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.

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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!

Cami Kaos works at Automattic. She lives, works, and parents in the rainy city of Portland, Oregon.

WordPress Community Website | make.wordpress.org/community

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 11.

Liam: Hi! Welcome the hallway chats. I am Liam Dempsey.

Tara: I am Tara Claeys. Today we are very excited to have Cami Kaos with us. Cami lives, works, and parents in the rainy city of Portland, Oregon. She tells me that she walks around the streets wearing her WordPress t-shirt and carrying a banana. I am hoping she’ll tell us a little bit more about that. Cami works at Automattic, and she is a frequent sight at WordCamps. We’re really happy to have you with us today.

Cami: Hi!

Liam: Hi Cami. So we got the brief overview from Tara but tell us a little bit more about yourself. Tell us about life and fill in some of the gaps that we haven’t covered yet.

Cami: My name is Cami, which you already told everybody. I do work at Automattic, but I am leant out. Essentially, I was given to the open source project. So while I work for Automattic, I work on the open source WordPress project. Specifically in WordCamps and Meetups (primarily in WordCamps). I like to say that I organize the organizers. Because our organizers are all volunteers, I help them and give them the tools that they need to get their very hard volunteer work done.

Tara: We’re glad that you are there to help them with that because we had heard over and over again how important WordCamps are for people in this community. They are really life-changing. We have heard that more than one time. I had that experience myself. Tell us how you got involved and how you were introduced to WordPress. Tell us your WordPress story.

Cami: My WordPress origin story is not so different than a lot of people. In Portland Oregon, we have a very vibrant startup and technology scene. We have been long known for our camps. It was joked that if we could, we would have a camp camp because we had every sort of camp imaginable. A person who I worked with on a community blog many years ago decided to run a WordCamp. I never used WordPress. I was on blogger at the time. This was way long ago. It was the first year that WordCamps were happening outside of San Francisco. He needed a hand. He needed some volunteers that he could trust to help with the WordCamp. I said I have absolutely no idea. I’ve never used WordPress. He said it is better than what you are using so why don’t you move your blog over and see if you like it. Oh, by the way, I need you to come and help me anyway. So the night before the event I moved my blog over from blogger to a self-hosted site. I spent the entire next day handing out t-shirts, attending sessions, and helping people move their blogs over to WordPress.

Tara: Wow! That’s a really interesting way to be introduced it. I think I have not heard that before. After that WordCamp how did you progress with WordPress and Wordcamps?

Cami: I kept blogging. I was a prolific mommy blogger, and it wasn’t just about being a mommy. I had a site called Mommified Me. The intent of the language was to be like this is the mommified version of Cami. This is what happens when you take Cami and make her a mom. I think how it read to most people was this is a mommy blog, and I am mean, which is fine. It was what it was. It was a great source of confidence for me when I was a stay at home mom. Is there such a thing as just a stay at home mom? Every mom works so hard.

Liam: I go to work, so I don’t have to be a stay at home parent. There is no rest there. There is no break. There is no lunch break. It’s tough.

Cami: No. It’s 24/7. I was blogging, and I was podcasting. I had both of my sites on WordPress. I continued to volunteer and help organize WordCamps in Portland. Then life changes, and I made the decision to end my marriage. I had to go back to work and parent. I wound up parlaying my skills with WordPress into a full-time work from home job (but not for Automattic) that I currently do full-time from home. I did this for a meal planning service that ran on WordPress. The owner of it needed someone who was used WordPress and had some customer service skills (which in the end was not what he needed all). But with my skills with WordPress that I gained just from volunteering and blogging and seeing how other people used WordPress were invaluable. I worked for him for many years until I went to work for Automattic.

Tara: Wow! So your experience with WordPress wasn’t in building sites necessarily or building them for other people beyond a blog.

Cami: I did build sites for a few other people, but in an out-of-the-box way, you plug this in and make it work. It’s easy to do. I am by no means a developer or designer. I’m just person who likes to make things go on the Internet.

Tara: One thing we like to talk about on this show a lot is success. As you defined your path from being a blogger, a mom, all the pieces that you put together, and working for Automattic, how do you define success for yourself?

Cami: That is an emotional question for me. I am able to support myself, indulge myself, support my child and stay in the city that we love. To me, any success (whether professional or personal) comes down to what enables me to live my life. So I would say successful in my case would be stable, meaningful employment that allows me to be the best version of myself and the best parent that I can be. I don’t know if that’s too touchy-feely or that makes sense?

Liam: That is awesome!

Tara: Totally!

Liam: What I really like about it is what is the best version of myself or the best parent of myself. I’m clearly not saying that verbatim.

Cami: I have choked you up.

Liam: You are much more eloquent than I. That was really powerful. Thank you for sharing that.

Cami: Thanks.

Liam: So within this definition of success that is the very real and very genuine in that it plays out in a practical way around stability and being able to take care of yourself, to care for your daughter and your family and to be able to live where you want and afford yourself an indulgence from time-to-time, within that milieu, what is the single most important thing that you can do every day to either achieve or continue your success?

Cami: Hmmm….my work is emotional. It is very emotional in nature because I’m dealing with people all day-every day. It would be easy to say I’m dealing with events, or I’m dealing with a program, I’m dealing with software. At the heart of what I do, I’m dealing with people, working with people, and helping people. So the single most important thing that I can do is get a good nights sleep and take care of myself so that I can continue to take care of all of the people that touch my life, both in my private life at home and in my professional life within the WordCamp and event group community. Also, I’m an avid list maker.

Tara: I love your focus on care; self-care and how that relates to caring for others because it sounds like your job (because you do deal with people and people who are are also caring for others). People who are doing WordCamps are doing it out of an interest in bettering the community and being a better version of themselves as well. So you do have an emotional job. How do you manage all of those emotions and dealing with people? I think as someone who deals with clients; I often find the struggle to be patient and kind with people who are upset or have a lot of things on their mind is a challenge. They’re paying me to do that, so I kind of have to do that. But for you, these people are volunteers, and they haven’t hired you. How do you manage that relationship and all of those pieces?

Cami: That is an excellent question. That is a really great question. Before I answer it (as a means of stalling), I am going to say…

Liam: Well played! I’ll give you a little more time.

Cami: There is a ripple effect to everything that we do. I’m a sucker for those videos where you see one thing change. Like a man walks down the street and he is grumpy and grouchy. Everything just dies in his path, right? Everything becomes just about a bad day symphony. Then the next day he is walking down the street, and instead of frowning at someone or kicking a dog, he smiles and helps a duck out of the sewer grate. One thing changes and those positives actions can change the day of everyone around. I know that when I wake up grumpy and on the wrong side of the bed, I am better off taking 15 minutes to refresh myself and remind myself that all the people I’m dealing with are a) they are people and b) no matter what they’re doing, if we don’t have an agreement about what we’re discussing, they are coming at it from a genuine place. They are not coming at it as I’m going to ruin that person’s day. They’re coming at it from this is something that I need. We need to figure out a way to make everyone understand if we can’t make everyone happy. I think I lost the actual root of the question.

