 Good morning everybody. Good morning. Welcome to today's business track. I'm the moderator for today. This is our first presenter, Boomer Sassman. Woo! Oh my god. That's fantastic. Is everybody ready? Yeah. Okay. Well, there's still people trickling in. Come on, Dan. Morning. Okay. This is going to be hopefully an interesting way to kick off the day. It's going to be extremely... And can you guys hear me in the back? Yes. You can? Okay, because I don't really like using mics. So, I'm Boomer Sassman. I have a company called Big Boom Design here in town. And I'm going to give you a little bit of a background about how I kind of came to this journey, the beginning of the journey. And then I'm going to give you a snapshot of kind of where myself and the company are at right now. And then I'm going to walk through a pretty transparent, hopefully transparent look at how we do what we do, why we do what we do, and kind of the murky waters that we've treaded water in for the past eight years. So, I'm going to start with this, hopefully. One more time? No, okay. So that sound kind of changed my life. And I think it probably did for a lot of us. I was 12. I was 12 years old, and I was in... I'm going to back up just a little bit. I was in sixth grade. I was in English class. And I overheard this young lady talking about her screen name. And I did what any 12-year-old would do at that time. And I didn't go up and talk to her. I went home and I said, Dad, we need to get AOL. And I didn't tell him why, but I knew that that was my gateway to communicate with her. And he said, nah, we're not going to get AOL. We'll get the internet, but we're not getting AOL. And at the time, AOL was the internet to me. And really, AOL was kind of the internet in a sense back then. It was everything was kind of bundled together and slammed together. This was before we saw all these kind of spin-offs and this diversification of all these services. And so I was crushed to be like, oh, I can't get AOL, but whatever, the internet, okay. So AIM came out and it let people who had the internet didn't have AOL talk to folks on AOL. And so I kind of, that was my first introduction to the internet. And I really got excited. I didn't really know where it was going. None of us really did. And I think now when we look back over the past like 20-plus years of the internet, it's really kind of bizarre to think about how ingrained it is in our lives these days. And we really didn't plan on it. And even the people and a lot of them in this room who helped build some of this stuff, we didn't really know what we were doing. And we still don't really know what we were doing at times. And so the original title of this talk was going to be fake it till you make it. And then I decided to change it to something a little bit more, I don't know, vague. Even more vague than that. And so I don't know if, I think I know half of you pretty well. And so thanks for showing up. And then the other half, hopefully the title was interesting enough that you either thought this would be like The Wizard of Oz or something. I don't know, but thanks for being here. So I'm going to give you kind of a little crash course from 12 until college. And when I graduated college and what that kind of looked like. So I got my start with Angel Fire and GeoCities. And I probably a handful of you in here who remembers Angel Fire and GeoCities? Who had sites that they built on that? Okay. Cool. Awesome. I wish I still had that. Archive.org probably does. I should go and look at some point and see if my old sites were there. So I went through middle school, got really hooked to the internet, went through high school. Never thought that it would be a career of mine. I was always playing in the woods and mountain biking and tearing into computers and turned 16 and got really into cars and started rebuilding cars and then got into motorcycles. And it was really a hands-on person, but the internet was always a big passion of mine. And so that's again a kind of a core piece of this presentation is passion. And you got to have the passion and you can't fake it. You really have to love it because it's such a crazy world on the internet that we all kind of play in and you really have to be addicted to watching to see where it's going next and really trying to like keep up with it. And so we're all I think really lucky to be in an industry that we don't have to push. It's pulling us. And we're lucky enough to be addicted to it to a point that we follow it closely at times and often it takes over our lives. Sometimes that our loved ones hate us for that. But it's a passion. So I got into college, was going to be a CNC machinist. I did machine work in high school, did an apprenticeship, got really into that path and really wanted to be a machinist. And then I did an apprenticeship and I realized that while I was interested in that world, I didn't want to sit in deeper 15,000 parts and I didn't really want to fall into this realm of doing the exact same thing over and over and over again. Even though it really interests me and I was really good at it, I realized that that wasn't really the future that I kind of wanted. So in college I had a friend of mine ask if I would build her a website for a class that she was in. And this was the first time anybody else, I ever built a site for anybody else other than myself. To that point, the sites that I had were basic, very basic at the time. They were about the music that I was listening to, the tweaks that I was doing on my cars and my bikes and things. And so I said, sure, I'll do that. And she said, can I give you a six pack of beer? Is that cool to do this site? I was like, sure, that's great. So that was my first barter opportunity. And that has definitely stuck with me 10 years later. So I did the site for my friend Ashley and that was the first time that I realized that the skill that I didn't even really realize that I had was useful to other people. And that this was a world that I just loved, that other people, for some reason, kind of needed to start tapping into. And that was a really cool realization for me. And I think this was probably freshman year up at Appalachian State. And I ended up going to school for industrial design, which was kind of in the wheelhouse that I was already interested in. And never really saw myself kind of getting into the web in a professional level. And so I did start working. I taught snowboard lessons up at Beach Mountain. I met a guy who had a web company and started working for him part-time. And started doing some design work, started trying to get a little bit into code, learning a little bit of CSS. At this point, WordPress was probably two years old, I guess, ish. And at that time, it really wasn't what it is today, obviously. We all know that. And so my first content management system was actually Joomla. And I dug in and did some Joomla sites. And still to this day, we do a handful of Joomla sites. Mostly these days, it's maintenance and upkeep, de-hacking older sites and things like that. But we've pretty much exclusively gone to WordPress these days. And I love it. And all my folks do as well, my employees. So I worked for this guy. I started doing more and more and more. And he was really just the sales guy. And so at some point, right around senior year, I realized that I was doing all of the design work, all of the code work at the time. The proposals, training people, identifying who to hire, bringing them in, getting them trained up. We were doing a lot of flash sites at that time, which in my opinion was one of the coolest times on the internet that we will ever see. It was so creative. It was really ridiculous. But it was really creative. We started building, he would sell these sites. And he'd come back and he was like, I sold this $10,000 flashlight. And I was like, oh my god. And I was like, 17. So that was