Hallway Chats

Evelyn is a strategist and designer for Design Powers, Nice Work, and Awesome Women Entrepreneurs. All three businesses utilize her creative expertise to assist clients and colleagues to connect and communicate their services to their desired target market.

Website | Awesome Women Entrepreneurs

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 72.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Evelyn Powers. Evelyn is a strategist and designer for Design Powers, Nice Work, and Awesome Women Entrepreneurs. All three businesses utilize her creative expertise to assist clients and colleagues to connect and communicate their services to their desired target market. Hello, Evelyn. Welcome to Hallway Chats.

Evelyn: Hello. How are you two?

Liam: Very well, thank you. Evelyn, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us more about yourself, please?

Evelyn: Originally from Florida, moved to Maryland as a young child. Attended and earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, “Hon,” and I now currently live in Arlington, Virginia with my hubby since 1990 and I’m a mom to a daughter who’s a junior and a son who’s a freshman in college.

Liam: That is awesome.

Evelyn: Is it? [laughs]

Liam: It is.

Tara: We say ‘awesome’ a lot on this podcast intentionally and not intentionally. Also, in full disclosure, Evelyn and I do work together quite a bit so it’s a thrill for me to have her on the show. She has been on this journey with us since we first started talking about this podcast and she’s been an inspiration to me because she has a radio show. So we’re really excited and honored to have her here in all of her professional capacities and also because she does work quite a bit with WordPress. Thanks for having us here. Tell us a little bit about what you do in– why don’t you start with whichever of the three businesses you want to talk about or if you just want to spend time talking about one of the mostly– go ahead and talk to us about your choice?

Evelyn: You know, since you guys obviously focus on WordPress– my background is graphic design as in print graphic design. But how I began to get more into the WordPress community is really probably about five, six years ago. Clients starting to ask me more about translating some of the stuff that I was doing in print design into for the web. I took a front-end web development class for general assembly and quickly decided that it really wasn’t something at my age that I was really interested in doing. Not that it wasn’t interesting, I just felt like it was sort of too tedious and that I kind of wanted to work more in terms of the digital strategies, the UX, that kind of part of web design and development. I got into WordPress because one with Tara and just other people that I was working with that just seemed to be the platform that most people were working on. I mean, that’s really how I got into it. What I do with it in my businesses is I basically now do discovery, the strategy, the design, the UX and then sometimes project management, depending up who it’s for and what I’m doing. Does that answer your question?

Tara: It totally answers my question. I’d like to ask you a little bit even though it’s not maybe specifically to WordPress but tell us about the organization that you founded and that you’re growing all across the country, Awesome Women Entrepreneurs?

Evelyn: Okay, that started out very organically with another mutual friend of Tara and I. Her name is Karen Bate and she had the idea that we all were women entrepreneurs and wouldn’t it be really fun to get all of us together just to kind of talk about our clients and what we did and things like that? I always like to call it like the book club without the book. We would drink wine and talk about our struggles and juggles and things like that because all of us have children as well. Over a two-year period, I started a WordPress blog and took pictures and was kind of like the branding person for these very, very informal monthly events that we would have. We called it Arlington Women Entrepreneurs. And then after about a two-year period, we really started to see how women were very, very invested and excited in these monthly events. We thought, you know, gosh, it seems like the timing is just ironic. Trump got elected and there’s sort of this whole zeitgeist right now of trying to empower women and being in a supportive women community that we would kind of take this energy and this idea and see if we could start chapters. First regionally, of which we did last year. And now we’re trying to do it on a more national level. WordPress has been pretty integral in it and it’s also been, for me– and Tara, of course, has heard all the total points. It’s been just a complete utter nightmare learning experience. [laughs] And part of it was based on the fact– as I said, when we started as a very informal club, it was just a WordPress blog pretty much. And then when we decided to try to do chapters, we made an assumption that, oh, wouldn’t it be great if every chapter had its sub-site? So I did a multi-site with a developer. We had a main site and then every chapter had a sub-site. It was hosted on WP Engine. Then when we tried to do sort of all the chapter admin rules, integrating WooCommerce, all the advanced calendar tickets, it just kind of wasn’t built as cohesively as it needed to be because the foundation was kind of in parts and we sort of did it as we went along. That’s really not how you can do a membership site. We launched this multi-site basically last January. By March, I was like, “Okay, this is not going to work. It’s not scalable, it’s not sustainable, it’s expensive, it’s a nightmare for me who’s not a front-end web developer to maintain. Things are just happening that are not a good experience for the user. Let’s just scrap it and start from scratch.” I kind of said, “You know what? Maybe WordPress is not the right platform. Maybe I’ll go a little bit down, let myself go down a rabbit hole and see what else is out there.” I did, it took about two months to look at association platforms, non-WordPress, different kinds of platforms that were out there. What I found was there is some really great closed-system platforms. If anyone’s interested, I’ll even give you some of the links for the show notes. But what happens is the company will bring you in and say, “Yeah, we’ll charge you 2500 bucks to set this membership site up.” But then the monthly fees are onerous. And then should the membership increase, the fees increase. So over time– and what I mean by over time, a two to three-year period, the investment that you make in a quality WordPress site actually winds up being a more economic way to go. Ultimately, I went back to WordPress and just decided to work with a company who is in the UK but they had sort of a specialty for membership sites. We’re still working out some of the kinks but I think– the site just launched last week but I think it’s going to come together much nicer than what we had eight months ago.

Tara: Yeah, I remember those sites are tricky.

Evelyn: They’re very tricky. There’s a lot of moving parts, especially in WordPress, I think the thing that’s the most trickiest is those chapter admin roles and being able to finesse and assign permissions and roles for the various kinds of people that need to have access to different kinds of information. Yeah, that was the big learning curve on that.

Liam: Yeah, membership sites are tricky, aren’t they? Every organization wants to run their membership workflows differently and so there’s no out of the box membership program. “We’ll get you there.” They all need tweaking and they all need modifications. The question is, where does that modification go? How does that come in together?

Tara: Yeah, you also have–

Evelyn: Let me just give you guys a quick plug though. This couple in UK, they run a website, WordPress site called Member Site Academy. It’s something that you join. Again, if you want, you can put it in the show notes. But I thought they do a phenomenal job of teaching people who run WordPress membership sites how to do it. They have all kinds of ideas. I’m not a member of it currently, but I actually am going to probably re-up in it because they do a phenomenal job and just really good resource. And if you guys wanted to talk to people that maybe aren’t in the US, I would definitely recommend them as a great speaker for another show.

Tara: Thanks for sharing that. That would be great. One thing I’ve noticed when I’ve done membership sites, it’s two things. One, you can’t predict everything that’s going to go wrong, and relayed to that is the amount of things that users will encounter when you open your website up to members who you haven’t trained to use the website. They inevitably are going to stumble upon a link or have some issue that you can’t replicate, that you couldn’t predict, and that’s a user error. A lot of times, you can even just boil it down to that. That’s really challenging because you can spend all this time setting everything up and then within days, the first days, some user is going to find some–

Evelyn: Caching. Let’s just take caching! [laughs] I mean, you can just knock your forehead to the wall plenty times that that rears its ugly head. Especially, that’s the thing that you love and you hate about WP Engine. They’re a phenomenal host but you’ve got to throw cash on them a lot. [laughs] But yeah, I’m always amazed and should never be amazed at the anomalies that people can find that you had no idea they were going to find.

Liam: Yeah, especially when you open it up to the members, it’s, “Oh, I didn’t know our website does that. Alright. Well, let’s have a look at that then, shall we?”

Evelyn: Every day is a learning experience. [laughs]

Liam: Evelyn, let me swing you around to one of our signature questions here. We’ve talked a little bit about your business and we’ve talked a little bit about Awesome Women Entrepreneurs. Within this milieu of different professional avenues that you’re pursuing. You mentioned your family as well and your children and living in Northern Virginia there. I want to ask you about your definition of success and how would you define success, be it personal, professional, or maybe a mix of both?

Evelyn: For me, success is simply to matter. I think that really everyone wants to feel like they make a difference and have value. I think I’m most fulfilled and most happy when I think that I have been able to help somebody or just that I matter to somebody, whether it’s personal or professional. And I honestly think that a lot of the world’s problems are because people don’t feel that they matter and they don’t feel like they’re getting treated with dignity or respected. And as emotional creatures, we need to matter. That to me is success. If I feel like I matter in whatever the particular instance is. It’s simply that day in and day out, honestly.

Tara: What do you do to work toward that definition of success? I really love that definition, by the way.

Evelyn: You know what I do? Honestly, and again, it’s another super simple thing. I smile a lot, I try to smile a lot, even when I don’t feel like smiling. I try to smile and I try to be nice to people that I think may not get people being nice to them. I do really try to practice that but I find that smiling is the easiest way– or making a little joke or humor or whatever, it’s the easiest way to make other people feel welcome and, again, feel like they matter. It’s not always easy to smile either. Sometimes you feel like, “Alright, I just got to smile because I’m really actually not happy right now. I gotta excite myself up.” It’s a really good internal mechanism for changing the zeitgeist or the feeling or whatever’s happening but it’s just a great way, I think, to try and go through the world is to be happy, to at least look happy, even when you’re not. [laughter]

Liam: I love the simplicity of to matter is success. What I wonder, your thoughts on how do we find the balance between wanting to matter but also knowing when it’s okay not to matter? Or if we don’t matter to somebody, not letting that affect our sense of self-worth?

Evelyn: There you go, I did kind of turn that around. I think that is success too, is that when you do do something and it’s not received in a way that you want it to be received to be able to move on. Having been a designer for 27 years, not everything that I’ve given to a client did they like. Early on, I’ve might hurt my feelings but I just think to myself, if we eventually get to something that achieves a goal, I’m not going to allow my ego to ruin that relationship and really these are just kind of small things in the scope of it. But yes, if something I did doesn’t matter to someone else, I just got to move on. That’s actually just maturity, too. And then even with my kids, a lot of times you think, well, it really is the perception of the other person, and that changes day to day and year to year, and sometimes you really matter to your children, and sometimes you don’t and you can’t let that sully how you move through the world.

Liam: I absolutely agree with that.

Evelyn: Yeah.

Liam: The opinions of the world, on one hand, are nice, but ultimately, I’d suggest they don’t matter. That’s more interjecting my views than yours.

Tara: And they matter to you even when you don’t feel like you matter to them. I think it’s part of it when it comes to children and family. I have a song going through my head right now because I’m a musical theatre person so there’s musical out there called Waitress written by Sara Bareilles and there’s a song in that everybody that’s called You matter to me. Look it up.

Evelyn: All right. Well, you go ahead and send me the link.

Liam: Hello, Baltimore. [laughter]

Tara: See? Another one. We were just doing WordCamp and I was explaining to Liam the meaning behind one of my tweets about Good Morning, Baltimore. Everything can relate back to musical theatre. Or I Love Lucy.

Evelyn: Charm City.

Tara: Yes. What would you say, Evelyn, is– maybe you’ve already touched on this a bit but is the biggest challenge in terms of mattering. What’s the biggest challenge that you’ve faced in endeavoring to matter.

Evelyn: Professionally, I think it’s always just to make sure that I don’t allow too many things to sully the solution. You know what I’m saying? Often, there’s so many different ways to go about solving a problem, it can become overwhelming. It’s really being able to have the confidence that this is the decision that I’m going to make today. If I’m working with Tara, I’ll consult Tara, or depending on who I’m working with and who I consult. And just knowing that it was the best decision that I could make with the information that I had, knowing that I can’t vacillate over it forever. I have to make a decision. And maybe in the long run like that multi-site. That’s the perfect thing. When we made our decision, we had all our reasons why we made it, it turned out to not be the right decision. I quickly pivoted. Did we lose time and money? Absolutely. But did I learn a tremendous amount out of that whole experience? You know, I can’t say that I would want to repeat that, but I did glean some insights that I would not have had had I not made that particular decision at that time. That’s really kind of how I go about making professional and personal decisions is thinking, there’s nothing that you decide at this moment that you can’t pivot or undo and you just move on. And if it’s a wild success, then, yay. [laughs] If it’s not, it’s like, alright, well I gave it the best shot I could do. That matters, that’s really all you can do is do your best as much as possible, which I do feel I do try to prepare as much as I can within reason for every situation. I don’t really try to fly on the seat of my pants too much because I do think preparation is one of the hallmarks of quality decisions and a good job. I do think you have to prepare and you have to research and you have to make sure you get exercise, eat well, sleep, those kinds of things. But preparation–

Tara: Where does that approach come from, Evelyn? Do you think that focus on preparation? I often think of creative artists as being more, what did you say, fly by the seat of your pants type of people. To what do you attribute your focus on preparing?

Evelyn: Definitely art school was– when I went to art school, I can remember my drawing teacher saying, “You need to do a 15-hour drawing of trees.” And I remember I was like, “How do you know if I’m going to do a 15-hour drawing of trees?” But darn it, if he didn’t know, and then I started to see, wow, I can tell people who spend 15 hours on their drawing and people who spent five. I could tell. In high school, I had a couple of really, really excellent English teachers. Same thing. They would say, “You need to put the time in how you craft and construct your paragraphs.” And whenever I tried to do it really quickly, I could tell. But if I sat down and I did it, and I really gave myself the time to do it correctly, I was proud of myself. It really is an internal thing that I know when I prepare and I get out there and I feel like I did the best that I could with the time that I had, because we don’t always have a lot of time, I’m just happy with myself. I may not be the best to someone else, but it’s the best that I can do.

Tara: I appreciate that very much and I am definitely not that way.

Evelyn: I wouldn’t say that at all.

Tara: Would you say there are some people who can get away with that? Are those the ones that would come into the test and after hardly studying, they would be able to just accomplish something with much less preparation. Do you think that there’s a personality style or a type of person who needs more preparation than another?

Evelyn: I think it depends on the task. Like, let’s say you’re a really good talker and you go on to a sales presentation and you have to negotiate, and you kind of know what you’re talking about but you don’t really know what you’re talking about. It sort of depends on your audience. You make it that great contract. If you’re talking about a highly technical thing and you don’t know what you’re talking about and you go into a room with people who know what you don’t know, then yeah. Everything is context in content. Yeah, I think everyone can fly by the seat of their pants some of the time, but you’ve got to know your high ends and know what you’re getting into. I do know sometimes, I’ve been in situations where– for instance, Tara knows this story. Very first WordPress site that I sold was way above my head. Luckily, though, the client didn’t know that. That’s where I could fly by the seat of my pants. I got the job but then I quickly realized, I was like, “Okay, you got that job, now you’ve got to execute that job. Now you’re going to have to prepare.” At some point, the preparation either comes in prior or after but you have to prepare and research. if you can’t do it, find the people who can.

Liam: Speaking of finding people who can, I want to spin around to our other signature question. It has to do with advice. Evelyn, what’s the most valuable piece of advice that you’ve ever been given or found and implemented into your life with great success?

Evelyn: Well, I have two. One was my mother-in-law said to me when I had little kids, she said, “You can do it all but not at the same time.” And that really helped me because I was struggling. I had my own business and I had two little kids that are very close in age. My second child cried a lot and I was kind of at my wit’s end. Just hearing that, because I am a driven person. I was like, “Oh, I’m failing on all fronts.” But hearing that kind of gave me the permission to, “All right, I’m going to do the best I can with what I can at this moment. Even though I don’t feel like I’m doing what I want to be doing in some fronts, I can do it later. Then the other little piece of advice actually was a woman that I used to live with right out of high school, she was a friend’s mom. She said, “Watch what you ask for because you just might get it.” [laughter] And I always thought, watch what you ask for because if you get it, then you got to run with it. I kept those things in mind and basically, they’re both– you can do what you want to do but sometimes it may not be a good time, and then other times, you just run with it. Or don’t do it. [laughter] Now, disqualify things is a good thing too.

Tara: Yeah. That first bit of advice really can relate to multi-tasking which we’ve talked about with some guests before and which I talk about a lot and enjoy doing. But it is a good reminder that you can’t do two things well at once. There’s proven evidence of that. But certainly, I keep trying.

Evelyn: And as women, too, maybe a little bit more than men, because we kind of get more of the child-rearing role. Just again, speaking in generalities, but I think we’re very brutal on ourselves when we try to be a mom and work. Whereas, guys, I think– and again, just generalizing, are a little bit able to compartmentalize that. It helps me because here it is, my kids are gone now. I can spend every breathing moment that I want on work. Of course, I don’t but that’s not something you can do when you have little kids. Luckily, I’m living along enough life that actually what my mother-in-law said is true. You can do it all, you might not just be able to do it all at the same time. I do think it’s a good advice really for anyone that sometimes you just can’t do everything all at the same time. And give yourself a break, that’s basically what that says.

Tara: Yeah, and have patience.

Evelyn: Have patience, yeah, exactly. We’re all very impatient with ourselves, very impatient. It’s kind of sad we beat ourselves up. [laughs] Really, it’s kind of like, just chill.

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: Patience is a difficult skill-set to master, isn’t it? We want things today, now, or a week or two. Our 90-day plan and then it all begins. And 90 days is a blink of an eye in a lot of ways. Depending on what we’re working on, it can take years to make, can’t it?

Evelyn: And sometimes, Tara knows, things happen in your family that might just kind of blow up the best laid plans. I had just a situation in my extended family where my entire spring kind of got cannibalized by a leadership position that I had to take on. There was no one else to do it and I took it on and it was four intense months of dealing with it. And I’m glad I was able to be able to get what I got done but yeah, did other things suffer? Absolutely.

Tara: Well, I think that comes back to your definition of success in a way also because when your goal is to matter, you have to make choices about where you want to matter at that point in time.

Liam: And that’s not always easy to do when there’s competing challenges, whether it’s work or extended family, or even immediate family, depending on what the needs of those inner households are. That can definitely be a problem and I very much get that. Alas, speaking of time and priorities, we are out of time.

Evelyn: That was so quick. [laugh]

Liam: It was very, very quick. Before we say goodbye to you, would you please share where people can find you online, Evelyn?

Evelyn: Probably my best web presence right now is Awesomewomen.org and also the joint venture that I have with Tara, which is Getnicework.com. [laughs]

Tara: Yeah. Thank you so much for joining us, it was really fun to have you on the show. I love your perspective and thanks for sharing your advice and your thoughts with us.

Evelyn: Well, thank you, Liam and Tara.

Liam: Thanks, Evelyn. Bye-bye.

Tara: Bye-bye.

Evelyn: Take care, bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Malcolm has done a little of everything with WordPress and is currently the co-founder of PressTitan, a premium managed WordPress posting service.

Website | Press Titan

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 71.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Malcolm Peralty. Malcolm suggests that he is potentially known and forgotten in the WordPress community. He has done a little of everything with WordPress and is currently the co-founder of PressTitan, a premium managed WordPress posting service. Hi, Malcolm.

Malcolm: Hello, hello.

Tara: Hey, Malcolm, we’re glad you’re here. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Malcolm: Sure. I’ve been using WordPress since 0.72. So not 1.72 or 2.72 but basically since late 2003 and like the intro said, I’ve done a little bit of everything. I kind of fell into this whole thing. I didn’t really expect to be doing this as my career. I was going towards computer networking and plugging computers and kind of fell into professional blogging for a little while and then taken care of websites. It’s kind of grown and moved from there and now here I am today, a little over a year into co-founding PressTitan. It’s been a crazy route.

Tara: Where are you located?

Malcolm: In Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Between Ottawa and Toronto. I usually say just outside of Toronto because that’s pretty much the only city that anyone outside of Canada seems to know so that’s what I usually say, but yeah, it’s Kingston. Really nice waterfront city.

Tara: Cool. Glad to have a Canadian on the show.

Liam: There’s a nice campus out there.

Malcolm: Yeah, Kingston University, right? Queens, yeah, Queens is an amazing university up here, yeah.

Tara: So 2003, is that when you said you started?

Malcolm: Yeah.

Tara: and were you in school at the time or were you in fifth grade? [laughs]

Malcolm: No. I was just outside of college, it was the height of the tech crash. I had my computer networking diploma in hand and there was really no jobs out there and I had done a little bit of PHP programming when I was in college and I decided that I had a lot that I wanted to say, of course, as every youth hopefully does. And I said a lot of horrible things on my first blog and found WordPress and fell in love with it. It just kind of spiraled out of control from there.

Tara: Well, you look young. You look like you would have been very young to be in that early version of WordPress but that’s cool. What were you blogging about? Was it tech stuff?

Malcolm: Mostly. I was covering laptops and cameras and what was happening in WordPress. A couple of my favorite sites have been purchased by this guy Jacob Gore. He came along and he purchased CSS Vault and Forever Geek, a bunch of these blogs that I was a huge fan of. So I reached out and I was like, “I want to interview you for my personal blog.” And I was expecting no response or him to be like, “Go away, kid.” Kind of thing. And he’s like, “Sure. Why?” I was like, “You just bought all these sites that I like.” And we got to talking and he said, “How would you like to run these sites? I bought them and I don’t really know how to do this.” That was kind of my first foray into professional blogging and how I started this whole thing.

Tara: That’s a cool story.

Liam: What was the turnaround between the initial email and you on the clock managing sites trying to figure out how to do it?

Malcolm: Probably three or four months from start to finish.

Liam: So not a ton of time?

Malcolm: No, no. It was funny, the reason that he ended up hiring me on full-time, he wanted to hire me on part-time at first. That was his whole idea. And I was trying to balance how I was going to work at Future Shop, which was Canadian Best Buy that no longer exists. I was working at Future Shop as a tech person and writing on the side. I actually had two part-time jobs. I was working Darron Rowse, who’s ProBlogger, a lot of people know him as ProBlogger, on his technology sites. He had a whole bunch of laptop blogs and camera blogs way back in the day that were really just about getting traffic to convert with Google AdSense. I was writing on his stuff while he was going on a vacation, and I was working part-time for Jacob. And when Jacob found out Darron was interested in hiring me on, he hired me on full-time and yeah, I was lucky that way. I was making probably around 3$ an hour when I started blogging full-time as a paid position. [laughs] I wasn’t rolling in the money or anything like that but I loved every minute of it. I was working long hours and publishing dozens of articles a day and just loving it.

Tara: Yeah, working long hours and loving it. Those things can go hand in hand, I guess.

Malcolm: Sometimes.

Tara: Tell us about what you’re doing now? You’re doing some hosting, it sounds like. Is that also long hours that you’re loving?

Malcolm: Sometimes. Thankfully, I’ve developed a lot of skills in WordPress over the decade and a half. So I find it pretty easy to do 99% of things I need to do. We currently only have about a hundredish websites that we’re hosting. Not massive like WP Engine or anything like that but enough that we can spend personal time with each and every customer we have, which is really great. I kind of fell into that as well. A colleague of mine, David Krugg, his wife was pregnant and it was a one-man show at the time. It wasn’t even PressTitan, it was just him kind of freelancing, hosting these sites. And with the baby on the way, he was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I need someone I can trust to do this for me while I’m on maternity leave. Who do I know that can do that?” So he contacted me and I said, “Well, I really only want to do this if we’re going to go 50/50 and actually make a real go of this.” At that time, I was ready to settle into a career for the long haul. I kind of bounced around, I had lots of jobs that were one-year, two-year, three-year, and I really wanted something that was going to last for long time. I figured that the only way I was going to have that is if I build it myself. It just seemed like the perfect opportunity at the time and so that’s what we’ve done.

Tara: There’s a lot of competition in that space?

Malcolm: Very much so, yeah. Thankfully, after the first couple of people that David Krugg had on his list of freelance clients, everything else has been good referral. We’ve grown entirely from referral. No advertising, no complex marketing beyond that. We’re kind of getting to the point now where we’re thinking about expanding into third or fourth person because it’s just the two of us still. So we’ve been starting to market a little bit more and try to figure out that space. I know it’s difficult. I’ve worked with WP Engine before on some projects for them and I have a good understanding of how they do what they do. And I’ve been very fortunate in my career to pick up a lot of unique set of skills. I think you can go to places and get a lot of package support for WordPress and you can go to a lot of places and get managed hosting. I think it’s a little bit more rare to find both with one billing cycle or one company that you can work with. That’s where we’ve hit that little bit of a unique selling point, a little bit of a unique stride.

Tara: I think about people who have hosting companies or who work for hosting companies as being sort of like doctors, especially like an obstetrician type of doctor where you’re on call and you have to get up at 2:00 in the morning when you get the call that the baby’s on the way or something bad has happened to someone. How do you handle that with two people and 100 websites? I imagine– and not necessarily the fault of your servers. Things happen, whatever. Somebody clicks an update and the site crashes, and they’re panicked and they need to contact support. Do you have the phone ringer on 24/7 and you have to get up at 2:00 in the morning when that happens?

Malcolm: Thankfully, Krug is in the Philippines right now so we’re on an exactly 12-hour schedule difference. When it’s noon here, it’s midnight there and vice versa.

Liam: That’s convenient.

