 Alright, good morning everybody. How's everybody doing? I think it's time to get this thing on the road. It's party time. So we are here today to share some business stories and some business secrets but today I'm going to start off with a true story. I'm going to start off with a story that started in 1949. Story begins with a gentleman by the name of Wag Dodge. He was a senior smoke jumper and he was leading a team of junior smoke jumpers into a forest fire in the mountains of Montana. They landed in a place called Man Gulch. The fire was on one side of the gully, in the trees, and on the other side of the gulch was a lot of dry brush. It's where the mountains met the fields. Wag had a bad feeling about it that day. And the fire was getting closer and closer to his team so he decided to move his team to the other side of the gully. And then the wind started to change and the fire started to come down the gulch directly at his team. And then it jumped the river. At this point the fire was about 3000 degrees centigrade. It's hot enough to melt rock. He saw it come at him and he yelled at his team to drop all of their equipment and literally run for their lives. All of them started running up the mountain side to get away from the fire. He looked over his shoulder. They were about 200 yards away from the fire. 30 seconds later he looked over his shoulder again and it was 50 yards away. He knew that they were not going to make it. So he stopped. He yelled at all of the rest of the men on his team to stop. All of them ignored him. They all kept running. He had no idea if his idea would work. It had never been tried before but he had a moment of intuition. He took out a box of matches. He lit a match and he lit the grass on his feet on fire. He took out his handkerchief and his canteen and he got it wet. He put it over his mouth and he laid down in the ashes at his feet and breathed what little oxygen was left. Seconds later the fire flew right over him. Didn't touch him. He was completely unscathed. He literally built a firewall around him. 13 other firefighters died that day. To this day over 70 years later they still teach that tactic to junior smoke jumpers in school. So that's what these word camps are. These are places where we come to find out why we're always getting burned and learn from other people how not to get burned as bad or as often. And so our goal for all of us is to try and become a little bit more like wag dodge. And so today I'm going to talk a little bit if we can pull this thing up about some tactics that we can all use in our businesses. There we go. Back in business. All right. To escape situations like this. Fires are going to eat you alive when you are bootstrapping be prepared to keep replacing your straps every time they get burned off. So let's talk about that word bootstrapping. It's kind of a blue collar word. I mean it kind of brings to mind leather and sweat. It doesn't really bring to mind intelligence or high level thought necessarily. And I think I think that's a big part of it. You kind of have to be crazy to bootstrap any operation. You're also starting off with not just little money. But you're starting off with a lot less intellectual capital with your business. There are no shortcuts. This is the hardest thing you'll ever do in your life. If you're bootstrapping a business you absolutely have to be crazy. And you have to be willing to work harder than anyone else at the thing that you're working on. And so you're already here. You know why you're here. And this is why we're here is to share in this in this experience in this knowledge. So let's get into some specific actionable stuff. One of the things that I get the most value out of at these word camps is sharing what the latest tools are. And this isn't just specific to WordPress. These are tools that we can all use to run our businesses. These are all tools that we should share with each other. Hey, I started using this thing. It's awesome. It's great what you use. And so I'm just going to share a couple of the tools that our agency uses. And we have spent years curating it. But also keep in mind that the size of your business, whether you're a freelancer, whether you are a small team, or whether you're a large agency, that will actually determine what tools you use. So for us, I'm going to talk a little bit about kind of startup tools and small agency tools. So accounting software, if you make less than 100,000 a year in your business, you can use something really nice and clean like fresh books. If you move up beyond 100,000 a year, I strongly recommend you look at either QuickBooks or Zero. Those are great options. QuickBooks is kind of the old man on the scene, not quite as user-friendly as Zero. But it's also been around a lot longer, and they have a lot more money behind them. So when you're choosing accounting software, it's always a good idea to go with stability. But either of these are fantastic choices. Here's one that I haven't heard a lot of people talk about. A great new tool that we've started using recently is called HubDoc. A really, really cool tool that allows you to interface with your accountant without actually having to do any work. In the past, you used to have to log into a bank account, download every statement by hand, PDF, one by one, and then share that with our accountant and then have to keep logging into all the different bank accounts that we have, whether it's a PayPal account, the actual bank account, all of those different things to get them all the statements they need. With HubDoc, you can log in, sync up all of your accounts in one go, and then give your access to your accountant. They can log in anytime they need a statement forever without ever needing to touch you or bother you again, and you've given them no credentials whatsoever to actually get access into