 Right, we're back. Thank you very much. So again, Ryan, what are the hashtags and how do people ask questions if they want to ask questions? Again, the hashtags are WCMIA, MBA, and in the Slack channel do the at ampersand, Ryan Alright, so we've picked a couple of them that have already come in and as time allows we're going to go forward. So Ryan, do you want to ask the first question? Yes, our first question is for Sherry. You discussed a little bit about not making enemies of yourself and clients. We had a question regarding do you have any tools or tips for not making enemies of your family, i.e. your spouse, and what do you do when your spouse or your family aren't necessarily supportive of your endeavors and may have negative feelings toward what you're trying to accomplish? Would you like a microphone, Sherry? I suspect I'm probably not the only person on this panel who has feedback about this. So some of my background that maybe I didn't say is I've been married to Rob Walling for 18 years and I was very young. So we've gone through this entrepreneurial journey together and there are many, many things that make the difference. But I think one of the things that's been super important in our family, which is not going to be at all surprising, but it's really open communication about what's going on. So the difference between sitting at dinner with someone and they're on their phone and distracted and the frustration that that causes when you don't know why. But if there's a simple explanation of like a server's down, I'm checking in with somebody, like there's a situation happening, that's why I'm doing this and it will be over at a certain time. So the explanation of the stress or the distraction is a big game changer in terms of what it feels like to be in partnership or the significant other of someone who's also growing a business. And sometimes a business can feel like a second significant other, like it's the other woman. So I have complicated feelings about drip as an email marketing company. But you kind of like develop this sort of way of talking about that and joking about that and explaining it and putting it out into the water so that it doesn't breed frustration and resentment, which of course is the enemy of any healthy relationship. Anybody else in the panel want to mention something? What you just mentioned about the explanation for why your attention is not focused is something I've learned the hard way, actually through counseling, marriage counseling, because entrepreneurship's hard. So every once in a while we go to the marriage counselor to get a little tune up and that's what she said. She's like, Josh, you can't just do, you have to explain why you do and then things will be a lot easier. So I'm just reiterating that point. I'm married a psychologist and that's all the problem for me. That's good. All right. Our next question comes from Twitter and it's wondering what the panel feels is the breakpoint. When is it time to let a client go? And when do you push through and how do you push through that negativity? So it can be hard to get to a point where you want to just say we're going to walk away. But the biggest decision maker for me is if a client is flat out rude, disrespectful, just completely unprofessional, swearing at people, whatever, we're probably done. You want to protect your people. And if they're being complete jerks and words we're not going to say on the live stream to that, then we're just going to walk away. I would agree with that. I think we probably have a zero tolerance policy for abusive behavior and there's a really big difference between an angry person that's frustrated that you could probably win over with great service and attention to detail and someone who's being just flat out abusive. When you talked about the Amazon review I was cracking up because one of my most traumatic moments was someone left a review on color forms and it literally said, Chrissy Charinas is absolutely useless. First and last name, absolutely useless. And I was like, not useless. You used to plug it at some point. And there's a big difference between someone's angry and you can make a difference here and you can turn this person into a huge advocate and they're just calling your names and identifying that is important. Actually follow up question based on that because if you could give her the mic. In Sharon's presentation we said, I love my customers and they love me. This falls into sort of that category. How do you deal with that sort of, oh my gosh, that moment of what she just described? Breaking up is hard to do. Awesome. Yeah, I do think, you know, stepping back, that's where it's really important to have other relationships in your life. Personal relationships, colleague relationships, relationships with customers that feel like they're healthy and there's a healthy feedback loop so that you can tell the difference between a good relationship and a bad relationship. I think when we're in the weeds and we're like, I just have to get the things on my to-do list done, it becomes difficult to do that bigger picture reflection to decide. Is this, can I really provide a great service to this person and is this the right relationship for me to be in professionally and to be brave enough to say this isn't a fit, it's not a good relationship, it's not working well and it's not in the best interest of anybody's time to continue on forever. Okay, thank you. For the next question I'm going to ask Sayed, because I've actually heard some great stuff from him at an event we did together. What are some of the routines you have implemented in your person life that have also helped you on your entrepreneurial journey? I'm constantly trying to tweak and iterate. One of the most helpful things was waking up early in the morning and I did that. But now it's challenging now that I'm a father with a 16-month-old and trying to balance that. I'm going to sleep at 