Malcolm: It’s super convenient. He’s thinking about moving to Colorado and I keep trying to convince him not to because it’s just been so nice to have that kind of ability to bounce things back and forth whenever we’re sleeping our away. But yeah, we’ve had to get up in the middle of the night multiple times before. And it’s just part of the job. When you balance out the time you spend during the day dealing with that emergency stuff, it’s not really a big deal and it’s worth it.

Liam: So I want to go back a little bit and just talk again about getting into business with your colleague where he came to you and said his wife was pregnant and he was excited about that. “Can you help with this, this, and this?” And you said, “Yes, and here’s how I see it coming together.” Again, there’s not a lot of time. At the most, it was nine months that you had to figure out how to do business together and if he’s anything like me, he probably sweated it out for a month and a half or two before he realized, I’ve got to get on this and fix something.” Talk a little bit of how that came together because I’m interested in that personal dynamic.

Malcolm: Sure. We’ve known each other for going on 10 or 12 years. We’ve worked together on different projects here and there before for other companies and we’ve just been kind of like ships passing in the night over and over again always going, “We should really do something together.” And never really syncing up for the right time. I’ve always been kind of– if you look at my employment history, I’ve been very fortunate that I’ve always been employed. I’ve always had another career, another job, another company that I’ve been able to work with and learn from. I’ve never really kind of wanted to take those kinds of big risks before and say, “Let’s do it on our own.” This was just kind of the perfect time and kind of a lucky ask. When he asked me, we had maybe six weeks to figure it all out and what that would look like in a partnership agreement and introducing me to the few freelance clients that he had, and determining what name, and coming up with the logo, reassuring businesses, and all that stuff. The complexities there– I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur or a business owner. So being kind of thrown into that has been kind of ridiculous in a sense because Tara, you mentioned that I look young. In business, I feel very young, I feel very much like a six-year-old playing with little cars with a friend of mine and saying, “Hey, let’s sell these cars to a kid down the block.” I don’t really have a deep understanding of business and neither does David Krug, that’s probably been the biggest learning curve for us. It’s not been the technology and the hosting and the WordPress, it’s been understanding business.

Tara: Yeah. And as you grow, that will change even more as you become more– you’re hiring more people and doing human resources and benefits and all those things, too. You said you never thought of yourself as an entrepreneur. How do you like it? It sounds like this is a challenge. You’re not necessarily doing the tech stuff as much as your business grows, like I’m saying now.

Malcolm: Yeah, there have been points where we’ve had to do some cross-training between Krug and I because I quickly gravitate towards technology. It’s something that I’m very comfortable with and it’s very easy for me. Sometimes, he kind of got caught out at a loop on all these different things. And then six weeks would go by and he would go, “Wait, how do we do this now? What is the procedure for moving this site from one server to ours? What did you do? What tool is this? Where did this come from?” There’s been a lot fo cross-training between the two of us to kind of keep up-to-date on that. I’ve been kind of pushing like, “You do the invoicing, I don’t want to do the invoicing.” Now, he’s had the cross-training on that to make sure that I understand how he processes invoices and things like that. But we’re very fortunate in that, again, because we have such a limited client base. We can really dive deep into all these different things. If I worked– Some weeks, I’ll work a 20-hour work week, some weeks I’ll work a 60-hour work week and in the end, it mostly balances out. I mean, my wife kind of makes sure of that. But yeah, we get to spend as much time as we want on each of these things and I really enjoy that.

Liam: Is your business partner Canadian as well or is it at least a Canadian business or– no, you’re shaking your head as we’re chatting here. Tell me a little bit about that? Where is the partner from and which country did you decide and how does payroll work, all that kind of stuff?

Malcolm: Yeah. I mean, that’s only getting more complex as we’re getting ready to hire on. He’s born in the States, lived a lot of his life in Mexico and now lives in Philippines. He’s very much kind of–

Liam: Oh, so he’s not there just on vacation or on a kind of nomad–?

Malcolm: Yeah, he’s married with kids there and has his whole life set up there. He really would love to come back to the states and just is kind of in the process of making that happen. No offense to anyone who lives in the States, I don’t know why you would want to move there from the Philippines. I mean, he lives like a king in the Philippines making what we make.

Liam: Does he not pay attention to any news?

Malcolm: I can’t comment on that part.

Liam: Fair enough. No, I’m being a bit silly.

Malcolm: He’s a smart guy.

Liam: No, I know. I’m not insulting him.

Malcolm: He registered PressTitan in Nevada, so it’s an American business. And I registered it as Canadian business, and we just have a partnership between us. I basically invoice him as though I am a client of his business, and that’s how we worked it out. Because it’s really the easiest in terms of dealing with that kind of thing because just the whole Canadian-American business thing is not for the faint of heart at all.

Tara: Yeah, we won’t get into the whole trade negotiations. They’re happening there too, right? But it’s not a political show. So let me move on to something that we talk about on every show, which is success. I think it’s related to what we’re talking about. I’m really curious to hear what you’ll say given that you are sort of in this new territory, and how you would define success as it relates to your new venture as a business owner, as an entrepreneur? That’s something that you never really expected. And maybe how that ties into your view of success personally as well?

Malcolm: Sure. I would say in my late 20s, I started to have this vision of what success was for me. I had had a failed relationship and she had basically said, “You’re the kind of person that won’t be happy until you’re president of the planet kind of thing. You’re always trying to climb that corporate ladder really quickly. You’re always trying to move up too far too fast, and you’re never happy with the position you’re in.” That really got me to think, what am I looking for? What do I want? What is success? I really kind of defined it as this ideal of kind of being comfortable enough financially to take care of your family and friends without worrying about making ends meet while still having the flexibility to kind of spend the time diving deep on your passions. If I had to do 60, 80, 100-hour work weeks every week even doing something that I love, I think it would burn me out. I really want to kind of experiment and see what the cutting edge is and try to create the cutting edge. To do that, you need time, you need time to fail. Yeah, success for me has been– as we’ve setup PressTitan, we’ve been very careful about scaling, we’ve been very careful about which clients we’d take on, very particular. Even though it is a hyper-competitive environment, we really want to make sure that we have that balance to really explore and dive deep on our passions.

Tara: Do you think that your business partner and you have similar views of success as it relates to your business?

Malcolm: Sometimes. It can be hard to see eye to eye sometimes. David Krug really would love to be kind of that next WP Engine or that next major hosting company. He has had lots of smaller projects, smaller companies, lots of freelance work that he’s done. So the idea that we could do 1000 websites, 10,000 websites, or 100,000 websites really appeals to him, but his goal is similar to mine where the want to expand is in hopes that it will allow him to find maybe like a COO or someone to kind of run a lot of the show to let him figure out what’s next, what’s the cutting edge.

Tara: This idea of being big, being competitive with the big guys that you mentioned, that could possibly be a struggle because there is this– I have a business partnership and have a lot of entrepreneurial friends some of whom have made it clear that they really want to have an agency with the sign on the building, and office space, and employees, and Christmas parties, and all those things that you think of as a big company. I’ve had to say that, clearly, from the start when you’re starting a partnership, that’s not what I want. I don’t want that stress of making payroll and not paying myself. That’s a really important conversation that you’ve had with your business partner about what your goals are in terms of growth and size and responsibilities. It sounds like you guys have talked about it.

Malcolm: Very often, for sure, yeah.

Liam: Malcolm, within that definition of success then, what’s the most important thing you’re doing or can do every day to achieve that success?

Malcolm: It’s really been about spending that first hour to every day on myself, on the things that I want to learn, the things that I want to understand, the projects that I want to tackle, where I am with everything that’s going on in my life. Not just in terms of my work but my personal life. Looking at that calendar and understanding my position in it and booking my free time to play video games or watch a movie with my wife and just kind of having that complete understanding of what things look like and knowing that I can move those blocks around and that those things are all in there and important to me. I find too many of the people that I’ve worked with previously will put in their calendar all their work stuff and not any of their personal stuff, and what ends up happening is they just slide those little work lines longer and longer or all the personal stuff basically is forgotten because they’re not important enough to put in your schedule.

Liam: You say the first hour to the day. Do you mean quite literally your day? So waking up and the like or do you mean–?

Malcolm: Yeah, rolling out of bed kind of thing.

Liam: Getting into the home office kind of thing?

Malcolm: Well, I mean–

Liam: I appreciate it’s probably the same.

Malcolm: Yeah, it’s hard, right? Because my hobbies are really computer-related as well. So pretty much from when I get up until my wife says, “You have to get off the computer because I need to spend time with you.” I kind of sit myself in this chair and do various things. Yeah, pretty much the start of the day. When I get up, I roll out of bed and do all the morning routine stuff, sit in the chair with my bowl of cereal and kind of look at that calendar and figure out what my life looks like.

Liam: Cool, I like that. Let me kind of change gears a little bit with you and walk us back towards WordPress a bit. You said you’ve been involved since 0. something, long before any idea or concept of a WordPress community that exists, long before WordCamps, and meetups and probably even long before many people had even heard of it, much less using it. Are you involved with the wider WordPress community currently, and if so, where are you with all of that? And I mentioned in your intro that you’ve been known and forgotten within the community. Talk to me about what you meant by that and maybe relate it to whatever you do around that place?

Malcolm: Sure. I have been publishing my own kind of little WordPress podcast called the WordPress Minute or the WP Minute, and it’s a daily look at kind of what are the top news stories every day in one to two minutes basically. Cover the headlines, a little blurb about my opinions on each thing that’s happening. I publish that every day and I think I’m over 60 somewhat episodes now. I haven’t missed a day yet. I’m hoping to get to 100 and not mess a day. That’s my goal right now. I spend a little bit of time on WordPress Support forums. I did a live stream I think about two weeks back where I said, “Hey, I’ll answer anyone’s questions, and if no one shows up, I’m going to be doing WordPress Support forums stuff.” And I did. And it was really funny. One of the people came back and was like, “You answered my question.” It was like, “How did you find this video? That’s weird.” But you know, it’s really fun. I haven’t really made it as much of a priority as I probably should recently. Back when I started, I was on the WordPress Podcast with Charles Strickland, which was kind of the defacto original WordPress podcast. I did probably about 50+ episodes of WordPress Weekly with Jeff Chandler who– that’s kind of one of the more popular WordPress podcasts to the day. I worked for support for Gravity Forms, one of the big premiere or paid plugins for WordPress. I’ve released themes for WordPress back before 2.0 existed. I hope no one’s using them today because if you are, they probably are riddled with security holes and I would be very sad. I’ve done a little bit of everything. I was a pretty prolific WordPress blogger back in the day. I have probably written about 10,000 to 15,000 posts about WordPress news and WordPress community back in the early days like pre-2.0.

Tara: What happened?

Malcolm: What happened? In 2008 or whatever when the US kind of went through it’s little financial fun, a lot of the money in terms of advertising dollars just vanished overnight. That meant content creators that were in North America were kind of given the boot. Server managers in North America, a lot of them were kind of given a boot for cheaper places. And rightly so, at the time. Some of these businesses, they couldn’t have survived, had they not done that. I got it, it wasn’t a big deal. But I ended up working for the government for a while and working for some other agencies, and kind of working my way back into the wider WordPress community, but I felt kind of a little bit burned from the whole thing. Just because you are successful in a community, doesn’t mean that the community is necessarily going to find a position for you. You really have to kind of figure out how to carve that out yourself.

Tara: Yeah, interesting. You’ve come back. Are you reinvigorated with all the changes that are happening in WordPress? Does that motivate you? You’re in a different side of it now, right? You’re doing hosting, you’re not doing–

Malcolm: I will say, Jeff Chandler used to call me kind of the WordPress Curmudgeon and I don’t think that– all this stuff with Gutenberg hasn’t changed that at all. I am very hyp-r critical.

Tara: For Jeff to call you a curmudgeon, I think that’s maybe–

Malcolm: Yeah. He used to be a big WordPress fanboy back in the day. You go listen to the first 10 episodes of WordPress Weekly, man. He was all like, “This is the best thing ever.” He was sunshine, lollypops kind of guy back in the day. Everything WordPress. He was kissing the ground that it walked on. It’s been interesting to watch him as he’s kind of learned those deeper things. He’s been able to grow those opinions as I did back when I was on the show with him. Grow these opinions and have these discussions about where WordPress is heading, where we want it to be. How do you deal with the fact that there’s this lower-buried entry that continues to happen? How do we make it more accessible, get more developers on board, make it friendlier for users but also kind of continue to push the limit of what the technology can do?

Liam: Yeah, that’s not, I would have thought, a unique experience for person involved in WordPress. The idea of open source and concept in coming into the community, and it’s not necessarily WordPress experience. It’s anything that we as humans encounter. There’s– I don’t want to call it a honeymoon because that overstates the relationship, but some sort of– we find something new that we like, we enjoy it, we can get really excited about it. Then we use it a little bit more, we work with it a little bit more and we see it’s a little bit more of its nature. And nothing’s perfect, everything has challenges. I wouldn’t say the sheen comes off of it but we see it perhaps in a little truer light.

Malcolm: I think that’s one of the good things about WordPress though. If you have an issue with Microsoft Office, let’s say, it’s very difficult to go to Microsoft and say, “Hey, you really need to fix this issue. Here’s what you need to do.”

Liam: Right. “Here’s my patch. Can you release it?”

Malcolm: Exactly. “Put that in for your next release.” It doesn’t happen so it’s so great that we have this kind of publishing platform where we can all have a voice and have a say in what we want to have happened. I think it’s only made better by more people having differing opinions in these conversations.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. The idea that more people are trying to solve the problems and also more people are thinking about the problems. Because the way that the three of us in this call would position a certain challenge or problem could be useful but we might be totally missing the boat. And having more people think about that is really helpful. It’s good to get advice from other people and to hear their mindsets and the like. With that in mind, I’m going to switch it to another one of our more signature questions around advice. Malcolm, the question is, what is the single most valuable piece of advice that you have ever received personal or professional, that you have worked into your life and that’s really made a big difference to you? What did somebody tell you, what is something you read? What did you hear on a podcast, see in a video?

Malcolm: [laughs] I instantly think of Gary Vaynerchuk. I’m a huge fan of his style of business and motivation, which is kind of remember to go back to that old world business, that personal touch, that interaction and communication. I live on my computer. I’m surrounded by technology all the time. The best things that are stored in my brain are those personal moments, whether they happen on a computer or not, it’s those personal moments that mean the most to me. They’re the things that brought me the most success. Reaching out and asking how someone’s doing on Facebook and really wanting to know, putting out a response to someone’s Twitter message when they’re having a hard day, those are the kinds of things that can mean a huge difference to someone else. Rising tide lifts all boats kind of thing. If we all work together, we can do some amazing things.

Liam: Yeah, that’s really interesting, that point. I had a conversation over the weekend with a friend who was going through some challenges and I just wanted to give this front space. It turns out she was expressing some concern that nobody reached out from the wider community. It was only after she was kind of in a position to move forward that she was able to share that with people. And it’s just reaching out even just to say, “Hey, we’re thinking of you even if you can’t come back to us right now.” That’s a really valid point, thank you for sharing that.

Tara: Yeah, thank you, very sincere.

Liam: Let me swing it back to your new business because you’re– how long have you been in business now? How long has PressTitan been kind of public and running and bringing in clients with you fighting for control of the– jokingly, fighting for control of the helm.

Malcolm: About 14 months now.

Liam: Okay. How are you implementing that advice, that personal touch, that not just, “Hey, did we solve your tech support problem?” Obviously, you’ve got to do that. How are you doing that through PressTitan? How does that work through?

Malcolm: I mean, the big thing, all the beer companies are going to facepalm this but no standardized reporting. We custom write emails to our clients talking about what we’ve done for them, what we’d like to see them do, kind of any advice that we might have for them if they’re looking for more advice. None of our clients ever deal with us on that kind of, “Is your website up? Is WordPress up to date?” Kind of thing. We actually talk to them about their business and their business goals. I know most of their family members at this point because they’ve joined us on a Slack call or something. Having those personal experiences with them and not just form-lettering everything in the business has been a huge time commitment but it’s worth every minute.

Liam: Yeah, I can see how it would be building loyalty with your customers where it’s not just, “We’ll do the service that you pay us for.” But, “We do care about your family.” That’s really great.

Tara: That’s unique.

Liam: It is. This is a conversation that we can go on for for hours, but alas, I believe we are out of time. Before we say goodbye to you, will you share with us and with our listeners where we can find you online, please?

Malcolm: Sure. My Twitter account is at @findpurpose. Long story there. If you ever want to talk about it, go ahead and tweet me. Of course on Presstitan.com, go ahead and use the contact form for whatever, if you just want to reach out.

Tara: Awesome. I was intrigued by your Twitter handle when we were communicating about having you on the show, so maybe after we stop recording, you can tell us that story. [laughs]

Malcolm: Sure.

Tara: Thanks so much for joining us. It’s really great to meet you.

Malcolm: Thank you for having me.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Thanks, Malcolm. Bye, bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Michelle and Brett are informal partners in business and in life. Brett is an engineer, Michelle is a designer. Daily, they balance living and working together 24/7 while building their respective businesses.

Website | Blue Sky Phoenix

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 70.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we are joined by Michelle Coe and Brett VanSprewenburg. Brett and Michell are informal partners in business and in life. Brett is an engineer, Michelle is a designer. Daily, they balance living and working together 24/7 while building their respective businesses. Welcome, Michelle and Brett.

Michelle: Thanks for having us.

Brett: Thanks for having us.

Tara: We are so glad you’re here and we are here live with you, which is a special treat. We are actually in a hallway at a WordCamp which is a treat so it’s great to have you here in person and can you tell us a little bit more about yourselves? And you can take turns as you’d like to.

Brett: We can work it out. Go ahead.

Michelle: I’m Michelle Coe, I own BlueSkyPhoenix. We do brand strategy and web design and development in Northern Virginia.

Brett: I’m obviously also in Northern Virginia and I assist Michelle’s work in WordPress when she has sort of engineering level kind of changes and additions and functionality that needs to be added to a customer’s site as well as I have my own consulting company and I have a couple of business partners in Perigee Labs and that’s my company. We do WordPress sites and custom PHP sites and mobile apps. It’s sort of a general covering of stuff that we do there.

Tara: Cool. How did you guys find each other? Did you start working together?

Brett: Michelle blames me for getting into this.

Tara: Okay. [laughter]

Brett: No, seriously. A designer and stuff like that.

Michelle: Yeah. I started my business back in 2011 when I first moved to Northern Virginia and it took about three weeks of doing a commute from Northern Virginia up to Silver Spring around DC to convince me that commute was not the way I wanted to go. So I started my business and at first, my background being graphic design, I thought that that’s what I was going to do is a lot of print work. And Brett convinced me that no, website design is– you need to get involved with website design. I said, “Okay.” And so I started learning WordPress and learning the ins and outs of web design. That’s how that started.

Tara: Okay. Brett brought you into it. Brett, how did you get into development and coding?

Brett: To go backwards from where Michelle was, from a WordPress perspective, I was thinking along the lines of, what would be a good way for someone who is design-oriented to get into the space of– well, what I perceived is lots of customers could use some with these talents in this space. So I suggested, “Hey, there’s WordPress.” And I didn’t know enough about it or a lot about it at the time. I’m like, “WordPress to me-” This is years ago, 2011, “- sounds like would be a great vehicle for you, Michelle, to deliver your designs to people on the web.” That’s kind of how that happened. Before that, my background in development work was from the corporate world where I was at one time– I worked for Eastman Kodak Company and I ran their professional photography online services area, and e-commerce, and content, and pro-photographer connectivity, stuff like that. I had this sort of self-made background in all of that as well as digital imaging, and photography, and things like that.

Tara: Okay. Do you have a design sensibility as well then with your photography?

Brett: Only when I look at it and go, “Yeah, that’s great.” Or when I look at it and go like, “Yeah, something’s wrong with that. Maybe it’s not the right color or something.” But I often say this, I’m like, “My design is good strong Soviet design.” It’s like, “Boxes, that’s perfect.” And then I look at the stuff that she does and I’m like, “Well, that’s fantastic. I can’t do that.” But I can look at it and go, “Yeah, that’s awesome.”

Michelle: When we’re out in the world talking to people, a lot of times, I’ll say to people, “I’m the one who makes it pretty. He’s the one that makes it work.”

Tara: That is a very good team in two different people. You know, a lot of solopreneurs, which I know is something that you like to talk about, like me and a little bit like Liam too. You have someone who helps you with some of your development work. But you kind of bundle it into one person and you can’t do either one really well. So you have that teamwork going on. I’m going to give a shoutout to Michelle’s art skills because I follow her on Instagram and she does these art snacks and she’s amazingly talented designer. I’ll give a shoutout to follow her on Instagram.

Liam: Excellent. I’m interested in kind of the interplay of WordPress in your two respective businesses and you just said when you were chatting about when you were talking to clients and the like, that both of you sometimes talk to. It sounded like your clients, Michelle. And I wonder how does that work, how does that kind of come together for you in real life? “This is my colleague, this is what our sources do, this is–” How do you spin that in a way so that when they hire you and your business, they know they’re getting what they know what they’re getting?

Michelle: Right. Most of my clients know from the start that when they’re hiring me, they’re getting more of a designer and a brand strategist. I really work with them on a lot of the strategy aspects of it. I’m helping them figure out who their ideal client is and working out their logo and their overall look and feel. Sometimes I’m even getting into some of the mission statement and content writing and voice and everything that feeds into that brand, and then roll it into a website design. Now, my favorite clients to work for are startups and small businesses. I really have a heart for smaller entrepreneurs. A lot of times, I luck out in that way because they don’t really need really complex websites out of the gate. However, whenever I’m out talking to a client, I’m able to say to that client, “Oh, you have something more complex? Great. That’s not a problem. I have a team here locally that I will eye on to do all of my complex coding work, and let me bring in my lead engineer and we’ll talk about this more complex issue.” That’s when I’ll bring Brett into the conversation.

Brett: The guy on the other side of the monitor. I sit on the other side.

Tara: Oh, you face each other? Your desk is in the same room?

Michelle: Yeah. Our office is in our home and we have a double-sided desk. I have my two monitors on my side of the desk and he has his two monitors on the other side of the desk.

Brett: But there’s a spot I can sort of lean over and look past if I look over.

Tara: Do you have the same taste in music? Do you listen to music when you work?

Brett: Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes it’s a distraction so yeah, there’s been periods of time when we play a lot of music, and then periods of time when it’s really quiet because phone calls and things are going on or something that’s being focused on or something like that. I thought maybe you just told everybody, “Oh, I know a guy.” I thought that was it.

Michelle: No. [laughter]

Brett: Like, “Oh, yeah. I got a guy for that.” But to back up what you’re saying really is a lot of the clients– and I find this when I do work on the site too is they will have sort of typical needs up to a point, and then there’s one area of, you can’t get that functionality out of the box. It’s like, this thing, whatever it might be, maybe it’s a plugin, maybe it’s something based out of WordPress or whatever. That’s close. And a lot of times, it’s connected with a rule or a permission or some sort of type of file or they’re uploading some kind of activity that needs to be looked in upon by interested parties and it needs to be protected or only shown to certain people or downloaded in a certain way. It’s like, everything else is fine except for this one little bit. We just need something built that handles our particular data or our particular process. I tend to focus on those areas and build things out that are like, “Hey, I did this WordPress site for this guy who does a golf club thing.” You have a whole bunch of golf courses that participate underneath his banner and he’s got this club card that goes between them all. People, as they play, collect points on this card. It needs a place to upload these points, he’s got these CSV documents he pulls out of this other back-end database, uploads it to the WordPress site. And then people come in and log in using their card IDs and things like that, check on their free rounds and how they’re going with their points. Not very WordPressy, right, usually? But it really wasn’t a big deal for me to kind of add that functionality. And WordPress was a great thing because this guy is not really technical, for instance, to handle this stuff. So it’s really easy to point him at the back-end of WordPress and say, “Click this, upload this.” It’s all laid out. I tend to treat WordPress more as a convenient framework of things that are already built.

Liam: Yes, it’s good at that.

Tara: Yeah. Let’s spin away from the technical and to the question that we ask everybody, which is about your definition of success. You work together from home. I don’t know if this is something that you talk about with each other or if this is something that you thought about in preparation for this conversation with us. But we really love to hear how people think about success and how they work toward it, I’ll turn it over to that.

Michelle: We did talk about it actually on the drive up to WordCamp this weekend and I think in some ways, our goals are very similar with a little different twist. I’m very focused on– success for me professionally is all about creating value for my clients and really helping my client get their work out into the world. Which is one of the reasons why I love working with startups, because they got all this passion and they just can’t wait and they’ve got some great big idea, and I get to get in right at the ground floor and help them to kind of get focused and then I get to kind of push them out of the nest, and they go make great things, and then they become successful and I get a lot of reward seeing that come to pass. I don’t need to have my name on the front door necessarily, but just to know that I’ve created value for that customer is just hugely rewarding to me. That’s how I measure success, more than dollars. It also both professionally and personally for me, my definition of success has a lot to do with freedom and being true to myself. If I can’t be creating my business in a way that makes sense for me or creating a life in a way that makes sense for me, then there’s no sense in doing it. I had a mentor a few years ago when I was really struggling. One of the many struggling points that you have with business is your business is involving. So I sat down with this mentor and this gentleman’s been in the business forever and ever and he’s a management consultant and whatever, and I’m sharing my woes and he says, “Well, if you’re not in business to make money, then you shouldn’t be in business.” And I looked at him and I was like, “Are you for real right now? Because that just–” If this were a perfect universe, I would just meet with the client and do great things together with that client and put great work out in the world, and they would just send me money, and I’d be just totally good with that. And I realized that that’s not the way the world works and that’s why I have invoicing software, but that’s not my driver. For me, success is measured very differently.

