 Let's go! I also tweeted the link to the slides if anyone needs that. So we are here to talk about how to run a WordPress design agency efficiently and how doing that allows me to follow my dreams. There's a little quick link if you want to tweet me or tweet about the session. You can check that out while I'm talking. So I have always loved to sing as long as I can remember. I was the nerdy child that would pause the Disney movies and write down the song lyrics so I could rewind it and sing the songs over and over again. And when my dad brought home our very first computer, it was a Tandy laptop if anyone remembers those. The only thing I wanted to do on it was type those song lyrics and sing them. So I come by it natural. I've always loved music. I've always loved songwriting and poetry. It's nice that songwriting is poetry and code is poetry. So I feel like all that has always gone really well together in my life. So I've always loved music but when I was growing up I was in a choir and played the piano. But when I went to college I thought I had to be a business professional for whatever reason. I just didn't give myself permission to pursue that passion as an adult. So I always missed that music in my life once I grew up and got married and got a real job and kind of went out into the real world. Fast forward to today and now my husband and I live in Nashville. I'm an artist and a songwriter. I'm working on my first album. I'm touring regionally with a band which is so much fun. We've had a few shows in Raleigh already this year so that's been a lot of fun. I'm absolutely living the dream. I feel so lucky and it sounds a little cheesy but really I'm doing more than I could have ever imagined and a lot of it is all because of WordPress. So I'm really grateful for the WordPress community and the open source software and all those things that make it all possible. So thank you all for being here. We're going to talk about the in between and how I got from A to B and how WordPress has helped me live the dream. So my husband and I run a creative agency called Rebel Creative. We work with small businesses and help them build websites and get their online presence up and running. For those of you who are curious, I'm more of a designer developer. I am self-taught, learned online and at work camps like a lot of you guys and this is a picture of me and my husband. That was back when we had day jobs where other people were paying our bills. Those were the days. So the thing that kicked it all off for us was reading this book the four hour work week. Yeah, I made the mistake of reading that book on a tropical vacation. The first vacation we had had in years where we used our vacation days to actually relax and not to visit family and things like that. So we read this book and we're absolutely inspired to reorganize our entire lives around how we could make more time for our passions, quit our day jobs and live the dream. So a few things I'll say about that. The book itself is a little cheesy in the front part. It sounds kind of like a sales pitch. So if you can just get past the cheesy front part, there is a lot of good stuff in the middle and in the second part of the book about really specific tools and strategies you can use to beta test a business idea, run your marketing campaigns. It gets really didactic and strategic in there. So definitely don't judge it by the first few allegorical chapters. The other thing I'll say about that is that it looks very glamorous. It looks like you're relaxing in a hammock and everything's great, but it takes a lot of sacrifices and things along the way to make that happen. So one of the things that helped us make the jump from having day jobs to running our own agency was being extremely frugal. That's not very glamorous. We haven't owned a TV in years. We don't pay a cable bill. Ever since I started working from home in my pajamas mostly, ever since I started working from home, we've been sharing one car because we don't have to go to two separate offices. So we've made a lot of sacrifices along the way that have allowed us to be really frugal, keep our expenses to a minimum. We've always worked remotely. We've never rented office space or anything like that. We've always been very cognizant of keeping our expenses to a minimum so that we have the freedom and the flexibility to live our lives and not have to worry so much about where our next paycheck is going to come from. So that whole transition for us was actually a four-year transition. We both had day jobs. I went down to part-time in my day job as I was doing some freelancing. Eventually went to full-time web design. That was about six years ago. And eventually my husband went down to part-time, and then he came on board full-time as well. The whole transition took about four years. It was very gradual. We were very careful about that along the way to make sure it was going to work with our lifestyle. So it looks very glamorous and it will be, but there are some sacrifices along the way for sure. So I want to talk to you about first laying the foundation for your agency or your business, but I want to ask how many of you here already run an agency for yourself or work for yourself in that capacity? Awesome. How many of you are thinking about it and you're kind of wanting to? You're just now starting to... Okay, cool. And how many of you are just here because you wanted to hear about the music industry and what it's like to be a musician? Okay, we'll talk more afterwards. Yeah, your WordPress brain might be a little burnout at this point. So hang with me. My goal for this class is for you to leave with at least one nugget that will hopefully change your life and or your business. If that's all you take away, I will be super happy. So definitely tweet me after and let me know what you thought was the most helpful thing that you learned today. So when we started our business, we definitely got advice from an accountant and a CPA to figure out what structure was right for us. So definitely do that. I'm not here to give you any legal or CPA accounting advice. I started as a solopreneur, which meant I was a sole proprietor. Once my husband came on board, we got very official, formed in LLC, et cetera, et cetera. But some of the tools that we started working with, really all we need is our laptops and internet to build a WordPress website, right? Well, good web hosting, I guess, too. So we try to keep our expenses to a minimum. Like I said, there are a few things that are mission critical. You have to have your own website, although sometimes the cobbler's children has no shoes, but you want to have your own website. So we have a domain name, basic