 Thank you all for coming today. We're big on branding, and so you're going to see a lot of penguins here. If you care to take note, a lot of them are labeled. This rock hopper penguin will be starting us off with our project management for developers. So yeah, a little bit of my background. I started off as a solopreneur. I developed websites, and I also sold websites, and I also project managed websites. And so we all kind of know the age-old tale. So a little story here. Totally hypothetical situation. Let's say we've got a customer, and we've got a developer, and they start having a good conversation with each other. And the customer says, hey, I need a website. And the developer says, hey, that's great. I can get you a website. How many pages do you need? And the customer says, oh, maybe about seven pages. Home, about a photo gallery. Nothing too big. And the developer is like, hey, that's great. I'll go ahead and do that for you. Wendy, you need it. A month would be good, right? Not too bad. So three days before the website set to go live, developer reaches out to his customer and says, hey, great news. Your website's ready. Give it one last pass through. And the customer says, oh, shoot. I've got three more products. And I feel like they really should have their own page. Can you just build out three more pages for me? I mean, super easy. Developer, of course. That's simple. I'll just clone the product page that we already have. Change out the pictures. Change out the content. We're good to go, right? So calls up his customer again. Hey, your 10-page website is live. Customer says, wait, wait, wait, wait. Hold on a second. I was talking to Amy and Matt. And they feel like we really should have a team bio. I mean, we got eight employees here. Like we really should be talking about our employees, don't you think? And you as a developer, all right. What's eight more pages? What's that going to do? I mean, whatever. Let's say we go live at the end of this week instead of today. And I'll get that in my schedule for you. So we got eight more pages. And hey, your website's done. And customer says, oh, that contact form. Wouldn't it be great if that contact form worked differently if a customer fills it out or a new lead fills it out? Can you just build in a little bit of conditional logic for me? Fun, gravity forms, easy-peasy, done. All right, time to go live. Oh, oh, wait, wait, wait. Developer, I signed up for this great live chat service. This is going to change my business. Can you just put this little bit of code into the header? That's what they're telling me to do. And you all know how this works, right? Live chat integration. Super, super simple. You take that little line of code that the customer gives you, and the next thing you know, you're on the phone with them because you need their login for their live chat service because they didn't send you the right code. Oh, the buttons don't match the color of the website and all the little things. But hey, we're still going to go live because I'm staying up till 2 a.m. and I'm going to get this project done because I need it on my portfolio. And 2 a.m., you type out that final email. All right, I'm going to bring your site live tomorrow and you wake up in the morning and you've got an email important in your inbox. Can you just add a contact form to the folder? Last request, promised. Anything, someone familiar? Anyone? Total hypothetical story here. No one's had the solution before now. So what do we end up with? We end up with a super happy customer. It's all about keeping the customers happy, isn't it? This is a great model to run yourself out of business. And this is kind of what I'm here to talk about today. I've lived this story. When I started to grow my team, I started by hiring developers because we had a need for developers. And exactly like this story, I let my developers interact directly with the customers because, hey, customer service, do what the customer wants, listen to the customer, help them out. I like to get a kind of a feel. How many people in this room are actually website developers? All right, all right. How many of you guys interact directly with your customers? So that's almost everybody here, this is good, all right. Anyone not run into this situation before? For the video, no hands, except for our social media writer over there, so. All right, so there is a lot that goes into project management. This talk is really geared towards you guys, towards the developer. I'm not going to go into the basics of Scrum. I'm not gonna talk about all the different types of project management. What I'm gonna talk about are some key points that you can bring home that you hopefully will be able to implement in your business on Monday that will help you prevent scope creep. We're gonna talk a little bit about scope creep and ways that you can keep your workflow moving a little bit more smoothly. So to start out, kind of all the way back to the basics, we're starting about project management. So what is a project? Google's dictionary definition, but basically a project is, and this is key, a project is a temporary endeavor that has a set beginning, a set end, and its purpose is to create one unique product or one outcome. So a project is not, I have a new customer and they're my customer for 30 years. A project is my customer needs a website by March 5th. Projects have a clear beginning and a clear end. You need to have a timeline on your projects. Projects can be ongoing. Oftentimes you wanna maybe break those down into smaller projects. And also projects need to have a defined scope and resources needed to complete whatever outcome the customer's looking for. So this project management triangle we'll talk about a little bit more, but basically the scope of the project is what needs to be done and the resources are the time and the