Hallway Chats

Mark helps build teams and manage processes to create digital products and services, often using WordPress! He is Technical Director at the Jake Group, a DC-based digital agency.

Website | Jake Group

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 41.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Mark Wahl. Mark helps build teams and manage processes to create digital products and services often using WordPress. He’s a technical director at the Jake Group, a D.C.-based digital agency. He’s also a dad, amateur woodworker, cider maker, and a Yankees fan. Hi, Mark.

Mark: Hello.

Liam: Hey, Mark, welcome. Tell us a little bit more about yourself, if you would please, sir?

Mark: Sure. Thanks for having me. I am Mark Wahl. I live in Annandale, Virginia. I am originally from Western New York, Rochester New York, and I came to D.C. about 12 years ago, and I’ve been here ever since. I have two kids, I’m a dad, and I work in WordPress building websites and other products and services for all-manner clients.

Tara: How did you get started with WordPress, Mark? What’s your background with tech?

Mark: Sure. I thought about this a good deal and remembered some things that I hadn’t thought about for quite a while. I guess, when I was in middle school in the ’80s, my school offered a basic programming class. And I took that over the summer and I thought that was cool. Then I promptly stopped doing that sort of thing for about 15 years and went and studied English in college and literature. Then I came down to D.C. to work for environmental non-profits. That was my thing back then. But that was late ’90s and we were looking for new ways to communicate our message. The web was just sort of emerging then. I remembered how much I enjoyed that programming and I was kind of the guy, me and the other guy, at my organization that was willing to get their hands dirty figuring out HTML and the web, and I had a lot of fun doing that. Soon thereafter, I ended up in a graduate program at Georgetown called Communication Culture and Technology. That was very multi-disciplinary and people studied all sorts of different things from the economics of the internet to policy. And among the things that I studied was, actually, code, and I got involved with an internship there and a group building websites. I really enjoyed that and built some cool stuff for the university and some related clients. After that, I ended up still interested in advocacy and non-profits, I did that for about another year after grad school until I really realized my passion was more on the engineering side of things. I made some moves then, freelanced for about a year, and connected with some people. Then ended up building websites for living. I’ve been with the Jake Group for about 12 or 15 years now, building all sorts of different things.

Liam: That is a pretty impressive story, to work its way from Western New York down to D.C. and around to like– what really caught my attention and from the way that Tara is smiling, I think it caught hers, was the degree that you explored and got at Georgetown. Can you talk us through that a little bit? I’m trying to remember the three words you said, something like culture, creativity, and it wasn’t code but it was like technology or something like that. Talk to us more about that if you would, what did you study?

Mark: Sure. It’s called Communication Culture and Technology. I started in ’99, I think the program started in ’96 or ’97. It was really an attempt to make sense of what this new thing at that time, the world wide web, was becoming. It was sort of born out of many different disciplines, from more on the liberal arts side, more on technology side, like I said, economics, and policy. There were and continue to be a lot of great professors there from all those different disciplines. It represents itself as a, I think, multi-disciplinary or intra-disciplinary program. In terms of academic, I really focused on the economic-side of things, but there was a group there called Keybridge.net at the time. That’s where I started getting my coding jobs working with them. There are all sorts of people out there who are CCT grads who do all sorts of different interesting things. I do code and technology but there are people in government, people doing more artistic stuff. It’s a very interesting program, especially if you’re sort of self-directed and have an idea of what you want to do. I was at a conference this weekend, World IA Day, and I saw someone speak. I really enjoyed her talk and I thought, “She actually looks pretty familiar, I’m not sure why.” Only a couple of days later did I realize that we graduated from CCT together. And I haven’t reached out to her yet, I have to contact her.

Tara: Wow, that’s really fascinating. What a great opportunity that you had to do that. I’m sitting here sort of jealous because I live in DC, too, and I’m thinking, “Gosh, how did I not know about that?” It sounds like a great mixture of all the things that now are so important in the kind of work that you do, that we do, anybody who works with the web. But you were really on the forefront of that, that’s really exciting.

Mark: I’ll add, it was ’99 and 2001 that I was there, which was smack dab in the middle of the .com crash, main crash. When I went in, everyone was very excited about all the business opportunities that there were. When I left, everyone was a little bit realistic.

Tara: Interesting, that’s great. What did it take for you to go back to school after already working? Or had you thought about that when you graduated from your undergrad? Did you always plan to go to grad school?

Mark: I didn’t always plan to, it was an option and I think it was just the discovery of the web and how it was changing things that we were doing at the environmental group I was at, and how big that seemed to me. And I wanted to be among a group of people who are thinking about those things, and get an opportunity sort of to learn more together.

Tara: How does that translate into what you do now at the Jake Group? How long have you been there and what’s your role with them?

Mark: In 2003, that’s when I started freelancing and I did that for about a year, which was a great experience. It was great for me but it led me to a more formal job, and I think that was what was right for me. One of the things that led to was that my colleague, Anneli, who is the creative director and president of the Jake Group, also graduated from CCT with me. There was a relationship there but also I think the broadness of that program, beyond just the code and building of sites and technology, really gives me an ability or perspective, anyway, to talk to clients and bring there some sort of critical thinking and some problem-solving to their issues and challenges.

Tara: What is your specific role there and in terms of, do you mostly do coding and tech work there now? You’ve been there a while so I imagine you’re in a management field.

Mark: I do code working in WordPress largely. I’ve always been a little bit more on the back-end than the front-end but I do both. But that’s not primarily what I do right now. I’m more often working with the team, leading the development team and trying to find ways for folks to work more effectively as individuals and together. And also working a lot with clients, I work with clients in managing projects and speccing out projects and finding solutions to the issues that they bring to us. More often than not, I’m working with people, working with teams and trying to build teams to execute the projects that we’re working on.

Tara: Sounds like you get to wear a few different hats and do a lot of things. I’m going to ask you a question we ask everyone, which is to talk to us a little bit about what success means to you, how you define it, where you find yourself if you’re on a path towards success, where you find yourself on that path, and generally, what’s your definition of success?

Mark: I gave this some thought. I think for me, success is a process because one destination is just a moment in time really and so success for me is a process and that process involves being involved with work and with people and relationships that allow me to contribute to some ends that’s bigger than myself. That can be as simple as helping a small company come up with a web presence, to working on a project that contributes to some public good, to personal things like being involved with my family and the community. But being able to contribute to something that’s bigger than myself, and then so feeling like I’m growing and improving, and able to do more in the future, learning and moving forward. One thing that I would add to that is that ends that I talk about, some way of measuring that. That’s something that I try to bring to our clients a lot is, when we talk in the beginning of our project about discovering and planning, how are we going to measure that. I don’t want to be too soft with my answer, there has to be some way of measuring, I guess, in order to determine we’re meeting goals, or at least to have a target to move towards.

Tara: Yeah. How does that work, is that intimidating to make a promise and then measure it and follow through? What kind of measurement are you talking about? That applies to your clients but also how do you apply that to your own self in terms of measuring your own ends?

Mark: I guess I would say for clients, it is at first intimidating to say, “I’m going to promise you this level of ROI on your project.” However, I think what we– we’ve been around for a good long time and the one-off projects are less fun and less productive for us than the ongoing relationships where we develop a relationship with maybe some small project and then work together for a really long time. And when you’re working together for a really long time, you have to have those milestones along the way. To say, “We wanted to accomplish this thing and this is how we did or did not do that.” The fact is, even when we don’t do it we can usually show progress and find ways to better reach the next milestone. What I find is setting those goals is not so much a way to be evaluated, than it is a way to build the team and work together to try to meet the next goal and then the goals after that. For myself, that’s a harder question, I hadn’t really thought about that. I have lots of lists, I’m a list person. I use Trello for my own self as well as scans of paper, and I tick things off. I guess I could say goals are measured that way but yeah, I hadn’t really thought as much about that. I set a goal for myself for how many books I want to read this year, so I guess that’s one way I measure things, too.

Liam: I am very good at setting goals around the number of books I want to read and I am very bad at achieving goals around the number of books I want to read.

Mark: Yeah, me too.

Liam: Mark, let me ask you, within your definition of success of being empowered to contribute to projects that are greater than yourself, but that allow you a capacity to grow and improve, what’s the single most important thing you can do or you do every day to help ensure that you’re staying on that journey, as you said, you’re staying within your process?

Mark: One thing that I think is really important to stay on target is almost exactly that, staying focused on the important work at hand. We’re a small group at work and we all are familiar with all the demands and requirements. And what I find to be most helpful is being able to, at the beginning of a day or the beginning of a task, identify what the key thing is that needs to be done, and focus on that. That’s very hard, it’s not only the most important thing but it’s also the hardest thing. When you have a lot of different things going on, a lot of different projects at any given time, figuring out what is the thing to focus on and pointing yourself in that direction and staying in that direction I think is one of the most important things I can do. And hopefully can help others do that as well. That’s sort of a short-term thing. I would also a sort of a broader thing is building relationships to the extent that my day involves interacting with my team and vendors and clients, and building relationships that extend over time that helps us get where we want to go.

Liam: I like that building relationship, especially with your internal team, but also you mentioned earlier how you prefer and find more value in working with clients and setting goals as a way to build team. What does it look like, as you’re trying to help the team, both within your company and on the client side, stay focused? How do you work together to determine what is the most important goal, and then ensure that there is, if not collective buy-in, at least collective support for achieving that goal or staying focused on?

Mark: Right. That’s an ongoing process. The thing that we’re doing of late, we’ve adopted using Asana as our cast management system and I’ve done a good deal of reading and learning task boards and things like Kanban and Scrum. We’re not doing anything really formal like that, but we do use a board to assemble a backlog of our tasks that not only I am sort of in charge of but anyone else on the team is also very closely involved with. It works best when we can talk about high-level priorities at the beginning, at the outset of a project or at the beginning of the week, and then let people, individuals prioritize what it is that needs to be done. Now, in a small organization like ours, there’s constantly something that’s coming in to disrupt those things. Having each one able to make those decisions on our own, as well as the ability, literally– our office is very open so literally to turn around and consult on things. That communication and that backlog of tasks is something that we’ve found helpful so far in helping to prioritize work.

Tara: It sounds like you’ve adopted a new system using Asana. How is that integrated with your team in terms of overlapping and when you were talking about sharing these tasks, not stepping on each other’s toes? Has that been something that you’ve found difficult to manage or has that been pretty smooth?

Mark: Well, this iteration of a sauna has worked really well. We adopted a tool called Creative Manager Pro I think in 2005 or even before that, which is a huge system and it did so many things, it was wonderful. We used it for about five minutes and then realized we had to invest so much time in setting everything up that it just wasn’t working for us. We’ve done it several times over the years, including with Asana in one previous iteration, and just never made it work for us. This time around, Asana is working for us, and the reason I think is that we have limited the scope of how we’re using that to very specific things. Managing those tasks as opposed to trying to create an overarching project managing system, which is probably not what it’s best for. We do use it to some degree to interact with clients on some bigger projects where we can share documents and share process reports and stuff like that. But it’s really that granular element of finding a way to manage our day-to-day stuff that it’s quite useful for.

Tara: Interesting.

Mark: There are lots of other tools that we use as well. And I talk about that bottom-up assembly of tools as well as for top-down. Maybe if we figured it all out, we could find a top-down tool that does it all. It’s been bottom-up that worked best for us.

Tara: Yeah, I know you and I have had conversations before about tools because you know I’m kind of a tool junkie but they’re good for helping to overcome challenges. What would you say is your biggest challenge, both in your work environment and maybe in tackling those goals that we talked about with your scads of paper? Is that among your biggest challenges? What is your biggest challenge and have you or are you overcoming it?

Mark: I think the biggest challenge for me is workload. Having more things to do than I necessarily can or should be trying to accomplish. Again, we’re a small agency so our workload really ebbs and flows a lot so there are times where we’re a little less busy and there are times when we’re super busy and it’s really overwhelming. And that’s challenging, so a lot of what I’ve talked about so far probably speaks to ways of trying to deal with that. I’m also just inclined to probably bite off more than I can chew. That’s me, I think. I try to measure with that. Beyond what I’ve already said, what are things we have to deal with– one is going to bed. I am really a night owl, I’ve always been one. Once I get going in the evening, I don’t really want to stop. What I figured out is that going to bed is really helpful because it keeps me healthy, it keeps me energized the next day. It also sets this limited scope for the resources and time that I have. If I say I’m going to bed at a certain time, I can only make effort up until that time. I’m not great at it, I still fail to meet my deadlines to go to bed. But yeah, getting rest is one of those really simple things that’s really hard to do that makes such a huge difference.

Tara: Yeah, when you’re on a roll, it’s hard to stop. That’s hard for your family life, too, though.

Mark: Absolutely.

Tara: You’re up late keeping people up.

Liam: Mark, where do or how do woodworking and cidermaking feed into that balance that you were talking about?