email, file storage, all those kind of things. And this is a great example of a kind of slide that I'm not going to go down every line and read it to you, but it's here in the notes and in the slides if you want to go back and refer to it. I just want to point out some of the really awesome tools on here that have totally changed our business. And the first one I want to point out is the Wave accounting software. It's like QuickBooks, except it is totally free in every way. It's brilliant. It has amazing features like recurring invoicing, automatic invoicing, your clients can pay with a credit card. If they mail you a check, then you can sync your bank account so the transaction automatically appears, and then all you have to do is link it up to the invoice and hit reconciled, hit the little checkbox. So it's so convenient. It's absolutely changed our lives, and it's been saving us $25 or $50 a month for years since we've been running our business compared to QuickBooks and some of those other software. So I definitely love it and recommend it. Another thing is HubSpot. I personally have seen lots of clients waste tons of money on really expensive CRM customer relationship management software implementations. Those softwares can be absolute behemoths, and they're hard to manage, and it takes almost a full-time employee to manage all the intricacies of those things. HubSpot is free. The CRM portion of it anyway is totally free. It allows you to manage your sales pipeline, and the best part is the little widget that integrates with your Gmail if you use Gmail and allows you to pull in email templates to your Gmail and then track those in HubSpot automatically. So huge time saver if you put template emails for your sales process into your free HubSpot CRM. So that's really, really great for keeping yourself organized. Also, I could not live in this day and age without LastPass. So many client passwords. The head spins for sure. So LastPass is a lifesaver. I also want to talk to you guys about how to get clients. Again, I don't know you personally. I don't know your strengths and your skills and your friends and what your team looks like. So all I can do is tell you a little bit about us and what works for us. So what works for us is doing what we say we're going to do and doing good work. We are a referral-based business. We get business from our natural networks of friends and family and we're meeting people, and then we do good works for our clients, and then hopefully word gets around. Sometimes it feels a little hypocritical as a marketing agency to not do a ton of outreach, but there's so much spam in this industry, too. That can be really difficult. So one thing, one of our first clients came along, actually, from just a simple LinkedIn post, and it was actually my own cousin in South Florida who said, oh, I didn't know you built websites now. That's cool. We need a website. So don't underestimate that you're extended cousins or friends or family who already exist. You might be thrilled to know that this is what you do now. And social media is a great way to keep in touch with that natural network of people. And posting regularly is also just a nice way of reminding them that you're there, so that you're on their mind the day a need does come up for them. And that's kind of how we use our social media. It's just to stay on people's radar. Another thing that really helps is actually caring about people, being a good listener. If your client has a problem, it may not be what they hired you to solve, but if you can just say, hey, you know, I heard everybody really loves MailChimp. Maybe you want to think about that. If you have ideas and strategies for them to add value above and beyond what they hired you to do, that's going to go a long way to build that relationship and that trust for you. So we try to do that. And always under promise and over-deliver. You definitely want to overestimate on those timelines to make your clients happy by exceeding their expectations instead of the opposite. Another thing our friends and family have along the way kind of asked us, ooh, aren't you worried about Squarespace? How are you going to make a living if everybody can just come along and do what you're doing and build their own website? Aren't you worried about that? So we always try to stay up to date on what the competitors are doing for sure, but to be honest, we really don't worry about that. And if I have a client who comes along and says I'm thinking about doing my website myself, I say go for it. That's what's so great about WordPress. It's an awesome community of people who are here for you and we're here to help you learn how to do it. I'm self-taught. You can be too. Go for it. That's awesome if you have the time. The type of people who are going to be good clients for us are the busy business owners who know that their time is best spent running their business and not working in the business, if that makes sense. So those people who have the time and the interest and the creativity to do it themselves are not going to be your ideal client. You're most likely, most likely your ideal client is going to be that busy business owner or a nonprofit with a big team and no one has the time because they're so busy working with volunteers that you really just can't worry about the do-it-yourselfers. You can just encourage them to connect with the WordCamp community and start learning. Like I said, we don't do a lot of outbound marketing because there are so many spammers in the industry. I find that that makes it really hard to stand out from that crowd if you are doing any kind of outbound marketing. So be really careful about that. I will say if you're building your portfolio and just starting out, a great way to do that is to offer to do some websites for free for people just to have a few items to start your portfolio out with. When you do that, if you're using that strategy, be really thoughtful about the type of person or business you're building that free website for. For example, is there an attorney or a CPA who specializes in working with the type of clients that you'd like to be working with? If you do a really good job for them, their clients are going to see their website. They're going to possibly refer their clients to you. We have a lot of clients in that position who send us new clients. So it's great to establish those relationships and keep them. And we also tell our clients at the beginning of the sales process, our goal is to establish long-term relationships with our clients and always be here for you. Our goal is not to build a website and scurry away. So that's really helpful. And you would be amazed, unfortunately, and none