Taking Business to the Next Level, Episode 70

Episode Transcript

Carrie: Hello everybody! This is Carrie Dils and you are listening to officehours.fm. The number one podcast as voted by my mother. This is episode number 70. I’ve got two amazing guests with me today. I’ve got Karim and Rebecca. They kind of go together like Batman and Robin, Superman and a super woman…I don’t know…maybe I can stop at those analogies…Hey guys! How are you doing?

Rebecca: Hello. We’re great.
Karim: Doing wonderfully.

Carrie: I like that you just answered for Karim, Rebecca. That was awesome.

 

Rebecca: That’s my sidekick. I need to, don’t I?

 

Carrie: Absolutely. Well, for folks that don’t know you guys, I’m going to let you a little quick introduction of yourselves. And ladies first. Rebecca, let’s get started with you.

 

Rebecca: I am Rebecca Gill from Web Savvy. I founded the company back in 2009. We’re a Genesis shop. We do a lot of custom development and then we have the largest Genesis child themes store outside of Studiopress.

 

Carrie: That is quite a claim to fame.

 

Rebecca: And I’m going to stick with it.

Carrie: Karim. Tell us about yourself.
Karim: My name is Karim Marucchi. I am the CEO of Crowd Favorite. I’ve been building websites and doing this business for about 20 years. I manage large teams for large enterprise clients.
Carrie: Awesome! Well I know you guys are busy wheeling and dealing, so I appreciate you taking the time to come on today. I know that the folks that are tuning in live also have…you’ve got lots of things going on. So I very much appreciate that you would take an hour out of your life to tune in to officehours. A couple of just ground rules before we start because this is like a wrestling match and we want to make sure that everyone stays safe….gets the proper eyewear. If i…no not at all. So there’s a couple of ways that you can participate. If you want to ask questions of Rebecca and Karim…1) if you’re watching this over on Google+ you can just use you the Q & A app to submit a question. 2) You can tweet using #officefm. Of course that’s on Twitter. And then thirdly if you’re over at the officehours.fm website, click on today’s episode and you can just leave a comment there and I will get that and ask our esteemed guests. So the reason that I wanted to have you guys on…Oh wait! Before I get there, let me let me thank our show sponsors for today. I’ve got DreamPress2 brought to you by DreamHost. DreamPress2 is their managed WordPress hosting service. I’m going to elaborate on that a little more in the episode. You can check them out @dreamhost.com/officehours. And then we have Web Savvy Marketing, which is the largest theme shop for Genesis themes outside of StudioPress. Just go over and Google them. Web Savvy Marketing. Savvy is with two Vs. And just for disclaimers…I invited Rebecca on this episode and I told her that I wish she would not sponsor this episode because you know…she doesn’t have to pay. She can come on my show any old time. But who am I to deny her the opportunity to support the show? So thank you very much Rebecca. I do appreciate your sponsorship. Ok. You guys…I first met you both at WordCamp Las Vegas 2013 and got to spend some time with both of you and getting to know you. I respect you both tremendously…just both as human beings…but also you both manage to have tremendous success in your business. I wanted to talk to you…most of the folks that are tuning in right now or maybe listening to the episode later are primarily bunch of freelancers. So we’re always interested to hear how people have sort of moved from that point A to point B in either growing their business or getting better clients, or just sort of settling into what the niches are. That’s part of the reason I wanted to have you guys on today. To just talk about that and give out listeners a chance to “pick your brain” even though I hate that phrase. Brain-picking just sounds like something that would happen in medieval times. Ok. Melanie. Thank you. God bless Melanie who’s in the Twitter audience right now. Rebecca? She’s just thrown you pretty much a huge softball. She asks are there any new themes coming out for Web Savvy?

Rebecca: I think that Melanie is my new sidekick, because she did. She did great. Yes Melanie, we released one yesterday. And it’s called Caroline, which is named after Ms Dils here because she’s one of my favorite people. It is integrated with WooCommerce, LearnDash, BuddyPress, bbPress and the events calendar. So it’s kind of like an all-in-one solution. We did the demo for universities because potentially they could use it all. But really it can be used for any website. You don’t have to use all of those plugins but they’re available. Styles and radio. She’s for sale on the site.

 

Carrie: “She” is for sale. Just to clarify, I am not for…well I guess I could be for sale…name your price people. Actually the theme is for sale. Rebecca and Melanie, I’m actually glad that you asked that question. That segways into some really interesting points. So Rebecca, your company…you are a combination of both client services and then you have this product space. Which came first?

 

Rebecca: We started with services and the only reason we started with products or launched the products was because we would have downtime between client builds. Chris Creed who works on our team kept pestering me to do the theme store. And I was like no, no, no, no no. And he’s like yeah we should. Then we had a break, and was like all right. Let’s do a theme store. We launched it…gosh…two to three years ago. And now we have over 35 themes.

Carrie: What were your biggest hurdles with…because I know you’ve a strong marketing background…for those of use who really suck at marketing because we’re developers or whatnot. We hate saying certain things about ourselves. How did you over come those…just bringing your product to market and getting people to hear about it?

 

Rebecca: We launched the store. We picked four themes. We created four themes. I have a graphic designer. She does all the graphic design professionally for it. But they were generic. And we sold things but we did not sell a lot. From that, I kind of put what I know to work for our company. I started to use SEO and put a lot of data and a lot research into it. Now when we build something, it is typically related to a plugin, a major plugin and it usually has some type of niche so that I can incorporate SEO and bring traffic into the product page itself through a given phrase. Like a long tail phrase, which works. And that’s how we’ve grown the store without question. And there is a good talk on this in WordCamp Chicago…I think last year. I really go through it…50 minutes and give you the highs and the lows and talk about the things that I learned along the way. And the failures I made. So if you are interested in launching a theme store or even a plugin shop, I would take a moment to watch the video. I do really lay it out there. I show you everywhere we went wrong.

