 answer after I left the job that I needed a break from. Anybody had that job? Then you were like, and I'm done. What are you doing next? Not sure, but I know I'm done. So in that moment, I had a lot of requests to build sites. I wasn't, I've always kind of had this skill in my back pocket. And this was back in 2008, 2009. And I, I, in my own journey, it's going to be different, but I had what's newly wedded at that time. And my husband, we could live off his income. I never had that option before. And so he's like, give it a try, whatever you want to do. That took the pressure off for me to become immediately profitable. I meet lots of people who don't have that luxury. And I recognize, Hey, listen, you got a family, you got expenses out of the gate, you got no one else backing you. So your journey is going to look a little bit different, but that's okay. So I right out of the gate was burned out with my previous job said, I don't want a team. This is going to be me. And whatever I feel I do when I discovered WordPress in that season, I discovered the WordPress community. My first word camp was down in Orlando, and it blew my mind. And I was like, I'm doing this thing. And it said to my husband, Hey, I know I said, give me a few weeks or a couple of months to figure out what I want to do next. I kind of don't want to do anything next. And it kind of started to grow, started to get referrals, started to get recurring work started to become profitable, started to get too much work. So then I began to revisit this question, do I need help? Do I need someone else helping me out? And so that migration began to happen in my own mind first before I actually did anything about it, you know, personal life is a big part of this. A lot of you guys might start off as a freelancer, because there's a personal reason. And so there's a reason you need to be home. There's a reason you don't want to work with a large company anymore. There's a reason you have, you know, as a side hustle as an extra source of income. And suddenly and now it needs to grow and become your full income. So a lot of times our personal lives and our work lives overlap. And we don't always say that out loud. So I just want to say that's okay. For me, we began to go through an adoption process. And suddenly I was like, we have to maintain a certain level of income to qualify. We need to bring these children home. And in order to do that, I need to be available in the home, going through my home study and all the process that's involved there. So I needed the freelancing thing to work. But now I needed help because I needed to also have the mom thing work too. And so they began to overlap and I began to look for help. And I'm going to talk to you today about some of the places I looked for help, some of the things that work and some of the people who did not work out. So then I decided I'm going to build an agency. I didn't start there, but that's where I got. So the question today is, are you on that same journey? And I know we got a small group in the room, but let's just do a quick poll. How many of you would classify first definitions? Freely answer for this talk, I'm going to roughly define as you're doing the work and you're working by yourself. It's you, your time and your effort, your freelancing. Now you may be contracting with a larger company or whatever, but it's you. You stop working, it's over, there's no more income. You keep working, you work harder, there's more income. You're freelancer. And that's a rough definition. And then for agency, I'm going to say you have a team. So it's not just you. So I can fly to the Philippines, adopt my children and while I'm gone, someone else is keeping the company running. That's a different scenario than me waking up every morning on my laptop trying to make it go myself. So that's my rough definition for this talk. I know that can be parsed a little bit, a few other ways, but let's just go with that. How many of you would classify yourself? I'm in the mode of freelancer. All right. How many would say I am a small agency? I got a small team working with me. And that team can take any form. And then how many say, listen, I'm a more established agency, a larger agency. We got multiple things going on in multiple layers. Well, good. Because this talk is not for them. Okay. So that's who you are. The question is, if you are a freelancer, is making the transition to becoming a team the right fit for you? And I want to do a little bit of a self-check on that. So here's my question. Do you love the business of the work you do? Or do you love the work itself? If you are passionate about the work itself, but the business of the work makes you break out in hives, agency life might not be for you. Because it's different. You're doing different things in your day. You're not slinging code. You're not throwing out designs exclusively. You are managing client relationships. You are dealing with expanding invoicing issues. You are hustling more for sales because you have higher capacity. It's a different life. So that's the question. And there's no right answer here. Do you want to scale on your own? Or do you want to scale with others? Because you can scale both ways. You don't have to become a team. You can scale individually. If you want to become, want to remain a freelancer, you can raise your rates. You could do value-based pricing. You become a specialist. You could niche down. You could become a consultant. All these things will elevate your income without even necessarily bringing in a team. So there's a book out, a company of one. There are ways to do it. So I'm not saying it has to be for you, but it's a good thing to check yourself. There's nothing wrong with remaining solo. But if you want to build a team and go for it, then I want to just share some tips along the way that you need to be considering. The first one, I want to talk about your clients. And this is back to a bit of a qualification. If you resent your customer, do them a favor and don't become an agency. I talk to developers all the time that are just like, oh my God, they email me again. Like, that's not a bad thing. Like, your customer is the reason you're in business. You can develop systems to manage their expectations and to fix the communication problem. But if deep down inside, you don't want to be bugged, this