of you guys are this way, but unfortunately in this industry, there are a lot of people who don't do what they say they're going to do. They leave a project in the middle. Heaven forbid they get paid early and then fall off the map and you can never get a hold of them again. Unfortunately, in this industry, just doing what you say you're going to do and doing it well is a huge differentiator. So never lose sight of that and just always follow through and go the extra mile to make sure your clients are happy and you'll be fine. So any questions about any of that before I dig into some of the WordPress bits? Okay, awesome. The biggest thing if I could emphasize any one point to you guys would be process, process, process, process. Never do anything twice manually. Proceduralize it. Find a way to save yourself time doing it. Get really efficient and repeat. So that's what we do. When we first started out doing websites, I used to go to Theme Forest and I would shop for a different theme for every client. I would find a nice theme that looks like what they wanted to communicate and I would get to work customizing it for them. I had to learn what is that developer's theme options panel look like? Oh, where do they hide this or that or how do I get the social media icon? And it was just a nightmare of learning every different theme every time. It was an uphill battle for sure. Ever since we processed out our designs, we started using Genesis with the StudioPress Pro Plus theme package. It has saved us immense amounts of time just because of the themes all being built on the same framework and the same structure, the CSS classes are going to be largely the same from one theme to the next. Dot, site, hyphen, header, those kind of things are going to be the same. You're not going to spend a lot of time rooting around in the code. It's just a really efficient process and it's absolutely changed our life. If anyone knows why this keeps popping in and out. Oh. No. Okay. Yeah, so just processing out the theme platform alone is a huge time saver for us. I also use site ground hosting. I just prefer to use the same hosting platform as much as I can, again, just because it's efficient. I know how to use it. I encourage my clients to let us host their site as well. Okay, my only complaint about StudioPress themes, which has more to do with the fact that I'm a designer developer and not one of these from scratch hardcore developers, is that sometimes the interior pages on a StudioPress theme can be a little boring. Sometimes the client wants a really nice, long-scrolling page like the homepage for the interior pages as well. And for those situations, we've started using Beaver Builder. There's also a specific plugin called the Genesis Danbuster that will do a really nice job of connecting your StudioPress to your Beaver Builder and getting rid of all those other content areas that you don't need. So that has been another huge time-saving process for us that leads to a much nicer-looking website for us in the end for our clients. You guys are probably sick of hearing this, but always make a backup. Backup your backups. We have SiteGround web hosting, which makes nightly backups of all of our client sites, but every so often I'll also pull down a backup of my SiteGround account and upload it into OneDrive. So I have a backup of my backup. The thing you may not have heard people say, and maybe they don't say it because it's common sense, but sometimes you have to learn the hard way, is don't, even if you have a nightly backup, don't do four hours of work on a client website and then do something that might break your database. You might lose the four hours of work you just did, even if you have last night's backup. Don't forget to think about all the work you just finished doing on that site. So that is possibly a piece of advice that will save you a lot of time. Another thing that has saved me a lot of time over the years is really understanding the difference between the WordPress one-click installation and the manual installation. Your web hosting company probably has a really snazzy one-click installation, and that is so awesome, and use it all day long. However, it has also really come in handy for me to understand the little bits and components inside of the wp-config file. It has the database name and the database username and the database table prefix and some of these little pieces of information that if you understand how the pieces of the puzzle connect to each other, you're going to be a lot more empowered to troubleshoot problems, especially when you're moving a client site to a new web hosting company and things like that. So don't be scared of the manual installation process and understanding how that works. And if you don't understand how that works, come to the happiness bar or talk to me afterwards and we can talk about it. Another thing I do to save time is once I do my one-click installation to set up a new website, I will go straight into wp-content and plugins and delete the plugins folder. Sounds crazy, but what I've done to save time is take all my favorite plugins on my computer desktop and zip them into one plugins folder. So then I go replace the old plugins folder with my plugins folder and unzip it. And then all I have to do is go into the WordPress back-in and run one big update plugins, activate all plugins, and now in five minutes I have all my favorite plugins there instead of taking 25 minutes to install, activate, install, activate. So again, just saving time with a process that works for you. Also, importing your theme demo data can come in really handy if you're trying to get from A to B really quickly on a client site. And the widget importer and exporter plugin has saved me a lot of time, especially when you're dealing with those studio press themes. So the studio press home pages are built with widget areas. So even if you import the theme demo data, you still have to go in and manually build those widgets. So again, never do anything twice. If you build a theme for one client and you configure all those widget areas according to the instructions, go ahead and use this widget import-export plugin to export all those widgets and now you have them saved for next time. So next time you have a client who wants to use that same theme, you'll be ready to go. And it'll only take you five minutes instead of an hour that time. So again, just always be thinking about your process in ways you can save time. Any questions about that before we go on? Cool. Okay, I'm not going to talk about all of these plugins. You guys might have plugin overwhelm at this point. I'm just going to pull out a couple that have been really helpful for