Carrie: So people can find that at WordPress.TV?

Rebecca: Yes.

Carrie: And you said WordCamp Chicago? What year?

Rebecca: 2014?

Carrie: 2014. Ok. Or just go search for Rebecca Gill if you head over to WordPress TV. I’m glad you mentioned WordPress TV because that’s a fun little nugget of basically… yeah. You can get access to tons of previous WordCamp talks and yeah. It’s Awesome. Actually Karim you got some videos over there yourself.
Karim: I do. I do. The lastest one went up from my WordCamp Europe talk. That was a lot of fun to do. I was asked to speak on specifically what’s the difference between working in the WordPress world and working in the old traditional professional Web services world and trying to partner with people. So I try to bring an outside of WordPress community take, at the beginning. By reminding folks how down and dirty it can be and how easy people can mess with other people’s business if you’re not paying attention. And then how we sort of shifted when we came into the WordPress world and how I try to do things now. Which is all about partnerships. Which is really how I started in this business. I started in this business because while I might be good at speaking with clients, I really couldn’t code my way out of a paper box. But I love this industry and I love this business so immediately I said the only way I’m going to have any success here is by partnering with people. The second I started working with some really incredible people who could code. They’re like yeah, you go sit over there and you work on clients, you work on the business and we’ll work on the code. So my first experience was a very good one back in 1994 of actually learning how to work with teams in this business and not try to do everything myself.
Carrie: We talk about that quite a bit on the show of finding…as opposed to trying to do everything and do everything just sort of “half-assed” to focus in on what it is you do well. Then find you know either through subcontractors or partnerships or employees, however you accomplish it…but to find other people that are strong in the areas where you’re not. Yeah. Good valuable information. Rebecca, you started…not just started…but you have…how many people are a part of your team now?

Rebecca: We have over 10. But I went the first year and a half by myself. Probably a year by myself. Then after that it I was kind of pulling somebody in who worked at night for me. Just when I had tasks to do. I was exhausted. You reach a point where you can’t do it. Like Karim said, you need to find people who can do that for you. Because I was hacking code and I wasn’t hacking code well. Then everything changed. Once I started actually hiring people and getting people in as  part time the world opened up. And then we really grew after that exponentially.

 

Carrie: Ok. So you recognized that you needed some additional help. For myself and I know a lot of people listening… to be able to…you may well recognize that, but to take the risk of spending money maybe when there’s not a whole lot of excess cash to spend…to risk that on hiring someone? This is actually a question from Sarah. How did you find the right people for your team and how did you sort of make that leap?

 

Rebecca: I think that the easiest way to make the leap when you’re a freelancer is to hire somebody part-time or hire somebody for a project and try them out and see if you have chemistry. See if we work together well. See if they say they can do…they can really do. Validate it that way. Start small with the relationship and usually what my policy is…hey do you want to work for us a little bit? Then I kind of suck them in…I suck more and more of their time. They don’t realize it’s happening. I hate to admit that, but…
Carrie: (laughing) You’re a WordPress vampire.

 

Rebecca: I know. I am. So they just end up working more and more hours for us and less doing other things. But I always do keep…if you want side projects then go forth and do your side projects because that’s what makes you happy. And if you’re happier then you’re a good employee. If you’re a good employer then company is doing well and it’s just kind of an eco system that needs to existence and flourish. With everybody’s needs in mind.

Karim: So that’s reaching down and across Rebecca. Which is awesome to help other freelancers…ok work with me on this other project. People can also reach across and they can also reach up. It’s very hard with all of our personal phobias. I know I’ve struggled with this for years.  I need to have control over everything so then I’m just going to look for people that could help me and I’m going to pay them. But there’s so many wonderful people in this community you can reach out and you can even reach up to people who are maybe above your current weight class and say hey I’m looking to partner on a project. I want to retain this client relationship, but at the same time I’d like to work with you guys…or you. Let’s see what that looks like. Don’t be afraid to partner. It doesn’t just have to be I need to find the money to hire somebody.

 

Rebecca: That sounds familiar by the way. (all laughing)

 

Carrie: Yes. That’s a great point and I think you two, in the interest of disclosure …Rebecca?

 

Rebecca: We’ve done that.

 

Carrie: Up and out.

 

Karim: Yep. Just to be clear, when I said I’ve reached up, I’ve reached up for Rebecca’s help.

 

Rebecca: So it goes both ways. You find a person with talent or an organization with talent. In the case where I was just joking about with Karim, we had a potential client who had been following me for over a year who wanted to do business with us. Wanted to move him off of Expression Engine. It was a massive project. It wasn’t something that I could do on my own or even with my own team. So I brought in Crowd Favorite’s Forty Division for the graphic design because we need a really strong emphasis on the user experience. I brought in someone who I’d worked with before to do integration with the form software that was getting used. Then I brought somebody in who was a LearnDash specialist to work on the configuration of LearnDash. So there’s four of us. Web Savvy is managing that team. It’s a huge project. But guess what? It’s going just fine. You know we’re at the very end of it and I’m so happy that I did it. Not only was it a good thing for the client. Now I have proven resources. When I come into that type of situation again I know exactly who I am going to call. They know what my expertise is and they can call me with that too. It’s a win/win for everybody.

