 Welcome to how to scale your business. I've just gotten thrown into this, and I'd like to start out by just letting everybody give a quick introduction of themselves and your 10 second elevator pitch. Tell us what you do. Kim, I'm gonna put you around the spot. I'm Kimberly Leperi. I am COO for Valet. We are a site management and development company. We take sites and help them grow specifically to their needs and scale up. We are long-term partners, digital partners, and we're just full-on agency, so. Hi. Thank you. I'm still, Ann and Aurora Cross. I still run React. As of now, I still run React Studios. We're an agency based in Tampa, distributed. We do a lot of custom development, both in the custom plugins. We do site builds. We're one of the VIP feature partners, and we like to focus on building things that haven't been built yet. Still Curry Maruki and, like Norcross, still CEO of CrowdFavorite. But my history for this panel is I've scaled four organizations from zeroed over 35 million in services revenue, and I wanna bring that here to the WordPress community. That's on. My name's Brett Cohen. I'm CEO of a digital agency called Imagine. We're outside of Boston. We also have an office in Delray Beach. I've been, I'm an overnight success. It just took me 20 years. I'm actually filling in for my partner, Bill Gadlis, whose name is in your program. He's sick, so I'm gonna do my best. And just, let's go back down the road. You said this, but how long have you been in business? I built my first website in 1996. Okay, so. 20 years. Is that 20? That is 20 years. Congratulations. 94. 2008. Okay. Valet's been fully up and running for four years. And let's start off by defining scale. What does scale mean? And what does scale mean to your business specifically? Who wants to go first on that? Just jump in. It's okay, Brett. Go ahead. I think from us, for our business, it's scaling employees, obviously, you know, how big of a company we are. I also think it's the types of projects that we work on and have worked on starting in 1996 with our first project, or my first project, it was $800. So scaling from that to where we are today with the number of employees and when to add those employees and who are those employees, especially the first few, those are the key ones. I think that's what it means to us. Okay. So for me, scale is a formula. And it's a formula of type of project, revenue, and employee per revenue. In the services business, really, whether you're doing value pricing or charging by the hour, at the end of the year, profit and loss is gonna come down to how much money you're making per billable employee. And a scale that's used a lot in professional services is a minimum scale of, for instance, $100,000 ahead. So can you get multiples on that? Can you get to 200? Can you get to 300? Can you do like Bain Consulting does and get over $400,000 per head in revenue? That's what scale means, whether you're doing it for the enterprise space or you're doing it for medium-sized projects or if you're doing it for small-sized projects. And it's a little bit different with the product world. Yeah, for us on the service side, they've pretty much outlined it. It's the type of project, the scope of project, our ability to handle those projects, employee count, things of that nature, on the product side, it's how much market saturation we're able to get, where the marketing reach goes, where we're able to find product revenue, where it matches up with needs in the community from a user base, from a development base, like things we can actually build that are realistic for us to build, maintain support, compared to what the market will bear from a pricing standpoint, and actually be able to determine where those numbers go and be able to manage multiple commercial products out in the same space at the same time without having to have a whole lot of overhead to constantly manage and keep them going. Yeah, for us it's a lot of the same, trying to make sure that we can bring people on, add on new services, do it in a way that's profitable. I think one of the major concerns for us scaling was to ensure that we could grow in all of those areas, money, revenue, services, processes, systems, but do it in a way that retained the quality of service that we wanted to have as part of our company. So once time to scale, what do you use as a measuring stick? I use lack of sleep, okay? I mean, jokes aside, like what happened for me, like was I realized that I was spending a lot of time, you know, I would have a full scale, a full scope of work to do, and then I would have to do all the other work to manage the work that I was doing. And, you know, I was getting the point where I was doing 80, 90, 100 hours a week, I was not sleeping ever, like people, like I had to switch my phone to 24 hour time because I didn't know if it was 7 a.m. or 7 p.m. anymore. It's funny, but it was legitimate, like, you know, people were starting to get worried about me. And, you know, things like, people thought I had auto-tweet setup because they'd see it like two, three hours apart, 24 hours a day. I was like, no, I just don't sleep anymore. And that was when I kind of learned, you know, realized that something had to give. And that was where I figured, okay, is the revenue high enough? Where do I need to scale? You know, because it was never just like, oh, I need another developer. It was, okay, if I'm spending all this time doing admin stuff, maybe I need to get a part-time person just to handle things like invoicing and bookkeeping and just the things that take me away from my core competency. Fatigue is your measuring stick. That was my first point. There's so much truth to that. So much truth. It's panic and cold sweats, right? Like at some point when you realize I can't do this, my hands are too full or you lose sleep for consistently over a single issue or a problem, something comes back over and over again. And we've learned from that, thankfully. We sleep a little better now, but we started tracking the work that we do in measurable numbers. You know, how many tickets do we get? So how many hours do we spend? How much money goes out per lead