 Come on, come on. Actually, I appreciate going right after the keynote because I thought that Natalie gave an awesome presentation, and it was a really good lead-in to the kinds of things that I'm going to talk in. She gave a bit of advice on how to manage your business, and I want to give you a bit of advice on how to manage yourself, how to make yourself a bit more successful running your own business. So I did this presentation a few weeks ago at our meet-up. I organized WordCamp and WordPress Orlando, and I wanted to prepare for coming here. So I decided to give it there, and all my old co-workers and my old boss from the last company I was at were in attendance watching. Well, I thought it was great because I can be like, by the way, here's what you do. Screw these guys and go do this. But they're nice folks. It wasn't too weird that I was talking about people while looking right at them. Thankfully I don't have that going on here today. So who here runs their own business right now? Okay, then go do something else. Seriously, you're in the wrong. No, so I've been running my own business for the past six years. I've been running it full time for the past three years. About four years ago, what I was doing was going to a day job, or I was doing web development. So I spent from eight to six, I was on the computer, working for clients, for my boss. Go home, take a short nap, get online, work another four or five hours on my own projects, take another short nap, and do it all over again. I was doing that for months on end. It was actually more fun than it sounds because I love the internet. I've been similar to Natalie. I've been doing web development since about 12 years old in high school. Doing WordPress is about 2008. So I'm close to seven years now. So it's fun for me to spend my time on the computer. Presumably it's fun for some of you as well because here you are. But there was a lot of things that I did not know. I didn't have any sort of mentor to walk me through what it means to start your own business. I didn't have anyone, I didn't really have anyone to look to. I just mainly started getting ideas from the Meetup Group that we had, the WordPress Meetup Group, from other events I attended, or other people I saw that were doing this themselves. I even stole a bunch of ideas from my boss. So again, this probably doesn't apply to most of you since you all are already doing your own businesses, but there's a lot of things that you need to consider before you start doing this, or even things that you need to consider on a regular basis. I pretty often spend time reviewing the kind of work I'm doing, reviewing where I want to be and what I've done and see where they match up. I did a pretty extensive, I call it life audit, about two months ago, where I go through all the things that I want to be focusing on and see how far off that is from reality. Thankfully, it's shrinking, but there's still that big gap between like I've never been to Paris or whatever it is you're thinking, that one's not good for me, but whatever the thing it is that you want to do and whatever it is that you're doing now that can either help you get there or is hindering you from getting to whatever thing you want. The end goal presumably is not money for you, but whatever it is that money can help you achieve or whatever it is that running your own business can help you achieve. Myself, that's freedom to spend a couple of days coming out here to spend all day doing, just reading a book or doing whatever I want to do because I don't have someone constantly breathing down my neck, making sure I'm getting whatever thing out there. That's not to say that I spend less time working because I probably spend more time than I did at J-Jup, but I get to do what I want. If you're starting out in your company, you probably have a problem with irregular income. I know that I did, especially when I was starting out, I had the problem of some months I was getting several clients and getting backed up with work, and then a few months later, I'd be getting no clients and trying to figure out what's happening there. I haven't found any really good way to correlate when I'm getting them or not. Some people say they have seasons and cycles. For me, it's just us. For some months, nobody decided that they needed help. You might have a problem similar related to that. You may have a problem managing personal costs if you're not the kind of person who is very dedicated to making sure that you don't go over budget, dedicated to making sure you don't go crazy and do a lot of spending. I like buying stuff. I like toys. I like fancy electronics, all these things. They cost money. That wasn't me. You might have a problem with work-life balance. That's one thing that I don't even think that's a thing that exists. I'm not a fan of the whole idea of work-life balance, but it's repeated so many times to make sure you have a balance between this and that. It's more like just make the time doing the things that you want to do. Sometimes I have to spend an evening in working on a project because I spent all day goofing off. That's my fault. I can make those decisions when I need to figure out what I need to be focusing my time on. If you're running your own business, you're gonna have to do something that a lot of people hate. You're gonna have to work with the clients directly. It's a lot more fun to be able to just just have somebody else manage the clients and you just do whatever work that you're told to do, and I enjoy that as well, but I also enjoy getting to talk with these clients, getting to figure out what they really want, finding new ways to help their business out. My company, we don't just build websites. I kind of try to build solutions for people. I have to ask the question of why very often. But if you're not the kind of person who likes talking to people so much or likes talking to people who are paying you money very much because they're usually more demanding of your time than talking to other people is, that might be a problem. You might have a problem figuring out where you fit in with all this. There's a lot of people here just this weekend. There's like 600 people here who are doing their own things. Everyone has their own different focus that they're working on. So it's sometimes hard to figure out where it is that you fit in. I started out being very generalist when I started doing web development. But I realized after a while that I had to choose certain things that I wanted to focus on. So the first thing I focus