 And I really do mean it when I wrote that in my bio that Mickey just read. Mickey, Mikey? Mickey, okay, just making sure. Everything I know, I've learned from this community. Well, I feel like that's a little loud, isn't it? No? All right, everything I've learned, I've learned from this community. Really, when I started out in 2007, yeah, seven, wow. In four days, it'll be 11 years for me. When I started out in 2007, I had partners, I had employees, I had an SEO guy, and we were starting out as a brand management firm, actually. We were not planning on building websites, but one of the partners, that's what he did, and in 2007, everyone needed a website. I mean, everyone needs one now, but back then, it was just a thing that people hadn't thought of unless you really sold it to them. So we moved from being a brand management company to solely making our money from building websites at that point in .NET. And only one of us of the three partners coded, and all the people we hired did things that we didn't do, so they didn't know how to handle any of the .NET programming or any of the really heavy lifting. They were just junior front-end developers, SEO people, salespeople, things like that. And, well, one day, our lead developer and partner decided that he was going to take our three biggest projects, all the money that was coming to us, and some equipment out of my house while I was out of town, which was awesome, and started his own business, left us all flailing. We were responsible for other people's livelihoods, and all of a sudden, we're now knee-deep in these projects that are gonna just barely pay the bills, and then we still need to figure out how to complete them to get that money. And so our SEO guy was like, hey, you're good with computers, here's WordPress. And it was all point-and-click, and we finished those last three projects. The whole lot of tiers, and probably 40, 50 plug-ins each, held together by Super Glue, and good luck. So, the year closed out. The company, everybody left in the company went their separate ways. Fortunately, nobody got stiffed. Everyone got paid in the end, well, except for the owners, but that's how that goes. And we just moved on. I mean, there was really not much else to do. I didn't really plan on being here. Not here, I planned on being in Birmingham, but I didn't plan on the place that I was at. I went to school for digital design, for integrated marketing campaigns. I wanted to do big-scale strategy planning on advertisements and how to get your message out there, and all that kind of stuff. And all of a sudden, I'm now a WordPress implementer. I wasn't even comfortable calling myself a developer because I literally knew no code at that point. I would go into, and I don't know if it's even existing. I mean, I know it exists still, but I don't know if people use it anymore. There was IRC for WordPress support. That's internet relay chat. And think of Instant Messenger, or any kind of chat room, that's what it is. Only, we were all still pretty immature then. Like, even the people that today who helped build this ecosystem, they trolled me a lot. They helped me, though. I needed to move a button from the bottom left to the top right, so I learned some HTML. I needed to change some colors. I learned some CSS. I needed to, actually, this was a very specific thing that came up. I had a Grammy recording artist, a Grammy-winning recording artist. I was so excited, great client to have. They needed their albums to scroll on the side, and I didn't know scrollers were, like, sliders weren't really a big thing, so they just needed to kind of do this nice little nuanced shifting albums, and I didn't know how to do that, and so I learned PHP. And at that point, it occurred to me that coding is English, and that's something that I've never been afraid of, is just kind of diving in and reading and figuring out what's next. I'm technical-minded, but I was not a developer. I had never seen code before. When I did, it looked alien. I'm like, why are there carrots and question marks all over the place? Well, it turns out that those things are just there, basically, to say, hi, I'm code. Once I learned that, everything else was English. Like, I wanted to change where the title was on my WordPress site. I just had to find the title. That's a crazy concept, that that's the name of a function. I would get lost in my head when I had a company of the partner who was telling us, oh, I have to build this algorithm, and this, this, and this, and he's talking about functions, and all these things that sound so complicated, they're not. If you remember high school math, even the littlest bit, you learned the quadratic formula and other things like that, and you find out a function is a function is a function. It doesn't matter if you're writing code, or if you're doing your basic math problem or helping your kid out with math, it's still a function. And once that occurred to me, and I was seeing that this was English, it was actually quite attainable, and this is how I started my career in being a freelance developer. And my slide thing doesn't work. Cool, so we'll move over here. So, rule number one, be nimble. Things are going to change. I had no intention of ever being a web developer. I never would have dreamed that I would call myself an engineer, and now I spend my days obsessing over form data and databases. It's a weird thing. You never know where life is gonna take you. The best thing you can do is be nimble. I know there are a million quotes out there for this. My favorite