 with a key on being profitable, which, believe it or not, can be easier said than done. As you said, I'm Jocelyn Mosek. I run a web design agency. I've been working with WordPress for over 10 years now. I spent the first five years as a freelancer, next five building my agency. And actually this year, I've just started doing coaching for other freelancers and agencies. So WordPress is pretty amazing for us professionals, where it can really take us. So I know I have no clue where I'll be in another five years. So I get a feel for you guys, who here would call yourself a freelancer? And yeah, with that, OK, so most of the room. And how about agency? When I say agency, when you start having consultants working for you, and so you're not the one delivering everything. OK, just one or two. All right. So yeah, so today I want to kind of share with you, and obviously this is coming a lot from my own stories, of the fact that, as I said, building a profitable agency can be easier said than done. And just share with you, especially to all the freelancers, some of the things you might think about, if that is something on your horizon. And so today I'll kind of go through some quick definitions. We'll talk about why on earth you'd want to do this to yourself. Some of the ways you can set up your agency, because like most things, there is no one way to do this. Some of the growing gatchas, this is again where I'll give some nice stories of where I learned the hard way, and some of the clients I've coached have learned, give you some resources, and I'll open it up at the end to questions, which is usually a lot of fun. We can share more stories. So the more in word here is profitable. And the key with profitable is that obviously you are keeping more pennies. The pennies coming in don't all run out the other way. And profitability has degrees. It's great if you keep a penny that's profitable, but we'd like to aim to keep a few more than that. And the big difference between a freelancer and an agency is, at least as I'm going to define it, is a freelancer is someone who you're the person doing the work for the service you're giving your customer. You might have a bookkeeper. You might have a blogger. You may have support in your business. But what I'm really talking about the transition to an agency is when you go from being the one who is delivering all the services to where you become a little bit more of the manager. You may still do some of the tasks, but you're not responsible for everything. You're the interface to the client. You're delivering the final product. But who exactly does the stuff in the middle? Well, that starts to be someone besides you. So why would you want this? Why would you want to even go from your nice, simple life as a freelancer to growing an agency? Well, one of the reasons I did it was I wanted to be able to offer better services and better products to my customers. I myself, I'm an engineer by trade, which makes me a great developer. I love CSS. Like, that makes me happy. But I always found the graphics design was the part that I could kind of sort of do. But it really limited me. It limited me in what I felt I could charge. It limited me in what I felt I could do. I could design it. I could make it be life. But I couldn't necessarily create that amazing picture. And I certainly was not about to try to build a logo. And so one of the first people I brought onto my team was a graphics designer. Now, this graphics designer actually knew how to do some front end development. But equally for her, she was an amazing graphics designer. But she held herself back because she's like, I got to build this darn thing. I can make a great picture, but I don't know how to build it. And so one of the beauties of having an agency is you get to create a team of experts where she can shine in what she does. I can shine in what I do. Together we can start really up-leveling what we can do for our customer. And so an agency, a team of experts, because we can't be good at everything. You can't be a copywriter and a graphics designer and a front end developer, a back end developer, an SEO expert, and O project manager. I mean, you can. And as a freelancer, you do. But we all have our zone of genius. And the nice thing about creating a team of experts, which is what an agency is, is you can all start executing in that zone. And as a result, you can start aspiring. And ultimately, some of my later slides will be justifying this is why you get to charge more and why you need to charge more. Another beautiful thing about an agency is letting go of those tasks you don't enjoy. Did I mention the graphics design? Stress me out no end. That was always the part of the bill that made me nervous. Once I had the picture, I was good. And so it allows you to let go of those things that have you out of your zone of genius, the things that make you not show up and shine. And it's the things that you're not as good at. Plus, there are perks to being the boss. Some of those oh-so-glamorous rents and retreat tasks, like entering products into e-commerce, you can send that to your team because now they're the junior engineer. And so there's some joys to being the boss. You provide jobs. This one, yeah, this was five years ago when I had my first developer working for me. And I think I paid him $1,000, $1,500 that month. And he wrote me back. He was all excited. He had gone out and bought a mattress. And I went, oh my god, I just impact somebody's life. Damn. And it's incredible. My favorite day of the month is the end of the month when I pay my team. And some of my team is US based, so I'm buying the mattress. I'm not quite supporting the family yet. But some of my team is international. And I am supporting their family. I'm able to have my guy in the Philippines, his wife got sick. I was able to say, you take care of her. You are paid for this week. Do not worry about it. You take care of your wife, because that is my gift. I can afford to do that. My gift to you. Incredible, or at least I'm pretty humbled by it. You're lonely. This is very real. One thing I know I miss being a freelancer from working in corporate is that water cooler, right? It's me, myself, and I at home. And yeah, I can go to a co-working space. But I miss that camaraderie, that team, the working on stuff together. And having a team lets you do that. And when I get into later, the ways you can build a team, one of the