 I am Julie Anderson. I am currently a project manager at Sideways 8. I have worked in various things that have done various roles in the web development sphere so to speak for the last 20 years. I've been in my own agency, it was very small basically when my kids were growing up. So I've attempted to code and and then I did some sales but what I found is I really like project management which apparently nobody else does. So which is great. I have been married for 25 years and have two kids that are almost grown up, not quite, and then I got a couple of, yeah it's not detecting it, sorry, anyway they and what else, oh I'm a jogger not a runner and I'm in a cyclist and that's about it. Oh and I'm a rabid North Carolina Tarheel fan so yes, so yeah we we we get a little crazy, nope it's not gonna, well I mean I can kind of, I just don't want to hold everything up. It's only 20 minutes. Speak graphically? Okay well to start, you know everybody starts off with they, you're starting off, you need to build a portfolio, right, so you'll do anything. You will barter with anyone, you will just trying to build a decent portfolio. So at one point I was bartering with somebody who's a massage therapist, that was great but then I signed up to do my ex, my friend's ex-husband's website and he was selling beef jerky and had flaming logos that he stood behind me and said move it five pixels this way, four pixels down. You got to get past that stage, right, so you get past that and you get to, you know, where you're working 40 hours a week or your staff is working 40 hours a week and you know you just have to start weeding out some of these people and then how do you go about doing that, how do you know which ones are the ones that you need to let go of? So you need to start thinking about some of them are annoying but you're still making money with them and so you kind of got to balance that. Some of them are your favorite friends, the people you want to hang out and have a beer with but you're losing money working with them and so you've got to start thinking, have tools to figure out which ones are, which ones are which and which ones you can, should be cutting loose. So nothing, alright, let me at least have it until I can kind of fit follow along with my, I have a great picture of my, of the the logo that was, so that's when I'm really sorry you don't get to see. Yeah, flaming beef jerky. So, okay, nothing's working. Sorry guys. Well, so essentially what you need to do is you find out and basically what you need to figure out what your gross profit margin needs to be in order to and see if people are really, you're really making money and I also shouldn't mention that I'm, I was an economics major so I'll try not to delve into too much of that business stuff but you've got to have goals, okay, so if you set your gross profit margin you'll know whether or not somebody is profitable. Gross profit margin is, for those of you forgotten since those classes, is the portion of money left over after you have paid all the bills, you've paid for the cost of goods. Because we are a labor-intensive industry and primarily because we have WordPress it's free. Our cost of goods are generally for cost of labor. You know, we usually, at least at our agency we pass the cost of plug-ins off to the clients, we have them by them. So that's really where our major cost comes from. But if you sell a site for ten thousand dollars and it costs you eight thousand in labor to build, do you think you've made money? And you meet, you know, when you first look at it you say yes but you have to start thinking about your overhead. How many hours did you not clock if you're the agency owner? Because that happens a lot. And what did it cost to get this business? And what else could you be doing with your time that you're spending on this business? So, unfortunately I can't say this, but say you set your budget, your gross profit margin for fifty percent. We use a tool called Harvest and we can set a budget for that. In Harvest it says, and the amount you plan to invoice. We just say this is the amount that we are going to count. So we have all the other leftovers for the gross profit margin. And it'll track what you're doing hourly. And all the hourly costs go in and it'll show me my budget. And I don't know, I'm going to hold this up even though you probably can't see it. But it shows me, oops, it shows me when I'm going over that goal budget real clearly. And I also, it shows me what percentage of the budget I'm currently at. And so if I'm still in discovery and I'm over fifteen percent of my budget, I know I'm in trouble. So I know I can, I need to dial it back. But it's really a great tool and I think it's free. It's pretty close. Okay, so what does Harvest, Harvest have? Yeah. Now what does this do for you? It lets you know which of your clients cost you the least to make happy. And then those are the ones you want to keep. So I have a, we're obsessed with Einstein at our company. So I have a picture of Einstein riding his bike. Looking very happy. So again, unfortunately sometimes you find out that your obnoxious clients are actually ones that are profitable. And worse you find out that the nice