 Lights. Magic. Thank you all for attending. This is the last session of the last day. And I'm feeling a little, I'm feeling, I'm feeling good. You guys feeling good? How many people here actually, how many people work in an agency show of hands? Yes. Oh, most, most. Okay. You guys in the, in the rear in the last row, you guys work together? Everyone in this row? Yeah. What agency do you work with? It's called Django. Django. Django? Okay. Yeah. And gentlemen, gentlemen in blue? Yeah. Same? No. No. Yourself? All right. Right? Accelerant. Accelerant? Yeah. I've worked four agencies up now. You don't know, but they don't? How other know? You don't know? Well, I didn't get an increase. You work, you're, the name of your agency? Sir? The name of the agency that you work with? I could. And yourself, sir? I, uh, I'm interested here. Okay. Um, it's good to know you guys have heard of, you have some notion of agency, agency life, your own agency lives, most of you. Uh, some of what I'm going to talk about today may feel familiar or sound familiar. Some of it may be a little bit different. Um, my name is Andrew Malus. I'm the CEO and co-founder of CalMUNA. Uh, CalMUNA is an agency that works with mission-driven organizations. We are, uh, committed to making, uh, the world and the internet a better place. It is with, uh, the help of the community here that we are able to do that. We work a lot in Drupal. We also provide design consulting services, strategy, et cetera. Our home base is in Oakland, California. Uh, on the other side of the country, I am, uh, native of Toronto, Canada. Uh, and we have a few of our members in our primarily distributed team at this point. We'll talk a bit more about the challenges of working in a distributed virtual environment, the nature of the changing scope of work, the nature of work towards the end of the talk. Um, but that is where we are based. We're a U.S.-based company. We'll talk a little bit about the differences between U.S. and Canadian law. We have learned so much, uh, since moving to the U.S. eight years ago now. These are some of our clients to give you an idea of the breadth and scope and scale, uh, which we operate. Um, this year, we, uh, we worked with the City of San Francisco, uh, just across the bay from Oakland. Uh, doing a little bit of, a little bit more work in the, in the government spaces. Uh, we work a lot in nonprofits, uh, Fair Trade USA. It was a big project for us, uh, this year in Jubilee. And, uh, quite a, quite a smashing array of higher education clients. Uh, always, um, tricky, uh, political, uh, variable. Uh, and, uh, we thrive in, in those types of environments, uh, because our, our membership embraces, uh, diversity and, uh, a very, uh, humanist approach to problem solving, which in these types of institutions is, is really key. Uh, to meet with success. Uh, these are some of the ways that you can contact me. I use my real name for things. Uh, not too many other people have, uh, my name so you can use the standard search tools. I'm on, uh, Drupal.org and have been for some time, 11 plus years now. And, uh, you can tweet at or with me, email me. Uh, I am accessible. Uh, I don't tell you a little bit about myself. Uh, I don't usually do this, but I thought it would be relevant because I started an agency. Um, and it's not something that many people do, but I think before I was in one, I thought about doing it. I'm like, well, who am I? Am I the type of person who could do this kind of thing or not? Are you the type of people who could do this kind of thing or not? What is involved? How does it change your life? And, uh, how, uh, have we been successful a little bit? Um, maybe, you know, might shed some light on things. So I, uh, I studied art at the Ontario College of Art and Design. Um, that's actually what ended up bringing us to California eventually. Uh, my wife, uh, went to pursue her, her MFA, uh, there. And so we moved, we moved out there, uh, to Menlo Park while she was going to Stanford. And I got involved with the Drupal community there. I met some other people. We'll, we'll get to that. Back to the art though. Uh, big picture stuff always been interested in, you know, topologies and, and thinking about like the macro and the micro, uh, really, really looking at how to, um, how to, how to, how to narrow in, how to narrow in on something, use some photographs, aerial photographs that I've taken, uh, some time back in, uh, in Nevada here. Um, but, you know, I was looking for, I was looking for something new. I was looking to start something new. Um, and I've always been interested in art and computers and how those two things come together. How I could use technology in my art practice, which had a bit more of a traditionalist background. And, uh, how I could blend that potentially with a history of, uh, social activism. I was very interested in how we perceive technology, how we interact with that and mixing media. Some of that thinking has kind of informed the way that I've sought to I've sought to brought, build business. And, uh, before, just before starting, uh, starting Calamuna, I, I was a contractor, a freelancer. I had a bit of a Robin Hood mentality. I would take clients I didn't really want to work with. I would charge them more. And then I would give big, deep discounts to the work I really wanted to do. And then the world was on fire. Occupy started. I moved to New York City. I, uh, lived there for a few months. I helped to run much of the digital infrastructure that powered the movement, including making this website, the Occupy Directory, which was a, a global directory and a very big data project that sought to shed light on where the conversation spaces were happening. It was built in Drupal. Um, it was a collaborative effort. It was all open source, free, everything free. And, uh, you know, we garnered