Mark: I was in a project, and that probably speaks to me biting off more than I can chew sometimes. Woodworking, that’s sort of something that I was introduced to early in life. My grandfather made clocks, my father did work around the house and I sort of learned some things and found it interesting and fun. I just like to build things in general. Wood is something that’s readily available. I’ve done lots of different projects, shells and little bit of furniture here and there. But if you recall, was it 2010, snowpocalypse? Before we were really calling things ‘pocalypse and everything, it was that first big one. We were really here in the D.C. area really off for a week, at home for a week. And I went down to the basement and I had– I grew up in Western New York and we had cider all over the place growing up. I had been thinking about making my own cider and so I built a cider grinder and a cider press that week.

Liam: That is awesome.

Mark: Just sort of a prototype. Then from there, it’s just sort of grown. We started hosting an apple fest each fall where we’ll bring lots of apples, all different kinds of apples, and we press a whole bunch and people take a bunch home, and then we make some hard cider from what’s left over. That’s a hobby and it is really fun and it’s something that I spend a good deal of time learning about and doing.

Tara: That’s impressive. You don’t live far from me so maybe I’ll have to come to your apple cider party, sounds like fun.

Mark: Yeah. Next September, it will be year number nine this year.

Tara: That may be one of the best things that came out of that snowpocalypse, I think. [laughter] That you did that and you actually had the materials to do it. What a great memory that you have in time of what that meant to you, that’s excellent. Mark, tell us for a minute about your interaction with the WordPress community because I know, I’ve seen you at some WordPress things, what’s your involvement there?

Mark: Yeah. We started using WordPress 2009 or 2010. Back at Georgetown, one of my first projects was building a CMS, very small, very limited in scope but nevertheless a CMS based in ColdFusion and Microsoft Access, which was a great way to learn. Over the years, I’ve built light CMSs for various purposes for some clients. But we were growing and at that time, it seemed like we needed a more scalable solution. We considered some things and WordPress seemed a great route to go on account of it being open source, free to get started with, and based in PHP which I and others on the team were familiar with. We started working with it then and then we had someone come on board, Leeland, who, Tara, you know, who said, “Hey, you guys want to sponsor a WordPress D.C. meeting?” Because back then we needed sponsors for every event every month. We did and since then, I’ve just sort of been coming. I really enjoyed getting involved with the community, meeting a lot of people, working on similar things, or working on things that I had never really imagined. That’s been fun and I’ve gotten into presenting here and there, presented at WordCamp D.C. last year, and would like to do more of that. I enjoyed that because it stretches my mind and helps build some of those relationships as well.

Tara: Great. Well, I enjoyed meeting you at our local meetup and it’s nice to have a representative from an agency because in D.C. there aren’t that many. It’s good for your company to support the meetup as well. We’re getting close to the end of our time but I really want to ask you another one of our signature questions, Mark, which is about advice. If you think back to what’s the most important piece of advice you’ve received that stuck with you and that you implement in your life?

Mark: I’m lucky I’ve gotten a lot of good advice over the years and I am appreciative to all those who offered good advice at the right time. I thought a lot about this but the one that I would say is I have an uncle who likes to provide a lot of advice, as many people do. And sometimes you’re just looking, especially as a younger person, you’re just looking to move on and play with your cousins or something else. But he gave me advice that’s really stuck with me which was, in life to find things that you can be passionate about them and then pursue them and become an expert in them. And the passion thing has really stuck with me in particular because there’s a lot to do in life and a lot to choose from. And finding things that you can be excited about even when you’re overwhelmed or things are hard, or you don’t understand, or you encounter failure. Having something that you can be passionate about allows you to get through those times and really invest yourself in those.The expertise thing is interesting because what does that exactly mean to become an expert, and when I look at him, the person who gave me that advice, his expertise is medicine. What always impressed me over the years, and I realized what he meant by becoming an expert, was not so much to reach and ends of becoming an expert but to always pursue growth in that area. I remember him when we would visit going upstairs and studying books about a surgery, or reading articles, or being involved in events where he was growing even as this person to me who seemed like the expert in his field. But he was always growing, is always growing, and so I’ve taken that to heart as trying to do things that I’m passionate about and always growing and always developing more and more expertise in those things.

Liam: That’s a great combination of then land on something that you really love and think about and think about even when you’re not doing and enjoy doing it. And if you could figure out a way to work that into your work, well, it makes going to the office, or working from home, or whatever the appropriate place of employment is, all the more enjoyable and fulfilling. It almost sounds like that becoming an expert, you’ve interpreted more along the lines of don’t become complacent, always keep learning. And that which is true today about it may not be true tomorrow, especially, I suppose, in medicine, right? The way they did surgery in 1920 is not how they do surgery on the border of 2020. That’s a great bit of advice. On that inspiring note, if I can, Mark, we’re going to have to wrap it up. We can’t believe it’s already been 30 some odd minutes with you. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Mark: Thank you for having me. I really enjoyed talking to you guys.

Tara: Thanks, Mark. Can you tell us where people can find you online?

Mark: Sure. My company site is Jakegroup.com. I am on Twitter although I’m not a frequent user. I’m frequently there but not tweeting. My Twitter is @markawahl and I’m also on LinkedIn.

Tara: Great. Thank you again for joining us and see you soon.

Mark: Thank you.

Liam: Thank you, Mark. Bye.

Tara: Bye-bye.

Mark: 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.

Dale Reardon is from Australia and is the founder of My Disability Matters. An online community for the disability sector. Dale is qualified as a lawyer but he asks that we not hold that against him. He loves everything to do with France. Wine, food, and champagne. Dale is legally blind and uses a guide dog, Charlie.

Website | My Disability Matters News Site/Blog

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 40.

Website | My Disability Matters News Site/Blog

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 40.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re chatting with Dale Reardon. Dale is from Australia and is the founder of My Disability Matters. An online community for the disability sector. Dale is qualified as a lawyer but he asks that we not hold that against him. He loves everything to do with France. Wine, food, and champagne. Dale is legally blind and uses a guide dog, Charlie. Dale, welcome to the show.

Dale: Thank you very much for having me.

Tara: Hi, Dale. It’s great to meet you. Welcome to Hallway Chats. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself? It’s a great introduction Liam gave. Where can you go from there?

Dale: Yes. I live in Hobart, Tanzania. Right down the end of the world, far away from yourselves. I’ve been using the internet and computers online for a long time since 1996 I’ve been on the internet. And actually started as a child using the Challenger 4Ps and 8P computers from what the Americans know as Radioshack. We had Tandys here in Australia. Then about seven and a half years ago, I started using WordPress which is what we’re talking about more today, of course. I started using the Genesis Framework and in the recent years moved on to using the drag and drop screen editors such as Divi and Avada and Beaver Builder. Yes, over the time, I’ve come from using WordPress for simply a more static site to using forums such as bbPress and membership sites. Now, actually, I’m using it for a fully-fledged community using the PeepSo Software to run a community for the disability sickness, and now I’m using WordPress to its very full extent and powers.

Tara: Yeah, I’ve heard of PeepSo. How many people do you have in that community?

Dale: Just this morning it clocked over 3100. Yeah, it is growing quite nicely and they’re getting engaged. We did actually use BuddyPress when we started but one thing I’ve learned with BuddyPress, even though the core plugin is very good and a good community product, of course. To get the many features that you need, you have to use so many different add-on plugins from different developers, which causes at times conflicts and lack of support and minor little bugs. Whereas PeepSo is what can be described as a freemium product with the core product of PeepSo being free, and then all the paid add-ons, they’re produced by the same development team. So you’re assured of compatibility, and support, and updates every couple of weeks. It’s just proven a much more powerful system for our community.

Tara: Yeah, I remember paying a lot of attention to it when it came out. Maybe two or three years ago PeepSo came out, right? Because I was doing a site with BuddyPress as well.

Dale: Yes, the current owners, Matt and Eric, took it over from the former owner about 12 months ago. They’ve really been developing it, they’ve made some strides. We’ve actually paid them to do some custom work, which then they released as paid add-ons for other people. Eric is just a fantastic project manager, which is so important to software development products, to make sure you don’t just make good program, as you do actually need someone to manage the whole project. And that’s one strength that PeepSo really has that’s been beneficial to us.

Tara: Yeah. Your disability forum that you have, is that your full-time job? Is that something that you monetized, how does that work?

Dale: Yes. It’s what we would call a start-up business at the moment. We’re certainly viewing it as our full-time job. My wife is my business partner and co-founder. We are, yes, developing that as our full-time business and income source. We’re not monetizing it as highly at the moment, we have had some sponsored posts on the news side. We do have some paid business members and we’ve had one large disability provider come on as a sponsor partner. But yeah, we certainly hope as we get more and more members, which we may need acquiring through Facebook ads, then yes, as we grow, we’ll get to test out more advertising options.

Tara: So your target audience that you’re targeting on Facebook. Are they specific disabilities that you’re targeting?

Dale: No, we have actually targeted all different disability groups, but we have found that we managed to get a lot of members with autism, and a huge number of members with various mental health disabilities and illnesses. With depression, anxiety, bipolar, all the various different forms. And one of the reasons we created the community was due to the bullying and trolling, harassment, whatever you want to call it, on particularly Facebook and Twitter of people with disabilities. Being, they’ve come to our community and finding it a much more safer and respectful place.

Liam: That’s really interesting to me, the approach you’ve taken with disability and kind of taking a, ‘we’ll take anybody’. And I don’t mean that in a crass kind of way. Because I helped start a group just in my local church for fathers of children with special needs and we, too, took that agnostic, almost, approach of, we’ll let the fathers define what the special need is. We have some dads whose children have Down Syndrome, we have some who– kind of a whole range of issues. And many are on the autism spectrum. But taking that approach of, we don’t try to describe what a disability or a special need is, we let you come in and tell us. That’s been a great way for us to welcome people and to let people know that they are welcome and that we’re not trying to pigeonhole and/or say, “It’s our way or the highway.” It’s, “Come be a part of the community.” And it sounds like– and I may be overreaching here, you tell me, Dale:, sounds like you’ve taken a very similar approach. From what you were saying, based on your membership numbers, it sounds like that that’s really working out for you in the community.

Dale: Yes, definitely. That is the approach we’ve taken. Yeah, you can disclose your disability if you wish publicly or to us, but you don’t have to do either because we open the membership up to friends and family members, and supporters as well. As long as you abide by the rules of being respectful and tolerant to people about disability issues, that’s our key theme of the community. One thing I’ve discovered, too, I really like Twitter for myself for being informed, to read news. And I follow lots of people back in the WordPress community, and one thing I found since about 15 months ago when we started the community and I started tweeting about disability issues, is that a lot of the developers that I follow and respect turn out to either be on the autism spectrum, or have mental health issues. Once they knew that I was either disabled myself or involved with the disability community, they reached out and told me about their situations.

Liam: Yeah, that’s something that we certainly hear about on our little show here and certainly in WordCamps. We had very much, you just don’t know until people put their hand up or until they step forward in some way.

Dale: Yeah, because I think one of the good things in the WordPress community is it’s been very quick to embrace remote working, which is effectively what we do ourselves. We run our business from home and we’ve got a VA staff member who’s in India. And because of that flexibility around both hours of work and location, it is really well suited to people with disabilities. Yeah, and the WordPress community does seem very welcoming of people with disabilities. There is a great team of people dealing with accessibility, the core WordPress software has taken accessibility very seriously. Particularly, Ghost, the SEO plugin that everyone would know about. He does a lot of good work with accessibility and even writes blog posts about how to do accessibility in your plugins far better.

Liam: Yeah, I have to say that as an anecdotal observation, the Europeans caught on to and latched onto accessibility much, much sooner than we Americans did. I spent some time in the UK and that tech community and wider culture as well was embracing accessibility from a web perspective much, much sooner than The US ever did. I’d agree with you that the WordPress community as a whole is now, within the last few years anyway, really latched on to accessibility and taking it into core not just in a technical sense but really to the core of, we are going to democratize publishing. Then there’s a significant portion of the world that needs a software made in a way that enables them to engage.

Dale: Yeah. And I think the Europeans– I went to France and Italy about three years ago for the second time, and I’m hoping– because I’m hoping to get back this year if I have time, but the only thing the Europeans did worse, thankfully, not in the WordPress community, so many of their websites back then, I’d say that 90% used Flash, and Flash is just completely inaccessible. So force people using screen readers like myself. I was very pleased to hear in the last six months that Adobe has given a timeline for Flash dying off the internet. In many ways, thanks to Apple who has led a lot of accessibility things because it doesn’t support Flash on all the iOS devices. As the world has come to use lots of Apple products, developers have realized they’ve had to leave Flash behind.

Tara: Yeah. Using a screen reader, how do you find your web experience has changed over the years, talking about incorporating accessibility into websites becoming more and more accepted or more and more done? Is that something that’s really apparent to you or do you still find it to be challenging on the majority of sites you visit?

