 Good morning, everybody. How are we doing? Can I get a better response than that word cam? How are we doing everybody? Good morning. Yes, we are in the Winter Garden room and we're about to hear a wonderful talk by the illustrious Jesse Gerr. Some intro facts about Jesse, her love for website development started back in 1993 when at the age of 12 she learned HTML and secured her first .com. Does everyone remember GeoCities? With the black backgrounds, the lime green text and the running dog, GIF or GIF depending on your preference. Oh, those were the days. So Jesse actually started Iceberg Web Design in 2005. She grew the business from two employees in her basement to a full staff of seven in less than two years. Jesse lives in Anoka, Minnesota with her husband and two young boys. She enjoys organic gardening, making candles every fall and vegan cooking. Thank you so much for coming out and sharing your knowledge with us today. And everyone, please welcome to the stage Jesse Gerr, freelance agency taking the leap. Do you want to step the door back there? I need to sound a little bit. Good morning. So I'm Jesse. Like she said, I own an agency, a small agency. We are seven in Minnesota. And I'm going to start this out with a little bit of a story. Day way back in the year 2015. I was about 10 years in my career as freelance web designer and things were going pretty well. I was making a respectable living so much so that my husband was able to quit his job and become a full-time stay-at-home dad. At that time, our kids were one in three, and we were kind of living the dream. We paid off all of our debt. We took a bunch of vacations. We even bought a new car. You know, thinking to myself, this freelance gig is not so bad. Except that I was very, I was completely stuck running my business. We went on a vacation to Disney World. Our song was two, and my husband took him on the pool ride. And I had to sit on the sidelines with my laptop, fixing a form into one of my customers. They went on Small World twice without me. It was the high of our life financially, and it was below of my life personally. And I couldn't stop thinking how much of a strain this was. And quite frankly, I was reaching a point of burnout. I mean, if I had to answer another customer's phone call while I was sitting at Disney World, if I had to add more to my website, if I had to explain to Joe over at half this in the 50th time of using the global website and his desktop website, we're the same website. So if we may change this to the content on one, it was automatically going to change on the other. I was completely at a breaking point. So at this point, I realized that I was not on one. So I want to kind of get a feel before we dive in for who we have here. I'm curious how many of you are freelancers? How many people? How many of you are the main points of contact for your customer? How many of you could take a cell phone, take your laptop, set them aside, walk up the door tomorrow and take a week-long vacation without giving customers any... a couple of days. So this is why I'm giving this talk. This is kind of my driving force behind this. In 2015, kind of when I started to make a shift, I went to a B&I networking group. A lot of you are in networking organizations familiar with this. A business strategist stood up and he said, you guys, a good business makes money, but a great business makes money without you. And I went home that day from the networking meeting and I sat there in my home office in my basement and I saw a lot harder of all this. Good business makes money. A great business makes money. And I decided then that something had to change. I sat down. A really close look at all of our operations, everything that I was doing, and I decided that I had to shift. I had to get myself out of that house. I had to stop being the only person that my customers relied on when they called. Fast forward, this is January of 2015. I took the entire second half of January 2015 off, or 2018, January 2018. My son, he is now five. We went to Disney World again and this time I went on every single two rides, 32 times. I went on the small world until I could sing the song forward and backwards. I did not answer a single phone call for the second half of January this year. I did not talk to a single customer. And you know what was even cooler? I didn't have to do any management with my team. The only conversation I had with my staff was through our Facebook and Messenger app where they would send me a picture of the cars buried in snow. And then I'd send them back a picture of the house. And then they'd send me a picture of the computer that was open. That was a little scary, but I figured they had it under control. And so I'd send them back a giraffe from the animal thinker. And what happened was I had two weeks of uninterrupted time with my family. I went back to the office with sales had been closed, money had been deposited, websites had gone live, and all of the team members went around their face. A good business, makes money, a great business. I should throw a little disclaimer in here that this is not a how to get rich quick talk. And we're going to talk a little bit about that as we go through here. I mean, if I was rolling in maybe millions of dollars a year, I probably wouldn't be talking at work camps. But what this did for me was it gave me the freedom. Financial freedom is great. Everybody likes to think about that. For me, this is a personal freedom journey that I've been going on. And so I've been doing a lot of traveling, talking about this. I've been building websites, like I said, since, you know, the early 1990s. I'm