 Well, we're going to get started. So John, one of the things that people in the room may or may not know is that your official background training, education, and degrees were not in software development. You're a different kind of engineer, is that right? Yeah, what I kind of term as a real engineer. That's right. That's exactly what all engineers would say. Yeah, that's what we say. Software engineer isn't engineering. That's right. No, my background, I went to school. I started in mechanical and finished in civil engineering, became a licensed professional engineer in the state of California, and worked in land development and large-scale civil engineering projects for about 10 years. The underlying thing behind that, though, is that I have been a technology geek since I started programming in 1980, at about eight years old, when I got my first computer. I've always loved software. I always loved computers. But if you think back to the 80s and the early 90s, getting out of college and going to the high school and going to college, it was that I didn't want to work in a job where I was sitting at a computer all day. It's a pretty active, outdoorsy kind of guy. And I was like, do I want to go into this computer programming thing? Everybody tells me, you should be a computer programmer. That's the up-and-coming thing. And I looked at this giant CRT monitor sitting on a desk with a tower underneath it. And I went, yeah, no, that's not my career. Yeah, and the options in those days weren't. It was just you're going to go work at Adobe or Microsoft. But that's not our sun. But none of those were like, ooh, this is going to be engaging and interesting in entrepreneurs. I'm just going to be working on one little bit. I'm going to be in a cave under fluorescent lights all day long. And that wasn't my gig. Engineering meant physical, tangible structures, outdoor site visits, inspections, while still being math science-based, which was my thing. At some point, you picked up a camera, though. I did. I took a sabbatical of sorts and decided I wanted to travel more because I love traveling. And got hooked. And I'm like, I like that engineering thing. But I don't want to go back to working in an office where I can't travel, being tied to a desk and a team that I worked with, that I'd be physically present with. And I thought photography was the thing. Love photography. Tried to make a living out of it for a while. This is before everybody took their own photos with cameras. Yeah, it was right before the camera phone revolution. But I like photography, but I didn't really like doing it as a business. I didn't like selling it. I didn't like the jobs I had to take doing it. All the power to people who do. But selling creative work was not the right fit for me. Yeah, you decided that selling web projects was so much more awesome. That's amazing how karma comes back and kicks you in the butt. It's interesting because it was in that a photography client of mine who ran an online business, e-commerce business, needed a blog for WordPress Built. And that was the very first WordPress site I built. And it got me back into this position of helping people with technology. And I really love that aspect of it. And there was none of that in photography. I was just taking pictures and trying to sell them and building gigs. But now I was back to people who didn't understand technology, didn't understand the web, didn't understand how it worked, didn't understand the usability of digital interfaces. And I really got a lot of joy out of like, OK, I'm helping people with the thing that I'm awesome at. And they really struggle with it. And this is a great partnership. And that's where I started with WordPress. You started using WordPress a long time ago. Do you remember what version it was? It was 2006. And I think it was version 2.5 or 6. It was something like that. My name, and it really wasn't that. Yeah, because I think I started the year before you at 1.5. So you might have been at 2.0 or 2.1. Yeah, that's a long time ago. And you really did like travel. Oh, yeah. I mean, like, really like travel. How many of you like travel? Look at that. Everybody likes travel. OK, so when you say you like travel, right, little audience participation, when you say you like travel, how many of you would define a good travel year as four weeks of travel in the year? Yeah? How many of you would be like, I would die for five? Or six, right? Six, yeah, look at that. It's all the way from Nepal. And he's like, I want six, right? Six weeks would be amazing, right? John, if we look back over the last year to an average, how many weeks a year are you not at your physical home? Somewhere around 45, let's say. Boom. His version of I Like Travel and our version of I Like Travel, not the same versions, right? We spent about two months in Southern California, which is where I grew up. So you started, and you started traveling. And you went Southeast Asia a lot. And I started seeing the photos. And I'm not joking people. It is John laying in a hammock with a laptop. And he's like, I'm working. And I was really struggling to get. I mean, I'm fine with remote work. But that was remote vacation work. Can I get another mango smoothie? Exactly. So you started doing this remote work thing in a different way than other people were doing it, right? I mean, you were working. You were doing WordPress websites. You were helping customers. But you were definitely not sitting at a desk, even if you were somewhere else. How do you figure out how to pull this off? Well, so this is an interesting thing, is when I came back from the first year of travel, was hippie backpacker-style travel. I took a full sabbatical, wasn't working, was doing some photography, and got into that. But then when I got into the web, I was holed up in a family property cabin up in the mountains. And that's where I started the web development. But knowing that the photography hadn't worked out, in part because my photography clients were local, right? It was referrals. It was this business referring this other local business. It was this