Dale: When the internet first started out, because it really was a text-based medium back then, due to speed of your connection to the internet. It was very accessible. In the last five year, I’ve found it went through a period of not being as accessible as lots of developer would use interactive elements that use Javascript to create special menus and controls on web pages that weren’t using standard HTML elements. It has become better but websites that you use or create custom controls inaccessible with screen readers– the screen reader, I’m using JAWS which is now the primary one– can work with all standard HTML controls. But if you– for example, lots of plugins use this sort of fancy toggle switch to turn options on and off. That is essentially a graphic and you click on the left-hand side for on and right-hand side for off. Unfortunately, that completely doesn’t work with screen readers. Many plugin developers I’ve spoken to, thankfully, have swapped over back to using a standard radio, not checkboxes, which is accessible. Yeah, these people starting to take more advantage of some fancy features which can cause accessibility problems. Then there is the prevalence over the last several years of the greatest difficulty for accessibility yet, so-called Captchas, where you have to try and identify those graphical things. Google, in the last six months, has brought out what it calls the invisible Captcha, and there is a WordPress plugin to implement it. It’s completely different to their standard Captcha and it uses different ways of detecting whether you’re a robot or a standard human. That is a lot better because you don’t have to actually do a challenge unless it thinks you’re a robot, then it gives you a standard graphical challenge. Captchas sites need to think about different ways rather than using them because I really do block the websites. Even occasionally when I get my wife’s help to fill them out, she can get them wrong several times because that is so difficult.

Tara: Yeah, I find even the– Google has the one where you have to pick all the photographs that have a car in them or something and I get all nervous because I think, “Wait a minute, maybe I’m missing it.” It’s very stressful even when you don’t have disabilities, I can imagine it’s got to be very off-putting, make the experience less enjoyable.

Dale: And there are plugins out there where you use– it is a premium plugin, a site called Simple Comments. There are other services out there that can do spam protection without using a graphical Captcha. And yeah, I’ve encouraged developers to look into those different options throughout the news and graphical Captchas.

Tara: Interesting. I want to transition and kind of go back to your background a little bit. What you’re doing is really interesting and I’m excited to hear where it goes forward. Going backward, you have a background as a lawyer, is that right?

Dale: Yes, I worked as a lawyer for about six years doing a lot of mainly litigious work, criminal, family law predominantly. That was in Australia, in both Tanzania and Western Australia.

Tara: Moving from that to, now, I assume that since you talked about this being your full-time gig, that you’re self-employed?

Dale: Yes, that’s correct. In fact, my first venture onto the internet was when I ran in conjunction with my ex-partner, a tourist accommodation, bed and breakfast properties for seven years. That was when we first did marketing on the internet and created websites and things using the old software back then such as HotDog, Dreamweaver, and other screen engines that were way more difficult to use than WordPress.

Tara: Interesting. You’ve had your hand in a few different things. One of the things that we ask our guests to talk about is success. Knowing that you have this range of experience and where you are in your life right now, how do you define success, Dale? What do you think success means to you?

Dale: Success to me means the ability to have a more free lifestyle, while at the same time learning enough in account to be comfortable. And not to have to go to an office from nine to five or nine to eight, happens a lot these days. And just be tied down to a desk. I absolutely hate working in those office blocks that have all those shared cubicles where you’re just next to another worker. I did that for several years and it’s just so destroying. You have no freedom, everyone can hear each other, you just can’t do anything. Yeah, I just hate those environments. And I’ve done lot of studying them, that is terrible. Certainly, I like a freer lifestyle where you can choose to go to the beach during the day for an hour or two and then come home and work later at night time and things. Two years ago, we actually spent two months in Bali and worked out of a villa we rented there. Because, yeah, then we could go for a swim each day in our private pool and get work done the rest of the time.

Liam: Now you’re just showing up. [laughter]

Tara: I like that version of success. Isn’t that like the happiest place on earth? Are people there the happiest or am I mixing that up?

Dale: Yeah, the locals were very happy. Everyone we met was really friendly and nice. The same in Thailand when I went there. As you mentioned about Europe, quite a few of the premium plugins that I use are actually developed by French or European programmers. Yeah, they are very strong into the WordPress community in France and Europe, generally.

Tara: Yeah, that’s interesting. When you put all of this together in your daily life now, what is the most important thing that you do every day towards that success or towards that flexibility that you like to have?

Dale: Really now probably is marketing the business, getting involved in the community we’ve created to get the members engaged. I’ve found that social media is very beneficial. As I said earlier, we have one sponsor from a large disability service provider in Australia. We met each other on LinkedIn. Some other customers and great developers I’ve met on Twitter. Social media is not all time wasting, it can be used very effectively to develop relationships. I do get a lot of news and relationship building done on social media.

Liam: Dale:, let me ask you. You talked about spending your full professional time when you’re not in Bali on a beach working on My Disability Matter, a community that you’re facilitating its growth and its connectivity. Can you talk to us a little bit about the business model that you’re exploring there in growing? You said you were in start-up mode. Would love to hear what you’re trying to do to grow that because that membership site is a challenge anywhere and I wonder how it’s going and what you’re doing and what your vision is.

Dale: Yes, we’re looking at several different income models. We have two sides of the Mydisabilitymatters.news. Site is the one where we publish articles, curate news from the disability sector, and there’s an email newsletter there to let people know about updates to the site. That is using a very traditional income model of either sponsored blog posts, banner ads, trying out Google AdSense, specialist help, advertising networks. It develops a lot more traffic but we know that takes time. That really is going to be a stick to those more traditional income models. Whereas the other site, the community mydisabilitymatters.club is going to very shortly, in the next few days hopefully, release a premium membership alongside the free basic membership, which will offer some upgraded benefits in the community. A shopping discount program in Australia. And we know of options to expand that to UK and US as we get more members in those areas. Then we will have business membership, because at the moment, we’re exploring, it remains to be seen whether it works, of course, charging business members an annual monthly fee to participate in the community, rather than the track that Facebook’s gone down of now, charging for every little tiny bit of engagement on the platform, be it either paid ads or boosted posts or whatever. Then we are also having banner ads and AdSense in the community, and we have gotten email notifications going out to members with all sorts of things and labeled some affiliate links in the newsletters as well. At the moment, we have really been concentrating on building out the free members to get the community engaged and then, as we’re heading closer to sort of 5000 members, we’ll start doing some marketing to businesses, once we can place for them to benefit from.

Tara: Yeah. I’m curious about using– we talked about PeepSo a little bit but mentioning Facebook. I know in the communities that I’ve looked at building for a couple of clients, in deciding between what platform to use, they often end up going to Facebook because people around Facebook anyway, and they don’t want to login to another platform. But I wonder with your subject matter and with your audience if Facebook is a place where they like to be or if they feel more secure and private maybe, and so they don’t mind logging onto another platform for your community. Talk about that a little bit?

Dale: Yes, I wasn’t sure how it’s going to work in the beginning but we have found Facebook ads, which means we’ve enticed people away from the platforms be very successful. We’ve been running between a cost in Australian Dollars, between about 60 cents and a dollar per signed up member through Facebooks ads at the moment. We thought that’s been very good. We obviously had to keep improving that with our conversion rates, but get people because people with disabilities have quite a few problems on Facebook, whether if it’s through trolling and harassment or Facebook has a lot of accessibility problems for, particularly, vision-impaired people. I find their website just impossible to use. They have an accessibility team but their website is so cluttered, they’ve done so many updates on the page and just knowing whatever’s happening where on the page, it’s very difficult. Yeah, we have had relatively easy to get people to sign up to the community. Then it is a matter of taking them through an email onboarding process to try and get them involved and engaged in the community.

Tara: Right, that’s interesting. Do you track how many people log in to your site and engage in your site?

Dale: One of the things that we do need to do develop soon. We’ve got Google Analytics, of course, which gives you some quite good statistics, but the one problem that PeepSo, and I’ve mentioned lots of other software these days, uses Ajax calls a lot for updating information on the page. And Google Analytics, although it can be made to work with Ajax site changes, it doesn’t by default. At the moment, we are missing out on a lot of tracking as to how much engagement there is because a Google Analytics, MonsterInsights plugin that was formerly with YOAST we used, then added records page impressions rather than all the Ajax activity that people like in post or writing a reply or that sorts of things. As we get some more income, hopefully, we’ll have to develop a better statistics package.

Liam: Yeah, data is hugely valuable. Especially, when you’re trying to grow a membership community. And there’s only so many times you can survey them, right, and just be able and great to say– look back at the first six months and say, “Here’s what’s going on and here’s what they’re clicking on. Here’s the conversations that matter rather than having to do it as a survey.”

Dale: That’s right. I have spoken to the developers of MonsterInsights and they tell me that a developer could relatively easily write an add-on to make it work with Ajax. And they had actually looked at developing a free add-on but they said that Ajax is implemented differently on nearly every piece of software so they’ve just haven’t been able to find a solution to that yet. We all have to wait until we can get the PeepSo developers to produce add-on specific to their software. The other thing I was just thinking, going back to you asking about the income models. The one problem with BuddyPress that we’ve found was advertising and managing to get ads inserted into the community. PeepSo has taken the approach of trying to build up and insert different revenue models into he software from the very beginning. There’s a WordPress plugin suite out there called Advanced Ads which has a fantastic developer, and PeepSo has integrated that into their software so that we can actually do in-stream ads just like on Facebook. We can target people on their profile fields and all that. You know, reduced version of what Facebook does without all the intelligence behind it. Of course, it does allow way more selective advertising and building it into the stream and all those options unavailable in BuddyPress.

Liam: That’s really interesting. On the chance that there’s people listening who haven’t heard of PeepSo. It really is an alternative to BuddyPress. It’s its own standalone entity, its own plugin and it connects with WordPress. Dale, I’m going to change gears on you and ask you what I’ll call our signature question. What is the single most valuable piece of advice, personal, professional, or combination that you have received and implemented in your life?

Dale: Yes, it’s not specific to business but it certainly applies to business as well, even a result I’ve got today, is to basically just know what you can achieve, or what someone can do for you, or what you can make your website do, or whether someone will date you or marry you if you don’t ask. Don’t be scared to actually ask for help, ask for something to get done, ask for a fiver or some sponsorship assistance. Really, yes, don’t be backward and come forward. Even this morning, I’ve just secured a sponsorship deal in a membership training program, Community RoundTable. I asked if they’d be prepared to sponsor our community by giving Jo and I free memberships, and they were. Yes, if you don’t ask, whether it being your personal life or in business, you’ll just never know what is possible.

Liam: Yeah, I love that. They’re never going to say yes, if you don’t ask.

Dale: That’s right. Back in my younger days, I had a lot of knockbacks with dating but I had some few successes just because you ask. [laughs]

Liam: Yeah, just putting it out there. I love that. I wonder how that’s worked outside of business, outside of dating. Maybe around personal development or other aspects of life that we haven’t really gotten into. How’s that bit of advice proven true in a value for you?

Dale: Yes, I suppose that attitude of trying something could be distilled down to – has been really good. I traveled to France, Italy, UK, Ireland, Asia. Going and experiencing how the cultures and other, food, meeting people, discovering history has been fantastic. If you just stay at home and never explore then, yes, you don’t learn anywhere near as much.

Tara: It’s great that you were able to travel and experience all those things and that you’re not kept at home. I would say, when you think about the word ‘disability’, I don’t know, I’ve heard some people that have issues with that word and so I think hearing that you’re approaching your life without the view that you have a disability in that way and it’s holding you back from anything is inspiring.

Dale: Yeah. And as you said earlier on, Europe, in particular, is very disability-focused, disability-supportive. I’ve had great success at different monuments or historic sites with getting access right up. When I went to, for example, Stonehenge, for the first time, it was 18 years ago now. Back then, you could actually get right up and touch the stones right then, everything, whereas, you can’t now. But even at the Louvre in Paris that I went to four years ago, they actually have a special section for vision-impaired people where they created replicas of some of the statues and different exhibitions that they have so you can touch them and go right up to them without having to damage the originals.

Tara: That is wonderful. Oh my gosh, that’s really impressive. That’s a long way that they’ve come. That’s awesome.

Dale: Yeah, even– it was 15-20 years ago at the British Science Museum, I got to explore a lot of all the taxidermied animals and different things they had on display, the dinosaurs. They were very approachable and friendly about letting you get right up close and touch things. Even in Europe, it’s certainly not the same with Australia but we take it with much appreciation. It’s all of the big monuments, the Pope’s Palace, the Colosseum in Rome, we turn up and I’ve got my white cane that I use in Europe because quarantine’s too much of a hassle with my guide dog. The moment that the people in charge spot you as a person with a disability, they came and grabbed us and take us in for free and jump the queue.

Tara: That’s great to hear.

Dale: Yeah, a few benefits. Europe really does provide some great accessibility – I was reading a a little while ago – even the gondolas in Venice have wheelchair accessible options now. I wasn’t quite sure how it works for the video but yeah, I’ve read of people doing it very successfully.

Tara: Excellent. I guess that makes traveling all the more enjoyable for you, that you can enjoy at that level and have some people that acknowledge you and allow you to experience the tourist attractions as much as you can. That’s great.

Dale: Yeah. One thing, obviously, outside our chat today that probably seven, six years ago I became very familiar with the frequent flier points options and how to use them to best advantage. There is a whole other world out there where I have traveled in business and first class for the same price as economy or less.

Tara: Good for you. I love that approach of asking and knowing how to make the most of things. I think that’s great. I’ve learned a lot from you today, Dale:, so it’s really been great having you on the show. We’re about out of time so I’d like it if you would share with our audience where they can find you online and on social media?