us. I would never build a WordPress website without some kind of cache plugin. I use the SiteGround Optimizer because my websites are on SiteGround. If you use a different web host to get a plugin that works really well for your web host to speed up your site, definitely an SEO plugin. If you like Yoast or all-in-one SEO pack, those two are awesome. I will point out the pods, custom content types and fields plugin has changed my life. As a designer developer, I used to be really scared of custom post types. But this plugin makes that really easy for you to create a custom post type for your client. And then you can call that on the front end using something like Beaver Builder to display your custom post types. Oh, yeah. And these slides also you can get by going to laurabell.com forward slash slides. And I also tweeted that link as well if you need it. These are all pretty standard. I will say they use any font or the font squirrel web font generator. Those plugins both come in handy if your client has a really specific branding and style guide and they want you to replicate that exact font. And it's not available on Google Font. So those can be life savers in the right situation. And the page links to plugin comes in handy for me a lot. Sometimes a client wants to link a web page to a PDF instead and things like that. So it's always a kind of a fun work around plugin. The short code any widget plugin is also a life saver. It allows you to put any content in a widget and then pop that short code into the front end of a website. This comes in really handy, especially if you need to put a piece of code on a regular WordPress page that doesn't usually play nice in the regular page editor. So there's a lot of different scenarios where that comes in handy. And the rest of these are pretty standard. Any questions about plugins? Does anyone feel like I'm talking too fast? Okay. First client meeting and getting started. One thing I try to think of as a differentiator for our company is we come to all the meetings prepared with an agenda and a process, a document that's going to guide them through the first meeting. Here's what we're going to talk about and some of the questions I'm going to ask you. And then I have a checklist of here's the things we're going to need from you after the meeting at your convenience, all your logins and things like that. And also, here's a timeline that we're going to work off of. And then as we go along, we can add to that same document things like the first draft of the website outline and things like that to help us stay organized throughout the process. I will email them this Word document in advance of the first meeting. It will probably not include the first draft of the site outline at that point because we won't have gotten that far yet. But it's a great way to remind them that they're coming into your process. And also, if you're in charge and organized, it helps put them at ease. Question back here. Yes, sorry, that could be confusing. Yes, we've already had usually a call where we find out what they what they want, what they need. They tell us who they are. And we tell them here's our quotes. In our proposals, we typically bullet out all the things that the site includes and also include some things. Well, it doesn't include this. That might cost you extra. We make sure to be really transparent in that process so they feel comfortable in knowing that this is what they're going to get and at what price. And they don't feel like we're going to try and upsell them afterwards or charge them more. So after all that happens and they've agreed to let us build their website, this is just how to kind of run that process to stay organized. Question. Do you have this meeting in person or by phone? One thing, part of the music journey for us has been building a business where everything is completely remote. If we happen to be in the same city as a client, we do this meeting in person and we have done that before. We will typically do this on a Zoom free webinar. And that may or may not be a video call. Sometimes we'll just share our screen or a lot of times we'll get on the video chat so we can see the client in person. But yeah, we use Zoom a lot. And sometimes it's just a phone meeting depending on the client. So one process we try to stick to is before we kind of you never want to be elbowing your way into the client's life and saying, oh, here's what you need to do. Before you learn about them, what are their problems that they need solved? You don't want to be a nag or pretend like you know how to run their life. So it's always better to ask them lots of questions and get a feel for how they're running things, what's working, what's not. And then you can provide suggestions. But definitely don't do that before you ask a lot of questions. We had a friend who had their first child come back and their tagline was he's coming into your world. Don't be overwhelmed. You don't have to rearrange your life around him. He's coming into your world. So we try to think about our clients that way. They're coming into our process. We're the professionals that they've hired to help guide them through and we try to stay organized and help them feel that way and really guide them through that process and run the meetings and those kind of things. Question? Yeah, that's a great question. I will always ask them first of all what they need, why they called. I'll ask them how they heard about us. I'll ask them what's been working with their old website and what hasn't been working. One thing that's really important to ask them and we'll talk a little more about this is do they during the design process how much of their content is going to change or will it stay the same? Will it be written from scratch or will it be a light refresh of their old content? The content can really be a sticking point and helping them understand the workload for that. What we have found makes that process go really smoothly is to be their consultant and their friend in helping them imagine and organize what their new website is going to look like and how it's going to be organized. Asking them about some competitors who have a nicely organized website that they like can be really handy to reference if you're overwhelmed and don't know where to start. Once they have that first draft of the site outline it might look pretty standard like home, about us, our services, anything else creative you can think of, testimonials, contact us then they can use that outline like a checklist to then go and write the content or refresh the content. Figuring out the content is a big one. We I do often go into those meetings with an agenda and I'm happy to tweet out