 Ben Furphy, he was a freelancer, and now he's not freelancer anymore, he works for an agency and he's going to talk about what he would do differently, as I said, if we freelanced again. So yeah, big applause to Ben Furphy. Good morning, can everyone hear me? Yeah, okay, great. Okay, so first things first, do a little bit of a small audience survey. Put your hands up if you freelance right now. Okay, so pretty much quite a bit of the room. Of those people who just put their hands up, how many of you actually have never worked for an agency before you've just gone straight from doing maybe a different career into freelancing? I said quite a few. Okay, one more. How many of you currently work for an agency and considering going freelance? Okay, so you're all, there's one. Okay, so sorry to put you out there. Okay, so that's quite a good spread. Okay, so it's the title of this talk, so Sutley suggests. This is going to be a no-holes-barred look at how I royally screwed up my freelance business. So I'm Ben. I am now a senior front-end developer at a company called EMS Internet. We are probably one of the largest agencies you've never heard of, partly because we are primarily a Drupal agency. Yeah, boo. We have about 80 people that work for us. We build websites and apps. We work with people like Reebok, the NHS, Stagecoach, GBK, to name just a few. Our SEO team was recently named one of the top ones in the world by research agency Clutch, so it's quite a good company to work for. Definitely learnt an awful lot from them. So like those people who held their hands up after I asked whether it was the first career or for freelancing was the first time they'd ever worked in the web industry. I was not always a developer. Before I went into development, I was actually a journalist and I did that for about a decade. I worked on all kinds of different magazines, you know, IT, information security, video games, mobile apps, business music, but you might wonder why I'm telling you this. It's important for you to understand that I'm not some level 100 rock star ninja wizard developer with math skills. I'm just like you. I might start messing around with COVID when I was 16, but it was only really in the last four years that I really stepped up to the plate. So what would I do differently? Or, as I like to put it, things I screwed up last time. Now, start off with a quote from Steve McRaney. I really like this quote. It's the perfect analogy for how I felt at the time. I possibly think, you know, a lot of people forget to remember and that's that the master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. If you ever feel like you are doing something wrong because you've failed, don't. Everyone learns by making mistakes. If you feel shattered, like you can't go on, like the hill is too steep to climb, or if this is a gaming reference, if you've ever played Eve online, the learning curve on that is absolutely horrific. Freelancing can sometimes feel like that. That is a really good, these are your typical careers and then freelancing. So going back to the quote, it hits on the nail on the head as far as what this talk is about. This talk is pretty much six points about what I've learned either hard way or from watching other people fail. Hopefully, they'll help you too. So first one is outsource. Outsource, outsource. You cannot be an expert in everything. I thought I was at first. I made the mistake of trying to do design, development. I can do both, but to be honest, I'm crippled by imposter syndrome when it comes to design. When it comes to development, back when I first started, I really didn't know anywhere near as much as I thought I did. I also dabbled with SEO. Yeah, it was a jailer. That was a big part of my job. So I could do that, but I didn't really get on with it. And then there was PPC. Yeah, didn't get on with that at all. My biggest mistake probably while I was freelancing was I didn't outsource. Like I was saying, when I first started, I thought I knew how to pull a website together. I'll go out and get a plug-in. I'll get that theme. There's actually a technical term for it. It's the Dunning-Kerrugger effect. So they were researchers and they hypothesized that for any given skill, and this applies across industries, incompetent. I don't like the word incompetent. This is straight from Wikipedia. So it's one of those. But incompetent people will fail to recognize the lack of their own skill. I certainly made that mistake. Fail to recognize the extent of their inadequacy. Again, I made that mistake. Their third point, fail to recognize genuine skill in others. I know Gary Jones. I knew I didn't know anywhere near as much as what Gary knows. So thankfully, I wasn't quite on that one. I just thought that there was always, like I said, I always thought it was going to be a plug-in or a theme that I could use. The secret is there really isn't. So what would end up happening is that I'd run a project for £700 and I think, I need that £700 to pay my bills. I need to pay off various things. I need to do whatever. I wouldn't outsource. And those projects would cripple me because they take months due to imposter syndrome on the design side and my lack of coding knowledge when I actually came to build the site. And the issue was that because I didn't actually think to myself, if I outsource this, instead of taking two months to build this site, it could actually be done in two weeks and then I can get another project. And then I can get another project. It never really occurred to me that you can actually make more money by outsourcing. So, within the WordPress space, yes, WordPress definitely does democratise publishing. It doesn't