 Okay, there we go. Like Ryan said, my name is Christy Chirinos. I am one half of Caldera Labs. We're best known for Caldera Forms. It's a drag and drop form builder plugin for WordPress. And some other things, some other plugin development education projects and so on and so forth. It's a lot of fun. And you can follow along with this presentation at businessing.business. You can get a bit of a story about this cheeky name. I'm not gonna go into it. We only have half an hour, but kind of wrote it up there and also shared a lot of the graphs that I'll be sharing and a lot of additional links and reference materials if this is something that is interesting to you. What's an micro-MBA? So this morning, we are doing a sequential track series. Well, you're here about different people, different stages of development of a business and we're starting out with this idea of just general business topics when it comes to starting your business. And the reason that I wanted to give this specific talk was because last year, I had a lot of conversations with people at work camps where they said, well, I'm thinking about going to business school. I think it's gonna help me figure out my business, figure out my strategy for growing, my idea, my practice, my freelance practice, whatever it might be. And I wanted to address that question head on in a setting where we could do a Q and A and really have a conversation and start that conversation with what do you actually get out of an MBA? And I think something that is important to keep in mind is that all MBA curriculums are structured into book learning and theoretical learning, case studies and then networking opportunities, right? And when we say case studies, we're talking about the specific study of things that have gone very wrong or very right with businesses and the different ways that the theory can apply to that practical real world example. So we're doing a morning of MBA talks at Burkamp, Miami. I would encourage audience members who are here because you're trying to answer that question, right, of like, should I continue my education in this topic to think about the value that you get out of a business education in those three categories and see if you can find those buckets of knowledge here and see if furthering those three buckets of knowledge is something that would interest you and be beneficial to you, then it might be the right move for you, right? Or you might think about that and you might think, well, why would I pay $100,000 for this, right? And then maybe you should not seek a graduate level education in this way. As far as this presentation goes, this presentation is more of the theory and hopefully we'll have time to answer more of those anxieties about would a business education be right for me in the context of what I'm trying to do with my WordPress product business or freelance practice. So the way that I wanted to do this presentation was I wanted to take you through five concepts that I have found were incredibly useful from my formal business education when it comes to running, growing and planning for caldera forms. These are the things that I learned that I've noticed, like, oh my God, I learned that in school, right? I think you get that feeling of like, oh, okay. And hopefully understanding these basic terms will give you an understanding of how to think very strategically about the thing that you're trying to do and it will have the sub-effect of letting you know, like, wow, this kind of material is really interesting. Maybe a formal education and this would be right for me or, wow, this kind of material is really dense and I don't really wanna be a consultant. So maybe let's think about other ways in which I can grow my business. Sorry, I just kind of figured this thing out. Okay, so the first term that I wanted to share with you was this idea of long-term competitive advantage. This is like, if you do any kind of academic work at all, you're basically just learning something under the umbrella of this concept, right? And long-term competitive advantage is about finding the thing that you're best at that makes you different from your competition, different from the other people, finding their business in a similar business to yours and really honing in on that and understanding where it comes from. Usually when we talk about long-term competitive advantage, we're talking about it in two categories. We have people who have achieved long-term, whose long-term competitive advantage is based on a cost strategy. So like Walmart is really good at selling you things cheaply, right? Amazon is in my next slide and Amazon is competing in a low-cost strategy, right? Like they're figuring out how to make that supply chain completely tight so that things can get to you super fast, super cheap. As opposed to the Ferretti ancient strategy which is more about our products are unique, they are intelligently designed, they are a cut above the rest and that is why you should be paying more for them or should be going out of your way to get something for them. And when it comes to this WordPress context, the vast majority of us are going to be competing in a differentiation strategy, right? Most of us are going to be thinking, well, what about me is unique? What's the secret sauce to what I'm doing for why my customer should pick me as opposed to the alternatives for the same problem they're trying to solve? And so up on the board are some of the ways in which we find these different cost strategies, right? The cost and low-cost strategy being mostly found through, like I said, really airtight supply chains, really efficient processes that let you keep those costs much smaller or those margins much bigger than your competition. When we talk about economies of scale, right? Like we're talking about this idea that if I want to sell really cheap form plugins, I need to make a significant investment before I can sell one. And then to sell two, to sell three, to sell 10, to sell 20, my additional investment to sell more is smaller and smaller and smaller, so the amount of money I spend on each sale decreases. So when you have much older businesses, they can find a low-cost strategy through economies of