 Well, thanks everybody for coming to my talk today. My favorite guy up there, Deshaun's in the room. So stoked to have been able to meet him this week. But anyways, I'm gonna hear talk about finance and the title of my talk is Working Backwards for WP Business Growth. Anybody in the room have an MBA? All right, anybody in the room have a CPA? All right, I think one of the really great things about this talk and about my approach to building business within WordPress is I don't have any of those things. You know, when Devin and Matt and I came together and we're sitting around and thinking about building Give, that's what I spend most of my time on as head of finance. And we're thinking around and we're googling away and we're like, well, you know, to build a company, everyone needs a hipster, a hustler, and a hacker. And so what are you gonna be, Jason? And I'm like, well, I work in agency sales and I know a little bit about marketing. You know, I'm gonna become the hustler. And I think what we found is that in the WordPress space, like, hustlers don't exist. Like, you don't really have sales folks in our company. Like WooCommerce never made a sales call. You can't call them. Like, you wanna get in touch with Yoast and you have to submit a support ticket. I was like, oh, well, here I am in finance, right? So that was about four years ago and today we're gonna talk a lot about kind of what it takes to build a company and then we have something really interesting happening right now at Give where we've expanded on an entire new department within our company. So I'm gonna take you inside Give. We're gonna talk a little bit about how we build it. But I like to remind everyone why I'm here and I'm really here for one reason because I believe that WordPress gives us the opportunity to not only earn a living, but to change the world. To give a voice to the voiceless and to deliver on what we promise every time. So it's really exciting to be part of such a powerful community that powers such a big part of the web that really has the ability to, like I was just doing a support ticket with someone in Istanbul who was looking to set up a ran payment gateway in South Africa to help out refugees, Christian refugees that were migrating down from Sudan who've been persecuted and that's why we're here. If you've visited other tech conferences, maybe they're there for different reasons. We're not here to talk about that today but we need to deliver on the brand promise of democratizing publishing. One of the people that I really respect within WordPress, he came to WordPress a few years ago from Kleiner Perkins. Maybe you might have a bad notion about Kleiner Perkins but I think John made a coming to our community last year and he put out a design and tech report. Hopefully you all were able to fill out the 2018 survey. They just closed those responses but this is the 2017 survey and I think Chris and the other folks on the stage talked about this in the last talk is that we need to learn better about business, we need to do better with financing if we're gonna deliver on that brand promise of democratizing publishing and truly and actually changing the world, right? Not just doing some freelance work and being able to take off on Friday at two o'clock. That's not why we're here, right? We gotta take that into where we were. I don't design any of my presentations so all the work that you're looking at is from one of our designers Flavia so I'd love to point her out. I'm not the designer in the presentation because I don't design. We have team members that do that and Flavia's my team member and she's been with us for a couple years. I do encourage you to go to that designandtechreport.wordpress.com and continue to support John and his work at Automatic so I wanted to bring that up. When we think about our company I always like to look to the people that kind of built really great things in the past and I really, really love Alex Spagusky. Does anybody know who Alex Spagusky is? Well he's the founder of Crispin Porter Bagusky and he really believed that everything that is done at a company is baked into that company and that's why I'd like to share my team, Taylor's in the house today but every one of our teammates is responsible for leading under our goal of democratizing publishing so wanted to share that with you as well. So action items, I love taking away action items from this. We're gonna talk a little bit about what working backwards is. We're gonna talk about this real dilemma that's happening right now at GiveWP and at our company. I love talking about futures and ratios because people say, well Jason, you know you're like kind of a, you're not like that accountant type. I said, well here's the deal everybody. Like if you work in finance, that's not tax, okay? Right, we have CPAs that do tax. Like finance is about craving curiosity, about being playful and making stuff up and like I'm pretty good at that. So we're gonna talk about futures and ratios. We're gonna talk about teammates and buying. I wanna share a little bit about what we kind of believe failure is or successes and then my first rap song again and again and again. Talk a little bit about that. So what is working backwards? You know when I think about