 Thank you. Thanks so much for that introduction. My name's Katie and this is my business partner, Victoria Cole. Hi guys. Awesome. So we are coming here today from North Carolina. A little bit of background. He just introduced our professional background, but in addition to graphic design, I'm also an interactive theater for social change actor. So what that means is I go across the country performing at colleges and universities on things like sexual harassment, sexual assault, racism, and pretty much everything else under the ISM umbrella. So what that means is you guys are getting a warm up this morning. I bet you were expecting that. So everybody stand up and if you're not standing next to each other, just move forward for this first bit. It'll take like two minutes. I know everyone's so excited. It's 9 a.m. on a Saturday morning. So we're playing a game called Gotcha. What you're going to do is you're going to take your right hand and make a thumb and put your thumb upside down and scoot next to a person if you're not by a partner and neighbor. You make a palm with your left hand and you're going to stick your thumb into your neighbor's palm. So this game is called Gotcha. I'm going to count to three and on three you are going to try to grab your partner's thumb and make sure your thumb doesn't get got. All right. One, two. I didn't even follow my own rules there. Sorry. I'm killing it this round. We're going to switch it up. Make your left thumb a thumb and flip it upside down and make your right hand a palm and we're going to go the other way. This time I'm going to be a little bit of a sporadic counter. So just get on your toes. One, two, two. Oh no. I know. Everyone else is feeling that right now. Okay, three. Warm up the brains this morning. Warm up the brains, right? Again, getting moving, getting a little bit more engaged. It is 9am. So sorry to put you through that. So as our introducer was talking about, Carbureaucreative's mission is to empower women and minority on businesses to succeed with impactful design. Carbureaucreative grew out of Victorianized frustration with our options in the traditional workforce. And we're two of many women who have left their traditional workforce in previous years. So since 1997, women-owned businesses have grown by 114%. Well, that number is even larger for women of color who own businesses. Businesses owned by women of color have grown by 467%. And this is compared to the national growth rate of 44%. On the surface, that seems incredible. More and more women are starting their own businesses. But when you dig a little bit deeper, you find that a lot of these women are necessity entrepreneurs. So a necessity entrepreneur is somebody who's starting their own business because they don't have any other options. So they're either unemployed or underemployed or face certain challenges in their workplace that make working a typical job impossible. So as women, I'm sure we've all faced our challenges in the workplace. And there's some that are pretty well known and we'll kind of dive deep into a lot of them. So why are women leaving the traditional workforce? There's higher unemployment among women. There's family responsibilities that make working a traditional nine to five really challenging, especially when PTO is limited. There's the lack of flexibility when you have a family, when you need those extra hours, or if you have health concerns or other mitigating circumstances that make it really challenging. And then when you do find a job, women make 76% of their male counterparts. So it's incredibly frustrating knowing that the work you're doing isn't being valued as those around you. There's the Boys Club. Most industries are still typically dominated by men. And when you have men dominated industries and there's one or two female on a team or even a department, that can breed in culture of sexual harassment and discrimination. And that's why I left the workforce myself. Being in two previous jobs with sexual harassment, I grew incredibly frustrated and started looking for other options. There's a lack of visibility among female leadership and female bosses, female managers. So it's hard to envision yourself growing within a company or seeing your growth potential where you don't have an example to look up to. So we'll dive a little bit into that. It's what I call the leadership conundrum. On average, women are 18% less likely than men to be promoted into manager positions. And this is from entry-level positions. So starting from the ground up, you don't have the same possibilities and growth potential as your male counterpart. And it gets worse as you continue growing within a company. Only one in five C-level executives are women. But like, I think the population is half women, right? Right. So that seems like a really skewed statistic. It is. So when you're in a job and when you're seeing these in your leadership position, when your bosses are men and not women, you can grow discourage. And so a lot of this comes down to the idea of a personality bias where women who are assertive and decisive are seen as aggressive and bossy. And women who don't assert themselves are seen as weak or lacking leadership skills. So it's kind of a lose-lose situation. We're talking a lot about a negative stuff. I promise we'll get to more positive stuff right now. But we want to just kind of discuss the foundation of why women are leaving. And women who are in roles aren't applying for promotions or aren't applying for jobs that they don't feel qualified for. Women don't apply for a job unless they feel they meet 100% of the requirements. Men apply when they meet 60%. But I thought when you apply