scale. That's important because when it comes to WordPress, very few of us are going to really stand out on that low-cost strategy, but if you did, that's probably your key. And so these are interesting definitions for you to consider as you listen from the speakers that come after me and see which ways their business has found success. Differentiation is a lot of what you hear about when you go to a word-camp business track, right? Like you hear about branding and customer service and investing in your team, and that's because the vast majority of us are going to be finding our competitive advantage in those terms. So the second thing that I think I found really useful when it comes to a formal business education that I would encourage you to know about is this idea of Porter's value chain. So this is a diagram that shows me all the different buckets in which a business exists, all the different things that it does, and separates them into which are the activities that are supporting activities? So what are the things that I do because my business needs to do these things to exist, right? Like pay taxes as opposed to what are the things that I do because I'm working on my product and growing my product and increasing my product and identifying which of your activities fall into these buckets? If you can do that and you can think about competitive advantage and how you find it, I'm gonna mute my computer and see if that does anything. Then you're able to identify the block in the diagram in which you're existing. This is the thing that I'm really good at and the other things I can start to think about getting other people to do them for me. So that's what that chart looks like. And it's a chart where at the very top exists this supporting activities and at the very bottom it's operating activities. This is like an old, old chart from, well, it's not that old, it's like from the 80s, right? It's an older chart because the world of business has changed a lot and in that time the biggest change that you'll see is that the lines among inbound operations and outbound logistics start to blur, especially in a business like ours, right? Because this chart came about when we were thinking, like, well, we're making steel. So where do we get the steel? Where do we get the factory? Where do we, how do we process it, right? Although certain people have their way, we're gonna live in that world again. And, sorry. But this is an important thing for you to consider because we are, regardless of how much these lines blur, still all doing all of these things and especially important is that difference between what are your value-generating activities and what are the parts that generate value but don't necessarily exist as a part of what you do in your operations. With this chart, and you'll be able to see out of that business link, if you really wanna take a close look and zoom into what each of those categories is, the key for you is to figure out what is that special sauce of your business and then figure out where in this diagram it fits because then it gives you a good idea as to what you should be focusing your energy on and then research, what do you need to know about marketing and sales to get somebody else to do it, right? And that's very different than just sort of trying to do everything yourself and it's a big step to how you actually go from like, I have too much work, I don't know, to running an efficient business. So I wanted to share this with you because of that thing that I noted about the logistic section of that chart which is that being not even that old, right? Like not even 40 years old, this chart starts to feel outdated because our business world is changing so much. And so as a result, not directly, but as an effect, we have this concept of the business model canvas which is also in that link if you'd like to explore it more. And so this is another business diagramming tool that encourages you to think about all the different moving parts of your business and it's written in a way that it's much more oriented towards people like us, right? Where we're not looking at terminology that talks about like units of production, right? And we're talking instead about the questions that we all know, right? Like who are key customers? What is our value proposition? And being able to answer all of these questions and then go to other people and say like, did I answer this question correctly? It's a valuable thing. And again, taking this concept of like, what's my special sauce? And then understanding where it fits into all of the different moving parts of any business operation to understand what you do really well and what you're better off contracting out. So then with those two ideas, the third thing that I think you should know about the other definition that I think will help you to think about as you hear from other speakers this morning is this idea of order winners and order qualifiers. So you find your sauce, you understand the diagram of your business and then what I would encourage you to think about is, is the special sauce that I think I have that people are buying and they're buying into me for actually a thing that people are just buying for or is it just something that I should be doing, right? Anyway, and I need to think a step above to actually find what my competitive advantage is. And so that's the idea of the difference between an order winner and an order qualifier. When you have an order qualifier, that's like old school operations management term for this aspect of your business that has to be good enough for you to compete. It can't be bad or no one's gonna buy for you, but no one's gonna buy from you because of it. So I found this really example of like a Domino's Pizza box where like they literally say our pizza's not that good. It's like, we're not artisans, this is not that good, right? But this is the interesting strategy about Domino's Pizza is that their pizza is an order qualifier. It has to be just good enough for you to buy it and be like, I can eat this, right? Like it can't not be not edible, but it doesn't have to be an artisan pizza. And I just thought that was hilarious, that box is so funny. And it's such an excellent