amazing. And that was a huge chunk of money. And I was like, this is really cool. So we'd build these sites and we'd put them out there. And then they were nowhere to be found. Because Google and other search engines at the time didn't know how to read into them. And so we had to get creative. And so what we started doing is creating these flash sites that were really, overly complicated. And then creating an HTML version that kind of sat below it. That nobody saw unless they were on a slow connection or in case they had certain things disabled. And so Google saw that, the HTML content. And then these sites started to get indexed. And that was really cool. And so that was kind of the first time that I realized that we were kind of being really agile and kind of figuring out this really fluid environment that we were in and kind of adapting to these rules that were getting made at that time. And so Google was really starting to take a, have a big foot in the door with the internet. And so I graduated college and a month later. And so let me back up just a little bit. So I realized that I was really doing everything at this company except sales. And I think at this point I was 20 or 21. And I realized that I was running this guy's company. He was running into the ground and I was trying to keep it afloat. And he was 50 and I was 20. And I was thinking, man, if only I could figure out the sales side of this. But I was scared to death that at 21 no business owner would take me serious for any reason. And then I realized that if, at that time, if business owners would take a 21-year-old serious for anything, it was the internet. We had this knowledge. We, folks that were young at the time, had this knowledge that business owners really needed to tap into. And I got really excited about that and I decided to go out of my own and start a company. So a month after graduation, I'm hiking in the woods with some friends and I slipped and fall off a 60-foot waterfall. Fell into a 6-inch creek bed down below. Snapped my right foot almost completely off. Broke two toes and almost severed them over here. Broke my thumb, split my elbow, split my head wide open. Seven-second accident. Went from the best shape of my life, 21. Just graduated. All of a sudden I have one working limb. I'm in a hospital bed. I had just left this company. I have an industrial design degree and I'm addicted to the internet. What am I going to do? So I had a lot of downtime, obviously. And so from Cone in Greensboro, the hospital in Cone, fifth day, I purchased BigBoomDesign.com. I realized that I was getting ready to have some undetermined amount of time where I wasn't going to be able to run around and work on cars, run around in the woods, hop on my mountain bike, go play in caves. I had some undetermined amount of time sitting in front of this thing and that scared the hell out of me. But at the same time, it gave me this opportunity to really look at my life and it slowed me down at a time that I really needed to be slowed down. And in hindsight, that was probably one of the most significant and best things that's ever happened to me. That accident. So I started BigBoomDesign and for the next two months lived in my parents' living room, which was so humbling to go away to college, graduate, and then have to come back and live in the living room. So I did that and early on it was a really, really slow progression. I really didn't know where I was headed. I didn't know if it was going to be just me. I didn't know if I was going to try to stack up a team like I had at my previous company and at his previous company. And so for me, it was really the next year and a half was kind of this growth period of just trying to figure out where I was headed. And years later, this was a couple of years ago, I found a TED talk by a woman named Jane McGonkel. I think it's her name. And the title of it, if you want to check it out, it's called The Game That Can Give You 10 Extra Years. And she was a game designer and got into a car wreck and smacked her head on the dash with a steering wheel and had this brain hemorrhaging going on. And the doctor said to her, you can't do anything for the next six weeks or six months and forget what it was. You can't read, you can't go outside, you can't work on your computer, you can't design games. You can't do anything that's going to cause activity in your brain. You have to pretty much just kind of hang out. And as a game designer, she says, I really, as silly as it sounds, I kind of wanted to kill myself. And the topic and what she really tries to point out in this presentation is this concept of post-traumatic growth. And so we all hear about post-traumatic stress, folks that come back from war that have seen these crazy things and it kind of spirals and it takes over their life and they kind of head down in this deep, dark place. And so the flip side of that, as she presents it, is this post-traumatic growth. And when there's these big, major moments in your life, you can go one of two routes. And one is, oh my God, why did this happen? And I'm doomed. Or the other is, oh my God, why did this happen? What am I going to get out of this? And so for me at that time, and I didn't even realize it until years later, that was the moment that I really realized that I wanted to take control of my life. I wanted to own my own business. I didn't want to be tied to somebody else, somebody else's decisions. And I made a point to just head down that path and not look back. And so that was about 10 years ago, like eight and a half, nine years ago. And so that's kind of the precursor to the rest of the story that I'm going to lay out, which is where we are now. And so I got back on my feet. I moved, I left Boone. I moved to Asheville on crutches. I packed in my house. I moved all my stuff. I got to Asheville. I spent 13 months on crutches, learning a new town, trying to get around, trying to meet women on crutches. It's tough. It's really tough. And it was a new town and it was a mountain town. It was a tough place to live, especially not having a job. But as you guys all know, this is a bring your own job type of place. And so I kind of had a job at the time. I really didn't make much money, but that was okay. And I started in Fairview and I rented a room. And then the business started to grow a little bit. And then I moved out to Candler and lived there for a little bit. And I was lucky enough to get clients. And I had folks that really trusted the fact that I was very transparent with the process. And that's one thing that my previous boss never did, is everything was built on smoke and mirrors. And it was all sales and the delivery was really lacking. And he kind of made a bad name for himself. And so I made a decision when I started the company, and as I grew the company, that it was going to be very transparent. And it was going to be as educational as it possibly could be. I was going to bring the client into the mix, teach them what I was doing, if they wanted to learn, and really try to get them into the mix with it. Because it's something that I felt like a lot of other web companies weren't doing. They were really saying, don't ask why we're doing it this way. We're just doing it this way. It's right. Just trust us. And they weren't giving analytic data. And they weren't informing the client about this stuff, about these sites that they spent tens of $20,000 on. And it was ridiculous that so many folks were making so much money in such a crummy way. And so that's been the goal from day one, is educational web design. And so Big Boom Design is an educational web design and internet consulting agency here in town. So I kind of want to play this again. No, I won't play it again. So these days, here's kind of a current snapshot of who are we these days. So at this point, we were established in 2007 in Boone. It's an educational