is not the right path for you. You need to love your clients. Your clients are the reason that we're in business. You need to be excited when they have additional needs that you have good solutions for. You need to serve them well. And if that is, if that is something that's a struggle, I mean, I would say right out of the gate, get your relationship with how you're going to handle your clients straight right out of the gate. Let's talk about that. How can we have good communication strategies with our clients? Strong communication is the key to making the client relationship work. You need to manage their expectations. That doesn't mean always sounding like you're popping their bubble, but, you know, providing paths and solutions and helping them think through the things they didn't think about. That's going to, they made this request, which is I know is going to lead to this and this and this. They didn't think that through. I'm going to help them with that. I'm going to set their expectations properly. You also position yourself when you have strong communication, you position yourself as a wise guide in this whole process. They keep coming back to you because you're communicating well. It builds strong rapport and an understanding. And my business is so referral based. It's ridiculous. And it's because I work so hard to have good relationships with my clients. They like me. Even when a project gets complicated and maybe goes a little bit sideways, we work through that. I don't ghost them and disappear and I figure a way through it. And then that grows your potential for future work. When you have strong communication, they're not scared to tell their friends about you and you're going to get more work that way. And they're going to come back to you a second and third time. Also, when you're strongly communicating with them, they're going to realize you offer more than one thing. And when they need a second thing, they're going to remember, oh, she does that too and come right back. Here's a few communication strategies. Please reply to emails. Please. Reply to these four people. They are emailing you and asking for something. This is, again, a hard, hard-learn lesson on my part because I want to just reply with the answer. They're asking a question or they're making a change. I'm like, oh yeah, I need to do that. But I don't have time right then. So I leave it sit in my inbox. I'm going to do that. And then I'm going to reply with done. But in the meantime, X, Y and Z is actually more important. And if you reply and say, got your message, I'm on it, let me get back with you as soon as we get there. And by now you should be using we language. We will get back to you once the team gets this done. Then, at least in their mind, that tension level of I had a request drops and they have more grace for you to use the time to get back to it. But if you just remain silent and don't hit reply and let your inbox pile up, it causes stress with your clients. At least say, I'm on it. At least say that. And so don't close your clients. Don't do that. Put everything in writing. This is not so you can bang them over the head with it later. This is so that those expectations are managed. Have a conversation on the phone. Follow it up with an email. Hey, great talking with you today. Just to recap, we agree to X, Y and Z. Don't let the phone conversation be the definitive information. I have been burned by that. Well, we said it on the phone. Oh, yeah, we'll do so and so. Improve it. Show me the email where that was approved. What? Okay, just put it in writing. It makes everything so smooth. Also train them how to communicate with you. You got that one client texting you in the middle of the night. Hair is always on fire. You can train that client. I had a client like that and we work with them. We got it down. He knows how to communicate with me and how not to. And it's not a big deal. You have to say, how do I want to be communicated with? I will train them that I will be responsive if you use these channels. If you use these other channels, oh, no, I don't check Facebook Messenger for that. I totally miss that. That's not where I do business. Or if I see the Facebook Messenger, I immediately reply with an email. Hey, I saw you message me in Facebook. Go ahead and send me an email and I'll get on. I like email. Some people have form set up that feed into support ticket systems. That's totally great. Whatever works for you, whatever channels you want to do, train your clients how to use them and then nurture the relationship. In the last year, I'm putting a few tools and resources at the bottom of some of these slides. These are just ideas of things that we've used. One of them we've discovered in the past year is nurture copy. Nurture copy, they write for you emails on various topics that you can use to nurture your client relationship. Use a CRM like we're using an active campaign and we're sending these emails out with very little effort in our part. And then we're using AI to also write accompanying blog posts on the same topic and social posts that are slightly different than the email. And I have had so many replies from emails from customers this year where they say, hey, I saw that email you sent. You're right, I need to get some stuff updated on my website. I sent an email out about, hey, when was the last time you updated content on your site? I forgot we even sent it. I was like, what email did I send? But I have gotten so many clients like, oh, listen, I didn't know you could also handle my logo design. I was trying to hire this other guy on 99 Designs. But hey, if you can just do it, well, they didn't even know that I offered it until I sent it out and nurtured this relationship. So continue to nurture your clients. That is a big first step from switching from, it's just me, what I can do to becoming more professional and more agency-like. The next thing I want to talk about is your team. It's time to get people on the bus. It's not going to be just you anymore. If you're going to make this journey, it's time to go find them. And I heard this quote in World Camp Atlanta 2014 for the first time, Corey Miller. It was not his originating quote. I think it came from somewhere else, but he's the first one who I had heard it from. And I loved it. It was if you want to go fast, go alone, or if you