self-taught, as are the majority of my team members. I'm self-taught. And I can stand up here and I can talk all day long about building websites, about coding and HTML. But this is really my passion now. I get a really great side every day when I walk into the office. I see six people sitting there who are collecting a paycheck, who are thriving in their personal lives through this business endeavor and I get an even greater sense of joy when I'm able to move into you to take my family on vacations. So the big thing, kind of where I want to start out with all of this, is anyone here thinking about growing an agency or thinking about a handful of us? Have any of you gone through this journey? Starting. All right. This is great. So for all of you, I mean, hopefully this will be relevant and you'll all be able to take back a little bit of information and apply this to your own. But I really want this kind of to be the main point of this talk. You think along and hard, why do you want to grow? What is no reason behind getting yourself out of the house? Why do you want, there are plenty of good reasons to grow. Maybe you are overwhelmed. You're working 40 hours a week and 20 hours every night. Maybe you're focusing on your customer by providing super fast customer service and things are falling and you're getting good bills and it's really going well, like it was for me. Maybe you are seeing such a fast increase in growth but you just can't manage it yourself. Maybe you want to take it to the next level. Maybe you've dabbled around with outsourcing or you're already hiring other freelancers to work for your freelance business. Part of my motivation was do you want to create jobs? Maybe you want to see what it's like to help someone else in their career. Maybe you need more personal money. You want to travel. You want to go on a vacation. You want to start talking at word camps. You need to get out of the office and start doing that. Or maybe you just have some desire inside of you to grow, to do something. Or, quite frankly, it's the real reason that I did all of this. So keep that in your mind. Why? Why do you want your business to grow beyond just you? And we'll come back to that throughout this talk. But first, I'm going to touch a little bit, sort of, so this is going to be kind of a practical approach to starting a business. Not, you know, there will definitely be some information about starting a team, growing your team. But we're going to talk about the logistics because quite honestly, starting a business is not a cakewalk. There are a lot of different things that you need to come to terms with. A lot of different things that you need to learn. And things that, and a lot of people, people that you need to rely on as your business grows. So the first thing you need to do is figure out what your business structure is going to look like. There's a lot of different types of businesses that people form. Most people who are, most of you who are freelancers right now, you're probably in a sole proprietorship. A sole proprietorship basically is a type of business where you, the business owner, is not distinguished from the actual business. You may have incorporated a DBA so you can operate your business under a different name, but financially and from a tax standpoint, from a legal standpoint, you are the business. So this is how most people start out when they start freelancing. And it's also super easy to set up a sole proprietorship. You just file a form with the Secretary of State. And I'm not 100% Sharon Luz here in New York so it's like a $35 filing fee. You just mail it in and then you got to run a couple of weeks in your local newspaper so that people know that you're offering the business. A partnership is when two people come together and they form a business. This is really common in our industry because you see graphic designers and developers coming together to share their talent and share their resources. Maybe you've been designing logos for 20 years and your friend has been developing websites for 20 years. And you just had, hey, you know, let's get together. Let's start this agency. We both have a wide customer base. Why don't we pool our resources? We pool our finances. Similar to a sole proprietorship, oftentimes a partnership also is looked at almost as a pastor business where both of you have a stake in the company. The things to be careful about with a partnership is making sure that you have to find who has the final say in tuition making, what percent owners are you. We had an agency in our town where that exact same scenario happened. We had a logo designer. We had a developer. They came together. They formed an agency. Things went great for about a year until they had a single business. So with the partnership, make sure that you're a little bit careful going into business. Make sure that you have documentation. You know, if you want to do a 51, 49 percent ownership so someone always has the strings, you know, maybe make this a financial decision. Have something in writing and definitely talk it over with your attorney. A corporation is what you will see, you know, what's the larger businesses. The biggest distinction between a corporation and a sole proprietorship is that there's a legal distinction between the two entities, between the business and yourself. So the business is taxed as a business entity and you typically would then be an employee of your corporation. Corporations can be public or private. A public corporation allows for shareholders to move at the end of the day in the state. The people that you see on the stock market. Private corporations can also have employee