nice things about having a team that is in your time zone-ish, meaning somewhere in the US, is we hop on Skype in the morning. And we chit, whoops, uh-oh, computer, wake up. We hop on Skype in the morning, and we chit chat. You get that little like, hey, I'm bored. Hi, I don't want to face my day. No, I don't want to face the day either. Or someone's too quiet, and you're like, hey, what's going on over there? You get that piece, and some of us need that. I wouldn't go back to corporate. I love what I do. But there are things that are challenging about being a solo business owner. And having a team can kind of help that piece. Going on vacation, this is important. You can actually have a life when you have a team. I have a project manager, and as I mentioned, my graphics designer can do some front end development, and I can kind of wing the graphics. This means I can go away at Christmas, and my customers are not like high and dry, right? If the sky falls, I've been here this weekend, and I've just taken some emails and shuffled them right on through. It's a beautiful thing. And it allows my clients to continue to be taken care of. And vacation is the planned time off. What about the unplanned time off? Again, you're taking better care of your customers in many ways by having that team, because you are not the end all in be all. And finally, having something to sell. And I know this was not on my radar until about a year ago when I read Built to Sell, which is a great book. And like I said, when I started 10 years ago, I never thought I'd be here. Five years ago, didn't know I'd have an agency five years later, and now as I slowly get older, I hate to break a few, but as freelancers, you're not selling your job. Nobody wants it. You don't want it some days. But as you create an agency, I have customers now where my project manager and my team, I used to be everything to these clients. Now I just send the invoice and go, wow, how did that happen? She's talking to this person and the client's taking care of. That's actually something I could sell. Someone would want to buy that. Someone would actually want to buy something where there's this system with documented, here's how we do things and the client is there and the worker bees are there. I can actually maybe cash out in some ways of all this work I've put into my business. You may not be there at this point, but it is a perk. Because yeah, as I said, no one, you can't sell your job. It's not gonna happen. So those are the reasons for why an agency is a great thing. Now there are pros and cons to both models. Don't get me wrong and there's definitely perks to being a freelancer and there are times where freelancer is the perfect solution for you. I'm just highlighting some of the ways that the agency model brings some stuff to the table. There's a lot of ways to create your agency. Everything from the highest investment, cost-wise and connectedestina-wise, which is in the US, you're W-2 employees, to having 1099s, which are your US contractors, which is where probably most of us start. Then you can move to overseas. You can use white label services and potentially strategic partners. And I'll dive into each of these, but these are getting a little bit further and further away as far as how connected they are to you. But I would argue these are all ways you can model your business. And my agency hasn't always looked the way it does today and I'll get to, at the end, how my model looks, but know that there's no one way to do this and the way it is today is not the way it's gonna be tomorrow, it's not the way it was yesterday. Okay, maybe not that tight, but you know a year ago, a year from now, this evolves, this morphs, this flows. So in all of this know that you can test, figure things out, experience some of the mess of growth, learn, you don't know what you don't know. And sometimes you need to just jump into it, figure things out, backpedal, come up with some new plans and move forward again. So just know that as I'm explaining all this and sharing all this, it is a never-ending learning opportunity. This is business, right? I like to joke, it's similar to parenting. We're just making it up, we're doing the best we can and we're finding our way. So employees is obviously in some ways the best, right? They're dedicated 100% to you. You get to call all the shots. You tell them where they need to be, when they need to be there, all of that stuff. And it's important if you have contractors, you don't treat them like employees. There's some very serious legal components of how you treat a contractor versus an employee. But obviously you've got the cost. And so most of us are not gonna start there. You've got the fixed cost, which is now, you need to, they kind of depend on you to pay them regularly. And you've got all the taxes and the insurance and stuff. So most of us aren't going to start with employees, or at least I haven't gotten there yet. Contractors is usually where a lot of us start our business. And there's sort of two models. There's the local and there's the overseas. And I'm gonna really dive into kind of the pros and cons of each because they both bring different strengths and challenges to the table. The nice thing with local is you've got a shared language, typically a shared time zone. So it's gonna make communication a lot easier. They're typically, when they're local, they can interface directly to your customers. They can essentially kind of move into replacing you. But obviously they're probably a little more expensive in comparison to an overseas team. And you do need to know with your contractors you can't dictate their schedule. It's actually imperative that you're not their only bread and butter, that they're not working for you 100% of the time. Usually there's kind of this healthy understanding. But you can't necessarily say you need to be at this place at this time. So that's just the trade off there. Overseas is nice and when I say overseas I'm starting to talk about emerging markets like India and the Philippines. The nice thing about there is you can forge yourself. So if you're a business and you're trying to be profitable and you're hiring someone local and you wanna make $100 an hour and they wanna make $100 an hour there's a problem. Cause all that happens is that check comes in and goes right on out and you're like what the heck. And I will tell you my first year moving into agency