 Mr. Person in the cute socks in the front row. So what kind of shop do you have? Nice. That's a lot for four people. How many of you really are want to grow and how many of you want to scale? So who wants to grow? Who wants to scale? That's the right answer. It was a trick question. So how many of you know the difference? A few. Okay. So it's good. So I'll just talk about my past and then when we get to that part in the slides we can ignore it. So I had a Drupal shop. I had a Drupal shop by accident. I was a print designer and everyone says oh, that's a lovely business card. You're gonna build me a website, right? Like somehow print and web are like the same thing. And so we started cleverly with Drupal. Like not knowing anything about web development. I chose Drupal. Not WordPress. And I'm so glad because I'm here now, right? But then the company was two, then four, then six, and then six with some people part-time and I wasn't making any more money. Like when I was at two people I made X and when I was at six people I made X minus some. And then when it was gonna be 10 I was making X minus minus. And so it's like I'm pretty clever and I'm pretty sure this isn't quite right. I was working more hours. There was more risk. There was more complexity. And I wasn't actually making more money. The business on the outside looked awesome, right? Like oh, we're growing. We're starting to do cooler projects. We were in the non-profit thing. And so I ditched it all. I said I'm done. I'm out. Somebody actually offered me really good money for my business randomly. And I said hello, that was an excellent exit strategy. So I sold the business and then, but you know, my mind wouldn't let go of it. Like why? Why was there all this sales? Why were there all these happy customers? And what wasn't right? And it took me maybe two or three years. And I realized the difference is I was growing and not scaling. So this is real world experience from having and I would say succeeded, right? But from making money and having the life that I wanted failed miserably. And then I started coaching other businesses and I saw the same mistakes showing up over and over again, which was really comforting because it's not that I was doing something wrong. It's just when we fall into a business and we do the best that we can, it's how we end up. And so I hope you really get something valuable out of it. And I have to tell you a funny story. When I very, very first started my very first session, it was called growing a Drupal shop. See the title growing. There it is that mistake. And Lee was sitting in the front row like he always does. And he actually took my advice, which back then was not very well formed. And I don't know, did it work, Lee? And so he's doing very well. So anyway, is it time to start? Okay, so who has a thorny problem that they would kind of like some insight into that maybe we can tackle today? Guy in the darling jacket. What do you hope to get out of today? Yes. Okay. It is. It dovetails. It talks a lot about how as a CEO, you are the captain of your ship. And in this session today, your business can be transformed. If you write it down and remember it, there is some part of our human brain that you can sit in here and go, those are all great. And if you don't actually write it down on a piece of paper, it will all leave you, even if you put it in your phone, because it's not the same. In order to get any value out. Yeah, if you actually do it in Evernote, but you have to actually write down three concrete things that you're going to change, because your brain will say yes, and then some weird mammalian part of you will never act on it. And so then the moment is inspirational, but it won't, it'll always be an aspirational thing. So I really encourage you to take notes and this will be recorded, but very few people, well actually a surprising number of people actually watch my sessions again, but, but yes, actually write down something concrete that you're going to do out of this. We cover a lot and, yeah, so one thing I want to talk about and I don't talk about in the slides and it's sometimes a touchy subject, but since we got time, I'll alienate some part of my audience. So how many of you track some sort of data? How many of you can actually say with some certainty that that data is at least 80% spot on? If I came in and audited you that that data had high integrity? Yeah, so that's little less than half the people that raise their hands and one of the things that I saw so often is an intense amount of work in data collection and then, but when I really looked at the source of the data and the accuracy of the data, it was not there. So you might be investing in an action that's not really going to give you the real results and a clear case of that, how many of you have teams that are tracking their hours in their tickets in the moment when they're actually working on it? Oh, that's so much better than it used to be. And this is a really good example. A lot of people, and I had a shop that had like 15 people and they didn't know that red mind would allow you to track time. And so at the end of the week, their developers were like putting in hours for what they worked on. So that's a really good example of false data, and it makes you feel better, but it's not actually accurate. So I don't know. I think the hall's mostly empty. We'll get started. And if we run long, please feel free to leave at the appointed time. And if you want to stay for Q&A, because I think there's a long break after this, I'll stay here as long as people want to talk. So welcome. So I am a partner now at Thunder Active, which is a lead generation inbound content marketing company, which is like all the rage marketing automation inside of Drupal, which is really exciting because that means that Drupal is growing. We're evolving and like that. So if you want to know more about being HubSpot and content marketing for you or your clients, come talk to me after. So we're HubSpot partner, which is really awesome. And I already did who's here, so I know who's here. And so I've been in Drupal. Actually, I lost some of my years when they did the upgrade, but I've been in Drupal for 12 years since 4.7, since before there was a book on Amazon. And I've done a lot around Drupal. And so the darn Tesla is affordable now, so that doesn't count. So we're now margins of Maserati's. So why am I here today? I think I know why some of you are here, but why do I feel so compelled to talk about this? Because I am really passionate about this. And it's because what I was telling you about having that Drupal shop, it just got to be so heavy. There was just an endless amount of work and risk in client angst. And I did learn some amazing things, like some of my project rescue work. I do enterprise project rescues. And I learned from my client wrangling. Has anyone heard my client wrangling session? Yeah. So which was great. But finally, someone did offer me money and consulting was so lightweight. It was just me. And it was so liberating. But not all of you are going to do this, right? And nor necessarily would I advise it. It's not for everybody. So I really started thinking about the difference. And so my