first, educational web design internet consulting agency. We have five full-time employees, two part-time. I include myself in that mix. Our staff is 100% here in Asheville, Arden, Asheville area, but we're all physically here. We have an office up at Crest Mountain. We were in the incubator over at AB Tech for three years, and that was a great time. These days, 70% of the work that we do is WordPress. Groundup construction, overhauls, WordPress related things. We still do some Joomla work, and so 30% of the business is Joomla. We host a bunch of sites. We do analytics, ad words, and I teach a bunch of classes thanks to AB Tech and thanks to WordPress. We build roughly 30 to 50 sites a year these days. We host roughly 250 sites, and I'm not a developer. I peaked into that world and realized that it interests me a lot, but it's not where my abilities really lie and it's not where the passion really was. I really like the collaboration, the client interaction, bringing the team together, pushing the projects forward, and so that's kind of my role. So I'm not a developer. I'm not a graphic designer. I steer the ship, and without them, we just sit there. So I really appreciate the fact that I've been able to find, and in some cases they've found me, some really, really talented folks here in town that really kind of help do what we do, and I really just kind of help steer the ship and keep us all on track. So originally when I laid out the description for this talk, I laid it out and it sat there for a while, and then I went back to it about a month ago and I was like, what did I put in the description? What are these people expecting to learn? And then I tweaked a little bit because I was like, I don't want to get into that. I don't want to get into that. And so I kind of polished it a little bit, and one of the things that I wanted to do is try to help people identify, and maybe you're just coming out of college, maybe you're an encore entrepreneur. It doesn't really matter. The idea of where are you going to find your place in this crazy sea of competition and web design and the internet, and so I was trying to identify, am I going to try to steer people and say, you should start a company, you should be a freelancer, you could hop into this role, that role, and I'm going to backtrack a little bit from that and just kind of talk about all of them and say, here's what I've learned, here's the stuff that worked, here's the stuff that didn't work, and so I've got about 10 of these bubbles that have about five or six bullets on each one. I'm going to go through and talk about all of them, I might kind of hop around a little bit, I'll try to be linear, but the internet is anything but linear, so I apologize in advance, that's my disclaimer. So what does it mean to work for yourself? It's great, it's fantastic, it's horrible as well, and we all kind of know that. So you're always the catch-all, you always, you end up, especially as the company grows and you start pushing tasks over to other people that are far more able to handle those tasks, you end up with everything that you can't give to somebody else. And that kind of sucks sometimes. I have a buddy, a client and friend, his name is Grant, he lives in Boone, he runs a rafting company, and we were talking years ago, and he said, you know Boomer, if all I had to do was guide people down the river, this would be awesome. He says, but I deal with the IRS, and I deal with marketing, and I deal with employees trying to date each other, and I deal with drug policies, and he started going through this whole giant list and he was like, I can't tell you the last time that I guided a trip down the river. And I now can relate to that where you are the catch-all that catches everything that you can't necessarily give to somebody else. And it's not always a bad thing, it really keeps you tight to the business. Sleepless nights and endless days. And I can't tell you how many evenings I was sitting there plugging away, trying to de-hackajumla website at 3.30 in the morning, only to get an email from a client who was equally crazy and up at that same time, that I then switched gears, answered that email at 3.30 in the morning, so many times, until I finally had to draw the line. Without passion, everything will crumble. You really have to be addicted to it. You really have to be in love with what you're doing, and I'm going to stress that over and over again. You'll fake it till you make it. You really will. There's a lot of times where I sold a website for, and it was the next biggest project that we had ever gotten in. It was like a $4,000 site or it was a $6,000 site or it was a $12,000 site, and it kept snowballing, and there were so many pieces of that project that I had just sold that I had no idea how to do. But you sell it, and then you figure it out. And that's okay to do. You don't want a lot of people about that fact that you don't know how to do it. Sometimes you can be very upfront about that fact, and they appreciate that, and you can be very transparent and say, look, I really don't know how we're going to do this reservation calendar tie-in thing. We will figure it out, though. And that's okay to do. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. I've been very lucky that we haven't had any major issues other than a couple years ago, the day after Christmas, I had a server get hacked into and 75 websites got hacked the day after Christmas. I was at home in Greensboro with my folks and had this realization, and it was a GoDaddy dedicated server that I had that I hadn't kept up to date. I didn't have the managed account with the server, and so every service that was running on the server had slipped. The security had slipped. I didn't realize it. I was on a Linux guy. I'm still really not. And so there was a big old hole, and somebody got in and hacked every single site. One FTP account for all of them, because I thought that'd be great. I just have one FTP account. I get in there, and I can just hop between sites. Don't do that. These days, we run four different servers. We run a Rackspace server, a WP Engine server, a SiteGround server, and still a couple little GoDaddy boxes. But three sites per FTP cluster them out. If you have a lot of sites all lumped together, they will all get hacked together, and that's a bad thing. So it took me to wrap up that little server hacking story. Basically what happened was they didn't shut the sites down, but they locked me out of plus. They locked me out of the interface, and so I then had to figure out how to take backups of all of the sites without access, pull the database, pull the files, get them moved over to a brand new server, locate all of those domain names so that we could repoint, and I spent three and a half weeks not doing anything other than dealing with that. Damage control. And at that time, it was just me. Find the path with heart or else. And there's a really good quote that I found the other day. It was way too long, and so I'm going to paraphrase it, but it's Carlos Castaneda from the teachings of Don Juan. And basically I'm going to summarize it, and it's that all paths are the same. They're all the same. Does the path have heart? And if it does, it's a joyful journey. And if it doesn't, you will curse your life. And not to be like a downer on that, but basically don't head down this path that ultimately you don't think is the right one for you or the right one for who you're selling or offering services to. It's not a good situation for anybody to be in. Who are you and what are you building? How many web designers are in the room? How many graphic designers are in the room? How many bloggers are in the room? Because there's like at least ten of all of you. And that's just in this one room. And now I know it's a WordPress conference and there's a lot of us here, but think about Astral on a larger scale and all