democratise development, though, unfortunately. The reality is that while there's a wealth of documentation, tutorials and experts out there, and they are more than happy to help, they are not there to help you do your job. They're not there to help you getting out of overselling your services. We've all seen people who do that. If you're a member of Advanced WordPress on Facebook or you go on Stack Overflow, you will always see people who've oversold what they can do and then suddenly realise it, panic and go on to one of those forums and expect to get an answer to their problem. The crucial thing is knowing your limits. This is where outsourcing really comes into its own. If you are not a developer, find a developer, outsource to them. If you're not a designer, find a designer and outsource to them. It will make your life so much easier. One of the biggest pieces of stress that you will get in your freelance career is hitting a roadblock where you feel like you can't do something. Now, we've all hit of implementers. Do we know what consider an implementer is? So, the term implementer is use derogatory a lot of time by some people in the community and it really shouldn't be. They're people who are the people who go out and get plugins, get themes, put them together. Now, I used to work in IT between the time I left journalism, went into coding. I think there's a lot that the web industry could learn from the IT industry, namely that their clients have similar problems to us. They're technical in nature. Usually, it's a technology-based solution. However, very few of the systems that they actually provide within that solution are actually built or developed by themselves, hence the name system integrators. They might get a server from HP, storage from EMC, networking from Cisco. They don't build these things themselves, but that doesn't mean that they don't know exactly how they work. They know how they interact. They know what the cost performance issues are. They know what potential bottlenecks are. The point is that as if you're an implementer or if you are an integrator, partner with somebody who does know what those are, there's a term within that sector called pre-sales. These are the guys who are the experts in how that stuff works. The crucial thing is that they know when to delegate and outsource to other people. Point two, referrals are the lifeblood of business. How many people here get the vast majority of their business through referrals? About half of the room. How many of you spend more than 30% of your time trying to sell to people who haven't been referred to you? Okay. I made the mistake of trying to chase leads down, trying to network with businesses. It's not a good use of time. One of the great things about referred clients is that chances are they already want to work with you. They've spoken to somebody, they have a problem, they've asked, do you know a web developer that will help me with this? Do you know somebody who can help me with my site? They already want to work with you. They just need the confidence that you understand what their particular needs and issues are. The real benefit to this is not having to go out and sell means that you can spend more time on billable projects. There is a caveat to this. Who's here at BNI? Okay. If there is a BNI group near you that does not have a web developer, spend that 700 pounds tomorrow. Seriously, it is like a license to print money. They are always referring businesses on. Now, remember what I was saying about the 700 pounds I could get for one project? There's another real benefit to outsourcing. And that's if you're working with a developer, they might come if you're a designer, for example, they might come to you and say, I've won this client, I need somebody to build a website for you. It's another way of really pushing through those referrals. Referrals have very, very much come down to the strength of your network. The third, don't spend money on tools you don't need. I made the massive mistake of massively overspending on tools when I was a freelancer. Every little new shiny tool that came out, I'd invest in because it's one of these things. It's one of the great pleasures of running your own business. You get to decide what you spend the money on. I made some great purchases. My iPad with 4G, for example, it actually had a real benefit in the sense of being able to go to a client, not have to ask them for Wi-Fi, being able to demonstrate them, demonstrate to them what a responsive website is. Great purchase. There was some so-so purchases. Things I didn't really need, but I bought into the bull crap about. They made my life easier. Proposal software is a common one, CRMs to some extent. The problem is those were issues with my workflow. They weren't issues with the tools per se. It's one of those, you've really got to balance those type of things. Then there were some terrible purchases. Who's head of infusionsoft? For a short period of time, I was convinced that there was a market to basically push as somebody who specialized in integrating infusionsoft into websites. For a long time, I was top of Google for that particular search term. I got no business from it. The people who I tried to push it into, the problem is infusionsoft is a massive beast of software, and it was not my skill set. Be very careful when you are approached by people and ask them to join on as a partner. Stick to what you know. It's pretty much the biggest lesson that I learned from that. Besides spending money on tools that you don't need, don't switch tools constantly. Who's changed their text editor in the last six months? Okay. So a couple of people. Okay. Technically, I am guilty