I definitely I had crossed six figures I was all excited and then I looked at how much I kept and I went hey how come I made less this year than last what the hell. And that can happen as you go into an agency you gotta be really careful. Cause you can find yourself being like what on earth just happened here. I could have sworn I touched more money. But overseas you can afford yourself because at least in my rough multiplier I found that there's about eight or so X difference. So for example if I'm paying my team like $10 an hour that's like them earning $80, $100 an hour here. So you can in some ways buy your level of expertise there. So it definitely is easier in that respect. However, and the other advantage is you can there's kinda no rules. So for example my guy in the Philippines I'm like yeah I want you checking in at three o'clock every day which is six a.m. your time. And that's what I want. And some people I know actually pay a differentiator instead of paying $10 an hour you pay like 12 which is 20% that's sizable and they work their nights so they work your days. So there's much more flexibility and freedom there but it's not free. Some of the challenges I've run into with overseas is the cultural, the language, communication, time zone you know with my team in India they're coming online like at nine o'clock at night and they're leaving line at like seven o'clock the next morning. Well if I'm under stress for a project it means I work all day I'm sitting there chomping at the bit till they come online and they very well wake up the next morning and go I had directions what happened and suddenly you know one of the challenges is that you can potentially miss a whole day. If you give directions and you think you're clear they come online you've gone to bed they can't ask clarifying questions it's now the next day. So overseas is cost effective but not cost free. I do find with overseas in my personal experience it is a little easier to maybe have lost that day or potentially if I'm not explicitly clear in my communications there can be challenges. But it's part of my solution and when I go into my team you'll see that I have a mix of all of them actually as part of my team because each of these parts has strengths and again I'm trying to stay profitable. Would it be great to have W2 employees? Sure but I would kind of like to keep some pennies at the end of the day. And so as a result I've had to kind of look at all these pieces and dynamically assemble what looks like a good team for me for where I'm at right now. Another solution you can do is white label services. So the advantage of the first three I mentioned is that they're all under your umbrella which means you set the systems, the processes this is how it's done here. When you start using other companies like white label services the great part is is you don't have to worry about the staff right? They're giving you a solution in a vacuum like you might need SEO services so they'll take care of it for you. The downside is you're trusting this company. It's their people, it's their systems, it's their process you get no say in that part. And so you know that's just a trade off a cost and a risk and it's a great solution but it's just again those pieces that you're always weighing as you figure out what are you gonna use for your solutions. And then finally another piece you can use is strategic partnerships. So this is where instead of like the SEO where you white label it so you sell the service but it's umbrella under your business no one needs to know that it's not necessarily an in-house solution. You can have strategic partners where it's like okay this person is my copywriter go to them. And so obviously I'm not gonna necessarily profit as much off that I'm not marking it up but at the same time what strategic partnerships can do for you is there might be some unofficial referral credit of like hey thanks for the business here's a gift card from Amazon. Or the other great thing about strategic partnerships is my copywriter we're not in competition with each other so I send business to my copywriter my copywriter sends web business to me. So it kind of broadens your spectrum of people you're working with which is great. And that's actually another thing I'd say that's really nice about contractors. And especially even I don't know if I'd say US but that's been my experience. They're working with more than just you which means again they're not in a vacuum they may very well say you know what on this team we do it like this and you go wow that's a great idea. And so by having this kind of interconnectedness of people working with other people there's a lot of new ideas that can come into the table. And you know with all of these you need to remember you're creating your team your way. And so it's your systems, your processes, your values, your culture. In my case I have a really big value in my team of fun. When my team starts teasing me and giving me a hard time I consider it a good day. If you can rag on the boss I consider that a good team and a good day. And especially with overseas I've had to work really hard to make sure that I'm very clear in my communication and also very clear that I expect feedback. I do not want to be told yes. I want to be told what the hell are you like what sort of crazy direction is this? Or I reward my team when they go and do things like okay you said to do it like this but I had this other idea so I made a sample page what do you think? And I reward that and I really pull from it. And with overseas teams you may need to extract a little bit more and it's really important that you're looking at personalities when you're hiring too because technical skill is important but that personality is important too. So as I kind of alluded to I've got a blend. This is my team at the moment subject to change. My project manager basically the way I've got it is that the tasks that are more sort of either interactive with my clients and or tasks where I personally am not as strong are the tasks that I've noticed I've chosen to keep US based which means lower margins, you know. But at the same time it's just necessary and easier for me. So my project manager is US based, graphics design, SEO, social media, things that are much more communicative. If it was something like SEO research that's fine. And so from my own findings I found things like front end development, back end