want to go far, go together. And many of you have heard that before. And that is the thing. It is not faster to bring a team on. It's not. It's going to be slower at first. But in the long run, you're going to go farther. So it's time to get team. Yeah, we have a question. I'm sorry. I think you're wrong. Yeah. Am I speaking louder? I'm okay. Okay. So this is the second time in this World Camp, and I just really like that. But to go fast and go far, well, first you're going to go slow, and then you're going to go fast. Well, no, there is an investment. The question was, can you go fast and far at the same time? And I see when people try to do that, the wheels fall off the bus. Because what happens is processes aren't fully in place. And we're going to talk a little bit about that. Things, structures aren't done because you're just like popping. You're like hiring left and right. And you're like, these jokers over in the Philippines are messing up my stuff. And you're not managing it well because you haven't worked up, worked that muscle of team management and getting all the systems. Now, if you have a whole system and you're just like hit and play, maybe it works. But I have not seen it work very well. Because while you're running fast, you're still like screwing the bus together. Does that make sense? To stick with the analogy? So here's a couple of things that I've learned over the years in the hiring process. And I am not by far the best because I tend to just hire people I like. Which means I'm training them and then their ability is at the level of what I've trained. So there's pros and cons. We're going to talk about this, but a couple of things. Number one, start by defining the role that you are hiring for, that you can't hire for. My hair is on fire and I just need help. That's not a role. Okay. You're not going to hire another one of you. You probably have multiple skill sets that you are using throughout the day. And you're expecting someone else to come. I do this. Like, okay, they need to be this level of a designer, have this much of a coding experience they need to have, be able to troubleshoot what's going on, be an experience in these 10 page builders and these other plugins and you're not, that's a unicorn. That's you. You're trying to hire you. You're not going to hire you. You needed to find what is this role that needs to happen. If you are not clear, their success can also not, will never be clear. Are they hitting the metrics? Are they hitting the mark? Are they meeting what you need them to do? How do they know you've never been clear about what you need them to do? So you start by defining clearly what you're doing. If you hand off chaos, you will get chaos in return. Secondly, find the right people. Okay. Right people in the right seats. Sometimes it's the right person. You got them in the wrong seats. Sometimes it's a really good skill set and they're just not going to mesh with your culture and we're going to talk about culture in a minute. So always be evaluating, do I have the right people in the right seats and go after that? Where are you going to find them? So there's project based sources like, like Upworth or somewhere where you're like, I need something for this thing. I just hired a guy last week. We needed some custom animations made. I don't know him. He's in India. He, I defined, I need this isn't this, here's the graphics, who can do it. I vetted a number of people and said, oh, this guy, I like his work. I hired the skill in that instance. I don't know this person. I didn't hire him to be a long-term team fit. I will use them again because I was happy with the work he did, but that's hiring just project based in and out. This is what I need. This is the budget I have for it. You can use a vetting service. I've also been experimenting a lot with this lately, like GoWP has a service called Quickly Higher where they will vet developers, content writers, designers, and they will match and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. There's other ones out there where they will curate and vet and do a matching service to find you the fit. The nice part about that is it's less work for you in the hiring process, but they're taking a cut in the middle and you got to think it's a fair on all sides and all that stuff, but also finding the right person in that regard takes some strategy. You can post it out there yourself. If you just like, hey, I've done this, hey, I'm looking for this, this, and this, and I'm putting it on social media and putting it on our website, you're going to get spam. You're going to get so many requests. I could do it. I could do everything. How many of you guys get those emails that say, oh, I can give you WordPress support services that I do? I'm like, delete. I don't know if they do or not because I don't have time to vet that. I don't even know how you got my email. If you start putting it out on social by yourself, you're going to get that back. Maybe that's fine. Maybe you want to go through that process and trial a few people. I find it really overwhelming and it hasn't worked for me. Yeah. The question is, how would somebody get through my gatekeeping and not be considered spam with a cold email? I just don't know that cold emails work. I would say some finding another way to curate a relationship. LinkedIn is also a place where I just get hit up with cold requests and it comes back to thinking about me. I have a lot going on. I might not have time to weed through what you're saying. Everybody is sending me the same email. If I meet you here at an event, if I talk to Erin and say, hey, who are you working with, do you have anybody who has some extra time? These are things that they are warm leads. They are referral based. They are not me just being hit up cold. It's just going to rub me the wrong way. Maybe other people have had success. I have a client who likes to hire those guys and that works for a minute and then he fires them and I have to rebuild everything. I just haven't had great success with that personally. That's more of a marketing question, I guess. How would you get through the gatekeeping? Well, for me, you're not going to, but I don't know about other people. Do you hire friends and family? Sure. I have. Bo here is my brother-in-law. We worked together for eight years. I train him. He supported