 There's a couple of options and you pick this talk, so thank you very much. This is the tools that improve operational efficiency, lovingly referred to in the WordPress community as Matt's cheap tools talk. So because one of the fun things is a lot of the tools that I'm going to be going over here start off kind of a freemium model. They start off for free, especially for personal use, but then they scale really well in a business type atmosphere. So let's see. I've been giving this talk for a couple of years now. As the industry changes and as I get referrals and feedback and work with different products, I change and update this. So this is kind of the 2018 version. One of my favorite parts is at the end of this we are going to have a Q&A and that's when we can talk and we can hear people say, hey, have you suggested or have you thought about this product? And I'll say, no, I haven't. Let me try it out. And then sometimes that gets worked into the the talk. So And don't worry about copious notes. There's a little tagline here. All of you in the back might not be able to see it. It is already on slide share net. So I am kind of waiting for a mass exodus of people to go ahead and leave the room. Nope, we're good. All right. Thank you very much. All right. I'm also aware that this is the talk at the very, very end. So I do want to try to keep it to about 30 minutes and then everybody who needs to go can leave. But the cool part is in the middle of this talk, we're going to be doing something where I encourage use on your cell phones and on your laptops. So if you're down there and you're doing this, it's not going to offend me at all. I'm going to think that you're just going along with exactly what we're doing. I will let you know when that part starts. And you can just heads down, be good to go, you can text your loved ones, do whatever you need to do. This talk is going to answer three things. This talk is going to go over why is this topic even important? What can I use in my business today, and then how can I implement it? All right, but first let's have a little bit of story time. So although this talk changes, the story time is kind of similar. A lot of you people may already know this. My dad was an operational manager for Sears back in 1970s. He was one of the first people to introduce Just-in-Time Shipping to Sears when they were doing the Robux catalog. That was kind of a big deal. It was cutting edge back in the day, and it's something that Google and Amazon and all the other big distributors use now. It's kind of commonplace and accepted. But he loves this stuff. He loves operational efficiency. He ended up creating a book. He wrote a book about it, and then he ended up teaching that book for 30 years at DeVry University. Needless to say, he was passionate about his work, and then he would bring it home with him. And I use the word home kind of loosely. This is actually a picture of me when I was eight years old. And for those of you who don't know what this thing is in the back, it's a pop-up camper. Every single time my dad had vacation, we had to get out of the state, and this is the mode of travel that we would prefer to do it in. Now to go from the condensed format to this popped-up living space, there was an operation. There was a process. There was a sequence of events. So to get it all up and high, you actually had to crank it up so that it had that click-to-clack, click-to-clack, click-to-clack noise. All the people at the KOA loved us for that, by the way. It would go up. You'd have to push out the sides of the beds. You'd have to connect the water pipes. You'd have to connect the gas lines. You'd have to get the foundation down just right, or it'd be all skewy. There was a process. And dad would love to go to the campsites, hold a cup of coffee, talk to the other campers, and say, you know what? My family and I, we can pull into a campsite in a full thunderstorm. Pop it up and not get wet. We are that efficient at it. There we go, ladies and gentlemen. Now in actuality, it took about eight minutes, but that was pretty quick for something like this. And we started off somewhere in the 40 minutes, somewhere around there, I think. So that dad was really super proud about that. So who's this guy? Why is it, I think I'm even wearing the exact same outfit in this one. Just the eyes went a little bit weird. This is branding, ladies and gentlemen. All right, introduction. My name is Matt James. I started doing IT in 2002. My claim to fame at the Fortune 100 company that I was working at is making tiny little scripts that improved their operations for the business unit that I was in. By the time that I left, they were calculating those savings in the millions of dollars. I got a recommendation from the head of IT. But it was such a slow moving company. And I was young and I was naive and stupid. So I went to Atlanta and I decided I'm going to shoot myself in the foot and do mobile device management, which is app development, which is crazy. And we ended up building a company down there, not we. I ended up joining up with a little place called AirWatch. AirWatch, I was their global SaaS developer. Excuse me, global SaaS administrator. We helped scale all of their operations from kind of a local footprint