your accounting. So a great piece of software. And it's also cheap. I think it's like 10 bucks a month or something like that. Harvest and forecast are what we use for time tracking and tracking ahead. When you're just a freelancer, you don't need to worry about tracking ahead. But I would suggest that whether you're a freelancer or you're a small agency and you're just getting started, it is really, really painful at first if you've never done it before to track your time. But it is also one of the most valuable things that you can do. Tracking your time will give you some deep insights into how you're actually spending your time on any given day and you'll be amazed. So just as an example, I started tracking my time even though most of my hours in my agency are not billable. I started tracking my time and I learned that about 30% of my day was being done on menial administrative tasks that I could easily train somebody else to do and delegate. And so I had no idea I was wasting that much time on any given day on those things. So it made a huge difference when I looked back on my time. Forecast is looking ahead. Up until recently, we weren't looking ahead, but now that we have more projects than we can count in our queue, forecasting and looking ahead where we're assigning our teams hours in advance tells us. So in the past, we just told every client, hey, we'll get started in a couple of weeks or we'll get started whenever. But the reality is if we weren't planning our hours ahead, that would actually be a guess. And guessing with client deadlines is one of the most dangerous things you can do. You need to be very accurate in telling people what your promises are. Hi, Rise. This is great for your CRM side of things if you're trying to track sales, if you're trying to track what your customers are and where they are in the funnel for your sales. So we use it a little bit, but we have a relatively small amount of clients that anyone time in our sales funnel. We don't do a lot of direct advertising, so we don't have a huge amount of people coming in at any one time, so it's pretty easy. But there are also, if you outgrow something like Hi-Rise, the next step up is something like Salesforce. You've heard of those things. But this is great for if you're just starting off and you're having a hard time keeping track of who your potential leads are and where they are in your sales funnel. So base is a competitor of Hi-Rise and a lot of people say that it's pretty awesome. I haven't used it personally, but I've heard great things about it. And Pandadoc, this is an awesome app. If you've never heard of it, I strongly recommend it. This works for small, medium, and large agencies across the board. It is for proposals really at the end of the day. It's for your proposals and your contracts. You can build out actual catalogs of your services or your products and set it up so that even if you have another person on your team, within minutes, you can train them how to build a contract to your exact specifications for your business. And you can kind of roll your own. You can build up an entire library of different offerings. And it's just an amazing piece of software and it allows for digital signatures online. When you send out a proposal, it'll even tell you, it'll send you an email when your clients open the proposal so you know the exact moment to call them up and say, hey, have you seen the proposal yet? KeyPass, this is our password management software internally. A lot of people use LastPass. We are a little bit more paranoid, so we try to keep things out of the cloud a little bit. And after LastPass got hacked last year, we felt a little bit more justified, but we keep KeyPass on our systems locally. And it's great for managing literally thousands of passwords for hundreds of clients, so highly recommended. And then the software that this presentation's on in case you're wondering, some people ask. All right. So now let's get into the hardest part of building and growing any business. And that's the people. So adding new members to your team, okay, you're growing, things are going well. How do you bring on somebody? How do you know when you can afford them? How do you know when's the right time? And how do you do it? So there's a couple of different ways to run with this. If you're bootstrapping, you don't have a lot of money, you typically can't afford the kind of talent that you want. A lot of people think that the only way to get over that barrier is to make somebody a partner in your business. And what I would suggest to you today is that you do not do that. Do not ever add a partner to your business for a couple of reasons. When you add a partner, it complicates your business greatly. And don't get me wrong, there are probably a lot of great partnerships in this room. But what I would suggest is that long term for a business to be sustainable, that there should be a single helm at the wheel. I like to say that the only type of partnership that doesn't sail, or the only type of ship that doesn't sail, is a partnership. So let's talk a little bit about how to find people. If you can't find a partner, if you can't bring somebody who's great on board and make them a partner in your business, how do you get good people on your team? And so what I would say is one way when you're bootstrapping is to start off by using a subcontractor. So let's say you find a talented subcontractor that you can't afford. You start to give them enough work that they start to get busy. If you can give them enough work that it becomes a full-time job, your next step is to say, OK, this test worked. This is a great relationship. I keep giving you more work. You keep doing a good job. So yeah, let's make this a full-time gig. And the reason that you would want to do that is a subcontractor. The one thing, there are pros