I buy WordPress client books.

Specifically, I buy the part of your business you've come to hate: the hosting, the care plans, the support requests, the sites you built years ago that still call you.

Here's who I usually end up talking to.

• You took a full-time job in the spring and you're still doing plugin updates at night for eleven people who found you through a friend.
• You quoted hosting at $20 a month in 2017 and you have never once raised it.
• The design work is going fine, and it would go better if you weren't losing nine hours a week to support tickets that pay $75.
• One of them got hacked, you fixed it for free over a weekend, and you've been quietly afraid of the other thirty ever since.
• You want to go do something else, and the only thing actually stopping you is that these people trust you.

That last one is the real one. Almost nobody calls me because they want money. They call me because they can't stomach the idea of sending thirty small businesses an email that says good luck, and they've quietly concluded the only honorable option is to keep doing it forever.

It isn't. You can hand the accounts to someone who does this all day, the clients keep getting service from an actual person, and you get paid every month for as long as they stay. That's the whole pitch and there isn't a second half to it.

What taking it over looks like

I take the accounts, the hosting, the support inbox, and the billing. Clients get a real introduction on each account rather than a mass email announcing that you've sold them, and we write that introduction together before anyone hears anything. Most of the time the honest version is also the best one: you're focusing on design work, you brought in a partner for the ongoing stuff, here's who to call now.

Then I migrate everything onto our infrastructure at my expense, on my clock. You don't clean anything up first. The books I look at are usually a mix of three page builders, two hosts, a domain registered to an email address nobody can get into anymore, and at least one site running PHP 7.4. That's normal. It's not a reason to discount anything and it's definitely not a reason for you to spend a weekend fixing it before we talk.

How the money works

Nobody writes a single large check for a book of informal month-to-month relationships, and you should be suspicious of anyone who says they will, because that offer tends to evaporate around week six of diligence. What actually closes looks like this:

• A fixed amount at signing, for the domains, the records, the brand if you want to sell it, and the introductions.
• Then a share of what each transferred account actually pays me, every month, for a defined term with a cap. This is where most of the value is. If a client sticks around three years, you get paid on three years of that client.
• It's measured on the services in place the day we transfer. Anything I sell them later is mine, and you're never asked to guarantee retention or hit a number after you've walked away.
• Ninety days of your time for introductions and context on the strange ones. That's the entire ask. No consulting agreement, no non-compete on design work.

The structure exists because it's the only fair way to price something whose value depends on people neither of us controls. It also means a small book is worth having a conversation about, where a broker would tell you to come back when you're at half a million in revenue.

What I don't need from you

Every one of these has come up as a reason somebody assumed their book was unsellable:

• Audited financials
• A signed agreement with every client, or with any client
• A clean P&L
• A team, a broker, or a data room
• A growth story
• Rankings, traffic, or domain authority

What I do need is a spreadsheet of who pays what and how often. That's the real diligence list, and if you have it in a Stripe export you're already done.

Roughly what a book like yours is worth

Three questions, and you get a range without sitting through a discovery call. It's a range and not an offer, and I'd rather it read a touch low than have you anchored somewhere I can't get to.

Things people ask on the first call

None of my clients have signed anything.

Almost none of them ever have. Every second person apologizes for this and it isn't a problem. It changes how the deal is structured, not whether there is one.

What if clients leave after the handoff?

Some will, and both of us know that going in, which is exactly why you're paid on what accounts actually pay rather than on a multiple of a spreadsheet. You will never be asked to write money back.

I only have eight sites.

Small books are often the cleanest and they close in weeks instead of months. If yours is genuinely too small to structure properly, I'll say so on the first call instead of stringing it along.

I'm marking up hosting. Do I lose that margin?

No, it's part of what's being bought, so it counts toward what you're paid. Tell me what you charge and what you pay underneath it. Nobody's grading you on the markup.

Can I keep doing design work?

Please do. About half the people I talk to don't want out, they want out of one specific thing. You keep building and redesigning, I carry the ongoing management on what you've launched and on whatever you launch next, and you stop being a hosting company by accident.

I'm not ready, I just want to know what it's worth.

Then ask. Some of these conversations start a year before anything happens and a few of them end with me telling someone to double their care plan prices and keep the book, which is a perfectly good outcome.

M

Mat I've been building websites since 1997 and running WordPress since 2007, back when it was still mostly a blogging tool. My own clients have been on care plans since 2011. Staten Island, New York. About 300 sites under management, and I answer my own phone.

I was on Jeopardy! once. It has nothing to do with any of this, but people ask whether there's a real person behind these pages, so: yes, and there's footage.