some attention, the work that we were doing and the, and the media and other spaces, and there was a real impact. And, uh, when Occupy eventually fizzled out, um, I didn't have the patience for the types of clients that I didn't want to work with anymore. And I thought maybe there's a better way. Maybe I don't need to bend over backwards. Maybe, um, I can stick to my beliefs and, um, not compromise as much. So, um, my outlook changed and suddenly I started making more money when I was not interested in making money. It was, it's, it's like when you lose something, you know, you've lost your keys and you find them as soon as you stop looking for them. It's like magic. Um, and so in the Bay, you know, I was looking for some other opportunities. I was looking maybe for some other people to collaborate with along these lines. Uh, there was a few, a few, a few dudes, a lot of dudes in tech. Uh, we're trying to, uh, fix some of that, uh, in our agency. Um, a small shop called East Bay Development, which eventually would become Kalimuna. We got together at this place called the Revolution Cafe, where there was a bit of a burgeoning, uh, you know, culture of hacker-nish, or a hackish-nish around, around Drupal. And, uh, eventually, you know, we got an office, uh, with some, some rafters and a nice old building that was a converted bank. I like to refer to it as the bank of the proletariat. Uh, on the front, there's a beautiful facade, some Art Deco motif. And, um, you know, we started to, to pick some, pick some things up, pick some projects up. And eventually, uh, grow. Uh, this was DrupalCon in Portland. We built a little, uh, slideshow. Um, everyone loves slideshows on their websites. And, in their promotional materials. Uh, but, uh, we got, uh, an actual slide projector, uh, printed some slides digitally. And, uh, I have an amazing, adventurous tale that involves, um, uh, the Hell's Angels to tell you if you're interested after this as to how I found the, uh, lenses that we were going to project, uh, our, our slideshow. Uh, Oakland is a fabulous place. So, um, you know, we continued to grow some more. This was our website back in the day. We're very, uh, you know, forthcoming with our, our value proposition. Eventually, that, uh, shifted a little bit more. Um, we matured a bit more as a brand. And, uh, we, well, maybe not that mature. This website was launched from this hot tub in San Diego. Um, thanks to Pantheon. In one button, uh, with one button, we were able to push from, from tests to live, um, without needing to leave the tub. So, uh, our, our website doesn't quite look like this anymore on the front page, but, um, our company has grown, matured a little bit more. And, uh, it's been, it's been an interesting journey. What, what I want to talk, um, with you, uh, about today is, is a bit of the lessons that I've learned in terms of how to run a business and, uh, what that means behind the scenes. Uh, before doing this, I didn't appreciate what was all involved. I did some because, you know, I was a consultant. I ran my own business, but once you scale up and continue to scale, uh, things do change and your preoccupation changes. Uh, our organization is maturing. I'm, uh, attempting to mature with it. And my role previously was to, you know, serve clients. Uh, things have changed a little bit. Um, my client, uh, is now the team. And, and so I, I work, uh, for them. Uh, I want to show you a little bit behind the scenes of what, uh, goes on in an agency, how we're built, how we're constituted, and, uh, wrong behind the scenes. Uh, another photograph that I took, um, in Chicago some years ago. Um, but one thing that we really do in terms of deciding the direction of the company is engage everyone in that process. Um, we value, uh, a high degree of transparency, a radical transparency, sometimes too much truth. Um, but that's good. I think it's important to be able to, uh, be honest. And, uh, it is how we, how we grow. So, uh, this was in, in Baltimore, uh, around these conference times in Bad Camp and also DrupalCon. We bring the whole team together. I mentioned before we were primarily distributed. We'll talk some more about those challenges, but, uh, preceding those conferences, uh, a day or two, this was a two-day thing. We just kind of re-envisioned where we wanted to go. A lot of sticky note exercises, some thinking, different ideas, some structure to that, some engagement from individuals, remote and physically present, um, and setting forth, you know, some of their, some of their thinking. And so I designed some exercises that are, that are made to, you know, maybe they're not obvious initially, but it's a bit of a pasty should all come together in some interesting and meaningful way. How many people are you at this point? Um, we are about 15 people. Perhaps 20. It depends on, uh, how you, uh, calculate things. But we are, uh, in our core 15, there are some, uh, contractors with whom we work regularly and others irregularly. So, um, I guess it's a bit of a, uh, probability cloud, you know, if you want to look at it that way. There's the core, the core is, uh, is not moving so much. We host events as well. I think this is really important, uh, in our, our space in particular. We are here at a conference, um, to exchange ideas. And we want to facilitate, and in some cases lubricate the exchange of those ideas with, uh, animated dancing robots and, uh, funny hats. And, uh, pardon? I know. I know. Yeah. Uh, that's the, the subtext of lubrication. And, uh, and so we, we bring, we bring people together to have those conversations to, um, you know, perpetuate the magic. Uh, this was at, uh, at Bad, at Bad Camp. And, uh, we sponsor events. We sponsored this event. We sponsored other events. Because it's important, you know, unless we talk, unless we get together, we, uh, we're not, we're not