1.30, woke up at 5.45, I'm kind of tired. But setting boundaries as the team is growing and clear definitions of roles, what are you okay with doing? What are you not okay with doing? Sometimes things have to be done, whether it's in your business, whether it's in a client relationship and you have to make those ends meet. But understanding what are the processes that you can put to make sure that you are at the happiest while, things are still going. By the way, thank you for joining us last second like that, putting you on the spot. I'd like a quick answer out of everybody if I could. Josh, what are some of the things in your routine that's helped you? What has helped me? I'm actually terrible with routines. That's a good thing. That is actually Sally's strong suit where I am much more just lacks of days of cool. But I have learned to embrace some routines and they've been quite helpful. Always use the calendar for scheduling team meetings. Nice. Time box them and we have 30 minutes here at 31 minutes. We're done. We have other stuff we've got to do. So sticking to the not letting meetings run long and using the calendar to manage it. Because if you count the salaries of everybody in that meeting, it's a waste. So not only did we have a question, which we'll get to on the podcast about family life and how to deal with that. But we also have a lot of questions around this and I struggle with sort of the ADHD moment of what do you do? Time boxing really helps. I agree with you. Sherry, what do you think about the types of routines that have helped you as an entrepreneur or can help in today's? I think there are two that I think are really important. One is taking a vacation. Really, no matter how cash-strapped you are or how early you are in your process, take a week really at minimum 10 days off, let your body reset. Let your brain think about different things, have different kinds of experiences. So vacations are really important and it's really easy to rationalize not taking them. The other thing that we have done and that thing we talked about a lot in Zen Founder is the practice of taking a retreat, which is not a vacation. It's like a deep dive into your business. It's the time to kind of ask big picture questions to think about goals and directions for your business over the course of time. But again, it's out of the day to day. It's not a to-do list. You don't answer email while you're on a retreat. It's a really intense deep dive in and I think that really helps. You feel really present and also newly motivated and energized to keep moving forward. Thank you. Kristi? Unlike Josh, both Josh on this panel and Josh in my life that I work with, I'm the queen of routine. I think the most important thing with that is know yourself. Like if you're not someone that gets benefit from a routine, you're not going to get benefit out of making yourself get into routine. I don't think. I think there's probably a sweet spot there. But for me, I love routine. I think that it helps me minimize the number of decisions that I have to make in a day. I think that it sets me up for success in a day of running around all day. I dig on morning routines. I actually am the person, that person that gets up every morning and then makes a cup of green tea, brushes her teeth, does yoga, does 10 minutes of meditation, drinks the green tea, gets rest, goes at the door every single day. That really helps and I find that really beneficial. I also got into minimalist fashion to minimize the number of decisions I have to make about what to wear each day. The Mark Zuckerberg hoodie thing. But for women, it's a whole thing. You actually design your closet around having every single piece match. I find these things comforting, but I think that it's a know yourself thing. I think that I know so many people in my life that conventional wisdom would say, well, wouldn't this all be solved by routine? But I could see them getting even more stressed out by being told, well, but now you need to establish a routine and so finding something else is probably useful. Okay, thank you. So for those of you who don't know, at Crowdfavorite the way we grew is we treated every single department as a business unit. So Pat is brought to thinking I have to think as an entrepreneur and I manage my team and they have their own budget and their own revenue goals. And so he's really running his own little mini company. So when we ask him about how he's had to do routine, he's one of the people who's gone from freelancer to managing a team of tens of developers on a daily basis. So what kind of routine has helped you move from being sort of that freelance state of mind to working with a small agency and then working with a large team? Living in Google Calendar is the most fundamental thing I've done. If it's not in the calendar, what did I say? If you don't write it down, it doesn't exist. If it's not in the calendar, it doesn't happen. So I need an autoresponder that goes right back into Slack that somebody's like, hey, can I do this? And it's like five questions. And I'm like, I'm in two meetings right now. Go away. So the calendar is useful because it takes the fashion thing. It takes the decision making out of your head. You put it down. Once that's gone, it's out of my head. It's not occupying space that I have to use to think about other things and pre-fill it out as much as you can. Because then you're planning your week, you're planning your month, and that certainty is so comforting and lessens the mental chaos. The second thing is something I've started having our team do, and it's called show your work. If I come to Karim with something and I don't already have a couple of ideas and a couple of options, and this is what we went through, kind of like what Josh was saying on the turn the ship around, bringing him some, this is what I know. Here's some assumptions. We could think about this. What do you think? He's going to