Episode 163 – A Chat With Tom Finley

Show Notes

Silence Commentary, from Cassandra Decker

Tom’s Socials:https://twitter.com/tomfinleyhttps://wptoots.social/@tomfinley

Websites / Projects:https://prufcreative.comhttps://tomfinley.cohttps://dcbeer.com

Episode Transcript

Topher: Hey, everyone. My name is Topher.  

Nyasha: And my name is Nyasha.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. Before we get going, we want to thank our sponsors at Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand. They have some new tools for ECommerce that really make them stand out from other options. WooCommerce automated testing, sales performance monitor, and plug-in performance monitor give you the data you need to stay powerful and profitable. And they’re free with every Nexcess plan.

Okay, our guest today is Tom Finley. Welcome.

Tom: Thanks for having me. 

Topher: Thanks for being here. This is the first one of these that I’ve done that I did not know the guest. Ny was the one who brought you here. So I know basically nothing about you except you have a longboard hanging on your wall.

Tom: Yeah. Which I don’t ride anymore. Out of frame, I’ve got a couple guitars that I don’t play anymore. Why not mount them on the wall like trophies, right?

Topher: Right.

Tom: Where do I start?

Topher: Where do you live? What do you do?

Tom: I live in Washington, DC. Well, in the general area. I should be careful about how I say that because DC natives get really offended when you say you live in DC and you don’t. But I live over the river in Virginia. I’ve been here since about 2017. 

Early on in the pandemic, prior to the pandemic, in fact, I worked as a marketer in in-house marketing team for telecom. I did WordPress work there but it was pretty far afield of the path that I had been pursuing prior to that, and I had just sort of hit my limit in terms of corporate culture and a lot of the stuff you tend to encounter. So my plan was after my wedding in February of 2020, and my anniversary is tomorrow, my wonderful wife-

Topher: Oh, man! What a way to kick off the pandemic!

Nyasha: Ooh. congratulations.

Tom: Yeah. So we threw the biggest party right before the pandemic. My 40th birthday was also right before the pandemic started. The idea was that I would hit the ground running as soon as my birthday was over, starting my new agency. 

My niche is breweries and restaurants. So I chose sort of the exact vertical market to try to get my arms around. But, you know, so far things have been going really well. In the past year, I definitely have deepened my relationship with, I guess, what you consider the DC beer and hospitality scene. I’m really focused on sort of two communities: this local beer community and WordPress.

Within WordPress, I mean, you know, I have some limited interaction with you and Ny at MasterWP. I’m really interested in, so this makes some people bristle, but the modern WordPress trajectory, which is full site, right?

Topher: Yeah.