Drupal shop actually generated a Ford, right? But my taste wanted a Maserati. And this is the difference. And so even when selling your business, if you can show someone that a business is scaling, they will give you a bigger buyout. Nobody who's buying a business is looking for a business that's growing. People only want to buy a business that's scaling. So how do you scale? The first thing I would say is get out of your own way and get on top of your company and look down. See it as an outsider. And if you can't ask for help, you probably have a friend that's like a business guru, not related to Drupal. Like sometimes we're too insular. We think everything lives in Breathe and Drupal. But anybody who's running a business can give you an objective viewpoint. Because at the end of the day, we're all running a business. The fact that it's Drupal is slightly irrelevant. It could be making brown shoelaces. It could be something on Etsy. You could be running an eBay store. So we think of our work as so unique and special. And from a product that you're delivering, it's true. But from a business perspective, it's just another small business. And so maybe separate, delaminate those two concepts and look at your business from the outside. I've worked with a lot of companies and a lot of shops and I've done a lot of consulting. And CEOs are an interesting breed. CEOs are an interesting breed. And some of them are very data-driven and some of them are very gut-driven. I heard this thing. I want to implement it. And so today we are this. I have a different sales strategy. I heard other CEOs are talking about this. So there's a spectrum of how businesses are run. And the first and foremost thing is to be a data-driven company. So how many people think they're a data-driven company? Oh, good, a few. And so that's the first thing. It's a little hard. I'm not a big numbers person. Unfortunately, my business partner, Max, he has an MBA in finance from a real school. So it's great for me. So I get to be a data-driven company with a little bit of effort. And the other thing is that data has to be measured over time. One point does not a path make. And so you have to measure things over time. And this is the hard part. It's easy to muster up enough energy to measure your business. But it's not as easy to measure every day, every week, every month, every quarter. And the way you do that is actually by developing process. How many of you have a process you feel like for every part of your business? Wow, that's impressive. So we'll see. We'll see at the end if you feel like that's true. So wait, raise your hands again. If you feel like you have, so I don't know, what is that, about 20%? Yeah. So let's see how we feel at the end. So the point of failure of every business, and I'm included, right? Like, I measure a lot of things. So sometimes I measure, but then I don't do anything with the data. But I do have enough systems in place now that the data is being collected so that at some point when I actually follow some of my own advice and sit down and do my own reporting and looking at those numbers, I actually have the data. Any questions so far? Okay. So many of you became CEO by accident. Like you were a great engineer or maybe a good marketing person. And next thing you know, yeah, like that's kind of how I ended up the head of a Drupal shop. And it's important to ask, I ended up here and I am here, but am I the person that should be here? And it's hard to let go of the title of CEO, and it's possible that you should. And so I think it's important to kind of think that through. I am the biggest fan of reverse engineering. If you figure out what it's supposed to be, you can work backward. Who said that? Someone said, yeah, or that way out in the hallway. So how many of you know what you want your company to look like in five years? Maybe three years. Yeah. So that's the challenge because you haven't yet defined the end. You can't really get anywhere. Do you see that? So we're just meandering, hoping for the best. And that's how you end up growing because you're not sure where you're supposed to be. So therefore, you can never scale to that thing. It might be a buyout. It might be, it might be that you just leave. You just have some company that's running and you have enough things in place. Like, how many of you ever thought of that? That you could actually build enough infrastructure? Yeah, please, over here. Yeah, that's why I'm here. Yeah. So that you can actually step back and maybe be a lifestyle owner, right? So the more remote you want to be and less hands on you want to be, then the more process you have to have in place. So it's really good to be king, right? How many of you are Game of Thrones fans? Okay. So we all know what happens, right? So it didn't actually work out for Tywin. And so one of the things that Tywin didn't figure out was where he was vulnerable and where his limitations were. And so your first task as a CEO is to actually know what you're really good at and what you're not. How many of you feel like that's true? That's very good. That's very good. That's more about half and that's really good. And so if you don't, it's not a problem. I know where my limitations are. I really not that good at numbers. Like people start talking P&L and in the moment I can make myself pay attention and the minute I turn my head it like all disappears. It's like an etch a sketch. But Matt's on the other hand, I tell him two cents worth of information and he holds on to it forever. So I know where my Achilles heel is and I am always very sure, no matter how small I was when I was just two people, my first outsourcing was I hired a bookkeeper who worked 10 hours a month. Like there's no point in lying to yourself that you're going to get around to the books. And that failure of getting around to the books is mission critical. So these are the big buckets that I've identified. And marketing is very different than sales. Those are two very different things. Sales is what generates cash flow for your business and marketing is what grows your business. And so it's not, it can be one person but they're very different activities. HR is its own big thing, operations and finances. So in my present day thing, what happened? So in my present day thing is, oh, so this is what I was saying about the bookkeeper, right? If you don't, I don't do well with finances and if I had not hired a bookkeeper, this is what I was doing to my business, right? I was giving it a bicycle wheel instead of the wheel it needed. And some of you may have four of these on your car and so your Maserati's not going to go very fast or very well. So the question is who should do these things? How many of you are like you're the, you're the, you're the lynchpin, like you're the one wearing all the hats? Okay. How many of you have a trusted partner in business with you? Good. How many of you have an exit strategy with your partner? So one piece of advice I will give you, separating from your business partner is messier than getting a divorce. It's messier, it can be gorier, it can totally gut your financial life. So have an exit strategy. You should have exit strategies for if they get ill, if you get