to an international footprint. We sold a VMware for $1.54 billion. And that felt pretty good. But when you have about 1,400 people internationally and you're the guy with the football cell phone, when they call whenever they have issues, it feels like you're one of the five firefighters and everybody's running around with matches. So I got really kind of, I took a long, hard look at my life and I said, you know what, I'm going to migrate to marketing. With the technical background in marketing, it was a natural fit. The people that I ended up joining in with said, you can do websites, right? And I said, sure, websites are fun. That's how I found WordPress. In doing WordPress, I started freelancing in 2015, realized how much taxes took out and immediately incorporated in 2016. I am now the information architect at a lovely church up here in Marietta. My manager is actually here in the audience. So that is a nice thing to see. All right, let's jump in. Let's make sure that you guys are in the right spot. Who can benefit from this talk? All right, maybe you're a new business owner. Maybe you want to make sure that you're doing everything right. You're not tripping out of the gate. Maybe you're an experienced business owner. Maybe you have been doing the same thing for 10, 15, 20 years and you're kind of looking to change, reinvent some things a little bit. Maybe you're a business and you're looking to scale up. Maybe you have the best problem that businesses can have. You have 15 months worth of work and 12 months to do it in. That's a great problem. Conversely, maybe you're a business looking to scale down. Maybe you have eight months of work and 12 months of bills. Operations can help with all of these. So I'm pretty sure if you are any small business owner or startup, you're in the right spot. Is anybody not in that category? All right, all right, only one. We're good, we're good, not to single you out. All right, I still think you can have a benefit from this. All right, so why is this topic so important? So it's easy to throw Google and Amazon and say that they're innovative and to say that they're creative and that's kind of why they're so good at what they do. But innovation and efficiency really kind of go hand in hand. Cornerstone were able to track 50,000 people that went through and did a job placement survey. In that job placement survey, they tracked if they had a standard browser, which is going to be Internet Explorer or Safari, or if they took this survey on a non-standard browser, Chrome, Mozilla, Firefox, and they found something kind of interesting. They found out that the people that used a non-standard browser stayed in their job for 15% longer and they performed better across the board. Why? Why would the browser make any difference? So they were kind of scratching their head and they said, all right, maybe there's an extension, maybe it just operates faster, maybe, I don't know. What they found out is that it's the innovative spirit. When people are given something, hey, you need an Internet browser. The people that say, all right, let me take a step back instead of using the thing that's been given to me, what's a good one out there? Do a little bit of research, ask people, look around, figure things out. Those people that had that spirit in them performed better, so that's why this talk is important. Now, an aspect of operational efficiency is you've got to know your shop rate. Real quick question, how many people know what this shop rate term means? Okay, all right, so let me explain. Shop rate is the value of your time. If we're all entrepreneurs, we're all trying to get something together, it's easy to just kind of try to do any jobs that you can to make mincemeat, but knowing your shop rate knows if it's worth your time. This is, if a company is paying you, how much they're paying you per hour? Okay, we're going to get back to that. This is actually a term that we're going to just kind of have to understand that it's a value for our time, because I want to make sure operational cost and operational efficiency are two completely different things. You can have low operational cost and low efficiency. You can also have high operational costs and low operational efficiency. They don't necessarily correlate to each other, so I just wanted to make sure that just because these tools are free, sometimes you need to pay a little bit extra. I'll explain how to do that at the end, and there's a spoiler alert. It's math, and I know I just said a four-letter word, so you guys might start feeling like Captain Jack Sparrow running away from the math, but you know what? Don't worry, it is a super simple formula. It's just output over input. You don't have to get any engineer. This is actually across-the-board, mechanical, hydro, and operations managers. It's what is your output and what is your input, figuring it out. All right, so let's break this down. These are the different areas. I'm going to give you two suggestions for each area of this business. I'm not going to get into the more bespoke custom tools. If you're a video editor, if you're an SEO person, if you're a web designer, you should have been here for the talk before, because Ali did an amazing job with that. But we're not going to get into those