 I was really happy with the business speakers that we had for this year apply and we've gotten set up in the business track all day for the most part. Really above average quality business track speakers, so really happy about that. And when we saw all the folks come in, we thought let's put a panel together of some of our business speakers and let you guys ask some questions and I'll ask some questions and we'll go from there. So my name is Nathan Ingram, I'm the lead organizer here at War Camp Birmingham. I'm also a coach for WordPress freelancers and I love the business tracks at War Camps. That's usually where I speak and I've gotten to know a lot of these folks over the years. And so what we're going to do is we're going to start off letting them introduce themselves and then I've got a few questions to kind of get the conversation started and then we'll open it up and let you guys ask questions. Okay, and we'll go for 45 minutes or so. All right, so let's start down here at the end with Mickey, Mickey. What you guys are going to do is tell us who you are, where you're from, a little bit about your business and kind of stuff, what you do in business. All right, my name is Mickey Trivedi, I work for USA Enterprises. We are out of trust in Tennessee, also known as Jonesboro. It's in the very tip top of Tennessee, a very small community. I've been in business since 2004 and I do website design for people who are pretty consulting and all that good stuff. What will I do there? Anything? No, good. I'm Melanie Adcock, Adcock Creative Group. I just recently, as of last week, merged with my husband. I used to be MGA Creative Designs on my own, so we have merged. He's also a freelancer. We're out of Newton, Georgia. I've been doing freelancing since probably 2003, but WordPress Freelancings since 2010. My specialties are church websites and retirement communities, but I've done really really well. I'm Gordon Sygrup. My two companies are Copperleaf Creative and Press Managed. At Copperleaf Creative, we build websites for clients, with purpose, on purpose. And at Press Managed, we give our clients the peace of mind of a sleeping puppy by giving them a single neck-to-ring, mind if anything goes wrong, and then you just call us and get it taken care of. We run out of Wublin, Colorado, which is about an hour north of Denver, and I've been building websites full-time on WordPress since 2018. I'm April Weir. I run a digital marketing agency in North Metro Atlanta called Sugar 5 Design. And we work with growing businesses who want to grow faster. We do web design, SEO, strategy, and business coaching. And we are very involved in the local WordPress community, and we just really, really love going to meet-ups and cams and supporting the community. So, how many of you folks are, you own a business, you're working with clients, that's your thing. All right, awesome. So, how many of you struggle with pricing your websites? More or less. All right, how many of you at one time or another have charged far less than you should have for a website? Desperate people. So that's the next question. I would like each of these folks to tell us what is the least you've ever charged to build a website for somebody. Okay, the very first website I got paid to do, I got paid $99, and it was live for five years. Whoa! Okay, you want to talk about long-term value to a client? That's 20 bucks a year in development. Now, I don't know if it was a good website or not, but, wow. Yeah. The cheapest website I ever bid was 200 bucks for a restaurant. I got lucky they didn't say yes. The cheapest one I actually got paid for that stands out in my mind was pre-wordpress for me. It was an OS commerce bill, full e-commerce, for 800 bucks. Anybody ever use OS commerce? God bless you. Other than the ones before I was a pre-answer that I actually did for free when I was a teacher, and I did one for my school, the least I've gotten paid is around $500, and the site is still on. So, yeah. And it's pre-wordpress, so it's terrible. I'm a police. I've done a free website for nonprofits, so I guess that would be the least. But the least I've done, paid for, would be the request website I ever sold was $500. And that was one of the dirty words that we're going to call June 1. June 1 is a wonderful, and they're the step-child of the open-source community. We love you. So, okay, anybody think $99 for a website? I think that's awesome. That's a dubious price. Yeah, right. Well, you know, the funny thing about that is that it was awful. It was ugly. It was awful. It was ugly, but it ranked, and it got the guy a lot of business, and he wasn't able to... It ranked as in on Google, or as in... Well, no. No. All right. So, that's the least you've ever charged. April, why don't you start again and tell us the largest dollar-wise project you've been involved in. Well, I specialize in reservoir sites. The largest price point that I really usually go to is around $6,500. Unless we're doing something really super fancy, that's as high as I can. And I think if you don't actually have to charge a lot of money to be profitable, you just have to have really, really good processes. Exactly. Yeah, that's not about the dollar signs, about the margin you have in it. That said, I have two part answer again. I recently bid between $190 and $240,000 for working the next 12 months with the client. We both know we're in the client. Now, that's going to go through, so that doesn't really count. The most it's ever cleared through was a phased project, and that added up to just shy of $35,000. It was actually last month. The client signed it $23,000 for a website that's about... Well, actually it's $23,000 for the main website and $5,000 for each satellite website. So that's going to be about a $35,000 project when it's all done. And I just knew that they had deep