for a job, you have to have all of the requirements. Right. So did I. Yeah. So for all of my jobs, I've only applied when I met 100% of the requirements. And I've only applied for promotions when I felt I met 100% of the requirements. And women who even go so far as to apply for a promotion or raise are 30% more likely to be seen as intimidating, aggressive and bossy as compared to men. And I can speak to that. Right. I can speak to that personally. In my first job as an office manager, I was working for a startup that was developing a product that helped women, which sounded really, really cool. Going into an industry, going into a job where I felt like I was doing something. But I quickly learned that they weren't insulated from the same problems we're talking about. Within the first few months, I started working directly under the VP of product development, working with design and ideation and starting to really build and brand this product. So when she had to leave abruptly, I took over all of her responsibilities and projects. So for a few months, I was doing both of my jobs simultaneously. I was doing all of my office management jobs and I was doing all of her projects as a product of the VP of product development. And I finally decided to ask for a raise. I sat down with our CEO and I wasn't asking to be paid as much as the VP of product development. I wasn't asking to be making twice as much as I'm making. But since I was an office manager and I was doing payroll, I did know I was making less than anybody else in the company. So I didn't think I was going out of left field to ask to be paid appropriately. So I sat down with them. I laid out what value I brought to the company, the responsibility, the jobs I was doing and his response. Well, we didn't hire you for that position. We wouldn't have hired you for that position. You didn't have the requirements. Why should we pay you for something that we would not have hired you for? But you were already doing the job, right? Yes, for months. I had been doing the job for months. So I had that reaction too. I was in that meeting and I didn't say anything. I was like, all right. So I left that meeting feeling undervalued and really questioning my role in the company and whether or not I would continue to grow in that company. If I was doing a job and I wasn't being recognized, how else was I going to be promoted within the company? So I sent an email pretty much clarifying everything we talked in that conversation and I did get a raise that next week. But it shouldn't have to take me essentially threatening to quit the job for our bosses to recognize our worth. So another factor in women-owned businesses or a lot of women leaving to start their own businesses has to do with family. Women with a partner in children are 5.5 times more likely to do all of the housework than their male counterparts, which is an issue in itself. However, women tend to take on more family responsibilities. And this can make a traditional workday a little bit more incompatible, which is incompatible and there becomes a need for flexibility. I am one of the women who left a job because of the inflexibility of a traditional workday. After having my son, I realized that it was really difficult, especially because I found out my son has special needs, finding adequate childcare, finding affordable childcare in order to provide flexibility so that I could keep working day to day. And at the same time, I did leave my full-time job after I returned from maternity leave. But at least you got from maternity leave, right? Yeah, I mean, it's fairly required that you get a couple months after you have a child for maternity leave. Right, because women who have children probably need some paid time off to recuperate. Yeah, except for it's never paid. Really? I mean, a lot of women do work for corporations or companies that provide paid time off, which is fantastic. However, a large majority of the United States does not have paid time off for maternity leave, which makes it very difficult in order to return to the job because you're not paid for several months. And with my experience, and depending on the state laws where you live, there are different requirements for companies to provide. But when I returned from my job, or from my maternity leave, I found that when I got back, I had actually been demoted. Wait, so you were demoted? Why? Because my boss said that I probably needed a lesser responsibility from all the things that I had going on. Wait, great. Wait, so because you had a baby, you couldn't do the job that you had been doing before? Right. Yeah, that's what it seems like. What was his reasoning? Like, did you lose your brain when you had a baby? Apparently, that's what he thought, but I think it's still in there. Yeah, so just to clarify too, North Carolina is a right to work state. So we don't have a lot of the same workers' regulations as some of the other states, maybe like California. Yeah, so in North Carolina it is illegal in, but only in very specific ways. So with Victoria, she was put in a lesser position and not immediately, her pay wasn't immediately lowered, but a month after she was in this lesser position, they came to her and said, well, you know, corporate doesn't think this position is worth that amount of money anymore. So there are definitely ways that, you know, companies may skirt these laws in order to cause these issues to happen. I was working in the automotive industry, which is an incredibly male-dominated field. I think there were two women in my entire department of probably 60 people. So the access to the, yeah, basically, so we, you know, having women to stand up for you or