sharing. Limited liability company, this is how my company is set up and this is also how a lot of newer agencies are set up. This kind of is a combination of the corporate and the sole proprietorship where there is a legal protection for your business. So for example, if my business necessarily is my car in my house and it also allows for some accounting tax benefits where part of the other parts of it can be set up as a business employee. It's mostly, this is kind of what you will see a lot of agencies set up until they reach kind of that threshold of 15 or more employees where they can see financially in their business. The incentive is a business that's owned by its members. You can see this with the co-ops. A lot of non-profit organizations will be set up as cooperatives where members will buy a share in the business kind of like stock except for it's more of a collaborative individual private sharing and then members either get a cash incentive at the end of the year or perhaps they get a discount on other incentives for supporting the business. The non-profit organization is an organization where all of the money is gone towards some sort of a charitable organization or to a cause. Non-profit organizations absolutely can make money, they do make money, they can have employees on payroll as long as they can justify their operating expenses. Lots of great tax benefits for running a non-profit. I don't think people in the marketing agency are going to set up as non-profits unless you're specifically marketing to other non-profits that might be happening in your target market in charity or churches you may be able to find a way to. So, back to the actual practical implications of starting a business. The very first person that you should talk to when you've decided that you're going to start your business is your accountant. You're going to need to find a really good accountant. Your accountant is going to help you make that determination in which type of business should you set up. Did you do that as a sole proprietorship? Did you do an LLC? Did you jump right in inside a corporation? Are there two of you? Who's finances are being distributed to what? Your accountant is going to help you get your employees or your contractors set up. There are a lot of forms that need to be filled out when you engage a contractor or when you engage an employee. Employees need to fill out W-4 forms. Contractors need to fill out W-9. At the end of the year, somebody needs to wrap those all up. They need to report them to the IRF. They need to distribute them to your employees. If they're passive, your accountant is the person who is most likely going to be doing this for you. Other things that you have to consider is unemployment insurance, top insurance. It's possible your insurance agent will handle those. My accountant handles both working with top and unemployment insurance for our business. And then it's really nice if you can find an accountant to work with you both on a business and a personal level because as a business owner, your finances are a lot trickier than someone else's. There are a lot of tax write-offs for a business. You travel to work camps. You eat at McDonald's. That's tax write-off. So you need to make sure that your accountant is keeping track of these things with a bookkeeper or, you know, you can have accountant and bookkeepers oftentimes work hand-in-hand. You may do the bookkeeping yourself. You may bring in a third party for a bookkeeper. But at the end of the year, your accountant oftentimes will sit down and say, okay, look, this is how this business did. And here's the tax rate for your business. And then here's what you collected. And as an LLC, the way that our business structure is set up is that the owner collects a paycheck on a regular basis. But at the end of the year, there is either a dividend or a draw from the business to kind of balance out the finances. And I don't know anything about accounting, so I'm very glad that I have an accountant in my back pocket. We touch base at least once a month to build a payroll and then we meet about every quarter to really kind of dive into how are things going. How is your business going? What do your income projections look like for this income? Your accountant is going to help you prepare for growth the next step. So after you have your account and your employees, what life is going to look like? If you are hiring employees, your employees probably should be signing some sort of a contract, whether this is just an employee handbook that they sign to acknowledge that they know the roles of the new organization, or if this is a sales employee that you're hiring, you need to have contracts in place to clearly outline pay, commission schedules, so that at the end of the day absolutely no questions from your employees. The worst thing that can happen is you can get in a dispute with an employee over their pay. This is where business is starting to turn sour really quickly. So having an attorney draft up these agreements is an absolutely essential first step to hiring employees. Having an attorney review leases if you're renting office space is also beneficial. You never know, you may need to have a lot of insurance protection. Your attorney will look at that. Your attorney can do a little bit of research on the landlord and on the office space bring up any issues that might come up. If you ever have this kind of dispute, and I have been in this really tough scenario, really tough situation to get into, and as a business owner you're going through another. So having an attorney who can help you draft up a severance agreement, or even just help