Tara: No, I think that answers it. It must be hard to always to remind yourself of that because in the heat of the moment when you are dealing with emails or emotional people I think part of what you do with WordCamps (or what WordCamp organizers do) is event planning. It’s like putting on your wedding. There’s a lot of balls in the air, and you have a lot of investment in what your expectations are and what other people’s expectations are. So I think your focus on paying attention that…

Cami: I sometimes fail at that. There are times when someone is trying to have a conversation with me, and I’ve been preoccupied and thought to myself I’ll just talk to them later, and it will be fine. I didn’t realize that it was something urgent. That person had something that was important to them that I should have heard. When I become aware of the situation, I will kick myself for months.

Tara: Yeah.

Cami: I’m thinking of one right now, and I’m just kicking myself.

Tara: Those regrets are hard. We all do things that we wish we could do over again. It sounds like you are really focused on being a better version of yourself and caring for others. This sounds like a job that’s not only good for you but that you are good for.

Cami: I hope so.

Tara: I think the community benefits from that. So that message is important to share.

Liam: So I want to go back to where you talk about when you find yourself waking up on the wrong side of the bed and spending that 15 minutes. I think that level of self-awareness and being mindful of where we are emotionally or psychologically on any given day (or spiritually on that day) taking the time to assess and go back and reset if you will whatever our process may be. It’s so important and so valuable. I love that you shared that with us because I think that’s a step that often times…I hold my own hand up on this….that we forget about doing…when dealing with people in a stressful situation as you were talking about. Being mindful when people are coming to you with their to do list version in their own mind and being mindful and respectful of that. That’s really powerful stuff. Thank you for sharing.

Cami: Thanks.

Liam: So let me let roll on then. Within this work environment where you’re supporting the organizers and the volunteers who bring WordCamps to places all over the world, I am going to ask you two questions so that you have a chance to think about what might be a more challenging aspect of those questions. So within that environment what’s your favorite thing to do at work every day? The second question is…

Cami: It sucks when I get to…

Liam: I was going to give you the second one so that you can have it in the back of your mind. This one can be either personal or professional. What’s the biggest challenge that you faced or are facing and how did you overcome it or how are you overcoming it?

Cami: I will give you a specific favorite thing and a little bit more general answer. My favorite work function that I perform is something that not just the paid staff does. It’s something that a lot of mentors for WordCamps also do. Shout out to our mentors because the Mentorship of WordCamps really does make everything possible. My favorite, absolute single item is something I call the pre-WordCamp prep pep talk. This is something that takes place with WordCamp organizers a few days before the event. It’s like a normal mentorship check in call, but it really is intended to go through and make sure that they know everything they need to know to feel prepared for the next day (or two days later depending on when in the lifecycle it happens). There is just something about that call that I find inspirational and joyous because they are almost always far more ready than they expect to be. It just gives me a great sense of pride to see them at the moment and to know that they’re going to pull off a great event. In general, the favorite part of my job is working with organizers.

Tara: I’m sure you must meet a lot of interesting people. Do you work with organizers all over the world?

Cami: Yes. Because of time-zone constraints and because we have folks in other time-zones now, I more and more work with people in North America, Central America, and South America. But there are folks who are not constrained by time-zones who I still get to work with on the other side of the world as well.

Tara: Wow! Can you put a number on this? How many WordCamps are you overseeing or coordinating?

Cami: We had more than a hundred WordCamps last year. We had a vast team of deputies and mentors and people wranglers that work with so many of them. So I don’t know. Personally, at some point everyone probably touches on almost every WordCamp in some little way, whether it’s to update their status within the WordCamp central site, whether it’s to pay a bill for them, give them a piece of advice, sign a contract, or give them support. I would say probably about 75 a year that I get to have some touch on.

Tara: Wow. You must know a lot of people in the WordPress world. That’s really neat. So I think part 2 of Liam’s question was talking about challenge. What is the biggest challenge that you have faced (not necessarily only in what you’re doing now) but sort of in your daily life or daily approach?

Cami: I think for me it’s all about balance. Balance is the hard part. I hear people talk about work life balance. I think it’s amazing if someone can achieve that. I really do. I often feel though that something is going to suffer, either I’m not paying attention to enough to my child, I’m not paying enough attention to my work, or I’m not paying enough attention to my partner. I struggle and I don’t anticipate that this is something that I will ever solve. I don’t think it’s a solvable puzzle. I think just continuing to be mindful and saying right now this really needs my attention. What can I shift? Within that same vein, I struggle to turn it off. I let one of the teams I’m working with right now know hey! I’m checking it right now, and I will check in before the end of the day. I’m going offline this weekend, so don’t have any emergencies, please. There is so much going on right now that this weekend I really need to be able to shut off. Being able to say without guilt that I’m going offline for two days and I can’t help you until I get back is a struggle for me. It’s something I know has to be done from time to time.

Liam: There’s that word again, mindful. I love it. Thanks for keeping using that. Let me ask you this if I can (around balance). I very much agree with you that it’s very much like being on a seesaw. It’s almost impossible to hold a seesaw perfectly level. We go up and down; we realize we’re falling we push ourselves back (hopefully not too hard). You talked about going offline as a mechanism or a tool if you will to help you reset and maintain balance. Do you have any other thoughts or tips on little techniques (whatever it may be) around maintaining that balance; or least maintaining an awareness about your sense of balance to know when you’re not at the level of equilibrium that you want?

Cami: I have a great tool for that. It’s not something that everyone can utilize. I have a teenage daughter who will walk in the room, and if I am on my computer when I shouldn’t be, she never hesitates to let me know that. That is a built-in tool for me. Yeah, Kay is not shy about saying hey! Work has had enough attention. Come pay attention to us now.

Tara: There’s nothing like your…

Cami: On the other hand, my partner is a workaholic. So Kay really has to be the one to say hey! No more. Work will always let me know when they need me. You have a thousand voices crying out we need you to do something!

Tara: Do you have backup? There is a team of you?

Cami. Yes. We have an entire team of folks who work on this all together. We collaborate fantastically. I am so fortunate. I have two teams. I have a team of my coworkers who are also working on the WordPress open-source project with WordCamps and Meetups. Then we also have the community team which is a team of folks (some of them are also paid by their companies to work on the project, and some of them are just outrageous amazing community volunteers). So I have backup most places.

Tara: Yeah. So if you take a weekend off, you know someone else is keeping an eye on things.

Cami: We are very much encouraged to take time off that we need. I think this kind of work lends itself to caretakers who are often better at taking care of other people and communities than they are at remembering to take care of themselves.

Tara: Yeah. It sounds like your daughter is keeping an eye on that. Is she interested in technology or WordPress at all?