quality that it takes, or the time and the cost that it takes to implement the scope of the project. So that's kind of a project overview. Management is basically the process of dealing with or controlling people or things. And so a manager has the power to make decisions. A manager has the responsibility to oversee a project and is responsible for its results. The project manager is essentially the person who is responsible for the success or the failure of a project. So a lot of you website developers out there, you kind of think about your job is to develop the website, but really if you're talking to the customer as well or if you're also project managing, you are responsible for whether or not your project is a success and your customer's happy or a failure. And you can have a very happy customer on a failed project if your company takes a significant loss for it. And so this is the type of thing that I'm hoping you will take from this. So back to that project management triangle. This is sometimes called the triple constraint triangle. The project management institute talks a lot about this triple constraint and basically keeping that triangle as an equilateral triangle. So projects in general, they need to be delivered within the agreed cost. Nobody wants to buy a website and then find out after it goes live that they owe a lot more money for it than they signed up for. You need to deliver projects on time. Nobody wants to sign up for a project and then find out that their timeline has been extended by three months, even though you originally said that you could complete it in a month. And they need to meet the agreed scope and the quality needs to meet or exceed customer's expectations. And so the key here is to keep that project management triangle equilateral. You define the scope, you figure out how long it's gonna take and how many resources are needed to complete the project. And if any of those things change, the quality of the project will be compromised or you need to change the other two as well. So this example here, if we have a project with a set cost time and scope and the scope increases without changing the time and the cost of the project, what's gonna happen is the quality will fail. So great example, I need a team section added to my website but you only have one night to do it. What's gonna happen? You're gonna build out a team section that doesn't have appropriate header tags. It's gonna have broken or missing links. It's gonna maybe have some broken images just because you didn't increase the time or the cost to complete it. So for everybody in this room, as a project manager, your job is to do those things. Make sure that the projects are completed on time, meet the scope and meet the price. So you have to kind of take a step out. Now, all of you developers in the room, when you're talking on the phone with your customer, you're no longer a website developer. Sure you are. I mean, that's what you're gonna go back and do but you need to have a mind shift when you're talking with your customers and think of things from a little bit more of a project management angle. So when a customer says to you, hey, I just need some conditional logic on my form, sure, as a developer, that's super easy. But is it within the scope that you talked about? Is it adding a little bit of time? Once you start going down the wheel of adding a thing and adding another thing and adding another thing, you're changing the customer's expectations. You do one little addition above what's outlined in the proposal and the customer all of a sudden realizes that they can get more things for you than you signed up for. And so they're going to come back again and again and again with small requests that eventually are going to lead to a pretty big problem. As a project manager, you're the project's leader. So it's your responsibility to lead yourself or your team to meet the objectives of your customer. You need to be able to balance competing objectives and get input from everybody who's involved with the project. So a great example of this, if you have a company that sells online and you've got two people in the room talking about how they want to handle shipping. And the guy who works in the shipping department says, well, we need to streamline shipping and we need to put everything in one box. And the guy who owns the company says, well, no, we need to not get overcharged for shipping. And so we need to sit down and integrate with FedEx and USPS and UPS and figure out all of the best quotes. And so as the project manager, you need to have the ability to talk to both of the people on the team, get them to come to a decision, figure out the why, why are you lobbying for this? Why are you lobbying for that? And figure out a solution that will meet both of their needs without taking more time or resources than were originally allotted. Asking customers, does it meet your goal? Are we still on track? Is this what you originally had in mind? Is a great way to communicate. Communication is key. A thing that we found out pretty early on into the careers, if you're talking with people who both, if you're talking to two people, a decision maker in a company and a stakeholder in the company, and they're not the same person, you need to make sure that you get input from both of them. So if Joe is writing the check for your website design project, but he said that Molly has the ability to make all of the decisions and you work just with Molly, at the end of the project, Joe comes back in and decides that he wants things changed. You need to define upfront, who is the person that's making the decision? Maybe get that in writing and who is the actual stakeholder in your project so that things don't derail. And so that when the project's done, everybody is satisfied with the results. And as a project manager, oftentimes