 All right, you guys ready to get started? All right, so if you are a person who works with clients and you constantly find yourself putting off your own work, to do client work, you're in the right place. Does that sound really weird to anybody? All right, so my name is Nathan Ingram. I'm from Birmingham, Alabama. Well, I'm away from here. I said, okay, if I slip in a y'all every now and then, you can take a part from me, I'll do it. I'm the lead organizer for Workhand Birmingham, which is in a couple of weeks, and we have the best hashtag of all. It's WPYALL, isn't that great? It's WPYALL.com. I'm the host at I-Themes Trainings. I do two, three live webinars a week. Most of them are free. It's like when you're working all year long, we're at training.ithemes.com. I've personally been a business owner working with clients since 1995. That's when I built and sold my first website. I've been doing this forever. I've worked with all kinds of clients, big and small, great and not so great. And I'm a business coach for WordPress freelancers as well. That's one of my favorite things that I've been doing for the last four years or so. So I used to start a talk like this with a slide that says I am not an expert. And then I found that quote by the physicist Dr. Neils Bohr, who said that an expert is a person who is found out by his own experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field. So by that definition, I am absolutely an expert. What I can offer you today is all the stupid stuff I've done wrong, and then you can avoid some of the mistakes that I've made, especially when it comes to personal productivity. So if you are, come here, this is your first word camp. First word camp. Awesome, let's give you guys a hand. Awesome. Actually, guys, if you guys like to see what is your first word camp, that's awesome, yeah. The chances, especially if it's your first word camp, of coming into a place like this and wondering, am I the only one that has the problems that I face? Am I the only one who struggles with the issues that I struggle with? And maybe you've already been moving around conversations in the breakfast area over here and people are using acronyms, you may be not quite sure what they mean. And everybody sounds a lot more intelligent than you. If that's been your experience so far, let me encourage you to say that's pretty normal. We all struggle with different areas and we all have strengths and weaknesses. We all face common challenges. In four years of coaching conversations, I've found very few unique issues. So let's just do a quick poll. How many of you guys had it all together in your client work? You never struggled with problem clients. Yeah? Have you totally got the pricing then figured out? How many of you are site creation processes bulletproof? How many of you have a consistent site creation process? Most people don't. You never struggle with isolation or feeling alone. You do know it. How many of your income is stable and it doesn't feel like this? Okay, see, we're all cut from the same fabric. You are in a community of friends. That is one of the great things about work camp. So by all means, do not eat lunch alone today. Find some people around you and just simply ask what do you do for a press? And start the conversation. You are in your own tribe here. No matter if you feel alone right now, you can if you want to meet some friends and you will have so much in common and they'll blow you away. So here's what we're gonna talk about today. We're gonna spend a little bit of time talking about one of the common struggles that we all face is freelancers, which is personal productivity. How many of you work from home? Yeah, me too, and my kids are at home because we home educate our children and yikes, right? So it's a little challenging. Personal productivity is a common issue that most people struggle with when you're working with clients, especially if you're freelancing. So we're gonna spend some time talking about why it's a common struggle. We're gonna understand the problem. We're gonna develop a strategy to deal with the problem and I'm gonna offer you some suggestions for success. Does that sound okay? And in the middle of that, I'm gonna give you a tool that you can use that will hopefully amp up your personal productivity. All right? So that's what we're heading today and let's start off talking about the common struggle. The common struggle is strategy versus execution. So the first part of this talk today is gonna be putting some terminology into a struggle that I believe every freelance web developer faces. Oh, by the way, I'm gonna give you a link to all these slides to the end. Okay, so if you are scribbling furiously or typing furiously, it's okay. Just soak it in and I'll give you a link to everything. So we need to put a term to the struggle that we face because I'm of the opinion that if you give a name to your challenge, it's a lot easier to deal with it, right? If you can put a label on it and deal with it, it sort of puts it in the box a little better. So we need proficiency because we're in a technical space, right? If you're working with clients, depending on what kind of work you're doing, you need to know the HTML, you need to know the CSS, you