Live vanaf Laracon EU spreken we met Pete Heslop, algemeen directeur van Steadfast Collective en officiële Laravel Partner.
Pete deelt lessen over het runnen van een Laravel-bureau van elf mensen, waarom hij tien mensen een gezonde bureaugrootte vindt en welke uitdagingen ontstaan wanneer je doorgroeit. Ook vertelt hij over de stap van ontwikkelaar naar algemeen directeur en waarom bureaus vaak moeilijker zijn dan ze van buiten lijken.
Welcome to the Dutch LE Foundation podcast. This one is for you. Broadcasting live from 2026. Let you >> lovely. >> Yeah. So, good morning. >> Morning. >> Yeah. And who who are you? >> Yeah. So, I'm Pete Hesop. Um I'm the managing director at Steadfast Collective. We're a Laravel partner and I'm speaking day two. >> Oh, you're a speaker as well? Yeah, I'm speaking on day two. >> Okay, cool. And what are you speaking about? >> I'm speaking about real world UX. So about uh the lessons we can learn from Yeah, the lessons we can learn from hospitality, airports, hospitals, and what we can bring into our code bases from that. >> Yeah. And is it is it your first time talking on the stage like this or do you do >> No, I've spoken at a few conferences, not not a laron. Um this is quite a big room. Um but it' be good. It's also a non-technical talk. So between all the really deep technical talks, it'll be some light relief. Okay. And are you nervous about it or? >> Uh, it'll be good as long as I can keep my voice. >> Oh, yeah. Yes. >> I shouldn't have gone out quite as late last night. >> Oh, that's great. So, uh, what do you do for work?
Yeah, so I run a Laravel agency. Um, I used to be a developer. Uh, now my job is very much emails. Um, so I manage the team and make sure they're all happy and our clients are happy and that kind of stuff. >> And how big is your uh, >> 11 people? >> Oh, all right. Right. Yeah. 11 people across the UK. >> Um and then when I have some spare time, I I wrote the book. >> Yeah. What do you think about agency of that size? Is it Yeah. just that you can be a little bit more flexible sometimes or is it just is it too small or is it too large for you? What what what are the ideas about that? >> So my my thoughts on agency are I think 10 is a great size. I think if you want to go bigger, you need to go much bigger. you need to jump to 20 25 because you start introducing so many non-billable people like head of accounts and that kind of stuff and head of people and they're all non-billable. So you need to be billing a lot more to make it worthwhile. So I feel like you need to be either 10 >> or 20. >> All right. Yeah. So I have an agency with seven people and and we're just at the amount of that that we say yeah we need to add a little bit more of billable people to generate more like a good margin on thing. So >> agency stuff. Yeah, >> it's a tough model.
Yeah. I thought, well, with an agency, I'm going to be rich and famous and stuff like that, but >> agencies are hard. Agencies are really hard. >> Yeah. H and I only found out 5 years that I'm in the agency that it's a hard thing to do. So, you also mentioned that uh you have uh written a book. >> Yeah. So, you have it here. Can can you tell something about it to the audience as well? >> Yeah. So last year I started writing a very long blog post um called Laravel for the rest of us and the idea was it would be just a non-technical guide to Laravel for our clients. Yeah. >> That turned into an ebook and then you know I was like I'm really pleased with this. So I talked to a few of the Laravel team members over in uh Denver um at Laracon last year and they were like yeah it's good. You should you should print it and we'll help you work on it. So Taylor wrote us a forward. Uh James Brooks wrote us a nice quote and and lots of other folk and all the profits for the book go straight to Larabel's. >> So we make we make no money. All the money goes straight to Susanna and what she's doing.
And um yeah, we're really proud of it. Um so yeah. >> And you sold a lot of books in the Netherlands as well. >> Yeah. More than anywhere else. I I I have no idea why, but like um the Netherlands I get I get orders for like five at a time uh on on a regular basis. >> But it's also a good present for for Yeah. For like your manager. Like your manager's like, "Why is the queue broken?" and you're like, "Well, here's a book about why cues break." >> It's a little bit larger than uh convince your PDF your boss PDF. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. It's nice and it's pretty and it's nice to look through and it's not too heavy and you can get through it in a couple of hours. It's not It's not crazy, but cuz it's printed, it feels a bit more like of substance than just being like, "Here's an ebook." Cuz no one's going to read an ebook. >> No. No. Not anymore. No. >> Exactly. >> No. That's good. >> Or maybe they listen to the podcast as well. >> Yeah. So, we do a bunch of videos around this as well. So, I run a YouTube video. uh YouTube channel which we talk a lot about Laravel and Stripe >> YouTube channel >> Steadfast Collective the name of the agency and then we're we're currently doing a series based on each chapter on this. So if you don't want to read things and you want to watch things YouTube >> All right, great. And where can I order the the book?
Laravel for the rest of us.com. But you can keep that one. >> I can keep that one. >> Of course you can. >> Okay, that's great. >> Yeah. >> Okay, thanks uh Pete. Well, I wish you good luck tomorrow. >> Thank you. And uh hopefully uh our audience as well uh can share it here or uh at the live stream as well. Absolutely. So I say good luck tomorrow. Thank you. Thank you much for having me. >> Okay, there we go. >> Welcome to the Dutch Foundation podcast. This one is for you.