that comes in? So we've started tracking things that we can measure and create relationships between to determine when that is. So we sleep better than Norcross now, I think. Oh, it's so sleep-welfing. To riff off of what Norcross said, the measuring stick of when to do that is exactly that, are you too busy for X? But what's interesting is, in my opinion, if you're a smaller organization, don't hire to double what you're doing. Hire specifically what your weaknesses are. So if you're horrible at writing, hire a writer. If you're a great developer and you don't do design, get more into, hire for your weakness, whatever that may be, that'll help you faster than doubling down on what you're already doing. Then once you have filled some of those weaknesses on whatever that is, then move on to actually trying to get depth of expertise. Because if you're already a successful entrepreneur or a small agency, you already have that expertise, you're being recognized for that expertise. I think in our case, and maybe in some of you, your case, it was just about the checkbook. It was looking in that checkbook and not seeing any money in there. Our scale was, we need sales and need customers. So our actual first employee was a cold caller. Our method was, let's get customers and then we'll figure out how to get the job done. And then it's pressure from clients. So we take on too much, we sell, sell, sell, take on too much work, and then we say, okay, now we gotta hire some people to do the work. And that's kind of how we did it over the years. So you're scaling, you're identifying where you need to scale based on a whole or a void or a weakness. What if I'm not able to identify that weakness for myself? If you can't, someone else will. Tell me about that. That was a serious question. So tell me about that. My experience was, I was having issues. I would forget to invoice clients. I would, you think you would never forget to get paid. I would forget to get paid. I would launch sites and forget to tell them that it was live. I would not answer emails because I was just so busy that I would be like, all right, I'm not answering. I'm not looking at email from this time to this time because it's too distracting. And then there'd be so many emails that were there. I'm like, all right, well, which ones are super important right now? And I forget once, okay, I'm gonna respond to that, but I gotta do some research and then it'd be two weeks later. And I would, the leads, I wasn't able to respond and keep getting the work from the leads because I didn't have enough time to respond to the leads that I was getting. And that was, it became apparent to me when like new work was slower and slower coming in because I simply didn't have time to actually get it. Like they were coming to me from a reckoning out. There were referral recommendation. Essentially all I had to do was, yes, I could do it and it would have been mine, but I didn't even have time to say yes. And that became readily apparent when those things stopped coming in. Yeah, sometimes you'll figure it out from going to an event like this. For us, we went to a builder.com show probably in 1999 and it was the first time that we actually heard the concept of a project manager and we said, because it was just us doing the work. So sell, sell, sell, then at night do the work. My partner's at home doing design, I'm doing some development, we're uploading together. And we hired a project manager, our first one and it really helped us out a lot and we wouldn't even have known about it or thought about it even though we could feel the pressure internally but we just didn't know what the answer was because we were so young and we just didn't know. And going to a conference, we started to hear other people talking about the notion of, hey, a project manager and you should have a project manager and we kind of bit the bullet and hired a project manager. And every single hire, especially at that time was like a big dilemma. How are you paying them? Do we have enough business? Do we have enough clients? So it's a struggle which is why I said earlier those key initial hires are big decisions. So I mean we've heard a little bit in the other panel, we've heard some of this panel today about risk. We're really talking about risk. So how do I, I know I'm covered this a little bit. I'm asking a leading question on purpose but how do I know when that timing is right, right? I've identified my weakness, right? I've identified that I'm, I've got fatigue, I'm lacking sleep, right? I'm not invoicing, right? I need this. When do I know when the time is right? When do I pull that trigger? Usually by the time you know, it's been for a while. For me it was, it was a few things that I realized that like for a good two, three month period that I needed to have done this. And it was where I'm like, okay, either I can keep not, I can keep putting this off, I can keep not doing it, and I can basically sink myself. Or it is risk, absolutely risk, a lot of it's blind risk, it's just, it was, I'm gonna do it. The first person that I hired, you know, Bronner and his contract, he's now partner in the agency, I vetted his code for 10 minutes. Cause I had so much work that needed to be done, I didn't have enough time like to go through and be like, that looks good. And that was it. And that was the extent of it, I didn't know. He and I are officers, we're not very good friends, but, and it worked out extremely well. I mean, it was much luck as anything else, but it got into that point where like, I didn't have enough time and I didn't have enough resources to go through a large process of doing this thing, I just had to just do it. And if it didn't work, I would have had to deal with it, but at that point there, I didn't really have much of a choice. I was kind of back into a corner. And I know Josh and he's right. He was extremely lucky, Josh is a great partner. And the same thing happened with me when we started what is today crowd favorite, we had a small team and we didn't realize that we needed to scale on one particular aspect until quite literally an existing client decided to leave the organization he was