need to know some PHP, you need to know some JavaScript or jQuery depending on what you're doing. I tell people, I'm the one up PHP for self-defense. I am not a developer, don't want to be a developer. It's that cynical that always gets me every time. It's always the wrong place. Maybe you need no typography or you need to know good principles of design or you need to know strategy on how to build a website. We all need proficiency on the execution, but we also need proficiency on the strategy side of our business, which means great internal documentation on your processes. And even if you're a one-person shop, you need a list of checklists for everything you do. It's got to get out of your head and onto paper because it's going to make you who are efficient, more effective, more profitable. It's also when you grow a lot easier to onboard somebody if you already have some checklists. You've got to figure out the strategy on that sort of stuff. The documents, the processes, the marketing, creation of new services, and then personal productivity. We need the execution. There's a lot of great talks this weekend on execution, but we also need the strategy. We need the what we do, but also the why and how we do it. Does that make sense? And those things are at a tension all the time, but both are critical. The problem is, you probably already understand the need for strategy. You're a smart person. You're here working out, you're spending the weekend doing geek stuff. I'm gonna assume that everybody here is a pretty smart person. We know we need the need for strategy to become more efficient, more effective, more profitable. The problem is, the doing of the strategy gets messy. How does your strategy look right now? If you had to draw a line that would visually represent your strategy, is it growing, doing better? Or does it look, or something like this right here? Yeah, if you're a wide-most novice, you're sort of stuck over there on the right side. You do pretty well sometimes, and then you get kind of hung up at the end, and then you go backwards a little ways, and forwards, and up and down, and then you have a problem applying and things go way backwards, and then this is a pretty common struggle. So why is it so hard to keep our strategy in focus? Why is it so difficult to do the strategy piece when we're busy with client work? Read a fantastic blog post, and you're like, that's awesome, I need to do that. Maybe it's a technical thing, maybe it's a strategy thing, or maybe you've read a book. I am a wonderful reader of books, like the first 25% I was in a nice company shelf. Anybody else do that? Like if you start a book, you're like, yeah, can I have this whole shelf of books I'm supposed to read? Or you find this amazing thing at work, you're gonna leave probably this weekend with a notebook full of ideas. How many of you were left, or were you last year, you left with like a major list of stuff to do, and how much effort did you actually get accomplished? So why is it that that happens? You got this great list of stuff that you know you need to do, but that list only seems to get longer and never seems to get shorter. Things are added, but very few things ever get marked off. So what are you gonna do with all the great ideas that you leave work here with this weekend? Great ideas that are never implemented. It's not that you wanna have great intentions about it, it's that life gets in the way, right? You get home and you've taken how many days off to be here. For me, it's a travel involved, I've been gone a few days, and during that time some customer demands came up, or some family issues got in the way, and all of a sudden it's three months later and you've done nothing, does that sound familiar? I know this because I live this, right? We are all cut from the same fabric. So I wanna put a word to this whole idea that's gonna help us to start working towards a solution, and that word is whirlwind. Whirlwind. Whirlwind is a great word because that looks like life in business, doesn't it? You've got a million emails and a million demands, a million things to do, and things you ought to do, and things you've supposed to have done already, and they're all swirling around you all at the same time, and sometimes it's hard to make heads or tails out of things, right? So let's spend a little bit of time understanding this whirlwind. The whirlwind is the energy and attention that's needed to run your business. The whirlwind is the urgent. The whirlwind are the 15 emails or clients that are waiting on you in the morning all with demands of things that have to be done by noon. The whirlwind is that customer call that happens right as you are just about to work on your own website for a change. The whirlwind is that one hour meeting with a client that stretches into three. Does all this sound familiar? So you come to your desk with the best intentions. It's gonna finally be a day where I work on my stuff for a change, and it lasts about 10 minutes because you opened your email and the whirlwind was waiting on you, and hours, and seminars, and webinars, and reading books, all full of excellent information that could really help my business, and I never implemented any of it at all. It was great stuff, but