I'm not foolish enough to think that the entirety of WordPress' growth is driven by our love for the software, but that we consultants are responsible for a sizeable portion of it. A portion that shouldn't be ignored and one that should be welcome to the discussion more often.

Under-represented. Perhaps.

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I know many of you are like me, we don't run 100+ person agencies, we don't have 1mil+ plugin downloads, and we haven't been contributing code to core for the last decade. However, what we do share in common is a life of servicing customers in the online business space. Servicing customers or our local community by way of building websites -- helping organizations amplify their message.

This act of service is deeply rooted in using our favorite tool, WordPress.

Sure, we're talking less and less about the tech side of things lately, but we know that it delivers a massive advantage as a platform to our customers. An advantage that might not matter to them in the short-term, but in the long-term sustainability of their business.

While many might join the ranks of offering WordPress services simply for the fact that it represents a big market to cash in on -- and we all know that person -- I believe many of us are in it for the right reasons: * Promote the use of open source software. * Give our customers a chance to own a sliver of their online presence and/or data. * Provide a flexible & sustainable platform for future opportunity. * Earn an honest living through service.

It's at this point where I begin to disagree with a part of Matt Mullenweg's theory of WordPress' growth. Granted, he has a WAY better vantage point from atop a tower of data that I (we) don't have access to. I'm relying on my own gut instinct, naivety, and feedback from my audience to deliver this message -- take it for what it's worth.

Who is responsible for all of this WordPress? A business can't survive without strong sales & customer service, two competencies that are arguably the lifeblood of a company.

Many of you reading this fill that exact gap for the open source WordPress project. I don't mean this as a slight to the thousands of wonderful people that build the software, document it, and support it in the forums, but that consultants (doing it right or wrong) are also fueling this locomotive too.

There are no official sales or customer service channels at WordPress.org and us consultants bear the brunt of it -- for better or worse -- and that's where our job comes in. Just as you trust a core contributor to spot-check her code and ensure that we've sanitized all the things!

Consultants are the boots on the ground, and as you'll see below in my feedback section, represent a disproportionate ratio of launching many more websites than an individual website owner. Mullenweg alludes to the end-user (what I'm calling the solo site owner) as the driving force behind growth. He might (probably does, can we have it please?) have more data than me, but on the flip side, it might be a vanity metric. If you count all the 1-click installs on GoDaddy or .com installs, perhaps, but how many of them were influenced or eventually turned to a professional to take over the reigns?

Just back-of-the-napkin math, a consultant might launch 50-to-1 websites in a year versus an individual blogger or business owner launching their first and only website. What happens when that number compounds over 5 years? On paper, I'm responsible for 500+ WordPress sites in the wild not counting the hundreds of other people online and in my local community I've influenced over the years.

I'm sure you're in a similar boat as an individual or team that is responsible for the growing adoption of WordPress.

Thank you for that. Thank you to everyone else that makes this project possible.

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