women who've been through the same thing was hard, difficult to find. And we want to clarify, we recognize that not all women who are starting their businesses are doing it out of necessity. There are so many awesome creative entrepreneurs and innovators and fantastic women who have an idea and are rolling with it. We're just speaking from our experience and a lot of the women that we're working with, they're experiences that they have shared with us. So not all women are starting businesses because they have to, but that's a lot of what we're touching on today. So how we empower women with design. When we did design to start our own businesses, we laid that in the foundation of who we were. It's in our mission to empower women-owned businesses. We thought as designers, it was our responsibility to do something with design that we felt passionate about and that we felt would help other women in positions similar to our outs. So the first way we do that is we work with women-owned businesses. And this seemed like a no-brainer. Women-owned businesses are growing twice as fast as any other business. The market is there. The need is there, and advertisers, designers, and other marketing professionals aren't listening to that need. You know, 91% of women don't feel like advertisers understand them at all. And 7 out of 10 will go so far as to say as they feel completely alienated by marketing design. We are letting these women down. We are letting down the consumers who are purchasing items or visiting websites, or letting down the women business owners who are buying the websites and buying the websites to speak to their target audiences. So one of the things we hear time and time again from our clients who have tried to go to designers in the past, have tried to have had websites designed, is that they weren't even given the time of day. They've gone to agencies where the minimum budget was $25,000. As a small business, that's impossible. Or they did find a designer and they didn't listen to their needs. They didn't feel heard. The designers were pushing their own agendas and telling clients what they needed for their business without even understanding what their business was. Or they found a designer and didn't feel like they could trust them. They didn't feel like the designer knew enough about web design, marketing, or any of the skills to really help grow their business in a way that was impactful. So one of the things that we do to empower women's design is that we build effective websites with women in mind. We choose to provide designs that will elevate and promote women-owned businesses, women's issues, and products that are designed for women. We believe it's our responsibility to invest our time into these projects. Effective web design captures the mission, the brand, and the values of the company. You want your website to obviously motivate your customers to engage with your company. And you want it to promote a professional presence so that your customers or your clients know that you're a business that they can trust. I can't tell you how many times, and I'm sure everyone else has been in the position where you don't go to a business because their website frankly sucked, that you went to the website and you're like, how can I trust a business in my experience with that business if I don't like my experience with their website? Things were clunky. You didn't even have any idea what they were selling, where they were located, where they were. Their brand was non-existent. If they had a brand, it wasn't consistent across all of the pages. There are so many problems. And a lot of those problems come from people like the people we work with who are either building their websites themselves because they couldn't find a designer that they could trust to work with. They're going to sites like Wix and Swear Space that have templates that are incredibly generic, and if they're not a designer, they can't even work within those templates effectively. So we're having a lot of these issues come up, or with designers who aren't listening to them and capturing their brand. One of the biggest things that we do to really empower women is to, we actually listen to them. We reflect what they want and they need in their design. And we take active listening skills in order to really capture what the client is desiring in what they want to promote from themselves. It feels like a no-brainer, like sitting down with a client and hearing them, asking the right questions, being authentic. And I think that's a huge part of it. And we'll go through a couple of ways that we try to do this. But just being there, being present is so important, especially in the beginning process and throughout the entire process, having clear communication and listening to the needs of your clients. So there's a couple of things that we do in order to achieve this. We send design questionnaires before we have a meeting. We try to get our clients to really focus in on what they actually want, what they really want to display to the world. It also helps nail down what their style and design choices and, you know... Having their needs on paper as well before your first meeting. And it helps so when you're first meeting, when you're actually sitting down with your clients, it's more focused on deepening and clarifying instead of defining. So it saves you a ton of time. Also, logistically and contractually, having something in writing for back to you as your scope of services helps throughout the process as well for having that clarity and transparency, which is exceptionally necessary for having a good relationship with your client. Next thing we do is we take copious