on is WordPress. My business is geared towards doing all WordPress work. I don't do any other CMSs that I used to use. It's been quite a long time since I built a static website. I choose to focus on the clients who specifically want WordPress. And then finding niches within that. I do a lot of membership websites. When somebody says, oh, I want to do this certain thing, I have a lot of other sites that I can draw on both as showing them that yes, this is something I've done before and I know how to do. And also it helps me know where to get started because I've done it so many times. Finding that niche can be difficult when you're getting started. It can sometimes be thrust upon you. Last year I had a lot of clients who ran hotel websites and travel websites. I'm mainly gonna talk about the fact that I live in Orlando where we have 60 million visitors a year. But I don't think I was actively pursuing them. But it was kind of pushed upon me that these are clients that seem to like our work. So that niche can be one that you choose yourself or one that comes to you. And then finally, relating to having that balance of work and life. You have limitations of time. I spent a long time trying to do everything myself. If you're the kind of person who needs to make sure everything gets done exactly how you want it, you are going to need to lose that pretty quickly. You're going to need to be more comfortable delegating to others. That's something I'm still working on to this day. Whenever I want to work on a project, I need to have some sort of plan in place. Behind, you might find that a lot of companies behind the scenes, you think that, oh, they're doing such amazing things. And then if you can see what's going on, as I see it with a lot of my clients' companies, as I see it with other web companies, there is a lot that's held up with spit and duct tape in the back end. There's just so many things that people are just making up on the spot. People ask me questions. I try to be honest generally and tell them whether I know or not. But I don't want to say I don't know too many times. Sometimes I make things up with educated lies. I don't know that, right. It's enough to fulfill. But there's a lot going on that you can't always plan for. But in general, the things that I can really control, the things that come out to the systems and technology, the things that come out to how I manage, well, I'll get to some later about processes, but just things that are in my control. I try to have them pre-planned whenever I come into a project. So besides planning, I try to plan what I spend my time doing. This is my calendar from a couple weeks ago. I try to log everything that I do during the day, though, granted, most of it doesn't go on this calendar because that'd just be a nightmare. So usually I just do things like phone calls when I have meetings, when I have events coming up, what things I have to do for a specific day. I try to get it so I can look each morning to see what I'm working on. So that's part of my plan for being able to see what I'm working on that day. One of the most amazing things for me, being someone who's not normally a planner and I'm very forgetful in general, is the introduction of all of these awesome tools, integrated calendar tools, things like Google Now, things that help me remember and figure out what I'm working on. I got this watch a couple months ago because the most amazing thing ever is that I can just talk at it. I can be like, okay, Google, remind me to something later and it'll record it for me and then it'll buzz me later when I forget. Oh yeah, that's right, I have whatever thing I have to do today which happens to me very often. Turn that off still. And it pops up all here. So I pretty much get a notice every morning of what are all the meetings I have today, what are all the calls I have for the day. I take things as they come day by day but I can add things on pretty quickly. That's been tremendous as part of my plan, just being able to see everything that I have to do and block out time accordingly. So I'm gonna use Trello. I know there's a bunch of tools out there. I love Trello, I use it for almost everything, even things I have nothing to do with clients or web design. I use it to plan out trips that I'm going on, things like that. Trello is a project management tool similar to Basecamp, Podio, Asana do. There's a lot of them out there. This one's focused on the getting things done mentality which which I love, I'm a huge fan of. You sort things into lists. I'm gonna show a screenshot of another one in a bit but it helps you sort things into lists to see where you are on project and where things need to go. Plus it's helpful to keep that plan in sync with other people on your team so I can pass things along to different parts of the process. So I'm gonna have these online later with the videos and everything. So you don't need to write them all down now. But there's a lot of tools that we use internally and a lot of tools that I use with clients to help keep these plans in place. I use something to track my time. Right now it's mainly harvest and rescue time. Although I try to add another toggle, it works very well and it's a free one that exists. Basically these things let me see what I'm spending my time doing during the day. Track time for specific client projects. For me a really important thing is introspection retrospectives being able to see what I did recently and go okay maybe I spent a little bit too much time this past week on Twitter. Maybe I should focus a little bit more on turning that tab off and looking at whatever project I'm working on. I'm trying to do the whole quantified life, quantified self thing and it's really helpful to see to correlate days that I spend way too much time on things that don't involve work and then see what other things I did that day. It lets me figure out where my weak spots are in terms of focus and concentration. I'm here have a hard time concentrating like I do. Are you super ADD? Are you not even all the people who like, I can tell you're listening even though you're looking down at your phones right now while you're raising your hands. Right, so that's me. I will literally be like, I will be in the middle of say writing a function for a client site and then switch over to something else entirely and work on like a completely different client just because at that exact moment my brain says, hey, you should go do this instead. That's probably not the most efficient way to work. So I try to force myself