Hallway Chats

Growing up as an extroverted nerd has paid off. Alison is a community leader and artist with a passion for WordPress. Her mission is to delight and engage people through raising the bar on web literacy. She is controlled by two tiny parrots.

Website | http://eraserheader.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 16.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Alison Knott. Growing up as an extroverted nerd has paid off. Alison is a community leader and artist with a passion for WordPress. Her mission is to delight and engage people through raising the bar on web literacy. She is controlled by two tiny parrots. Hi, Alison.

Alison: Good morning.

Tara: Hello Alison, welcome. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself besides that really creative and awesome introduction that Liam just gave?

Alison: Hahaha, sure, no problem. The birds let me out of my cage today so I can come and chat with you guys. I am a proud Canadian hailing from Halifax on the one side of the Eastern Seaboard of Canada, and I am a– I guess I’m kind of the go-to lady locally for WordPress and for just basically keeping communities together. I run a variety of things from artist meetups, I run a WordPress Meetup. I ran the first WordPress conference east of Montreal and essentially I really enjoy watching people become educated around the web. I think so many people use it but they don’t know– it’s like we’re all driving cars but we have no idea it has wheels. You just get from A to B. And I like to help people understand what’s going on there so that they don’t get frustrated and those of us that are professionals have a better time working with everybody because we’re all on the same page, that’s me.

Liam: That is excellent. What an intro! Thank you. There’s so much to unpack there and I really want to dive into it, but first, we’ve got to talk about the parrots. Is that cabal of evil, is it a coincidence? Tell us about the parrots.

Alison: The parrots are– that’s more like a personal story. When I was going through separation, basically– which is totally fine, we’re both still totally cool friends. My friend at the time, who would eventually become my boyfriend, he had owned birds before and he got two green cheek conures which are the little tiny green guys that are six inches tall. They’re the ‘quietest’ birds you can get. It’s not true, birds are loud. So when I separated from my husband and I got my own space, I thought, “Oh, what a great pet that would make.” I got one but then me and my boyfriend got together and his female and my male got together, and now there’s two humans and now two birds. Regretfully, we lost one two years ago, he was a very sick bird. But there’s four of us in a one-bedroom apartment, we all work from home and somehow we still manage. He does Twitch streaming of animation and I do Facebook live broadcasts with two parrots in the same room. It’s pretty nuts. They’re fantastic animals if you have the time and energy for them.

Tara: That’s impressive, all of that in one apartment going on. It’s a busy place.

Alison: Sure. I’d say messy but you can say busy. Hahaha.

Liam: I feel like that’s an entire podcast, not just an episode, but entire show in itself right there.

Alison: It is. People always want to see the birds when I do my Facebook live sessions and I’m like, “If you want them, you got them, but their baby squawks will pierce any microphone equipment and they want to just basically chew all of my video equipment to pieces.” But they’re fun, people love them. I think people don’t get an experience to be that close to birds that talk to them. And they’re very social, I didn’t know that. I was a cat person, I had no idea birds could be that emotionally capable of everything from loving you to being offended. You can offend a bird. If you go to a pet store and the bird turns its back on you, it’s literally giving you the cold shoulder, it does not like you. That’s what birds do, they just go, “Pff, screw you.” And they turn around. Who knew?

Liam: We do now, thank you.

Tara: Sounds like they have something in common with cats then too. Hahaha.

Alison: Yep. More similar than we thought, even though they’re the arch enemies, as personified by Tom & Jerry cartoons. Haha.

Liam: Hahaha. Alison, you talked to– I’m getting a little bit more on track here. You talked a lot about community organization and how you do that not only with and through the WordPress community but elsewhere around art as well. Can you talk to us about how you got into community organization in the first place, and how over time, if that was over time, that led you to WordPress and how you do that then within the WordPress community?

Alison: Okay, sure. I think at the core, growing up as a kid, I was a bit of an outcast and I kind of found my way through art and through theater in that. It was interesting to find like-minded people. I always told myself when I got older I would never let anyone else be in the position where they were in a group and felt outside of that group. Through there, my first endeavor was E3C, it’s the East Coast Creative Collective and that is a monthly meetup that’s five years old now in Halifax and it is not networking, it is simply a fellowship group. We hang out at a local pub for five years religiously. And it’s a space for artists of all skill levels to hang out and just get to know each other. As opposed to going to a place where it’s have a business card and be like, “Hey, I’m a designer, can I get work from you?” It’s more about, “Hey, I’m new at this and I heard I need to do taxes. How do I do that?” Or, “I’m having a client problem.” Or even, “Look at these awesome pens I’ve bought. Who else wants to play with these $30 pens?” And people really responded to that. They responded to a lowkey thing where they can be themselves and yet still foster friendships, relationships, jobs, opportunities, right from the– we’re a very small city here in Halifax. Often, decision makers are your friend’s roommates, there’s no HR person that’s gatekeeping a place you want to work. You’re pretty much talking to the CEO or CTO right on– that was going well, I was working at a small studio and they basically– I had done web for years, I used to be GeoCities, I had like the second largest Tedy Ruxpin fan page on the planet when I was 16. I know. Super famous over here if you’re into that stuff. And they said, “Go learn WordPress. You’re a designer but we want you to learn WordPress.” I build it through Lynda.com, never used it. They were like, “Here, you know code, do it.” And I liked it and so did our clients. I was kind of bored and I was like, “I want to go somewhere. I want to do something different.” I saw this thing called WordCamp and I was like, “I’ve been to creative conferences but I’ve never been to one pertinent to a platform.” So I went to WordCamp Montreal and to sound like a converted, it changed my life. I have found a space where people were like me, they were willing to give away all their information and talk openly and positively about something. People were learning and they were sharing and they were– It is Montreal, it’s a wicked city to ever go to. So I came back and I said, “I have to bring this to Halifax.” I started the meetup and the rest is history. People respond and then they pay it forward in kind. It’s one thing to have people come to your event, something else to have someone who’s shy or feels like they’re not capable and they come back and they show someone else something. To me, that’s the spirit, right?

Tara: It’s amazing how many people that we’ve have who had similar sentiments about WordCamps that I’ve said we should be sponsored by WordCamps because so many people have that story and we came– the name of this podcast is Hallway Chats because I think Liam and I met at a WordCamp or a meetup and we found that that’s really the sentiment of the community that we love. I’m glad to hear that you’ve had that experience with WordCamp as well. The Halifax WordCamp, was it just recently that you had your first one or have you had it for a while?

Alison: Yes, we had it May and we had fantastic–

Liam: Congratulations.

Alison: Oh, thank you. Yes, it was a lot of work but it paid off. I was the only person in the entire group that’s ever been to a WordCamp. I had a wonderful gal by the name of Megan Haines. She was from Ottawa, she was our mentor and she showed up physically, she was there with us. It went really well, it was really positive. The two biggest takeaways I got from it, number one was that the speakers that were national that came said they were astounded by the literacy of the dev track. They were getting really high-level advanced questions of the developers of Halifax so that was cool. We didn’t know that locally here we have a really huge depth group that they want to know more. And then the other one was people were saying, “We had no idea that this was your first one. It was run so well.” I think planning is of the essence and people are just dying for it here. People were going to the swag tables and they were like, “This is free?” Like, “Yes, Halifax. It’s all free, take it. You pay 25 bucks, you get everything.” People are not used to that up here so it went really well, more than I ever could have hoped for. How about that?

Tara: That’s great. It speaks a lot to your organizational skills but also talk a little bit about how the WordPress community and the WordCamp mentors that you said that you had, how they interacted with you?

Alison: Okay. I would say I’m going to write a blog post about this. It’s in draft but a huge, huge shout outs to Megan Haynes. And the reason being is that you are a volunteer with volunteers and unless you were all, for example, Alison types that can run a– you have a variety of personalities and everyone can only give as much time or energy or they have certain skill sets. And I think having a great mentor is important because ultimately– we had three leads but ultimately if you’re not familiar with the WordCamp or familiar with what it’s like to wrangle volunteers to find the time and get all these assets together. That mentorship is key and I think that anybody who’s thinking of mentoring a WordCamp should not enter into it lightly. I’m a huge proponent of mentorship in a variety of ways. Mentorship isn’t handing out advice when it’s ideal to you, mentorship is making sure that the person you mentor– they’re called mentees, I call them padawans because mentees sounds like a toothpaste brand. But you want to make sure that they are supported and that you’re giving them the tools. I don’t think– it got tough sometimes to wrangle things and without Megan’s support I felt like, who mentors the mentor in that sense? Everyone looks to you as the leader of WordCamp to get it all right but you need some old experience. Anybody who’s listening who’s been thinking about mentoring a WordCamp, I think you have the power to do it. Just know that you ask your padawan what they want and together you can achieve a lot. Support means more than anything. You can take a great thing that happens, you can take a terrible thing like if your venue doesn’t come through. Way easier if you feel supported by someone who’s like, “Man, I got your back, I got your bum. We’re set.”

Tara: It’s an impressive structure, I think, that has been put together when you have an open source community and people are contributing. You still need to have some organization and ground rules and keep things consistent, and I think they’ve done a really excellent job in the community part of make WordPress in terms of mentoring but also finding people who are jumping in to help and follow the rules, so that’s great.

Alison: And between different countries, too, which really impresses me. Up here in Canada, we have different thinking methods and we have different– but different regions have concepts of taxes and what’s appropriate for deposits. Somehow it just speaks to the global view of open source in WordPress, right? We all figure it out even though it’s timezones and different ideas of what good catering looks like. I love it, it’s so interesting.

Liam: Alison, that was a really interesting point around the uniqueness of WordCamp. Even the different flavors that happen in one country, on one side a country as big as Canada, east versus west kind of thing, and everything in between. And then we take that to the US and cultures even beyond and it’s really unique, all the different flavors that happened and bring them out. Yeah, there’s still that commonality of sharing an open message, which makes them really special. I want to ask you within this context of what you do both professionally and personally is to tell us what your definition of success is, and you can give us a personal definition, a professional definition. Or maybe you have a definition that overarches both.

Alison: Sure. The personal and the professional definitely change from time to time. I think the overarching one is, to me success is anything you’ve given or thought someone they are able to successfully pay it forward. Not that if they don’t do it by rote or they do it the way that they do is wrong, but there’s so much power. To me, there’s nothing worse than when something falls flat. As in, someone comes to your event or they buy your product, you work together, and that’s the end of it, it has no lifespan past whatever it is you’ve completed. To me, success is when something lives on. It’s the idea of legacy, and I don’t mean legacy in, “I’m going to be famous.” Or, “I’m going to have 50 billion thousand Twitter followers.” That stuff’s so finite. To me, success is whatever we– we’re all a collection of our past experiences. And then another person, aka, another glob of experience comes to you and you glob together, and out of you comes a glob of experience, and it’s just globbings happening all over the place. To me, that’s success. Money only goes so far. I live in the eastern part of Canada where money does not go very far at all. I stopped banging my head against that success. Numbers of followers and in a world that’s full of funnels, and influencers, and all these other things, you’re fine. But to me, that success is no good if people do not take what you do and move it forward and influence, inspire or educate other people. To me, that would be personal and professional as well. Am I going to have a room full of 50,000 people chanting my name while I run around and jump up in a little tiny trampoline on stage? Probably not, I don’t care, I don’t care. What I care is the five people who felt that they came to see me or came to my meetups, whether artists or web people, that they have a problem and they walk out feeling capable of solving it and having power within them. Man, I’ve done my job. I can sleep at night, let’s have a beer. It’s done.

Tara: Yeah, that makes sense. How do you find that that translates, though, into working for yourself and running a business? Paying it forward, it’s great, and I think sometimes that helps get your name out there and help your business grow. Obviously, you have bills to pay so can you tell us a little bit about how you run your business, how you market your business, and even though money isn’t part of your success definition necessarily, I’m just curious about how you incorporate your philosophy into running a business and making a living?

Alison: Sure. My making a living is quite low. I have very little expenses, I live– there’s a reason we live in a one-bedroom apartment with our birds. We like low overhead, and I would be lying if I said that I am flush with cash and I’m able to do whatever I want because I can say, “I’m coming out of divorce, I’m coming out of a variety of things.” For me, it’s tough, I’m not going to lie. There’s not a way personally, I feel, that you can give so much away and yet, reap so much in an amount of cash. Essentially, what my methodology is things like Facebook Ads, really obtainable, easy to track advertising is great because it affords me a way of reaching people I wouldn’t ordinarily. I do a weekly Facebook live video session and I give away like– within 15 minutes we cover a tiny topic. I’ve had friends of friends of friends, this is a small city again, who come in and say, “You’re the gal on video and I saw you, and I’m so impressed of what you gave away. What can you do for a price?” I think in this day, the web is being so commoditized that we can’t really just show our guns in our technical abilities anymore because there’s always someone who can do it for a cheaper price. My methodology is I’m selling myself. I’m selling my openness and my willingness to have them feel prepared, and then I plant their seeds and then they come back because they know enough, they read enough, and they go, “You know what? I want to run my business.” Here Alison, come back.” I do quite a bit of retainership with various clients. Yeah, we’ll build a website but that’s not my end goal. My end goal is I’m with them every month, I’m watching their audience change and helping them to create different campaigns. I have a graphic design background, first and foremost, so I’m able to marry those two together. But is it going to be as lucrative as doing passive income? Probably not, which is why I recommend people diversify. Don’t just do passive income, don’t just– that’s why I teach locally at the Community College here and at the Art University as well as do WordPress as well as teach my own workshops. I think that’s it. I’d love to say there’s a secret sauce to it but I didn’t choose the path and as long as I’m paying my bills, I’m fine.