Cami: (laughs) No, not really. She’s an amazing person. She would like to be a filmmaker (or something). That’s currently on the list; which is phenomenal. I fully encourage that. My working in technology and my partner working in startups that mainly focus on technology has soured her on that direction.

Tara: Yeah. My children are the same. It’s a turn off to see your parents. It’s so weird.

Cami: She thinks my job is really cool. She loves to tell all her friends about it, and her friends are like seriously? Does she work for WordPress? No. Nobody works for WordPress. They work ON WordPress. No. I’ve soured her on that. If it’s not Snapchat or Instagram…no.

Tara: Cami? Knowing WordCamps as intimately as you do, what advice do you give to people who have not been to WordCamp before? What would you tell them?

Cami: I would tell them to go with an open mind. You might walk into a WordCamp thinking these are the three sessions that I’m going to see and that’s all of what’s of value to me. You might walk into WordCamp thinking this is too much me. Why did I come here? If you’ve never been to a WordCamp before, you will likely walk in not knowing anybody. The WordPress community is so amazing, welcoming, and inclusive. WordCamps seem intimidating (they really can seem intimidating) but at their root or their heart from the very beginning, they are meant to be casual conferences that are organized by people who care within your community about WordPress. So just the fact that you are there and interested in your community means that you have things in common with other people. I find the more WordCamps I go to, often what I gain from those events, is talking to people not just hearing the talks. So there are times where I gain more from the hallway track then I do from sitting in sessions. Although, sessions are still awesome.

Tara: I agree.

Cami: Also close your phone. Close your laptop. Listen and talk to people. Meet the sponsors. Hang out with the volunteers.

Liam: Yeah. I love that last piece of advice. I was at WordCamp Baltimore last year (or the year before). I think it was two years ago. For whatever reason, I decided I’m not going to bring my laptop. I probably brought it, but I will leave it in my bag. I’m going to take notes with a pen and paper. I found that after the second or third talk that I had so many more notes, so many more takeaways, and so fewer retweets. I actually learned a lot more and really felt a much deeper connection with the material that was being presented. I think that’s great advice. Electronics are great but focus on the people.

Cami: We couldn’t do WordPress without them, but we can do WordCamp without them.

Liam: So as we come to the end of our conversation we have a question that we would like to ask you. What is the single most valuable piece of advice you have received and implemented either personally professionally?

Cami: Wow! That is a show stopper.

Liam: That is why we ask it at the end.

Cami: Yeah. You know? I feel more like a touchy-feely nature mama than I ever have in my life answering this. But the single best piece of advice I received has been applicable both to my professional and personal life. It was some version of being yourself. You can’t continue to pretend to be other things. You can’t be all things to all people. No matter what you do, you’re going to make someone happy. You are going to disappoint someone so just be true to who you are and take care of yourself. It has informed my work, it has informed my parenting, it has informed my romantic relationships, and it has informed my friendships.

Tara: I can see how you have woven that into your life just based on our short conversation today. It’s nice when people take advice and actually do take it to heart and use it in their lives. Thank you for sharing that with us. Cami? It’s been great having you on the show and getting to know you a little bit. Where can people find you?

Cami: The easiest place to find me is @CamiKaos on Twitter. CamiKaos.com is my blog.

Tara: Ok. Maybe people can keep an eye out for you at their local WordCamp.

Cami: I hope to see you there.

Tara: Yes. Thank you so much for joining us and for what you do for the WordPress community.

Cami: Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Liam: Absolutely. Thank you very much. We will see you soon.

Kyle Brown consults with business owners to help them learn how to use processes and software to become more efficient, scale, increase profits or just free up time so they have the freedom to do what they want. He is the founder of wpSaaS.net and blogs at kylembrown.com.

Blog | kylembrown.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 choice when it comes to hosting your WordPress site. Liquid Web is the Managed 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.

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Tara: And now, the conversation begins. This is episode 10.

Tara: Hey! Thanks for joining us today out here in the hallway.

Liam: We’re about to meet someone new. We’re pretty excited you’re here with us.

Tara: I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: This is Hallway Chats.

Liam: Together we’ll explore the stories of people in our community, stories of living and stories of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: Today’s show is brought to you in part by Liquidweb.

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

Tara: One of the things we love most is when your content goes viral Liquidweb doesn’t charge you more for a huge spike in traffic. They have transparent pricing and no surcharges.

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

Tara; I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re excited to have with us, Kyle Brown. Kyle consults with business owners to help them learn how to use processes and software to become more efficient, to scale, increase profits or just free up time so that they have the freedom to do what they want.

Kyle: Hi guys!

Liam: Hi Kyle! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us a little bit more about yourself. Where are you from? What do you do? What keeps you busy?

Kyle: Sure. As you guys stated, my name is Kyle Brown. I was born and raised in the Washington DC metropolitan area. The answer was pretty accurate. During the day, I spend most of my time consulting with government agencies, enterprise companies and some small businesses helping them with processes and ways to become more efficient in running their businesses from day to day.

Liam: That is awesome. So within that day-to-day search for efficiencies tell us about how you use WordPress and how you help your clients use and take advantage of WordPress.

Kyle: Ok. So, I maybe left out a little bit of what I do.

Liam: (laughs) Ok. Feel free to fill in the gaps.

Kyle: I will. As an entrepreneur, you are involved in a lot of things. Sometimes, probably too many things. The portion of my time that is the heaviest dedicated to consulting is mostly you know during the day. In the night and evenings (and sometimes during the day as time permits) I work very closely with the WordPress community. This started a few years back. I was using WordPress in the early days when it was a baby…when it had just been ported into becoming WordPress. I always used it as a user making webpages (that kind of thing). That was a while ago. In the last few years, I’ve watched this ecosystem kind of grow and evolve. There are businesses coming out of it. There are services coming out of it. There are all of these great things coming out of the WordPress community. So I started looking at opportunities there to apply some of the things that I’ve learned in the corporate world or the consulting world. One of the things that we started to do (we being my company) we put a couple of plugins out to the ecosystem. We also put together a service called WPSaaS. It’s a Tier 1 support outsourced for WordPress business owners. Essentially this means that we provide the Tier 1 support for plugin business owners so that they can spend that time developing their business, marketing their business and growing their business.

Tara: So you provide support for plugin developers (not for WordPress website builder clients)?

Kyle: Yes. Primarily, our clients are companies that have developed software or developed WordPress plugins that serve a purpose. Sometimes we support themes. Usually, what generally happens is they take care of their support (the developer themselves or the designer themselves) who owns the business, or they hire or go through the pain of hiring someone and have them do it. Well, we take all of that of a headache away from the business owner.

Liam: That’s interesting then. Do you do then take the plugin if you take on a new client do you take the plugin and go away and study it and figure out how it works? Do you get guidance from the developers to get a good understanding of what typical issues they will encounter so that you are able to provide that support?

