 First of all, before we start, I'm going to throw things. And I won't be using that clicker anymore. So I was going to take a picture of the room. So thank you. If it can go back together, that would be amazing. Probably. Thank you. Nope, it'll go right here. Yes, community to the rescue. Village, the village is important. So I will not throw yours. But yeah, so everybody wave. Thank you. It wants me to set up the, OK. You know what? We're getting started a little early. So I don't know why it thinks it's a keyboard. I might just need to use my spacebar. OK. All right, so Unity. Unity is this business that I decided to build about two years ago. And the first picture up there in the top left is my team. You can see me on the right. Lexi is on the left. She's a developer. Christina is in the back. She's a marketing and business development strategist. And Johnny is in the bottom middle. He's my production manager. So he makes sure that things happen and things get done and then the rest of us do them. The top middle picture is our office. And that's kind of what we do. We do a lot of thinking and whiteboarding and planning and strategizing and finally building. And so the right is a picture of a design thinking session that we did with some clients. It was a lot of fun. We work a lot with North Carolina companies. A lot of nonprofits. It's about 50-50 nonprofits, for-profit businesses. But really the thing that is common across all of our clients is that they have a mission. And so we have our own mission. And I'll get into that in a little bit. We do WordPress development, WordPress websites design strategy and development for mission-focused companies and community-focused companies. We work out of the frontier in RTP. It is the coolest co-working space partially because it's a nonprofit that runs them. And they have a free co-working space there. And you can also lease offices as well. And they have food trucks. And it's pretty amazing. And free beer on Thursdays and free yoga on Wednesdays and meditation on Tuesdays. And it's pretty fantastic. It's like you can hardly find time to get work done. But it's a good place to be. And the reason that I'm doing this is for my kids, my family. So those two little guys are why I did this and why I continue to do it. And when the times get really tough, why I continue to do it? They're not. No. So Calvin is six. He's turning six this week. And Wesley is three. So it's my business birthday. Birthday. We're two years and one week old. When I started this company, it was just me. And I had these huge ambitions to be an agency. And so I decided that I would name it with the word agency in the name so that I would have to eventually be there. And I am proud to say that we are an agency now. I do have two full-time employees and one contractor, as you saw in the last slide. So yay. What I'm going to be talking about today are sort of how I got to starting the business and then the things that I've been focusing on since I started the business. So my idea, the purpose, the people on the profit. So the background, even though the business is only two years old, much like a person, it started before those two years. And I think common to a lot of other entrepreneurs, I have this idea that getting a job is hard, but that making a business is easy. That it's the easier option. And so I have had a few jobs in my life. When I was in college, I thought, well, I thought I'd be a business major for some reason, but I hate busy work. And so I dropped the class the first day because they said, your homework is to cut out an article from the Wall Street Journal and bring it into class every day. I was like, that sounds really dumb not doing that. So I dropped my business class and I picked up psychology. And I was like, oh, this is cool. I like this. I like helping people. I'm really interested in finding out about people's motivations and understanding why somebody behaves a certain way and how can we... I'm fascinated by people and understanding people. And so I kind of have a one-track mind as I can get very scattered, but I do have this kind of I get on a path and I just kind of charge. I'm a tourist, so maybe that's part of it. But the idea I had was like, okay, well, then I'll be a psychologist because I can help people. Didn't work out. To get into graduate school, you have to take this thing called the GRE. And in psychology, there's a subject-specific one. And I was like, that sounds hard. I'm just gonna take the regular one. So I only applied to the places that took the regular one. I didn't try very hard. I didn't get in. But I got into graduate school in Chapel Hill for library science. I was really like doing research. I like helping people do research. I was like, I could be a librarian. That'll be fun. I graduated in 2009. And if you were in North Carolina in 2009, you might remember there was a hiring freeze in the state and there were no jobs for librarians. Most of the jobs in library science are public sector. And so when the state decides that they're not hiring anymore, that means nobody's retiring anymore because those places aren't going to be able to hire. So I was unemployed straight out of graduate school for good 10 months, I think. I worked as a bookseller at Barnes & Noble. People treated me like dirt. It was a really good experience. Because I got to learn a lot about people and motivations and marketing. And it was fascinating. And I really had a lot of time there to think about what I wanted in life. So I was convinced by a friend to apply for this part-time junior web developer job. And I was like, you know, I've been doing web development as a hobby. I taught myself when I was a kid. So I look super young, but I've been doing this longer than it looks. I started programming in 96. And throughout my whole life, it was never something that anybody talked about as being an