notes. I always have an iPad or a computer and type furiously throughout. Katie always has a piece of paper and a pencil. Multimedium. Multimedium because you never know when the iPad decides to die. Katie takes a million notes. We also organize those notes in a way that we can refer back to them afterwards. We like to be able to refer back so we don't have to keep asking the women the same questions over and over and over again. Nothing screams we're not listening. We're asking the same question five times. And also after the meetings, by organizing the notes, I know it sounds super annoying, and at first I was super hesitant about doing it because you already wrote the notes. Why should you go back and rewrite them and clarify them? But it saves you time in the long run when you're able to quickly refer back to what you've talked about and pull from that for your design. And when you're taking notes and when you're asking those questions, ask the right questions. Ask questions that are thoughtful and detailed and ask questions that reflect what your client has already told you in their design questionnaire or when you're actively listening. And asking the right questions takes time to figure out what those questions are. What we like to do is when we're done working with a client, really reflect on our experiences and think of those moments where halfway through the design we're like, oh shit, I wish I would have asked that question. Now I have to go back and redo something because I made an assumption and I didn't have all the information. Another part is that you really want to hone in on what your client really wants. By doing this, we use visual representations of styles, designs, concepts, font choices, things like that in order to really nail down what they actually want visually. What we've found is that people have different versions of what words mean. So what something means to me may mean the same thing to you. Take feminine, for example. To some people, feminine is pink flowers and cursive writing. To others, it's obviously something completely different. So we really want to make sure that we're not making assumptions, which is a big part. So don't make assumptions just because we don't really want to put women in the box. We don't want to put any client in a box. We don't want to assume based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or industry even that they have anything. We don't want to make any sort of assumptions. So what we do is we follow what we're doing right now. We're asking the right questions, we're honing in. And we face this with clients in the same industry is where we've really found this to be important. So a lot of clients in one industry will find a designer that specializes in that industry. For example, accountants. So we're currently working with an accountant. And before meeting with us, she said she went to another designer who showed her a few different templates and a few different websites that essentially all look the same and didn't actually capture who that accountant was or what their brand was. It was just accountant was the brand, which is not a brand. That is not saying who you are. You don't know what you're getting other than, okay, they know how to do things with numbers. But that doesn't say anything about your relationship or the experience you'll have with that business. Right. One of our big two clients we did two yoga organizations site builds at the same time. They're both yoga organizations. They're both owned by women. And what the final product ended up being a two completely different things because the mission of the companies were completely different. The target audience was completely different. The style and the preference of the owners of those companies were completely different. So making assumptions creates issues that we don't want to happen. If a client comes to you and wants a feminine website and pink flowery or with Curse of Writing or something like that is what they want, just make sure that you actually get to that conclusion together and that it's not an assumption made without deciding together. And briefly touched on don't make assumptions about what people mean when they say things like modern or vintage or any other design jargon because modern to me can be completely different than modern to my client. So having even within the website questionnaire, we like to have images of this is what a modern website looks like. This is what a vintage website looks like. This is what a tech website looks like. Having examples so they can say I like that. I don't like that. It makes it so much easier for all of us in the long run. We use sliding scale billing. We take slides for payment. Yeah, we take slides for payment. Water slides, guitar slides, home slides, office slides, pretty much any slides that you can think of. Oh, that's awesome. I would love a slide for the office. We don't yet, but if anybody manufactures slides, please let us know because we're totally interested. But we do charge clients larger or smaller amounts based on the size of their company and based on the budgets that they have. We found that when working with our larger clients, we're able to charge a higher hourly fee or our package fee. So then we can work with smaller clients and take lower fees. And it makes sense to work like that. We don't think that design should just be accessible to people with money, especially women who are starting their own businesses that might not have the resources that might be a necessity entrepreneur where this is their only option. I don't want to box them out of having the potential to grow because they can't afford us at that