ill, if they get divorced and can't come to work for six months. If one of you actually just wants out, like make that plan now because you can't bring it up in the moment. So Lee and I are business partners and then his wife says let's go live in Bali for two months and he's like I'm totally down with that and he goes I'm working remote from Bali and you're going no. It's too late at that point to say remember when we had that conversation if one of us checks out the other one has to have these things and blah blah blah. You can bring it up if you've talked about it in advance. You can't bring it up in the moment. So sit down with your business partner and map out all these contingencies. So in the who, in my company with my partner, our company with my partner, right now he's doing the sales and I've been doing HR and operations and he's been doing the finances. When I get back, I'm going to start also working in marketing and sales. We're going to turn over some of the HR and operations to someone else. So it evolves. It's not static and it's important that we always talk about who's managing that big bucket of things and it has to be somebody with skill and somebody that you trust, somebody that fits with your company's ethos and all those kinds of things. Any questions? So what does it mean to be CEO? How many of you have a clear vision of like what you should be doing as a CEO? A few. Okay. The first thing is setting a vision. So if you as a company don't set a vision of who you are, you're never going to attract anybody really interesting. People want to be invested in a dream. We're aspirational as a culture and so a CEO that has never set a vision for what they're going to do and how they're going to be in this very competitive landscape, it's going to be hard to succeed. And you're not really sure what you're going to do. If you don't really know where you're going, you can't chart a course. You can't say these are the milestones. You know what? We're going to do our first $50,000 web project by the end of the year and we're going to rock it with nonprofits because we have a mission to have clean water everywhere in the world. So that is something when you're looking at developer, a developer is looking at company A and company B and this guy goes come do Drupal for me. I need a ninja. Like they've never heard that one before versus come work over here with us and we're going to make sure that the planet has clean water. Where do you want to work? What are you inspired to do? Why do you want to give up Thursday night nine o'clock deployment? So it's actually having a vision and charting a course and having some dream that people can be part of. How many of you have read Good to Great? Wonderful book for people. It's an old book and I actually believe the old books are better than the new books. The new books are basically a slide deck that they printed out and are charging you $22 for. This book actually has meat and will take you a weekend to read but it's not hard. One of the great takeaways from the book and there are many is having the right people on the bus. And if they're not the right people on the bus, letting them off the bus. And how many of you are comfortable letting people go? Good. It's a really important skill to have. And people think of it as something detrimental. However, if you view it as you're letting people succeed somewhere else because if they're not succeeding with you, nobody is happy, right? So then everybody wants to win. Everybody wants to succeed and do well. And if they're not doing that with you, then coach them, help them, guide them, find them another place where they will be happy. And for you, then that allows you to have the right people on the bus. The right people on the bus sometimes changes. Like when you get $250,000 nonprofit projects, that project manager that you had might not fit your current needs. And holding on to the wrong people for too long can be very, very detrimental. And it will actually demoralize your team. And it makes people lose faith in you as a leader because you're supposed to protect the whole team, not just Pam. And so when that kind of thing happens, you're actually rocking your own ship. You have to be the first advocate of process. How many of you like process? I only like process for other people. I'm really clear about that. And it's a big flaw of mine is that I am the first advocate of process and I find it very difficult to stay in the process. So what do I do? I minimize my footprint and I stay out of people's way. So the worst combination is you don't like process. You get everybody on your team to work out of process. And then you gripe about everybody not doing the things in process. Do you see what I'm saying? So this is where I know where my failings are. So I try my best to be in process. I will sometimes enroll other people to help me be in process. And I make sure that I don't cause any wake in my failure to be in process. And I admit to it too. Like you have to be honest with your team. It's not like they don't see it, right? Understand Ops. So this is the difficult part. How many of you came from a technical side? Okay. How many of you came from some other side? Guy, lovely man in the purple shirt. What part did you come from? Operations. Okay. Who came from maybe sales or marketing? Nobody? Wow. How about design? Yeah. So in that we are all flat tires, right? Like we don't understand everything. Like no matter how much someone explains get to me, I've never done it. I'm never going to deploy code. So I can't manage Dev Ops. It's a black box to me. However, I have to do my best to understand not how to do deployment and GitHub and Dev Ops and server boxes. I have to understand the impediments. It's really key to understand what blocks people from doing their job. I don't have to know how to write a module and I have to understand where modules break down. Most of the time modules break down between what the client is expecting and what the engineer needs to develop. So that's facilitation, right? But understanding the whole process, how many of you actually understand the HR laws in your state? Right. How many of you understand benefits administration? Yeah. So this is where we go back to the five buckets and you have to know what you know and you have to know what you don't know and you have to make sure that somebody in the organization understands it. Even if all you have are you buy eight hours of HR consulting from an HR, there's all these online services, right? So that you have access to it and that maybe you have your office manager part of an organization where she can get HR support, etc., etc. So just because you don't know it and you're busy ignoring it because who wants to learn HR, actually I don't. That's another one of those things that I can I can know the limitations. I know where we're going to get into trouble as a company if we do things. So I've learned again the impediments for the company to scale but I don't actually have to learn benefits administration. I need to know that the company needs it and that is your role. So you have to understand your business stem to stern in all five buckets and be aware when you've put the