custom tools. We're specifically focusing on kind of the more general, I think, a lot more people will get benefit from these ideas and how they are used. So let's jump right in. Finance. How many of you guys have even heard of Navy Federal Credit Union? All right, we've got about half the audience. Another part of you may just have not thought about them because they have Navy in there. And well, don't I need to be in the Navy or somebody have to be part of the Navy to be considered for that? That's actually not the case. They have a pretty open, I know it's kind of messing up the fonts, but Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, there's a lot of different areas of service where if you have a family member, they can sponsor you. I actually got in because my dad is a Vietnam War veteran. My grandfather, through this process, I found out was a commander in the Navy, so that was pretty cool. But all that to say, you may have a sponsor available to you and you get some great services for this. I like the fact that they are a tech-savvy credit union. I prefer putting my money into a credit union because they have lower rates, they have lower fees, they work with people a little bit more. They even have a small businesses service section. If you guys are looking for a place to kind of put your money, these guys would definitely be a good one to go to. Now that we actually have our money, how do we manage the money? Wave apps is what I like to use. The real point here is if you have a small business, chances are you're not going to have the ability to have a separate business account and a personal account because kids need braces, kids need to eat, mortgages do. You're going to be mixing personal and business incomes. Wave apps is a great way to sort that out and let you know which ones are personal expenses and which ones are business expenses. I also like the fact that it is an all-in-one system. Invoicing, estimates, if I need to pay people through payroll, it's all done in here as well. It is a free solution for all those services. If you want to pay them a little bit of money, you actually get better support. You get better response time. You can call them up on the phone. I've only had to contact them two times, maybe three times. I'm pretty sure the third time it was my fault. Email is perfectly fine for me for using that service for free. I also like the fact that I can give special access to an accountant. I don't have to make another login or give them my login and wonder if they're going to screw anything up. They have view-only accounts for accountants, which is super nice. They also have the mobile invoicing and receipts, which we all kind of expect nowadays from something like this. Let's jump to security. Password management is something that is not only becoming necessary for personal use, but I'm an advocate of using it for business use. How often have you guys gotten an email like this? Notice the data breach. I just got this one last week. We get emails. Experian was a huge break that came out. It was a huge notice that occurred. A lot of people will get this email and say, oh, I should change my username and password for that site. They'll log in. They'll change the username and password. They're like, all right, I'm clear. They won't log in as me. It's not exactly the case. That's not what happens. Hackers will take this information. They'll go to a little place called the dark web. They'll sell your information for between $3 to $4 each, depending on what it is. Then they will try your username and password across a myriad of other websites. Google, Apple, Vimeo, you name it, Amazon. Just trying to get access and pretend to be you. The reason why they do that is because they know that people reuse passwords. They know that people are going to name something about their kids or their dogs or their pets or loved ones or what have you. That's why this model for them is working. Now, can I have all my username and passwords in this one account? Now, if that gets hacked, what happens at that point? I just made a honeypot. Good news. This hash database with 256-bit encryption, hash and salt are security terms. Hash and salt is a cipher for unlocking your database. What last pass stores on their end is gobbledygook. It is encrypted information. They don't even see your username and password. When I put in my password, the cipher unlocks. I'm able to get it in that instance. What this also means is if I try to do the I forgot my password feature, whoops, forgot my password, are you sure it's you? What street did you grow up on? Yep, okay, that's you. Go ahead, make a new password. That does not work here. What they say is, well, that stinks. That database is gone because that was your cipher. That's the only way that we're in. So they are a secure method for keeping your information that I would highly suggest not only for business, but for personal use as well. It's also a digital will. In my family, I do the finances. If I get hit by a bus, I hope my wife would mourn for me for just a little bit. But then after that process, she doesn't have to go through and try to figure out what username and password I was using for the banks. It doesn't have to worry about car insurance, logging in, getting