Hallway Chats

Aditya hails from Pune, India, and has been working in WordPress for more than a decade, as well as being a WordCamp organizer multiple times and volunteering at other events.

Website | WordFest.Live

Website | BombayPirate.com

Twitter | @adityakane

Topher: Hey, everyone. My name is Topher.

Cate: And my name is Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. We’d like to thank our sponsor Nexcess, a Liquid Web brand, and their cool new product, membership sites with WP Quickstart. If you’re thinking of building a membership site like we are, check it out. Our guest today is Aditya Kane [pronounced Kah-nay] from Pune, India. Welcome.

Aditya: Thank you.

Cate: I still read that and thought it was “kayne”. This is terrible.

Topher: This is not Mr. Kane, the famous wrestler. It’s Aditya Kane.

Aditya: Yeah, I’m not a famous wrestler.

Cate: YET. You’re not a famous wrestler YET. There’s still time.

Topher: There’s still time. And then that guy will be like, “Oh, curses! He changed my name.”

Aditya: This is a very weird introduction.

Topher: Wow, this is not a tech talk.

Cate: And we’re very weird people. So we’re good that way.

Topher: So I met you many years ago, and actually traveled to Pune to meet you. Are you a Pune native or did you move there?

Aditya: I moved to Pune, actually, the same year we met in 2015.

Topher: Oh, yeah. Oh, I remember you were in Mumbai before that, weren’t you?

Aditya: Yeah, I was in Mumbai. I was born in Pune but I’ve lived all my life, my school and college, everything in Mumbai. I moved in 2015, towards the end of it, I moved to Pune and became a Punekar or Puneite which is a Pune native.

Topher: It’s been six years now. Which one feels more like home?

Aditya: It’s difficult to say that. But since I’m married and I’m living here, I guess, Pune feels like home but… yeah, I mean, Mumbai is the place where I grew up, so there’s a lot of childhood memories. My dad still lives there. He still lives near my old school and the neighborhood I grew up in. So that sometimes feels like home too.

Topher: That’s cool. Do you go back often?

Aditya: Not since the pandemic started.

Cate: Oh, yeah.

Topher: Oh, right.

Aditya: I haven’t been there since my dad has certain health issues. So we didn’t want to take the risk. But I used to visit every few weeks.

Topher: Oh, that’s cool.

Aditya: It’s not very far from Pune.

Cate: I was wondering, how close are they?

Aditya: About four hours by road. Three and a half, four hours by. And it’s very well connected by train and transport.

Topher: Yeah, they’re both pretty big cities. So how did you get into WordPress? What’s your story?

Aditya: The first time I heard about WordPress was when a friend of mine shared the WordPress zip file with me saying that, “Hey, this is something interesting.” And I said, “What do I do with this?” Very common story. That was I think back in 2007… yeah, 2006 or 2007. I read to find out what WordPress was and I didn’t really find a lot of information that time understandably.

And then the first time I actually started using it properly and a lot was in 2009 when I joined this company called rtCamp just based out of Pune. I was hired to take care of the blog network. And that’s when I first started using WordPress.

Cate: Did you say that was ’09 that you joined rtCamp?

Aditya: Yeah.

Cate: Wow. I didn’t realize that the company had been around that long. That’s really amazing.

Aditya: It’s recently finished 12 years. So it’s been around for a while.

Cate: That’s really cool.

Aditya: It started from a publishing background, so they’re primarily publishers, blogs, basically, and then development.

Cate: So you joined in ’09 and you’re still there. Have you been there the whole time? Have you come and gone a little?

Aditya: I have come and gone a little bit. So I joined in 2009, I left rtCamp in 2016. Yeah, 2016. And I then tried to start my own thing with a couple of friends.

Topher: I remember that.

Aditya: Yeah. Yeah, I think we chatted about a few things. And after that, by… we wrap that up pretty quickly. I think it was just a year that a lot of the people who founded the company had a lot of issues, not work-related or with each other, just a lot of personal issues going on. So we wrapped it up. Then I did some freelancing. And then I joined Automattic as a community wrangler from 2018. And then I was out of Automattic last year, 2020.

Cate: Okay.

Aditya: Then I slept for a couple of months.

Topher: I know.

Topher: That’s great.

Aditya: Then I was doing some freelance work. I kept in touch with Rahul Bansal, who was the founder and CEO of rtCamp. So he basically asked me if I was willing to work. And I started working half time there last year. And then from this year onwards, I’ve been working full time.

Topher: What are you doing there now? What’s your task now?

Aditya: I take care of a few things, but could say the marketing part, like everything to do with marketing in rtCamp to clients, but also potential clients, but also to potential people who would join rtCamp. So hiring. I also, along with a couple of people, we basically run the editorial desk of rtCamp, so everything that is a case study comes out, everything, we sort of come up with that content. And also the internal communication part, which is-

Topher: That’s a lot of things.

Aditya: That’s a lot of things, yes.

Topher: You keep saying, “And also.”

Aditya: Yeah. And also because it’s like everything is [put in? 00:07:51] to say, “This is internal communications,” which can be anything.

Cate: There are things that kind of fit well together too. I’m on the communication sides of most things I’m involved in. And if your marketing team isn’t connected with the communications team, you’re gonna have some real problems. So, yeah.

Aditya: Yeah.

Topher: So do you do stuff with WordPress outside of work? You blog. Do you teach?

Aditya: I did do a bit of teaching. Not really in terms of… So this was basically a voluntary teaching. I thought a bit of WordPress to some people who were new to WordPress just when the pandemic started, just because I wanted to keep my… I mean, I was not going to work, but I wanted to do something.

Topher: Right.

Aditya: So it’s teaching how websites are built to some people. Some kids basically.

Topher: That’s cool.

Aditya: I shouldn’t call them kids. They are about 19, 20, or so.

Topher: Some 30 years younger than me.

Aditya: And half my age.

Topher: Yeah.

Aditya: I mean, I sort of taught them WordPress. I’ve done a bit of outreach with open-source workshops at colleges in Pune in the middle. And yes, of course, I’ve done some freelance work in terms of writing, content writing, and things like that.

Topher: I have a memory of a blog of the Bombay Pirate?

Aditya: Oh, yeah. That’s my personal blog. I used to write a lot on it. I don’t write as much. But I still do write an average of one blog post every three months. So every three months. That’s my thing. I don’t want to go beyond three months without a blog.

Cate: That’s really cool. So, is writing your background? You went to university, was it a writing, journalism communications kind of thing?

Aditya: So growing up, I would have preferred to be a journalist or an economist. Possibly an economist. They have better jobs. Maybe you become an academician or something like that. But like most kids our age and slightly privileged backgrounds, I mean, we’re sort of brainwashed by society—it’s not like my parents did this—into picking up computers, which is why I did a computer degree.

So I have my basics in computer. I started picking up jobs, which are basically customer support and technical support for some outsourcing jobs. There are certain outsourcing jobs that I picked up. And back in 2008 or 2007, 2008, I worked in IBM, similar job profile, which is tech support. It was so boring to be sitting in a cubicle and do that. So I used to go home, and I basically ended up writing on a word document several hundreds of pages. So utter boredom basically turned me out into a writer.

Cate: It’s so true. Boredom has so much value. We hate to be bored but at the same time, it sparks so much creativity and interest. You know, it really drives us to try other things that we might… you know, out of desperation, we have to find something to do.

Aditya: Yeah, yeah. That’s true. I remember reading about this somewhere. I can’t recall where but there was like a research done with people… there’s this YouTube channel Veritasium. It’s a science YouTube channel and it talks about creativity. And there was research done that if you did something boring and then tried to find solutions immediately afterwards… like a certain group was apparently more creative than another group, which was sort of not doing the boring works, apparently. That’s so interesting.

Topher: That’s cool. I’ve heard that there’s a great deal of value in boredom for children. Because it spurs them to play. Like you put some kids in the backyard without toys and they’ll come up with something to do. They’ll make up a game, they’ll invent something. They’ll tear down the house and burn it. You know, something.

Cate: It might be burying their little brother in the backyard. But at the same time, you’re right, there is something to that, you know, where if you’re forced into creativity.

Topher: I’d like to talk about WordPress events a little bit. I first met you because I was looking for some business advice from Indians who had succeeded in a WordPress business. And somebody said, “Hey, WordCamp Mumbai just happened. Here’s a list of the organizers. Go talk to them.” And you were on the list. So you were an organizer for WordCamp Mumbai, right?

Aditya: Yeah.

Topher: It was the second one ever?

Aditya: Second one ever, 2015. I mean, technically the third one, but the first one was not nice. I wasn’t involved.

Topher: So what’s the rest of your career been like as an organizer? Have you organized more?

Aditya: Yeah, yeah. I’ve been always a co-organizer at WordCamp Pune right up to 2016. WordCamp Mumbai, sorry. And then I started being a co-organizer at WordCamp Pune. The WordCamp Pune you attended in 2015 was not when I was an organizer. But because the cities are so close, there’s a lot of commonality. So a lot of people are friends with each other, and they can easily travel to and fro. And the community is sort of mashed up. As in there’s no separation and such.

Topher: I met a lot of Mumbaikars when I was there.

Aditya: Yeah, you did. You met me. [unintelligible 00:15:20] You met me, you met Alex Gounder

Topher: Yeah. Ramya Pandyan.

Aditya: Oh, yeah, Ramya.

Topher: Rahul Bansal.

Aditya: So I’ve been organizing events right through but basically as a co-organizer. I like to be an organizer. I don’t like to sit in the [unintelligible 00:16:02]. I don’t like the name like you participate. I recently organized WordCamp India, which is why I sort of… Yeah, WordCamp India. It was an online event. And I think it was held a few days after the first Wordfest.

Cate: Yeah, it was. I think it was three weekends long.

Aditya: Yes, it was. It was three weekends long.

Cate: I was exhausted for you. After doing just one 24 hour day, I couldn’t imagine three weekends of a virtual event. But well done you.

Aditya: Yeah, it was interesting to have a three-weekend long experiment. Probably not… I mean, if it is up to me, it probably… I was the one who proposed that we do this over three weekends. And I’m happy enough to say that I wouldn’t want to repeat that again.

Cate: Well, I think the virtual event space, you have so many possibilities. And we’ve seen this with Wordfest as we’re doing it again for a second time, and possibly looking ahead to a third one. You have to try these things. You don’t know if they’re good idea until you try them. And they’re kind of easy to try. Like the simplicity of holding a three-week end event online is completely different than trying to get a venue and food for people for three weekends in person.

So you try it, and maybe it works and maybe it doesn’t. But you don’t know until you did. So it’s great to have done it and then say, “You know what? Not going to do that again.” That’s just fine.