bicycle tire on or when your team is running with a bicycle tire and sometimes that's what budget allows, right? Is that bicycle tire? And it's important to tell your team, I see the bicycle tire. We're just trying to get to the next crossroad. Everybody pray, everybody push, everybody just keep your fingers crossed and we'll make it, right? So it's okay to be honest with your shortcomings but what they don't want to hear is what bicycle tire? Go to work. Like that kind of thing doesn't engender any loyalty. It doesn't engender any faith and you're breaking trust with them, right? We all see the bicycle tire. So understanding ops, understanding your failures is really important. How many of you drive sales? How many of you like driving sales? The truth is if you're under, I don't know, $2 million in revenue, $3 million in revenue, it's going to be you. It's going to be you for a long time and so you have to know that you're going to own that bucket for a long time and deal with it. You cannot write brilliant code and do sales and do HR and do all the other things in the business. So focus on sales and I will tell you one of the things that I realized and having done maybe two, three, four company turnarounds now is I have been a little late in focusing on the marketing because it's so easy to get driven into operations. I'm lucky now because Max does all the biz dev and it's awesome. However, focusing on marketing and sales is a little bit your first priority because that's where all the cash comes in. Manage finances. How many of you are good at finances? How many of you know what a P&L statement is? How many of you know what a balance sheet is? Oh, wow, you guys are all better than me. How many of you plan for contingencies? How many of you have forecasted the next downturn in the economy? How many of you have a plan for that? How many of you know who you're going to downsize if you lose your biggest client? Yeah, so that's the kind of thing. There's all kinds of contingencies. Fortunately, Drupalite snuck up on us so slowly. We all had time to deal with that one, right? This is mission critical as a leader is to kind of anticipate that. How many of you have an exit strategy? Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to focus that far down the road. And it's important to kind of think about, like maybe spend one day researching and reading about and thinking about an exit strategy. So let's talk about setting the vision. The first thing I would say, how many of you actually have a business focus with your Drupal? So in an ideal scenario, all of you would raise your hand. You see how many new... I went to a party and I didn't know anyone. Like, that was just astonishing to me. I know this community really well, and I don't remember everyone's name, but I know a lot of people. And I went to a party. I did not know a single person in that bar, not one. And so our community landscape is always changing. There's always new people doing Drupal, and there are people coming in from digital agencies or coming in from other platforms. There are now going to be a whole flood of people that maybe do symphony. You can't all be general Drupalists. You will disappear in part of the black sea of umbrellas, the sea of black umbrellas. You have to have something that sets you apart, something that gives people to remember you, to think about you, to recommend you. Raise your hand again if you do a specialty of focus. A lovely man with that orange lanyard in the black baseball cap. What's your focus? Commerce. That's an excellent one. Who else? Lee. Search. Really? Search? Oh, solar search. Okay. I thought I might have to take you out at the knees. We do search. Solar search. That's an excellent one. Like, that is very narrow and specialized, and solar is wonderful and weirdly complex. So it's perfect. Yes. Drupal Salesforce. Drupal Salesforce. Wow. That's awesome. Right? And so now all of you have heard somebody that does something special and you're going to go, I know a guy that does solar issues. Here, give them a call. Like, that's what you want. If you just are one of 5,000 agencies that does vanilla Drupal, good luck marketing yourself. Or you could wear fabulous jackets. That could be a thing. And red shoes. Like, that could be a total thing. Or Miami white pants. That could be a thing, too. So what kind of Drupal do you do? Drupal social. There you go. So if you don't do anything else, go home, talk to your team, look at what you've done, and figure out something that makes you unique and special in the world. Be a red umbrella. Any questions about that? Anybody else do something really fun in Drupal? Yes. Data and software integration. Very nerdy. I love it. Someone else raised their hand. That's another good example. So what happens when you specialize? So rather than competing with everybody, like, you guys that all specialize could get together, like maybe there's a reason to have social and solar together in the tourism industry. So you see how now you can start sharing and collaborating rather than trying to go head-to-head with each other on every single project. You're just going to get worn out. There's not, in the early days, Drupal would just fall in your lap. When I had a Drupal shop, I literally would field two to three leads a day, right? And that's why I got so fast at Drupal because it was just coming in, and I didn't want to turn down. That wasn't smart either, but we're not going to cover that today. So focus. And the other is product ties. Oh, I heard it. Amen. Amen. Yeah. So who knows what I mean by product ties? Yes. Yeah. So in the extreme case, it would be ImageX has a brand new open EDU distribution. Phase two has a lot of distributions. They're very intensive. So maybe not a good fit, but that's the ideal scenario. That's the Henry Ford ideal scenario. However, it can also be a little softer in perhaps in the tourism example or the social example. Maybe it's vanilla Drupal, but you have certain ways that you put it together and you put it together the same way over and over again. Aten or Aten out of Colorado has open, they have a distro, and it's very specifically for small nonprofits, and they roll that out. And so that gives them a hook. It gives them visibility, and it's a nice product because they really like focusing on the nonprofit sector. Any questions? Okay. He turns. Okay. But we'll cover it where you can do Q and A after it. So charting a course. So again, specialized. So how many of you know the financial difference between being a family, practice doctor, and a neurosurgeon? Yeah. Half a million dollars a year, maybe more. If you're a family practice doctor and you're a good generalist, you see everybody, you do everything, it's great. You can make a very good living. You probably make a quarter million dollars a year. If you're a neurosurgeon and a highly sought after, you're going to make eight figures a year. You're going to make over a million dollars. And it's the same in Drupal. It's the same in business. People that are experts get paid more than people that are generalists. How many of you have a sense of who your ideal persona is? You know who you're marketing to. A few. And next time I come and