with and I thought to myself, he'd really be good for us. He's got the right something that might add to us. Started to think about it and talk to him and even though we didn't have an exact place, it's like that skill set would probably be really good for us and he's now become my business partner. I had no plan, it just felt right. So go with your gut, go with what you know is right for what you need to build. And what happens if I make a mistake? I think make a mistake and make it quick. I always say fail fast, don't be afraid to fail but do it quickly and move on. The business we're in, it's all labor. So it's not like you're making a mistake investing a million dollars in a printing press and then figure out that printing's dead. So you're hiring people and if somebody doesn't work out you just move on and hire someone else or say, oh, maybe, okay, we didn't need that person. We figured out we didn't actually need that person and you just move on. And there's other jobs and there's other people and people will move on from you in a heartbeat and sometimes in business when you wanna grow you have to do the same thing even though it's very difficult to move on. You take the risk and you learn from it. You take that mistake and you learn from it. You're paying attention when you fail and you hit that wall and you go, gosh, this isn't right. This isn't a good fit. Something's not going well or a client comes to you and says, I gotta go. You just, you take it and you use it and you move on and that's what helps you to make the risk next time with a little more confidence and with a little more certainty. So we've talked about scaling staff specifically so far. Wouldn't I know it's time to scale the type of projects I'm going after or the type of products I'm building? The amount of monies that I'm trying to tackle. From a services standpoint, the reputation that we were able to develop sometimes in spite of myself, we would, not the classiest, but yeah, I know, surprise to me too. But the scale of my development skill got better and especially when Josh came on we had now had two people who had a solid development ability. You know, we knew people, you know, we were active in the community. We knew people that we could reach out to if we had a very particular thing that we were working on. So some of our clients grew with us. We maybe built them a simple website or a small plugin for something and now two, three years later, they've grown and they need larger scale services and they're like, well, you built it then, can you build it now? And there's a lot of times where I felt, I felt comfortable with 90 to 95% of what they needed. And I was like, I can probably figure out 5%. It wasn't like a 50, 50 thing or like, I don't know how to do any of this and I'm just gonna say I can. And it was like, I know I can do almost all of this and I can figure out that a little bit. And let's talk, I have an issue with your question. And my issue with your question is this, not all scale of revenue is about getting a larger project. I know of more than two agencies in this particular community that do a really good job at volumizing smaller projects. And when they try larger projects, they'd fall on their face. Sometimes we'd help them, but it doesn't necessarily mean because I did a project of X size, my next project has to be of Y size. You don't need to necessarily do that. So what you're talking about is potentially scaling profitability. Yes. Correct? So with the current project base and the current product base, current service space, scaling profitability. Let's talk about that a little bit. I mean, you kind of did, but how do I go about doing that? So those of you who know Crud favorite, oh my gosh, you've grown so much in the last three years. What people don't realize behind the scenes is it's not a hockey stick. There are companies out there that grow like hockey sticks. Beware, beware of anybody who's doing that. It's a stair step. Major growth, plateau, figure out what you're doing, optimize, deal with trying to make sure you get your profit margins under control, try to get your processes going, do a general check. Because I know there's a mix of people who work in agencies here and agency owners here, but not all people in agencies will be comfortable with the growth path of where necessarily the entrepreneur wants to go. Not all the same people will be on the bus three years in that we're on the bus the first day and that's okay. If you handle it right, you can help them get a job somewhere else if you want to move your agency or maybe they do want to follow that journey with you and then it's your responsibility as a business owner to help them scale their own service, their own set, skill set. But if you do that, what'll end up happening is you will grow almost a further desire of those people to see your agency succeed and work with you and they'll watch your profit margin as much as you will. So everybody will benefit from that. Our scaling and profitability was, for us a lot of you talked about risk and hiring, we was also about risk and projects. We had some clients that would come on that we had great relationships with and we were talking to them every day and the one and one asked, well, do you do this? And you would thought, why not? Like Norma said, I can get most of that, sure, why not? And then somebody else asked, well, can you do this? And it was the same thing. So we went out on a limb, we tried it and then we did it twice and then we did it three times and we said, okay, is this something that we can add on to our services line? Is this something we can be profitable with? What is it gonna look like to hire folks to do this or something we can handle in-house? So there's a lot of questions that come from it but really it's, you take that initial step, talk to your clients, the people that you work with every day. I mean, that's how you figure out if there's even another stream, right? There's something you might be interested in but it might not even be relevant to what you're doing. That might be a different conversation altogether but for us that was, the first step was actually just doing