the folks that are one of those three roles and not in this room. And then you think about the state and then you think about the country. What makes you unique? Why is somebody going to go with you over somebody else? And you don't have to know that when you get started and you start heading down that path, but you've got to know that you're going to stick with it enough to figure it out. I clicked a button accidentally, okay. So figure out what either you have to bring to the table or what your company and your team has to bring to the table and maybe you guys do really kick-ass responsive sites. Maybe it's email-related stuff. Maybe it's analytics. Maybe it's AdWords. Maybe it's Drupal. Maybe it's Joomla. Maybe it's WordPress. Maybe it's a combination of all of that stuff. But identify what it is and stick with it. Or at least broadcast it until you realize that it's tweaking. It's changing a little bit. And so we're an educational web design and internet consulting company. Carve out your niche and draw a line in the sand. There's a really good book called Rework. It was written by the two guys who started 37 Signals, which built Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack and Campfire. And it's a fantastic book. I encourage everybody to read it. And one of the things that they talk about in there is I think it's Whole Foods or Earthfare. They say, when Skittles approaches them and says, hey, will you carry our Skittles? They don't have to check with the board or whatever. They say, no. You're on that side of the line. We don't do that. And so just draw that line. And for a long time for us, it was e-commerce. I don't do e-commerce. I don't like it. There's too many emotions. I'm the last person to touch the product or whatever. And if something doesn't go right, you're going to blame me. Maybe it's a crappy product. But I can't say that and they get offended. So I just decided to not do e-commerce for a long, long, long time. We do some now, but I still don't really like doing them that much. Clearly identify your capacity and your capabilities. And like I said earlier, I recognize the fact that to progress in business and bring on bigger and bigger projects, the development side had to improve. And I was not a developer. And so I was lucky enough to have Michael in the back send me some random email one day and say, hey, I'm a developer in town. And I think I need some help. I need some framework. And I've stacked up all this knowledge. I need kind of this framework and this position to help stack up more information, more knowledge. And sometimes I find these folks that are super talented. Sometimes they find me and I'm super grateful to be working with some of the smartest people that I know. Is it you and your laptop in a coffee shop? Or is it you and a team in a big office building? And either one of those is completely fine. And you don't have to make that decision early on, but just understand where you are. And you don't have to puff up your shoulders and pretend to be this big giant agency if you're not. You can if you want to, but be true to who you actually are. Is it a lifestyle business or are you building something to sell? And for me, I don't really know yet. It's definitely a lifestyle business at this point. I don't really ever want to sell the company. And I think that folks who build something to sell it, it's a little jaded. And it's like, yeah, OK, if it's this product or if it's this thing and you don't really want to be connected to it, that's fine. But maybe you don't have the passion invested in it and maybe it won't get to that point. So I think the folks that realize at some point, like, whoa, we could sell this for a lot of money. That's one thing. And then the other side of it is I'm going to head down this path and I'm going to build something to sell it. And there's two very distinct paths. Become the brand or not. And I think this was also something I pulled from rework. And to me, what it means is they talk about how you keep yourself safe from competition. And they say, one of the things that you can do is you put yourself in the product. You put yourself in the product of the service. People can take your content. They can take your images. They can take your code. The internet is so transparent that can happen these days. But they can't take you. They can't take your spirit. They can't take your passion. And they can't steal that. One of the things and the reason why I have dot, dot, dot, not is because I've now realized that I have completely attached myself to the business at the hip. And so from a teaching standpoint, and I have kind of become a boomer, you're the guy that owns that big boom company, right? And so now as I not necessarily try to step away, but as I try to work on other projects and other things, there's thousands of business cards out there with my cell phone number on it. And that at times is a little nerve wracking to know that even if I wanted to kind of go away for two weeks or take a vacation or something, I'm still the main person that people are going to call. And so just know that when you're heading down that path, you're really attaching this thing to you. And that might be a great thing. It might not be. When and how to hire help. And this is something that is a tough thing to identify. Don't burn out before you shine. I, like I said, spent lots and lots and lots of hours up really, really, really late and probably pushed it further than I probably should have. And I started bringing in some employees and had no idea what I was doing with managing people. I had never managed anybody. I didn't take any management classes or even any business classes in school. And so it was really kind of figured out as you go. But I was lucky enough to not do it for so long that I just burned out on it and said, you know what, I just can't cut it in this. And I brought in some folks and they really helped out. Accept your shortcomings. Again, with the development side, for me, the accounting side, I get it. I understand it. It's important. I don't really like to do it. So I farm pieces of that out. And that's perfectly okay. You always need to keep tabs on things, but it's okay to push some of that stuff out and pay the people what they deserve to be paid. Are you going to work with local or international talent? Like I said, I decided to say we're 100% local. And for me, that's not because I want to brag about that being this local thing. That's cool and I do brag about that. But for me, it's more about communication. I don't want a time lag with people overseas. I don't want the communication issues. I want to be able to sit with people and look at them and drink coffee and hang out. And I really like that. But there's a lot of people that I know who have very great success with hiring folks overseas or across the state or across the country. Find the lifelong learners. And I can't stress that one enough. I feel like I am a lifelong learner and I think those of us that have this spark that lasts forever, we're going to go places. Because we are just stacking up knowledge and we love it and we're addicted to it. Hire excellent writers. I'm not an excellent writer. I try. I'm working on it. But there's something to be said for folks who can communicate. Whether they're a graphic designer, a developer, a project manager, a bookkeeper, it doesn't really matter. Really good writers. That's a really nice trait for them to have and it speaks volumes about their personality. Encourage creativity but set limits. I really try and encourage all the folks that I work with to explore. And this kind of goes back to what Google does. They say take 20% of your time and just play and explore. Tell your coworkers what you're doing about it but just take that time to explore. You're in this business and you're in the internet because you really have that spark for