 Do you want to do your introduction again, Jeff? Oh, this is your show. I'm going to introduce you. This is my show. What's up, everyone? Welcome to call number three. This is sort of a follow up from the last call. The last call, we're talking about pricing WordPress services. But in that call, we just touched the top of everything. And we didn't really take a deep dive. So after looking at the call, like we just saw that, it would be much more helpful and valuable to instead of putting too much stuff out there, too much information, to break it up in blocks and to really dig deep into this. So this week, Lauren, she's going to talk about making a profit, looking at that side of your WordPress service. And just to give you a background of Lauren, she's got tons of experience, has worked with big agencies, has freelance successfully for a long time, started her own agency, and has been scaling up that agency and going in a very positive direction. So I know she's got a lot of valuable experience and information for everybody here. So yeah, Lauren, it's all you. Awesome. Thank you, Jeff. And I apologize for any background noise. We're in an office in Indonesia, so there's a lot of motorbikes that I like to drive by and also for the glitchy internet. So what I'm going to actually do is just stop my video and share my screen. And then we can just jump right into it here. Let's see. Can you see it all, Jeff? Yeah. All right, perfect. I kind of wanted to talk about making a profit. It's been something I've been learning for, gosh, 13 years now, and it's something that I'm still learning. So just kind of bear with me, because this is through a lot of trial and error, a lot of error. And probably in one year from now, things will probably change. So just a quick overview of my journey. I didn't even go to art school. I just took an online art certificate and just started working immediately after that, actually in a finance company. So I didn't even join a typical web agency at that time. And we were building things. That was back in the tables before DIVS. That was back in the day. From there, I went from freelancing to an agency. Then the web group in that agency left, and we all started our own agency. And then I quit that, did some more freelancing, and then I started Brave Factor, which is a little agency I have here in Bali. And I've made some money, and I've also lost a lot of other money until I learned how to actually price properly. So the main thing that I want to get across today, if you don't remember anything else, is just that you are a business, not a freelancer. It doesn't matter if there's just you working in your basement by yourself, or if you have 10 people or 100 people, you are a business and you are in this to make a profit. The problem that I did for a long time was I would price myself as a freelancer, not actually building in a profit and building in a future for myself. So I want to really focus in today on how to price yourself and the different pricing options. And every area is different. Every specialty and industry is different. So how you price yourself is up to you. But I hope I can give a good framework around how to do that for yourself. And the way I start anything is I always ask myself the hard questions. So what is your comfort level around money, and why do you feel that way? For the longest time, I felt uncomfortable. I felt guilty. I didn't want to ask people too much. I didn't want to ask them for what I consider to be a lot of money, but maybe they did not consider it to be a lot of money. So I would even limit my own pricing on what I would stick or shock myself, so to speak. And that is really something that is a whole other conversation by itself. So really what I want to focus on is more the math side of things, which is what are your expenses, what are your goals, and how many clients do you want to work with? And part of that also looks at what type of clients do you want to work with, and tailoring your pricing around those types of clients. So to dig into the math side of things, we're going to look at your expenses, your minimum gross revenue, your minimum level of engagement, and then figure out a profit margin on top of all of that. I am not a math person. I draw pictures. So I've had to have a lot of mentorship. And the business partner that I partnered with is a finance guy, and he's helped us become profitable. So a lot of this has been learning from this past year for me. OK. So number one is determining your expenses. And this is just kind of a made up scenarios. It's not for me or my agency. It's just a made up freelancer of some typical expenses that they would have. Maybe you have more. Maybe you have less. We have, if you're renting a co-working space, we have buying a new computer. And one thing that I was actually doing wrong with that expense specifically was that I was not really accounting for buying a computer. Buying a new computer, so to speak. Or even if my computer broke down, that was more of a variable expense when I needed to make it a fixed expense. An easy way to do that is to kind of look at what it would cost to lease your computer or to rent it. And then build that in and create that as a goal for buying new computers in the future or fixing your current one. We have software as a service. We have general subscriptions. Maybe you have some insurance that you need to pay for. Depending on where you are, there's licensing. There's legal fees. And then, again, depending on where you are, at least in America, we can write off everything from our taxes. So I always have a food and coffee budget, too. So to make it easy for myself, over