Tara: Where would you say that you see yourself, or what are your goals and where do you see yourself in the coming years? In a year or five years on that trajectory of paying it forward, and teaching, and helping others. I would think that would be something that would be exponential for you.

Alison: Yeah, I guess for me, my roots are growing here locally and I love it. But I would love to– I do speak nationally at other WordCamps. I would love to dip into the States, I would love to go more abroad and show a Canadian flair just like we Canadians love it when we watch a TED Talk from somebody who was in Australia or something to that amount. I think for me, travel’s great, who doesn’t want to travel? But I want to see the pain points, I want to see the conversations that are happening outside of my Atlantic bubble, and I want to see how I can bring some perspective and what perspective people can bring to me. So in a year, I hope that people– I would love it if they say, “I hear you’re fun and entertaining.” I bring candy when I do talks. I don’t know if you ever heard of a guy named Johnny Cupcakes. He sells t-shirts, that’s all he does. But what he does is he makes it such a free and delightful thing that you don’t care what the price of the t-shirt is. When you go into his shops they smell like bakeries. He gives away candy bars. He sometimes sells– you think you’re buying a t-shirt and you actually get cupcakes, even though you think he’s a t-shirt shop. He spoke at FITC two years ago and he just said, “Man, that’s why I love that. Don’t you want to be delighted every day?” Who’s like, “No man, I don’t want to be delighted. I’d like to be blase.” Come on, right?

Liam: Hahaha. Let me ask you then. I love that phrase, I’d be delighted every day. How are you organizing yourself? How do you keep yourself delighted every day? What kind of sanity mechanisms, focus mechanisms meant to emotional wellbeing, all the wellbeings that matter to you, how do you do that?

Tara: And what part do the birds play in that too?

Alison: Okay. The birds can be loud but they’re very funny. You can teach them phrases. Honestly, I forget this all the time myself but when I become uncentered, to center myself I’m an artist and I draw out of adult material. I draw boobs and I draw genitalia. To keep me delighted, this sounds crazy but I try to ruootmyself in the computer and I do that first love that keeps me going that no one can say, “You didn’t do that SEO proper.” Or, “The syntax of your drawing isn’t right.” And it’s just for me. If I put it on Instagram, cool, and I just like picking out material because I find people are funny-looking and there’s enough beautiful artists who draw things very perfectly and I like wonky, I don’t know, genitalia, and people’s knees, old pin-ups, and stuff. You guys are like, “Why do we ever have this lady come on the show?” But that’s what I do. I delight myself of removing myself from the everyday and putting me in a space that no one can tell me I’m doing it wrong and it delights me. The funny thing is people like to look at it. It often delights other people as well. Who would have thought? Doing that, I think, talking with people, getting outside. There’s a really great book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, and that’s just a book where it’s got a lot of religious references. But if you just want to put God aspect of that book aside and listen to what she has to say, she’s like, “We have a little artist child inside of us that wants to be delighted. And at the end of the day what matters, people at the end of their life, they regret the things they didn’t do.” To me, I just like to be delighted with the little things, whether it’s drawing, being yelled at by a six-inch parrot, or being outside and just being with friends and being in the moment. It’s such a hippy thing to say but it’s true, it works.

Tara: I think it makes a lot of sense, everybody has to find what delights them, right? It’s different for everyone. Out of all those things that you do, is there one single thing that you would say is the most important thing that you do every day?

Alison: The most important thing that I do. Out of those, I wouldn’t say they’re important as far as every day. I guess out of that, I would say it’s important, I know better, I know I should draw more but I don’t because sometimes there’s an RFP you have to answer or there’s a workshop I have to run. Then I’ll do that and then you keep going because you want, you do need money, you do need to setup advertising. Then I’ll be all flustered, and of course, boyfriend who’s the animator is like, “Man, when’s the last time you drew a boobie?” I’m like, “Oh, you’re right. I haven’t drawn a boobie. I should go draw that. That’s why I’m uncentered.” You can handle so much more if you draw someone, or in my case anyways. But from a larger perspective, I firmly believe that the most important thing is to tell the people you love you love them. I know this isn’t very “WordpPressy” but you never know, right? Because if you’re in a position where you tell someone you love them but you’re like, “I love you.” Then no one’s working with that. Usually, if you’re going to tell someone you love them, you’re both going to feel pretty good about it. That’s important, that’s the most important thing, love each other.

Tara: I think that inspires. It’s a roundtrip thing, right? You do that and it comes back to you so I think that’s a good important thing to refer to.

Liam: I agree, you can never let people know too much or too often that you love them. I think that’s fantastic, and once you get used to doing it, it feels great to say it and it also feels great to hear that back, that, “I love you too.” And it’s just nice and it’s confirmation, it’s affirmation, it’s rewarding in its own way.

Alison: And you can’t get that from followers, you can’t get that from executing a code, right? You can have followers who do love you, they’re from far away, but the immediate people– again, you’re a big glob of experiences, those immediate people feeding you with this big glob of experience, they’re the ones that are going to allow you to feel you can accomplish anything really.

Liam: Absolutely. Let me ask you this, and this is one of our main questions and maybe our primary question. Alison, what’s the single most valuable piece of advice that you have ever received and incorporated into your life?

Alison: Ooh, the most valuable piece of advice I ever received and incorporate it into your life. my mother, years ago, said, “Don’t be a sheep and follow the herd, be a goat and do your own thing.” And I have held on to that my entire life. It came from being a lonely child outside but never losing faith in what I wanted to do, when all of my designer friends were still doing print and I was getting into web, and they were like, “What are you doing? That’s for–” I’m 33, so back in the day when you were doing that, it was like, people went into webs like, “Robotics was code.” You didn’t make money, the .com had exploded, knowing the .com boom was gone, you didn’t do that. When I wanted to run an artist meetup, E3C people said you have to charge for the event and you have to have sponsors. I said, “No, I don’t.” Not everything I’ve done has worked out but I can always safely say at the end of the day, I did it because it’s what felt right to me and the right people were attracted to that because they too, were people who do what they want to do. And it’s the most valuable advice, it makes you stand out from a business sense and it makes people find your– the authenticity is a big word, it’s like, “Oh, it’s a really hot trend in 2017.” I’m like, “Screw trend of authenticity.” No one’s ever said, “You know what’s going to trend this year? Total bogusness. It’s so hot.”

Liam: Hahahaha.

Alison: “Fake is hot. Sell fake.” Yeah, be yourself.

Liam: Maybe in the ’80s it did. Maybe in the ’80s it did.

Alison: Haha, true. I know – the hair color. But yeah, that would be the biggest piece of advice is don’t follow. Understand parameter but be a goat, do your own thing because you have to live with it at the end of the day. No one else does, you do.

Tara: Kudos to your mom for that. As a mom, I would say that’s the kind of thing that you want your child to incorporate into their philosophy. We want our kids to– I want my kids to forge their own path and not follow others. Your mom did a good job in instilling that in you and you did a good job in living it because a lot of the times kids don’t do what their parents say. Haha.

Liam: Alison, before we wrap up here and say goodbye to you, it was an absolute pleasure to have you on the show. Really, really enjoyed it.

Alison: Oh, thanks. I appreciate what you guys do here, thank you so much for running a pure true hallway track. I need more, more, more.

Tara: Well, you’re super fun to talk to. I hope I get to meet you in an actual hallway.

Alison: Hahaha.

Liam: Can you share where people can find you online if they don’t live in Halifax and bump into you in your relatively small town as you described it?

Alison: Sure. You can find me – it’s not a David Lynch reference, although he is a phenomenal artist – Eraserheader.com. It’s eraser, like the thing on the pencil that you can draw naked parts with, and header, as in the part of a website. Eraserheader.com, you can find me on Twitter. And if you really just want to check out all these body parts I’m talking about, I am on Instagram as DrawStrange. Of course, Instagram’s a bit picky about that stuff so the more– the calm items are up on there. If you are wondering what I do to center myself, you can go look at the insanity that is all my drawings on Instagram. EraserHeader or DrawStrange, you will find this hot mess at all of those locations.

Tara: Great, thank you.

Liam: Thank you so much.

Tara: Thanks for joining us, Alison.

Alison: Thank you guys, I wish you much success in this and keep it up. You keep being your own goats with this because I think we need more of these personal podcasts online that people resonate with them. They need it to cool down from all their funneling.

Tara: Right. Thank you.

Liam: Thanks, Alison, bye.

Tara: Bye, bye.

Alison: Cheers, guys.

Liam: Thanks for the listening to the show. We sure hope you enjoyed it much as we did.

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.

Mike Hale is a developer at Rainmaker Digital where he helps build the Rainmaker platform. He’s also a collector of guitars, bizarre music and enjoys a nice cigar and bourbon in his downtime. He lives in the western suburbs of Chicago with his family and his two dogs.

Website | http://mikehale.me

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 15.

Liam: Hi! Welcome to Hallway Chats. I am Liam Dempsey.

Tara: I am Tara Claeys. Today we are joined by Mike Hale. Mike is a developer at Rainmaker Digital where he helps build the Rainmaker platform. He’s also a collector of guitars, bizarre music and enjoys a nice cigar and bourbon in his downtime. He lives in the western boroughs of Chicago with his family and his two dogs. Hey, Mike!

Mike: Hey it’s nice to be here.

Liam: Hey Mike! Thanks for joining us today. Your intro very much caught my attention. When I asked you to introduce yourself, you just have to explain and talk about bizarre music.

Mike: Bizarre music. OK. So I got on a kick a while back at a flea market finding old just weird foreign or obscure LPs. So I collect them. It’s pretty much anything that a record collector would leave behind. That’s the stuff that I like. So if it’s anybody you ever heard of or know of I want it. It’s been a couple of years that I have been collecting the LPs. It keeps growing. Someday I’ll figure out something fun to do with it.

Tara: So they’re actual vinyl LPs, viny?

Mike: Yeah usually.

Tara: And you bring them home from these things and listen to them?

Mike: Yep. I bring them home, clean them up, digitize them and go through them.

Tara: Do listen to them more than once? Or is it usually just one-time listening experience?

Mike: Some of them you have to listen to more than once. Some of them are just so awful, and some of them are duds. You get then home, and there is nothing really special about them. Those get the once over. But yeah, if it’s something unique and super interesting they kind of make their way into the rotation a bit more.

Tara: I would love to see what you do with those when you digitize them. That sounds like a very cool website someday to visit. That’s very interesting. I’m also interested (we talked a little bit before we started recording) about Rainmaker and what you do there. I’d like to hear some of what you did before that, what your background is and how you got involved with WordPress.

Mike: Sure. I’ve been in web development for probably close to about 20 years now. I started doing websites back in the late 90s; standard static HTML sites back in the browser war days when it was Netscape 1 .2. I was there for the introduction of tables. So I’ve been doing that for a while. I started in WordPress probably around about 2010 or so where I really started to do it on more projects and not just for my own stuff. The first time I used it; I had a project that I needed a site for. Rather than building one from scratch in .NET. I knew of WordPress. I had seen it here and there. I thought you know? I think I’m going to roll up my sleeves and dig into this to see if it’s something that I can make work a lot quicker. It was quicker. So yeah, before WordPress I did a lot of .NET stuff. It was ASP before that. I was working for a lot of bigger corporate clients. I did web app projects for places like BP, Heinz, McCormick, Ulta Beauty; those types of places while doing some freelance web development on the side.

Tara: So you were freelancing and also an employee of those big companies?

Mike: When I was working for them, it is mostly in a consulting role. Outside of that I always had my own projects, or somebody would have something going. I worked like as a freelancer. I free-lanced up until three years ago when I went full-time with Rainmaker digital. I actually consulted with them. I had done development for them on Scribe, which is the content optimization software. It’s rolled into Rainmaker now. I had worked on the API and some of the web UI for that on and off for about three years. It just hit three years that I’ve been a full-time employee with them. Which is by far the longest I’ve ever had a job at one time.

Tara: Wow! So you’ve been on your own most of the time the past 20 years, except for the past three?