into blocking off time saying, you know, I'm gonna focus on doing this and then again reviewing later, see what I've done. I'm not great with money. I don't know if any of you are here are amazing money whizzes. I'm not super great with it. I need things to tell me what to do. I have literally had clients who've sent me checks and I'm like, what's this for? And they're like, well, because he did this thing. Oh, okay, sure. I mean, it's nice. It's like finding a 20 in your pocket because he forgot to wear those jeans for a while. But it's kind of bad when you're running a business. So I started getting better at it. I use FreshBooks myself and I use Harvest as well. And then other popular ones, QuickBooks if you use it for all of your other accounting. I can quickly send out invoices to clients, track which ones have been paid. My favorite thing for FreshBooks in particular is that you can see when clients have looked at things. And I get so often people are like, I never got that email. And I can go look and be like, you're such a liar. You logged in and looked at this like right after I, I never called him out on it, but I keep it in the back of my mind when I'm working with clients. I invoice from FreshBooks. Internally, yeah, with myself and with people I work with so I can get an idea of how many hours are working on a project. As somebody who doesn't, oh, sorry. I'll give you a few minutes to show. That is also good, because again, I don't have to think about it. As somebody who knows that I don't manage my time very well and somebody will come to me and go like, well, how long does this take in three hours? And then I turn it out later. Never mind, it took me 45 minutes or it took me five hours. I use Harvest with my contractors to see how long they're spending on something because I know the numbers they give me for how long something's gonna take aren't necessarily true either. Not because we're lying, but because sometimes it's just hard to really estimate how long things will take. I see that problem as, I think about the coastline problem. If anyone's familiar, it's when you're looking at a coastline, like I live in Florida, so I'm looking at the Florida coast and I can look at it on a map and I can see, okay, the coastline is 1,000 miles or something. Then I zoom in a little bit closer on it. I double the zoom on it and I see, never mind, I'm re-measuring that coastline. It's actually like 1,500 miles because I get a little bit more detail and the further and you zoom the more detail you get and the longer that coastline is. It's the same thing for these projects. I'll look at something and go, oh, that contact page should take me two hours to finish putting together, but then I didn't realize, oh, wait, I have to come up with content for this. Or, oh, they have some interesting form integration that they wanna do or something else that I didn't know from first glance that changes the time. Did you just require your contact to be varied or should you do, okay? No, no, no, they track it because it's so easy just to, oh, Trello has a nice harvest integration in it where I can have a card that says, you know, contact form and on the card, again, I'll show a screenshot of this in a bit, but on the card, it has a little button that you can start tracking your time right in harvest. So while they're working on that task, they can actually click track time right there or you can get it for your browser, like a little menu bar thingy icon. And again, something to manage your product projects, I don't care what you use. Everyone has one that they will live and die by that they say is like the best one ever. I don't care. I like Trello. I've used Basecamp, Podio, Asana do. I've used half a dozen of them. Trello one is really easy. It's really easy for new people to get started with. It does have some drawbacks that some of the other ones have other tools that it doesn't have. I make up for the fact that it's really easy for new people to get on with and it is 99% of all stuff you can do is free. I have the paid plan because they make such a good tool that I use a lot, but admittedly the paid plan doesn't even, let's see, change the color of cards and stuff, things that you don't really need. You have a question? I don't even know if that happens. Okay, so I haven't done that. Admittedly, I just follow up with people via Slack, via Hangouts, something else just to say, hey, do you have some time for this this week? And I try to block out the full week in advance so I can see what people are working on, but not so far out in advance that they say they're free and then something else happens. The best thing for that is that you can actually tag people in cards on these and say that this is your project and this is the time you're assigned to it, and then they can follow back up and say whether or not that's feasible. Plus, I can look at it in a calendar view and see if I'm really loading a lot of stuff onto one person. I kind of know that that's not gonna be feasible. You had a question? I was just gonna ask you. Yes, yeah, I mean, Basecamp is very good, but it's a little pricey and I found other ways to do most of those features that actually work better for me. You can do a lot more customization, personalization, other tools than you can in Basecamp, so I'd much rather people see things coming with our logo and everything. I briefly mentioned have a process for the things that you're doing. I have processes for when a client reaches out to us, the Trello board, actually, that all of my leads for clients go into. That's a nice thing about Trello. It can take integrations from other services, so I'm not here just to sell that tool, but it's awesome. So, every time someone fills out my contact form, thank you, Gravity Forms Integrations, we'll go straight to a Trello board, a Trello card, excuse me, and I can follow up from there, move them into different lists based on how far I followed up. So, if you guys? Yes. Do I have that phone? Yeah, I can do, I mean, depending on whatever integrations I can find, I use Zapier and Iftolot, their services to integrate different services together. I can pretty much just chain a lot of things together, which has worked amazingly well for my process for pretty much everything I do because it saves a lot of time that I'd spend on doing things. For instance, this is a board, this one's almost, this one actually is a done project, so I feel, okay, putting this up here. So, I have, so we would have a list of things. They're all a little bit different, but