on the side, I have a desired income of $1,250. This can be whatever currency, whatever price you want it to be. My expenses are $750, so my total expenses every month is $2,000. So then we have to build off of that a little bit. Again, depending on where you are, you might have taxes you have to pay for. And depending on your team size, that's going to determine the gross revenue that you're going to need. Variable expenses, that's something that is those unseen costs. So maybe it's a salesman that takes a commission. Maybe it's a contractor. It's anything that's kind of unseen, but you need to actually plan ahead for that. When you count for all those things over on the side there, we've got your monthly gross revenue. And that is the bare minimum that you need to make every month to be able to survive. It's what you need to feed yourself. It's what you need to keep the lights on. And pay those elementary fees, you know. And you can project that out easily enough, times 12 yearly, we're looking at for this scenario $26,000, 27, if you want to round up. So I think it's pretty basic so far. I apologize if I'm going fast. I've looked at these numbers so many times that it's becoming more and more fluid for me. So from there, and this kind of breaks down, there's tons of calculators to determine your freelance and rate. Another way to determine your freelance and rate is to look at like industry averages for the area that you're in. However, just for pure math's sake, if we're looking at $2,200 per month, you break it down weekly, you can do that hourly, sorry, daily, and then you can do that hourly. And again, this is the bare minimum. This is not saying that you are only worth $13. If you are the world's best Elementor developer, the world's best backend developer, whatever it is, you can price according to your skill and according to your area. I know there are some areas like this. I think San Francisco, it's $100,000 salary for a great developer or $100 to $200 per hour for a great developer. So again, this is bare minimum. You got to figure out your own markup and your own worth and your own value on top of this. So next is the minimum level of engagement. And this one was a big game changer for us when we actually were able to step outside of kind of chasing every dollar and getting that bare minimum and entering into, this is the minimum that we need per client. And if we accept less than that, it's not gonna be profitable. So this goes back to that question, how many clients do you want and what type of clients do you want? In this scenario, I'm saying I only want 10 clients for the year. For me to be able to have 10 clients and still pay for my expenses, I need each client to pay me at least $2,600. And again, that is not making a profit. That is just covering the bare expenses. So any project that you take, if you only take 10 clients, if you take a project that's $1,000, you're gonna be losing money by the end of the year. And that's a really important factor to keep in mind as you talk to new clients. And one thing that I just started doing is cause we've quadrupled our Emily this last year. One way that I have been able to have that discussion a little bit more and figure out pricing with a client is to just be upfront with them, okay? It costs, our Emily is, in this case $2,000, but it could be $20,000. The minimum level of engagement to hire us is $20,000 for the year. Is that something that you have put aside in your budget? And from there, they can kind of get an understanding of who you are as a freelancer or better yet a solopreneur or who you are as an agency. So that is kind of just the bare minimum for that MLE. Now, all those numbers, that is still just covering your expenses. And another big mistake that I did when I was freelancing was not include a profit margin. In general, 5% is low, 10% is considered average. However, I would say for this industry, 20 to 30% is more around average for web development. And the reason why you have to include a profit margin is because you are a business. You're not exchanging your time for money, you're exchanging your skills, you're creating stability for yourself, you're creating stability for your family. You are, if you are a freelancer, you don't know, well, we all are that way. Agency, we don't know where our next project's coming from, so you're building into your runway, you're trying to create a better future for yourself by keeping that margin. So please, please, please include a profit margin while you're pricing. So we look back at that MLE of about 2.7,000 and we wanna include that profit margin of 20%. That then means that we need to only accept clients at $3.2,000 per client per year. Worst case, if you're starving and you need money by all means, just take what you can, you can just take that 2.7, but I asked one of my mentors about this because we had a slow month and I asked him if we should just take on a bunch of small projects or wait for that big project that actually hits our MLE. And he said that their agency had that situation too, but for them, they preferred to wait for the bigger client and leave space and availability with their team rather than fill their plates with the tiny projects that isn't hitting their MLE. What they did in that other time was marketing, networking, reaching out and connecting with those bigger clients. But that's something that you have to determine your own comfort level with, but at least you know the bare basics of what you need to survive, what you need to grow and then what you need per client. So I know that's a lot of math. It's a lot going on and my numbers are simple here, but I still