Aditya: I mean, the things we did at WordCamp are quite satisfying in the sense we wanted to do something different from having speaker sessions. Like just having speaker sessions, and then maybe a contributor day. And that’s like the classic WordCamp format, which has also been transferred to the online format.

For me, that is not as exciting. I wanted to see if we could do something different. And that’s why we had a workshop day, where we had a few very basic workshops. So an introduction to WordPress, or introduction to WooCommerce. In the workshop day, we started a workshop with an English version, and then the same workshop was done in different languages, one after the other.

That actually got a lot of new people involved. That was the whole idea, and in that sense, it was quite successful. Because the idea was that… that’s just… I don’t have statistics, but I can say that it’s just the sense I get that when there’s an online event, it’s just we are the same people are getting together because we know each other and we’re not sort of getting other people into the community, because we’re not a physical event, which they can go to and sort of hang in the shadows and just get someone in the hallway and have a chat. Which is how a lot of people start taking part and getting into a community.

I think they can’t do that because they don’t know about these events. And even if they go to these events, it’s just a one way conversation because it’s all focused on the sessions, and then all the chats. I mean, we try to make them by having Zoom rooms around but it’s not the same.

So the other way was to not actually have that and just have something completely different, which people can engage with. We got a lot of new people who had never been to a WordCamp and who attended those workshops. And because we had a workshop on the first weekend, and then we followed up, one of the people who actually presented at the workshop became organizer by the time we ended up with the event.

Topher: That’s cool.

Cate: That’s really great. But I loved the idea of holding the same workshop in multiple languages. It’s so hard to figure out how best to meet a global community needs, you know, particularly with online events. And I think that’s a really clever way to have gone about it.

Aditya: Yeah. I mean, it was sort of easy to do in India, because almost none of us have English as a first language and none of us have a very common language. Like I work with people in my team, there are four people and each has… one someone speaks Punjabi, I’m the speaking Marathi, and another one speaks Hindi, and another one I don’t know what he speaks but he definitely speaks English. So we all have our different languages. So it’s not that easy to speak in our own native languages.

So a lot of us are comfortable speaking in English, especially at the level of using WordPress. There are a lot of people who do not know how to… so they understand how to read English and maybe even write in English, but they’re not really good at asking questions in English or listening in English to somebody who speaks very fast.

Topher: Yeah.

Aditya: So if the session is in Marathi, it’s not that they wouldn’t understand in English, but very often it just gives them the comfort level to just ask a question. So that was the aim.

Topher: Something I’ve found with HeroPress is most of the people I communicate with globally, it’s on Slack. And most people who have English as a second or third or fourth language read and write wonderfully well, but don’t speak it that great because speed is an issue or accent is an issue or something like that.

And the whole concept of the difference between understanding a language as written as opposed to spoken is really interesting to me. It’s one of the reasons I’ve started doing translations on HeroPress. I was told early on, especially in India, you don’t need to do multilingual, just do English, we all speak English. And there’s a difference between speaking and reading English and really deeply understanding it, and having… in your own language, it just makes it more comfortable.

Aditya: Yeah.

Topher: That’s what we’ve done there.

Cate: And I really like your point about asking questions in your own language. If I was learning something new, even if I could read it and understand it in the language it was being presented in, it doesn’t mean that I can come up with the right questions, or even… I tend to be more shy in that kind of environment anyway, so I’ve struggled to ask questions at all, let alone questions in a language that I’m really uncomfortable with.

Aditya: Yeah. And there’s a lot of formality to what can speakers and… I mean, not because of anything that the speakers do, but it’s just how the world is. That if you’re put on a podium everybody thinks you’re great. And everyone’s great, but the point is, you know, people think-

Topher: You wouldn’t in the podium if you weren’t great.

Aditya: Yeah. But the point is, you’re not that great and a lot of people assume that you’re like this great expert or something and you need to be God-gifted talented or something like that just to be able to speak on some subject. And a lot of people don’t realize it’s not that difficult. To reach that level of expertise is not that difficult very often.

So there’s a lot of assumptions that “Oh, I shouldn’t ask questions” or “I shouldn’t speak up” or “I shouldn’t connect.” And that happens a lot more in India at least when somebody… or South Asia for that matter. If somebody speaks in English and English is perfect, people feel this person knows WordPress, and in English. So let me not ask a question.”

Cate: Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. Like, I really see the thinking behind that.

Topher: So I’d like to pivot a little bit, but not too far. Still talking about digital or online conferences. You’re a volunteer for Wordfest just coming up. As volunteer wrangler, I should know what you’re doing but I have no idea. What are you doing for Wordfest?

Aditya: I have no idea myself.

Topher: Awesome.

Aditya: I think I’m a community moderator of some kind.

Topher: Okay. I’ll get back to you on that.

Aditya: I think I’m that. But I know that I’m not doing a couple of things that I signed up for. So I think the other thing, which I signed up for which is moderating on the community.

Topher: What make you… Go ahead.

Aditya: I have not really gone through the Wordfest program. I know I’m supposed to attend sometime in the afternoon, some volunteer greenroom.

Cate: Yeah, greenroom session.

Aditya: I’ve just not had the time to do that. It’s like bang in the middle of the afternoon for me. That’s when my workplace just comes alive. But I’ll find time.

Topher: What made you want to be involved in a global event like Wordfest.

Aditya: I was interested last time round, the first time around because of the fact that they were speaking of mental health and self-care. So I generally like the tone of the Wordfest conference and the things that they put out. So I generally liked the tone of it and certain things that certain people said about it.

And then a lot of people had a lot of fun at Wordfest. I think a couple of my colleagues. I think Imran was there and a very good friend, Yogesh Londhe or Yoge as you might call him. They had a lot of fun. They told me they had a lot of fun. So I wanted to sort of get involved. I didn’t know there was a Wordfest happening—another one.

So I joined the Big Orange Heart Slack group I think a few months ago and then I found out that there was this event that’s going to happen. So I said, “Yeah, I’ll volunteer. I want to be part of it.” Specifically, because they do focus quite a bit on mental health and self-care.

Topher: One of the things that’s unique about Wordfest is that it is a 24-hour event. And so it has like time zone silos where people can see talks in their own time zone. Like nowhere in the world where they have to get up at midnight to watch. I would enjoy your perspective on the value of that. You and I are almost 12 hours off, so we’re pretty different in time zone. Do you view that as a particular value, as opposed to like WordCamp Europe or something, which would be in an awkward time for you?

Aditya: I mean, to be honest, when it comes to big marquee WordCamps, like WordCamp Europe, WordCamp US, sorry to say, as a consumer of that event, I don’t find them all that useful.

Topher: Okay.

Aditya: I might if I end up going there in person. Again, I mean, I might want to attend a couple of events like that but I wouldn’t want to do that. I’m not very comfortable with 3,000 people in some area. I like the slightly more compact WordCamp or something. Like maybe 300 people. I say 300 people, I know that’s still a big number. But in India, if you just randomly stand around on the road, there will be 300 people. Even during the pandemic. So, yeah, I mean, closer knit sort of group of people is something that I get more out of.

Topher: Okay.

Aditya: So the Wordfest thing actually is quite useful, because it has a very specific… I like the fact that there are a lot of speakers from this part of the world will be speaking in these time zones, and so on and so forth. So that sort of allows people to listen to experts from their part of the world rather than people from North America and Europe, who do tend to dominate the narrative and the speaker sessions at all of these WordCamp events, the big WordCamp events…

Topher: Right. That’s cool. That’s exactly what I was hoping for. That’s what I was hoping you would say because that’s what I imagined. This was the benefit that I hoped would occur.

Cate: That was the goal. I was always concerned… like, one of my thoughts was as great as it is to have local speakers and local time zones to shake up the speakers a bit so that you’re getting a sampling of speakers from different time zones. So you get more exposure to new people. Particularly when you can take an event virtual, you have more opportunities to meet someone that you’ve might not come in contact with in-person some time.

For instance, I haven’t been to Pune so I’m not going to necessarily just meet a WordPressor from Pune. So yeah, that’s always the question is do you keep it more local? Or do you mix it up some so that there’s a wider exposure? Which isn’t really a question. It’s just a thought.

Aditya: I think there’s some value to that, to mixing up the speakers as long as we are thinking of the topics that we’ll be covering and if they are relevant. If you’re talking about let’s say SEO and Yoast is going to… yeah, he’s going to be speaking, and if he’s speaking in our time zone, that will be very rare because we won’t get him. We won’t be able to usually listen to him speak in our time zone. So that’s a [novelty? 00:33:35] factor. But maybe having one or two speakers. An example of yours choose very accomplished and very famous. But yeah, it’ll be nice to mix up a little bit and get some… So yeah, you and the audience has connection with people from different parts of the world.

Cate: Yeah.

Topher: Cool. We are getting near the end of our time.

Cate: And it has been a delight talking with you.

Topher: It has. It’s been really good to see you, man.

Aditya: It’s my pleasure.

Topher: I want to point out that you did a HeroPress essay very early in the history of HeroPress.

Aditya: Yeah. That was ages ago.

Cate: It does feel like forever, doesn’t it?

Topher: If people want to learn about what you did in WordPress when you were a young man, then they can go read that.

Cate: Younger.

Aditya: Yeah, they can go back and read the HeroPress essay that I… I think I wrote… I don’t remember what I wrote. I think I wrote about my uncle who is sort of like… that’s the first place where I saw the internet. He was communicating with his sons who were studying abroad. And that’s the first place that I saw the internet working.

Topher: You should go read it. It’s a good essay.

Aditya: Yeah, I remember it for one particular reason. So I wrote it in the morning on a Google Doc and I send it off to you. And I said, “Hey, I didn’t spell check that.” I went back the next day and was about to reach out to you and you reached out to me saying, “Hey, I published this.”

Cate: That is so much my life with him.

Aditya: That was a fun thing to do. I think it was like the fourth or fifth essay on HeroPress. Maybe be the sixth.

Topher: Yeah. Those were different days for HeroPress. I really appreciate your support that time. It was a big deal. Talking about HeroPress, it’s been really interesting. We’ve been having a lot of these conversations about how HeroPress is relevant and why it is relevant in India and how it opened up… I think of it personally as like oral History project, where people come in and say their story, and you have to go back and are able to go through an archive.

In my case, it’s goes back so long that I can actually find something new and what I had written.

Topher: You’re right.

Aditya: I mean, it’s bit like an oral history project. That’s how I approach it. I tend to just read… it’s a lot of wonder in the sense that you read about somebody in South America, someone in Egypt or Middle East, or even parts of India, South Asia, and so many places, even in the US.

And you see a lot of the stories are very similar and yet different. It’s great because those are people who should be… every single of them as the… HeroPress has something that takes a slice of the community or the public of WordPress, because the republic of WordPress will be preserved because we’ll have all the community team and wordpress.org tools to archive that. So yeah, this is something I think the people’s history program. This is how I see it and that’s why I love it.

