 All right, how's this mic doing? Okay big room and As as far as I get started Congratulations to the French on a great new president. That's pretty awesome And how about a big round of applause for the great organizers and volunteers at WordCamp Europe? It really really takes a lot of effort behind the scenes to put something like this together. So as I said As my introduction said I've been a 14-year entrepreneur I've made a lot of mistakes some of them almost fatal, but I've managed to survive this far So we're gonna go through five of those What I call life lessons or the school of hard knocks so you guys familiar with that expression here Apparently I have a master's degree from the school of hard knocks. I had to learn every lesson the hardest way possible so learning is a gift even when it's even when pain is the teacher and Then we'll finish up with two items that I think anybody should do everybody should do and if you do those I guarantee you'll have a little bit of success so my my first hard lesson That I learned as an entrepreneur was about burning the candle at both ends didn't if you guys have Mike Jack, how are you doing? All right, so How many of you guys have side projects? How many of you guys and gals have side projects on your side projects? Some of you might be in the agency space. Some of you might be plug-in authors. Some of you might be theme designers Some of you might work for a company totally outside unrelated to WordPress But in the evenings you're probably working on whatever your passion project is and Since so many people raise their hand There's probably a lot of future billionaires in this room is as they all start to take off Well the hardest lesson I learned here was When we were in a design agency for about six years and then for about the last nine years We've been doing page leave for those first six years The pain work always came first right you had payroll to hit you had Client projects you had to get out the door and As much as we wanted to kind of do something else do do more of a service model or I'm sorry Software as a service model or recurring revenue model It always took a backseat and you never got around to it. So it didn't We were stuck The have any of you felt stuck sometimes in your business We were stuck Working the client side even though what we thought you know what we wanted to go in that direction We could never get to it And so burning the candle both ends is that expression where you're lighting a fire here and you're racing to try to Kind of serve this master and serve this master And we all know how that ends up you end up serving none or you serve them both poorly it wasn't until About 2010 a little bit after page. They'd already launched The Sally and I made the decision to stop contract work. So page. He was a brand We had launched managed WordPress hosting yet. I was still doing some contract work on the side to kind of float the bills and Page they just kind of sat there. It went out to the market just kind of sat there And it wasn't until we made that conscious decision No more client work. No more contract work. We need to go all in and focus over here It wasn't easy at first, but we managed to do it and now nine years later all you people think I might have something worth to say so There's a little tip there extreme focus Cut some of the side projects cut some of the fat make the decision to go and do one thing very well And be the best at it, and I think that's a valuable lesson that anybody With some advice shouldn't have to repeat like I did as I said For about six years. We're an agency Doing design SEO light development work. We started using WordPress at WordPress 1.2 be So we've been using this great CMS for quite a long time Who here in the agency space kind of Thinks they need the newest chair or the newest laptop or the newest tool or They need a nice office so that people would take them seriously Sometimes we surround ourselves with the appearance in the in the facade of being successful When maybe that's not necessary to perform our duties and I Got caught in that track I Thought we had to have a office and a really nice zip code. I thought we had to have You know the latest computers The fanciest chairs well, what happens when The clients check is late What happens when your client on net 60 decides to be net 90? Or what happens when that 90 turns into nothing Well, we had a couple business lines of credit set up. I'm sure you guys are familiar with that is you know They essentially gave us a big credit card against our earnings and said have at it Why they did that to a 26 year old? I have no idea So I proceeded to spend myself into debt. I Had the nice computers. I had the nice this I thought I was being successful When the client checks were slower didn't come on time We drew on that to hit payroll You know at the time that was only maybe 40 50,000 a month in payroll But where did that leave us always behind always catching up So I can see now Debt is a wonderful instrument if used properly Use it in it to fund the appearance of success It didn't work out ten years later as of Was it on three or four days ago? We sat down and have a little celebratory moment and I opened the computer and I logged in I said hey We're gonna make the last payment on this line of credit that we've carried ten years almost So my advice here is don't I Hope that's a pretty apparent Spend within your means on what you really need The must haves not the nice to haves. I think this is probably the hardest lesson. I had to learn