Putting WordPress to Work
Carrie: Hello! Welcome to another episode of officehours.fm. I am ridiculously pleased to have back for maybe the third, fourth or fifth time my friend Chris Lema. Chris? Welcome back to the show.
Chris: It is great to be here. I think maybe third. I think that’s the right number but I could be wrong.
Carrie: Ok. Well, I could’ve been imagining all the times that I wanted you to come on but didn’t want to pester you.
Chris: Anytime.
Carrie: A lot of folks who listen to this podcast probably know you in the WordPress space or have seen you speaking at a WordCamp. You’re also a prolific blogger over at ChrisLema.com. Most recently you have taken on a new role with liquidweb. I guess you can call them a new player in the managed WordPress space. Can you give a quick rundown about what you are doing over there?
Chris: Sure. They are a long time, long existing hosting company and on of the serious players in the managed space. Whether you want you want managed Python or managed you know anything…they’ve tucked in cloud sites, wire tree and a handful of other companies as well. There are all sorts of technology over there. But you’re absolutely right. They haven’t really done a lot in the managed WordPress space. They started trying to navigate into that last year. At the very end of last year (in December) I joined as the VP of products to help with that managed WordPress product and to help broadly over R&D, product, and where we’re going as a company. It’s exciting. It’s been a lot of work and a lot of fun. I’m very excited for what happens over the next several months as we rollout this product.
Carrie: Cool! Well, I look forward to staying in tune to that. Chris? Every time I’m around you, you really just have to open your mouth and good words of wisdom fall out. You are the ultimate storyteller but today I was hoping for a story around freelancers and small business owners. We get stuck in seeing what our neighbors are doing, seeing what the next guy is doing and really just rolling out another version of the same thing that’s been done a million times over. That’s an ok place to start. You’ve got to start somewhere. I’d like to talk to you about how do you get out of that (I guess I’d call it a small mindset)? I don’t mean that in a derogatory fashion. How do you think bigger about the landscape of WordPress in business? How to we do more? There’s a big long, three paragraph-like question for you.
Chris: Yeah. We can totally talk about that. If we are going to talk about that, we need to talk about Branford Marsalis. Branford Marsalis is a jazz artist. If you’ve never heard him play jazz then you’re missing out. He’s an incredible artist. One of the most interesting things that I discovered about Branford is that…he said pretty much for every jazz musician ever out there, the thing they have to do first (the very first thing you’re doing with your instrument, whether it’s a saxophone, a tenor sax or anything else) is you learn what someone else before you has played. You learn all their riffs. You learn all the things they do. So imagine you pick up a trumpet. You’re like ok. I’m going to start playing the trumpet. You just don’t start playing the trumpet. You start playing Miles Davis trumpet. You start literally going ok what was he doing here? Now when Miles was doing it, Miles was doing his own riff, his own stuff, right? He was totally like wow! If you know Miles…it’s like there’s three, four or five Miles… a little bit like the two or three different Luther Vanderoffs (but that is totally different). Anyway, the point was, that when you are Branford Marsalis, you go and look at what Miles Davis was doing. You learn all the riffs. You learn all the notes. So he says you do it with your mouth. Even before you pick up the instrument you’re like…(mouths Trumpet do do dos). He’s just playing this stuff out. You’re going wait a minute. Are you saying that you were copying someone else? You’re a jazz great. It turns out he’s now a jazz great, but when he was just starting out he was copying someone else. You’re going to copy someone else? That’s horrible, right? He says no. You gotta know. You gotta know what their doing and you then you’ve got to pick it apart. You’ve got to see why it works. You’ve got to understand all the stuff. Then once you know, then you can veer off and do your own thing. So I have no problem with freelancers who are looking left and right, figuring it out. Oh my gosh! Cutis McHale, one of our friends is writing blog posts all the time. Then he’s like boom! I’m going to do a book. You’re like maybe I should do a book? Then he’s like as an add-on to the book, I’m going to do a couple videos that add to the book. So you can buy the book or you can buy the book plus videos. You’re like maybe I should do that? There’s nothing wrong with looking at what someone else is doing and internalizing some of it, picking it apart and figuring out what works. Why did I buy that book, right? Let’s be honest, how many of us have bought books or courses and we’ve never read them or watched them. I have a list of those. I’m like yeah…when I get some free time. I once took all the e-books I ever bought and never read and put them on an iPad. This iPad was the only iPad that I would take with me when I would take a week off sometime in the summer where all I do is read. So I said I’m going to catch-up and read over there. It’s true. I took the iPad and I did read like three of the ebooks that I hadn’t read before. I was like oh! I bought this like two years ago. But the other 237 ebooks that I had purchased and still had not read were still on the iPad. I never read them. I’m like Arrgh. At this rate, it’s going to take me hundreds of years to get through it. But the bigger question to ask is why did I buy it? Why did I buy it? What was it? There’s a ton of stuff I’ve never bought. So was it about our friends when they do something that you go…Brian Richards at WPSessions just sent an email saying hey! We have this new course. It’s a new thing that he’s going to do. Your like ah! Let’s say I bought it. Why did I buy it? What was it in the messaging? Let’s be clear, Brian Richards is not like the most amazing