Run an Agency On Purpose

We picture this scene together: coffee in hand, morning air, and a quiet moment before the inbox fills up. That calm space is where we can ask better questions about our work and our vision, and our goals. This is the spirit behind agency purpose, not by accident. In this post, we walk through the ideas from a session with Kurt Vonahnen, educator for agency owners, and we explore what it really means to build a WordPress-powered agency with intention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_kk7XCP2ugk

Welcome to Living the Agency Life

Kurt opens in a simple but powerful way: he steps outside to talk about agency life because he knows many of us business owners spend most days inside an office. The message is clear. Before we grind through projects, we should step back and decide what our vision and goals are for this agency journey.

He frames this training as a conversation, not a stiff slide deck. We are here to enjoy the process, be honest about where we are, and get serious about our agency’s purpose and where we want to go.

Most Of Us Start Agencies By Accident

Kurt often kicks off his talks with a quick poll.

1. He asks a room of professionals to raise their hands if they think they are good at what they do.
2. Almost every hand goes up.
3. Then he asks how many wanted to be a digital agency owner when they were in third, fourth, or fifth grade.
4. This time, no hands go up, only a few laughs and some uneasy smiles.

We can relate. Many of us never planned on running a marketing agency or e-commerce-focused agency. We just began to specialize in something, picked up a few clients, and suddenly found ourselves running a business.

Very few agency owners grow up dreaming of “I want to run a WordPress agency” the way kids say they want to be firefighters or pilots. That honesty matters because it sets up the central question of this whole training.

Imagine If You Did It On Purpose

The key idea is simple and a little uncomfortable:

If we are already decent at this by accident, how good could we be if we did it on purpose?

Kurt challenges us to picture a different path to agency growth.

• We study the agency framework of how agencies actually run before we scale the agency.
• We build systems and processes instead of winging it.
• We treat agency ownership as a clear goal, not just something that happened to us.

He promises to stay transparent throughout the course, in lessons, masterminds, and office hours. He is open about wins and mistakes, because this is about real agency work, not a highlight reel.

From Accidental Agency Owner To Open Book

Kurt does not pretend he planned any of this. He says it outright: he fell into running an agency.

His background was in very different fields. He worked in automotive, powersports, and marine industries. He even helped marine dealerships improve their business results. Nothing about that path screams “future WordPress agency owner.”

What changed was exposure and responsibility. Over the years, he:

• Led office hour mastermind calls for LifterLMS, helping agency owners launch and improve eLearning projects.
• Worked with WP Tonic, a business that supports agencies with WordPress hosting and plugin stacks.
• Contributed to WP Minute, sharing conversations with others in the WordPress and agency space.

Through those roles, he saw behind the curtain of many agencies. The pattern kept repeating, reflecting an agency culture where most had also “fallen into” the work. They were specialist experts, but very few started with a clear, intentional plan for business development.

A High School Room That Changed Everything

The turning point for this training came from a local high school in Kansas. The school hosted a career day and invited around 50 businesses. Students chose which sessions they wanted to attend.

Kurt went as an agency owner. To his surprise, about 60 students picked his room to hear about how he built his agency. That level of interest was the first sign that a younger generation might want to run agencies on purpose, seeing the powerful agency proposition of scalable freedom and real-world impact.

The school also had IT classes, so he expected a basic level of tech awareness. This made his next questions even more important.

Kurt kept the talk casual, almost like a TED-style session, with only about 20 minutes to work with. Instead of burying students in slides, he asked questions to get them involved.

First, he asked, “How many of you have heard of WordPress?” Since WordPress powers a huge share of the web, he thought at least half the room would respond.

Out of 60 students, only two hands went up.

Next, he asked, “How many of you know what open source is?” This time, not a single hand went up.

That moment lit a fire. If students who chose an agency session, who attend IT classes, have barely heard of WordPress or open source, how can they ever build agencies on purpose? Without this basic market awareness, they’ll struggle with agency positioning and face serious hurdles in client acquisition.

WordPress, Open Source, And Real Control

Kurt takes time to explain why this gap matters.

WordPress is built on open source. That means the core software is available to everyone, and we all have access to the code. At the time of his talk, WordPress powered around 43% of the internet. It is the backbone of countless sites, from small blogs to major e-commerce and eLearning platforms that drive agency services.

With open source WordPress:

• We can host sites where we want.
• We can change or extend the code.
• We can build, sell, and package solutions around it.

This is very different from platforms like Wix or Squarespace. With those, we are renting space and tools from a company that keeps tight control over the software. With WordPress, we hold the keys. That control is what lets digital agencies specialize in building real products, automation workflows, and long-term client solutions with top performance.

LifterLMS, where Kurt has spent years helping agencies, lives in this open-source space. Their knowledge base has hundreds of articles covering everything from getting started with the core plugin to building courses, quizzes, memberships, and certificates to handling payments through Stripe, PayPal, WooCommerce, Authorize.Net, and more. There are sections dedicated to reporting, assignments, advanced quizzes, groups, private areas, and themes like LaunchPad and Sky Pilot. That depth reflects the kind of work modern agencies can do with WordPress, especially when they build serious eLearning projects.