and cons there, the thing about using a subcontractor is that they're going to have other clients. They're going to have other responsibilities. And so you have less control over their schedule. You have less control over your ability to use them. And so if they get really busy doing their own thing, suddenly this resource that your business is starting to become dependent on is no longer available to you. So that is why as you grow your business and you try to get more sustainable and you try to give more consistent service to your clients that you're going to need to onboard them and create an employed team. All right, so there we go. Now, at the end in the Q&A session, we actually have a pretty interesting tactic for onboarding new folks and finding them in weird dark corners on the internet. And we'll talk a little bit about those specific tactics and exactly what we do, how we find some good valuable talent, and then work on developing them into a higher level type of talent. So just ask me about it after the talk or after the thing is over. So I'll give you a couple examples. So every member of our team right now is a misfit that we found in really odd places. So our lead designer came on board in 2006. He was a caricature artist at SeaWorld. And honestly, when we hired him, he didn't really know how to use Photoshop. But he was an incredibly talented designer. So that's the part you can't teach. So now he's incredibly well known in our local area. He's one of the best brand designers in central Florida. And he builds amazing logos and brands from the ground up, does great work. But in the beginning, I didn't have enough work for him. I had enough to give him part time. And he was struggling between SeaWorld and our agency. So how do we solve that problem? I kept him busy doing other things. I had to find another way to create a stream of income out of somebody that I technically couldn't afford yet. So what we did was, hey, in your free time, why don't you do some really cool stock illustrations? And we'll throw those up on the different marketplaces online. And voila, we have another stream of income through stock illustrations. And ended up doing some dental illustrations that are now on literally thousands of dentist websites all over the world. So you have to get creative sometimes when you're trying to grow a team. We got Adam Bradford, our director of development. When he came on board, he had no commercial programming experience, none whatsoever. He had no degree, no schooling for programming. Yet we hired him on as our lead programmer. And to this day, he is an incredibly gifted talent. Not necessarily easy to work with, but he's an incredible programmer, he's an autodidact, and he can learn any language within a matter of a week. So if we throw something new at him, he'll learn it and teach the rest of the team literally just by throwing a rock in his room. He's good to go. Jeff, this guy is awesome. Nobody else would hire him. He didn't have a green card. He had just came to the states from the Netherlands. Now, a couple years later on the team, he's on the accessibility team for WordPress. And he has learned JavaScript deeply. One of the best team members you could ever ask for. It does amazing things with WordPress. And Sidique, so this guy is an MBA from the University of Central Florida. But he was in a completely different field. He had no digital marketing experience when he came to our team, none. No one else would hire him to do it. But he is the fastest learner I have ever met in my entire life. And within a matter of months, he became one of the best digital marketers that I'd run into. And over the last couple years, he's become one of the best digital marketing strategists that you'll ever find. All of these people, when they first joined our team, they were unhireable, technically. And so we got them at a great value. And this is the part that I would say, you can find people at a great value in weird places, but do be very cognizant of how you lift them up, of how you train them. And once they get to the point where they're helping you grow your business, make sure that you change their compensation to match that. So the last thing, we're running a little bit close on time. So this one, I think, is probably very important to a lot of people in the room. A lot of people who are running small businesses in the WordPress, just getting started, whether you're a freelancer, or you're trying to start a small agency, or you're trying to sell products for the first time, this question comes up a lot. And it is a very sticky question. How do you know when to raise your rates? How do you know what to charge? And this is a good question that we all struggle with, honestly, trying to decide what you should charge is a lot like reading braille off of tree bark. There's a little bit of magic to it, not a lot of science in some cases. So what I would say is this. The way that you figure out what you need to charge, or at least the way to determine what your value is, is to ask what your peers are charging. That's a good place to start. The amount of experience you have, the quality of work you provide, the size of your business, those things are all kind of starting places. Find other people who are in the same space as you doing similar things as you, and make absolutely certain that you are regularly kicking the tires on those businesses. Find out what everyone else is charging in your industry so that you're not tone deaf to your clients when you're giving prices. So when you raise them, it's when you're too busy. If you're a freelancer and you're working 50, 60 hours a week, then you need to raise your rates. It's that simple. It's that easy. It's not complicated. That's not rocket science. And then I'm going to give one other tip, kind of a tactic. This is very specific. I