 I'm so glad to be here today at WordCamp. So far I've met amazing people, and I just love the whole vibe of this. So thank you. Yeah, so today I'm giving a presentation on building a generous business. And I got to practice actually telling people what my talk was going to be about at the speaker dinner yesterday. And I realized that the best way to introduce this topic is when someone says, what are you talking about? I can say boundaries. Because building a generous business is maybe the motivation. But in a lot of ways, what we need to talk about when we talk about generosity is boundaries. So I'm going to start just by quick show of hands so I can get to know everybody here who works with clients. OK, good. I was really worried. When I was talking to people around the lobby and at the speaker event, I was like, anybody here work with clients? Or are folks working for companies or have a different arrangement? So that's great. I'm at the right place, talking to the right people. So all right, raise your hand again if you've ever had this client. Awesome. So yeah, so my story, the sort of boss situation that I ran into had quite a few. But I actually did a bunch of pro bono work. I love doing pro bono work. I love doing side projects. It's actually a big part of how I get referrals and how I have built a portfolio is by seeking out projects that I care about that I want to support. And so I did a community center website design and build. I think I might have a slide about that somewhere. Yeah, there it is. So there's like 30 plus pages, multiple projects, multiple project leaders, conditional posts based on what project, an events calendar, community events, submission form, all the stuff that WordPress is really good for. So you wouldn't want to build this on a Weebly platform or something like that. And what happened was that the client didn't value the site. So has anybody ever given something away for free and then it wasn't valued? Yeah, so that's what happened. And so I launched the site. I reach out to them and say, OK, we need to talk about hosting. We need to talk about maintenance. No response. In fact, I had no response for months. And then finally I get a response. And it's all caps. And it's like, we need to post this right now. How do we do it? So of course, I post it for them. And I say, well, how about the maintenance and everything? And no response. So what do I do? I keep paying for it. So yeah, so boundaries, right? So this has become one of my favorite problems. And this article about Richard Feynman from Tiago Forte is excellent. It goes into this idea of having 12 favorite problems that you kind of hold onto. And Feynman is this incredible physicist who figured out all these great things. And what he said was, you've got to hold these problems in your mind. And throughout time, sometimes just through the various inputs of what you experience and what you see, something clicks. And you start to make sense of it. So these are some of my favorite business problems, which is how to build a generous business, how to raise prices and value while still being generous, while still feeling aligned, while doing work with clients I love working with. Also, how to scale a service without losing quality and without losing hospitality. So when trying to solve a problem I try to figure out, well, what do we want? So as designers, as developers, or business owners, we want to be fair. We want to feel like we're within integrity. We want to be respected. We want to be helpful. We want to sell without being icky without using hype or fake deadlines and things like that. We want to provide genuine value. Ultimately, I think a lot of us who work with clients do this work because we want to be generous. So we need boundaries. We need time boundaries. We need scope boundaries. We need communication boundaries. We need process boundaries, value boundaries, money boundaries, focus boundaries. And that's what I'm going to be exploring a bit as we get through this presentation, which actually have this nice progress bar here you can follow along with. So David Allen, who wrote Getting Things Done, and has been kind of my origin story into doing knowledge work and design work, talks about minds like water. And he borrows that concept from martial arts, which I'm sure it's connected to all sorts of other disciplines because it's a pretty awesome concept. So I'm going to go with it, too. The idea of mind like water is that we want to react appropriately to things. So we don't want to underreact to the tax bill and not pay it and then get in a whole heap of trouble. We don't want to overreact to it and get really stressed out about something that we can hopefully control and deal with. I think it's the same with clients. We don't want to underreact to their communication style, the ways that they might push our buttons. We don't want to overreact or underreact. So process is how we get there. Process equals boundaries. Boundaries makes us generous. Generosity equals growth. So I have a really cool contrasting experience that I recently had about maybe a month or so ago, which my friends here in the center know all about because I had to vent about this client situation with them a lot. I had a contrasting experience. I had two clients, same service. I was offering a retainer service, marketing, consultation, content editing, publishing, stuff like that. I was getting text messages at night, like 10 o'clock at night, getting emails in all caps, just normal emails too, not even like no need for all caps. One of my clients called one of my other clients to complain with them