moment. With a lot of these clients, we found when we charge them a lower rate at first and it helps get their website out there and it helps their website grow and their business grows, they have more design needs and they end up coming back to us and hiring us. And as their business grows, our business grows. So we're able to go back and renegotiate our fees and talk about that and be completely transparent with our clients when we start out so they know how our charging works and how our pricing works. And these are the same clients that are more likely to refer you to other people. So we like to think of working with people as building a relationship and not just a one-off design. We're not just building this website and not talking to you again. We want to be there to support you. We want to be there when you need business cards. We want to be there when you need website tweets or website updates. We want to be there with you through your entire journey as a business and it becomes more fun for us too. It's more fun to work with people that you have a relationship with and it's way less stressful because it creates constant streams of income and you're not constantly trying to find new businesses to work with. So one of the things that we do to do that is we try to build a network within our community. So we're from North Carolina and our area is small but big. So one of the things that we do is we try to make a community every day. We become patrons at women-owned businesses. We use their services. We eat their restaurants. We talk to the owners, the workers. You get to know people in your community just by talking to people every day. I hate networking events. I absolutely just buy sitting in a room and making small talk because it feels like keep speed dating. So I try to get creative with what I consider networking, which might be different for California. For me it's going to the same yoga class every week and talking to the people next to me and telling people what I do and being proud of what you do, which can be really hard sometimes. You don't want to feel like you're selling or pushing people in a direction but just being excited about your work and even if that doesn't necessarily lead to work in that instance, it can lead to something months down the line. I remember the first time someone, I was out with a few friends and one of the people there were like, oh, Carburetor Creative, we've heard of you. And this was early on in our business so I think my reaction was probably like, really, really? You sure? Like, Carburetor Creative? You're the one that does the women-owned business stuff. We're like, oh, yeah, that's cool. She's like, yeah, you know, I was talking with a friend of a friend who had used your services and was super excited about it and the things that you were doing. So just having conversations with people in your community and keeping up those conversations can lead to a lot of work. And asking for referrals with your clients that you already have. If a client loves your work, don't feel weird about asking them to tell people. Ask them to introduce people to... Ask them to introduce you to others in their communities. Ask them to share reviews on your website. And I can share on your website, on your Facebook, on Google. Utilize the resources you have. Utilize social media. This isn't anything new, but it's something that can be really hard to do, especially when you're the one running a business or you're the one freelancing. So I forgot to ask at the beginning, but how many people here are designers? Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, awesome. So yeah, how many people own a design company? Nice. And how many people are freelancers? Okay, awesome. And how many people work within an organization in their design team? Okay, cool. So we have a little bit of everything, which is super fun. So we try to sprinkle things that can be true across the board. So even if you're working in a company right now and considering design or considering freelance design in the future, considering starting your own business, start laying the foundation, start talking to your community, talking about wanting to do freelance. That's something that I did when I was still working in a full-time job. We've mentioned yoga companies. I'm also a yoga teacher and I've done yoga teacher training. So I have a large yoga community. When I was working in my full-time job, I started talking about doing freelance and started picking up small freelance jobs on the side. So when we started our business, we had two websites that we were hired for within our first month. So really start being proactive. If you're at that point in your career or thinking about that, being proactive and setting the foundation for when that time comes, you can have things lined up. We use design as a tool for social change. So this is my favorite part of our job and this is a huge part of the reason why I've taken the jobs that I've taken in the past is using my skills as a tool for social change. So in addition to working with women-owned businesses, we work with nonprofits and organizations that promote, elevate, and empower women. One of the clients that we're working with right now is Duke University's Duke Women's Center. Has anybody here heard about Duke University? Probably heard about some problems on Duke University's campus as well. Right. So we met the director of Duke University Women's Center through one of our clients. So that was one of the networking that she had talked to their center about us and they called us in and they sat us down and they were like, we want to do a campaign to prevent sexual assault and we need your