copyrighter on the planet but he did something. He said something. He wrote in a certain way. So by all means, if you’re a freelancer you should study what’s going on left and right. You should look at them. You should learn from the people before you. You should learn from people who actually make it work. Then you go ok. Let me internalize what’s working and what’s not working. Let me go figure out how do I veer off? My good friend, Syed Balki who runs WPbeginner, OptinMonster and MonsterInsights for Google analytics, Soliloquy for sliders and all that stuff…you watch. He goes and figures something out and it shows up on the website for OptinMonster. Then you’ll notice, once he got it locked in he goes and copies it over to Soliloquy and copies it over to MonsterInsights. All the sites start becoming very similar because he’s figured something out. You’d be moron if you were selling a product and you didn’t say let me go see what he’s doing and let me go figure it out. The problem is not looking at other people. The problem is not learning from other people. The problem is not copying someone else and figuring and breaking apart, deconstructing and analyzing it and figuring it out. That’s not the problem. The problem is when you stop there. When you stop at just copying someone else because you think it’s a quick buck, right? Let me just copy that woman or guy’s sales letter. Let me drop it in. Let me tweak a couple of words and let me reship it. Then you’re just a “me too”. Gosh! There are few things in the world that cause me to rant as much as people who are just in it for a quick diamond looking to just copy what someone else doing. They stop innovating on their own. Part of it is because those people started in a good place. You started in a place where you’re like I have skills. I want to help someone. This is cool. I’m making some money. Wow! I made some money but somehow that veers off into ooh! I can make some money. Then you start copying other people just to make the money. It’s the modern-day equivalent of a snake oil salesman when you’re like I know this may not work but it doesn’t matter. By the time they figure out it’s not going to work, they’re going to buy the e-book and never going to read it. By the time they read it (three years now) I’m often doing something else. There are people (thank God they’re not friends of ours) but there are people who launch a new plugin every year. They kill off the old plugin every year too. They’re constantly launching because that’s the move. They learn from someone launching is a big deal. So great you figured out how to launch. So now you launch and launch and launch and everyone is buying and buying and buying. But the moment that person needs help, you’re like I’m sorry. I’m on to my next product. Oh God that’s horrid because you took the wrong lesson. You took the wrong lesson. More often than not, the context is what counts. So we say things like oh it’s ok to copy someone else. What we mean is copy the motivation, right? Figure out what was Miles Davis doing in that riff? Ok. Once you understand what was the motivation for what he was doing, copy that motivation in your own context. Figure out your context and copy the motivation in your context but don’t copy the results. If Branford Marsalis goes up and grabs his trumpet and starts playing exactly what Miles Davis plays… your like excuse me? That song has already been done. You go oh my God! That’s insane! I worked for a start up years ago that spent (I’m not joking) $70,000 with a branding firm to figure out what their brand should be. What’s their brand? You and I know that as freelancers, we’re not to be a place where we can go and spend $70,000 to figure out my brand. But this company had just taken in money. They were like sure, we can do it. So they go and buy this company to come in and tell them what their brand is. You know what they ended up with? It was a 30-page document. I got to read it and it said we stand for integrity and quality. I went are you kidding me? Are you for real? You paid somebody $70,000? What company is raising their hand and saying I am for lying and I want shoddy work effort? This is insanity! Of course quality and integrity are important. We paid $70,000 for this? But it was a beautiful and was manicured. The document was gorgeous with all these little quotes and antidotes. You’re like you have got to be kidding me. Here’s the crazy thing. For as stupid as that sounds and every time I tell that story, people are like that’s just stupid. You’re like right, except that every one of the freelancers that we know all say the same things. Well you know there’s time, there’s quality and there’s everything you want. You can’t get all three, so pick one. You’re like shut up! I have never said I would like to spend more than I would like to spend. It has never happened. It’s never going to happen. Of course I have a budget. Of course I’m price conscious. With you telling me that you just need to spend…no. Give me a reason to spend. Create the compelling narrative that says this is what I want to do. By the way, the compelling narrative is not the question are you ready to invest in yourself? Everybody has used that in the 80s and 90s are done so move on. Don’t copy someone else’s results. Copy the motivation. If the motivation was oh your engaging people and making sure that the right customer is engaged and making sure the right customer is ready to spend money with you. Great do that. Copy that motivation but don’t copy the are you ready invest in your business? Are you ready to get serious? You’re like what the hell? Everyone did that already. It no longer works and it rings hollow. So what happens is people copy freelancers or are trying to differentiate. You know what they’re trying to differentiate on? I love customers. And you’re like really? Who’s pitching services in the service industry that is saying “I hate customers”. They say it on Twitter or they say it in their masterminds but they don’t say it publicly. You definitely don’t say it to the customer. I’d like to take your money and I hate you. So you’re not saying anything original, right? Are you kidding me? You’re telling me that