is, gosh, I always said it was a John Steinbeck quote. I know it's not John Steinbeck. The book is of mice and men, but the best laid plans are of mice and men, and they often go awry. That's a great one. Blessed are the flexible, so they will never be bent out of shape. I will. And it is, regardless of what your business is, if you're starting one, if you're knee deep in one, if you're even toying with it, if you're an employee somewhere, be nimble. Really, by being inflexible, you're never going to be able to adapt to the next situation, and you will be left behind. It's really what we had to do. It's what happened to us. We knew we were in a bad place, and we had to figure out how to fix it, and we could have just cried a lot about it. We could have sued him and got us nowhere. I mean, there were so many things we could have done, but the answer was just get right up and keep moving forward. So, next one. Don't put the cart before the horse. It's kind of a silly saying when you just read it, but I think I spent $1,700 on business cards because I went to school for advertising, and every professor said the cheapest leave-away you will ever have, your best marketing materials are your business cards. I still have 900 of those 1,000 business cards. They were awesome, by the way. Ray's logo, perfect color, everything about it. We spent so much time designing that. Then, oh, this is even better. I would fly to Toronto to go visit with my business partner. He would fly down to Texas. We would go back and forth spending all this money. We didn't have clients yet. We were building a business based around the idea that we just thought we were awesome. And it turns out that belief can only take you so far. Now, when we were actually in business, we had some pretty decent projects. I would laugh at them now because, I mean, realistically, having three managing partners and a handful of employees at the price points we were putting out there were pretty absurd. And it was obvious that if we weren't gonna fail because of the financial crash or because the partner left or something along the lines, we were gonna run out of money. It was just a matter of fact. And most of those meetings were about writing procedures, planning, planning, planning. Everything was about planning. There's nothing wrong with planning. Plan, it's super important. But just know that all your plans are gonna go sideways. It's just, it's how it works. When they go off without a hitch, it's an amazing feeling, but it's not gonna happen often. So, get your first client. Don't worry, don't stress about, oh, I don't have a portfolio. How do I sell myself? It's so insignificant, honestly. I probably sent out our portfolio of designs that I had from college or that my partner had done in his front-end development stuff to thousands of clients. And it yielded a fraction of a percent in those results. The biggest thing that helped us was being an expert. People were hiring us, and Mickey said it yesterday, you can put your two fingers up to your ears. That's what they're paying you for. What's between there? It's not because you can write code. It's not because you know marketing or SEO. It's because you are an expert in your field is why people are hiring you. And when we had that realization, it just became a matter of sending that message to as many people and the right people as possible. Now I say as many people as possible, because isn't that where we all start? We're just like throwing out our contact information everywhere. I would get on Craigslist day in and day out and I would find at least 10 to 15 different job leads that said tech or WordPress or IT or anything. I had a whole slew of keywords. And I would do 10 to 15 of these a day just sending out emails. We hired salespeople again when we were still trying to rebuild after everything fell apart. We would have them in Craigslist all over the country basically sending out these kind of leads because what we do can be completely remote. Now, this was a great lesson for a lot of reasons. One, we didn't get paid often. Even though we had all these rules that you hear all the time get paid first, have deposits, don't do things for free. We tried really hard at that but we also just wanted to have work. We wanted that idea of being paid. We needed to get paid. So we did a lot of work and didn't always get paid but what we did get out of that Craigslist experience is that we figured out a message. And this email we devised would just had over 80% rate of getting a response back. It wasn't always a closing project but we learned at that point how to form a message, how to build a funnel. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm slow to the punch here. I know that these things are well discussed and well documented but again, I didn't get into what I was doing because I wanted to do sales. I never even occurred to me that that was gonna be a big thing. Obviously it is. You gotta sell your business somehow but I was a dumb kid out of college and again, we thought we were awesome. We were just gonna make it work. So moving forward, I had a lot of really bad clients. I mean, again, sometimes I got paid, sometimes I didn't, sometimes I got paid months out. I have people asking me to build them Facebook for $500. I went through a bevy of just awful decision making but aside from learning how to form that message, I also learned to spot red flags that to this day, I still tend to ignore more often than I should but I'm an optimist at heart. That's the most important thing. Being