have to double check my numbers all the time. There is an alternative way to finding your MLE and that is simply working backwards. If your goal is to make $50,000 for the year and you only want 10 clients, then that means that you get 5,000 per client and that you don't accept anybody less than that. It's pretty straightforward I think in that way. And next I'm going to talk through pricing options, but first I kind of just wanted to open it up and leave space for if you want to ask questions because that was a lot of little steps with a lot of little numbers all adding up to a lot it was. So does anyone have any questions for right now? Shoot. Yeah, this is probably a dumb question. What is an MLE? Oh, sorry, no, no, no. That's not a dumb question at all. That is your minimum level of engagement. Yeah, I just shortened it because I'm lazy. That's the only question I got. No, thank you. Yeah, thanks for that. Does anyone else have any other questions? No? You guys are easy so far. All right, so I'm going to jump back to here. I'm going to jump back into the next. So there are a few different, I should have done a little intro slide for this one. There's a lot of different ways that you can price. And we have technically priced, probably all of them, to be honest. The first most straightforward is your hourly. And most often if you're a freelancer, you'll be asked that, what is your hourly? Again, we have that minimum burn rate. We have that profit percentage that you want. That's your minimum hourly that you need to survive. You have to determine if you're worth more than that for the clients that you have and for the industry that you have. But it's a really, really simple way to figure out your hourly rate. I want to emphasize too that as a freelancer, or as an agency even, that you always bill for that kind of extra time. You are, your day doesn't start when you open up your programs and you have your computer, like you got that coffee ready and everything. Your day starts when you're thinking about things, when you're emailing your client, when you're going through those meetings, all of that adds up. And if you aren't billing for that time, you're gonna be losing money, to be honest. The client is paying you for your expertise. They're paying you for this product. They're not necessarily paying you for that clicking time on the computer of just coding things and just moving things around. So always bill for that extra stuff. The next type that is most common, I think in our industry is project based. And this is what we most often use. So we'll, for the first, I would say eight months of our agency, we were not tracking time because I liked the freedom of it. I was always stuck in time trackers and other agencies and I didn't like it. And then I did a lot of research and everybody recommended if you're not tracking time, start tracking time now. It's not a morale booster. It's not the most fun thing. And there are, you know, I totally forgot that I left my timer on when I had a meeting with another client. So there's always gonna be times that you're gonna fix things. However, the benefit to tracking time is that you can make sure that you are hitting within your budget, but also that you have an actual idea of how much something takes you to get done so that you can price more accurately in the future. So we're just assuming that all our numbers here are good, of course. So we break down, we always charge for strategy because again, all of our expertise and all of the value comes from that extra thinking time. So we charge for strategy time. Got the design time build in there, the development, always build for QA as well. And that extra project management to send those emails to the clients to make sure that everything's staying on track and checking in with your team if you need to. Again, in this case, we've got our little hourly costs down at the bottom there. Maybe you have any other additional costs that were not accounted for before like elementary fees or fonts or anything that you're not billing that client that you wanna include in your services. And then we got that profit margin built into it too. So in this case, this estimate would be about $3,400. Our MLE is 3.2, so that hits it just perfectly. And it actually works out pretty well for this project. I don't wanna ramble too much because Jeff and I talked a lot about how to kind of, and he covered that in the last call, how to set up a proposal, set up a contract and help them stick to the contract. But the most important thing with a project-based, if you're billing one time is to make those deliverables really, really super clear so that it doesn't go over the hours. So that you say you have two design iterations that will take 60 hours, then you just keep it to design iterations. As soon as you go into iteration four, five, six, you're looking at a lot of extra hours that you're not getting paid for. So that's kind of a risk with project-based is if things go over, but that typically goes along with setting those expectations, setting that scope, and actually project managing it to fit within that budget. The last one is kind of considered the Holy Grail, is value-based pricing. And I can think of no better example of value-based pricing than a banana duct tape to a wall. Chris asked me like, what the heck is that? And basically that some artists that made $120,000 with his banana duct tape to a wall. Value-based is, the value is determined based on that brand advantage, in that case, the artist, as well as the value of a product. So another artist example would be someone like Picasso, costing much more than your kid's artwork. Or in