you just have to make decisions to keep the project moving. So some great skills for project managers to have problem solving is key skill. In this industry where things are very intangible, oftentimes you're gonna have to come up with unique solutions to different problems. Motivation, if you're not motivated to keep a project on track, it's going to derail. Leadership skills are essential for project managers, especially if you are working with a team of other developers or if you are working with a team of clients and you need to help them move together to reach a common goal. Communication is key. Communication is the bulk of project management. Make sure you are able to write clear, concise emails. Make sure that you're able to talk on the phone. Make sure that whatever method your customer likes you're available for. Negotiation, oftentimes negotiating over price, scope, quality, time is gonna come into play a lot if a customer wants more than they've asked for, then they need to either extend the timeline or increase the cost. And so you need to be pretty good at explaining that to the customer, negotiating with them either for more time on your project or for more resources. In customer service, of course, as a project manager, your primary goal is to make sure that the customers are happy throughout the entire project. A lot of other roles you might play that will come in as a project manager, you could be the billing department or the accounting department. Customers are gonna call you halfway through their project and say, hey, where are we? Where are we with billing? How much would it cost to add on a team section? How much would it cost to put that conditional logic on the form? How many hours of consulting time have we used so far? So as a project manager, you need to be on top of that. If you have an external billing system, you might want to be in communication, hold weekly meetings, make sure that you're talking to people who are managing the finances on a regular basis and communicating with developers and with the customers where you're at with expenses on the project. You may be a sales agent. Hey, I need that team section? Sure, it's gonna cost you X, Y, Z. As a project manager, actually it's a great way to upsell your customers mid-project or push things to a phase two. Hey, that would be great on your website. Let's do that later and we'll get you a quote for that after the website's done. You might act as a hiring manager. Perhaps you are a freelancer and you outsource work to other developers from time to time when your schedule gets busy. You may have to hire them. Maybe you work on a team with website developers and you have to assign tasks to individual developers who are gonna best fit each part of the project. Both of those things, you need to have a little bit of experience with delegating, figuring out who's best for the job and how to get them on board and make sure that they fit and that they have the availability to complete the project. And you may also be a purchasing manager. Figure out if using software that's been pre-purchased is cheaper than having an in-house developer do it. Maybe you wanna buy a plugin. Maybe you need to do a little bit of research as the project manager. You know, who developed this plugin? How long has it been supported for? What happens with future updates and releases? Maybe you are given the ability to purchase premium licenses for e-commerce software or for form software to make the project run more smoothly and then kind of back full circle to the accounting if you are purchasing premium software for one of your customers, how does that fall into billing for the end user? Who holds the license? Do you buy a developer license? Do you make your customer buy the product and renew it? So all sorts of decisions that you need to make as you're building on a product. So scope creep. Has anyone here ever heard of the term scope creep? All right. Yeah, so this is the big thing and this is the toughest part of project management that I've run into and that our team has run into. And I think in this industry, especially scope creep, it is a problem. So scope creep, for those of you who may not have heard, basically when a project starts to grow beyond what was originally included in the proposal, it is scope creep. And you know that scope creep has already happened when a project is starting to cost you more than you planned. If it's starting to take you more time than you planned. If you're starting to pull more staff members in than you had planned, this is running into scope creep. And so we're gonna talk about some ways to stop scope creep before it starts and then also how to handle scope creep once it's come up. And the most important thing that I can stress with scope creep is that it begins at the very beginning with the sale. So back to our hypothetical situation. Let's say we've got a nice sales guy and he meets with a happy business owner and they're having a discussion about building a website. And the sales guy says, oh, hey, I'm gonna get you a quote and I'm gonna get you a quote for a five page website with a team bio section. And the customer doesn't hear him because she has all of these other things in her mind that she wants on her website. And she's just wanting the price that he's presented. And so she's got this idea, either she misheard something that he said or maybe she's taken in a different way but they leave that conversation and the customer is thinking, yeah, I'm gonna get this great shopping cart. I'm gonna have 10 forms on my website. They're all gonna go to 10 different developers. And so sales guy goes back to the office and he talks with his development team and he says, great news, I just sold a website. And the development team says, great news, we're gonna build that website that you just sold. And sales