working backwards, I think about looking into the future, think about accomplishing goals and then that process of working backwards. When we got into a role, we recently hired a woman named Michelle Ames out of Rochester, really wonderful. She's actually a phenomenal opera singer too. But we brought in Michelle, I said, Michelle, so I work in finance, you're gonna be building this new department. Like how are we gonna do this? And she says, well Jason, what are the rules? And I looked and I'm like, well there's no rules. We don't need to have rules to make decisions in finance because it's not tax, right? Finance is the process of looking into the future, projecting based on some random numbers and then figuring it all out, right? I know MBA is needed or CPA is needed for that. I think what's needed more is the ability to ask good questions and be incredibly curious. So finance in a traditional sense might have rules, but those are the folks that are doing tax. When we're thinking about building the future of WordPress, when we're gonna take it from 30 to 36%, when we're gonna increase our average WordPress salary from 58,000 to 258,000, we don't need to provide rules. We don't need to provide rules and there are no real rules in our community. All right, so let's talk about the main thing we're gonna talk about today, which is the customer success manager dilemma. So we decided this year really to follow Bobby P from GoDaddy, right Mr. Parsons that started GoDaddy. He said, you know, what we need to do is set up a call center and talk to our customers and everyone in hosting is like, oh you don't wanna talk to your customers, right? Here we are, what, 15, 16 years later since GoDaddy. So we had this dilemma at our company as we were thinking on bringing a customer success manager on board, like someone buys our product and then we pick up the phone and call them and talk to them like a human being. So we went to our mentors and we created this little chart and I said, well, do we need to, from a finance perspective, really think about sales experience? Like let's hire that sales slayer. Let's find someone, it doesn't matter if they're in WordPress or they're not in WordPress, they know about sales and they're gonna be able to get on the phone and talk to our customers. And I'm like, oh man, I don't know about that. And then we're like, okay, well maybe we need to find someone with WordPress knowledge. Well, they don't have any sales experience. They don't know too much about asking someone for the clothes. If you say AJS to them, they're like, well, what is an average job size? So this is a real dilemma that we were struggling with in December and January of this year. And in my role as head of finance of the company, as I'm talking to Michelle as her leader, I was like, Michelle, well, shoot, let's use finance to solve this problem because I called my mentors, like I called Howard Drauter, a amazing man who sold several different companies for a significant amount of money. He said, Howard, here's the deal. We wanna hire a customer success manager to call our customers and I wanna hire someone with WordPress experience. Terrible idea, okay? I called the head of sales at house, they're a SaaS product. They said, head of sales at house, we really wanna build this WordPress. He's like WordPress, what does that have to do with sales? Oh God, then I called my other buddy who's head of sales at digital at NBC, looking for those mentors to find that good information. I said, head of digital sales at NBC, like, do you hire people that know about production? He's like, Jason, you're crazy. Like you need to go to the sales market. Like this doesn't make any sense, right? So this is a dilemma that we really struggled with. And I didn't know what to do because for me, I was like, we're growing this whole thing within WordPress. Finance, sales, marketing, develop, development, support. This is growing within WordPress. But everything that I was hearing from my mentors was the exact opposite. So I did what I knew to make my decision was really good, is we went to finance. So we've got the dilemma here. I'm really stoked about it. We're gonna take you through finance. We're gonna look at some spreadsheets. Hopefully this will inspire you to think about your business maybe in a different way, maybe in the same way. And I think like maybe, hmm, everyone is said throughout the conference, we're always learning, we're always growing. And we don't really know what we knew yesterday until we knew it today based on something that happened yesterday, right? So we've got WP Good Vibes versus the Sales Slayer. And this is something that Michelle and I spent, actually before she was hired. So we spent about 60 days really thinking about this to try to make a decision. And the way that we began thinking about it was really just by creating these random parameters. So when I think about projecting in finance or forecasting the future, let's think about all these other parameters that may or may not be tied to this end result, which is generate customer loyalty and get more renewals, right? We learned from the leadership from Pippin Williamson that if you put someone on auto renewal, you can increase your renewal rate from 35 to 