they're pretty similar. In this case, I've just won things we haven't started on yet, and it's a small enough company that we don't do any sort of agile or scrum or anything like that. It's very much a waterfall method, meaning that we move from one stage to the next while we're working. So, most of our client website builds are, we're going to move into design. When something is designed, we're gonna move it to development. When it's done in development, we have completed. If I'm working with contractors, if I'm working with anyone else, besides myself and my business partner, we also have a review board list, excuse me. These here are lists, the whole things of board. We have a review list, so they move it there, and then I can just come in at the end of the day and click on what they've done, see it before I move to completed, or make more messages. So, a few things about Trello. One, you can make, you can have things attached to cards, images. If you have files from clients, pretty much any kind of file you can attach. You can make checklists, which you may see that there are some of these, green means everything on the checklist has been completed. I can assign due dates to things. I can assign specific people two cards. You can leave comments on them. You can also link them to other pages, cards, whatever. Basically, you can have one place that can be a hub for all of the activity that you do. And then again, with all the integrations it has into other tools, when certain things happen, I can make them happen other places as well. And you can have a running log of all the things that have been done on this project or on any other project you do. So that's part of my process for the work that I'm doing. The process is, I can see, or excuse me, the process is for, what happens when I'm building a custom plugin for a client? What happens when I'm building a custom theme? What happens when I'm reaching out to a new client? What happens when I'm following up for payment? I have a specific list of things to do, which is evolving over time. This helps me, with my work, make sure I've hit all the check marks. What happens when I'm putting a client site live? Now I know all the things I need to do. This also helps when I'm working with someone else. So when I have to pass on to someone else and say, you're gonna put this client site live today, they have a full checklist to make sure that they have to get all these steps done before they can say that they're complete. It's a really important thing to do, just because, especially again, getting to that delegation, getting to that having control, I get to have my cake and eat it too. I get to have full control, make sure everything is perfect, while still having someone else do that work for me. So I don't have to worry about coming back and having someone go, oh, well, what happened to all the redirects to our old site, or from our old site, and have to scramble to figure out did this person do that or not. Theoretically, I should be able to look at the checklist and confirm that they did. Is Trello integrated with Slack? I'm getting a yes. I have not tried yet, but, oh, right, yes. Actually, yes, excuse me, yes. So when cards move around, you can integrate with Slack to give notifications. We don't use Slack for clients yet. I'm on like eight Slack channels already. I don't need any more of them. What is Slack? Oh, Slack is a chat service. It's kind of like AIM on steroids. AIM, you all have Messenger, all those older ones. The idea is that you can have a Slack group, which has individual channels in it. So for instance, WordPress has one. If any of you are not on it, go to chat.wordpress.org and you can join the WordPress Slack channels. And there's a channel for all the different teams that exist in WordPress. You can privately chat with people. You can send files back and forth. You can share fun gifts because that's an important part of our day. You can keep up to date on what people are doing. Any notifications when someone wants to talk to you specifically, which is really helpful when you're part of eight plus Slack channels. So I do have a client. I do have a client starter Trello board. Yes, so one thing that you can do with Trello, you can copy boards, the whole blue thing here. You can copy lists from one board to another. And you can also copy individual cards. So if you have one, a template that you're starting with, then you can copy that to new clients. Which is what we do, because most of the clients will fit onto the same type of board. And then plus I can take that template and every time I have a new step to add, I can just add it there and have it extend across to new ones. Do you say it has a calendar view as well? It does have a calendar view. When you, it's called a power up. There's a little, when you're looking at a board, there's a little button here that says menu, you pop it, menu pops down, and it'll say get power ups. So you actually have to turn on the calendar for individual boards. It's kind of a pain that it's not turned on by default, but it's useful when you have that you can see all of them. And then going back to the calendar app that I was using before, it's called Sunrise, it's just a free calendar app. You can also have Trello cards show up there. So when if I have specific due dates, I can see them on my, excuse me, it can, but not by default, no. You have to use some sort of extra integration. So I'm just gonna hop back real quick. This one right here, this is a free app called Sunrise. It's in the browser, it's in both Windows and Mac. I think Microsoft actually just bought them like last week or the week before. But it was originally meant for a Google Calendar thing. So you can integrate Google Calendar, couple different types of other calendars. Most of the major project management boards could meetups, Facebook for birthdays and stuff and events. Whenever I'm invited to something, I'll get a little notification. So it's basically like a calendar app for all of your other calendars to link together. Oh, I'm sorry. I do cap the amount of hours people spend to a point. I try to give a guideline of how much time they should spend. But again, since I don't know how long a project's gonna take, one, I pad in some extra time with clients, I think if I say this is gonna be 10 hours, it's probably gonna be a little bit more, so I'm gonna bill it at 15 usually. Depending on the project depends on how I bill. Most projects are by the project. Sometimes I do hourly, especially with smaller maintenance