Topher: I love that term oral history archive. In the last couple years, I’ve come to realize how few people read every essay as it comes out. For a long time, I thought of HeroPress as a publication, like a magazine, or newsletter. When it comes out, you read it. And I’ve come to realize that most people treat it like a library or an archive, and they don’t read every week or whatever. But they’ll go every few months and read five or 10 essays at once.

Or pick a geographic area and read all the essays from whatever, you know, someplace. And it sort of changed how I publish, why I publish, when I publish things like that. For a long time, I was very rigid about publishing every Wednesday morning. And I see my wife nodding. And I don’t care as much anymore. If a Wednesday goes by without an essay, that’s fine. If I publish on a Thursday, that’s fine. Because it’s not about getting it to a person who’s sitting at their desk waiting for an essay. It’s about just attributing, you know, adding more paint to the picture.

Cate: And one of the things we’re hoping to do moving forward is to get it more organized, the archive more organized so that it’s easier to find common threads. So you could search for a topic or… broad enough. We don’t want people to feel spotlighted. There are a number of essays that have some common themes. So that can be really inspirational for people. We’d like to make that easier for them to find.

Aditya: Yeah, good luck with that.

Topher: It makes Topher eyes…

[crosstalk]

Aditya: I’m not being sarcastic about that.

Cate: No.

Aditya: It’s generally saying good luck with that. It’s interesting. I mean, it’s started off as something that Topher just wanted to create a space for people to say something. And there’s a lot of people. I know from where I come, I think there must be like what? Fifty or sixty? I don’t know. Forty essays from India? I’m not sure.

Topher: Yeah.

Aditya: Probably around… It’s still interesting to see earlier on when I was reading essays, it was usually all the people I knew. I had met them somewhere or I knew about them or something like that. And now, I often don’t know the people who are writing on HeroPress and they’re from India. So it’s really nice. It’s really something good.

Topher: I have an impression that I don’t know is right or not. I feel like India is a lot more involved in WordPress than they were in 2015. Is that right? Maybe more on the community. Maybe not so much WordPress, the technology, but just the community.

Aditya: Well, there’s a couple of things that are sort of the larger issues at hand. One of them is that India generally has, historically a better view of open source or open licenses, or considering our colonial past, a lot of that was done through tariffs. And it was not done through conquest. It was done through tariffs and closed sourcing. Sometimes our Indian technology are native technology.

So yeah, I mean, there is historically been always like a social acceptance of an open systems or open standards of world, as we call it. Which is not true for the world. But at least in tech, that thing is catching on. I mean, in India, we think of it more as that part rather than of maybe in the West, where it’s more about personal freedom and freedom of expression. But here it’s more about those things.

Along with that, I think the barriers are a lot less, I mean, India is a very young country. I think half of India’s population is younger than I am. So something like 40% of them are younger than 30. So essentially, India is a very young country, which is having a lot of people coming out of colleges and looking at careers in terms of finding their way around in the internet, on the internet, in publishing in all those places.

I mean, just an observation, maybe probably true, but young people tend to bring in a lot more energy and ready to take a lot more risks in terms of doing new things, or just doing something without even wondering if it will fail or not. And I think that’s something that is… And the WordPress ecosystem in India, essentially are very, very young. Most of them are just out of their teens.

Topher: Yeah, kids.

Aditya: Yeah. Most of them are kids. That’s probably why they’re much more active in the community side of things. Because the technical side is slightly less accessible. Because at times, it’s slightly less accessible. You need to communicate in English, you need to write a proposal, you need to do a lot of those things. And as I said, it is a barrier. I mean, very often I work with somebody and I get this feedback from some of my friends that it was quite easy to just write a [unintelligible 00:44:52] and a proposal. Like, if you know how to code you probably can do this also. It’s not a big deal.

So I think most people do feel scared of getting involved in technical ideas and contributing technically in terms of core and all that, though there are a lot of core patches done by Indians. There are quite a lot of core that’s done by Indians, but not as many regular core contributors from India, at least at this point of time. Regular as in somebody who’s taken care of an entire feature or something like that.

Topher: Right, yeah.

Cate: That’s really fascinating.

Topher: Yeah.

Aditya: That’s something maybe the younger folks can take on. And because it’s open-source, it’s easy to get started with. So a lot of the learning is free and easy to access. I mean, I was just talking about this to somebody that the LinkedIn Learning, when they acquired Lynda, that’s about… I think it’s about $15 per month, the pricing, which is quite expensive for let’s say somebody who is 21, 22 years old. So to learn slightly more complex things, to spend that extra amount of money, especially when it’s… That’s slightly difficult. So a lot of people get into WordPress because it’s just easy to enter into.

Topher: Sure.

Cate: Yeah. Those economic barriers can be just a real problem that we don’t realize. It depends on-

Aditya: Also the economic barrier is one part. But I think people would pay for something if they knew that it would give them something in return. And very often, a lot of things on the internet are pretty useless, even though they’re charged.

Topher: Yes.

Cate: Yes, that’s very true.

Aditya: Especially, you know, they’re charged at times. I mean, that is a barrier that people don’t want to spend those thousand bucks here.

Cate: Okay, exactly.

Topher: Yeah. All right. We’ve been talking for a long time now, relatively speaking.

Cate: And it was great.

Topher: And it is time to wrap it up. We’ll do the outro here real quick.

Cate: So thank you so much for being with us. We do really appreciate it, spending your evening here.

Aditya: Thanks, guys. It was nice getting to know you-

Cate: to know you too.

Aditya: And nice catching up with you. It was fun.

Topher: All right. This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, a part of the HeroPress Network. Your hosts are Cate and Topher. We’d like to thank Sophia for the music, and Nexcess for hosting our network. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.

Dan and Michelle have been working together to make WordFest Live be a top notch, world-wide WordPress conference. We talk with them about it works and the difficulties of making a global event happen.

Website | WordFest.Live

Twitter | @danmaby

Twitter | @michelleames

Topher: Hey everyone, my name is Topher.

Cate: And I’m Cate.

Topher: And this is Hallway Chats. Our guests today are Dan and Michelle. Welcome.

Michelle: Good to have us.

Dan: Hey, good to be with you.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Topher: We’re glad to have you. This is our first Hallway Chats since we took it over. So you guys are very special in that regard.

Michelle: Very honored.

Dan: What a privilege!

Cate: Or victims. I’m not sure which one to go with. But we appreciate your patience and willingness to put up with us.

Michelle: It’s okay to be a guinea pig sometimes.

Cate: Guinea pigs are adorable. So, Michelle, speaking of guinea pigs, you set yourself up nicely, how about if you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself, where you live, what you do?

Michelle: Sure.

Cate: Anything, you know.

Michelle: As you said, I’m Michelle. I live in Rochester, New York. It’s summer here now, but it’s not as summary as it might be for where some people are listening from. I am the director of customer success for GiveWP by day, and I’m a volunteer and on the board of Big Orange Heart outside of that, which just kind of permeates all of the time, so day, night, whatever.

In addition to that, I’m the co-founder of Underrepresentedintech.com and I’m a podcaster myself as the podcast barista over at WPCoffeeTalk.

Topher: So Michelle, how can we help you find more things to do?

Michelle: Well, you know, I still have a few hours at night when I have insomnia. So if there’s something you need, just let me know.

Topher: Excellent.

Cate: Insomnia. I need to get that.

Michelle: I don’t recommend it. One star. Not recommended.

Cate: Dan, why don’t you go ahead and tell us [00:02:00] about yourself, where you live, what you do.

Dan: Sure. I am the founder of Big Orange Heart, a mental health charity that supports and promotes positive wellbeing and mental health within the remote working communities. I am also the founder of a digital agency called Blue 37 based here in London in the UK. And just generally keep myself very, very busy across the WordPress community. I’m very passionate about the people side of our wonderful community.

Topher: I know you’ve been involved with Big Orange Heart. WP&UP is what it was before. Can you tell me when that started and when it turned into a full-time job?

Dan: Good question. Well, the idea of the charity started around 2013, I believe. I was actually in a position of struggling myself. I was wanting to connect with like-minded people to be honest, and realize that I was in quite a dark place, working alone in an environment where I just didn’t have people to interact with on a regular basis.

I’d come out of that kind of office environment and was working from home. And I just saw my mental well-being struggling to be honest. That’s really where the idea of I figured if I was struggling, certainly there are going to be other people out there as well that were also in a similar situation.

Topher: Sure.

Cate: Yeah. Definitely.

Dan: That took some time from that point on to then start to evolve this into Big Orange Heart, the nonprofit that it is today.

Topher: That’s really cool. I like it. Michelle, how did you get involved?

Michelle: So I work for GiveWP and we have a donations plugin. [00:04:00] And Matt Cromwell was talking about doing some things. WP&UP was doing a summit—The Do Summit Good, and Matt said they need some people to be on this panel, “and so I’d like to have you and me.” I honestly can’t remember who the third person was. It might have been Taylor.

So I was on that day, and I was like, “Oh, this is really cool.” So I looked more. And of course, they were trying to raise money that day, so I signed up as a recurring donor. Then I was like, “I wonder how I could be helpful.”

Topher: Because you need more things to do.

Michelle: And I said, “Is there anything I can do to help? I do a lot around fundraising.” And so I joined the fundraising team. Then from there it was suddenly I was doing a lot more. I’m not really sure how that slippery slope happened, but I am very grateful for all the work that I am able to do there.

We often talk about mental health as far as remote work. I have a thing that Caitlin White made for me. It’s on my nightstand. It says, “Find your tribe, love them hard.” And when you do remote work, you don’t necessarily have that group of people that you see on a daily basis, especially as a single person. I have cats at home and they’re not good conversationalists.

So WP&UP, as it is now Big Orange Heart, turns out that’s my tribe. And being able to be part and giving back to that actually fills my soul in a way that I haven’t found in a lot of other places. I love the WordPress community, and this is one way that I can absolutely help give back.

Cate: Well, and I think if you’re someone who’s ever felt that loneliness of being at home, I mean, I felt that as a single mom… oh, not a single mom, but you know, stay-at-home mom. I felt like a single mom a lot of times.

Topher: That’s part of the problem.

Cate: Right. Whenever you’re [00:06:00] in a role where you have to be focused elsewhere and it doesn’t necessarily include other adults people, that it’s just… you know, once you’ve felt that, it’s hard not to give out to other people who have felt that as well.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Cate: I think it’s interesting that you got started with Do Summit Good as well, because really that was HeroPress’s move into kind of the Big Orange Heart world as well. We opened up a little bit there about some of the struggles that came with getting HeroPress up and running and the challenges to a family of trying to start a nonprofits sort of thing and do community work while balancing family work, while balancing work work. It’s a lot of plates to keep spinning some days.