pockets, so I just couldn't pull the amount out of the air. And they signed it, so I probably didn't charge it up. With me, it would be around $13,500. And that was a pretty good bid back. So about $30,000, if I'm going to go to school, if you want me. And so the point of asking those two questions is to show you the range where people kind of started, $99, up to $30,000, not only starting at $500,000 to $300,000. So there's a lot to be learned in the journey between a $500 website and a $23,000, could be $30,000, something $1,000 website. There's a lot to be learned. Yeah, yeah. So my largest client, I started off on a $350 a month retainer. And they are now $68,000 a year. Good. So starting small doesn't always mean ending small. No, that's such a great point. The most important dollars I think you can earn in a WordPress business are the recurring dollars. That is where the priority has to be. So there's a journey, like I said, between starting out in the $500 range where a lot of folks start out. Anybody start out around that's kind of where you're starting roughly there, $500,000 or somewhere in there. Yeah. And then charging a lot more. There's a lot of aches and pains, business growth, a lot of stretching that has to happen. So let me ask you guys, in that process, what's been the biggest mistake you made in your business? Biggest mistake? The biggest mistake in my business. Well, before I kill that, I want to say something else about the crossing. What I've noticed about the crossing is the lowest payment that I have is the worst client. Yes. So I don't even agree with that. So I just think we need to bring that to the focus as well. But the biggest mistake I've made in my business was not hiring help sooner. It cost me so much money because my business tripled when I hired help. So it makes me think, you know, what if I would have hired help when I first started versus when I did 10 years later. Look at the amount of money I could have made, could have shared with it. But instead I didn't because I was stuck on, hey, I can do this and nobody else can do it like me. Boy, that wasn't sure. It was hoping like me. The biggest mistake. That wasn't the biggest mistake. Mine's probably 2.1 is being afraid to talk about money upfront. I used to be like, you know, Oliver, you know, can I please have more? So it's like the top three questions, what's your budget? I am no longer afraid to ask them, being afraid that they wouldn't have a big budget and then I lose the job. It's not a problem for me anymore to tell them, tell them no, I'm not the person for you. I don't work at low budget projects like that. The second thing is not having a process for everything because if you have a process for everything and you stick to your processes, it just makes your life so much easier. Before you pass it, let me dig into one of those answers you just gave. You said that, you know, your first mistake was, what was it? Not talking about money. Yeah, so how do you learn, talking about money is tough, right, with blanks? How do you learn to talk about money? Well, you taught me. You and WP Elevation taught me about not being afraid to ask about your budget and if they say they don't have a budget, so I say, so you have an unlimited budget, money's no object. And that is a great thing to get a number like that. Well, I'm thinking about, you know, $2,000, well, you're not going to get an e-commerce site for that. You know, then you can kind of ask as WP Elevation, go wide, go deep, start asking what they want and why and why and why and what else. And you get down to the nitty-gritty and they may not have the budget then, but then you can break it down into pieces, which I did with the client. They didn't have the money up front for e-commerce, but you still need a website, so let's start with a brochure website and then once your business picks up, let's go add the e-commerce. So you end up still keeping the client, but breaking it down and then now you're guaranteed they're going to come back to you for phase two, phase three, and they end up being the client. Great. Gordon, biggest mistake. Biggest mistake was hiring too soon. And actually, built on both books. My biggest mistake was hiring staff too soon. It led me to run the business upside down for over six months, meaning I was losing money every single month. I was busting my tail, paying my staff out of my pocket and racking up debt. That is the worst thing you can do. And the reason that it was too soon is that I didn't have the processes. It was your same mentality, I do this. I'm amazing at this. How do I outsource that? Or how do I insource that? How do I staff do what only I can do? So that put me in a really bad spot. We're probably geared up to start hiring again in the next year or two, but this time it'll be processize everything, but that isn't to say get it down to every single click in screenshots and videos because if you make it idiot-proof, only idiots will want to work on it. That's actually a quote from the CEO of Netflix. Roughly, you know. Repeated. But the process of this is these are the steps you go to figure it out. For example, the WordPress troubleshooting process. Turn off all the plugins, but the one that you think doesn't work. Then turn off the theme. It's not what button, what plugin. It's the bigger process. I also waited too late to get my processes in order. So everything was a spoke design solution for each client. And that doesn't, I mean it sounds great, but in reality it doesn't work and it absolutely doesn't scale. So if you don't have processes, get them now. And you have processes, they're just in your head and they need to be on paper or on your computer. But I think, for me, on a bigger picture is one of the big mistakes that I made was allowing my people-pleasing personality to affect my business