Dale: Yes. We have, as I mentioned, two main websites, Mydisabilitymatters.news and Mydisabilitymatters.club. The news sites and the community. Our corporate headquarters with all the information and maybe have had some different things is at Mydisabilitymatters.com. And on social media, my personal Twitter is @dalereardon. Our business Twitter account is @audisability, which is up to 26,500 followers just proving the popularity of disability issues online. Yeah, I can forward you the LinkedIn and Facebook so that you can add them as well.

Tara: We certainly will. Thanks for sharing all of that, thanks for sharing your story and for doing what you’re doing for the community. Really appreciate it, Dale.

Dale: Yes, thank you very much. I have found the WordPress community great to deal with and it’s terrific to be involved with.

Liam: Dale, we’re all better for you being involved. Dale, it’s been an absolute pleasure spending time with you, thank you so much for joining us today.

Tara: Thanks, Dale. Bye-bye.

Dale: Goodbye.

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.

Cory is a full-stack web developer from Waco, Texas. He’s the author of Beginning Joomla! Website Development. He’s a relative newcomer to WordPress after transitioning from Joomla work. Cory’s married, with three children. He loves public speaking and has given more than 15 talks at Joomla conferences and has now even given one WordCamp talk.

Website | Reactiv Studios

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 39.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Cory Webb. Cory is a full-stack web developer from Waco, Texas. He’s the author of Beginning Joomla! Website Development. He’s a relative newcomer to WordPress after transitioning from Joomla work. Cory’s married, with three children. He loves public speaking and has given more than 15 talks at Joomla conferences and is now even giving one WordCamp talk. Welcome, Cory.

Cory: Hi, thanks for having me.

Liam: Hey, Cory. Thanks for joining us today, great to see you. Tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Cory: Yeah, I’m a full-stack web developer, which means I do a little bit of everything. I’m from Waco, Texas. For those who are in the know, that’s the home of the Fixer Upper, the popular TV show on HGTV. It also is known for other things that are maybe a little less positive, but we won’t talk about that. I work full-time for a company called Reactive Studios. We are a one of about a dozen WordPress.com VIP partners. I spend my days building and maintaining websites on the VIP platform, and then on other various platforms for companies who use those. I spend most of my day buried in WordPress code.

Tara: I really want to hear about your transition from Joomla to WordPress and your comparison of the two of them. Of course, that’s going to be intriguing for a lot of our listeners who use WordPress. I have used Joomla in the past but I’d love to hear your perspective on the two and what your reason was for transitioning.

Cory: Sure. Actually, the one WordCamp that I did speak at, I talked about WordPress from a Joomla perspective. It’s basically just about how I made the move from being a Joomla guy to being a WordPress guy and generally, they’re kind of the same. They’re both PHP, MySQL-based CMSs, but there’s a lot of differences and the nuances of how they both work. For me, it was a pretty big jump in order to flip the mental switch, I guess, between thinking like a Joomla guy and thinking like a WordPress guy. I don’t like to do value comparisons because, honestly, I think Joomla’s a great platform and I think WordPress is a great platform. I know a lot of people like to try to make value judgments and say, “Oh, WordPress is better because it’s this.” Or, “Joomla’s better because of this.” Honestly, most of the time, yeah, that’s actually true. WordPress is better because of ABC and Joomla is better because of XYZ. They both are good at certain things. It’s just a different platform and different philosophy, and a different way of thinking about things. You just kind of have to jump through some mental hoops to get there, to go between the two. But ultimately, I really like both platforms, I love both communities as well. That’s to me the strength in any open-source platform like that is going to be the community, and I think both have really great strong communities.

Tara: That’s a great overview. Do you miss Joomla?

Cory: I don’t miss it. I still do Joomla work, I still interact with my Joomla friends, people that I have known online for 10 years or more, people that I’ve hung out with at conferences and spent time with and gotten to know through various things. I can’t say that I miss it because I haven’t really left it, so to speak. I’m doing a lot more WordPress work these days. I’m really enjoying that, honestly, I’ve done WordPress stuff for years. But Joomla is one of those things that has paid the bills so I just did more of it. I would love to be able to do Joomla full-time still. But honestly, there’s just not that much of a market for it, at least in the US. In Europe, Joomla’s still pretty big. There’s still a lot of Joomla work and a lot of companies that are doing Joomla stuff, and other parts of the world. Here in the US, not so much. Which it is what it is. I think with anything like that, if you put all your eggs in one basket, that’s kind of your problem, right? It’s to my benefit that I’m able to do both. I’m more of a PHP full-stack Javascript developer than I am a Joomla developer or WordPress developer. The underlying platform is really more– trivial is not the word I’m looking for, but it’s just kind of second.

Tara: Yeah, it’s not as important. It’s good that you can train those skills. Let’s back up for a little bit and talk about what got you started in the first place in programming and that led you to Joomla, what’s your background?

Cory: Yeah, I started tinkering with HTML and web stuff a little over 20 years ago, actually, as a freshman in college at the University of Texas. I was an electrical engineering student and in our introductory class, my freshman year, they said, “Hey, you need to know how to build websites so that you can publish your information about engineering, basically.” So, “Okay, let’s do that.” And I just loved it. It was kind of an instant gratification of building a website. You put down some HTML and then maybe give it a background image and set some colors. Then all of a sudden, you’ve created this thing, it’s there, it’s instant. And I fell in love with it immediately. But it also kind of felt like a toy in a way to me. It didn’t occur to me like, “Oh, that’s something I can pursue and do and make a living at.” So I finished my engineering degree, I went and got a masters degree in business. And then all the while pursuing this hobby of mine of building and designing websites. My wife and I, we would go to bookstores and she would go to the fiction section, she’s an avid reader. She reads a couple of hundred books a year, I think.

Liam: Wow.

Cory: Yeah. And I am not that, but I do love learning in tech books, especially back then. 15 years ago, you didn’t have all the websites and the tools like Lynda.com or some of these other tools that would teach you how to do things. You had to go to the bookstore and actually get a book and read. So she’d go looking at fiction section, I would go to the computer books section and get PHP, MySQL For Dummies, or HTML For Dummies, or Learn HTML in Four Easy Steps, or CSS or whatever. And every new thing you learn is like this great revelation, right? I remember building sites with tables for my layouts and thinking– I remember before that, actually, going– I see this site with columns, like, “How did they make that column there? Oh, they used a table. That’s genius.” Then five years later, I’m like, “Why would anyone use a table for layouts?” So you learn CSS.

Liam: Technology.

Cory: Exactly, right. Just over the years, right? You just continue to learn and continue to pick up new skills and things. Back in 2006, I guess, I was doing this hobby thing and this Joomla company said, “Hey, you’re pretty good at that. You want to make some extra money?” And I was like, “Make money doing my hobby? Okay.”

Liam: “It sounds good to me.”

Cory: Right, exactly. They hired me on to do some side gigs, basically, do some freelance work. And I was making way more money than I had ever thought was even possible. I had done websites for friends before that where I would do it for free or charge them maybe $300 or $100, whatever.

Liam: Rent money.

Cory: Some price that it was like, “We can’t make a living doing that.” When I started making real money doing it, I was like, “Oh, wow. This is something where I could actually maybe make a living doing it.” The freelance work grew to a point where I was like, “Alright, I need to go ahead and quit my job and pursue this full time.” That was the beginning of 2008, when I started my company which is really just me as a freelancer. That grew and I had some employees, especially around the time that my book came out that kind of landed some credibility to my name and gave me a little bit of name recognition. My business grew with that. Anyway, long story short, my team and I got recruited to go work for another big company and then I left that a couple of years go to do freelancing full time. Then this opportunity with Reactive came up, so I’ve been with Reactive Studios now since November, which is as of today about two or three months. And I just really love it, I love working with this team, I’m with some really brilliant developers on my team. I’m learning a lot from them and I’m really enjoying the opportunity to work on some really interesting projects, that’s kind of where I am today.

Liam: That’s quite a journey. Cory, let me ask you this, when you joined Reactive, were you coming on as an experienced full-stack developer and that you would learn WordPress, or had you already been transitioning into WordPress? You were a full-stack developer and so they brought you on in that combination?

Cory: Like I said, I’ve been doing WordPress for years, so it wasn’t new to me. I have certainly learned a lot since I’ve really been digging into it full-time. But I was already to a point where I can build plugins and themes and I understand the API and understand template tags and all the functions, WP Query, all of that kind of stuff. My resume didn’t necessarily show it, right? My resume says Joomla over it.

Liam: Sure, of course. Well, the books, if you write the book, you’re probably not dabbling in Drupal all that much, right?

Cory: Absolutely. In a way, I feel like I was kind of stepping out in faith that one of these WordPress companies would take a chance on a Joomla guy, and fortunately, Reactive did and I feel like it’s been a really good thing. I really loved working with them. But yeah, I did have WordPress experience before that. Like I said, it’s one of those things, too, where I feel like as long as you can do the underlying things like PHP, and databases, and Javascript, and CSS, and HTML, The CMS is sort of secondary, right? There’s a lot of nuances to it that you certainly have to pick up and understand, but it’s a lot easier if the fundamentals are there.

Liam: Yeah, that makes sense. He says as a non-developer, “That makes sense.” You’ve talked to us about your education and your career and how you wrote the book and grew a freelance, and grew into a business, then you joined a wider business, and then a couple of years into that you went back to freelance and now you’re in the employment of another team. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I think Reactive’s a relatively small company, with respect. They’re probably bigger than one or two people but they’re not a 800-person company.

Cory: Certainly not.

Liam: Maybe as you’re reflecting on this, you can share with us your definition of success in either a personal or professional way?

Cory: Personal and professional success, I kind of feel like you can’t have one without the other. I guess I take that more as kind of like a holistic view of life that if I’m successful professionally but not personally, then I’m not successful. There’s a big gap there. But for me, the way I see it, success is being able to do what you love while meeting your obligations and responsibilities without having to compromise the core of who you are. What I used to think success was was making a million dollars and being super wealthy. And that’s one path to it, right? Because if you have a million dollars, you certainly can do whatever you want. But I think for me, I’m doing a job that I love with the team that I really enjoy working with and personally, I have a great family, great wife and kids, and we’re really involved with our church, and really enjoy doing that. We get to travel some and do that which is really fun. And we’re meeting our obligations. We’re paying the bills, we’re doing what we need to do, we still have the ability to kind of do some fun things. And I haven’t compromised who I am as a person, right? A lot of times, Christians will debate with each other whether or not you should put that on your resume or you should let people know that you’re Christian, right? And that goes with any group, right? Don’t anybody know what you’re a Muslim, or don’t anybody know that you’re gay, or that you’re this or that or the other. For me, it’s never been an issue. I never felt like I needed to not be open about who I am, which, obviously, as a Christian in America, that’s easy to do, right? But in some circles, it’s not. Part of that, too, is my background, I have a lot of church experience in my background, too. That’s kind of on my resume and you can’t really hide it. Things like that. It’s like, “Well, this is kind of who I am. This is how I want to treat people. I’m going to treat everybody I meet, everybody I work with, with respect. I’ll treat them the way that I want them to treat me.” So I never had to step on people to get where I am, I’ve never had to belittle people or never had to– you know what I’m saying?

Liam: I get that, I respect that holistic approach where life is holistic in every sense so one can’t have success at home if there’s a disconnect between what’s going on at home and what’s going on at work, and vice versa. And I respect that, that sounds like that’s a very healthy way for you and your family to live. Within that definition of success, what’s the single most important thing you do every day to either achieve or continue that success?

Cory: For me, it’s find ways to get better, find ways to improve. Look for new things to learn, look for ways to improve things that I already know how to do. You can always get better, right? If I’m going to be a web developer, I need to be the best web developer, I need to be the absolute best I can be. And I’m not that, right? I mean, I’m pretty good but I’m not the best that I can be. Tomorrow, I’m going to learn something that I didn’t know today.

Liam: Let me interrupt you with that. Just with resepect to web development, and learn something new or be the best you can. Aside from the client or your colleagues present you with a problem, Cory, we’re trying to bring this functionality and we’re not quite sure what our thought process should be and how to bring it. But if it’s really something that you’ve never encountered before, particular challenge problem, whatever. Where do you go to learn that? How do you go about tackling that? If it’s really something you can’t reach back into your history to, where do you go?

Cory: It really depends on the situation. Currently, I go to my team first because, like I said, I work with some really brilliant developers who have a lot of experience and generally, one of them is probably going to know the answer or is going to at least have some insights as to which direction I should take to solve a certain problem. If that doesn’t work, then there’s Google and there’s Stack Overflow and tools like that. Because there’s a lot of people out there that know the answer or have some insights into how you can figure out the answer. And that’s something that I’ve actually had to overcome because I’m kind of a solve it yourself kind of guy, so if I encounter a problem, I try to solve it myself. It’s been hard for me in the past to reach out and ask someone for help and to say, “Hey, I need help.” Because, ultimately, eventually, I can probably figure it out.

Tara: Yeah, and that’s very satisfying, too, right? When you figure it out on your own. It’s a good feeling.

Cory: Yeah, it definitely is. But it’s also unhealthy, right? Because if it takes me a week to figure it out, when it could have taken me a couple of hours if I had just put my pride aside and asked someone. Then, which is better, right? It kind of depends, too, because sometimes figuring it out yourself helps you understand it better and helps you when the next problem that comes along looks similar, you kind of have a better way of thinking about it.

