencies do that. Okay, we finished the website. We, this was the moment when we earned through money, and then we just keep it on maintenance. And it is as it's right, but in, in, your case, it's different. The maintenance is also one of the most important aspects because I'm guessing that in your case it's not just, technical maintenance, it's something more.
[00:33:04] Karim: Right?
[00:33:05] Karim: It is more. But, let me start by saying, I made the same mistake. Early on in my career that a lot of agencies do, I had a team and that team moved from project to project. As we all know, projects have a lifecycle that's very th wave ish, right? Yes. and at the end of a big push, your developers or your project staff are very tired and they need a little bit of a break and.
[00:33:34] Karim: Most agencies will basically say, alright, between the big projects, I'll have the staff work on maintenance, or we'll have that happen as we can all from one team. I made that mistake too for years. Then a while back we realized that best thing to do is actually to separate into two separate departments with their own p and l, their own books, their own staff, their own process and everything.
[00:34:03] Karim: So actually running what folks call maintenance, we call it DSS. What actually works as maintenance needs to have its own process, its own people. And what you can do if you can do that is you're no longer just making sure that you are up to date and you're doing, and you're doing maintenance on the project and maintenance on the client, but you can actually bring in a process or you are getting ahead of the curve you can bring in.
[00:34:32] Karim: Business strategy and digital strategy and work with their partners who do SEO and advertising and other medias to make sure that you are ahead of the curve. You can bring them innovation within a management project, within a maintenance project.
[00:34:52] Karim: I can tell you that yeah, from, the times when, I ran my, own agency.
[00:34:57] Karim: Yeah. I also made that mistake that I didn't. I think the proper word would be that maintenance isn't fun enough.
[00:35:05] Karim: you can make it fun if you, say to your client, look, just to do the basic, keep the site open is X hours. Our maintenance projects are actually x plus hours. And in that plus we actually will give you regular deliverables and those deliverables will keep you moving forward.
[00:35:26] Karim: And really. If you think back to the origins of where open source really took hold in the enterprise, it was in the late nineties with a partnership between Red Hat and IBM, where Red Hat was between Fedora and Red Hat. It's the same code base, but two different paths. The bottom line though, is that they didn't have robust enough support.
[00:35:47] Karim: IBM came in and said, we're gonna give you a support plan that's enterprise grade. And the enterprise went, okay, now we can actually use open source. We practiced that same concept today of saying we're not just gonna make sure it works. It's not just like you pick up the phone and something's broken, please fix it.
[00:36:04] Karim: We have to stay ahead of that maintenance. We need to stay ahead of that next release. To release planning, understand what's coming down the, roadmap, understand what their needs are from their partners, and that's how you create something that goes from maintenance to long-term strategy.
[00:36:26] Karim: This, doesn't sound like maintenance, it just sounds partnership and, while talking about maintenance, let's talk a bit about the security aspect of it, because
[00:36:36] Karim: Yeah.
[00:36:39] Karim: Here at perhaps like we, we know a thing or two about security, and we also know how very often it is difficult, to sell the concept of security. until very often, until someone gets hacked. or for example, I'm sure that the, all the backups companies, love the clients that just lost their data because this is the point when they do start to understand.
[00:37:06] Karim: Why it's so important. Is it easy or difficult to convince enterprise clients to invest in, in the security of their, product?
[00:37:16] Karim: with the enterprise, it's the easiest thing in the world. You have to be careful not to oversell it, because they're already wanting to make sure that it's secure.
[00:37:27] Karim: For instance, stack Crowd favorite and one of the premier WordPress hosting companies out there. The three of us collaborate on one of the most complex WordPress sites out there for one of the largest media companies in the world. and that media company has some of the highest security requirements ever when it comes to our developers submitting code and maintaining security in how we do our job.
[00:38:00] Karim: But through the partnership between. Patch stack, the hosting company and us, we really maintain that top level of service where we don't have to deal, we don't have to think of what's going on the server. We don't have to think about some of the vulnerabilities that might come from third party libraries because that's where you come in, you're already tracking that.
[00:38:25] Karim: So as we're looking ahead, because obviously in the enterprise, we're usually. A build behind on some of the main features, but we're absolutely up to date on the security patches before it ever gets into production. Your team is usually telling us where the, problems may lie, and that is what the enterprise wants to pay for.
[00:38:46] Karim: So this another layer of backups, of backup backups and everything. Exactly. Absolutely critical. So probably a tip for, all the new agencies, work with Enterprise if you want to, and have good maintenance plans. It will absolutely, it'll work perfectly. And, now imagine that you are starting a new agents.
[00:39:12] Karim: How would you, what would be your first steps on which would you focus and which parts will you skip?
[00:39:23] Karim: that's a very good question. if I were to start an agency today, I really would focus on what I wanted my vertical to be. There's so many opportunities right now with ai, with different ways of the creative agencies, the technical agencies.