you get through the process of terminating the place is incredibly valuable. If for any reason, you can talk with a law so you can see where you're going to need to hire an attorney. So there are a lot of legal services out there where you can draft up contracts online. I recommend that you actually meet face to face with an attorney who will be able to see you in their office. Most attorneys do three half hour consultations. Ask around, this is a perfect place for the other three letters, other agency owners, ask who their attorney is ask who they recommend. You're going to want someone local. So someone, if you're here in New York you can meet with face to face on a regular basis, and also local so that they know the laws and your locations. Your attorney should review also your terms of service agreement and your privacy policies and any other contracts that you are providing between you and your customer and then give you advice on how to either draft those or enforce them. The third person that you're going to need as you get your agency set up is a great insurance agent. So there are a lot of different types of insurance that the business needs. General liability is a big one. Everybody here should already have general liability insurance if you're freelancing or operating as a business in some respect. I mentioned unemployment insurance earlier often times that is through your accountant insurance agent may be able to help with that as well. Erin Emissions, I specifically pointed out here of this, we're in Erin Emissions is the cover your butt insurance. So let's say that you make a website for a roofing company and you're selling the hosting services and then they run a big national television ad and the host goes down to say hey my website was offline for a few minutes. This is your Erin Emissions point to or if one of your customers accidentally uses some sort of cover material maybe your customers are adding content to their blog and they go for the photo op result. You can tell your clients what they should and should not do but if that somehow makes their way back to you this type of insurance will keep in for that. So Erin Emissions is one that most businesses owners don't think about. A lot of businesses have an insurance a good insurance agency will talk to you about this. In the tech world there are some very specific insurance policies a tech policy or for hacking there are a couple of different policies specifically that my insurance agent recommended to me that don't apply to retail businesses for people. Do you have questions? So the question was so your customer has to go off of Google and all of a sudden you're slapped with copyright infringement law too can you cover that in the upfront? Yeah that would be a great question for your attorney and something absolutely to spell out at the end of the day who owns the website who owns the content. If you are clearing your contract that you are providing this as a service to them to use their website they are the owners of the website they are the owners of the property on the website and they're responsible for it then that very well could be but go back to your attorney about this and make sure it's in the contract and if your insurance policy has to kick in maybe you want to bridge the gap between your attorney and your insurance agent One thing about that there's a type of insurance called publishing apparel or media apparel that you might look into depending on the situation Okay that's great that specifically covers copyright infringement A bunch of attorneys have copyright and trademark law as well if you find yourself regularly working with content that you are worried is going to be copyrighted if you work for publishers for news agencies you might want to talk to your attorney and your insurance agency about coverage for that news articles for company are shared they are straight for content so that's a great point looking for publishers specifically Other types of insurance that your business is going to need is not that you're going to need property insurance on your staff you're probably going to need some sort of an insurance policy for your employees there's employee liability insurance that helps protect you from that disgruntled employee that you should have gotten when his contract states out If you own a car that you primarily use for business your insurance agent may be going to give you other rates for your car through an auto policy and then sit down with your insurance agent There are a lot of great insurance agents out there I work with a broker so my agent she's able to shop around a lot of different large companies so every year we sit down and review and she asks the questions how many staff you have this year, how many hours are they putting in how many sales you have how many people are in your office how many people work out in the field the insurance rates and the amount of insurance that you need to take on for your business your own individual scenarios so at least once a year sit down and review with your insurance agent because chances are if you set up a policy today in two years, you're not going to be covered for the official shape of your business in two years you know two years ago we had three computers today we have eight it's a very big difference especially when you're using the same stuff alright so those are really kind of a nitty gritty basics the things that you need to have in your back pocket before you go are you ready, should we move on alright so the biggest, alright so now getting kind of the logistics, the legalities out of the way the first thing you're going to have to do is