about my pricing and also called one of my contractors and tried to ask them to work with her directly instead of with me. Kind of weird. Ultimately, these clients were both really stressed out. They were really stressed out because they were launching their online programs, and that's a really stressful roller coaster experience. And the contrasting experience was so freeing for me because what happened was I held a boundary with them. I don't know if my slide, yeah, my next slide doesn't say anything about this. I held my boundary, and one client had a total tantrum, and the other client was like, thank you. Now I know what I need to do and started working within my process. And it was so amazing because I hadn't had that type of contrasting experience before. So not having a process, and what I mean by boundaries, as I said, all right, here's the updates. Here's what I've done so far. Here's what's coming up next. Here's when I'm available. So I basically just reasserted some of my process. So without a process, these are the types of things that I tend to feel. I feel guilty. I start to talk down my pricing and my values. I have doubt. I start wondering, if I couldn't do this huge project and as tiny of a scope as possible, am I even good at it? Do I even know what I'm doing? So I start doubting myself. When I have anxiety, when I get these all-caps emails, I start to procrastinate and under-communicate because I resent the client. So I start participating in this dance of not necessarily being the most responsible either. And that sets me up to feel worried about setting a boundary because now I'm showing up saying, well, I haven't been communicating. I haven't really been upholding my end of the structure. So now I'm going to create structure. So yeah, without a process, I just started to get a bit adrift. And of course, with perfectionism, trying to really over-deliver tends to lead to scope creep. So now I'm doing a lot more than I necessarily need to do or that's included. So then you have this other client who the moment that I put that process in place, immediately I start feeling more generous. I start feeling like I can communicate more clearly. I feel like I understand the value that I'm bringing. I'm able to feel more confident because I have a process to get a repeatable outcome for them. I'm just generally more calm. I'm more calm when I'm talking to potential clients doing sales. I'm more calm when I'm closing a project and I'm saying it's done. And also just being able to finish things on time. So this whole experience of designing processes and figuring out boundaries was really the moment that my business started to grow. So this is my transition slide that tells me we're going into the next part of the talk. So what I'm going to do is go through those different things that I mentioned before, like time, process, audience, offers, pricing. And I'm going to open each one with a question. And then I'm going to show you a few of the ways that I've answered that question. It kind of goes back to that 12 interesting problems concept. So who has an expensive problem I can solve today? That's a really helpful question to ask when figuring out what services and what process will work best. So I'm just going to give a couple of examples. For web designers, it's going to be anyone who has traffic without a clear offer. So I have about 100 clients on a care plan and I can see their analytics. So I got an analytics report and I looked at the report and I thought, wow, commonwealth herbs, they've gone up almost 1,000 views. They're averaging it around 25,000 views a month right now. Maybe they want to talk to me about conversion rate optimization. So a monthly retainer where I could be meeting with them once a month, I could be reviewing their copy, and I could be giving them suggestions of what they could do. So for designers, it's a really good to focus on conversion rate optimization. For developers, it might be a monthly retainer reducing risk, improving the experience, increasing sales. So someone who relies on their website for money is going to feel generous paying your rights to reduce the risk of their store going down because they're making money off of their website. For entrepreneurs who are wanting to create a repeatable solution, a care plan service, something that can be a very clear fixed scope that could scale, something like uptime monitoring support desk updates, the care plan service that I created was the first time that I went from feast and famine cycles into recurring revenue. And just that safety of the recurring revenue meant that I could start being more selective about who my clients were. Amazing. All right, now I want to talk about offers. So oftentimes when I first was getting started, I was offering what other web designers were offering. And so I think the interesting question here is, what do your leads and clients or target audience really need? What do they actually need? And what they need is for you to take charge. They need to learn your value. They need to understand why you do it the way that you do it, why you charge what you charge. They need to be provided an appropriate offer at the appropriate time. And they need guidance. So here's a little example. This is Sebastian at a restaurant called McSeo. This was my favorite place to go and get breakfast and lunch in Ithaca, where I'm from, Ithaca, New York. And Sebastian was really an incredible chef. He had a lot of integrity, a lot of commitment to what he did. So he stopped letting people tell him what was going to go in the burritos. He just completely took his order form