decisions. And so I would take consequences, business consequences of my clients and I would absorb them. So my client wouldn't have the budget to do it and I would do it and I would absorb the difference. Or they would make a bad decision and break their site and in the middle of the night, I would fix it. That's absorbing their consequences that they should be absorbing. And of course that can ripple out through the rest of your life. But once I got that in order and started respecting my business and started putting appropriate boundaries that I'm responsible for and what they're responsible for, because a lot of us care more about our client's sites than they do. Right? That's a tweetable. A lot of us care more about our client's sites than they do, which is absolutely true. I totally agree. So all of you guys had mentioned something about processes. And this is just kind of open for anybody to watch the volunteer. What are the processes? Well, the way we do our processes are the things that we do repeated tasks or methods or philosophies that we do our work on. So in the beginning, it was all in my head. But when I got ready to do what I call a process book because I don't want to be in my business forever. I wouldn't have my business running forever but I don't want to run my business forever. So I actually hired a VA. She's fantastic and we started doing process workshops. And so we would spend time and I would just brain dump and then she would organize it and show it back to me and then we would create repeatable processes for other people based on that. And it was really amazing because it was such a confidence builder for me because seeing what I knew and what I did for my clients not only validated my value that I was bringing to them but now I can duplicate that value without me having to do everything. Get my VA to do that. That sounds fantastic. Do that. I'll jump on something really simple and looks smaller. Checklists. Checklists save you from errors of ineptitude. What that means is something you knew you had to do but you just forgot. It's not that you didn't know but there's 8, 9, 10 things in a row maybe you did 9 out of 10 but that 10th one matters. So for me the book was the Checklist Manifesta. It thinks it's about the World Health Organization but it's not. And my fun story on that is that I ordered a sitting standing desk and they've asked me not to use their name and when I went to check out the options were credit card or test check out. That's interesting. So I went through their test check out and like a lot of us developers we know there's a test card number it's not a secret it's 4, followed by 15 ones. So I checked out and I fully expected that they were going to send me an email that says hey nice job, Bozo you can't have your desk but instead I got a payment confirmation I got shipping confirmation I got a desk. And then we took pictures of us putting it together and never were we put in the office and we got a blog post about errors of ineptitude and this book and what happened and then I emailed them the blog post and I said listen guys I had no intention of stealing a desk from you I'm going to pay for it I just thought you should know and they called me and said listen take our name off that blog post and we'll give you the desk at half price I said this is not extortion I'm not blackmailing you I'm paying for the desk I did take the name off the blog post you can replicate what I did they turned off the desk checker it was like I hacked anything but they seemed to think it was a security problem wait no you need checklists and then later this is really ironic I had a client read that blog post and then come back to me with a screenshot of the admin panel where I had left the box that said to discourage search engine indexing checked for 9 months and they walked in and said this is not an aptitude this is your blog post this is our admin panel you're right so really basically my checklists are a reminder of everything I've ever screwed up ever so when you screw something up it goes on a checklist and now we go and check all the boxes and when we make mistakes we make it right I credit an awful lot of money to that client and they're still in the client because it's lists so mine are checklists checklists for what to install on a website I have processes for actually even scoring clients that come to me I work most just by referral so if I have a cold call from a client they have to pass a test I actually score them if they don't pass that I pass on the project because I don't want to work with PETA clients pain in the asterisk clients if they really sound like it's going to be a neat project and you just charge them a whole lot more to work with them but I know when you're first starting out you don't have that luxury I have the luxury to say no and that's what having a business coach has you got the permission from somebody smarter in the or farther along in the journey that's what people know processes I love checklists and launch checklists simply because of that very reason making sure that the test mode is turned off I actually thought oh this is such an easy small site I launched yesterday I don't need to go by the checklist and I went in there last night and I had to still have it on test mode for checkout luckily she don't have one product so I didn't think the whole world was going to try to buy this product but I went through the checklist and I'm like oh I forgot to do that and it was on my list so have a process for everything that's important in your step to go through even bringing on clients what you need from them sending them the list of what you need I have to write it all down because I'm not doing it anymore I can't remember everything so having that list in front of me that box on Trello that I can check that I've done it