the internet so explore it. Refine your application process. I'm going to jump out real quick to... and hopefully this works. So a couple years ago I had to fire somebody. I was thinking about fire somebody. And I called my dad and I was stressed out about it and I was like, dad, this person's not working out. They just can't cut it. Their retention's not there, blah, blah, blah. And I went on for 15 minutes and I said, what do I do? And he was silent. He says, you hired him. And he just put it right back on me and I was like, huh, you're right, I did. I'm the one that hired him. I'm the one that didn't do the due diligence to find the person that was right for the job. It wasn't their fault, it was my fault. And that was a really humbling moment to be like, okay, dad, that was good, I got you. So what I've done over the past couple years, I've hired a number of people. I've only had to fire a few of them. I came up with this application process. There's some questions that you can't ask when you're trying to hire people, but if you can ask the right questions, the answer is that you're actually looking for. And so this is what I do these days. I have an application, I'm sorry, I have a job description. And then at the end it says, submit your resume and fill out this 10 question application. And so this is the application. And some of this I came up with, some of this I pulled from Google. What's your name? Why do you live in or around Asheville? And some people put paragraphs in there and they said, well, me and my husband moved here, blah, blah, blah with our two kids and our golden retriever. And they just like dumped so much information into that that they never would have gotten from a resume or even from a conversation sitting with them. How many basketballs would fit into a 10 by 10 by 10 room? Well, so the questions that follow are the basketballs fully inflated. Which is good. Yeah, is it a standard size basketball? The answer is actually 1728. I got some really interesting responses for some of these. What's your email address? So I kind of alternate between odd things. Who would win in a fight, RGB or CMYK? I had somebody write me a novel about this epic battle that happened between RGB and CMYK and it was awesome. What's your favorite TLA? What's a TLA? Three letter acronym. Some people wrote back and said, I don't know what a three letter acronym is. Wrong answer. Google it. It's like the third thing listed on Google when you Google TLA. So FTP, CMS, URL, SSL, DNS, RFP, CRM. What makes you more interesting than the other people applying for this job? Mac or PC? If Google were a planet, what planet would it be? Anybody? Anybody? Trick question. It's the sun. Do you have any experience working with the following? Asana, AdWords. I'm not going to run through the list, but just to kind of stack that up. So this little simple survey changed, completely changed the way that I hire people and completely changed the applicants. Some people just submitted a resume and didn't fill this out. They were out of mix. Some people just filled this out, didn't submit the resume. It just is what it is. But I've really tried to refine the process of hiring people because I've realized that it's going to happen more and more and more. Yeah. Yeah. It depends on the question. And so what I would do is I would go through and I would read the same question for everybody and start whittling it down. And some people, anybody who didn't take the time to just Google what I was looking for and I made some of them intentionally obscure. And there's a blog post out there that talks about how many basketballs would fit in a 10 by 10 by 10 room. I didn't make that question out. And so if you can't take the time to just Google it, you instantly are out of the mix. And so I got this most recent round when I hired folks, I got 78 applications. I opened it for 10 days. And I said the application will open on this date. It will close on this date. Here's what you need to do. I got 78 applications. I whittled it down to, like, 24 that I sent emails to. And then I whittled that down to nine that I did phone call interviews with. And I whittled that down to four that I met in person with. And then I hired. So that process is, it takes a lot of time. It kind of sucks. It's tedious. But it's worth it, I think. And a lot of times what I was looking for is personality. That's the biggest thing in my opinion is you've got to be able to communicate. You've got to be clever. It also showed how long people took to fill out the survey. And that was really interesting. Some people, it was like eight minutes and it was super funny. Other people sat there for an hour and a half and it was really boring. So. Craigslist is a good one. My sister runs a staffing agency down in Charleston. So she kind of helped kind of spread some of that stuff out for me. I haven't used Monster or any of those kinds of things. But Craigslist, I mean, these days, very legitimate people go on Craigslist. And especially if they're trying to move to the city, you know, that's kind of, surprisingly that's kind of the go-to, which is odd, but whatever. If you don't track it, you can't improve on it. And so, at the end of every month, I do this. I take four sheets of paper and I write these four words on them. Automate, delegate, eliminate, and just do it. And I go back through my little notebook and I still like making lists of things. And so I go back through the past month of stuff that I've done. I go back through that. I go back through Asana. And I put everything that I've done, or at least as much as I can track down, onto one of those four sheets. Automate it, eliminate it, delegate it, or just do it. And that has really helped me review what I've done for the month. It really helps me identify what I'm wasting time on. And I think it's a good thing that people should try to do. It's simple, it's quick, it's easy. I'm not religious about how to do it every single month, but I do try to do it pretty often. Managing clients. Sometimes the best deals you make are the ones you walk away from. Enough said on that. Set the level of expectation immediately. And by that I mean the level of functionality, the level of design, the level of attention to detail, what they're paying for, and what they're going to get. And you've got to get that out right out of the gate. First meeting. Communicate on your terms. I don't let clients text me. They do. And I email them back. And sometimes if they continue to do that, I will say to them, I don't communicate through text, I'm sorry. I don't let people hit me up on Facebook. I don't really exist in social media. I spend enough time on the internet that I really don't play in the social media world. And I'm okay with that. But set that level of communication. Set it and stick to it. If you like texting or if you like doing Facebook messages with clients, that's fine, I'm not knocking that. It's just not what I want to do. I want to get phone calls, emails, or meet in person. Yeah. And it lets them realize that I am aware of it enough that I say I want to meet in person. I would rather sit down in person. Or I'm great with phone calls or Skype or things like that, but I don't do text and I don't do Facebook with clients. It's just, I draw the line, I say that's personal and this is business. Set boundaries when you are available. At five o'clock, I'm done. On the weekends, that's my time. Emergencies happen. And stuff happens. And you got to deal with it at times. But for the most part, like I said, I used to respond to emails because I was sitting there working at 9, 10, 11, 12 at night. And I don't do that anymore. I still work then, I just don't communicate then. I'll even knock out a bunch of emails really, really late, but I will wait until the morning to send them out. Don't overcomplicate just because you can. We are a privileged group that