Dan: I’d say that yeah, I think that Do Summit Good event has got a lot to answer for, because actually, that was also the seedling for WordFest Live.

Michelle: It was. Absolutely.

Dan: I think this subject we’re touching on here about having the environment, the working environment that we’re in, it can be very challenging sometimes, particularly if you’re ever in an environment where you are on your own and you don’t have your coworkers, there aren’t other people around you.

I know when I was in an office, I would have people sat opposite me, people sat next to me, people sat around and I would just verbalize stuff that was going on in my mind. And I might be working on something and I might even be chatting away about it. But without me realizing it, that’s allowing me to process those thoughts and process those issues that are going on in my mind.

And just often I certainly found myself I wasn’t able to do that. I’m not somebody who will sit and talk to myself. I need other people to be able to talk to. Just as you say, trying to find your tribe.

Topher: Yeah. I’m a remote worker for 11 years now. But when COVID hit, I was working for a company that was [00:08:00] primarily not a remote company. I was remote, but they had probably 800 employees that were office employees. And in one day, they all became remote workers. And it was a huge shock. Just like when I did it, I thought about it, I prepared for it, I read about it, I had some idea what I was getting into. But places like a Big Orange Heart have been huge for that whole community of people that were suddenly thrown into it.

Dan: Absolutely.

Michelle: With COVID, one of the things that it wasn’t just about suddenly you were a remote worker. Suddenly you were a remote worker, if you had children, you were homeschooling or helping homeschooling your children, you were now ordering groceries or not… you know, you could remote work from home and still go to the park and go to Walmart or stick in a show or go to a restaurant. And suddenly all of those things were moved to all at the same time.

So it wasn’t just a situation of a company decided to become a remote company, but we all became incredibly remote and incredibly isolated. And it was about that time that we made the decision to switch from being… maybe a little bit before that, but to go from being WP&UP to be Big Orange Heart and be a little more inclusive of the remote work community in technology not specifically focused on WordPress. I know Dan can talk a little bit more about that too.

Dan: Sure. I mean, actually, we set out working specifically within the WordPress community. I mean, our heart is very much within the WordPress community. Nothing has changed there. However, there had always been an intention to evolve and grow the services and the delivery of services from the organization into a wider community. [00:10:00]

The remote working community had always been that focus for us. Partly because that was where I was at. I had those issues around being a lone worker, a remote worker. But of course, you have to start somewhere. So it’s very, very passionate about the WordPress community but equally as… it was actually right on the cusp of the pandemic really kicking in for us certainly here in the UK in terms of the timelines.

That was when we took the decision to bring that timeline forward for the transition into a wider focus and more inclusive organization. So not only did we go into this situation of having to deal with a pandemic, we saw a 300% increase in demand on the services of the charity at the time. We also decided that moment would be the best time to rebrand, I think go through a rebrand.

Topher: Brilliant.

Cate: But that all makes sense because a lot of ways WordPress itself is moving into a broader spot in the overall web economy, where as it goes more headless, more people are going to be embracing it from an outside standpoint. We see more companies coming in and being interested in WordPress. So having something set up that is inclusive to anybody who’s struggling in this area who meets the remote worker require… like this falls into, it just makes sense to expand right now into something bigger.

Topher: Yeah.

Cate: And with that, you moved the summit into… So Do Summit Good became WordFest. And for that, you had to come up with some new technology. And like my husband would never do, you [00:12:00] didn’t take something out of the box and use somebody else’s. You had to build your own.

Dan: I’m laughing. I’m not sure if that’s hysterical or not.

Topher: I’m curious about the process you went through to decide, should we build our own or use something off the shelf? I’m kind of interested in the specific tech used. But that could go on forever and we don’t have all that much time. So I’m more interested in about the decision-making…

Cate: I made a note about that actually that time could go on forever.

Topher: Stop talking here. So I’m interested in the process of decision-making about why you decided to build your own and all that.

Dan: Really, it was born out of the need of the community, if I’m honest. We’ve run for a long, long time several WordPress focused events. At the time we were running our regular monthly events. We were delivering WPLDN, the WordPress London meetup, for example. And in the February of… I’m not even sure what year. All the times blended into one.

But at the start of the pandemics at 2020, before the UK Government had placed us into a national lockdown, we had our event at the end of February and as an organizing team, we had a conversation about the what was happening. And we decided to be to err on the side of caution and not deliver any more in-person events until we had a better idea of what was going on. Little did we know that that was going to go on for as long as it has done.

But we wanted to continue to enable our community to come together even though we couldn’t do them in person. So the following month, the last Thursday of the month, as we always do for WPLDN, we organized an event but we decided to run it on Zoom. And within seconds of running that [00:14:00] first event on Zoom, we realized that Zoom was entirely the wrong piece of software to deliver an event.

It’s an amazing bit of software for meetings and for the kind of smaller conversation. But when you try and get 60, 70, 80 people into a Zoom call, nobody has the opportunity to speak. It’s just not an environment that lends itself to connecting. So we set about immediately after that event may have been actually during that event we were looking at alternative ways to deliver it.

And being a big open source advocate, we wanted to look at an open source solution. There were several proprietary solutions that were available. But again, this was all very early and there were lots of companies that were very quickly scrambling to develop something that would enable these kind of online events to happen. And we just couldn’t find something that was we really felt was fit for purpose at that moment.

There’s lots of these platforms have evolved into fantastic solutions since then. But again, it was about how can we develop something that is built on open source technologies that enables us to make sure that we have ownership over the product and the service that we’re delivering, make sure that it is privacy-focused. You know, there are so many issues in relation to some of the proprietary services that are available.

So we stumbled into Jitsi, which is an open source video conferencing project, which became the backbone of what we’ve developed since. And it’s been quite a considerable journey.

Topher: So it wasn’t 100% from scratch?

Dan: No. We’ve actually built a custom app that [00:16:00] has Jitsi at its heart in terms of video conferencing. Then we’ve got our table functionality of various other bits. We go through some work at the moment to actually convert the entire platform. So if you’ve attended an event on the Big Orange Heart platform before, what you’ve seen there, we’re currently going through the process of converting that into a WordPress plugin.

Topher: Oh, nice. Nice.

Dan: So we want to make sure that it is available for communities out there to be able to access as well.

Topher: At the risk of getting too deep down the rabbit hole, did you actually fork Jitsi and like add to it or change it? Or is it just a module in your larger platform?

Dan: We have actually forked a version of it. However, it has presented us with some challenges along the way.

Topher: Always does.

Dan: It’s been a learning curve. But it’s been a really interesting project. We’ve had some fun times.

Cate: I’m finally laughing here hysterical in the background having had these conversations so many times over the last 25 years.

Topher: Tell me again why you built it yourself?

Dan: There’s been several kind of unintended consequences across this if you like. We’ve had a fantastic team of volunteers that have supported the project in various ways. And that team of volunteers has really evolved into this little kind of micro family, if you like, of people that are actively working together on a daily basis, giving time into the organization and enabling this platform to grow and evolve.

In the first 12 months that we delivered events on the platform, we had over 12,000 registered attendees come through it, which was totally unexpected for us. We never imagined, if we go back 12 months ago, that we would be in that situation of having those kinds of numbers through a platform that [00:18:00] we as a small kind of micro community within the organization that we create.

Topher: Open source takes you in some interesting and surprising places.

Dan: It absolutely can.

Cate: Very true. So that’s, like the technology side, are some of the challenges that you’ve faced trying to put on a global conference with global speakers, and global sponsors, and global volunteers. So Michelle, could you dive into a little bit more of maybe the people side of putting on a global virtual event?

Michelle: Absolutely. At the risk of deflating him a tiny little bit, one of my biggest challenges is pulling Dan back from the edge sometimes. I think of us as the yin and yang to a lot of what happens at Big Orange Heart and WordFest because he’s like, what do you think about this? And I’m like, “I think you should table that till next time.”

Cate: I also have similar conversations believe it or not..

Michelle: As Dan said, our group of volunteers, our group of organizers, specifically, and of course, the volunteers that we bring into the different parts of not only WordFest but Big Orange Heart are phenomenal. Just the group of people that have assembled, the people we’ve asked to join us, the people who’ve asked to join us are just… it’s just a phenomenal group of people, and I couldn’t ask for a better family of people at Big Orange Heart, for sure.

For me personally, some of the challenges are the fact that when you’re looking at a global event over 24 hours and Cate’s laughing because she knows I’m gonna say that I’m time zone challenged…

Cate: It’s so hard. It’s so hard.

Michelle: Last year was the first time I was doing work not only with Big Orange Heart, but with WordPress in general that the concept of UTC, I’ve never heard of UTC as a time zone before. I’ve heard of [00:20:00] Greenwich Mean Time, I had heard of different time zones, and then all of a sudden everything was being measured in UTC.

And I have to have a special website hotlinked so that I can see what time it is in any particular time zone based on the UTC time zone. And even that I’m like, “Well is it daylight savings time or is it not daylight savings time? And what does that mean?” And I show up an hour late or an hour early to things. I don’t think I’m the only person who is challenged by time zones. Evidence…

Cate: No. And we set things up right over the time change. Like both events were planned at each of the time change. We are not good at this.

Michelle: And I rely on Dan because he’s in the UK. That is kind of like the Greenwich Mean Time thing and UTC is like based right over there. So I rely on him. And even he and I, this week, both realized that we had set up all of the schedule in the wrong time zone and we had to come back and fix all of that. And so we’re constantly double-checking and triple-checking things.

But the challenge also comes in how to—and God bless Cate, she is the lead organizer for marketing. But how do we market an event that’s a global event, that we’re marketing it to people in 24 different time zones basically around the world and still having one website that says, “This is how you get involved?”

When we did it in January, people in my local meetup who I have been touting the event two were like, “Oh, I missed it. I thought it started on the 21st.” I’m like, “Well, it did, but in UTC it started last night.” Like you’re trying to log in at the tail end and you miss 24 hours of an event because you didn’t understand time zone. Like, I was speaking with authority like I had any clue either, right.

So part of the challenge is making sure that people understand when events are happening, [00:22:00] how the events are happening, communicating properly with our speakers. This time we’re including interviews for community interviews, we are including some wellness talks, and we have some exciting things happening that way. I’m not going to give away all the exciting news that’s coming up. I’m gonna let Cate have the excitement of sharing some of those things out over social in the next few weeks.

But we do have some exciting things that we’re doing with WordFest that are different. But all of that means that we need to manage a 24-hour event with people who aren’t all physically in one location. So that means that coordinating that can be a bit of a challenge.