we meet, you will all raise your hand on this. You are hunting for a very specific person. That person has a specific title. They do research on the internet in a specific way. They are interested in specific content. And if you are not actually fishing for this persona, what you're getting is whatever you get. And so go back and look at who your most, what your most successful projects are and who actually was responsible for hiring you for that. And you'll get closer and closer to your ideal persona. And as you do marketing and as you meet people, you can say for instance, we want to be introduced to legal marketing firms with 500 or more attorneys. And the title is the CMO. Or we're looking for a Drupal shop willing to spend $9,000 a month marketing themselves with automated lead generation. And they can be the CEO or the vice president of sales. So if I tell you that, then when you run into that person, you can go, oh, you should talk to Susan, right? So being clear on who you're marketing to will really help accelerate and scale your business. How many of you know your ideal company profile? A few more. So that persona works somewhere. And then that somewhere is the ideal client profile. It may be a nonprofit with two to 300 employees that has a mission of X and that does advocacy of Y. And the title of the person that you're looking for is the director of Z. This is that charting a course. This is that actually like figuring out where you're trying to get to. And once you actually think through that as a good thought exercise, you'll start to understand that you don't always need to be at Drupalcon. You might need to be at the legal marketing association as we are. You might need to be at the American Booksellers Association. You may need to be at the Los Angeles Tourism Board Convention or whatever. You get it. So how many of you have a sales person driving some sales for you? So I have done sales for many, many years. And sales people are notorious for bringing in anything because they get commission on anything. And what you can do is actually incentivize them. So sales people usually make somewhere between 5% and 10% for the things they bring in. So here's how I would do it. I would say if you bring in a sale, that is worth 5%. If you bring in a sale with our ideal persona and company, you get 10%. Done. It's as simple as that. And then you will start getting the projects that make you money. And now we're talking about scaling instead of growing. How many of you are good at hiring people? You can already see once you can start articulating who you are in painting a vision, you're going to actually have opportunity to hire better people that are a better fit. So there are three things. There are skills, talents, and attributes. Almost every job description focuses on skills, skills, skills. You have to have four years of PHP. You need to be a front-end developer. You need to know CSS. You need to know HTML5. And there are a lot of people that fit that description. I actually do it the other way around. I actually look for attributes. I look for the things that make up the human being the way they are. There's only one thing that I feel is really hard wired in a human being. And that is judgment. There is no way to teach someone to have good judgment. You cannot scale your business without a team of people with good judgment. It's just not possible. And how many of you feel like you have someone in your organization that doesn't have good judgment? Yeah. They take up all your time. They take up all the oxygen in the room. They make you go like this all the time. And they make your customers go like that. And if they are interacting with your customers in any way, your customers are going, oh, my goodness, what did I do? So this is perfect, right? The world is flat. So yes, good judgment is hard wired. Have it. Don't have it. Get rid of the ones that don't. I also like resilience. I am a big believer in change. I change often. I change hard. Left turn. People that play with me have to be able to shift and not come to work and go, my desk was here yesterday. I'm going to have a bad week because you moved my things. Those people don't float with me at all. They drag me down. They drag down the energy of the people around them. So one of the first things I do when I take over a new team, we move desks. We make everyone move because people get attached to six feet of carpet rather than committed to a vision. And you have to shake it loose. So when I first started doing this in 1980, the team was aghast. It took us about two hours to move. And as someone who watches billable hours, that was so painful. And at the end of the day, everyone is cross and tired and grumpy. And we survived it. And I made people sit cross departmental and everyone got smarter. Everyone made new friends at work. Everyone got to see their job from a different perspective. And then we moved again. And it took an hour. And then we moved again. And it took 30 minutes. And today with my team, the way that I've had them plug in all their stuff, we're mobile. And so we can now move desks in about 15 minutes. 20 people. Boom. We're done. And people start requesting it. And that is resilience. And you want people who feel empowered enough to not have to sit in the exact same place with the exact file cabinet. So you can see. Endurance. Sometimes you just have to work hard. And you just have to work long. And I want people that can do that. There's a weird thing called team awareness. I call them the wobbly wheel on the shopping cart. And I actually, this last year in 2015, I kept a woman on way too long. She was so smart. And she was so nice. And she just had so much potential. And she was such a wobbly wheel. And I kept her too long. And it actually demoralized the team and caused social ramifications within the company. And I shouldn't have done that. And so you need to be aware of when someone is a wobbly wheel. And you need to correct it. And we did. We did performance improvement things. And she really was giving it her all. And that's why I really appreciate when people give 100%. And I stayed with it though a little too long. So be aware when you have someone that is the wobbly wheel, it's going to derail everything. People come this way. You're a happy baby or you're not a happy baby. I have a friend that suffers from depression. And he's like, what is wrong with you? I go, I wake up like this. This is me every day. He's like, I don't understand this. So be sure when you're hiring people, they have a really strong positive attitude. Some people can do it. Some people can't. I look for people that have done a range of things. If they've only ever been a Drupal developer, they've never gone out of the sandbox. They've never traveled the world. They don't try interesting foods. It creates for me a very stifling environment. I don't like it. I like people that have done weird and adventurous things. One of our strongest team members, she's gone to clown school. She knows how to juggle. She's lived on a sailboat. She managed the pit crew. She was a race car chief. And so she can tear apart an engine and get it back together and get a race team 1,000 miles down the road for