you value quality. Yep. So does everybody. You’re telling me that you like and want to understand my business and want to help me grow? Yep. So does everybody. Nobody has ever said hi! Would you like to invest in negative growth? Telling me you care about quality, telling me that you care about investing my business or helping me grow my business, telling me that you’re fast…you know what? Do something new. Answer the phone. Because if you tell me that you don’t answer the phone, please don’t call me only text me or email me because I prefer asynchronous methods. Be original then. Answer the phone! You’re still selling your services to people who are 50 years old. When they’re 50, they remember using the phone. They actually have a cell phone. My dad uses his cell phone as a phone, right? My brother, who is obviously a generation younger, is like I never phone anyone. That’s just stupid. I just text them. So you go yeah. You want to be original? Be the freelancer who answers the phone. I know of customers who are calling one number after another going God. You get to a website and there’s not phone number here. The freelancer is saying no. I don’t want my phone number out there. I don’t want them call me. Just text me, right? You’re like oh my God. If you’re going to do that then put on your homepage hi there! I do professional service and freelance development for people under 40. Just do it. Announce it so that people know. I only do text messages with emojis. Put it on the homepage! If you’ve been waiting for the emoji freelancer, that’s me! Great. Differentiate that way, right? But don’t differentiate by telling you that you care about me but then I can’t reach you. Don’t tell me that you are interested in helping me grow my business, when I’m like so is everybody. There’s not a single person who is not willing to tell me that if I am going to pay them money they’re going to help me. No doubt. Do something different. It’s why I recommend that you specialize in something. If you specialize, then all of a sudden you’re like no. I know more about what you’re going to face. For the longest time I did sideline work with freelance coaching and product development where I worked with companies doing products. The only thing I can say is look! If you’re building a SASS, I built them before. Because I built them before, I can predict the next five problems you’re going to face. Because I can predict the next five problems you are going to face, I can help you accelerate through them. But the only place that worked is if I was helping a company doing products; specifically if they were doing SASS. If they weren’t doing products and SASS, then I’m just like hi! I want to help you grow your business. They’re like yeah no thanks. When we talk about marketing and if you’re in the copywriting or product marketing space if you know what? I can help you with your marketing copy. And you go yeah that is pretty much what I expect. That’s what everyone does. Do something different. Come up with a different framework. Come up with a different approach. I think it’s great to learn from others, to copy others and copy their motivation but I also think you need to look around and go ok. What am I trying to offer here? How is my offering unique, interesting and compelling? If it’s not (I know this is horrible to say, especially if we’re talking to freelancers) if it’s not interesting and compelling, go get a job. Get a job working for someone else and learn some new stuff. I don’t know what it is about working for “the man”. I’ve been in the corporate world forever but I hear all these people saying I just want to be my own boss. How long are you working per day? Because you have all the time you have to code, then you have to go sell your services and you have to interact with customers for support. By the time they’re working, they are working twice as hard as an employee. They are like yeah but I own my own business and I’m killing it. You’re killing it? What’s your definition of killing it. After you’ve paid for your insurance and you paid for your everything else, you come back and you’re like I’m making $60,000. You can make more than $60,000. Just be an employee somewhere. Now there’s a lot of places where employment sucks, right? There are a lot of companies that you’re like I’m just a cog in the wheel. I think that’s what everyone fears. Find yourself a good boss. Even if they’re not hiring, go connect with someone that you want to work with. Start hanging out and interacting. Volunteer, help and do something. Most of the time companies don’t hire people they don’t know. They hire people that they have interacted with as a consultant or something else. They higher known entities because we can’t afford…when I pick up someone or hire someone…I can’t afford that it’s not going to work out. I want it to work out. So there are other ways you build rapport and relationships, you test out services and everything else. Go find someone, interact and work with them. Interact with them and get hired. Spend the next year two, learning some really new things so that when you go break out on your own again you’re interesting and you’re doing something new and different. If your entire existence is going to peak at 32, you’re doing it wrong! If you seriously know everything that you are ever going to know and you’re like killing I’m it because you made $150,000 or $200,000…if you peak 32, what the hell? What do you do at 40 and 50? Honest to God…some of these folks…ok I have to slow down the rant here…but seriously? Some of these folks are peaking in their early 30s. I don’t know what life looks like for them. What is it going to look like at 40 or 50 when you need… there’s a whole long tail. If all you’ve done is his play out the short-term game, if all you’ve done is to optimize for like I know all the nuances of Facebook ads. What the hell happens when Facebook ads is done? So go get a job somewhere and learn some stuff and go deep into a problem space. Become an expert in something that actually has a chance to outlast the next 2 or 3 years. You will level up your game, level up your revenue potential and you’ll level up the way that you can help others.