development and again I'm a developer so this might be why I've kind of settled into this groove. I can very easily write systems and processes about this is what I expect, this is how it should look, this is how I can quality check it. So what's nice about this for me financially is I'm able to say okay the project budget is this. My US team is a little bit more expensive but it uses this amount. So let's say a project takes 60 hours. All right figure 10 hours or so for project management, 10, 15 hours project management, 10, 15 hours graphics design, you know 40 hours for build out but I use that overseas at a lower rate so I kind of get that chunk of time at a slightly lower cost point to me. And then kind of we go back to the project management of the training of the client and the overseas. So I've kind of, that's just how it's flowed and worked for me at this point. Everyone has very different experiences. The biggest thing I would tell you with your teams is just make sure you communicate and train. The most frustrating thing for me to see especially with overseas teams is people are like they did a horrible job. Well all the, all the business owner did was throw it over the fence and hope it landed. Of course they did a terrible job. They didn't know what the directions were. They didn't have clear expectations. They didn't know what success looked like. So as business owners, and I'll get to this, it's really important that there's some things you put into place before you grow. Or like me, and probably you will do this too, you sort of learn a few things the hard way. You find those yourself at the end of the first year are going, how come I lost money? And you go, oh yeah that's why. All right, I can fix that. And then so as I mentioned strategic partners, copywriting and SEO and AdWords, and then white label, I actually offer PSD to WordPress. So I don't use PSD to WordPress, I actually offer that service within my agency because that has to be something we're good at. So you can remember that not only is your team kind of partially using services, but you can provide services. You can be that white label service in your team's zone of excellence. So it goes both ways. All right, growing gutches. So I'm gonna try not to get on any soapboxes here, but it can happen, because this is the part I'm super passionate about. Systems and processes. You know, when I started as an engineer, processes and documentation was like a bad word to me. I'm like, I do math, I'm a calculus person, don't make me write. But what I've learned is they're so important, and they're so freeing. Even as a freelancer, they're important and freeing because we keep so much in our heads. And if you're gonna have a team, alas, I tell my team, they say, how can I do better? I say, mine read better. Right, not fair. And so, and we do it to ourselves. It's like you're like running through the checklist. Okay, when I launch, I should do this, this and this. And really you owe it to yourself and you owe it to your clients to have a consistent quality product. That's what being a professional is. And to have a consistent quality product as a freelancer, as an agency, you need to have a here's how it's done here. Here's our final checks. Here's the themes we use. Here's the plugins we use. And again, even if you're a freelancer and suddenly you're out down for the count and you don't know why someone else can step in and say, okay, this is how we finish this project. It's just something that you can do that's good for your customer. And so systems and processes are so important and it allows your team to come on. It allows your team to be successful. And it can be something as simple as screen recording what you do. As a matter of fact, one of the ways I started was I'd screen record a task and then I'd have my developer actually go through it taking screenshots, making like a real document for me. And in that process, while he was knocking out that real document so I had it, it was reinforcing those steps to him. So I did the easy part, did a five minute video, no skin off my back, used Lume, easy to do. And I let my team do the more kind of intensive let's document, document part. And again, it was a training at the same time. And systems and documentation can feel overwhelming. You can be like, oh my God, how do I do all of it? So how I approached it, could do it kind of two ways. If you're gonna bring on for small tasks, you can just simply record the small task and then hand off the small task. As you start to want to really say what are my company's systems and processes, what I did was I took a step back and I said, okay, what's the pipeline of a client for my business? Okay, there's intake, there's kind of intaking them, there's discovery, there's design, there's building, there's quality check, there's launch, there's afterwards. And then I kind of went through it again and I said, okay, intake. Well, when I intake, I put them in this system, this system, in this system. And so what I did was I went through kind of each of my big phases and each time I went through the cycle, I dug a little deeper. So I didn't try to take on the whole thing and go like super deep. I just did really high level and then I broke it down and then I broke it down. And one of the amazing things that happened when I was doing my systems that I kind of celebrate on a regular basis is I was trying to set up my intaking system for a VA to do and I'm like, okay, we put them in this tool and that tool in the next tool. And I had it all spelled out and I went Zapier. And I set up a zap. And now when I get a new client, I fell out of form and anyone who knows Zapier can have a geek moment with me here. And it automatically runs out and puts a Slack channel in a Dropbox folder and puts them in Harvest and puts them on a to-do list and it just runs around and does it for me. I don't even need a VA to do it. So sometimes when you flesh out like, what am I doing? You even save yourself time doing all those repetitive tasks because you go, there's a better way. All right, that was just point one. All right, I warned you about the soapbox. The next one, which is the one that really bit me was not having a handle on expenses, how long something really took. When I was a freelancer, if a project took 40 hours, 50 hours, 60 hours, I mean, it was my time, but it was just my time, right? So at the end of the month, if I had enough