this case, these are value-based products because they're private companies. It's kind of hard to figure out exactly how much they cost, but a lot of people speculate that a Rolex part, just all the parts and pieces, the metal, the gears, all of it accounts for about $800, they say, but they sell for over $5,000. The same like the new Apple iPhone, all the parts of it is the same parts as any other phone really, but, well, that's not true. But it costs under $500 to make it. And they sell it for over $1,500. You know, the quality of the product is debatable, but you're still buying a phone. What you're really buying is that value of the brand and the perceived value of the brand. Now, value-based is a whole other conversation. We haven't done too much value-based pricing on our own, and it takes a lot of research, to be honest, because a lot of people think that it's kind of the Holy Grail. You gotta find the right client for it because you're not exchanging your time for a product, you're exchanging just the product for what they perceive the product to be worth. It's very complicated, to be honest. But one of the best suggestions I've heard was that the value has to actually come from the customer that's using it, not necessarily the client's perceived value. And the more that you can get a hard number, the easier it will be to offer a value-based price option. This one specifically comes to mind with kind of startups where they think they're gonna make a billion dollars, but they don't. But it's more of that customer testing to make sure it's worth that much. Now, I actually do have an example. There was an agency that I was working with, and they had a client that was competing with some of the biggest Fortune 500, Fortune 100, whatever it is, companies in their industry. They said that they were losing $100,000 per month because they didn't have this new platform, this new e-commerce platform that they wanted us to build. So in their case, this is a really big client, in their case, their potential income is about a million dollars per year. The agency that I was working with, I know, priced it at project-based. And the downside to that was when the scope got bigger, they had to ask for more money, and that became a very uncomfortable conversation because they've already paid tens of thousands of dollars, and now they're being asked to pay tens of thousands more because the scope has changed. When with value-based, you can be a little bit more fluid with it where because your profit margin is so high, you have the ability to offer more, so to speak. So one way you can ask is, okay, you're gonna make a million dollars per year. Is it worth 10% of that potential income to invest it in this product right now? If they agree to that, then you've just got an invoice of $100,000. And really, there was another, I'm blinking on his name and I can post it after this call is done. He only does value-based pricing and he does a hundred percent payment up front, which is pretty baller to ask me. But he only does like value-based pricing where he prices it really, really high and the engagements go on as long as they need to. When they deliver that product and that product is doing what they need it to do, that's when the project is done. So he's actually had a project go on for, it was an estimated one year and it actually went on for two years. And the client at that point felt bad. They were like, we're so sorry. We just, we know we're taking up a lot of your time. We wanna finish this project for you. Where he was fine, he like 10 times the amount, so he was comfortable. He did take another five years for all he cared. But that was a good situation instead of saying, hey, this took another year, you need to pay double again and having the client upset, why didn't you finish? It's a good situation where, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's get it done. But he's already well paid for his time. Again, it's hard. There are pros and cons. Something to keep in mind that in this case, the client that you're working with, cost is not the most important factor. If we're dealing with some of the smaller mom and pop shops or someone that's really watching their pennies, it might be more difficult to pitch value based to them. What they care more about is the results and that they trust that you're actually gonna be able to deliver on that. And that's what you're selling more than the product itself. So, how do we, at Brayfactor Price, we actually, we have hourly contracts actually, where we've built in a comfortable profit margin and it's just an ongoing design contract, ongoing development contract that actually creates good, stable income. And we do just exchange our time for that hour. We have 10 hours of design work, we do 10 hours of design work. For new projects, we typically determine the project costs and we try to figure out that project value. But then I always do a little bit of pushing to try to figure out that lost cost, that risk, the potential cost, as well as their actual budget. Because once we can hone in on that, we can raise the pricing a little bit more than just the project itself. And another suggestion that was told to me that we're trying to do is with every new client, just keep pushing it higher and higher. Some, Jeff and I, when we started, we were told double your pricing, every new client double your pricing and we were like, no way, there's no way we can pull it off. So we've been doing it a little bit more, I'll speak for you, Jeff, we've been doing it a little bit slower. But the point of it is, it's easier to start a newer client higher than to raise pricing with an existing