it a little bit or finding help to complete it and we did it most of the way. I think it's looking internally and refining your business and figuring out what you're actually good at and where you make the most money internally and once you can kind of separate out each individual piece and say, okay, I make a lot of money doing this and these are great projects and we have these great clients, you wanna try to do more of those types of jobs and don't take on the ones that are on the outskirts because you might need the money at the time. We've had so many projects over the years that we took that we knew what kind of outside of our range at the time but we couldn't pass it up because it was the dollars and then we take them and it kills our company because we're just not set up to do it. We had, it was too much stress on the employees. It was just didn't work and we over time have refined who we are. We have a really good sense of who we are, who our clients are, what are the types of projects we wanna work on and what we can actually execute on and we just work really hard at just selling those types of projects over and over again and we don't need to be everything to everybody. So there's a lot of stuff that's kind of outside our wheelhouse that comes in that we have opportunities for that we're just smart enough now after 20 years to be able to say that's not the right project for us. Now in that kind of a situation, do you find a person that you can refer to you? Do you have a network of people that you could refer those projects out to? We're trying. So I would say historically we've been in a bubble just so busy with our own stuff. We spent 10 years on our own content management system built in .NET and launched probably 700 or 800 sites just nonstop. We were like a little factory and we weren't part of a community until really WordPress and we just, we had some people who had worked for us in the past that if something that was too small for us came in we would give it out to them but then for whatever reason when we referred it out and things went south we ended up owning it so we kind of stopped that. But yeah, now as we move forward we definitely, so if anyone wants to talk to me about stuff we don't do that you may be interested in taking on I'm all is. That's great. I've got a follow up for both Andrew and Kim. When you got these requests for new services that were outside of your wheelhouse as you took on these new services or as you approach these new services were you completely transparent with your clients as to what your capabilities were and were not? It would really depend on what, I mean if it was so far out of our wheelhouse that we just simply didn't know what we were doing we wouldn't take it. If it were something where we have familiarity with e-commerce but we hadn't used this one particular package we'd be like that's not one that we've normally used however we've done enough e-commerce work that we feel confident. Internally we'd be like okay if we're gonna have to spend a little bit of time researching we're not gonna build that. That's on us. If it's something where we dig in we realize that this is just a terrible thing. We might be like we build milestones so we both either the client or us can kind of cut at certain points and we're not stuck in a whole project that none of us wants to do. We focus a lot on foundational growth we're like the things that we've gotten better at and added into our services like we've spent time making sure that we're actually confident doing it and we want to do it. Like there's work that we're qualified for that we couldn't be more bored doing so we don't do it. And that's fine. Different people find different things interesting. Like we don't have design at house. We have designers that we work with when the client needs it. We've tried having design at house much twice and for us it was horrible and it wasn't worth the effort of the management and the added revenue just it didn't make sense for us. For other agencies they couldn't think about not having design at house. So yeah there's gonna be certain stuff that comes our way that yeah we know designers. It's not a matter of qualification it's a matter of like we're not gonna project management design. Like we're happy to build it when it's done but we're not gonna sit on timelines because you don't like the shade of blue and you know which is fine that's design and that's great and people that love that stuff and I'm just not one of them. So you know that's where we kind of focus on like how far out of it is it really. Part of it was just kind of gut like do we wanna go there? Do we not? And then whenever we would talk to the client about it we kind of internally talk about what that would look like and if we'd be willing to go after it. But yeah we were always transparent with this isn't what we normally do. We're willing to do it for you but we would always show up with a list of this is what we can get you. There was always some minimum guarantee of we can do this for you. It's not gonna have star stripes and glitter but you know it'll be here. You'll have a box and it'll be done at the end of the day and if they were fine with that that was great for us and then we would use that to kind of over deliver if possible at the end of the day so that we could exceed our own expectations and the clients but it was a great way to learn be transparent so that they knew what they were getting at the end of the day and we felt confident that we could at least deliver something. And Kareem how do you handle requests for services that are outside of your wheelhouse? So full disclosure, you. That wasn't meant as a softball. Yeah, none of that. We have commercial partnerships with Rebecca Gill of WebSavvy with Zeke. We have found different expertise in different verticals and we use those and sometimes they go well and sometimes after a couple of projects we don't use them anymore but we're always looking and we're always looking to try and expand that because the more we verticalize the more respected we get in what we do well and that's really as important as it is to try and grow your business is