Hallway Chats

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.

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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.

Anthony is a railroad futurist at GE transportation. So unless you think you’re on the wrong podcast, we are talking to a WordPress person. Anthony has a lot of experience with WordPress. He’s also a hot sauce enthusiast.

Website | http://adp.rocks/

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

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

Tara: I’m Tara Claeys. Today we have with us, Anthony Paul. I’m super excited to have Anthony here. Anthony is a railroad futurist at GE transportation. So unless you think you’re on the wrong podcast, we are talking to a WordPress person. Anthony has a lot of experience with WordPress. He’s also a hot sauce enthusiast. Welcome, Anthony!

Liam: Anthony? Greetings. Thanks for joining us today. I’m going to let Tara takeover in just a second, but I have to know…Siracha or not Siracha?

Anthony: I love Siracha, but it’s not hot enough.

Liam: Awesome!

Tara: What’s your favorite hot sauce?

Anthony: Ooh…I don’t know. I make my own hot sauce. I grow my own peppers, and I’ve had all of the hottest peppers around the world. The most unique sauce I guess is the sauce that I discovered at a burrito joint called Gator Stop. It has a hot sauce that has molasses and honey mustard, and they add things to it. It’s kind of like the A1 steak sauce of hot sauces. You can put it in anything. It’s just tastes right.

Liam: Ummm.

Tara: Do you like to get your eyes watering? Is it that kind of hot or do you have a line that you don’t cross?

Anthony: I do. I have tear gassed the house hot sauce. (all laugh)

Tara: You have to watch out. Just the vapors can cause you to cough and choke (from what my husband has made).

Anthony: Yeah.

Tara: So Anthony? Tell us a little more about what you do.

Anthony: I’m part of an innovation team at GE. We do software for the railroad industry. I’m a behavioral scientist, so I take everything that I learned through my years of agency work in figuring out what are the questions our clients want to ask but aren’t actually asking and all that experience of getting information out of people. I now go out into the field for the railroad industry, and I shadow and talk to railroad engineers. I figure out what are the problems that they are trying to solve day to day. I take that back to my team, and we come up with concepts for software to help them with their business problems.

Tara: So it’s not specifically something like app and website related but not necessarily WordPress related?

Anthony: Yeah. It’s web applications. As of six months ago, I’m not using WordPress professionally anymore other than the occasional freelance gig. But I’ve been using WordPress since Miles Davis 1.0. So 10 years prior to my current position, I was in the typical design agency world where I was using WordPress all the time.

Tara: Ok. How did you become a behaviorist, a specialist in the type of UX stuff that you are doing now?

Anthony: Well, I went to school for graphic design. I had to take general education coursework. So I started taking linguistic classes and classes on the way we perceive color, iconography, the cultural politeness theory (all kinds of odd things) I thought they sounded interesting Really, I took the classes for fun. I took so many of the psychology, linguistic and behavioral science classes that I almost had accidentally ended up a minor. Instead, I took the clever approach of sitting down with my advisor and having her replace a bunch of classes that I was supposed to take with the ones that I took for fun so I could finish up my design degree. I went into the field as a designer and developer. Because I was a designer and a developer I had to translate information between the design team and the development team. So there was a lot of empathy and understanding of the head-butting between those two teams. I also filled in kind of the gray area between the sales team and the customer. So going back to what I was talking about with the railroads, in the agency I saw a lot of that where we go into a new business meeting or a kick-off meeting with the customer. You see the finance person or the marketing person who is really head strong. They need a specific thing in their website. They need a specific feature or need it to do a specific thing, and they are not really saying why. It was my job as the person with intuition recognizing that they’re having a hard time verbalizing something and figuring out a way for them to verbalize that thing that they need…so we can get to the root of what is the problem that they are trying to solve and ultimately give them a better solution than the feature they were coming with.

Tara: That sounds really interesting. It actually sounds a little bit like a sales job. I think it would be really hard to convince a client or a designer that what they’re doing or what they think intuitively is the right thing to do is actually not what research shows as the best approach. Did you find yourself a lot of times in conflict with them on those things? Did you find you learned how to persuade them to the facts or the research?

Anthony: Yeah, a little bit of both. I was learning how to listen to people’s pain points and then learning how to persuade them through the use of their own language. You know, something like convincing somebody of a feature that needs to be in there. I would lean inherently on something like accessibility, usability or best practices. That doesn’t necessarily communicate that idea to that person, but you can take those ideas so that accessibility or usability can be reframed in the context of search engine optimization or better conversion. If you talk about that feature in that value language to the person that you’re talking to, then you have a stronger say.

Tara: Yeah, that’s an easier sell.

Anthony: It’s both the listening and the reframing.