Kyle: Absolutely! What we do here is no different than what I did in the in the corporate world. You sit down (each client is different), and you learn not only about the product itself. So we take the time to learn about the product…what it does, what it doesn’t do and what some of the issues are…anything the company/business owner has learned since they made the plugin available to the public. We take all of those things and we build systems around those things so that we can provide that same level of support that the business owner him or herself would support. Another thing that we do (which isn’t talked about much is the tone of the company, the vision of the company, the way the company thinks and how they present themselves to the public. We also study those things as well. , We interview the business owner and work with the business owner for a short period of time before my team would actually just take over…as much of it as the business owner would want us to take over.

Liam: That’s really interesting.

Tara: It seems important.

Liam: Yeah. It’s something I don’t think I would’ve thought of on the first round of doing that. It makes a lot of sense. It kind of leads us to the expression Kyle (speaking of vision and tone) one of the questions we like to talk about is a definition of success. What is your definition of success whether it’s personal or professional?

Kyle: That’s a very good question. I think about that quite frequently. Where I’m at now in my career and my life, success to me means having the freedom to do what you want to do and when you want to do it versus what you have to do. That is my idea of success.

Tara: Yeah. We hear that pretty frequently. Where would you say that you are on that journey?

Kyle: I’d say that I have put a significant number of hours in toward reaching that. I will say two things. One is that I’m always listening, always learning, and always trying new things. I don’t think that’s ever going to stop. That’s true for an entrepreneur and just in life in general. So a portion of it will always be happening. I feel as far as WordPress goes, WordPress is a very interesting (at least to me) is a very interesting ecosystem. Before WordPress, there has not been a lot of opportunities to get a product out into the world. I’ve tried several different things and failed with a lot of things. I’m actually very proud of those because I learned a tremendous amount from all of those failures. The thing where WordPress is unique to me is that it presents itself as this thing that you can find a place for yourself in and contribute. You can make the world a better place by contributing to the community while also potentially making a living. That’s something that is talked about a lot and discussed. Very rarely do you see it actually (at least in my experience) I’ve never really seen it manifested anywhere where I see it happening in this WordPress community. I say all that to say that I feel like I am very close to being at the place of success. I think that I am there. I am there already but you know we all as humans have this way of always thinking we need to do something else and always thinking that there is something else down the road. So I think that I am there already. WordPress is going to help keep me there. Maybe that’s the way I should put it.

Tara: Yeah. It sounds like you’ve put a lot of work and thought into it. How do you keep it all together? You started the other business while working another job. It must be hard at times, stressful and tiring. How do manage that?

Kyle: Before I started consulting (it’s only been about four years) before I started consulting I had a real traditional job working at Verizon Communications which may have heard of. I worked there for 15 years, and I learned a tremendous amount about business during my time there. However, I was also working 12 and 13 hour days on a regular basis, weekends, and holidays. Taking those weekends and holiday hours and those hours beyond eight, I made a commitment to myself that I would slice out just enough for consulting somewhere in the eight hour a day range and everything else that I had been giving to the corporation would then be given to my corporation. So it wasn’t really a hard transition for me to make because I had already been doing it. I’m sure many other people already are doing it in their day jobs anyway. I just got disciplined and took the time that I was given to the corporations and applied to my corporation.

Tara: That’s great.

Liam: Yeah I love that. That is awesome! Kyle? Within your definition of success and your focused eight hours a day, what is the one thing, the most important thing that you do every day to achieve that success or to maintain that success?

Kyle: Just continue to learn. Always be looking for opportunities to learn or improve. I think that’s probably the biggest thing. I try not to rest on any particular subject. If it appears that there’s something that is not working properly, then I’m looking to improve it if. If I feel like it can be improved any further than I’ll look for something else to learn about and improve on. You know? There was one other thing that I didn’t mention from the last question in terms of how I do all of these things at the same time.

Liam: Go ahead and fill that in. Please do.

Kyle: It’s very important, and it’s not just me. It’s a combination of the team that I’ve put together over time. It’s giving them processes or systems that they can follow and use in my absence so that the business runs on autopilot as much as it can with very little involvement from me. So the amount of time that I’m putting in now is very much focused on vision, leading, and objectives. The day-to-day details are handled by the great team that works for the company now. So it’s not just me. It’s me and those guys and gals.

Liam: I am sure your team is grateful for the shout out. I couldn’t agree with you more. Let me let me ask you what I think is a Tara question. You’ve talked about one the most important things that you can do to achieve success, and that is continually learning. When you discover something within your processes that isn’t where it needs to be, or the level of efficiency is wanting or you think you can deliver better quality. So you’ve learned there is a problem. How do you go about studying and addressing that? Where do you go to learn?

Kyle: That’s another good question. So the processes are just like software. They are always changing. They should grow as your business grows. They should be changed as your business changes. We keep them very lean. We keep them very agile. If we identify something that was working just fine yesterday and today for whatever reason is not longer as efficient as it was (which is a very common thing) we break the process down. We take a look at it. We do some analysis on it and determine how it should be handled going forward, and we make the changes. I think there’s a sort of a misconception about processes. I work with a lot of developers. I still work with a lot of developers every day. There’s a perception that processes are stiff and rigid and they’re very restrictive. They need to be flexible and be able to move which is what a lot of developers like to do. That’s just not true. It can be true in some instances, but that’s all driven by the leadership. If the leadership allows that to happen that’s on them. A process should be a just as flexible as the code, a plugin or any other software application. When it needs to be changed, there’s an exercise that everyone goes through as far as the software development cycle goes. You look at the requirements, you pivot, and you make adjustments and release new code. A process should follow the same exact principles. That’s what we try to do.

Tara: So along the same lines when talking about learning, one of the things that we hear a lot is that people rely a lot on the WordPress community and other communities to learn about new processes, to learn about what’s new, business techniques and code and all of those types of things. Can you talk a little bit about your interaction up to now with the WordPress community? Whether you’ve attended Meetups and WordCamps and whether you spoke at these types of events?

Kyle: Yeah, sure. As I mentioned before, I’ve always used WordPress (since 2.x). I don’t want to date myself too bad here, but I really don’t remember when it was…it was .x) I remember that. I just used it. About three years ago I was part of an online community of entrepreneurs that were interested in building startup tech companies. The recommendation was made to use WordPress. The WordPress community is a great place to go and cut your teeth and learn about the online software business. So I just started talking to people who were business owners already in that space. That actually just began as a journey. I found myself at a couple of conferences of accomplished business owners that is held in Arizona called PressNomics. I attended that and got to meet people and know people. I started to spend a lot more time talking to people online that were in the community, hanging out in the repository from time to time at .org and just looking at some of the challenges people were having. My focus was more on the customers who were using the products and not necessarily the developers. They just gave me a real sense of some of the needs in the community, where the community was in terms of being an open source community and where it was growing. The discussion of business just won’t stop coming up in the WordPress community. So from this, I’ve just gotten more involved. I’ve written a substantial amount of information on my blog about how to do certain things in WordPress. I like to focus on all the things that you can do in WordPress without paying the large amounts of money for off-the-shelf products that do the same thing. But you never hear about the WordPress version of it. Those are the kinds of things that can help people who may not have a budget or may be on a limited budget. They can achieve some of the same things that they would if they were unfamiliar with the WordPress community.