able to find qualified leads. Being able to, once you have that message and you can get it out there and you can formulate it in a way that you can get responses back, how do you make sure those responses actually are quality? And that became our whole new lesson to learn and it was a hard lesson to learn and there was a lot of sign this NDA, sign this contract and we thought by signing contracts, this meant like it was a legitimate project, we're gonna get paid. No, people don't wanna pay you even if they're breaching your contract. You still have to sue them. You still have to collect the money and let me tell you something. If these people aren't paying you, they aren't paying other people which means that you're going after them for money through the court system means that they could put a lien on something down the line but they're gonna have to pay all of their other debtors first or creditors first before they get around to paying you. So you take it with a grain of salt. You learn, you move on and the most important thing that I learned in that case was to be careful what I signed. I get hit up to this day all the time for NDAs and non-competes and signed this contract. Oh, and that's the other thing. I also spent thousands of dollars with a lawyer to write a contract that we would give to clients and then when that contract came into dispute found out very quickly, don't write your contracts. Let them do it. Honestly, the reason for that is is you can then pick and choose what you like of that contract and tell them they have to adjust it and if they won't, then that's a good way of qualifying a lead. Second of all, if there is a dispute the onus is on the writer of the contract to ensure that there is no room to ambiguity. And so that was a big thing that we had to deal with is that we had ambiguity in our contract. When the partner left, of course we went in and asked somebody like what are our legal options? They looked over our partnership agreement and they said none. He's in breach of fiduciary responsibilities but then again, you don't have those specifically outlined here so good luck. Not to mention the guy stole all of our work and money because well, he needed it and what are we gonna get out of it other than just branding him as that kind of guy? And that's his own journey to deal with. So, with all that said, do make sure you get paid. Really, I know that I just said I spent a lot of time chasing people down and they wouldn't pay me half the time. Well, that was where that qualified leads come in and you start to realize who has those red flags, who's asking for more than what they're really wanting you to build. You're gonna build it and they're gonna say oh, whoa, whoa, wait, it doesn't work here. It doesn't do this thing or it doesn't do that. Well, that's great and all but you contracted me to build this, this one thing and it works and I can give it to you. It doesn't, I can't really do anything beyond what you have in mind with it if you don't tell me those things. And like when you would start to hear these kind of red flags come up it became painfully obvious that these are not good clients. Sometimes I would refer them to somebody who was a little hungrier than I was to take on new work and say look, I can't tell you that they're qualified. I am worried about them. This is why I'm not taking them. But it became a pretty regular thing for me to start to look for those red flags everywhere that I could. And I didn't even know that this was a thing that people discuss this kind of stuff all the time because I was making one of the biggest mistakes of working by myself. Even in a company, we were working by ourselves. We didn't have any interaction outside of our clients. And it turns out that well look where we are right now. There is a whole community here and you know what's even better? If there isn't one nearby, if you go home and you're driving an hour and a half outside of Birmingham or outside of Pelham to go wherever you live and there's not a WordPress meetup, there are people near you that work on WordPress. Start a meetup. We talked about it after Gordon's talk yesterday. There was a lot of how do you get involved? Starting a meetup, getting the foundation to put the bill on it even, it makes it official. As long as you're not trying to sell your wares or something like that, you've now created a community of people that can at the very least be on the same level of the problems that you've had. Like you, they have gone through not getting paid. They have been in that position of not knowing how to complete a project. They've gone through generally all of it and it is such a nice feeling to know that you're not crazy, that this is a regular thing. I was just saying this earlier. I always think of myself as like not really a developer because I have to Google everything but then I immediately, that's fixed by getting on Twitter or anywhere else and I see tweets of like, hey I'm a senior engineer and I just spent the past two hours looking at how to move an object with JS. Now for anybody who writes JavaScript, well that's easy of course but if you forget, you forget and there's a whole lot of things happening around us and that being nimble really plays a big role in that because you're constantly trying to learn something new. You're constantly trying to get to the next step and it's really easy to forget that HTML or that CSS or that rule that does this thing or that thing. Don't worry about it. Generally speaking, I have six Chrome pages open with anywhere