stop for this because you've been working for how many years within your business within your view you're giving everything to your customers now it's time for you to stop you need to take a step back and look at everything as a whole you're going to have to stop devoting your time to the work and you're going to start devoting your time to the business this is why you're hiring employees you're going to have to make some serious changes raising your prices is absolutely the first change the minute I hired my personal employee our prices doubled and they continue to go up as we add staff and this is just when you add staff to your base you are increasing the level of service that you're providing to your customers you're also increasing your overhead make sure that you're not being stupid about your pricing price fairly do some market research talk with your customers talk with your customers about what they're paying now what they could pay think really hard about what your business does you're going to start an agency that's great are you going to come up the gate doing everything are you going to do logos and ad words and websites and graphic design are you going to specialize on what you're good at and then firm strategic partnerships with other businesses to refer customers to or to outsource work as needed so think really hard about what it is that you want to provide what's your core service keep an eye on your numbers track how much money you're making how much money are you spending every day my VP of sales asked me the other month how much money does it take for us to operate on a daily basis and I sat down and I had not thought of that before it was pretty easy if you're tracking your numbers it was pretty easy to sit down and figure out my payroll is expensive divide that out and that number is shocking and will really change the way that you look at your businesses and that number alone is how much is it possible that your daily basis to operate is going to help you set your prices and structure as well establish systems make sure that your employees are on board with your systems document processes it's super important to have processes in place for every single step along the way so that as you have turnover as you onboard new employees you have documentation in place for them makes the onboarding process a lot smoother the biggest thing with starting a business is and I said this a little bit earlier you're going to have to prepare for probably the biggest financial investment in your entire life maybe you're going to take out a significant business loan to borrow money whatever it is starting an agency is not achieved ever especially when you start bringing in employees you have to do this for your employees you have to have all this for your employees so keep this in mind and prepare for this goes back to talking with your accountant talk to your attorney make sure that you're making wise financial decisions but be prepared you're not going to be rolling in money tomorrow just because you're old most importantly thinking to delegate is possibly the most difficult part of giving up your freelance career this was the hardest for me to do was to find somebody else to do the things that I did really well you are never going to find a web designer that's as good as you you're never going to find a logo designer that's as good as you you're never going to find someone that writes as great a content of you and you're never going to find someone that's awesome with customer service with you and that's just the fact of being your business owner you're doing things your way you're really good at doing what you do and if you are going to start relying other people to do them you're going to see people so start with the easy stuff I started by hiring assistant that was my pain point I was done with the phones I needed more time to focus she took the phones that was great so one thing at a time eventually I would still be building out the website and then she'd build up the 50 pages that came with it so that was easy and then eventually we had her actually building out the homepage after I installed WordPress and then she started doing that by the time that my project manager started I pretty much picked up the doubt on hers so the more and more that you delegate the easier it gets again back to processes and systems make sure that you're explaining to your employees why you're delegating work to them what their job is make sure that you set your expectations and make sure that you're paying and compensating fairly for the job I mean if you're unloading something that you really don't like to do you're going to have to find someone who really does like to do it or pay them for that if customer service is the vision of your company you're going to have to find someone who's really great at customer service and you're going to have to compensate them to continue to treat your customer as well and check in regularly be available don't be a distant business owner don't delegate and then go away help people through the process check in with them maybe you need to practice a little bit delegating to different people maybe Jennifer is great on the phone but she hates designing websites Harry loves designing websites but she's great on the phones and so this brings us to actually building your team finding the people that are going to do doing all the good jobs that you can't do anymore on growing and running your business you know who who do you need to hire to do the things that you at least like to do who do you need to hire to fill in the gaps that aren't being filled what is your biggest pain point