opportunity to have a job doing that. And my dad's an IT. It's not like he didn't help or support that desire of mine. It was just, there wasn't such a thing as a, or at least in my worldview, it was kind of like, this is just a hobby. It's not a job. So I didn't think that I'd get the job because I didn't have my background. Like I didn't have a degree or anything. And I felt like I was overqualified for all of these things that I've been trying to do, but I felt like there had to be a place for me. And I really, like I said, I have this big deep motivation to help people and help the world. And so I was really lucky because for some reason, the hiring manager saw that in me and saw, well, she's smart, she can figure it out even if she doesn't know this stuff yet. So I had built one WordPress website before I got that job. And that job was building WordPress websites. About six months after I started, the senior web developer quit in the middle of a Drupal project. And I was like, well, I have to figure that out now. I can do that, either that or they hire someone above me. So it was my big sink or swim moment. And as a woman in the tech industry, it was really hard for me. I felt very undervalued and underappreciated. And I think that a lot of people didn't see, you know, they just see the surface and don't give me a chance to prove my worth as much without that first initial judgment. So there was a lot of, I worked there for about four and a half years. My boss totally valued me. He saw what I had to give. But it was really hard because working for a small business and a startup where they were just trying to keep things going, I wasn't able to get paid what I was worth. So as much as I loved working for clients and working just in the community, I got the most amazing opportunity to leave that job and be the CTO of a startup media nonprofit. And so for two years, I worked for Education NC and I helped launch that nonprofit. I was the designer, developer, strategist, everything, a journalist, I had my own column about STEM education in North Carolina and it was incredible. And I throughout that experience really saw the way that nonprofits give back to the state and what the people that work in nonprofits, the kind of the lifeblood of our state are the people here. And it made me so passionate about, how can I do more as an individual to really help the causes that I believe in? And so I did a lot of soul searching and realized that I needed to leave this single nonprofit and I wanted to start a company where I could be a good boss and I could build a place where people that are a lot like me that have the same kind of desires to help really build the world and build their communities. We could all, and that are in this tech space and maybe misfits in the tech space that we could all work together and have a common mission and give back to our community. And so I listened to a lot of Michael Jackson and I know this slide has been up for a while, but I mean, this is really, this is the soundtrack of my life. I really think that for me I had a very windy path but I have done a lot of self reflection and there's a lot of challenges in the world, but I think that if we all kind of take a minute to look at like, what is it that's unique about ourselves and how can we elevate that and enhance that and make the world a better place through our own actions? And so the word unity was a big part of, it came out of my self reflection, what is it that I believe about the world? And I think that there are way more things that unite us than divide us and I want my business to be a reflection of that and help people be reminded of that day to day. So our mission at Unity is to spark vibrancy in communities. I'm having to read it. By empowering our partners to inspire action with open source and accessible solutions. So we use WordPress, we don't use other CMSs or other tools, part of that is because I love the platform. And another part of our mission besides open source is accessible and so we focus on website accessibility, both in the design and the development and in the content, making sure that, I don't know if you were here last year, but I spoke about accessibility. It's something that I'm very passionate about. So inclusion is one of our mission or is one of our big values. We wanna make the web an inclusive place for everybody. I wanna make the tech industry an inclusive place for everybody. We really celebrate diversity but strive for that equity and inclusion through diversity. Another value that we have is sustainability. I am really passionate about social sustainability and environmental sustainability. I think that a big part of building a business is, it's kind of the oxygen mask thing. You have to put the oxygen mask on yourself before you can help others. So part of that is making sure that you're respecting yourself and so sustainability, something I have to remind myself about a lot because I fall victim to this a lot with not giving myself time to take care of myself. But I'll talk a little bit more about this later about sustainability, but it comes into play pretty much daily in my company. Collaboration, like I said, it's really important that I have a team that is inclusive but that we can all work together well. So it's been a challenge to find the right team members, but to make sure that we are all on the same page about our values and our mission and making sure that we're working together to find the best people in the world. Solution for our clients and then also for our community. Another value is iteration. We're agile, we do not follow a scrum, but as a small team, we can't help but be agile. So we have to iterate, we have to follow best practices in some way. We kind of learn from our mistakes, not kind of, we actually learn from our mistakes. We fail fast and we recognize when we fail that we have learned something