of that, but that was for a very good reason. I was using sublime. We used Git massively in the agency that I work in, and we realized that switching to Atom would be a lot easier because of its integration with Git. That said, I'm not saying go and switch to Atom. It's about having the right tools and using the right things for you. There are a wealth of tools out there that are open source like WordPress. Leverage them. Atom is an example. You've got brackets. There's quite a few within the text editor space. Personally, I said the only things you really need, at least when you're starting out or keeping things basic is a place to keep your clients' details together is nothing that will kill your business quicker than screwing up clients and their information about when was the last time you spoke to them? When are you due to send something to them? What were the actions that were required from the last conversation? I can be kept in something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet if you really want. One more caveat as well. If you are a developer, you cannot ever stop learning. If you stop learning, you are dead in the industry. Not dead to the industry, of course, but it's a bad idea. Investing in something like Treehouse or Linda or one of the vast majority of learning software providers out there is a good investment. When it comes to tools, you have to think very carefully about is this something that is actually going to be a good use of my money or is it going to be something that I'm potentially wasting money on? I never made this mistake, but I know several people who did. Do not screw with the tax man. He will absolutely kill you. I have seen people with four and five-figure fines for screwing around with stuff. It is not. You can lose your house from making this mistake. I've seen it, like I said, and I learned very, very quickly. There are people out there who say that you can't learn from the mistakes of others. Seeing that type of stuff, you can. If you want to avoid it at all , you need to find a way to avoid the cost higher in accountant. A bad accountant will reduce the stress that you have and potentially cause some more but they should at least reduce the amount of stress. A good accountant will not only earn you the money back that you pay them, they will save you even more. Have a separate bank account. Who has a separate bank account for their freelance? Who doesn't Okay, those people have just put their hands up. How much work is it for you to do your tax returns at the end of the year? No. Yeah. I made that mistake initially. I quickly learned and switched over. If you don't, I recommend going to the bank next weekend and asking them to set up one. It doesn't matter if you're a sole trader, whether you're a business, whether you're doing it as a partnership. Separating cash flow from your own personal work will make your life a lot easier, especially if you use tools like FreeAgent. The fact that you can reconcile, just upload, don't ever link bank accounts. That's one of the biggest things. They offer these tools, but never link it because if that software is ever compromised and you lose money from your bank account, you are absolutely screwed because the banks will say you've given your details away and you are not protected under that circumstance. But what you can do is download your statements and upload it to the software. A lot of this software, FreeAgent is my personal preference, but there are other ones out there, you can reconcile from that bank statement and some of the software out there will actually recognize repeating invoices, repeating charges, and you can actually automate that process. I mean, I moved from one software tool that shall remain nameless to FreeAgent and I managed to do my entire year accounts or catch back up to where I was within 24 hours. And there was a lot of work in there, but just being able to reconcile that meant it was a lot easier. Who's that registered here? Okay, there are two reasons why you register for that. You are very, very good at your job and you earn over the 80,000 pound threshold. Or you work almost exclusively with businesses that are that registered. Do not register for that unless that is the case. Some of these fines that I was talking about were because people forget to file their VAT. It's every quarter, it can get nasty. And if you screw up, take for example Adobe. Adobe is based in Ireland, which means that you don't have to pay the VAT on the software at the time of purchase, but you do have to declare it to the tax man and it has to be paid. I know several people who've not put it through their system correctly and they've been handed a fine by the tax man because of that. For a matter of pounds a month and they end up losing four figures in fines. Same goes for being a limited company. Is anybody a limited company here? Okay, there are real benefits to doing it, but speak with an accountant first. I'm not gonna say go off and do it. I'm not gonna give you any reasons. Speak to an accountant. They will tell you whether it is worth it or not. If you're not a registered business, go and speak to an accountant. They will tell you there are actual real tax benefits to it sometimes, but again, it comes down to this thing of actually knowing what your circumstances are. Processors. Yeah, I didn't have a process. I got the money and then yeah, it was pretty much what I felt like doing that day. It was not a good idea. If there was one thing that killed my freelance, it was this, it was processes or lack of one more precisely. And I actually realized how bad my process was until I joined EMS where I work today. This is why I was