client. So with each new one, we just, hey, our price is gonna be this much, is that possible? Our price is now this much, is that possible? And we work it up. I feel like I was speedy, so I apologize for my swiftness, but that's kind of the end of my slides here. And it's just open up for discussion and questions and all the arguments about value-based versus everything else. Now I'm gonna jump in on the value-based because today actually is one of the first times I'm pitching value-based and I just saw an opportunity come up today with a client. We did a rebuild recently on an e-commerce website. And before the rebuild, they were making about 5,000 pounds a month on their e-commerce. After our launch, they went up to 10,000 and 12,000, now 15,000, they're already averaged for the last three months, 180% sales increase with an increase of 3% conversion rate. Now I have all those numbers. And the reason why I'm switching to value-based is because this client tried a low ball and they kept trying to low, they wanted to save money, and they kept trying to low ball. And I was even willing to give them, we're getting them on our maintenance plan. And when we do maintenance on e-commerce to cost more, they're trying to get a better deal. And then I did my portfolio on them and I did my research. And I looked, I'm like, wait, we just made them all this money right here. So it just like, I'm like, we just profit them more. So the services that we did is worth so much more. And the way I look at it is like, we still got opportunity, we still got the SEO, we still got conversion optimization. Like we could take that number up to 20,000, 25,000 a month, very confident in it. And now the way that I'm pitching it to the client is, if we were to go ahead and get you instead of 15,000 euros a month, 20,000 euros a month, how much is that gonna be worth to you? Would you be willing to spend $1,000 a month on maintenance plans? So instead of giving them $200 a month, we could do more. So that was my first opportunity. I saw the numbers, I saw exactly what we could give. And I think anybody with the right mind, somebody were to come and tell me, if you give me $1,000 a month, I'll give you 5,000 back. I'll give you 5,000, give me 20,000 back. Like I'm just gonna try to get more. One other thing too, on the value-based pricing, there's a book and it's dude, I think Blair ends, he kind of like started it. Like he coined it and the book is called, when without pitching manifesto. So check out that book and like this dude is just amazing. He'll change the way you look at pricing. I'll post it too later on after the call. So it'll be easy to find. Yeah, that's my piece on the value-based pricing. Yeah, and you make a good point too, because Christo talked about that before, where it states like someone needs to pitch back for an manifesto meeting. Oh no, am I forgetting? No, it's just Jeff that says, okay. Sorry, Jeff. I'm freaked out. If you're trying to get a million dollars from investors, Chris will say like, well, what is a reasonable amount percentage that you'd invest in this? And they say, you know, 5%, 10%. Okay. Sorry about that, I just cut out over here. I hope the recording is okay, because that was too dope. I really, my heart right now, I do not want to lose this recording because this was amazing and you know, super valuable. Should be okay. I have a question. So like, this is like, I'm trying to think like for somebody who's never, someone's microphone is off and it's making noises. That question. There you go, you're there now. Hi. Let me again, using Elementor and using WordPress. Actually came out of nothing, started last year, didn't do anything on the web yet. Now I have three sites that I'm building and building portfolio for. For me really right now is the question, how am I gonna price stuff? Because right now I just ask people, can I build you a website or you'll get your website for free and you only have to pay your hosting? And they all said yes. But now I'm coming to a point where, okay, after I've done these three, I do wanna really set out as a price plan. And I'm thinking two ways now, am I gonna go with how much you actually want me to do? Or I'm also looking at the kind of site that you want me to build because, well, I think for me right now an e-commerce site is a lot more work than just a page for a portfolio page or somebody that's a coach. What is, it's very hard for me to set out the main guideline, what am I gonna use? What's gonna be my first hang up or okay, this is how much it's gonna cost? Do you have any thoughts on that? Jeff, you wanna shake it? Yeah, sure. Truth is, for like the first year or two, it's a lot of trial and error. I mean, it's like sometimes, I learn a lot by undercharging and be like, I should have charged a lot more. And then like I get more confidence, I raise my prices up gradually, and that's how I learn to put the price on my stuff. But another way that I do it right now is, because I don't do all the development anymore, I find out how much it's gonna cost me to have the website built. So let's say for example, like a client comes to you and they ask, okay, we want this e-commerce website built. How much would it cost you to have somebody else build that website and then double that price? And then add a little bit more on for wiggle room. And then you got a price right there. So you're safe, you're gonna make a profit, because you never know, maybe I've gone on projects I've taken on, and I had to get help on it. So there's unforeseen expenses that do come up. And that's a good rule for any contractor too is to double or triple the cost because if they don't