Tara: Yeah, it may be case-specific but that sounds like something that you’ve given a lot of thought to. When you talk about your Christianity and you talk about solving problems on your own and reaching out to your team, what would you say, mixed in with any of that or not, is the biggest challenge that you face on a day-to-day basis? What’s the biggest challenge that keeps you from maybe being the best you can be?

Cory: True. That’s a great question. I think one of the best challenges that I’ve had in the past is being focused on getting things done I need to get done right now. So much so that I don’t have the opportunity to think long-term or think strategically about what I need to be doing to improve myself going forward. Especially when I own my own business and have pleas and things like that. I was spending time doing things that were more gruntwork or things I just had to get done as opposed to stepping back and taking the time to do the things that I need to do to get better. Part of that, too, was being a Joomla guy. All I ever did was Joomla. So, you spend your day buried in Joomla, you don’t necessarily always get a chance to reach out and learn other things, too. That’s part of it, too, I guess is as much as specialization is a good thing for marketing. I’m a Joomla guy, so anybody’s looking for a Joomla guy, they’re going to come to me. But in terms of becoming a more well-rounded developer, well-rounded person, specialize but also find the time to do the things that you need to do to get better and to improve your skill set and just improve overall as a person.

Tara: Yeah, and I think the key word in there is find the time. I think that’s a challenge that we talk about a lot here. How do you manage your time? What’s your schedule like?

Cory: Right. I work from home, which is great because it’s very flexible. But it’s also terrible because it’s very flexible. Because you can work anytime. When your office is your home, you’re always there, you’re always at work. But I’ve been doing this for about ten years, working from home. And you learn over the years that it’s best to set aside time for the things that need time. Work happens between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM, and the life happens outside of that. Sometimes life happens inside of that, right? Like, when your son gets sick at school in the middle of a podcast and you’ve got to figure out how to get him picked up, that kind of thing happens, right? But for the most part, I have blocks that were things that are supposed to happen. So work happens eight to five, family time happens five to whenever the kids go to bed. Then, beyond that, I get to hang out with my wife once the kids are in bed and we get to spend time together. And we’re not distracted by other things because this is dedicated time. That’s more or less how I do it, that’s not super detailed.

Liam: Cory, that sounds pretty structured. Sorry to step on your toes. Tara, you want to go ahead?

Tara: No, go ahead. I was just agreeing.

Liam: Okay. Tell me, the schedule that you have now, is that something that you started off doing right away or is that the voice of experience speaking?

Cory: When I started my business and kind of went full time doing this, and even before that, I had one kid and she was a baby. She was about two years old when I started my business. Two-year-olds are pretty easy. I say that, right, I have three kids now so I can say that. But when you have one two-year-old, life is pretty easy. We put her to bed and I always work. I was working all the time. I was getting stuff done and I wrote a book and my business was growing, but I was working all the time. My personal life suffered, I wasn’t able to hang out with my wife as much as I wanted to. I was constantly on the computer doing some work or thinking about work. I learned pretty quickly into that that it’s just not sustainable. You can get a lot done doing the Gary Vaynerchuk, work 18 hours a day and never do anything else, way of life. But for me, it just wasn’t sustainable, it wasn’t something I could keep doing long-term. Then, obviously, we had another kid and then another kid and it’s like, well, now you really don’t have time or the energy to work all that much.

Liam: Sure.

Tara: Yeah. Something we ask everyone on our show, Cory, is what’s the best piece of advice that you have received and implemented in your life?

Cory: That’s a good question. I think the best advice that have probably had, I would say is probably just to keep getting better, keep improving, never be satisfied with the status quo. You’re not as good as you can be right now, and that’s okay. That kind of deals a little bit with imposter syndrome, right? You think, “Man, I’m with these developers that are brilliant and I’m not that good.” It’s like, “That’s okay, but you’ll be better tomorrow, and you’ll be better the next day so just keep improving.”

Liam: That advice of just keep getting better ties back very nicely, then, with your holistic definition of success where you’re working on a personal front to get better and working on a professional front to do the same, that’s nicely succinct.

Tara: Yes, it is.

Liam: I’ll jump in if I can and take us back really just to the start of our conversation around Joomla and WordPress. I’d be really interested to get your thoughts on what the WordPress community could learn from a Joomla community. In a community building kind of sense, what is Joomla community doing really well that maybe the WordPress community might not have just figure out just yet? I mean that in a constructive supportive way?

Tara: Good question.

Cory: Man, that’s a really tough question. In the Joomla community, there’s kind of a sense of banding together to get things done. There’s also this notion that we don’t have this benevolent dictator in Joomla to tell us what to do. We work together to come to a solution. Drupal has Dries. Is that how you say his name? I think it’s how you say it. I’ve known his name for ten years, I still don’t know how to say it.

Liam: I’ve only read it.

Cory: We’ll say Dries. Drupal has Dries, WordPress has Matt, Joomla has the core team. Joomla has the community. There’s kind of this notion that, if I don’t step up and do it, it’s not going to get done. Which, I don’t think WordPress lacks in that. I think WordPress certainly has plenty of individuals. I was at WordCamp US in Nashville and there was the community contributor day, and on the last day, there were hundreds of people in the room there to contribute. Like, “Hey, what can I do? Where can I go?”

Tara: I suppose that Joomla benefits and suffers from its much smaller use, smaller audience and community. I imagine the community is way smaller than WordPress because the percentage of use is way smaller. That’s probably helpful in some ways, like you said, from a maybe bureaucratic standpoint, but you also have less manpower or woman power.

Liam: People power.

Cory: Absolutely. The scale is a problem. In WordPress, you’ve got thousands of people coming to WordCamp US, whereas in Joomla, our biggest conference has 300 people. WordPress, you have random WordCamps in cities throughout the year that have 400-500-600 people. That makes it hard but it also makes a little bit of a more tight-knit community in some ways because you know everybody. WordPress, you kind of can’t know everybody because there’s just so many people. It’s tough to say because it’s just two different beasts altogether. WordPress being so large and having so many resources and so many people behind it, they’re clearly doing things right and doing something right. Joomla’s still trekking along, it’s kind of like the little engine that could. It’s still going, it’s still a great platform, it’s still improving. If you haven’t checked it out recently, they’re doing some really cool stuff with it.

Tara: What’s it primarily used for? Does it have an industry-specific focus?

Cory: That’s part of the problem, right? Joomla’s never really had a focus, it’s never had a target. It’s been kind of like, “Okay, WordPress is the easy one. Drupal’s the hard one and Joomla’s kind of somewhere in the middle.” But there’s not really much to the focus of, like, “Oh, we really target this industry.” It’s just, anybody that needs a CMS. Which, unfortunately, for Joomla, anybody that needs a CMS is probably going to use WordPress.

Tara: I appreciate all this information that I don’t think either of us intended this to be like Joomla versus WordPress conversation but you probably hear that all the time.

Cory: True.

Tara: We appreciate you sharing it with us and with our audience because it is really interesting as a comrade Joomla user, especially. Thanks for sharing all that with us and thanks for sharing your ideas about success and your story, it’s really been a pleasure chatting with you. We are just about of time here. Would you share with everyone where they can find you online, please?

Cory: Yeah, absolutely. My Twitter handle is @corywebb.

Tara: Okay, I have to jump in and ask the question. Webb as the last name. I mean, I know there’s two Bs. That’s the first thing. We had another guest on here, his name was Cory and his Twitter handle or his website is @coryweb with one B.

Cory: I saw that.

Tara: You get a lot of pun jokes about that?

Cory: I’ve been accused of actually making the name up for my career. It’s like getting Homes who is a home builder. I always use Wolf Blitzer as an excuse. He was like a war correspondent and his name is Wolf Blitzer, you’ve got to believe that’s not his name. But maybe it is, I don’t know. Cory Webb is actually my name.

Tara: Okay.

Cory: My parents are named Webb, my brothers are named Webb.

Liam: We believe you. But if there is a Cory Webb out there with three Bs, we’d invite that one on, too.

Cory: Yeah.

Liam: Cory, thanks so much for joining us today out here in the hallway, it was a great time, thanks so much.

Tara: Thank you, Cory.

Cory: Thank you for having me, I appreciate it.

Liam: Bye-bye, for now.

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.

Patte started her WordPress business, Unique Site Helper, three years ago. She loves to figure things out and she loves the WordPress community.

Website | Unique Site Helper

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

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Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 38.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Patte Shetler. Patte started her WordPress business three years ago. She launched a website at Uniquesitehelper.com to have a web presence and to show that she was legitimate. She loves to figure things out and she says that she loves the WordPress community. Hi, Patte.

Patte: Hi, Liam. Hi, Tara.

Tara: Hey, Patte, welcome. Glad to see you here. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Patte: Yes, thanks for having me on. I’m Patte Shetler, I work from home in Sewickley, which is a little north of Pittsburgh. I retired from corporate America about three years ago and was trying to figure out what I would do to keep moving forward in technology. So I opened up a little website business and I would say I’m a website implementer. I listened to a lot of podcasts, including yours from episode one, and I started out with Carrie Dils about three years ago.

Tara: Great. I think that I met you through Carrie Dills’ Office Hours, through her podcast commenting or something like that. We met through Carrie Dills, so we can thank Carrie for knowing each other and having you here today. What did you do before you started your agency and working with WordPress?

Patte: I worked in infrastructure for years on the back-end of data centers and move data centers. I was Unix admin and then I moved up through security devices and all of that. And then at the very end of my career, I ended up being a project manager for hardware and software.

Tara: So you’ve never been intimidated by technology? It sounds like you’ve kind of been on the leading edge of technology even before technology was a thing.

Patte: Some places that I worked had very old technology, like financial institutions. But everything that I owned, I literally tore apart. My first PC I took apart, my first iPad, my first, what were they called, shuffles? Took those all apart just to see if I can get them back together.

Tara: Wow, that’s impressive. Is that how you approach WordPress, as well?

Patte: No. I really couldn’t figure out WordPress when I first started. It looked like a framework and then I jumped right into Genesis, which was the framework on top of that. And how did that all fit together? I struggled a little bit when I first started. The reason I love the WordPress community so much is I would be able to reach out to somebody and they would help me through getting that website up and running.

Tara: Yeah. And how did you discover Genesis as part of that, then?

Patte: That was through Carrie Dills because she had some courses on Lynda and I went there and then I bought the StudioPress Bundle and that’s where I actually started.

Tara: You’re growing your business now and working on your own, how are you finding self-employment and growing your agency. How’s that working for you?

Patte: Well, I have to keep growing in air quotes because I really don’t want to grow it that big, as I said, I wanted just a web presence and I only take on people that are nice and that I want to work with. Because, when I initially started out, I made those same mistakes that everyone else did. Work for a friend, do something for free, do it pro-bono, and I did not do what everyone advises you to do. Setup a statement work, a contract, limited time, and then when you step away. I made those mistakes.

Liam: Yeah, those mistakes are really commonplace and it’s so interesting to hear, we’ve all made them. I know I’ve made them, and Tara’s told me in conversation she’s made them too. It’s really interesting, the human side of things where we know on paper, don’t do that, and then we get into it, and then, sure enough, we all do it. That’s interesting. How quickly were you able to realize that you were doing it wrong and to make adjustments? How quickly did you get yourself out of that?

Patte: I didn’t think I was doing it wrong. I’ve come out of corporate America, I’ve seen a ton of statements at work, I approved a bunch of contracts, I had to pay invoices. So I knew better and I thought, “Oh, I don’t need this. No one’s going to take advantage of me. I was just very trusting about it.” And I would hear the challenges that small businesses would have, and I would just think, “Oh, that’s not going to happen to me.” This last year, it happened twice to me. I thought I can’t move forward in the way that I have been doing this for the last year or so.

Tara: That’s interesting because you’d think coming from that corporate background that you have, that that would have been something that you would have had experience with in terms of having systems and things like that. Are you implementing those now because of the experiences that you had last year?

Patte: Yes, they’re all implemented. I think they were there, to begin with, and I just ignored them but I didn’t provide somebody with a statement at work, or I didn’t write the requirements down. Now, even when I’m setting up a site for a friend, I’ll write down a little statement and say, “This is what we’re going to deliver.” At this point, I grab a date and I say I’m done. Then I will say, just like I’ve heard many, many times, “In 30 days, if I don’t hear from you with content, or 90 days, then you have to come back into the queue in order to be considered to go live.”

Tara: Yeah, it’s hard to do that, to be firm and feel like you’re still being nice. Especially when we’re working for ourselves and we’re often times working with friends, or friends of friends, or people who become friends because you are meeting them in person, perhaps. It’s hard to make it format because it makes it seem so unfriendly sometimes, but what you realize after you’ve had bad experiences is that you’re avoiding the bad feelings down the road by facing that little bit of discomfort and formalizing it at the front-end. I think that you’re going in the right direction and making that decision now.

Patte: I also think in corporate America, I had that buffer, there was always an attorney there or you had your customer support people that you could always– they would always be buffering it before it got to me as the developer or the manager or the project manager later in my career, that I just assumed that that would be still happening. Now you have to wear all these hats and you have to have that legal piece and your accounting piece all set up in your business.