Carrie: That was epic! I actually had the timer going. I think I asked you a question 15 minutes ago. You gave me everything I was hoping for and more including a little mini rant. We’re going to do a little bit more. Ok, Chris. We just left off on a rant that was a tree with many branches. I’m not sure which direction we take next. Do we take the long-term planning the long game approach for self-employed folks? Do we take the approach of hey it’s ok if freelancing is not for you. It is not a defeat. Do we take the go get a job branch? Which branch are you feeling?
Chris: I would like to spend the next 45 minutes talking about why Carrie Dils is not working for Chris Lema right now at Liquidweb. Yet I feel like you probably don’t want to run that on air. I would say by all means that the reality is there’s nothing wrong with freelancing. Freelancing is awesome. I wrapped up some time at Crowd Favorite last year in April and all I did was freelance work from April until December. It’s fantastic, right? But my world today as a freelancer is remarkably different than my world as a freelancer 20 years ago. Honestly, 20 years ago I didn’t know anything. At that point, 20 years ago, I thought I knew something. But it’s been the years of putting things to practice, trying things and testing things…I just want you to think about the logic of this. Let’s say we’re talking about Carrie Dils directly for just a second. You’ve got a podcast, you’ve got some training videos over at Lynda (which is awesome) and you’ve got a book you’re writing. Imagine that the book doesn’t work. I don’t think that’ll happen. I don’t think that’s the case at all. I think it’ going to be an awesome book. But imagine it doesn’t work. The entirety of the risk of that effort sits on you. The risk profile for you then has to be fairly large for you to determine that yes, you know what? I’m willing to invest a whole bunch of hours and time and if it doesn’t work, if it only sells five copies, I will just say it was worth the learning and move on. Here’s what we honest to god know. You likely are not tracking your time. The reason you’re not tracking your time (first of all there is no boss telling you to track your time). Secondly, deep down inside, I don’t think we want to know how much we invest in some of those efforts we do that may or may not work. Nobody wants to be like well I invested approximately four hours a day for 200 days and I got $12 from it. Go ahead and do that math, right? We don’t do that. We don’t track any of this. But what I’m saying here is the risk profile is completely on you. Now imagine you go work somewhere where you start learning about whatever it is. In your case, this book is about freelancing. Say you were writing a book on something else, like functional programming. So you’re writing on functional programming, what’s going on, how to do it and how it’s making its own resurgence. So you’re playing in this game. Now imagine instead of doing that, you’re actually doing functional programming. You jump into a company (or you’re working for a company) and you dig into the nuances. Now when you go to write the book, you’re writing straight from all the stuff you’ve been doing and the things you’ve been experiencing. You were paid the entire time you were testing those things. So your risk profile is tiny. If you put out the book and it sells great, you quit your job and go on a speaking tour. Wouldn’t that be awesome if you were speaking on a cross-country tour about functional programming? It’s a different profile. People just don’t think through the risk dynamics and say do I need to be my own boss? If I work in a place where I’m being challenged, where there’s high engagement, where people are investing in me and where I’m learning and growing, am I shrinking my risk profile when I do want to create creative works or new things or even when I want to move on? I am ridiculously lucky. Every day I am very aware of it. There are people that started their career the exact same day that I did. Twenty-one years ago I went to work at a government research lab to start building software online. We had the third fixed subnet of the whole Internet at Berkeley lab. I was building an online training system and it was crazy that I was doing this. But at the same time down the hill in Berkeley someone went and got a job in a travel agency. They started working in that travel agency and within two or three years my job kept going. Within two or three years Expedia swallowed up their job. They didn’t do anything wrong. It just so happened that I started doing something with this thing called the Internet (in those days we called it the information superhighway) and guess what? It didn’t leave! In fact the kind of software that I started working on was hosted software. We called it hosted software and then we called it application service providers, or ASPs. Now we call it SASS, Software As a Service. The truth is, none of that disappeared. I am