 

Carrie: Awesome. Yeah that’s really great advice. I am thinking about myself for the people or others that freelance and aren’t going with subcontractors, there’s a cap on the projects I can take. Not just…I’m not even talk about value. I’m just talking about realistically if I were to bid a project that was scoped over $20,000 there’s no way that me by myself could deliver that in a reasonable timeframe. So I like the idea that you could get exposure to larger scale projects by teaming up with some other people. By the way, we’re all so incestuous on here just working for each other and reaching up and out…ok.

 

Rebecca: I think one thing to note is when you are looking for potential partners or someone who you can engage in relationship with in that nature, especially if it’s a big project, that’s a really big emotional toll on you because you have to have trust. I would expect the viewers are wondering how you gain that trust? I’ll tell you that before Karim and I ever exchanged money on any project we had quite a few drinks and quite a few dinners together at WordCamps and conferences.

Karim: Sure.
Rebecca: That really allows you to get to know someone better. Same thing with Carrie. I’ve given money to Carrie to do tasks for us too. That type of environment at different events and different social settings…you don’t see everything about somebody but you see a lot. It allows you to build the trust without financial activity taking place.

Carrie: Good Point. So I’m going to throw a bold statement out there and you two can refute me or agree. WordCamps are where these relationships really can unfold.

Rebecca: I don’t think we want to argue with that. WordCamps, Meetups, Pressnomics, Cabo Press. My favorite event is Cabo Press because you don’t have 200 people around you. You’ve got 20 and you’re floating in a pool with them. That gives you a very good moment to have some in depth, personalized conversations.
Karim: And at Cabo Press your not being presented to or spoken to. You can bring your real problems with running your product or service agency to an expert and actually get fixable advice. Like here’s my problem. Ok. Let’s walk through some possible solutions rather than just here’s how we run things in a perfect world because that’s sometimes how presentations come across. But to go back to your original point. Absolutely. WordCamps are a great starting place. We are very involved both Rebecca and I in the WordCamp world and we continue to be. In fact, I’m looking forward to coming and participating however possible at WordCamp Dallas next. That’s my next WordCamp. Yay!

Carrie: We are excited to have you here in the greater Metroplex area.

Karim: And then past that not only Meetups, not only Cabo Press, there’s also different formats. And in those formats you’re going to meet different folks. For instance Rebecca mentioned Forty which is our UX UI design division here at Crowd Favorite. I met them at a non-WordPress event. It was a wonderful thing. Then I got to know James Archer because we went to WordCamp together and then we happened to be in the same city for another event and it just ended up really to be a way to get to know each other. So reach out. Be social. Those of you who prefer to sit aside and code still go out there and meet folks because folks like me who can’t code are looking for you. So it’s a wonderful thing to get out there and just get to know the folks and it doesn’t mean like when you meet someone you have to do business with them. As Rebecca said, it’s about getting to know them. It’s about understanding what their client ethos is. For me that’s very important. Some folks come from a school of it’s all about the engineering only. That’s great for the product world sometimes maybe or for certain types of service companies. But for us it’s always been about the client experience first. And you need to understand if you’re working with people that have the same type of ethos as you do.

 

Carrie: Extremely important. Yes. So Rebecca that was good advice earlier to just sort of dip your toes in the water with people. So a great question following up on the conversation about partnerships. How do you…and maybe you can even use your own business partnership as an example if you would like to or not. How do you know how to structure those? Do you have to have a lawyer to do that? Karim you mentioned earlier that in the outside of WordPress world it’s easier to get screwed. How do you protect yourself…and well…just take it away.

 

Karim: So I think the…what people start is the original client services…saying that has been around for 100 years…he who controls the client controls the gold, right? So if you’re just getting to know somebody and you don’t have that level of trust yet it’s easy just to make sure that you’re very clear on who’s controlling the client and who’s in a subcontracting position, even if that person’s above your own weight class for instance. That’s until you get a little bit of trust. Past that when you’re talking about vehicles to do that it can be as simple as half a page that both of you sign. It doesn’t have to be something very dramatic. A contract is anything that two people agree to. It’s that simple. You don’t need to go to an attorney and in client services if you’re doing your job correctly and you have that good relationship with your client then you shouldn’t feel threatened by working with somebody else. If you’re working with them, hopefully you feel they’re going to bring value to the project in the first place. So besides that, Rebecca what would you think? What starts it for you?

 

Rebecca: You know, we have a simple contract that wasn’t very advanced. Had we not had a good relationship, I would have wanted more than that. But because I had spent time with you and I had the opportunity to ask you personal questions. You answered them. That gave me a lot about your character. He laughed. That’s because…here’s a quick example. We were at Cabo press last year. We were at dinner. He was to my right and Syed from WPBeginner was across from me and I asked Karim a very personal question. Syed looked at me and said why you asking that? Just wait. Karim gave me his answer and I looked at Syed and I said that is why. Because that validates the person that I thought I was sitting next to. It speaks to his character and I wanted to know that answer. I think that it makes a huge difference. I like to play 20 questions with people. I did it with Syed. It’s just the nontraditional questions because I wanted to know how they got to where they are and what drives them emotionally. For me that’s much more than a piece of paper. So I think that’s really important. The one thing I would say when you’re going partner with somebody and you’re going to bring them in… my policy is I’m not negotiate you down. I’m not going to nit pick you. If I brought you in to help us on a project…you’re an adult. I trust you. I believe that you can deliver. I don’t want people to do that to me so I won’t do that you. I think that also sets up the relationship for success. It continues to build that trust. It’s vital.