from 10 to 60 tabs in them. I can't find half the stuff I'm looking for and I have to like make it a nightly routine of closing things down so I can figure out what was I working on. And also if you don't track your time by the way for all of your client projects, first of all, do, because how do you have metrics on how you've been succeeding and improving if you don't track any of this stuff? It's nice that you come up with estimates but if you're literally spitballing it off the top of your head and you don't have quantitative data to back that up then that's what you're doing, you're hoping and hope is not a strategy. So make sure that you don't get ADD and forget what you're talking about. No, find your community, build your community, rely on others. And the best thing to do with that is that to get out there and just put yourself out there with there. We're all here right now and you can turn to the person next to you whether you know them or not and say, hey, what do you do with WordPress? Conversation started. You never know how you're gonna be able to help the next person. You never know how they're gonna be able to help you and it help is such a broad word. I mean, finding people that I can just complain about this horrible thing that happened the other day on a project that we'll understand and have been there is a huge help. Having a group of people building a community around you, of folks that can relate to you and help build you up while you build them up is one of the most rewarding things possible and I absolutely love what I do because of this community because that brought me to this point. I went from chasing down $500 clients to joining the WordPress community and finding out that, wait, I shouldn't be charging $500 for a website? I mean, I knew this, but I didn't have anybody telling me every single time we met that I was an idiot for charging that little. So by doing that, I learned this great thing that you guys have probably now heard four times at least through the WordCamp Army Ham. Raise your rates. You're doing a disservice to other developers, to other business owners, if you are charging the bare bones minimum. If you are not making money off of what you're doing, then you can't help yourself, so how can you help your clients? So being able to have people to rely on is, it's been a life changer for me. I've learned more for development, business acumen, anything you can think of that comes down to being successful from just being in a community. Everything I learned at school, all my sticktuitiveness, my ability to research stuff and kind of figure out the answers, like that's great and all, but it doesn't do nearly the same thing as having people around you that have been there or are going through it currently and that will help you succeed as much as you wanna help them succeed. And as I mentioned it before, keep learning. This goes right into being nimble. You have to keep learning. Everybody right now, if you're a developer in here and you see all the stuff everywhere that's like learn JavaScript deeply, do it. I mean, really, it's not just a marketing pitch. It's not a fad. It is the next thing that is really taking over. Does that mean you shouldn't learn HTML? Of course not. You start with the basics, you work your way up and if you're not learning something new, if you wake up tomorrow and you realize that you haven't learned something new today, the day before that is, then you are just stagnating. You're not moving forward. It's time to open up that next blog. It's time to read the next article. And this can actually be a huge benefit to just starting out. When I discovered there was a community, I then also discovered that there was millions of blogs out there about what I do. I discovered that there were podcasts, not just about business, but very niche about WordPress itself. OfficeHours.fm is like one of the largest business WordPress podcasts out there. And she covers everything from developers to building marketing lists, to automating things for non-developers. Like if you're responding over and over again to the same email or the same types of requests and your canned responses, guess what? Without coding, you could have that automatic response go out. And I didn't know these things existed without me coding them up or something until I realized that there was this greater community and there were people to learn from all the time. Never be the smartest person in the room, really. Even if you think you're the smartest person in the room in the back of your head, don't be. Just keep it to yourself and listen because it is amazing. Every single person's unique experiences that have brought you to this exact moment now can benefit even the most advanced expert in the field. With that said, actually, when you look ahead, when you look at speakers or anybody out here that is doing something that you're in awe of, that is just so cool. I wanna do what they do or I wanna be that successful. We're not all successful. But when you have that thought, you need to remember that there are just as many people that would be looking at you, at your current position, wanting to get to where you are. So by helping them move forward, you help yourself move forward. Not to mention, once you teach something, you've kind of committed it to memory. So that's kind of a nice thing. Once you've taught it, once you've learned something, you turn around and teach it and then all of a sudden, you're an expert. I skipped the slide or was a little slow to it. But really, take what