has this knowledge of this terminology that we can very easily confuse people. Don't do it. It's not needed. We are kind of, to compare it to the automotive world. We take our car somewhere and we hope that they're telling us the truth and that they're not using these words that we don't understand. They can break it down. We can too. You shouldn't overcomplicate things just because you can. Tell them the truth about the budget and the timeline. People say, sometimes they don't ask it. And I say, so you got two more questions, don't you? And they say, well, I don't know what you mean. And I say, how long is it going to take and what's it going to cost? And they say, yeah. I say it's going to take twice as long as you want it to. And it's going to cost at least twice as much. And they kind of look and they kind of like, are you kidding? I'm like, no, I'm not kidding. Like everybody wants it twice as fast and twice as cheap. And it's not the case these days. Quality customer service is essential. This is a tough thing, especially as more and more projects come in and you get more and more clients. And you realize that you have to hire somebody to kind of go between you and the clients. And that's a really, really scary thing. And customer service is key. And if you put the wrong person in place there, it can really cause massive ripple effects. And so customer service is really, really essential. And turn your clients into salespeople. I don't have any salespeople. We do a really, really good job for our clients. And they tell other people. And they bring us other business. It's all referral. I do a lot of speaking gigs. I teach a lot of classes for free. And it helps spread the word. And you get clients and you treat them well. And you then turn them into salespeople. And you don't have to pay commissions. You don't have to have somebody else on payroll. And that's a great thing. Managing staff. The ability to self-manage is key because I don't really want to manage anybody. I'm not a manager. I've had to be, but I really would rather have people that are self-directed, self-governing and manage themselves, identify what they need to do. I'm there for feedback and support, but I really need them to manage themselves. And that's been a struggle to try to give people that freedom, but then keep them in check and make sure that they're not just like going off down this crazy tangent. Communication channels. I have tried a dozen. Task management systems, time tracking systems, list taking systems. These days, we use Asana and Harvest. Asana is our task management and communication system. Everything gets plugged in there, assigned to a certain person, pinned to a certain project, files attached to it. Asana is great. It's changed the business for the better. It seamlessly integrates with a program called Harvest. These are both web-based services. Asana is free. Harvest is not, but it's pretty inexpensive. Harvest does all of the time tracking and reporting on that time, and then invoicing. And it also lets you tie in payments. You can do PayPal or Stripe, tie in with Harvest. And I know I don't have time, but I was going to dig into, and I was going to actually show you our Harvest and our Asana section, but I don't have time to do that. Okay. I'll come back to that if I can. I want to run through the rest of it, but I've got two tabs open with kind of example of that. I'll also be outside after this if anybody wants more info. So file storage and sharing. We use Dropbox. I use Drive a little bit. And Dropbox, for the most part, works pretty well. A lot of stuff gets attached to the task in Asana. And I think Asana uses Amazon S3 to do the file storage. And that works pretty well. We have a network attached storage at the office that we can tap into. It's like a three terabyte drive that we put a lot of stuff in. Once we finish a project, we ain't going to Dropbox. We drop it in there to archive it. I've got to back up at the house as well. Access to information. What I mean by this is my guys have passwords. A lot of my sensitive information. And you've got to have a level of trust that you've hired the right person. And they're not going to abuse the fact that they have access to a lot of your information. And that's a scary thing. There's tools that can help with that. LastPass actually has a section where you can create a shared folder and you can share that folder of passwords with people. And you can share it so they can see the username and the password. You can share it with them so that they only see the username and they can't see the password. And then they have a little app on their browser and when they go to GoDaddy or Rackspace or wherever PayPal, they can log into it. I have probably 60 clients' PayPal information. And they're probably scared to give that to me, but I trust my staff. I trust myself. I trust the systems that I have in place to make sure that that information is secure. You've got to trust. You've got to do the due diligence to find the right systems and you've got to trust it. Train and trust, but always track. Time tracking, just making sure that the system's tight. There was a very pivotal point where I realized that I had transitioned away from building the systems, building the websites, to building the system that was building the systems. And that was a very significant transition that I had to kind of realize that I wasn't building the websites anymore. I was building this business that was building the websites. Landing and managing projects. Identify the best system for your needs. And in our case, I use PowerPoint. I do a proposal. Something I was going to dig into. I was going to walk through. I've got a kind of a 10-page template PowerPoint proposal that I send out and I tweak stuff. And it's really great to have a series of templates of previous proposals that you can go in and swap stuff out so that you're not having to recreate that each time. Don't set deadlines if possible. I hate deadlines. I do. I hate them. And so I just don't set them. And it actually works really well. People often want timelines and that's fine. But when they say, well, when is this going to be done? I say, this is really more on you than me. We'll do everything that we can as quick as we can. I'm going to pass it back to you and then you're going to take three weeks to get me content. Sorry, that's how that goes. The puke factor. Half of all proposals that you send out should get puked on. That's enough said there. I don't remember who told me that. I think it was a friend of mine whose wife is a really amazing artist here in town. And we were talking about pricing and he was like, you know, half of all those price sags, people should just want to puke all over that painting. I thought that was pretty funny. How many projects is too many projects? I don't know. I have pushed that limit a lot of times. It's based on the life cycle of the business and where you're at and the price point of your projects that really determines how many you can stack up. If you're in the one to two to three thousand range and it's just you, you can have just a couple and that's fine. You can get six or seven or 10 and that gets a little scary. If you've got a big staff and you've got overhead and you've got payroll and bills and all this stuff, you kind of have to stack up a lot of projects. And so hopefully the price point of the project scales so that you don't have to stack up a whole lot of projects that you're managing at a lower price point. Fewer projects at bigger prices are generally better, generally. Sometimes the terms of payment are stretched out and that's a tough thing to deal with but that's a really, it's a balancing act there. Seasonal swings, this is something that I didn't really realize at first and what I mean by this is the internet, while there's no seasons on the internet, businesses go through