 

Karim: Once you’ve was gotten past that point, I think then it’s important to say ok I’ve had an experience with this person. Do I want to keep status quo? Is there a way to grow together? You know our friend Corey says go far together. It’s a great wonderful anthem out there. What can I do to grow my business where this person or this company can help complement mine? Back-and-forth…and see if you can do that. Now word of caution. To do that…it’s very hard to do that if you’re marketing position and your client says I’m all things to all people. I do every type of project, up and down vertically. I do every type of industry left to right, horizontally. And every type of service depth wise. What you’re doing is casting yourself in a corner. But people do that out of almost fear of…especially when you’re a freelancer. Even I started out this way. I’ve got a mortgage to pay. I need to figure out how to get money in the door. So if somebody wants to pay me for writing code today, doing SEO tomorrow and giving them advice on how to get a small business license the third day…I’m going to help him because I can charge him an hourly rate. As a freelancer you need to move past that and say I can make money focusing on what I’m good at and let me look at partnering with somebody. So once you have that good experience see how deep it can go. That’s where Rebecca and my company are working very well together now. We’re not necessarily saying ok. How do we merge these two companies right away? We’re actually working very well together as two different companies and we’re leveraging what our different companies do well together. We’re exploring that. We’re seeing how that fits hand and glove. It doesn’t necessarily mean that Web Savvy is going to buy Crowd Favorite tomorrow. It means specifically that we just work well together. That’s ok.

 

Carrie: You touched on a couple of points that I want to elaborate on. The first is that the counterintuitive mindset that if you niche down your service or your product offerings that you’re narrowing your opportunity and you’re turning away all this potential business. When in fact, it’s the opposite. The more you niche into a specific service offering the more of an expert you are. The more of an expert people perceive you as and the more opportunities open up. I found that to be true. The less of a generalist I am and the more of a specificatician…I don’t even know what that word is…no…I just wanted to echo that I’ve seen that play out for myself. So even if people aren’t partnering and are just working for themselves, just focus on a specific problem or segment.
Karim: Um hmm. Outside of these partnerships, talk about mentoring. Everybody knows that Chris Lema is our CTO today. Everybody has seen over the last three years where at events sometimes Chris and I are practically inseparable, even before he started working at Crowd Favorite. We developed a friendship. We developed a friendship based on the fact that both of us have over 20 years experience him on the service-side and me on the products side but then what ended up happening is I needed somebody who I could respect to bounce ideas off of. So even while he was working somewhere else I said look I’d like you to come and join our board. I’d like to get some mentorship from you, I’d like to get your opinions on certain things. We got to know each other very deeply. Honestly, he joined the company much earlier than we originally thought might ever happen. It just turned out that way. It wasn’t like planned where it was just going to happen. I needed somebody to bounce ideas off. So I really thank him for what he did specifically, but also I try to reach out and give that same level of offering, of experience to anybody out there who needs it. It’s one of the reasons why I speak at WordCamps. Yes my business today might not be completely relevant to every freelancer out there but I specifically started the same way everybody else did who listens to this podcast. One little project and can I start in this business? I want to specifically try and help those folks out. So that’s why I speak at WordCamps, that’s why I am going to these events. Believe me. Our clients aren’t there necessarily but the community is. It’s how we can give back. So look for mentorship, look to mentor if you have a certain type of experience.
Carrie: So the recurring theme for this episode so far is relationships, relationships, relationships. And somebody even followed up on Twitter and asked where do you find these other people that can code. Where do you find people that are looking for the kind of work and it really is…it’s continuing to network, to build genuine relationships and WordCamps are a great natural opportunity to do that. Rebecca? You and I were friends, we’re twitter buddies but it wasn’t until I had opportunity to meet you for the first time in person that our relationship really blossomed. (laughing) I just wanted to say blossomed. Ok. So let’s hit some questions. This is a great one. And I think maybe placed a perception… so Karim you used the phrase your weight class. So maybe your peers in terms of like a Crowd Favorite does Enterprise-Level Services. The types of clients I work with, the types of clients that would never be suitable for your visit business, and vice versa. But the question is Cabo Press more for bigger players not little freelancers?

 

Rebecca: Oh, I don’t think so.

 

Karim: Yeah. I don’t think so either.
Rebecca: You can learn so much. It’s not that you’re going there to learn all of Karim’s secrets going after the enterprise…it’s here is a classic example. Whenever I went last year in the fall I was struggling with our affiliates for the store. I had 15 to 20 minutes to sit down with Syad who is so smart he hurts your head when you talk to him. Because you try to process what he says. He gave me some invaluable advice that was for the store, that wasn’t anything big clients…that was just I have a problem. It was a simple affiliate network and the advice he gave me made a huge difference. So you can learn all types things. Even as simple as how stinken Corey Miller can be so endearing. Just with his personality. Just take some queues from that. I mean anybody can learn from that regardless of what size you are. So don’t discount those types of events as you’re too small. You can’t go. It should kind of fit into your schedule. Are those people that are going the people that you want to be with? You could potentially glean some knowledge from them. Look at that. Don’t look at the size because you’ll be welcomed and will take a world away from it.