work, and then there are a few clients if it's a larger client, usually do weekly billing. So it's kind of like how many hours do we spend on your project this week, because usually at the size of those clients, it's open-ended to when the project will end. It's similar to stay on the topic of payments. It's another thing too that I have clients pay before they do the work, before I do the work, excuse me. So I usually break projects, especially as a project base into milestones and then phases. I've gotten a lot better at planning over the years. Having to force myself into rigid structures is very, very helpful, but whenever there's like a certain milestone, so like this milestone is the wireframe milestone, they pay for that milestone before we build those wireframes and then move on to the next. That saves a lot of time having to chase clients for money. Right, most client projects I do on a flat, most, the majority of the work that we do is custom theme and plugin development, so it's just building themes and plugins for specific clients, and we do that by the project. Usually, estimate how long that project will take and then build to that. In addition to the whole having a process, one of my processes, I use Genesis a lot for a lot of clients, if it's something much more customized underscores, but for both of them, I have my own child theme that I've created that has a lot of things already built into it, so I can just go in and do a search and replace for the client name, change it. I actually had a little form that I used to do this now, but I go in when I'm starting a new project to make a copy of it in the new WordPress install, and I have little bits of code that I can just comment on and off and go, okay, in this one I do have a need for these certain functions, I'm gonna comment them on, or I, knowing that Genesis has specific hooks in place, I have a whole section just like navigation, footer, widgets, and I can just go in and go, yes, they are gonna need a footer widget, they're gonna need three of them, or yes, they're gonna need the no subnavigation, so I'll comment that out, and that allows me to just very quickly, in a few minutes go through and get the bare bones of this website done so that I can spend time on styling it, yes. Yeah, my main functions file this theme is it's all one thing that happens in the Genesis setup hook, in this case specifically, broken down into sections of the page, like there's section for header, there's section for the head tag for footer, et cetera, for all the widgets, and then I have library functions for custom post type functions for user control functions for different widgets I'm doing, whatever things that go in, they all have their own files. Have you organized your files or? Basically the function style at the top links to other specific files if they're needed in the project. Where do you keep your post nipples? Where are your templates, yeah. Oh, in a separate folder, a lib folder. The ones that you use for like any client. Yeah. You have like a snippets folder. Oh, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I have one folder with a lot of work like that. I haven't gotten into putting it all up online, I know that, you know, I don't really use this GitHub or something, put it up, I haven't done that maybe one day. But I also have, I use Vagrant for starting new sites when I'm working on them locally and I have the folders there so I can just start a new website, push it up. If I'm not, oh no, sorry, different word camp. I was gonna say I also use Brad Parbs VV if anyone here does development, that's a pretty cool thing to make it a lot easier for me to start new websites. That's, there's a tool called Vagrant and there's a company called TenUp that did this tool called Varying Vagrant Vagrants VVV which admittedly is similar to the, it's similar to the server structure I'd use for client sites. So I use their tool because it's a lot of work that's gone into it. Basically it's a way for me to start new sites on my own computer. So I can start developing on my own computer and put them live. And then there's another tool someone built atop that called VV which makes that process even easier. So I can go into the command line and type out one or two line commands to start building sites for me. And then having my own code in there too means that I can go in in a couple minutes to be like 50% done with the actual work of the site. Brad Parbs. First I thought he was here and then I was thinking the wrong word camp. Yeah, you can find on his GitHub page and how to use it. It works rather well, I'm enjoying it. I use Bitpocket for my client sites. The reason I use Bitpocket over Git is Bitpocket gives you free private repos. And I figure if it's client work may as well have it not public facing. Like I said, I haven't really yet gotten to use in GitHub to put up my own stuff to share but you should probably get around to doing that. Again, I have a problem with focus. I thought about like 500 different things while I'm standing here talking. So it's amazing that I can get things done, quite honestly. Staying focused is kind of hard for me. I don't know if it is for any all but I found ways to stay focused by removing distractions from the room. I already live kind of minimal lifestyles. My house is kind of boring, admittedly, which just works for me to not spend too much time doing other random things. So I have a specific, I have a workspace in my house. I also work out of a co-working space which is even more sparse because I just bring my laptop and I sit down at an empty table. But I have those spaces that are specific like this is where I'm gonna be when I'm working. I've separated a space that I use for home activities from the office space. I don't have a dedicated office anymore. I used to and then I moved into a smaller place but now what I do is I have an area in the dining room which admittedly we never use the dining room anyway. And so I don't sit on the couch in the living room or something, I sit in one space and when I'm there I know I'm on the computer doing work, doing something. One thing that I've had a harder problem with is differentiating between the on and off time. When you can work wherever you want, whenever you want, you're working everywhere all the time because you think, oh well I can get that done, I have a few more hours tonight or oh you know, I'm gonna put that off until later because if I don't do it now I can just catch up on it before bed or whatever. That's gonna be the death of me