seasons and especially in a town like this that's tourism based, October to February, sucks. It dries up. People hang on to their money. It's tax time, it's holidays, tourists aren't here as much and there's a lot of, it gets tight often. Every year I kind of go into that time period thinking like, oh man, I'm gonna be able to give everybody Christmas bonuses and we're gonna have all this money and then projects just start disappearing. And so I'm lucky now to have enough clients that we can hit up and say, hey, it's time for this theme overhaul or I've got folks on retainer and things like that, hosting helps at times but just know that there's these seasonal swings. The perceived value, not the hours spent and that's a tough thing to deal with but if you're gonna build a site for somebody what's the perceived value? If you're gonna build an e-commerce site for them and it's gonna bring them $150,000 and they only wanna pay you like four, you need to make them realize that that's a ridiculous state to be in. Be exclusive. I started doing this a couple years ago. I used to tell people, we got to a point and I'd say, well, we don't take new clients. Well, we only take new clients from January to March and then we stop and that was a lie. We take clients all the year round but to tell people that and sometimes it was like, ooh, I don't really wanna work with you. I'm just gonna say that we're not taking anybody and at times that has been true but for the most part you always take the projects that really interest you and that's okay to do but be exclusive and say, kinda draw this line and say we only take these types of projects or we only take projects in these cities or we only take projects for restaurants and bars or whatever and just don't say we build websites for everybody because everybody needs websites. Don't do that. And then that's the link to the proposal but I don't have time for that one. So we're getting towards the end. Where does all the time go? Like I said, we use Harvest to do that. Sometimes reviewing the time is scary. Sometimes it's really, really tough to track time. I feel like a bit of a hypocrite because I have all of my employees and contractors track down to the minute and I've tried to track my time but it is very, very difficult and a lot of my time isn't really billable time. I try to have all of their time be billable time but not always and most of the time my time is not billable time. It's producing invoices and it's looking into analytics and it's things like that that I can't bill for so the need to track it is a little bit less. Seamless invoice, seamless integration with your invoice system. Asana and Harvest tie straight together. Harvest tracks all the time. I can go in and just say create invoice for this client. It looks to see all the time that's been stacked up. It takes it. It knows the hourly rate for that employer, for that project. It puts it all on a clean invoice and I don't have to deal with Excel. I don't have to deal with QuickBooks. It just ties it all together. You can pick your date range. Again, I was going to do a little walkthrough but I don't have time on that. Be transparent with your clients with time. If you say, we're going to bill you down to the 15 minutes, do that. If you spend a ton of time on something and you can't really bill for it, tell them how much time you spent but say, look, I can't bill you 17 hours for this thing that should have only taken three. But be upfront about it because if it keeps on happening you need to adjust their expectation, your quote, the time that somebody's spending, whatever it might be. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's, that might be the next one. But both. I lay out a proposal and I say, this project's going to be $49.50. But rather than just have that fee, I say, we're going to spend 12 hours on this. We're going to spend four hours on this and all of that is at $95 an hour. And all of that totaled up equals this. And then they can say, I don't really want that social media four hours, pull that out of there. And they can then kind of whittle that down. At some point I say, no, I priced this whole thing as a bundle even though I was transparent about, you know, how much time it goes into each section. Not everybody works through tasks the same and what I mean by that is for me, I'm pretty ADD if you guys didn't realize that or if you don't know that. I hop on stuff. I work with a lot of screens, a couple computers. I'm hopping between tabs and programs. And so it's really difficult for me to track my own time because I kind of hop around so much. Just recognize that with employees or with anybody you're working with. Making money or not making money. How much is your time worth? And identify that. We had this kind of incremental stair step up. Right now we're at roughly $95 an hour for most things that we do. We have a 120 rate for some more complicated things. Once a project's built and they're asking for changes, we drop it down to $75 an hour. We do some content work at about $50 an hour. But for the most part, everything averages out to about $95. And it took eight years to get to that point. Years ago when it was really just me and one or two people, I was charging $50 an hour for everything that we did. And that was great. But then we started stacking up more bills and more projects and more skill sets and so it made it okay to do that. Hourly projects. Hourly project price were both. I just kind of answered that one. We do a combination of both. Keeping track of invoices and payments that's tied in with harvest and harvest does have a really good system of receiving payments and you can get reports at the end of the year that spit out all the numbers. The three ways that we make money. We do hosting. We do hourly work for people. And then we do installments on projects. And so the billing is set up based on that. Hosting we build quarterly. It's $15, $25 or $50 a month. Harvest lets you do reoccurring invoices that automatically send out or create them and then you can verify them. Paying the man. You got a pan. Regardless. Always more than you think. One of the things that I wanted to slip into this talk which is Soul, Proprietor, LLC, S Corp. For years I tried. I was confused by that. I asked accountants all over the place when do I change and nobody could give me a clear answer. Here's the most condensed version. Lisa correct me if I'm wrong. I had an accountant who's my current accountant. He said, when the company makes $40,000 or more you should go from Soul Proprietor to LLC. Once you personally make $40,000 you should go from LLC to S Corp. And I know that that's not a solid rule so I don't say that hey boomer told me to do this but that's the most solid answer that I've been able to find. So is it worth it? Hell yeah. It's great. I have ruined myself to ever work for anybody and I love that. I am in this till I die and I love it. But keep in mind you can't fake passions and don't try. Make it simple before you make it complicated. You'll be blamed for way more than you're responsible for. The internet never slows down and never stops changing. Thank you. Questions? Yeah. Hourly you mean? I bring people on training rate of 12 bucks for a month to two months at 12 bucks. I start everybody there. I always try to pay people a couple bucks more than they ask. I say what do you want to make? And they say 10 or 12 and I say okay I'll give you 12 or 14. I always bump it up a couple bucks because people always are going to undercut themselves because they want the job. So I do that for a month or two until I see the quality, the attention to detail, their passion behind it and from there they're either gone after the two months or I then stair step them up to about 14 or 15 almost immediately after those two months. People kind of float between 14 and 18. I don't know. Michael do