asking those of you who have or who are freelancing and who've never worked for an agency, one of the best things you can do is go and work for an agency. You will learn so much. You will either learn how not to do things or in my case, you will learn exactly how to do things. Now I can't go into too much detail because I'll get pulled into the office and told off for giving away sensitive business information. But a rough outline of how we work with our templated packages, so things that are less than a thousand pounds usually. We will typically sell a site to the client and then they're immediately contacted by customer services. Customer services send them out a link to a form that they have to fill in. That form has fields depending on what they've paid for. If they've paid for a two-page website, it will have one form because they get a front page and a contact page. That's a templated package that we have. We've got three. We're working on the fourth at the moment and that's it. You get a website based on that. They provide us with the content. We have a deadline that is automatically triggered. They get a photo shop produced flat as a JPEG after two weeks from when they supply the content. That two-week deadline does not get triggered until they supply the content. There are many people who are out there who have bought their website a year and a half ago and still haven't got that two-week deadline because they still haven't provided content. Once that happens and we send the flat out, obviously it goes through the changes process. It's difficult. I wish there was a simple way of saying here's how to get a client to not go through constant revision processes. We've got clients who do it. We've got clients who are probably on the 18th or 19th revision. We've got clients who literally just go, yeah, that's fine, go ahead. Once that's done, it then goes and gets assigned to one of the junior developers who builds that site, puts it through, again, goes through the revision process. As soon as that's done, it gets put into our live list and sent live. That whole process per site can be as short as three hours. We can launch a site in three hours. Not, obviously, all together, but working on the client. We turn around about 100 websites a month around. So having that type of process really can speed your website building process up. The lesson there is, obviously, have a clear process. And don't just have a clear process. Make it clear to the customer. Make it clear to the customer what their responsibilities are. And do not be afraid to chase them. Don't be afraid to tell them as well that if they miss a deadline, they will go to the back of the queue. The amount of times that I've spoke, I personally know I'm guilty of this and I've spoken to other freelancers, that they will drop everything once a client who they've been chasing gets stuff in. It's not a good idea. It disrupts your workflow. It disrupts your process. Try to make it clear to them that missing deadlines has consequences. And bearing that in mind, missing deadlines have consequences. You might think as a former journalist, I've never missed a deadline. As a journalist, I missed every deadline. There is no such thing as a journalist who hits a deadline. And invariably that's usually because the people that you're speaking to don't get back to you. You'll give them a deadline of, oh yeah, I need it by 4 p.m. on Friday so I can go to print on Tuesday. And they'll give you it at 10 a.m. on Tuesday because the sales team have told them, oh yeah, we don't go to print until 10 on Tuesday. It's not a great thing. But anyway, do not miss deadlines. Sometimes it can't be helped. That's the point. Sometimes it can't be helped. For whatever the reason, tell the customer immediately. You will be amazed. Sometimes we don't want to do it because we're afraid the customer's gonna shout. Sometimes they'll shout. They're just shouty people. It's better to tell them. Often they'll say to you, yep, no problem, completely understand. The fact that they've been told ahead of time makes them calm. Final point, know your shop rate. Who actually has a shop rate? Or in fact, actually first of all, who knows what a shop rate is? No, okay. Right, there we go. So that answers that question. A shop rate is a base rate, which is another thing I'll get into in a second. And then a profit margin on top. You try to never go beneath your shop rate. You never go beneath your base rate. Okay. So first of all, a base rate is your costs plus your pay, plus 10%. That's your base rate. The idea there is that you always cover your costs, you always cover your pay, and you always get at least 10% profit on the project. Your shop rate is your base rate, plus 50%. So in theory, you should always be, it's Sunday morning, maths is not my strong suit. It's about 50 to 53% because it's not quite 10% plus. You'd think it was 60%, it'd be nice if it was 60%, but it doesn't quite work that way. For the sake of making this easier, I'll give you an example. Let's say you wanna pay yourself 18,000 pounds a year. Not suggesting you pay yourself 18,000 pounds a year, personally, I think everyone who can do what we do in here deserves more than that. But then you also have 6,000 pounds a year, costs on top of it, it's 24,000 pounds per annum. The smart people will have already clicked on to why I picked 24,000 because you can divide it by two, you get divided by 12, you get 2,000, which makes it a lot easier to work out. Let's say you work 35 hours a week. Really, as a freelancer, one more addition that I'll quickly add, have a start time and have an end time and stick to it. One of the biggest stressors that I had