look at me like you're completely wasting my time. And he's right. You don't just go, hey, this isn't working. It's like, okay, great. What did you try? What did you do? What caused it? You know, what was going on? So I'm pushing that down to my team as much as I can because it has been what works at my level. And so it just encourages everybody to be those self-starters, which makes the routine easier. So for this question, we're going to ask for volunteers, whoever wants to positive an answer. How to accept or deal with my first, a new client who tells you upfront my first freelance or messed up the project, use half my budget so I can't afford your quote. How do you transition them to get the value that you have to offer? You just walk away. See, that's what you do when you just start. If you're, as you go, you realize if you don't offer it, somebody else is offering that. And you do a revenue share deal with them. And then you take 10% of every lead that you send that way. Syed is a master class right here. I love this. All right. All right. Doing the random thing. Karim, while you do that real quick, can I ask your name, Miss? Kayla? Kayla is a great listener. Like, as speakers, it's really nervous to be up here, but she's an active listener. And I just want to say thank you because you, it was comforting to look over there and just see a nodding head in a... And then you take some notes. Just thank you. It's great. You could be a therapist, too. All right. Here's one for Sherry Walling. What advice do you have for dealing with emotional gaslighting by clients? Without firing them. So gaslighting when they're trying to get you upset, I would imagine. Or convince you that you're the problem. Right. This is a business problem. Well, Sherry, choose on that for a second. So we talk about, when we talk about setting client expectations, a lot of your communication is going to be verbal. If you're doing it right, even remotely, video guys. I can't stress video enough. But after you have that conversation, send an email with a couple of bullet points. This is what we discussed. That's what's going to stop that. Because the minute they gaslight you, they're going to actually... You can say, I understand how you're feeling. I understand what you're going through. Feeling. But I think my notes reflect something else. Let's talk about that. That's the business answer to do that. And if they're going to be at all reasonable, they're going to sort of come back to the table and re-engage you. If not, what Josh said about the last answer. Yeah, I think that's where your capacity for self-reflection is, again, another superpower as an entrepreneur. Because if your default is to be pretty congenial, pretty like okay with most people, but suddenly you, with this particular kind of client, begin to feel irritated and frustrated. And you begin to feel things that aren't necessarily your default way of interacting with clients. That's your first hint that there's some kind of emotional process that's happening where they're... I'm going to use the language of my field. They're projecting something onto you and it's sticking to you. And so you're acting out of that. And I think it's really actually, I think very important to be able to recognize when you're stuck in an emotional process that you don't own and you don't want to live in. And that, I think, probably precedes being able to make a good business decision is being able to recognize when it's happening in the first place. And part of that is really paying attention to your emotional life and paying attention to those clients that are getting under your skin in ways that seem inexplicable. Okay, so we're passing the number of books we have here. So I think we have a limit on that. But I encourage you to keep asking questions because we will answer them on Sherry's podcast, Zen Founder, as well as do a sort of more business-oriented video with the speakers who will participate. And we'll get that information out through all the WordCamp Miami channels. But there are some very good questions here, like, for instance, we all struggle these days in today's culture with the difference between creating a business and then some people who are in business then create a personal brand, right? And people have a trouble distinguishing with that. Question here is, should freelancers using their personal brand create a separate identity for that business? If so, how would you start? So, you know, I'm going to clarify a little bit for a panel, but, you know, you're a freelancer and now you've got a volume of work that you actually want to start building a team. What's the point to make that shift? I mean, I think Syed's got a lot of experience in this because he's got a very good, high-profile personal brand and successful businesses. Yeah, I guess I never really tried to create a personal brand. I created separate brands and then those brands kind of built my brand around it. So most people, if you go on WPBeginner, you never really see my name on it unless you go to the About page. Same thing in OptinMonster, same thing on Monster Insider, WP forms. But over time, you know, the brand kind of, because we were doing good stuff, the brand came, you know, the personal brand kind of built on its own. But I have a lot of friends who have done it the other way. You know, they created their personal brand and then their freelancers started getting a lot of work and their name kind of became the thing. It all depends on what your end goal is, right? It's kind of hard to sell said bulky.com. If your end goal is to exit out, it's easier to exit out with a brand than your personal brand. For example, a real good friend of mine, Neil Patel, he has Neil Patel Digital. That's his agency that he uses to do marketing, et cetera. It's practically impossible for him to exit out of Neil Patel Digital. He can appoint a manager and step away, right? But people aren't really