guy then goes on his way, collects his commission check and the developers left speaking to the customer who's pretty sure she bought more than the proposal stated. And so now it's the developer's job to manage the scope creep. So the first part, making sure that your sales staff understands what they're selling but also building it out into a super crystal clear proposal. Make sure that your proposal is very specific. How many pages does your website need to have? Do you need contact forms? How many contact forms do you need? How many fields do each of your contact forms need? Are you gonna be selling online? What payment systems are you gonna take online? Just PayPal or do you wanna integrate with authorized.net? Do you have a team section? Are you gonna need team bios on your site? And make sure that your proposal is line itemed and this is where one of my favorite graphics about project management. You want e-commerce? You want 10 forms on your website and you want it tomorrow? I mean, maybe we can do that for you but it's not gonna be cheap. Or you wanna pay $2,000 for an e-commerce website? Sure, but you're not gonna get it any time this year. So make sure that your sales team whether that's you, whether you have an external sales team is communicating very clearly with your customer and go through the proposal line item, line by line and explain exactly what it means. And always ask if the customer has questions about their proposal. If they have questions, bring it up. Don't be afraid to say, oh, that's not outlined in the proposal but we can add it on. And then now that you've got a clear proposal your customer signed up before anybody starts working make sure you explain your process. How do you work? Have a kickoff meeting. One thing that we do is we bring our customers into our office and we sit around a table. The person who sold the website is there, the project manager is there and typically we'll bring a developer or designer into the meeting at some point depending on how big the project is so that everybody's on the same page before anybody even writes a line of code. Determine how you wanna communicate with each other. Some people prefer to talk on the phone. Some people prefer email. A lot of people prefer text today. Figure out how your customer wants to communicate. Figure out who you're gonna be talking to during your project and make sure that you have the line of communication open and also set your expectations. What are we gonna do for you and what do you need to do for us in order to make this a successful project? Oftentimes in our business we'll sell websites but the customer decides that they want to write their own content. So if you can deliver them a document that says, hey, here's an example of what we expect from you for content. This is our expectation that you will fill this out and send it back to us before we start working or would you like to talk about purchasing content? After the kickoff meeting, you wanna sit down and identify the major milestones. What are the big hurdles that have to overcome in your project? Do you start with the design and then you develop out a page and then you develop a function? Where do you need approval on items? If you can make an outline of the project and highlight each of the milestones, make note especially where the customer needs to be involved is key here. A lot of times customers don't understand that website development is a collaborative process and they need to be pulled back into the conversation mid-development just so that their goals are being met. Winner items do. If you want to put dates on your timeline you can or you can say after every deliverable you have X number of days to review and approve but make it clear what you expect from your customers and how long things are going to take. If your customer has a day that they need their website live by, then you need to develop a timeline and then adhere to it strictly. Whether that's on your end or the customer's end and make it super clear that if things fall or go off the rails, it's gonna derail the project. Keeping the lines of communications clear, I think we've covered this a few times but again, find out who the primary contact is. A great thing if telephone or text is their preferred line of communication, always send a follow-up email. It's really good just to have things in writing so that you're documenting what's been said. So if you get on the phone with a customer and they say, I would like you to add three more pages to the website and you say, all right, well that's gonna cost X, make sure you follow that up immediately with an email. Hey, per our conversation you've requested that we add these three pages to your website. As discussed on the phone, we're gonna charge this for it, let us know if you have questions. Thanks for your business. Just so that if they come back at the end of their project with their final bill and they have any questions, you have documentation to reference. And then also communication, not just with you and your customer, but make sure that you're communicating directly with the members of your team. If any of your team members have direct access to your customers, it's always a good idea to be part of that conversation. So oftentimes we'll have developers hop on the phone directly with our customer just because it is so much easier for customers to explain what they're getting to a developer than to a project manager. But maybe get the project manager either on the phone or have the developer send a recap email stating what happened. You don't wanna get yourself into a situation where your customer says, well, Joe said that I could have eight team members and you're telling me I can only have five, what's going on? Because you don't wanna fight with your customers, you don't wanna get into that he said, she said, you