it ended up making no practical impact on my world, and it wasn't the author of the book's fault. It wasn't the presenter's fault. It's because when I got back to my desk, there were all those emails and all those phone calls and a hundred other things I had to do in that day. Or maybe I got fascinated by a new shining piece of technology that's been half a day working on something that really didn't move through art sticks in my business. I'm sure that if you would do that, that's a living. What's the problem with the whirlwind? We know that goals and strategy are important, but the whirlwind is the urgent. Franklin Company has this great statement, when urgency and importance clash, urgency wins every time, doesn't it? Strategy is important, those customer demands are urgent, and urgency wins every time. So what do we do? We say, oh, I'll get to it later, tomorrow, next week. Now here's the problem. Delaying strategy doesn't work because the whirlwind never goes away. What we never seem to realize is that I'll say I'll work on it tomorrow. I'll get to that next week. I'll do it next month when I finish this project. And what we don't realize is that tomorrow, next week, next month, the whirlwind is still gonna be waiting on us. The whirlwind never goes away. Now, before you get a bad taste in your mouth about this whole concept of the whirlwind, let me just remind you, the whirlwind is not bad. It just is what it is. The whirlwind is actually pretty good. It's your business. It's your work that you have to do. I mean, if it weren't for the whirlwind, you couldn't pay your bills most likely. I mean, you can sort of tame the whirlwind down a little bit and make more sense out of it, but the whirlwind is the stuff that makes us money, generally speaking. It isn't bad, it just is what it is. It's a fact of life if you're running a business, if you're working with clients. So, we have to accept the whirlwind and consider it as we figure out how to move our businesses forward in the middle of the whirlwind. So, now we get into how to do with that. A strategy to deal with the whirlwind. We need a plan. We need a plan to accomplish our goals while the whirlwind is swirling around us. So, if you're a freelancer, if you're a web business owner, you're a smart person, you have some level of discipline, otherwise you wouldn't be working for yourself. Your challenge is not accomplishing your goals. Your challenge is accomplishing your goals in the middle of this whirlwind that you're in. Now, here's a foundational principle. Without a plan, the whirlwind always wins. It always wins. Urgency and importance, right? I've got to have a plan or the whirlwind is gonna win. And you see this happen, right? You seem to have it. You have great intentions, but you get sidetracked. So, we've got to have some sort of plan. So, I'm gonna suggest to you a very simple plan that I think can actually help you get some traction in this issue. It's gonna start with a, it's basically three phases. There's an initial planning. There's a weekly planning and a weekly execution. Now, this is doable, I promise. I've been doing this for years and this approach has transformed my personal productivity. Transformed. I tell people, when they're first starting a freelance business, there are three important things you need to pay attention to. Number one, you wanna systematize everything you do, get it as down to as much of a process as you possibly can. Number two, you wanna build recurring revenue as quickly as possible. Number three, you've got to get a handle on personal productivity. Because there are only a few things about your business and working with clients that you can control and how you spend your time as one of them. We need a plan. So, we need to start off with some initial planning, then there's a weekly planning and a weekly execution. Let's talk about the first step here, which is this first planning meeting and I'm gonna give you a tool to make that look a bit easier. The initial planning meeting is a meeting that you have with yourself where you stop everything, you unplug, yes, that is possible, and you go somewhere that you enjoy. Coffee shop, your back deck, your favorite cafe down the street. Some stimulating environment, whether it's quiet or noisy, whatever works for you, turn off all screens because what happens when you open a screen? Ding, ding, email, text message, client, whirlwind, whirlwind, right? This is what happens. The screens are the key to the whirlwind mostly. So, we turn all that stuff off. I'm gonna schedule this as a priority. I'm gonna suggest something very radical in a conference like this and that is get a piece of paper and a pen because analog works for this sort of thing. I'm gonna give you a tool in just a minute you can download that you can print out and take a pen or a pencil. Pen, for those of you who are very self-confident, the pencil is like I'm gonna erase stuff so I need a pencil. Whatever works for you, and unplug and focus on this stuff. This needs to be on your calendar with a couple of reminders so you remember to do it because urgency and importance, urgency wins every time. So you have to schedule this and make it as urgent as any other bit of client work that you're