Mike: Pretty much. There was a lot of times where I’d be an employee of a consulting company but you know if you ever had any experience with that, you’re only an employee as long as they have a project for you to work on.

Tara: Right.

Mike: So you’re constantly looking for the next project.

Tara: Yeah. Talk a little bit about that switch. A lot of people that we talk to on this show are freelancers who have left a job or have never really worked for someone else and talk about flexibility of working for themselves. It sounds like you had that mostly and now you’re employed by someone else. Talk about that change, what that’s meant for you, and what that experience has been.

Mike: It was hard to let go of some of the freelance stuff and that control. But then again, you’re trading it in for some stability. I think I’m kind of in a unique position because working for Rainmaker; everything is remote. It’s all work from home. So it wasn’t that drastic of a change. It’s really like you’re working for one client, but then you have the stability and benefits of working for actual an employer. So it wasn’t too drastic of a change, but there were very few situations out there that I would’ve left the freelance world for. This was one of them. When the opportunity came along, I had to jump on it.

Tara: It’s good to hear that it’s been a good transition for you. Were you working a lot with Genesis before you started working with Rainmaker? How did you encounter them?

Mike: I started working with Genesis not too long after I had started working with WordPress. It’s kind of funny. It’s because of Rainmaker (I do real estate) I still do it kind of on the side…and I went to a real estate tech conference that Brian Clark and Brian Gardner were speaking at. Brian Gardner is from StudioPress. Brian Clark is the CEO of Rainmaker and the start of Copyblogger blog. Afterwards, I was talking to Brian Gardner just a little bit. I said I’m a developer too. I used WordPress and had a conversation. That’s how I started doing consulting work for them. I was just about to kick off another project. I thought if I’m going to do some consulting work for them, I probably should be using their product. So that was the first time that I had got my hands on Genesis. When I was doing freelance sites for people, it was almost exclusively Genesis. The only times it wouldn’t be was if it was a client that already had a theme or already had something in place that I couldn’t get rid of or had to use. But yeah, if it were my choice I’d always go with Genesis. From the range of doing completely custom themes, usually just kind of modifying a theme (which is why I liked it). I could take just a regular StudioPress theme and easily customize it to how I wanted it to work.

Liam: What a great networking story. I’m going to go back that. You’re at a conference. You bump into to the two guys running the program and chat with them. That leads to where you’re at today. That is awesome! I just love that. I think that’s a big part of what we’re trying to do with Hallway Chats. Just get out and meet new people and talk where you don’t know where it’s going to go. Just be friends, it might be nothing, but it might land a great job that you really enjoy. You may end up having it for the longest time that you ever had a job. That’s awesome.

Tara: Mike? Tell us a little bit about what the meaning of success is for you. Whether it’s just in your personal life or your professional life. You’ve changed from working for yourself to working for someone else, but it’s working really well for you. How do you define success?

Mike: I think I’m at the point now where I’m starting to look more at being recognized as being good at what I do. I’m working a little more around the personal branding I guess to make more of a name for myself out there. Anytime (businesswise) if I’m able to help somebody out; I get a lot of calls from people still where they are in a jam, or they have some problem or some hurdle that’s blocking their business…anytime I can help somebody out of a bad situation based on what I know I call that a win. It’s a very good feeling to be able to do that for somebody. So always continuing to learn new things and trying things and just take on different challenges, that’s kind of what I define as success. It’s not so much as getting to a certain point and saying hey! I’ve made it. It’s just always moving forward from where you’ve been.

Tara: I think that makes a lot of sense and I like what you said about being recognized for being good at what you do. Part of the way that you are moving toward that is by helping other people and using your knowledge and experience in a positive way. How are you interacting with the community in order to do that?

Mike: I’m a bit of a WordCamp addict. This year I will probably end up going about 8 or 9 WordCamps.

Liam: That’s a few.

Mike: Just a few yeah; anything in the Midwest. I do speak at WordCamps when I can. This year so far (if you count WordCamp Kent which is about to happen). It may have happened but the time this goes out. That will be the fifth one that I’ve spoken at this year. I really enjoy it. I really get a kick out of that. So going to WordCamps; I love that. I love hanging out with people. I have so many friends that I see a different WordCamps. There are different circles and different groups of people that I know kind of by area now. I also am the co-organizer of our local WordPress Meetup, which is WordPress, Naperville. So I live in Warrenville Illinois. It’s basically 30 miles straight west of downtown Chicago. There’s a couple of good MeetUps in the city. I was joking, but it’s true. There’s a real popular North Side Chicago WordPress Meetup that’s run by Becky Davis. That’s in the city. But from where I am at the time it is, you’d be easier for me to get to a different Meetup that meets at Beloit Wisconsin because of the traffic. So yeah we took over WordPress, Naperville. I think it probably would be about two and a half to three years ago. The guy who was running it just didn’t want to run it anymore. So we took over and found a new location. That one is actually now one of the charter Meetups. Everything with our venue and our Meetup fees are all handled by the WordPress Foundation, which is nice. We just have to worry about getting good topics in there. That’s another way by hosting the Meetup.

Liam: I really appreciate the city angle. We have a similar set up in the Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Meetup is fantastic, but I was in a similar situation. It’s going to take me an hour or an hour and ten minutes (and another hour to get home). Maybe there is another way. So I love what you are doing to just bring WordPress to you or help it grow where you are. That’s fantastic!

Mike: An hour! I’d be happy if the commute to that one was an hour.

Tara: I started one outside of DC as well. Although (full disclosure) I can get down to DC in about 20 to 25 minutes. A lot of other people can’t…so we’re all suburbanites…Meetup suburbanites. Tell us about your challenges, Mike. What do you find is the biggest challenge, whether in your daily life or in your career and how are you working on that? What is your biggest challenge?

Mike: I would probably, work-wise and it definitely gets to the personal life too. It’s very common I found especially among WordPress people for whatever reason. It’s really just when the imposter syndrome starts creeping in. It’s hard because with WordPress being open source, everything you do is public. If you write a plugin or theme and it’s out there for people, they can pick through every little line of code that you have. You think you know they’re going hate this. What am I doing? I still (even after three years working every day) some days you just wake up and think today’s the day. They’re just to call me up and say you know? We realize that you have no idea what you’re doing. That creeps in and really gets hard. Overcoming it, I think and just trying to stay positive. Actually, at WordCamp Jackson, Ian Wilson did a talk on this. One of the tips that I found was to keep a vision board or you can you keep a scrapbook of positive comments or a journal of things that I’ve been doing that lately. Anytime anybody says anything good about me, I either copy and paste into my Evernote or I save it somewhere.

Liam: Mike? You’re awesome.

Mike: I’ll just play that in a loop.

Tara: Yeah. That validation is really helpful. Where doessome of that fear come from? Has anybody ever criticized you or looked at your code and torn it apart? Have you seen it happen to other people? Where does that fear come from?

Mike: Not in a deconstructive way, has it ever happened. I tell the story how when I wrote my first plugin ever; I just wanted to have something in the plugin repo. So it’s a silly little plugin. All it does is in the footer links it makes them no follow because a couple of years ago that was the big no-no. If you had them all in there, that was considered spamming links. So I wrote this plugin for the Genesis framework and themes. I put in the review. The review went through. I was so proud of myself. I was so happy, so I Tweeted it out and went to bed. I’m thinking I’m awesome. I’ve got a plugin in the repo. I woke up the next morning, and I had about 15 notifications from GitHub. It was Gary Jones who is in the UK. He’s a big Genesis developer, and he’s all about code quality. He had gone through it and fixed a lot of things. He sent the pull request. It was kind of funny because as I said it was not in a bad way. He was doing it to make the actual plugin better, but it was kind of funny that I was feeling all good and then I was like ok. I guess there was a lot that I missed. I think it just comes from when you’re freelancing it’s really hard. You don’t have reviews. You don’t have somebody there. You don’t have coworkers sometimes to even bounce stuff off or to say hey! Can you take a quick look at this? When I did start working with Rainmaker one of the nice things was that I could bounce ideas off somebody. Within the development team that’s a really big thing that we do. It’s hey! Here is what I’m thinking. What are you thinking about? You are kind of out on an island sometimes. You don’t really have a lot of feedback. Even if a client says, we’re really happy. As developers, you kind of think that you’re over optimizing everything. You think well it worked for them, but there are so many ways I could have done this better. Even though it’s fine for what they actually need, it’s just kind of hard sometimes without that feedback.

Liam: That loops back around to your definition of success doesn’t it? It’s being recognized as knowing what you’re doing. I absolutely agree with you, as freelancers or stemming from freelance to employment or freelance into business, if we don’t have agency experience or we have not worked with a team…well it works but put in a few nails and some drywall up…it will stay up on wall for a while, but for how long and under what circumstances? So I get that feedback loop. It can be kind of tough from a freelance standpoint. It can contribute to that imposter syndrome. So if success to you (in addition to pushing yourself and learning) is maintaining a reputation of knowledge and in knowing what’s the single most important thing you do every day to either maintain that or continue to achieve that level of success?

Mike: For me, I think it’s always about staying up to date and learning things. I subscribe to (in Feedly) probably about 150 blogs on everything from growth hacking, to startups, to marketing, to WordPress, and writing. I subscribe to about 60 podcasts at least (61 including Hallway Chats). You can’t listen to everything that comes out in a day from those you know. Even if you’re on one and a half times speed, so you do pick and choose. When I say subscribe it doesn’t mean I listen to all of the 60 episodes. With the 20 or 30 different newsletters to my inbox which I’m very selective about, plus I’m going through Flipboard and my Twitter stream and reading all those links. I think it’s really about wanting more knowledge and more info. It gets to be a challenge where that starts to become work at a point. I’ve got twelve backlogged podcast episodes that I have to listen to. Sometimes you have to cut through them a little a little quicker. I think to me that’s what always makes me feel like I’m moving forward is if I’m learning something new, even if it’s just picking up some little interesting article or some little tidbit or some little trick that I can use someday. I think that’s really what I do. I focus and take the time to go through and consume a lot of content as well.

Liam: So, I love the idea of pulling together so many different sources of information. I wonder if you have a system for how you dig into that? Do you say every Tuesday at 4 PM, I scan Feedly for 15 or 20 minutes, I pull out 3 or 4 and I book them for reading and listening on Thursday or some other system? How do go about doing that?

Mike: With podcasts, I listen to them pretty much all day while I’m working. I find it a lot easier to listen to podcasts than music. I love music.

Liam: Yeah, bizarre music.

Mike: Bizarre music and regular music too. But I start worrying about what am I going to listen to next? So I listen to podcasts. What I do is use Pocket app (which is kind of a note-taking app), and so pretty much each night I’ll flip through my Feedly. If I see an article that looks interesting, I’ll put it into the pocket. I do the same thing with Flipboard. If I’m flipping through Flipboard and I see something that looks interesting, I’ll put in there. I’ll go back later when actually have some time (maybe twice a week or two or three times a week) read the ones in detail. I will save them away if I want to. I’ll also go through and put them all out to share through buffer so that I can share those links as well. So if it’s something that I’ve shared, then I’ve read it. That’s about the only way that I have found to manage that much. It is to skim through it, pick out the ones I want to read and then go back and read them later.

Tara: With your podcasts, I was thinking it might be helpful for you to attend that Chicago Meetup now and then because you could listen to a lot of podcasts on your commute.

Mike: Right.

Tara: I tend to listen to them on my road trips. I like to listen to podcasts.

Mike: The only problem is that my car is so old I had to get a little Bluetooth radio transmitter adapter.

Tara: Yeah they don’t work that well. It makes it hard to listen.

Liam: Mike? Let me jump in. You talked a little bit about what your favorite thing is to do. Let’s talk the other end of the spectrum. So you have full-time employment, you’ve got a variety of responsibilities within that. What’s your least favorite thing to do on a Monday through Friday basis? As you’re thinking about that, I’ll ask you to also talk to us about how do you overcome the urge not to do it? What drives you? What systems do you have? What mental approach do you take to make sure that you’re meeting the professional goals that you and your employer set out for you?

Mike: I think one the challenges gets to be is with Rainmaker being a platform supporting it. Like any good developer, I don’t want to work with legacy code or somebody else’s apps. I want to do something fun, exciting and new all the time. That does become challenging. Sometimes there are just things where it could be an issue that’s very hard to figure out or very hard to get through. I’m not always the best at managing and prioritizing the order that I do things. I do fall into the trap where I might knock off five easy things rather than taking on the one hard one. Again I do have the advantage of having some resources that I can go to within the company to say hey! Can you take a look at this too? But I think the general approach is to getting in that groove sometimes. If I do knock off a couple of little things or tiny issues and get a couple of little wins, then you feel positive. Then you can dive into that big thing. It’s not so overwhelming where you think I’m never to get this done or never going to get this fixed.