wedding party referring this other wedding party. I was like, I can't travel because all of my referrals need me to be physically present. So when I started in the web, I made a concerted effort to target clients who weren't physically present. So that the referrals would come from Salt Lake City referring me to somebody they knew in business in Atlanta. And that allowed me to say, no one knows where I am on the planet, and I can work from anywhere. And never once have I, well, not since the first couple months, have I met with a client in person in 10 years. So you've done it for 10 years. How many customers a year, roughly, are we talking about? Dozens. Dozens. Dozens of customers every year, over 10 years. So 120 to 150 different customers, almost none of whom you've met in person. No. Which means you have to figure out ways to develop trust and to build that kind of authority without sitting in front of them, right? And one of the dynamics, I think, that's pretty helpful to you is that word of mouth referral, right? It passes a lot of trust and authority when one of your customers tells another one of your customers, how do you make that happen, or how do you help that? It's cliche, but it's always making sure you're existing happy when customers are happy, right? Like, as long as you leave them happy, they will refer you. And it's the case of, people ask us, like, where are leads come from? Like, a lot of times, I don't know. Like, we ask, but a lot of the times, it's a friend or a furl or something like that. It's not a organic search. It's not Facebook ads. It's not all the things that we counsel our customers to do because they're selling a different product. But it's making sure that you leave customers happy where they're like, no, I had a really good experience with nine seats. That was a good experience. You should go hire them. It also gets them over the pricing hurdles of being a small micro agency of like, wait, that's a lot more than I was gonna pay a freelancer on Upwork. Yeah, but remember how good your friend said we were? That's why you're gonna do it. All of those things kind of come together. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So you started traveling. One of the things you had to figure out was where you could co-work out of, like all the different places. And did you have a strategy for how you figured out where you'd be working? Like, how do you know you don't get to a place and it doesn't have internet? You don't, but you have backup plans. So tell us about your backup plans. Well, for your process. Well, the process is, one, co-working spaces were just starting out 10 years ago. And so I got accustomed to using those when they're available. Cafes had Wi-Fi, that was a backup. Wi-Fi at the places we were staying, which back then was largely like guest houses and hotels and things, was often iffy. Not so much anymore. But you had a, this is my primary plan, co-working space. The secondary backup plan would be some cafe. And then everywhere I go, I end up buying a local SIM card, because I travel mostly internationally. So I buy a local SIM card for data and that's my final fallback. And that happens a lot. When we're in Indonesia, it's like, you just never know. Internet's really spotty, infrastructure's not the best. And so we'll end up like, all right, we're just gonna, we're at a cafe that has Wi-Fi, but it's so bad that the 3G cellular service is better and so we just use that. And it's really not that expensive. The worst I end up spending is $60, $70 a month for tethering data, if I have to. But most of the time, it's trivial business costs. Which is awesome, given that the other kind of costs you have of living in Indonesia or Southeast Asia in general is fairly low. Yeah. Different if you're living in Italy for a few weeks. Yeah, we've done Italy. Europe is certainly more expensive, but it's actually not that bad. The big difference was, until three years ago, we had a home somewhere. And about two and a half years ago, we had a home somewhere. And we had spent seven months out of, away from home. And for those months, we had managed to sublease our house to friends who were also fellow digital nomad-y people. But it was actually really, we were living in Hawaii at the time. And it was shockingly hard to find anybody who wanted to come to Hawaii for two months and pay us minimal rent to live in our house. Because they were like, oh, I'd love to come for two weeks on vacation. There really aren't that many people who are like, oh yeah, I'll come hang out in Hawaii for two months while you're gone. And we found out this is just too stressful. And we lost rent, so to speak, gave up. And now it's like, you know, $1,500, $2,000 a month on an Airbnb is cheaper than we were paying in rent and utilities and everything else we were paying back home. So it's not an expensive lifestyle we lead. Right. It actually works out. But yeah, Thailand, Indonesia, Bali, way cheaper. You get to live like royalty. So you started that all independently. You were doing your own freelancer work and a guy in Vegas, John Hawkins was running nine seeds and you started doing some work for him. And you were one of the kind of regular contractors and that would do work for him. And that meant he was doing client acquisition at that point. And you were just like, hey, send me the work. I'll do the work and I'll ship it back, right? Which is even easier when you're out and no mad and doing whatever. And at some point he asked you to join nine seeds, right? And then a little past that, right? He asked you to become a partner in nine seeds, right? And you took on more legitimate responsibility. You were helping the business. You were helping shaping process and procedure. And then he decided he wanted out. And so you bought the business from him or took it over, right? Tell us about that process because it's an incredibly interesting dynamic of going from your contractor who's doing some work to your partner in the business to it's now your business and the founder is out. Yeah, so that is very accurate. I had started