the next race. She is incredible at work because she's just done so much. And she brings all that passion and joy with her. And so don't be afraid to hire someone because they don't know Drupal. You can teach them Drupal. Hire someone who knows how to organize the heck out of something. You'll be surprised. I look for people that have taken on leadership in any way. They run a brownie troop. They are an awesome bowler. They run their bowling league. Whatever. Leadership is leadership. You have it internally, and that's who you want on your team. And people that have actually won at something. If they have never experienced winning in their lives as a human being, they're not going to experience it with you. It's just true. People either experience wins or they don't. And be wary of people when you ask them, tell me your biggest accomplishment in life, and they can't name anything. And like I said, it doesn't have to be Drupal. You really want it to be something else. I won the spelling bee in sixth grade. I left and went to Ecuador for three months. Those are all personal victories, and you want to see that in people. How are we doing on time? Because I will talk forever. Okay, good. So understanding ops, I had to have to go a little faster. So one, if you are in charge of operations, your number one mission is to be profitable. You have to know what things cost, including all of your human resource allocation, and you have to know what kind of sales you're trying to drive. How many of you know what utilization rate is, right? Yeah. So you have a team of people. Are they billable 10% of the time, 40% of the time, 80% of the time? So it's important. And if you don't know this, it's really easy to read about it and figure it out. In order to know utilization rate, though, you have to have a process. You can never figure it out unless people are doing the same things over time and you're measuring it. This is the challenge of process. How many of you have tried to implement process, and it kind of comes and goes? Yeah. So you have to have the tool. Process cannot be just write things down. There has to actually be a tool in place to record, to interact with it as a process. There has to be your rules of engagement, like when do you use it, when do you don't. And you actually have to pay a human being to enforce it. This is where the difference between growing and scaling. So when you grow, you never do this step. You never have that enforcement person. And it's not you, by the way. And when you scale and you put this in place, now you can have five employees instead of two, because there are tools, rules, and enforcement. And so for you, what you're giving, you're part of the equation, is time, money, and commitment. So we have a team of 18, 20 people. This is our tool set. I implemented all of this last year, and created all of this process. It's a big process. We have a production team. It'll be different for you, because we're content marketing company. And you can see, this covers every aspect of those five buckets. I have tools in every bucket that measure the right things. And there's no way I can enforce that. I can't. I have a person that I say, one password, someone left, update one password. New tools, go put it in one password. I physically could not get around to doing all that. And then the one password process breaks down, and then we have all our client passwords in Google Drive. How many of you do that? Yeah. Panama papers? Right. And that was that word press plugin. So everything needs a tool set so that you don't have to manually do things. Reverse engineer, how many of your clients are this happy when you deliver a project? Yeah, it's hard. Yay! One person raised their hand. So you remember, I'm a big fan of reverse engineering. So you start here, you say, when we deliver this project, our client is going to be this happy. How do we get there and work on that and maybe deliver slightly better results? I see a lot, a lot of Drupal delivered like this. It's like, it's what you asked for. It's all in there. So measure data in real time. We talked about that, like actually tracking tickets. And then you can have your reporting, right? Like I can see at any given week how many hours that we've logged, billable, non-billable, et cetera, et cetera. So it's good. When you do all that, you will see where the gaps are. You will see what is missing and then you can actually fill in the gaps. So there's a plethora of stuff that you can do. How many of you use Basecamp for clients? Simplest solution out there to do. What are the rest of you using for client communication? Email? How many are using email? You can never scale. Email is for two people. Email is for how I ask Max to meet me for lunch. Email is not a business process. Basecamp is a communication tool. And you can use something else. You could use open atrium, whatever. How many of you let clients in your ticketing system? That is also a system. I've never, I kind of believe in the separation of church and state. But if it works for you, that's great. It always makes me queasy. I don't like my clients to have so much access to my development team. It's not the tickets that I have a problem with. I don't like them communicating with my dev team. I feel like my job as the operations person is to protect my highest paid resources from client interaction that has not been filtered. And that's why I don't do it. So fill in the gaps for yourself. I love FreshBooks for estimating. Best thing. We get contracts signed off on HelloSign. We get designs signed off on Proof HQ, etc, etc. So create process with these tools. And you can see, like here are all of the processes, right? So this is from marketing all the way to the last invoice. And every single one of these has to have a process around it. How many of you are daunted now? Yeah, seems big. And it is. And mastery. So last year was the year of mastering our environment. I talked about it every week. We got our tools. We sometimes grouped them, right? Like we enrolled teamwork. Does anyone use teamwork? I love it. It is my favorite ticketing tool. It does everything I needed to do and just enough of everything. But it was mastery, like figuring out how to use teamwork, how to communicate through teamwork. And we're still working on it, right? So how many of you know Mandelbrot sets? Yeah, that's what operations is. It's that you kind of like, this is my broccoli. And now I'm going to get smaller and tighter and smaller and tighter. And this is why a CEO mapping vision cannot turn around and focus on operations. You can't do both things. You cannot be moving the ship forward and tying the knots. And so this is the first biggest split you might have to do. Any questions? Finances. Now we're really getting to the Maserati part. So having finances, even the concept. So how many of you know what cash flow is? How many of you run your business on a cash flow basis? Yeah. So for those of you who didn't raise your hands, cash flow can make you feel like your business is doing well. Meaning every payroll you have money in the bank, enough clients have sent you money to pay all your expenses and there might even be money left. But that's cash