wanna keep the relationship strong and you wanna keep the communication clear. So make sure that internal communications are happening as well. And anytime that a red flag comes up, anytime your customer starts to request something out of scope, make sure you address it immediately. Address it politely, address it quickly and clearly and define what needs to be done to make their request work. If you're having issues with customers continuing to request items, maybe they're willing to pay for it, maybe they're willing to extend the timeline for it. That's great. But maybe it just is adding on and on and on and on to a project. Now remember, projects have a clear cut beginning and a clear end. If your customer starts taking a project to a point where it has no visible end in sight, this might be a great time for you to go back and revisit the original goals of your project. Say I hear you, I hear you that you want this. You know, why are you requesting this feature? Is it in line with the original goals? Is it something that we can do later? Don't be afraid to upsell. Don't be afraid to push things out into a phase two. But try to keep online and remember that a project is supposed to have a clear beginning and a clear end. And keep track of changes. In our company, we use a change order form. So if a customer requests something beyond the scope and we decide we can roll it into the original timeline for the project or if a customer doesn't deliver on time and it's gonna extend the project, we have them fill out a change order. This is a form that we have in writing with their signature on it, saying they approve the change for X cost or X delay in time and they get a copy of it as well so that they know that their projects change and that gets then filed with their original proposal for reference later. And I said earlier, yeah, always offer your customers the ability to purchase more. I think that goes without saying. And the last step, okay, your project's complete, that's great, follow up, learn. Learn from what you did, improve on your projects. Ask your customers how things went. How did you like our process? Did we get through, did we get all of your goals? What could we have done better? What happened in this project that you didn't expect? Get feedback as much as you possibly can after every project so that you can change and modify and better your own business and yourself for future projects. After a website goes live is a great time to ask for a review if the customer's happy. Usually going back three, four months after you build a website, it's kind of tough because you're coming back to an old relationship so when your relationship's strong, your customer's got a high from their website being live is a great time to say, hey, did you like working with us? Here's a direct link to our Google page, we'd love a review. So, any questions so far? All right, so kind of to wrap things all up, there are a lot of different tools that you can use to help your project stay on track, to help keep things running smoothly, to track timelines, to communicate with your customers. A lot of tools to assign different tasks to your team members, hit milestones, deadlines. These are some of the tools that we use or have used in the past or that are common in the industry. Our team right now is using Slack primarily for communication even though we are a co-located office, it's really great to put everything in a Slack channel for our customers because then we can go back and reference it and it's, you know, oftentimes developers will be working on two or three projects at once and so if they can go back and revisit sort of the stream of communication through a Slack channel, it's great to kind of have that record rather than having to sort through and filter through email after email after email. So our project manager uses Slack to assign tasks to our developers and our developers, you know, use Slack to communicate with each other during the course of a project. We use Google Drive for almost everything, whether it's making spreadsheets for timelines or for storing documents for customers. You know, you got pictures, here's a link to our Google Drive folder you can upload them to, sharing resources with customers. Pretty easy and free with the other benefit of Google Drive up to a certain amount. Asana is great for task management. We use Asana for task lists for sort of the everyday checklist, you know, this is the process of going live. Update the DNS records, check the dev link, check image links, you know, go through meticulously and so Slack is kind of where we put most of our overall communication and then direct over to Asana for sort of the more task management. A lot of companies use Basecamp as task management, project management. We used to use that in the past. Active Collab is another great project management, task management tool with a built-in calendar. It comes out a little bit higher of a price point, but pretty good for larger teams. Trello, Trello boards are really popular among the website development industry. And Process Street is similar to Asana. It's a software that I learned about a few months ago and it's pretty cool because you can set up your entire process on Process Street and this is great if you run a website development agency with a remote team. You can create an entire process and put checklists in it like you do for Asana. You can assign it to team members but you get a quick overview of all of your projects and what percent they're at and what stage they're in. So it's kind of, yeah, it's a paid program. They do have a free level but it's kind of an alternative to Asana that a few people, a few colleagues of mine have really been enjoying. And so from here, go home, prevent scope creep, work with your customers, keep your customers happy. Do you have any questions? All