Tara: That makes sense I think. Everybody is interested in making a website perform better. If you can prove to them that what you’re proposing will do that, it would be a lot easier. Sometimes I think that’s pretty hard to do. So you’ve switched from agency to client (being a client and doing very different kind of work in a lot of ways). In the two or more different capacities that you served in your career, one the things we like to talk about on this show is how you define success. Do you feel like you’re on a trajectory where you’re trying new things? How do you define success?

Anthony: I think the reason my career has been all over the place is because I define success as constantly enjoying what I’m doing. That’s going to be professionally and technically challenging myself; it’s going to be learning from others, and being able to share exciting things I’ve learned with others. In all of my workplaces, when I felt like it was time for me to leave, the number one reason I left was typically because I felt like I wasn’t being challenged enough or I wasn’t able to share with my team. It was one of those two (if not both). It was getting broken down at some point. So in that regard, my career has left me being a little bit of the belief in the wind, in that at any given moment I’m looking at what is it next that I want to be working on personally and professionally? I keep driving toward that. That’s how I accidentally ended up where I am professionally in what I do. I could have continued down the design track. Specifically, I could’ve continued down a development track or even within user experience (which is the domain I practice in mostly today). I could choose something hyper-specific like information architecture. I could certainly make a career of that. I like understanding all sides of a problem. I like at any given moment in time figuring out which of those fascinates me the most and pulling toward that.

Liam: Anthony? Your description of success about constantly enjoying what you’re doing is really fascinating to me. I was particularly intrigued when you talked about how a big part of your work satisfaction is learning and sharing. Then you went on to clarify that when you are ready to move on to a new job, position, or career phase (depending on what you’re after) you talk about either wanting more challenges or you’re running into an inability to share. I wonder if that inability to share…if you just shed a little bit light on that…is it kind of a communication breakdown in a work environment? Is it more of you struggling to engage in a meaningful way? How does that come about when you say it is an inability to share?

Liam: I get that. I understand that. Go ahead.

Anthony: In addition to the narrowing, it’s also that it’s not an inability to share, but perhaps I’ve already shared a whole lot. So I designers and developers start taking user centered approaches. I see they’ve started using specific tools regularly like wireframes or gathering peers around them and having sketching studios to ideate on something really quickly. When I start seeing those patterns have erupted and they are taking over an agency I don’t need to be the Moses or the Jesus (or whatever) who does that.

Liam: Your work is done there.

Anthony: Yeah. My work is done.

Liam: Cool. Thank you.

Tara: Anthony? Tell us a little bit about your involvement in the WordPress community. Even though you’re not necessarily working in it right now as you said, you’re involved in it. I met you here in DC. Now you’re in Chicago. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Anthony: Yeah. So today I still speak at WordCamps all the time. I’m usually organizing one or more WordCamps. Outside of WordCamps, there are a lot of other camps that I am also involved in (ex: UX camp). I try to get involved in the design and development communities much as possible… a lot of behavioral science Meetups…I attend a ton of Meetups. That’s basically my involvement right now. It’s continuing engagement with the community. Historically, when I moved to Chicago for this position, I was leaving the DC community, and I was one of the people who helped revitalize the DC WordPress community. I co-organized that for a good number of years along with Aaaron Jorbin and Andrew Nason and some people in the early years. But that has transitioned to another larger group. My activity today is a lot, speaking, organizing, and supporting in any way I can. I have a personal mantra that if I’m not speaking at a WordCamp, then I’m (at least) volunteering at it. Even when I’m speaking, I’m generally also volunteering. I find volunteering at a WordCamp to be (even more so than speaking) the best way to meet anybody at a WordCamp.

Liam: That is a great way to participate. I totally agree with that. Thank you by the way for all that you do to contribute to the community. It means a lot to have somebody like yourself who is actively engaged and supporting. Thank you.

Tara: Yes. You’ve been a great help to me and a lot of people in this community and at other WordCamps where you have spoken. What would you say (can you remember back to when you started in the WordPress community) and you’re giving back a lot right now. How did you get started in it? Was it something that you relied upon?