Also, just the fact that we are completely volunteer. Anybody who’s ever run a WordCamp understands what it’s like to work with 100% volunteers. But when you’re running a WordCamp, you tend to be people who are again, can get together for coffee and can have dinner together and make those kinds of plans.

Instead, we are in all those different time zones because we are a global agency as well, or organization as well. And so having the challenge of coordinating people, coordinating times, and making sure that it all comes together. And that at least looks like a well-oiled machine, even if we know that there’s chewing gum and twine holding some of us together at the end.

And then, of course, the last part that is a challenge, it’s fun. But the fact that people like Dan, you, me, will be awake for 40 hours or more because we’ll work the day before we’ll be prepping for and then we’ll be awake for the entire event, towards the end of it, we get a little punchy, we start to have hallucinations. Maybe not really.

But anyway, it’s fun because we do have our Discord channel where we’re all discussing what’s going on and we have the ability to chat with one another, [00:24:00] and we have that camaraderie through that. But it is also a challenging thing to be able to make it through that many hours a week. When I was a teenager, a lot easier. 52 years old, a bit more of a challenge.

Topher: Amen to that.

Cate: Yeah. Dan, will you tell us a little bit about the choice to bring Discord into the event? Just real quick. I know for me personally that had a huge impact on the amount of fun I had as a volunteer having Discord available. And I never would have thought that. I never would have thought there’d be a time in my life I’d use Discord or I’d want to use Discord or any of those things. So can you just talk about that a little bit before we wrap up?

Dan: Sure. I think this is the really exciting part about this, as Michelle was touching on there. We’ve got a global events that is meant to have a focus on the global community that is run by an organizing team across the globe. We’ve got many people across our team that are spread across multiple time zones. And of course, that communication side of it is part of the challenge. So how do we overcome that? How do we make sure that we’re all in the right place doing the right thing at the right time.

Because we’ve got 66 sessions this time around from across a 24-hour event. That’s a lot of moving parts. That’s a lot of things that we need to make sure is happening at the exact right moment. And Discord became just this little gem within the whole thing that I certainly didn’t expect to be quite sort of positive experience from it, if I’m honest.

We used it as a voice-only channel. So our day-to-day basis for the organizing we use Slack as communication. We’ll often jump in Zoom calls, regular team meetings, etc., building up to it. But on the day, we felt that there’s so much going on at such a fast pace that Slack really didn’t offer that ability for us if something needs to be dealt with [00:26:00] quickly there and then.

So, voice was the route that we wanted to go. So we use discord as a voice only. You’ve got the push to talk solution within Discord. Basically, we just left that channel open as a channel between all of the organizers. And then we had a channel for our AV team and various other team members that would enable us just to simply drop in.

For me, I certainly had it open for the full 24 hours of the event, and there was just chatter back and forth all day long. And it was just spectacular. For Me, it created this really special experience which you get, or I’ve experienced when I’ve run large in-person conferences in the past, where the team just built this bond on the day or over the few days that you’re delivering the event.

And you all understand just how exhausted you are going through that process of delivering an event. Because it is tiring. We need to face facts. When you’re doing in-person, you’ve got a lot of physical stuff around it. But when you’re doing it virtually, there’s a huge cognitive load. I mean, the amount of stuff that you’ve just got to be thinking about and keeping on top of.

It was this strange experience of literally like we were running around the halls trying to track speakers down and find out where people were, even though we were doing this entire thing virtually. And I think that combination of Discord for voice and Slack for text actually helped to create that kind of experience of the hallways. And literally we’re on the hallway chat. It was literally having this hallway chats because you would just run into somebody on Discord and you’d have that conversation. And it was fantastic.

Cate: Yeah, I didn’t… Oh, go ahead.

Dan: I think it has created some really special moments for me, which I’m so happy that we use the tools.

Cate: And I didn’t even think of it until you just mentioned it. But you’re absolutely right. I mean, it was so great to get to have conversations with people that I had been working with for a long time or people that I had [00:28:00] not really met exactly, but we were just all kind of hanging out together. And it really was that hallway feel of being at an event. It was pretty spectacular.

Michelle: You can type lol in Slack, or you can actually laugh with one another on Discord. And that’s the difference, right?

Cate: It is.

Michelle: It’s a much better bonding experience when you can have that opportunity. It’s a little bit like we’re all in the same place on walkie-talkies and having that ability to kind of just chat with each other.

Dan: But then that was also what we were trying to replicate again in the platform with the table functionality. So you haven’t got 60, 70, 80 people all stuck on a single video conference. You’ve actually got the ability, because we know who’s within the events, we’ve got the ability to open up the platform for people to freely move about.

And it was about trying to replicate that kind of hallway track the… I certainly absolutely love when I go to an in-person event. I spent far more time in the hallway track than I do in the sessions. And that was what I really wanted to replicate in some way, the best way we possibly could in a virtual environment. And from the feedback we’ve had, we’ve had some phenomenal responses in relation to the format of the event.

Cate: Yeah. One of my favorite things was at the very end, all these organizers went and sat down at a table together, you know, virtually but still at the table and just kind of collapsed in a heap and sat there for like an hour just kind of decompressing. And it was a great way to end the event, to be able to sit down with your friends and just sigh and not really talk about anything while you’re still talking about everything.

Michelle: And it was an open table though. So other people were still part of it, and laughing [00:30:00] and enjoying that aspect of it as well. It was like, wow, I get to talk to the people who’ve been putting this whole thing on. So that made it I think even more special that some people decided to stay and hang out with us too.

Cate: I felt so bad for the poor sponsor guy who was there, who just kind of collapsed on the table and forgot to let go.

Michelle: Poor guy.

Topher: That’s the end of an event like WordFest, the volunteers often need to reach out to a mental health organization.

Dan: This is something I wanted to just touch on. We’re talking about, obviously, we do put in a lot of very long hours over the delivery of the event. But this is something we’re making a conscious choice as individuals to do that here. This isn’t something every person that comes on as a volunteer across this, we discourage people to actually be active across the entire event.

We actually did last time and we will be doing it again. This time we placed breaks through the sessions because we do want to encourage people because obviously, it’s not healthy for us to be spending any sort of length of time in front of our monitors at our desks. So it is about making sure that we’re balancing our well-being with obviously the enjoyment of the events.

I mean, I certainly over the course of that 24 hour period while we were delivering the event last time, the amount of times I went off within my office, but still keeping in contact with what was going on. It’s fantastic

Michelle: I actually took a three-hour nap in the middle of it.

Cate: I slept and Topher took over my communication duties.

Topher: That worked pretty well actually for the two of us. We tag-teamed sleeping and working.

Dan: We had this wonderful, wonderful situation right at the start of the event where I won’t mention names, but one of our lead organizers, a very key individual in the whole process overslept right at the start.

Michelle: He’s MIA as we started to get up and running.

Dan: But it all adds to that experience of events, I think. [00:32:00]

Topher: We’re getting close to wrapping up here. So before we go, I’d like to hear about the details of the upcoming WordFest? When? Where? All that.

Dan: Sure. The next WordFest is going to take place on the 23rd of July starting at midnight UTC. As we know that can be challenging. So take a look at Wordfest.live. Www.wordfest.live. On there, you will find on the homepage, a list of exactly when we start. So we actually start off in Australia. The purpose of this event is a global celebration of WordPress. So we start off in Australia, we move on to Asia, Africa, Europe, South America and finish up in North America.

And if you look at the homepage of the site, you’ll see that there is a list of when we start. We’ve tried to be as helpful as possible. So we’ve listed both UTC time. So we start at UTC midnight. We’ve listed the local time for that continent or kind of as local as we can for that continent. The site should also detect where you’re coming in from. So your time zone will also be displayed as well, all going well.

So please forgive us. Time zones are complicated and difficult trying to deal with a global events such as this, which is why we stuck with UTC, which is really, really conveniently actually coordinated universal time. Even the acronym is the wrong way around. So head over to Wordfest.live 23rd of July. We would love to see you join us.

We do have an open call for volunteers available at the moment at the point of recording. So if you are interested in being part of this, then do head over to www.wordfest.live/call-for-volunteers. And you can be part of this. We had 64 people across the last event have [00:34:00] volunteer to help deliver it. So it does take a village, it does take a small village to deliver something like this. So if you’re interested, we’ve got a wide variety of skills that we’re looking for and we’d love to hear from you.

Topher: That’s really great.

Cate: Yeah, thanks so much.

Topher: Yeah, yeah, we really appreciate it. It’s been fun hearing about it.

Michelle: The schedule is live too. So if you’re interested in seeing who’s talking and what it looks like, go look at the schedule. Some really great topics, some really great talks out there. Again, there’s a few places that look blank because we have some fun things up our sleeves too. So pay attention. Follow us on Twitter @aBigOrangeHeart Big. Find us Wordfest.live. We’re also on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Cate: And tickets are free.

Dan: There’s donations.

Cate: Yup, there’s a $10 donation, optional, if you want. That goes towards Big Orange Heart and all the work they do for remote workers. But the registration is open and tickets are free. And we would love to have you at the event because there’s really something fun for everyone.

Michelle: And there’s still spots for sponsors. I have to say that.

Cate: Yes.

Dan: Yeah, we do have an optional micro sponsorship which closely reflects the actual cost of a ticket, what it would cost us if we were to be delivering this as a paid for event. So if you’re interested, everything can be found on Wordfest.live.

Cate: Thanks.

Dan: Cate, Topher, I just want to say thank you. We really appreciate this opportunity to come and have a chat with you. Hallway Chat is great that it’s back. It’s great that it’s got this new home. We’re really honored to come and join you for the first one.

Topher: Thank you very much.

Cate: Well, thanks. Yeah, we couldn’t think of two better people to start off talking with, both for all the things you do, for your charming personalities, for the comfortableness of talking to somebody that I actually know really well. We’re really grateful to have you on our first Hallway Chats. I can’t wait to talk to you again soon.

Michelle: Sounds good. I wish you well in all your future episodes.

Cate: Thanks. [00:36:00]

Topher: Thanks. This has been an episode of Hallway Chats, part of the HeroPress network. Your hosts were Cate and Topher. We’d like to thank Sophia DeRosia for the music and Liquid Web for hosting our website. If you liked the episode, please subscribe and mention us on social media.

The DeRosias are the founders and stewards of HeroPress. If you don’t already know about it, HeroPress tells the stories of people who have leveraged WordPress and its community to change their lives and achieve their goals. Through these stories, global connections are made and conversations are had that build a stronger community, more employment, and educational opportunities, and easier access to resources.

Website | HeroPress

Twitter | @mysweetcate

Twitter | @topher1kenobe

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

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

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 150.