flow. When you measure what you'll be able to see is the money that you got in from clients, all of your costs and what you actually made on the project. If you just run a cash flow business, like I took another deposit, I've got enough money and Greenbird was a cash flow business and we never busted payroll. We always had money in the bank and every year I made less and less money because I was incurring more and more cost because our clients were getting bigger and bigger projects means more complexity, means more operational hours and it actually means less margin. And even though I had a bookkeeper, I didn't have someone that actually explained finances to me and so what is very important is that you look at each project discreetly. You have to know what the margin on each project is. So one of the turnarounds I did, they had, they were a small company and they did a half million dollar, they had, they got, most of their projects were like between 50 and 100,000 and they got in a half million dollar project and what that project did besides almost sink them, literally almost drove them out of business because it was too big for them, is it hid the fact that all of their other projects were underwater and the cash flow, the big project was also underwater but the cash flow hid all that under the auspices of having money every month. And so what happened the minute that big project completed, who can figure out what happened? Yeah, they like had to go from 15, 20 people down to four because they weren't actually ever profitable and so you know we worked on that but sometimes people don't want to hear that, right? So it depends. You also have to measure per person and so this is how I do that. So you take your total revenue, we made $1 million last year and we had five people so that's $200,000 per person or you have 20 people and you have less and this number will let you know whom you should hire next and why a marketing and sales person might actually be the most cost effective hire you make because a sales and marketing person may drive the most revenue per person and so you can hire a themer who might, you might pay 75 and he generates 150,000 billables or you may hire a sales and marketing person at 75 and they may generate 500,000 in revenue. Revenue per employee. There's what we do and what I'd like to target. I'm not quite done yet but I would like to generate probably, I can't do the zeros in my head but it's getting 15 people to 2.5 million dollars but I will say that the digital marketing side is a little more lucrative than the development side because you have to pay developers so much money. Last chance to ask any questions. Well not really. Yes, that's a really great question so what's really great about contractors is that they're 90% billable and so it can be a very effective way of scaling. There's some quality issues and some other things that you have to work through but it can be a very effective way. So I find that many CEOs are captains of calamity. They are their own worst enemies so let me talk, I've talked about all the things that you should do. Let me talk about some things you should not do. Email is not a to-do list and it is not a business plan and it is not a good way to run your daily activities. Email is highly disruptive and it makes you work on the thing that is here now not the thing that is most important. So and I should have actually included this slide. Matt just gave me a wonderful book and it reminded me of all the things I know I'm forgotten don't do. However there's a way to actually categorize like what is the most important thing that I do? What is the most urgent thing that I need to do? Etc. Etc. And it's good to have those distinctions. If you sit through your email and just spend your day replying to email, very bad leadership. How many of you run your business on Google Drive a lot? Like that's where all your finances are held. That's where all your project information is held. That's where all your web development docs are and all that kind of stuff. It's very fragile. It's not really a process because you can't measure it. You can't aggregate any data out of Google Drive. You can count the number of spreadsheets you have but there's nothing that's accumulated and learned from having a business in Google Drive and it's very fragile if you don't have good naming conventions, if you don't have good sharing processes, if you don't do all these other things around Google Drive and so it is necessary and it's not a business process so don't confuse those two. I struggle with this one. I'm mostly consistent and I'm often inspired and make sharp left turns. Sometimes when you work under me that can be problematic, right? That's why I like resilient people. Maintain team health. Definitely get rid of the odd wheels. How many of you are micromanagers and won't admit that you're micromanagers? Yeah. How many of you go oh I can do it faster myself? Yeah. All those things are so bad for scaling a business so if you can't read it the manager's looking over and he says there's no hyphen in micromanager. It's your job to do all the other things we've talked about. It's not your job to actually be in the business doing the work. It's your job to lead the ship. This one I worked at a company and I really wanted it to be my home and I lasted 10 months and I did that because the CEO there never figured this out. We come in, we put in this process and he's like I promise so and so that we would deliver this tomorrow. We can do that, right? Took in bad projects, moved deadlines, did deals for friends. If a client yelled at him he'd come out and yell at the team and we'd shift everything around. We were always breaking process and then he was micromanaging outcomes even though he shouldn't be and then the project managers always left in frustration, right? You can't hold someone accountable for delivering great work and then constantly throw bricks in their path and go I don't know why they're falling. They're falling down and so don't be that CEO. Don't, don't ruin the trust you have with your team because when you do these things they don't respect you anymore. They don't like you anymore. You are making their life hard and uncomfortable and frustrating. You're giving them the responsibility of being in your company and delivering great results and you're not giving them the authority. You have to respect that they can do this job or otherwise they shouldn't be in the job. So the rules apply to you. How many of you pay project managers as much as you pay your developers? Good deal, I advocate this. A good project manager is worth their weight in gold. You cannot be on the ground in front of the clients doing all the things and this is who actually makes you money. They can upsell the client, they can be your early warning canary, they can keep your dev hours from burning out, etc, etc. This is a little bit more about the focus but pick a lane. I worked with a CEO and every time he went to Vistage we had to have a new thing. We had to have Vision Day. We had to have, I don't know, whatever all those crazy things in that are really great and don't actually yield any tangible results for anybody. So we were always