[00:39:42] Karim: Everybody's default idea is that when you start an agency or a digital agency, that it has to be all things. I've always bucked against that. Assumption, and I've always thought that the best agencies are the most vertical, the most specialized. And people go, why? Why would you think that? When you can really, you can diversify your revenue if you do all the other things.
[00:40:07] Karim: And my answer to them is, I. Closing yourself off to partnership. You can't be an absolute expert in everything, so you can decide to be middle of the road. You can decide to do volume over quality. You can decide to actually make quality the number one thing you wanna deliver. But then you have to pick a lane.
[00:40:26] Karim: You have to pick a direction, and if you decide to pick that direction. Realize that's a vertical direction, and if you do that well, you're building in a partnership strategy at Crowd Favorite. We work with dozens and dozens of agencies. Some of them talk about being horizontal, talk about having cradle to grave services, doing all the aspects of it.
[00:40:48] Karim: Some of them are very verticalized, but even the ones that are very broad are working with crowd favorite because we're very well known for something that's very vertical and we go deep on that where have deep expertise. So we work with them until the end client. We are providing a service that others can't.
[00:41:07] Karim: And on the other hand, if something else is needed to partner with other agency or company that also specialize in something. Exactly.
[00:41:17] Karim: Exactly.
[00:41:19] Karim: Last question, because at the beginning you mentioned that Kroc favorite was your fifth agency. And during those four agencies, before you made all the biggest mistakes.
[00:41:33] Karim: And
[00:41:33] Karim: you still make them today, don't get me wrong, but
[00:41:39] Karim: I always like to ask this question, what was the worst decision you ever made? And you still think about it and think, why, did I done something like this? Worst decision, I ever made was probably reacting to momentary fluctuations in the market.
[00:42:01] Karim: In making decisions about my team. So one of the core principles at Crowd Favorite is a lot of our staff have been here for a lot of years and they're very invested in our future and we're very invested in theirs. With every agency, there's always some difficult moments, and if you panic and deal with those moments without looking at the long-term future, without looking at what's possible, you will cut off your nose to spite your face.
[00:42:29] Karim: You'll end up in a position where. You will regret it. So my regrets from the past have to do with moments where I didn't take a heartbeat before making a decision to really think out the consequences. Long
[00:42:44] Karim: looking at what is happening at the IT market right now, I think that a lot of managers should also think a bit more about, about reacting to some situations.
[00:42:58] Karim: That's true, but I won't lie. I hoped for a funnier thing like that. You deleted a server or something like this, but, but I have a, good story. I think enough time has passed. this is a story from the, late nineties. In the late nineties. We were asked to do a, this is not crime favorite.
[00:43:21] Karim: This is another agency that's long gone. I'm gonna. Withhold names to protect the innocent. In the nineties, we had an agency that was based in Los Angeles, California, and we literally had an office on the movie lot. So the office was in the movie studio lot and we had a design department that was all, 24 to 30-year-old designers who were really good and.
[00:43:45] Karim: This was back in the days of Flash. And, they, were very proud of all the animations they did with Flesh. And what ended up happening is that I came to work one morning and we were doing a website for a new movie that was coming in and the animated movie and the developers had started doing the flash animations.
[00:44:04] Karim: We were about three months before the, movie was gonna come out. They'd started doing the, animations for the website. For a game in playing around, they started making these animated figures do very rude things because young designers, and the office manager and myself walked by one afternoon and saw that they were doing this, and were like, all right.
[00:44:28] Karim: Cut it out, delete that stuff, get it outta here, because tomorrow the client's coming in to see where the project is. So they took it out of the game system. They took it out of the core programming. But, one young man who didn't think ahead had actually taken the flash code and used. Shockwave to make it a screensaver.
[00:44:48] Karim: And he forgot to change his screensaver. And the next morning we had movie studios executives who were walking through our bullpen to the conference room, looked over and saw one of their favorite animated characters doing something very, rude. And everybody stops and they look at it, and they look at the account manager and they look at me and they're like, what's that closest we ever came to getting fired from that client?
[00:45:17] Karim: Again, I, must admit that this time, this was also not what I was explaining, but you really amazing story. But I also think that it's, very, important tip for every agencies do not do things like this different. Turn them into screen sabers. Never. Never, no.
[00:45:43] Karim: I know plenty of agencies that were fired for Easter Eggs and Flash programming.
[00:45:48] Karim: Yes. Oh, I can imagine. I
[00:45:49] Karim: can imagine.
[00:45:50] Karim: Yeah.
[00:45:51] Karim: Yeah,
[00:45:53] Karim: So I think that we, we went through every aspect, at least the ones that we could fit in around one hour current. Kareem, thank you so much for, sharing a lot of, a lot of tips, a lot of history. Especially the last story because yeah, it was, like a great way to, to end this interview.
[00:46:19] Karim: So K, thank you once again and yeah. Have a great day, everyone. Bye.
[00:46:26] Karim: Thank you so much for having me. Bye-Bye.