Carrie: I agree.
Karim: And a lot of the lessons that are being learned when you hear other peers asking the question about well you know, I’ve worked on these freelance projects for small shops, for small businesses and now I’m looking at a more medium-sized client. I realized I needed insurance. So the whole conversation starts up about insurance. And I’ve had people come to me after Cabo Press and said I didn’t even realize that I needed to ask that question but because somebody else did, I was able to learn from that. And now I have a follow-up question. It’s about all different sizes. There are people who are coming specifically to ask me how to sell better to enterprise clients. There actually are. We have no problem in welcoming that because there’s more work out there than any one shop can handle. Even at what we’re doing now. So we’re trying to help bring folks sort of up that value chain.

Carrie: I love that. I would just encourage folks and I’m one of the little freelancers who threw my application in for Cabo Press this year. I am excited to go. Think yes, in reality we all have differing levels of experiences and for example you two guys have a wealth more of experience dealing with business and clients than I have. So maybe it’s just a personal confidence issue but you’re not…I hate to tell you…but you’re not on a pedestal. I love you but you’re not a pedestal. I think people maybe… people are intimidated by me and I would just say if you’re listening to this and if you see any of the three of us at a WordCamp please go up and introduce yourself. Because a really… or anybody else that might be on a pedestal in your mind that at the end of the day we all poop….hopefully. I mean we’re just normal humans and WordPress, Karim as you as said so nicely earlier as a community is just extremely welcoming. So there… that’s my pep talk for the day.

Karim: I want to add something though. On my personal website Marucchi.com there’s a contact form. I get requests there all the time for just a question, you know? There is a freelancer or just a small shop that has a question…I am happy to reply to those. Privately or publicly. Not just at an event. If you need something reach out. We will make time.
Rebecca: Speaking of your blog have you published anything recently?

Karim: It’s been a struggle. I know. Call me out. That’s what I expect from friends.

Carrie: Wow! Public call out.

 

Karim: Absolutely. It’s been a struggle. You guys are aware of my travel schedule for the last two months.
Rebecca: You sit on the airplane. Write while you’re on the airplane.

 

Karim: You know if it they didn’t have such great Wi-Fi that kept me in touch with everybody I need to talk to, you’d be absolutely correct.

 

Rebecca: I’m just teasing you.
Karim: No. I know. I’m working on some stuff. More is coming. Writing has not been one of my strong suits, it’s more of the networking and helping folks out. So it’s something that I’m interested in working on and something that’s got to be pushed a little bit further. So stay tuned. Don’t give up on Marucchi.com.

 

Carrie: Ok. You can still go to Karim’s site and submit a question. Even if there is not necessarily a recent blogpost there.

 

Rebecca: The question could be when is the next blog post is coming? Yeah, I don’t know.
Carrie: Wow. So apparently this is the kind of crap you get if you go to Cabo Press. Just everybody.
Karim: Oh yeah. That speaks to the whole pedestal things well. We are not on pedestals. I have made more mistakes. I have pissed off more clients and I have lost more work than I’ve probably gained in the last 20 years. So I have probably made more mistakes than anybody out there who’s going to reach out and ask a question. Please do.

 

Carrie: Excellent. Well I’m going to take this little…we’re about the midway point and we’ve got some great questions coming in that I ‘m going to get to a second. But I teased earlier that I would tell you a little bit more about our sponsors for this. I have something special that I’m going to try to do. And I hope that it doesn’t cause…I’m going to try to screenshare…because I pre recorded and I hope this works. If not, well it’s just going to be awful. Ok. Can you see my screen?

Karim: Yes we can.

Prerecorded message:
Carrie: Ok. Hey everybody. Here I am. (Pre recorded) I have Mika Epstein from Dreamhost your path support road. Although you’re telling me Mika that you moved into a different roll. You now longer the support road. I’m kind of the development road now. But I still do support and training support. Ok. Excellent. So I wanted to tell everybody real quickly about DreamPress2 which is your managed WordPress hosting service. And you talk about DreamPress2 being super duper fast. But for people that aren’t…like me…I don’t really read all the detailed server specs, what does that mean? I know. I don’t read instructions. So tell me why it is so great. So fast.
Mika: The thing that people hate about any Website is that you have to choose a server to make things run really fast. Because you can ask WordPress to cache itself to make things faster but that’s always going to be slower than if it’s being run by a server. It’s sort of like saying why can’t you…it’s just not really the best way to go about things. So what we did with DreamPress originally was that we were using Varnish as a front-end cache. So you won’t have to use things like WP Super cache or WP total cache. Both of which by the way are fantastic plugins. Just using Varnish really wasn’t enough. Because all that’s doing is caching pages as if they were static HTML for example, for your visitors. What really needs to be set up is how fast the server is cached to search your database. So every time you run a search process or every time you pull up a post it’s asking the database for information. We set that up by using a thing called Opcache. Opcache is our PHP and when we added that in it, that actually made WordPress about 25% faster and reduced the power usage on our servers. So we’re pretty sure that’s the right way to go. And if you using HHVM which is our new option setup theme, it’s even faster. It’s really cool and fun.
Carrie: Well hot diggity… I almost said a cuss word on there. But Ok. So OK wow! I don’t think that totally failed. I don’t know. I don’t know if you could hear that or see that. But anyways…That was something new and different. Mika knows a whole lot more than me. And yes we kind of talked about Web Savvy’s latest theme Caroline that integrates seamlessly… it’s already has got the styles built for LearnDash, Buddy Press, bbPress, WooCommerce, the event manager and calendar. A big calendar. Sorry. Yes so if you need to work with any of those right out of box and don’t have to do custom styling that’s pretty awesome. You can check that out over at Web Savvy Marketing. And then one more thing, I was stalking your Facebook page. I like to mutually stalk you Rebecca. I think it was the Genesis WordPress group there was a discussion going on about the developer pack. You guys yanked the developer pack a while back because of some abuse by basically a handful of people ruined it for everybody. A great little conversation sparked there and you have now reopened that developer pack option to “friends” of Web Savvy. So people that are vetted because you have some relationship, right?