Tara: That’s a good point. Liam, did you have something?

Liam: Yeah, I’ve just wondered about the way that you transition, the lawyer would pipe up or the senior product manager would pipe up and address these concerns in your previous career and you didn’t have to. I wonder if you find yourself taking any communication-style lesson, then? My experience is that a lot of problems that we face as small-business owners can be addressed through proper and early and consistent communication. I wonder if you’ve had the same experience and if so, what kind of tools or techniques or lessons have you learned that make it a little bit easier for you now?

Patte: On the communication side, because I was a project manager, I would always have a style in place. I’d always ask the managers, “How do you want to get this information?” It would either come through the project– of course, it was Microsoft Shop, the notes would go up there, the memo would get out. And then if the senior managers wanted to know by meeting what the status is, that’s what I would do. I always ask the customer and client now, how do we communicate. If they have no idea, then what I’d do is put a framework and say, “Well, once a week, how about I send you a status update?” And I set up a call to talk every two weeks because that way you’re getting in front of them and pushing them for whatever you need, content or decisions on the statement of work that you’ve provided or where are you. I always ask, and this was another mistake I made last year, was I always asked that client, “Are we still on track? Are we still doing what you wanted to have done?” Because a lot of times when I get in there and they see that site or they see the way that the structure is, they no longer want that. If you don’t ask that, then you start to have communication problems. I have a very structured style of how I reach out to them.

Liam: Yeah, that last point you made, Patte, around clients pointing you in one direction, if you will, offering guidance about where they go, and then once they start to see things, their views change. That’s something I’ve experienced as well, is small-business owners are required to focus on so many different tasks and the mental and intellectual effort that they put into their website kind of ramps up, right? They get excited by the launch but they don’t really think about the ins and outs of what they want and need until it starts to come together. That can be a challenge to encourage them to intellectually invest early so that it doesn’t cost more later on when they say, “No, no, no. I don’t want to do that at all.” Well, yeah, but here we have four emails where you said this is exactly what you want. So we’ve put the time there and we can change it, it’s early enough but there’s a cost there. As you’ve been rolling these out, these changes and these edits to your flow, have you noticed any kind of positive outcomes or smoothing of communications or projects going more swimmingly?

Patte: They have. But as I said, I don’t have a big volume so it’s easy enough for me to manage that. It’s mostly about managing those expectations. We struggle with that. I’m also in the situation where I am learning and trying new things so I need to make sure that I don’t pull the whole thing off the rails by saying, “Hey, this is a really cool thing I can put in here.” Or, this is a different way you can make a payment and change it for them, right? I have to, and I think it’s– to advise the client, you have to make sure that you go right back to that statement at work and I hate to say this, but I go back to the old way of filing, each client has a file with a little notebook. From the day I start with them and I’m writing notes, and I go back to that statement and I will update it if something changes. I always put three small changes and then if we bring in any major change, then it’s a change management request. A lot of people will say, “Oh, we’ll move that to phase two. That was a lovely thing that we did when I was in corporate.”, “Oh, we can’t do this.” In order to say no, we would say, “Okay, we’ll move to phase two.” And we would never get there, right? It would just drag on and on until that project wasn’t budgeted anymore. Well, this is a very different approach now with the client because you are building a professional and personal relationship sort of with them, and you’re going to the same small-business network meetings often, or you see them– I live in a very small town and you see them, and you just can’t duck away from that so you have to make it very clear that there is an ending to this.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a really good point, that finality, in a good way finality. I’m going to change gears a little bit on our conversation and I’m going to take us to a question about your definition of success. Can you share with us what is your personal and your professional definition of success, Patte?

Patte: My personal definition of success is to get through a day without being just negative and pessimistic. I fight that all the time and you have this negativity coming from– you could be working with a client, or watching the news, or in some Slack channel and somebody just pulls you down in this mood. And I don’t want to end my day that way. I start my day by looking at something very positive. I look at it again when I’m doing my exercise in the middle of the day, and then I do it again at night. Then when I’m done for the day, I pull that into my personal side. I’m making a conscious effort to be kind to everyone that I’m talking to. That’s typically family, your spouse, anyone that’s irritating you. That is my goal now for every single day.

Tara: What are those tools that you use? What do you look at to remind you to be positive?

Patte: I look at a lot of positive quotes during the day. I use Panda Planner where I look at– there’s a 30-day check-off for your habits. I look at that every day. And if I’ve slipped then I don’t put a check there but I try to work toward that particular habit.

Tara: Yeah, I like that. Do you set a little alert on your calendar or something to say, “It’s 12 o’clock today, think of something positive.” Is it that organized and structured?

Patte: It is that organized and structured. I started that this year because of beating myself up from last year for not having that structure. You had mentioned, Tara, that you looked at the 12-week book thing. I’ve done that last year in order to train for a race and it was very good to break your year up into those quarterly sections. I’m doing that with my personal and professional piece, too, this year.

Tara: Yeah, me too. I find that goals are more tangible when they’re in a shorter distance from where you are right now. Makes you work harder towards them and accomplish them, I think.

Patte: I think it helps your focus.

Tara: It does, for sure. You have your personal goals, I know you’re interested in fitness. What are your business goals for your business then, in terms of that 12-week year planning?

Patte: It was to setup– and I’ve always worked with an accountant, but to actually look at what the financials are. What is profit and what are my expenses? Before, I just kind of approached it with– it was pretty lackadaisical. I waited my last year of work in corporate and I saved all that money so that I could set up my business, but I allowed myself being in semi-retirement to go down different rabbit holes. I would try to figure things out. I would always listen to office hours so I offered to Carrie, “Why don’t you let me do your transcripts?” I think I did the same for you when you guys first started to provide a service back to you and have some filler work. But I really wasn’t looking at that as all the income. I was just kind of, “Okay, there will be some here and there while I’m working on websites.” But I wasn’t focusing. I purposely wasn’t doing that so that I give myself time to make that adjustment. At the end of last year, I looked at SEO and have been offering a little bit of those audits reports and really looking into that. That is a constant changer. You have to be on top of that every day. You know the struggles around that. I also have a piece of my quarterly income around at least one SEO clients. I have four of those this year and we’ll see where that lands.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a big learning process, you and I have talked about that. We’ve been involved in some projects for SEO and I know Liam’s also been doing some more SEO work as well. It seems to be the burgeoning side of a web agency now is that you really need to know how to do that and incorporate it into what you’re offering in order to grow your business. That sounds like a good goal to have. Towards that goal, you’ve already talked about your positivity planning throughout your day. Would you say that’s the most important things that you do every day, or are there other things in your day that you find are most important, and/or also that are your favorite things to do?

Patte: Well, it is my most important and it is my favorite because I’m hoping that it would change my outlook over time. They say, “If you do something for 28 days, it becomes a habit and that changes.” I also like to make time to learn something every day. If I can’t get a particular training video in or an article in, I’ll save it for the end of the day but I make sure that whatever is on that week, projection gets finished. That’s somehow difficult to do when you’re tired at the end of the day, or tired in the morning. I’m stuck with that as well.

Tara: Adding professional development into your schedule, it’s always the last thing to come, but it’s like that ‘eat the frog’ mentality of doing that one thing that you don’t want to do and getting it done. Yeah, that’s hard to do. I also think the idea of having it in your mindset to look at life through– I don’t want to say, necessarily, through rose-colored glasses but looking at it in a positive way. I’ve been doing some yoga and one of the things she talks about is smiling. And it’s amazing when you just approach the moment with a smile on your face, how much it changes what you feel about it, even if you’re going into it feeling unhappy. Just smiling forces your emotions to take a different view of things. I love that you’re committing to that positivity practice, that’s really cool.

Liam: Yeah, that’s really powerful. Patte, let me ask you this. Speaking of trying to tackle big things in a positive healthy way, what’s been your biggest challenge to date and how are you addressing that or how did you either fix it, address it, overcome it, or how you’re working on it now?

Patte: My biggest challenge is telling people what I do. When you’re in any situation, you can be at a party and people ask you what you do, and you say, “Oh, I’m building websites for small businesses on the side.” Then everyone wants one. It’s just like, people that are doctors don’t tell people what they do professionally because then everyone wants this advice. I’m happy to give that but you can get sucked into even explaining what a website is or what a search engine is. Especially, and I hate to say this, I’ve explained technology a lot of times and it takes a lot of time. Now, somebody is very interested and then comes back and says, “Oh, that is really cool. WordPress is out there and I want to use that as part of my technology.” They’ve done the research and they come back, then great. I just can’t offer that up a lot of times, I just say, “Oh, I’m retired.” [laughs]

Liam: Yeah, that is a challenge of trying to describe our careers in a way that is genuine and productive at the same time, without getting caught up in the, “Let me tell you everything that you know and be an educational resource for you, without any kind of either compensation or even, at times, acknowledgement that this is taking time to explain things to you.” And sometimes people just take that for granted, don’t they?

Patte: Yeah. Or that it’s even a true profession, right? Because they see Squarespace and Wix and, “Oh, I’ll just throw up a website and it’s 300 bucks.” And they’re expecting– not expecting, but wanting that information or thinking that that’s what you’re doing when you’re not. As we all know, WordPress is not easy.

Liam: It has its challenges, that’s for sure. Let me ask you this, if I can, what’s been the single most valuable piece of advice, and it can be either professional or personal advice, that you’ve received and incorporated into your life that has ultimately led to a positive outcome in some way?

Patte: This is going to go back many years. In ’77 when I was a freshman in college, I had a female professor. And you have to know that it was not coed. That college was probably coed four years before I got there. She told me, and it’s always been in front of me, that getting what you want scares you more than getting it. She always said, “Don’t fear about changing direction or learning something new. Always go out, do it, and if it’s the wrong thing, make the adjustment.”

Tara: have you had to use that advice throughout your career?

Patte: I’ve used it always. I’ve had some fearful things happen when I’ve managed people and had to have those tough conversations and thought, “I don’t want this but it has to happen.” I used that and think, “Okay, I’m going to work through this fear and get to the other side of it.” And guess what, you come out fine. We’re not saving lives, it’s very– we have to get outside of our own heads and just do it.

Tara: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your community there. Most of the people that we talk to, like yourself, work from home and work alone. What kind of involvement do you have with your community and how do you manage the potential loneliness of working out of your home by yourself?

Patte: The loneliness is a real challenge. You hear that a lot where it’s Tuesday and you’re thinking, “Oh my God, I haven’t spoken to anybody.” I have this part of my daily schedule, I would go down to the library and work there a couple of hours. I used to do a co-working situation with a couple of other WordPress entrepreneurs and we would get together and work one morning every week for help. And then, I’ve been back to participating in the meetups locally and I go to, naturally, the networking things. In Pittsburgh, it’s called a Red Chair Event. It’s women in technology and there’s a Pittsburgh technology council that has several meetings a year and I go to those as well. And then when you’re meeting people, then I try to get at least a coach or someone I can talk to, to hold me to the task of staying involved.

Liam: Yeah, that was a very constructive and practical and easily measurable mechanisms of combating loneliness. You can look back on the week and say, “Did I go to the coworking? Did I go to the library?” And they’re less intangible like, “Be positive.” Right? That’s harder to measure. I like that setup that you have and a practical approach to it. Was that something that you took care of or took an effort to address proactively, so as you were spinning out of corporate and spinning into self-employment, was it one of those, “Well, I’ve heard a lot about people working from home being lonely so I’m going to do this.” Or, “Struggling with working around no one, I’m going to do this proactively.” Or was it more, you were a number of months into it and, “Something’s wrong here. What am I doing?” And then you took steps?

Patte: It was definitely latter, there was something wrong because that first year was hell. I just didn’t have anyone. I went from being able to call over a cube, a set of cubes, to a developer and say, “I’m stuck with something here, can you help me?” And I had a great crew that I absolutely loved. Even going in in the morning around that coffee. I mean, it was a very big change. And the other thing that happened was, personally, I was then an empty nester. Both kids have graduated and moved away, and my husband still works full time so I was at home thinking, “This is not going to work.” That struggle is real. You have to put in an effort to exercise and see people, and put a structure into your day. And I saved money for the business but I didn’t consider what would happen with my time.

Liam: Yup, that’s important. I am going to circle us back, if I can, just to go back to the success because you were kind enough to share with us your personal definition of success. Then we explored some professional goals. I wonder if we can go from those professional goals and go up a few thousand feet or so and talk a little bit about your definition of professional success. Can you share that with us?

Patte: I had always aligned my professional success with my career, which wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do. I moved up through it, jumped from one organization to another every few years so that I could keep learning and grow my salary and my career. I was so attached to that title and that success, that was not what it was about. It wasn’t about the money and it wasn’t about pushing those kids through school when I’m sitting back now thinking, “Okay, what–” For me, professional success has nothing to do with that title and what you’ve accomplished or anything to do with money. And I wish I’d known that 30 years ago.

Liam: You shared what it is not, what is it, though? What is success to you, professional success to you?