income and I had enough sleep, it obviously worked. But when you hire a team and you've got the project budget and you're paying people hourly, they actually care whether it's 40, 50, or 60, they wanna be paid accordingly. You watch your budget go like, what the hell's going on here, people? I wanna keep some pennies. And so another thing to do either before you grow or trust me, when you grow, you're gonna figure out real fast how long things take, track your time. And I know it sucks, but if you don't know, you don't know. And it's even good for you to know, to even reevaluate your pricing, because I'll tell you, as someone who tends to feel bad about charging, I felt a lot more confident raising my prices when I went, okay, I'm putting in 60 hours, they are getting quality, no more this low price nonsense, okay? So it kind of almost reinforces to yourself, if you need that justification, which some of us do, it helps. You also need to realize that by building a team, there's gonna be some overhead that you may or may not see coming. You now have more children to feed, more marketing, marketing time, marketing budget, this is not billable time. As an agency, you really need to realize your costs are going up. You know, your team, now that money that comes in, you're not doing the work, you're sharing. Theoretically, you're bringing in more work, but you are sharing some of that profit, and you're also gonna have expenses in the realm of software. You might have invoicing software, time tracking software, tasking, ticketing, list building, proposals, all these things that, you know, when it's one user, it's one price, and you got another user, the price just went up, and okay, we're gonna play to a slightly higher level audience, all right? I probably should put those proposals in a tool, and you know, all these little hidden expenses, this $10 here and $10 there, as we all know, always check for leaks. That's one other really good advice. Twice a year, check your statement and reevaluate your tools on a regular basis for those $10. Keep them in your bank account, as opposed to sending them out. You'll find yourself constantly, you know, leaking little shiny objects. So this is, yeah, I guess this would be the official soapbox, not remembering your value. And so this is the justification and the reason that when you move up to agency, your old pricing probably isn't gonna work anymore. Because when you were pricing before, you were pricing for you keeping 100%, you not having all these additional costs. And so I know I felt some discomfort raising my prices. I'm like, well then why isn't it fair to my client that used to be okay at this price, now it needs to cost that price? And what I had to really remember is exactly why I grew this agency in the first place. It's the value I'm bringing to my client. Remember how I said if I got sick, if I went on vacation, someone was still there? Remember how I said I've got a team of experts and it's not just me trying to fake it in the other areas? Those things are value, those things are important. And those things mean you can charge more. And so these are the systems, the processes, all the things that you've needed to put in place to grow that maybe you had as a freelancer, but I'll tell you I didn't. All this refinement, all of this, and also as you've moved into an agency, this is probably not your first year doing web development or whatever your field is. Your expertise, all of these things are why you should and need to raise your prices. Because when you grow, you do have this increased cost and if you wanna stay profitable and you wanna end the year having kept more pennies than the year before, you're gonna need to keep an eye on these things. But you also need to believe in knowing that it's okay that your price went up because now you are doing even better by your clients. Or at least you are offering something that is even more valuable. You're able to do those bigger projects, you're able to work with those bigger companies because they need the refinement, the systems, the processes, the pieces you now have in place because you've up-leveled your game. So I wanted to share with you just some of the resources. This is just a few that I have found helpful in my career as I've moved up from being a freelancer to an agency owner. One of the most important ones for me, and there's a couple other people in this room who have been in WP Elevation, is an online community started by Troy Dean. I'm not sure how many years ago at this point. But this is an important one. It's important for a lot of reasons. Not only is it a great resource for learning how to set up a freelance business and or agency business, basically a website design business that has good systems, processes, flows, and ways of handling your business in place. It's really cool because it provides an online community of about 700 now other consultants that are in WordPress. And what is so powerful about that is it gives me, and so this is also especially nice as freelancers where you don't have that team. It helps with the lonely issue. It gives you a place where you can show up and say, I just kicked butt, or I'm crawling under my desk, or how the hell do I? And you've got a community of people that are similar, that are peers. And so that has been something, a resource that has been really valuable to me over the years is finding that. And so you guys have your meetups, but I would encourage you to explore finding ways to have those connections because it's so important for your professional knowledge base and your emotional support to have that network. That just happens to be one of mine. Jason Swank is another person who very much focuses on kind of up-leveling the agency almost to sales. So that's kind of more of his positioning where you've already got an agency and you're kind of trying to get to the next level and possibly ultimately sell and cash out. Jennifer Bourne is wonderful. You guys probably know of her also in the WordPress community. She's got a new program of profitable project plan which is talking about really how to systemize moving your clients through the process of working with your business. What I really like about her is in my personal opinion, WP elevation, Troy Dean has a much more, and so this is a little gender specific, but more masculine kind of assertive approach to how he suggests you position yourself and communicate