think one of the most important parts of talks, not just to give inspiration or general advice, but to give some specifics. And this is a specific method that works like wonders. So as you grow your business, in the beginning, typically you're going to be charging less. And over the first couple of years, your first clients are going to end up getting charged a lot less than your later clients. And so what I recommend is that, especially if you have retainer type businesses where you're charging something on a regular basis, your goal is to make sure that your retainers cover your overhead for your business. Cover all of your costs. Cover your payroll. Cover your software. Cover everything that you're using. Once you get to that magic point where all of your overhead is covered, you're adding new clients at your highest rates. And the second you add a new client at your highest rate, you go back to your first client all the way back to the beginning, the one at the lowest rate. And you tell them, hey, we're now providing a higher level of service. We're a stronger company. We're growing. And for us to continue to support you, we're going to offer some new services. Or you're going to say that this is it. Hey, we're renegotiating the contract. This is the next level of rates. And you give them your highest rate. You're giving them an option. Hey, would you like to continue on with us? It's going to be at this new rate. And if they don't continue, that doesn't matter, because you're not making great margins on them anyway. You might, in fact, already be losing money on them. So that would be the next step is to drop them or keep them. And if they stay on, that's a win-win for both parties, because then they're getting the benefit of all of your experience that you've gained that you didn't have when you first brought them on. So basically, from there, you just repeat, repeat that process over and over again. And bringing it back full circle, starting WordPress agencies like Smoke Jumping, Your Life, will be about surviving fires and solving impossible problems. So when you go out there and you solve impossible problems, don't forget that your next step is to apply to be a speaker at your next WordCamp and tell us how you survived that forest fire. Tell us how you solved an impossible problem in a way that's never been solved before. That's what this is all about. So basically, questions. So just to give you guys a little bit of background, we run a 10% agency. And we focus on high-end custom WordPress development and digital marketing and design and branding. And literally, I am an open book. If you have any questions whatsoever about pricing, hiring, how we run our business in any way, shape, or form, I would invite that you ask that question now. So any questions? Building a team with, oh, so yeah. Basically, you just need to determine whether or not everything that you do in your business belongs to you or your team. If somebody's an employee, you should absolutely have an employee agreement. And when they're working for you, everything that they do while you're paying them while they're on the clock should belong to your company. And that is very standard with any kind of employee agreement. Right, right. So the question that he's asking is, how do you get people excited to join your team if maybe they don't have the big picture in their head the way that you have it in yours? And the answer is, start telling your story with deep passion. You're going to be very, very passionate about your business. And you are possibly going to be the most, and you should be, the most passionate person about what you're building and what you're trying to accomplish. And so when you're sitting across a table from somebody that you think would be a great talent that would be an awesome person to join your team, and you're really excited to try and get them on the team, you have to share that passion with them. And honestly, the reality is if you can't light a spark, if you don't get somebody else excited or sparked up by telling your story or your idea to them, then they're not the right fit. That person has to have the same spark that you do before you onboard them. So the question is, do our contracts expire? So specifically retainer-based business, I assume, so something that's regular recurring, whether it's monthly or annual. So when we first started our business, we did everything month-to-month, no contracts. But over time, we're starting to go more towards stricter and stricter contracts. A lot of it has to do with how confident you are in your business and what you're selling. If you have a strong process, and that's what your goal should be in your business. If you're running a service-based business, your job should be to turn that service into a product. It should be so much of a process that it feels like a product. When you buy a service, you pay for it, some of it upfront maybe, and some of it on the back end. But if you're selling a product, if I go and I buy a Mac, I'm paying 100% upfront. If your service is solid enough, you can actually sell that at 100% upfront. So that's for the flat rate stuff. And then for ongoing retainer stuff, what I do recommend is just try to make them long-term contracts as much as you can and make sure that there are penalties built in, because the reality is, if you're doing retainer-based service work, there's a lot of work that goes in on the front end that a lot of times is front-loaded, and it's hard to get that back unless that client is with you for a set period of time. And again, if you're confident in what you're selling and if what you're selling is a good product, then your clients should have no problems signing on to long-term contracts. And if that's just the way you do business, and they really like you, they will absolutely go for it. As far