Liam: I find it very helpful as well. I’ve got a small team at my company. Those massive projects, we know they’re going to take hours to get through. I’m just overwhelmed by that and failed to realize that actually any forum or task has a 15 to 20 minute or half-hour task built into that. If we can chunk out or attack any one of those two 15 or 20-minute tasks; as we progress not only is time gone, but you realize that this wasn’t so bad. You realize it is not as daunting. Let me ask you this if I can, thinking about freelance versus working with a team; you’ve talked about the downside of you don’t have quite a mix or flexibility as you once had. You’ve talked about the upside of having a team having to the ability to bounce off ideas. Clearly, you like where you are professionally. You said earlier that this is the longest you’ve been with the company. You’re really happy about that. This is just kind of a theoretical question. Can I ask you where your career might be going? Could you see going back to working alone without that team? I’m not talking about do you want to leave and set up your own freelance but how much do you think you would miss stepping away from having professional, intelligent, and supportive team members to help tackle the problems you’re facing…building the product and making the company grow?

Mike: It’s hard to say because having gone from freelance to a corporate gig back to freelance, back to that, I’m okay with either. I know the benefits and disadvantages of each side of it. I do run into the thing where you I’m going to turn 45 this year, so now I’m having this thing of do I want to be a 50-year-old software developer? Not so much. I do have at least five years to figure that out.

Tara: What do you want to be when you are 50?

Mike: I definitely don’t mind being in the software business or something. I want to move more into business development. More of the strategy side of things. When I worked those corporate gigs, I was like a technical team lead. I usually led the projects. So it was kind of funny going to freelance. It was in a way kind of a step back because I didn’t have that cushy corporate job where I was kind of in one of those more advanced roles. But then you had the miserable commute going in each day to a job that you didn’t really care about at all. So it definitely is a trade-off. I’d like to move into that type of role in the future. But I definitely still enjoy writing code and learning new things. Last year one of my focuses was front-end development. I just did a project of my own with React which was kind of fun. I think if I ever start to feel like I don’t want to do this anymore, I’ll just take on a project to learn something new.

Tara: Do you find that you have more time, not as a freelancer? Was it less overwhelming? I’m curious not having worked in the corporate world for a long time myself. Do you feel like you have more boundaries when you’re working for someone else then when you are working for yourself?

Mike: The issue I always had when freelancing is your working with your clients, but then you’re also working on your business. So there much of that from accounting to writing proposals and all that stuff being taken away. It’s nice when you do not have to do that much client work.

Tara: That’s a good point. What do you miss about being a freelancer then?

Mike: I actually just miss working with different clients. I worked with a lot of smaller companies. So it is really interesting. I didn’t really have a niche market that I focused on. It was kind of interesting to learn what worked for one company and one type of business didn’t work for another and the kind of similarities and that what you take from having worked with a screen printer to doing a site for a local pizza shop. Stuff like that. So I liked learning about different businesses and how they ran their businesses.

Tara: That’s a good answer. I can definitely see that.

Liam: I enjoy that a whole lot too. It’s just different to realize that it was a concern for this particular industry. Or your course that makes sense. I would normally not appreciate that going in. It’s really neat.

Tara: Yeah. I don’t think about that very often, but that’s a really good point. Something else that we like to ask our guests Mike is to talk about advice. What is the best piece of advice that you’ve received that you would share with us? What would that be?

Mike: My guiding principle is if you know Occam’s razor or KISS (which is just keep it simple stupid) that the easiest answer or the easiest solution to a problem is probably the right one. I try to live that as my motto. I worked for a company, and it was really driven home where they just couldn’t get version 1 out the door because they kept adding to it and reworking things. I was like it’s good enough. Let’s see how people like it. I always just try to keep things on the simple side. Don’t over complicate things, make it work and then go back and learn what you need to learn from it. Then put all the finishing touches on.

Tara: I think that’s great advice. That brings me to another question that I struggle with in that regard. When you’re trying to do that and when you’re working in this industry we’re faced almost every day with a new and better way of doing something, right? When do you decide whether you take the time and energy to adopt the new way of doing things when the way that you’re doing it is easy for you and works? Do you have any advice about that?

Mike: You know I’ve gone through about every productivity type system from getting things done to the bullet journal. I like to try the different approaches and kind of pick little bits and pieces out of it that I like. Then that usually ends up becoming a hybrid that works for me (probably just for me) with the way my brain works. I like to go through them, learn about them, see what I like about them and see what pieces I can take a takeaway and use on my own.

Tara: That’s great. Maybe you can share those with me later. Mike? We’re just about out of time. Where can we find you? Where can other people find you online?

Mike: The easiest way and where I’m most active is on Twitter. I’m @Mikehale on Twitter. I also have a very neglected blog at MikeHale.me.

Liam: Do you want to throw a shout out for the soon to be launching website of your bizarre music collection? Do you have a domain name for that yet?

Mike: I do actually. I have eartrocity.com I still own. An atrocity of the ears.

Tara: We should have had you prepare one that we could use with outgoing music today. That would be fun.

Liam: You heard it here first folks. Youratrocity.com coming to a Web server near you before long. Mike? Thanks so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute blast. We really appreciate your time.

Tara: Thanks, Mike. It’s great to meet you.

Mike: Sure. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

Tara: We’ll see you at a WordCamp sometime.

Within the WordPress community, Dave Kiss has evolved from client work, to plugin development, to now teaching others code and development skills.

Website | https://davekiss.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 14.

Liam: Hi! Welcome the Hallway Chats. I am Liam Dempsey.

Tara: I am Tara Claeys. Today we are joined by Dave Kiss who tells us that a Google search for information about how to program led him down a decade long worm hole into WordPress. Hello, Dave!

Dave: Hey guys! How’s it going? Thanks for having me.

Liam: Fantastic Dave. Thanks for joining us here today. We really appreciate it. We’re excited to get to know you. Spend a few minutes telling us about yourself. Where you are, what you do and what’s moving you ahead these days.

Dave: Yeah sure thing. As you guys know and I’d like everybody to know, my name is Dave. I am a full stack Programmer. I’ve been writing code for the past ten years or so now. I never really meant to do that. I kind of got into it by accident. I went to school for video production. I thought I was gong to be the next Star Wars guy or something like. But I found that carrying around those 70-pound cameras and working 16 or 17-hour days wasn’t really for me. I decided that maybe I should start looking elsewhere for what was fulfilling to me. So I kind of just got into…I always liked spending time on a computer and AOL was a big thing for me back in the days when it was 2.0 or 2.5. I loved chatting online. I thought maybe I would get started building some websites. So I wanted to show off some of the videos that I was making my own site, so I tried to figure out how to put all the videos I was making online. It turned out that I actually really liked the fact that nobody was bothering me when I was getting my work done. I liked the logical picking apart things and trying to figure how they worked. The more time I spent doing it, the more I realized that I really enjoyed it. So here we are ten years later. I don’t know. I kind of fell into this role, but I don’t know how I got here.

Tara: Yeah. So you taught yourself? Have you taught yourself everything you know?

Dave: Yeah. Everything is self-taught. Obviously, it’s not just because of me but because of everybody else with the ability to just Google something long enough to figure out how everything works and watching YouTube videos. Now you get to the point where if you do it long enough you eventually get good at it. So that’s where we are now.

Tara: So tell us a little bit about your work that you’re doing and your programming skills. Are you working for yourself? Are you freelancing? What kind of business are you running?

Dave: Ok. Sure thing. I guess when I first started off I was just doing client work for other sites and any kind of work that came my way. I would take on anything and just try to get things done for the client. But I realized (after doing that for a year or two) that I wasn’t really getting a whole lot of satisfaction out of it. I wanted to really figure out why that was. I think it really comes down to the fact that I never really got into this work just to do work for other people. I got into it because I was interested in building and I really liked the satisfaction of seeing my ideas come to life in creating. So instead of working for a client, I decided to start building some of my own products, plugins, and ideas and have those come to life. It took awhile. After doing that for a couple of years eventually, I started selling some plugins online. It got the point where it became a sustainable business model. So eventually after doing that long enough, I made enough sales to go off on my own. That’s now my full-time gig. It’s just doing product sales online.

Tara: Tell us about some of the products that you offer.

Dave: Sure. The main product that I sell is called Vimeography. It’s a Vimeo integration for WordPress that allows you to show all of your Vimeo videos on your WordPress site. Again, that naturally goes back to my video production background and I guess what I was interested in before this whole life that I’m living now. So that is the main flagship thing. I’m also really interested in teaching and sharing what I’ve learned along the way because that’s the only way that I’ve gotten to the point of where I am now I guess. I am moving forward. I am really interested in doing online courses, writing tutorials and sharing everything I learned along the way as well.

Tara: That’s great. Tell us a little bit about success. It sounds like you tried client work and that was something that wasn’t a great fit for you. You found product development to be something more satisfying. We like to talk on this show about how people define success for themselves; whether it’s in their professional life, personal life or the combination of the two. How do you think about success?

Dave: Yeah that such a big question, right? That’s something that we always want to make sure that we’re on track for. I like to think about it (at least for me) I like to see how can I enable others to become the people that they want to become rather than just think about what I want to become. I try to think about the ways that I can do that. I think for me I like to teach and I like to share everything that I learned along the way. I like to build products and build solutions that help other people achieve their personal goals. For me, that’s building that Vimeo integration that allows other people to build their portfolios. I’m also working on this learning system as well to help other people share the information that they possess. I’d really like to just enable other people to get to the point where they want to be.

Liam: I think that approach of tying your definition of success to the ability to empower others to succeed is really impressive. I think it’s very much a part of the WordPress Community. I can see that’s why you are doing so well. When your default position is how can I make you better, even if they’re not clients in a services way that you really do not like doing, they are clients that are using your product. That’s just a great way to view success. It’s not around money; it’s not around sales, it’s now around any kind of business metric but rather I want to make you a better person or a better whatever you’re trying to be…I want to make you better. That’s fantastic. Thank you so much for that.

Dave: Yeah of course. I really believe that the value should always become before your profits. That kind of stuff comes if you put enough heart and effort into it. That should never be your primary focus. It should be about providing as much value as possible for your clients or customers.

Liam: Yeah. I agree with that in the sense that if you do the work and you put your heart into it, and you pay attention to what you are doing the money will be there (maybe not all the time and not every day), but at some level, it’s going to be there. If it’s not there, you’re probably doing it wrong, or we’re doing it wrong. That is great. What a great outlook. Thank you.

Dave: Of course.

Tara: It sounds like the evolution of your development skills have brought you into helping others with that. In what ways are you reaching out and helping? Are you on the forums? When you talk about helping others, tell us a little about how you do that and where you do that.

Dave: Sure. So I guess as somebody that’s been writing code for as long as I have been, it’s really easy to get into a very complex topic. As soon as I learn something (what I’ve what I found to be the most effective way to communicate that to somebody else) is to do it as soon as you learn it. So I will I read something in an article for an hour, and I’ll figure it out on one day. After all, my bumping around and all my errors I try to share that back with the community as quickly as possible because I remember what it was like to just have learned that. Where as if I try to teach that five or ten years later to somebody that’s just getting started, I might forget some of the search terms that I was using, or the words, or even the questions that I had at the time. I like to try to communicate that as quickly as possible. So I will learn something one day and then write an article about it the next day and try to communicate in the same terms I was thinking at the time. I also have been building courses online for about six months or so. It’s the same principle where I will learn something, and as soon as it becomes really comfortable and rock solid for me, I want to put it in a format that makes it easy for other people to also consume that information. So I’ve been working on a JavaScript course for WordPress for the past three or four months or so that I hope to get out later this year because that’s kind of a big topic that’s coming up in the WordPress world. But yeah, it is usually just trying to learn something one day and share it the next.

Tara: I like that. I also found that if you do that it also helps with getting it ingrained in your head. You have a reference to go back to as well, right? You’re keeping a journal of your own path.

Dave: Totally. It’s almost embarrassing how many times I watch my own tutorials and read my own articles.

Liam: You think I’d remember by now. You know what? I need to chime in and say that I really like (aside from just keeping the knowledge fresh in your head) I think the context around which you are trying to figure out the new technology or that new code (also the frustration that comes with not knowing it yet) and being able to keep that in mind as you writing a tutorial. Oh yeah. I remember this part was really challenging. The documentation that’s out there kind of describes it in this vague (or in my opinion) unhelpful. I want to describe it this other way. That’s really great. I think that contextual learning while it’s still fresh in your mind. You still remember that it is hard when you have been doing it for fifteen years, or ten years or five years. Oh yeah. That’s easy. Here’s how you do it. Well, it wasn’t always.

Dave: Exactly. Yeah right. So when I run into those frustrations, I will actually type out and make a note of the frustrating thing about it. How do I turn that into like a headline on the article? Are you stuck on this? Here’s how you fix it kind of thing. But really those frustrating points are kind of the highlights of all the stuff that I share.