was getting up at eight o'clock, or getting into the office at eight o'clock and then not getting out of the office until 11 o'clock at night. It can literally kill you. Your health is so important. So stick to, say, 35 hours a week. If you turn that by four, that's 140 hours. Okay, I cheated, I worked out on my calculator before, I'm not doing math like that. Again, cheating. If you divide that 2,000 by 70, sorry, by 35, you'll get 14 pounds 29 an hour. Doesn't sound like an awful lot, but it's pretty much what you'll find a lot of people are on, especially like middle weight developers. So if you take that 14 pounds 29 an hour and you add 10% on, that's 15 pounds 71. So that's your base rate, your hourly base rate. And if you saw my talk last year, you know never, ever, ever sell hourly, sorry, hourly. The whole point of knowing what your hourly rates are is for you to make sure that you're not going beneath it when you put out a quote at either fixed or value-based approaches. Now, the next part is that that makes your shop rate 23 pound 50 an hour. Rule of thumb, double it immediately because unless you're very lucky, you probably only manage 50% billable time, which means that your shop rate comes out at 47 pounds 40 an hour. So you can see that is already quite quick in terms of going up quite quickly. But the point is that if you do that and you actually stick to that base rate, you know that you're covering your costs. You know that you are making a profit, which is of course the most important thing to do when you want to run a successful business that gives you buffer because how many people have actually lost money because they've been off ill? As Joe knows, I tore two ligaments in my knee two years ago that actually, I'd lost probably about 3,000 pounds of my planned revenue for that year because of it. And it was luckily because I had this base rate that I actually was able to make sure that I could live off what I'd already earned. The point is that if you keep to that base, if you keep to that shop rate, you know that you'll be safe. And that is pretty much what it comes back down to. If you go to see a client and you know that your shop rate is X and you know your base rate is Y, you can have much more confidence in going into that discussion and saying, this is how much it's gonna cost. So I'm Ben, again. Like I said, I'm a senior front-end developer and yeah, they're my contact details. Questions? Thanks, Ben. It's very sobering for someone who's going into freelancing myself. What types of resources would you recommend that you would... So you've said Treehouse and Linda, anything else that you would recommend, any training courses or anything like that that you think actually that I've been on that? I would get so much further. It's one of my pet hates about the WordPress community. Who here's a user of Magento at all? Okay, right. Those people just put their hands up. Who actually has been through the certification courses with that? Okay. How... It's good, isn't it? They're expensive, but they're good. There needs to be something like that for this community. They're not complicated. They literally just go through the basics, but it gives you the ability to say, I know this and it gives a base. Going beyond that, probably one of the things at the moment, if you are a developer interested in the REST API, Zach Gordon's recently announced or has released a JavaScript for WordPress course. I haven't done it myself, but everyone who I've spoken to who's on it absolutely loves it. Again, it's one of these. I mean, I've found Treehouse to be probably sufficient for most of the time. At the agency where I work for, we have a learning hour every week. Everyone has to take that and they have to spend it on Treehouse. They have to learn something in it. At the end of the month, they are asked to explain what they've learned that month. Partly because otherwise some people will go off and they'll watch WWE for the entire hour if they get away with it. Not me. But yeah, that's pretty much, I mean, it's one of those things. There are a lot of resources out there, but it all comes down to how much time you have and what you're looking at learning. When you talk about outsourcing, what's your method to find reliable people? Events like this. How many people are here for the first time? This is the first ever word camp that they've ever attended. So, hands up for those people who said that they did that. How many will come to another word camp next year or later this year? Okay, this is how it works. You will meet people. You will talk to people who've been to these word camps. You will meet people who have basically have a set of skills. Sometimes you do have to take a chance. It's not always possible to say that this person definitely is going to deliver, but you try to speak to all the people in the community and you try to find out whether or not they've worked with them and whether or not they're reliable and it's literally leveraging the community that you've met at places like word camp to actually find people. Because as a more of an SEO sort of agency, we don't really do much dev, but people ask us for it and I'd like to white label it much more and I'm struggling to find good people, which is why I'm here. Okay, so there you go. Freelancers in here who are developers? So what's your name? Shane. Grab Shane at the end. What's like that? Okay. Are there questions? Yes. I have a question about scope creep and as you're doing the, I'm new like two or three months into it and the bed was looked straight forward, but it turns out not to be. And then I'm swimming in over scope. How do you stop that? Tell them no. Okay. Tell