really going to make, make a dent in things. You can't, you can't plan it all out. We need to leave room for the informal. We need to leave, uh, space for water cooler talk. And more formal talk. So we'll host panels, uh, organizing and working on, uh, higher education summit at Bad Camp to bring the voices together from different universities. Um, and we did something kind of interesting in, uh, New Orleans. We organized a funeral for Drupal 6. Uh, given that it was end of life. Uh, and engaged a traditional, uh, funeral procession and marching band which we took to the streets. Um, we had a coffin, uh, for, for it filled, filled with, uh, cupcakes. But, um, uh, it was quite, uh, it was quite moving. You know, in our community, we work tirelessly sometimes for many years on a project. And Drupal 6 is no exception. Uh, Drupal 9 may, may be the exception. But, uh, some people had worked for, you know, six years, uh, in, in Drupal 6, uh, or more. And, uh, it was kind of cathartic, uh, to let it, to let it go. And, uh, so we did that ceremoniously and with great fun. Um, that's a little bit, kind of about us. I don't know, gives you perhaps a little bit of a sense that we are, uh, playful, uh, earnest. We care about each other and, uh, about, about the community. Um, do you guys have any thoughts or questions before I jump into some more pie charts and things? I'm, I'm planning to show you a little bit, a little bit of that under the hood. Are you planning on staying about the same time? Planning on growing? Um, that's an, that's an interesting question. We are hiring. So, uh, so we are, we are looking to grow a little bit. Um, one of the reasons we're looking to grow is, uh, because um, the team, we're interested in building a high-performance team. Everyone wants to do their best work. And in order to do that and be solvent, um, we have to fix some concurrency issues that we have. Working with large institutions, feedback cycles can be long. And so we must be working on, you know, a lot of things at once. And that can spread the team across too many things. So we're, we're looking a little bit to have, um, more redundancy and, and increase a little bit of the volume of work that we're taking on so that we can achieve those, those goals, um, in our practice. And that's, that's our primary reason to grow, uh, right now. Um, there is no long-term plan after that. Um, we will see then what the next move, what next move makes sense. There are some other areas where we may want to you know, dive deeper into. Um, but it really depends that, in a company of our size, it really depends on, on the people. You know, it's not as much about the positions. And when we're talking about growth, it'd be like, hey, yeah, we should start doing more SEO, right? Like, unless you really have someone who's going to make that happen in the right context. Um, you can find that person and find a role, but we're, we're just so, at a certain size where it, we really want to play to everyone's strengths and grow organically. I can just offer, I co-founded a lot of Canada's first, uh, triple shops and went from like two people and thirty-five people. And in fact, if there's a lesson I took out of it is we probably should have planned for the growth instead of just wouldn't have an organically. Because at some point, we're too big to have discussions of the way we used to have them. Yeah. I don't want to make it seem like there is no growth strategy at all. I'm very aware of the caps that happen. In an organization, there are certain humps in growth. And I've learned this, or this has been reinforced in talking with other agency owners, multiple agency owners. I've been privileged to be part of some networks and conferences and other spaces where we talk very frankly and openly about these things. When you get past twenty people, there's a bit of a shift. You incur more administrative overhead and that's not only from a cost perspective, but also from a human perspective. HR becomes a lot less of a thing you can do on the fly. There's just a kind of, and then that cost increase pushes a need for revenue to offset it. And so it can very quickly start to become a race to catch up to that financial picture and within, you know, there's a pressure to go from like twenty to thirty to fifty. And some people are on that track. And then once you get past like thirty, then there's a sort of aesthetic where, and increasingly in our space, I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but you may have noticed a lot of agencies have been sold in the last few years. It's not new. We'll come back around to that. But once you get past thirty, then there's other pressures that start to happen and other, you get on the radar of other agencies that can see you as more of a threat and that competition becomes fiercer. So we're currently still a bit scrappy. That lets us move nimbly and we're a bit more like a frigate, you know, at this point, if you want to use a naval metaphor. This is how we're structured. This is a new construct that I put together this year to try and express, despite our small size, areas of concern and responsibility because when you are, you know, fifteen, twenty people, it's a lot of different hats are being worn. But there has to at some point be stewardship in some key areas of the organization. These are the ones that we've identified as most important to us and each of these spaces needs decided leadership. It may not be the purview of only one person to act in that capacity. In marketing we formed a committee in order to move that forward. We didn't have a single person who was going to be able to achieve that mandate. And, you know, technology is also a joint effort. We have many leaders in the technology space because we are heavily invested in a lot of research and development and community