Tara: I’m going to ask you a follow-up on your first definition when you talk about helping these new startups, helping companies get themselves, their presence defined, and out into the world. How is that measured? When you launch, is it that feeling that you’ve succeeded because now they’re live or is it each step along the way? How do you assess that? Or how would you say a project was or wasn’t successful then in that way or your business was or wasn’t successful?

Michelle: It’s really for me, my biggest reward is to see the smile on the client’s face or to have them email me in all caps, “I LOVE THIS WEBSITE WHICH I JUST GOT THREE DAYS AGO!” And I was like, “Yes!”

Tara: That is a great feeling.

Michelle: To have somebody, especially somebody who’s coming from a space where either they’ve had a developer flake on them, or they’ve been to three logo designers and not found what they wanted. And then they come to me and I listen, and they’re like, “Wow, you listen.”, “Yeah, no kidding, that makes me a better designer for you. Tell me more.” And I spend a lot of time with them at the front-end, and sometimes that backfires on me. But more often than not, it’s really about them being delighted with what they end up with at the end of the day.

Tara: So that feedback?

Michelle: Yeah, that feedback is great. And then, obviously, that creates loyalty. And so the next time they have a need, they come back to me and they go, “So Michelle, now I need this thing. Can you do this thing?” And either I say yes or I say, “No, but I know a guy.” [laughter]

Liam: Good segue.

Tara: What a great team you are.

Brett: Well, it’s funny because mine is somewhat similar but you’ll know the difference in thought process and I’ll explain. When I talk with clients about things, I like to talk to them about– I sort of try and get to figure out where they’re at regarding their process or their data or what it is that they’re doing. And then I make suggestions and say, “Oh, that’s cool. I like what you’re doing there.” Could be golf or steel or some non-profit agency or whatever. I’m like, “Okay, this is what we can do with your data. Let’s do this and let’s do that, how to reach your people. Here’s a cool technique we can do, here’s a new feature.” And I like it when I can get sort of people sucked in with the possibilities of doing these sort of things. Because at the end, my professional feeling of success with something is along the lines of, “They got a lot out of it. They’re actually using the things that I thought were special about the buildout and they’re using those features.” So I feel like I’ve done a good job and I feel success when somebody uses this tool, this utility that I built for them to it’s fullest extent, because I’m sort of a believer in the most successful tools are those that are used by people in ways that its inventors never thought of. That’s a successful tool. I try and build successful tools. And to that end, I know that software is self-limiting because it either has that feature or it doesn’t. I try and build in those sort of things in the front-end by talking about the possibilities with people to say, “Hey, that’s cool. Have you thought about this, how these two things might connect, or this external system may be able to interact with that?” Or something like that to try and give them and draw more ideas out of them. I suppose it also results in, “Hey, can we give you some more money for you to build that?” I’m like, “Well, sure. That would be fine.”

Tara: Yeah. You’re a good problem solver.

Brett: Yeah, that’s what I do. I fix things or fix until it’s broke, broke it, break it until it’s fixed.

Liam: If we talk about success in kind of a business standpoint. I know, Michelle, you made it very clear that it’s not about money but at some point, it has to be. It’s not an end of itself but rent, and/or mortgages, and/or food don’t just show up.

Brett: It’s weird, but yeah. [laughter]

Liam: And the two of you have two separate businesses. And inevitably, you’re in some point in time going to find you both have to launch that site on Friday or the deadline for your respective bigger projects are coming in looming near. How do you, as a couple, as individuals who can’t just swear at each other and go home to your respective homes because you’re already there. How does that work in real life? How do you maintain that kind of successful working relationship that the joy of being around each other when Brett’s feeling the heat from his client, you’re feeling the heat, Michelle, from your client, and there’s only so much time, how does that work?

Brett: It’s like an anti-success answer.

Liam: Yes, because it comes back to– that’s going to inevitably happen so how do you keep staying successful with those kinds of practical challenges?

Brett: It does and actually, it’s still a challenge because I’ll say that if you’re asking what’s the biggest challenge in your life, and that’s what I mean by sort of anti-success, is finding time to not work sometimes and to manage your time successfully. I still struggle with that, and I’m using different techniques and we’re having stand-up meetings or sometimes we sit for those. Sometimes we get out on the deck and sit under the umbrella back on sunshine, still a meeting though. Trust me, it’s very serious. Or sometimes we just talk like, “Hey, how are things going today?” And that’s sort of like draw you back to your tasks to try and move things forward because personally, I find that I’m not very good about managing my own time properly and I’ll end up too focused on something and not able to switch to all these other things that need to be done. That causes a problem. I don’t sleep a lot in some cases where, “Hey, this has to happen on Friday. So does this, so does this.” I’m like, “Well, that’s caffeine time at midnight. Okay, here we go.” That is the issue in that it collides and you’re absolutely right, it collides with what real life is– right now, it’s pure grunt getting over those things. It’s just pure energy and it’s lot of individual contributorship to get those things over the finish line. But there’s a limit. I don’t know where that is yet but I don’t know how to solve that problem exactly.

Tara: Do you help each other in those situations? I know my husband, I tell my husband all the time, “Just come in and tell me to stop.” And he’s afraid sometimes to do that because I’m not good at stopping myself. Do you rely on each other for that?

Brett: No. Actually, we don’t tell each other to stop. Or actually, sometimes I do. I say, “You know, you should probably go to bed.” It’s along the lines of the, I can just tell sometimes, “Hey, how do you do this?”, “Well, here’s how you do it.”, “That’s just dumb.” [laughter]

Michelle: And then it’s not right after that but shortly after that, he’ll go, “Maybe it’s time to go to bed.”

Brett: “Tomorrow will be good for this.”

Michelle: “You can finish that tomorrow.”

Tara: And then you say, “Just five minutes more.” And then 20 minutes later, you’re still there?

Michelle: No, I usually take that queue. Early on, it was– we’re working at it. It’s always, it is a whole another component when you’re living with that person too, it’s like a whole another aspect to it. But we’re getting better at it, we’re working at communicating more, at telling each other when to stop. And encouraging each other to do other things besides work.

Brett: Like I asked you, “Hey, we’re going to yoga tonight?” That’s not me telling her to go to yoga, it’s just reminding her to think about, “Maybe we should go to yoga tonight.” Because that’s always very uplifting renewing experience for you.

Tara: Well, this brings me to one of the other questions that we ask, which is about advice. It sounds like you kind of give each other some advice but can you share with us some advice that you’ve received that has stuck with you and that you use in your life ongoing that’s important to you?

Brett: Yeah, yoga. [laughs]

Michelle: My best advice that I received was from my mom years ago and it was probably about 10 years ago. She gave me a bracelet and on it, it said, “To thy own self be true.” And I was living an entirely different life at the time. I was living in Western New York and my life was very, very different than it is now. most people who knew me back then would not even know me now. It’s so night and day different. I moved to Virginia to completely reboot my life. And I decided that if I was going to reboot my life, I was going to do it on my terms or no terms at all. I was going to remain true to myself. So far, that’s been really my main guiding principle and that has stuck with me and served me really well.

Tara: That’s a really concrete example. Did it take you a while to– she gave you that bracelet and you started thinking about that and took you a long time to act on that and make this big move? This amount of change, or was it something that clicked for you?

Michelle: I think that in the back of my mind, I’ve been thinking about this major change for some time. It wasn’t like my mom specifically was giving me permission to make this big change, because I don’t need my mother’s permission, right? Although if you meet my mother, it would be good for her to–

Liam: It’s not a bad habit if you get it.

Michelle: It’s not a bad habit, but it’s not required. But just having that reminder was like, “Yeah, no, I do have permission. I can make this life what I want it to be and I don’t have to stay where I am. I can create this life in a much better way.” That was the catalyst that really generated this massive, massive change in my life.

Brett: And come to her talk tomorrow to hear the rest of the story.

Michelle: Yeah.

Tara: It’s true.

Liam: Can I ask about the bracelet, the gift? Do you know if that was a deliberate gift from your mother or was it a bracelet and it was a style that you liked and she just happened to give the gift, and it was fortuitous that it had that and you took it in a way? If I’m prying too much, feel free to say so.

Michelle: No, no, that’s fine. I don’t know if my mom gave it hoping to precipitate the extreme action that was taken. However, she knew that I was struggling and she knew that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. She just wants, like every good mom, wants their child to be happy. She knew that if I stopped trying to make everyone else happy and started being true to what I needed in order to be happy, that everything would be okay. So I think her gift was very deliberate in that sense.

Tara: Does she know the impact that it had on you?

Michelle: Yeah, I have spoken to her about it.

Tara: That’s wonderful, thanks for sharing that.

Liam: That’s great, thank you.

Michelle: Sure.

Tara: Brett?

Brett: Mine’s not nearly heartfelt.

Tara: I was going to say. [laughter]

Liam: Michelle just set a really high bar, what are you going to do about it?

Brett: I know, not nearly so heartfelt but mine is so much more– you’ll understand when I tell you what it is. It’s from a series of books that I read a long long time ago. Given specifically to me, not necessarily. Was it general advice that I incorporated in my life? Sure. The series of books and this philosophy has permeated pretty much everything that I do. The advice was this from Douglas Adams and it was simply, “Don’t panic.” The thought process in his laughable look on life and his critical way of examining stupidity or people who think that they’re smart and what it is that they are going through and just analyzing the craziness and the, “Why do you even do that?” It’s the questioning of automatic actions and actually examining processes or thought-processes, or things that people do or institutions to the point of absurdity, which I’ve really internalized throughout my life. So don’t panic, that would be my advice. See, not bad?

Liam: Calmful way to be mindful.

Tara: Yes.

Michelle: Yeah. And honestly, you were asking about how do we– when we’ve got these deadlines and stuff like that. He’s really my counter-point. I’m flipping out and kind of like, “Woah.” And he’s just the more you turn up the heat, the more calm he gets, and that is why, because he’s like, “Don’t panic.” When he does start to panic, that’s when I know we’re in trouble. [laughter]

Brett: Essentially, “Oh, you’re upset? Oh, no. Oh, boy.”

Tara: That’s great. Both of those are great pieces of advice and they go well together, thank you for sharing that. We are coming up on the end of our time together. I know we’ve got to get back to the WordCamp, too, so we really are so grateful that you took the time out from WordCamp to find a quiet little spot and tell your story and share your ideas with us. Thanks so much. Where can people find you online?

Michelle: Most of my social media– you can find me at Blueskyphoenix.com or my social media for Instagram and Facebook is @blueskyphoenix. If you’re looking for me on Twitter, you have to look for me at @bsp_design because some guy in Manila has my Twitter handle, which I’m still trying to get back. [laughter]

Brett: You can just come to Perigeelabs.com for me. Like the moon, apogee, perigee, perigee when it’s close.

Liam: Thank you both for joining us, it’s been a real pleasure getting to know you.

Tara: Thanks so much.

Michelle: Thank you.

Brett: Thank you very much.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Jan Dembowski has been volunteering with the WordPress Support Team for the past 12 years. He works for OpenDNS as a systems engineer where he helps the sales team. He is learning to master 3D printing and enjoys the occasional coffee.

Blog | Mostly Harmless

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 69.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Jan Dembowski. Jan has been volunteering with the WordPress Support Team for the past 12 years. He works for OpenDNS as a systems engineer where he helps the sales team. He is learning to master 3D printing and enjoys the occasional coffee. Hi, Jan, welcome.

Jan: Oh, boy. That’s like saying Einstein liked math. I definitely enjoy the occasional coffee.

Tara: Welcome. We’re really glad that you’re here, Jan. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself including– I’m going to ask you to talk about coffee because you have one of the more interesting Twitter– I don’t know if it’s your Twitter handle or whatever, Twitter title is, your name that has to do with coffee. Maybe you can tell us a little bit more about that, too?

Jan: Sure. My Twitter handle is– do you remember when Twitter let you expand what you can put in as your name to something like 50 characters. And most people put something representative like, “certain goose steppers are bad.” You know, funny things like that. I put down in mine with Jan, I think I put in quotation marks, “Coffee is the best, coffee is the greatest.” As far as I can. I actually figured, okay, I put in my name and I kept spacing it out until it said, “Okay, you can’t type anymore.” I said, “Okay, I’ll take off a few characters from there.”

Tara: I’m looking at it, it’s Jan “SUCH COFFEE SO GOOD RESPECT COFFEE” Dembowski.

Jan: Exactly, coffee is your friend and it should be respected in our lifetime.

Tara: Well said. Okay, thank you.

Liam: Hear, hear.

Tara: Now you can tell us a little bit more about yourself other than your Twitter name.

Jan: So, I’m a volunteer for the WordPress Support Team and essentially, I have this routine where I wake up at just before 5:30 in the morning and not fully conscious, my routine entails walking down to, and please don’t hate me, the K-Cup machine. Loading up and getting an eight-ounce cup of whatever I have. At that point, I’m not even looking. It’s just on the pilot, I put it in and I get my coffee. Then I sit down at the computer, log into the forums and I start, while not fully awake, going through and doing day-to-day stuff. Clearing the spam queue. We have another queue called pending queue which sometimes you type in a lot of links and the forum goes, “We don’t think that’s spam but somebody should look at this first.” That’s my morning routine. I think that goes for 45 minutes. I try not to answer any topics at that time because complete sentences are not really the thing I can do at that particular hour. If you ever follow me on Twitter, in the background, I’ll have the news playing and I’ll just type something, someone said something horrific or irksome on the news. I’ll type it in and later on, I’ll be like, “Oh, my gosh. My mother was a sixth-grade grammar teacher. She must be ashamed of my grammar, and spelling, and punctuation. I bring dishonor to my family.”

Tara: That’s a pretty severe morning routine jumping into WordPress support right when you roll out of bed. How does one get involved to that level? You don’t work for Automatic, you’re volunteers, is that right?

Jan: Yeah, that’s correct.

Tara: What’s the process for vetting you? How does that work? You’ve been there a long time so they obviously trust you to do that, but what does it take for one to become a volunteer like that?

Jan: Really, it’s pretty simple. Different teams that WordPress has, Plugins, Community, we have a Marketing team. Wow, you guys probably know about that. Documentation. Support really is the easiest one to get involved because it’s frankly low-hanging fruit. You log into the forums and you start by looking at things that practically interest you. We have a section called ‘fixing WordPress’ where people will be like, “Hey, I woke up one morning and I installed a plugin and I can’t get into my WordPress. I get this error message. Here’s the error message.” That might be something that you’ve encountered or you recognized the error message and you could just type into the white text box just whatever steps that you feel could help them get through it. That could be something simple like, “I updated Akismet and now it’s showing me error message.” Okay, you type a message to them in reply saying, “You go into cPanel– you do have cPanel I hope. And you locate WP content, plugins, and Akismet, and just delete the Akismet directory. Don’t delete anything else. Delete that directory.” And shortly after that, if the problem is alive and they are looking for help, you may get a reply from them saying, “Hey, that’s fantastic. I can get to my WordPress installation.” Hopefully, they’ll present some more information. You can try to figure why that particular plugin caught fire. Maybe it was lacking dependency. Akismet is bad example because that generally works with everything, but for example, image plugins. I have this one plugin– I forgot what it was but the developer had dependency on cURL. I’m a huge believer of the WordPress HTTP API because it will just figure it out. If you have cURL, it will use it. If you don’t, it will just do what it has to do to get your webpage or whatever it is that you’re downloading in RSS feed. I took it off and my installation broke. I’ve got a lot of experience in sysadmin so I looked at what the error message was. I put the cURL module back but shortly after that, I got another plugin because I really don’t like cURL. Almost as much as I don’t like that other thing called sock puppets. That’s a whole different talk.

Liam: It may even be a whole different podcast.

Tara: Yeah, and we’re getting over my technical head already so I’m going to bring it back to this question. And it relates to what you’re describing, that anybody can sort of jump in and do that. I’ve gone to some happiness bars or whatever they’re called at my own meetup or WordCamps, and I often wondered how that process works because I did see once where somebody was volunteering to help and crash somebody’s site horribly and caused a problem. What I guess my question is going back to how does that work? What’s the process for vetting that so that people who are stepping into help actually know how to help?

Jan: It’s a little bit different in the forums because in the forums, you don’t really access folks. You’re making suggestions. And if you’ve really done this for a long time, you may couch that with, “Hey, make sure you have a backup. Make sure you know how to restore it in case something acts up or something.” When you have a happiness bar situation, there probably is going to be somebody nearby at the happiness bar who could get involved and go, “Oh, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Here, let me help you get out of that mess.” Because, you know, things do happen. Sometimes you’ll get a situation where somebody did something and it had unintended consequences. Nice thing about a happiness bar lounge type support table is that there’s almost certainly going to be somebody there who might be a little more along the lines of technical support and going to help you right there to get you out of the hole. There’s not really a lot of vetting, most of the time– I think we’re particularly lucky because the people who volunteer, I don’t want to say they’re known– they’re known to somebody. Like, when you’re at WordCamp US, we have volunteers for– Yoast sent a bunch of people, Taco, I think Taco helped out one time. People that have a reputation in the community, you know them on the forums, you know them on Slack. That kind of helps a lot. Occasionally, we do get someone who just out of the blue wants to help. But again, there’s other volunteers who if they get into the deep end of the pool, we can help them out.

Tara: Okay, thanks for explaining that.

Liam: That’s an incredible amount of work that the volunteers do. I was involved with the team for a period of time before I got more involved in community efforts. There’s a team of very hard-working people who give a lot of time, energy, and thought into keeping the forums moving forward, and to actually be a valuable place to get information. I think internet’s been around long enough, we’ve all been in enough forums to know that some of them were just knowledge skills to die. And the WordPress.org forums are hugely valuable so just a little shout out for all the work on that. Very rarely to the support you say, “Job well done.” Aside from very short online comments. Thank you very much for all you do there.

Jan: I really appreciate that. I know the rest of the support team will appreciate that too.

Tara: Yeah, it must be rewarding to help people – to solve people’s problems, they are usually very grateful and excited about that.

Jan: Especially when you go a little bit out of your comfort level. I’m kind of fortunate that I can spell CSS but sometimes– I was at WordCamp New York City at the Contributor Day and I had this very nice attendee help, and somebody posts this question. I’m pretty sure I knew that it was a margin. They wanted to do little padding on a graphic and their header, and I said, “Hey, how’s your CSS?” She said, “Pretty good.” I said, “Well, I think it’s this.” And she goes, “Well, yeah. Pul that up in the inspector and then type this.” And I’ve said, “Hey, thank you.” That confirmed that I’m not totally messing it up. I typed in the reply and she looked at it and she goes, “Well, you know what? Don’t have them do that by 10px, have them do it by five and type in something in there to increment that, to see if they like it.” A few minutes later, we got a reply from the topic poster that essentially said, “That was perfect, that’s exactly what I was looking for.” And I replied back to that one saying, “Fantastic. It was really the person next to me but you know.” When you got a recomfort zone, it’s really gratifying, especially when you help somebody who– you help them out and they learn something and you learn something, that’s very cool.

Liam: That’s awesome. Success, if you will, in support forum world. Speaking of success, I’m going to segue into one of our signature questions, Jan. I’m going to ask you to define success? What does success mean to you? What is your definition of success? That can be a personal definition, a professional definition, maybe a mixture of both? How do you define success?

Jan: To me, success is about growth. When we start out– I used to be in a– and now I’m in a completely different role, but I used to be in a role where I worked for companies and I deployed network kit, I deployed security solutions, and success was usually measured not burning down the house. We put something out on the weekend, we got on the call to monitor at seven o’clock on Monday and nobody joined the call. Hey, that was successful. Because happy people don’t join calls for things like that. But the reason I say it’s growth is because as I got older and more experienced, I was given more opportunities. I’ve been very lucky that I almost always worked for somebody that I liked or admired, that I had a good relationship with. A few years ago, my then manager said, “Hey, we’re looking for somebody to run the group that you work in. And I’m just like, “Oh, you want me to get you applicants?” And he goes, “No, smartie, I mean you.” I’m like, “Really?” And we talked about it, we talked about what was entailed. He let me think about it and over the weekend, I came back on Monday and I said, “You know, that actually sounds pretty cool to get a little bit behind the scenes.” He was like, “You’re still going to have to do the heavy lifting.” I’m like, “I know. I know who I’m talking to.” But it was really great, for three years I got to manage not a terribly big group. I think at one time, we had eight different people. Some parts of it I wasn’t particularly thrilled with. Because it turns out they really do– my boss was essential, “That’s great. Now you get to do the performance reviews.” [laughter] “Oh, you’re horrible.”, “Yeah, don’t be late. They do it on the 14th.” But yeah, growth. If you’re growing, if you’re challenging yourself, you’re going to have setbacks because we’re all human. But as long as you’re moving forward, that’s not a bad definition of success in my book. It can be scary, though, especially when you do new things. Our community really has a good understanding of imposter syndrome. Every now and then, that happens to all of us including myself where I’ll be just like, “Wow, I wonder if anyone’s going to catch on to that, I’m just making this up as I go along.”

Tara: Imposter syndrome, that probably keeps people from volunteering sometimes because they’re afraid that they don’t know how to help people. I guess, in terms of growth, you probably experience a lot of growth in your capacity as a support person. But we’ve talked a lot about supports. I don’t want to go back down there, I want to hear a little bit more about other ways that you challenge yourself to grow?

Jan: It’s kind of funny. The support thing of me in WordPress actually started out as therapeutic exercise. One of the nice things about challenging myself to provide support in the forums is I found that– because you’re very limited in what you do and type. It’s not like a Word document. You literally only have text, you get a little HTML so you can bold and italicize things, and not really much else. As a result of providing support in forums, I found that I became better at writing emails and technical documents and whatnot, because you get the– support forum posts basically forces you to be concise and, whenever possible, precise. And if you’re in engineering, have room for company, that’s very valuable capability to be able to just get to it. Like a lot of technical folks, you don’t really have to read all my email because first one or two sentences will tell you what you need to know. If you want to read the rest of it, fantastic, we’ll give you the backup. But the house didn’t catch fire and then you go on about what happened. And maybe the house did catch fire, there was a flood in the basement, start with that and then go up to the details. That’s much like replying to a support forum post. Somebody has a problem, walk them through what they have to do as concise as you can. And don’t be afraid to make mistakes because everyone does. I don’t try to not make mistakes. This is going to sound weird, I try to make new mistakes.

Tara: So not repeating the same lines?

Jan: Yeah. I get a little disappointed when I repeat them. Of course I do, but I try, I really try not to.

Tara: And like you said, communication is a very important way to grow. And sometimes we do make the same mistakes in communicating poorly. That’s something to always work on.

Liam: Jan, you’ve talked about working for OpenDNS?

Jan: Basically, a few years ago, six years ago? A little before my time at the company, they had this really great idea. What if you, when you wanted to inadvertently click on sale, link to a phishing site. Instead of giving you the IP address of a phishing site, we gave you the IP address of the block page that said, “That’s a bad place to go.” You kind of see that with search engine hits. You ever go to a link and you get red screen of, “This is not a good idea. Do you want to proceed or not?” As a company, they decided to do that with DNS for a couple of reasons. It’s really fast. Instead of going someplace, downloading a bunch of stuff, having to get interrogated by your PC, your laptop gets real hot and stuff like that. “Hey, we have real good reason to believe that’s a bad site and we’ll block it for you. It’s very fast and it’s very efficient.”

Liam: So is that a subscription service, say a company might say, “Pay your monthly fee to–” Any link that people click on from within their systems or networks.

Jan: This is one of the things that appeals to me. If you’re a regular person at home, I always recommend that people put this on their grandparents’ computers because– and I’m not being judgmental. Anyone, please, listening to this, don’t hate me. I’m not making fun of senior citizens or anything like that. But people don’t know. They click on the link they got the email and bad things have happened. OpenDNS is free for users at home. You sign up for it, you run a little agent that just tells OpenDNS, “This is Liam.” It’s an IP updater because files or whatever you have will change an IP address from time to time, and you’ll get protected. It’s really that simple. I think we’ve got 90 million users and the majority of them actually are users at home being protected as a public service. Now if you’re a company, then, yes, we actually have enterprise version, it’s very effective. It works. Part of my job is to support the company that sells that particular service.

Liam: That’s really interesting, that a company like– and I know very little about Cisco as a company and I’m not denigrating them.