work out, and you need a higher, I said, and yeah, the good thing here is to kind of see your competition, see how they price things. We didn't go so far Chris, we thought about it like sending out fake emails to see their general pricing, or you can find your niche, figure out your pricing kind of like how people price similarly. We can post this later too, but I think like if you can figure out what is your goal, how many clients do you actually want, and then figure out your expenses and then you can kind of figure out the minimum that you need and work from there. That was a good one. See what somebody else would charge me for it if I would make them build the website. Thank you, that's a good starting point. Thanks a lot. Another thing too to do is find out the budget of the client. Sometimes also that helps out. I like to look at what the client has working, what we have to work with right away. The client on the very beginning shows they got a smaller budget, then I know what I'm working with. So I like to talk budget now from the very beginning, whereas when I was new, that came at the very end. But now I, yeah, so like I said, there's a lot of trial and error, and so getting to that point, but. That's a good one, probably. Okay, thank you very much. Cool. I have some questions. Hobar, thank you for your video first, Lauren. And then I just wondered like, so usually you give the proposal for the client before you start your work, actual work to make sure that like what do you expect and what I'm going to get paid. And then sometimes the client will add little things like while I'm building the website. And like in the case, you usually like do, it looks kind of simple, but sometimes it adds up a lot of the work eventually. And you usually tell the clients like, no, I cannot do this for you because it's like too much work to do. Or do you usually do for them as a service because it's a really client and then I don't want to lose you, lose the client because of that reason. Can I take it, Jeff? Yeah, go for it. Yeah. There was a lot of questions in one. The process that we usually do, like Jeff said, is we say the number on that first phone call and we see if it's a good fit to get from the going. Because if you read that, what is it called, Jeff and Tolly blanking on a note, the win without pitching manifesto. He says that we are not in the proposal making business we are in, you know, the creative business. We're not getting paid to make those proposals. So figure out before you spend time if they're actually the budget that you want them to be. Then we make the proposal, then usually, you know, Jeff, you could speak for yourself too. We get that proposal approved. We get a contract always that in that contract it has the scope of the project. So we'll say this many pages, you know, if it has a blog, e-commerce, whatever the limitations are, it does not include X, Y and Z and then deliverables. So after that, it's just a measure of project management. I used to, and Jeff, you can argue with me on this one. I used to with all of my clients on page one, three pages, fine, let's just do it. And then they ask for more images, a lot more revision time. It's gonna add on to the cost. If you want more testing, it's gonna add on to the cost. And even if there's delays, it's gonna add on to the cost. And usually it helps you stay more sane where we don't get burnt out and we don't get angry because we're not being paid for this extra time. But it also helps them understand that they're not gonna get any surprise invoices down the road of us doing too much work. Jeff? Yeah. Jeff, you're the Jeff. All right. In my back. All right. Yeah, I don't know what's going on with my internet right now. So we got a very similar process as well. And in fact, this is the topic that I'm going to be going over next week is about setting the scope and keeping the projects within scope. So I love this topic. I don't know, you know, we're going to dig deep into this one. Next call. We're going to go on to them. You know, we're going to talk about the proposal, setting expectations, you know, I could say my very first two years, I had scope creep on every single project, every single one. I had one job that's supposed to take a month, took a year. And I, we did it for free. I would never do another free website. And I buy it's not to do free websites, you know, but it comes down to the communication. And, you know, I like to, now I tried to, I tried to, like, I'm trying to phrase it. I go by a certain like philosophy now with my work, which is set the expectations a little bit lower and give over perform under, under set under expectations and over perform, which means is I don't want to promise a bunch of things. And then get me in trouble down the line where now, you know, because scope creep, it causes stress. It gets into the way of other projects and it affects other projects and other clients as well as my own health, you know, but I do take care of clients. Every single project I've done, I do go above and beyond and do more than what I'm going to say. I just do that on my own because I want to show the client, like, you know, we care that we really do. Yeah. Great question. You know, I actually forgot the question. There's a lot in there. Like, I, well, I didn't just forget. I wanted to robot mode with my internet connection. I kind of guessed it from you, Lauren. You can, you can watch it on the replay. It's okay. If it recorded. Oh God, I hope it's okay. All right. I have a just like one little more question, like many, many beginners usually go to make the portfolio. They usually go on the light of work or those kind