me during the adoption and now he's off doing his own thing and doing it well. It can work. A lot of times, I hire my sister. That did not work. Sometimes when you're just started and your hair is on fire and you've got to get stuff done, you look around at who's nearest and has time and you just go with that. There's pros and cons. I know the general rule is don't hire friends and family. It makes things weird when things fall apart. Just tread lightly. Have eyes wide open. Be upfront. Bo and I had 1,000 conversations about this is working. We had a lot of discussions about boundaries and family events. We worked it out. I'm not saying no. I'm just saying maybe. Do we hire cold or do we hire vetted? We talked about warm leads. Do you hire the skill or do you hire the person? These are all things to consider. I tend to hire the person, but lately I've been hiring the skill. It just depends. Do I have time for training? Something to think about. Next, onboard them. Get them on the bus. You need to budget time for this. This process of becoming a team is going to cost you money before it's profitable. I am sorry. That is just the reality. You're going to lose time because you're going to onboard and then, oh, my gosh, they didn't work out. Last year, that happened and it didn't work out. That's a big amount of money there. My time, the other person's salary and the fact that we weren't able to pass that on to the client because of the level of work that came out, whatever. This is part of the process. If you set yourself up front, it's going to cost me something and you look at your budget and you allocate funds, we're going to build into a team and I have this much money to play with. It won't be so much anxiety when you end up taking a loss. You just pick yourself up and you try the next thing. You say, okay, that didn't work. What could we try? But if you don't have that mindset up front, you're going to immediately pull it back and be like, forget it. I'm just going to do it myself and you're going to stay a freelancer. In order to make this jump, you've got to say out loud, this is going to cost me money. Then your role is going to shift and this is where I'm like, if you don't like people, don't be an agency owner. Your role is going to shift. You are going from serving your clients to serving your team. If you wake up in the morning, the first thing you need to think about is does my team have everything they need to be successful today? I don't want to end up at the end of the day and realize I missed a slack message from eight hours ago that so and so lacks a password that I forgot to give them and she got nothing done today. My top priority should be to be checking on them before I check on the client with their hair on fire because if my team isn't working, my team amplifies my effort. And if they are not working because I have not followed up, they asked me a question, I didn't have time to answer it, then I am shooting myself in the foot because they're billing me possibly or they're definitely not billing the client. Things are just stalled and it's getting ugly. So you are now, your priority has to be your team. And then I mentioned this before, I would say go slow. I'm slow. Now I probably went too slow. This has taken me years to make this shift and part of it is just me working out what this needs to look like for me. But if you go super fast, it gets too chaotic and you give up on the process. So I would say go slow. And my last personal standard and post heard me say this a thousand times, don't beg people to work for you. I have had people who just started ghosting me in the past. They have personal life situations or whatever. And I'm like begging them to do the work. Listen, if the person, if the other freelancer is not working out, the contract labor is not working out, you just be like, hey, I see that your priorities have shifted. You haven't had time to get to this. We're moving this task to someone else. It's been great working with you. I wish you the best of luck. Like just make, just do that quickly. Don't beg people to work for you because if they don't make the effort to show up by their actions, it's just going to cause you frustration and resentment. And we're not going to do that. Questions on this before I move on? Do you resources for acquiring? I mentioned quickly higher and upward. I like the WP community groups. I have had great success because those are warm leads. I pay to be a part of post status. If you say in there, I'm looking for someone who does this and you get a referral back, it's a better lead than something cold. Also, the admin bar is another group that I've had a lot of success with lately. Being a part of, there's some agency building groups that I'm in. GoWP has a group, digital agency owners. I'll put some of these links at the end. And those have been really great conversations and really good resources when you do need people. Next step, what are you going to offer? We do this, we don't do that. That is okay. You need to get clear on what you do. You need to double down on your strengths and swap out the rest. You do not have to be all things to all people. And a client can respect you more and see you as a guide when you say very clearly, we don't offer that, but let me help you find an agency that does. Or you do need this. I really think you need some PPC work. We're not doing PPC, but I have another agency here in town that I know they do it really well. Let me get you in touch. Oh, you want to do this complicated thing I've never heard of. You know what? That's interesting. I haven't heard of that. Let me look into it and get back with you. You don't have to be all the things. And when you're transitioning from being a freelancer and you were just doing one thing and now you're thinking, I'm an agency. And the clients are going to start asking for things that were not in your initial scope of what you're offering. That's okay. You need to be clear about what you do. And instead of constantly shoring up what you don't do well, I would say become really good at what you do do well. Double down on your strengths. These are all, I mean, this is a two minute brainstorm of all the things we could be offering. Each one has its own pricing structure. It has its own way that you package it, the process and the way you complete it. There's