Liam: Kyle? I love that last bit where you talked about where you love to see people using WordPress in ways that are perhaps unconventional. I’m going to go ahead and put you on the spot. We haven’t talked about this yet. Ok. What’s been the most interesting, the most unique or the most “whoa!” That’s really cool use of some kind of WordPress product, feature, plugin where it wasn’t following what the plugin was originally designed for? Somebody took that plugin and did something really kind of unique and interesting with it?

Kyle: I’ve seen a lot of examples of that. I don’t want to be selfish and mention something that we actually did.

Liam: Go ahead.

Kyle: We have a product called WPdocs. It essentially leverages a lot of the functionality that is already in WordPress. It allows you to turn WordPress into a knowledge base plugin or a knowledge base application. Just like you would find with…I’ll use ZenDesk as an example…because I think a lot of people know what Zendesk is…or a help desk or HelpScout docs. They both have this knowledge base add-on component. It helps you build a knowledge base. WordPress lends itself perfectly to that because it’s all about categorizing and storing content that’s searchable. You login with your username and password and registration. All of that functionality is already there in WordPress. It was very easy to add a few things here and there to turn it into this knowledge base tool that is basically built on top WordPress.

Tara: That sounds really great. We’re going to send you our sponsorship package after the show.

Liam: (laughing) Nice one Tara! Kyle? Let me let me change gears on you just a little bit.

Kyle: Ok.

Liam: You talked about your career. You talked about building your own business. You shared with us your definition of success and the single most important thing that you do every day to achieve and continue to achieve that success. Can you share a little bit about what might have been or what is your biggest challenge? What was your biggest challenge and how did you address that? How are you currently working to address that?

Kyle: I think the biggest challenge that I’m having right now is time. Even with putting processes in place and people in place, there is just no substitute for time. There’s only so much that I can do as a founder with the limited number of hours that we have in a day. I am also a father and a husband. So a significant amount of my time goes to the family. I believe family is extremely important.

Liam: I agree.

Kyle: Yeah right? I didn’t always feel that way early in my career. So a lot of my time goes to the family. After I slice the pie up with all of the systems in place, the processes and all of talks and motivational speeches, there are still only 24 hours in a day. I think time is probably my biggest concern. The way I’m addressing that is just continuing to scale the business and grow the business. I repurpose the resources as they are made available and to add more people to the team who can help take on some of the tasks that I’m currently taking on.

Tara: That’s great. Kyle? Can you tell us something not work related about yourself? We know you have a family. Is there anything unique?

Kyle: There isn’t anything not work-related about me.

Tara: Just work. Gosh! That sounds familiar.

Liam: I don’t believe that for a second.

Kyle: Let me try…not work related… I’m a big fan of movies. I love what Netflix and Amazon are doing as far as the independent films. I think there’s a lot of unique content out there. I love to work with my hands, build things and do carpentry work.

Tara: That’s great! One of the great things about movies that I discovered is that you can watch them while doing certain types of work. You can multitask.

Kyle: Yes. Absolutely!

Liam: Always back to the work.

Tara: The taskmaster that I am. That’s when the binge Netflix comes into play.

Kyle: Listen. If you work hard, you have to play hard.

Tara: You are exactly right.

Kyle: I do love to read. Reading often takes me back towards work for whatever reason. So that’s why I mention reading.

Liam: Kyle? Let me ask you this. It’s kind of a question we like to put towards our guests. As you look back over career, life and what have you what is one piece of advice…the best piece of advice…whether it was personal, professional or maybe a combination of both? What, is the single biggest piece of advice you ever received followed and got the most value from?

Kyle: Wow! I talked to a lot of mentors. I’m always looking to talk people who have accomplished things that I want to accomplish. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback. One thing that probably jumps out at me the most when you asked me that question is to always keep your focus on your objectives. There’s going to be so many different things that happen. We’re living a life where you’re working 9 to 5. Taking care of your family can be complicated enough, but you know trying to start a business, grow the business and run the business brings on a whole other set of complications. It’s very important to just keep your eye on what your objectives are. That way with all of the noise that is going on around you will seem minor and temporary as long as you maintain focus on those objectives. If I could throw two of them in there…another one just came to mind.

Liam: Please do.

Tara: Sure.

Kyle: It’s a marathon. It’s not a race. It’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon. It may not happen tomorrow. It may not happen next year, but it will happen as long as you keep at it. Looking at things with that perspective definitely helped me. It helped me think of things differently than I had been. It helped with the strategy a lot.

Tara: It sounds like focusing on being patient when you’re in it for the long haul is hard to do. It’s important and is great advice.

Liam: I love that. Thank you.

Tara: Kyle? It’s been great to have you on the show. We’re going to wrap it up. We loved hearing about what you’re doing what you’ve done. We wish you the best with all the products that you are doing and your support system. Where can people find you?

Kyle: So I blog over at KyleMBrown.com. I’m @kylmBrown on Twitter.

Tara: Great. I’m sure people will look you up. We loved having you. Best Wishes!

Liam: Thanks, Kyle! I really appreciate you stopping by.

Kyle: Can I say one more shout out that I did not mention earlier?

Liam: I think you should.

Kyle: I spoke at the WordPress DC Meetup where I actually gave my first talk at a WordPress Meetup. It was in February. I definitely wanted to mention that.

Tara: Great. I hope to see you at more.

Liam: Thanks for having that Kyle. Thanks for your time. It was great chatting with you.

Kyle: Thanks for having me guys.

Liam: Have a great evening.

Amy Masson is a former teacher turned WordPress nerd. She owns a company, Sumy Designs, with her sister, Susan. As a kid, Amy was a member of a competitive jump rope team.

Website | sumydeisngs.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 episode is sponsored by Beaver Builder. Beaver Builder is a powerful and flexible website builder for WordPress. Whether you’re a beginner or a pro, building sites for yourself or for clients, you’re going to love the results with Beaver Builder! And now you can build websites even faster with the new extension, Beaver Themer. You can create theme parts, layouts and templates easily and even integrate with Advanced Custom Fields! Check out Beaver Builder and Beaver Themer at beaver.builders/hallwaychats

And now the conversation begins. This is episode 9.

Liam: Hi! This is Liam Dempsey. Welcome to Hallway Chats.

Tara: Hi! I’m Tara Claeys. We are excited to have with us Amy Masson of Sumy Designs. Amy’s a former teacher turned WordPress nerd. She loves Harry Potter, wine, and tacos.