Anthony: Yeah. Before the WordPress community; in college, I was part of the design community. It was part of the student chapter of AIGA, IIDA, IDSA (a bunch of acronyms for specific industries). I found a lot of value at that point in being a student, and I was one of the officers. We would organize events for students to go into agency environments with hands-on learning. What are the problems that agencies are trying to solve? What are the types of projects they are working on? It gave us a really quick sense of what the workplace is like and what all the different types of work you can do with the same type of degree? As soon as I started my professional career in DC that was something that I really missed from school. It was something I yearned for in DC. I became involved in the DC PHP group first. It was a very small group. They had a Listserv. When I started involvement with that is as an email Listserv. There were events on occasion but mostly it was people sending bulk emails to people on this Listserv, and it was great! I was a young professional. I had questions that I didn’t know the answers to. I knew that when I posted questions out there I would get dozens of answers at all different levels. It didn’t seem like anybody was judging any questions. So when Meetup came along, it was kind of the big game changer. Suddenly, we had regularly scheduled meetings for PHP. So I started searching Meetups for anything I was interested in. WordPress was one of my favorite content management systems at the time. There was a DC group, and they were looking for a venue. The agency I was at…I actually convinced my bosses for us to start hosting the PHP group. As soon as the PHP group was there and they were meeting in my office space monthly (which was very convenient) because for me to go to the Meetup, all I did was walk from my desk to the other room. I could have them there every month. Then, I believe it was Andrew Nacin who reached out to me about the WordPress group, within a couple of months the PHP meeting in our space. They were looking to get the WordPress DC group started again. It had been sleeping for quite some time. I talked to my bosses, and they said yeah. We use WordPress all the time. We would love to have them. I was also involved in the Joomla community at the time, but there wasn’t a Meetup. There was just a camp. Then DC JQuery was the third that reached out and said hey! Can we host our Meetup in your space? So we created a kind of cool chasm community in DC where the PHP, WordPress, and JQuery (at the time were all very complementary to each other). What we did is put them three days in a row in our space. It was kind of a rolling beer stock because we didn’t do sponsorship. Everything we did was tell our members to bring your own. Someone would bring a six-pack or something that was nonalcoholic. You know, it was a blend, but we had a refrigerator in our agency. There were always leftovers from a previous Meetup that came in. So we have this rolling stock that was awesome because it wasn’t all of one thing. You had probably 30 different drinks to choose from.

Liam: That’s awesome.

Tara: That’s very smart.

Anthony: We got a lot of cross-pollination between members. That’s where I started meeting people and getting addicted to the community. It was probably not for the first six months or so before I started getting comfortable enough to do a lightning talk or to speak. Mostly, I just liked being there and shaking hands with people. I liked hearing unique perspectives and stories that the speakers and how they’re using WordPress or a specific coding library or the technique somehow that they may approach business problems.

Liam: Thank you. That was cool. I love the way that you wove together the different Meetup groups and focuses on development into one space and have them sharing beers and sodas together. That’s great! Let me back up and take a wider approach for a minute here and ask you to reflect back on your career and think about what’s been (if not the biggest) one of your biggest challenges professionally and whether or not if that’s…I had this type of design project to do, or maybe it’s a personal development thing you are addressing personally. What’s been one of your biggest challenges in your career and how did you address it? How are you addressing it if it’s ongoing?

Anthony: The biggest challenge…it’s going to be a blend of imposter syndrome and FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). The biggest challenge, specifically when you’re in the technical space (it’s in the design and UX space as well). Particularly in the technical space (like development), everything is always new. You could you take and 8-week nonstop training boot camp with the top CTOs from Facebook and Twitter (whoever) if you wanted to enter into the industry and six months later the stuff that you learned would already be old. So there is this persistent anxiety that what you know is not new enough. So somebody was telling me about a talk that they are putting together for WordCamp. Actually, I think it might be Tara.

Tara: (laughs) Thanks for that plug.

Anthony: Yeah. That was an accident. I was thinking of the abstract subject and what I liked in abstract was basically giving you permission to not move toward the shiny thing. There is this persistent feeling that you always need to be checking out latest of this and the latest of that. A lot of times we make the mistake of not rechecking ourselves and asking is the thing that I’m using right now going to solve this business problem? If it is, then it is the right solution for the problem that you’re solving right now. Sure, some stuff has shelf life but again even if you were to somehow squeeze in training for yourself and the latest thing and turn around a solution that is good enough and solves the problem, ultimately, (again) six months from now, it’s going to be as out of date as something else. I think that’s something as professionals in our industry I’m probably not the only person who is always struggling with that. That’s the anxiety of keeping up. That’s kind of why for my own professional goal I think Twitter is a good metaphor here. When I first got on Twitter, it stressed me out because the number of tweets that were flying by me every time I would open up my app and had 300 unread tweets I would try and read every single tweet.

Tara: Gosh! How do you deal with Slack?

Anthony: Yeah. Exactly. So I would read…I was used to things like Instant Messaging. I was used to things like email. I was trying to keep up with every single tweet before I came back. Then I found it so arduous with trying to keep up all the tweets that eventually I said I’m either going to delete Twitter and not use it anymore, or I’m going to accept the fact that I cannot read all the tweets. I would just actually turn off notifications on my phone for Twitter. I don’t have any badge markers or anything. Whenever I have a minute I will look at it, read a few of the latest tweets, I’ll look at some funny GIFS, retweet a couple of things, and then I’ll get back to my day. That’s eventually how I had to arrive at my career as well. There is no way I’m going to keep up with all the things. At any point that I feel like I’m facing a challenge that I can’t overcome and I need to go out and find something to solve that challenge, I will do it. If the tools work that I have in solving problems that I solve today, I’m perfectly fine with that even though I know there are probably better ways of doing things out there. That kind of piecemeal learning is what has led me to constantly be changing direction, but it’s also brought a lot more sanity and balance into my life.