doing because you are your most important client. True? You are the most important client. And if you're worried about, well, I can't serve my client as well if I take this kind of off to work on my business, that's a fallacy that so many folks have. If you're not around in a year because you didn't do the strategy part of your business well, who's gonna take care of your clients then? Taking care of your business is one of the most important things you can do to serve your clients well. So it's gotta be on the calendar with a reminder, two hours unplugged as a priority. Now in those two hours you're gonna do two tasks. Two hours, two tasks. Identify the issues that you need to change in your business. And plan some action items, can you do that? Two hours, two tasks. One of the main things I need to do to grow my business and plan some action items to actually accomplish those. Identifying the issues. What are the changes that I need to make and which are gonna bring the most immediate results? Remember, I'm gonna give you all these slides so don't worry about scribbling things down. Two hours, two tasks. Identify the issues. What do I need to change and what are gonna bring the most immediate results and pick the top three? Why the top three? Because I need to figure out the three most important things that are gonna make immediate impact in your business because when you're trying to establish a habit, momentum is everything. So you want small wins. Things you can do quickly that will radically make a difference in your business. Does that make sense? Identify your top three. Immediate impact builds momentum and you're gonna need that kind of momentum because you are fighting an uphill battle. You are swimming upstream. Ever seen those videos of the crazy reporters standing out in the hurricanes? What are those people thinking? And they're standing, this is you and the whirlwind and you've got to think, I'm gonna be walking directly into that wind so I need some momentum. I need some wins at the very beginning to get this thing started. Now by the way, the three things that you pick out right here are probably not going to be things that you enjoy doing because you would have done them already, right? So just keep that in mind. These are probably not gonna be fun things but they'll be big things that bring immediate impact. Now the second thing you're gonna do in that two hour planning session is plan some action items. You're gonna break those goals into three goals into action items. They're gonna take you about two to four hours to complete. So when you figure out this is a thing I need to do. I need to have, for example, a contract in my business. How many of you have great contracts? How many of you have the, yeah, yeah, yeah, how many should you have, right? Okay, so I need to improve my internal documentation. I need a better proposal template. I need, whatever it is, I need to learn what the world of Gutenberg is and I'm gonna break those things into two to four hour action items and there's a reason for that that I'll get to in a minute. Now, unless this starts to dissolve into lots of details, let me give you a tool. You can go to NathanAgrim.com slash W-C-V-O-S, that's the hashtag for today. That's also the link on my website where you can download my advanced goal worksheets. Advanced is my coaching service for freelancers and it's a tool that we use, NathanAgrim.com slash W-C-V-O-S, and let me pull those up on the screen because I'm gonna show you what that looks like. Okay, now this is the part where I get to try to control that screen while standing over here with a teeny tiny mouse and I'm not sure how this is gonna work, okay. So how many of you have heard before the term smart goals? Okay, smart goals, I think it's the best way to go plan to set your goals. Now I do it a little different because I take the smart goal and I turn it into a declaration and I'll tell you why it doesn't matter. So smart is an acronym. It stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and tied down. Those are five characteristics that make up a good goal. A good goal, for example, isn't, I need to make more money in my business next year. A good goal is I need to raise my first quarter earnings by 10%. That's a smart goal. There's a big difference there. So this is a tool that you're gonna use when you identify the three-count issues. You're gonna put them into this smart goal template. If you do this, I promise the goal will be much easier to execute. So the S in smart goal stands for specific and you're gonna ask yourself, what do I really want to accomplish? These are questions that answer the who, what, when, where and how. I'm gonna give you an example of this in just a second. Measurable means how do I know I'm making progress? Add in some things about how much and how many. Attainable, is this a goal I can actually achieve? What are the obstacles? Am I gonna overcome those? And what are my next steps? Attainable, the R stands for relevant. And this is maybe the most important point. This is where a lot of goal setting falls off and it's why is this goal important? Why am I doing this to begin with? The R in smart goals, the relevancy piece, is whirlwind repellent. Because this is