of platform site and then the bidding is the bidding system is sucks. They'd have to like suggest really, really low price to get the job, the first jobs and like for you two guys already have like your business. So, you know, you know, you know, if you're making like building a website, do you recommend to use those methods to build up portfolios? Sure. If you could get leads from there, you could get projects. You know, if you're like, if you're new and just getting your first projects in, you know, like any way to get paid, just, I just suggest not to ever do it for free. You know, if you're building a portfolio to what you could also do is like, you know, you know, you know, for example, like I might like Nike a lot and I could do like a Nike concept piece or I could find like somebody's website, you know, for like a company or like, like something that I'm generally interested in. So if you have like something you really like, you're interested in, but you, you want to like, maybe you could maybe make them a better website just for your own, you know, your own concept, like a concept piece and use that as your portfolio. But if you could get a lead, you could get paying jobs at first, you know, I, I recommend trying every avenue that you can, you know, trying to cause, yeah, cause you're going to get experience that way. You're going to find out what works. What works for me might not work for Lauren and vice versa. You know, so it's like constantly trying. So I would not, I would not leave anything out. What do you think Lauren, do you also recommend using like those freelancing website to get started? To get started. Yeah. I think kind of like what Jeff said, it's just kind of see what sticks because I feel like getting started. We're always kind of just trying to get our feet wet, get that experience and figure out where we want to go. If you do know like, I only want to work with the Nikes of the world. And I just want to do athletic websites. Yeah. Then focus. Like he said, you can make examples of that, put it in dribble by hands, all of that. And also one thing that's helped us is kind of reverse engineer our client. So if you know where your client is looking, then you can try to get yourself there. And there are some things that did not work for us, Jeff. And there's some things that worked really, really well. So like we were trying to get higher paying clients. So we got on clutch where, you know, dribble hasn't been so much for us. And like fiber and stuff hasn't been much for us either, but we do look for freelancers on fiber, you know, freelancer, whatever those other websites are. So it kind of just depends on how you want to position yourself and what client you want to work with. If that helps. Thank you for answering both of you. Sure. Thanks. And real quick, I'm just going through the chat and I see there's a question about payments. And I think because you mentioned that about the other guy. Yeah. You know that that gets a hundred percent payments upfront that that's kind of like unrealistic. And you know, like, how do you deal with the payments? I could say for myself, I don't start anything till I have 50%. You know, I don't start any work at all. And then I break my down in chunks and milestones and define milestones throughout the project. And until the very last payment is given to me, basically it's all mine still. It's my intellectual property and I turn everything over upon final payment. Do you have anything to add to that one? No, we do the same. We do 50, 25, 25 based on milestones. And then that kind of helps the cash flow too so that you're not just, you know, when those projects are late, you're not waiting for 50% payment. Especially when they're big ones. One question I have for you, the Jeff is how do you do? How do you price or maintenance? Because we've been trying to do a hundred percent maintenance upfront before the maintenance work is done. But a lot of times it's net 30 where we fill out the beginning of the month and then they pay by the end of the month. Do you do something similar? We keep them our maintenance on PayPal and we have recurring. So that way it automatically generates the payment every month. You know, we don't want to chase down payments. It's not fun to do. So, yeah, I'd rather pay the PayPal fees than to, you know, chase down payments and invoices and everything. Then we just set up everything to automate, you know, automate as much as possible. Yeah, that's a great point. I got one more question. And for Lauren, so there's a lot of information inside this, especially when it comes to like burn rates, run rates, MLE, and all the numbers. How would you, what would you suggest to somebody new just starting this process like where to start and how to start like, and in a way that's not like overwhelming with all these numbers. It's a great question. Before I forget a thing, you brought up a good point with pace pricing because we have including fees, transfer fees, all that kind of stuff. And then you're not making as much as you thought. Because sometimes those things can add up and it's not as fun. So include that in your very real costs. For people just starting. I think it's hard for me to just tell everybody like one script to follow for me. What worked really well for me was I just took on as much work as I could and learned as much as I could. I actually did do a lot of free websites, but I felt more in control of it because I could manage how much I was going to get for free. Like, no, no, you're not, you're not. At least then I could build my portfolio. I think it's a lot of our clients comes from word of mouth. Unfortunately, where