Rebecca: Yes. Yes. So we pulled it. We pulled the developer Propack which is all-inclusivetheme usage, current themes and future themes. We had that available since we launched the store but we ended up pulling it because literally people were buying the themes and giving them away all over the Internet. That wasn’t what totally set me off. What set me off was when we started to have credit card fraud for it. It was giving notifications that a grandma in Kansas is paying for somebody over in India to get all my themes and give them away. You don’t mess with Granny. So that was like my end of my ability to tolerate it. So we cut it and yesterday there was…maybe it was even today… there was a lot of discussion would we bring it back? Could we have it as a limited…you know availability. So we did do that as of yesterday after the conversations and Facebook. We brought it back. If you’re interested in it, let me know. Contact me through the inquiry form. If you purchased from us before, I give you a coupon for whatever you spent to go towards the purchase price of the license. If you’re brand-new and I’ve never heard of you, I’m not going to give it to you. You’ve got to least have bought a theme. Know that you want the theme. Be in the community. Something. Because I don’t want to go down the path that we went down before. It was just severly abused. That is not what we’re the business for. I do want to help the developers that want it, who are going to use it, embrace out theme and support us. I want to support them back.

 

Carrie: Once again it comes back to relationships.

Rebecca: It does.

Carrie: Ok. So we’ve got…and somebody asked for clarification…sorry… I speak Texan. It’s Cabo Press. C A B O P R E S S. You can learn more about that at CaboPress.com. It’s happening in September. I believe this year is already full because it is a pretty limited registration. But keep your eyeballs peeled for upcoming years….for following years. And Cabo Press isn’t the only event. In the past there’s been Beach Press. There’s PressNomics. There’s a lot of conferences that are sort of WordPress centric, but are not WordCamps that are these more smaller intimate gatherings. So Karim you looked like you’re on the edge of your seat to say something. You’re muted.
Karim: Thank you. The reason why Cabo Press is kept small is specifically so we can give that one-on-one help. So we’re seeing that there’s a giant demand for this. I think more is probably in the works. So stay tuned to the newly designed ChrisLema.com and to our sites here because you’ll definitely be in the know about it. Because it’s very interesting to instead of having an event where people are speaking to you to actually be involved.
Carrie: All right. Well let’s get back to some questions. And this one goes back to an earlier one when we were talking about partnering. Either partnering up or looking across and…anyways finding someone to work with on a project. Jackie asked if you wanted to work on a larger project in a partnership context what first steps would you recommend for a freelancer with a specific set of niche skills?

 

Rebecca: My recommendation would be to do some introspection. Really think about what you’re good at and where you lack, and document that. I did that. I literally said here’s where I’m good, here’s where my team’s good, where we stink or we have this gap, right? Now look at the target market you want to go after. It may be a different target market then you’re currently going after. Which I did. I said I wanted to go up channel. Then I looked at my website and said what does my verbiage say? Fix the verbiage. Magically, new projects started coming in that were at that new target demographic that I wanted to obtain. Now I had a project. I had something firm. I could say ok who in my pool of resources or do I know that can help me fill these gaps where we lack. I will tell you that I have a solution or I have a partner or I have a person ready to go. No. But there’s been cases where I reached out to Carrie, where I reached to Chris Lema and said here’s what I have in front of me for a project. Here’s my gap. Who do you know? Who can I go to? Not only do they give me the name they pave the way for me. It’s not just those two. A lot of people have done it. They’ll say let me make an introducdtion to you. Let me vouch that you’re reputable and that you’re good people. That’s really what it took for us. It’s really changed our business model. It’s changed our target demographic. It’s changed our revenue stream and it happened way easier than I thought it was going to. And way faster than I thought it was going to. We’re redesigning our website right now to try to catch up and better position ourselves for that new expanded target demographic. I didn’t anticipate having to do that. So it is possible. Don’t let it scare you. Go after it if it’s something that you want.

 

Carrie: Cool. Karim would you add anything to that?

Karim: She literally took the words of my mouth but that’s not surprising because we seem to agree on so much. I will take a moment to actually say what happens after you found the relationship? What happens once you’ve figured out your marketing? People seriously need to think about planning ahead for their infrastructure. So you don’t need to spend days, weeks and months on this, but look at your existing process. If you’re a freelancer and you’re going to partner. Whether you’re using a tool like Basecamp or you’re using Sifter or one of those tools out there…will that scale to working a team? How are you going to work with your new other freelancer or partner company…or what have you…before you actually get there. If you have a mentor relationship with somebody, reach out and say ok I’m thinking about working with Rebecca or Carrie on this project. Can you give me any advice on how to think of that infrastructure because what people get into problems with…is one of my tenants when I talk about working with clients is always be setting client expectations. Set client expectations and then surpass them. The minute you’re behind the ball…as happens to all of us…you have to play catch-up. So have a little bit of a plan and if you don’t know what that necessarily is reach out and try to get some help from somebody who’s been there before so that you can have that good client experience. You know we work a lot with the three kinds tenants of a successful project. The first tenant of a successful project is a great client experience. The second tenant of a successful project is wonderfully executed product or code. So the actual deliverable. And then the third one is profit. If you can do all those three things and client services you are definitely going to make money and you’re definitely going to have clients bringing your next client rather than have to do a lot of marketing.