that agenda template maybe tomorrow after I fly home maybe in the airport later. Any other questions? So when we're working with clients we're listening and responding with empathy even if they say things that we think aren't very nice we're always trying to be transparent with our pricing what's included and what's not we try to be trustworthy and reliable we try to have a 24 hour response time if it's a small change on your website that's a 24 hour response time if it's a bigger change we will be careful to reply to the email and say hey got it gonna get on this here soon expect it to be done by ex-date so always communicating just trying to help them know that they've been heard and we got the message and if you make a mistake just apologize that really goes a long way and I think as humans everyone appreciates that and again you might be nervous that a mistake is gonna do damage but a lot of times it can build trust even more if you apologize and handle it the right way so one of the biggest things one of the biggest struggles that we've had to deal with that has been unexpected for us to see is defining our boundaries that's really fun isn't it the content creation has been the biggest boundary to be defined and work through with those clients I listened to a podcast which I linked to in the resources for you all about this and when I listened to that podcast the podcast host said designers design content designers don't create content if your client wants you to create content if that's something you're into awesome that's something you need to charge extra for what I found myself doing was just to speed the project along was helping the client rewrite the web page and oh you don't have content for the home page you know kind of called action I'll just write that for you and those are things that copywriters charge a lot of money for so as soon as I heard that podcast the very next client we got wanted some hands-on help with their content which is something I absolutely would have done for free before we ended up charging them an extra $1,500 for that so like Bridget said in the keynote be sure you're not undercharging be sure you're not doing things for free that other people are charging for unless maybe that's a part of your custom process and the value that you add to your clients but definitely you don't want to be doing it on accident typically waiting on the content is the worst part of any website project the client might underestimate how long it's going to take them to write that content they might procrastinate it waiting on that content a lot of times is the biggest slow down so when we base our timelines every timeline we create for a client is after you deliver all the content to us then your website is going to take us this long now the real kind of secret is we can get started behind the scenes about the design we don't need to tell them that necessarily but that's kind of what we're doing we tell them the timeline is based on the final delivery of content you can't deliver us the content a week before the due date and then expect your site to be done so that's kind of the biggest boundary we've had to set we also set a boundary with three rounds of changes just to encourage our clients to get all their feedback out on the first draft and not feel like it's an endless loop of change this change that okay no I don't like it change it again three rounds of changes if you need more we want you to be happy that's fine we might need a charge for that and we also offer our clients 30 days of free edits and tech support after site launch most of our clients do go ahead and pay the invoice as soon as the website is done being built but we feel like this is a great courtesy for them if they catch a typo it also makes them feel really secure and like they're not just being thrown to the wolves as soon as you cash that check so our clients like that we also track our time in bill in 15 minute increments minimum if something takes you two minutes by the time you read the email do the thing reply to the client send the invoice track the invoice cash the check all the things that you have to do it's definitely way more than two minutes so even a quick thing for a client is going to be a 15 minute invoice we use a couple of fun tools to manage our time I could not live without to do our to do list software also I'm a big fan of doing the most important work first in your day or else I will get caught just responding to emails all day so make sure you're working on what's important and not what just popped into your inbox we do have a standard website wrap up checklist again this is a fun fact that I remind my clients of very regularly it helps them be sure they're not going to be left high and dry I always provide them with every piece of login information that they need to access their site in the past a lot of our clients have been burned by designers being really secretive with their content and thinking that that's going to lead to client loyalty if they don't know how to do anything without me oh that's job security but really that can leave clients in a bad spot if maybe you win the lottery and you're not doing your web design business anymore you know just set them up for success and leave them feeling empowered which is why we have a standard wrap up process that includes giving them video tutorials and making sure they have all the login information that they need and a few other things as well making sure the site's cache aid it's mobile friendly, it's scoring well on all those mobile and speed testing sites and submitting the XML index to Google search console and things like that so again standardizing your process I do, yeah Quicktime which is free on Max has a great screen recorder so you don't even need any special software for that you can just do a screen cast and just walk them through here's how you login, if you want to login and change this sentence it's very easy if you want to do anything more than that we're here to help you but here's where you might go if you wanted to try it don't worry the site's backed up nightly if you make a mistake we can roll it back just empowering and encouraging them and I find only about 20 or 30% of our clients use those tutorials a lot of times they just call us I upload them to our YouTube channel unlisted and then give them the links in their kind of wrap up password document I do a word document via email question I would like to do more proactive maintenance agreements I feel like that's an opportunity that we've missed over the years if I had it to do all over again I would encourage clients to do at least like a $50 a month proactive maintenance agreement right now