and we move forward. It's a part of being a small business. Another value is elegance. I think that one of the things that draws me the most to programming is how code can be so beautiful. And I think that's part of why I'm drawn to WordPress with just the code as poetry value. And I do believe in that with making sure that everything that we build, everything that we design is as elegant as possible and that it is simple and clear and well built. Another value is, oh it's up there now, authenticity. So making sure that we are being authentic, that we're being humble and that we have integrity in everything that we do. These six values are values that me and my team came up with together. And whenever we have a new team member, we talk about what is our, in the hiring process. I talk a lot about the mission and our values and how we have to stick true to them in order to make sure that the business is being built in the way that it was intended and that it continues to grow in that direction. So a big thing that has come out of this is we became, at the beginning of this year, we became a certified B corporation. Has anybody heard of that? Yeah, okay, cool. It's a really amazing type of, it's a structure really, that it's sort of like the, it's what fair trade is to coffee but to business. It's an assessment that you have to take as a business to make sure that your business is good for the world. And so there's like five different, I should have written them down but, and I actually looked at the book before I came here. It's like, I should take the book with me. It's like a B core handbook. Ask me about it later when I'm not on stage and I can tell you all about it. But anyway, so it has been, it's been amazing for our company to be a certified B corporation. It has given us a network of other businesses who also believe that business can be a force for good in the world. And it's sort of our compass. It's our north so that we know what direction we need to follow whenever we have big decisions to make. It's something that we can look at, okay, is this going to be the best option that we could possibly make? So people, people are our number one resource. In my company, like I said right now, there are four of us. If I burn out myself, I'm not gonna do a good job. And if I burn out my people, then the company is going to fail. So sustainable people, sustainable lifestyle, I wanna make sure that as the company grows, we are taking care of our people. We invest in their education, we invest in their health and I think it's been a really rewarding thing for our team to be in one place as well. A challenge that I've had, this is, so when I decided to start this company, I knew that people were gonna be a really important part of it. I knew that the purpose was a big part, but that the people were really, the decisions that I make about my team kind of comes out of that purpose. So community is really important to me. I wanted to have a business that supported my community. And so I made a really tough decision that is still having a little bit of a ripple within other aspects of the business, but I only hire locally. I don't want a distributed team and I don't want to hire overseas and it's really tough when other companies are able to go on Fiverr or somewhere to get something done really quick and cheap and I'm so tempted to do that sometimes. Sometimes I'm just like, you know what? I don't wanna have to save this thing as a PDF for 15 different PDFs and do all this. It's like menial, nobody wants to do it. It would be so great if I could just outsource that, but then I have to look back at my values and how I've decided to run my business and it is the most challenging thing that I've had to deal with this year, but it will pay off and I believe in that. So people are also our biggest expense in my company and I believe that that is how my business is going to change the world and it's only a little bit at a time, but I'm starting small. I wanna start locally. I wanna be able to make sure that the economic impact of our business helps North Carolina. So our suppliers are another part of the people part of this and it all goes back to our values again. So the first one, whenever we decide to work with an outside vendor or, you know, if I'm looking for, not just hiring, but if it's a contractor or if it's another company that provides a service that would be helpful for our business, there are factors that I weigh anytime I make a decision about bringing them on. So the first one is I look for minority and women-owned businesses and this is anywhere. I wanna help support people who are in the same kind of shoes that I'm in. I did register my business as a hub certified business of the state, so it's a historically underutilized business and any women or minority owner, it's like over 50%, if your business is owned by a minority or a woman, you're able to get that certification and I look for other businesses like that. The second thing I look for is if they're local or statewide, I think of local as North Carolina, but I figured I may as well put statewide in there. I wanna work with other businesses who are also supporting our community. Also fellow B-Corporations, so there's a website bcorporation.net and it has a list of all the B-Corporations. There's other businesses that are not B-Corporations but that have good business practices or some states, so it's too much to get into here, but B-Corporation is a certification. Benefit Corporation is something that a little over half of the states have as an actual legal entity for your business, North Carolina doesn't. It's sort of a hybrid between a non-profit and a business and a for-profit business. So there's like in those states, there's tax breaks that they get for having this kind of cause-based or benefit for their business and it's really about that triple bottom line. It's more