a lot out there. Don't feel the pressure to do all the things. Partnerships, swapping clients back and forth, sharing resources is another way to meet a client's need without drowning yourself in too much at once. But get super clear on your process. And I think someone told me, Nathan, are you speaking on process later? Okay, you're going to want to hear that too. Nathan's excellent about this. But here's a quick overview on creating that roadmap of this is the process. In the past, it was you. I know what I'm doing. I'm doing it every day. I'm slamming it out. Now it's okay, we're going to take the effort to get it out of your head. And we're going to put it on paper or video or checklist or bullet points, something. Here's what I do. Now you're going to get it out and out. Then someone else now, okay, I know how to do this. You're doing what I'm doing. So now it's not just me, you're doing it. And then you come to me and you'd be like, why do you do it this way and that way over here and over there? And you say, well, that's because five years ago, go daddy's screen, wouldn't let me through go this way. I had to go around that way. And then they say, well, it's not like that anymore. And you're like, yeah, but that's just how I've always done it. And they say, how about we do it this way and that way I can shave a whole hour off of this process. Boom, you're making it better for me. So that is the path that you want to be on from stuck in your head to handing it off to now they are literally suggesting ways to make it better. This process doesn't have to be painful. If you haven't used loom, loom is a lot of fun. It's a video, a screen sharing service. And I know there's other ones out there. Make a video of you doing the process and record your activities. They have AI built in that will spit back at you an outline of what you just said in your video. This doesn't have to be that hard. You do it, you get an outline, you refine it, and then I keep it very high level. We made mistakes of getting super granular with detailed screenshots and click on this, then click on that. Then guess what? Five minutes after I finished this process, whatever tool I was using changed their interface. And my whole process is worth crap. So I need to keep it high level and then keep make it very accessible to my team. And then I would need to hire intelligent enough people that they can deviate from what was in that process because the interface has slightly changed and they can figure out where to go because they understand the main thing. And then I need to review this on the yearly at least set up some sort of a recurring pattern. And then you need to delegate ownership because ultimately you should not be building these and maintaining them going forward. The people doing them should be building them and maintaining going forward. We use loom to record videos. It's super easy. Now you've got a video and a bullet point list and you're off to the races. We used to store them in Google Docs, which is a total nightmare because it's like a pit. You make a doc and it's just buried in there and nobody can ever find it again. Navigating Google Docs and then searching, it's just clunky. So I wanted working documents. I wanted the impression that this is constantly improving. So we've moved to Notion. We really enjoy Notion and Airtable to keep our processes front and center. And I can create a database. We can filter. We can list in a table view who's responsible for each one. We can just see all of our SOPs are up front. A couple of books I would recommend on this. E-Meth Revisited is an oldie but a goodie. And then a lot of what I'm talking about today is coming out of the book Traction where they talk about the entrepreneurial operating system, EOS. And it is big picture, but they have such tangible ways to build your agency. And so those are all resources here that will help you build your processes. Let's talk a slight, I want to talk a minute about money. This is the whole thing. There's lots of talks about it. There's a lot more that could be said. I just want to highlight a few quick things. You have to think about money as you're growing because you now have the, your labor is going to be your biggest expense. And you need to make sure you're pricing accordingly to do that. A couple of things. Learn the basics of it. There's a couple books, Profit First really helped me. There's another one, Simple Numbers. It has a long title. That one really helped me just get some basic understanding of finance if this is not your strong suit. Learn how to read your reports and then back to EOS system. They recommend a score card where you define which numbers that you're tracking every week and what it looks like. It's been very helpful. Also focus on MRR. Think through, back when you're choosing your product offerings, think through what is recurring? What is recurring? And what can I do that's going to come in consistently every single month? That is, that is the foundation of a successful agency. Also think about your team members billable rate and percent profitability. So if you bring on somebody as a contract labor and they are, their time, what they're doing is directly billable to your clients, that is a no-brainer man. The more you work, the more I bill. But that person's going to have meetings with you. There's going to have project management time. There's going to be stuff. Okay, let's make sure we can accommodate that. But then you bring on an admin person and this person is doing internal processes, maybe bookkeeping. You're not billing that time to the client. So each role will have a different target of how much needs to be directly billable to the client. What percentage does that need to look like for me to stay profitable? It was very helpful once I made a few spreadsheets around that to see where everyone's going and I can track that. And then I mentioned this before, fund extra time to build your team. Make sure that you have set aside money to do this. You need a whole team, by the way, on the finance, you need a bookkeeper. You need someone because it's going to get more complicated when it's not just you and you're not a freelancer anymore. It's going to get more complicated. You need someone with that skill, don't waste your time doing it yourself, get a good person. You need a CPA. This