bills paid. I have had to go through this before and it hurts. So the fact that I can contact LastPass ahead of time and say, hey, if my wife emails you and says, hey, I need access, wait five days a week, 24 hours, however long I want to wait, she will then get access to all the passwords. I think that's a great little handy feature. We're going to jump to the second aspect of security. Now, a lot of you might be small businesses, but at some point I hope that you're successful enough you're doing business with complete strangers. What that's going to mean is you're going to have to start using contracts. I know whenever you do business with friends or family, that's kind of your trust net. It's almost a slap across the face if it's like, hey, you're going to pay me, right? This contracting is kind of like a safety blanket for both parties involved. And I like Shake Law because if I need to do a statement of work, a non-disclosure agreement, a bill of sale, or even a napkin contract, I can write that out on my cell phone right now and say, you promise this, I promise this, sign, they sign, boom. We both get a copy of it in our inbox. They have a lot of free email contract, or not even email contract, they have a lot of contract templates that are available. If you pay a little bit of extra money, you can also get lawyer consulting. That's great. You get into new territory and you don't know if you're covered in certain areas. This is a great way to get consulting to figure out if you're covered there. And I probably should have said, this is the time where you guys can do on your cell phones and like laptops out and everything like that. I have the web addresses in the upper right-hand corner. I just forgot to make that announcement. Sorry. All right. Next one, communication. Domain registrar for communication. I guess the main point that I like for Namecheap is their renewal costs are really, really low. If you get a domain registrar, sometimes they'll get you in with 88 cent domain names. And that's great, but then it's $20 to renew after that. $30, however much. Somebody asked me last time, I said, yeah, I like their cheap renewal costs. And they said, how much is it? And I said, I should have known that. So I put them up here. These actually just came up for renewal. I got my .com for $11. I got my .info for $12 almost. And my .me for about $18. So your mileage may vary depending on your website. They have been very good to me. I also like the fact that they have an affiliate program. If you guys are building websites and you're having to set this up anyway, it's a nice little kickback for you. They are a great company, so I have no problem putting my name on it. They also have 24-7 support and live chat. I am a millennial. I prefer live chat more than talking on the phone a lot. So that is a nice little handy feature. Next one, communications. Yes? You might want to mention, I don't know how to put charges up to 20 bucks just for privacy. Really? They can freeze. Yeah. Is that the ICANN? That's the privacy policy? For domain cheap? Yes. Yes. It's really cheap. Oh, $30. Mercy. It's very reasonable. I actually just had a couple of them roll through. It's about $2 a year for domain privacy. Super low. You can also use a PO box, which was something that I used to talk about in this talk as well. If anybody has questions about how to use that, approach me afterwards so we can keep moving forward with this. Google Voice is a call-forwarding service. I live vicariously through this tiny little glowing box that fits in my pocket. Okay? But I don't want to give everybody access to the number that's directly tied to this. So a call-forwarding service kind of creates an additional buffer between me and clients. Now, one of the benefits of having a call-forwarding service is I can do personalized voice mails. Maybe I have a client that's kind of pushing at me, likes to call me at 9 o'clock. Their voicemail will say hello. Our business hours are between 8 to 5. We will respond to you the next day. Thank you very much. I can also for my nice one say, hey, sorry, I missed the call. Maybe it's in that awkward part between the driving station and the chair and the car. I'll get right back to you. You can do that. You can have custom voicemails. You can also set it up so that it rings multiple phones at once, which is super nice. If you hit 4, you can record the conversation. And I also like the fact that when, if I'm near a computer, I can respond to text messages through the web browser. I don't have to pick up my cell phone. Because a lot of times when I go home, I like to do that. And I just like to set it on there. But I'm usually on my computer. So that is an added benefit. You can port a number. You can port a number. I think it's 10 bucks. It's either 10 or 20 bucks. And you can have the number in your cell phone immediately tied into Google Voice. You would then get a new number for your phone, though. Because your SIM card in your cell phone is what holds that. So what you could do is if people are used to calling that for your business, and you kind of want to make that buffer, you can do that jump. You can make the transfer for 10 or 20 bucks. You can also conversely get a new number through Google Voice, and that's