like shifting, oh we're going to like have this new kind of operational process. We're going to be team led and then, you know, you get the idea. Don't do that to your people. Hire people that will argue with you, hire argue people that will productively go toe to toe with you. The emperor has no clothes and remember you are the emperor and you need to have people that will tell you that and you need to be open to hearing it. So what we covered, you're going to set Vision, chart a course, hire the right team, advocate process, understand ops, drive sales, manage finances, and the process scales and then you can have margins of Maserati's. So today we went up against Drives and Josh Koenig. So I really appreciate that you came here to hear this. The Drupal Association actually decides who gets to speak based upon the feedback form. So if you didn't like it, don't fill it out. And if you loved it, let them know. Follow me on Twitter. I don't tweet much. And then do connect with me on LinkedIn. So because I love to stay connected to people. But thank you so much and we'll now do Q&A and there's a microphone back there and let's rock it. Let's find out what you really want to know. Hi. Quick question. You can hire when you're too busy, right? But does, is, can you make a case for hiring to get more busy? Say that again? Well it's kind of common, the common convention is you hire when you're at that pain point where you're just too busy and you need more people. But what about the idea of hiring so that you will get more busy? That's a brilliant question. So when you're actually scaling you actually have money because you're making money, right? And you should always anticipate and hire in advance of the next thing. So that's challenging. And so people should always have some capacity. You should be billing at around 80%. So I just worked, did a little consulting while I was here with a friend of mine and he's like my COO is so busy like he doesn't have time to do anything and he's trying to get like from 50 to 100. And I said well listen to what you just said. You're trying to get to 100 but the person who needs to get to your 100 is already maxed out. So see sometimes we say our own thing and I'm not sure if that's exactly the point you were getting to and you need to anticipate growth and you need to have redundancy. I don't know if we talked about that in the slide and how you can scale is to not offer 52 services. Stay very narrow, stay focused and have redundancy and be deep rather than wide. Depth of stability, wide and shallow is the water that dries up and evaporates. So I don't know if that quite answered but when you have that redundancy then it's easier to scale, it's easier to produce at a high volume. I believe in the word velocity like if you can do the exact same work you're doing now and because of process do it faster you're making more money like that. Anyone else? No more questions? Oh come on. We have time for one more question. Yes so he's asking should there how do you share ownership in a company? I think that it gets very expensive because there's a thing called an ESOP where you can do that and you can have partners and it's only if you want to get married. If you love someone so much and they bring so much value that your company would be detrimentally not the same without them that's a use case for sharing equity and maybe making them a partner. Have your exit strategy. However for most companies the way that I would create that ownership is I would bonus based on margin because then everyone is driving towards that and so let's say that you're going to make 10 percent margin and you're going to say I'm going to give half of our margin. If we exceed 10 percent we'll do a 50 percent split on the margin at the end of the year or something like that or bonus or quarterly but it and reward based on the activity that you want because you really want growth in sales and margins so you know figure out something like that and I think that gives people enough ownership because there's liabilities like when you if you give me shares and ownership in your company and you go out of business I now own some of the debt as well so it gets very complex and you can't take those partnerships back so I would do that very judiciously but you can always bonus on revenue anything else? Not really I think good to grade is maybe my favorite one because it's just kind of all encompassing about the people yes do feel free to leave don't feel like you're going to hurt my feelings yes oh my business first business partner and I work for minimum wage for about 12 months and we and what we did though is that we came and we worked every day 40 hours a week on the business growing it basically I think we were making like 300 dollars a week at first and we were so excited when we got to 800 a week pay yourself regularly without fail but make it the least amount of debt that you can muster but make sure that you do with discipline all the time how many of you pay yourselves regularly that's excellent excellent anything else we don't and again it's a little bit of separation and and state so I keep everybody out of fresh books except for the finance team yeah and one person production to make sure you know checks and balances for the actual going into production and so it's not robust enough for me like you can't do ticketing so much in fresh books we actually do ticketing in teamwork and we have tasks and we assign tasks and we have recurring task lists and things like that and so fresh books is too macro it's good for when we have contractors and they just want to bill us for 10 hours or something like that but it doesn't work for the granularity that I like they do it in teamwork we do we have billable and unbillable hours it's one system that records two types of time so inside of teamwork the task can be deemed billable as client work or unbillable as internal work and it's really important I keep that and people have to get permission to burn unbillable hours like even though they're writing a blog for the company blog that time is unbillable time and they have to check with me and I have to sign off on it no we have different tasks in that are unbillable anything else okay yes oh thank you for asking that's so sweet and yes I should write a blog and yes I should actually mark it right non-billable time I I don't I know there are a lot of business coaches that I mean this everything that I said is not new right I package it nicely and I speak passionately about it and the concepts aren't that revolutionary so a good business coach like you could actually point them to this and say do you agree with these philosophies because I do and then you'll be able to find someone that does it but great question oh very cool you can I'll pop in there so next year for the business summit recommendation I'm going to make is that we have we break the business summit into companies under a million dollars and companies over a million dollars so you might all enjoy the business summit next year I think I'm going to try to run it as a workshop and we should talk like maybe there's some part you would like to to be part of so thank you guys so much it was so much fun