but to figure out a way to work in the better. I try to set specific times. Most important for me is with clients. I definitely have a work day with my clients. I'm an early riser so I have my work day, I say like they can contact me and I'll respond to them between eight and five on weekdays if it's not then just imagine that I'm in an office and that the phone is not even near me anymore. If I say ringing I'll get to them tomorrow. If I get an email I'll respond if I feel like it. I tried using auto, not auto responders, timed responders for a while, like there's two called Boomerang for Gmail and there's a few others. I found, or there's one called Follow Up as well. I found that they're only helpful if you really just wanna disguise the fact that you're on at midnight doing stuff and you wanna make sure it goes out at 8 a.m. I usually forget to put them on so stop doing that. But basically I try to, I make a specific time that I say this is when I'm available. If I'm doing something outside this time that's because I want to be doing that. I don't like the phone very much. I'm not a phone person. I love talking to clients, don't be wrong, but I'm not a phone person very much. I schedule all calls. I mean for client calls if we don't have a scheduled call then I'm just gonna assume that I'm in the middle doing something else at that time. A lot of people might be, I'm sure probably some of you in this room are probably listening to me going, what the heck are you? The client is always number one, whatever. I like my clients and I absolutely agree they're the ones paying me. I should be giving them the proper time but there is a proper time for that. And I can go, well I have some time available on Thursday. Here's a few times I'm available. One of my friends actually has a calendar in his signature of his email that's like hey, do you want some of my time? Book it here and you click on it. It's called You Can Book Me and they can click on it, see times that you're available and do that. I chose not to go that route because I don't want to make it an open invite to just go, oh, well David's free for an hour. Click, now he's not. That's not something I want to do. But when it comes to clients, let's say they're on a different time zone. So most of my clients are East Coast, I'm lucky there but I do have some clients who are in different time zones or even better teams that are in different time zones. So we're talking to one person who's out in Denver and someone else is in LA and then someone else is in Miami. We also be on the call at the same time. One, I've mentioned I'm very specific, saying no matter who the client is, our call is from three to 330 EST. I make sure, you know, I say the time zone as well just in case they think I'm talking a different time zone. Cause I had one client who was like, oh, no, you said it was three and I'm in California and I forgot. So he's like, so make sure you change it to three but that's a three hour difference for me I had other stuff going on at that time. So I had to kill that pretty quickly. Right, so I pre-scheduled those calls. There's not many exceptions I make to that. It usually it's easier too cause I can make sure that it's a time that works for them that I can say, hey, we have our half hour chat to review what we've done this week and go over what we're gonna do next week. That's nothing too, I try to schedule everything in the 30 minute blocks because a call can go on for an hour if you give someone an hour. The call will take 30 minutes if you give them 30 minutes. Underscores, it can be found at underscores.me. It's mainly people who work on WordPress core or at automatic, the wordpress.com parent company. There are a lot of people who've contributed to that and they use it for I think all the automatic themes now. So I can trust that code base. There's no style sheets associated with it so you have to do all of the styling of the website yourself but it's a good base of HTML and PHP. There's really no need to redo it every time you're doing a new site. If you wanna write your own theme, I wrote my own theme framework for a couple of years ago that I used for a lot of client sites and then I didn't like maintain it, moved over to two other existing ones. You can make your own theme if you want, just why spend the time doing something different on every website. There's a reason that something like say Genesis is popular. Go look at their website at all the different themes and just think about the fact that it's pretty much just a functions and a style sheet that is the only thing that makes them different from one another. WordPress is pretty flexible. Oh, this, the screen? It's called Sublime Text. This one has a free trial but it is a paid one. I like it because it has something called packages. Basically, there are bits of code that other people wrote that you can include on your site, or include, excuse me, include in your project. So I have things that will automatically minify and connect files for me, things that will upload files on save, connect securely service for me. I use CSS linting tool. It's something to clean up the code. There's a lot of things that you can get for it and you can make it look pretty much however you want. That's just the theme that I chose for it. When you start a new project, what makes you choose between Genesis or under source? So it's usually more budget, actually. And there's two reasons that it's budget. One, lower budget means I'm gonna have less time to spend on it. So I'm gonna start with one that I have more. The Genesis child theme that I have, I use for more projects in the under-scores one just because I've done so many things to it over, I think, about two years. I've been using this specific child theme that every time I have a new thing that I wanna do, I just put it into my base one and then I can go from there. And then two, usually if it's a bigger budget project that also means that there's more complexity to it, in which case, not that I don't fully trust all the Genesis code, but I'd much rather have it just be streamlined to just the things that I need. So in a roundabout way, it's budget that choose which one I use. As I mentioned earlier, I like, oh, yeah. I'm sorry, in terms of what? Frame working. Are you ready? I'm sorry. Frame working. Frame working? Like bootstrap foundation with one and zero. Oh, okay. I don't really have a preference there. I don't like bootstrap being pushed into everything. I think that it has a lot of great use cases, but I actually don't think