Tara: That sounds great. When you’re learning things and teaching yourself things, talk a little bit about (I’m going to use the word imposter syndrome) because I feel that way sometimes. When you’re learning how do you face the challenge of being sure of your code? And I guess sharing your information knowing that it’s good code. What kind of challenge do you face in that arena?

Dave: Yeah that’s a great question. Imposter syndrome is very real especially for somebody that doesn’t have a computer science degree. I’m not like a professional. I don’t ever expect to be an employee of Facebook or Google or anything like that. I do think that because of that syndrome existing; a lot of people just have this fear of sharing what they even believe in or what they think they know. I just at least bypass that. If I learn something and I think that this is the right way to do it (in fact one of my free online courses that I have available right now) is a way that I learned it. I bet there’s somebody that’s smarter than I am that could watch the course and say hey! You kind of did this a little bit differently than I might’ve done. But I don’t let that affect me because I think that a lot of what we know and what we feel most comfortable about covers the 80% of what is important to know about on any given topic. That 80% is extremely valuable for somebody that is just getting started. So I always try to think about it that way. Don’t let that last 5% of imperfection prevent you from actually getting something out or sharing information with somebody else because all of the other 95% is way more important.

Tara: That’s a great perspective. I really appreciate that. Can you talk a little bit about that other challenges or what you say is your biggest challenge in what you’re doing and the path that you followed? How did you overcome it? How are you working on overcoming it?

Dave: Yeah sure. The biggest challenge that I faced for probably three years or so now is hiring. There are a couple of corners to that and why I am struggling with it. Some of the main points for that is a) It is really hard to find incredibly talented people that aren’t already doing with they’re super interested in and in love with. And it’s also very incredibly hard to compete with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft or Facebook when you’re at a certain level because of the benefits that they can offer, and all of the pay and all that. So I think what I need to find (and what a lot of people that are hiring at a certain lower scale might need to find) is the ability to offer other value to potential employees that isn’t necessarily just amazing benefits and we watch your dog, and you get free food all the time. But the fact that hey! I can empower you if you want to learn how to how to grow a plugin from zero sales to a hundred sales a month. I can teach you how to do that sort of thing. I can share what’s worked for me and what hasn’t worked for me. I can share one-on-one why I’m writing my code the way that I am. I can really just have a meaningful relationship rather than just you work for me, get this done and I’ll give you a banana for lunch or whatever.

Liam: I’d prefer that you just keep an eye on my dog, please.

Dave: Yeah, actually is not a bad benefit. I don’t know if I can do that. I already have two of my own, so.

Liam: But your point around creating a culture, a climate and a milieu where employees and colleagues feel valued, feel cherished, feel an opportunity to be challenged, to be educated, and to grow I think really is a huge value. We spend do much time at work, right? Anywhere from 20 to 80 hours a week, depending on the week to have it not be a place where we look forward to going can be really problematic. It can be really challenging for our wider lives. So that you’re trying to hone in on that as a value for joining your company is great. I think that’s really insightful.

Dave: One of the things (I’m not sure that this is the best analogy) but there is this idea of having a home away from home, right? Where if you’re on vacation or you’re in another city it is something that you make you just as comfortable as if you were in your own place. I like the idea of having to work away from your work. It’s the same idea where if you are interested in a certain thing professionally when you’re at your job you should still feel like you’re being cultivated and surrounded with the things that you love professionally.

Tara: I love that. That’s awesome! I need to make a note of that. Work away from work. I like that.

Liam: You heard it first here folks from Dave Kiss. Work away from work.

Dave: Yeah. Trademark, copy that.

Liam. So Dave? Within Dave within the plugin business that you’re growing and your work to find reliable professional capable team members, you’ve talked about the biggest challenge that you have been facing. But what is a single most important thing that you can do to achieve that success or maintain that success that you talked about earlier where bringing value and empowering others is what drives you forward?

Dave: I think the most important thing you can do is wake up and drink a cup of coffee and get going. That is super important to me, but I think that the ability to just kind of break down your big goal into incredibly small pieces and just take one step at a time. I think it’s really easy to look at your big picture goal and have it become very difficult to accomplish because it just seems so overwhelmingly huge. I believe in just building tiny and taking one step at a time. A lot of times I’ll only write up to a hundred lines of code a day or so. I’ll call that a win. As long as I’m taking these steps forward and accomplishing small tasks eventually the bigger thing will come. Those small tasks kind of layer on top of one another. But you’ve got to start building your lego castle with just one lego. You can’t just build the whole thing. They probably do sell kits out of the box or whatever now. I believe that if you’re going to build this from the ground up, you have to start one step at a time.

Tara: Yeah. It sounds like you love what you do. I can hear that you’re passionate about your products, helping other people and having employees. How do you balance that with your life? I believe you are “a digital nomad” if I am correct on that? How do you balance your work life with hobbies or having fun? Do you do things that aren’t work?

Dave: That’s a good question. I was traveling for the past six months or so, and that was an interesting experience because it kind of forced me to be in a place that I’ve ever been before. I don’t know anybody there, so it required me to rely on the things that I did know (I was traveling with my wife and our my dog). So it required really focusing on those things that are important to you and making sure that your spending that time where it needs to be. In general, even when I’m not traveling, I just believe in being completely present wherever you are. I also think that this whole 40-hour workweek thing is completely overblown, unnecessary and antiquated. Like I said before, some days I only write a hundred lines of code, and I’ll call it a day. It’s not because I don’t want to work for the day but I think that is an incredibly important balance that we need to really dial in to figure out how much work is actually enough work for a given day? How productive can you be in an eight or nine hour day? There’s a lot of statistics on that. So if you can just find those hours that you can really dial in and do your best work, I think you can use the rest of the hours to dial in and do your best personal life.

Tara: Also, in code writing, you are finding yourself most likely solitary. What kind of community involvement do you have? How do you interact with others when you’re writing hundreds of lines of code in a day? That can be kind of lonely and isolating.

Dave: Absolutely. The community is incredibly important for this. I’m a member of several Slack teams that have kind of kept me too distracted throughout the day. I also participate in a lot of local Meetup groups and even not local. When I was traveling, I spoke at the (we were in Tucson Arizona). I spoke at the Tucson WordPress Meetup group. It’s really easy to do. You can just reach out and find everybody’s contact information and say hey! I would love to meet who is in this community. I would love to help out and share my experiences. With the travel how can we set this up? I believe (especially if you aren’t traveling) you can just have your local community to participate there and really get to know the people around you that also have similar backgrounds or similar goals. The Meetup groups really (and speakers in general) while the topic and the content of the talk might be interesting, it’s really just an excuse to get like-minded people together and share what you know with one another and have a good time. So participating in local Meetup groups and even remote Meetup groups are really great way to complement your solitary confinement during the day.

Liam: Absolutely! Dave? I want to back to the work life balance that you mentioned. Some days you’ll just write a hundred lines of code and call it a day. Let me start by saying that I think that’s a fantastic way to approach it. There is this balance and tying our workweek to a specific number seems somewhat antiquated at the very least. Tell me a little bit about (if you can) what is your thought process? How do you decide when it’s been a successful workday and that’s enough? I don’t mean that maybe you have an appointment at 2:00 so you have to leave early but when there is nothing else technically drawing you away from work, how do you approach that? What’s your thought process?

Dave: I’m probably the least organized person that you might ever meet. So in terms of a plan, I have these plans. I have a ten-year plan. I try to break that down in as many different increments as possible. So okay, if I want to be at X in ten years how can I break that down so that in nine years it gets me 90% there? In eight years, 80% there but continue that granularity all the way down to one year, six months, three months and one week. So I try to just think about all these little things that can layer on top of one another. In a day there’s not a whole lot that you can just you hammer out in one single day that’s going to get you to that ten-year goal. So if you can just figure out what are those small steps that you can call a win (whether that is you implement one feature or you solve one bug fix or answer ten customer support tickets). Those are all things that I feel good about moving forward that are going to move closer to that ten-year goal (or even a three-month goal or the one-week goal). Once I start considering maybe those two or three wins throughout the day, that’s a good day for me. So I try to think about what are those one, two or three things that I can do you today that I can solve today that’s going to make everything else irrelevant or much easier to deal with. If I can pick up those two or three wins a day that’s a really positive thing.

Tara: I love goal setting. It’s an important thing to do when you are working for yourself. It’s very hard to be mindful of it sometimes. Have you learned this skill on your own? Do you follow blogs or business blogs and information to learn about setting those goals or is it something that you’ve done on your own?

Dave: I mostly get people that yell at me and tell me that I’m doing things wrong. That’s like the only way I ever learn anything. I have a mentor/business coach that helps me with some of the stuff. We get a weekly phone calls. I think it is always incredibly important to talk with other people and reflect on is this the right step for my business? Is the thing that I should be working on this month? Just getting that sort of feedback and then books can help for sure. I’m not that great at finishing books. A lot of times I’ll skim through and pick up different parts. But I think that really just communicating and reflecting is the biggest take away for me.

Tara: I think it’s great that you have a mentor or coach who is helping you work through some of this. That leads me to a question that we ask everyone on the podcast which is to talk a little bit about the most important advice that you’ve received that you can share with us.

Dave: Yeah I think it would probably go back to what I was just talking about a minute ago which is what are the things today or the one thing are the two things today that you can do that just makes everything else irrelevant or easier? Specifically, in terms of your goals. So a lot of times…I always call these projects sand castles…where my mind just goes from one idea to the next. I want to build this thing. Then I get this other idea going, then a third idea. Then by the time I look back to the first sandcastle, the waves kind of came and knocked it over. So I have to go over to that one and start fixing it up. Then the third one starts to fall over, or the wind blows it away. None of these ever really actually get done, and my focus is just all over the place. But if I can think about what is the one thing that I can do today where these other castles aren’t really going to matter for my personal goals then just do that. Why am I wasting all this time just jumping between all these different projects when it ultimately isn’t get me closer to what I guess I’ve been calling my arrow or future self? What I want to be in the life that I want to live. So what is that thing for you and how can you implement it so that everything else becomes easier?

Tara: You sound very organized to me. You said that you were not organized. It sounds to me (at least in your thoughts) that you are very organized.

Dave: Yeah.

Tara: I think the sand castle visual is fabulous. I talk about rabbit holes a lot. I think that in the kind of work that we do, whether it’s emails or a bug that you have to solve right away, we go down these rabbit holes all the time. I think that the sand castles are an appropriate analogy for what we do and how we deal with issues every day.

Dave: I would agree.

Tara: I like that one focus. That’s a great way of looking at it. So I think we are just about out of time. Dave? It’s been great having you on the show. Can you tell us where people can find you (websites, emails, social media)?

Dave: Absolutely. I am Dave Kiss just about everywhere. So @davekiss on Twitter. DaveKiss.com. You can email me [email protected]. I’m also just sharing information about developing on WordPress so feel free to get at me if you have any questions or if you’re interested in learning more specifically about WordPress plugin development.

Liam: Dave thanks so much for joining us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure to chat with you. I love your vision of sand castles and your arrow. It’s very descriptive. It’s very unique, and it’s very powerful to get a sense of how you go about achieving your success. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and wisdom with us today.

Dave: Of course. Thank you for having me.

Tara: Thank you. I appreciate your time. Bye!

Becky runs her own WordPress business and is active in the WordPress community. She has spoken at many WordCamps all over the US and at WordCamp Europe in 2016. She has run the Chicago Northside WordPress Meetup for six years.

Website | beckydavisdesign.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: Today’s show is brought to you in part by Liquid Web.

Liam: We sure know that there’s a lot of choices when it comes to hosting your WordPress site. Liquid Web is the manage WordPress partner you’ve been waiting for. Whether you’re a business owner, an agency, or a freelancer, Liquid Web has you covered when it comes to performance, uptime, and ease of site management.

Tara: And one of the things we love most, when your content goes viral, Liquid Web doesn’t charge you more for huge spikes in traffic. Transparent pricing, no surcharges.

Liam: Liquid Web is offering Hallway Chats listeners 33% off for the first three months. Go to Liquidweb.com and use the coupon code, HALLWAYCHATS, all one word, to sign up.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is episode 13. Welcome to Hallway Chats, I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Becky Davis. Becky is active in the WordPress community, has spoken at many WordCamps all over the USA. She has even spoken at WordCamp Europe in 2016. She runs the Chicago Northside WordPress Meetup and has done so for six years. She’s a big advocate for sharing knowledge and trading clients. Excitingly, she’s approaching her 10-year anniversary of running her own business. Hi, Becky.

Becky: Good morning.

Tara: Hi Becky, welcome. Tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Becky: I’m an old lady, my kids are adults and gone, and supporting themselves at this point. I started this business when my son was in high school and here I am 10 years later still making this as living, no regrets.