off the table. He was like, no, we're not doing that anymore, because people don't know how to combine things in the burrito, and then they complain about it. I thought that was amazing. I was like, yes. But could you just add a little bit? No. Because what happened was people would put a lot of cold ingredients, and then they would basically get a wet salad that was falling out of a tortilla. So he was just like, no, I'm done with that. So yeah, clients need you to tell them what is included and why. You can't let them customize it unless they really know what they're doing. They also need to learn more about your value. And one of the best ways to do this is to use a framework. So what I'm showing you here on the left is a spider graph from mysnapshot.co. This is a self-assessment tool that I give to clients that has them basically rate themselves and rate their website on 16 different points. So outline, copy, media, outreach, funnels, software, hosting, publishing, style, graphics, layout, email list, stuff like that. And what this does, what's so magical about this is that the time that they take to fill this out reveals to them all of their known unknowns. So they start realizing what they don't know yet. And the best part about this type of assessment, which is based on a rubric, is that when they're answering the questions, they're actually reading a description about what it means to be basic, developing, capable, and exceptional in each of these areas. So they start to understand what it means to have an exceptional website. And when they understand the known unknowns, they start getting really curious about the services that I'm offering. I also use templates and Miro boards. This diagram on the right is something I created in Miro, which is basically an online whiteboard tool. Anybody here use Miro? Awesome. Yeah, it's so cool. You can zoom in. You can zoom out. You can add sticky notes. You can do so much stuff with this. But this really impresses clients, because I get on a Zoom call. I share my screen, and I say, here's the process. First, this is actually part two of my process. So this is the design and content phase. So I'm like, here's our process. First, you're going to read this guide. And I sent that to them in advance. And then we're going to talk about the content plan. We're going to talk about who your audience is. We're going to talk about what they're looking to answer. And I have them outline all of their content based on the questions that their audience needs to answer. So instead of having a blank page, they're actually answering their own questions. And maybe I help them identify some of those questions if they don't know. So using frameworks like this make it really clear what your value is, that you're not just taking orders from them. It also means that you're in control. So they're not thinking they have to micromanage you anymore. Now they're relaxing into that place of, great. They're on it. So I'm missing the word at the top, but I think you can fill in the blanks here. The next thing is you need to provide an appropriate offer. And this is a tool that I use with my clients, but I also use it to structure my own business, which is an axis of commitment and awareness. So when somebody is not very aware of the topic or the solution or the problem and all that kind of stuff, then they're going to have a lower commitment offer is going to be more appropriate for them. So this example ladder, which I use is self-assessment, 10-minute video, or oftentimes I actually have a series of 10-minute videos. I do free classes. So I have people register. I do webinars. I do programs. And I do consulting. So the pricing also goes up on that ladder as well. So it's really just about getting the right appropriate offer to them. And the final thing is clients need guidance. I talked about this a little bit with the spider graph and everything and just having a framework. But the more guidance that you can give them, you can see the align your offer is right there in the center. But the reason I have this set up is so that even in an initial meeting, they can see, oh, wow, there's a lot more to this. We're just in this free 15-minute call. Ryan's just like bringing me into this one little section we're talking about offers. And the reason I'm talking with them about offers is because I want them to understand that their website isn't a brochure. Their website is a place to interact with their potential customers. Through that interaction, they're building trust and awareness and commitment. And once they understand that I'm guiding them in that direction of seeing their website as this bigger picture, they have an incredible amount of trust in the process. They have trust that they're going to get a return on investment. OK, now I want to talk about scope. The question here is, how can I easily negotiate scope instead of price? So somebody says that price is too high. Then I can say, great, let's talk about the scope. And it changes the conversation away from how much is my value and how much do you want? Or what do you want? And then that's, again, where you need to get clear on boundaries. Because remember, just like with the burrito, you can't say, I just want a third of a burrito. I mean, actually, that does work if you wanted to only eat a little third of a burrito. But you get it, right? Can you just do the burrito without, yeah, I don't know. I'll work on that one. So one of the ways that you can be generous about your scope is by understanding your margins. And I can give a shout out to the Business Numbers podcast for basically being my free