help. Whoa, yeah. That is a heavy, that's a heavy project and that has so many high needs that go beyond just making a website. That was a perfect situation where listening and working with our client has led to more impactful content and more diving deep. So Duke University Women's Center works to elevate and promote the voices of women on campus and also end patriarchal oppression. They have counseling services that work with survivors of sexual assault and outreach in their community to work on these issues. So the point of this campaign would be a series of posters that brought light to some of the situations that students put themselves in, some of these very targeted specific areas where sexual assault is more prevalent than other areas. And they basically sat us down and were like, we need to call out these places without getting fired. So that's the type of climate that we're in. It's how can we be creative and how can we use our skills to help get their message out there in a respectful way, in a way that actually works. So being able to be part of a project like that is also super empowering for us because it feels like we're a part of this larger conversation and this larger mission that we wouldn't have been able to do by just taking other projects that were outside of this realm and really positioning ourselves in a way where they were seeking out our services for these specific projects. Another great organization that we work with is a United Church of Chapel Hill in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. And it is a church that has been for 25 years dedicated to gender equality, social justice, and the support of LGBTQ plus communities. It's the church that if I had gone to this church as a kid, I probably would have kept going to it. Their foundation is all about lifting up voices of underrepresented, confronting white supremacy, using their resources, using their community to bring light to issues within North Carolina and within the United States. And so they are so... They're great people to work with and what they're doing is great. So being able to work with them, we started on a very small project where the budget for that particular project was an incredibly large. But we had known them as the cool church of Chapel Hill. If there's such a thing as a cool church and it was just like a fun project that we wanted to take on. And since we took that on, we have done multiple campaigns, a full rebranding, social justice work with them and continue to work with them in a large capacity because we are able to be flexible at the beginning. Right. And so we realized that supporting and empowering women is completely multifaceted and it's a huge complex problem. But we just attempted to create our business so that we can actually at least cause a little bit of positive change. And one of the added bonuses, I forgot to say this earlier, when you're working with organizations that are doing powerful things and when you're working with companies that are doing awesome things, you end up getting to work with awesome people. So I don't know if anybody else has had this experience, but part of working in a toxic work environment is you don't get to choose who you get to work with. You don't get to choose who your clients are. If you're working in your own design businesses, you can really be specific with the type of people you work with. And a part of a way to do that is choosing the projects you work on and then you end up meeting awesome people doing awesome things and it doesn't feel like work. It becomes more of like a passion project, which is such a cliche to say. It doesn't feel like work. But when you're working on something like empowering women and trying to stop sexual assault on campus, it becomes more of like a drive and determination to do something bigger which is really empowering for us, too. Great. Well, so I guess we're going to open up the floor if you guys have any questions, comments, experiences that you'd like to share. We're happy to answer anything. We can also sit here for the next 15 minutes, too. So somebody said that they own their own design agency. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Sure. Yeah. I started this as part of the graphic artist. In 2009, I come from I.T. and programming development. Oh, thanks. High tech. Society of the industry. It was male nominated. Oh, yeah. Always. Oh, yeah. But I tried to... I have an information of the same kind of thing in the last few months there for a little while. Very cool. I came back down to California. Found a graphic artist. I was like, you guys, part of business. So we did. And it's come to us. This amazing kind of company called Hybrid Creative. Awesome. That's great. It was purchased by a vendor or company. Congratulations. That's amazing. Yeah. The strange thing is I'm no longer a business owner. I don't have a business anymore. But I've sold it to a larger kind of company. Nice. That is ridiculously amazing. We felt the team to... We're 19. And how we started with this being a business partner. It doesn't line for anything else. We've got the thousands. And then we're a team. We're going to probably expand to 30 or so in 2019. That's amazing. Great. Inspiration. Right. And it's hearing stories like this, too. That also just feed us. Yeah. It gets us going. It gets us excited. And I think it's important to share those stories. So that's kind of why we're asking, too. If you're thinking about starting a business, there's people in this room who haven't done it. Connect with those people. It is, as you know, it's pretty hard at the end of the fall. And, you know, it's sort of jumping into the unknown. I'm