than just profit. It's about their missions. The third thing or the fourth thing that I weigh is that eco-conscious. Hosting, our host is a green hosting platform. They buy back three times the number of renewable energy credits than their whole platform consumes. So they're giving back to the environment or to the industry to the renewable energy industry by buying back extra. All of our printing materials are done by a B-Corporation that prints on 100% recycled paper and it's really good quality and they have soy-based inks and nothing's bleached. So the paper, it's white, but it's not using bleach so it's really good for the environment. And then my accountant is local. And a lot of the contractors that I work with are minorities or women. So this is another part of, I'll come back to this later, but it really impacts the business having this supply chain. So profit, I'm gonna come back to that. First, before I get into profit, I wanna talk about challenges. This is where we get real a little bit. I've had a lot of problems over the last two years. My business is very new. And one thing that gives me hope is seeing that there are businesses that survive. I know that there are some that fail, but I've had a lot of kind of heart-to-heart talks with my accountant and he assures me that I'm okay. I've cried in his office way more often than I should admit on camera. He's like my therapist. So costs. When I make decisions about my supply chain and my people, my costs go way up. So I'm still trying to figure this all out. I don't have a degree in business. I took half a day of a business class ever. So I'm totally winging this whole thing. And I'm learning day by day, month by month, usually month by month, about how to keep my costs lower while still staying true to my values. People, nobody cares about my business as much as I do. And not even my husband. And so I've had a really hard time making sure that I find support and I don't lean on my employees for support because they need to trust me. So they need to know that I'm there for them. I need to look elsewhere for my support. So people though, I heard recently on a podcast that startups, and these are like the high growth kind of startups that the investors look for high turnover in the early years. And they see that as like a sign of a good leader. And I was like, well, okay, then I might be onto something because what you have to do, and it's the hardest thing, but you have to make sure that the people who are there are the ones that care and the ones that are there are gonna stick through the hard times and that they believe in you as a leader. And so I've had to make the really hard call to let go of several people. And every time I do, I learn. And every time I do, I wish that I had done it earlier for various reasons. And I think as somebody who is very caring, that's my biggest personal challenge. No, it's not, all of these are hard. Chemistry, I have depression. I really struggle. And it's so hard because I totally blame my depression on myself, which is dumb because I can't control it any more than anybody can control getting cancer. But I have to take care of myself. And I have to make sure that, I have to try harder to take care of myself than I think people without depression or anxiety or other kinds of mental illnesses have to take care of themselves. And so life is a challenge. I am so busy, I'm always rushing. I have two kids and a husband and one of my kids just started first grade and my other one doesn't want to walk anywhere. He wants to be carried everywhere. And my husband has a very busy job and my parents won a lot out of me and my friends and other family members. I just, I feel like I'm being stretched, super thin, and I have like a thousand hats on. So all of these things are challenges and all of these things are things that I'm working through. And I'm gonna continue to work through them for the rest of my life because I don't want to do anything else with my life. I love what I do. I just, I wanna do it better. And so that's my goal is to do what I do better. So how on earth do I manage? First, my village. I mentioned that before when I threw my thing and it broke. I couldn't do this without my friends and my family and other business owners. There's this amazing place in Durham called Nido and it's where I got started. It is a childcare co-working facility. They have, it's Montessori style and it opened my eyes to one of the things I was like, this is the kind of business that I wanna see in the world. Why can't we have this for people who are starting businesses, who have small children or in grad school and have small children. And I met so many people there that were doing this and had small kids and were in the same kind of place as me with a dream that they wanted to launch. And I couldn't, I don't think I could have done what I did without having a community of supporters of people who are in very similar shoes as mine. And so my support system are people that I've met through that. Other small business owners that I know just from life, people that I went to high school with, people that I meet at the frontier. It's true really that raising a company is a lot like raising kids. And if you have kids, you know, you can't do it alone. And so if you're starting a business, you need to remember you can't do it alone. So find some support. The second thing is podcasts. I don't have time to read as much as I'd like to, so I listen to podcasts. And there's one amazing WordPress podcast that I listen to, KitchenSyncWP. Adam Silver is back in the back of the room. That's how I keep up with what's happening in the WordPress industry. I hired another developer so that I don't have to do as much constant learning of the space. I'm still leading the development team because I can't let go. But what I'd like to do is I'd like to be a CEO. I want to be