education on business finances. So thank you to Ben McAdam for giving me that education. But margins is really interesting because a lot of people, when they're new at running their business, they basically consider their own labor to be free. And so they don't build in margins into their services. So the idea behind margins is also this rule of thirds, which I got from my friend's mom who said this is how we budget with the rule of thirds. And so I learned about that. But basically, the idea is that every service that you have should have a 65% gross profit margin, which means that you have about 30%, 33% to spend on fulfilling the service. So it should cost you, if you sell a website for $6,000, you have $2,000 to spend on building the website. And that's also your own time, right? But when you know what those numbers are, you can feel generous about spending it. You can feel generous about paying the developer who's working with you on it for all the time that it takes to build it. You don't have to be worried. You know exactly how much you have to work with. If you also, if you get stressed out and you start feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm in the red, but you've set your profit margins accordingly, then, yeah, you're in the red. But you're still not losing money. And the point here is that you need money to invest on operations and growth. So you need money to spend on marketing, you need money to spend on bookkeeping, sending invoices, all that kind of stuff, distracting yourself, all the things that we do. So we also need to get clear on our offer numbers. So the idea here, this is an example of a spreadsheet where you calculate the expense of fulfillment. So you can see here in this example, this would be my conversion rate optimization service. So I might go through it and say, OK, this is how much I want to. This is my expense for coaching call, for portal updates, for just basic customer service, things like that. And so then, if I charge $950, then I'm staying within the correct profit margin for that service. And I could probably even charge more, depending on what the situation was. So really, getting clear on your offer numbers helps you make those choices. And then also revenue streams. So like I said before, I started a care plan service. That care plan service gave me stability. So I wouldn't be in a feast and famine cycle with website projects. So if I look at revenue in my business, I have custom projects, retainers. I call it sapling website services, this website accelerator group program that I run. And I have care plans and then affiliate revenue. This is not how much money I'm making, by the way. This is like I'm going to talk later about the goal numbers and having generous goals. Yeah, so we'll get to that. But the idea is that when you create a picture and you understand your revenue and the different streams of revenue, you can kind of ask some more interesting questions like maybe custom projects aren't, maybe I don't actually need custom projects that much. Maybe that's not actually a big percentage of my revenue. Maybe custom projects are more of a like portfolio building like referral engine opportunity. And so I want to be really selective about who I'm working with because my real money is coming from retainers. And if my real money is coming from retainers, well, how many retainers do I need? And in this picture, if I want to make 15,000 hours of monthly recurring revenue, then I only need 10 to 15 retainers at 1,000 to 1,500 a month. So wow, if I did conversion rate optimization for people who had an expensive problem that I can solve easily and I was able to charge $1,000 a month and have 15 websites a month that I was doing a conversion rate optimization like review for as a designer, like wow, that's pretty cool. So this is conceptual, but the point is to looking at your revenue streams, you can figure out ways to change your business model to be more generous. So I have custom projects. One of the ways that I manage those is, let me just go back to the top here, yeah, with the scope. One of the ways that I manage scope for custom projects is I give a Getting Started guide. So I'll talk a little bit more about that in one of the next slides. All right. I want to talk about process. Process includes onboarding. It includes portals and includes regular communication touchpoints, milestones, things like that. So the question that I think the interesting question to hold for this is, how do you provide an experience that empowers clients? So when you're empowering, like in that contrasting example that I shared before, reinforcing that boundary and process actually empowered this client. So onboarding is key. So again, the Getting Started guide, kickoff call. I have an onboarding checklist for each client. And the screenshot just shows that in the guide, I have an entire section that's like your crucial role. These are the things that only you can do. And that's my way of saying, let me do the things that I can do. This is your role. I provide a client portal where I can give project updates. I can organize all of the client assets into these tidy little toggle lists. And then you can't really see too much of the bottom. But I can also go through my deliverables in order of the phase. So if I'm building a website project, I've got onboarding, kickoff call, welcome packet, discovery, design drafts, design iterations, development, where I'm building layouts, all the way to launch. And so I have it all mapped out in a client portal. Each of those items can open up into a page that can teach my client. But it also