you learn all the time and teach others. I know that's kind of a little tricky to just say, but when you realize that there's a meetup nearby, when you realize that there's a word camp coming up soon next year, heck, when you go to the library and they're doing a basic internet training, go down, check out some books, see what there happened to be talking about. You might have a huge way of impacting those people. You might have just spent all day yesterday figuring out why your category pages won't load and now you know how to fix it. That's something that someone else doesn't know. It doesn't matter how immediately intro you are, how you just got in here, set up your first site and you don't know what else to do beyond that. You've just been through an experience that somebody else hasn't. You can help them. And by helping them, you're establishing your expertise. By teaching others, by putting yourself forward, you don't have to call yourself an expert. I know I'm not an expert in most things. I'm an expert at taking naps. I'm great at it. But let your work and your ability speak for you. I literally just had business cards printed for the first time since that first agency. I spent, I think, $85 including shipping, it's awesome. I didn't know that getting pretty cards could be so cheap. But really, my entire business model, building my referral system, which if you don't have a referral system, build one. That means, again, join a community, interact with others, help others. They will refer you. You can refer them. It works out. By being out there, speaking at word camps, helping out the meetup, going to these library events, seeing any place in a community that I felt I could be effective and showing up has kind of established me as an expert without me actually needing to run around and say, you Google me. And all of a sudden, it's just page after page of Mark Gratch and WordPress or FTP or Server or this or that. And it makes it so much easier for the sale. I can move on to the next level of client and not worry about having that giant marketing pitch because they're not looking for that marketing pitch. They're looking for someone who can fix their problems right now. They're looking for someone that can solve their need. And by Googling me, they find out that, hey, this guy knows what he's talking about. Also, just by being out there, people have a tendency to just wanna come up and talk and find out more information. Those one-on-one talks get personal. I mean, really, the line between, yes, you need a distinct line between where your business ends and the rest of your life goes on. But at that same time, being personal, letting people build a rapport with you and vice versa is going to be the most beneficial thing for making that sale. I just did a pool last summer. We went through contractor after contractor after contractor. And they all had different methods of trying to sell us on picking them to build our pool. And some of them would give us the cheapest price. Some of them would be overly technical. Some would say, oh, here's a little rule that you should definitely follow. But in the end, it was the people that made us the most comfortable that we ended up going with. And this was no small, this is actually quite a good analogy for the majority of the scale of what you should be selling your product on if you're in the WordPress industry to any other contractor. It's hard to compare yourself if you're building giant applications to a plumber or something like that. Though it is fun when contractors show up at my house and we get to commiserate over being a contractor. But it was the ability for the folks that we ended up going with to build our pool to make a legitimate connection with us. We felt at ease with them. We knew we could trust them. They clearly knew what they were talking about. A quick Google search proved that they were good at what they did. But so did that for everybody else. But we connected with them on a much more personal level. And that comfort made us very confident with that decision. And we haven't regretted it. I mean, it was not a small purchase, but in the end, the things that we complain about are minimal. And I think, you know, if anybody spends that kind of money, they're gonna complain about little things that didn't go exactly the way that they had imagined. But generally speaking, we are very happy and we keep calling them out to do new things or come up with new projects for us because they made us feel comfortable. So I'm a little all over the place here. And I know that I meant to reorganize these into more sense, but well, I'm nimble, right? Life happens, I just kind of roll with it. Say no. Really, raise your rates and say no. It's so useful. Because I was that person that wanted every contract coming through. I couldn't fathom not taking on an opportunity to make some money because that's what I'm doing here this for. I mean, I wanna be successful in running a business. So why would I say no to money? Well, it turns out there's a lot of good reasons beyond being those red flags and unqualified client. Do you like these people? Do you want to have a relationship with them? Do they have any of those red flags? Are they paying the right price? Are they okay with you raising your rates? I mean, the list is personal for everybody, but be confident in your ability to say no. Because if you don't say no, you are going to end up with some really bad clients and you're gonna hate what you do and you're not gonna wanna keep working with them. And that's