contributions. So that follows a little bit more of a consensus model. In support we have a director of support that has more, that's more of a straight arrow. But all of these things combine and they're supported by a base which is operations which includes, you know, HR, legal financial, all these kinds of runnings of things and time management. We're all moving upwards. This is how we think about marketing. Marketing is communications. It's marketing and communications. And so for anything that we take on, we want to evaluate its relevance. You know, we can do a lot of things and any action that we take might impact many parts of this. When we were thinking about, you know, sponsoring this event, thinking, what is it, we give, you know, a thousand dollars to the event, like what do we get in return? Well, in some ways we don't really care that much. It's intangible. But we also think, well, you know, maybe there's a possibility for us to increase our reaching reputation. That's important to us. We want to attract talent. That's also important to us. So we're working kind of in these spaces. I don't know how much of this spirit, the internal spirit, like, I mean, it's Josh and I, I think we're bonding, right, Josh? We drank some good beers while we're here. So there's a little bit of that that's going on. Our network loyalty and retention, not so strong. We don't have any Canadian clients. We can't compete in this marketplace because we have American employees that we need to pay in US dollars. And the exchange rate is not favorable for an organization like ours currently to do business in Canada. That may change. You know, we may find other ways to make that work, but that's just the economy right now. And so client acquisitions, even though it's really very important to us, not something that we are expecting to do here. So we're here for spirit. We're here for the spirit and the community. And also to, you know, practice some of these talks, which we'll hopefully be giving in other times and spaces. Time. Time is money. It's time. You know, we're spending time on stuff and we'll get more into how we do that. But I want to share with you a little bit about where our money comes from when we do make money. This is a slide from a report that I haven't given yet to the team. It's a few more slides I need to do and we're traveling and things. But every quarter I talk about our financial picture. I share our numbers. Everyone is aware of what our profit margins are, of where our expenses are going, of how well we're doing. It's really important in an organization of our size for everyone to have agency, right? To be able to be an independent agent that acts responsibly in relationship to a context. It's not just a job. We want to do well. We want to enjoy the work we do. We want to feel like it has meaning. And unless we understand that context, it's difficult to get passionate about that. And it's difficult to do our best work. It's difficult to go beyond and not feel like it's for a good reason. It's taking something away potentially rather than adding. We're very conscious as well of making sure that people aren't working too much and we monitor all these kinds of things. But as I said earlier, we do a lot of work in the higher education sector. It has in 40% more or less. This year it's displaced some in dollars. It's probably similar. But because we've done more work in government, that slice of the pie is displaced in higher ed a little bit. And it was interesting for us to look in previous years at this startup category. We have some mixed results working with startups. They expect a lot. They think they know everything and they think they need you because they don't have time and maybe it's for convenience. That's not really the kind of relationship we want to engage with. We want a respectful, mutual conversation. We want to be partners with our clients. So we thought to divest ourselves working with startups that's reflected moving forward. But unless we can expose this data and share it with the team and have a conversation around it, you're just left scratching your head what should we do and this and that and then we have a conversation we talk frankly about it. It becomes really clear. And then as leadership startups approach us I say good luck. I've blanked out some of the numbers in the names of our clients here because there's some clients that we say we're working with yet it's in contracts. As you grow as an agency clients get bigger you have to sign all these things and they say hey you can't tell people you're working with us and then later you put in writing you ask them hey can we take it now and then they say yes and you can put their logo on and then maybe they'll come back to you later and say oh you gotta take your logo off we changed our whatever standards or whatever this. Anyhow what I'm trying to say is a long tail of income a few clients that give us more money a lot of clients give us a little bit of money we operate a support program so that's where a lot of that long tail is but some of it in the year might just be like a big project that just ended in January either way what's really important here is to find a good mix this was skewed differently in previous years we had the team wanted to work on less projects at a time so we needed to endeavor to change the shape of this graph because we needed we needed fewer larger clients so that we would be doing less at a time so that we worked on that things have shifted things shifted that makes a big clients that might be about like two big projects at the same time and some other little things and that's kind of like the character of like what work and revenue looks like onto time this is this year so far but this is about how many hours we put in every month as a team and track, we used harvest to track our time