full-time CEO, not developer. But for now, I still am, so I listen to that. I also listen to Zigzag. It's an amazing podcast about these women who are starting a media company in New York and the podcast startup is also very good, Gimlet Media. All of the Gimlet podcasts are amazing. And I escape through podcasts. I used to escape through reading. And so I would just read, I love fantasy. I love true crime. I love mystery novels, all of that. But since I don't have time, I listen to them. So I listen to true crime podcasts when I wanna escape and it's terrible, but it gets me through. So my weaknesses. So part of depression and part of anxiety is telling yourself how terrible you are constantly. So I've got this thing in my head yelling at me, like, man, you are lazy and you are selfish and you are stubborn. And so my weaknesses are part of my coping mechanisms because when I listen to them and the other part of my head is like, uh-uh. So I have this constant battle in my head and I've actually started to see them as strengths because I can recognize when I'm getting really stressed out that that voice gets louder. And I know that, okay, it's time to slow down. So instead of seeing things like, or hearing things like I'm lazy, I'm efficient. And I'm not stubborn, I'm determined. And if I didn't have these weaknesses or what I think of as weaknesses, then I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. Out of laziness, instead of getting a job and applying for jobs when it was time to move on, out of laziness, I filed articles of organization with the Secretary of State and started a company. And that's not lazy, but that's what I've told myself. And my determination, I don't wanna fail. Oh, another great podcast is Seth Godin, a Kimbo. I feel like I heard it on there, but I might not have. It might have been another one, but one of the things that I heard on a podcast was that failure is just doing what everyone else does. It's going and getting a job. It's not the worst thing. So I don't want to do that, but man, that makes it easier to think about it in that way where it's like, oh, okay, then it's not that embarrassing if my company fails, but I don't want it to. So I'm determined, I'm going to make it happen. And I'm not selfish. I keep telling myself I'm selfish, but I don't give to me. I give to others. And I think that instead of being selfish, I am trying to think of the right word. I think it's that I'm empathetic and that I pull in other people's feelings into myself and then I dwell on them. And so it's not me being selfish when I'm being introspective and reflective. It's really about empathy. So my other, the way I deal is really my strengths. And so one of my biggest strengths is that I'm a really, really good developer. Not to brag, but I'm great. And so when I'm feeling really bad about myself, I'll go in and I'll dive into a deep problem and I'll figure it out. And it makes me feel really good about myself when I manage to do that. So I really like puzzles and problem-solving and that kind of thing. And so it gets me through. All right, so I want to talk about profit. And I've kind of laid out a lot on the table here about my values and some decisions that I've made in my business and then also a lot of the personal challenges that I struggle with. And one of those, I don't, not having a business background, kind of figuring this out myself. My business is totally bootstrapped. I don't have investors. When I started it, my family was already very much in debt by paying for my husband's education, which is, he calls debt. I do see it more as an investment. But how many of you have either kids in daycare or have paid for that? Yeah, it's really expensive. Luckily, our oldest got to start kindergarten when he was still four. So we got to get that off of our payment. That payment, but so I was the primary breadwinner of my family. My husband was working in a nonprofit and he was making less in that nonprofit than he was before he went to law school. He's an attorney, making not much, well, then. And so I had to make sure that when I started my company, I could pay the bills. I had to pay for our mortgage. I had to pay for food, power, but then also all of the childcare expenses. His salary's covering taxes and health insurance. And without that, we wouldn't have been doing okay. And so that was a very valuable contribution to our family. And so the whole thing with bootstrapping was I had to make sure that if I started this thing, it was gonna pay off. So when I started, I was a freelancer and I knew I didn't wanna be a freelancer because I didn't wanna keep learning and when a developer wants to stop learning, it's time for them to not be a developer anymore. So I knew that it was temporary that I would be the primary person building these sites. But it was what I had to start with. So my mindset as a freelancer is like, okay, if I can make 4,000 a month and I have 1,000 in costs and the cost would be hosting, licenses, equipment, that kind of thing, I'd be okay because I'd be making 3,000 a month. It's not ideal but it'll pay the bills for a little while plus our savings. So that was kind of my goal at the beginning. And I did that in the first month, that was no problem. Each month, I grew faster than I thought I would. So shortly after, I would say it was probably like four months later, I was like, okay, it's time to grow. I was making 8,000 a month and I was getting more work than I could handle myself. So I was looking for help. And as soon as you're looking for help, you have to pay other people besides yourself. And they're more important to pay because there are legal reasons to pay them. And so the first person to get their salary cut is the owner, unfortunately in my case. So I started getting contractors to help out. Because I wanted to actually build a team instead of just, and a local team, I started