Running a WordPress Agency on your SmartPhone

Being a digital agency.

For those born before 1990, it may seem like a fantasy world in which you can run a medium-sized successful WordPress agency from your phone.

The world is a different place now: The cloud pervades everything we do, location is irrelevant and “there is an app” for everything you need to run a digital agency, or any other information-based service company.

The old-world of crummy offices, local networks and desktop computing is past – replaced by cool drop-in work hubs, 4G and device-independent applications. The new working model is more agile, lower cost (sort of) and suits our new flexible lifestyles.

Not all companies, or even agencies, take advantage of this way of working – many still adhere to working practices founded during the industrial revolution that revolve around fixed assets, places and working practices.

We do use apps and cloud, and this is how we use them to devastating affect:

We live in a world of cloud applications.

Every service, application and function we use is both based in the cloud and device-independent. That means we have access to everything from everywhere. And here, in all their glory is a sample of what we use (clickable links included):

Toggl - Team Timekeeping Buffer - Social Media Management Penelope - Virtual Phone PBX in the cloud Quickbooks Accounting DropBox Storage for big stuff (1TB) Pingdom - Server, application and service monitoring and alerting Zendesk - State of the Art client service ticketing application Slack Team Communications and intranet/library/knowledgebase/watercooler Gmail - Mail and other Google services including Calendars and Contact Management Apple Pay - Expenses, Tubes and all contactless payments Personal Notes - Off/Online Sync Basecamp Project Management Open Calendar, accesses Google Calendars Skype for international calls IFTTT - Business automation and app integration Uber, cabs outside central London Maps so we don't get lost Tube Map with live updates (useful during the strike season) Speedtest - chasing the fastest WiFi or 3/4G connection Cabs in central London Premier Inn - we stay at the value chain, paid automatically expenses Trainline for train travel, automatically billed PayPal for clearing into our banks and expense claims AMEX for paying all services in a single place (with cashback options!) Bank LastPass password and MFA security Authenticator for token-based MFA

That covers every aspect of our agency business. Comprehensively if you include browser access to other services.

If you rolled the clock back to when we founded in 1996, you’d have found us living in a hardwired world, with slow data links and a lot of Excel spreadsheets – today we don’t even use spreadsheets, as their will be an app that does the job better and will be more integrated with our other systems.

We started adopting apps with the launch of the iPhone 3G in 2008, first it was Basecamp followed shortly by Google Mail. Since then every core function of the business has been moved to the cloud and is now supported by apps. This also fitted our pivot from being a traditional web development company into an agile WordPress digital agency. Boy, that was lucky.

This for us, has translated into 100% independent working – independent of device, independent of location. It means we don’t need offices, commuting, desktops or even laptops (many folks still choose to use them but they have the choice). We can work where, when and however we choose – that also means we attract top talent that doesn’t want to work in a fixed manner and have the skills and ability to work from anywhere.

But it doesn’t stop here. In 1996 we were cutting edge and have continued to evolve to this day. We have strong ideas of what’s happening next, but that’s for another day. In the meantime if you have any questions about how we use and link all the apps together then drop us a line.