free. They give you a bunch of different ones to choose from. Cool. Got to jump to scheduling. I love Calendly. All right. So one of the things that happen very often is scheduling. Scheduling meetings. A lot of you actually have goals for I'm going to go to 12 meetings a month, 15 meetings a month. And it takes time to schedule that. All right. Calendly, instead of the conversation being I'd like to talk to you. I'd like to talk to you in person, too. How does Tuesday look? Well, Tuesday is kind of difficult for me. How's your Wednesday look? Well, Wednesday I got to drop off the kids. I got to do, and there's a back and forth, and that takes time. With Calendly, it is integrated with your calendar. So you can send them a link and your email sounds like this. So that we can schedule some time together. Thank you very much. One and done, sent. It also has go-to meeting and Zapier integrations. So if a lot of your meetings are online, this can help schedule that for you as well. It also has a two-way sync. So I'm not having to sign into Calendly to see what my Calendly appointments are and into Google for what my Google appointments are. If I delete something in Google, it gets removed on Calendly. Two-way sync. It's a beautiful thing. If you want to see what an invite looks like, invites look like this. It is mobile responsive. I still have the powered by Calendly link because I don't mind if they know, and it's free if I do that. If you pay a little bit extra, $8, you can do your own custom branding. You can do your own, I think even your own custom colors, which is pretty slick. Teamwork. Last year this was a sauna. This year it's teamwork because a sauna is a great task management system. Teamwork is a great project management system. So depending on the size of your company, you might prefer to use one over the other and that's okay. The reason that I like teamwork so much is because typically when you are communicating with a client, you will be working on the thing, you will update the task and then you say, hmm, did they want blue or orange? And then you shift over to your email inbox and you say, did you want blue or orange? And then they come back orange and you go, okay, cool. And then you go back to your teamwork or whatever it is and you say, the client wanted orange. They do email piping. What that allows me to do is in the task, I say, discover what color the client wants. And in that task, I can write out, do you want orange or blue? They get an email and they are able to respond to that exact same email. So they don't have to learn a new system. They don't have to adopt new tricks of the trade for you. You can meet them where they're at. And then all the information stays in accordance with that task. That's one of the big reasons why I like teamwork. They also do task templates and milestones. If you already have a lot of operations in place, this is a great way to kind of flesh that out. If you're playing around with operations, it's also a good way to kind of do trial and error, see where the breakpoints are. It's also, I think, a lot of fun. But I'm kind of a nerd. Oh, and I did want to say their video library is fantastic. A video library is bite-sized information. Two to three minutes. It's not, hey, check out our hour and a half long webinars where you can finally get to the point. All the information is bite-sized and they're available for you. All right, this is the last section, the last two pieces. How many of you guys use RSS feed readers or news aggregators already? There we go. Okay, we have part of the room. For those of you who don't, Feedly is just that. It takes all the new sources that you want and it funnels them into one place. This is how my home screen looks. So when I log in, I like to follow cryptocurrencies. I like to know what's in the local news. I like to know what technology is trending. So I can go ahead and identify all the news sources that I like and I can have them stream in and available on my cell phone or online. And it's great because when I'm waiting in line for something, I can go through and I can say, oh, that looks cool, that looks cool, that looks cool. That doesn't look cool. And I can earmark the ones that I want to go back and read later. And then when I'm sitting at home, I can go through and read the full article. It's a good workflow for me. You can also integrate it with ift and zapier. I may or may not have played around with automating my Twitter feed. So it's great if you have certain news articles that you want to pass along from trusted news sources with this and buffer and zapier, you can actually have it all kind of work together, which is cool. All right. Last one, Meetup. Chances are a lot of you people know Meetup. That's how we do a lot of the WordPress get-togethers is through Meetup. I like it for more than just WordPress. It's a personal and it's a professional networking tool. My wife is training to be a sommelier. Not right now because she's five months pregnant. But she does Meetups through there for wine tastings as well. And I like it because with Facebook, it's more about the people, not so much about the activity. And Meetup just flips it. Meetup flips it so that the activity is the focus and then it draws people in. And it really