looking for part-time employees because I wanted to get people on board and actually grow a business with employees. And like I said, I'm very stubborn. And I had, everybody told me not to do this. They said, don't get space, don't hire people. That's not gonna work. And I was like, you know what? It is gonna work, I'm gonna make it work. And so my goal for my first year was to have an office and an employee. And I did that within six months of starting the company. So I got this amazing office space for the same price at other co-working places where you could get a desk. I was able to get a door with a lock on it and a room. So I felt like that was a huge win for me. The room was 12 by 12, I think, maybe not even that big. It was tiny, but there was enough room in there for another desk, so I had another person in there. Suddenly my cost went way up. I had to pay for more business insurance. More people, even though they started as contractors, so I didn't have to worry about taxes as much. And then rent. Suddenly, even though these numbers are totally fake, by the way, they're like estimates and averages. Every month has been like this. And so this is kind of, yeah, this is basically average. So first phase of growth, my bottom line was very similar. But when I started seeing the quality of our work as something that I wanted to pay more for, I wanted to make sure that I was getting people who, A, wanted to work full-time for a place, which is hard when you're looking at other freelancers as hires because they don't want a job. That's why they're freelancers. I realized I really had to step it up with the growth and make a commitment to hire full-time. And that was a huge cost. So suddenly, second phase of growth was going from contractors to full-time employees. This has been incredibly difficult. So our revenue has definitely increased. This is not where we are right now. We need to be a lot higher than that. And like I said, it goes up and down, but our costs for hosting licenses and equipment is pretty much the same. Our costs for insurance, people in rent has gone up a lot in taxes. Oh goodness. So one thing that you might see at the very bottom here is this is kind of profit is the bottom line there. So it's like, okay, it was about the same. And then suddenly growth phase two plummet zero. I did read Profit First. I loved that book. I had a really hard time with sticking to a plan because I don't stick to plans, I wing it. But I need to get back into that where I need to value myself more. And so at the beginning, as a freelancer, I was seeing very much like, okay, after my costs, everything else is mine. Everything else is how I pay myself. And so as a freelancer, I was basically taking all of the profit as my payment. In the growth phase, I was still paying myself as an employee in a way. And I was able to save some of the money as a profit in the way that it should be seen as profit. But suddenly when I made a lot of sacrifices to make the company grow to this phase two, where I'm valuing the people that are working for me, I've suddenly undervalued myself. And so I pretty much pay myself whatever's left over and, hey, it's really good for taxes. You don't have any profit. But it's something that is the next phase of my business journey is the profit, the focus on profit. I focused on purpose, I focused on people, and now it's time for me to focus again on profit. So I'm reframing how I'm thinking about profits from being a freelancer to being a business owner. First is profit is a reward for doing well. Profit is what you get on top of your income. This is money that you're getting that's almost a thank you from the market to say thank you for doing what you're doing. You're valuable. The second way of thinking about it is it's savings for setbacks because a business is a roller coaster ride. And in addition to being able to reward people with this money that your business has earned as a bonus, there's setbacks, but then there's also future growth. I want to continue growing. I have more people that I want to hire. And I can't do that without making sure that there's money on reserve for that opportunity. And then the proof of marketability really goes back to the reward for doing well. If a business isn't profitable, and this is back in the whole view of businesses and it's like why are you a business if you're not profitable. And right now, being bootstrapped, I think about this a lot. And this is where my account is like, no, you're okay. Your business is only two years old. It's okay that you don't have profit yet. But as I focus on growing and as I focus on that profit, it's really a proof. It's proving to myself that it's worth it. And so I've built this company as something that I know that I want to see in the world. I wanted more businesses like this. But next it's really, do other businesses want to see businesses like this? Will our clients pay more to invest in a business like ours? Sort of like how people pay more for organic food. Are we going to be able to raise our prices in a way that shows the marketplace that we are this other level of service provider? We're not just, oh, you don't just get a website with us. We are going to do all of these other things for you too. And this is all something that we're kind of exploring right now. So I don't know what that path is going to look like, but because I have these values and mission, I feel like I'll certainly know when I'm straying. And so if this is a path that you're interested in or that you're on, I would really like to get to know you because like I said, a village is very important. So thank you. Yes. I just want to say thank you so much for being so authentic in your talk. It's really amazing. And I got a lot out of it. I feel like I'm in a similar place in my business, which is not web-based right now, but I'm curious about, you said that you're in