example of what we're talking about because when I'm talking about competitive advantage, I think that a lot of people in this room might immediately default to like, well, I'm a really good designer, well, so is everyone else, right? And so what about your designs are really good? What about the specific thing that you're doing is great and should make me choose what you're doing above another person? So really funny, so there's actually a case study about this Domino's Pizza considers their technology to be their order winner. So they say they are technology companies selling pizza and so their pizza has these like labels on them that's like, it's kind of terrible, right? But then when you order a Domino's Pizza, it's like the most perfect experience. You can go online, you ordered, you get like a tracker, you get an email. They have this like weird thing where you can put in all of your personal information into a profile and then you can text a number, a pizza emoji and they send you a pizza, right? And so that's why they're selling because not necessarily because it's the greatest pizza in the world but because you can text them a pizza emoji and give them money and that's the difference in an order qualifier and order winner, right? So as you think about the potential of a business education, as you listen to the upcoming talks, I would encourage you to think what's my competitive advantage? How does that fit into diagram of my business? What are my order qualifiers and winners? And I would also encourage you to maybe think about the marketing mix. So this is like big head strategic thinking that you can look at other people's experiences and then let that educate your judgment as to identifying and making correct hypotheses about strategy. But my guess would be and my guess exists because of my work with Caldera Labs that many, many, many, many of us are going to have to find this differentiation strategy and are going to really, really have to hone in the marketing part of whatever you choose to use, whether you diagram your business with that Porter's value chain or the business model canvas. And so for that reason, it's probably really important for us to actually get a grip on what marketing strategy theory looks like in a formal context. And in that sense, I know there's a lot of marketing talks at our work camps and they're really good and they're very actionable but something that I think is really interesting is that I would qualify most of this as digital advertising talks because when it comes to marketing, what we are actually talking about is this like another really, really old 80s framework of the marketing mix, which is this idea of like price, promotion, place and product. And when we talk about like SEO and social media and how to be really good at all of those things, we're specifically talking about the subset of promotion that is digital, right? Like promotion also has the traditional subset, which none of us are doing, right? Like none of you are running TV ads for your freelance. No, okay. But we also have the marketing components of the other four piece, right? So like your product. In the quote unquote traditional business world, this is like the packaging, right? Like a big part of how a person makes a purchase decision is the package nice and attractive. But that same concept can be applied to what you're doing. How do you present what you are selling? Do you present it effectively, attractively in a way that's easy to understand because marketing is not about getting people to talk about your product, right? Like that's PR. Marketing is going through that process of from I don't know who you are to I hand over my money. So there are so many different factors to study on what makes a person hand over their money and awareness and relationship building through digital advertising is only a small piece. So consider the four piece and promotion is only one of them, but it's not the only thing. Other big components of why a person makes a decision to hand over their hard earned money have to do with the product itself and how it's presented with what it's priced at and how that compares to other people's prices, other businesses' prices, and then where it's available, right? So it's funny because when it comes to caldera forms in this framework, it's like I'm placing those at the website that's calderaforms.com, right? But then that's actually really big because that helps me think in the diagram of my business and realize that calderaforms.com, the website by which I accept your credit card or you know, Stripe accepts your credit card and I take your money, is a part of my marketing operation. And that really helps me with my budget. It helps me with Telly the lead developer, like stop working on the website, right? And that makes us more efficient and it makes our margins better. So the last thing that I think you should understand is more of a theoretical economic concept, but I did a business panel at work camp Montreal last year and like after we talked about, I don't know, like being nice to people, right? Everybody was like, but what do we price at? Right? And it's like, that's a valid question, right? And the worst thing about that is that it really depends on what you're doing and that's actually the correct answer and that's a very frustrating answer, right? Like what do I do? Well, it depends. I don't like hearing that answer and I don't like giving that answer, but it really does. And it depends on having the framework to do that kind of research and think about your pricing in a strategic way. So in my opinion, that begins with the idea of pricelessity of demand. So that's this idea that there's certain things in our world that are quote unquote inelastic, right? So no matter how much the price of gas changes, the amount of gas that gets purchased doesn't change that much because we all need it, right? Like even if it's skyrockets, you make room in your monthly income, something else goes because you need to put gas in your car. That's what we call an inelastic good. It means that it's not very responsible to fluctuations in price change. There are very few people that are gonna be like, well, you know, the