Building YIKES, Inc. with Tracy Levesque

Billable Hours

In this episode I talk to Tracy Levesque about her agency YIKES, Inc. We cover a lot of important and interesting topics, such as diversity and inclusion. YIKES truly stands out by being a deeply ethics-based business, by being a certified B corp, a certified Womens' Business Enterprise and a certified LGBT Business Enterprise amongst other things. We can all learn a lot from YIKES and I'm excited to publish my interview with Tracy.

Links

• YIKES, Inc.
• Tracy on Twitter
• A Diverse WordPress Twitter list

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Transcript of this episode (automatically generated)

Today, I'm really excited to welcome Tracy Levesque onto the show. Tracy is the co-founder of YIKES, a web design and development agency out of Philadelphia. YIKED truly stands out by being a deeply ethics based business, and we'll unpack what that means, by being a certified B Corp, a certified women's business enterprise and a certified LGBT business enterprise amongst other things, we can all learn a lot from YIKES.
And I'm excited to dive into today's interview with Tracy. You can find Tracy on Twitter at LilJimmi and YIKES on yikesinc.com. Before we begin the episode, I want to tell you a bit about Branch. Branch is my business, and the sponsor of this podcast. It's the simplest way to set up automated deployments for your WordPress sites.
We've got your back with recipes for all the common workflows that WordPress developers need. Making it super easy and fun, honestly, to build out your deployment pipelines. It's continuous integration and deployment without the learning curve and it's free to get started. So go check it out. And if you open up the live chat widget and identify yourself as a listener of this podcast will double the amount of free deployments on your account.
Yep. Twice as many deployments without paying, you can sign up for free on branchci.com. We started this episode with the history of YIKES. Back in the nineties. I started this company with my wife at the time and a friend of ours named Vicky. And so the three of us, we always did computer stuff for free, usually for non-profit organizations or groups that we're involved with.
And then we really bonded because really like computer stuff. And we all had a different skillset. And one day we were like, Hey, why don't we charge money for this? And that was it. Then when you started in the agency, you know, since that was a really long time ago, we went through a lot of different web technologies.
And in 2006 I had a baby and my wife Mia started a blog for the baby on WordPress. And also during that time, we were trying out different CMS and we didn't really like any of them. And then I started to hack away at WordPress for the baby blog. And realized that I really liked it. I probably did everything really, really wrong.
Cause it was the first time using WordPress, but in 2010 around, we became a exclusively, a WordPress. So we only do WordPress. Now, what were you doing before? Word press? Do you remember? We've tried everything from like OS commerce, Mambo, Joomla expression engine. All the different PHP, frameworks and stuff called fusion.
We did a lot of cold fusion work and we made custom CMS. So everything under the sun. Really? Yeah. That's cool. It's rare to see like an agency with this seniority or like the age of your agency, I think from your website, you started the same year that I started in school. So quite a long time ago, when you think about it through a couple of recessions, a couple of.com collapses.
Yeah, that's cool. So what the company looked like today, we are a WordPress VIP agency partner. So we do a lot of enterprise work, which is really super fun, but we've always stayed with our non-profit roots, probably over half. Our clients are non-profits and our biggest client is a nonprofit they're out a client.
That's been with us since the very beginning, since the nineties. And so we're, you know, a very mission-based company or a triple bottom line company, meaning. Planet people and profit, not just profit. So while we've been doing more work in the enterprise space, we still committed ourselves towards doing really good work for nonprofits.
That's really cool. Yeah. I kind of wanted to talk a bit about the business. So you mentioned already, like the kind of customers that you have. So what I would love to know is more about what services you offer to them, or is it all like one-off projects or do you have. Any sort of recurring revenue or just kind of like a little bit about like the business model or like how the business works.
First. We do mostly agency work, see like 90% of our income comes from agency work and we also do some plugins. So we have about nine plugins in the directory. Combined or plugins tab over 200,000 active installs to those plugins, the most popular ones we have either pro versions of those or paid add-ons.
So that's fun. I was nervous to get into the plugin world is I just imagine like lots of angry people sending mean tickets, but it's really fun actually. So a former employee talked me into it cause he was really into plugins. I'm like, okay. And I'm like, Oh my gosh, you have to do all this infrastructure.
We have to become knowledge base. We have to make platform. People buy the plugins and licensing and all this stuff and pay sales tax, which you don't have to do, you know, for an agency. And it's really fun. It's like there is way more people that are happy for your plugin and happy that your plugin helps them do their job or accomplish whatever it is then.
I mean people out there and they're going to be super mean in the forums or mean, and tickets. And it's just really satisfying. It is different, like selling a $30 plugin versus a hundred thousand dollars website. But I don't know, I guess the volume of customers and the positive feedback you get back.
And also when you go to work camp and people are like, Oh, I use your plugin. I love it. You know, I don't know. It's nice. It's fun. Um, so that's one, but it's a really tiny part of our business, but it's just a nice recurring revenue. It pays the rent, you know, and like utilities and things like that. I mean, that's awesome.
If you get it to that point, is it connected to the business in any other way? Like, did you use the plugins for customers websites or is it just slowly like another side thing? Or like, how do you think about it? I think about it as I'm not a side thing because it's part of the business, but it's something I definitely want to grow, you know, and develop more plugins.
And every year, you know, that recurring revenue goes up because people then renew their licenses. So that's a nice part. It, I love seeing this upward line of recurring revenue. So if it can pay for itself in that way or even make a profit, that's good. That's one leg of the business. And then the rest of it is like a traditional agency.
So we do projects. So client will come to us and like, we'll do a project for them from beginning to end, beginning to development launch. Sometimes they have like, you know, recurring services with us. Um, our biggest client, they pay us monthly on retainer to do everything for the...