 

Rebecca: I think one thing to add which I didn’t say is if you have something come to you and we’ve had this happen at various levels…and you’re not ready. Don’t take it, right? So whether it’s a specific RFP that’s been given to you…we had the largest power company in Michigan come to us and kept coming to me to bid. It was I think three years ago. I decided we can’t do it. knows We didn’t have the infrastructure. We didn’t have the team in place to do it. I had to turn it away. It even happened to me this last time I spoke at WordCamp Las Vegas. I mean I talk will talk to somebody in enterprise space. I walked away. I investigated a little bit further. We weren’t ready for it. I had to back to the person and say you know what? Thank you so much for the opportunity but I can’t meet your requirements right now. I don’t want to walk down this path. You need to do that because you need to save you’re reputation and if you are connected to anybody that knows that potential client you need to save their repetition. So make sure that you evaluate and you don’t jump in too deep into the pond and you can’t swim and keep going. Make sure you’re all going to be a success at the end.

Karim: Um hmm.
Carrie: You all don’t even really need me on this show. We all could just kind of banter back and forth. As a matter of fact, the next time I’m out of town, I’m just inviting you on to handle things.
Karim: I’d love to do it.

 

Carrie: Ok. There’s something that I would love to get your guys take on. I’ll frame it up here. Somebody actually submitted the question ahead of time. Is it possible for the one-man shop…the one-man show to make 75k to 100k a year? And of course the resounding answer is yes. But here’s…let’s dial it back down to… let’s say I’m in my first year or freelancing or maybe I’m a beginner freelancer…whatever. Maybe I’m in my first year..maybe I’m in my 3^rd or 4th year…I’ve just never kind of grown beyond the initial small projects. So my average project is under 3k. You know you can only do so many of those in a year…I mean divide 100k by 3K and that’s a whole lot projects. So there’s the desire to take on this larger project. Maybe we move up to the 5k to 10k average project range, which is completely doable as a solo person. That’s where most of my projects fall. So you can do less projects, but make more money. Of course, those are larger scale projects. I really do have a question in here…just sort of trying to paint a picture. So you want to move in that direction, but here you are doing sub 3K projects and you’ve got…I mean the mortgage is due. So there’s this real challenge of balancing immediate short-term cash flow needs but also planning out and making longer-term decisions for your business. So I would just love to hear kind of your take on that, or what you would have to say to someone who’s in that position.

 

Karim: So if those short-term 3k things are coming in, right? I’m going to use Rebecca’s example a moment ago of the power company in Michigan. Three and a half years ago we didn’t know each other so there was no alternative. But something like that, even if she knew me at the time and said Hey let’s work on this together. Those take a long time to close. The larger the project, the longer the sales process. So while you’re working on those small 3k projects as you call them; some are even smaller, right? What ends up happening is you can say all right. I can’t handle this power project by myself yet. But because iI know a company that can…I can approach the company and say how can you make it worth my while because they’ve obviously come to me for a reason. The power company has come to me for a reason not just because I do 3K projects. So there’s value to keep me in the project. How can I remain on the project? Help out. You guys take a bunch of the work but yet it’s good for me. The answer could be that you could easily make more than 75k to 100k a year on a mix of things. You don’t have to make it all by writing code or by assembling websites if you’re one of those folks. You could make it by a mix. There’s quite a few people who work with companies not just Crowd Favorite but also some of the other larger shops who specifically make money finding and working with just a little niche of a larger project with us and others. So you can plan short-term and long-term that way. That’s one way. How about you Rebecca?

Rebecca: I would say that today in Web Savvy I’m constantly looking at tomorrow and payroll and making sure that I can pay my employees first. Then I can pay myself a salary and I’m taking on jobs of various sizes to make sure that happens. But then I’m also looking out six-months and saying ok what do I need to do to position myself or the company for want we want in six months and where we want to be in six months. It’s a balance. You’ve got a make sure that you’ve got a good balance there. First and foremost you do need to pay yourself. You do need to make sure that your kids have diapers and there’s food on your table. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll know what those projects are that are the right ones to keep that going and keep the revenue going and to keep you afloat and to keep you in business. If you’re realistic with yourself, you’ll know what you have to do to get that next level that you want to reach. Keep looking out. Don’t just look at tomorrow. Keep looking out. That’s how you improve. That’s how you grow and that’s how mature as a business or as an individual in the freelance space.

 

Carrie: Golden nuggets. Thank you. Thank you guys for both of that. I agree Karim that it can definitely be a mix. You and I have chatted off line about this, but that’s where I presently found myself doing a blend of both client services and branching out into the product space. And then trying some new things. I’ve got a webinar coming up. It’s a new kind of thing in the mix. Yes it doesn’t all have to mean that you’re just a robot on the machine doing the same thing over and over. Certainly variety is awesome. Man! Ok. Thank you Francesca. She’s tweeting some lovely tweets. Karim you’ve got one that you’re going to have to address. She tweeted in Italian. I have no idea what she said. Francesca, thanks for the question.
Karim: Let me let me jump in there real quick. First of all Francesca Marano is somebody I just met in my latest travels, in trying to help the Italian community sort of renew and blossom. She is not only one of the organizers of the Torino WordPress Meetup but an incredible blogger and consultant. She’s somebody who is was a very well known in the Italian blogging market and a strong woman in the WordPress world, which is why I wanted to mention that to both strong women I know here in this world and in this WordPress podcast. She is doing a really good job of trying to get those Meetups going and helping with that area. What she wrote in Italian was..let’s see…there’s more work out there that any of us can do by ourselves. She was repeating the quote that I made out there. Earlier I had said I’ve lost more work than others. I meant I’d lost more offers out there and more RFSs than I’ve gained in the past. It’s not necessarily just clients. But it’s very important for everybody to look out there and as you said…relationships. So I’ve made some new relationships in my travels of late and you can see how that response and trying to get more into the WordPress community. So if anybody’s interested in what’s going on in the blogging world in Europe and in Italy right now, that’s somebody to take a look at. So she’s trying to dive in and help out to bring more Italians to this market as well.