ridiculously lucky that the thing that I started doing 21 years ago and the thing that I do today is basically the same. It hasn’t changed. What it’s afforded me then is 21 years of going into and pulling apart all the nuances of this one space. That’s all I’ve done. My risk profile then (to spin up a new SASS or to coach someone) in the interim time from April to December, when I’m coaching and advising or whatever…I’m leveraging stuff where I have a massive depth of knowledge. This allows me to charge a high premium. It allows other people to come find me very quickly and easily. I don’t do a lot of sales. People show up and say I need you and you’re the only one I need. Liquidweb was like we went and talked to a couple different people and they all basically said you should go and try to higher Chris Lema. You go that’s nice. That’s nice because you’re going to take a corner and go deep in it. I know that space. So to the freelancers who are listening and going oh. I just felt like I have to be my own boss and that’s the only way to win. I’m like no! You can go get a job and develop some deep expertise in certain areas and still call that a win. What you’re doing is shrinking your risk profile developing long-term experience. With that experience, when you pop back out on the other end (two years or three years from now) if you been doing one thing for three years you come out at the other end where your hourly rate will triple. The people who might recommend others to you will grow because you’re not just one more person who’s assembling and installing and configuring a WooCommerce site. If all you did right now is spend the next three years building the highest performing, highest scaling WooCommerce websites for a company (where you’re working for someone else) in three years when you come out you can say like this is what I’ve been doing. People will come in droves. That’s really different than I have installed and configured a baseline WooCommerce set up a thousand times. There’s 1000 guys next to me doing the same thing. I’m trying to differentiate, right? I want to say I am a WooCommerce expert.
What kind of expertise do you have?
I know how to set it up. You’re not going to win that way.
Carrie: Go deep, not wide.
Chris: Absolutely! Sometimes the easiest way to go deep and not wide is to get hired by someone that wants you to go deep and wants to pay you to go deep. You’re like Sweet! Let’s do it!
Carrie: Are you hiring?
Chris: It turns out I am for the right person. Are you applying right now on the air? Is that what you’re doing? Please Dear God. People on the show need to know that I beg you pretty much every single day. They know it right now. Folks? If you’re listening right now, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to go find any picture of someone doing the Heisman, right? Then I want you to take Carrie Dils face and stick it on top of their face. That’s what Dils does to Lema every day. Just know it. We’re still friends. I’m still waiting for the day where she’s like ok. Let’s do this. Get the picture the Heisman and put Dil’s face right on top of that. That’s what I want you to do people. Put it on Twitter so I can see it!
Carrie: That’s awesome. I will say I love freelancing. I advocate for freelancers and want to help them be successful in their jobs. Just as recently as this past year, I’ve gone and worked for you and with you at Crowd Favorite. I can testify to the value in stepping out and into a company to experience new things, get brought up to speed and have teammates. As a freelancer, those are all things that you miss. You can get a little bit stuck. It is hard. It takes a lot of effort to learn new things and branch out. Like you said, take the risk on something flopping in a year or going to be thriving? Which basket am I going to put my eggs in? There is a tremendous value to be gained from aligning yourself with someone. I’m not accepting your job on the air Chris. We can talk later. +1 for taking a break from a freelance journey to go and get some experience somewhere else. Well, Mr. Lema are you still there?
Chris: I can hear you.
Carrie: Well Chris? That is all the time that we have today. I know that you need to get off and go change the world and make everybody’s lives better. If I keep you on this podcast you can’t do that. If I keep you on this podcast you can’t go check Twitter to see if people have uploaded their little Heisman images of me. I will let you go. Chris? Where is the best place for folks to find you online?
Chris: That’s great. It is ChrisLema.com. @chrislema on twitter I’m also a blogger over at ChrisLema.com.They can find me where I’m starting a new blog over at Liquidweb. We’ll get the url to people when it launches. It was great being on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Carrie.
Carrie: Thank you so much, Chris. For those of you tuned in, check out officehours.fm. I’ll have the link to the blog that Chris just mentioned and his other sites.