person's going to be more focused on your taxes, maybe there's some overlap here, but my CPA doesn't talk to me very often. Maybe I need a new one, but he does a good job to come tax time. So I also have a virtual CFO. You might also hear a fractional CFO. This person I meet with quarterly. I could meet with a monthly. He reviews my books and he and I have big picture. He's like, Hey, I noticed last month you had XYZ project in a build like this. And you know, how is that going to continue forward? You might want to consider this. I went to him, you know, a couple of times, okay, I'm thinking about bringing this person on. They're going to be at this rate and they're going to do this kind of work. Does that make sense in my numbers? I can have these high level conversations. My CFO doesn't, he just cares what the tax liability is. He's not really giving me a translation of how I should be using the money that I do have. So this person has been invaluable to me. I found a really good one. I'm in Florida. If you want a reference, you can talk to me later. And then having a business coach, I have been through several people that I've worked with. And that has been very helpful because in the numbers, but then also in the direction of the business. So I see this as a whole valuable team. And these people, you know, they're not on staff. I'm not big enough to have a CFO. So the option to have a part times, virtual CFO look at it from time to time is it's been invaluable. And you can find those things out there. Do we have a question? I have something to share with you. People compromise on the cost for the bookkeeper. Bookkeeper is a very assisted person. My wife is the bookkeeper's last year, she is the book what you say. And she has on plans. And the customers have forgot to send invoices. They get double paid. The clients don't even know they are being invoices. Why? Wow. So the comment was the valuable nature of a bookkeeper. And that you can, you want someone else's eyes on your books and catching discrepancies like double paying invoices and things like that. And yeah, bookkeeping is a big deal. And if it's done right every month, it's no big deal come tax time. Nothing needs to be scary because it's just like, here's the report, we did it every single month, we're all good to go. And you can run a report at any time and know where you stand. I use zero. Zero is an option if you don't like QuickBooks, which I don't. But QuickBooks is a standard. So I'm not saying QuickBooks is bad. So if you use QuickBooks, that's great. But I've enjoyed zero. I enjoy the interface. I literally have clients, once I send them invoices say, what, how did you send me the invoice? It's so nice. It's so easy to pay. And so I'm like, that's a win. So I like zero. So I'm just mentioning that there. But again, you do you whatever works, but definitely don't skimp on the bookkeeping. Aaron, I hired a CPA that could deal with zero. That was like a requirement. My CFO is from a different company. And their team is exclusively zero. So it is becoming a thing. Stateside, it comes out of Australia, New Zealand, I don't remember. Anyways, so it is, it's taken a minute to be more Americanized, but they've had some investment and so it has improved. But you're right. If you are like, I have a CPA and my CPA wants me in QuickBooks and you're kind of stuck. So that is a conversation you need to have. I went the other way. I was like, I went and looked for a CPA that could deal with zero. All right, briefly on the legal. Again, I mentioned putting everything in writing. Here's just some things we put in writing. Put your proposals in your contract. This is, this is with your clients. Get that stuff in writing. Don't, don't handshake it or hey, yeah, quick phone conversation. I'm going to plug monster contracts has been a great option there. If you want to check that out. That's Nathan's product. And it's a great starting place to say, these are the things that need to be in my contract. Team agreements, bringing on contractors, have stuff in writing. The big things that are in my team agreement, that NDA you're going to work for me. There's going to be some agreement of privacy about my clients content and my content. You're going to have access to passwords. They're going to be in your system that needs to be in there. Another big thing that I have in there is a non solicitation, which means you cannot go around me to the client and be like, Hey, I've been doing this stuff for you through Karina. Listen, I'll just do it for you directly and it'll be cheaper. No, we're not playing that. And you're not going to solicit my team away from me either. So it's in there. And then the other big thing is ownership. You're contracting for me and I own the work product. So get some legal help setting that up. Check out monster contracts. Both of those could be covered through that background checks. I don't always do background checks until it's someone's core to my team. So I have like a core team and then like, you know, as needed team, I got my whole list of people that I can reach out to. My core team, yeah, I ran background checks on them and they have to sign, you know, the permission for me to do that and I use the service. It's not, this is not very hard, it's like 25 bucks. It's really not that hard. And then also what are the security policies? This week, I'm going to grab my water. This week, my family is dealing with a situation where our, a cell phone company has been, our account has been hacked. We are the victims of something called SIM swapping. So you can Google that. It's ugly. I never even heard about it till this week. And now we are in danger of all of our numbers being hijacked and Xfinity Mobile can do nothing about it. I've spent multiple hours talking to support people. So we are literally porting all our numbers away tomorrow to Verizon just because they have protection in place. And we have to protect our account. We've frozen all our bank account. It's gotten ugly. Well, here's the, the way it works is you get onto the phone, they hijack my phone number, send it to their device with a new SIM card. And then they're going to do forgot password, which is going to get all the two factor authentication codes are going to go to their phone and boom, they're into all my accounts. Well, how many apps are on my