Tara: Yeah. I think that’s an excellent point. Many of us feel that way. I think it’s hard when you’re in an open source community where people are so willing and happy to share all the time. They’re always sharing their best discovery and the best new way of doing something. It makes you always question whether what you’re doing is the best way to do it. I think that’s definitely something that many of us feel. Along those lines, I think what you’re sharing in terms of the advice on how to avoid that is really powerful and helpful. But something that we like to ask everyone on the show is about advice that you’ve received and what you would say would be the most valuable piece of advice that you’ve ever received in your professional or your personal life?

Anthony: This is a tough one. It was always harsh advice. I had a favorite design professor in college. I have a lot of one-liners from him that I’ve retained with me all the time. The first one was on the first day of class, and he stated over and over I’m not your therapist. It was don’t tell me that you did your homework because of whatever you know. Or, I’m sorry if your mother died and you missed class. Within reason there, he wasn’t heartless. There were things you could go to him for. Ultimately, his point was he didn’t want to bunch of wet noodles in his class and having excuses for not doing his projects. He was likening his class to the professional world where there are hard days and some days you just need to show up. You need to turn in that thing and finish that project. That was one of the life lessons that I got from him. I actually really liked that he started off the class that way because he basically invited anybody in the class (who didn’t want to take the class) to drop out. Then the next day, he’s like now we get into the fun stuff.

Liam: I love that. I love the candidness. This is real. Get used to it. It’s the way to get it done. It reminds me of a phrase that I’ve heard from my wife’s side of the family. I think it was her grandmother who said (talking about your deadlines and getting things done in time) if it’s worth doing well, it’s worth doing badly. Just get it done. (laughs) Not that badly is the target but that sense of just get it done. Speaking of just getting it done, we are out of time today Anthony. So on behalf of Tara, I just want to say thank you so much for joining us. It’s a real privilege for both of us to have on. You keep a very busy schedule so thank you very much for your time.

Anthony: Yeah, it was a pleasure.

Tara: Where can people reach you, Anthony? How can people find you if you’re not at WordCamp?

Anthony: You can Google me with my middle initial included. Anthony D Paul. You’ll get 10,000 Google search results that are only me.

Tara: Do you have any upcoming WordCamps?

Anthony: Well the inaugural WordCamp DC is happening this summer in the middle of July. It’s actually my birthday weekend, so I consider it an elongated birthday celebration. My next WordCamp speaking will be at the end of this month at WordCamp Halifax. That is also the inaugural WordCamp Halifax.

Tara: Great.

Liam: That is awesome.

Tara: Thanks again for being us and I look forward to seeing you soon Anthony!

Beth is a Washington, DC based web developer, digital strategist and activist. She builds websites and organizes around open source communities, feminist issues and the intersection of technology and empowerment.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience 

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

Liam: I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Beth Soderberg. Beth is a Washington DC based web developer, digital strategist and activist. She builds websites and organizes around open source communities, feminist issues and the intersection of technology and empowerment. Beth? Hello!

Beth: Hello!

Tara: Hi Beth! Welcome!

Beth: It’s great to be here.

Tara: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself beyond what Liam just described?

Beth: Sure. I build websites for a living. I run my own small consultancy, and I work primarily with nonprofits, activist groups of various kinds and random small businesses as well as some larger subcontracting type clients. So day-by-day I’m building websites. I try to bring the work that I’m doing with building websites or supporting websites back to issues that I care about, especially with organizations that really need technical support. They can trust and rely on me (which is rare to find especially for a small nonprofit working an issue that is much bigger than their bandwidth).

Liam: That’s a great introduction. Thank you Beth. If you’re making websites and you’re on our show, are you using WordPress? Tell us a little bit about how you first got into WordPress. What impressed you about it? What drew you to it?

Beth: I was dragged to WordCamp Boston 2010 which was in January. It was a very cold experience. I knew nothing about WordPress. I just knew that my mentor at work had managed to convince our boss to pay for it to get me to go.

Liam: That always makes the trip seem nicer.

Beth: Yeah. I was working at a small nonprofit that was focused on women’s rights issues. We didn’t have money for this type of thing. So the fact that there was a moment in time where it was somehow approved for me to go to something like this…it didn’t matter what it was… I was going. So I went. I had been a writer. I was in charge of an online daily newswire about feminist news. The argument for me to go to the conference was to learn to be a better digital editor and strategist. I went to the conference. I went to some of the blogging sessions. I had already been working professionally online as a media producer for several years at this point. I got bored in those sessions. I started to just go to stuff I didn’t understand. That was the first time I was like huh! It’s interesting how this works beyond what I can put into it in terms of words. From there it was sort of a slow evolution into deciding that I liked writing code more than I like writing words. Now I’m back at a place that I realize I like writing both words and code. That’s been an interesting sort of full circle.