and to build we also used this forecast tool that they have I don't really like it that much but it's what we have right now anyhow when all of a sudden done we're tracking over a thousand hours as a team per month and you can see that some of it is for administrative time some of it is for available hours for R&D and for the most part we are getting close to our goals our goals are a function of revenue that revenue is to meet demands of salary needs and growth needs and so we kind of retrofit those projections monitor them we look at utilization when I say we it's mostly like me and accountants and then presenting that information to others and getting feedback and then reworking stuff improving the way that we track formulas we use so we're trying to keep people billable at a certain rate different people maybe in different percentages but overall as a company as a whole we look at that holistically what we're kind of our targets are we on, are we off of it we compare that a little bit to revenue we get a sense of where things should be we know when there's slow months we know when there's heavy months we can start to develop more of an accurate sense and in the patterns of work we know for example that during Drupal Con our billables take a bit of a nose dive because the entire team is there conferencing that can't as well and so we need to plan for that when we aren't billing we're doing work internally we track that as well, we track everything there's some overhead to it it's annoying, I don't like to do it I don't think anyone really likes to do it but there's just some things we have to do or else we wouldn't be prosperous and we wouldn't have clarity there's a lot of administrative time there's a lot of development time this is actually all time, not just internal time so as an organization we're doing a lot of development that's in state relief sites there's R&D that we're doing and project management and those slivers are so when we look at these charts we're like are we really tracking things appropriately I thought we should be doing more of this or less of that so we can go back and take a look make sure we have time forecasted to accomplish our goals in those spaces and then when we're not billing we'll be working on different things people might be doing some training we have some internal projects we're working on and that's so we restructured things a little bit, you'll see 2016 we've moved R&D to more internal stuff anyways this is just more to give you an idea I think it'll take too long to dive too deeply into that but ultimately what I'm talking about here is transparency transparency is something that not only internally I think is important but externally to our clients it's really important we don't round hours we don't want to inundate people with too much information but we provide them if they want it, complete transparency into all of our time in what we're doing for them because we are responsible we want to demonstrate that value that we're providing and we want to be held accountable as we should be for the dollars that we're charging them and the work that we're doing and that's I think the right thing to do this was a bit of a workshop trust exercise that we did in the office in a previous iteration of these workshops this is a spreadsheet that I use it has some fictional numbers in it but I thought I'd share it with you because I've shared it with a number of other CEOs and financial people and so far it's fairly unique as far as I can tell in terms of how to look at compensation difficult conversations to have particularly when you're hiring someone difficult conversations to maintain after someone has been employed everyone is valuable and it's hard to put a number on things everyone has aspirational goals one of the interview questions that we ask is what would you do if you won a million dollars in the lottery and the follow-up question that is what would you do if you won a hundred million dollars in the lottery starts to abstract that question of money and speak more to values and that's what's really important but we can't lose sight of the real financial realities people have different goals they have families they have different needs and they're various some people want to work 40 hours a week some people want to work less we want to be accommodating for that before we have people in Canada we have people in the US we have payroll we're not a big company yet we don't run payroll across the border so we healthcare exists in Canada it's called health insurance in the United States and that comes at a cost but it's a benefit that we pay for and deliver to our American employees but how do we look at that scale across that and do that fairly how do I compare compensation for different roles and different positions I don't think it should be an arbitrary thing I don't think it should be like how little can I pay you versus how much do you want we need to have a contextual conversation around that I can flip over the spreadsheet maybe if this is too small but I just want to walk you through a few points here so first often people come to us and they're like well I'm making this much money right now you know but I hate my job I want to work with clients that I care about it's fantastic you're the type of person that we want to work with but we're also the type of company that's going to provide that kind of opportunity if we didn't care for people to be super super billable we'd be working with clients and gouging them and yeah we could pay you more and you would be working all the time and you'd probably be working on the weekends because we're going to make some unrealistic promises that we need to keep because we need to pay we need to make the cash but we don't want to operate in that way and that comes at a little bit of a payoff people who