gonna help you remember, this is why I'm going through the hassle of doing this to begin with. The T is time down, what is it going to be accomplished? Okay, here's an example. I need to create a social media service to create managed social properties and content for my clients. That's pretty specific, right? Do what, where, when, how? Yeah, okay, so in this example, our goal is I need to build a social media service. Because I need to do more than just build websites. I need to do some other stuff to get some recurring revenue coming into my business. Does that make sense? It's a pretty good goal, if you can do that. That's your thing, awesome. So that's specific, the A, the M, sorry, measurable. Well, how do I know I'm making progress? I'm gonna start with Facebook, I'm gonna big move to Instagram and Pinterest. The attainable, yes, the attainable, I need to understand Facebook better, develop a template for social marketing, determine the best platform for management. It's attainable and I can do these things. There's a few first actions listed. Relevant, why am I doing this to begin with? Because I need to offer more than just web creation services. And adding a social media management service is the key to building recurring revenue. By the way, all this is in the download. Time now, I'll have this service ready to go by April 30th. Now, here's the thing about this particular worksheet. It is the declaration. What you're gonna do is take the elements of the sort goal and turn it into a statement that you're gonna put on your computer, on your whiteboard, so it's staring at you all the time. And it's pretty easy to do. I will, and you combine the specific and measurable elements by this time, because or so that, the relevance. Here's how it would look. I will create a social media management service for my clients using Facebook by April 30th, because it's a key to building recurring revenue in my business. You put that in front of you, so it's staring at you, nagging at you, mocking you every day. And when the whirlwind comes up, you look at that thing and you remember, no, I've got to spend the two hours working on this and I've scheduled because I've got to build my recurring revenue, does that make sense? You put the so that right in front of you and that helps to put the whirlwind in perspective. Now, giving you another worksheet, we're not gonna spend time on this really because of time here. There's also a goal manager. And it's in this one that you actually start the flesh to go out. It's in that two hour planning meeting that you're gonna be doing these worksheets for each of the goals if you wanna follow this method. So you pull your goal in. This is a declaration from the previous worksheet. And you start jotting down some things. What is some of the stuff I need to do? I need to understand Facebook conversion. All the stuff that I need to do is go resourcing some information I need to actually accomplish this goal. Start making some notes. I use a competitor that offers it for this much in this certain setup theme. And then you start listing some action items. Two to four hour action items in a list and your secret here is you're gonna do one of these every week. One to two of these every week. All right, so you mark off some next actions. Does that make sense? This is normally a 45 minute talk, but I have to do it in 30. So I'm gonna blow past this if you wanna talk on the outside after. Okay, so that's the tool. And you can download that, NathanIngram.com, W-C-V-O-S. So that's your initial planning. Two hours, two tasks. Two hours, two tasks. I've got my goals laid out. I've got some action items laid out. Now we're gonna do a weekly planning session. This is where most people fall off the wagon. They get excited, they do the initial thing. They got all this stuff to do, but they don't take time each week to plan the time to execute. They just think they can go straight to executing. It's a mistake. Don't avoid this. Take a half hour before the week starts and plan your week. Yes, it is possible to plan your week even if you're a freelance web developer who is constantly barraged by client requests. It is possible to plan your week. So before the week starts, for me, it's always Friday afternoon. Friday afternoon is a CEO time for me. That's when I spend the time working on my business and I'm planning the next week. If I can't get the planning piece done, I do it Sunday night. When everything's quiet in the house, kids are going to bed. I do the planning of the week then. Or some people I'm coaching do it early Monday morning. But the point is, before you hit the chair Monday morning in your office, you got the week planned. Because without the plan, the growing is always going to win. It's always going to win. I promise you. You're going to try to do this without the plan and the growing is going to win. And you'll remember, that guy in Boston said, the work was going to win if I don't have a plan. Because it does, it just does. So take that 30 minutes, plan time to execute at least one action and then pull everything together to make it so that when views sit down to accomplish that, you've got everything you need to do it. Here's how my weekly planning typically looks. I