Liam: Talk to us about that circle of the evolution of writer to developer. I started as a writer myself and did not go code. I went with more design and writing (some code but no parts developer). Maybe you could talk us through your own journey?

Beth: I was an accidental writer. Writing is by far the thing I am best at. I always resisted it because I didn’t take English in college for example. I had placed out of it because I had 5s on the two English AP exams. I’m terrible at grammar. I’m awful at grammar. I can’t tell you what an adverb is still. But I’ve always been a very prolific reader. As a teenager…where I grew up there is a small-town library where I still know the librarians…this is how much I went as a child.

Liam: That’s awesome!

Beth: Yeah. I can walk in 25 years later and say oh! It’s great to see you! How have you been? But as a young adult, the rule in my family with the library was that you could take out as many books as you carry. So I routinely was taking out a 2-foot high stack of books. I decided to read through the young adult section in alphabetical order. So I started the top left of shelf and I read. I skipped books that I thought were not interesting or too hokey because young adult novels can be that way. I read from the authors that started with A to the authors that started with Z. I finished the shelf. It was one of my life goals as a teenager.

Liam: Can I ask how long that took?

Beth: Um…a few years, 2 or 3 years.

Liam: It’s still hugely impressive. Wow!

Beth: I’m a fast reader. I love to read, and I think I just absorbed grammar by reading. For those of you who heard me talk about learning to code (which is something I talk about a lot), I’m also terrible at grammar in code. I’m horrible. I can’t describe syntax at all. I have to really focus on it in order to explain to you what’s happening. Part of why try I try to teach it is because it helps me internalize it.

Tara: Right. Do you learn through books as well? Did you learn to code by reading?

Beth: Yeah. I am 100% a book learner. I have a huge bookshelf full of all sorts of web development books, and the stuff that I am best at is the stuff that comes from the books that I’ve read like 3 or 4 times each. When I was learning CSS, I had this book. I would go out during my lunch hour and sit on a bench in the park. I just read that CSS book cover to cover several times. Eventually, it clicked. For me with learning things, it’s just exposure. Once I have exposure to something eventually there’s something in my brain that comes together. All of a sudden it makes sense. Because I’ve have internalized the syntax, I’ve never needed a person to explain the nuances of the syntax in the moment that it clicks. It might happen a few years later.

Tara: Do you have to practice it as well? I would think just reading it without doing it would be hard…for me anyway to learn. I can sit watch a video but if it doesn’t have an exercise file where I can actually go do it, makes it harder to learn. I’m fascinated by your ability to read a book a few times. That’s just awesome!

Beth: I don’t know. For me, it plays to how I learn. I have a very hard time paying attention in general in the world. When I try to do a tutorial online…I tried Code Academy a few times to learn JavaScript…ugh…I can’t. It’s not that it’s bad in general; it’s bad for me. It’s a terrible thing for me to sit there and try to pay attention long enough to the little video to get anything out of it. It’s part of why I like going to conferences so much. When I’m sitting, and someone’s talking it’s rude to not pay attention. When I’m watching the same talk on my computer, I will play games on my computer.

Tara: (laughing) So with books you can focus?

Beth: Yeah with books I can focus. It’s usually because I’m trying to do something that I’m reading a book, right? I got a job where I needed to use SaaS. I had never used SaaS before. I got a little pink book that Dan Cederholm wrote. I read the SaaS book on the metro every day for 2 or 3 weeks. Then I started the new job where I needed to use the technology. I knew enough about where things were in the book to look up what I needed in the moment.

Tara: I can see that.

Beth: I kind of needed it. It’s an as needed thing. In the beginning it was totally… I don’t know anything about any of this. I need to read all the things. Now it is I know I’m going to have to do this thing, so I study for the thing rather than the general.