going to buy Neil Patel Digital. They might buy his book of business and move that over, but it's impossible to buy that personal brand. So just keep in mind of what your end goals are. For example, in December, we sold to our business unit EnviroGallery in Solokwi. And, you know, while the personal brand aspect that I had helped, you know, elevate the corporate brand, it was easy for us to sell it because it wasn't tied to me personally. And at the same time, get a fairly decent multiple. Anybody else wanted to get a stab at that? I would just say maybe we're not lawyers and a lawyer's... a law office is quicker clients in Marbury or something. So it doesn't make sense in a digital space, I think, to use a personal brand to run a business. I would say that this sounds like a question of competitive advantage to me, right? Like, if people are buying your services from your freelance practice because you've established a strong personal brand about, like, you are the person who knows a lot about this particular thing, then it might make sense to continue with that. But as a fact, that's not a sellable business, right? Because, like, they can't buy you. But if that's what the entire premise of your freelance practice is, then that's what the entire premise of your freelance practice is. That's a thing that you're going to have to identify and make a decision. If your clients for your service business are coming because you have figured out a process of taking their request and documenting it really well and then passing it on to a developer, then you're selling, like, you and your face going to stuff, saying that you're really good at something. So what I... Huh? Okay, please. Yeah, this is a good topic. Yeah, one thing I forgot to add. You know, what is the one thing that people want from a personal brand versus a corporate brand? It's you, your character. There are certain traits of your character that people are attracted to. That's what they trust. And one thing that I believe that we've done really, really well is create a character for each of our brand. And it's actually used in... It's a technique that we stole pretty much from Hollywood screenwriters, a concept of character diamonds. And essentially each one of our brand has those qualities that I feel attracts people to us, makes them see that, okay, you know, this is why they want to follow us. This is why they relate to us. And you know, this is why they keep coming back. And what this allows you to do is build a scalable organization, have other people who fit into that character diamond, and you can assess that at the time of hiring through various techniques. And so it's a good exercise. Look up, you know, character diamonds and how you can do that, because that's what people are really attracted to. You know, you can watch a Superman movie from the 60s or, you know, 90s or whatever, and you still love Superman. No matter who plays it, it's still the same Superman. And a lot of the good personal brands that have evolved in the organization have taken that concept, where the thought leader example, Ryan Dice, for example, pulled himself out, a digital marketer, have a team running it, but people still follow that concept. Okay, so this is why these panels are so valuable. You've gotten an answer from literally the beginning of the journey of being a freelancer all the way up to creating multiple brands. That's amazing, like, between all these answers. But for the folks in the room, here's something that's very, very important that I ask all freelancers. It comes down to money, personal brand versus a brand. Are you going to be marketing yourself on your particular skill? How many hours in a week can you sell? And what's your billable rate? Are you telling me that's the all the money you're ever going to make? Because if you're that good at what you're doing, that you're going to charge that much money, like licensed professionals do, then awesome. Keep that personal brand, in my opinion. But if you want to scale that service, if your service is replicable, then personally, I would think about what does it look like beyond a personal brand? Kristi, you had a follow-up? Can I talk about the middle of that path, too? Because that's something that we started experiencing, which was, you know, when you have a strong personal brand and you put out a product, your personal brand's followers are like, oh, so-and-so put out a product. But that can only go so far. And we actually asked this question. We said, well, what happens when the thing that people love about our product is when they email us, they can talk to the person who made it? Well, that will never happen alongside growth, right? Like that's going to go away, right? That cannot be your competitive advantage. It's just never going to work. You are a person. You only have 24 hours in a day, and eight of those are wasted sleeping, right? Spent, intelligently spent sleeping. Valuable time. And so we asked that question, right? And the answer to that question is, you're going to extract what the founder is so good at, and you're going to make it a nameless process that anyone can do. And that's how you go from your advantage in the market. It's like, you're really good at something, to your advantage in the market, is you have created an army of use, and you can sell the army of use. All right. Well, thank you, everybody. Thank you to our panelists. If you're in the room, and you actually had a question answered, please come down and see us. If you're online, and you did, please get in touch with Ryan Kinney or myself through Twitter. We'll get in touch with you. And we will be putting out on all the broadcast streams about Sherry's podcast for her AMA, based on this session, and on the business video that we'll do to answer those questions. Thank you again, everybody. Have a great day. Thank you for coming. We were kept Miami. And don't forget, there are no vegan meals.