may be 75% billable in their old job to a less billable state because they're going to be doing more R&D more community involvement more of those things that they care about and that comes as well at a cost for us as an organization so we want to demonstrate that and again it's a transparency when you're working you're making money for the organization that you're working with every hour that you work you know what they're charging clients and that's a real thing we're charging these clients $175 an hour I could be making I could do this I could charge $100 an hour and I'm working here and I'm making $50 an hour it can start to breed some kind of resentment I think it's really important to have that conversation upfront and contextualize it because there is a context for that there isn't a mountain of gold somewhere we're accumulating all this money goes to different places 80%, 85% of our money goes to our people directly so that's what this is about we have a whole bunch of benefits benefits add up to total compensation then we pay taxes on that we're talking to contractors those contractors think well if I'm a contractor I'm charging $125 an hour but then they're going to get dinged on their their taxes as an independent contractor later they don't necessarily do the math on that so our company is also in addition there's money that we pay in income tax on top of that so we want to be transiting around that but here's the staff that cost for us we're salary and that's how much it equates to per hour if you do the math this is not a good column to have it's not really that advantageous for when I have this conversation to show that number but it's honest it's the truth if I don't show it people are going to do that math at least and then afterwards there's the income if someone is making let's say in scenario A they're making 80K after the total compensation and they've got all the benefits comes out to be like 93K plus afterwards our taxes that's like 100K so it's like they started at 80K but it's really costing us $100,000 so there's some context to begin with and then in scenario A there's some time off and then they're working 40 hours there's 239 workdays in a year that's 1,934 hours they're at 67% billable that's 1,276 billable hours they're working if the average billable rate that they're working is $150 an hour hypothetically they're generating 100 and $91,000 in income for the company their staffing costs $100,000 there's $90,000 that they've generated towards the company's financial success and this works to balance out other roles that are non-billable that recognizes being important in marketing and administration and HR and other things some people are more billable than others so that you know what that works out to how are we going to what margins are how are we going to express that and express the value of a workday taking time off of what does that mean is a revenue revenue that the company wouldn't be making if someone were working otherwise known as opportunity costs and we can play with those numbers some people have young have young families or they have another passion they want to pursue and they want to work less time so how do we do that? we can calculate how many PTOAs people want to get a time off that salary is adjustable so there's some play that you can have with that and we've had people that have shifted they've moved that around I think we had an employee a team member who was at 40 hours a week and they wanted to go to London in order to pursue a course of passion that they had dropped down to 32 hours and so we were able to quickly just change that up it was an easy conversation change the numbers everything's proportionate and where we can examine those scenarios as well and this is important because we want people to do their best work and their best work is going to be done if they're happy and if we're accommodating and if we're not pushing people beyond where they need to go and we're also giving them the space to do what they need to do and we can express in this case there's some scenarios where we want to drop 40 hours to 32 hours a week there's some math I think but anyways this should be lower and then one more PTO day and this is kind of how we have these conversations early and later how do you treat lunch? pardon? how do you treat lunch? so that's a good question we look at 40 hours as 40 hours that are tracked it's not shift work people work in different rhythms and it's not quite the same as like 15 minute breaks and half hour for lunch it's a slightly different economy this is the norm in our industry as I can tell from talking to most other agencies I have contemplated moving it down to 37 and a half hours to make some of those accommodations our numbers don't currently support that right now we would have to shift drastically across the board to make that a reality but it's something that we can figure out and yeah that's how we do that people work across multiple time zones and for the first part we have overlap spend diagram time we're doing stand ups and we have someone who's in Europe so they stay up late because we value collaboration we want to pair programming we want to work together this is the value it's our strength but we want to be flexible the work's got to get done so what I've learned is that and this is not new to me when I was at school when I was at OCAD I ran the student union for a couple years I started a school newspaper which I ran for a few years and running an agency is like is like creating a little government we have to take care of people in the US it's that way more and more it's not Canada I learned some very interesting lessons if someone gets injured on the job or not on the job and you bust your hand you can't type in the US you're pretty much SOL the government does not do anything for you that is