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

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

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Cate and Topher DeRosia. The DeRosias are the founders and stewards of HeroPress. If you don’t already know about it, HeroPress tells the stories of people who have leveraged WordPress and its community to change their lives and achieve their goals. Through these stories, global connections are made and conversations are had that build a stronger community, more employment, and educational opportunities, and easier access to resources. It’s a great resource, a great organization. We are such fans of HeroPress. Thanks for joining us. Hey, we’re glad you’re here.

Cate: Thanks for having us.

Topher: Thanks for having us. Tara…

Liam: You are very welcome. Go ahead.

Topher: Tara, you did an essay on HeroPress once.

Tara: I did.

Liam: Tara is awesome. Thank you for sharing that, Tara. And thank you for flagging that up, Topher. And welcome to you both, Topher and Cate. Thanks for joining us here today.

Topher: Yeah.

Liam: This is where we would normally say “tell us a little bit more about yourself.” I feel like because of your great work with HeroPress, most of the folks probably listening to our show or at least our regular listeners are going to know who both you Cate and Topher are. So we’re going to do things a little bit differently on this, our 149th episode of Hallway Chats.

What we’re going to do is in our little role change, we’re going to ask Cate and Topher really to interview Tara and I. And not so much from our individual perspective than individual lives, but really as the cohosts and organizers of Hallway Chats. So we’ll be really answering our two signature questions, not from our own personal perspectives, but rather from the perspectives of managers of this happy, little show. So if everybody’s all with us here, then I will turn the mic back over to DeRosias and invite them to get this interview underway.

Cate: So my first question would be, why did you start Hallway Chats?

Liam: And I’m going to turn that question over to Tara to start.

Topher: Well done.

Tara: We had a lot of free time. No, no. Well, in part, to be honest, inspired by what HeroPress was doing. And also at the time, for me personally, I listened to every WordPress podcast there was. And at the time, there were maybe four or five that I really listened to really regularly. And I noticed that a lot of times it was the same people on those podcasts each time. So I thought it would be kind of nice to hear stories of people that I meet at WordCamps and in Slack groups who aren’t on podcasts. So I kind of had this little idea of doing something like unsung heroes or something like that, not to take the word “hero” into it. But sort of just the idea of your everyday WordPress person that’s just like you and that can inspire you to see what they’re doing and what they’re struggling with. So that was my idea initially.

Liam reached out on Twitter—I told the story a couple of times—but Liam reached out on Twitter. We had met at a couple of WordCamps. You know, we’re friendly, didn’t know each other too well. And he said he was interested in doing a podcast and I reached out to him. We kind of talked about it and he was interested in the same idea. So we made some adjustments to the concept a little bit and came up with a name and really wanted to do something to give back to the community and give people an opportunity to have their story out there, to share, they can send to their friends and family and people can listen to while they’re out walking their dog or something. That’s the genesis of it from my perspective.

Topher: I have one now. I’m assuming you did research before starting this about what’s involved in time and money and all that stuff. Is there anything that jumped out of the dark at you two months in and made you go “Whoa, I didn’t expect that at all. Do we really want to keep doing this? Is this worth it? Anything really jump out at you?

Liam: I’ll take that. I will share that Tara, is wonderful in so many ways, but one of her best qualities is if you look up in the dictionary the word “organized,” it’s just a picture of Tara. With Tara, she and I were able to really plot out kind of all the things logistically. How much time this is going to take? How much money is it going to cost? What do we need to spend? What equipment do we need to buy? Do we need to buy that end of equipment or can we get something a little bit this or a little bit that?

So we had done all the homework. And Tara and I were working on it probably for about six months, just shy of six months before we launched our first episode. We even recorded some test episodes that never went live just to say like how bad are we at recording podcast episodes. So we had done a lot of that. From my perspective, no, I never had a “oh my gosh, we’re totally in over our heads. This is terrible.”

I think that said though, one of the areas where we have consistently struggled is around finding new guests. We don’t want to talk to the folks that are on every podcast. They are wonderful people and have a lot of great things to share, but we want to talk to those that we don’t know. And we very much did not want it to be the friends of Tara and Liam show. Especially since COVID hit, we’re not going to WordCamps. We’re not meeting a ton of new people.

You certainly can meet people online and meet people on virtual WordCamps, but it’s not the same, “Oh, I sat down. I just happened to bump into this person and had a two hour chat. Oh my gosh, are they amazing?” So that’s an area where we’ve consistently struggled. I think we’ve done pretty well all things told but it’s been a real challenge. And I think we underestimated just the challenge of that. And certainly, you know, we had no idea that COVID was coming. So we were not able to really prepare for that in any kind of meaningful way.

Topher: That’s interesting. Are we going to someday see a producer’s cut, early release of Hallway Chats? Those episodes that didn’t get released.

Liam: Somewhere in Google Drive.

Tara: They are with my pets. So they’re not that interesting actually

Topher: Isaac Asimov has a book that’s out that is really, really early stuff that he didn’t want published. But people wanted it because he’s Asimov. He wrote the intro for it and he’s like, “I have no idea why you people want this trash.”

Tara: We have talked about outtakes or things like that, but there haven’t been that many. We only release the audio, but we do have the video of all our calls, of all of our conversations.

Cate: I do like the potential idea though of branching out to pets in the future. Like if things gets really slim or you know, particularly busy week, we can sit the dogs down and ask them how they feel about being a part of our crazy family.

Tara: My cat was just up here on my desk.

Cate: Right, exactly.

Tara: So he really wants to be part of it.

Cate: Cats do seem very interested in podcasts. This could be a whole new.

Tara: Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Topher: So I have another question—something I always wondered. It’s related to run costs of owning the podcast. Obviously, you want to have decent hardware. So you think, “Oh, I need a microphone.” What are some costs that surprised you? I mean, you need a website. You need a place to put mp3. You buy hardware. What else is there?

Tara: I don’t think any cost surprised us necessarily. The one investment that we make in every episode, which is really our largest outlay of funds is to have our podcast transcribed. So we’re very grateful to Evalyn Maina who lives in Nairobi and transcribes our podcast for us every single time and does a really great job. Before that we had a young man who also was overseas. I’m trying to remember where. He was in Eastern Europe somewhere.

So we have been very happy to spend that money because we really feel it’s important to offer that transcription, that written visual version of the podcast. And that’s really the main expense. We’re grateful to Liquid Web for supporting us by giving us hosting for our website where we hold our podcast. We use Blueberry for the hosting of the audio, which is not terribly expensive. I think it’s about $12 a month. So it’s really the costs are relatively manageable and low and we pay for that ourselves because this is not a business venture for us. But it’s been fine. If we did more with the podcast, I think there could be more expenses related to it.

Topher: Sure.

Tara: We used to publish every week. And that was because of the transcription cost that was more expensive. So not for that reason. But just because of what Liam described in terms of scheduling, we change every two weeks, and that cut the cost.

Topher: I’m amazed at how inexpensive drive space is these days. When Mp3 started coming out, being popular in the 90s, I was working at a hosting company, and relatively speaking Mp3s were huge compared to like a Photo. And you pay hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month for an archive of mp3, a podcast, or whatever. And you’re saying now it’s $12 a month. That just blows my mind.

Cate: So have you learned anything about yourselves while you’ve been doing Hallway Chats?

Topher: Or each other?

Cate: Or each other. Because I’ll be quite honest. I mean, Topher and I have been married well over 23 years, and I’m still learning things about him that I can’t believe that I didn’t know. Things like “this is my favorite food.” And I’m like, “That’s your favorite food.” I’m like, “How did I not know that?” But yeah.

Tara: Liam, do you want to go first?

Liam: Sure, I’d be delighted to. So, Tara and I, as she mentioned, didn’t really know each other when we started. We were WordCamp acquaintances. I could see her from across the conference hall and say, “Yeah, I think that woman’s name is Tara. I think she’s from Baltimore, Virginia, DC kind of thing.” But beyond that, we didn’t really know each other. We were part of a Twitter conversation. And… January of 2017, Tara? Joe Casabona was on the conversation and maybe a few others, and we were just thinking about podcasts not really sure where to go, yadi yada.

Topher: In hallway chat?

Liam: Yeah, yeah, on Twitter. Without vitriol. So we just started to get to know each other a little bit. In those early days, we were talking every week or every other week and sending some emails. And it was a mixture of: do I like the show’s concept? Do I really want to do this myself? Do I want to do this with this woman Tara? Does she want to do it with me? Do I like her? Well, like her enough to want to work with her as closely as we’ve ended up working.

I suppose on a deeper level, it was also is she committed to matters like community individuality respect for humanity, for people, for all the individuals as individuals as I think I am? A little bit that is, you know, you just have to start to talk about things and see how it goes. And I’ve been absolutely delighted to become as good friends as I am now with Tara. We could have hours and hours of conversations about how profoundly generous and kind and thoughtful and caring she is.

And I don’t use those words lightly. She thinks about things from a generosity standpoint two and three steps ahead of most people I know. She doesn’t really sector that off. It’s not like, “Oh, these are my WordPress friends, so I’m nice with them,” or “those are my running friends and I’m nice with them,” or “these are my family. In my experience with her, she’s been that generous person at every turn. That’s been pretty amazing to see and pretty amazing to watch and pretty amazing to learn from. So, I’ve learned a lot about Tara. And I love her a lot. She’s amazing.

Cate: I couldn’t agree more. I don’t have the pleasure of knowing Liam as well, but the last year or so I’ve really had a chance to get to know Tara and her support as I’ve dove into things over my head that have… has just been huge. You know, just the unconditional support and encouragement. So I’m glad that Liam got to learn that. I’m just so thankful for it. So now you get to talk Tara.

Tara: I’m all red-faced and just about in tears. That’s awfully amazingly kind. I’m a bit speechless about that. It’s certainly wonderful to hear that from someone like Liam who I consider a very dear friend and someone who has, for all of the nice things he said about me, I think he’s inspired me to think about things from a position, as he says, of love, to come at things first with love. I think about him a lot and how he has changed me in that way, I think. Not that I haven’t thought about being a kind person for a long time. But having more top of mind. And Liam’s very strong attention to value and his very thoughtful approach to everything that he does is something that I’ve learned and been inspired by.

He’s also really fun to chat with. He’s a great conversationalist. He asks really good questions, not just of our guests, but of me. I’ve reached out to him as a friend separately from the podcast at times when I’ve struggled, and he’s always been extremely supportive and patient with my struggles. So I think I look forward to continuing to be in touch with him and for a long time to come because he’s just an amazing spirit and my life. And I am very grateful for his guidance, really.

So, for every nice thing he said about me I can send it right back to him. And I’m so grateful to him for sharing this podcast with me because I wouldn’t have done it by myself. He’s brought so much to it. So yeah, both of us paying attention to the community has been something…it’s been nice to share that attention to giving back and to paying attention to who we’re chatting with and learning about them. And we’ve had some amazing guests and conversations that will always stick with me. So yeah, thanks for asking that question.