we're only charging our clients for web hosting if they're on our server and then we charge them hourly when they need maintenance we're moving more towards proactive maintenance agreements though it's a nice way to layer in some recurring revenue for yourself while making sure that the site is proactively maintained instead of letting them decide when they need the help a lot of times we work with non-profit accounts who can take advantage of the free dream host for non-profits outside of that we're pretty much encouraging them to be on our site ground account and we manage that all on one account if there's a special issue with their site or they're getting tons of traffic we might put them on their separate account any other questions how much time do we have are we out of time how many? oh great awesome good okay more questions then? yes I did bring the guitar yeah I want to make sure stop me like three minutes before time so I can play you guys a song great question yes yes in fact when I was giving my pep talk about life and dreams and work and saving time kind of the other secret is now that we're combining web design with music yes I'm living my dream and that is so awesome we have time for almost nothing else you know running a business really does take a lot of time so you know we don't own a TV we don't go to the movies a lot we hang out with our friends and do music and do WordPress and that's about it but that's okay because that's all super fulfilling and things that we love and are passionate about I will say I'm the type of person that's always thinking about okay how can I get the bills paid so I can spend more time doing music you know what's it going to take the pre-vote tour bus is about two million dollars so that's out but what if we had a really nice hybrid minivan with a little trailer for the gear you know wouldn't that be nice so I'm always thinking about that kind of stuff and doing and I think it's smart in the four hour work week book will also talk you through some of this outlining your dreams and how much they're going to cost and what it's going to take so for example if your target was to make six thousand dollars a month and you bill a hundred dollars an hour to your clients as an example you need to work you need to build two hours a day including weekends which isn't bad I'll work on the weekends if I only have to work two hours a day so there are ways to think about it that aren't overwhelming ideally you would want to do project based pricing so that you're not trading hours for dollars but I do think about it that way sometimes question yes no however I am highly ADD very distractable I've had to really teach myself to whatever is the most important thing that day I do turn off email I don't focus on anything except for that one big priority three hours later when I'm out of that zone then I'll circle back to email so I'm not quite that disciplined about it but there is definitely a discipline of focus that has to take place I always check in the morning make sure nothing's urgent then kind of go into my zone until I get the big priorities done and then kind of come back to it because the reality is also if it's a crisis they will pick up the phone and call you question yeah oh yeah that's in there what do you do in a situation where you know six months later you still haven't gotten all the content we ask for 50% of the project fee immediately for that reason we're investing our time even before we have everything that we need to do so if that was to happen we've already gotten 50% of the project fee it stinks if we have a really busy month coming up the next month and they're kind of pushing us towards that it's Murphy's law it always happens that way but really we've been compensated 50% so it's kind of all on their timeframe in fact I say that to my clients a lot we're happy to work on your timeframe if it takes you longer that's fine as long as you're not expecting me to do it in one week because you waited until a week before some huge event to put your content together no we just wrapped up a website that did take about eight months but that was a situation where they were sending us content gradually as they were able to finish it and so it was nice for a change to be able to just do a little bit at the time during that eight months instead of having to do it all at once so pros and cons any other questions yeah that's a tricky one yes that's a tricky one we have had clients that told us they couldn't afford a copywriter and the content that they provided was not good and we advised them that we thought the content could be improved and they just said sorry that's what we got so sometimes that happens and there's really nothing we can do about it other than falling on the sword and writing the content forum which I don't think is a reasonable expectation I mean it's their business so at the end of the day they're kind of in charge and if it's that horrible you can always take your name off the bottom of the website so insane sometimes they do that exact thing so would you get you actually completed? in that situation I mean you're not going to link to it on your portfolio page right if it's not very good you're not going to get any more contracts another nice way to illustrate that content's not included is I like to say this project includes up to five hours of basic proof reading services anything beyond that is x dollars per hour so that is a nice thing that I try to build in to give myself the peace of mind of not a run on sentence but we're very clear about where to draw our boundaries for sure but you had a question? no that's just me because I'm the grammarian in the family but I'm not perfect typos still happen and I'm ashamed of myself but I do my best and there's also websites like is it Grammarly where you can paste a paragraph and it'll tell you so if that's not your strength and you still want to build that in as a value add for your clients and also I think if your talent is writing and you love writing content for your clients then charge for that and build it in as part of what makes you great hey I'm going to help you have more awesome content than the next guy that's your niche now you know so I think having an honest assessment of your own strengths and weaknesses is extremely helpful in how you set yourself up for success with your clients and draw your boundaries and what you're not and what you're willing to help them with for a fee I think somewhere in here I said practice saying this phrase yes I can absolutely help you with that and I'll just go ahead and track my time and send you an invoice yes I would love to help you with that I'll just send an invoice no problem