phone tied to the business? How many of my team members have apps on their phones tied to my business? Maybe they're logging in to one password. We like one password. We left last past last year after that debacle. So, you know, maybe they're logging in to my, my, my admins logging into my bank accounts. Not that she has the app on the phone, but she has access through her email to that login. So when I started, when you think it through, man, you got a team, you're not just securing yourself anymore, you're securing everybody. What's your policy and what, how your team's passwords look? If you record to my team, you get an email address at OpenSky agency. You don't get to, I'm not sending permission to access my stuff to your personal Gmail, because if you and I part ways, all I do is turn off your email and you are out. So think that through. Have some security policies in place. There was a question up in the corner. I think it was called accurate. Yeah. And then recently, I just, my next point here is insurance. I just switched insurance companies. I was with Hiscox and then in the state of Florida, I got a nice email saying they no longer cover anything cyber related last year. And I was like, oh, that's fun because that's what I do. So I got my insurance broker Brightway, if you're interested. And I don't know, I don't know the legality of state to state. They've done well, they shop our house insurance. But I said, do you do business? They're like, absolutely. And they found me a new insurance that covers professional liability, errors in admission, plus cyber and technical issues, something more specific to what we do with the rise of fraud out there and access to our clients stuff. I mean, I'm on client stripe accounts for integration reasons. I am in, I'm like in all the things. I have to secure that data liability wise. And then I got to cover myself with good insurance. Well, we switch, we're switching to US Li, which gives us great technical and cyber insurance coverage. And I just got an email this week that they now offer background checks. So I'm not sure if I'll, I haven't used them yet, but that's another thing. There's options out there and it's not that expensive. And then how are you going to secure your client content and make sure you liability doesn't pass on to you as your clients sending you photos. And who knows where the heck they curated them. And now we're getting letters saying from lawyers saying this photo is copyrighted and it's on use on your website and you're in trouble. So we need to know as an agency that we have policies in place on how we receive photos, how do we receive content is his plagiarized content. I have a client who likes to copy his competitor's websites and send me the content tell me to use it. So you know, I when you have to have some policies in place, get everything in writing, cover yourself legally, protect your team and protect yourself from your team, protect your clients and protect yourself from your clients. Yes. So we sure. That, well, that's a great question. The question was, how am I securing things? We use a password manager that also enables two factor authentication through there and we can share an individual login or an entire vault of client access, depending who needs it. The one I like is called one password. There's another one. What'd you say? Big. Oh yeah, bit word. I was like, there's another one that we value a bit word. It is another good one. Last pass had some security issues last year. I would not recommend anyone start clean with them if you haven't already chosen one. And my last point is culture. Yay, we went into business for ourselves. We built our own team and we did it for a reason. And now we get to sit the culture of where we work. So if you've ever worked somewhere toxic, guess what? It's up to you now what this is like. I love the piece of culture because I love the team building process. That's why there's so much more that can be said about being an agency. But today I'm really focusing on the people because I love the people side of it. And sometimes we don't talk about the joy that it is to have a team working with us. This is what culture is. I heard this the other day and I thought, this is brilliant. It's your internal reputation. Your culture is not something you get to say, this is our culture. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Ask your team. What are they saying about working for you? That's what your culture is. But you get to help set it. First of all, define your values and then celebrate it when you see them. If your team member does something that is right on point with what you want to be about. Celebrate that. Celebrate that in front of the whole team. Make it a big deal. Celebrate your people when they do things right. Celebrate their ideas. I had a contractor in Romania say, hey, I know you have me doing this, this and this. I looked into it. You might want to also consider doing that and that. I was like, that's actually great. Let me take that to the client. The client loved it. We're building it now. In front of the whole team, hey, we have this great idea come from Adrian. He did this and this and this. That's something that I can celebrate in front of everybody. Change your language. This also sets the tone. Bo actually called me out on this at one point because when I was just me doing everything, all my client relationships were through me and all my conversations were me. I will do this. I will get back with you. Then we changed and we started to pivot to we. Let me get with the team. We'll let you know as soon as it's done, but you know what that does? It tells the team you are part of this and it's not just me trying to hide you behind the scenes. Start using the we language. Honor the live stories. My favorite thing is Monday morning team meetings. We all chat about our weekends. We remember what each other are about. I have one girl working with me. She is an artist and she has gotten a residency at a gallery down in St. Augustine and we get to hear how your piece is going. Hey, I'm working on this. My new line is going to be this and that and we're celebrating that with her. I have had people who have had deaths in the family. We're honoring that. We're sending care packages. We are celebrating winds in the family, kids doing special things, but