as renegotiating them on an annual basis, there's two different ways that we do it. If we like the client, we will just say, hey, we're just going to extend the contract. Are you okay with that? If the client is difficult to work with and our margins have suffered because of how needy they are, we will absolutely discuss negotiating higher rates or changing the retainer based on the level of effort required to solve their problems. Does that make sense? Yeah. So she asks if I've ever had a bad experience with onboarding team members. And the answer is, yeah, of course. So I've been doing this for 15 years and a couple of bad experiences. And the reality is, is I am not very good at letting people go when they should probably be let go sooner. So I onboarded a digital marketer once who, in the interview, sounded like he'd be a great fit. And three months later, we're not getting any kind of results with our clients and his writing's not very good and he's just not doing a very good job. I kept thinking that I could teach him and I kept thinking that I could develop him and make him better. And the reality was, is I couldn't. Some people are capable of leveling up and some people aren't. What do you do in that situation? It's really, really difficult. Letting somebody go is hard to do, especially if you don't like confrontation. So, but if I had done it sooner, it would have worked out a lot better both for myself and my clients. And the reality is, is handling that situation, it should be done quickly. If you see a problem, act quickly. You can't change people. You can teach them stuff, but some things just can't be taught. And yeah, how you handle that is bad. And then we've also had some extremely talented people on our team leave sooner than I was expecting and that's painful too. And both of those things are great examples of how you can learn and how you can become a leader. And all you can do is learn from those experiences and find out what you did wrong and try and correct for that and make sure that it doesn't happen again. Okay, so his question is how do you know when you're trying to develop people without experience, how do you know when it's time to nurture and when something is a deal breaker, right? So, the answer to that question is, is there are soft skills and there are hard skills. Hard skills are things like being able to code or learning how to research competition in the search engine rankings. These are things that can be taught. Soft skills are more, how does somebody interact with a client? How does somebody, how fast does somebody learn something new? So you give them a task that should take them a week to learn and it takes them two weeks to learn. So that's not, you can't teach somebody to learn faster. So that might be a deal breaker as an example. Does that make sense? So yeah, soft skills and hard skills is how you draw the line there. Yes, I'll go over here. Yeah, yeah. So Chris asked, how do you find people in the odd dark corners to where you can find value? So everybody at WordCamps, a lot of times, people here are already gaining significant value and they're already touching a lot of other agencies. So may not necessarily be a good value. Everybody in here is starting to learn from everybody else, hey, this is really what I'm worth. I'm not charging enough. I need to charge a lot more. So maybe if I'm bootstrapping a business, I'm not going to be able to afford to hire some of the people in this room. You guys are ahead of the curve. So I'm going to give a very, very specific use case that we've used to onboard quite a few people on our team that it's basically the Hail Mary pass of the internet, which is called Craigslist. So, but here's the thing. If you use Craigslist to try and onboard new people, you're going to end up in the weeds. They're literally, I mean, you'll post a job listing and you'll end up with a thousand people that are not qualified for that position. But there is a way that you can automate a process and a system to filter out the majority of that. And with very little effort, kind of find the diamonds in the rough, so to speak. So one of the keys that I've found is we've got kind of a quirky agency. We've got a specific oddball sense of humor. And so when we post our job listings, we post them with that same sense of humor in our Craigslist posting. And so, and then we give some very specific instructions that people have to follow if they do want to apply. If they don't follow the instructions, they've filtered themselves out. If they reply to our post with no humor or some sort of canned response, they've filtered themselves out. So usually within 20 minutes of work, we can filter out 90% of the people who would not be a good fit. And then the next step is, is for the 10% that are left, we have a canned response set up in Gmail that with one click, we can tell them, hey, go online, take this test, take this test, take this test, and then call this Google voice number and answer these questions. And so now, without ever having to do an interview, we get to hear what they sound like, we get to hear how well they communicate, and we get to see how well they follow more detailed instructions. And that filters down to less than 1%. So with very, very little effort, we're able to find actual diamonds in the rough, people who haven't been able to find the right fit or the right job through normal channels and bring those higher level people onto the team. And the reality is, is the people that we've onboarded in that way have turned out to be fantastic human beings and some of them are actually in the room today and they're pillars of the community and they're great leaders. And we are proud to have worked with them and are looking forward to find more like that in the future. So I think, okay, I'm out of time now. It's official. Thank you.