Liam: Amy? How are you? Thanks for joining us today.

Amy: I’m great! Thanks for having me.

Liam: Excellent! So we know you’re Amy Masson. We know you like tacos and Harry Potter. I do too. We know you have a company called Sumi Designs but tell us a little bit more. Tell us about yourself, a little bit about life, about your company, and what you do.

Amy: We have been making websites now for over 11 years. We started in 2006. It kind of fell into our lap. I own it with my sister. One day I was getting my hair cut, and my hairstylist asked me if I would make her a website. I said ok. That’s really where it all started.

Liam: Did your hairstylist know at that point in time that you make websites or was that just a question out of the blue?

Amy: Well I was the computer technology teacher. I maintained the school website she knew that I did know how to do it even though I wasn’t teaching anymore. It was something that came up, and I said that I’d be happy to.

Liam: That is awesome! So you own the company with your sister. I have to ask is it your older sister, your younger sister, or your twin sister? What is it?

Amy: As I like to say, it’s my much older sister.

All: (laugh) ok.

Amy: We have a fun sibling rivalry. She is the graphic design portion, and I am the and website builder portion.

Liam: That’s awesome. That’s a nice fit.

Tara: I noticed that you called yourself the website builder portion. Most partnerships are a designer and a developer. Did you intentionally not use that word?

Amy: I did. I don’t think of myself as a developer, but people are mean. I don’t want to get into that debate with anybody. I do what I do. I make websites, and my clients are happy. So I’m not going to put a label on it. I am a WordPress nerd.

Tara: I like that.

Liam: I really like that. You make your own definition. I like that. You call yourself a WordPress nerd. Tell us a little bit about how you got into WordPress and how you use it now, day-to-day. You call yourself the website builder. What does that entail for you? What are your tools and how do you go about getting websites built?

Amy: We started in WordPress early. Our first site was in 2006. We started that because my husband had a blog. Then I had a blog where I wrote about my family. We used WordPress for that. Then I was doing one of my first websites for clients, which was for the local Democrat party in my tiny town. They wanted to have a blog, so I made it with WordPress. It was slow going to go to all WordPress but I was periodically doing WordPress then. As WordPress got bigger and I got better at it, I eventually switched to doing only WordPress.

Liam: That is very cool. I like that. Let’s talk a little bit about (if you wouldn’t mind) how you and your sister work together from a design versus development from a client’s interaction standpoint. Do you both jump in and chat with clients directly right from the start? Do you lead? Does she lead? Does it depend on the client? How does that all come together for you in a way that is productive and efficient (and fun)?

Amy: Well it starts with me. I’m the one that writes the proposals. I talk to the client initially and get everybody on board. I do all the onboarding. At that time, they get a questionnaire with information about their site and that goes to my sister Susan. She has all the information that I had previously talked to the client about. She usually follows up with her own questions about the site. Then she really takes over the whole design process. They do a back and forth. A lot of times she’ll send me things asking how does this look? What do you think of this? Can you make this happen (if it’s something we haven’t done before)? One of her favorite pastimes is making things that I’ve never done and making me figure out how to do it. At that point, once it’s done and the client has approved the design, she sends it all to me, and I start building it.

Liam: I like that she checks with you before she sends it to the client.

Amy: Sometimes.

Tara: That’s smart. You can’t overpromise that way. How did you guys figure out how to do this? When you decided to start working together, and you’ve been doing this a long time (it was back in 2006 when you started) so you could get the processes. Did you have a mentor for some kind of networking group?

Amy: No. I had been a teacher, and I knew how to make websites. I knew HTML and CSS. She worked as a graphic designer with a big book distributor. So she had started doing a Blogger blog with a bunch of running people. They all had their own little running blogs. She was mastheads for the blogs, but she didn’t know how to put them in the blogs. She would ask me to put them in for everybody. So we kind of both had been doing this a little bit. Then when I got asked to do this website (I’m not a designer I can’t visualize anything) she kind of took over that role of I am going to make it. You’re going to build it. It was all very part time and very hobby like. It definitely was not a full-time business in 2006.

Tara: So the client portion in terms of the questionnaire was that just kind of learn as you go? I guess the word now I hear in terms of website development is agile development where you iterate your process as you go through it. Is that how you describe the evolution of your process? Did you take a class? How did you know how to do all of that?

Amy: It’s learning as we go. I’ve researched online and see what other people are asking. I find the questions that are relevant to us. We aren’t building the same kind of website that everybody is building. I’m not taking on the giant $30,000 project. That’s not what we want to do. We want to work with small businesses. We’ve developed these questions that are relevant to the kind of businesses we work with that get us the answers that we need to be able to develop the website that’s going meet their needs and the needs of their customers.

Liam: So let me ask you this. As you were thinking about Amy going into business with your sister, did you talk about any definition of success and what the business should look like? How (or how not) does your definition of success line up with your sister? How did that all come together?

Amy: Not for a long time, no. Initially, when we started we did all that legal formalities, we incorporated, we had our EIN, and we had a bank account. But it in terms of anything else we just have no idea what we were doing for a really long time. She was still working her full-time gig. I was a stay-at-home mom. This was kind of something that rolled into my lap, and I thought let’s go with it. I didn’t even want it to be a full-time job for a number of years because my children were very small.

Liam: So how would you define success now if you didn’t define it together back then? How would you define it now?

Amy: Well now I define it as if something would happen to my husband I would still be able to do this and support my family. That was something that a long time ago would not have been the case. I probably would’ve had to go back to teaching. Now I’m at a place where I can support my family if something were to happen. I would be able to keep doing this. For me, that’s what success is. My sister was the same way. At some point along the way, she got divorced. We were both worried that she was going to have to go get a “real job” and not be able to do this together as much. We were able to able to turn it around so that we could make a real living from it.

Liam: That’s really neat. That’s really cool. So if sustainability is a big factor and the ability to cover the family bills (which is hugely important for just about everybody who hasn’t won the lottery), how do you and your sister go about getting new clients? What’s your business development process?

Amy: We have a pretty steady stream of inquiries that come in. We rank really well in Google, so we get a lot of inquiries. We have to qualify them and go through them and pick the ones that are good fits. Some months we have more than others. It’s always kind of a roller coaster; up and down but at this point, we’re pretty well placed to attract new people just from Google searches.

Tara: That’s interesting. I think a lot of the smaller agencies like yours and ours rely a lot on our local network. So we know the people that we’re building websites for and have either physical contact them with meetings, or they’re in our communities. We have at least met them. It sounds like a lot of your clients are (because you’re getting them through Google) are not people that you know or have a connection with. How does that work for you in terms of vetting them and building relationship?