Jan: They’re a nice company actually.

Liam: It strikes me as an interesting business model and I wonder if it’s reflective of the changing internet-based account where I’m on the riverside now as I’m chatting with you. The basic home user variations that they offer are free. Is that new to something like Cisco, that kind of approach? That’s really interesting.

Jan: So the answer is yes and no, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. OpenDNS was an idea that came up outside of Cisco and it worked really well with Cisco’s model where they want to go as a company. That’s cool, they’re actually very responsible. I really liked working for them. Have you ever heard of Snort? They have a little pig and they sniff packets on the network and stuff like that. There was Sourcefire, and like OpenDNS, Cisco purchased Sourcefire, an open source company. Here’s where it gets really interesting in my mind. They do security intelligence, they look up threats, they identify threats, they write about threats, they write about how to mitigate threats. The best part is they don’t just do that for their customers, they do that for the entire internet. There’s a group out there called Talos Intelligence. The folks working there in security are primarily old veterans, they’re fantastic. I had an opportunity to meet one of the people in Minneapolis who manages a group of them at that location and they’re really cool. They identify threats and they protect users all around the world and, again, that’s not just something they do for Cisco costumers, they do it for everybody. After the company that I ended up working for, they would be number two on my list to work for, but to be perfectly honest, I just don’t think I have security or programming chops to pull that off. They’re, I don’t want to say hardcore, but they really are.

Liam: Yeah, it sounds like it. Let me ask you this. Let me swing around to one of our other questions here and ask you about advice. The question is this, what is the single most valuable piece of advice that you ever have received and implemented in your life? What’s some advice that somebody has shared with you that’s really made a significant difference to your life?

Jan: Oh, boy. I can see why you say you’re not going to make me cry. I’ve been a little lucky growing up that– fortuned that I have a lot of, I guess, role models. You don’t think of your family members as role models. It’s only later on after they’re gone or something where you’re just like, “Oh, my gosh.”

Liam: Yeah, you spend most of your young life getting mad at them for not letting you do exactly what you want. And then later you’re graceful that they didn’t let you do exactly what you want.

Jan: Exactly. I think the best advice I ever had was my grandmother on my mother’s side, she basically was very clear that, you know, never be ashamed of who you are. If you make a mistake, own it and apologize for it, take responsibility for it. And stand up for yourself. Very simple advice but when you’re a gawking nerd growing up and whatnot, you can count your friends who are also nerds, that kind of helped too. That’s actually pretty good advice. I’ve got high schoolers and I think they’re pretty confident. Maybe I should check on them every now and then. But for me growing up, there was this idea that if you’re a teenager or pre-teenager, you are by default doing something wrong, which, looking back, wasn’t necessarily incorrect. But it was particularly good advice from both my grandmothers to stand out for yourself, and take that seriously. Have a good time, be yourself, and don’t take anything from people that you didn’t particularly earn.

Tara: Yeah, I think there are sort of two sides to what you’re saying because you talked about, when you make a mistake, own it, and also stand up for yourself. That means really being honest about when you need to own it and when you need to not own it. Do you think that that advice meant something to you when you were younger when you first heard it? I think about high schoolers more as thinking that they know more than you. [laughs] I don’t know, is that advice that has settled in with you and meant more as you’ve gotten older or did it strike a chord with you when you first heard it?

Jan: At the time, it didn’t quite strike a chord with me when I first started because like a lot of kids that age, I just by default thought I was smarter than everybody else. I didn’t really realize that that was something you have to earn. You just didn’t get recognition for showing up. There’s a social commentary there about certain– our society today, I’m sure, but that could get kind of long.

Liam: Yeah, moving along. [laughs]

Jan: Moving along, moving along. Yeah, as I got older, I look back at both my grandmothers and I’m kind of– looking back, I’m in awe how smart they were. You never think it growing up but they really had it together and I was to benefit for sure of that.

Tara: That’s wonderful. I think when we get to this point in our lives as we look at those types of things, we wish that we could make our kids aware of it now so they don’t realize it too late as well, but that just does not work.

Jan: It doesn’t.

Tara: But that’s why I really appreciate you showing that with us and telling us a little bit about your grandmothers. They sound like they were strong and strong enough that they left a good impression behind.

Jan: One of my grandmothers was, I think, all of, in heels, five feet tall and she taught me how to punch and she gave me a bloody lip by accident. [laughter] She felt really bad about it, it’s like, “That’s going to go well. [laughter]

Tara: That’s wonderful! Oh, cool.

Liam: That is really neat. Jan, let me use up just the last few minutes that we have because we’ve talked about growth and we’ve talked about this great advice that your grandmother shared about, “Be who you are and own your mistakes, and don’t take things off of people that you shouldn’t. Respect yourself.” With all this around us, can you share with us what’s been your biggest challenge to date? What’s been your biggest challenge? And maybe touch on a little bit, if it’s ongoing, how are you dealing with it or how did you deal with it, how did you overcome it?

Jan: I think the biggest challenge is getting out of habits, if that makes sense, getting out of ruts. I worked in a particular industry for about 19 years and about a year and a half ago, maybe not quite that long, I completely changed jobs into a brand new career. That was a bit of a hurdle for me to get it over. First I had to work out the nerve to even apply for it. The more I did the interviews, the more I talked as I got closer and closer to them making me an offer, I realized that I really wanted to start something brand new. The biggest hurdle was listening to everybody else saying, “Hey, you can actually do this. There’s no reason to think you can’t do this.” And actually, walking across the threshold, accepting an offer, and working with a company that I work for now. It’s been, I don’t know, let’s say 14 months, and I had fun time doing challenging things. I’m able to flex skills that I never really had to focus on. I mean, I’m getting into writing Python scripts to blow things up and process them and stuff like that. Thing is that I used to just take for granted and never really had to do. And now that coworkers who are like, “Hey, we need to parse gigabytes and gigabytes of logs and get stuff out of it. Can you take a look at it?”, “Sure, just upload that up onto our favorite cloud-based file storage and I’ll download it.” And I do and I get paid tell people do that to get their goals, and that’s pretty cool. A couple of years ago, I would never have thought or entertained the idea that that was something I could do, let alone do it in a way that people depend on me to actually do this thing. Yeah, the biggest hurdle is just continually reminding myself that– back to imposter syndrome. This actually is something I can do. In the last gig that I had, I was a rock star. I was a guy you called to shut down 17-hour outage call, and I did. Now, I’m doing something completely different and I’m not a rock star. I am fortunate to work with people who do the job amazingly well. I’m in awe of how well they do it. It’s great just to be able to start over and get out of that comfort zone and do brand new things. I really have great time with it. That’s been a hurdle.

Liam: Yeah, success is growth.

Jan: I actually quite believe that. It also helps that I have grown ups around me in my life who tell me things like, “You know, this is going to be okay. Even if it doesn’t work out, it’s still going to be okay.”

Liam: That is awesome. Thank you so much for sharing that. I’m afraid, we’re going to have to wrap it up. We are on time here. Jan, before we say goodbye to you, can you share where people can find you online and interact with you?

Jan: One of these is my Twitter handle. It’s spelled Jan. Don’t say January. Somewhere Mika is going to hear this and she’s going to say “January.” @jan_dembowski. I’m sure there will be a link. I also spend a great deal of time in the Forums WordPress Slack chat. We use that primarily for administrivia. Like, “Hey, there’s a spam.” Or somebody forgot to close an ordered list and it broke the formatting, stuff like that. But we do have weekly meetings and I try to attend. I don’t always get to participate but yeah, you can find me on Twitter, you can find me in forums channels, you can find me on the forums, but you better have a support topic if you go there.

Tara: Great. Thank you again for joining us.

Jan: Thank you for having me.

Tara: really great to meet you and hope to see you in person sometime. Take care. Bye.

Jan: Thank you. Bye.

Liam: Thanks, Jan.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Kevin Cristiano is a partner with Tadpole Collective where he works on business development, database configuration, and web development. He’s active in civiCRM, an open-source community. He’s also deeply involved with organizing WordCamps through the WordPress global community team.

Website | Tadpole Collective

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 68.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Kevin Cristiano. Kevin is a partner with Tadpole Collective where he works on business development, database configuration, and web development. He’s active in the civiCRM, an open-source community. He’s also deeply involved with organizing WordCamps through the WordPress global community team. Hi, Kevin. Welcome to Hallway Chats.

Kevin: Hi, Tara. Hi, Liam.

Liam: Hey, Kevin. Thanks for joining us here today out in the hallway. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself please?

Kevin: I live in Philadelphia now. Before that, we lived in New York City. I live with my wife. My son is now grown and living in another state. We moved to Philly about a year and a half ago.

Tara: My first time that I met you, I remember, Kevin, I’m going to completely confess my sweet tooth, was at WordCamp New York and it was in Brooklyn. It was my favorite WordCamp because the afternoon snack was cupcakes and bowls full of candy, and I just thought you are the best WordCamp organizer. I loved that. So you’re from New York originally and you’re really involved in WordPress there as well, right?

Kevin: Yeah, I got involved in WordPress back in 2006, I think. And by 2008, I had found the New York community, and got involved volunteering, organizing, and when we did go to the Brooklyn Marriott, the first year we had box lunches and the feedback was less than stellar and they couldn’t hit the dietary restrictions. So we, in 2015, spent our food minimum on pastry and coffee, and the feedback was incredible. The cakes, the cookies, the cupcakes, the cannoli, it really worked out well.

Liam: Sugar bribes?

Kevin: [laughs] New York City is a tough town to find a venue in that’s affordable and when we did the hotels, the space was ‘free’, but you had to spend a fortune on catering. It wasn’t even good catering, they couldn’t even hit the dietary restrictions. It was tough but that did work out pretty well.

Tara: Yeah, I have a lot of other WordCamps adopted that I haven’t seen it anywhere else.

Kevin: No. As some of the stuff that I have done, it’s one of the last WordCamps where we got away with not having a lunch because part of our contract that we tell our attendees is that your 20$ per day fee gets you coffee, lunch, and a piece of swag. We took away that lunch piece. It does happen occasionally but from a global perspective, we try to ask that we feed lunch to all the attendees. It’s just kind of the nice thing to do, to feed the people, and not just junk food.

Tara: With or without lunch, it’s quite a bargain really. I know there’s some conversation I saw about raising the price but still, I think that’s an amazing price.

Kevin: I have to chime in on that, but even if the price does get raised, it’s still going to be affordable. I don’t predict anything will happen but a very token increase. We haven’t raised a price ever. This is the price when it started. We all inherited that from WordCamp San Francisco and that’s just been where it’s at. It has no relation to anything other than someone decided that back in, I don’t know, 2000 and– early days.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a very interesting conversation. And I want to talk more about WordPress community and your work with the global community team, but before we get into that, tell us a little bit about Tadpole Collective and what is the civiCRM open-source community project?

Kevin: Sure. Tadpole Collective was born out of WordCamp New York City. We all met working, volunteering, organizing on WordCamp New York City in 2010-2012. We came together because there were five of us at the time all doing freelance work and all good at different things. So we decided to partner up and leverage each other skills in order to be able to do more. I hate CSS which means I’m bad at it and it takes me far too long, so getting together with someone who can front-end work was awesome. That’s how we started. Early on, one of our members was involved in May First, and May First was working on the Occupy Wall Street at the time. They adopted civiCRM which is a constituent relationship management system that– It was a Drupal module and also a WordPress plugin. So civiCRM is perfect for non-profits, activist organizations, political organizations where we need to keep track of your constituents. You can actually track your constituent data, donation data, event data, memberships, grants, something called case which is really a workflow module built for social workers but has many more options. We got involved in the WordPress integration. When it started, it was okay. [laughter]

Liam: That was very diplomatic of you.

Kevin: Okay. I had different words for it at the time but as with anything else open-source, since I wanted to change, I showed up, participated, and have been working on it ever since. We’ve helped them build a ton of improvements into civiCRM with the WordPress integration, and it’s now a really solid product on WordPress where you can kind of– the CRM does the same features across Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, and Backdrop. I think I said them all. It’s kind of neat to be working on an open-source project that embraces multiple CMSs. As you learn a little bit about each community and how they work, and it gives you a lot more perspective on how different people do things, and you learn from that.

Liam: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I suppose the CRM aspect of it is independent, right? And the plugin and the module and whatever Joomla and Backdrop call that kind of functionality are just a connectivity between the respective CMS and CRM.

Kevin: Yeah, basically, the core module is the meat and the potatoes, as I think of it. And then there’s the WordPress repo, and Drupal repo, or Joomla repo, et cetera. And that actually provides the CMS-specific functions that links so that when you login, the user is connected to a contact. This way, we can display content on the front-end. You can use civiCRM just in the back-end. We have a couple of clients who don’t ever publish a single form on the front-end. It’s all for internal staff. It’s all how they manage their data. I embrace that because owning your own data and not being reliant on some paid service that one day will send you an email that explains that the price is up 423% is something that I’m not in favor of. I want the organizations to have their data, have a backup of their data and be able to take it and go wherever they want, it’s their data.

Tara: Yeah, that’s often an issue when you’re working with non-profits who use these third-party services to do all of those things, is that then it’s not in their hands, so it’s a great option. I’ve looked into it a number of times. What’s your background, Kevin? How did you even get started in all this development and WordPress stuff? Let’s go back in time further.

Kevin: I guess my background, I guess if you go back to education, accounting, and economics or what my degree might say. But, oh god, I guess it’s now about 12 years ago or so, my wife built a website and it became popular and needed help. I learned about WordPress through her. I had, at that time, kind of switched gears. I was doing enterprise accounting solutions. I think that was the marketing phrase. Basically, I was working in New York City and going to large enterprises and installing, and maintaining, and building their back-end accounting system. I was doing very heavy sequel work, which was very close and felt like a good match. That got me involved in WordPress but I had to learn. That’s how I found the community and that’s just how I got involved, it’s because she needed help.

Tara: And I know she’s also involved in the WordPress community as well. Did you pull her in after you started getting involved or did you both jump in together? How did that work out?

Kevin: I got involved because I needed help. I was doing it wrong, as they say. But I got involved early on in volunteering and got to meet people that I had access and got to learn the right ways, and got to benefit from that. And I saw these WordCamps were a great place. I encouraged Laura to come and join me and she finally did in 2015. 2015 was the first WordCamp that she went to, and it was Scranton. It was unique because that was one of the only WordCamps I’ve seen in recent years where Matt Mullenweg showed up and did a Q&A. Her first WordCamp she got to see Matt Mullenweg, we had a great time, and from there, that was the ‘aha!’ moment for her as she’s like, “I can do this. I can speak. I know this stuff.” I’m like, “Yeah, you do.” And that’s how she got involved.

Tara: That great. It’s neat to see a couple together at WordCamps there. A few couples you see at a number of WordCamps and you guys, it’s fun to see you together. So that’s neat to share that. My husband has no idea or interest in WordPress. Do you talk about it in the evenings? Do you put WordPress aside or how do you manage that with your balance and your relationship?

Kevin: It becomes a bit of a challenge because we do talk about it at night, we do talk about it at times. And I tend to start my day at around somewhere between 6:30 and 7:30 eastern, and I’m done by 7:00 PM local time. Whereas Laura’s a night owl and she keeps going. So at a certain point, we have to shut it down. We’ve both been on the organizing teams for WordCamp US for two years, so that’s a constant topic that we can converse on. I don’t know if we’ve got a good balance yet but we do speak about WordCamps and WordPress quite often.

Tara: Yeah, I imagine your social circle, you must have a big social circle that you share that way, too?

Kevin: For me, definitely, over the years, most of my contacts and people that I see all revolve around a WordPress or civiCRM communities, it really has.

Liam: That’s interesting. Tara, my better half has little interest in WordPress, aside from kind of make the institute that she founded a website and we help keep it running. But like, “Hey, let’s go to WordCamp.”, “No.” [laughter] Fair enough. To each her own, to each his own, I guess. Kevin, let me swing us around to one of our signature questions here and ask you about your definition of success. How would you define success in a personal and/or professional way? How do you define success?

Kevin: I don’t know that I have a single definition. I define it more transactional. Success on a project is that it launches on the simple level. I try to keep things simple. Professionally, I guess success is keeping your clients satisfied, building good products and giving back to the community. If I can do all of that in a project, that’s a professional success. One of the things that we like to do is when we’re building a project for a client, we’re actually looking at giving them what they need but also improving the underlying product. I’m really speaking about civiCRM, not WordPress here. We don’t work on the code on that. That’s how I look at professional success. On a personal level, it’s really– personal success for me would be balancing the work and the life and having time to do the things I want to do. So I do kind of feel as if I’m failing on a personal level because I seem to run out of time but that would be how I define personal success, getting that balance going.

Tara: What do you do toward that definition, I would say, toward that goal? But what are some important things that you do every day to–?

Kevin: Sorry to cut you off there. So, I saw this talk at WordCamp DC that talked about productivity tools and things to use. Yes. [laughter]

Liam: We know where this is going.

Tara: Thanks for the plug or perhaps maybe not. I don’t know. [laughter]

Liam: Wait for it, wait for it. Go ahead, Kevin.

Kevin: So what I do every day now is I’ve always had to track time– well, maybe not always but maybe the past 15 years. So I’d always use a time tracker and I try to– how did I do. But then I installed the tools that actually monitored how many hours a day I was on the computer. A digital to-do list where I’d see how many things I did per day, how many days in a row. So I look at all of those because I love data and metrics, and I’m sure part of it is gamesmanship that I’d like to see the numbers go up. But I look at this, I look at the time management, those are what’s very important because my scheduling and how I balance all the different projects and all the different communities that I volunteer time for need that. Those are some of the most important things that I have to do every day when I start the day, and how could that help with the personal success goals is, yeah, if I can start balancing and not be on the computer as many hours per day as I can clearly see I am now.

Tara: Do you enjoy it? Does the time go by fast when you’re in front of the computer for hours? You log in at 7:30 and then, all of a sudden, it’s 7:00 PM and you’re like, “Wow, where did the day go?” How does that happen?

Kevin: most of the time, because one of the improvements that I did make years ago was when– I guess 2012 is when I fully went out on my own. That was it. I’ve always done a bit of that and that one’s two different things. Because I also do work in accounting and finance and I still do some consulting work there, as opposed to just web development. And being able to keep my own schedule, I’m able to choose what I do and do what I want to do mostly. I think all of us know we don’t get to do that all the time. So for me, yeah, most of the time, I do enjoy what I’m doing. We all have those situations and those days that we want to reset but yeah, I do enjoy it most of the time.

Tara: Yeah, I think that’s an important aspect of it. I know it’s easy to beat yourself over how much time you spend in front of the computer. I do that a lot and I’m trying to spend less time. But then on the other hand, sometimes I say, “You know what? It’s very satisfying.” And you are getting things done, you’re volunteering, you’re doing lots of good things, so that is the balance. What else do you like to do when you’re not in front of the computer, Kevin?

Kevin: Well, since we moved to Philly, I think that the think I really enjoy doing the most is exploring the restaurants and the bars in town. And we’re not done with that yet.

Liam: I hope not. You’ve only been here, what did you say, for about a year or so. If you are almost done, you’ve been out and about a lot.

Kevin: [laughs] We have been out a lot but no, we’re still exploring different areas. We do that. As far as other things that I do, not very often anymore, but the one thing that I want to bring back as a goal is I used to do a lot of hiking and I want to get back into that. I’m kind of excited because next week, I’m at a civiCRM event and it’s a week-long event, and it’s in area next to some really good hiking trails that I used for years before I moved down to Philly. I’m going to organize a couple of hikes during that and try to not work 20 hours a day as you can at the kind of event that that is.

Liam: There’s some great hiking in and around Philly, that’s for sure. Have you been to Ringing Rocks Park yet?

Kevin: I don’t know. I ‘ve done the AT from Wind Gap through to New York. I went for a good swath of Pennsylvania but when I did it, I really wasn’t aware of the area.

Liam: So there’s a place called Ringing Rocks Park. It’s about an hour north of Philly up in Bucks County and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s about three or four football fields of rocks, that if you strike them with a hammer, they ring. So you just bring out hammers and pound on rocks for a while. It’s a little simple but it’s a lot of fun. I’ve been there a lot.

Tara: That’s interesting.

Kevin: And they don’t break and shatter?

Liam: Well, sometimes some specks hit your face but no, these are boulders, these are massive rocks. When you get there, you’ll see that a number of them show signs of having been hit with a hammer repeatedly. I mean, they call it Ringing Rocks Park for a reason. As you’re walking in, you see all these families walk in with little ham tools and hammers and things like that. There’s some hiking too, there’s a little waterfall that you’d want to see.

Tara: You wonder how someone discovered that. Was he going around banging on rocks to find one that rings? That’s an unusual thing. I’ve never heard of it. Cool.

Liam: Well, it’s a whole boulder field. It’s pushed by the glaciers, so the glaciers were pushing us this the front end of it. And I think, somebody historically got up there and just pounded. Because it’s like three or four football fields of boulders. Young boys and girls being young boys and girls would inevitably bang something. Kevin, let me leave hiking behind for just a moment and swing towards advice. One of our questions that we like to dig into is advice that we have received. What is the single most or one of the most valuable pieces of advice, either personal or professional, that you have ever received and successfully implemented in your life?

Tara: It could be hiking-related actually. We don’t have to leave hiking. Maybe it’s something like, “Watch where you’re walking.” [laughs]

Liam: Good point, Tara.

Kevin: I remember that you asked this before to others and I thought about how I would answer that. I don’t know who gave me the advice because it’s something that you hear variations on, and it does apply both professionally and personally, and it comes down to, perfect is the enemy of good. Or, ship early and iterate. Variations on don’t hold back until it’s picture-perfect. Make it good, make it work, but don’t be afraid. Ship it, just do it. They’re all variations on the theme. It was one of the things that when I joined the WordPress community that I realized– and I like to tell people, “Don’t be afraid of version one.” I love when I see plugins at 0.9.9.9. It’s like, “Come on. Don’t be afraid. It’s okay to say version 1.0. There’s always a 1.0.” I know one plugin that’s been at 0.9.something now since 2010. It’s really a version 16 at this point. But what do version numbers mean? But that’s the best advice is that you can’t make it perfect, you have to know when to stop. It really helps when you’re dealing with clients with scope creep, as they keep asking for things. It’s really variations on that of, you’re right, we can always make it better but time and money are the enemy there and we have to find a point where this is working, this is good, this is going to be what we ship. Personally, yeah, we can’t have perfect. If I wouldn’t cook until I could make the perfect meal, I would starve or I’d be out to dinner every night, and neither with work.

Tara: I’m a fan of that advice. I follow that advice as well. I think it’s a personality type that can adopt that advice more easily than others. There’s a personality, working style analysis called a DISC Survey. Have either of you heard of that before? It analyzes your working style and you fall into either D, I, S, or C. And D is that style of get it done, cross it off, move on. C is the person who is just that .99999 personality type who just wants everything to be perfect and it’s hard. If your client is a C and you’re a D, that’s a really hard thing to manage, I find. And to communicate patiently and kindly when you’re feeling like, “Okay, I know, but really, I have to move on to something else now.” I think that’s good advice that’s hard to follow for a lot of people.

Liam: Yeah, I think it can definitely be a challenge. And it’s one of those things that if we take the time in dealing with clients or ourselves and kind of rationalize through the argument, we always say, “Yeah, that’s good enough. We should probably go live. So should we publish it tomorrow?”, “Oh, no. Let me have another couple of days to think about it.” Right? It’s that there’s one more, there’s one more, there’s one more. That’s a challenge. I said this before on this show but my wife’s grandmother who I was never able to meet. She passed away before I met my wife. She had a variation of this same theme that was, “If it’s worth doing well, it’s worth doing poorly. Just get it done.” I kind of like the blunt approach of that. And what you were saying, Kevin, you can always fix it, you can always do it better. That’s the beauty of the web, it’s not print.

Kevin: And that’s one of the things that I really like about WordPress and the community and the WordCamps, because they’re a safe place to fail because we’re all in this together. When you sit in your cubicle, office, coffee shop, and you’re working on this, you start to believe that you’re the only one messing this up. That everybody else is better than you and you are the worst in the world. Then you go to these WordCamps. And one of the things that I learned early on was, “Oh, my God. There are people that are so much better than me. But wait a minute. I know some stuff that others don’t. I’ve got something to give and boy, do I have something to get.” And then with the WordPress community, people are willing to share and help you gain the skills. It’s not cutthroat, “I’m not going to help Kevin because then he’s going to steal my clients.” It’s something that I really enjoy because, at least from the perspective I take ongoing for business, as long as open-source wins, then that’s a win for me. Yeah, I want the business, I want the client. But if we keep them on WordPress, or Drupal, or Joomla and on a solution that fits them, that’s really the most important factor.

Tara: Yeah, it’s a great thing about the open-source community. Another great thing about the open-source community as it applies to WordPress are the different teams. And we’ve mentioned at the beginning that you’re really involved in the global community team. So I know we’re coming up to the end of our time but I’d love to have you share with us a little bit about what you do with the global community team and what that team is for people who might not know?