in business It's important to attract the right people and the right talent, but it's more important to get the wrong people out Sounds kind of harsh In America, we're mostly a right to work set up so you can it's at will employment We can fire people they can quit and I understand in Europe. There's a little bit more protections for employees but in how this applies is How many no, I won't have you raise your hands. You might rat somebody out But I'm sure some of you work with others on your team that maybe don't pull their weight Or that are maybe drags on company morale Or maybe they're just really pessimistic and always just negative Think about how that affects how you see your job How you go about your day-to-day? Now look at it from an owner's perspective if I got 15 20 employees and One of them is just the sour pus all the time even though maybe they're really performing maybe they're a high performer But they're an a-hole That happens you get people that you just like I couldn't imagine not having this person But gosh, he's so terrible to deal with That's just dead weight We had an employee Nice enough guy. We hired him. He was a little green as a support agent and after two four six weeks It was kind of clear he wasn't progressing on his skills, but more importantly We had to care more about his job than he did As owners it was like our our responsibility to make sure he was doing his work That's a recipe for disaster his team lead was coming like come on. We got to get rid of this guy I'm like, no, no, you know give him one more chance. Give him one more chance Finally we let him go and what do you know it all the metrics that we track and support started improving We had another employee who we felt like we really had to have he was kind of a key employee But frankly, I didn't like him. I didn't trust them. I Would keep him out at arms distance. Oh He was never part of the fold that it was page And sure he did well and you know, we grew several million dollars in revenue while he was with us and a lot of it was him driving that but I didn't like the company. I didn't like what I was doing. This is seven eight years in to page Lee well six six years into page Lee Ten twelve years into my entrepreneur career and I wanted to quit I didn't like what I was doing anymore Because this one individual was just like sucking the soul the life out of what we wanted to do and Again, if I felt like that How do you think the rest of the team felt? More importantly, what was that saying to our customers? If Sally and I if you get to know us, hopefully We espouse a certain set of values on how we should run a company how we should take care of people how we should treat our customers Those values are very important to us if a public-facing employee is not towing that line and is Saying presenting a different message now. It's incongruent with the brand Now we look like fools The the customer saying I've heard these great things about page you but why are you such a douche? And it got so bad that a good friend of mine what Here in this room, maybe if I can't see him He came up to me last night. He's like you remember that guy I mean this is five years later and every time I see him He's like you remember that guy that was working for you. Whoa so the the lesson here is obviously You got to stop the cancer before it spreads A bad attitude is not worth any amount of productivity Because the culture of your company is so important. It needs to be protected. It needs to be nurtured And it needs to be viciously defended internally Because without a good work culture What are we doing? Right, nobody wants to just go punch a clock and You know say yes to the man you want to be excited where you work and you want to work with people to get it So as uh managers or Founders make sure you you viciously defend what you've created This one's great There was a time Four or five years ago Maybe some of you remember There was a big kerfluffle in the wordpress community between a prominent theme author And our fearless leader over the gpl And It was a very vocal and very messy time in the community People are choosing sides people were saying things it was it was it was the peak of wp drama And uh, I thought I'd save my two cents I thought I had something valid to say well Put it this way it didn't make me any friends It didn't make me any friends to the point where In hindsight it probably cost us millions of dollars Not directly but indirectly because once you get a reputation as that guy that rabble rouser Puts a target on your back as tony told me last night He's like man, you just you're too abrasive You're you quit being such a rebel You just got a target on your back so This is not a call to be a wet noodle and just lie down It's okay to swim against the current It's okay to fight the good fight. It's okay to have conviction and say what's on your mind But mind your tone right or or mind the venue in which you say it I shouldn't be up here saying negative things about anybody Maybe in private would be a better situation to air my grievance So in any community in any situation What what what have you? It's it's important to play to the audience and For a long time we didn't we thought we knew better. We thought we were the best We thought this we thought that And all around us are competitors Perhaps you know some of them We're out smiling and giving away shirts at word camps And just eating our lunch Because I you know I got this whole self-inflicted Target on my back and it took me a long time and hopefully