because that's not included but I would love to help you with it um let's see so we talked about this a little bit with the proactive maintenance plans um as a web designer if you are just building websites for your client when that website is done now what? it's like you're a hunter who has to go out and kill and eat for every meal it can be kind of a bummer when you don't have a steady day job or when your spouse doesn't have some kind of steady day job pay your bills in that situation so as a business owner you always want to be thinking about recurring revenue opportunities for you and your sanity and your peace of mind um this can be really great and it might look different for everyone again depending on your skill sets if you can develop a really nice proactive maintenance agreement with your clients where you charge them so many dollars a month to proactively maintain their websites awesome there's one client that does that with us right now because when they came to us they had a contact form on their website that had been broken for a year and lots of people had emailed them and asked about their services and they had missed it so that client is happy to pay their proactive maintenance fee you might have a hard time talking other clients into it who really watch those recurring expenses like I do you know anything recurring expenses yes I'll say something like includes up to 30 minutes a month or 1 hour a month of basic changes or not depending on what you're going to charge them and I include plugin updates, theme updates PHP updates um and then yes automated daily backups I think that's it sometimes we'll include an SSL certificate yes we provide all those video tutorials and everything and even in the sales process really stress to our clients WordPress is user friendly you're not going to be beholden to us you can get up there and make a basic change yourself don't worry about it but probably 75% of our clients don't do that and just email us because again they're busy business owners but some of them do some of them especially the ones that are big enough to have individual employees or in that situation having the video is really great because employees turn over now you don't have to train every employee who ever comes to their company how to do the same thing on the website okay oh great question I always thought growing up singing in my car I'm an epic car singer my friends in college used to say next year to stop light the other day you were singing in your car you were really singing in your car you were really going for it oh sorry yeah that's what I do I always thought you had to have something to bring Nashville so I always thought gosh one day I'm going to be talented enough to go there and I think gradually as I got more into songwriting and music I learned the best of the best are and learn from them and it is devastating and humbling and demoralizing and it's all you can do not to want to go home with your tail between your legs but if you can hang in there and learn from these people you're going to come out the other side way better than you would have been if you were not in a pressure cooker learning from a fire hose so once that kind of clicked I absolutely were full steam ahead on moving to Nashville because I just wanted to be in the middle of it and there's other great cities for music too especially New York and LA so that's not the only place we could have gone but for me I've always loved country music so it seemed like a good fit there's a lot of other kinds of music in Nashville too the studio and recording industry is big there for all genres was the second part of the question how many groups do you remember? so I am the artist songwriter myself I play guitar and go out and tour and play we'll do sometimes we'll do cover gigs at a brewery and play cover songs but what I really love to do is get out with a full band of musicians that I bring from Nashville and go and tour and play sets of original music so it's really fun let me see if I have any more slides to get through before I take some more questions and play you guys a song so just when we're talking about recurring revenue just a few other things I want to say this can be really powerful for building your business in the long term if you have any of these skills if you are excited about learning these skills definitely if it's not your passion don't even bother because that will absolutely come through and you won't love your life but if you have any of these skills then think through how you can dovetail your process with hey client now that your website is complete do you want to talk about how I can help you with Google AdWords do you want to talk about a proactive SEO coaching program do you want to talk about social media consulting we used to we used to do social media management for clients years and years ago we found that the effort it takes to really roll up our sleeves and speak in that client's voice every single day was too much of our time and too much money for what the clients were willing that's probably because we work with a lot of really small businesses so I'm not saying that would be the case for everyone we found that the consulting approach was more effective helping them build those profiles right the first time giving them some feedback on how to manage that how their blog strategy can work with their social media strategy and giving them that advice but letting them run with it no they are all over the place my husband used to be in financial services so when we started out we worked with a lot of independent financial advisors just naturally what our friends were but now it's completely random we're also very passionate about nonprofits so we work with a lot of nonprofits if you work with nonprofits I'm also very passionate about letting nonprofits know that Google will give them $10,000 a month in free online advertising through the Google ad grant program so definitely tell your nonprofit clients about that so just really think through any recurring revenue products that you can offer for your clients not to be salesier pressure them into it make sure you're really adding value for them but what if you woke up every day knowing that your bills were paid for the month and any websites that you designed were gravy on top of your regular recurring revenue income that would be kind of the ideal situation to be in from a business owner standpoint it also allows you to cast a wide net and just be ready to pivot right industries change social media used to be a big thing it still is a big thing but business owners are kind of having to prioritize it with all the other big things that they have to worry about just