and I move on to the next task and that way I can go to bed and sleep at night and I don't wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and go oh did I forget to do that so just having a process for if it's not on the list it does not exist yes so I'm going to go with pretty much everything they said since I'm the last guy I do as well I use Trello as well but one of my things too that I do is how many of us have like one of the things I've screwed up the most is contact forms how many of us forgot to change the email where it goes to once we launch so that's like number one on my checklist and number two is do I really want this client as a client you know and that's where I got into that mode of every client and then I go down in the launch and stuff like that as well I mean another thing that I do is I have personal goals that I want to do every day and I don't have a list of ten goals I write down two or three goals a day that I want to get done because it's easier to get two or three things done than it is to get teased so you know and I don't want it to be able to be reached and that's what I do so I love some of the stuff they've said as well awesome some questions here, yes sir you're probably way past this but when you pitch a client what deliverables do you offer so for the video and for the room the question is when you're pitching a client project what are the deliverables that you offer are you after what do the clients normally want they want results they want beauty, they want aesthetics I mean what do most of them what triggers do you think get you the job so my number one thing is they want to return to the investment so I mean they will get to work and get business going whatever that entails whether it be optimization whether it be good content writing whatever is needed is what they want but that's you know every clock is different I mean I don't really know how you can say what they want that's why I get that information in the client interview I'm going to talk a little bit about tomorrow my presentation on writing proposals and what you put in them but you know you have to keep asking what do they want because most of the time they don't know what they want the brand new websites that you build because they have to have a website because they are not considered a legitimate business unless they have a website so if they just be a brochure site they don't need it, I just need a website well and farther along it might be that they need landing pages to sell a specific service you know what do you want if they're a church what do you want them to see on the homepage for new visitors that are looking for a church it's you know what kind of worship do you have how do we dress what do you have for my kids versus a retirement community that you want them to know that you do the full level of services for retirement communities from independent living all the way down to skilled nursing so it all depends on what the client is and you listen to them and then in the proposal feed it back to them and mark those as the target needs that you're going to solve the problems that you're going to solve it's not I'm going to install this plugin and configure it is what problems are you solving you don't want to tangibly give them you know I can get you X amount of oh no no no no no actually I'll jump in on that so it's largely I agree with almost everything we said except for the detail that I like to add which is it has to be measurable so that if they say contact request a month I want 10 I can measure that and six months down the road it's hard to measure beauty you know you're excited about my fancy new website but that's not really what you wanted so again to roughly quote someone else I believe it was Brennan Dunn who said keep asking clients questions because one of two things is going to come out of their mouth money or BS keep asking questions until you get to them one and that's it then what they're deliverable that they want then ask them how they plan to measure that and then echo it right back in the book would you have a promise 10 contacts per month no never because we don't control the internet or the universe but we agree we are working together to hit this goal and we're going to evaluate it at six months and if we're at 12 that's awesome and if we're at 8 let's figure out why and what we need to make better if you can use language like we're going to increase your leads you know we're going to set things up and this is how we're going to try to increase your leads we're going to do you know slide in email sign up forms we're going to do a free giveaway you know you come up with a strategy to increase and I would say that kind of goes back to who owns the consequences of the website who owns the business right so is it my responsibility to make sure your business succeeds because that's way outside the scope of building a digital marketing platform right so what I try to do is I try to go to where the pain is so they're experiencing pain and we can define why they're experiencing that pain and we can craft a solution to alleviate that pain that's worth money let me just reflect for a second because the answers that you just got are not about building a website they're about running a business and there's a lot of what we are asked to do as web developers that follows much more under the hat of business consulting than it is building a website and those are two totally separate services you may be able to build a website you may be able to offer some business consulting some amount of people just need a sounding board but those are two separate services so make sure you're charging them when people ask you what you do for a living you do not build websites you own your own web design company that's a huge difference in perception than I'm sitting in