We're past that but it it took a long time for that kind of stigma per se to wear off so Whatever you do in your business, you know play nice Be strong have conviction, but Certainly play nice. The old proverb is something like You catch more flies with honey We got to move along a little faster here. This is a picture of Chris Wallace at Pressnomics He did a great talk on workaholic being a workaholic This is not a badge of honor. It certainly is not When we were launching pagely I was working the 85 90 hour weeks. I thought that's what you had to do I have to do this. Who else is going to do it? I work and I work I start shrinking because my back hurts so bad I'm not sleeping my guts starting to hurt. I think I'm getting ulcers Problems with my wife because I'm just not available It's not a badge of honor to work to work that much. I have a strong work ethic, which I'm proud of But that work ethic does not mean sacrificing everything else Um You're no good to anybody if you're not at top form parents know this anybody with kids We got two kids of ourselves ourselves and Would you agree we're better parents? when we've slept And when we when we've had a little personal time, maybe you went to the spa or maybe you got to go for a drive We're all better parents when when we're in the right frame of mind Same thing with work. We all work better when When we're feeling good so Yeah, those are the five things that I think I did that sunk us, but surprisingly we're still here You know in 2006 we came up with this idea in 2009. We launched it Now it's a billion-dollar channel Managed WordPress is a billion-dollar channel when you had go daddy blue host Wp engine pantheon page leave VIP that did it did it. There's a billion dollars a year here a little something that Sally and I came up with in phoenix, arizona We also did press nomics. That's a lot of fun global team 900 percent over three years and Our pitch is essentially we help big brands scale wordpress These are the two. This is the first the two things that I think you absolutely should do if you want to succeed in business Obviously iterate iterate and iterate and I'm not talking about your product I think iteration on your product the next killer feature it's passe I think the next killer feature Is your new marketing message is your new positioning statement. That's where you should be iterating It's an arms race You're never going to have as many features or check as many boxes as the next guy And even if you did is that really going to help your business? But what you can do Is tweak your messaging tweak your positioning identify your market more appropriately how this worked all this this first one I went to art school and We'd sit down and the professor would say okay. We're going to do x give me a hundred thumbnails You guys understand what those are? Sit down and draw 100 examples of whatever we're working on That was just a warm-up before we started weeks and weeks of work So your first 20 attempts you're just warming up And you're going to get advice and you're going to get data points and people are going to tell you You should do it like this. You should do it like that That's all just noise What you need to apply is not the advice but apply the learnings So what did you learn by going through this process by iterating you tested this message? Did it work? Did you test this message? Did it work? You go to our website right now or a be testing two new headlines We'll see how they work Most importantly is to seek the blue ocean. Is everybody not familiar with that concept? Right pagely crowded market There's dozens now of hosting companies that do what we do How are we going to succeed? There's hundreds of plugins that do the same thing. There's thousands of themes that are geared towards real estate agents The blue ocean is seeking the empty space To innovate to position to change find the next empty space that's uncrowded And position there for page. We said, okay. Well, if everybody's going to do it for 20 bucks We'll do it at 100 and add some features Okay, if everybody's going to do it at 100 bucks, we're going to do it for 500 and move to amazon Okay, well if everybody's going to do it at this price point We're just going to go right to the top and tackle vip We're just going to expand our enterprise services and we just kept going finding room To fit and and and grow our business and it took a lot of tweaks and iteration and zigs and sags for us to get there So again, don't Don't iterate your product but iterate your Your value proposition What is it that you were really good at? What is it that you do better than nobody else? Now go say it differently than everybody else Present it differently than everybody else That kind of gives you space that you can claim as your own so the uh What do my notes here say? Yeah, today's killer feature is the story Your story how you did it how your brand does it better And uh, don't be afraid to ask for help Along the way again this data You shouldn't necessarily apply everything you hear But use the advice ask for help and use the advice to maybe inform your next set of action And then apply the learnings from that and keep going This is the final thing that I attribute All is a perfectly acceptable word here all our success to Sure sally and I you know worked hard in the early days sure. We caught some breaks But all of our success is due to our team you need to invest in the people In your company To such a degree That they could not see themselves Doing anything else And i'm not