is there so that if I bring on new team members, I can say, here's our notes. Help us evolve this. Help us iterate it. Record touch points. And this is actually the video I sent to one client who apparently didn't watch it. But it's nice. You get to know, right? You can send a reminder email if you need to. But a touch point is an opportunity for you to be consistent with your communication and say, this is what I did. This is what's coming up. And what I do is I actually record myself updating their portal. So while I'm updating their portal, I'm recording it. So that's my own built-in accountability for myself. And another thing that really helps is to send emails at the appropriate time. So send it when they're going to be able to respond. So they're more likely to procrastinate if they get an email in the afternoon. They're more likely to respond to me if they get an email in the morning. So if I do my updates on Thursdays, schedule to go out Friday morning, end of the week, balls in their court. I think also it's really important to assume, or not to assume, that clients know how to work with you. So I have a how to give feedback to designers guide that's included in the onboarding. So teach them how to give feedback. One of those things is ask them to assume that I have a reason behind everything that I'm doing. I'm not just designing it in a certain way because of my opinion. Assume that there's a reason. So ask questions as much as possible. But I always frame it in their benefit. So I'm going to be able to deliver this faster for you. We can arrive at better solutions. You can really leverage our time. So speaking of time, that's the next one. How can you make faster decisions and protect your energy? So I think this image is a joke of peak productivity. Because when I looked at it, I was like, cool, an image about peak productivity, but I think it's a joke. But I think it also emphasizes that in this scenario, where 2 AM is the only time you don't have distractions and you're not, well, I would be too tired, but there's a lack of boundaries. So the question is, when are you at your best? I'm sure you've heard of this concept. But just like, when are those golden three hours that you can actually get things done? And the way that helps me is I theme my days. So if I structure my days to have themes, then I know exactly when I'm available for clients and when I'm not. So I stopped doing meetings in the mornings, except for Tuesdays. And now that I don't have meetings in the mornings, I just know that that time is protected. But it also makes it easy for me to schedule calls. So I optimized my booking calendar to only be available on certain days. So yeah, sometimes clients have to wait another week because I only do meetings on Tuesdays and Fridays. But it allows me to feel calm through the rest of the week, but still be available for them. Another thing is I started doing recreation meetings. So I started like some meetings, I'll just take the dog on a walk or I'll be like doing chores. So if I don't need to be in front of the computer taking notes, then don't do it. Like normalizing audio only Zoom calls is really, really helpful for my health. OK, so this is the goals part. Has anybody seen the new Netflix show about being rich? Ramit Seti? Yeah, a couple of people. So it's actually like a really down-to-earth, like genuine show. I really liked it. It was really interesting. And what I liked about it was it starts with the premise of defining your rich life. And the question, I think, is not about how much money do you want to make, but how do you want to feel? And what does that mean for you? So for me, I lived in an off-grid cabin for four years. I had to haul water, all that kind of stuff. But that was one of the most richest experiences that I have ever had. So how do you want to feel and what kind of ways can you structure your life to support that? And that's what the goal picture that I brought up before is about. So setting a goal, coming up with what a sort of example monthly recurring revenue might look like. I run an agency, so there's four of us on the team. And my main goal is to build a team that feels really supportive and that feels really fun. And I really want everybody to stick around. And I want them to have job security and see a future working together as a group. So that's why I'm setting my goal higher and then breaking that down. So knowing what the expense budget is, and then the reason why that's so helpful is that it gets me to stretch. I couldn't do something at a website internet thing without a cat picture. So I found a way to squeeze it in. The reason that this big goal, which I was really uncomfortable with at the time, being like, I want a million dollars a year, I was like, I'll just put that out there because that just feels totally unattainable and ridiculous. But what happened was it got me to really think about my limiting beliefs and it also got me to think about how my service would change. So if I was doing a million dollars a year in revenue, I could never do that with custom projects that had a start and an end time. It just wouldn't be possible. There's no way to do that unless I continue to scale my team over and over and over, multiple levels of management. And maybe that's a limiting belief. I'd love to talk to somebody who could help me pitch some really big number one-time projects. So yeah, I think that having a big goal is really important for having that kind of a stretch. So generous environment, what kind of environment supports you to be most generous? Well, good people, of course. So you just wanna be