Topher: You both sound like really nice people.

Cate: You know, what I really like about all of that is that’s a lot of the reason that we put effort the last couple months into doing more of HeroPress is, you know, as a family, we have gotten so much out of just being involved in the project—the people who’ve been able to meet the friendships, the business relationships. Just that access to new perspectives and new resources that are out there. And we kind of looked as a group at where we were with the girls being older now and not having to manage family. And we can kind of move the focus we were putting into building our family and to building this stronger element of the community, and open up these opportunities that we’ve had for other people to be able to enjoy them and to be able to benefit from them. And hopefully, in the end, help everybody in the community benefit from them.

Tara: Yeah, I love interacting with your girls, and having met them and sort of your family. It’s not many communities where you have whole families that are known and contribute in very valuable ways to the community. So your whole family’s involvement and embrace of our community, the WordPress community, is really notable, I think.

Cate: And part of that comes actually from the reverse, where…

Topher: I was going to say that too.

Cate: Yeah. When they went to their first WordCamp, it was Chicago in 2014. It was my first WordCamp as an attendee. And they were 12 and 14 at the time, and they just were able to… because the community is safe, I mean, you still have to be cautious though the community is safe. So they were able to just go attend their own events. They made new friends. They met people in the community before I did. I remember the first WordCamp US, they were there, and we didn’t have to watch them closely. I would find them off in a corner learning something from my design friend. Or they would have questions, people would just take them aside and help them learn. The more we can do to help facilitate that for other people, it’s just huge.

Topher: I’m always surprised and happy when I learned that my kids know people in other countries that I don’t know.

Tara: Wow.

Topher: They made their own friend in Nigeria.

Tara: That’s awesome.

Topher: It’s cool

Liam: That’s really a pretty amazing way that your family has explored and involved itself in the WordPress community. I think that’s pretty unique in that approach. I’ve taken couple of my children to WordCamps. They were there but mostly because I brought along a dozen of donuts. And they did enjoy WordCamp US because that sponsor row for one of my children was like, “Wow, this is like Toys “R” Us, and yeah. All the sponsors were, “Have this and have that. Come play this video game. No, keep playing. Have fun. Yeah, you’re going to win it” kind of stuff.

So, yeah, it’s great. I’m so delighted that your family has embraced it in that way from what Cate had shared. That it’s really driven your relationship with each other to a more profound level. That’s so exciting to see and so exciting to hear about. Thank you.

Cate: I get so excited because I think about where I was at 19. Even as an educated person, or heading off to college, I was always a good student, all those things, there are things that are in front of them, like starting a business, learning about a business that comes from the internet, but also comes from the community that we’re a part of that just weren’t there if I had wanted to do them. And the opportunities for them to just do something huge with their life is amazing. Of course, they’re now both loading trucks at FedEx at the moment. But you now, you need people who are doing that too. But it’s just the options just sit there for when you’re ready.

Liam: Absolutely.

Topher: Yeah. For me, it was a real joy to have my family join what was becoming my life because, you know, I go away to WordCamp, and so it’s a wonderful fun time, and I’m off having a great time and my wife is home with the girls. That’s not fun for her. For a while, as I recall, Cate wasn’t sure that she’d be interested in going to a computer conference. It’s just not her thing. She’s not a computer nerd like I am.

But having them come along, especially having them enjoy the community and want to be there, made it so that I didn’t feel like I have to quit this and rush home to give my partner a break or even just because I want to be with my family. My family was there with me and we were doing something fun. It’s like those families they go RVing together and love that life. If they didn’t all love it, then it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. And we all love it.

Cate: Yeah. In fact, the girls are starting to get a little antsy that there haven’t been any events lately. And so they’re excited to get… Particularly Emma. Emma is much more reserved. She likes to just be. She’s more cerebral. She’s very happy. Happy like I am to be back behind the scenes a little bit more. But even she was saying how she can’t wait for there to be another WordCamp so that she can go somewhere

Liam: Yeah, she and lots and lots and lots and lots of people around the world it’s hard to believe we’re a year under COVID already, at least here in America. Other countries have been dealing with it longer.

Well, we’ve talked a lot about community and building community. When we started this conversation today, we talked about how Topher and Cate were the founders and the stewards of HeroPress. While certainly the community contributes to HeroPress and it makes it what it is. And it takes a dedicated effort and a lot of time and energy to provide that platform for the community to share and connect. With that in mind, Tara and I are really delighted to share the news that Hallway Chat will be joining the HeroPress umbrella of wonderful content. And perhaps even more excitingly is that Tara and I will be stepping down as hosts and the wonderfully talented and generous Cate and Topher will be taking over.

Tara and I are kind of staring at each other through the Zoom window here and we’re both kind of stunned to hear me say that aloud and to realize, not the finality of it because nothing’s coming to an end but the gravity may be away. I’m going to just stop talking for a second and see if Tara has some things to share.

Tara: That’s twice my face is turned bright red, and I’m tearing up in this episode. I don’t know if I’ve cried twice. I know I have cried on some episodes, but maybe not twice though. I’m super excited for Cate and Topher to make this part of HeroPress. The timing is just great for us and for them. And it’s a bittersweet moment to be stepping away, for Liam and I to be stepping away as cohosts. But I feel like this child is ready to graduate and move on. And we’re really grateful and excited that Cate and Topher are going to do this because it is a natural fit for HeroPress and what they’re doing with HeroPress. So thank you for joining the Hallway Chats family and bandwagon and taking up the mantle.

Cate: And it really does feel that way. You know, we love Hallway Chats. As we’ve talked about a podcast, Topher has always wanted to do a podcast with HeroPress. There just was not enough hours in the day, enough resources to go around to make one more thing fit. But as we’ve been looking at ways to expand it and make HeroPress more of an asset in the community, something like Hallway Chats was on our mind, but we didn’t want to compete with Hallway Chats because we love what you two are doing.

So, to be able to bring it in, put the resources for people because both girls are interested in being involved in it to, you know, to be able to expand to the people who are involved and to open up some opportunities for you two to move on to your next amazing thing, it makes everything better. Every time I talk about things, it’s always an and these days, where it’s not HeroPress or Hallway Chats, it’s HeroPress and Hallway Chats. It’s not Cate and Topher battling Liam and Tara in some kind of weird smackdown, it’s us doing this, and then you each doing the new things. We’re also much richer when we just keep expanding and growing that way.

Tara: Yeah.

Topher: When Hallway Chats first came out, I thought, “Ah, what a great name. That’s exactly what we would have wanted for HeroPress. And quite quickly, I applied to be on the show and was told no. And the reason was that you were trying to reach out more to people who aren’t on podcasts all the time. Exactly as you said. And I thought, “Oh, that’s exactly what I wanted for HeroPress.”

Like Kate said, “I’ve always been a bit envious of what you’re doing and wanted to have something similar. So I am exceptionally delighted that this worked out. We had been talking about starting a new podcast that’s going to be a little different from Hallway Chats. That’s kind of how we got to here is I spoke to Tara and I said, “Hey, you know, we’re thinking of doing a podcast.” And she said, “Oh, really? We should talk.” And that’s how we ended up here today. But I can’t think of a better model for a HeroPress podcast than this. So I’m really excited.

Tara: Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Yeah, thanks for reaching out. That was fortuitous timing. I messaged Liam right away when you reached out. Each year we’ve just told ourselves, we commit to another year of doing this together. And so when it comes up before the next year, we start having thoughts and conversations about what we would change or do differently, or whether we would continue or not. So we were just embarking on those conversations when you reached out.

And I think we both have things going on separately with each of our own businesses, and community commitments, and that type of thing. And so we were thinking about stopping. So to be able to pursue other things and still have Hallway Chats live on is great. As we’ve talked over the past couple of months and kind of put together all of the processes and systems that we’ve put in place, as Liam mentioned, he kindly said that I’m super organized. I probably I’m like to a fault. But in some ways that’s helpful because you can get a whole set of processes that you can inherit, good or bad as they are, but that’s really…

You know, when you asked earlier about what was surprising or investment, the time investment in putting together all of the processes and learning how to do things so that you can get it down to a very quick and easy, repeatable process. It’s kind of what we’ve done over the past three years. So hopefully that will be helpful as you move forward.

Cate: I, for one, don’t think you can spend too much time organizing. I’m both thrilled with what you’ve been able to hand over to me, but also deeply, deeply on board with the systems and processes.

Tara: You have to let me know what you improve upon because there’s definitely stuff to be improved upon.

Topher: Another fortuitous thing about the time that we were thinking of doing a podcast and about the time we talked to you, a friend of mine in India, who was one of the organizers of WordCamp Mumbai approached me and said, “Hey, I want to do a podcast with you about HeroPress people and kind of make it like a Hallway Chat. I said, “Oh, really? Maybe this is the time.”

Liam: Yeah. So what’s happening with that? We haven’t talked a whole lot about it. I told him that we were working on this. We got a bunch of ideas. He might be another host.

Tara: That would be cool.

Topher: We’ve talked about the girls being involved. We don’t want to have four or five hosts and one guest. But maybe we rotate hosts. In one week is Cate and I and one week is Cate and Sophie and then maybe this other guy.

Tara: Cool.

Topher: We’ll see.

Tara: That’s wonderful.

Liam: I’m super thrilled to see how the show evolves over time under your stewardship and to see the exciting new ways that you take it and the way that you support the community and bring it close together in ways that Tara and I could never have imagined. That’s really I think what I’m looking forward to the most.

Tara: Mm hmm.

Cate: We had some ideas. We’ve been talking about maybe a family podcast. I would like to try something where it’s literally sitting around the table chatting about WordPress, have some hosts. So we might try some different formats. I know to get started we’re going to look at maybe some people that you are familiar with in the community, but that are doing some different kinds of things in that community. It would seem that COVID has been an opportunity for a lot of people to start thinking outside the box when it comes to events and meetups, and what does community look like, and how we can come together. So, I’m not quite as outgoing as Topher is, so it gives me a little time to get comfortable with the whole format. But also I think it’s nice to take a look at just the new things happening.

Tara: Yeah. I know you’ve been really involved with Big Orange Heart. So I’m sure that that connection also has introduced you to a lot of people in the community and are doing amazing things for the community. That would be great to chat with on Hallway Chats.

Cate: Yeah, it’s been crazy. I’ve talked to more people during lockdown than I think I did in any given year. But between I was initially involved with organizing WordCamp US. So I got into more of that angle, which brought me into helping out with Big Orange Heart. So the number of people I have met doing things has just exploded.