WordPress in general is the best use case for bootstrap. And I am much more fan of, rather than using a CSS framework of building things specific to the site, I try to build things that are device agnostic, which is a lot harder to do with bootstrap. Plus it's harder for our design team to have to think about. Like it can be a good constraint, but in a lot of times I still have to rewrite something anyway, something that actually spans three and a half columns instead of three or whatever. And I focus on the main thing that people wanna use, or in my mind the main thing that people wanna use a framework for, for their stylist for things like responsiveness. And I try to make that focused on the content of the site rather than some notion that I have of how it should collapse. But I mean, I don't have any specific break points that apply to specific types of tablets or phones or whatever. I go with what looks best for the content, or at least I try to do as much as possible. Also are you a SaaS user? I'm not, I just never got into that stuff. I don't, I'm sure it'd probably save more time too. Maybe one of these days. I slowly ramp up to new, to new things. Like one thing that I know a lot of people use, I know David Parsons over there. Yeah, getting a look up from your, he uses grunt a lot for his projects. And he do a lot of cool stuff. He has a really good talk on wordpress.tv about automating your automation. With a lot with grunt. I just never, I haven't gotten into it yet. That's another tool that I'm sure can save me time, but I have to spend all the time ramping up learning it before I can get there. So it's a trade-off to make one day. So there's a few, if anyone has any cool tools afterwards, please share them with me. We have a session in our meetups called Cool Tools where we get people to show things that they found online to help them do their jobs better. And there's always something I've never heard of there. Well, as I mentioned before, I have the trade-off of doing all of the work and maybe not necessarily always even making as much as I could just doing an hourly project for somebody. But my trade-off is that I get to free time myself. I have my own ability to choose when I'm working on things, what I'm working on when I get to say no to the client if I want to, when I get to make new suggestions that they might not have thought of. So my motivation here is definitely independence. I feel like I'm a very independent person. I like the fact that I can just do whatever the heck I want whenever I want to within a reason. That's my motivation for what I'm doing. At the very least, I hope that everyone has some sort of intrinsic motivator for starting your own companies because I mean, most of you here, say you own your companies, I'm sure you all can attest, it's a lot of hard work, right? It might not always be the best payoff. There are certain projects that would be a lot easier if I just had some other company running it and I just did like contracting for it. But I like that ability to choose what I'm doing, how I'm doing it. I say no a lot, or I say no to clients a lot. I try to do so in their best interest, but also when it's just something I don't wanna work on admittedly. I think you're obviously comfortable saying no to clients now, but when you first started out, were you comfortable saying no? I mean, because you see that you have the, you don't know how much money you're gonna make from one week or one month to the next. Right. One of the problems I had when I started out was always saying yes, even to the small projects. And those are the ones that became the biggest pain in the ass because it's clients that don't wanna pay money that just grow. That is correct. So when I was first starting out, I probably said yes more than I should have. And it's not that I say no to everybody all the time. Usually when a client comes to me, the lead is good enough that when they come to me usually, that if I contact them back and then they contact me back, that usually means I'm getting the project, whatever it is if I want it. Just gotten to that point of streamlining that process of it. I had the ability to say no, because I was working another job and I also had limited time. So I had to say no out of necessity. If you have a lot of free time and you're looking for clients, you might say yes to things who wouldn't normally say yes to, which isn't necessarily bad. There are projects that I thought would be great that became headaches. And then there are projects that I thought would be terrible that turns out they were pretty reasonable people and not that clients aren't usually reasonable, but that I ended up learning something new. Final real big thought that I have is having some perspective on what you're working on. Again, there's a lot that you could be spending your time doing. And even within WordPress, you could decide, well I wanna build a plugin and I'm gonna sell that plugin with this ass model or I'm gonna sell that plugin just individually to individual buyers or I'm going to make plugins for specific clients. I'm gonna make themes and I'm gonna sell those themes custom. That's what we mainly do versus I'm gonna make those themes and sell them mass market or I just wanna do support or whatever many thing you have. You have to have a perspective on what part of the market is gonna be the place that you find yourself best fitting. I enjoy doing, it's easy for me to keep current client sites up to date, fix any problems they have, people who I've already worked with, but I don't really like doing general supports. I'm not a fan of clients coming to me for like a one or two hour project. I try to focus on the project base because that's where I found I fit best or where I can give the proper amount of focus. So, leading into what we just talked about, jumped again a little bit. I hate the phrase the customer's always right. That's wrong, sorry, it's wrong. There's a reason I try to impress this upon people I work with. You're not hiring me because I know how to build something. You're not hiring me because I can take this idea that you drew down and build it. You're hiring me for my experience and expertise as well. You're hiring me for all the countless hours that I spend traveling toward camps and doing meetups and reading blogs and doing all those things. The ability to make suggestions and tell you when something's gonna work or not. Plenty of clients who are like, well, I wanna have a video that auto plays when someone comes to my website. Y'all laughing