supported in being yourself. And if you can be yourself with clients, in fact, I think this is the promise of having a service-based business, especially on the internet, is that you can build a niche just around your own weirdness. And people who like you, who accept you, will hire you. And it's like this crazy amazing thing where you don't have to pretend to be somebody you're not. It's incredible. So yeah, finding people who really see your potential, also friends who challenge you to do great work, all that kind of stuff. And then of course, setting up a cool space that you feel inspired by. So I got really geeky about my desk, took a picture of it. Took like 1,000 pictures of it, actually. There's this website called Grovemade that's just incredible pictures of desks and they sell you little trinkets that cost a lot of money. It's called Grovemade. Oh my gosh, I love it. Just look at that all day. And then also finding an environment where you're in a cohort of peers that are working on similar things. So shout out to the webpro group right here in the middle. These folks got me to come to this conference. They were like, let's all go to WordCamp and see, you know. So people who really get it, people who support you to do what you gotta do. Also Lasha, my instant best friend who I met at Craft & Commerce. Yeah, good people to know. And so like when you go to conferences, you can meet amazing people. So that's something we should do here at WordCamp, right? Should like spend some time meeting people, staying in touch with them. That's gonna create the kind of environment that we need. So I'm gonna go through operations. Question here is what systems allow you to be generous, to build a team around your vision? So we have a team dashboard that has like one central hub for all of our information, a team handbook. But the kind of top level documents that structure the business are the, our objectives, our decision making guidelines, our core values, things, you know, how we do project management, stuff like that. Having roles that's structured around those different areas. So fulfillment, which is actually finishing the projects, operations, running the business, and growth attracting new people. So in this diagram, the purple is me. So I created the diagram even though I was doing mostly everything. And that allowed me to start showing the team and say, hey, this is your path into other things. Like that's like I'm mapping it out so that we can get there. Of course, the process for your clients, that's part of your operations as well. And it also helps your team. And then it's really important to have a process for organizing knowledge. So we have a shared documentation database. We track changes, versions, and creators automatically. So it's all built in. You know who created something, who updated it. And in all of our documentation, we just use a really simple what, why, how template. So it's really easy to write our procedures. The last piece of this framework is generous growth. So how do you cultivate growth with as little effort as possible? And it really comes down to this concept that Nathan Barry from ConvertKit explained at his main stage talk a few weeks ago, which is the flywheel. So rather than the consistent effort, you only get an outcome if you put in effort, create some kind of cycle. So one of those flywheels that you can use for your business is a testimonial flywheel. So the idea is you take that, you build in with automation, requests for testimonials, which then you can put on your sales page, generates more sales, so on and so forth. And so especially when you have a clear process like this and you're coaching your clients and you're explaining to them how to be good clients, how the process works, all the stuff that you do, it's much easier to ask for testimonials because they're pretty consistently amazed at the experience, they're kind of shocked by it. And one of the ways you can get testimonials is you ask people this question, what surprised you the most? And just that word surprise is incredible when you're asking for testimonials. I think it's right to the stuff that you need. So what's the big picture as we wrap up? We just have about five minutes left. What's the big picture? And actually on the airplane back from Craft & Commerce, I watched a TED talk from Simon Sinek, which the title of this talk is How Great Leaders Inspire Action and he explained the why, how, and what circles. And of course I'm obsessed with circles because Maple is the name of my business and I use the tree rings as a logo and as a metaphor for iteration. And what I realized when I was watching that video is that this idea is the why, how, and the what. So everything that we just talked about today was just kind of scratching the surface on the how. The what is the service that you're providing and the why is what's the impact that you want to make in the world. And so one of the ways to get to the why is to choose a target audience that inspires you because design is leverage. Design is all about finding those opportunities to make a really big change with the right kind of inputs or solutions. But the how isn't just how you build it for them. It's all the stuff that you do to create an experience. It's like the experience at a restaurant. It's why, you know, the DMV or like, it's why the restaurant doesn't look like the DMV, right? Yeah, the DMV needs to work a little bit on their process. So these are the things that we covered basically. So we're talking about the why. If your goal is to be generous and make a difference, then the how is your process. And that's