I wake up every day at 5am. Not to work. That comes later. The first two hours of my day are mine and have nothing to do with WordPress.
I hydrate, do some quick exercises, then spend the time learning French, reading, studying. All before the rest of my household gets up at 7am.
Then there is an hour of getting three kids fed, dressed, and out the door to school.
By the time I actually get to my office and open my laptop, my agency has already been running for hours.
Emails sorted. Client sites checked. Security monitored. A full briefing sitting on my desk telling me exactly what needs my attention today.
I didn’t hire anyone to do this.
I built it.
Table of Contents
The Reason I Wanted to Build This System
I run a WordPress agency. Over 100 client sites and I do this mostly on my own.
If you run any kind of solo business, you already know the feeling. You sit down to work and before you have done anything useful, an hour has gone. Emails. Notifications. Plugin alerts. A client asking why something looks weird on their site. Three things you forgot from yesterday that are now urgent. The list is never ending.
The actual work, the stuff that grows your business and helps your clients gets pushed to “later.” And later never comes because there is always more noise.
I’d had enough of it.
So I started exploring ways that I could connect tools together to handle the things that do not need me sitting there doing them manually.
What Is Actually Running My Agency
I’ll try and be as specific as possible here because saying “I use Ai in my business” is meaningless today. Who doesn’t?
What I ‘m doing though is different, I’m connecting it to things that actually matter.
I’m running Claude through an open-source tool called OpenClaw. It sits on its own Apple Macbook and can do anything a person can do at a Macbook. It connects to my email, my client sites, my task system, and my content pipeline. It doesn’t just sit there waiting for me to ask it something. It’s proactive and it runs on a schedule. It checks things overnight. It reports back in the morning.
So here’s what that actually looks like before I get to work.
4am – ‘Bill’ my Ai bot assistant scans WordPress news, SEO trends, Reddit discussions, and industry newsletters. It pulls out anything relevant, drafts social media posts based on what I actually worked on yesterday, and writes a daily lesson – one thing I can teach my audience that day. All saved and ready.
5:30am – My daily brief gets compiled and sent to my Telegram. Today’s priorities pulled from my task system. Calendar commitments. Weather. Latest news that interests me. Exchange rates (I live in France, work in GBP and have US clients too). Plus any client emails that came in overnight, all summarised with recommended actions. I don’t need to read 30 emails every morning now – I read one briefing and I’m all caught up.
7am – Client site monitoring runs. If something needs attention, I’ll know about it.
7:30am – A second email inbox gets sorted. This one handles plugin notifications, backup alerts, security scans, form submissions across 100+ sites. Noise gets archived automatically. Anything that actually needs attention gets flagged and sent to me to handle.
Claude and OpenClaw have just catapulted my productivity so I’m no longer wasting time on tasks that used to eat my mornings.
By the time I sit down, the noise is handled. And that changes everything.
So what am I doing with all this free time?
For years I’ve been offering hosting and maintenance. I make sure the sites are online, kept up to date, I make sure nothing breaks and send a report at the end of the month. It pays the bills but nobody gets excited about it. Not me, not the client.
Now I am building something different. A growth service for my existing clients. Instead of just keeping their site alive, I want to make it work harder for their business. Get them more visibility, more leads, more reasons to see their website as an investment and not just a cost.
And ‘Bill’ my Ai assistant helps here too. It pulls Search Console data so I can see which pages are close to ranking. It flags which sites need the most attention. It helps me write content, research competitors, and spot opportunities I would have missed when I was buried in plugin updates.We
One client went from an invisible website to ranking on page one for their key terms. Not because I got smarter. Because I finally had time to offer this service.
So the new system will be, WordPress handling the client sites. Go HighLevel handling my CRM, automations, and follow-ups. Claude and OpenClaw handling the operational tasks.
Three tools. Connected and me steering the ship
Go HighLevel is going to play an even bigger role as I start using it to reach out to clients with these new services. But that is a story for another post.
Where’s This All Going
Doubling my monthly recurring revenue is just the starting point. First, I am building growth plans for my existing clients. Then I am going after businesses who are not my clients yet – offering them hosting, maintenance, web development, and growth services, all backed by the same system.
The goal is to systemise everything. Every part of the business that can be automated, connected, or made smarter – will be.
Follow the journey
I am documenting all of this inside WP Odyssey. How I am building it, what works, what breaks, and what I learn along the way. If you want to see where WordPress, AI, and automation can take a one-person agency, come and follow along. It is free.
I am documenting the whole journey of building a smarter WordPress agency. Join WP Odyssey for free and follow along.