them no. You will be surprised at the amount of project managers who are terrified to tell people no. I will turn around and say, is that in the contract? No, you can't have it. If you want it, it's a good idea, but let's build what we're building first and then we'll discuss it at the end of the project. You never, never, never say no to a person but always say to them, look, let's focus on this first. Let's get this out of the way and then we can come back to it. We'll provide a separate quote and then we'll move forward from there. But I mean, it's just having that confidence to know that you can do it. Is there, so this person, I am a PM by training, so I said, I'm happy to do that. That'll be an additional face in an hour. And he said, well, I guess we'll just fall out. So is there a way when people are in that, do they spam you? I was afraid he'd just start bashing me on the web even though it was completely out of scope. So I went ahead and did it as a sucker. Yeah. There are times when we will back down there are times that we've even as an agency as big as us back down. It really depends on the client and how much you want to keep that client. I would say probably the best protection are watertight contracts. If you do not have a contract, get a contract. If you don't necessarily want to pay out for a contract straight away and the Clarks contract killer. Get a lawyer to check it but you know, tweak it yourself, speak to a lawyer. I don't know how much it will cost, but you know, they will give you advice. It and he's been using that for, I don't know, I think about seven years or something now. So it is pretty watertight. But the crucial thing is just if you have a contract and within the initial proposal, you keep it quite tight and you spell out exactly what you are doing and refer to in the contract that you will only provide that within the scope of this project. You know, that's how it is. You can go much bigger than that. The IC consultancy that I used to work for literally produced massive gantt charts and statements of work that were iron tight. We'd spent hours doing this and it was quite clear. They'd come to you, they'd say, can we do this? We'd say, is it in the statement of works? No, well then you need to put a change request in and that change request cost money. Actually changing the statement of works itself cost money before you even start thinking about what the additional work is going to cost. It depends on the type of client. We typically did that with larger clients. So it was people like police, government agencies, that type of thing. So you can't always do it, but it's one of those contracts and sort of having a tight scope of works and saying, no, that's pretty much the only way you can really protect yourself against it. Thank you. I just want to add to that, I was freelancing and thanks, Ben, it was a great talk and I wish I saw this talk two years ago before I ended up in two years. But yeah, in contracts, it's really good to tell people what they're getting and also tell them what they're not getting. Yes. And then you just go, no, that's in the list of the things you weren't going to get. That really helps. Hosting, be very, very clear. If you do not do hosting, put it in your contract. You do not do hosting. You do not do anything to do with hosting. They will be expected to get their own account. You will help them set that up. But ultimately, if they have a problem, they speak to the hosting company, not you. It's a great point that you should not just put what you will do, but what you won't do. Emails. Don't. Just don't go near emails. Our customer service team, spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with email problems that have nothing to do with our email service. They're to do with Virgin, BT, Vodafone, EA. It's just not worth the time. Like I said, stick to what you're good at. If you want it out, if somebody comes to you and says that we want such and such, go, I know a great freelancer, or I know a great guy who does that, great girl who does that, let me put you in touch. Or project management for them. Make the introduction, handle it for them. It's one of these things that can kill your business very quickly. It can kill your enthusiasm for the job if you start going out into other areas that you're not an expert in. Thanks Ben for the good talk. If you were to do it again, what avenues for advertising yourself would you use? This is the horrible one. It's the chicken and the egg argument. What comes first? The job or the referral? Once you get that first job, if you do it well, chances are you'll get a referral out of it and it'll snowball. For getting that first job, if I didn't have a list of clients that I knew I could go back to and pick back up, I would probably, I'm a big advocate of not doing things for free. Approach a charity and offer to do something for them. Just say you're starting out, you need experience, or you want to build your portfolio. If you can do this, but you're looking to build your portfolio, can I do, can I rebuild your website? It's not responsive. You're gonna have problems with that type of thing. But if you do that and you do it for free, then you can build them. When you build them, tell them exactly how much you would have charged and then put 100% discount underneath it. Because the problem is if you do it for free, they'll keep coming back to you with little problems. If they know that that website would have cost them 1,500 pounds, they will know that when you come back, how much value you've given them. There was a, I can't remember who it was, there was a really interesting study somebody did where they actually looked