you want me to say what you make? No, okay. But that ranges upwards? No. That is a much higher, that's what I was asking Michael. I'm not going to divulge that. Sure. So I mean in Asheville, so we're a living wage company. So everybody that works for the company is making more than 14.75 which is the living wage certified thing. Everybody's making more than that. Some are making more than me. So, yeah. Yeah, so let me touch on to that. And this is a recent transition that I can talk about this without saying too much that I'll regret. So we've recently made a transition where a lot of projects that would come in, I would kind of split up into this pie and I'd say graphic designer you're going to work on this and developer you're going to work on this and you folks are going to work on this and contents over here. And I would then project manage all of that stuff and make sure everything was moving around and trying to keep track of stuff. I've started to try and, and that makes it really difficult to track time to pay people what it's worth. This person spent six hours on something that should have taken two. This person spent two hours on it that should have taken six, like what's going on here. If you can isolate projects with one person and that time is solely tied to that person it gives you and them the opportunity to both make more money I found. And so that's one thing that we've started to do and the project comes in, Sarah my graphic designer is going to do the mock-ups pretty much for every site that we do. But then once the mock-up is produced and the client says yeah we like that if our website looks like that we're happy I take that mock-up I print it and then I go to one of my guys and I say how much do you want to build this entire website start to finish. And then we work on and I'm going to say this is what the proposal price is and I'm very transparent with everybody my whole staff knows every single dollar amount for every single project. And so that they know that like we're not making a lot of money on this or we have a potential to make a lot of money on this. And so I give that person the opportunity to kind of bid out to me what they're going to want to make on it. And I say okay well I'm going to give you half now and then half at the end once it's done. Or it still goes just to them and then I pay them hourly. So those are kind of the two things it's do you want to do this hourly at your rate and it's just solely tied to you or and you're going to help me with project management on this or do you want to give me this flat fee and say okay you know what the project's worth and you say I want to make X number of dollars and say well that's way too much because the house makes none and I'm not going to have to manage all this stuff and like you know that's three quarters of the project so no. So as a general rule the house needs to make half because that's the overhead you're the one sticking your neck out the house has to make half of every project at least. But at the same time you don't want to send out proposals that are too low just because you're trying to get the project. So that's one thing that is always the challenge is like how much can you push it what's pushing it too much no no so that's one thing that some other web companies in town and I'm not saying you but some other web companies in town if a project comes in and they say well 25% of this project is development and and then the developers like no 60% of that project is development but they're like well we allocated 25% of this 10,000 bucks toward development so you're getting that period. I think that's stupid. I pay my guys for all the time they spend they run way over on a task or tie way too much time up on a project I still pay them for all that time I just make them realize that you can't do that like that's not okay I'm now losing money on this project. One of the other big things that I do is I bring especially on the development level I bring Michael into every single project that is development related. I say let's figure out how many hours like I don't do the proposal and then get the project and I'm like hey here's what we just got like they're involved early early on in the creation of the proposal and I'm not a developer. I know how much time it should take with the design and analytics and hosting and migration and DNS stuff and then training and all that but the development side really I'm lacking in so I don't really know how many hours should go into this particular directory system or this event plugin or how much we're gonna have to tweak it based on the client's needs. So I try to get them in the mix early on so that I know that when we send out the proposal it's doable. So I'm not blindsided them with some arbitrary number. So yeah. Yeah I mean yes and so yeah pretty much and this is stressful times even if the work's not there they can still work that time and so there's always stuff that we can do there's always things that people can work on at times that's a little stressful you know it's like oh my god I'm gonna make payroll on a credit card I haven't done that in a long long long time which I'm glad about but I hate going to my folks that are so loyal and saying you can only work 20 hours and that happened you know five years ago around Christmas time I was like I thought I was going to be able to give all you guys big bonuses I gotta tell you you can only work 20 hours for the next couple months or 20 hours per week for the next couple months and so I just try to make it a point to never do that again. Both. Both. I've got I use flex pay for my payroll and so they're paid bi-weekly every other week it cost me 70 bucks per check processing up to five people and so some folks get direct deposit through flex pay and they just take my money out and they take the taxes and they pay what they need to other folks it's I cut them a check and at the end of the year they're responsible for that. Yeah. Right. I don't even really from the project level I don't really ever think about it that way I kind of think about it on a yearly basis like I know that I'm going to sponsor X number of events and I'm going to put like 2,000 bucks a year towards sponsoring events WordCamp is obviously one of these events and so 2,000 bucks I'm going to do towards that I spend about 2,000 bucks a year on green squishy hand grenades and I'll tell you what I have landed probably in the past couple years $150,000 of business from those hand grenades specifically people that said I was in so-and-so's office I asked about that hand grenade they threw it at me I said what is this they said oh it's the guy that does our website you should call him and then I landed a $20,000 project because of that there's little stupid green hand grenades and there's only a few left so if you don't have one you should go get one I don't really look at it percentage because I never know how much money we're going to make or not make so I would say I probably spend 5 to 10,000 bucks a year minimum on outreach and marketing material and stuff like that but that doesn't include paying my staff to work on our website and once a year once every other year we do a website overhaul and we're adding new slides and we're doing this and that that all kind of helps with marketing but when I look at how much time the company spends on our website it's like oh jeez and so it really stacks up more than you think but as far as we don't really run ads out there I do ad words I spend 70 bucks a month on Google AdWords and go after actual internet consultant and WordPress stuff and things like that and so I guess that works into the budget as well so I should probably know that number like we spend 12,052 dollars on marketing I don't know because it changes every single year so it's more every year I can say that yep yeah more yeah more and more every year so thank you