Rahul Bansal, founder and CEO of rtCamp, shares lessons from 17 years of building an enterprise WordPress agency and explains how AI is reshaping the agency model. Key advice includes hiring people who complement your weaknesses rather than mirror your strengths, choosing clients who depend on your expertise, and niching down within WordPress (e.g., WooCommerce, payment gateways) rather than being a generalist. The most significant shift discussed is rtCamp's all-in AI mandate: if something can be done by AI, it will be. This is enabled by a unified open-source ERP stack (Frappe/ERPNext) that consolidates CRM, project management, and accounting into a single source of truth, allowing AI to cut operational costs dramatically. Proposal writing, lead qualification, data migration, and QA testing have all been accelerated. Rahul expects build costs to fall by 70% within two years, predicts WordPress will be a net winner from AI adoption, and is shifting rtCamp's hiring from engineers toward sales, marketing, and consulting roles.