into customers who had a website for free and people who'd paid money. And invariably the ones who'd been given stuff for free were less satisfied, caused more problems, caused more headaches, would ask for fins. People who actually paid more, and this was actually, I think, actually more on the discounting side, this thing that people who'd been given a discount were more of a pain than people who'd paid full price because there's a perception that they've got full value out of it. Other alternatives, like I said before, B&I, Skaecler of Chamber of Commerce, they're good, but it's a room full of people who are trying to sell things, not necessarily buy. And most of all, do not waste your time with Twitter hours. They are the most irritating thing on the planet. It's a Twitter hashtag full of people shouting and selling things and nobody playing. It's just not worth your time. So yeah, it's not easy to get started. I wish it was easy to get started. But yeah, sort of offering volunteering things out, pick the people that you volunteer for very carefully. Give you a hint, actually. In their ultimate wisdom, Citizens of Vice Bureau decided that they were gonna give all their charities. Your local Citizens of Vice Bureau was actually an independent charity. It's not actually part of the National CAB. In their ultimate wisdom, they gave everyone this WordPress template. They're not paying for hosting. They're not paying for it to be integrated. They were just giving it and just told, go and set it up yourself. There was a great opportunity in there to go to your local CAB and see whether they've already worked with somebody. If they haven't, offer to do it. Build them, but offer it for free, or at a full discount. Invariably, the people who run those charities, the very top chief executives, are very, very well connected with the local business community. And they can refer people to you. But be very clear that the reason why you're giving them, that at that price is because you expect them to refer you. Any other question? A question, again, on outsourcing. I've got a designer that I like to try and do all the designs for my clients. But he's got about 10 years experience on me, so charges considerably more. He's been good enough to come down to my rate. But is there kind of any advice on sort of how you can make that work for you? Because obviously, we kind of partnered up on building a website, which was great. Worked for both of us, but now I've got the client asking me for business cards and stuff. And that's not really my area of expertise. I'm getting him to do all, which is great. But I'm not really making any money yet. Any money yet? No, it's fine. Tough one. There are many things I hate about the BNI. I've never been a member. But I know a lot of developers who are, and like I said, do make a lot of money from it. They have a saying, give his gift. Oh, no, give his gift. Give his game. That's it. That's the one. The idea being that, yeah, you might pass that lead onto him, but then he might get something that's just technically, purely dev, that he's not going to make any money from and he'll pass it back to you. That's, you know, it's not guaranteed, but it's that type of business relationship that can work. You know, on the topic of him being expensive, unfortunately, what most designers are, it's very rare to find a designer who is good, understands web, and is not either being paid in an ordinary amount by an agency or being paid in an ordinary amount by developers. So... Hey, Ben. Hey. Thank you for a really honest talk, first of all. I think that was really useful for us all. But I have just one small little burning question. Will you go in freelance again? Probably not. It's one of these things. I joke, I lie joke, but I'm being deadly serious when I say, one of the nicest things about working for an agency is that they hire people to chase people from money. Very scary people to chase, basically say, their full-time job is you owe us money, pay us now, or we'll send the bail us. There are many things that are great about freelancing. You know, recently discovered it. If you want to go and get your hair cut, you know, you've got to go at the weekend if you work for an agency because you can't just toddle off down to the barbers when you want. You know, you can do that as a freelancer. I don't recommend it, but, you know, there are many, many freedoms that you get from being a freelancer, but there are many trade-offs as well. It can be lonely. You know, that was another thing that crippled me when I was freelancing because I was working such long hours. I was very lonely. One of the best things about working in an agency is the banter. You know, there's probably not a day that goes by where there's something probably completely inappropriate and totally not politically correct, said. But it's all part of, you know, like the guys on the recruitment panel said yesterday, we're all social animals. And I think realistically, if I was to go freelance again, it wouldn't be freelance freelance. It would probably be as a partnership straight from the off, 50-50 split off, you know, freeway split, where, you know, sort of, we have our own special skills. QDOS are people who are freelancing, because like I said, I know exactly how hard it can be. You know, hopefully my employer won't go, oh, you're going freelance again now with a nice P45 after those things. But, yeah, there's part of me which would love it, again, because I would love a dog, but I can't justify leaving it at home all day. But, yeah, it's one of these, it's never say never, but no plans at the moment, so any more questions? Cool, yeah. Thank you, thank you, Ben.