then I also have to honor people's privacy levels. I got team members that don't want to talk about their family. That's okay. You honor that, but you still continue to make them feel included. Force yourself. If you're a task oriented person like I am, it might be a discipline to force yourself to come off task and see the people in front of you. I was talking just this week with one of my team members and she seemed stressed and I was like, hey, real quick, jump on video. I need to do this, this, and this, and this. She's like, okay. Then I had to stop myself because her body language had changed because we're on video and I have a video on rule. I don't want to be talking to black screens all day. Just kill me. We're not doing that. We're turning our videos on. I'm looking at her and I had to stop myself because I was on point and I had to be like, are you two okay today? I have a migraine and this and that was happening with the kid, but I'll get to this. Hey, what do you need? What do you need? Then you can be responsive in the moment. That builds culture in your team. That makes them feel a part of the team even if you're dealing with contractors who are not full-time W2 employees. You have to be intentional if you're dealing with a remote team. We got to step up our game. We got to think outside the box. It's a little bit easier when we're all sitting in the same office. I mean, we were always remote, but I remember when the pandemic hit, we were like, we're going to have a Zoom Christmas party and I sent everybody hot chocolate bombs so that we could all get on video together and drink our hot chocolate together at our Zoom Christmas party. I could try to make that effort. On our birthdays, I do social posts and we celebrate them within the Slack and we send a gift. What does that look like with a remote team? I was like, gift cards. How boring. First year, everybody got Starbucks. Second year, I was like, okay, what else can I do? Everybody got Amazon. Next year, okay, I got to think better. Gift-giving is a learned expression for me. It's not my level of language, so I work on it. So what else can I do? I found a couple of things. Spoonful of Comfort sends gift boxes that I had several team members get COVID. We sent Spoonful of Comfort gift boxes that had chicken noodle soup. It was all done up really nice. Cookies and a mug and all this. It was nice. Then it's like, okay, we're going to take it up a level. I just discovered on Goody, it's fun. You can literally send, and I'm going to use this for client gifts too. You can choose all different levels. They can even swap out the gift that they didn't like and they never see the price point. They just see other eligible gifts for what level at that level. It's a really cool website. I use Stirred by Hand, which is a smaller company of somebody I know who makes handmade salted caramels. They're so delicious and they use it to raise funds for adoption in orphan care, which is in line with my values. I send those out as client gifts and team gifts. Then I had a team member say to me, thank you so much for the delicious caramels. I'm sure they're delicious. I didn't eat them because I'm diabetic. I knew that. You win some, you lose some. It's okay because you made the effort. You do something different next time. But do find ways to celebrate your people even if they're remote. What do you do for international? That's a good question. You really have to get creative. I send caramels international and customs didn't let them through. So I'm working on that. I am definitely because it's true. It gets more complicated if they're remote and even more complicated if they're international. Sometimes they actually have a local online ticket like Amazon Phoenix in that country. That's a great point. For example, for birthdays this year, I was like, everybody's going to get baked goods. Have anyone heard of crumble cookie? Oh my gosh, they are the best. Everybody's getting crumble. Then three of my contractors have no local crumble in their area. I was like, dang it. Then I'm like, fresh market will deliver a cake. I did that. It is a little bit of effort, but the appreciation on the other side that you saw me, you made some effort, and not everybody's love languages gifts. There's other ways. There's words of affirmation, like I said, celebrating them. Celebrate your team in front of your clients and let them hear you doing it. Talk them up. That's a big, big part of this. Let me just say one more thing on that. When you make that transition from me to we, your clients probably hired you. You probably made the sale. They're probably your clients. Now you got these people that you want to put in between you and the client. Talk to the project manager, not me. Well, they're used to talking to you. Back your team. If they make a mistake, then just go with it. Back them. Hey, don't be like, oh yeah, I had someone do it. He messed up. Let me get on that and fix it for you. Don't do that. Don't talk about your team like that to the client. Say, yeah, I saw, we did that. There wasn't quite understanding, but I think I know what you want now. I'm going to clean that up, and then the team, we're going to make that right for you. We're going to make that right for you. Back them, even when they do it in a way that was not the way you would have necessarily done it, and celebrate them in front of the team. Like I told my clients, hey, my one team member found this great idea. What do you think? Yeah. I just wanted to touch on subculture. Dare to Lead by Brene Brown is being, is a good resource. Yeah, she's excellent. Yeah. Here's a couple other resources. This is the end. I just recently joined Microagency Academy. That is a referral link, but if you use it with that code, you get 30% off your first three months. So I'm just putting that out there. That is, that is literally for our sized businesses. Looking for guidance, it's coaching with Chris Lemma and Pete Perry. It's sponsored by GoWP. So I'm just putting that out there. These are the Facebook groups and communities, Slack communities that I have had the most value from in the last year. I'm constantly curating new ones if you're interested in that. And then I don't know if we're out of time, but yeah. If you have any more questions, you can come find me, but enjoy your journey. And thank you guys.