the second phase right now. So can you clarify what does that mean? Are you not paying yourself and also you don't really have profits? So if that's the case, how are you sustaining yourself? Or if that's not the case, what's happening? Yeah, so the question for the recording is if what does the second phase look like for my business and how am I sustaining myself? So I am lucky enough that my husband has gotten a job that does pay the bills more, but I haven't been able to pay myself and it's been a really rough few months. And so there's been a lot of soul searching. A lot of it was problems with people which I am recovering from and I'm on the track for actually paying myself this month. And so it's really, it's a challenge, but this phase of growth really is about, I've got the right people in the business now and so I need to focus on being able to pay myself and then I'm going to probably have to take another hit in order to afford another person, but it'll be worth it. And I'll know because I've learned from this experience. I think I saw your, yes. You said the problem was people. If the problem is people, is it productivity or personality? Both, and a part of that I think comes back to nobody cares as much as I do. And so I have to make sure that the people that I'm hiring are committed and we're not big enough to have somebody that doesn't care yet, hopefully ever, back there. So as you continue to grow as a business, obviously you need to take on an on-board more and more performance. What has been your strategy for getting clients, once you go past a personal and then a little bit of an extended network of people that you can connect to directly, how have you grown beyond that and made it sustainable? So the question is how have we grown beyond just the personal relationship type of business? What is your business development? What is your strategy for on-boarding clients in terms of how many clients? Okay, so strategy for on-boarding clients. We luckily are still small enough that it's all a very personal relationship. That we, is it, is your question really about after they've become clients or is it about acquiring clients? Okay, it's all been word of mouth. It's all been referral-based and it's all return customer, not all return customer, but it's many return customers, many referrals. We are working on that. How do we market ourselves? It's just hard to see when you're in agency or when you're in marketing. You know when you're talking to clients that you tell them you can't see, when you're inside the pickle jar, you can't read the label. So when we can't see our label, and so I've been working with outside consultants to help us with our own marketing because we can't do it for ourselves and that's been a game changer actually. I think there was a question up front. Yes, Judy. Thank you for your talk. It reminds me, my agency now is 10 years old and I would love to talk to you. Oh thanks. My biggest turning point that my early stage was Russell, when he said double your prices and we were working together on a project and he came back with the price and I said that's not what we said, it was like 17 and he comes back with 23. 17 I thought was high, 17,000 and he comes back with 23 and then the next time he mess with the contract it was in the 30s. I'm like we can't do this and we can do that so that was a huge thing. We have just like one day we just took our prices and we just doubled them and then I've done it several times and now our prices are like I can't even, thank you Russell. That's amazing. Two days later. Yeah, I very much would like to double our prices. Great, thank you. Judy says I can double my prices. Yes. You've been very kind to sort of describe the roller coaster business. Describe a little more detail, the kind of work that you do. By that I mean is it building new websites? Is it maintaining websites? Is it fixing busted websites? Maybe the answer is yes. So that's our problem actually, that's one of the problems that we've been having is that we, I've focused very much on who our clients are and as a helpful person I want to do everything and we can't do everything. So we have been, typically we start with a big project and then they become maintenance clients. We have gotten some maintenance clients who sites we didn't build and then we end up fixing the busted website. And so we, I think that ideally what we would be doing is working with an established marketing team within a company to help them really elevate their messaging through the website. And so we want to do really creative cutting edge designs for websites that are built well and are fast and secure and all of that but that are interesting. And so that's really where I get excited about it and making sure that they work well in the accessibility space and that they make sense to everybody. Because I think a lot of times what I'm seeing is a big challenge for a lot of our clients is that what they say about themselves doesn't make sense to everybody else. So we kind of cut through that to deliver their message in a more streamlined way. Yeah, thanks. Lydia. So the way that we kind of came up with the mission statement and the values, I started it by myself and then as soon as I had team members we would have like half day retreats where we kind of went through what does the business look like? Where do we want to go? And really refined the mission statement and the values from there. But a big thing that helped me was doing the B impact assessment for the B corporation because it has a lot of questions about like, do you do this? Do you do that? Is your mission statement or do you have a mission statement and does it have these kinds of things in it? And it kind of gave me guidelines in a way and I don't think it was necessarily intended to give me guidelines, but I certainly took it that way. All right, well thank you everybody.