Amy: It works great. I do have some local clients. My sister is not local. We’re both working remotely. We never really had a big local following. It’s always been across the country and across the world actually. The time zone thing can get tricky. I have few clients in Hawaii, so I send emails, and the next day I get the response. I can communicate through email, through Skype or through the phone, we can get all the information we need without having to meet in person.

Liam: Yeah that’s awesome. I have a fair amount of that with business in the UK. That time zone is a challenge but once you figure out the formula then you just kind of roll with it. Ok. I’ve got to get this to them by that time. Sometimes it works really well because they’ll send us things at the end of their day. We work on it. By the time they get into the office the next day, it’s all done. They’re like how did you get that done so fast? Well the time zone. That’s pretty neat.

Amy: Most of our clients know that we’re remote and not local them, so the time zone thing is something we work around. They’re usually pretty agreeable to doing a lot of emails to figure out what we need to chat about.

Liam: So that’s interesting. Let me ask you one kind of business logistics question. Because you’re working with clients all over (and even you sometimes said around the world) from a payment standpoint, do you accept credit cards? Is it PayPal? Is it just check and then you walk it into the bank? What works for you folks?

Amy: The vast majority of our clients pay us through credit card. We take credit cards right on our website. There’s a link that goes with every invoice. They just click the link and put in their card. Some people do send us checks, which is nice because there’s not credit card fees. The majority of people just pay online.

Liam: Cool! Thank you! So your sister does the design. You do the building and development. What would be (either historically or currently what you’re working on) what would be your favorite project? What’s something that excites you, geeks you out, where you just absolutely love it and had a great time with it, or something that you’re really enjoying it? Tell us about that.

Amy: My favorite thing is when my sister sends me the completed design and I get to take my WordPress blueprint where I start (my blank page) and make it look exactly like she made it. That is my favorite thing. It’s having that challenge to where you have to make it look just like this. I love spending time there and watching it come to life.

Tara: How does that work with interaction, animation, and that kind of thing? Does she indicate that to you or do you come up with that on your own? How do things work that way?

Amy: It’s a little bit of both. I know a lot of people are going to the design in the browser method. Because my sister’s the graphic designer and I’m not, that model just doesn’t work for us. She does it all in Photoshop, InDesign, or Illustrator (wherever she’s feeling the call that day). She will sometimes note you this ruler is going to be the color or we want a bounce here or can you make this a carousel? I’ll know how carousels are supposed to work but sometimes as I’m working on it, I’ll get an idea about functionality and how something could work better. I’ll just implement it and say you know tell me what you think of this? I can change it if it’s something you’re not happy with.

Liam: So let me ask you this. Do you think (in your process) that you treat your sister as a client if she’s sending you visuals? Ultimately, you have collectively your business client, but you then build it and go back to her and say how does this work? How does that work? Did you like it? Is that a mindset at all that you take? Not necessarily that she’s the boss of you kind of thing but how do you approach that mentally?

Amy: I definitely don’t think of her as a client or as someone I’m trying to please. I’m trying to duplicate what she did to make it functional. I will sometimes send it to her and ask does this look right? Am I missing anything? Is this what you had in mind for this feature? Sometimes I know I’ve got it exactly right and send it straight to the client and say here’s your preview. Take a look and let me know what I’m missing. I find that in the process of going from the flat design to the dynamic website that sometimes there needs to be adjustments and tweaks because things don’t look the same when they’re seeing it for the first time in their browser…the functionality versus the flat pdf file that they’ve been getting.

Liam: Cool. So you talked about success as the ability to have a sustainable business. You talked about your favorite thing is taking your sister’s visuals and converting that into a living breathing website. Thinking about what you like to do and your definition of success, if you had to narrow it down, what is the single most important thing that you can do any given day to help your business achieve that success?

Amy: Well for me really at the end of the day it’s that my clients are getting a website that meets the needs of their clients. So what I tell people is that I want to give you a website that you’re going to love. I want to give you website that your customers are going to love because that’s the people that are going be giving them their income at the end of the day. So we can have a return on investment if they spend money hiring me and then their customers, in that they get more customers or their customers are happier going to their call to action and submitting their forms… then I’ve done what I’m supposed to do. Then they are very happy.

Tara: Do you outsource anything? Do you do analytics or do you do that yourself? Do you work with any partners that provide writing, SEO or any of that?

Amy: We do actually have a team of people. I have two part-timers that do SEO and Internet marketing if we have anybody that wants Google Adwords or Internet marketing, I have several contractors. I have two copywriters and an advanced developer to do any JavaScript or something I just don’t know how to do I can go to him. I even have somebody to address server issues if somebody is having a problem with that. I can have Ed jump in and fix their server. I’ve got a lot of resources, and that really enables us to provide everything somebody needs without me having to learn how to do everything.

Tara: How did you find all those resources?

Amy: Well, some of them were friends that I trained. One of them is a neighbor where I happened to I know that he worked from home and he did systems admin. I was like hey! Do you want to help me out sometimes? Another developer friend had an advanced developer that she used, so she referred him. The copywriter is someone I actually knew from Twitter. The other one was a client.

Tara: Cool.

Liam: So I noticed when you were talking about this team of professionals that you have around you, you describe their roles and their tasks and what they do (except for the SysAdmin Ed). I imagine that Ed is your go to individual. Uh oh. Better get Ed. Is that correct?

Amy: Well you know in the past I have had…I have a dedicated server, and I used to offer web hosting to my clients. I don’t anymore, but I still have those old clients that I had then. It was a big thing to be hosting reseller when we started. It was a way to make money, but it got to be too much. My server has gone down, but I help. Why is this email not working? So I needed somebody to help me with that. So as I’ve gotten better hosting and better servers, I haven’t needed him as much. There have been days where I’ve been crying to him to please make things work because I’m going to die.

Liam: Yeah. Sysadmin is tricky at best. I try to steer clear of it. I wish I had an Ed sometimes. That would be very useful.

Amy: I can give you an Ed if you want one.

Liam: (laughing) I got out of hosting a long time ago. Fortunately, I don’t need Ed.

Amy: We don’t sell it anymore, but I have about 130 people that I have to maintain.

Tara: Wow! I’m just starting hosting for people maybe I should not do that.

Amy: I now do affiliate links, and I have a list of the companies I like. I tell my clients here are the ones I would recommend. Choose any of them. They will be great. I don’t offer it to new clients anymore because the possibility of having to buy a new server and have a second server and then maintaining two servers is just not something I want to do after having a couple of giant server issues. When your server goes down with 130 clients on it, then that’s 130 people calling you. I didn’t want to do anymore.

Tara: Yeah that sounds awful. Do you do your own billing?

Amy: Yes.

Tara: Well that also sounds like a billing nightmare.

Amy: Well usually for most of them, they are signing up for a recurring payment, or they pay annually. So it’s not a big deal.

Tara: Do you have maintenance plans for those clients too?