Beth: In the beginning, when I first decided this might be a good idea it was 2010. The recession was raging. I was 23 or 24 maybe. I could not get a new job. I had been trying to get a new job for at least a year. I knew I didn’t want to go back to school because I could see the glut happening in all of the people going back to school. I was terrified that I would go and not be able to find a job later. So I knew I had to stay in my job. Originally, learning more about technology was simply a way to get a better job. That was it. I was an executive assistant. I had this writing capability, but no one really cared in the job market at the time. My academic credentials definitely were not helpful. I have a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies and another bachelor’s degree in psychology. So no one wanted to hire me. I saw technology as a way to grow my resume and get a Digital Communications job rather than the pure writing job… sort of admin assistant job that I had. I continued to fail at getting jobs for the next year or so. During that time the person who managed the website at the non-profit quit. She pulled me into the server room that we had (which was literally a closet in the dark). She said, “Beth you’ve got to take my job.” The first thing I said was I couldn’t. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know how to do your job. She said, “it doesn’t matter, you can learn.” “I know they want to keep you.” So I moved to that job. In that job is where I was reading the books on the bench. I started to figure out I liked it. I originally hadn’t planned to stay in that job very long. I planned to stay in it long enough to get another job. I stayed in that job for three years. By the time I left, I had gone to school at night. I did a web design program at the Corcoran, which is no longer there (The Corcoran College of Art and Design for folks who are not local to DC). I had been starting to rebuild that organization’s websites. I had incredible imposter syndrome. I had no idea how good or bad I was anything because I had no frame of reference. I only have my mentor who was so much better at everything than I was, right? I just thought I was terrible. Then I took this class at the Corcoran. It was a bunch of development classes and web development. I remember walking in, and I was terrified. This was the litmus test of how good am I? I regularly was debating the professor about the right way to do things. The final project was to build a very basic WordPress site. It was super basic. I went to him at the end of the class and said this is going to take me 30 minutes. Can I do something else? I want to actually learn from this experience, so I built my first sort of robust child theme as the final project for that class. I look at that now, and it honestly wasn’t the best code I’ve written. But when you looked at it on the front end and the ideas behind it, it was pretty extensible. It was beyond what that class was meant to do. That was a key moment for me.

Tara: Was the class worth it that case? It sounds like you had to teach yourself and go beyond. Would you do that again?

Beth: It was worth it for two reasons. 1) I gained a lot of confidence from that experience. I realized I wasn’t as bad as I thought I was. 2) I needed that class. It was required to get the certificate. My resume up unto that point was feminism. My mentor (this is something that was incredibly valuable) we changed my title to web developer. This was a generous term for what I was at that time. She knew what my goals were. She knew what I was trying to do. So the combination of changing my title and getting that certificate is what enabled me to get a job doing web development full time. Then I worked at this PR firm. I applied to the job offer off of LinkedIn. It was an ad. I ended up on this little development team with some wonderful people (entirely Drupal developers). I thought it would make me a better developer to learn Drupal. It totally did. I’m still more of a fan of WordPress then Drupal, but I do work in both still. Again, about six months into me being there my boss pulled me aside and was like I thought you were going to require a lot of handholding. I thought you were a beginner because you presented yourself as a beginner in your interview and you’re not. I was like, well that’s good. I gained a lot of confidence in that job. I built some really cool things in that job. It was just a great learning experience. I worked with an awesome team, and I loved my teammates. The only reason I really left is because the focus of that business changed. They weren’t doing web development anymore. So the amount of work that we had as a team lessened. You could see the writing on the wall. One of my teammates left, and we didn’t replace him. I was like I’ve got to get out. There’s a certain point where I am going to leave here whether it’s of my own volition or not. So I got another web development job which further served to legitimize me. That’s where I learned SaaS. While at that job the nonprofit that I used to work for started to fall apart. They called me one night. They got hacked pretty badly. There was an animated GIF of hugging kittens when you went to that newswire that I used to write. They called at 2 o’clock on a Tuesday afternoon. I said I’m at work. I can’t you can’t help you right now. Well, what do we do? I told them who to call and what to say and what to do. They said what if we mess it up? I was like ok. I’ll be there in like 3 hours. I can’t just drop everything right now. I am at work. I don’t work for you. I haven’t worked for you for years. So I went that night and was there until 1:00 a.m. I had to hack back into all of the systems. I didn’t have any passwords word or credentials, but I knew how everything was set up. We fixed it. Then you know that’s sort of what started the trend for me coming back to where I am now. I still work for that nonprofit. I ironically sit at a desk, which is in the same location where I was when I left. I’m not there every day. They’re not my only client. It was a case where sort of the stars aligned. I have to thank those hackers for giving me the opportunity to reevaluate a little bit…what I was doing and how I was doing it. I learned from the whole experience that it was just so much more meaningful to me; to do that kind of work than the other that I was doing the stuff I was doing. Even though the other kind of stuff I was doing from a technical perspective was pretty cool and pretty visually awesome. You know it is more meaningful to me to actually build something that’s not perfect, but that is really serving a cause. It is more important than building the most beautiful perfect website. I try to build beautiful websites for a cause though.

Liam: That’s really powerful. I love that as your career developed you learned not to just write words, but code and you’re really excited by and don’t fall into the code. You learned that over the course of time you continue to self-evaluate and eventually realized or discovered or discerned it’s not just the code or the writing, but it’s the larger cause that it’s connected to. That’s really powerful. I’d like to use that setting to ask you to share your definition of success.