If people outside our bubble do not even know this world exists, they cannot choose it on purpose.

Why Lack Of Awareness Holds Future Agencies Back

When someone has never heard about WordPress or open source, they cannot see the path to becoming an agency owner, including finding clients. They might think the only options are a few hosted site builders or social media profiles.

They also miss the community that forms around open source projects. They do not see meetups, WordCamps, Slack groups, and office hours where agency owners share processes for working with clients and help each other drive agency growth.

Without that visibility, a future agency owner may still end up here, but only by chance. Kurt’s point is that we can do better. We can show people, early on, that agency life is a valid and attractive option, whether they care most about a marketing agency focused on SEO and PPC, AI-powered content workflows, or full eLearning ecosystems.

This Training Is About Agency Ownership On Purpose

Kurt sets a clear expectation for this series. It is not a software tutorial course.

We are not walking through “click‑here, then click‑there” guides for:

• Building a full site with LifterLMS.
• Connecting an email list with tools like FluentCRM.
• Setting up automation rules step by step.

Those topics are valuable, and many platforms, including LifterLMS, already have detailed tutorials, developer docs, and troubleshooting guides for tools, integrations, and themes. The training here sits one level higher. It is about agency operations, running the agency strategically.

We look at the big picture of business structure:

• How do we use tools like WordPress, LifterLMS, and other plugins as building blocks for agency services and products?
• How do we slot AI, marketing automation, and YouTube content into our offers without turning every job into chaos?
• How do we treat eLearning, membership sites, and client portals as ongoing relationships in working with clients, not one-off builds?

The focus is on doing this on purpose, with intention and structure.

What We Will Explore Together

Kurt gives a preview of the topics that shape real agency life. Over the coming lessons, he plans to address questions like:

• What does it actually mean to be an agency?
• How big do we need to be before we call ourselves an agency?
• Do we hire full-time employees, contractors, and offshore partners when hiring the right people?
• How do we set up agreements with hosting companies?
• In what way do we negotiate with customers when working with clients so both sides feel respected and aligned with our core values?
• How do we manage conflict when projects go off track?
• What systems and processes do we use for project management?
• How do we delegate tasks with effective leadership and time management without dropping details?
• How do we check quality before anything reaches a client?

Each of these topics ties back to doing the work with intention, driving client retention through successful agreements and hand-offs. When we ignore them, everything stays reactive. When we address them, we create a base that can support complex builds, from simple brochure sites to full membership and e-commerce portals.

What Most Agencies Are Missing

One of the sharpest insights comes from Kurt’s consulting work with other agencies, often through LifterLMS office hours or WordPress hosting partners.

He noticed that many agencies, including very talented teams, lack basic systems and processes. They often:

• Do not have a real project management system.
• Do not follow a clear delegation process.
• Do not map the life cycle of a client contract from first call to renewal.

Instead, they improvise. They “wing it” because work keeps showing up and they have to respond.

Here is a simple view of the gaps he sees and the impact they have on performance:

Common Agency Gaps:

• Impact on the Business
• Clear project management,
• Missed deadlines,
• Confused priorities
• Delegation
• Process Bottlenecks around one or two key people,
• Issues with leadership
• Hiring the right people
• No contract
• Life cycle map for working with clients
• Scope creep
• Awkward renewals and hand-offs
• Poor client retention
• Little quality assurance
• Rework
• Client frustration
• Damaged reputation

Many of these agencies are still “pretty good” from the outside. They build sites, connect tools, maybe even set up automation and AI-assisted content workflows. But they are often doing it by habit, not by design. That is where we have a real chance to stand out.

How To Get The Most From This Journey

Kurt closes his opening talk with a direct invitation.

If we are even a little introspective and we sense that agency life might be for us, then we should treat this course like a serious opportunity. He suggests that we:

• Take each lesson seriously, not as background noise.
• Do the quizzes, because testing our understanding helps us apply ideas, not just hear them.
• Take notes on concepts that hit home, especially core values around process, contracts, and client communication.
• Join discussions if community calls, mastermind groups, or office hours are part of the program to build agency culture.
• Share questions, problems, and ideas (as specialist experts) that might help other students and agency owners.

This is very much in line with how tools like LifterLMS are structured. Courses include quizzes, reporting, and engagement tools like certificates and achievements to keep people moving. Good platforms track progress and performance while supporting different learning paths. As agency owners, we can learn from that same mindset. We do not just consume content. We build a path, follow it, and measure our performance.

Start Your Agency Life On Purpose

We started with coffee outside and a simple check-in about where our careers are heading. If we are already doing decent work by accident, it is worth asking how far we can go by doing it on purpose with a clear agency purpose.

This training is an invitation to build an intentional digital agency, one that uses WordPress, open source, SEO and PPC, automation, AI tools, and eLearning platforms as core agency services supported by a solid agency framework instead of guesswork. It is about community, communication, education, and yes, a bit of entertainment along the way.

We can keep doing what we have always done, or we can step into the next lessons ready to change how we run our agency through focused business development. The choice is ours.