Liam: That’s great, that’s great, that’s great. Let me ask you, I want to get into how you got into starting your business in a few moments but I’d like to start by just asking you to tell us a little bit about what kind of services your business provides?

Becky: I mostly do custom theme shop, I don’t do ready made themes, I don’t have out-of-the-pocket solutions but I like building– I never understood ready made themes because how does a theme that 10,000 people use work for my content? It just makes no sense to me. I like building unique themes for clients that fit exactly what they need, that fit the kind of content that they have, that they’re willing to work with me so that we get all of the functionality and all of the things showing up there that need to show up, and it works.

Liam: That’s excellent. And then, you said you’re doing front-end development, you’re making custom themes, you’re working with clients. Tell us a little bit about, then, how you started your business and if you could weave into that story, tell us about how you got into WordPress as well?

Becky: Well, 10 years ago, I was an unemployed IT person again. It was a lot of contract work and I was sick of chasing the next contract and I stood up at the ripe age of 48 and said, “What the heck do I want to do?” And I had no answer to that. [laughs] And then I realized that I had never asked the question. I spent 20 years taking care of other people, and when you get in that mode, you don’t think about, “What do I want?” I had a big IT background, I had built an HTML site in ’98 for a law firm. You know, with the red rounded marble corners, remember those in Notepad?

Liam: Absolutely.

Tara: Yeah.

Becky: [laughs] And I had worked for some photographers briefly so I knew Photoshop pretty well, and I started looking at web building and I was like, “Oh, this kind of combines all the stuff that I already know how to do.” And of course, there are 10 million things more to learn and I’m still learning every day. It started slowly. I think I did my first site for 500 bucks.

Liam: I think a lot of us do that.

Tara: Yeah.

Becky: Yeah. Well, you have to. I learned a really important lesson with that one, not the lack of money but she and I went back and forth on the shade of purple 20 times. I was like, “Oh, how bogged down in this detail do we need to get and it’s such a big difference whether it’s your CRT or it’s my black screen?” That print design is so– I can pick the paper, I can pick the ink, I can pick the layout, I can do anything I want and I can guarantee that everyone will get the same experience. And web design is so opposite of that it’s a different experience for everyone all the time. That’s a hard thing for clients to accept and understand.

Liam: Yeah, especially in 2007 where not everybody was online, smartphones were sporadic at best. It was a real apparent point of transition. Speaking of transition, did you jump right into WordPress or did you start with static HTML and transitioned a little by little? Take us through that.

Becky: I started with static HTML, I built a few sites for small businesses and one for my mom. My mom, she just passed away last summer but she in her retirement painted needlepoint canvases and sold them to shops all over the country. She had a collection of 300 pieces and I spent two days in my old bedroom taking pictures of these canvases and built a site for her, and showed her to use the mouse in the process. [laughter] She was actually a pretty good for a client because she was accepting of everything that I did without questioning it.

Tara: What a nice way to remember her and memorialize her then, that’s a great thing about the web, right? It’s timeless.

Becky: Exactly. Yeah, WordPress, my dad was a poet and political activist and liked to rant and write, and I thought it would be a good present for him to have a blog where he could do that, and that was how I got into WordPress.

Liam: That’s the best WordPress intro story I’ve ever heard, thank you.

Becky: [laughs] And I picked the horrible crappy theme and I installed it and then I had no clue what was going on. I spent two hours on a phone with the woman while she was trying to get the info to work properly. Then I spent, I don’t know, six weeks to try– you have to try to– poetry is very weird in its layout. Some lines go in, some lines go out, that kind of thing. I spent six weeks transposing an entire book of his onto the web. I felt pretty familiar with the 2.7 interface at that point and I guess I never looked back at that point because that was a question I had even in early HTML classes, how do clients update? How do they change their phone number, how do they do this without having to call me and pay me money? There wasn’t a good answer for that, and then when I found WordPress I picked it as the answer. That was in late 2008 or early 2009 when I got into WordPress so I had been doing HTML for about a year, and it was just a natural progression. Then there were another two years of people wanting other stuff. “Oh, I want a store.” Or, “I want membership. I want–” I was like, “No, WordPress can’t do that.” Then I stopped saying no. A lot of things happened in time tree between eight and ten. So many more plugins were available, so much more functionality was available, the whole community was growing, that the minute I stopped saying no, all of a sudden, it was like, “Hmm.” And that, sure, got me find out, and voila, there would be an answer or there would be a plugin I’ve never heard of that solves this issue. It was pretty incredible. Then things really exploded. Business exploded and I exploded, I rode that WordPress tsunami without even realizing that I was on it. But I just got paid more and I have clients all the time who are pushing me this way, that way, “How come it doesn’t do it this way?” And this is why I get so involved with plugin developers and other things because it’s like, “Yeah, you really should allow for this.”

Liam: At times like that, that very pivotal mindset change that you’ve made, and I’m going to ask you if it was deliberate or just kind of gradual over time, but when you were making that was a hugely pivotal time in web technology, right? As eight, and nine, and ten was coming, all the services that we consider old-school web were really just starting to get user-friendly, starting to get mass updates. I wonder about your mindset as you made that transition, and then you said it’s really so influential in your business and helped you grow. I wonder how else you might have carried that through in your life, that ‘don’t say no’ approach.

Becky: It was a conscious decision. I can’t tell you what day I made it or did it happen all at once, I’m sure it was a process but it was very much conscious decision because I realized that even if I didn’t know the answer at the beginning of the project, that I had a 90% chance of solving it by the end of the project. And how much more can I learn and how much more can I do on the next project if I conquer this, if I learn this? It’s led me down some pretty interesting roads. I did a huge redesign of very complex sites and it’s still very complex, 1000 quotes, multi-language, big medical technology terms and whatever, and the old site, you couldn’t find a thing. Every landing page had a different layout, every search was useless. It was just a mess. I forced a client to hire a UX person to help us reconfigure this site. She comes back with wireframes with facets on them, and I’m on a five-person phone call with the clients, and the UX person, and the designer. I’m looking at these facets and I’m like, “Can WordPress do that?” My brain blew up. [laughter] It just blew up, I was like, “I don’t know if I can do that.” Then while I’m still on the conversation I just googled ‘facets WordPress’, and found the plugin, FacetsWP which is amazing. I was like, “I guess I can do that.” And that’s the benefit of not saying no.

Tara: Yeah, it’s a great thing about WordPress too, is that usually if you ask the question, “Can you do it with WordPress?” Usually, you can.

Liam: Becky, when you were talking about your decision to transition out of IT consultancy and into something new, you had said that you never really asked yourself, “What do I want to do?” And that’s so particularly poignant and I wonder about then as you’ve gone through your WordPress career, owning your business you’ve changed this pivotal mindset where you don’t say no anymore. Can you share with us your definition of success and maybe touch on personal success, professional success, and how those intertwine for you?

Becky: Sure. Professional success is making a living, it’s as simple as that. I a nice apartment in Chicago, my kids are out and gone, I don’t have a lot of other expenses and I’m quite comfortable. I don’t work 60 hours a week either, and that’s fine. I actually take the weekends off. That’s part of my success, if I can go 48 hours without looking at email, that’s a success. I’m a big believer in, when you spend your entire day in front of a screen you should get away from the screen on a regular basis.

Liam: Yeah.

Becky: That’s all success to me. I’m in a good place professionally.

Tara: That’s excellent. I’m happy for you, that’s great. It’s great to hear that you have some discipline in your time and that you take weekends off, and that you don’t work the crazy hours a lot of people work these days, and I like to hear that you don’t live in your email inbox. Out of all the things that you do every day, what would you say is the most important thing that you do? And then, following up on that, what is your favorite thing? Whether or not those are the same or not, it’s a question.

Becky: Wow, that’s hard. Most important thing I probably do is that I do a stretching program every morning because you sleep all night and sit all day. I try to keep as active as I can. That way, it’s now summer here so I’m now on my bike and my poor car is feeling neglected. That kind of thing. What I like to do, I’m a big old movies fan, I like to knit. I like to get out with friends on a Friday night. The downside to what I do is that it’s isolating, I don’t have the cubicle chatter. I actually work better without it, it’s better but I have to make the effort to go seek to move.

Tara: With that in mind, I know that you are involved in the WordPress community in your area. What is that meant to you and how have you introduced yourself to that community and brought people into it with you?

Becky: I really enjoyed running the Meetup. I’ve met a ton of interesting people there, and the friends that I reach out to for help often come from that source. I often get work from that source which I’ve never ever expected. WordPress is a tribe at this point and it’s very much about being inclusive and sharing the knowledge, and I like to do that as much as I can on this micro-local level and encourage people to get up and do a presentation and whatever, and it can be hard. Women, in particular, are very shy about speaking and I am always encouraging women in my group to get up and do a talk. I’ve been talking to them for three years and I haven’t talked them into it yet. Some of them might meet once and they get up to talk in the next session and it’s awesome.

Liam: Becky, Tara and I both run WordPress Meetups at our own necks of the woods as it were. I’d love to hear your thoughts, aside from chatting supportively with women who are interested or you think would be good to get into speaking at WordPress Meetups and WordCamps. What other tips or techniques can you share with us around supporting those communities, those individuals within the community who we know they have it in them but we want to help them get to where they’re at a point to not say no, to use your mindset?

Becky: It’s a challenge. There was a lovely presentation at WordCamp Europe in Vienna last summer called the Imposter Syndrome. It’s out on WordPress TV, I encourage everyone to see that because-

Tara: That was Sonya?

Becky: Yes, we will all recognized ourselves in this. And I think with women, in particular– and this is a broad generalization, but a guy will get up when he just learned something new whether he knows everything about it or not because he’s excited, he thinks he’s a rock star, he’s got that confidence. A woman feels like she has to know inside, out, backward, and forwards before she can even think about sharing that knowledge. I think that very much ties into that imposter syndrome of, “Oh, I don’t know as much as she. I can’t possibly share anything.” I like to get everyone to talk but I like to encourage, particularly– and as a group, we’re all introverts, right? We’re all a little shy so I try to encourage it as much as I can sometimes. Sometimes I’m successful and sometimes I’m not.

Tara: I think that’s important. I remember the first few times that I went to my local Meetup here and someone asked me if I would speak and I started with a five-minute lightning talk. What I discovered was that it took a lot of guts to do that but it also forced me to gain confidence because I had to learn something more in order to speak about it. I think it’s a great way to learn is to sign up to speak about something that you may have a pretty good knowledge of, but then once you are on the hot seat, you really have to know it better. It’s a great way to learn as well, I think. In your business, it sounds like you have– you’ve been running your business for quite a while and have done a wide variety of projects. What would you say is the biggest challenge in running your own business?

Becky: Well, part of not working 60 hours or 80 hours a week is understanding that even when you try to work just normal hours– yes, I get dressed in the morning and I sit down at ten o’clock in the morning and I’m usually here until five or six. Is understanding that even half of those hours that you were in front of the computer are billable, you’ve had a good day. There are many, many things that aren’t billable, producing bills is one of them, dealing with the massive amounts of emails, putting out little fires in the morning. Yes, you can bill a lot of those things but a lot of them you just can’t. Sometimes you’re just in research mode. “I need this to figure this out.” But it took me a while to realize that, oh, I only billed 14 hours this week. But that’s why I charge what I charge and I’m still making a living and that’s okay.

Liam: Yeah, convincing yourself of the value of that balance and the tradeoff, and that it’s not a numbers– I mean, it is ultimately a numbers game, right? Rent is about having enough money to pay the rent or the mortgage, right? When you get hungry, it’s hard if you don’t have some numbers in your bank account. But to get to your point, to see that bigger picture around the balance of it all and, “I only did 14 hours of billable.” For example, “But that covered the bills. I’d love to do 18 or 20 but 12 is what I need to meet my bills.” Tell me a little bit about how long it took you to kind of come to this understanding of how it all works in a way that keeps you healthy, keeps you in a position, getting out to do your morning stretches and to spend time with your friends outside of your work?

Becky: First 18 months of making this commitment that I’m not working for work, I am working for myself, and that was a mindset change right there, were a bit of a struggle. I was in a lucky place that I had enough savings reserved that I could pay the rent. During that time I gave myself three years, five years max, to make this work. In 18 months I was doing well, in two years I was doing pretty well. Then, of course, I had– and anybody who’s been in this business knows this happens is that you grow exponentially in your third year, right? Then things kind of kind of level off, but there was that one year where I had 70% increase in income and I was like, “Whoo.” [laughs]

Liam: That’s nice.

Becky: Yeah, yeah. But then there’s always so much you can do. I have been blessed with one giant client who keeps me busy month in, month out. Whether we’re doing redesigns or just regular maintenance, and then I take two of those four bigger projects with different clients every year, and that’s enough, I’m happy. I can stop at six and have dinner, and decompress, and not work on the weekends. I can’t say I never worked on a weekend. Of course, we all have. And everybody is like, “Oh, you get to work in your pajamas.” It’s like, “No, I get up, I get dressed, this is work. I’m in my office, this is work.” The only time I’m in pajamas is when it’s a Sunday and something has come up, and I’m not happy about it.