70% profound impact on the bottom line, profound impact on the ability to create jobs, and yes, profound impact to change the world. So some of the parameters that we thought about when we were just riffing was, well, how many calls are they gonna make to generate a renewal? How many demos do they have to give to generate a renewal? If they get an upgrade, how many calls is that gonna take? If we make calls, are we gonna piss people off? If we make calls, are we gonna deliver that WP good vibes? If we make calls, will WP good vibes get upgrades? So we started creating all these things that were unnecessarily unrelated to the spreadsheet, but we were just curious, like craving curiosity, just thinking about this stuff over and over again, get on the call, get on a slack hangout, and really think about it, spend the time thinking about it, walk away from it and coming back because some of these things don't even make any sense. Like this is our brainstorm. So as we start to think about this, we're like calls to annoyed folks. Okay, so like that's my Matt Cromwell in me, which is like, we can't call people, we're gonna piss them off. We threw that out of there, that was stupid. Annoyed folks to renew, well if they're annoyed, how can we measure being annoyed, right? So anytime we're doing finance, we need to measure it. Like how do you measure someone that's annoyed? It's a feeling, it's tonality. Like if you talk to me, I'm from Chicago, I got this really high-pitched voice, I speak too loud, like I'm always annoyed based on what people think, right? So we created these items that were on a sheet that we just talked about for a few times, and I think that's a really good lesson as we think about finances that before you get into finance, like don't go to bear metrics and download their ratio sheet and then start plugging in numbers, like that's not what finance is about, right? Finance is about being playful, finance is about taking risks, finance is about going 10X to wherever you wanna go based on anything that you wanna do, right? Again, leave the tax for the CPA, that's not what we're talking about, what we're talking about is scaling, what we're talking about is growing. Well from it, what it led to a few different things that we wanted to measure. First and foremost, we wanted to measure sales training. When we're thinking about coming in, and again, this is happening in the department of finance at our company at Give, right? So this isn't like within the product, this isn't within the support channel, this isn't within the marketing channel, this is like CFO Jason working with Michelle, our implementation partner director on creating these different things that we can start to measure. So the first thing was like sales training, well, good vibes doesn't know anything about sales, they need a lot of sales training, right? Sales layer, they're like, I'm the best. How about WordPress training? That's another thing we thought about when we started thinking about this customer implementation program. Well, you need sales training, you're also gonna need WordPress training and we could measure that as well. We also wanted to think about word camp participation, like who loves coming to word camps? It's the dankest place in the world, word camp participation. Next thing we thought about phone calls, like, well, the slayer's gonna be able to make 100 calls a day when Michelle and I got this together, she was the head of admissions at RIT. I had been involved in call centers in college, I did some fundraising for my fraternity, said, well, how many phone calls can we make in a day? Well, like 20, 160, 16, so that's something that we also measured in creating our flow. We also wanted to measure emails. How fast could you send emails out? We also wanted to measure contact rate, like when you make a phone call, how many times do you contact that person? We also wanted to measure total contacted, demos and first level support rate, demos and first level support, new revenue convert percentage, and also the new revenue number. So in the way that we think about our business, because we are a business and because it requires capital to change the world, let's not kid ourselves about that. These are the different items. What is there? One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. So from that weird sheet, we're talking about annoyed folks and I'm upsetting my buddy Matt Cromwell. We got to this, right? No numbers, no financial formulas. Nobody's talking about churn. Like that stuff doesn't matter folks, right? What matters is figuring it out first. We figure that out later once we start getting the data in, right? So we've got these 11 different parameters that we're thinking about. Well now we start doing what I like to do which is getting curious and being playful and building out futures. And this is the future sheet that we built for WP Good Vibes. Unfortunately, like we don't have a huge screen. I was at a U2 concert this year. There was like a hundred yard screen. We need to get that at WordCance. Anyway, so we got four different months here and you've got our 11 different protocol here and you can see kind of how we baked it out for Good Vibes, right? So this is a WordPress professional who doesn't