Kevin: The global community team is the team that facilitates WordPress events worldwide. We are the team that helps meetups get started locally that are chapter meetups. A chapter meetup just means a WordPress meetup that’s listed under the WordPress.org account and follows the five rules. Many meetups that are not chapter still follow these. And WordCamps, we help fund. Well, obviously. We help organizers run WordCamps and we do a lot of funding, planning, advising, mentoring. What I do specifically, I got involved basically because in the early days, I was in New York, which was so expensive, and I needed to change the way we handled money and sponsorships in order to have enough money to have those wonderful desserts. And I got involved directly in the sponsorship program and I was one of the people that started the global sponsorships and got that done. So I still focus mainly on WordCamps, budget review, global grants, finance, and that type of things, if that’s not too vague and weird answer.

Tara: That’s helpful, I think. It’s not always clear to people how meetups and WordCamps especially, how they come to be. Especially as we talked about, for 20$ a day. It takes a lot of effort on the back-end to make those things happen. We’re grateful to you and your team for helping us have great experiences at WordCamps. They are life-changing for people.

Kevin: Thanks. Well, I think so.

Liam: Certainly, as WordPress community has grown to the size that it is and the structure around WordCamps and practically every community that wants one and WordPress meetups almost every few miles, if you will, in a good way, it’s really amazing to see the infrastructure behind it that makes that happen and the team that works so hard. It’s not a small amount of work and certainly, through my involvement on organizing WordCamp Philly for a number of years now and being involved in WordCamp US as an organized for a couple of years, it’s a massive amount of work and energy that goes in, so thank you to you and your colleagues for the work that you’re doing on that. We really, really appreciate it all. Alas, we’re out of time. But before we say goodbye to you, Kevin, I invite you to share with us where people can find you online, please?

Kevin: Tadpole.cc is the website for Tadpole Collective where you can find me online, kcristiano in most places, Twitter. I do a lot of social media reading, not publishing, but that is where to find me.

Liam: Awesome. Thank you very, very much for joining us today, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Tara: Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin: Thank you both.

Liam: Bye for now.

Tara: Bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Sally Gradle is a WordPress business owner living in Northern Illinois with her husband. Her hobbies include gardening, knitting and crochet, and cooking.

Website | Blue Orchid Web Development

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 67.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Sally Gradle. Sally says that though she is newish to WordPress, she has been on the planet for a while. She lives in Northern Illinois with her husband, they’re recent empty nesters and enjoying it. Her hobbies include gardening, knitting and crochet, and cooking. Welcome, Sally.

Sally: Thanks. I’m glad to be here.

Tara: Hi, Sally. It’s great to see you. Thanks for joining us here in the hallway, virtual hallway. Can you tell us and everyone listening a little bit more about yourself?

Sally: Sure. As you said in the intro, I live in Northern Illinois. I’m about 40 miles straight west of Chicago, and it’s kind of the perfect place to live because I can get into the city easily or into the country easily. It’s just really nice. My WordPress career is actually kind of my second career. I came originally from manufacturing but kept running into code and processes so it was kind of a natural evolution to eventually go into working with WordPress and building websites and working in programming, things like that.

Tara: What type of manufacturing? Tell us a little bit more about your background?

Sally: Sure. They were small manufacturers generally. The company I worked the longest for made traffic control devices. Traffic cones, and barrels, and message boards, all that kind of stuff you run into in construction. [laughs]

Tara: Yeah, I would think that message boards and that type of thing have evoloved How long have those been around? Electronic?

Sally: Quite a long. During the time that I worked there, the increases and improvements in the technology was pretty amazing. Just LED lights, when they first came into being, you had to put all kinds of lenses on it. Like, a lens almost like on a lighthouse to make it brighter. But then as LEDs improved, you didn’t have to do that. It’s really fascinating to see that ram up so fast.

Tara: So what kind of role did you have in that job? it sounds like you were exposed at least to the technology. You talked about how that kind of helped you transition.

Sally: Yeah, I was in office administration mostly. It was a small company so I pretty much was the IT department because I had the patience to figure things out.

Tara: Yeah. And how did you discover WordPress?

Sally: I discovered WordPress through Treehouse. It is an online learning company. Liam’s nodding his head, he knows it. That’s where I first started learning HTML, CSS, and all that. And then I saw a little course on WordPress. I’ve heard of that, let’s check it out. I went through the course and I said, “This is it. This is where I want to work and the space I want to be in.”

Liam: Was that Zac Gordon’s course on Treehouse?

Sally: Yes, it was. Zac’s amazing. [laughs]

Liam: He’s a great guy, I’ve got a lot of time for him.

Tara: Yeah, we have him here locally in the DC area, we’re lucky we get to see him now and then.

Sally: Oh, good.

Tara: Yeah. But I think probably anybody who’s touched on WordPress has seen Zac on Treehouse at one point or another. He’s great.

Sally: I’m working through his ‘Learn Javascript Deeply’ course now too because we were given that directive, we were given that homework to learn that.

Tara: That’s right. Do you prefer sort of that code and development end of stuff or you kind of make– or you are soup to nuts unicorn? You make websites from scratch and all the way to finish, right?

Sally: Yes. I do custom and semi-custom making use of all the told. I’m not an artist. When I need art direction and things like that, I will reach out to designers and artists. I can make something look nice, but to make it look really ‘wow’ and when people are paying for custom, they need ‘wow’, that’s when I reach out to the designers to help me with colors and good layouts and good graphics and things like that.

Tara: From a development standpoint, are you spending most of your day doing code? What does your day look like in your– you run your own company, is that right?

Sally: Yes. My day is more front-end really, design and layout and thinking about the information flow and the interface and the experience, but I’m not afraid to jump into code if something’s not working right. I’ll write CSS if I want something to be particular because I usually do. I’m kind of a brat though, out of the box is never good enough for me.

Tara: Well, perfectionism is a virtue and a curse I think.

Liam: So let me ask you this. As you were getting through the courses on Treehouse and starting to get into WordPress, how did that come about as a career? Did somebody say, “Hey, can you help me make a website?” Or did you say to yourself, “I can probably make some money on this?” How did development and growth of your business come about?

Sally: A little of both. I was doing kind of side work through one of the freelance sites and just trying to build up my skills and build a little portfolio and things like that. I was working in– this was my last real job, was with a large nationwide company in admin and I was just really frustrated with the culture there and the lack of opportunity that would be there for me. Some people absolutely thrived in it, I did not. I was talking with someone about it and she said, “Well, this is what we’ve chosen.” And that was a huge eye-opener for me. Because I thought, “Wow, that sounds limiting but it’s actually not.” Because that means you can unchoose it.

Liam: Yeah, choose something else.

Sally: So I did. And I talked with my husband and we looked at what’s what and who’s who. I said, “Yeah, I can do this. I can leave that and start a whole new business and a whole new career.” So I did. That’s actually kind of– I explained on my website the evolution of the name of my company, it’s Blue Orchid Web Development. Blue because 80% of the world, my favorite color, is blue. And the orchid because I realized there’s a saying that even an orchid growing in the wrong place is a weave. I realized I was an orchid trying to be in the roses. It wasn’t ever going to fit. If you’re an orchid being an orchid, don’t try being anything else. If you’re a rose, be a rose, stop trying to be anything else.

Liam: You’ve peaked my interest. How long between ‘we’ve chosen to be here’ or ‘this is what we’ve chosen’ and starting web became Blue Orchid Web Development?

Sally: Months, just a few months.

Liam: That’s quick.

Sally: Yeah.

Tara: Were you at all hesitant in terms of working for yourself? Not just from a financial standpoint. I know you said you talked about that with your husband, but that’s a huge lifestyle change and time management and all of that kind of things. How did that transition go for you? Also, just running a business, and getting business and all of those things. How would that transition go for you?

Sally: The transition was alright. I had actually– several years ago, I had another business that was providing outsource admin work for local businesses. So I had a little bit of experience with that. I hope this time I did it better. You know, you try to learn things you do in the past. The transition this time has been a lot easier. The general environment in the world for freelancers is a lot better than it used to be with the increases in technology, and the ability to communicate with one another, it’s just so much more open. And there’s so many more tools than there used to be.

Tara: Yeah, and it sounds like also your background had some sort of operational– as you described it, sort of, you were the IT person and probably many other people in that job, so you probably had a handle of it on multitasking and doing all kinds of things to make a business run. I imagine that you build in that experience to run your own business too?

Sally: I did. I’m very much a process thinker. And I’ve heard people say you’re either strategic or you’re tactical. I’m very tactical. I can just usually figure out how to get things done, and what needs to happen and in what order. It’s kind of the same as laying out the flow of information on a website. How do I need someone to move through this information or how can they move through easily to get what they need out of it? It’s been long-term, I kind of can’t turn it off. My family calls me a compulsive planner.

Tara: Yes. I’ve been accused of that. [laughter] That’s a good transition into me asking you some questions not just about your work but sort of about you and your life and your family. You said that you are a recent empty nester, and how is that adjustment going?

Sally: It’s pretty great. It was hard, of course, our daughter lives in another town here in Illinois. She’s a teacher. And then our son lives in another state and he’s working in a business. It was sad to see them go, but at the same time, I thought, “Okay, this means we did it right. This is what’s supposed to happen.” They’re happy and successful and that’s really all you can ask for. Then we’re just free to do whatever we want. It’s pretty great. It’s only been a couple of months since our son moved out so we’re still trying to figure out, “Hey, what do we want to do next? Where do we want to go? What do we want to see?”

Tara: I love it. You can open your mind a little bit. You said a ‘ding-ding’ word in there, which is success. You talked about your kids being successful. You know, we like to talk about success. I’m going to ask you about success and how you define it. Your children are successful, how do you define that for them, for you, what does that mean?

Sally: Am I happy in what I’m doing and can I pay my bills? That’s important. I’m free to choose what I want to do, that feels like to me the biggest success is you have freedom to choose what you want to do, either personally or professionally. And the biggest thing for me is can I make something better, can I make something better, can I make a process better, can I make someone else more successful in what they’re trying to do, can I provide an improvement somewhere.

Tara: Yeah. That’s a good definition. Do you think that if you look back on your previous career, do you think that you would have defined it differently? I asked that because you talked about freedom to choose and you mentioned that sort of lightbulb that went off in your last job where you realized that you have the freedom to choose. I’m just wondering how you would have maybe defined success before you realized that?

Sally: Actually, probably still the same way. One thing that will frustrate me is if I know we can improve something and I’m not able or allowed to do it. That will frustrate me a lot. So just being able to see that something can be improved or how it needs to be improved, and being able to do that is a huge success.

Liam: Do you run into that much with your current business or is that thinking more back to past jobs and careers?

Sally: I don’t run into the frustration aspect. Usually, I’m presented with the challenge and now I’m free to think about the best ways to meet that challenge and accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish. I joke with people that if people in the general public knew how much time developers spend googling things, they might think we don’t know anything. But the truth is we know where to look for what we’re trying to do.

Tara: That’s right, yeah. And what to use and not use when you find things as well. That’s true. You defined yourself as a planner, what are some things or maybe the most important thing that you do or some things that you do every day towards this idea, this definition of success?

Sally: The most important thing I do is spend time in meditation and prayer because that centers me. I tend to get a little wound up about things, I’m a little anxious. So that brings it down to, okay, I don’t have to solve everything right now and everything’s not on me, and things will happen as they’re supposed to happen. That’s the first thing I do. Then I look at my calendar, I do that the night before and the morning of and think about what needs to be done today, what needs to be done on Wednesday, what needs to be done next week, and plan out the steps on that, and try not to overload myself with things that all have to be done on Wednesday.

Tara: You approach short-term each night and each morning, you review what you got, and then you also look at your week ahead. And then how about bigger picture stuff?

Sally: Bigger picture stuff, if I know about it ahead of time, it goes on the calendar. Ever since my children were little, if it wasn’t on the calendar, it doesn’t exist. It has to be on the calendar.

Tara: That’s the planner.

Sally: And then I try to think about how long things take and then you always add another 20% at least on that because things go wrong. So I think about, by the end of next year, I want to have x amount of income or I want to be able to do certain things. I want to be able to pay for my own insurance for example. Or I want to be able to buy a new computer and monitor by this point. So I have goals and steps that I need to reach those goals.

Liam: How long does your night before and morning of review of calendar last because that’s something we hear a fair number of people do. But at the same token, we hear a lot of people say they’re so busy and they overload themselves, and, “I got to the end of the day and I did one thing.” How does that look? Aside from this opening up the calendar, “Oh, yeah. I got to call the client, I’ve got lunch here at this place, I’ve got to launch the site on Friday so I need to get these three tasks up that.” What is that night before, that evening before process look like for you?

Sally: One of my favorite things to do is check things off the to-do list. And I use the Todoist program because then I can put everything personal and professional on one list. I do have recurring tasks that I do every day, that review actually is one of them. So I sit down and– I try throughout the day, as I accomplish things to check them off, but I sit down and look at, “Okay, what got accomplished?” It’s almost like a bullet journal approach without doing a bullet journal. What things are no longer important, what things need to be done tomorrow, what can be pushed off. It takes maybe a maximum of 20 minutes really thinking about that. And then in the morning, since I’ve done that, it’s just kind of the, “Oh, I’m coming out of the fog and I’m having some coffee and, yes, I need to do that first.” [laughs]

Tara: Yes, I think that’s a good process. I’ve been doing that for a while as well and I find it very helpful. Things don’t slip through quite as often, they still do somehow, I don’t know how that is but they still do.

Liam: Let me ask you this, since you both do this. Work week is roughly five days. Out of the five, on average, how many nights before are you doing that 20-minute review process? Are you five for five most weeks, are you four for five, three for five? And I’m not saying it to try to put you on the spot and make you look bad. I’m just kind of wondering about the process and the flow and how easy it is to find time at the end of the day, because that’s what I really struggled with, to do something at the end of the day when family’s coming in, family responsibilities are taking over, that kind of stuff.

Sally: It’s really six days because I’ll start Sunday evening for what’s happening on Monday. And if I’ve been faithful in doing it at the end of the day, Friday, that Sunday evening is pretty easy to do. It’s just the reminder of, “Okay, this is the mindset I need to have, these are the things I need to do. I need to be out the door by eight, whatever.” So probably six nights awake. The thing I do struggle with is ending the day because when you work from your home, the personal and professional blend together. I have to very consciously say, “At six o’clock, I need to stop and eat.”

Tara: Especially when you’re an empty nester and you don’t have kids to take care of, and maybe your husband’s working, or other things are going on, it’s a lot easier to come back. I sometimes do that shut down at 10 o’clock at night before I go to bed. It’s not really the end of my– maybe I really stop working working at six or seven but I realize I hadn’t done it so I would do that before I go to bed even if it takes me five minutes to look at what I have and write it down in a little– I’m using a new journal called the Panda Journal, and it not only does that but it also has you in the morning write down three things you’re grateful for, and three things you’re excited about. And then at the end of the day, what your wins were. It doesn’t take me 20 minutes, though, you must be very thorough I breeze through it pretty quickly.

Sally: [laughs] That’s a good approach. And 20 minutes is kind of maximum, sometimes it’s because I’m moving things into folders, I’m terrible about this, putting things on my desktop. Sometimes it’s moving things in my folders where they need to be and making notes for myself and things like that.

Tara: What is your biggest challenge, Sally?

Sally: Building a clientele. I think like most freelancers, I think that’s the biggest challenge is building a clientele and balancing out the new business with the ongoing business, creating those constant revenue streams. Same challenges, I think, that everybody has.

Liam: How are you currently doing business development? How do you bring in new clients?

Sally: The best tool really is networking.

Liam: Agreed. What does that look like for you?

Sally: For me. I attend a regular monthly meetup that’s WordPress focused here in the suburbs. I attend another meetup that’s– it’s people that work in all facets of tech. Some are web developers and some are sysadmins. The neat thing about that is we have a presentation once a month, and maybe it’s not a tool that I especially use but I usually get something out of it. Some kind of process or way of thinking. And again, just building those relationships and building community even if I’ve never worked directly with that person, building that community. Then when they’re looking for someone or I’m looking for someone, we can communicate that way. Then I also belong to a coworking and makerspace where, again, it’s people from all different disciplines and we all– it’s become quite a little incubator, there are several of us that are small business people that have really grown our businesses by being in contact with our community.

Liam: Sure. And how many days do you hit that coworking space? You mentioned working at home sometimes.

Sally: I try to get here at least three days a week. Some days, I just want to get up and pour some coffee and start working. Especially, if I’ve got a big project. I just start right away and then have to remind myself to take a minute and breathe and look at what I need to do and don’t go off the rails. But yeah, I try to get there at least three days a week.

Tara: Yeah, I heard a lot about the coworking space being, not just good for your own productivity and your own ability to separate your day and your time, but also, like you said, to network. Are you finding clients at your coworking space or ideas for clients or other networking opportunities through that?

Sally: I have actually, yeah.

Tara: That’s great, cool. I’m going to make another jump and ask you another one of our questions and that’s about advice, since you’re sharing some advice with us, it seems like it. What would you say, if you look back, is some of the best advice that you’ve received and implemented in your life, whether for your business or for your personal life?

Sally: It’s again, be true to yourself. Be the orchid if you’re the orchid. Don’t try to be something you’re not, it will never ever work. If you’re an introvert, don’t try to be an extrovert and vice versa. If you’re tactical, don’t try to be strategic, and the other way around. You just don’t have the tools. So be who you are and work with what you do best. If you do what you do best, you will be successful.

Liam: I think that’s a great bit of advice. Become who you really are. It can be a challenge to figure out who we are though, isn’t it?

Sally: Yes, definitely. Especially, if you have people around you who want you to be like them, because it’s more comfortable, you’re more comfortable around people who are like you. So that’s really hard to say, “You know what? That just doesn’t fit for me.”

Tara: It is also tempting sometimes to try to fit in.

Sally: Definitely.

Tara: Not just for the teenage children that you’re telling them that they don’t have to, but I think in the adult world as well. Some of that imposter syndrome term that we hear all the time, I think is related to that idea of wanting to fit in or wanting to be– not wanting to be perceived as not knowing something or not fitting in. That’s a common thread throughout life. But keeping in mind your advice is a good idea to keep in mind about who you truly are.

Sally: I recently embraced the idea that it’s okay to say, “I don’t know.” It has to be okay to say, “I don’t know.” As long as you follow it up with, “I don’t know, let’s find out.” Or, “I don’t know, but this person over here does, so let’s ask them.”

Liam: Yeah, I love that. But I also love the, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” [laughter] Not to say that everything should be that. The client says, “Hey, can you do this?”, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” But kind of on this finding yourself bigger picture issues, there are things about which we just don’t care about. It’s not a priority for us to throw us off our track and get us to derail.

Sally: I agree. You can’t put your energy everywhere so you have to put your energy where it’s important to you and where you can do something.

Tara: Yeah, I’m pondering. I have a question. I’m not sure where to take this question. You mentioned something about always doing better, getting better, remind me?

Sally: Making something better.

Tara: Making something better. Does that apply– I’m going to get really deep to maybe go off on the tangent, we don’t have much time left so sorry. But how does that apply if you’re true to yourself, if you’re being true to yourself but you’re also seeking the best version of yourself. Does that mean that your true self is malleable? Where does that trueness fall? Where is that?

Sally: This goes back to something I learned in manufacturing. I worked in lean manufacturing, so some of our audience will probably have heard of that before. It’s a system of constant improvement. You make a change, “Did it work? Yes or no? Okay great, if it worked, great. Now, what’s the next thing we can do to make things better?” Being true to yourself is– when you make that change, did that work? Is that really true to me or am I trying to be something I’m not? And if it did work, “Okay, did I do it well? Is that a skill I need to improve or not?” It’s just that constant examining of how do I make it better. Big or small, what can I do to make this better?

Liam: And that requires a certain mindfulness in that for asking ourselves, “Did that work?” We have to be mindful of what we actually did. “We’ve got to try harder this week.” Sounds great on a Sunday evening but what does try harder mean. Is that to-do items, does that mean I’m going to focus more?

Sally: You have to look at what’s your purpose. What are you trying to accomplish? Is what you’re doing serving that purpose? In the business, it’s like being true to your vision and mission. Will these actions serve that mission or is this off-message?

Tara: I think when Liam and I talked about success, he had a very clear definition in that approaching everything with love type of idea, that ultimate overriding concept that you’re talking about. I think I was thinking about– if I’m true to myself, am I a bitch? [laughter]

Sally: Some days, yes I am.

Tara: Or do I try not to be? I guess that’s kind of where I am.

Sally: I don’t want to be, but some days are just not good days. [laughs]

Liam: Emotions happen, Tara, emotions happen.

Tara: But is that my true self? I don’t know.

Sally: You know what? It’s not because it bothers you, so it’s not your true self and you know that.

Liam: I know you’re being silly with that word, I get that. But it’s really kind of unpacking. What about when you’re being cantankerous, is it because you’re mad or is it because as we’ve seen with Serena Williams, you’re being forceful and direct in a way that culture and society doesn’t always appreciate or respect? What is happening and what is the challenge? Does that sit within something that you, Tara, or me, Liam, or Sally, in our own world needs to work on to get better at or is it something that as a group, we need to work and change society? I think that’s where things like mindfulness and asking ourselves question, and to Sally’s point, “Is this working? Is it not? Do we change?”

Sally: “Does this bother me because I’m being a brat about it or does it bother me because it’s actually wrong?”

Tara: I love that. Thank you for going down that deep philosophical path. I appreciate the conversation very much. It’s definitely been a good hallway chat that we have to wrap up, I think, now on that very deep philosophical note so everyone listening can go off pondering who their true self is.

Liam: That was good questioning, Tara Claeys, well done, thank you.

Sally: Well done.

Tara: Well, Sally inspired me. Where can people find the true Sally Gradle online?

Sally: People can find the true Sally Gradle on Twitter. I’m at JustSal. Just me. My website is Blue Orchid Website. Yeah, those are probably the best two ways to find me.

Tara: Great. Thank you so much, thanks for sharing your story and all your thoughts. We really do appreciate it, Sally.

Sally: Oh, I’m glad to be here.

Liam: It was great to meet you, have a great day.

Sally: You too.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Bye-bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Meher Bala is a WordPress freelancer from Mumbai, India. She has been working with WordPress for 11 years. She is a foodie by heart and loves to travel.

Website | Meher Bala

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 66.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Meher Bala. Meher is a WordPress freelancer from Mumbai, India. She has been working with WordPress for 11 years. She is a foodie by heart and loves to travel. Hi, Meher, how are you?

Meher: Hi, Liam. Hi, Tara.

Tara: Hi.

Meher: It’s so nice to meet you finally.

Tara: You too, thanks for joining us here today, Meher. We’re really, really pleased to have you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Meher: Thank you for the opportunity firstly. I live in Mumbai, India with my family. I’ve been working since past 11 years and approximately nine and a half in WordPress. I started my first day of my career in WordPress, continued for almost one week, after that was shifted to another CMS for approximately a year or so, and was battling to ever come back to WordPress. My boss was pushing, “Let’s build a site in WordPress. Let’s build a site in WordPress.” And I was hesitating because I was so used to the other CMS. Finally, I took the plunge and now I’m here, I don’t look at any other CMS except WordPress. It’s fun.

Tara: That’s great. Yeah, we’re glad to have you in WordPress. Can you let us know where you work? Do you work for yourself? Do you work for someone else?

Meher: For the past nine years, I worked for someone else. I was working in a company. Then I was bored of a nine to five job and I was n’t getting too many WordPress opportunities. My company had gone into social media and digital marketing so there was hardly any WordPress projects. Then I said, “Let’s go into freelancing.” And my family stood by me so after that, I’m full-time a freelancer. Currently, I take on clients as well as work with an agency who gives clients and I do the development.

Liam: I was going to ask you about that because in the intro, I said you worked with WordPress for 11 years and then, not uncommonly, I got it wrong. You clarified that. Thank you. What are you doing within WordPress? You said you work in development. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Meher: Development as in integration mostly. Develop e-commerce sites, develop– if the client already has a ready design, I implement the design to the website. I’ll create a design from scratch. Usually, I have a person who backs up with the design but if he is busy, then I take on the design. That’s pretty much it.

Tara: Tell us a little bit how you even got started in computers and your background. Did you study computers in school or how did you find yourself even in the text space, and what that’s like, also I’m curious to know, in India?

Meher: I own a text space thankfully because of my father. I am dyslexic so I was kind of forced to take computers intent because that was not an option for me. I started liking it, I started developing interest in the internet and how it works and stuff. My father saw that interest and enrolled me in a three-year computer program. So with my three-year computer programming, and once I finished college, I had to do another one more year of computer program because in my final year, I stopped because my timings were clashing. Once I finished both, I got onto my job.

Tara: That’s interesting. You mentioned that you have dyslexia. Is computer programming or using computers make it easier for you to read and comprehend, because you don’t have to write? Tell me a little bit about what the relationship is between your choice to go into computers and your dyslexia?