price of gas went over. I don't know what gas is that. I live in New York, like what, $3, $4? And is that hopeful? Okay, I don't know. So, you know, so like no one's gonna be like, well, you know, gas is over $4 today. So I'm just gonna pass on this, right? That's not very realistic, so that makes it an inelastic good. Compare that to something like, it's really funny, I really struggled to find an example for this. I was like, what's an inelastic good that would be contextual to Miami audience? And I was like talking to my boyfriend about it, and he's like, I don't know, WordPress plugins? Right, that's probably true. But this is actually very true, right? You have so many options when it comes to WordPress plugins that if the price of your plugin increases, you can very easily be like, I'm gonna look for another option, right? We see this all the time with our work with Caldera Forms, right? It's like, people will be like, well, you know, this option that I'm using is, I don't know, it's like $29, but Caldera Forms can do it for free. So I'm just gonna go there. It's like, that's a little bit amazing to me, right? Because it's like, but it's $29, right? But where that level of responsive to prices and plugins, which works in my favor, understanding where your product fits on that scale is really important to how you price. And so when I talk about that scale, I'm talking about the fact that every single product has a wide range of where it can exist within this concept, right? So if you have a $50 product and you are selling 100 of those a month, giving what you're currently doing, right? And then you decide like, I think I'm pricing my prices wrong and you know, you go to a word camp and every single person you talk to is like, raise your prices, right? Like, has anybody been told that while you've been here? Yeah, like raise your prices. That's why you make more money, right? And it's like, okay, like maybe, right? So like, pretend you raise your prices here. There's a slide missing there. So if you raise your prices here and you have an elastic product, it has lots of other options and people can make lots of changes. You can end up losing money, right? Because if you're too expensive, people are gonna be like, oh, I'm just gonna go somewhere else, right? And the thing about this is that these two numbers can be plotted. So we plot the $50 and we plot the 100 that you're selling on two number lines, right? Like it starts to feel like algebra class. And then you plot the other ones and we can actually draw a line among these two and we can say that whatever product you have can exist anywhere along these things. So you could price it at like $10 and sell, I don't know, like a thousand. You could price it at $100 and sell one. And then your job is to figure out where's the spot among that range where you're going to maximize your revenue, right? So right at that panel, everybody was like, what should I price my products at, Christy? I was like, oh, it depends. I'm pricing the city of the man and the last of the man and the last of the man. And there was just one enough time. So I think this is a really important concept to wrap your mind around when figuring out what to price at. Because if you can figure out where your competitive advantage comes from, right? How it fits into the model of your business. What are your order qualifiers? What are your order winners? How are you marketing? Then you can figure out whether your product is more on the elastic end of things or the inelastic end of things. Figure out what other alternatives are out there and decide whether a price hike would be the best thing for you or whether you're someone that should be trying to sell like $1 million, $10 products. How am I doing on time? Okay, cut it out. Okay, the last thing that I wanted to share with you was time management matrix really quickly. This isn't really a business school thing but it's another chart that really helped me when I first learned about it which was the very first time after running a business and being in grad school and also having a part-time job at a gym and just doing too many things. And I was like, oh my gosh, I'm pulling out my hair. And one of my professors said you need to prioritize your time. What's important? What's not important? What's urgent? What's not urgent? And you need to learn to do these things in this order. This was like for me, right? And I would certainly encourage a lot of you who are coming in here saying, well, I need to get better at running my business so I can make more money. I'm sure that one of the things you're going through is like you just have too many things to do. And I would encourage you to take an hour to sit down and think like, well, what are all those things that I have to do? Everything from like, you know, water the plants to redefine my sales funnel and understand where those fits in the context with my goals and how soon they need to be done. Very helpful. So I hope that this introduction to, I hope that this introduction to some frameworks of a traditional business education are useful to you as you listen to the other speakers. I hope that what I convey is that where I believe a business education is really helpful is understanding the 10,000 foot view of what you're doing and where all of those pieces fit, as opposed to the feeling that you get when you are looking up at all the things that you have to do. I'm still looking up at all the things that I have to do. And the one thing that I will leave you with is I've joked around about this before. I said, you know, I worked in like sales or financial services for a while and then I went and got my MBA because I was like, I want to get into the entrepreneurship side of things and learn how to run a business. So this is probably a good thing that I should do. And by all means, I'd certainly learn how to think about my business. And so I went to a financial accounting class and I learned about reading an income statement and preparing a balance sheet and understanding the statement of cash flows and managerial accounting and cost analysis. But I did not learn how to migrate quick books. Let that lead how you approach the rest of this morning.