have too much sales experience. I'm sure they've been on the phone before like they call their mom or their girlfriend. But like they're in WordPress, right? And again, as a history lesson, people in WordPress don't like calling customers for some reason. I never really understood that. Like if people know the history, maybe you can cue me in on that because I've only been involved with WordPress for a few years. So we looked at all this stuff and this is, we're actually looking at actual data from January which is really exciting. So we made 84 phone calls, we did 168 emails. This was really surprising to me as we were baking out the futures. The amount of people that we were able to contact, the number of people that we contact and then based on that, how many people wanted to get back on the phone with us? Like this is a key insight folks for your business. Like when I've been involved in call centers, contact rate is 10%, demo rate is like 5%. You call 100 people, you deliver five demos. We called, what is that, 84 people? And we had 37 demos? Like that's incredible, right? So there's a key insight in finance as we're scaling our solution. People really in the WordPress community, unlike what Matt Cromwell thinks, likes to talk to folks on the phone, right? So that was pretty exciting. Can you cut that video? All right, on the other side, one of the most important things that our company is making money. We like that, we like money. That allows us to create jobs. That allows us to sponsor folks. That allows us to come to word camps. That allows us to go out and enjoy ourselves, right? So in January, based on that position, based on these contacts, we were able to make $2,419. Actually in terms of the forecast, initially I had it at like 3,600. So I did miss it by about 30%. But that's not really failure success because now that allowed me to scale up, right? So now I have my January data and I'm allowed to scale up on good vibes as we think about hiring this next person. So we run through the sheet. We're attending word camps. We're making more and more phone calls, right? I've got, in my projections, making 80 phone calls a day. How do we come up with the number 80 phone calls? We call lots of different people that were in the business. How many people are you calling? Well, we're doing 100 calls a day. How many people are you calling? We're doing 45 calls a day. So like finance is also about marketplace insights. Again, it's not about spreadsheets and formulas. That's not what finance is about. Like you can get real excited and create your SaaS plan and say, in two years, we're gonna reach this number of people and you're gonna forget to ask all the questions that you need to ask, right? So begin by craving curiosity and asking those questions. So this is how we kind of thought about good vibes. I'll go back and forth between the spreadsheets but a couple of things to note on this as I move into sales slayer. That's my favorite word of the day. Is our contact rate? Is our demo and first level support rate? And then is our new revenue rate, okay? That's really important as we go into the slayer. So as we move into the slayer, a couple of different things happening, right? First and foremost, we don't have calls being made because we're not gonna make any calls to anybody in the WordPress space until the slayer knows about WordPress, right? Like who wants to get a phone call from someone that doesn't know about WordPress when you're talking about WordPress? Like this is total madness. Maybe it works at other SaaS companies. It doesn't work at WordPress and I'm gonna tell you why in a little bit. So when I did this projection as we were thinking about sales slayer, I said, you know what? There's no way, no way that anybody's making a phone call to a WordPress customer without 90 days of WordPress training. You need to know how to install WordPress. You need to know what a theme and a plugin is. You better have done a give implementation and hooked up your fee recovery so you don't have to have your donors pay your fees. Like we gotta know this stuff, right? So in my forecast, no phone calls with the sales slayer, right? I also significantly reduced the contact rate and I took this contact rate based on me making phone calls, not Michelle. So Michelle and I both made phone calls in January. I was connecting at 22%. Michelle was connecting at 30%. Why? I don't know. Maybe because she knows a little bit more about WordPress than me. Maybe. I think so. Does that make sense? We also see our demo and first level support rate staying the same and we see our new convert rate going a little slower. So as we bump between the two, you can see we immediately are generating revenue with good vibes in the first month immediately based on our contact and demo rate and we don't generate revenue until month three with our sales slayer. The other thing that happens is we don't get our sales slayer into the community quick enough, right? It takes four months to get our sales slayer into the community. We hire good vibes, we get them into the community immediately. Does that make sense? Any questions? So this is how it bakes out in the end as we run through the whole thing and I'll talk to this. On an annual basis, the