when bad decisions start being made. When you back people up against the wall, they either have that moment of stick-to-it-iveness and just gonna push right through and they're gonna get through it, or they disappear on you, or the quality drops significantly. There's so many bad things that come with being involved with a bad client or just the wrong fit both ways, being involved with a bad contractor that you just made the wrong decisions. It's so important that you can, when you learn to recognize those red flags, that you instantly put a stop to what you're doing and you say no. You can be polite. You can give them as much feedback as you'd like. It's probably a good thing to give as much feedback as you can without being offensive, because they might not know that they're shopping around for Facebook for $500 and it turns out that's a little bit more than $500 to build that. But at the same time, don't say no. I know. I had to be clever there. But what I mean by this is that, so you've qualified your clients. You know who they are. You like working with them. Everything's working out great. And they say, well, I really need this to happen. Whatever this is. And even if you don't know, your gut, when you don't know, your gut might be, oh no, that's not possible or have something less than a positive answer. They're hiring you for your expertise. Therefore, don't be worried about what if I'm wrong. The answer should be, that's interesting. I will look into it and we will see how we can accomplish it. Now, it might turn around that you come right back and say, look, I did a lot of research on this. Get paid for that research. And it's just, this is not a good idea and then explain to them why it's not a good idea. But do not say no, just based on the fact that you don't know something. It goes back to keep learning. I mean, really, why are you doing what you're doing if the minute that someone presents you with something that you're not sure of or you're uncomfortable with that you're just gonna say no and back out. It makes them feel bad. You feel bad for yourself. You haven't been able to accomplish something. And when you can say yes or when you can say it's probably doable, I just need to figure out how. You're being very honest about where you stand. They can decide I need to hire someone that knows how to do this or they might just appreciate your honesty on the fact and wait and pay for your research into what their answers might end up being or what the appropriate path forward is. They're not hiring you to write code or write content. They're hiring you to make, to provide solutions to their business. And that's what you should be doing. Saying no to something that they think is gonna elevate their business is not providing a solution. Explaining to them why it might not be a good idea is exactly that. It is telling them how to elevate themselves. So don't be afraid of saying no to possible clients and bad ideas, but don't say no to helping your clients that you like move forward. And as I've touched on repeatedly, create and manage meaningful relationships. It is, in the end, I subscribed to the theory that when we're all gone, the only thing that holds us together is the impact that you had on everyone while you were around. And that holds true in business, it holds true in life. And by being a part of a community, by joining, I went to word camp in New York in 2014. It was my first word camp. Again, I'm really slow to the punch a lot of times. So I didn't realize these things had been going on for a very long time. And it was just, it was amazing to me. I showed up at 8 a.m. I had no idea what I was doing. I was nervous. I see this guy that I've seen on wordpress.tv all the time, walk by, and I'm like, oh my God, you're Andrew Nason. And he's like, oh my God, I am. Who are you? And we just started chatting. This person is, at the time, he was the lead developer for the WordPress project. I would have never imagined he would take more time to talk to me than to say hi and say thank you maybe. He took me around. And I mean, I just told him very honestly, like I've watched your talks. I've been very, you know, I'm excited about it and the possibilities of everything we can do. And I was a bit of a nerd fanboy. But he took me around, probably, to get rid of me and introduced me to one person after another. All these rock stars in our community turns out they're normal people. Who knew? And they embraced me instantly. I mean, as Gordon said yesterday, it's not hard to feel that big hug from our WordPress community. We all genuinely want to help each other, for the most part. Like there are people, there are always bad actors in a community. But generally speaking, I have never felt more embraced than in this community. I used to go to American Marketing Association meetings and because that's what I did before I realized we were gonna do web development. We'd spend thousands of dollars to go to the conference. We'd spend $100, $200 to go to one of their local meetings or something like that. And all it was was an opportunity to pass out business cards. I gained nothing from it. The talks were fluff. It was, how do you get ahold of me afterwards so I can do what I'm here to talk about so I can do it for your business? I assure you, I am not selling anything to you guys unless you want a year full of how I failed a lot of times. So have no fear, that's not what we're here for. But it was showing up at that word camp in 2014 and just being embraced by these people that had literally written