the responsibility of the company the company is responsible for buying insurance to cover that or not they don't have to do anything really you can't work long term disability is a different situation but here you can't really claim unemployment insurance you can't climb on employment insurance for a short term you can't do that in Canada health care costs are super super high you're looking at somewhere around like 300 to 2000 dollars a month health insurance costs depending on your plan and how many people are members of your family and at what level of coverage you know you need to have that's pretty significant and as a company as a Canadian I feel like there's a lot of pressure on us as a company to do things that I think should be the role of government but it's not the reality you know in the US and that's a tricky tricky thing especially in an organization where we have people across the border on both sides I learned some interesting things about the state of New York so I was talking earlier about like employment insurance right so we have an employee who is in Brooklyn team members in Brooklyn and employment tax is something that we've been you know deducting from their paycheck and remitting and we have insurance as well to cover to cover that portion because if someone claims the unemployment insurance the company pays for some of it and the government pays for some of it so that is shared but New York requires you even if you have that insurance specific plan in the state of New York in addition to that so they decided they wanted to find us $12,000 so we've been fighting them taking them to court it's not fun things you learn things we have to take care of all this stuff, all this insurance, oh my god employee health, short term disability, errors and omissions cybersecurity commercial general liability an umbrella liability clause companies want you to extend your coverage for whatever arbitrary number they have you need more coverage for whatever else they want you to be insured for vehicles because they have some overriding policy like you're not even physically there in the space you're not a delivery truck or anything there's all kinds of crazy complications that we end up isolating our team members from but the things that I've learned are important things I need to do I don't know if someone had made a list of all these things that I was going to have to do if I would have started this so please don't let me scare you off if you're thinking about starting your own company there's lessons that you'll learn along the way but it's good to be aware that there are things that you'll need to figure out taxes okay here's another difference with the U.S. in Canada this is crazy and I learned this too about the U.S. there's the Republicans and there's the Democrats and there's the conservatives and there's the Liberals it's not the same thing at all at all they're not just more extreme Republicans think about the country in terms of a republic like an actual republic where they really just don't give a crap about the federal government and they want to do their own thing that's why you have all these militias that's why you have all of these enclosed states and each of those states legislate their own way how they're going to deal with taxation for an employee payroll which means every employee that we add to payroll we need to levy specific kinds of taxes even certain cities have other taxes so in order to run a distributed company and find the best talent and work in this way we need to do all this huge paperwork for every single state for every single person for every single unique situation and it's confusing in New York they have some weird thing every state's got some weird thing and there's all these things we need to levy and do kind of stuff in software and all that and you don't have to think about it for the most part but it's a thing it's a thing to wrap your head around it's a lot of other stuff we just want to make some websites we're just trying to make some websites do some pull requests but yeah tax situations different all over the place so time check almost done we are distributed as I mentioned we use tools these are familiar to you I'm sure you guys are part of Slack there's been some talks about it Trello github it's a new era of collaboration collaboration tools are maturing more and more interesting collisions here it's not a lot of great open source alternatives there are open source alternatives all of this and we use them in Occupy and we use our own as well to be fervent about it but as an organization we can't afford downtime we can't be like oh no our custom project management tool has crashed and now we have to stop everything we're doing and take two days to fix it that is a lot that's a huge cost to our project schedules and everything so we incur a lot more costs we pay like over $35,000 just for all these different licenses it's only $5 a month per person something else that we do every Friday we have an all hands meeting everyone dials in we make a slide up and talk about our week how things were going for us personally this was my slide this week I was here with my parents digging through the old photo albums this was my son it was a baby picture I was like Florida it was like it was a little me it was amazing and I also discovered something else that was really new I didn't know why this image we had on our website resonated so much with me but I was digging through the thing in our albums and I found these pictures myself playing in the playground when I was in this picture it was amazing so I shared that with my team and everyone's got a slide like this amazing incredible events in everyday lives someone's best friend was murdered this week in Texas, shot in this apartment other people are going through tremendous journeys of recovery