with clients a little bit more of the, I am the professional in the room here. Whereas Jennifer Bourne for me personally resonates a little closer. She's a little more my own personality of like, this is a collaboration, we're gonna work together. I'm here for you, but here's my process. So it's kind of just a different feel. So these are at least two resources I know of where they're both helping you set up systems to really have clear flow of clients through your business but with different energies. And so find the one that works for you but it's really valuable to reach out. Reinventing the wheel is overrated. There's a lot of great people out there who have been ahead of us, learn from them or at least leverage them or listen to them and at least just take that in as information. The legal link is just that differentiator between employee and contractor, just that way you don't cross over any boundaries you shouldn't. And then just some books that I've enjoyed. This list could be a lot longer. E-Mess, probably most of us have read. That if not, if you're new to being a freelancer, read it. It's a really good one. Built to Sell is the one that really helped me think about the notion of you're not selling your job. What does building something that could actually eventually run without you that you could step away from look like? Starting with why Profit First is helping you with somewhat how you look at your numbers, traction, which is some of your systems, up-tape marketing, these are all great resources and there's more. And so I'm just really illustrating that there's a lot of great resources out there that as you think about your business, whether you stay a freelancer or if you choose to grow, that can really just help you think about how could I do this? Because we all started being really good at our craft but I don't know that many of us are business majors, marketing majors, a lot of things that we now fall under our umbrella. So these are ways we can keep growing and educating. Okay, I don't know how fast I talk. Oh, not too bad. Tend to talk quick. Any questions you guys might have? Yeah, I planted you. That's a great question. I would absolutely love to. She asked me, how did I go about, where did I find my overseas people? How did I figure out which one I was gonna hire? Like, what did that process look like? I'm guessing that's kind of, kind of have two stories on that. So my first person was a little bit more of random. I needed a small task done. I interviewed on Upwork. I hired someone. He did a great job. I was never intending to outsource overseas. It just kind of happened. Gave him a little more, kept doing a great job, ran with it. The guy's still with me. Three, four years later, he's still my go-to for backend development. My friend and developer was more intentional. I think, so this is where I may have gotten a little fuzzy on the line, so maybe it shouldn't be recorded. But I think I went on Upwork and it was either Upwork or something.ph. Anyways, they were all really good about kind of giving me their Skype information. We sort of went and had a side conversation. I think you're supposed to, if you started the conversation on Upwork, keep it there. Anyway, the more important part of this is how I went about it was, I came up with a job description of what I needed. So I knew I needed a friend and developer. I knew what the specifications were. I created the job description and then instead of just posting it where I would have gotten slammed with people, I instead looked and strategically said, countries I was interested, sort of their skill set I was looking at, price point I was looking at, and I specifically reached out to let's say 25 people or 20 people. Some of them contacted me back. I asked them some questions and kind of quickly got a feel for like if they were communicating well and just kind of followed my gut. Had it down to two or three people. So this is where it's nice with overseas. Then I made a test. So what I knew was, as a friend and developer, I would want them to be able to take a graphics design, a certain theme and build it. So with overseas and the fact that their hourly rate was $7 an hour, I could afford to do this. And so what I went and did was, I did a paid interview effectively, a paid test case, which they loved. They were so grateful. I'm like, hey, it's only fair. You're gonna do the work. And so what I did was I set up two test cases where I had the PSD. I gave them the development setup. I said, here's the installation. Here's the PSD. I want you to do at least the home page and this internal page. I want you to spend nine hours doing it. I don't expect you to do all of it. There's no way you're knocking out a site in nine hours. I want you to get as far as you get. Ask me any questions for issues or things you run into. And in the last hour, I want you to write down kind of like if I had more time, I would. And so it cost me 70 bucks for each of them. And what, it was so informational. Like one person did a great job just as a technician but visually couldn't connect the dots. Like I saw places where there was some like, it just, you could tell there wasn't that ability to just physically, to come up with like a graphical compliment to a design. Whereas the other person I noticed maybe wasn't as technically strong but I liked the way, one, he communicated with me and two, the way he kind of was able to graphically compliment. And I knew in my personal case, I was looking for that strength more than the other one. And so that's who I ultimately hired. I have been working for me 20 hours a week. But with overseas, you can kind of set the rules. You can sort of save the amount of time. So yes, I may have met them on UpWorks. I pay them through PayPal. La, la, la. It's a win-win situation. And so that's kind of how I did it. I basically made a test case. That would have been harder in the US but still probably a wise choice because the reality is firing someone just sucks because I don't know, I care about people. We all do, right? And once you bring someone in, you're emotionally attached. And then the other thing is when someone comes in, you're gonna train them, all this other stuff. So it's worth considering that upfront investment of once you get it down to your one or two people, give them a mini test that really executes what it is you need them to do for you. That was my experience. Okay, I