Beth: Oh. So, I had to write this down because this was one of the most existential questions you asked in those pre-interview notes. So I thought about it for a little bit. I think for me the ultimate feeling of being successful has a lot to do with flow. So that feeling of being really engaged in what you’re doing and just having that focus on it. Probably for me since the focus is an elusive thing usually, I think that’s part of why I find that to be such a measure. But I also think it’s a sign that you’re doing something that you’re skilled at and that you’re creating something that is really going to be of value. So in terms of a “feeling” I think that’s usually my feeling of success. In practical terms you know I’m all about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. For those of you who are not familiar with psychology that means things like food, housing, and all of that taken care of first. Then you can build on that. Building on that usually looks like spending time with my friends and family and having more of a balance and producing things that I think are really good but also have some sort of practical meaning. I built a website once that was a really high profile website in terms of clients that I ever built. It had a forum on it. I went to the website about a year later, and I knew from day one…I tried to talk them out of the forum in the UX process. They insisted on this forum. I just knew they were never to use this website. So that was a super high-profile client. Did it really matter? No, it didn’t. No one cares. No one used it.

Tara: That’s interesting. Thank you for taking this question seriously and giving it so much thought. We appreciate that. It’s one of the things we like to talk about, the idea of success and also where you find yourself on that journey. So you’ve made yourself. I would say that you’ve taught yourself so much. I’m really inspired and impressed by what you’ve managed to do with your own brain and books and school. I also really liked how talked about your journey through imposter syndrome and how you sold yourself short at times and discovered that (as it was pointed out to you) you are farther along than you thought you were. That’s excellent. So with all that in mind and your definition of success, where do you find yourself in that…in this new point of your career?

Beth: I think that it is a mistake to view success as a destination. People who have a goal, work towards the goal and reach the goal as the definition of success. They may reach that. I feel that they usually are standing around and looking around and going ok. Now what? One of the activists that I work with who was a leader in women’s rights in the 70s and 80s (she still is now but not quite as public) says all time…I’ve really internalized it. She means it in terms of activist strategy, but I think it applies to life strategy too. You need just to monitor and adjust, right? If the goal is getting 50% representation in a legislative body… you’ve gone from 2% to 10% to 18%. Then you go down to 10%. The important part there is what happened to 18 and back to 10. What you need to adjust to get back to 18? I think that I’ve usually tried to (with my goals and what I‘m trying to do) is I always have a goal. I’m okay with changing the goal. I refuse to ignore the experience that I have in the present, in lieu of focusing on the goal. Does that make sense?

Liam: Yeah. Absolutely. Beth? As you monitor and adjust your own definition of success and your measure of success what is the single most important thing you do every day to achieve and maintain that success (that flow you talked about)?

Beth: I think the thing I try to do day-to-day that helps me be successful is to control my list of what I’m supposed to do so that I don’t lose things. One of the things that I have as an intrinsic value regarding how I relate to other people. That is to try to always do what I say that I am going to do. I’m not always successful, but when I’m not successful I feel awful. I really try not to promise things I can’t do. Because I have a life that involves multiple clients who have no idea what the others are doing (open source projects that are totally unrelated to everything else) that can be totally volatile and time-consuming. All of that… my family…everything. What I tend to do is every night before I go to bed I sort of reevaluate what needs to happen. I make a list for the next day. I don’t let myself have more than 3 to 5 huge priority tasks per day. But everything else goes on the list too. Writing an email and things as small as text this person about whatever goes on the list. It helps me be more attentive to what I actually need to do…all those little pieces that are important to get the end goal done…whatever the goal is that moment. Every Sunday night staff meeting with myself.

Tara: I like that.

Beth: So once a month I go through my work and through my goals for the month (in reference to how my goals work for the year). I make goals that are yearly into five categories. This all comes from a course I took from a woman whose name is April Bowles-Olin. She runs a business for women creative entrepreneurs called Blacksburg Belle. I’ve never met her in person, but I’ve been following her for probably five years. I have found a lot of community and inspiration from the women entrepreneur creative space. It tends to be friendlier to women then tech communities. I took this course from her years ago that was about productivity. Her basic framework for how she sets goals and reevaluates is what I still follow. I’ve adjusted it over time, but it basically dials down to the fact that I have these huge goals for the year. I break them down so that every day I’m knocking off tiny pieces of them.

Tara: I like the goal setting. When you are setting these goals and managing your time (which I know we all struggle with) what would you say is your biggest challenge in your business or your daily life?

Beth: Intrusion of emergencies.

Tara: I call them up moles…like whack a mole.

Beth: Yeah. Particularly when you’re building websites and maintaining websites also when you’re working with clients who are dealing with politics…I rebuilt a website over the weekend that is going to launch hopefully today… it’s not done yet. It needs to be done because of what’s happening in Congress. So it got bumped up the priority scale because of the larger world and the needs of my client. It totally disrupted what I was planning to do last week and this weekend. But I make decisions all the time about whether that’s ok or not.

Liam: It probably relates back to your connection to causes. It’s not just that type of work making it a sideline.