you know it's all life and death and it's important to stay connected and it's actually kind of incredible when you are when you aren't just kind of seeing each other all the time sometimes the engagements can be stronger when they're micro engagements yeah so we try to keep in touch we try and stay we try and stay but to this other question of you know the future and staying relevant as an agency I'll give you some thoughts on that I know we're running a little bit close to the wire here I got 5 more minutes on the timer 2 more minutes on the timer so we've done a lot of interagency collaboration this year working with others on larger projects that's another way that we can remain relevant we had a little bit of a problem with project management and some hires that didn't work out so lined up some collaborations to augment some of our capabilities of others and round out our offerings other things that we're dealing with you know Drupal 8 has decided to be an enterprise solution it's hard to build small websites in Drupal 8 it's hard to build small websites in Drupal generally but there's ways to do it there's lots of great distributions there's ways that you can streamline your business like I want to make restaurant websites and find some economies there but in large complex ecosystems we're finding that's the case but that means that we're you know we're moving up market to make those projects worthwhile we need those 100, 200, 300 K plus projects to make those margins work and a lot of other people do too and the mid-market is getting crowded and that 100 K plus that's mid-market now I was building my first website as a freelancer it's charged I'll pay you a website for $5,000 you know that's no problem yeah but what does that mean you know how are these other agencies that we're going against being competitive while they're doing a lot of different things to acquire talent in order to be able to deliver those services they're driving prices they're driving their costs down by offshore development they are also sometimes trying to price you out and doing work to get their foot in the door and underbid in there's a lot more competition our biggest competition right now in the jobs that we've lost that hurt the most are the ones that we've lost to design firms that don't have strong technical capabilities and they've won important mission critical technology programs in Drupal because they had flashy presentations and and we know and this has happened time and time again we have these clients come back to us afterwards in support and we fix the problems and we make it work and we save the day but it's tough it's tough out there and it's getting harder it's getting a lot harder so we have to think about what we can do on that lower end of the spectrum it shouldn't be that unreasonable to build a website for $50,000 we're having more and more trouble doing that so is Drupal the answer? maybe not, we're diversifying we're doing more static sites we're doing some other stuff and that's important we have these mission driven orgs we work with they need to succeed and as these changes occur as technology changes which it will continue to always 10 years ago 10 years from now our value proposition ultimately isn't Drupal it isn't technology even though that is a strength and a differentiator our real value is people it's our people and our process what we're able to do together and how we're able to grow together and that's what we really need to invest in and if you're thinking about the agency that you work with for look around at the people they're why you come to work every day and it's important that those relationships are maintained and that's changing the nature of work is changing there's a lot more remote work going on and we are adapting I'd love to dive deeper into that question my friend who's an economist was probing me on new matters we've got a really interesting exchange on that topic about whether or not some economists think everything's becoming so with technology people will work less you guys work in technology you work less every day, every week you start your day on Monday and you're just like alright I have a difficult problem I solved it on Monday I'm gonna take the rest of the week off that's it I'm done, because that was easy look what I did, I did something and it took me a day it took me a week or a month to accomplish this but I installed the library and it works great, you don't walk away there's a drive clients are expecting more and more they want it to be intuitive and clean they want it to behave like billion dollar websites like Google we're facing these upward pressures and we're fighting we're fighting to meet those expectations and exceed them anyways we could dive deeper into that but we're out of time I want to thank you for listening to me for so long on this last session I'm gonna be here see you next year yes questions so how many which market which market which market more and more well I mean some market verticals have become nearly saturated there's still some increases higher education has been a strong proponent of Drupal for many many years about 40% of higher education is there I'd say at this point it's hard to get exact statistics because many universities don't even know how many websites they have there's just so many out there and the non-profit spaces are in my view shrinking in Drupal market adoption a lot of them are moving to WordPress and then there's Enterprise Enterprise is just adopting Drupal like Gangbusters, Aquias doing a lot of pushing there and so they've really made some inroads into those spaces and then there's a lot of unknown about a lot of things so I don't know if that's my two cents and government I'm happy to stick around and chat if anyone wants but I don't want to keep others have things to do, places to be