always be ready to pivot and learn a new technology to help your clients is kind of our philosophy I'm not going to read through these slides but I did provide this checklist of items you need from your client we'll start here and then obviously customize it for that specific client you're going to need all their logins and lots of other fun stuff I always like to get the original logo file from them because it's going to be a higher quality image to have up on that website here's the additional resources we already talked about the 4-hour work week the second item there 10 mistakes you're making with clients that cost you that is the podcast that put an immediate $1500 in my pocket definitely listen to that podcast and see if you get any nuggets out of it you know I think the guy hosting the podcast is more of a graphic designer so you'll kind of have to tweak the advice for your industry but it's great automating when you can't afford to hire yet especially if you're an Apple laptop user this is a really great podcast with lots of fun apps and things that save you time and the big leap conquer your hidden fear and take your life to the next level I'm kind of a self-improvement junkie this book is really really great and helps you understand kind of your own psychology and things that can happen when you're trying to step outside of your comfort zone and do something new to be honest if you're starting an agency or quitting your job or something like this your friends and family are going to freak out they're going to say things that they think are really supportive but sound really discouraging like oh but you can get your old job back if you need it right huh yeah interesting that you would point that out I'm sure I could but that's not the goal here so that book is really good for working through some of that oh three minutes, okay great let me see New Year, New Life this is like a cool video on Goal Setting by Tony Robbins it's my favorite thing about the internet especially if you want to watch it but you can watch it anytime and we kind of nerd out on Jeff Bezos and his regret minimization framework sounds nerdy that's okay it's basically just living life for no regrets right like I've always wanted to go to Nashville and do music and I didn't walk into town and get some huge record deal but that's okay I'm never going to spend my life wondering what would have happened if I went to Nashville to pursue music and quite frankly I did for a lot of years after college went oh man you know I got married and got this job like that's cool I guess I chose those things instead of music I guess now I can I guess now it's too late and kind of let myself believe some of that until my mindset shifted so really thinking through what are the things I'm going to regret not living life when I'm on my death bed kind of thing and one last pep talk you can only grow if you're willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new we were talking about this last night at the after party if you're doing life right and chasing your passions and building a business where you're doing meaningful work you're always going to be uncomfortable get comfortable being uncomfortable you cannot grow and do new things without doing new things that make you uncomfortable it sounds like really cheesy self-improvement advice but for me the music industry is that way in a perfect world I'm always playing for some kind of newer different audience that oh I've never played in a theater this big before this is terrifying even when I played my very first coffee shop as much as I love to sing oh this is terrifying these people are just drinking coffee and they don't even know what's about to hit them like I'm going to plug this guitar in and I just don't know what's going to happen I've never done this before it's terrifying why did I do this to myself oh gosh it's too late to cancel the gig again if you're always learning and growing and doing new things and progressing in your career which hopefully you are that feeling never goes away learning and doing something different if that feeling ever does go away because you're doing the same word camp speech or you're doing that you should probably reevaluate your life like always be learning and growing so that's the kind of people we are that's the philosophy that we subscribe to and it sounds really pessimistic but I do bring that attitude into my music like oh I guess this is just going to be uncomfortable I just say oh well here I am this is actually my first word camp speech so I'm living bad advice right now and it was a little uncomfortable at first but you guys were fantastic oh yeah see there's just no way to avoid those mortifying little things that happen along the way you just can't if you're doing life right it happens okay so I'm going to play you guys a song my big sales pitch if I have one is I write an email newsletter about the musical journey so I would love for you guys to go to my website and subscribe to that email newsletter and I tell all the wacky stories about moving to Nashville and doing music I apologize to our audio engineers I don't really have a way to plug in my guitar so I don't know how good this is going to sound on the camera and hopefully the guitar is loud enough for you guys to hear it so we talked about Jeff Bezos regret minimization regretting anything on your deathbed and we talked about well I don't know if we talked about it but life is short you know go out there and do passionate work that is meaningful to you live your life with passion chase your dreams and if having a remote WordPress business allows you to live your dreams that's great if WordPress is your dream that's awesome you're already rocking it so I'm going to play you guys a love song that I wrote for my husband but it's kind of about understanding that life is short and making the most of it in the moment so I'm going to play you guys a song I wrote called Immortal and then we got a skedaddle to the closing ceremonies I was curious if you are okay because the closing ceremony is supposed to start at 140 and maybe the whole audience can listen to you oh yeah yeah I'm for it uh okay yeah yeah oh two songs all right how about one song and then we'll see if y'all have questions and then hey if they want to hear a song at closing ceremonies I'm for it y'all tell them whether or not it's good and we'll work that out I'll just get over here so maybe you can see how's that oh yeah if you want to Instagram all the social media things feel free tag me up take me to the some free stickers if you did not get one come and see me and I'm here for questions and I'll be in the happiness bar after closing remarks for questions