Beth: I’ve definitely had moments with clients where I looked at them and said “Look. This is just crazy!” No one other than me would be willing to do this with you right now. So yes. I will stay up all night with you, and I’ll finish this thing, but you need to recognize that this is extraordinary. It’s not normal and not how we’re going to do every project.

Tara: That’s hard once you set that precedent to have that expectation of yourself or of your clients to draw the line or make priorities. How do you how you manage that in terms of how you charge as an entrepreneur and a businessperson? Do you put a premium on projects that are rushed like that? Even when you’re working for causes, their budgets are probably limited. You must face some challenges with that.

Beth: I don’t actually. I do it, but I treat it as though you were talking to a small child, right? If you say ok. You can have the ice cream now. That means you can’t have the ice cream later. If I do that…if I have a crazy rush. I’ll say ok. You’re not going to see me for 3 weeks while I catch up on all the other things that I didn’t do while I was doing this thing.

Liam: It really goes back to managing expectations and achieving a balance.

Beth: Yeah. But I’m very clear in the moment, and I’m very aggressive. A lot of people probably wouldn’t say some of the things that I say to my clients about what the self-reflective part of what I’m doing…those moments when I say to them you know that this is absolutely unreasonable, right? They’re like I know.

Tara: But they do it anyway.

Liam: Or we can do it this one time.

Beth: I’m going to do this, but we need to understand that this is not normal. When I’m done, I’m going to go away for a little while. That’s how I manage it.

Tara: Right.

Beth: It’s more of, I don’t do that kind of work because of the money.

Tara: Sure.

Beth: If it was because of the money and I charged a rush fee every time, that just would not sit right with me. I just try to make sure that I just don’t lose my mind while I’m doing that and allow myself to make time to deal with the rest of my projects and the rest of my clients in a way that’s destructive while also supporting the crazy urgent thing that is probably ridiculous that I’m doing.

Tara: That does sound like a challenge (an internal challenge) because you are working for causes that you believe in strongly and important things are happening, and you also have to run a business. I’m sure you must have that conversation with yourself…being fair to yourself and being fair to your clients. I think that’s an important challenge to face. It sounds like you have a good handle on it.

Beth: I try. I’m not to going to lie. There are days when you look at my time tracker. You see when these things happen that suddenly I am working 15, 16, 17 hours for days in a row. Then I crash, and there are a few days when I’m working 3 or 4 hours because I’m human. You need to sleep. You need to take care of yourself. You realize that you haven’t cleaned your apartment in 2 months. It happens. But there’s also the part of me that couldn’t live with myself if in those moments I didn’t do the thing.

Liam: That’s a really valuable point. What do I do when the chips are down? Beth? I want to change gears a little bit and ask you about the systems you put in place and the way you approach things. Maybe tell us what has been the single most valuable piece of advice that you ever received (personal or professional)? How did you work that advice into your life?

Beth: Not ironically I’ve actually already said this during this podcast. When I was in college during my senior year, I managed the tour guide program (the student admissions program) for university admissions. I had this team of 16 student leaders who were volunteers. It was a hard balance to strike because I was paid and they were not. It is always an organizing problem (that organizers in any service whether it’s political or not) organizers face this problem all the time. I remember packing up a good friend of mine. We were packing up our office at the very end of the year. We had graduated. We were both working there for a little bit before we started our real jobs. Then we were all done. I remember carrying boxes with him in the stairwell. It’s one of those moments in your life where you’re like I know exactly where I was. He looked at me. He said, “you know what I liked about working for you?” “You always do what you say you’re going to do.” I was like…I guess I do. I try to. That’s really important to me. He verbalized at this moment that was so critical. I was just about to start my first job. I had just finished this huge thing in terms of being done with college. It was the right moment to say that to me. The other best piece of advice that I ever received is actually just very practical. When you meet somebody, and they gave you their business card, later write everything you remember about them on the back. I do that all the time. When I go to super big conferences and meet new people (it doesn’t matter whether I have a business card or not), I have notes from like variance conferences about who people were. How I met them and their kid goes to college here and just random stuff.

Tara: That’s a great idea.

Beth: Later, when I see that person again I’ve internalized that. Some of the people (if you look at older notebooks) there are people I had dinner with in 2012. I wrote five lines about them in my notebook. They are now people that are really truly very good friends.

Tara: That’s great. Thank you for that.

Beth: That’s a more practical one, but it’s awesome.

Liam: I love them both! Beth? We are running out of time here. Before we let you go can you let people know where we can find you online?

Beth: Sure you can go to my website which is BethSouderberg.com. It currently still does not reflect accurately what I do, but there have been higher priorities. You can also find me on Twitter @bethsoderberg. I’m pretty much there everywhere else. The other Beth Soderberg are not a big fan of me. The only place I don’t have my full name is Instagram. A mom in the Midwest got to it first.

Liam: Beth? Thanks so much for joining us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure. I’ve enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

Tara: Thanks, Beth.

Beth: Thanks for having me!