right, we have a mic runner in the back so if you have a question, raise your hand and the mic's running towards you so on the far end on that side, right behind you, right behind you. Yeah, let's make him run back and forth, it's fun. Okay, so when you are asking developers to do more like clients interaction and project management on their own, how do you manage their workload? Like how many projects can they work on that way simultaneously if that's what you do? So I think this answer is a little bit different for every company based on the types of websites or the type of projects that you're working on. When we were growing, we got to a point where our developers were comfortably able to handle maybe five or six projects at a time before we decided to hire a project manager. And so we ended up going down the route of actually hiring a full time project manager to take that workload off of their plates but different project management methodologies will kind of have different ways to address that. The scrum project management kind of allows developers to focus on one project at a time and then move on to the next so they're not splitting their day up. I would recommend talking to each of your developers one on one to figure out what their comfort level is. I know among our team, we have varying levels of how many projects different people wanna work on. Some people are totally comfortable working on six different things at once. Other people really just prefer to work on one thing at a time. So if you can manage that as the business owner and communicate with your customers, you're in our queue but we have to finish however many projects before we get to there. Don't overload your developers, especially if they have to talk directly to the customers. Talking one on one to customers and developing websites can be a pretty big emotional strain. And if their forte isn't there, see what maybe you can do to take the workload off their plate, but yeah. I think you had a question as well, next to the microanorality. So I've been an agency owner for seven years. I started with zero customers. We're running about 200 now, so it's been a journey. But out of seven years building hundreds of sites, the biggest problem is content collection. You just maybe share overview or a 10,000 foot view. What's working for you guys? And I'll try to catch you up in the lounge. I'd like to pick your brand a little bit on that. Yeah, no, yes, absolutely. Okay, that's a big question. And that is one of our biggest struggles as well is content collection. So we sell content and that was our first solution was to start selling content. And initially I found a couple of contractors who were freelance content writers. And we just either direct referred to them for content writing or we would sell it. For certain cases we will recommend sometimes even require that the customer purchase content. We set up, as I mentioned our project milestones, content collection is always the first item. And if we set up a timeline and we need content collection by X date and you can't provide it by then, you need to fill out a change order form. At that point, maybe you have the negotiation there. Okay, well either we can delay your timeline, that's a change order. Or do you want to forego the change order? We'll adjust the timeline, but you're gonna buy content at this point. For individual developers, I strongly recommend that you find some freelance content writers to partner with, to network with. There are so many people in the industry and receiving quality content makes all the difference in developing websites. There was a question here in the front. So I've got kind of a two part question for you. First off, a really helpful session, thanks for doing this. Thank you. So my first question is, as a team and you've got a full-time project manager, what then is your role as the owner in the project management? Do you talk to clients directly? Does the project manager do that? What's your role in all that? So that's the first part of the question. So once you grow an agency, one of the other talks that I give a lot is growing from freelance to agency. And by the time you have a team of nine, like I do, your job is more managing people and managing workflow, not so much managing workflow, but managing team and managing culture and running a business and paying the bills, then it is talking with customers. So I speak with customers more in networking events as I run into them. I always meet in great customers if they come into our office. I'll get introduced to them, but our project manager, our full-time project manager is the person who has the contact with the customer. I really, I stay involved with the projects and I get updates and I'll provide input, but project manager is the one kind of running the show. Cool things. The other part of the question would be, how much do you let clients in on some of the tools that you shared? Like I have Slack, none of my clients use it. Do you let them in on that or is that just internal? We've never had a, no, we haven't ever. We have our content writer, one of our content writers that we network with who's outside our company in on our Slack channel that we bring in quite a bit. We've never brought a customer on, simply because most of the customers that we interact with don't have any idea what Slack is. They don't have any idea what Trello is. They don't know what Asana is. You can go ahead and invite your clients if you want, but I'm going to guess that they probably won't use it. But in terms of Google Docs, we do oftentimes share, Google Docs have shared folders with customers and a lot of times customers will have their list of edits or changes or revisions on Google Docs. The nice thing about Google Docs is that it can be collaborative. And so we've got three different developers working off