talking about financially While that is very important when we pay our team exceptionally well way above market There's other things that go into it. It's about creating a space It's about creating a culture. It's about defining a mission That people can get behind It's about standing back And letting other people Get out front and flex their wings Think about if you're an employer Do this exercise Think about a conversation imagine a conversation Between your employee and their friends in private Right there at the dinner table talking to a buddy the buddy's like how's work Your employee answers Imagine that If you don't like that scene You got work to do Because what your employees are saying privately is how they feel and if it's Negative to such a degree You're not getting the productivity. They're not on mission. Your business is not going to succeed to the level that it could As founders you need to be really careful to mind the greed You know i look at the bank account statements coming in i'm like crap i can do xyz But we have to remember No, just reinvest it reinvest it reinvest it and the people reinvest it in the product Because it's not about us and i'm sure everybody's familiar with the golden rule Do one to others as you would wish them to do one to you That's that's how we try to run everything at page league with our customers with our brand with our employees And this is the final thought which i think So many companies get wrong And if you get it right i guarantee you're gonna unlock it's it's like a switch It just goes from red to green It's a switch and you'll be surprised at how quickly Things start to fall in place In a typical corporate structure corporate hierarchy Business organization unit whatever you want to call it You have some people at the top And you might have some people in the middle and you got people on the bottom All the decisions Are made up top But the people down at the bottom are responsible for those decisions And held accountable for their results So what are we saying as an employee you get no stay in the matter, but you get fired if it doesn't work As an employee In that situation You're responsible for executing somebody else's vision And you're fired if it doesn't work out or you don't get your raise if it doesn't work out What we've done at page league is follow a philosophy, which i didn't even know what it was at first One of our recent hires Essentially handed me a book and said whether you know it or not. This is how you run the company So now I have names for these things that we just kind of did inherently But how we organize our company is There is people at the top There's nobody in the middle So there's people at top and just everybody else Those people at the top their only job Is mission planning Defining the mission What is the mission? What are we trying to accomplish? And that's it. I think we need to go into x market I think for us to prosper as a company. We need to do y thing Then it's up to everybody else to figure out the strategy to execute that mission And then we give the authority which in the old way is always at the top We give the authority to everybody to make decisions to act To interpret that mission to change the strategy on the fly As long as it's against our corporate values and our mission goals Everybody from the newest hire to the most senior hire has authority to do whatever it needs to be done to to achieve that Mission so then they're held respond or then they have that realm of responsibility And then they're held accountable So now look at the equation You have a say in what you're responsible for That which then you're accountable for What is what this has done is create a culture where there's no excuses nobody passes the buck Everybody practices what we call extreme ownership You own everything within arms the rate you own the outcome you own the the strategy You own the results There's no well No excuses being made if you can somehow Design your company structure your employees to that degree I think you will find that productivity shoots to the roof. The culture is amazing And there's really like nothing that can stop you everything just clicks into place instead of two people pushing You have a team of 40 or 50 or 60 all marching in step towards the same goal So the key lesson there is obviously investing your team always Let go of control And your ego which was hard for me To allow others to excel So that's it. Sorry if I went over Thank you Too late for questions or no, we are perfect in time You did not run late. Thank you so much that was so inspiring and interesting and You have great knowledge and experience and I'm quite sure there will be a lot of question here in these rooms for you so therefore We have two standing microphones here in front of the room and we have two standing microphones On the upper rows. So I would love to encourage you to use these microphones If you have questions to ask to joshua and please don't feel shy And especially not because you're maybe not an english native english speaker like me as you heard So please if you have questions use the microphones. Thank you kasper. You're the first one go for it Hey joshua kasper from wb media. Thanks. That was a Amazing talk. Thank you very much and the only question I have for you is when you're going to write your book Good one. Kasper was it? Yes, sir. Kasper. Thank you. Uh funny you mentioned that no We sally and I uh if you don't know this we're co-founders and husband and wife So for 14 years we've been entrepreneurs and