so I can assume that y'all know that that's not, that doesn't convert very well almost all the time. Some clients will still want that and I have to say, well, here I have data to back up. No, this doesn't work or I'm not fan of sliders. No, I don't think in most cases the slider is going to help convert. I think you should choose one of these things as your key message to use. Again, as I mentioned before, I have specific working hours that I stick to. If I tell someone I'll be available at a certain time, I try to be available at that time. But at the same time, I also have times that I'm not available for my clients to contact. So I have time to regroup, focus, play video games, do whatever I call it. I'm sorry to interrupt, but what did you do when you had that day job and you were saving those hours? How did you do it? How did you handle that before going all on your own when you did have that day job? How did you handle those clients who were calling in the day or whatever? So I usually schedule those either for the early evening or during my lunch time. It was an open secret that I was doing my own clients at my job, so it wasn't really a, you know, there wasn't any like I have to hide this or anything. The decision to leave the day job, by the way, came at a point when the amount that I was making at home was the same amount that I was making there, and I had six months of savings in the bank for all of my needs, and I thought, okay, this is the time that, you know, I don't know if it's as lucky enough to do this. Some people are thrust into the freelance life. Some people don't do that, but I was pretty lucky there, I will say. Like with insurance, like a big thing? Again, I was lucky in a variety of ways. One was both my parents were in the Army, so throughout college I had free healthcare. Thank you, U.S. military. And then my partner has a job where he has insurance, thankfully, they cover my benefits as well. So for there were a few years there in a gap that I was uninsured, obviously had something happen, had I gotten to an accident or something in the store, it could have been a lot different. There is a certain point that comes down to lock. Finding clients, lock. Getting someone to do something, there is a certain amount of lock in there. Again, I was not hiding this from my boss. As I mentioned at the start of this, I was in the room as foremost my old co-workers the first time I gave this presentation a couple weeks ago. I had this honesty with them right up front. When I went out on my own, within the first month two of his clients contacted me personally, and they were like, hey, I don't like something or whatever, will you do my work? We completely reached out to him. It was like, by the way, you have some clients who are trying to jump ship, so for whatever reason. I don't think those clients aren't around anymore, but I wasn't gonna be that guy who felt like I needed to say yes to get these clients, so I'm sorry I'm trying to run down the time. I try to get my clients happy, but within a reason, if they ask for something that I think is a little outrageous, I'll push back on it unless they really ask for a nice big check. And most important for me is I try to keep those clients happy because they will go out to other people without me having to do anything. I haven't even, it's on my list to start asking them for referrals, but for right now, almost all the work I get is through partnerships with other companies and referral small clients. If you don't keep your clients happy, they're not going to refer you to other people. I apologize for rushing this last bit. I spent a little bit longer than I meant to. Again, I spent too many years doing all this myself. I finally have 14 behind me, people who I can trust who do awesome design work, awesome development, can handle projects for me, can do all these other things when I'm not available, but also I have people who I just hired somebody to be like assistant kind of and all the little tasks that would be time to do in today. It's been a tremendous amount of help. One, you can do it. I have a network with other companies, other people who I partner with and a client I come to me who need mobile development. I don't do that. I have companies that I don't do it in vice versa. Knowing the things I'm not good at, terrible at design, I'm amazing. I have two people who are awesome at design who work with me. I contract with delegate things that I'm doing to make sure that I can get as much done that I'm good at. So that's something I'm not a great writer either. So I delegate writing to other people. I have someone who does social media all day for a living, absolutely does for clients. I try to make sure I'm very conservative when I give estimates and time estimates as well to clients so that if I tell them it's gonna be done in three weeks, I really think I'm gonna get it done in like a week and a half, in which case, happy client. It's like I've done faster, but also something comes up that weekend. It does take me three weeks, still happy client because I got it done at the time I promised. Every single project I do, learning something new. I get paid to learn, which is awesome. I'm sure that somebody will ask you to do something and you're like, I'm pretty sure I can do that. We'll figure it out. Almost all the time, almost every project has something that I didn't know how to do before that project that I'm able to learn on my job, which saves me a lot of time that I have to learn that for free. I appreciate all the questions. Now I'm sorry if you miss anything, please come find me after you talk to me. Obviously you all are already attending a conference. Yay, find people who are similar to you to talk to, maybe they have work that they wanna trade, maybe they have things that they can teach you. I keep tabs on what people are doing in the WordPress space and outside of that. I do Treehouse. It's an online training thing. They're actually based in Orlando, so bonus, I get to see them all the time too. Other than code school, code academy, code.org, all these different things that'll teach you different things that you might not already know. I had a big time to do that on a weekly basis. I try to go to events that are not WordPress related and I try to have lots of time to read for personal fun and play videos. Again, start around in a little short. If anyone has any questions, please find me after. Thank you all for coming to go here today. I'm gonna send work back to you. She's late. I'm not going to voice her.