the same Google Doc for revisions. Well, they can all just strike out the stuff that they've done so that nobody's doing the same thing. And then also with the customers so the customer can kind of see progress. We have a question over there. This is sort of a small detail, but I'm really trying to implement change orders, like a process for change orders. And I'm curious what you use specifically because for the very reason that what you said is each client likes to communicate in a different way and they don't all use the same platform. And my partner I've kind of discussed like trying to establish like you have to log into this dashboard and they just won't do it. They'll still just call you on the phone or text you or do whatever that is. So how do you like formalize that? How do you get that together? We have a page on our website for change orders with the form that they fill out and we pre-populated form that they sign online and they have to sign that. So get off the phone with them. You have a link in your email with the form. Do you have daily meetings with your team and do you do calls or do you do once a week or how do you manage and coordinate with your team of nine and do you have individual like how do you manage your time and the project managers and so forth? So we are a team of nine in a co-located space. We have an open office. We do utilize Slack for a lot of our communication. Right now we meet weekly to go over all of the projects. We meet every Tuesday so that Monday is kind of a catch up over the weekend day and Tuesday is also a day when everybody's in the office and so we sit down and we do about an hour long meeting with teams and then from there it's primarily one-on-one communication either between developer developer, developer project manager and we will have impromptu meetings as needed if we need to talk about something important. Yeah. I just wanted to ask first of all, thank you super helpful information but you were talking about scope creep earlier and as we try to prevent that we try to make sure that everything that's in the scope of course is in the proposal and then if I'm in a sales meeting I want to make the sale right then and there before they get to make change their mind overnight or whatever it is. But a lot of times in that meeting you discover other things that are needed and so I don't have I mean right now we use a word document that we're do you have a software where you can bolt things on quickly right there in person and be able to give that anything like that or how do you handle that to be able to make the sale quickly? So most of our projects are custom and they get kind of more of a custom proposal. We frequently have sales come in with sort of a base project and then at the project kickoff meeting we found out that the customer wants more. Typically at that kickoff meeting it's the customer, sales and project manager and so the project manager has already thoroughly reviewed the proposal and she's really good at saying hey you're talking about this that's I don't see that anywhere in here do you want to add that on? And you know maybe that's not the appropriate time to talk about the cost because it's you know the happy get to know each other yay rah rah we're gonna start the project meeting but a great leave the meeting with here's a bulleted list that I've you know put on a notebook notepad or something for you that my sales guy is gonna follow up with you and get you pricing on and then you can decide if you need to do that now or if that can roll into a phase two so yeah, does that help? Yes? All right we are going to our final question here in the front. Hi Jesse, you mentioned a couple of times in your presentation about maybe instead of doing a change order some features could go into a phase two and I've done that a couple of times with a few different clients but I've found it difficult to actually get the phase two to happen in the future because the momentum gets lost like once the big launch happens and they're basically happy with their website it seems to kind of go on the back burner and even if I try to follow up it's like oh yeah we're still interested in that but they're not like committed to making it happen so is it better just to do change orders and make the project bigger as you're doing it or do you have tips for how to make phase two happen better? Right, so it kind of depends a little bit on the project if implementing a change during the project is going to wildly change the project and take it off scope and maybe conflict with other projects that you have for other customers then you need to make that internal decision is it okay for you to add it on during the project? If it's okay for you then yeah it's obviously going to affect the timeline it's obviously going to affect the cost to just get in writing somewhere that you're doing that if you have a change order form maybe make part of that this is going to extend the live date of your website by three weeks by adding this so if that works for you and for your schedule great if not then that follow up time I would suggest potentially even giving them a quote with the follow up hey thank you for your business we're so glad the website's live leave us a review and by the way here's your quote for phase two it's valid for 30 days and give them an end point for how long they have to make that decision ultimately if you can give them a little bit of urgency and maybe 28 days later follow up and say hey that quote you have is going to expire in two days just FYI if you want to hold that price that might turn them back around and have them come in otherwise if you have a sales person a great opportunity for the sales person to follow up and maybe set coffee do a follow up and kind of reignite the buyer thank you very much everyone please put your hands together for Jesse