DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019:Making support the backbone of your business

Room: Auditorium
Presenter: Anthony Lindsay, Stella Power
Description: Is this you?

"Support isn't where we're focused. It's boring. We don't need it. We're pushing the boundaries, building new and innovative projects, reaching for the sky... and our cashflow and sales pipeline sucks."

Well, you might be surprised to learn that:

* Supporting existing clients makes sense.

* It's steady, predictable work.

* It maintains profitable relationships with household names who bolster your brand.


Finding new projects is expensive, whilst retaining current clients provides the financial stability necessary for growth. As support work is predictable, your revenue stream becomes more predictable, allowing you to plan for the future and weather the ups and downs of project work.

Often support seems to play second fiddle to major project work when, in fact, it can actually turn a financially disadvantageous project into a very profitable one. Taking this further, one can develop an entirely new revenue stream based solely on supporting projects that have not even been built by your own agency.

We'll talk about how you can, and should, put a serious focus on support in all its guises, from maintenance tasks, to ongoing development and continuous delivery, and all the way to emergency disaster recovery.

We'll explore why it is important for your business and how you can grow the service so that it is not merely providing a backup to new project builds, but becoming a primary service itself.

Lastly we'll show that at a human level, it is a rewarding place to be, offering endless opportunities for continuous professional and personal development.

Learn About:

* managing multiple projects
* keeping clients happy
* billing
* security updates
* testing
* the business case for repeatable business
* standardisation
* monitoring
* alerts
* maintaining a happy, healthy team

This session is aimed at people running/managing or thinking of starting their own agencies. You may be already working on offering your clients support. You may be looking for another revenue stream for your business. If you're interested in hearing all about making support work for your business, this is the place to be.

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