with your own business this is something that we ask our customers how can we help you how can you help your business by bringing in someone to assist in the areas that you're lacking right now we have a need to fill a social media void in our agency we're figuring out and we are now currently in the process of hiring someone specifically there's kind of three tiers to most businesses you've got the, well you've got you sort of as the overarching CEO the owner of the business sales operations and finances sales staff so if you sit down and think about how big do you want your business to be and what are the areas in your business that need to be filled everybody's going to need a sales department, is that you? are you going to hire somebody to do sales? operations, this includes your project manager any design staff development staff, customer service will fall under operations and then we have the finances which will be, you know, your accountants people, price keepers making sure that payroll is met in the beginning you are likely going to be filling a lot of these areas typically the financial area is the one that most finances is typically the part that most business owners hang on to the longest in my age of three years and seven and I am still the person that is in charge of finances even though I do work with a bookkeeper and accountants I don't give control of that department operations is typically the easiest one to start with if you can find a website developer you can find a graphic designer who works for you sales, most of us at Freelances most of us at Freelance are really great at sales already do you want to keep doing sales do you want to do the business owner role or your networking or do you want to hire people I chose to hire sales staff to free up a little bit more of my time in customer meetings so once you have your organization chart figure out who you need in your business to perform the task that needs to be done do you want to hire contractors or do you want to hire employees and there is not really a right answer here there are pros and cons to both contractors are people who are set up under a 1099 schedule you don't actually they don't fill out a W-4 you don't give them a W-2 at the end of the year you don't deduct taxes from their checks, you just pay them hourly, compensate them for their time in whatever fashion that may be the pros to hiring contractors is that they are super easy to find there are a ton of Freelance web designers that would be loved to their websites for you but still do their own side projects contractors are great because they are usually already trained you don't have to tell them how to do their job they often times have a high skill set and they are going to come in and immediately start producing for your company you don't have to worry about payroll you don't have to go down that route with your accountant you have an entire contact with faced company and they are super easy to get rid of so if you got a contractor that does their side projects and then they are just not up to the ball or maybe you are not getting it now business is super easy see you later, adios I don't have anything else for you the consiring a contractor though is that they do typically come at a higher price than employees and this is because they are usually a little higher skilled they are hard to conform to fit into your business to get behind your mission and your values so if you are thinking about why do you want to grow how can you bring a contractor on board with that there are plenty of organizations that have very successful teams made up entirely of contractors who are on board with the vision for the business so this is from a management standpoint how do you bring people in it is easier with employees to get them on board than with the contractors also contractors as easy it is for you to get rid of them super easy for them to get rid of you so if they get another job from your competition that is paying them twice as much they are going to say adios and they are going to head that way now you are back to the drawing board to find another contractor so employees and this is the direction that I decided to go with my business you can train your employees to fit your business we had an intern that we took on last summer who had no experience building WordPress websites she has now built 10 or 12 WordPress websites all by herself she was full time all summer she is going to school through graphic design so we kind of had that as a little bit of an added bonus so the benefit to employees is usually you are going to see them stick around a little bit longer and you can train them mold them into the people that you want them to be you can get them invested in your process in your system and you can get them behind your company vision really easily because you are writing them they are invested in you because they want you to get a job they usually aren't side hustling or other opportunities and employees generally are going to stick around quite a bit longer than your contractors the downfall to having employees is that you are immediately locked into a monthly salary that you are obligated to pay no matter how many customers you go so if you hire someone and you promise them 40 hours a week and you've got no work you still have to write them a paycheck this is in your employment agreement with them it's going to determine how you are set up as a business with your accounting you are going to have to make sure that you are on top of your W-4 and your W-2 you are going to have to deal with payroll taxes either you are going to have to hire an employee from your learning