how you're gonna protect it. It's how you're gonna empower clients. It increases your value. It makes you unique. You stand out from other people in the industry. It establishes your expertise because you're teaching them the framework, you're teaching them the known unknowns. You're helping them understand what you do without getting into all the details. It empowers them to understand what their role in the project is and what your role is. It supports your boundaries. So you don't get texts in the middle of the night or all caps, emails or all that kind of stuff. And it allows you to be generous. So this is my closing question. I want you to get out your phones and text me. And all of you on the internet and the live stream, I have my phone number, so you can text me too. Yeah, at 10 p.m. Yeah, go for it. All caps. Because I really want you to walk out of this talk with an action item. I want you to answer this question. Just what's one thing you can do this week? Let's just pretend it's like the beginning of the week. So what are you gonna do this week? I'll give you a little bit more time to improve your process. So you all work with clients and there's something that you need to work on that this prompted. Some ideas, onboarding, themed days, understand the cost of fulfilling your service, drawing your business framework. And the reason I asked you to text me is because I'm gonna read off a couple of them. I forgot to tell you that at the beginning. I'm waiting to see if it works. All right, I'm gonna read them up in just a minute. So as I wait for these all caps, urgent texts to come in, I just wanna say thanks to WordPress, WordPress Camp. I mean, because hosting an event like this is an act of generosity. It's everyone who worked on the lighting and connected the microphones and who's running the live stream and who's like cleaning the space and just maintaining it for us, opening the doors in the morning, sending out emails. There's so much that goes into hosting an event like this and it's really cool. I'm really glad that I'm here. It's my first time. I'll definitely come back again. So thanks. And I'd also love to stay in touch. I put the slides up for you. If you wanna get the slides inside the slides, I'm adding links. I'll be using the slideshow again so I'll keep developing on it as I work on this framework. This is fairly, you know, this is, yeah. All right, I got one text. It says, I will create a, I'm gonna like tone down the yelling here and I'll just say it. I'll create a process diagram to show clients the process and explain their role in the project and mine. Awesome. And I, my text thing isn't like coming in. So I wanna invite some folks to just talk to me about this. I'm glad that you sent it. I'll be able to see them later. So I'll be able to respond to you and check in with you about how it goes. So with that, thank you. They were awesome. Oh man, it was awesome. So actually that's how I started my web design business is I was living in a cabin on a river in Vanette in New York. And I was, my neighbors ran a cidery called Eve's Cidery. Amazing cidery. And I actually used to work for them. So I worked in the food service and farm industry for 10 years. And I knew a bit about websites because I had played around with them and built them and done some like, you know, volunteer website work for a while. And yeah, they were just struggling with their website. They were relying on distributors and things like that for their cider product. And so I helped them rebuild a website and I was like going back and forth to their barn to charge up my computer. And basically like the boundary that I had around my work, like not working too much was my computer would die and I'd have to go charge it. So I'd like jump on the trampoline with their like little kids while I waited for my computer to charge. So yeah, it was great. And I saved a lot of money when I was there too because living off grid is cheap. No subscription services, nothing. So being at the Craft and Commerce Conference, being introduced to the concept of using flywheels to create a process or maybe using a process and flywheels in conjunction, how do you go about building mental models to like always think in that sense when you're trying to create a productive system? Yeah, that's a great question. So the idea of a flywheel is that like every step of the flywheel is like kind of feeding or propelling the next step forward. And actually one of the slides didn't pop up, I think. There it is, flywheel versus funnel. This is really cool. So look at how urgent the funnel looks. It's actually an exclamation point. And so like that's why the whole like one-off projects or in this case I do copyright, I help. Well, okay, so my niche is I work with educators who do online programs and I work with like cohort-based courses. So I've done a lot of funnels and a lot of launch projects and it's incredibly stressful. This is why you get Bowser coming in at 10 o'clock at night with all caps because they're stressed out. And so I want my clients to also become more customer-centric because they can slow down a little bit and be more structured into this model. But if you think from a flywheel, it really puts customers at the center and that's what's so cool about it. I mean, it is definitely a way of thinking but you can take a lot of linear processes and you can bend them into a circle by just including things like follow-up 30 days later or some kind of coaching. So you deliver a product, somebody you deliver a website and then you say, all right, let's talk about care plans. Let's talk about when we're