Tara: Yeah. Do you provide maintenance to your clients after you’ve built their sites?

Becky: Kind of up to the client but I do quite a bit of maintenance. I have half a dozen smaller sites that I just have a yearly contract with and go in four or five times a year and just keep things updated. There’s not that much going on and that’s all they really need. My bigger more complex sites, I’m in every month to make sure everything is still working and keeping it updated and then they are always changing something anyway. Some clients leave and I don’t do maintenance. I like to empower the client to do as much as they want to do. I want them to add their own content and, actually, I want them to add their own content while we’re in development because that’s where the questions come up. “Oh, we really need this. How about if this worked this way?” And we can solve that before the launch. Then by the launch, they’re super comfortable with what’s going on.

Liam: So they understand the flow and the inner workings of the content.

Becky: Right. I don’t know how you learned but I know I learned by doing. I did that for three or four years, that 90-minute lesson at the end. “Here’s your site and here’s where you log in, here’s where posts are, here’s where are the pages.” And everybody shakes their head and six weeks later they remember nothing. Then they’re frustrated, “Oh, WordPress is too hard.” But if I get the editors, the people who are going to continue editing the site, involved during development, then they’ve done it all. They’ve added ten things, they’ve played with the menu, they understand how this works. And the comfort level is super high. Then when there’s questions they know they can come back to me, that’s as an always paying. But they don’t have to come to me every time when they need to add an event, they just have the event, they know how it works.

Liam: You support them to have their own workflows but when they need little help you’re there, but they’re not asking for every little thing. That’s a great approach – I like that.

Becky: Right, right. And then maintenance kind of flows into that. Do they want to be responsible for updating plugins and whatever? A lot of them are, particularly with the more complex sites I discourage that a little bit. “Let’s have a staging site, let me do the testing.” Because the minute we get past, what? What’s the magic number? There is no magic number but the minute we get past a certain level of complexity, updates, and in fact, other things that you couldn’t even realize, that kind of thing. But if they want to do it themselves, I ought to show them how. I’m all for it.

Liam: That’s great. Let me transition to one of our big questions I really like to ask. What is the single most valuable piece of advice, it can be either personal or professional or maybe a combination of both, that you have received and worked into your life?

Becky: I don’t know if I have an answer for that. [laughs]

Liam: It’s a big question.

Becky: It’s a big question. I can think of little things. Honestly, the ‘don’t say no’. I think that– always look for a new answer, always keep learning, never say something is impossible without doing some research. You never know.

Liam: Is that a mindset, is that a take that you came to on your own? Was it somebody shared it with you, was it some reading, was it some internal introspection? How did you come to that?

Becky: I think it’s more my own personal exploration of my life. Years I’ve spent doing helpdesk IT work where by the time you get to somebody’s desk, they’re already angry and embarrassed, it can be very challenging. When you say no to those people, they get immediately way more obsessive than they would under normal circumstances because they’re already upset.

Liam: Absolutely.

Becky: That was a long learning curve for me to understand– because I can sit down at somebody’s desk and they’ve got a problem, and I’m looking at the screen, and I see the problem, and I can curse under my breath and say, “What’s going on here?” I actually had a woman take that personal, she thought I was yelling at her. That makes you think, that wasn’t personal, I was aggravated at the problem, not at you. But that was a big deal for me to separate that and change how people view me. I can be a little abrasive sometimes. It’s never personal but sometimes it gets seen in that way. That’s part of not saying no. When somebody is asking for help and I’m too busy and I just say no, it’s a complete shut down, it’s a complete turn off.

Liam: So having that awareness to know what you’re doing and how it’s affecting others?

Tara: Yeah. Trying to avoid the knee jerk reaction which is really tempting to do when you’re facing the situation like that, yeah, being patient.

Becky: It’s so easy. You know.

Tara: Right, right. Becky, we are coming up on the end of our time with you. It’s been great talking to you, though, and I loved hearing about your journey and I don’t think you’re an old lady, by the way. I think you’re selling yourself short, I have to say. I have two adult children as well. [laughter]

Becky: You look at the web development world, and it’s 80% guys, and 80% of them are in their 30’s. I’m this girl in her 50’s.

Tara: That’s awesome.

Becky: Wow. And that’s one of the things I like about the tribe of WordPress as well is that there’s way more of me in this group than there are in Drupal or any other group of this nature. That’s why I like to encourage the ladies in my Meetup as much as I can.

Tara: That’s great. Thank you for sharing with us.

Liam: Great conversation.

Becky: This has been a lot of fun.

Liam: Becky, before we officially say goodbye to you, could you share with us, while we’re still recording here, where people can find you online?

Becky: Oh, Beckydavisdesign.com. It’s my site and yes, there’s a contact form but if you’re looking for a quote and you haven’t filled out my four-page Word document, I may or may not get back to you. [laughs] I like clients to work from the very beginning. “What is it that you want? What is it that you’re trying to do?” And I force them to use this and I try to do it as a web form and it never works out but, you know, it’s a four-page document. I want you to spend two days filling it out. I want you to think about that first. I need you to be involved in this project.

Liam: That’s an important emphasis, I like that.

Tara: Yes, thank you for joining us, Becky.

Liam: Thanks so much, Becky.

Becky: Thank you, it’s been a pleasure. You guys have a lovely morning, talk to you soon.

Liam: We’ll talk to you soon, bye, bye.

Tara: Bye.

Becky: Bye.

Liam: Thanks for listening to the show. We sure hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.

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.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.

Andy McIlwain tackles content and community projects at GoDaddy. He’s a fan of the arts, impromptu road trips, user-friendly technology, and helping Canadian small businesses work with the web.

Website | https://andymci.com

ToDoIst

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 12.

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

Liam: I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we have Andy McIlwain joining us. Andy tackles content and community projects at GoDaddy. He is a fan of the arts, impromptu road trips, user-friendly technology, and helping Canadian small businesses work with the web.

Andy: Howdy!

Tara: Hi Andy! How are you?

Andy: I’m doing all right. How are you guys doing?

Tara: Good. We’re so glad you’re with us.

Andy: I’m happy to be here.

Tara: We’re glad to have our first Canadian on the show. Tell us about yourself, Andy. Tell us a little bit more than what Liam just introduced.

Andy: Sure thing. My name is Andy McIlwain. I’m out of Canada. I was born and raised in Ontario. I’ve been working with WordPress for about ten years now. I’m a longtime advocate. My full-time gig is at GoDaddy. I look after content and lead projects over there. I do a lot of work with our GoDaddy Pro program. So I’m helping web designers, developers who are managing their clients who are using GoDaddy products. At the end of the day, pretty much everything I do goes back to helping small businesses. It just quite a passion for me.

Liam: That is awesome! We love small businesses. Tara and I both run our own. That’s great to hear that you’re so supportive of that particular community. So you say you’ve been a longtime user and big advocate of WordPress. Tell us a little bit about how you got into WordPress. Where did it all start for you?

Andy: For me, it was the early days. I was building fan sites. I was a kid building fan sites of video games and hobby stuff. That was a big interest for me. It was never really the coding. It was just about sites built out, getting the content pulled together, and putting something online. It was great because it had a very low barrier to entry compared to some other stuff. You didn’t need a lot of money to build a website. You just needed to know what steps to take. There were a lot of free services on line (Tripod GeoCities all those). I started getting into content management systems as a hobby. I was probably fifteen playing with different tools like Grey Matter and Textpattern. Eventually, when I was in college, I had an instructor who weaned me off Textpattern and said use WordPress. Why are you using Textpattern? Nobody uses Textpattern anymore. I got into WordPress around 2007, and I’ve been swearing by it ever since. Everywhere I go, and everywhere I work, I start spreading the good word of WordPress.

Liam: I am going to pause for just a second and Hooray your shoutout for Textpattern. That’s where I got into making my own database driven websites and not relying on a developer. I’m very much a designer. So yeah, woo for good old fashioned Textpattern!

Andy: It’s a great system. It’s still around, right? If anyone that’s listening is curious about it, go Google Textpattern and check it out. It’s worth seeing the way they approach things. It’s a little bit different from WordPress.

Liam: So you said that you had an instructor who won you over to the dark side of WordPress (I say that jokingly). What was the convincing argument? What did your professor say? Is that what convinced you or was it something else that you saw and found within WordPress that was the convincing argument (if I can phrase it that way)?

Andy: If I can recall correctly, I think it was when he introduced me to how themes were built in WordPress. The overall template hierarchy and how all of that came together. That’s what won me over because I was interested in building custom sites and doing custom designs. My comfort level was basically HTML, CSS and a smattering of JavaScript or JQuery. There was just that little tiny bit that everybody knew back then. Getting into WordPress…what really won me over and kept me there was starting to see the ecosystem that existed around WordPress. You start looking at the plugin ecosystem and look at the functionality. You can build it very quickly. You’re not going to scaffold something together with custom code and the theme libraries. If you wanted to a build out a prototype site very quickly, you could do that. I didn’t have to spend as much time on it as if I was using Textpattern or some of these other Content Management systems. It was very quick. That was a big deal for me back then.

Tara: What were you studying specifically?

Andy: Advertising. I was studying advertising, and I wanted to get into the ad industry. But I graduated into the recession. So WordPress really did save my life and my career in a sense because it was my knowledge of using WordPress and building websites that got me into working in tech. If I hadn’t done that as a hobby…let’s put it this way…a lot of my peers that graduated around the same time as me…pretty much nobody’s working in the ad industry. Nobody was hiring.

Tara: I also started in advertising. I can relate to that.

Andy: 2007 or 2008 right around there; 2008 especially was a bad time.

Tara: They’re related though. You are communicating. Advertising and website building is not that far unrelated.

Andy: It’s funny now. When you look at Content Marketing and where things are going in terms of our marketing strategy so much of it is this hybrid of the tech and the traditional advertising. In traditional advertising, you’re talking marketing communications, you’re talking about telling stories, and now you are hitting that point where it’s merging together; where it is storytelling with technology. How do we take VR or AR or the mobile first experiences and tell a story with that to build a brand and help move a product or sell services?

Liam: Yes storytelling has always been an important part of marketing and advertising. The phrase storytelling has grown increasing prominent in recent years. Maybe we’ll ask you (using that phrase) to tell us the story or perhaps more accurately the definition success. What doe success mean for you? It can be personal success or professional success; however you want to define it.

Andy: I always go with this old line. I’ve gone with it since high school. Do what you love and get paid for it. Success means looking forward to going to work every day, looking forward to getting up every morning, really entwining what you do professionally with your interests personally so that it complements each other. With what I’m doing now at GoDaddy, I feel like I’ve finally hit that point. With all the other jobs and all the other things I’ve done over the years, I’m kind of there. It finally feels like it really hit on.

Liam: Yeah. That story of just getting to where you want to be and getting to the point where you are in your success and doing exactly what you want to do and getting paid for it is really interesting. I was having a conversation last week with a friend around how we reach success (with books and success planning…I’m really struggling with words today). Let’s say that A to B, or the fastest point to get there But it’s very rare in real life that A to B is the path that we could take, right? We need to build skills, pay bills and take care of this concern or that concern. It is often A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and then eventually we get to where we want to be.

Andy: Yeah.

Liam: That’s really interesting. So now that you’re doing what you love and getting paid for it, and in a sense, you’ve achieved success and now you are working to maintain that, what is the single most important thing you do every day to build on or maintain that success?

Andy: Momentum. Building on the momentum and at a tactical level, just rocking the calendar. Making sure that everything you set out to do that there’s time set aside for it. If it doesn’t exist on the calendar, it doesn’t happen. It may sound a little bit OCD but really looking at day-to-day, week to week, and a whole year at a glance of how am I using my time? What am I doing first thing in the morning? What am I doing before I go to bed? I’m blocking all of that out just to make sure that I just keep chugging along. I feel that I hit a point of success but at the same time, the milestones you want to hit keep changing. Like I hit this point, now what am I going to do next? What is the next big thing I want work on that continues that train of success? So the calendar is the biggest thing.

Tara: So I am a self-professed tool junkie (especially productivity tools). Do you have any? It sounds like you’re really on top of managing your schedule and blocking it off. Are there any tools that you use for that besides a regular calendar?

Andy: I am a huge fan of Todoist.

Tara: I use that too.

Andy: I love their chrome extension. I use Todoist across every device. It is my favorite thing by far. In terms of other productivity tools, I bounce between Outlook and Google calendar on a regular basis. For work, it’s a Microsoft ecosystem. I’m in Outlook every day. Personally, I use Google and Gmail for a lot of my stuff, and I have for years. The one thing I feel that doesn’t really exist yet is the perfect merge between the two. If I have multiple calendars across multiple places, I’m sharing events across multiple email addresses. They are all me. I feel like I shouldn’t have to do that. I really haven’t found a better solution. With project management, I use Trello if I’m working with multiple people. When I’m working on the project, Trello is my go to.

