Sustainable growth is challenging a lot of Drupal agencies due to the volatile workload of the project businesse. Monthly overhead costs for staff, rent etc. face irregular revenue of projects. This requires a hunt for new projects on a monthly base - and takes a lot of energy and money. Building Drupal applications is a great base to add more value to your business by selling support contracts, to grow your recurring revenue and deliver continuous value for your clients who have built their online business with Drupal. Using the project business strategically to sell support contracts can help Drupal shops to grow fast and sustainable. In this session you will learn how to build a recurring revenue machine based on your project business!

1. Recurring revenue
in the Drupal business
Manuel Pistner
CEO of Bright Solutions & Founder of Drop Guard

2. Good & bad revenue
„Grow to death“
Profit counts, not revenue
Sustainable growth

3. Project Business is dangerous
• Hard to predict
• Hard to scale
• Little sustainable value
always too many projects or
too many employees

4. Passive income
Focus on
building
the system!
• Build a „revenue machine“
• Produce customer value

5. Recurring business model
Success can be transfered
to the next year
• Smaller chunks of revenue
each month
• Monthly recurring revenue
of
• Well predictable
existing customers

6. Strategical support business
Projects as strategy for
„Recurring Revenue“
• Support contracts (SLAs)
• Update contracts
• Retainer for development

7. How to organize support
• Dynamic support system
• 1 team member supports all projects for a week
• Reaction time 4 hours
• Plan 50% for other projects

8. Additional value
Provide value for clients during
the whole project live cycle
Hosting Monitoring Security updates
Payment gateways
Integration platforms

9. Convince customers
Team with know-how is on call
24/7 security by automated updates
Automated tests save a lot of time
Predictable resources for Agile
Advancement

10. Needs for automation
Monitoring
• Current Module Version
• Available Module Version, plus security level
Patching
• Regular Patching, Patch detection,
Composer, Git Submodules
• Failure Handling → Ticketing system
Git support
• Push into different Git branches based on
security level

11. Needs for automation
Testing
• Integration into Continuous Integration
System
Fully automated deployments
• Running Deployment tasks
Reporting
• Ticketing system

12. How to start immediately?
Hosting
Integrate tools for seamless workflows.
Support Team
Monitoring
Sell support SLAs

13. Build your recurring revenue machine
customer with project,
invested a lot of money
need for support
and security

14. Build your recurring revenue machine
support team
subscribes to Drupal security newsletter
keeps an eye on projects of support clients &
involves client into JIRA
reacts on available security updates

15. Build your recurring revenue machine
update available
installs update & commits
via Git repository
deploys on test instance
creates a ticket
support team member

16. Build your recurring revenue machine
update can
be tested
time consuming
support team member
informs client
creates ticket via JIRA
and sends test link

17. Build your recurring revenue machine
OK!
update deployment
on live server

18. Build your recurring revenue machine
done!
time required:

19. Solution?
Automate
every part of it!

20. Thank You!
manuelpistner
pistner@brightsolutions.de
manuel@drop-guard.net