freelancing. John, I don't lie on stage. No, you don't. You don't. I had founded what was called at the time J Brown Studios which was originally photography shifted into web. And at that point I was contracting for John and love the team that worked for nine seeds. I was like happy to work with you guys. This is awesome. I don't have to acquire my own work. I can do 40 hours of development a week instead of 20 hours of development a week and 20 hours trying to sell it and manage it and everything else. It was a great match. And then after about a year and a half of that I said, this is a great match but I have no job security. Like I'm a contractor for this agency and it's working out well but where am I in five years if I just keep doing this? And so I told John, I'm like I wanna stake in it or I'm gonna go back and build my own agency. And yeah, bought in as a partner and that went great. And then John decided he wanted to get out of WordPress. He got an offer from a startup which we had actually talked about in the acquisition deal. It was like we all work in tech. We all dream of like the startup being like here's that stacks of cash. None of us wanted to be handcuffed to saying no to that. And so he went and worked for a startup role and I took over the thing and it's been good. It's been a wild ride. One of the details about working with John was that he had great people skills both client and kind of HR in-house people skills which I did not as an engineer. I was a project manager, I ran teams but it was very technical. And so there was a great pairing there and compensating for that has been probably the biggest business challenge for the last few years. And it's where I spend all my time thinking and working on and fixing is that side of it. The technical side and building stuff that's all easy, the technical side of it. Awesome. So now you're running nine seats and you recently acquired another part of someone else's business, right? I mean like everything that a person could go through in terms of agency life, you're going through, right? So you've contracted, you've bought in, you've been a partner, you've now taken it over and now you went and bought someone else's part of their business. Tell us a little about the deal you did with WebSavvy Designs. So this woman in the WordPress community, Rebecca Gale, fantastic, amazing business woman, had built an agency and part of that through one of her developers had built a theme store and Rebecca and I got to know each other and felt comfortable and I was talking to her about like, yeah, you know, nine seats has always had a couple of products that were WordPress plugins we sold but they were very minor, like they barely hit the bottom line but we thought about building some themes and she's like, really? Cause I have a bunch of themes and I'm kind of tired of building and supporting them. Cause her key developer who had, her key developer had literally dragged her into the theme business, right? She had said no, no, he built themes, he built the store, he put it out there, people started buying it and then she went, oh my gosh, but eventually he left and she's sitting there holding that store. And for a couple of years, she tried to figure out how to make it work and I'm like, well, I have a team that's perfectly fit for these Genesis Child themes. Let's figure out a business arrangement that works and yeah, transfer that half of her business so that she can focus exclusively on consulting and SEO work, which was her focus cause she'd lost her senior developer who'd been doing this theme development work and we took over the support and then took over the entire store and all the themes and have new themes coming out very soon. Those were supposed to be out a couple of months ago and then we kind of went, let's make sure the foundation works for Gutenberg because now everything has to be Gutenberg, which is a good thing, same as bad thing, but there's still enough uncertainty there that it's not like we can just be like, this'll work in six months when Gutenberg comes out and we want to be sure that that's solid. Yeah. That means you're a company that is both a services business and a product business. Yeah, everybody says that's a bad idea. I normally tell everybody that's a horrid idea. You cannot do that well, but tell us how that's been or how it's going and what are the things you're seeing? It is not utopia, but it's not bad. It was a consciously made decision, right? Like what you hear from all of the products slash service back and forth businesses is services tends to always be on fire and you never have the extra bandwidth to go send off to the product side of the business, which isn't on fire and burning. And so there's this constant push and pull of resources, right? So we had pretty much intended and did set up a firewall. I had two people who had worked as for us as contractors for a long time and went, you guys are just gonna be doing themes. Client service people are still gonna be doing client service work and if they get time, which they never have, they're gonna be doing some product and support work and stuff. So there is the ability to cross over. But you're not doing a crossover. It means you're really running two companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is the only way it really works. Right, I don't disagree with that. That's good. So you're running both. You're running a product company and a services company. You have to, John's not there, so John's not pulling in new customers, right? So how do you, obviously on the services side, you have a whole lot of wealth of customers and so they're recommending whatever. How do you drive business on the product side? That's a good question, Chris. We need to do more marketing on that side because the theme business has only been ours for six months, really kind of more like three. And I'm just starting to figure out the SEO stuff that Rebecca had put in place still is paying off, that's huge. But we need to start doing more active marketing, which is not something we've ever had to do for the client service