sorry. Yeah. But, you know... Terrifying, but exhilarating. It is. And perseverance is so important sticking with it. You know, standing up to yourself is hard. Yeah. Yes. It is. And it's hard when you're owning a business as well. You're still having to be in those rooms sometimes. You're still having to ask for the price that you want. Or for ask for the package and not get taken advantage of. And that's something that we don't really speak a lot on. But, you know, when we're working with sliding scale businesses, it's not that we're charging people less because they won't pay us less. Because they're trying to, like, manipulate us. I think we've gotten pretty good at navigating that and recognizing that and having flexibility in that. But that's still a huge learning curve. You know, it's still knowing when someone is not charging you not because they can't afford it, but because they just don't feel like it. It is. Yes. And as like, now I'm, I mean, I mean, I wasn't exactly at the company before but I was the owner and president. But now I'm the exact and actually executive of this new company. Yay. It's people. Wow. And it's national. And I want to, I'm like the only executive. You know what I'm saying. Wow. Exactly. It's a voice club. Yup. And I have to assert myself constantly. You know, they were going to put, like, business partners, what portrait and buyer and I was like, nobody, like, why didn't I get asked to take a portrait? Wow. Wow. Oh. Right. Right. You own it too. Yeah. Right. Right. I have to watch for those things. And I have to, this is part of my food. But you've got to have my back. It's, you have to be, yeah, you have to be supportive men, men that are in this presentation. Right. So I'm like, I obviously, I started myself with art. And I'm like, I was, I honestly didn't think about it for a while. Right. I wanted to write this email. Yes. Right. I know how to boss, how to boss, I didn't think about it at all. So I was like, hi. But I did it. You know. The power of a well-crafted email. Oh yeah. That's super important. And it's, you know, it's, it's like, you tend to, you're taught to downplay ourselves. Yes. I'm, I'm a, I'll do this constantly. It's kind of take this my fault. I downplay it. And I'm working myself and my other colleagues all the time. Take it. Right. Right. Stick out for yourself. There's a way of doing it without and then bitching in a bossy. Right. Even though you're still going to be called bitchy and bossy. Yeah. It's a bad thing. Yeah. And having women around you to support you in that is so vital. So going to meetups, going to networking events with women, which I hate networking events, but some of them are really fun, especially if wine's involved. That's interesting. You can find one. We don't mind the ones with wine. Right. It does make it so much better. So if you're throwing a networking event, have wine. Little things like that. So I'm pushing my own agenda here now. But yeah. And then there's, there's moments like that too when you're in the workplace, at least in my experience where I question like, well, is it a big deal that my picture's not up there? Or should I even ask for that? Or am I being needy? Or is that, no, maybe I'm just being overdramatic or maybe I'm just, it's my fault. It's my fault. It's my fault. But then you think about, you know, the men who are on the website or the men who have those things already that have never had to think about should I ask for this? It just, it's theirs. It's an assumption. And that kind of goes back to this when I was discussing how women don't apply to jobs that they don't feel 100% requirement for. Also all the stats that I have, I have research that I can, if you want to give me your email, I can send that to you. I didn't just make up those numbers. I just, I use the same stat. Yeah. I'm like, women, yeah. They don't apply for a job if they get 100%. 100%. And they're hired on proof versus potential. And that is the key. Right. Yeah. I honestly, as a woman, I feel like, you know, I had no idea. I didn't know that you could apply if you didn't meet everything. But my, I mean, even my husband who, you know, is fully supportive and a feminist all the way, but like he does things that I'm just like, you can do that. Like, you know, he goes to, you know, he'll go to a boss and just be like, Hey, I want, I want this. And then the boss is like, okay. And I'm like, that's insane. I don't even know how you would do that. And I think it's, it goes back to the, you know, it's just a, it's a cultural shift that we really need to work on, like breeding and raising strong women who know how to ask for what they want. And men who support that. And men who support that. And we're on the same team. Like this is about women and empowering women. But it's not just up to women to do that. It's up to men for, to be in the conversation as well. And for men to stand up when their partner's picture isn't on the website or they see that they're getting more than their counterpart. And in something that I found so funny going back to that 100% thing. When I applied to that promotion at that job, which was building a product for women and their mission was to empower women, which blows my mind that I had these problems there. The CEO who told me that I didn't have the requirements for the job. So I didn't deserve to get paid for the job even though I had been doing the job. His only experience before becoming a CEO was coming up with the idea. And he was 25 years old. So he was, he felt entitled to it. He didn't see, and he didn't see that contradiction in that. He didn't have any experience. He didn't have the requirements for the job he was in. But he felt entitled to that. But when somebody else asked for that he couldn't fathom it. And I wasn't the only female in that company to have that problem with that person. And I found that in multiple industries that men just assume that they're entitled to things. And I don't want to make like all men suck because there are so many great feminist men out there. And obviously if you're in this room I'm sure you are also one of them because I don't think somebody who didn't care about these issues would be sitting in on this presentation. And I don't want to alienate men and be like, y'all just, but I want this to be a conversation and I want everyone to feel inclusive. And that's what's really going to make these changes. Yeah. That's what's the most important to us. Like, don't be an asshole to anyone. It's really not that hard. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. Right. Right. Absolutely. Right. So we're very person centered with who we're working with. And so we kind of approach it in multiple ways by sitting down and listening with the client and really trying to pull out from them what they mean when they're saying things and how they want to experience their website. And also recognizing that this isn't their field, too. So it's this fun balance of like we want to get all their input and really listen to what they're trying to say while also like nudging them in the right direction without being pushy. But like an empathetic approach. So when we work on these websites, we look at the research for user design. We work with a user experience. One of our contractors specializes that. But then we also just try to be like rational about it. What makes the most sense to us? And if we were on the other end of that, if we were that person who is using these services, what would I want to experience? And we also do branding. So another big part of our company is branding. So a lot of the websites that we're building are part of a full like rebranding design package. So we have the unique position where we're able to craft the brands and the website at the same time, which makes it so much easier because you start learning, as you're building the website, you're learning more about the brand and you're learning more about what it says as a company and it kind of helps come together in this really cool, evolved way. But we're also in that unique position where we also do branding. So I think when it comes down to design and when it comes down to user experience, listen to your client, do the research, research the industry and be logical about it. Which I know isn't everybody's field. It's not their specialty. It's not your specialty. Find someone whose specialty it is. And we didn't talk about that enough, but one of the things that we found to be so helpful in starting our own business is hiring other professionals, hiring professional women, realizing that accounting is not our strong suit so we don't want to spend our time accounting. Hire people who know what they're doing for the things that you don't know how to do and recognize that there are things that you don't know how to do. Really like facing the fact. I don't know anything about this. And I don't want to spend my time learning. And then when you're starting... That sounds bad. Learning accounting. I don't want to spend my time learning accounting when I can be learning more design stuff. And I briefly touched about sliding scale but another way that we work with that and especially when you're a small business that is just starting up, consider bartering. Consider trading your services for their services. That's how we got our first accountant who has been a fantastic referral service and has constantly been sending us clients. And also it's tax free that way when you're trading services. It just makes sense. And then it feels more of a relationship building as well and a funnel for more clients. Take on more clients. Absolutely. And that's of course something that we're kind of addressing right now because we actually are starting to hire more people. And it's becoming a bigger organization which... And then you have to really focus on the structure of the organization and stuff. So when we started it was just me and Katie and we have all of the relationships with all the clients personally. But what happens is probably one of the next things we're going to start doing is adding account managers and new designers and so then you have to create somehow the communication between all those parties so that empathy and that relationship is still there and hiring people you trust. Hiring people you trust. I mean hiring awesome women who also have the same values. I mean it's just like finding people who have the same values so that you can trust what they do and you know that they're going to treat the client the same way that you would. And that goes when you're working on your business brand and your own business mission and vision having that as your foundation as well. So then when you are building out the processes and the structures for taking on a new client and how you relate with the client you have it systematized so one person can do it the same way with their spin on it than another person. But yeah no it's definitely hard especially because we want to that's the fun part of the job too is having those relationships and being able to let go like we are just now letting go and being like you can start this one. Since it's all you. It's like sending your kids to school I don't have kids but I assume that's what it feels like. Like you got this. So. Yeah. Any other questions or anything? Well thank you so much for coming and we really appreciate it. Thanks.