Patte: Professional success to me now is being able to provide a good service to a client, deliver on what I said I was going to do, and also help other people in the community. We talked about the WordPress community, you see a lot of people starting out and really great personalities that work very hard and are very helpful. And I want to professionally be able to mentor them, give back to them in any way that I can. For instance, since I’m going to be listening to your podcast, I’m taking notes. I will say, “Can you use these show notes? I’ll do it pro-bono just to be able to help you out with your SEO.” Professionally, It’s satisfying for me but it’s truly not a monetary deliverable, right?

Liam: That’s a much more holistic approach to defining success.

Tara: And it’s a kind way to interact with people and greatly appreciate it. I was speaking with someone yesterday about a frustrating experience where I wasn’t able to help someone or they didn’t want my help and they talked about the cosmic karma of having a positive impact on someone else instead and having it circle back around so that kind of pay it forward cosmic good mentality, I think, is coming into play with what you’re doing as well. That’s probably what WordPress is about, too, is sharing your skills because people have been kind to you, passing it on. So thank you.

Patte: And just remember, if they don’t appreciate that, then just walk away.

Tara: That’s right, help someone else.

Patte: Don’t personalize it, there’s somebody else out there that will benefit from it and enjoy it, move on.

Tara: Exactly. On that positive and helpful note, we are out of time, Patte. This has been a really great conversation. I loved hearing you, I’m feeling very positive today, so thank you. [laughter]

Patte: Well, thank you very much for having me on.

Tara: Can you let us know and our listeners know where they can find you?

Patte: On Twitter, I’m @pshetler1 and there’s a bicycle there, of course. I think it was my retirement gift from a couple of years ago. And then it’s Uniquesitehelper.com and Patricia Shetler on Facebook.

Tara: Great. Thank you so much for joining us, I hope to see you soon, Patte, take care.

Patte: Thank you.

Liam: Thanks, Patte.

Patte: So long.

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.

Jeff is an agency owner, teacher, and podcaster. He leads his team at Come Alive Creative in producing podcasts for businesses and brands.

Website | JeffLarge.com

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 37.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Jeff Large. Jeff is an agency owner, teacher, and podcaster. He leads his team at Come Alive Creative in producing podcasts for businesses and brands. If you’re into Myers-Briggs, Jeff is an ESTJA, but also almost an ENTJA, which makes him a mix of driven and flexible. Hi, Jeff, welcome.

Jeff: Hello, hello.

Liam: Hey, Jeff. Thanks for joining us today.

Jeff: Yeah, thank you for having me.

Liam: Tell us a little bit more about yourself than what Tara just shared, please?

Jeff: What would you like to know, because that is a huge question?

Liam: Well, let’s start with what I don’t understand is the Myers-Briggs. What’s the driving factor behind taking the tests for you? Not for everybody, not the public, necessarily, but why did you get into that, why did you focus on that?

Jeff: I like learning. I was a teacher before I did agency stuff or even started a business or anything. I taught. My formal education’s all in education so I have my bachelors, and under bachelors in literature and language arts for elementary, and then almost masters for the same thing, language arts, except for secondary. I’ve always just cared a lot about it. I think understanding yourself and being sort of– introverted is not the word I want. It’s alluding me, the word that I want. Just to know yourself well, I think, can make you better and so it’s always–

Tara: Introspective.

Jeff: Yeah, introspective, that’s the word that I wanted. Thank you, Tara. It has always helped. I don’t necessarily care about Myers-Briggs, per se, but I really like just ways to sort of look at who I am and where my strengths lie, that type of thing.

Liam: Yeah, that’s interesting to me. Part of me always wonders, if I take the test and it tells me– and I don’t have the letters memorized. If it tells me ‘A’, does that automatically mean I am ‘A’ or is that what I was on the day and am I going to sort of try to conform to ‘A’ because I was told by a reputable test that I am ‘A’?

Jeff: Yeah, I definitely hear that. There’s ones that I think are better than others. If I had to pick one, it’s the one that goes along with the Strenghtsfinder 2.0 book, and it’s just the strength finders test. Out of all of those, definitely– I’m going to pull up, not on my site, I think I have it on my phone, too. Yeah, my number one is learner. My top five that I rank for are learner, achiever, intellection, input, and responsibility. It kind of just breaks to I think a lot, I research a lot, and then as soon as I feel like I know, I just get on it and get it done, type of a thing. I take a lot of ownership over it and that really feels very accurate to me. It’s kind of comfortable to be able to just go, “Okay, this is who I am. I know what I’m good at. I know what I’m not. I’m going to kick butt at the things that I know and I’m going to hire out everything else that I’m not good at.”

Tara: Yeah, it’s also helpful in working with other people. I am doing a leadership program in my local community, and as part of that program, everyone, all 50 people in the class, took a DISC survey, D-I-S-C. And you’re either a D, an I, an S, or a C. And everyone knows what everyone else is in the class. When you’re in a small group and you’re meeting with people, you know, “Okay, this person is a C. That means that they’re really detail-oriented and they’re kind of hesitant, whereas this person’s a D and they jump right in, and they don’t have the patience for meetings.” It helps not only to know yourself but if you know a little bit or if you maybe guess about people that you’re interacting with to know maybe where they’re coming from, it’s helpful too. Yeah, it’s super interesting.

Jeff: I think that’s huge. Our whole team, I’ve had them do the strength finders for that reason because there were gaps that I could tell. Even say, for a while, we had a pretty big gap with the sales side of things where I would always do it because I had to, but don’t care for it, per se. So we purposely sought out people with a specific skill set in order to jump in and help out with those aspects. I think it’s really awesome for anybody that’s running the team.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a good approach. I’m glad to hear that. Let’s back up a little bit and talk a little bit about your background. You have a teaching background, how did you get into WordPress?

Jeff: I had to promote ourselves. [laughs] I think it’s where it originally started. My web days began before WordPress because back in high school and college I used to be in bands. I’ve always been a musician and we needed a website to promote ourselves. I think I was building with Dreamweaver back in early 2000s in order to figure out how to do stuff and just straight HTML pages, that type of thing. It was shortly after that, maybe fast-forward a few years– I’m trying to think why I needed it. I needed a website again for something. Oh, we ran a board game publishing company for a little bit. The audience can’t but you can see all the board games behind me. We needed a website for that and I was looking for new ways or better ways to go about doing it. And I had a friend that introduced me to WordPress, so I was like, “Okay. I guess I’ll figure this out.” I was always kind of the tech person out of the crew that I was working with. That’s originally how that started. That was probably back in maybe 2013 that I started using it. Then we launched our first site around 2014, something like that, and then it just kind of grew from there.

Tara: What’s your favorite board game?

Jeff: [laughs] That’s too much. You’ve got to give me a genre or some boundaries.

Tara: [laughs] You know, I saw those games behind you and I just thought maybe you just had collected them over the years. Now I can see there’s a lot of board games there.

Jeff: No. I recently purged and got rid of about at least 30, and we probably have about 120 or something that we own. But the coolest thing that I’m proud of is that I probably played all of them except for two or three maybe, where some people are like, “I have this huge collection and I’ve never touched it.” But I’ve actually played most of them.

Tara: Do you play every week or every day?

Jeff: We used to. We used to play all the time. We don’t as much now, just between me running the agency and then my wife’s working too. She was always the main person I’d play with, and now it’s mostly– I have two kids and it’s mostly me and my kids will play. Then we’ll get together with friends probably once a month and do game nights, and then, we’re obviously always the ones that bring the game.

Tara: Fun. They just opened a bar and there’s a couple of them in this area. You pay to play board games at a bar. They do that there, too?

Jeff: Yeah, we’ve got something different. There’s several, and then there’s one in particular that started at Monday night on purpose, a pub in the area and it’s been pretty fun so far.

Tara: Cool, that’s great.

Liam: Tell me about how– because this interests me. Where do hobbies and work meet and how do you or do you work board games into client pitches of meetings and conversations? Not necessarily, “I like board games so you should hire me.” But maybe when you’re explaining something technical or you’re talking through your process, does your board gaming come in in any way?

Jeff: 100%. I will credit this to a good friend of mine, his name is Rich Mulholland and he owns a public speaking firm. Basically, he teaches CEOs not to suck at public speaking. He’s based out of South Africa. And he came across us through the podcast that I used to run for the board game publishing company that we’ve had. Through him and just going through that, he does a lot even with his agency to teach CEOs using board games. They’ll do these, I think he calls them gamestorming is what he uses on. And then there’s things that I’ve learned from him and just from the games themselves to go into a pitch. For example, we’re very goal-driven so any client that we take on, I need to know what their goals are upfront because it makes no sense for me to do anything or for me to try to make any sort of podcast or product for them if I don’t know what the point is. To get them on board, you think about– take a really, really basic game like Monopoly. Everybody knows how to win Monopoly. You’ve got to get all the property and all the money. But if I told you, “Hey, okay. We’re going to tweak the rules. Instead, the winner of the game is going to be who has the most of a specific-color property, or it’s going to be the person that has the most money after turn three.” Or whatever it might be, you’re changing what would be called the victory condition. So we’ll go in and as we think about things, I’m always asking the clients, “What is your victory condition?” That can change. That can change as time goes on, so we might have a victory condition of one thing in the beginning of our contract in the first scope, but then it may change as time progresses. They grow, the variables are different, and then all of a sudden, we have new victory conditions and further [inaudible 14:36].

Tara: Okay. I have a question. Moving into one of our questions that we ask everyone and I can totally tie it into that victory condition. We talk about success, we love to hear what different people’s perspective’s on what success means to them. And I’m wondering if that can relate to this victory condition and as your goals change? [inaudible 15:05] maybe your view of success changes but what would you say is your view of success and how it might relate to something like a victory condition that might change over time.

Jeff: I know you’ve shared those ahead of time and I thought about that one, I don’t really have anything revolutionary for it, per se, it’s just I feel like success is when you state a goal and accomplish that goal. Probably more of the important thing is how you determine the things that you decide that are goalworthy, I guess. As I look at my own life and whether it’s practical business things that I’m doing on an agency standpoint, whether it’s personal things. Taking the time to actually identify worthy goals is where I would spend more of the time, and then it’s just making sure that I accomplish it. And if I accomplish it then I’m successful.

Liam: How do you determine what’s worthy on both the personal and professional level, if I can ask you that?

Jeff: No, that’s fine. I think the personal level is probably more important because, obviously, it’s who we are. And who we are matters a lot. Everybody out there, everybody that’s listening has driving factors, they have motivators. The reasons why they do what they do. Maybe it’s family, maybe it’s faith, maybe it’s personal drive, maybe you want to accomplish XYZ, make a certain amount of money, whatever it is, we all have driving factors. I’m not going to tell you that mine are better than your’s by any means. But I can also say that my wife and I, we’re both very faith-based people. We care a lot about growing in that capacity, so a lot of my decisions usually revolve around more of those theological-type questions of, am I doing the right thing, where should I be right now, how do I best respond in this situation, how do I make decisions for me and my business that make it easier for me to love well, both the people that I’m working with and the people around me? Those are more of my driving factors. Then, you have to be practical at the same time and balance it against, am I being unprofitable, am I growing? All of those kind of things, too, because you can’t just live in a bubble either.

Liam: That’s a good answer, I like that. That comprehensive approach and that level of uniqueness to what’s relevant to you. I use relevant but that may not be the right word. It’s deeper than relevance, isn’t it? I like that where you’re trying to take a comprehensive approach to determining the best way forward for you and for your family and for your business and the people around you.

Jeff: The simple answer is just how can I love well, how can I best serve? I authentically want to help people. Sometimes it gets difficult because not everybody else in our spaces, whether it’s dev or marketing or whatever it is, always has the other person’s intention in mind. Sometimes people come to you, your clients come to you with a chip on their shoulder and you kind of got to work through that but it’s understandable. I’ve personally been burned, I’ve seen friends of mine get burned. You kind of work through the imperfections of each other but it’s okay because you push and you hope for the best and you just trust that your intentions are good and that the other person will be able to tell that.

Tara: How do you merge that with the profitability factor, either sometimes when your goal is to love well and to be a good, kind, nice person? You may have a tendency to put yourself in a position where you’re risking your profitability because you want to be nice. And then sometimes you may have profit in mind and it may come across that profit is your primary motivation versus helping your client solve their problem? [inaudible 19:18] the right way?

Jeff: Yeah, I get what you’re saying and what you’re asking. It’s not easy, it took me a long time to even be okay with the idea of making money, even decent money. That was tough for a long while. I just had an ill feeling about it. But you learn after a while, it’s like, by no means of– I get sick of the word expert and so I try to avoid it. I will say, “I know what I’m talking about when it comes to audio.” And I’m really confident in that. I don’t want to come off as arrogant, I hope I just come off as confident. I’ve been doing it for a while, I like it a lot. We’ve just explored it in a lot of different ways. I need to take that confidence with a certain level of professionalism when I walk into a client meeting and it’s okay for me to ask for fair rates based on the industry, based on the type of work that we’re doing, and based on what the client can afford. All those things come into play and come into factor. Just because you’re nice doesn’t mean you’re a pushover. I can love well and still charge a fair rate in the process. We will do other things. I typically– this isn’t anything that I publicize. I’ll say it because you’re asking me about it. We’ll usually be doing one pro-bono project on the side but at the same time, I’ve had people approach me where, say, we’d already be working on one and they’d need something and I would just have to tell them no because that starts to cross over into– it wouldn’t be healthy for me. If I start spreading myself too thin, then I’m just going to do a shoddy job across the board versus, “No, right now we’re focused on these client projects and maybe this pro-bono thing, but next month I’ll have an availability that I can help out.” Or on the flip side, it’s like, simple questions, things that literally take me just a few minutes to answer, whatever it is. I get emails often about, “What equipment should I use? What should I do about this?” I’m happy to send you the links about things that I’ve already written and I’ve built some websites that have to do with answering those questions, just because I get them so frequently. But at the same time, I’m not going to sit down and it would be unreasonable, and I think unfair for somebody to ask, “Hey, can I pick your brain for two hours straight?” You find healthy boundaries and I don’t think you have to compromise either.