Meher: When I was a kid, I used a lot of answers and all my answers were pretty decent. But when you put it on a paper, somehow it needs to come out. But when I was introduced to a computer, it almost started teaching me how to write, how to correct my spellings, how to work on myself. That’s how my computers and dyslexia kind of blends.

Liam: That’s really interesting. The tools of the computer, the spell checks, and the like that come with the applications were a great tool for you?

Meher: That was a lot of help. And also, my teachers have had backed me up a lot. They forced me to look at ways to help my growth instead of just thinking with the problem. They thought it’s how I can improve myself in learning, how I can improve my spelling, how I can become better. And don’t be defeated just because you have this. There are millions out there who have it and who are most successful. Don’t lose heart. Yes, some people will treat you differently, but then that’s life.

Liam: Indeed. Let me ask you, you said your father signed you up for a three-year course. That sounds like you were happy for that and not, “Hey, guess what? I’m signing you up, you’ve got three years to work on this.”

Meher: In the starting, I was happy. I didn’t know I was doing a three-year course. I just knew I was doing a one-month course. [laughter] My result of a one-month course was excellent, so my teacher who was teaching me, she literally drilled in my father like, “No, do a three-year, do a three-year.” When I was sitting on the table in the meeting, I was like, “Why three years? My college is there. I will not be able to have fun in college.” But I don’t regret it. I had my fun in my college, I had fun in the classes. I learned a lot. I’ve got a better exposure.

Tara: Tell me a little bit, Meher, because I was introduced to you because you are involved in Women Who WordPress, and the community that you have there. I don’t know if it’s just in Mumbai or if it’s in other regions around Mumbai and India. Can you talk a little bit about a being a woman in tech and being a woman in tech in your country?

Meher: Currently, I’m running a Facebook group called ‘Indian Women Who WordPress’, so it’s not related to only a state or city, it’s the entire country. Because there are a lot of women out there who are hesitant to come for meetups. I’ve always been saying that why are women hesitant to come for meetups or WordCamp? Why is only when a company forces you or only limits it in your own city, you’re thinking whether you should go or whether you should not go? When I started my career, I’ve been about WordCamps, I’ve been about meetups. It was after several years, almost seven and a half to eight years, when I was going through Facebook. I saw this event, something called WordCamp. That’s what led me to the meetup group, and I just realized I just missed it by a bit. That’s how it led me to become a part of the group. But I still enjoyed the meetup instantly. It took me another few months to join the meetup because the topics were not of my liking, it was a little too high for me. All my timings were clashing. I took a chance with one meetup and went and there were only two women with me, me and one more female. We were like, “Okay, is there any other woman around?” And I kind of left that meetup halfway. I didn’t know who to talk to. Gradually, as I started attending meetups, I got more involved, I got into the community more. That way, I became a part of the WordPress movement chapter. Then when Bridget and Jen spoke to me, when Bridget had said that, “You want to get interviewed?” And I thought for 10 days should I interview or should I not. I have never done this. I was scared to take up the interview. What questions are going to be asked? What am I supposed to answer? Why does the interview finish? Then I came to Women Who WordPress, and then few months later, in WordCamp Nagpur, someone was speaking to me], “You should start a Women in WordPress India chapter.” Then I started a group, because the best way right now is a Facebook group because not many people use Slack, especially the non-developers, the designers or just simple users. In that group, it was like– no one was asking questions. I had to get a lot of questions from them, I had to ask them, “What are the topics you all want? What are the issues you all are facing?” It just got silent. So at the start of this year, we, as a group, decided, “Let’s do monthly webinars.” This will help, if someone wants to speak up, you do a webinar because you are live in front of 10 people. Speak, speak confidently, do one thing, do three things. You’re not going officially live, but speak, gain confidence and developer skills, and then you can speak at any WordCamp. One of my main reasons to start a webinar was because it increases everyone’s attention in the group. Enhance people to speak and also helped me to speak. I can get a little confidence of applying as speaker.

Tara: That’s very smart.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a good approach and it’s not a small amount of work that you’re taking on. Starting a Facebook group is what, 15-20 minutes, but it’s the time and energy to build a community through that portal and to ask questions and encourage people to have questions and to think about different ways that the community, as varied as it is geographically, and culturally, and technologically, where they’re at in the WordPress technology level. All of that can be a real challenge and it sounds like you’re putting a lot of time and energy into that. It’s starting to become a success for you and for the group.

Meher: It will become a success when people, non-speakers, come in the group dual presentation and then become speakers. I am waiting for that. Hopefully, I’ll get there.

Liam: It will come. Speaking of success, let me ask you one of our signature questions here. how do you define success in a personal or professional way, or maybe both? What’s your definition of success?

Meher: For me, the professional way, success– everyone talks about everyone in a negative way to each other. But when someone talks about you in a positive way and encourages the opposite person to go and meet you or go and interact with you, or just says positive things about you when you have done for the community what you are doing and how that person can help me, or how I can help that person in improving their skills. And I’ve been told by social media that you’ve been mentioned, it’s kind of a different feeling because that’s how I realized that whatever I’m doing, yes, people are watching. To me, that is success because at some point, everyone does everything, everyone notices it. There are very few people who notice people’s work and appreciate the work they’re doing. When I have been told that you’ve been mentioned here, I was like, “Okay, where can I see?” That’s success to me in professional terms.

Liam: So it’s really the acknowledgment and maybe a feedback a little bit, if you will, that the work that you’re doing is proving valuable to a wider community. It’s not, “Hey, I really like what I built.” But people are getting value on it, people are appreciative of it, not from an ego standpoint but, yeah, “The work I’m doing is making the world a better place in some way.”

Meher: Right. And also, once someone talks to a female that and there is another female who’s working that much hard, who is growing the community– other women can take interest, can come forward to build a community, help their own cities to organize WordCamps or to create meetups. Because there are a lot of women in the WordPress community, but very few on the front light.

Tara: How is it for you? You’ve mentioned, can you tell us a little bit about your work/life balance and your family? You mentioned that you have a family there. Do you work from home? Do you go to an office every day? How does that fit in in terms of balancing what you’re doing professionally and personally in your life?

Meher: I work from home. I used to work from Starbucks. Now, I’m currently working with a colleague because when I was working at home, it was fun with family but then there was no one to talk to if you are faced with a problem on your website. There was no way to get quick solutions. And at the time, I was missing the office environment of interacting with people. Though being a freelancer, the office alignment is never going to be there. One of my colleagues from the community said, “I have a vacant seat. Just come in the office and do your work.” Currently, I am with one of my friends. I come to office daily. It’s fun, it’s interactive. It helps me learn more about WordPress and what are the new skills that I need to develop.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about your hobbies? You mentioned when we introduced you that you are a foodie and you love to travel. Where are some places that you’ve traveled to and what kind of food do you love?

Meher: My traveling hobbies come because of WordCamps.

Liam: Nice.

Meher: From the time I came to know WordCamps, I have been traveling to a lot of places. One is Udaipur, one is Nagpur. Recently, I have stopped traveling but I will get back to it. I am a Farsi love food and especially non-vegetative, non-veg. In that term, yes, I am an extreme foodie. I have a food Instagram profile also.

Tara: Oh. Do you like to cook?

Meher: Not really.

Tara: Okay. [laughter]

Meher: But if I’m forced to, yes, I can make dishes, not extremely high-quality, but I can make where I can satisfy my hunger.

Tara: That’s great. I also love food and I used to cook a lot and now I find it a lot more enjoyable when I don’t, for the most part. And I love Indian food, too.

Liam: Yeah, I love Indian food, too, and I like cooking. I need to learn how to cook Indian food from scratch. Right now, my Indian food is, go to the Indian grocery store and get the jar of sauce and go from there. I’m excited to try that.

Tara: I have to throw in a little pitch for an Indian cooking lesson at the end of the movie, ‘Bend it Like Beckham’. Have you ever seen that movie?

Meher: Yes.

Tara: At the end of the DVD version of it, she has a cooking lesson with– the director has a cooking lesson with her grandmother or her aunt, and her mother teaching her how to make Aloo Gobi, and it’s wonderful. Liam, if you want to learn how to make Aloo Gobi, watch ‘Bend it Like Beckham’ and go past the end to one of the special features, it’s great.

Liam: I’ll have to get it on the DVD. [laughs]

Meher: Liam, I’ll invite you to India, come. But I’ll treat you, my family would treat you.

Liam: Oh, I would love that. I had a few opportunities to go and just life intervened. A good friend of mine that I met in London is Indian and he keeps saying we should go over together. He still lives in the UK. My brother spent six months there on a work project and constantly tells us wonderful stories about it. I would like that very much. I’ll have to make a WordCamp out of it, which ties into the question I was going to ask you actually. You’ve talked about your work in supporting women to speak, to give tech talks, to speak to the community about what they know, and I wonder if you can share with us, have you spoken at a WordCamp, and if so, that first one, what was that like? And what specifically did you do to make that happen, kind of psychologically and emotionally? How did you gear yourself up for that? Because you’ve mentioned that a lot of people are stressed about it and I wonder if– like me, I still get stressed about it. So I wonder what you did to get over that hill?

Meher: I am official but I handled the group discussion locally. That was my first last year. I was nervous for it, I was pretty nervous. I did organize a couple of questions with my panelists. We did go through it once before the camp. One the day itself, I was just going through questions, I was just narrating how to face everyone. When on-stage, I think my fear just went away. It’s all in the mind that you can’t face a crowd. I had a good audience. I was surprised that I didn’t have an audience because there were three tracks and I really wanted to attend the other one. But I was surprised of the amount of people attending my session. It was fun. I enjoyed my session, I am sure the audience also did. And my colleagues also enjoyed answering questions that I was throwing at them. I did throw a couple of questions to the audience. Hopefully, coming soon I’m thinking of applying at a WordCamp, which I’ll solely speak.

Tara: Yeah, maybe you can come to the US and speak it at a WordCamp. [laughs] We’d love to have you here.

Meher: For personal reasons, because of family emergency, I couldn’t come for the Europe thing. Maybe next year.

Tara: Yeah, family always comes first.

Liam: Indeed.

Tara: I’d like to ask you our other signature question and that’s about advice. And especially as you start to do more speaking at WordCamps and Meetups and you think about your journey into your career. Can you share with us some advice that you’ve received? We like to say the best advice that you’ve received, that you’ve implemented in your life?

Meher: The advice which I had got from my school teacher to my seniors is that you work hard and success will automatically follow. If you run for success and if you fail, you’re going to get dishearted. So keep a small portion thinking that if it doesn’t go true, then what? Because not everything leads to success, there is always a balance of success and failures in life. And my friend says it’s work hard and party harder.

Tara: [laughs] I like that.

Liam: But I think, to go a little seriously on the advice there, slow and steady wins the race. We kind of forget sometimes that slow gives us time to react, it gives us time to perceive what’s happening, to process what’s happening, and to put our best foot forward with intentionality. And sometimes, if we’re going too quickly, we’re just moving everything and we’re moving forward, but we trip ourselves up and we don’t realize what we’ve done.

Meher: You get to correct yourself when you’re failing and it is essential for you to correct yourself because if you keep on doing the same thing, you are going to get the same results. When you do slow and steady, you correct yourself and then see success.

Tara: Yeah. I like the way that you phrased it when you first answered and you talked about running for success, and I had that visualization. It translates to this slow and steady idea, but the idea of running. You’re running so fast you can’t even see what’s going on around you or you trip and fall. So I like thinking of it, that visualization of the idea of running for success rather than sort of traveling toward it maybe in a measured way. I think that’s a great advice, thank you for sharing that.

Meher: You’re welcome.

Liam: With that advice in mind, when you find yourself running rather than steadily walking toward success, how do you find yourself catching onto that? How do you realize that? And when you do realize it, if you do, how do you correct that, what steps do you take?

Meher: I do realize that and sometimes it just misses, but when I know for sure that I am not going to get success the way it is, I stop, I take a break, I go out, I go for a holiday. I come back, I talk to people, then I start working. And then my mind freshens up. I come up with think different ways to solve things, that’s how I deal with my blockages.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. I think stepping away from the work environment, stepping away from the computer, stepping away from the monitor screen and going for a walk and placing ourselves in a different environment, maybe even taking off the headphones and not listening to music or to anybody except our head and the noise around us can be really valuable to recenter ourselves on that. That’s interesting, I like that.

Meher: Yes, it’s a relief for the body and soul.

Liam: Yes. Well, they’re all tied together, aren’t they? We don’t quite understand how but they all are, and if the body’s out of whack, the mind and soul struggling. If the mind is out of whack, the soul and the body do so. We have to figure out how to take care of all three together.

Meher: Yes, what you said.

Liam: It’s always easier to say that than it is to actually do that.

Tara: Absolutely, yes. Self-care is very important but it often comes last on the list.

Meher: I’ll even miss sometimes.

Tara: Yes, completely.

Liam: Yeah, especially if you’re running toward success. We lose the forest for the trees, we see that next project, or that next sale, or that next opportunity of business development, and we’re running, and then we either hit the wall or we fall in a hole or we find some kind of personal challenge and that’s a hard way to learning.

Meher: Yes, it’s hard.

Tara: Yeah. I think also, as we talked about in the beginning when Meher was talking about her advice is also failing and learning from that too. For sure, we’re coming back full circle to where we started on this conversation and we’re, I think, just about out of time here. Good circle, good circle, continuous and never-ending, but we do have to end. [laughs] Meher, thank you so much for joining us today. Can you tell everyone where we can find you online?

Meher: You can find me on Twitter at @meherbala, you can find me on my website, Meherbala.in. Thank you, Tara. Thank you, Liam, for the opportunity given. Loved chatting with you.

Tara: Thank you for sharing your story. We would love to meet you sometime.

Liam: Yeah, in real life. It’s been an absolute pleasure, Meher. Thank you for joining us.

Tara: Thank you.

Meher: And open invitation to come to Mumbai. Whenever you all come, just let me know, I’ll treat you everywhere, anywhere in India, even if not Mumbai.

Tara: Thank you so much.

Liam: I’ll have to check the WordCamp Mumbai schedule to see when that’s scheduled because that way, it can be a business trip as well, Tara.

Tara: Sure.

Meher: Next year.

Tara: Thank you, Meher. Bye.

Liam: Bye for now.

Meher: Bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Vaughan has been working on the web for 20 years, after falling into it by accident, and with WordPress since 2006, which was more deliberate. He’s been freelancing since 2014 specializing in web design and web content as Pilcrow and Pixel.

Website | Pilcrow and Pixel

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 65.

Liam: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Vaughan Simons. Vaughan has been working on the web for 20 years after falling into it by accident and with WordPress since 2006, which was more deliberate. He’s been freelancing since 2014 specializing in web design and web content as Pilcrow and Pixel. Hello, Vaughan.

Vaughan: Hello.

Liam: Hey, Vaughan. Thanks for joining us today. We’re so glad you’re here. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself, please?

Vaughan: Good to see you. Yes, more or less what the introduction says. I’m Vaughan, I live and work in London. I’ve lived here for, oh gosh, over 25 years. I originally come from Summerset in the southwest of England which is a very rural area. So I moved to a town where I lived all my life up until I was about 18, 20 of only 4000 people. Now I’m living in London which is eight to 10 million so quite a big difference. I suppose like lots of people, I sort of got interested in computers in the ’80s with the personal computer revolution. I guess, then I had things like Spectrum, would mess with that until late evenings. But then completely grew out of it when I was about 14, 15. Didn’t touch a computer again for over 10 years until I got a job at BBC in 1997, which I kind of fell into by accident. The new unit, doing stuff related to the BBC website which has only just launched in 1997. Yeah, I kind of went from there really. I kind of learned the basics of the web and messed around a bit with that, started my own blog a couple of years later on Blogger where everyone was, something like that. Messed around about for a few more years and then got into WordPress in about 2006, started messing with sites of other people. I worked at BBC until 2012 and I said, “Redundancy.” Then after a couple of the jobs for charity, I decided to go freelance and then try web design and web content. I included web content because the stuff I was doing in BBC was primarily editorial, I was writing content for websites and editing other people’s content. I wasn’t designing stuff or doing the coding or anything like that. That’s where my web content background comes from.

Tara: I’m excited to hear or speak to somebody who started working at the BBC when they had and they were just starting to have a website. That’s a pretty big feather in your cap, it’s a pretty cool thing to have that in your background. It must have been exciting there, I imagine. If you look back at what their website was in 1997-’98, probably quite different.

Vaughan: It was fairly exciting. I wasn’t involved in the launch but I was involved in a very small department at the time that happened to be connected to the web, but they did only launch their website in 1997 thanks to– I think it was a mix of– they decided to launch it after the death of Princess Diana, which was lots of people were going to the web to search for information, and also the 1997 election when Tony Blair won by the huge landslide. And those websites they launched very popular, and it wasn’t long after they decided to launch their website. I was in the early part of that, yes.

Tara: That’s really interesting. It’s like a Forrest Gump thing, I don’t know if you know Forrest Gump. You’re at this kind of pivotal point in history, that’s really interesting. How do you like living in London growing up in a small town?

Vaughan: I’m kind of used to London now. I’m still not entirely settled here. I still don’t feel like I really belong here. On the other hand, I haven’t visited Summerset since 1989, actually, when I moved to London. I wouldn’t know Summerset now if I went back to it. I think I’m a small-town boy who’s been transplanted to London and then kind of get on with it here. I like the fact that there’s lots of people around but I also don’t like the fact that there’s so many people around here. It’s kind of a love and hate relationship.

Liam: Yeah, especially in London. I spent a year in London. I was in Southfield before I moved out to Thames Valley. Where in London are you living and are you involved with the London WordPress community?

Vaughan: I started off in West London near the BBC at that time, but then moved to Clapham in Southwest London in 2006 where I’ve been since. I’m not really involved in WordPress community much. I am woving to get more involved with it but it’s more of a social thing. I sort of mentioned when we were talking that I’ve got Asperger Syndrome, which makes socializing quite a stressful experience. I’ve also got a physical disability so places that you go, it can be a bit limiting both physically and neurologically.

Liam: Absolutely.

Vaughan: It’s something I want to get involved with but I think it’s going to take me a bit of a leap to do it. I mean, I’m very active on Slack and things like that but actually going to things and meeting people is sort of nervewracking for me.

Liam: No, I understand that and that was not a pressure to ask. It was just an inquisitive ask so thank you for sharing that.

Vaughan: No, no, it’s fine.

Liam: You said that you kind of stumbled onto the web but you deliberately dove into WordPress in 2006. Tell me about that, would you?

Vaughan: Well, I had a blog on Blogger and then Movable Type, and I can’t remember, I think Movable Type was just getting on my nerves for some reason so I launched a new blog. I moved to my old blog which has been on Blogger and Movable Type and I decided to try this newfangled WordPress thing. At the same time, I kind of self-taught some various pages on the web, basics of CSS, and I was like, “Oh, this CSS stuff is good.” Because you’re not sticking in lots of code within the content, you can actually separate your content and your design, which really appeals me. That’s when I kind of started using WordPress, just the scenes really that I downloaded off the repo and got to know it that way. And then I was running my own blog, it’s still out there somewhere, I’m not giving you an URL because it’s terrible and it hasn’t had its design changed since 2006.

Liam: [laughs] Now I really want the URL?

Vaughan: No, no, no. I’m afraid not.

Liam: Alright, fair enough.

Vaughan: And it wasn’t under my name either so it was a complete change from my previous build where I had my name on it. I went through something to look semi-anonymous. So I had a blog on WordPress from 2006. It was quite– even by the standards of then, there’s no responsiveness or anything. It was quite a nice and minimal site and I did a lot of tweaking to it. And in 2009, I actually launched an online literary magazine called Kill Author, which you can look up. Again, not responsive to time, it is quite nice design that I put there. I kind of managed it and did edit of it completely anonymously myself, only revealing at the end after about 20 issues that it’s me who is behind it. I did that for about three years, until 2012. Also, in that time, I did a couple of other sites with people, friends, things to friends. Nothing paid or anything like that. So it wasn’t really– I left the BBC and I had a couple of rather unsatisfactory jobs that didn’t really suit me. So I thought maybe it’s time to try and do this thing freelance and see how far I get.

Liam: So within your freelance business now, Vaughan, what services are you providing? Is it content, is it theming? Is it a little CSS? Talk us through that?

Vaughan: My whole name with Pilcrow and Pixel is kind of– because I do content and design, really. I mean, I don’t really specialize in one or the other. I find that the specialism comes from clients primarily wanting design, so that’s my main part of it. But I do try and impress upon them gently that the content is important. One of the slight frustrations I had with clients was that, “I can do the content, there’s no worry about that.” And then you kind of look at what they’ve done and you think, “No, actually, you could use some help with that.” It’s kind of impressing upon the content is important and it’s not just about sticking keywords everywhere, it’s about having clearly written, clearly structured websites, and that’s the kind of sites– I suppose the things I’d say on my site would be WordPress rep design, content design, which is a sort of concept I’ve only learned about in the last couple of years. It’s definitely something I’ve kind of known about for years because of my BBC background as well, public service websites. Content design and how website’s constructed is very important.

Liam: Just the very name to it, right?

Vaughan: Yeah. I would sort of say, WordPress rep design, content design, and content management. Those are kind of the areas I specialize in. I’d like to do more content work, but again, it’s one of the things where you need to sometimes convince clients that you could do with a bit of help with your content.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely. That can be a challenge. How are you finding clients? You’ve mentioned that meeting new people and getting out and about can present a variety of challenges. But I wonder, within that, what’s been working for you?

Vaughan: I don’t meet clients, I work remotely, completely remotely.

Liam: Sure.

Vaughan: Nobody can actually ask to meet me, which is fine. I just prefer it really. I guess I’m better with clients by email, I can do phone calls and certain conferences if wanted, but I think email. A very clearly structured email, try not to give too much information to the client that will confuse them, try and keep them well-structured, and give them information they need without bamboozling them too much. I work with clients primarily remotely and by email.

Liam: And then, how do clients find you, I wonder, how do new clients find you? Obviously, if you’re emailing existing clients, they know how to find you. But how do new ones come in your door, so to speak?

Vaughan: New ones, I must admit one of my failings, I’m not very good at– I’m just going to get some water if that’s okay.

Liam: Absolutely, take your time.

Vaughan: Yes, clients. It’s primarily referrals but a small-time concern is there’s probably not enough referrals. I have sort of nudged times on this before, current clients, they are referring me. And I have had a few, but primarily, it’s through people discovering my website and liking the sound of what I do. But yeah, I’d certainly like to increase referrals. I think one of the things is the referrals I get aren’t the greatest. I don’t know, I have sort of spoken to other people on Slack about the kinds of referrals they get and I think the referrals I get is kind of clients saying to a colleague, a friend, whatever, “Oh, this person did my website. You should maybe chat with him.” It’s not very persuasive. It’s kind of mild referrals that sometimes get people contacting me. But I have tried things like referrals scheme but it didn’t really. I don’t know whether it’s a British thing, it might be a British thing but it didn’t really go down very well. It’s kind of a, “Well, I refer you anyhow.”

Tara: Yeah, I think it’s hard to find that line between what’s natural and what’s maybe, to put it in your kind way, more persuasive. [laughs] That’s a hard line to walk, and if you think about people that you refer or things that you refer for, I think we try to have an influence on people and give helpful information, if we’re happy with the service or something like that. But I guess there’s a point at which we don’t want to be pushing it to. But it’s good that you’re getting referrals and whether they’re more or less persuasive, I guess, is something that’s not really something you can control.

Liam: Well, maybe we can just share here that Vaughan is available for client work. If you’re looking for help, he’s available.

Vaughan: Thank you for that.

Liam: You’re very welcome.

Tara: That’s good, that’s somewhat persuasive, Liam.

Liam: Thank you. He seems a really nice guy so far. Vaughan, let me ask you one of our signature questions if I may, and it has to do with success and your definition. How would you define success? And if you want to talk about it in a professional sense, personal, or maybe a mix of both, we’d love to hear your definition of success.

Vaughan: My definition of success probably hasn’t changed hugely in years, really, and that is– when I finish a project or a piece of work, I always want to be really satisfied with it and know that the people who are getting that work are satisfied with it, too. I’ve got a few sites in my portfolio, no longer on my own site incidentally, that I’m less than happy with because various things came up in the end. It didn’t quite work out the way I wanted. Sites that are in my portfolio now are ones I can look at and say, “I’m really happy with those.” And the clients are really happy with them. As I said, I’ve got sites from my portfolio that are no longer on my own site that go back to 2013, before I officially started. But the clients feel very happy with and I’m sort of happy with. Certainly, if I was doing them now, I’d do them far better. But for me, it’s always been– when I’ve been in employed work, and in my freelance work, it’s always perhaps something at the end of it that I’m completely satisfied with and the person to whom I’m supplying that work is very satisfied with, too.