we need to work on our marketing a little bit more, but build really, really strong relationships. I forget who it is. It might be Blair. I forget which who it is. I'll have to Google this later, but there was something about like, like find that top. Find those connectors. I think he called them. I guess we have like two or three people who not even getting commissioned or anything. They just connect us with everybody else. Hey, did you meet Lauren? Hey, did you meet Lauren? When you're getting started, just network, get out there, meet people, do things that interest you, try to work with clients that you want to work with and figure it out from there, I guess for pricing. You know, start with your expenses and create profits and see how much you can raise. How much you can get from people. And, you know, thankfully you have this group here too, where you can ask Jeff or myself, if you, you know, how to manage that kind of conversation with people or, you know, ask for new opportunities or whatever it is that we have this community that we can work together on that. Yeah, Chris says, don't forget about taxes. Don't forget about taxes. Yeah, I know. Merchant fees, PayPal fees, Stripe fees, taxes, you know, paying at the end of the year, all of those sneaky little expenses, because you're a business. Yeah, I remember the first time I got hit with like, $120 PayPal fee. And I was like, what? And now, now I like have to figure that into my cost. So it doesn't shock me anymore because that hurts. $120 is just being taken out of fees. And I got conversion rates, you know. So yeah, that was my lesson right there to figure that in into it, you know, figure that in to my profit because there's more expenses that goes, you know, into it. And Pierce, I see your question on here. Jeff and I do want to talk about means because that's something he and I discuss privately a lot. What are you doing, man? How are you doing that? I know he loves it. I have mixed feelings about it, but that will probably be a whole other conversation altogether because you won't be able to shut him up about that. Yeah, I love maintenance plans. We will be doing that in a couple of weeks. Next week, we're going to be going over dealing with scope and, you know, how to use your contract and proposal and communication and to, you know, have the communication done right with a client. So that way there's clear expectations and to avoid scope creep and keep the project running smoothly. But yeah, maintenance is coming up. All right. Does anybody else have any other questions? So, you know, right now we're testing new things, you know, since this is new, the group that's going on is new right now. So we're testing out a few new things. One of the things we're going to start looking at doing is we're going to be doing a little bit of a call to maybe around the hour mark before we did the last ones that like hour and a half and keeping them more focused, you know, going forward. Also another thing too, um, like, it's, it's a, this group is open. This group is for, you know, everyone to help each other. You know, it's not just going to be myself. Not just going to be Lauren, but we have a lot of people inside this group that they have certain expertise. I think it's going to be really valuable to have others also step up and share their expertise on what is really working well for them. You know, so, uh, I'm looking forward to that coming up and open to all feedback. You know, please all feedback is super helpful. You could DM me anytime. I will respond to everybody's DM. You know, I just hope that this place is just a place where we can come and learn and grow together. So I can tell you what this does for me. When I do a call and I'm in a call and I'm also in other calls and I'm in other groups. And when I started doing these groups, it helped give me on fire for learning, you know, it got me out of that mode of just being stagnant and doing client work. I got into these groups and it just like lit that spark up inside of me that made me start looking at my business and started changing the way I thought. And you know, uh, so, you know, it, it did, it did so much to, you know, my, my growth, my personal growth. And that's why I started this group. And I'm hoping that, you know, in the elements or community, uh, that we could go ahead and help out others the same way. So with that, if anybody else has anything to add in, if not, we could go ahead and end this call and we'll go ahead and plan for the next one. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you for hosting. Cool. Cool. Big thanks to Lauren. That was amazing. I'm really, you know, that, that was awesome. I got a lot out of it. I was writing notes the whole time, you know, and for me, there's some things in there that, you know, made me think and start to look at, you know, especially which one was it? Uh, always billing for everything, billing for my emailing meetings and thinking. I was like, ooh, I like that one. You know, those are the sneaky hours. Those are the ones that really add up. So in about one to two weeks, we're going to have a way for everyone to come to one spot, to watch the videos and to download the PDFs as well. So, uh, just keep an eye out for that in the group. I'll be, you know, posting about that in the group. And we're going to make it easy. So as one place, you can get all of it. All right, everyone. Thank you for, you know, thank you for participating and being part of this. And also, you know, being part of my personal growth and my business. Thank you so much. Thanks all. Bye. Boy, what's up, man? Yeah. Hold on. Let me turn off the recording real quick.