think he's got someone in the back but then there's some other hands. Thank you, Jess. This has been great. Cool. You're the center line. And I myself, as you used to identify the points and your probably where you are and... Yeah, so I use, and there's quite a few options out there, what I'm using right now that works for me is I use Teamwork PM, Teamwork Desk and Harvest. So Teamwork PM is kind of a to-do list. You can bring in and have sort of what the different, I kind of bring in like, okay, we've got a new build and it will auto-populate, all right, discovery and here are the sub things we do and graphics design and here are the sub points, build out, here are the subtasks, quality check, here are the subtasks, things of that nature. So I use that kind of for my builds and for that sort of internal team assignment, like, okay, graphics designer, you're working on your piece and it's due on this date and things like that. Tickets are a little bit different. I use Teamwork Desk, which they talk to each other, which is nice, it can automatically create a to-do. Teamwork Desk I use for tickets. So these are things like ongoing care clients who are like, can you update my phone number on the contact page? They just submit to, you know, support at Mozak Design, boom, it goes in. We know there's a ticket, we can assign it to somebody who's gonna do it and a date and they have it do as to when it's assigned to when it's due. And the ticketing system actually also does auto-email, so then I can reply and say, okay, we got your ticket, I can say, we've done the work, please let us know. You know, we did it, here's the page to check, let us know if we missed anything and if you need anything else at all, blah, blah, blah. And then I use Harvest for my time tracking in voicing. So all of my time my team spends goes in there because obviously when they wanna get paid too, I wanna know what a project is costing, right? So I have all these different staff members, my US team cost is not the same as my overseas team cost. So when I look at a project I put into there saying, okay, they came in at this cost, how many hours went to the project management, how many hours went to graphics design, how many hours went to build out, how many hours went to training. So I can really see over time where's the time going because that was the biggest thing that I think I messed up with when I started and again that's where I say growth is messy and sometimes you just have to be messy to know what on earth you need to worry about. And so I grew and I learned and I went, oh wow, I really should have thought about that. Backpedal, systems and processes. Okay, let's try again. So that's kind of what I use. What are some other popular ones out there? I wanna say Trello boards are pretty popular. Yeah, Trello people use, really just pick the system that works for you. In my case that works well because they all sort of play nice and meet my needs. Don't system hop. Again, we can easily fall into the shiny. It's much better to know your systems and processes and then pick the one that works. But that's what I use. Did that answer most of your question points? Okay. I saw, yeah. My question is about overseas help. Do you have to give them 10.99s? And if you don't- Well, at least I don't. If you're a started H.T.D. rather than getting a bookkeeper right in front. Okay, yes to the bookkeeper. You will love that person. Worth every penny. Let's see. I don't do 10.99s overseas. I don't know if I should. I haven't. Hasn't been an issue. I just write as a business expense. I suppose I could be wrong on this advice. I'm giving you, I'm just simply sharing what I've done. Good question for my accountant, huh? But that's what I've done. I've just written it as a business expense. And I guess it's never been questioned. I mean, it goes to a PayPal account. It's like any other service provider. Good, good point. But yeah, that's how I've done it. If anyone knows better than me. Uh-oh, I might get corrected. Okay, so it appears that I have some homework to do. So far so good. Oh, well there you go. Can you repeat with us? And I'll try to repeat it for the recording. W-H-B. B-E-N, okay. All right, and for corporations, I think 1120S? Cool. Yeah, I'll be doing that next tax season. I think I saw, yeah? Whoops, she has the mic. I didn't see, sorry. Yeah, so I guess I have two levels of documentation. One is kind of the processes and procedures, which is kind of like how we do things at a high level, like enter them into the invoicing software. And then I have more local to-dos, like put them in harvest, knowing that harvest could change in the future. I'm currently mostly using it internally. I don't have any really written documents that I give my clients. I probably could save myself some time doing that. But I don't, I'm a very video person, so I tend to make them like training videos. It's just kind of my thing. I'm a talker over a writer. But yes, I do know one of the nice things with Jennifer Bourne. One of the things with her class is that she's given out, or the one that you pay for, the Profitable Project Plan. She actually has some really great emails that she gives the clients, where it's like, and this is what I need for this, and this is what I need for that. And she even has like keeping the client busy emails. Like, while we're working, here's some stuff for you to go read. So leave me alone. And no, but it's great. It's kind of great. It's like she has this whole system, and that's what her program is, that she's starting up is like, how do you keep auto, by the way, communicating with your clients? So they feel cared for while you're like, I'm underground doing work. Just let me do my thing. So she does have that. I haven't rolled that into my business yet. My to-do list is long like everybody else's. So yeah, it's on my to-do list. But that's one thing I really like from her particular course. She has like, I think I've printed 200 pages. It's just wild, the amount. I'm like, girl, I don't know how much time you put into this, but it was a lot. So yes, you can certainly use the documentation to also offload that. But you know, most of my clients, I don't know, I'm very verbal in talking with them. And then the training, it's video as needed. And more and more, I'm moving into more and more of those clients where they're like, you know what, my job is to run my business, and your job is to support