Tara: I think that what you’re describing sounds like you have very high standards for yourself and the way that things change over time. Best practices, design changes all the time, too, so yeah, satisfaction is a temporal thing. It’s not necessarily something that you’re satisfied now, but when you look back at it in a few years, you might not remember how satisfied you were.

Vaughan: Exactly, yes. And I do have a slight tendency to perfectionism. I won’t say my projects are the quickest, but I will certainly sit here with a design, looking at– one of my stupidest things is when I’m having a piece of text in a row, is that the spacing above the text is always a couple of pixels less, it certainly seems below it. And I would sit here for two hours looking at it, like, “No, no, it’s got to be–” Not quite two hours but it certainly seems like that sometimes but I would spend time at tiny little details like that. And I’d sit here at the end looking, the client’s not even going to notice that. It’s ridiculous but it’s one of the things that I do rather obsess over.

Tara: Yeah, I think that’s not unusual. I’ve certainly spent a fair amount of time trying to hunt down two pixels somewhere and adding in margins. [laughter] And it’s very satisfying when you eventually find it, but if it takes you an hour, that can be frustrating. And then I’ll do that and then I won’t notice the glaring typo in the headline because I was so focused on that thing.

Vaughan: That’s one fortunate thing I do have. Again, the perfectionism in design comes across the perfectionism in content as well. I will notice tiny little typo six miles away.

Tara: That’s good.

Vaughan: Or misuse of a comma or something.

Tara: Yeah. So you’ve talked a little bit about getting new clients and the referall process and otherwise for that. That sounds like a challenge for you. What would you say is your biggest challenge in running your own business?

Vaughan: Without a doubt, it’s self-marketing. I don’t know, I’m just not confident in doing it. I’ve never been someone who’s very keen on marketing, to be honest, and I think a lot of that comes from my time at the BBC. Because I’m sure you and a lot of your listeners will know the BBC is publicly funded so it doesn’t really have to go into things like marketing. Oddly, it does, but it’s not paid-for marketing. It can’t have adverts and things like that. It’s always rather come across to me, I just don’t have a marketing mindset. And I’ve tried– I’ve listened to every expert under the sun about running your own business and marketing and it just goes in one ear and out the other. I can’t get into that mindset. I just don’t understand it, I really don’t. I’m lousy at it, I wish I was better, I really do, because I’m sure– my business goes okay but I’m sure it should be going a lot better if I could be a bit more upfront and a bit more, “This is what I do. This is why you need it. Blah, blah, blah.” I’m just not that way inclined.

Tara: There’s a lot written about it and certainly in the freelance run your own business, entrepreneur website, agency world, there’s a lot written about how to market, how to get new clients, how to do email marketing. All of those things. Is there anything that you’ve seen that strikes you as, “I wish that I could do that.” Or, “This is what I’m aiming for.” Is there something that you want to emulate, or is it all kind of joined?

Vaughan: One of the sources which– they do some good chats about marketing, it’s the WP Builds Podcast. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that?

Tara: Yeah.

Vaughan: It’s ran by Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley in the UK. Their style and delivery and everything really sticks to my mindset, it’s kind of slightly cheekily irreverent but very informative. And they have some good guests on about marketing and their time. I would admit it’s probably the kind of British outlook and British sense of humor that appeals to me about their chats and interviews. And they bring that over into their discussions about all sorts of things. I mean, they have more technical discussions, they have marketing discussions, which I really enjoy. And I couldn’t name you any guests on there, I’m afraid, but there have been some good guests that have taught me a lot and helped me with my mindset and those kinds of things. What I don’t really like, and this is not to criticize any of them, but there are a lot of, as you were just saying, there’s a lot of courses about marketing yourself and they all come across as uber-confident. It just isn’t my way of doing things. What I like on the WP Builds Podcast is it really appeals to my outlook and sense of myself when they’re discussing things. And I think it’s possibly something that I don’t travel well in terms of listening to podcasts across the world about selling yourself and marketing yourself. I think it might be a peculiarly British mindset.

Tara: Yeah, that’s interesting. I haven’t thought about that before but that’s really interesting. I’ve listened to that podcast and follow David on a lot of different platforms where he exists, YouTube and otherwise, he’s got a lot of great things to teach us. What is your favorite thing to do? Your least favorite sounds like is marketing. What’s your favorite?

Vaughan: it would probably be marketing and admin. The admin, I’ve kind of got down to quite a good system now where I’m not dealing with lots of paperwork. I’ve got more clients on direct debit, so there’s more maintenance now. It more or less handles itself and I use quite a good accounts package that as long as I keep my invoices up to date, calculate my tax at the end of the tax year, more or less, I just need to press a button and my tax gets sent off at the end of the year. I’ve learned how to cut back my admin to very little. Yeah, I’d say it’s probably marketing the sort of thing I don’t like so much.

Tara: Yeah. What is your favorite? What’s the most favorite?

Vaughan: My favorite is probably all sorts of things actually. It’s getting into a project where I can really just involve myself in it probably too much and just really immerse myself in it and look at the details and get it completed. It’s getting myself immersed into projects, which is quite the common Asperger’s thing, you get obsessed by particular project. In some cases, that can be reading, in some cases, that can be doing craft. In some cases, that can be painting. For me, it’s kind of design and writing content, really. It’s just getting into something that really involves me and kind of obsesses me for a bit too long.

Tara: Yeah, I can relate to that. I always say, “I have a week or two weeks to build this.” But somehow once you get in it, you can’t stop, you just want to get to the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. It is, it’s fun. I can relate to that. Yeah, sure.

Liam: Vaughan, I want to interject and circle around to another question if I can, in the interest of time here. One of our signature questions is about advice and the question is, what’s the best advice you ever received and implemented in your life? What’s the best advice that you ever received and implemented? And that can be personal advice, professional advice, maybe a mixture of both.

Vaughan: I think professional advice. Well, actually, it would be semi-professional, semi-personal as well. But a huge stage of my life, the best advice I’ve ever received is to do what you love, simply. When I was preparing to go to university, I was all sorts of setup to do– well, not actually university, a level before university, I was all sorts of setup to do subjects like English, and History, and Geography. Now, I did two of those subjects, but the one I really wanted to do was drama. Not because I wanted to be an actor, I’m too shy and too nervous to be an actor, but I was just obsessed by theatre and directing plays and stage managing stuff. That was one point where I just decided I’m going to do Drama, and then I went to the university and did Drama for three years. Haven’t done anything with Drama, mind you, and then I ended up working on the web. I don’t quite know how that happened. But I think the other thing is professionally, it’s just when I finished at the BBC and I did these other two jobs, it really didn’t engage me. And then I thought, “You know, this is what I want to do. I want to work freelance and have my own business and do things I love.” Which is all things web in terms of design and content.

Liam: Yeah, that’s great advice. I like that. Do what you love ties back then to your success. You’re happy when the project ends and you still like what you’ve done and you like the output and you have the clients happy, so that ties in very nicely together with that.

Vaughan: Definitely.

Liam: When you’re trying to do what you love and you’re finding yourself pulled this way and that. You’ve got a deadline and you want to do some design but you also want to generate the content, how do you navigate that? When you have creative inspiration that might want to take you this way but the deadline is close and you’re concerned that if you follow that creative impulse, you’re not going to meet your deadlines. How does that work for you?

Vaughan: I generally will try and be strict to myself and concentrate first on the bits that are going to take longer. Now, for me, that’s generally design because I’m not a trained designer. I taught myself design over the years, whereas the content bit– I’ve dabbled with English quite, but I taught myself how to write content and that can come to me fairly quickly and fairly naturally. The thing I do first is the more difficult bit which is the design bit, and I focus on that first. Then I kind of think– in the way, I would never tell clients this, I do the design and then I think about the content last, which is something I never say to clients because I always want to impress upon them, “You’ve got to think about the content. It’s no good having a beautiful design, if you don’t have the content.” But when it comes to my own method of working, yeah, I will definitely do that. I will think about the content last, I would get the design and then I would the content, not around it, but inside it. And then if need be, then adjust the design around the content. So it’s doing the complex bit first.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a good method, I think. I love your emphasis and your passion for content, Vaughan. I think that’s something that a lot of us struggle to get from our clients, so the fact that you’re really into it and help them with it is great. But we are actually out of time, this went by so quickly. I really enjoyed meeting you, you and I have interacted on Slack for a while so it was really great to actually sort of meet you in virtual person here, voice to voice. Thanks so much for joining us. Where can people find you online, Vaughan?

Vaughan: People can find me at Pilcrowandpixel.com and they can find me on Slack regularly. I think I’m just VaughanSimons on that, I’ve got different names on various channels but I’m on the GenesisWP channel, Business of WordPress channel, a few others, I forget off the top of my head. I’m on Twitter irregularly, I got rather bored of Twitter but I should do Twitter more. And I’ve got a Pilcrow And Pixel page on Facebook, too.

Tara: Wonderful. Thank you so much, really appreciate having you on Hallway Chats, Vaughan.

Vaughan: Really enjoyed it, thanks very much.

Liam: Vaughan, thanks for joining us, it’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you and I’m just going to remind our listeners that Vaughan is available for work and we will put his links in the show notes, and you can check him out and if it’s a good fit, you’re invited to send him some work and partner with him.

Tara: Yes. Alright, bye-bye.

Vaughan: Alright, thank you. Bye-bye.

Liam: Bye, Vaughan.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Lisa Ghisolf is a freelance designer & WordPress developer. She’s worked for 20 years in the field and 10 years in WordPress.

Website | Gizmo Design

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 64.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Lisa Ghisolf. Lisa is a freelance designer and WordPress developer. She’s worked for 20 years in the field and 10 years in WordPress. She’s a Chicago native and speaks at conferences and travels as much as she can. Hi Lisa, welcome.

Lisa: Hello, how’s it going?

Tara: Hi, Lisa. Thanks for joining us, glad to meet you. Thanks for joining us in the hallway. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Lisa: Sure. I mean, as I said, I’m a Chicago native and I’ve been designing and developing since 1996, which means before CSS and before PHP and all that. I’ve just been freelancing for agencies and companies alike. I just love it. It’s kind of it in a nutshell.

Tara: Yes, so you’ve been doing this a long time, how did you get started a long time ago before WordPress and everything else?

Lisa: Oh, yeah. I actually was in school for journalism and found that I really loved design so I decided to go both ways. The funny thing is back then, no one was really doing it even though it’s such a huge deal, really, publications and print may be dying but it’s not nearly as dead as people would love to say it is. Yeah, it’s just been something that I’ve kind of grown with and tried to pick up as much as I possibly could.

Tara: Do you have a particular type of project or client that you work on right now or have you done– since you’ve been doing this a long time, I find people in that position usually have done a great myriad of things. Do you have a niche?

Lisa: Definitely all over the place. A lot of b2b corporate work, a lot of non-profit work, foundations, and a lot of small businesses too. The little mom and pop shops, all the way up. So I’d love to say that I completely niche in one area but it definitely has not happened.

Liam: Lisa, are you working mostly with clients directly, or you mentioned that you work with companies and agencies? Where do you land most of the time?

Lisa: You know, it’s kind of evenly split right now. Some places I work with directly, some are through agencies. It just really depends on my workload but right now, it truly is about half and half. It’s good and bad.

Tara: I want to talk a little bit about your description of yourself as a freelancer because that’s a word that I’ve gone to different talks about that word and what that word means. In your elevator pitch or at least in the pitch that you gave to use for this show, you call yourself a freelance designer and WordPress developer. What does freelance mean for you and does that mean that you work alone? Can you talk a little bit about that definition and maybe what’s wrapped up in it?

Lisa: Yeah, definitely. It is a really loaded word because I do think a lot of people think freelancer means fly by night. And I’ve definitely gotten a good amount of work from people who just kind of vanish off the face of the earth, which is cool. I have no problem with any of that. I think agencies identify with the word much better than the general public does. In my LinkedIn profile here I definitely say freelancer but I think there’s definitely a stigma to a certain extent that, you know, I’m not fly by night, I’ve been around for 20 years, 15 on my own. It’s not the easiest path in the world but honestly, I think that the freedom to kind of shape my own schedule and really just work how I want to work and with the clients that I want to work with definitely creates a much better life in a long run. I think overall, it’s been pretty good, that people have understood what I’m going for and how available I am, especially once they start working with me.

Tara: Yeah, thank you for that. I struggle a little bit myself because all of the things that you list, the flexibility and the freedom, I think the term freelancer has a lot of advantages to technically being a freelancer. But I do think that there’s been a lot of conversation in our space about that not being a very positive word or not very flattering for you as a business owner. I’ve heard the term solopreneur a lot, or sometimes people will say they have an agency. Do you have people that work with you or for you or are you solo?

Lisa: Depends, I bring on contractors if there are programming pieces that are just too much for me. Because I generally end around the end of the theme. If there are new plugins that need to get created or modified, that’s generally where I talk to other people and have them come in on those pieces. The design parts of it, I’m probably too much of a control freak and want to keep all to myself. They’re at that but I definitely bring in other people whenever possible.

Tara: And you mentioned that you speak at conferences. Are you involved in the WordPress community or do you do other types of things? What’s your involvement in your business community or communities?

Lisa: It’s kind of a mix. In the last few years, I’ve done a lot of WordCamps, mostly because I just want to travel to particulars locales. I’ve kind of been all over the place, even Montreal, but also Raliegh and LA. I tried to kind of go all over the place and it is great to meet these different communities and talk to them. But also just earlier this year, I still get NTEN, which is like a non-profit technology, I can’t remember what the E stands for, but essentially network. And it’s all non-profit technology which, essentially, the talk I was on was a panel and it was about starting a website and kind of where you take that website. Even if it’s a redesign or something like that, what is the process that you go through, how do you find the developer, et cetera, all those kinds of things. It just kind of depends. I’ve spoken to South by Southwest, it just generally depends how I feel and what direction I’m taking my business at that point.

Tara: Is it a business development process then? I assume WordCamps maybe not as much but these other sound like good ways to get your name in front of potential clients.

Lisa: Yeah, if I possibly can, definitely. Sometimes they are local so it’s kind of, are they people who may or may not be interested in my services or is this not the right crowd for them– I said that wrong, of course. Is this not the right venue for them, is this not the right topic for them? I think sometimes it’s kind of a struggle to find a match between who I’m talking to and my topic, and hopefully bringing it to them in a way that they can understand and walk away with something. Yeah, and I don’t know if I actually answered your question there. [laughs]

Tara: No, I think you did for sure. I’m just asking about your motivations behind different conferences that you participate in. I’m going to switch gears and get a little bit away from business or maybe more into business, depending on how you want to take your answer to this question that we ask everyone, which is, how you define success, Lisa? What success means to you, whether that’s personally, professionally, or where the two meet, how your life is fulfilling your ideas of success and what that means, can you talk a little bit about that?

Lisa: Sure. I think that it’s really actually fairly practical. It’s mostly just making enough money that I can do the things that I want to do like travel, and working with the types of clients I want to work with. I think that’s a huge thing, too, because at the end of the day, I probably spend more time with them than I do with most other people. I really want to work with people that are on the same wavelength as I am and that I’m excited about their projects and that they’re excited about my work and that kind of thing. Yeah, it really comes down to just being able to do the things that I want to do while I’m working while I’m continuing along, hopefully to creating things that I want to share with other people portfolio-wise and that I’m proud of.

Liam: That’s a pretty practical definition, I’d agree with you there. I wonder finding that balance between having enough money in the sense of project flowing in at your hourly rate, balancing that with people that you like, and maybe not go out to dinner with all the time but you enjoy getting an email, conversing, and working with them on projects. How do you find that balance, particularly as– well, any business has to find their balance but maybe it’s a little bit more precarious with a freelancer because it sounds like you’re the only one doing business development and you’re also the only one meeting the deadline. How do you make sure that you have enough projects coming in from the kind of people that you want to work with?

Lisa: A good amount of that, I think, has been locking the people that I’ve met. I’ve certainly met people who haven’t been the greatest to work with but–

Liam: [laughs] I think we’ve all met that person.

Lisa: Yeah, they’re all out there. But I am really happy to meet those people. I think, in some ways, it’s a very symbolical relationship that we just kind of give each other, and it’s easy to continue on then if they have continual projects and things like that. I found that I shifted over time to more of these corporate and agency projects just because for one thing, they generally know how to purchase design and development, they know what they’re looking for and I’m not really explaining everything to them, which isn’t an issue but it makes–

Liam: Or it’s less educational work, right? Plus, I have an onboarding cost and it’s a faster process.

Lisa: Definitely. And there’s always continual work then, too, so that makes a huge difference if we are working together. I don’t know, I find that I’m more excited by those projects and I think it all kind of comes together in a way. Finding them, I feel like I just networked and I worked around enough in different places that, generally, people will bring you with them when they move to another agency or another company. I don’t know, whatever their next piece is, they’re definitely talking to you about it and really working those relationships as much as I possibly can. I don’t care, I send Frango chocolates, I send whatever thank yous all the time. Yeah, I’m just a big fan of, “Hey, I love working with you and I will let you know.” And just being available as much as possible, too. I think that’s a big thing. I’m lucky that I don’t have kids to distract me from all of that, which they should, of course. But yeah, I think it’s kind of like an overall trying to bring those people in and I kind of feel like it’s the law of attraction, they keep attracting more of those types of people. They see that kind of work that they like as well and it just kind of keeps feeding into itself.

Liam: What kind of work do you do? I know you said design and development but– and you started in ’96. Was it always web-based, so you’re designing websites, you’re developing websites? Tell us a little bit about what’s day-to-day like for you in terms of sitting down at the computer and getting work done.

Lisa: Right now, I’m at a big project for Alight, which is kind of an offshoot of Aon, it’s a benefits company. I’m doing a lot of corporate benefits work but there are big campaigns that go on and they all need to be done by end of year so that everyone can get that information for legal reasons and all that kind of stuff. But generally, usually, I’d be ending up going to the co-working space, drinking lots of coffee. It’s funny because I am both print and web so I may be doing a bunch of designer production work for some pieces that some of my corporate or non-profit clients need. Adding to that, anything going wrong with WordPress sites certainly, I hear about it first. “There’s a glitch here, this broke, someone did something, you don’t know what, please just fix it.” I get that all day long and I’m cool with it, I love fixing sites. I think sometimes I enjoy that a little bit more than the creative side of it. Yeah, it’s kind of a ‘who knows what’s going to happen’ sort of thing, which is great, that I never know what’s going to come down the pike. It does keep me on my toes. I constantly know what things are happening, who’s hacking sites and how. That’s generally how my day goes. I never necessarily know, I can never necessarily turn off my email, that kind of thing.

Liam: Yeah, I get that. Within that then, what’s your favorite thing to do when you’re working? What do you like to do the most?

Lisa: You know, I still love to just sit down and create from the start. And I’m one of those people who doesn’t necessarily sketch but I love to design something from scratch. That’s probably my favorite thing. If it comes down to developing, and I can’t necessarily say that I work on both things at the same time because my brain would probably explode. I think it is just digging into something. And I know that I’m weird among my peers for this but I’ve heard it more than once, I love actually getting into a site that I’ve never been into before that’s been around for a while and then being able to clean it up and speed it up and get rid of some of the debris that’s kind of been bogging it down and just optimizing it and all, that kind of thing.

Liam: It’s a very polite way to say it, the debris.

Lisa: Yes.

Liam: You’re very diplomatic.

Lisa: I try, yes. [laughs]

Tara: Yeah. It sounds like you love what you do. You mentioned that you go to a co-working space. Do you also work out of your house?

Lisa: Sometimes, but I sometimes just find that I need that stimulation of just other people being around me. Even coffee shops before I found the co-working space. Because I’m on the burbs of Chicago and you don’t necessarily have that many co-working spaces here just yet. Yeah, I find it sometimes is just a little too quiet so I just try to get out whenever I can.

Tara: Does that help you shut down at the end of the day and balance things or are you always– you said you’re always on email or something. Are you always on call?

Lisa: It does help me shut down to a certain extent, at least like the bigger things. I do have a bad habit of just looking at emails every so often. But most things I try to push until the next day unless it’s an emergency. Yeah, if I don’t need to be available, then it is good for me to shut down because working 24/7, it’s a very easy way to burn out.

Tara: Yeah, it’s hard to shut down when you are a freelancer and you’re working for yourself because your clients, like you said, I call them the whack-a-moles, these things pop up, not when you’re necessarily expecting.

Liam: Wait a minute, you call your clients the whack-a-moles? [laughter]

Lisa: That’s what I thought at first, too.

Tara: Sort of. I mean, the clients or the client issues, because you never know– there’s that game in arcades, there’s a spider or something and you have to step on– it’s like something’s always popping up or you have to hit it with the hammer. I can’t remember. But sometimes clients remind me of that because you’ve been doing this for a long time so you probably maintain– I’m assuming you maintain sites for lots of people. Even if you don’t, a site you built six years ago, all of a sudden, they remember that you built it and they contact you because something’s not working and you weren’t expecting that. And maybe you go and check it and you think, “I’ll just look for two minutes.” And then an hour later, you’re still trying to fix their problem, and there goes your day. You can’t really necessarily predict what’s going to happen in your day and you also feel probably loyal. It sounds like you really like your clients a lot and they like you too, so to shut down at the end of the day is a great thing to do and we all know that’s a great thing to do, but in all honesty, probably we don’t do it as often as we should. But what do you do when you’re not working? What do you like to do for fun?

Lisa: Oh, god. I just not terribly long ago finished the improv program at Second City and I really would love to continue doing that but then I just got caught up with work, just hit and the balancing act is not there, not for staying late at Second City and then getting up the next morning and trying to get work done, that just isn’t going to work. And I love to travel, I think that’s my biggest outlet. And the last couple of years, I think I did about seven speaking gigs and trips tied into those, and just try to get out as much as possible.

Liam: Where have you been? Where have you traveled?

Lisa: Oh, lord. So the thing that makes me an international speaker is Montreal, that was for Montreal WordCamp.

Liam: Woohoo.

Lisa: Yeah, I know. I spoke– this actually was last year at the Write/Speak/Code conference in Oregon in Portland. Let’s see, what else? LA, San Diego, those were WordCamps, Raleigh. I did do some travel blogger speaking for a while there too, bloggers, I just have a few of them that stick around. Some of them actually do have budgets, it’s kind of shocking but some of them actually do pretty well. Yeah, just trying to get around as much as possible. I’d love to go more international but yeah, work has been a little crazier this year so it hasn’t been as big of a priority.

Liam: Sure, sure. You’ve been in business, you said, for yourself for 15 years, I think, or at least you’ve been working by yourself for 15 years. You’ve been designing and developing for 20. What’s been your biggest challenge as either a designer, or a developer, or as a businesswoman, as a business owner, or as a freelancer? I’ll let you frame the question as you want. What’s been your biggest challenge?

Lisa: That’s a good question because I can find answers for every single one of those names.

Liam: We’re only a 30-minute show so you’ll just have to limit it to one of them. [laughter]

Lisa: I think, as a business owner, I think business development is one of my biggest issues just because sales is not my forte and it was nothing I ever thought that I would ever have to do. I don’t think any– especially designers don’t think that we have to sell. But at the end of the day, we all have to sell what we’re doing to our clients, to whomever. I think that’s just been the toughest one for me. I’ve gotten a lot of word of mouth but it’s not always easy to break into different niches. I think that’s always been a tough one for me. Gosh, otherwise, I don’t know, time management sometimes is a big issue, just depending on how projects are going and if one project goes longer because websites tend to generally go longer than they ever should because of lack of content or something, mostly like that. I think those are my biggest issues, and also not wanting to do billing. That’s always a big one. I’d rather just get the work done and someone else to think about it, but then I would actually be working for someone else so that wouldn’t work too well.

Tara: Yeah. How about timekeeping? Do you track your time, do you bill hourly?

Lisa: I actually do. Generally, actually, it’s built off of my early but I do project rates for people just so they know what they’re getting into ahead of time. With a certain number of rounds of revisions and that’s so it kind of has a full scope and I can get an idea of where it’s going and if we hit beyond those hours that I’ve put out for. I use Goharvest.com, I love to use that just to keep track of everything because I hate writing down on little post-it notes everywhere. Like, “I did 15 minutes on this job, or on that job, or something like that.” It just makes life so much easier. For those quick fixes like, “This is wrong with our website.” It’s nice to be able to say, “Yeah, I spent 20 minutes on it and here’s your bill.” And go from there. But yeah, I end up tracking pretty much everything.

Tara: Yeah, that’s good. I think that’s a challenge for a lot of people, I noticed for me. Let me ask you another one of our questions that we like to ask everyone, which is, we’d like to hear if you have some advice to share with us? If you have any advice that you’ve received that has been helpful to you and that you’ve implemented and that you can share that with us? What would that be?