dot system depending on where your employees work if you are running a business where your employees are remote in other states there can be some tax difficulties there figuring out how to pay them by hiring someone earlier it's really hard to hire an employee emotionally so how to find the right people so I went about this by posting on Indeed and this is what I have heard from a lot of employers a lot of agency owners at Indeed is a great place to find candidates people are on Indeed all the time with the caveat we always tell people to find our data posting on Indeed but apply through our website so we turn off the ability for them to actually apply when you let people apply through Indeed you have to be prepared to get any five job applications we hired a project manager through and we put it on Indeed and immediately we got 50 applications so yeah you get lost in Indeed? yeah yep he was commenting Indeed is great for employers but not so great for employees and so I will tell you that I have never hired an employee that only applied on Indeed they have all taken the measure to find the listing on Indeed and go through our website and apply we also at the bottom of every ad encourage walk in come walk in and drop off your resume that gives us a really quick ten minute in front of you hey who are you? will you fit with us? and that helps a lot with screening candidates so for those of you looking for jobs on Indeed I would recommend absolutely be going and pay attention if you're hiring to the employees that do do that 50 resumes on Indeed you can look through resumes all day long you don't know if they wrote their resume or if they paid someone to write their resume and you don't know anything about the person unless you screen them screening takes a long time so pay attention if you are outlier we read out everyone who doesn't write a cover letter right away if you can't take the time to write a cover letter then you're probably just clicking apply apply apply apply so that's a good indication there's something to be said for just knowing that someone is the right fit for your team or the right fit for your job and look for people who are willing to commit one of the things that I always ask in job interviews is what do you want to be in five years what do you want to be in ten years what do you want to be when you throw up and if they're applying for a job as a web designer but in ten years they want to be an entrepreneur I mean is this the right fit for you are you just doing this so that you can go start your own business later or are you doing this because you want to be committed to this position you want to be part of our team I said this earlier don't be a distant leader make sure that you're staying involved with your team, ask questions do periodic reviews I just got done the last two weeks two hour one-on-one review to my employees I got a ton of information out of that that I was able to bring back to the team and make changes and improve our processes based on that ask for feedback and don't be afraid to get criticized being a business owner is a tough job and your employees are the people who are essentially running your business let them critique you get their feedback value their opinions and create a vibrant culture that I think is the most important thing in our company we make it pretty clear that families come first don't require anybody to work after hours we are nine to five business I have one of my employees who is working in the bus and she leaves in time to meet them off the bus after school and do what works for you and what works for your employees alright so now you've got your team you need some place to work so this is kind of how you want to set your business up do you want to have an entirely remote business do you want to have a place for them to go so I personally have chosen to run an office space we have a big open office environment that really comes to work to find a place where you can house people if that's your model location is super important the location where you decide to put your business is also going to a little bit dictate the people that apply for it that being said we have a couple of people who drive more than an hour to work every day at our office just because they like the culture and they like the job if your employees are working on site do they need a parking permit to expect them to provide that and then don't forget to have your attorney review your leases budget for rent utility signage keep growth in mind if you are renting an office space that's you know this size how many people can be super loud if we do that how many people do we have right now how many do we think we're going to have in five years keep that in mind with the length of your lease if you're signing a three year lease and you're expecting to add 10 people in the next three years ask around go and talk to the other tenants hey how do you like working here how's the landlord make sure you're super clear with your landlord on what facilities have to offer other sprinklers where the emergency exits are handy to have access for customers who might need that or a lot of believe it or not there are a lot of office spaces located on second floors especially in cities like this that do not have access so who is your customer base how important is it that customers come up to your office how important is it that you're offering an accessible space for your employees and then keep your attorney keep your insurance agent part of that process and back to the beginning can you really revisit your job as a business owner why do you take time to work on the business take time to