divide each day into three blocks. My family usually gets one of those. Family's a big priority for me. My family usually gets one of these. So there's morning, afternoon, evening. And the thing about us freelancers, we're pretty flexible, right? We can kind of do stuff as we want to do it. And so weekly planning looks something like this. Yes, I plan time for the whirlwind. Mondays are all about the whirlwind. Because for whatever reason, the wind blows stronger during the weekends, right? And you can end there's like 87 emails and you're in box on Monday morning. So Monday's all about the whirlwind and this is just a four example. And this week, my family, it's the most nice generally. Tuesday, I'm gonna spend some time in the afternoon working on a project that I don't need to get finished. So that's project time. During project time, I don't look at email. I don't answer my phone. I am turned off. So, whirlwind morning, project in the afternoon, family gets to the evening. Same thing for Wednesday. Oh, Thursday morning, my kid's got some stuff that maybe she wants me to be part of. So I'm gonna go to whatever this trip is that her class is doing on Thursday morning. Well, that means I'm gonna be working that night, probably. My family always gets one of the blocks. Now, sometimes if I'm on a big project, I'm working morning, afternoon, evening for a few days in a row to knock it out. You know how that goes, right? This approach lets you say, wait a minute, I owe my family three blocks. So I'm gonna pay that back either by taking a couple afternoons off or a whole day, whatever it is. It's sort of, life is really good about reminding me how much debt I have in the blocks here, right? And so Friday, afternoons strategy time, whirlwind in the morning, family in the evening. That makes sense? I mean, this is very simple. It's not simple, it's not gonna work. The personal productivity. It's gotta be simple. The whirlwind can be contained. Good productivity habits and being deliberate about your time, scheduling calls and emails. Don't ever be, well, that's an absolute statement. I would encourage you to rarely be available on demand by either email or phone because your client will start to monopolize your time. Schedule those calls. Don't respond to emails right away. I mean, unless the site is down, which is very rare, during the weekly execution, that's what you saw on Friday, the red block, the strategy block. Two to four hours, I'm gonna schedule that time and I'm gonna execute one or two of those two to four-hour action items that we talked about. I got four hours on Friday afternoon. I'm gonna do either two two-hour things or one four-hour thing that afternoon. And I don't want anything to erupt it. I don't schedule client meetings on the two-hour Friday afternoons. I don't want it to happen. That's my time. It's my CEO time. It's strategy time for my business. How many times have you ever put off your own work because the client had it and you get demand? We do it, right? But you are your most important client. So don't over schedule that time. Whatever time of the week that you block off is your strategy time, that's yours, and don't violate it. Again, the server's down, okay, right, but that's a greater, right? Usually it's because, I mean, am I right here? It's a lot easier to do work for a client than it is to do our own strategy work. Right? So having it on the calendar schedule helps you get it. Now, one more thing. What do you do when you run out of action items? You do another immediate, another initial planning phase. So after you've picked and accomplished those top three goals, that's probably gonna take you about 12 weeks to do. For the next quarter, you come back in and do it again. You pick three more, you plan it out. So you get in the cycle. There's a great book called The 12-Week Year, if you can actually finish that one. If you've never read it, I would encourage you to get it. It's all about planning your year in quarterly chunks. It's wonderful. Now, we're almost out of time here. I've got two final suggestions to leave you with. You will always, always, always have more goals than you have time, so prioritize well. Like I said earlier, focus on immediate impact to build momentum. There's a psychology to this. Small wins keep you going. And moving forward in the whirlwind takes a lot of small wins and momentum to begin with. So immediate impact. There's a great study that Franklin Cuffy did under this whole concept of the law of diminishing returns. How many of you have heard that phrase before? Law of diminishing returns. Here's what they found in a corporate environment. If a team had two to three clearly defined goals, they would accomplish two to three goals with excellence. If a team had four to 10, they would accomplish one to two. If they had 11 to 20 goals, they'd accomplish zero. Think about it. Looks like you're eating a pizza. If you're trying to eat two to three pizzas, you might be able to do that in your family today. If you've got more pizzas, you're gonna eat less and less. There's only so many bites a day you can take, right? It's the same sort of thing. So most of us go into this thing with gangbusters saying I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna get productive, it's all gonna work, and we have so many goals and then all of a sudden we get nothing done. One or two, three goals at the most at a time and you'll accomplish that many. That means that sometimes good ideas, I might even say great ideas, have to be put on a shelf because they do not bring the most immediate impact. If that's okay, get to live this year. The second pro tip I would give you is taming the whirlwind takes time. You gotta give yourself a break. It's a break quote that is attributed to G.K. Chesterton, I'm not sure if it's true or if he actually said it. He's one of those people that people attribute every quote to. I don't know, but anything worth doing is worth doing badly at first and I love that. You're gonna mess up on this and it's okay. The whirlwind is a strong and powerful force that you've been contending with the wrong way for a long time and it's gonna take you some time to develop some new habits, that's okay. It's worth doing, so it's worth doing badly at first. So just stick with it because the whirlwind never, ever, ever goes away. When urgency and importance clash, urgency wins every time, so you gotta keep and execute that strategy to accomplish your goals in the middle of the whirlwind. Now wrapping up, in six months from now, if you did this and you went through two quarterly cycles, if you did this for six months, how much would your business change? How much would change, really, think about it. What could you get done? How much would you grow? How many problems would you solve? How much better would your business systems be? And then as a result of that, how much better would your life be? If you have less stress, because your business was going better, your income was stabilizing, you started keeping problem clients in check, how much better would your life be? Probably better. My name is Nathan Ingram. You can find me at training.ikings.com and there is the link for today. We have five minutes for questions and we have questions right there. I think there's a very scary microphone that they want you to say. Talk pretty much. The number of questions is reminding me of this analogy I use, which is moving footballs down the field. If you're trying to move one football down the field, you give one down the field. If you're trying to manage 10 footballs, you don't get anything down the field. Exactly. Yeah, let's go. How many hours of... Yeah, they want to mix with the recording, sorry. The question for the recording is, how many hours do I usually work in a week? It depends on the week, honestly. I typically work 40 to 50 hours a week. That's pretty long. What would you suggest for people that are working full-time jobs and also trying to do freelance work or just work on the side? As I find that to be my biggest obstacle. And at what point should I consider transitioning from my full-time job that's not work or just related to being a full-time freelance worker? Oh, it's such a great question. How many other people struggle with that same issue right now? Look around the room, look around. This is a common question, it's a common struggle. So look at it, do you guys even have lunch together? Seriously. Okay, so the question is, how do you balance a full-time job and freelancing? It's tough, man. You have a very understanding family. If you have a family, you have a very understanding family that's on board with that mission of transition. How do you do it? Build recurring revenue as quickly as possible. That's a broken record for me. Because what will happen, the more recurring revenue you have, that revenue comes in every month no matter what. WordPress maintenance contracts are the best, fastest way to do that. Every single project you want, you want to have website management attached to that. That's 50, 75, 100, 150, whatever you can charge a month, that's what it ought to be. And what will start to happen is you'll be able to start replacing a portion of your paycheck with that recurring revenue. For a few years now, I've paid myself exclusively about the recurring revenue. Everything else is great. So that's the goal. Build recurring revenue as quickly as possible. Build a good, strong client base with lots of referrals coming in. That's what your emphasis needs to be. That's a very short answer to a very complicated question about what you had to talk more about after. Yes. Hey there, I'm Laura Rebelle, a musician and Nashville and also a speaker for tomorrow. I just wanted to take a second to do a shameless plug for my talk tomorrow because we're going to go over exactly a lot of that and also some of the checklist of processes you talked about and then share exact processes and things to stay really efficient with the client work. So some of these questions we're getting into, we're going to talk about there as well tomorrow. Awesome. What time is that tomorrow? I'm not sure what time is. But it's how running a WordPress design agency allowed me to follow my dreams of becoming a musician? Two 10, two 10 tomorrow. Definitely. So you guys check that one out. Other questions? I think we have a minute or two left. One minute exactly. Okay, we're done. Thank you guys. I'll be outside tomorrow. If you guys want to listen to me.