what this panel is about. It's important to make sure that you're seen as an expert or you're gonna lose the base of why you're there. I'm gonna open it up to questions. So I'm gonna try to summarize and that's what I heard was basic question is subcontractors versus hiring full-time employees. Let's start there. We've done that with almost every employee. Everyone that we've hired full-time has been on contract for a period of time first just to make sure that we're a good fit both from a culture standpoint and from an actual work standpoint because I mean you can look at somebody's code and get a good idea if they actually wrote it or not but sometimes it's every now like there's some code that I've written like that's amazing I don't know how I wrote that and I don't think I could ever do it again. Then there's some stuff that I look at and be like clearly I was drinking Dayquil because that doesn't even look like something I would do on a dare. So we try to do contract for a period of time simply to make sure that everything's a good fit before we bring them on board. There's some people that we have existing relationships with as a contractor that they do very specialized things that like say buddy press we don't do a lot of buddy press work. So we have one or two people that we know that that's the real house. That's what they do. That's what they love. If we happen to have a project that that's a component of we'll bring them in because the amount of time that it's gonna take us to get re familiar with where it is from the last time we've used it is not worth that amount of time on our end whereas we'll bring them on even if it's a you know our rate compared to what their rate is even if that works out flat and it's not like extra not a margin on top of it we know that we have the expertise that we're not gonna be spending more time internally learning a thing that we're not gonna do a lot. Some things aren't worth contracting out and some things aren't worth hiring someone internally for to have somebody that has a specialty we'll house you that you can kind of bring in on projects. We from day one it's probably one of the few things that we did right from day one was have a 30 day kind of onboarding test out period you know you you can work for us and we'll give you a check but you know after 30 days we're gonna talk about how well you did and that has grown we now have a 90 day boot camp where we push people through we make sure that we give them all the tools they need to succeed if we are looking to keep them on long term so we'll push them through systems we'll push them through our meetings and our processes and then at the end of 90 days we see okay is this a good fit and that's how we handle it. Yeah we've had tons of contractors over the years and you know it's been a struggle to get the consistency of work that we're used to producing with our internal staff and the project managers that we have they would just rather work with the people that they know and trust in especially the tight deadlines and we're a volume shop so we're doing a lot of projects and with the people that we you know well let me back up it's always bothered me especially as we were adding people over the years that our next employee always had to be a full time person you know I wanted to not have to do that I just you know there should have been a transitional process but it's just so difficult for some reason for us to find qualified people to do the work even though we know they're everywhere around us so I you know we have internal meetings where I say maybe we just don't work well with other people it's probably us because it seems like everybody else can do this except for us so maybe there's something in our process if we can't get people to work the way we work maybe we need to figure out how to work the way everybody else works and we've explored it so we're open for it and we've traditionally been a traditional business where you come to the office and you work and we're transitioning more because of where we were located we don't there's not a huge talent pool so we're south of Boston we're kind of right in between Providence and Boston and we get nobody from Boston because they're just not going to travel that way we get a lot of people from Rhode Island but there's not a huge talent pool so we have to if we want to add qualified people we have to add people outside and we're struggling I know there are companies that are just strictly remote companies but we're struggling with that hybrid mode of traditionally being a traditional shop and then adding remote people you know how do you trust issues and how do you manage them and that type of stuff so we're a little bit the anomaly all our people are actually employees some of the people who are well known in this community who are team leads for us for instance Kerry Dills she is an employee yet because she wants to do things in the community she is an employee that is contracted so to speak her contract says we give her 25% of her time back for the community for her podcast for working with the WordPress community committing code to the open source project so she is an employee yet we give her time back we are a reflection of what our clients wants are and our clients want us to have employees that we have under contract rather than subcontractors I'd like to add something to that because one thing that I think is a nuance it should be a nuance but it's very important if you're considering full time part time contractor a portion of that is the work and what you're hiring for in the term but the other portion of that in the thought of scaling and profitability is the revenue that you're going to have to have and maintain to keep that person on board and continuously pay them month after month after month after month so if you're looking at a short term project where you need somebody and you're like oh maybe I can use them later on on the road but you don't know that's a good instance where you would just default to a contract situation because you don't want to promise somebody something and you're going to have to take that back after a while so a part of