What is the agency carousel, and how does true managed agency hosting help you get back on track? Can fully managed hosting help you resolve these problems? How exactly do you go about doing so? This post reviews how managed support makes your agency life significantly more manageable and far more flexible. This leads to happier customers and a more relaxed atmosphere for you and your team. Let’s get into it.
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What is the agency carousel?
The agency carousel explains the ongoing race to keep up with the ever-spinning wheel of billable hours, client, and staff turnover. The more client success you have, the more hours of work you tend to get. This inevitably stretches your current staff workload, leading you to recruit more staff. Unfortunately, you’ll seldom find yourself in a position where the additional staff output perfectly matches the extra hours required. This leads to one of two issues. One potential issue is your existing team members become highly stretched and work significant overtime. Alternatively, bringing on new team members forces you to look for even more clients and billable hours to cut down on wasted employee time.
Both burden your precious time and can lead to additional problems. If your staff members are overworked for too long, they get burnt out and may eventually move on from your agency. This is particularly painful when the person in question is a long-standing senior and highly productive member of your team. On the other hand, having insufficient billable hours to cover the new hires will quickly strain your business. This quickly leads you to cut costs drastically or even let the new starter go.
The issue is that you’re again short on people and must stretch your existing staff to their limit and beyond. Not to mention that you have just wasted a ton of time and money recruiting and training. It’s a relentless, never-ending cycle. This is further accentuated when one or more clients decide to leave or cut their hours. Even when new or existing clients drastically increase their workload requirements, a good situation can become a problem.
Anyone who has worked in an agency will be familiar with the agency carousel and the burnout it can cause. So, what can you do about it?
True Fully-Managed Support to the rescue
The problem for many agencies is that the scope is rarely crystal clear. You often take on more than you can handle to help your clients and retain a good relationship. Creative, web design, or digital marketing agencies don’t tend to specialize in the technical side of hosting. Typically, you’ll partner with a development agency or external developer to assist. But what happens when your client already has an external solo developer? What’s worse is that said developer isn’t up to scratch and makes your agency look bad. You turn to your most technically competent in-house employee and get them to research something they may barely dabble in. This not only wastes their time on research that isn’t billable but often results in questionable results.
The ideal solution is to find technical experts who won’t cost you by the hour. Ideally, they specialize in the skillsets you lack and don’t use often. Enter RoseHosting!
Outsource Your Workload with True Fully-Managed Support
When your clients contact you, they expect an immediate response and a quick-fix solution that works. Your account managers handle client requests and communications while the rest of your team buckles down and gets to work. However, there are days when multiple clients contact you simultaneously, all requesting immediate results. This can quickly snowball and overburden your team. That’s where fully managed support comes in.
Firstly, you’ll always speak directly to a human being answering your chat request within a minute – typically within seconds. This enables you to respond to your clients instantly. Additionally, all our agency hosting comes with only level 3 support answering your requests. You can ensure your time isn’t wasted with AI or waiting to be transferred to a specialist. Everyone you talk to is a Linux engineer who can resolve your issues quickly and directly. Letting your clients know that a solution is being worked on buys you much-needed time.
This comes in clutch when multiple fires go off simultaneously. Giving your account managers more hands on deck ensures your client sites are operational and any installations or updates are actioned. Along with your internal team, this creates a stream of tasks that are getting done and quickly communicated to your clients. It’ll keep them happy and buy you valuable time.
If your client hosting with us hires a dozen new staff members who require their email setup – we’ll take care of it. They’re looking for a staging site for a Christmas campaign? No worries. We’ll install that for you as well. Your team can focus on the creative and the campaign work while we handle the technical elements, like installations and optimizations. You write up the eye-catching content and communicate it to your clients.
Cull Unnecessary Agency Hosting Expenses with Open Source Alternatives
Not only does every agency hosting plan include true fully-managed support for free, but it can also save you money. Most agencies use several paid software solutions. You need project and task management tools, email and file sharing, password managers, document editing and sharing tools, time tracking, and more. There are tools like Jitsi that replace your reliance on Zoom. Mattermost replaces Slack along with any privacy concerns. There are countless email alternatives to the costly GSuite and Microsoft platforms. No matter how you spin it, open-source solutions save you significant monthly recurring fees. Better still, as your team grows, the cost savings get bigger.
What’s more, open-source solutions save you a ton of money, and with a private agency hosting server, your data always remains yours. No one can get to your documents or your emails. People trying to hack Dashlane and LastPass don’t even know your server with Bitwarden or KeePass exists. A sudden company policy change from Google may put all GSuite users in a bind overnight, but your privately stored emails remain unphased. Typically, the only issue with open-source software is the technical know-how, but each agency hosting plan comes with fully-managed support.
You can even combine specific subscription tools like Ahrefs or Semrush, free, open-source tools like Google Analytics, and a free server-side open-source solution like Matomo. This will give you multiple sources to check in case something goes wrong, such as one source having a data-collection issue, making it easier to verify false positives.
Finally, the most significant advantage is that you can also roll this out to your clients. You can even host their sites on your servers or their very own VPS or dedicated server, entirely separate from yours. You can build good faith, keep them with you for longer, and make even more money.
Get an Additional Income Stream
RoseHosting offers your agency incredible flexibility when it comes to billing. All our servers can fit several websites, staging sites, microsites, and your applications and services of choice. The only limitation in what you can install on them is the physical server size. There won’t be any needless arbitrary limitations or overprovisioning with us. Simply tell us what you need installed and configured and we’ll take care of the rest.
As you grow accustomed to the many ways we can help your agency, you may decide that it’s a smart choice to move your clients to RoseHosting as well. This is the point where you have several options that can not only save you and your clients money, but that can make you an additional income stream. You can choose to go through our affiliate program, signing up all of your clients to their servers, having us take care of all the tech work, and retaining a 10% lifetime commission along with an immediate flat sum payout. Alternatively, you can get one or more servers for your clients and invoice them yourself however you see fit. We’ll still provide the same legendary tech support service with our cutting-edge enterprise equipment no matter what.
Get the Best Agency Hosting
What more is there to say? You can sign up to any one of our fully-managed Linux VPS or fully-managed dedicated servers or make an appointment with our sales team and see how we can give you a free VPS for your agency when you transfer your clients over.