Carrie: Excellent! Well Rebecca you and I have somebody new to stalk.

Rebecca: We do! But we need her to tweet in English so we can really know what she’s talking about.

Carrie: Well she was tweeting in English too. There was just that one question that I couldn’t quite handle. But we’ll use babel fish are something.

 

Karim: She speaks perfect English. Well she was being self-deprecating then to say that her English was otherwise. So some follow up comments. Design TLC says working on a small part of a big job also sounds like a great way to learn how to work with a team. Melanie chimes in that’s great advice to plan on those larger projects. So we’ve got more questions than we’re going to be able to answer today. I do want to throw one nerd question out there, since you know we are nerds at heart…and I say that in the most loving way. Davinder had a question sort of about workflow. This can apply to both of you. When you’re working across a distributed team and multiple hands are on the same project, what is the most effective…I mean beyond the obvious of just using version control or something. How do you manage that?

Rebecca: For us, we use Basecamp. We’re very structured. I have a template for all inclusive projects thats 80 points I think. That’s preassigned to dos with team members. That gets kicked off as soon as we have new project. It’s augmented for whatever specifics we have for the client. As soon as that’s done, we invite the client in. My project manager gets on the phone with the client. Walks them through BaseCamp; expectations and then we start marching on the project. Even if clients are calling or emailing and giving us this information off line, it goes back into BaseCamp. So the whole team has access to it. That’s a way that you can have a large distributed team cohesively working on a project…making sure that you have an infrastructure and a communication process and that everybody follows it. If that’s in place, you will be surprised at how seamless everything is and how well you can work together on completely different continents and completely different time zones and completely different backgrounds and tasks. It flows if you’ve got a structure in place.

 

Karim: And, I’m going to try to do this very quickly but I’m going to go on the communication strategy point and say the larger the team grows the more you have to have rules in place before you even start on who’s communicating what. The larger the team gets, it’s impossible to just have one project manager be the only person who talks to client;  one point contact. So when you have multiple points of contact who are inevitably working with projects make sure that you have rules. So when the client comes back and talks to the project manager about something technical, the project manager doesn’t say let me take a stab at that. They say let me get the person on the phone. Same thing when you have a layer of account management, or layer of SEO, or a layer of any of those other consultancies. Don’t try to be all things to all people…is a common theme. But also make sure that you’re honoring leaving behind the one-man “ness: of being a freelancer. Honor that team and the client will go wow! This is an incredible team my person put together for me.

 

Carrie: I was listening to a book called To Sell is Human by Dan Pink. One of the things that he was talking about was how Improve…setting Improv can actually help you be better at sales. One of the key rules of Improv was to always make your partner look great. When you do that, you ultimately make both of you look better. That applies to exactly what you just said. Always make your team around you look fantastic. Man! We could keep going. Can I just invite you all back on different episode?

Karim: Please.
Carrie: People don’t have millions of hours to listen to us today. I would like to say for the record in case anybody was keeping count…the word blossom was used twice on today’s episode. And you’re coding challenge is…if you can…for anybody listening…if you can actually write a program to get yourself out of a box then send that to Karim so that he can study that code and learn how to code himself out of the box. Wow. That was terrible. That was awful. Seriously guys thank you so much just for coming and sharing your wisdom. Again, if anybody that’s listening to this either now or maybe in the future on iTunes, or through some other format..if you see these guys at a WordCamp, or if you see anybody at a WordCamp for that matter that you would like to meet or respect; go up and just shake their hand and say Hi ! They would love to meet you. I feel confident. All right guys. Any any parting messages before we mosey on?

Karim: I will repeat. Reach out. Reach out to the folks on this podcast. Reach out to anybody in the WordPress community and beyond. Don’t think that the WordPress community is the only place to go. There are tons of vibrant communities out there. And people are willing to help. You just need to go out there and make yourself available and reach out.
Carrie: Awesome. Rebecca?

Rebecca: I concur. He’s dead on. Yes. We’ll end with that!

Carrie: Well in that case, preach brother!

Rebecca: Preach it.

 

Carrie: Ok. Well with that we will wrap up a successful episode of officehours. You can catch the replay of this over @officehours.fm. You can also catch any previous episodes or find all sorts of fun tidbits over on officehours.fm. As always, if you enjoy listening to the show, I deeply appreciate any reviews you want to leave over at Stitcher or iTunes. That helps raise the show’s awareness and help other people just like you find it. So with that said I’m going to say Salu. Wait! Is that Italian?

Karim: No. (all laughing)

Rebecca: Isn’t it Ciao or something?

Carrie: What is it?

Karim: Arrivederchi.

Carrie: Ok. So there. Now you heard my terrible accent. Thank you guys! I look forward to the next time I see you guys. And for everyone else listening, I will see you next week.

Karim: I’m looking forward to it. Bye!