sales slayer can make 7,240 phone calls, can send 7,360 emails, is gonna contact 20% of the people. I don't know, we've got about 20,000 customers now so they're gonna be able to get in touch with 2,900 of those 20,000 folks do a 32% demo and generate $61,000 or probably about their salary that they're gonna make for the year, right? That's a pretty break even. WP Good Vibes is a little better. We beat it by about $60,000 because of contact rate and because of total contacted and this is how we made our decision to hire the next person to say, you know what mentors? You're wrong. We're not hiring a sales person. We're hiring Good Vibes. I think there's something really interesting about this, there's something really, really interesting about this community and I call it the bees radar for Jason Tucker's daughter who I'm sure is gonna be watching this on WordPress TV but there's something about our community where we got the inside scoop. We know it a little bit better and I call that the bees radar. We got the best bees radar in the world. We bring a sales person in to give. They start calling our WordPress customers, our secretaries, our freelancers, our agencies, all the people in the community that work with us on developing the product and we start talking about give. They're like bees radar, no way, right? We don't make any. So we really got on that Good Vibes thing. I think one of the really important things in having a partner and I've got two partners and it's a very important part of our decision making is that as I went down this route, they're like, Jason, well you ran this big agency department and you guys were all sales people and you crushed it and you're telling me we're just gonna hire in WordPress. Well that's not what we brought you in as a partner to do. So I also have to create buy-in with my company. A couple of things about creating buy-in with partnerships. I think the first and foremost thing is this ongoing communication that you need to have with your partners. You need to be in touch with them. You need to see their face likely and you need to tell them about these things. Well I really feel like there's this X factor in WordPress where people know about the B's radar and if I have a salesperson call and they don't know anything about what a plug-in is or they mistake a plug-in or a theme, like the whole thing in my opinion crashes down. It's a very different buying experience than if we're thinking about doing a Salesforce implementation. The buyers of WordPress are tied to the identity are tied to the identity of WordPress and that's what makes us unique and that's also why we made this decision. So on the teammates and buying it really is up to all of us. So what do I do? I create what's called feasibility and I start with questions and get really curious like I said and you saw all those questions that I asked before. A few of the other questions that we've asked in previous things in our business as we're thinking about forecasting is like how many free downloads for a plug-in are we gonna generate to get paid purchases? That's something that was really critical for us as we built our company. But just like these two boys fishing, I love fishing, I encourage you all to go fishing. It really begins with a notion of, well I don't really know what's underneath the water. Like what am I gonna get? Could it be the biggest fish ever? And that's what we need to do in finance, right? Finance isn't some dry thing. It might be in your company. Well you need to change that if it is, right? You say well, hey y'all, it's not about tax. It's about curiosity and futures, right? That's what finance is all about. So we do this thing called long form feasibility. Long form feasibility is this long document that is created and it's really more than a spreadsheet. It's a word document. This word document generates our feelings. This word document generates our futures and then the word document also generates the data, right? Feelings, future and data, right? You can't run unless you have all three of these things running in your feasibility. So I feel that WP Good Vibes is the way to go because we're gonna generate a higher contact rate and get into the market quicker and make more phone calls. My futures, right? My futures show me, right? That based on the questions that we had, right? The questions about how we're gonna renew and how we're gonna contact, right? Those data points and then the data confirms it, right? So when you're thinking about finance, you can often think about those three things. So four things to do when you're making a feasibility document. First thing, crave curiosity, that's a great tag. Got that trademark. Ask for your peers for key insights. So this was something that we've been doing for a really long time as we're creating these feasibility documents. So we go into the community, we contact Pip and Williamson from EDD. We talk to the folks at Beaver Builder. What are your renewal rates? Are you hiring a salesperson? I asked Yost at WordCamp US. What do you think of this idea? Call clients, you're crazy, Jason. Well, that's what he told me. So we ask our peer for key insights. You know, I think one of the really important things is we talk to folks outside WordPress. You