ones aren't profitable. So I promise though that you handle the breakup well, you can still have a beer with them. And you won't be able to afford to buy it for them. But one of the other factors beyond the money is which ones are emotionally draining. There are people that you work with, and Brett's here, we had, he kept handing off all the clients that were emotionally draining. We finally got rid of some of them. No one on our team wanted to work with a couple of them. They found it demoralizing. When they constantly break you, they're just not, and it's not that they're not just pleasant. They're just downright mean. Everything for them is an emergency. Everything that comes over through your support. Hot, hot, hot. I need you, I need you on this today. And it's something they've caused. And it's, you know, six o'clock on Friday night. And yeah. So I call them soul suckers. And my, my graphic is of a dementor. So, but life is way too short to work with soul suckers. Okay, so you've made your decision, you've got your shortlist of people that you can start weeding out. What do you do now? You've got to have a sales pipeline. You've got to have either somebody who's going to do that for you and bring them in. You've got to have someone to replace. You know that there's more work out there for you. And a lot of times if you're working with the soul suckers, you're not taking the time to go do the sale, to build your sales pipe. They're, they beat you down and you don't want to go. So balancing those things out. There are several talks here about sales pipelines. I suggest you take it to either go and take notes or find somebody who likes that part. I also want to mention the concept of opportunity costs. And again, this goes back to my economics background. So I'm sorry, but opportunity cost is the potential gain by making other choices. So if instead of working with this client, who's not making, who I'm not making a whole lot of money with, I can work with this one, you know, but you got to make sure you're not just doing the grass is always greener. So balance those things out. One of the other things that I would say we do, we've gotten a lot better at doing is keeping records of the steps we've taken with clients. What warnings we've given them, what suggestions we've made that they haven't taken, which is probably why they're called, have a hot, hot, hot issue on Friday night. We don't just keep this an email. We project managers change, you know, the developer changes with we keep it in teamwork. That's another app that we use to just basically manage our projects. But we're it's really easy for us to go back and find out what we've done and what steps we've already taken. And when the client comes back and says, why are you letting me go? Well, on this day, we did this and on this day, we did this, you've got it all right there in front of you. So you figured out, you know, you have a reason for him now to go ahead and cut him loose. The first thing be polite, you don't know who they talk to, you don't know if you'll ever need them for anything. I mean, if there's the soul suckers, I'd say you don't have to be quite so polite. But there are some people that you're moving on from, you know, they don't have as big a budget as you're now shooting for. Be polite to them. And you don't have you can you should give them a reason, if you can, so that they know. But you can also always use that. It's not you, it's me. Excuse so that one works really well. But it does work as far as especially if you are moving into a niche, if you are now going to work with just restaurants, you can tell them I'm sorry, I can know, you know, I'm not really going to be able to help you with your mom and pop store. So we give them time. It's in our contract, but we also just out of courtesy. Don't just cut them loose. If they're not your favorite, then you give them 30 days if they're someone you like, you give them longer. You know, give them a couple of months. And then we also try to help them find a replacement. Again, if they're the ones you don't you don't have anybody dislike enough to send them, then they just have to they're on their own. But we do a lot of networking through meetups and work with camps. And there's a lot of people who would like your lower budget projects. So if you're moving up, you know, hand them off, give them somebody that you can you feel will be able to help them. So just kind of in summary. Unfortunately, you know what, I will put this on slack for you because you can't see the we use harvest app to set the budgets know which ones are profitable. We use teamwork to keep track of records. I also found a great site that has actually scripts to use with your clients. And you know how nice kind of template we've had it is not not one of them. But that is where it comes from. And then I just kind of clue through one other resource that I use a lot as a project manager that I think can be used by a lot of other people, especially if you're a small eight, you know, if you're a freelancer, or it's called the digital project manager.com. And it has all kinds of great resources there. But and that's what I've got. Did anybody have any questions?