Amy: We do you offer maintenance plans now. We don’t offer to host to new clients, but we do have a variety of support plans that will do their updates, backup their site, and check site security.

Tara: Do you require that of your clients for websites that you built?

Amy: I would like to require it but if somebody asks me can I not do this? I will say yes, but I put in all my proposals there as part of the deal. I’m not hard-core about it.

Liam: Amy? Let me ask you about your involvement and engagement with your local WordPress community…to be part of what we’re doing here online. Tell us is a little bit about how you first became engaged or came across the WordPress community. How do you engage with it on an ongoing basis?

Amy: Well I am my local WordPress community. We have a strong tech community, and we have an open source community, but there is not really a big WordPress community. There is no WordPress Meetup where I live. Indiana is one of the few states that has never had a WordCamp.

Liam: That’s right! WordCamp Indianapolis. There was talk of it a few years ago.

Amy: There has been talk. And talk started coming again, and it still didn’t happen. I would love for there to be one. Indianapolis would be a great place to have one, but I’m too far way to really organize it. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. So my first experience (I had no idea there was even a WordPress community). I was on Twitter, and somebody talked about going to a conference. I said I want to go to a conference. I never get to go to a conference. So I googled WordPress conference, and I saw this thing called a WordCamp just a few weeks later in Las Vegas. I love Las Vegas, and I’m like…let’s got to Los Vegas. That was WordCamp that really changed everything about how our business was working.

Liam: That is awesome!

Amy: That was when I discovered the WordPress community. I didn’t know it existed before then. I was just in my own little hiding hole in my house, and I didn’t have any interaction with other people.

Liam: So how long was it between when you first started getting into WordPress as a business tool that made websites to selling websites and that trip to Las Vegas? Was it years? Was it months?

Amy: That was WordCamp Las Vegas 2013. We started in 2006, so it was quite a stretch.

Tara: Wow! So has your business changed as a result of that? The community resources? What would you say has changed?

Amy: You know everything. Meeting other people that do we did and being able to talk to them was a huge catalyst for us changing the way we did business. Just things that we picked up that I hadn’t thought about like how important blogging is. We hadn’t blogged in eight months, but then we started blogging. The next thing was we’re number one in Google. So I would never have started doing that if it hadn’t been to that conference. Just the way to do proposals and the way to talk to your clients…there were just so many little things that I picked up one at that one conference really changed everything about the success of our business.

Tara: I love to hear that. I had the same experience, and many people have. WordCamps can really change everything.

Liam: Absolutely!

Amy: Yep. I credit Las Vegas 2013 with turning us from a hobby business into a real business.

Liam: You’re one of the few people to come out of Las Vegas on any trip feeling it was a success. That is awesome. So you’ve been in business since 2006. It took a big bump in 2013 after Vegas. Over the life of your business, what has been the biggest challenge that either you personally (or you and your sister collectively) have had to address, are addressing, or had to overcome in the past? A big challenge?

Amy: Gosh that’s a hard question. I’m not even sure how to answer it. Working together, not arguing and agreeing on things because we definitely have very different aesthetics. Learning how to communicate without offending the other one and working together on these projects; that was a challenge. Then being able to delegate the tasks of running the business, I think was a big challenge. I’m the one doing the proposals and doing the books. She’s trusting me that I’m actually paying her well and that she will be getting paid. So all of that running of the business has been challenging. Learning how to deal with the difficult clients together has been challenging as well.

Liam: Ok. So that can definitely be a challenge; learning to communicate and learning to communicate when there’s that family history. I don’t mean that to be in a negative way. So let me ask you this then. This is one of our questions that we like to ask. What is the single most valuable advice, it can be either professional or personal (maybe both) that you have received and that you followed and implemented in your life or business?

Amy: Write a blog.

Liam: No hesitation there. That was big for you wasn’t it?

Amy: After we went to the Las Vegas WordCamp and there is a session on blogging where they threw out some statistics on websites that have active blogs. I felt well that’s interesting. I said to my sister why don’t we blog every day for a month? We’ll see what happens. So we came up with a very intricate strategic plan that involved her blogging on even-numbered days and me blogging on odd-numbered days. We just started on January 1st, and we did it every day for a month. Traffic on our site went up 165%.

Tara: Wow!

Liam: Wow! That is awesome.

Amy: We were like this really works. We just kept doing it. We don’t’ do it every single day anymore, but we still do it. With our ranking in Google I attribute 99% to blogging that we do.

Tara: Do you promote that on social media?

Amy: Yes we do. It is automatically posted to our Facebook page and Twitter. It’s not something where I spend a lot of time. I don’t do it repeatedly. I don’t strategize about what time. We just post it and put it out there. I don’t spend a lot of time on the blog post. I’ll churn them out in 20 or 30 minutes.

Tara: So are you optimizing them with Yoast or something like that? Is it just organic words or what is it you’re using for coming up in Google?

Amy: I’m not going to say we haven’t optimized in Yoast. Sometimes I do, especially if there’s something that lends itself to a good keyword. I will optimize it and use Yoast. For the majority of what I do, I’m just writing content that I think is going to be useful to somebody. It’s information that I learned or gleaned or figured out somehow, and I’ll share it. Sometimes it’s a tutorial on how to do something. Sometimes it’s about SEO. How to have a good landing page or how to have a great call to action, those kinds of things. That’s what I just share, and it’s organically has let us…I think the last time I checked… We were on page 1 for over 60 different terms. We were in the number one spot for 30.

Tara: Wow! That’s amazing. I met you a couple of years ago at WordCamp US. You told me that story, and I did a 30-day blogging challenge. I don’t think I had nearly that kind of results. You must have some great topics. Do you research them or is it something that you know off the top of your head? That’s a lot of information to have and share.

Amy: Sometimes. Sometimes its things I’ve learned over the years that work and don’t work. Sometimes I’ll struggle and have a blank and start looking on Twitter. What are people writing about? Do I have a take on it? Is there a controversy? You know at the time when we did this in 2013 it was also right when they had Google authorship which we implemented. That played a role in getting us we were. They dropped Google authorship, so people don’t have that anymore.

Tara: Congratulations on that success. That sounds excellent.

Liam: That is very cool.

Tara: Before we go Amy and wrap it up, we want to hear how people can find you in touch with you and see your blog. Can you let us know your website and social media?

Amy: Yeah. We’re at sumydesigns.com. You can Google Sumy Designs. We are number one for that. We’re on Twitter @sumydesigns. My personal twitter is @amymasson. Sumy Designs is a combination of my sister’s name and my name. She is Susan, and I am Amy. So we’re Sumy. My husband is an attorney, and he finds that highly amusing.

Tara: (laughing) That’s great.

Liam: I love that story. Thank you. Amy? It was a huge pleasure getting to know you and spending some time with you this afternoon. Thank you very much. We will see you at a WordCamp soon no doubt.

Tara: We’re looking forward to it.

Amy: I’ll be there.