Lisa: That’s another tough one, which I probably will have another long rambling answer for. God, sometimes I think it’s just a matter of starting something. I think a lot of people that I know I talked to, when they talk about freelancing, they just say they can’t do it because they would just sit at home and do nothing. And I totally understand it. If you procrastinate on a project, it can be quite easy. But I think that if you just start on it, give it five minutes just to look at it, it makes a huge difference. And just getting something out the door and then you’re not dreading it quite as much. And if you’re dreading it, maybe you shouldn’t be working with that client or that type of job or something like that. I think just keep at it, that’s always been a big one. I think it’s easy to feel an imposter syndrome and that I’m not doing as well as everyone else. You can only do what you define as success and do as well as you possibly can with your work and how you’re getting yourself out there. To me, at the end of the day, it’s just about keeping at it, keeping a good attitude, finding others who can– the clients who are a pain in the butt so your friends don’t think you’re insane and move on from there.

Tara: So do you have that kind of outlet? You do a lot of speaking and traveling to conferences and things like that. What’s your support network? Is it your freelancer friends, you go to meetups, how do you manage that what you just described?

Lisa: I wish I were better about going to meetups because I would be much more in tune with the Chicago WordPress community. But I just never make it to anything, I feel like. I do look in freelancer groups on Facebook and I find that they’re really helpful to find those people that you can just talk to and get out the good and the bad that’s all going on, and not really put it out there on your Facebook feed, which probably your clients are also reading. Because half the time they will think it’s about them. Yeah, I find that those are the easier things, those kinds of freelancer friends designers. And the co-working space was excellent also for just talking to people on a general basis, kind of having co-workers that I don’t really work with, and the great thing about that too is that they don’t bug me then all day long to get jobs out because I’m not working with them. It makes it easier. Yeah, it just kind of introduces that social element if you want it. I think those are the big things that get the work stuff out at the very least.

Liam: And that probably helps, as you said. As a freelancer, there’s not an immediate community. You have to make your own, you don’t have a team, you’re working alone, especially if you work within home. And then to know, “Am I doing this right? Is this how people run a business? Is this the amount of work I should be putting in on this kind of project? How do I compare myself to the industry?” Not necessarily, am I better or am I worse, but like, is this even close to what most people define as right or rightish? And that can be a real challenge. Those different avenues of networking social media, Facebook, and real life at the meetups and at the co-working space can be really helpful, can’t they?

Lisa: Oh yeah, most definitely. It’s just, like I said, a different outlet that your friends and family don’t have to feel like they’re getting overwhelmed with, your complaints and all that.

Tara: I’m going to ask you a question that may not come out the right way but I can tell because I can see you and Liam did. None of us are probably in our 20s and 30s so I was thinking co-working spaces as being intimidating because I imagined that they’re filled with young people, and that I would feel so conscious about that. What’s your co-working space like demographically?

Lisa: It’s all over the place, to be honest. There are people who are in their 60s and down through– some of the women who work the front desk are in their 20s. Honestly, if you’re Second City– I got over that because one of the women that I was in the class with was 18 years old and another one was 18 and he was just still in high school. Yeah, I had to get over that really quick because otherwise you just feel like the old crone.

Liam: I think co-working spaces really have changed in the last two to five years, certainly the ones that I’ve popped into from time to time. And I don’t regularly co-work. There really has been that mix, the recent college grads but also the older professionals or older individuals. I think that’s probably reflective of the fact that so many people work from home even though they are employed by somebody else or they are running their own consultancy, their own services from. It certainly makes it not just the young people, hipsters club but it really is a place of varying demographics, Tara.

Tara: Yeah, that’s good to know. I have that sort of impression in my head which probably is left over from maybe earlier days. I also want to just say that I think it’s awesome that you do improv and I think it’s great not to just add humor in your life and interact with people of all ages that way, but you’re in Chicago and to participate in the Second City improv class must be pretty cool, that’s really neat.

Lisa: Oh yeah, and it’s definitely an outlet. It’s complete 180 from anything I do.

Tara: That’s really neat, cool. I think we are coming up on the end of our time with you today, Lisa. I’d like to ask you to tell us a joke but I won’t put you on the spot.

Lisa: No, I never get that.

Tara: [laughs] Thank you so much for joining us here today, it’s great to get to know you.

Liam: Thank you.

Lisa: Thank you.

Tara: Where can people find you online?

Lisa: You can just go to Gizmo-design.com and find me, and you can find all of my contact information and other websites there.

Tara: Okay, will do. Thanks so much.

Liam: Thanks Lisa, great meeting you.

Lisa: Yes, you too.

Liam: Hope to see you soon, bye-bye.

Tara: Bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Jason Yingling builds WordPress sites focused on results, he’s digging deeply into Gutenberg and shares what he learns on his blog at Jasonyingling.me. When not working with WordPress, Jason likes reading Elmo books to his one-year-old, he says, not to himself.

Website | Jason Yingling

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions, and our guests share their stories, ideas and perspectives. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 63. Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Jason Yingling. Jason builds WordPress sites focused on results, he’s digging deeply into Gutenberg and shares what he learns on his blog at Jasonyingling.me. When not working with WordPress, Jason likes reading Elmo books to his one-year-old, he says, not to himself. Although, who knows. Maybe sometimes. Right, Jason? Hi, welcome, Jason.

Jason: Hi, thanks for having me.

Liam: Hey, Jason. Thanks for joining us out here. Delightful to get to spend some time with you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Jason: Sure. As you know in my intro, I have a one-year-old, I’m a new dad. So I’ve got her running around. That’s a big part of my time these days. But when I’m not attempting to race her, I do WordPress development for a company called Red8 Interactive. I’m based out of St. Louis, Missouri but we actually work remotely now. We build custom WordPress sites, a lot of advanced custom field kind of focused stuff. And that’s kind of been our big thing. I think about when I started there about six years ago, we did a big shift to WordPress-only development. Because we were kind of mixing all around then, just to kind of niche down. It has been really good for us over that. It kind of helped me grow through WordPress, I’m able to go to WordCamp and get involved with the community a lot more. Now I’ve kind of expanded that into helping plan the WordCamp here in St. Louis, which will be going into WordCamp US next year. So that will be a big thing. Then doing some local meetups and then kind of doing some of my own theme and plugin development on the side just to keep moving.

Liam: That’s wonderful. I have two points I want to talk to you about. As a WordCamp Philly organizer and one of the organizers on one of the first US teams when WordCamp US was in Philly, be careful what you wish for. [laughter] A city WordCamp is one thing. No, I’m kidding. I’m being a little bit silly about that. The second thing I wanted to ask you about is when we–

Tara: No, you’re not.

Liam: No, I’m really not. [laughter] When the agency that you’re with was looking to limit the number of content management systems that it uses for building sites, what’s your involvement in that? Were you on the research team, were you on the development team, were you pro-WordPress or was that a decision that just came out? Maybe you can just talk about this because that’s really interesting. I’d be interested to hear how that decision kind of came about?

Jason: It’s been a while now but I’ve only been there probably six months or so, I think, when we kind of decided we were making that change. At that point, I was a junior developer there. There was a couple of senior developers that kind of led the charge. One was actually one of the original organizers. He organized some of the early WordCamps St. Louis so I’m sure that was a big driving force as far as his experience with it. And then just being– I think at that point, we were five developers and a couple of project managers. I was kind of with a small team trying to narrow our focus because we would have a build that’s like a Javascript Geolocation thing going on at one point. One thing that we did was a bunch of these kind of Amazon apps inside, like Amazon web stores. That was its whole own set of testing and all that kind of stuff. So just kind of narrowing our focus so we can just get really good and kind of consolidate our process so we can automate things, repeat things. That was the overall goal to focus down.

Tara: Jason, what’s your background? How did you get involved in WordPress and coding to begin with? You’ve been with this agency for a good bit, it sounds like? What’s your background?

Jason: Yeah, it’s actually not development really at all. I’ve always kind of been interested in web development, playing around with HTML and Flash back in the day, in high school. Just kind of teaching myself on the side, taking little classes here and there. What I actually went to college for was marketing, and then I also did a little bit of programming. My college had electronic arts that did a little bit of video production and audio, and a tiny bit of multimedia web stuff. I’ve just kind of always done that. Then I hung around and got my MBA, then when I finally started looking for a job, the first stuff I was finding was development stuff. I was like, “Alright, we’ll give it a shot.” I got hired pretty quick there and I’ve been at the same company now for a while. With the shift to WordPress I got– having the first senior dev kind of lead me in into WordPress and getting involved with WordCamps and stuff kind of got me more involved with that community. I always really liked how easy it is to create things. Just anybody can kind of go in and get something started. It’s one of the big things I like about the kind of open-source WordPress community.

Tara: Yeah. It’s interesting to me that you have an MBA, and a marketing background as well. I find it really helpful in what we do because websites are basically a marketing device, that’s really what they are at their core. So I find it very helpful to have that background. And MBA is a whole another level. I don’t know if I’ve met any MBAs who are doing WordPress development. Has that served you well?

Jason: Yeah, moreso now. Over the last three or so years, I’m now the director of development at our company so I’m kind of more in management leadership role. I still do a bit of hands-on development a lot of the time because we are so small. I think at this point, now, we’re actually three developers and one BM, we’ve kind of paired down even a little bit. Yeah, it’s kind of kicked in a little bit more now. And then as far as the marketing kind of stuff that I’ve done has been helpful just on some of my side-project stuff I like to work on. Any of that kind of stuff.

Tara: Are you one of the owners of the company that you work for?

Jason: No, I’m not.

Tara: Okay. Have you ever owned your own business or is that something–?

Jason: Kind of, I guess. I mean, I have a ton of different side-projects, nothing official really. I’ve got a site I put some themes up on just because I’ve kind of built up a few practice ones and stuff like that. But I don’t have anything really officially of my own business. It is something I’d be interested in doing down the road, I think, for sure, because I do kind of have that business background.

Tara: Right. It sounds like you’re applying that in a good capacity where you are right now, though, and not having the stress of having it be your own business and making payroll and all of those things that come along with them.

Jason: Right, those ones don’t sound as fun as creating the stuff. That’s what I’m more into, really.

Tara: And working remotely, how’s that? You have a daughter, as you said, who’s one, and you work from your house with her around, or is she out of the house?

Jason: Yeah. Let’s see. I think in October, shortly after she was born, so I guess last October, we went fully remote. Before that, we were working out of– it’s a building called Opio Startups here in St. Louis. It’s kind of like a tech incubator where people can rent office space essentially for small companies. We actually had kind of a larger office there and we were only using half of it, which is why we kind of ended up going fully remote. Actually, all of our developers are in St. Louis, but our CEO is based in San Francisco area. Yes, it’s been nice working remote. My daughter was about five or six months old when we went fully remotes so it’s been nice to be around whenever she’s there. My five was a teacher but she needed to go back right away so she’s been home, too. She’s able to kind of watch her if I ever have to do calls or anything like that. But it is nice to just be able to kind of run out and be able to play with her for 15 minutes to take a break. No commute is nice as well. That saves some time.

Tara: Yeah, for sure. I think if you can do this, especially when they’re little, it’s a great treat to have that opportunity. That’s great that you can do that. And your wife’s a teacher so she’s home during the summer and you said she’s taking some time off so the two of you cohabitating all day long with the little one. You can trade-off queue I imagine, yeah?

Jason: Yeah, for sure. My daughter’s a little more active now, she’s been getting better at walking in the last couple of months so she’ll kind of just come stumbling into the office a little bit. She’s apparently figured outdoor closing today so I heard her coming and then turned around, and she was closing my wife out of the room. [laughter] But she can’t open them yet, so that’s good.

Liam: That’s too funny.

Jason: Working remotely, it has its own– as far as doing the work and working with the other developers as a team, it does have its own issues to try to figure out. One thing that was nice when we had our kind of office space because we could just kind of lean over each other’s shoulders and be like, “Hey, what’s up with this issue?” Or kind of see if someone was deep into something and not just ping him to take him out of it. Yeah, those are some of the things that we’ve kind of been working out the kinks of still, as we’ve been little under a year fully remote now.

Tara: Yeah. I work for myself so I don’t collaborate that often but I always think about maybe just turning Zoom on with somebody else working simultaneously so you can sort of simulate that office environment and have some chit-chat. But once you start doing it for a long time, I think you lose the habit of even interacting with people. I mean, many years ago I did that but you sort of lose the habit of it.

Jason: One of the nice things– since I helped host a WordPress meetup here and I actually do it in the old Opio building where we had space before so they actually gave me a membership for doing that and let me come in and kind of hang out if I ever need to kind of get out around and actually work with other people, kind of deal.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a good opportunity. That’s great. I’m going to ask you a question we love to ask everyone, and we think about it often ourselves a lot, too. I want to ask you about your definition of success. It sounds like you are in a good place and you’ve got your family growing, and your job has transitioned a bit to allow you to have more flexibility. How would you define success and where on that journey, if it is a journey for you, where di you find yourself in that journey with that path of success?

Jason: I’m not the best at putting it into words, I guess, but I kind of define success as just kind of constant motion forward almost. Even if a project may not be like a financial success or something like that, there’s plenty along the way that can kind of be mined from as small successes and kind of applied to future learnings. I’ve always considered, as long as things are kind of moving forward and kind of learning from the experiences that that’s successful. As far as where I’m on my journey, I have trouble defining what successful endpoint would be really, so it’s hard to put a play on it but things have been moving along pretty well. Obviously, I still want to keep growing both career and family-wise and everything, so it is somewhere in the middle, I’d say, in the journey. But it’s definitely going in the right direction.

Tara: Yeah. Maybe there’s not an endpoint but it’s sort of like following it along or riding alongside it. Cool.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. It is a journey. And maybe success almost is being mindful of the improvement and the challenges overcome. Jason, as you noted, sometimes those improvements and those challenges overcome happen really quickly. Career goes on leaps and bounds. The arrival of your daughter, okay, it took nine months to get there, but once she’s there, that’s a huge change. And other times, it’s more gradual. But just being mindful of the effort and the change. I like that definition, thanks for sharing that. If that is your definition– and I’m not questioning, that’s just a transition comment, I guess. Given your definition, what’s the single most important thing that you do every day to keep moving forward?

Jason: I really just kind of keep plugging away at it, just kind of keep learning, trying to find the little successes in the different things. Some days, obviously, I get a lot more done than others towards any one goal. It’s just kind of, keep plugging away, just as long as we’re making improvements. As far as a company, as long as we’re making improvements. If we’re not hitting the deadline, what caused it, where can we fix that up later? Stuff like that, just to kind of keep improving.

Tara: What’s your favorite thing to do every day?

Jason: You know. I always have trouble deciding on things like these. As far as the work standpoint, I like the more creative aspects. If I’m doing coding, kind of solving complex problems and trying to create a simple user-friendly solution to complex problems and just kind of organizing stuff from that aspect. As far as personal life, things have definitely changed quite a bit now as spending time with my daughter and being able to kind of go around and play with her, whereas a couple of years ago, it might have been something a little different.

Liam: Let me ask you about the work one first, if I can. Your favorite things at work, solving creative problems. Now that you’re the director of development and coding less and working ‘more’, managing more using your business degree. When you get to be creative, are you writing the code that solves the problem or are you setting up the workflow, and the conditionals, and making sure that the fields collective will flow together and can go into this API or that? Where do you get to be creative and how does that play out in terms of sitting down and getting work done?

Jason: It is a little of both. It’s probably kind of a split, since we are a small development team. I still do a good chunk of kind of development. But obviously, I try to offload some of the stuff, even some of the more complex stuff, if I can, which isn’t easy always. Kind of the new challenge that that’s open for is how do I get better at kind of setting the requirements and expectations for a project at the startup rather than being the one that’s actually doing it, where all those can kind of be in my head and I kind of know since I deal with our clients a lot more than our developers, then I have more information and getting that information over to the developer that’s working on it in an effective way and making sure that they’re set up to go through everything. That’s definitely one thing I’ve been working on a lot lately, too, is kind of managing all of our different developers’ workload. Since now, I think we host about 60 of the sites that we built, so we do some hosting of sites we build through WordPress engine. So we do a lot of maintenance work from those as well. Kind of managing new project custom-built and fitting in time with our limited hands-on-deck to be able to kind of squeeze all that in and hit deadlines and stuff like that has been a big kind of challenge to work on.

Tara: Yeah. And then if you’re also now responsible for business development, I would think that also is a challenge, trying to spread yourself in very different directions. Do you have a preference? Do you enjoy having that diversity of tasks or if you could choose one thing to focus on, what would it be?

Jason: You know, I like the ability to kind of mix around a little bit, but it definitely is hard. And really, my position is more focused on kind of leading development on projects, I don’t do a lot of business development or sales-type aspects. I do more kind of producer-based setup where I’m working with clients to get the requirements, convert them into estimates and things like that. It’s a little bit trying to get– I do work with our CEO that does most of our sales a lot and try to make sure that he’s getting proper requirements from the client, and then those are getting mapped back to our estimate and then to our developers in a way that they can be handled as if they won. I do find it now that I’ve got a lot more going on, it is kind of hard to get focused on some of the more complex development things and be able to just kind of block out that time when it’s going to take four or five hours to build something. It’s a little harder to come across those things. I think I probably enjoy that time a little bit more just because I can kind of get locked in and focused on something. I know the other aspects are very important as well.

Tara: Yeah. Sorry, I think you said business development earlier and I think we have the term development is– I guess I’m just realizing how it has multiple meanings.

Jason: My title is director of development but I’ve noticed that that is kind of more of a business development thing usually. Web development is the term behind it.

Liam: I heard it as web development. [laughs]

Tara: See. That’s because I have a marketing background, that’s where it comes in. Sorry about that.

Jason: No problem.

Tara: It sounds like you’re pretty involved in the WordPress community and we also like to hear a little bit about that. We mentioned at the beginning that you’re diving into Gutenberg a little bit and maybe giving back to the community with some things that you’re learning there and being involved in WordCamps. What’s your favorite thing to do community-wise in WordPress?

Jason: I really enjoy a lot of different aspects. I’ve done a lot of WordCamp planning here in St. Louis. That’s always been interesting. I’ve been pretty involved with the website portion of it, going from the development background. And then we’ll be doing the big kickup for the WordCamp US coming next year. I’ve been somewhat involved with this year’s US. They kind of brought us in, a few people, after St. Louis was announced to kind of just see how it’s done as far as the big one. And I’ve definitely seen that it’s a lot more than just the city camp.

Tara: Have you attended WordCamp US before?

Jason: No, not an official WordCamp US one. I went to, I think it was, WordCamp San Francisco still, which was kind of the defacto US for a while. I think that was 2013 or ’14 maybe, that I went to one. That was probably the biggest one I’ve been to. Aside from that, I’ve just been to the ones at St. Louis and Kansas City, around this area for the most part. But yeah, that’s definitely one of my goals to get to a few more and apply to speak at some. I enjoyed giving talks at WordCamps. Public speaking isn’t really my forte, but kind of just going out there has forced me to do it. That was actually a big one behind the Gutenberg stuff. Because we were doing WordCamp US and I noticed no one had really submitted Gutenberg talk so I was like, “Alright, well, I’ll send one.” And then that one obviously got chosen so I was like, “Okay, now I have to learn this.” It was kind of a big focus on– how I kind of approached that was to just really go in topic by topic and just kind of learn it and then do a post about it on my blog, and then just kind of share to kind of basically put it into my words so it, one, helps me remember and be able to explain it so I actually can tell that I know it. That’s been definitely helpful, getting started with it.

Tara: That’s a brave undertaking certainly signing up to do a talk, I think, is one of the best ways to learn something. But Gutenberg seems like kind of a moving target a little bit. It’s changing so much. By the time you actually give the talk, it might be quite different than what you’re learning about it right now.

Jason: Yeah, and that’s true because I didn’t notice I was finishing up my slides the night before as I’m usual to do. And I happen to see that something had– there was a new update that came out two days before, and they deprecated a portion of it. I was like, “Oh, no.” So I had to stay up and–

Liam: What’s that line?

Jason: Yeah, exactly. I was like, “Oh, now I’ve got to figure this out and see exactly how it works so it makes sense.” I was like, “Wing it!” Yeah. I left it in as a strike-through and like, “Yeah, this was supposed to be in here yesterday but today, it’s over here. That’s just where the Gutenberg development is at this point.” That was a few months ago. It’s come a long way since then even, too.

Liam: Yeah, it continues to– Jason, I’m going to ask you another one of our signature questions, if I can. What is the single most valuable piece of advice that you have ever received and implemented in your life? It can be personal advice, professional advice, maybe a mix of both, received and implemented.

Jason: I’d say it’s to never stop learning really. Even getting done with college and everything was kind of like, “Oh, hey. I’m done with books and all that and I can stop.” Since I left college, I probably read more, learned more things, especially being in– getting involved into WordPress with just a ton of different stuff to learn that wasn’t really what my background was, as far as development, learning development techniques and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, really just to not stop learning. Kind of what I try to do now is I’ve been shooting to finish 52 books this year and that’s a lot through Audible, audio books and stuff is a big thing I’ve kind of hooked onto.

Liam: Does that include the Elmo books because I feel like– [laughter]

Jason: No. I haven’t counted those ones but that’s a good idea to up my numbers, I forgot about that. I’m kind of behind where I was last year.

Liam: I think you should. A book’s a book.

Tara: Good one, Liam.

Jason: Exactly. That’s a good point. I’ve got to be way over then.

Tara: Maybe Elmo can write a book about WordPress.

Jason: Yeah, that’d be good.

Liam: There’s a top for you. Elmo Me WordPress, right?

Tara: I think Rebecca Gill does a lot of talks with Sesame Street characters and stuff like that. That’s her backdrop for her slides maybe, you can do it with Elmo, Gutenberg with Elmo.

Jason: I have to work on my Elmo voice.

Liam: Jason, I have a question that popped into my head in this conversation and it’s really out of left field. I’ll kind of string the question out a little bit to give you some time to think about it. Because you’ve talked about your definition of success as kind of keep moving forward, keep making progress. It’s not so much the pace, it’s the fact that there’s some sort of forward movement. And then you shared with us most important piece of advice or most valuable is all about continuing to learn. And you explained that your favorite thing to do at work is to be given time to address complex challenges and try to come up with a valuable professional response in terms of developing user experience that works. I wonder now that your daughter’s coming up– you said she was born in October so she’s a year and a half or coming up on a year?

Jason: She was born in June so she’s a little over a year.

Liam: And so she’s clearly learning. You just said earlier that she’s figured out how to close the door. As you watch her, as you play with her, as you be her dad and help her learn and grow. What are you, if anything, seeing or witnessing about her approach to learning that inspires you to maybe think about the way that you look at learning? Whole idea that it’s all new, they’ve never seen a door before, they’ve never twisted it before. And the things that you, and I, and Tara do as routine, it’s so new to children of that age. Everything is. I just wonder, because I’m not a developer, my brain doesn’t do problem-solving in that way. I don’t, not enjoy it but it’s not, show me a big problem and I’m good for days. I don’t do that, I’m more of a marketing and design kind of thing. I just wonder about that. Are you seeing things there that offer insight or value to you in some ways, aside from the joy of watching your daughter learn?

Jason: Yeah, I hadn’t really thought of that but just kind of top of my head what kind of pops up is that really she’s not really afraid to try things, even though she’s going to screw it up. It’s not going to work out, whatever she’s attempting to do. Just kind of like, “Oh–” With the door closing thing, she can close the door but she doesn’t know quite how to open it. But even today, she was trying to jam her fingers in the crack, and then she was me get the knob, and then a couple tries later, she was trying to reach up and see if she can get on her tiptoes to reach the knob. Luckily, she can’t quite grip it to spin it so she’s not able to just full run in the house yet. But yeah, I think kind of that experimentation failing and trying, and learning from that failure and kind of building on that is definitely something I see watching her learn. That’s something that I like to try to implement myself, too. With the Gutenberg stuff, really the first time– we have a monthly meetup I host and we didn’t have a topic so I was like, “I’ve learned a little bit of Gutenberg. Let me try doing a talk on it.” And it didn’t go well at all because I was like, “Oh, man. I don’t know the technical stuff of this quite enough to really explain.” So I was kind of stumbling over. But then by the time the WordCamp presentation one came around, I had put a lot more effort into learning all of the different things, kind of being able to build on that.

Tara: I think we have another possible talk topic here, we’re coming up with all these great ideas. I love the relationship between the way a child learns and how we implement that in learning as developers or learning new things is not being afraid to try it and fail. Very good point.

Liam: And to learn from others just by observing, right? It sounds like you grab the door knob and twist, but there she saws that, “Oh, now I know.”

Tara: Talk topic brewing. Very good. Alright. Jason, on that very productive note, I would like to thank you for joining us today. It’s really been a pleasure meeting you and hearing more about you and what you do and your family. Would you share with us and everyone else where we can find you online?

Jason: Yeah. And thanks for having me for sure. You can find me online. My website is Jasonyingling.me and then my Twitter is @jason_yingling. Yingling sounds like the beer but it is spelled differently.

Tara: Great, thank you.

Liam: Jason, it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for joining us here today in the hallway.

Jason: Thanks for having me.

Tara: Thank you very much.

Liam: Bye-bye.

Tara: Bye.

Jason: Bye.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.