that equation is going to be the revenue you have to have that money before you hire that person or make sure that you can maintain it after you hire them because if not, it doesn't matter who you hire or what for you're still out somebody at the end of the day I was actually going to ask that as a follow up question then I was going to duck behind Brett do any of you use overseas resources? We haven't personally because the people that we've brought on as employees, we're not big enough to deal with foreign tax issues and that's just a scale issue that it's not the extra overhead and work and money to pay one foreign employee we're just not there yet but at some point we hope to be I'm sure that we never wanted to just bring in work and contract it out and just kind of be a storefront that no one really knew because eventually it does reflect on us and at times it was like if I had the time to QA all of this code that someone I don't know wrote I had time to write it to begin with and we would rather do a little bit less work and just know kind of what was going on at the door than try to shepherd a bunch of stuff that we don't know and then they disappear and then I kind of write it anyway so We've tried with contractors in Epic fail and again it might be the way we work it could have been a difference in time zone it was too much trouble with communication between our people and we've tried both companies where we've hired a company that's supposed to give us dedicated resources we just haven't been successful doing it So we actually have an office in Romania and when I found an individual that we wanted to hire in Romania actually flew over there started a small business in Romania paid the corporation tax to start a business there hired him as the first employee there and today we have 15 employees in Bucharest it's not as complicated as it sounds it just takes the effort to figure out what country and what their laws are and just talk to somebody who's done it before but it is more expensive at the beginning to figure that out and find the right cultural fit because people talk about offshore there are giant cultural differences around the world and depending on your personalities and your work culture you need to find the right fit And thank you for mentioning that because I was going to say as a follow up it does vary from country to country and you have to know what country and what personalities you're dealing with that's where it becomes hard to manage yep so that's a great question actually we didn't really cover that but let's cover that down so let's talk about pricing models and as it relates to scalability time and materials versus value based pricing versus any other models you might have at the end of the day you're trading time for money it really doesn't matter what you call it there's some people and some models work for like a single person like Curtis McHale who's in Canada does a lot of e-commerce work membership site stuff really good he does value based pricing he talks up and down it's absolutely the best way to go for him it makes perfect sense he's one person he has X amount of time he charges X amount for that week or whatever and he knows he's gonna get a certain amount of stuff done in that week works totally fine for him because he's the only person in charge of his time as soon as you start adding employees and you're tracking multiple people's time over multiple people's projects that model breaks out a little bit and you're still paying your employees for their hourly time because your employees don't really care what your pricing model is they care what their paycheck says so at that point again you're trading time for money how you wanna trade it and what you wanna label it it's really just window dressing value based pricing is hard it's very hard we've embarked on that journey and I think at the end of the day the major lesson is how you present your pricing to your client and how you factor it internally or what you label it or again it's time for money and we found one example it's a lot easier to talk to clients about doing work if we don't talk about what's this many hours you know we'll say oh it's gonna take this three days or something it's really just in how you present it to them how you calculate that internally you don't have to be that transparent with them right you can just give another subset of what it is you're gonna be giving them but yeah that's value based pricing is very hard it's doable but like he said with one person and a larger scale project is probably the better way to use it so I'm a giant fan of value based pricing with one caveat the top 2% of enterprise clients don't even start the conversation they will rip your argument to stretch but outside of that value based pricing works and it works better and better the more experience you have at pricing your own projects because what you can do is if you can control those costs you can control your profit margin and you're not talking about hours you're not talking about dollars you're talking about a fixed price we do that a lot with a lot of our clients but it's quite literally like walking up to a craps table or a roulette wheel if you don't have a very solid process for pricing and we probably spend 30% more in the estimating process than any one of our employees would like but the reason we do that is so that we can lock that down and understand it we have multiple iterations where we have the people doing the estimates or being questioned and talking with management and the client and it just goes back and forth and you're like why would it take you three weeks to get me a price it takes us three weeks to get you a price because we're gonna make sure we've covered all our bases and it's gonna be a fixed price and if something happens that is in our control it's our problem not yours but then you also have to have very important scope creep and scope management I know there's several other questions in the room but we are out of time on this one so I'm gonna invite the panelists to step outside if you have any further questions for them but a big round of applause for all four this is great