my basement in my pajamas building a website versus which you certainly are I do make a rule to get dressed every day so but I can't guarantee I'm not in my pajamas in the evening working on websites but there's a whole perception about that so get yourself out of that where they perceive you being in the basement you know working on a project versus that you are actually operating your own company yes nobody will ever respect your business more than you do now they're tweetable tweetable two for two alright questions going back to what you were saying about clients messing up your site and you fixing it in the middle of the night how do you determine who gets access and how do you lock it down so that that doesn't happen so I am kind of a jerk about this so I am very I'm very generous to my clients but I have very strong boundaries so there's a warranty period and I believe that my clients should have total access to what they own but they also own the consequences of access to what they own right so I don't do this anymore but I used to have a crack the box cause so you know like when you buy a PC and you crack the box you board the warranty so I would give them admin access and then editor access and if they locked in access during the warranty period they pointed the warranty I kind of dialed that back again but I reserved the right to reenact it at any time don't take it out keep it in ours is actually quite similar in that we create a client level access and the way we describe it is I try to remove the things where you're more likely to hurt yourself than do what you intended to do and so we turn all those off and that way there's really easy access to posts and pages and forms and the stuff they should be interacting with every day and it's all written in a dashboard widget that we made and then it says hey at the end of the day this is your site we will give you full admin access but if you break it we will fix it and that's billable and it says that in their dashboard every time they log in for me it depends on if I'm building it they're not going to be on a website care plan and I'm just handing it off I give them admin rights I still they don't know this I have the website backed up usually it's monthly for the people who aren't on care plans to my Amazon S3 they probably never even notice it goes there because that has saved and made me the hero so many times where they have broken something really really badly and I'm like well I have a backup so I'll just you do and I'm like well we have to plan for emergencies so I put it back up I come across as the hero and we go on from there for my care plan clients I give them an admin account they tell them never to use it unless I die and then they get editor access advanced access manager allows me to give them access to things like forms and things that they normally wouldn't get as an editor but they don't get to do things like plugin updates and things like that because I want to control that and make sure everything's working but they do own it and I do give them the admin but you know I tell them not to use it so I'm just like Gordon I give full access if they request it if they don't I set it up to where it's if they can't break anything and tear it up I do do backups of everything I think I'm going to set on there a database backup every day all my clients do not know that but I don't only want to have to do all the extra hard work if they screw something up so I have it there to help that but you know I mean I had a client for instance his password was 123456 he got hacked and anyways I told him I was like this is your fault he got billed for it and he wasn't really happy but guess what he signed up for my piece of mind right after that so it worked out really good for me but like I said I do pretty much what he says he does as well so on that subject I'll actually zoom in on the webinar on I think it's training I think it's one of the sponsors of the event today I think it's training in a couple weeks called preparing a site for the client it's free so if that's something that you're interested in and you want to see a process for that it's training.ithing.com and you can join us for that in a couple weeks another question yes sir maintenance plans versus you break it you pay for it what are your all thoughts on both sides of this basically I'm going to charge you $20 whatever I want and I will then take care whatever happens I'm not going to charge you anymore after that notice I think you're going to pay for everything that you gave me today so let me shake that question a little bit hourly work versus having some sort of maintenance recurring package for your clients if you have a package maybe tell us what that involves and how do you balance that with hourly work so I do have a piece of mind package that's what I call it because I want a client to have a piece of mind if they elect to do this I don't require that if they elect to do this then they are waived from ever having to worry about their website because that's what it is it's a piece of mind if it goes down I get it up if they break it I get it up if they tear it up I get it up period and the way I sell that to those clients is I'm like do you have a car yes you get the whole chain yes why not do the same thing for your website listen maintain your website we can keep it up today keep everything fixed where everything doesn't happen you invested this much money in it why not do that now if they go in and break it and they don't have a good maintenance plan then I turn the money out and fix that conference who still has a session yet to come Melanie what is your session crafting the perfect proposal 10 am tomorrow 10 am tomorrow morning so we'll be back right and early Sunday morning check out Melanie's session on proposals and enjoy the rest of the day