me. So it becomes a little bit more mutant in some ways as you get to the higher level. Been my experience for me. Yeah? One of my biggest things for an agency level. My question is, do you have residual clients that can keep you afloat for when you're finding, or when the marketing person is finding work for you, or how do you really, sort of change your position, and also handle the other expenses? Right, so it's called floley. You don't just necessarily go out and hire that full-time W-2 employee, like right? You do it slowly. And so in my case, I was more comfortable starting with a U.S. person, which was obviously more expensive, but he just started working for me. I told him, and I didn't even need to do this, but it's just two I am. I said, I want to guarantee you at least $1,000 a month, because I know that if I'm gonna ask you to jump and your answer is sure, the least I can do is help guarantee you can pay your bills. And so I took that on personally. I didn't have to do that. It was my own choice. But so I started having him do smaller tasks. So I would do something that was repetitive, that I could record how to do, and then move them in to doing it. I was chatting with another friend who she's just brought on someone overseas. So that's a lower price point. So she was able to bring them on at 40 hours instantly, and is instead going and just doing a similar thing where she's recording tasks. And she knows she may not always be able to fill the time. So she's asking her person, find some classes on Udemy, whatever. And I'll just, I know there's gonna be some dead time. You kind of have to transition. How much residual? I mean, just look at, I guess how much do you want to spend? I probably, for my 20 hours a week, for my developer overseas, I think you're looking at under $600 a month. That's actually not huge. My developers in the US, I typically pay my US team personally around $40, $50 an hour. So that's obviously much higher. But I just start them at a slower, like okay, I'm willing to commit to 10 hours a week. So I would say you don't need to go like straight to like, I'm an agency. Just grow into it, find your way, feel your way. And you almost, as I said, don't know what you don't know. My first project boundary, it was messy. My second one's much better. Cause now I'm like, okay, this is my systems and processes. I know what I need. I didn't know what I needed. I'm like, help. I mean, I threw it over the fence at her. And of course she's like, well what do you want me to do with this? I'm like, I don't know. And so like over time you get better. And you do come up with these. So don't expect you to instantly know what to do. Just find your way and you'll get there. And just keep moving in the direction. And know that there are days where you're just gonna be like, you know, screw this. I'm going back to just meet myself and I, where I keep all the pennies, or even screw this, I'm going back to corporate, okay? We all have those days. But at the end of the day, I personally love being able to have a team for what I can do for them and what they can do for me and what it means for my clients. And so at the end of the day, it's why I'm doing what I'm doing. You talk about systems and processes. Where do you keep them? So we found that you could start and do it. What I've done for myself is those two levels. So I actually have a Google site, which I use internally for my sort of that top level process where it's just like new client comes on, put them in invoicing software, send welcome email. And then next to that, I actually have the Google doc, which is more of the living breathing. Like we'll touch this and it's like, okay, that means harvest and whatever. And really that sort of actionable stuff is more in teamwork desk, teamwork, PM where the twos are. So I kind of have separated it between the sort of top level visionary and the actual like here's the steps because you will always put them in your invoicing software. What your invoicing software is might change and it kind of allows you to keep those two pieces. That's at least how I've set up and the Google site for some reason was really quick and easy for me to do that. Now, I was able to keep it private. I'm pretty certain I'm not sharing that with the world. No Googling it. It's hidden. I have some one more question here. Okay. The conch chamber of commerce, I attended a seminar slash workshop. It was given by a company called Andre Hall. Okay. And it about five or 10 minutes into this presentation, I was getting really angry. Okay. This, the owner of this company was talking about how creative people all over the country are working for slave wages. And I don't want to do that. But they're out there, tons of them. His company vets these people and they're doing copywriting, illustrating videos. They're doing all types of work including bookkeeping, you name it, for very, very low wages. And there are people who have time on their hands. They're all educated. And I'm not sure, but he said that they were vetted. I'm not sure all of them, but a large number are vetted. So I'm sitting here thinking, well, hey, if I want to migrate from being a freelancer to an agency, because I'm already making those plans now, I think that I would actually use them. Yeah. I would use that service. And I don't have just, I could make the choice to not stick with them. But I thought I'd put that name out there because you guys should really check out this company and I think the majority of the people who sign up are Americans. Yeah, and I will actually mention one thing I didn't say but a mistake I made in some ways is in my head, I went, okay, subcontractor, local, meaning like in my, where I lived, or overseas. One thing I forgot to consider was that living wage varies all over the United States. And I actually personally, and I really should update my slides to include that, is to remember and to think, like for example, if you're in New York City, yeah, the local person to work for you is probably maybe more than you can stomach. But you may be able to find somebody in the US in a different area where what you pay them isn't what you want to be paid, but make a great quality of life for where they live. And so yeah, there's a lot of options. This is not black or white, there's a lot of things. So yeah, it's great. That's something that, as I said, I didn't occur to me and is an important one. Yep, problem.