work on yourself let your team run things sit back and that is what I have we'll open it up for about five minutes of questions you talked about how your costs drive your pricing at some point you got pushback from your customers about the prices from the market driven website yes and no there are always customers who are going to push back on your prices because there's always a freelancer who is going to do that job for a quarter of the price I can tell you that we doubled our prices we have monthly recurring subscriptions built in we doubled those prices and we lost three customers so out of 200 so do you have any quick advice on what to look for in a project manager yes the project manager was the most important hired that I made so the way that I grew my business I started with myself I hired an assistant she turned into a developer we hired more developers I have actually spoken on project management quite a bit you need someone who is organized you need someone who is super comfortable talking with customers someone with great customer service skills your project manager is going to basically be giving you communication points for your company we chose to hire someone who did not have project management experience in the past but had actual management experience her history was working as a sales floor manager Adam Balvin so she had a lot of experience managing people so I think that is a great skill side to look for someone who can juggle a lot of different paths and someone who is comfortable delegating because they are going to be telling your customers what they need from them and they are going to be telling the developers what to do hiring a project manager was probably the best business assistant that we made because it took the developers out of their conversations with the customer it was really easy for a designer to do that I kind of recommend hiring a project manager that doesn't know anything about building websites because they will take a higher level approach to running a project and they won't have that technical know-how so when a customer asks for something they can legit say I don't know how to do that I will ask and tell you what it will take the project manager is going to be kind of your financial saving point sales is a tough one for me when I first started growing my team I was hiring part-time sales and they never worked out I changed the structure full-time so we have two full-time sales they receive a respectful base pay and a fairly aggressive initiative on top of that and I have tried this different ways one tactic is to provide double rental pay on a stack and it works on bringing up their base on a higher full-time and I would recommend not making sales after a step they had to walk into our office to apply for the first round Sean is here today I found him on Indeed Indeed, LinkedIn Recruiter I got a LinkedIn Recruiter account it was 100 bucks per month and I sat down and looked through Resley and I replied 15, 14 years and are fortunate enough that we're getting a lot of involved leads so no, we're not doing a lot of cold calling for sales right, so that is a different but in the past when I was essentially a sales person I did a ton of B&I networking I still do chamber events B&I chamber networking events were a little bit of a longer play depending on your business structure it might make sense for you to do that each of my sales employees do different B&I for 10 years we did a lot of that for our company but for us chambers worked really well for the cold outreach and then when we do some mailers we mail direct mail and have sales staff directly reach out so it's not overwhelming we try to work our way into the door we know someone else in your industry or we just work with someone else in your industry I didn't use a recruiter, I did it myself so I got a LinkedIn recruiter account and then I went through and just hand-picked people I found that extremely useful yes, and what I was looking for in sales was people who don't pop around people who hold jobs for more than 3-4 years in sales I was not specifically looking for sales in our industry more someone who's been in sales for a while who looks like they are committed and a lot of that you will get a sense one of the tactics that we use for hiring is also to have people take their strengths finder test that will tell you a little bit about their strengths their skills maybe about one more one more question so now you already have like agency setup and all the answers do you find problem in your employees doing them or forgetting about it how do I manage employees staying on board with this business following this process and system that you are a little bit so our employees are building the process in the system it's kind of the way that I cook it so we've been really growing very quickly and every time that we add any system we sit down as a team and we talk about the system that we're adding no, we really talk through every single project that we do through group and throughout the entire process there's a lot of collaboration and a lot of communication we had processes in order because I didn't hire contractors I hired employees who haven't necessarily always been in this industry it was a new process for them to learn and to follow and so I think it was a little bit easier for them to get on board since they had never worked for another website development company before so they were able to really adapt to my system and my way of doing business does that answer your question? alright can we get another round of applause for Jesse please there will be a 10 minute break and then the next talk is up at 11