side. So as you put it, yeah, I get to do it all now because once I've kind of figured out how to run the services business, now it's like, now figure out how to run a product business where you actually have to market and sell and get in front of people's faces and do split testing on sales pages and all that. So I'm definitely not an expert at that yet, but I love the new challenges, so it's coming. How big is my seeds right now? Five. Six. Six, assuming the higher I just talked to the other day, actually, signs. That's nice. So with six, and you have two of them doing the product side and then you have four of them doing on the, or three in the service side plus you running both, right? Yeah. So that's a pretty small organization. I take it they're not all sitting in the same location, right? None of them are sitting in the same location. So how do you help all of them stay connected, interact with each other and work well together? Man, have we been through everything? We used to joke years ago at Pine Seeds with John that we would be better equipped as software testing of project management tools, because we went through every single one, like from base camp to base camp, to the Trello, to Asana, to Red Booth, to Jira. One thing they don't know is that John created his own. Somewhere in that process of testing like 32 different task management systems, I got an email saying, hey, can you test this? And I'm like, what is it? He goes, we built our own, and I'm like, don't finish that sentence, right? That's what he had done. Scratching your own itch with eating the dog food and yeah, it was a time tracking and voicing system, which is still for sale. We don't use. Yeah, but so we've been through all the tools. Slack is our primary communication tool these days. Project management in general internally is in Asana. We had left Asana, then we came back to Asana because we missed it. Now we're like, eh, did we really miss it? And we just started using something I think you're familiar from your days at CrowdFavorite Sifter app for client facing issue and bug tracking, which is great. But structurally- Just don't try and integrate that with GitHub at all. Oh God. But in terms of the team building side of it, which is really critically important, we are not Agile-based. We're too small for Agile, right? Like your project ends up waterfall whether we want it to or not. But we do daily stand-ups, and we've tried to reduce those down to not be daily, but we do a daily half hour call in the morning, West Coast time, and really quickly hit what projects are going on, what tasks have to go. We use kind of the L10 spreadsheet kind of thing for our list. And that is a video call on Google Hangouts. Occasionally people start turning the cameras off and I start telling them they can't because face-to-face visuals is super important. If I see a camera off like three or four days in a row, I'm like, turn it back on. I consulted with a very, very well known and very large and highly revenue-producing WordPress company a year and a half ago, almost two, and I instituted daily calls. I was helping them with their engineering team, and I instituted daily calls, and I instituted that they all had to have their camera on, and their manager really didn't like being on the camera, and therefore he wanted to not have the team be on the camera. And he said, nope, everyone's gotta be on the camera. And then I gave them some assignment, right? Read this, do this, whatever. I don't even remember what the assignment was, it wasn't a big deal. But then two days later, we were on the video call, and I asked them if they had done it. And I knew exactly who had and hadn't before they said a word, right? Because you can watch their face, oh, I'm looking somewhere, I don't make eye contact with the camera, right? And they're like, you didn't, you didn't, you didn't, you did, you did, you didn't. And one guy's like, I'm ready for you to ask me this question. I've got my homework. It's amazing how video helps, right? Because it's all that non-verbal communication that still comes through on video that doesn't when you're on a phone call. No, that's all of it. And people who see each other once a day feel for way more comfortable reaching out about problems, help, you know, troubleshooting, whatever it is. Yeah. Having that daily face time, even if it's just a few minutes, makes a huge difference. Yeah. That's awesome. How do you recruit? I mean, you just said you were just hiring someone, right? So how do you, how do you evaluate and recruit people to join the team? So that's a good question, because that's kind of the challenge I'm having right now is hiring has become more difficult for us. Years ago, we would- Hiring is different for, difficult for everyone. We used to hire largely from work camps. And the primary reason for that was we were all going to a lot of work camps. Lots. And you would find people who were young, energetic, not the older people, can't be energetic, and committed and passionate about WordPress. And those people made great employees. Like they were excited- So they didn't think they were worth 250,000 dollars a year. Right. Now those same people had been in the WordPress community for eight years and they think they're worth 250,000 dollars a year, but they're not actually like computer science trained- Yeah. Software engineers. I can't believe I used that word. They're experienced WordPress staffs, but they don't understand object-oriented program. They don't know how to use Node or Dolpert, all of these tools that we're all using now. And so there's this problem. It's like I need to find those, those technically competent and not necessarily. We used to be like, you have to know WordPress if you want to WordPress, because it's all we do. We are a 100% WordPress-focused agency. I think in the, what, we're at nine years now, eight years, eight years, we have done three projects that weren't WordPress-focused. We migrate all sorts of things, ASP.net, Blogger, all this stuff into WordPress. But we've all done three things that are like pure PHP