Liam: So it’s really great that you mentioned Trello. I have struggled with personal to do list tools (not that I haven’t found good ones. I have some good ones). It’s more that I don’t want to maintain different systems. We use Trello at my company. I stopped using a personal to do list because I didn’t want to use two or three different systems. Can you talk a little bit how you engaged Todoist versus Trello and how to work tasks?

Andy: Sure. So for me, Todoist is a different philosophy. Trello is all about there are different tasks, and we need to work the tasks like a kanban board, right? You’re working through a process with different tasks. There are different stages. It’s really good for collaboration. If it’s just me working on my own thing and it is fairly simple where I have to get this done, that’s what ends up in Todoist. For example, I have a reading list in my Todoist account. I’ll use this little feature in the chrome extension add website as a task. So if there is not a bunch of articles that I’m curating from the newsletters that I receive every morning, I’m just going to open up the article I want to read…after I read it I add website as a task. That saves me a whole lot of time. I set that block of time to do reading. I just go through my Todoist and check off those tasks. When I see that point system go up and see the karma go up in Todoist..it’s really for that. It’s for knocking things out that are standalone items. Trello comes in if I’m taking on a bigger project where I need to be tracking multiple tasks.

Tara: So do you set aside time to read those because I use Pocket. I also use that Todoist feature as well. But what happens is that I have probably thirty articles on my Todoist (to read list) and I never go do it. Do you block off time to do that?

Andy: I do, and I currently have 73 items tagged in the read this in Todoist.

Tara: (laughing) That makes me feel better!

Andy: My biggest list is books to read. I have 138 items in there.

Tara: That makes me feel much better.

Andy: I try to block time. It’s one of the hardest things I find when it comes to reading (especially when you trying to do the reading for work) or use professional learning and development. You know it’s an important task but when you have these emails in your inbox and fires to put out, quickly that reading time gets set aside and you try to fit it in here and there. I think that the best reading time I have is when I’m stuck on an airplane. I’ll go through Todoist, block up a bunch of stuff to go into Pocket for off-line reading and I’ll get on the plane, and I’ll spend that 2, 3 or 4 hours just plowing through pocket articles. Otherwise, it’s hard to find the time to read. You’ll set it aside, but things come up.

Tara: I agree.

Liam: I’m going to ask one more question on this. It’s just because I’m really interested. So there’s a big project that you’re working on. You’re in Trello where you’ve got team members, and you have a task (you said you work around content and the like). Let’s say you have to pull together a series of articles. Then you are going to write a recap, and then you need to share it via social media. So in your mind, are you breaking those down? Are any of those specific task items make it into Todoist or does it all stay in Trello? If on the fourth day of not doing it, or whatever the case may be, how do you how you use your tools to encourage yourself to tackle?

Andy: So Trello is for working on a project. So what you’re saying is that you’re going through multiple phases and curation, and amplification and maybe a sharing or outreach aspect to it. All of that’s going to live in Trello. One of the things that I have tried in the past and it never really works is if you have the same tasks going into separate systems because at some point it’s going to fall a part. You have something moving along on one side. It’s not catching up on the other side. You have to reconcile that, and that’s another task into itself; reconciling all the different task statuses. That lives in Trello. Where it hits me as an alert is that I’ll set up a block of time in my calendar or appointment reminder to notify me that I need to get this thing done. It may not be that thing needs to go out at that time, but I need to work on it at that time. So in Outlook for example, or in Google calendar just in the event description or appointment description, I would link to the Trello card. This things needs to get done, or I need work on this to get it done.

Liam: Thank you. That is very helpful. So we talked about what the single most important thing is to achieve success. Within your day, what’s your favorite thing to do?

Andy: Oh my favorite thing to do? I really enjoy thinking of things in terms of systems and processes. So if you start looking at…let’s say we want to plan out a bunch of content over a quarter or over a couple of quarters, thinking about how those different pieces could layer together or be repurposed in different ways. How is that going to work? What are the different steps involved? Who’s going to work on what? I find I really get into that flow state. If I’m looking at things like that, where I’m looking at the big picture and then zooming right in on a very granular level. I love doing that sort of work. The challenge is setting aside the time to actually get into that. So it’s not really this 30-minute thing here and there. It’s you have a day. That’s my favorite. You have a day to work on something. You focus on that one thing the entire day.

Tara: Do you work from home?

Andy: Yes I do. So I’m one of a handful of Canadians working for GoDaddy. I work with the GoDaddy corporate team. My home base is actually Sunnyvale California. I work remotely from here in Toronto.

Tara: About how many hours would you say that you work a day when you have a day like that?

Andy: Oh God! It varies. Sometimes I’ll throw in a 12-hour day. Some days it will be a standard, like an eight or nine hour day. It really depends on what needs to get done with work and whatever else is going on. It’s one of the things that I really like about working remotely. There’s a lot of flexibility. As long as the work is getting done, everybody’s happy.

Liam: Yeah. That’s a beautiful thing about remote work. With the right environment and the right level of trust and the right self-discipline, it’s all about outputs, product, and quality. In theory, if we could do it all in a minute and have the rest of the day free, that would be awesome.

Andy: That would be wonderful.

Liam: It doesn’t happen. But that level of trust and that level of flexibility is fantastic. So if we’re going to chat about favorite things, I feel like maybe we should talk a little bit about least favorite things or things that you avoid like the plague.

Andy: Wow, things that I avoid like the plague. That’s pretty much any sort of bureaucratic paperwork that needs to get dealt with, whether that’s dealing with expenses, dealing with HR, dealing with legal, or dealing with anything like that. If I have to open up our internal knowledge base and start reading through documentation on how to do something that’s fairly simple (or should be fairly simple), it’s probably the least favorite part of my day.

Liam: I struggle with that as well. I understand that. It can be tough. It’s really difficult to put those kind of product tasks that have to get done (or are important on some level) to put them in a way or in a context that makes people of at least it not look forward to them at least not try to drive around them at all costs. So I appreciate you’re transparency. So let me let me talk back just a little bit. You told us about how you got into WordPress. You told us what you’re doing now and how that really helped you achieve a level of success of loving what you do and getting paid for it. A big part of that is with your role with GoDaddy now. Talk us through a little bit if you would what you did before you got to the level of success you’re in now. What were the steps between say getting out of college with that degree in advertising, realizing that WordPress is going to come in handy. What happened between then and now?

Andy: For sure. So for me coming out of college it was an interesting thing because I didn’t know what I was going to do. I really enjoyed what I was doing in college. I enjoyed the program. But then that time came when I’m about to graduate and I have absolutely no plan. I don’t know where I’m going to work or what I’m going to be doing. It’s just, hey! I’m done. I did well, now what? So I ended up getting a job as an SEO specialist in a small digital marketing company back in Kingston Ontario. It’s where I went to school. That was my first taste of actually working in a corporate office environment. That was just a huge learning experience. I never dealt with working with a bunch of professionals before. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. I think I know what my job is but I’m not hundred percent sure. So from there it was a lot of fast moves to different companies. I was there for about a year and jumped over to another tech company. I moved from that tech company to a start up. I moved from that start up to another agency. In each case, it was just the building of a little bit more experience – a little bit more experience on top of what I already knew. It was going from learning about SEO at the first job, to the next job learning about corporate IT and that ecosystem, dealing with client and sales and marketing. Then it was going to a start environment and learning about agile and working with a team of engineers and the friction that sometimes exists between the engineering team and the marketing team…and so on. I just built, built, and built. It was those connections that I made along the way and keeping those connections as I moved on that would lead to the new opportunities. So much of what I was able to get done just came through staying in touch with people, annoying people, and being part of the local tech and WordPress community.

Liam: So that’s an interesting journey along the way and getting to where you are now. As you look back on that journey and maybe even as that journey continued into your current role, what’s been your biggest challenge to date and how have you either dealt with it or how are you dealing with it? How are you addressing it?

Andy: My biggest challenge is that I say yes to absolutely everything and I really shouldn’t. When people come to me with a problem or an idea of something to do, I immediately jump to thinking about how can we do this and not whether or not it should be done. I’m like how do we do this? One of the issues is that sometimes when people see that you’re able to get something done and you’re able to get something done quickly, you become the “go to” because they know you can do it. So what I’m trying to solve for now is how do set the boundaries after expectations have kind of already been set that you’re able to do something. Now you’re trying to put the brakes on and say actually, you know the thing that we were doing over the last several months you can’t do that anymore. They are like why can’t we do it? It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that we shouldn’t do it. Why shouldn’t we do it? It’s just I need to do other things. That’s really our conversation to have. It’s kind of like when I was doing client work; a client would come to me and say hey! Can we do this? I’d say yes, here’s how we do it. Great! Let’s do it. Then I am immediately kicking myself because I’m obviously saying yeah we can do it. How do we do it? I didn’t think we would actually do it. I was trying to think of a solution on the spot because I wanted to do beat this thing and win. But that doesn’t work in the long-term.

Tara: I can relate to that. Probably most of us can. It sounds to me like you are a very organized person who likes to get things done and you’re very committed to work. You work a lot. Talk a little bit about how you manage that (in terms of self-care). Do you have other things you do or if work is all that you do? How do you manage your lifestyle and I’m not going use that phrase that we hear all the time that has the word balance in it. How do you hold all of that together?

Andy: Lately, it’s just been getting out and hitting the road with road trips, getting out of the city and just physically removing myself from the space that means work. For me, it’s my home office. When I’m in here, I can’t help it; I’m in work mode even if I shouldn’t be working. When I have a screen open, something is going to be work-related on there. It’s a habit. So it’s getting out of the city. One of the beautiful things about living here in Ontario is that we have lots of country a very short drive away. So getting out and going to the lake, exploring some of the smaller towns and just getting away. It really helps. A change of pace is nice.

Tara: Do you unplug that whole time or do you bring your phone?

Andy: I do bring my phone. I am trying to force myself to turn it on airplane mode. I was on vacation over the last few weeks, and it was my first real vacation in a long time. I realized just how helpful airplane mode could be. I just turn it on, let it go and don’t worry about it. And have it as the default and turn it off. If you absolutely need to check email or you absolutely need to do something. But after a day or so, I just wasn’t thinking about it.

Liam: Yes, it’s a presence of mind. I turned off the little notifications on the iPhone, so I don’t see those little red circles anymore. Just not having those red circles staring at me like the red eye of sorrow every time. You will open me and see if anything you said was entertaining to anyone else. Yeah, that’s great advice, use airplane mode. I’m absolutely going to try that. Since we’re talking about advice, let me turn you to our next question which is what is the single most valuable piece of advice that you received and implemented in your life? That advice can be personal, professional or can be both. What is the single most valuable piece of advice that you’ve received and implemented?

Andy: There are two pieces. The first one is getting small wins. When I first moved to Toronto my first job here, being in the “big city” was you need to get some small wins under your belt. In order to make any progress, you need to be able to show that you can do what you say you can do. So breaking down the ambitious projects into smaller things and building on top of that. Again, that momentum. The second thing was more recent. That is learning how to delegate. It’s something I’m still trying to wrap my head around because I feel so inclined to just do something myself. If I know how to do it, I’m just going to do it. I feel like it’s the fastest and best way to do something. That doesn’t scale. So learning how to delegate, learning how to get other people to help and not take on all the responsibility on your own has been very helpful in tackling everyday tasks. Even stuff on a personal level, it there are things you can delegate to a system. I was using TripIt to plan our itinerary on vacation. It’s a huge help.

Liam: Yeah I love that. The small wins are very important. It sits very nicely with my own system of trying to convince people to not only get small wins but document them because you will forget about them. When you’re looking for some win, I never do anything that gets done right. Well, actually if you document them even in a Trello board, Word document or whatever. Then the delegate piece I think is even more important because it’s around trust. It’s having people and systems around you that you trust and learning to trust those people. It’s the trust that you built up and surrounded yourself with that’s really important.

Tara: And tools, delegating to tools.

Andy: Absolutely! TripIt. I just briefly mentioned it, but it’s something that I learned about through work, but now I use it for personal travel and everything as well. You just forward your emails on and it handles all the outlining of the itinerary. It’s just finding systems like that or looking into something like Zapier (if this then that) streamlining things you might do manually is such a huge help.

Liam: I like that a lot. Make everything work for you. A little bit of research and a little bit of trust goes a long way. Andy? Thank you so very much for joining us today. It’s been a real pleasure having you on the show, getting to know you, and learning a little bit about your story. Thanks much for joining us.

Andy: Thanks for having me.

Tara: Thanks, Andy. It’s great talking to you.

Andy: Thank you.

Liam: We’ll see you soon!