Liam: I’d agree with that. I would suggest that a big part of loving well includes loving ourselves well, and fairly, and justly. Part of that legitimate, fair, and just self-love is going to include self-care. Time management is just part of self-care, right? If we take on 87 hours of pro-bono work in one week, that’s going to make it difficult to do paid work. And if we don’t do paid work, then we can’t pay in pleas, or we can’t put food in the fridge for the children and the family and pay rents and mortgage. I like that, I think that ‘love well’ is a much more comprehensive phrase, much more universally applicable phrase than it probably comes off at, or at least as I heard it when you first said it. It’s a pretty powerful phrase, thank you.

Jeff: Yeah, I think it’s complicated. Even to your note, I had an interview– because I run a podcast, too, if the viewers didn’t know. I had an interview with a person, Stephanie Helberg, recently, and she was talking about how she gives a lot. If anybody follows her on Twitter, she’s always talking to people, giving advice, and that type of thing. And one of the things she pointed out to me in our interview is that she purposely accounts the time that she spends helping and offering other people as work time. If she has a lighter work week, she can give more, but if she has a heavier work week, she purposefully pulls back and it’s an easy way for her to stand balanced and level so she can continue to approach everything with her best.

Tara: That’s interesting. I wonder how you can do that, turn it on and off like that, what your expectations are set for? But I will, actually, go back to the podcasting because we haven’t talked about that yet and I wanted to hear more about it. How did you get into podcasting and what– I know that you were telling us earlier that that’s something that you love. Where does that come from?

Jeff: I would say that it probably started with musicianship. When I was in high school, I think I started with an electric bass guitar and moved to electric, then I was vocals for some relatively hardcore bands at the time, which is just sort of silly to think of now. I got sick of yelling and playing at bars so I started doing acoustic songwriting, then my girlfriend at the time, which is now my wife, we would play sometimes together. She would sing and I would play and sing. I have this background in audio in general, and I’ve always really, really enjoyed it and kind of have a multimedia background. I was in video production for a long time and have always enjoyed that as well. Going back to the board game things that I said, when we first started, it’s my wife, my cousin, and I, and we were figuring out how could we market ourselves in a way that was meaningful. We figured, okay, why not try podcast? Because we knew we were going to take our first game to Kickstarter. We’re going to go and try and crowdfund it. Instead of just showing up and being like, “Hey, give us your money.” We wanted to create some value for other people first. We started a podcast that was all on the business of board games. So we were looking at how are people designing them, manufacturers, publishers, all of those steps. And we’d just be interviewing those kinds of people. On one hand, we learned everything we needed to know to produce the game. And then at the same time, other people were learning from us and we were building a good audience. That’s where it began. Fast forward a little bit more, once I started the agency, Come Alive, we did about four-years-worth of web development and digital marketing for people. One of the aspects of digital marketing was we ran some podcasts where we used them as marketing promotional tools for our clients. It was about a halfway through last year which was 2017 now, halfway through 2017. I just kind of got, for a variety of reasons, sick of doing the web dev side of it and I said, “Let’s drop everything except from podcasting.” That’s where we decided to niche down. It was slow-going at first but it’s starting to gain traction now. It’s been good.

Tara: There seem to be more and more podcasts coming out. Are you going after any particular type of podcaster or new podcasters, existing, where are you marketing?

Jeff: It depends. We have sort of two– this is how I’ll answer that question. There’s sort of three main levels of people that can help someone who wants to start a podcast. And then there’s two, more or less, verticals that we’re looking at as an agency. Normally, if somebody wants to begin a podcast or wants to improve in a podcast, there’s a lot of people out there who create tutorials, or videos, or PDFs, or guides, or whatever it is. And that’s kind of a low-buried entry, maybe the content’s free, maybe it’s not. The second and probably most saturated area of help that you can get is for people that want editing. Usually, if you have a podcast file and you send it to the agency, or the company, or the person, and they edit your file and they either send it back to you or they get it posted for you. Or there’s this final tier, it’s a little more of a turn-key approach or a holistic look at it where that’s where we settled in. We can handle just like– say, for example, the production side is one out of four facets that we focus on. We’re looking at it from a planning standpoint, the production which would include the recording and the editing, promotion, so actually looking at it after the fact, how are you getting word out about it, and then tracking progress. Defining some key performance indicators of what success looks like for the cast and then tracking those things. What we’ve done is that on one hand, we’re the service side, we’re typically working with businesses that have some sort of goal that they need to hit. It could be things like they want to grow authority in a specific niche, they need to build trust with the audience in order to bring more people in to purchase for them or work for them, it could be networking aspects. It could just be a general content strategy, that they’re trying to be in more places. Then on the other side, there’s plenty of people that don’t fit that mold. That would just be overkill for them to work with us in that way. We also have an academy that I’ve setup as a membership site that basically helps people that are more on the entry level of, “I just want to learn how to cast.” And then they can go to that and right now, there’s 40+ courses or tutorials and videos and things that you can take in order to learn how to do it yourself.

Liam: There’s a lot to get into that. I want to focus on your transition, your pivot from web dev and marketing into really just podcasting. Tell us a little bit about that process for you because [inaudible 28:25] thinking about it over time but once the decision was made. You said you did a lot of research, you’re a research guy, going back to the Myers-Briggs letters that I can’t remember. Researched on, decision made, who was involved in that? Were you a company at that point, was there a team behind you that you need to convince or have support? How did that all come together for you?

Jeff: Okay, the way that we’re structured is everybody– we have a small team, there’s probably about four or five of us that kind of I consider are core. Then we have other people outside of that, maybe upwards to 10 people that, depending on the specialty of the project, we bring them in. They’re just regular people that we bring in or other small agencies we bring in. For the most part, I don’t think there’s anyone on the team that doesn’t trust me, which is really, really nice. There’s not a whole lot of convincing to do. I just kind of inform them of what’s going on. I keep them in the loop. They see the process first hand, they see me thinking. I’ll let them know. It’s not like, “Hey, guys. We’re doing a 180 degrees flip.” They’ll know in advance. I’ll go, “Hey, this is something I’m considering. Just wanted to keep you posted, these are the reasons why.” They’re really well-informed as we’re going through it. I’d say, probably, the primary person– I have a few advisors that I look to. One of them is the person that I mentioned earlier, Rich, and then I have a few other gentlemen who just have way more experience than me in terms of running business between time and scale, and all this stuff. And I’ll go to them often for just general advice. Then, obviously, I’ve got to give big props to my wife because she’s been in it through– she’s not actually part of the company. She helps with a lot of different things but she sort of does her own thing still. She’s been a tremendous asset in that regard, too, to just be a good sounding board. Someone that knows me better than anybody else and then can kind of call me on my stuff when it’s good or bad. That’s sort of the process. What was the other part of your question?

Liam: Kind of how did it play out in terms of, “Okay, we’re now getting more audio equipment for everyone on the team because we got to do podcasting editing. We don’t need as big a monitor because we’re not building things anymore.” I’m being a little bit silly and tongue-in-cheek on, “I’ve got the checklist.” But the practicalities of, “We’re no longer going to do this service, we’re going to do a tangential, but actually, in a lot of ways, very, very different service.” How did that work? Did you call field clients and say, “Are you interested in a podcast?” Or where did that come together?

Jeff: Okay. Think– especially, for the listeners out there. Think about if you’re a freelancer or if you own an agency, think about when you first started and how crazy and scary that was. Then think about working for four years and then deciding to do that again. [laughter] That’s very much what it was like.

Tara: Your team, are they employees of yours or are they contractors? It’s your company and they’ve been with you this whole time?

Jeff: Yeah, everybody’s contracted because everybody kind of just does their own thing. It’s really nice in that way, we don’t have– we always run really small, like I was saying, and light but we’re efficient. We get a lot of work done when we need to and everybody has their own little niche and most of the people have some other aspect of what they’re doing. I’m the only one that’s all in on the company. Everybody else is kind of– to use trite phrases, this is sort of their side-hustle. But at the same time, everyone’s awesome. I’ve known two of our designers, I’ve known one of them since I was in middle school, the other one I’ve known for eight years now. We have other developers that I’ve come across from doing all the web dev things that they’ll help out with a lot of our internal projects. Like, if I can’t do it myself or I don’t have the time to do it myself, and then we’ve brought on more people, more or less, after the switch. We have kind of that core element of the design and dev was always in place. I had a little bit of help with the video aspects of things with the tutorial sides and that. Then, since we’ve made the switch, we brought on a couple more copywriters and people that will help with more or less kind of executive assistance that will help with just admin-styled tasks of creating the post themselves, and doing different things like that, lot of research. We’ll have to do a fair amount of research, especially during our planning phases and that type of thing.

Tara: We are going to be running out fo time so I want to ask one more question of you. Pivoting ourselves, which maybe we can tie it back in but can you tell us about advice you’ve received, specifically, the most important piece of advice that you might pinpoint that you’ve implemented in your life, whether it’s personal or professional?

Jeff: that one’s loaded. I’ve received all kinds of amazing advice.

Tara: We like loaded questions.

Jeff: Yeah. You give me a loaded question and we have one minute left. [laughter]

Liam: You can have an extra 10 seconds.

Tara: We don’t have a hard day or nothing.

Jeff: Great, that’s exactly what I needed, just 10 seconds. No, I can think back to, I had a really, really excellent college professor and I’ll give him props. There was a time that I was stewing over something and I was talking to him about it, and it’s going to be really dead simple, dead simple advice but it’s something that I feel like for whatever dumb reason we ignore often, or at least I’ll speak for myself, I ignored. I was like, “Look, I know what I need to do. I’m having such a hard time making that decision.” He was like, “Can I tell you something?” And I’m like, “Sure, go for it.” He just said, “Just do it!” And I don’t mean it from the NIKE sense. Just, if you know what you need to do, go ahead and do it. There’s been plenty of times in my life where I knew what I needed to do and I might not wanted to because it either wasn’t convenient or it didn’t necessarily benefit me, or it was just flat out scary. I’ve always sort of gone back to that where it’s like, you know what? I want to be a person of integrity. I want to handle the situation well and despite whatever, I’m going to do the thing that I know I need to do.

Tara: That’s excellent. I’ve been paying a lot of attention lately to productivity and sort of life goals. I came across this thing called the five-second rule. Have you heard of that?

Jeff: I think so, remind me, though.

Tara: I can’t remember her name but that’s basically her– she’s a motivational speaker, and I’m sorry I can’t remember her name. But she has a book called The Five-Second Rule and it’s basically that idea that you act quickly on something, to do it, to just do it before you dwell on it for too long and change your mind. I don’t know if that may be more specific to what you’re talking about but I think it’s a general philosophy of move forward with something rather than let it just kind of linger in your thought process. Yeah, I appreciate that advice very much. Thank you for sharing it.

Liam: I see that circling back around to live well, or love well. If it’s the right thing to do, it’s the right thing to do. That can be at different levels. “Shall I stop now to get the milk or get up tomorrow morning?” Right thing is probably just to stop and get it done with. But there’s also bigger questions around the right thing to do and it circles back to that. Good advice, thank you for sharing that, Jeff.

Tara: Yeah, thanks.

Jeff: You’re welcome.

Tara: We’ll wrap it up now by asking you, please share with us where people can find you?

Jeff: I got a lot of places but for the sake of ease, I’ll give you two.

Tara: We’ll put the rest in the show notes, though.

Jeff: Okay. I was thinking about, I was going to make one of those really exciting landing pages for all the listeners but I didn’t do it yet so now I’m just going to tell you to go to my main sites. If you want to learn more about me personally or hear my podcast, that type of thing, you can just go to Jefflarge.com and then if you want to learn more about our agency, you can go to Comealivecreative.com.

Tara: Great, thank you. Are you on any social media?

Jeff: Yeah, Twitter would be the best one. I hate most social media. Twitter is the only one that I actually engage with people on and try to talk to. If anyone ever has a question or just a quick blurb for me in some capacity, or question about podcasting or audio, you can find me at @realjefflarge becaue somebody else, unfortunately, already took the normal Jeff Large and they’re not using it and it makes me frustrated. @realjefflarge

Tara: [laughs] The normal Jeff Large. Well, thanks for sharing with us today, Jeff, it’s great to meet you and best wishes, hope to meet you in person sometime.

Jeff: Yeah, thank you both for having me. I really appreciate it.

Liam: It’s been a real pleasure, Jeff, thanks so much for spending time with us. Take care, 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.