husband and wife having two battles Rather than just trying to figure out how to be married. We're trying to figure out how to run company together So we've always teased that we're going to write a book called from the bedroom to the boardroom And any other married co-founders out there can submit chapters, right? I want to pre-order that book Yeah, thank you. It's That I can do a whole another talk on working with your spouse. It's it's so great and please do that Good one. Thank you. That's a question up on top. Please go Hi the I'm page I come from cancun and there's a Question that I would like to ask you you were talking about how being a workaholic is not a batch of honor I would like to know how is it that you reform from that? What what is the first step? right His question was how do you reform from workaholicism? You know, what are the 12 steps? I'm gonna have to be honest with you. I kind of cheated We found a little success and I could hire people to do more of the work That I was taking on and then that allowed me to step back That's not always feasible. Obviously if you're still grinding away So then I think it takes additional self-discipline if you're a solopreneur and you're working really hard on something You just have to have the mental wherewithal to stop Analyze your your your process analyze your results and say You know, maybe if I went and slept for a couple days or maybe if I went and took a vacation for a couple days Or maybe if I stopped and went and reconnected with my kids and my wife for a couple days This this problem You know, you'll solve it so much faster. How many of that's common, right? You're working and working and working. You're like fine. I give up. I'm going to bed And then the answer comes to you. You just got to get some downtime and get your brain back in order Thanks. Thank you. Thanks um If there's any more questions, I would love I would like to because you were talking about and investing into your team and that unfortunately, it's necessary sometimes to fire some employees that are not good for Um For the for the whole concept. So what traits are you looking for when you're hiring new members for your team? Okay, so the question is what traits do we look for when we hire the new team member? Pagely is 100% distributed. It's pretty common now in the WordPress space. So we don't have a physical office. Everybody works remote Two employees of mine are here that I just met for the first time here But they've been working for us for seven months several months and I just met them in person now So if that's the context if it's a distributed team Then what do we look for? Most definitely self-discipline The discipline to get the work done without direct supervision But the discipline to know when to take a break Because as you mentioned, we don't want people burning out what we asked for in our hiring process is I ask of you potential employee 125% of your effort for six hours a day that sounds normal in Europe In america that blows people's minds Because you know, we're known as a workaholic culture and you got to stay late But we're like no work-life balance have the discipline to be On point in the time allotted and then have the discipline to know when to just check out Uh what our senior What's his title Director of hosting operations if this guy got hit by a bus we'd have a bad day put it that way We had to take his uh ssh keys away And kick him out the door and say go take a vacation. You're no good to us You know, we had gone through two big launches and it was just kind of like here's a gentle reminder to have the discipline to turn it off Go take a vacation So primarily it's all about self-discipline on both sides to be productive and not overwork yourself Good Any more questions? No, I think we're done. Oh, here's one. Oh, there is one. Good. Sorry. Please. I have I have two things. Um The first thing is uh, the guy writing this text I was just thinking like everyone in here must be thinking what happens if we challenge that so Uh, this is a challenge for the techs guy So try to try to follow along here. All right. I'm gonna say a bunch of names and then try to write it down all right brandy hillach and in brandy and for subpoena millenia decor a sherry vane to chrisen That's man. That ought to move a tear to our table or a shelf until Come on Ah, sorry I just always be wondering about that the second question is for you because you talked about what you did And the kind of things that you regret doing But we all know that we make some errors that we learn from and we also make some errors that we don't learn from So my question to you is what just the which is the error that you have done in your life That you don't think that you have benefited from Something that you have done that you would rather live without that is a total waste that you would live without Just uh, you're asking what's the hard lesson that Had nothing valuable come out of it Okay Good one God that's a tough one While i'm thinking about that you should have seen the stinky eye. She was giving you She was not happy um I don't know sally you want to help me on this one? What's something I regret? What do I what don't what gets me? I guess Golf Yeah, my golf game is so bad. No, that's not No, I just said You know if sit down over a beer and let's have a chat and I I could probably unload on you I just nothing's coming to mind right now. Sorry Good, so thank you so much. It was an honor to have you here Yes, thank you big applause for joshra's travel. That was amazing