projects outside of WordPress. But anyway, to the hiring point, it's a challenge that I'm starting to look more at things like remote work jobs and posting, collecting resumes, that's currently my big business challenge, so I don't have a great answer. Yeah. No, we're seeing it again in six months. We see it all the time, right? I saw it when I was a crowd favorite, see it on the web, you have people that now have eight years experience, but in reality, they kind of have two years experience four times over. And so that doesn't actually equal the revenue they want for an eight year experience. But also it doesn't have what I need if I'm hiring a senior person at that price point. And half the time, I don't need that price point or that senior, I need something different, but it just gets harder and harder, right? And so. And I think the WordPress space is, I don't know if it's different. You have all the software experience outside, but there's a lot of people I see looking for job every six months. And I'm like, I don't necessarily want to hire those people. So indeed, the company that does job boards, right? Spoke at a conference last year that I was at and they said that the average person post their resume looking for new jobs within two days of being hired at their new job. And you're like. Mind boggling. What? Right? Those of us who are a little more mature in life, right? But like, no, no, no, you took a job, right? Like, take your name off the market and focus, and it's gonna be a couple of years and you gotta deliver value and you gotta grow into the right. And that's not the case, right? Indeed's going, oh, no, no, no. They just got the job. And within two days they're like, yeah, just in case something else pops up and you're like, oh my goodness, right? It also changes the nature. I'm still running a pretty good track record. I think the average is still, now it's come down from about six to about four and a half years. The length of time someone stays working for me, but it's coming down, right? Cause people are like, oh, I'm just, I just want to try something new, right? It doesn't matter if their job is great and they're doing good stuff. They're just like, yeah, but I'm doing the stuff that I've been doing and I want to go. Yeah, I don't expect anybody to work for us for life. We're not in the fifties, right? Like the marketplace has changed for labor. But you kind of expect a couple of years, like. Yeah. And just one of the things I talk about when I interview people, I'm like, well, what do you want me doing in a year or two? And it, like rails, the right answer is not, like, oh, I want to get into rails or rust, or what are you doing machine learning? Yeah, yeah, I go, why are you telling me this? You know, like I love having long-term plans for the people who work for us. Like that's really important because I try to fulfill those. Like I think that people work best when they're following their passion and they're on the track they want to be on. And you can't always be 100% on that. Like sometimes you gotta get the job done. But I spend a lot of time thinking about, like this person said they want to go into, you know, react, I'm gonna find jobs that I can put them into that because I know that that's where they're gonna excel. Because you gotta kind of follow that passion and ride that. We have time for one or two questions for John. Anybody have something? Yeah? Someone was transitioning into WordPress developer. What would you say they should focus on personally becoming the higher goal, buy soon before you're... So that's a great question. It's the whole, someone's doing, they've been doing other stuff somewhere else. They're transitioning into WordPress, right? How would you recommend that they do that? If you're working freelance and you have jobs or you're just trying to, I don't know how to answer for this. This is a question I've probably used to answer really casually. Start building sites. Like learn PHP, you've got to know PHP if you're gonna touch WordPress. But you can learn PHP by tinkering, right? Yeah, PHP is a very simple language. At least at the functional side, when you get an object oriented it gets more complicated. But you can learn that on your own. Like 90% of the people made up a number in the WordPress space are self-taught. Nothing about PHP, JavaScript, CSS is, requires formal education to learn beyond knowing how to Google for results. If you're looking for your first jobs, find people willing to hire you knowing that you're inexperienced. I tell people, the very first job I had was for a photography client. I think I charged them 20 bucks an hour. This is 10 years ago I built a floating share bar because he'd seen one on Mashable back in the day. I was like, that's the coolest thing ever, I want that. And I was like, I think I can figure that out like and figured it out. And then just started doubling my rates on new clients. I think one of the other things to note is first be honest about what you know and don't know. Because the right kind of employer who's hiring will see the other things you do know and if those are valuable enough, it's worth paying for that while helping anyone grow in the others. So everyone's bringing some value to the table even if it's not, I write this PHP code but I've done this kind of project or I've worked with this kind of client or I know this domain expertise. So make sure you're able to articulate what you do bring to the table. And the second piece is, so number one, be honest. Number two and that be articulate about what you bring to the table. And number three is plan on doing a lot of grunt work, right? The only way you get comfortable with something is doing it over and over and over again because then you start determining what's normative and what's outside of bounds, right? When you've only done it once or twice, you don't know if what you did was totally standard or what you did was kind of crazy and nuanced, right? So just plan on doing a lot. Let's give it up for John. We're gonna take a couple of minute break and then we'll be right back at it.