gonna check in and keep working together because they're gonna need support. And if you give them support, then their system's turn and your system's turn. Good question for you. What was the name of the tool that you referenced when you showed the Spydergraph? Something.co. Yeah, yeah, that is something part. That is My Snapshot. Ah, that's who it was. My Snapshot.co. And that is Charlotte Crowder who created that. She's a really incredible person to pay attention to in the education space. Yeah, she has an excellent newsletter. Regarding the things you told, expectation and the margin, right? Many times it happens like client is expecting some more, whatever is defined in the scope. But when the client is not technical, they are like, that is what we are looking. And then we have to change the whole scope. But they are not changing the budget what they have assigned to us. Yeah. So how to tackle in such a situation? Yeah, so in situations like that where the client doesn't totally, it seems like they don't totally understand like how to get what they want. So they're expecting something and then maybe partly through the project they're wanting to change the scope or it makes you feel like you have to change the scope to try to meet their expectation. Yeah, that can happen a lot. So what I think really helps with that is I don't think I have a slide for this but I started doing road mapping projects. And has anybody here done road mapping projects or basically, yeah, awesome. So like what I did is I basically took like the discovery part of the website process which I usually do discovery, design, development and deliver and I took the discovery part and I started selling that separately as a consulting package. And what's amazing about road mapping is that not only am I like protecting myself from that situation because I'm actually planning the whole thing is I'm also competing with other agencies. So I had a meeting the other day where I was like, okay, so let's talk about budget. And I said, what are some of the other agencies? You know, what are the figures that you're talking about with them? And then they said, oh yeah, I'm talking to this one agency, blah, blah, blah that, you know, 40,000 or something. And I'm like, I work with like small farms and stuff. And so we're talking, you know, smaller projects here. So I'm like, oh, well, that sounds reasonable. But, you know, one thing that I think you should know is that oftentimes agencies don't put a lot of planning into projects before they give you the proposal. So the way that I do it is I actually have a road mapping project and that's $1,500. And we're gonna go through the whole process of figuring out how to get where you want to go and what are all the ways you could get there? What are the priorities right now? And maybe that $40,000 budget isn't just like for this project. And then there's all these unknown expenses later. Maybe we figure out a way to make that stretch out over a 12 month retainer. And now I'm like, now I've got their attention because I still have them thinking about this larger budget which is helpful for thinking about a more long-term engagement. So yeah, road mapping, definitely. I definitely want to do like proper research and education with them. I really enjoyed your analysis. Starting with business and running it. Could you talk a little bit more about the profitability percentages that you, you had a whole slide on it and I thought that was really good. That's my biggest weakness. Yeah, yeah. So I want to admit that like the reason that I'm focused so much on this is because I struggle so much with boundaries. And it's been a way for me to like figure out my way in the world is to like design systems. So it might even be just a boundary with myself and like my own ability to like manage my time effectively or manage my distractions or priorities. So systems are everything for me. And with pricing, I have also struggled with underpricing or undervaluing my work. And then I see what someone else is charging and I'm like, oh my goodness, like it's incredible. So this idea of like profit margin is really key. I use a software called Harpoon to manage all my invoicing and stuff like that. And what I like about Harpoon is that it asks you to set a goal for yourself and then it breaks down that goal every month and tells you kind of how you're doing on that goal throughout like any given time. But it also helps you set a budget for how much you want to work on something and you can track your time inside this software as well. So it'll be like, you're in the red, Ryan, like you're doing real bad right now when I'm still making a profit. So it's really helpful to have like a system that reinforces the idea of like a gross profit margin of like around 65 or something percent. And that just means like however much it costs you to do it, if you were to give yourself an hourly rate and estimate that you're spending X number of hours on a website, however much it costs for you to pay yourself, you still have to add onto that the other 60% or 63 or whatever percent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if I wanted to charge, if I was gonna, if I wanted to pay myself $50 an hour, then my hourly rate needs to be $150 an hour so that when I'm doing non-billable work, which is onboarding, marketing, sending invoices, stuff like that, I can still pay myself that $50 an hour for the non-billable work. And then when I'm doing the billable work, I'm billing at $150 an hour so that I can cover those things. Thank you so much, everybody. I actually really enjoyed the questions, so, yeah.