the code on millions upon millions of sites. This guy could hit update and he could break a third of the internet. And he has no problem just introducing me people, treating me like a colleague. And it was just an amazing feeling. I left that word camp just amped up. I had to get involved. By the way, this was my talk originally but as you can tell Gordon already did it. So be nimble. But I was on a high. I had to get involved when I left New York in 2014. I went right to DFW and I signed up to speak at word camp DFW. I had been doing this for so many years. I knew I can train people on how to set up their first WordPress site and I did. It was a packed room. I went from never speaking outside of like my bar mitzvah basically to speaking to a room full of 200 people. And it was just an amazing feeling. And I said a lot of incorrect things but I do know that I got a lot of people down the right path to get started. And I just, I wanted more. This is everything that had come my way for years now. And I had a medium to give back, to explain to people how I could help them and like how you can help yourselves. I mean WordPress does empower people. I mean it's, Gordon said it once yesterday but it's democratizing the web. It's giving every person the opportunity to download this software for free, change it however you want and put the message out there that you want. I mean that's a pretty amazing thing right there. And so I spoke at word camp DFW 2014. I volunteered. I volunteered the following year. I was on the organizing committee the next year. I'm the lead organizer this year and last year. I'm the lead organizer for our meetup. And I don't know how I came in, like I never started this brand management company thinking I'm gonna be a community organizer. But that's what I do and I love it because it gives me that opportunity to try to help people as much as they've helped me. And by doing so, I don't go to a single one of these things where I don't come out feeling successful. I go to any word camp or conference that I go to now that I know that all I wanna do is help folks, I feel like I've accomplished something. And to its benefit occasionally I do get a contract that pays my bills for a little while. So that's always helpful. But really, it's easy to get lost in that funnel building process. Follow what everybody else has said. Take the legal advice, set up your business accordingly, have an accountant, hire people that do things that you don't like to do. These are all hugely important. But being honest of where you are, who you are and trying nothing more than to help other people puts you in a mediation position of information that does nothing more than elevate you also as well as everyone around you. And it's pretty amazing thing to be a part of. So that's pretty much my whole presentation. I have a amazing list of resources. Some of these are very developer oriented. Some of them are great for just WordPress business. I cannot recommend the first, gosh, I can't recommend all of them enough. But really, do you need a community where you can get really advanced help on your business or your dev stuff and it's WordPress oriented? Join Post Status. You need to know how to be an awesome freelancer. Fearless Freelancer. I'm not affiliate for any of these, I promise. These are my resources. This is what I rely on to get me through the next project. Join your local meetup. Come to WordCamp again next year. Find another WordCamp that you can fly or drive to if you've enjoyed this and you got a lot out of it. Just try to help other people along the way and you'll be surprised on how much they're gonna help you. Thank you, guys. If you have any questions, feel free to find me. Oh, man. Well, of course, the building Facebook for $500. Their inability to pay for a consultation or an audit of their site, don't work on somebody's project, on a live project without getting paid to look it over first. You can hear them explain it to you day in and day out, but until you've looked at the actual project itself, in my case, it's a lot of times a word press installation. I go through all of the plugins. I look at the code basis for them. When were they last updated? Are they still maintained? Are these even good resources to do what they're trying to accomplish? That costs money. That takes my time. If it takes up your time, you've gotta charge for it. And people start hemming and hawing over just paying for the time it takes to get to a solution, then they're definitely not the right client. For me, I, so this goes from another talk, but we are the digital gatekeepers. When we come down to work, like word press is a third of the internet, and if you have anything to do with launching a site, you have an immense amount of power. Now, by all means, do not do anything illegal. Do not sabotage someone you don't like. This is bad, unethical. I absolutely do not say to do any of these things. But it means you get to choose who you wanna deal with. So if you see somebody treating someone else poorly, or if you've watched their interactions, I'll go through clients' Twitter feeds. I'll look at their organization's PR releases. And I mean, that's just because that's the level that I fortunately have gotten to, but I try to look for things that say, this isn't a nice person. And honestly, if you're just not a nice person in general, then why would you wanna work with them? I mean, they're gonna make your life hard. So it's usually personal interactions that tend to do the right flags for me. Thank you so much, guys.