know, as we're building a customer success department, you only but have to look at Salesforce to see that they've built their company based on building a customer success department. Get on the folks with Salesforce. How are you building it? What are you doing? What are you doing for training, right? What Salesforce does so well is you come in as a success manager, they whisk you off for three weeks, right? So they take you away and you've got 120 hours to do training and you're gonna come back. And I think one of the really important things is doing it over again and again and again, right? Finance is my job. It's what I spend my time doing every day. It isn't something that I just come into my QuickBooks and look at it and feel good or balance my stuff at the end of the year or like get an email from Bear Metrics and be like, oh, they came out with the greatest SaaS projection toolkit and work on it. It's over and over and over and over again. Very, very, very, very important. You know, when people ask me about failure success, like I don't even know how to answer that question. Are we failing or are we succeeding? I think failure success is mostly driven by, well I would use the measure of word camp participation and the new people coming into WordPress and only but have to look at that key insight of everybody raising their hand if this is their first word camp to know that we are succeeding. Regardless of revenue, we are succeeding, right? So failure success in financing is often not tied to the revenue. It's tied to the feelings that you're creating in the community. We really believe that. It might not work for everybody else, but it worked for us. Like we were three people three years ago. We got 16, 17 people now, so it worked for us. One of the really great things about how our partnerships work together is that we work backwards everywhere and we don't even know we're working backwards. We work backwards within our support department. So support runs ratios. We do weekly support reports. This is, you're actually looking at 52 weeks of support. I think we do about 400 tickets a week so you can see we're measuring tickets to sales ratio. We're measuring capacity and we're measuring resolve ratio. So this is the year, this is last year, right? 52 weeks. So you all can obviously see when the giving's all happening, right? Everything's going on in December, right? We know that following giving Tuesday our capacity goes through the roof. You can see that during the middle of the year our capacity is way down. We love measuring resolve ratios because we can understand how the ratios are working within the marketplace. So this is done on a regular basis. We not only work backwards in finance, we also work backwards in support. I asked Devin, he's our head of product. He said, well Devin, how do you work backwards? And he gave me this really long spiel and he never sent me a doc so he doesn't get to be in the presentation. Matt gets to be in one more time. Support also runs future. Can you run me a video off the screen? So this is some really interesting insight. We love sharing. So this is data that Matt produced for me as part of his feasibility report for his 2018 hiring. So for every 50 sales we get, customers create 68 tickets. Our reply to resolve ratio is 2.6. So for every 68 tickets we have, we'd have 177 replies. Our handle time is 9.33 minutes. So every support person has 1,650 minutes and can handle 50 sales. And then each tech has 1,650 minutes a week to do priority support. So when we're building out our sales futures based on that customer implementation chart that I just shared with you, Matt then is running his numbers to determine how many support people we need at our company. Very important. It's not only finance that is working backwards. Our entire company is working backwards and that's really insightful. A couple things to share with you because I know I only got a few more minutes left. So people always ask me like, well what's the sheets that you work on on a daily basis? So I always have 18 month rolling budgets and actuals and I look at those every day. So every day I know 18 months in advance. How many licenses? What are average job sizes gonna be? What are support ratios doing? We do that on an 18 month rolling basis. We have forecasts. This should say 2018 and 2019. That's my mistake, I apologize. But we run year forecast and we run the second year forecast as well. So I know how much revenue we're gonna make in 2019 even though it's only 2018. Thank you very much. We also look at renewal, churn and financial health snapshot. So I only got a few minutes. We love blocks. We got a hashtag playing with blocks campaign that Taylor's been running. We think Gutenberg's really gonna be a great shift in the way that WordPress works to allow more folks to experience WordPress to continue democratizing publishing. And I guess with that, I would just say just keep doing it again and again and again. You need to learn from others. You need to attend to word camps. You need to scrum and you need to do testing. And that's what you need to do. I'm Jason Canill. I'm head of finance at Give. We got a great company. You can reach me on Twitter at jasonpcanill.com and thank you so much.