shows through the adage. If you want to go fast, go by yourself. If you want to go far, go with others. It's a great way to do it. We're going to take just a little bit of a breather. I have reset my time, so I don't know how long that took. Thirty minutes, perfect. Cool. We're going to take about another five to ten minutes and we're going to go over application. Chances are you came to this talk because something in the title jumped out at you. You said to yourself, operational efficiency, how can I use that? Here's the steps on how to do it. Get perspective. Start identifying your pain points. What keeps you in bed in the morning? All right, it's true. What is difficult for you to kind of be like, all right, all right, I got to psych myself up. Got to do another meeting. Got to send out another meeting invite. What is that? Just identify it. Just write it down. Put it somewhere. Search like you're starting over. A lot of times we've been in this industry for long enough. The things that we search for are this long because we think that, you know, we can kind of game the system a little bit better. Sometimes just stumbling into a new website or a new resource is because you start off with a very generic search. There's SEO warfare going on all the time. New companies are popping up everywhere. They are paying lots and lots of money because they want to be seen on the top spots. Check them out. Third, get feedback from clients you've already done business with. Not the clients you're doing business with. You are not going to get an honest response from them because they think that you will sabotage the website. Okay? Ask the one that has been six months or a year later and say, hey, did I respond fast enough? Were there questions along the way I didn't answer? Were there things that you wish I would have talked about more? Were you confused any at all? How could I do better? Okay? Those are the tough questions that a current client might not tell you, but a prior one will. It might even save you a one-star review. Okay? And then talk about your process to other people in the industry. That's why I love this talk so much because we're going to have an open Q&A and we're going to have people saying, oh, I liked that one. Have you tried this? Or, hey, this one's kind of cool. This is kind of where the ideas are in the WordPress community because it is so collaborative. It's not competitive. I mean, it is. But, you know, it's not. But it is. But it's not. So, all right. Let's do math. Yeah! All right, not so much. All right, that's fine. Again, we're bringing it back. It's just output over input. So we're going to have a very simple formula and we're going to take making meetings as the idea. All right. So you're at a spot where you feel like you should change this one area of your business. All right? You've looked at a couple of different tools. First thing that I would suggest you doing is figure out that shop rate. $125 an hour might seem crazy high. It's actually kind of standard. If you have a brick and mortar location, if you work from home, you could probably drop it a little bit. If you work 80 hours a week, you could probably drop it a little bit more. So figuring out what your expenses are, figuring out what your time is worth, allows you to plug in the variable into this equation that will help give you the answer. So shop rate is important. So let's say you have $125 hourly rate. Your goal is 12 meetings a month. All right, I'm going to do 12 meetings a month. I have about a 10% close rate. I don't know if that's higher or low that might be another metric that you need to calculate. And then on average, I get about $500 per close. Maybe I write blogs, and for each blog post that I write, I can close at that rate, but I need to get in front of that many people to do it. It takes 15 minutes to schedule. The back and forth, okay? Hey, does Wednesday work for you? No, Wednesday doesn't work for me. How about Thursday? No, how about this day? Cool, where do you want to meet? Oh, well, that's a completely new question. All right, well, let's see if we can go here. So given that time and that estimate, you're going to get a number. 1.6. It's just a number. Okay? But that's going to be your efficiency rate. Let's jump to the Calendly way. We're going to use the exact same numbers. Exact same numbers. We have 12 months, 10% close rate, $500 average. Now we're adding $8. $8 is the Calendly's... I think it's the next step up. I think it's like the business package or something. You could still probably do it with the free version if you really wanted to, but just to show, all right, I'm paying for premium. Crunch in those numbers. Now it's 7.2. 450% improvement. You went from something that takes three hours a month out of your time to 36 minutes. What are you going to do with that extra 2.5 hours? Just meetings. Okay? So this is kind of the heart of operational efficiency, figuring out if that's a good decision to go to, getting the analytics on what you're already doing, plugging in the numbers. If I had hours, we could talk about honorable mentions. I don't know if you guys actually remember. She was a meme for a long time. She came in second place. Mikayla. Well, that's pretty much it for the talk. Thank you all.