Topher: Something that I’ve been struck by in years with dealing with HeroPress is what it means to be a well-known person. I’ve run into communities that are very insular. The Nigerian WordPress community is very large. There are a ton of people doing really great things, and inside that community they kind of all know each other. And so if you would ask one of them, “should we interview this person?” they’re like, “Ah, they’ve been on a podcast a lot.” But you wouldn’t know them.

So I want to delve into those communities. I don’t want to find those people who are doing great things in some other community that you’re never going to run into by accident. I don’t know. Connect the strings around the world from place to place.

Tara: Yeah. Well, you have such an archive of HeroPress stories. I mean, it would be really interesting maybe. Liam and I talked about this. I’m just like, but it’d be really interesting to like go back to somebody who wrote a piece for HeroPress couple of years ago and see what they’re up to now and chat with them. That’d be kind of cool. You’ve got such a worldwide audience with HeroPress that I think you can take Hallway Chats all over. It’s great.

Topher: Yeah.

Cate: Well…

Topher: We’re going to…Go ahead.

Cate: I was thinking then as we… something we talked about as we launch life in, you know, living out of the RV and traveling around, maybe we can get into some more impersonal Hallway Chat conversations, you know.

Tara: Mm hmm, love that.

Cate: You know, just pull up next to a coffee shop and have a chat.

Tara: Yeah. Wow. Awesome. Great ideas.

Topher: There are two or three sequels essays on HeroPress. People who’ve come back years later and done one. And I can see this being a replacement for that sort of thing. Because they’re cool stories but a lot of times, it’s more of the same. “WordPress continued to be awesome in my life.” But a podcast would be a different way to say that. So I can see totally going back into the archives of HeroPress and finding people that… sometimes I don’t talk to people for a couple of years after an essay and say, “Hey, what’s going on?”

Cate: Yeah. One thing we want to be really careful with and we kind of started at the very beginning is making sure that as we look at expanding HeroPress that there’s something more. That we make sure that all of the offers, all the essay contributors are included in that process, and get to be involved in ways that fit them best, you know, so that as new things are opened up, they have first opportunities, they have the opportunities to be a part of Hallway Chats. Because, I mean, it’s great that we had an idea and HeroPress happened, but without people contributing essays, without the community really being behind it, HeroPress is nothing.

Topher: I recently went to look up a HeroPress contributor from four years ago. I pulled up an essay, and there are all the links in the sidebar, you know, and I clicked on her Twitter handle and it was closed. Like, “that’s sad.” And I clicked on her website. She had her own little agency and it was gone—404. And I checked Facebook, gone. I thought, “Oh, no.” She’s in England, so I went to the UK slack. I said, “Does anybody know this person?” And somebody suggested a guy that I talked to who happened to have the same last name as her. And he said, “She’s doing great. We have a 2-year-old now.” And I thought, “Oh, boy, that’s so much better.”

Cate: I was going to say having a 2-year-old is not better. But I see where you’re going with that.

Tara: You had me worried for a minute.

Cate: Yeah, profoundly beyond the 2-year-olds make things better stage.

Liam: I don’t know. Every stage is just magical in its own way and a headache in its own way.

Cate: I’m enjoying the magical stage where the kids go out and buy groceries and bring me back a Starbucks.

Topher: They did that during this podcast—while we were recording. We got a text that said, “We’re going out for coffee. We’ll be back.”

Tara: Wow. We did not build in that support stuff into our Hallway Chats process. That’s definitely something to add on, I think. Nice.

Cate: I’ll add it to the checklist. You know, this is my first contribution to an organizational process.

Tara: Coffee delivery midway through.

Liam: Value of team. The value of team.

Cate: Exactly. So are we at a good spot to talk about what you two are doing next?

Tara: Sure.

Liam: Sweet. Yeah, I think so.

Tara: Yeah, Liam go ahead.

Liam: So what’s next? What’s next? In recent years, I have really started to focus a bit more locally in a geographic sense and a little bit less centric on the internet itself. So less focused on WordPress and the WordPress community in a global sense, and more kind of who are the folks and the businesses and the community directly around me. Again, in a geographic sense.

I don’t really know why. I didn’t wake up any day and say, “You know what, here’s where I want to go.” But I think over time, influenced by the fact that I’ve now lived where I live today in suburban Philadelphia longer than I’ve lived anywhere as an adult, it really feels like home to me. I could see moving at some point, but I have no immediate plans. So it was just kind of a… what’s that silly little song? “Who are the people in your neighborhood?”

Topher: Yes.

Liam: And just kind of getting around that. So I’ve been doing some networking, doing some podcasting locally, doing some community work, getting to know some more of the nonprofits in the area. And really that’s where I’m going to continue to explore and put in my own time and energy, particularly as we try to transition out of COVID and see what that all looks like. So many businesses and sectors really got hammered by all the different challenges of the pandemic. That’s what is on my immediate horizon in terms of community activity and podcasting. Tara.

Tara: So, a couple of years ago, year and a half ago or so, I started niching down my WordPress website agency Design TLC to focus on building websites and working with small schools enrichment programs and education-focused nonprofits. That is a mouthful. But it is something I feel pretty passionate about. I had worked with a few organizations within that industry category and decided that’s what I wanted to do. So I’ve been spending the past year and a half or so really getting to know that community and engaging with that community in order to be a thought leader there and to meet other thought leaders there.

I’ve made some friends with some people who consult with small schools in various ways. So I’m actually launching another podcast around the same time that this episode will air. So no resting on my laurels, but also utilizing those processes that Liam and I created to do a new podcast called Mindful School Marketing, which will be talking about marketing for schools, but also talking about all the things that help people be better marketers, better people, doing things more efficiently. This is network success that we use on Hallway Chats, just finding success however you define it, which is a holistic thing, right?

If you are healthier, happier, more mindful, you will probably be better at what you do, whether it’s marketing for a school or working at FedEx, or whatever you’re doing. I think that it’s really important to think about that. So it’s very broad, which is kind of nice in a way to have that broadness of topics to cover. So we’re just getting that underway and just starting to record some episodes next week, actually. So yeah, from one podcast to the other. But this one is definitely a community-focused podcast, but it also for me, to be honest, is also a business endeavor. So I’m looking forward to that as well.

Topher: Don’t forget to add the coffee delivery to your new podcast.

Tara: I’m going to add. Already noted. Already noted. Coffee delivery.

Cate: That’s just so exciting. Those are both areas that I think you get glossed over and areas that can really use some extra attention, particularly coming out of the pandemic. The pandemic really highlighted some weaknesses there that I think you both are going to do an excellent job of helping to turn around. And it’ll be exciting to come back and see how it’s gone and see what impact you’ve been able to have in a new community as well.

Topher: Maybe you can be on Hallway Chats in a while.

Tara: Yeah. Well, we appreciate your support. Thank you so much. Do we want to wrap this thing up and get it ready to go?

Topher: Let’s do it.

Tara: All right. Well, normally we ask people where they can be found online, but when this airs, you can be found on Hallwaychats.com.

Topher: That’s right.

Tara: Anyplace else you’d like people to follow HeroPress?

Cate: Yeah. We’ve got all the HeroPress things. So HeroPress on Twitter. We’ve got a website and I think we have a Facebook page. I’ve recently made a LinkedIn page. It’s really funny HeroPress has always just kind of passively happened in our life and it’s a very strange getting everything organized and figuring out where the weaknesses are, what we still need to focus on. Yeah, HeroPress and Hallway Chats will both be around together working together.

Topher: Years ago when HeroPress first started, I thought, “I need to be absolutely everywhere.” So I created a Tumblr account, an Instagram account, and all kinds of stuff. I didn’t really do much with them. But just this week I’ve been experimenting with a new plugin from Emile called Revive Old Posts, which will go into your archive and bring one out. You can connect it to all kinds of stuff including Tumblr, and Instagram, and all that. So just to test it out. I did that. So, HeroPress essay one came out today, pushed to Tumblr and also Russian social network called VK, which is very popular in Europe. So I expect we’re going to start being a lot more places.

Tara: Cool. I can’t wait to see what…

Liam: Great things already. Great things already. I’m thrilled to see where it goes.

Topher: Your best path is Google HeroPress and pick the network you like best.

Tara: All right. Okay. Well, this has been a monumental episode and talked more than we usually do. But we are excited for you and we’re grateful to you. And apparently, Amazon is too.

Topher: Great.

Tara: I did not follow my instructions in muting my phone.

Topher: Thank you. Thank you both for what you’ve done and giving us the opportunity to continue to make it great.

Tara: All right. Well, until we meet again.

Liam: Thank you for taking over the mantle.

Cate: Thank you.

Liam: Tara, it’s been a huge pleasure. Thanks.

Tara: Thank you, Liam. Love you.

Liam: Love you too.

Tara: All right, I’m going to be to stop recording. Farewell.

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

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

Stephanie is a geek, entrepreneur, inventor, and craft beer lover. Her passion is helping grow agencies to scale and thrive through her white label company, FocusWP.

LinkedIn | Left Brain

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

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

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

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 149.

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

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Stephanie Hudson. Stephanie is a geek, entrepreneur, inventor, and craft beer lover. Her passion is helping grow agencies to scale and thrive through her white label company FocusWP. Welcome, Stephanie. Thanks for joining us today.

Stephanie: Hey, you guys. It’s so nice to be here.

Liam: Stephanie, what a pleasure to meet you. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Stephanie: Well, I have been in the WordPress space for about as long as there’s been a WordPress space. I’ve been making websites since dial-up days, which makes me feel super old. But currently I’m a Divi girl. I am on the Divi Chat Podcast. I like Divi but I’m not a hater of the other builders and things like that. I think we should all be able to get along. I’ve run an agency. I’ve freelanced. I’ve done all the things. I’ve had a full-time job with a boss who watched over my shoulder all day long. So I’ve done all of these things. And then I started to sort of take all that knowledge and mix it together.

We have a white label company, my business partner and I, where we do services for agencies. So I really am having a great time helping agencies to scale and grow. One of my favorite little pet projects is to take freelancers who are super insecure and give them a little pep talk before a proposal is due or something and help them to get more money, because they never think they’re worth it. So I’m just in general kind of a geek.

Tara: Well, and super positive too. I can tell you’ve got a lot of great energy. So that’s great. I think we have all of the major page builders represented here. Because I use Beaver Builder mostly, although I’m going to try Elementor soon. And Liam is an Elementor user. So we can now get along.

Stephanie: It’s hard days for Elementor right now.

Tara: Yeah, they’ve had a little rough time.

Stephanie: But Divi people understand because we’ve been bashed forever, you know?

Tara: Yeah. Well, the Divi community is huge. I mean, it really is…

Stephanie: It’s amazing. And it’s such a nice culture. I mean, when anything gets to a certain size, you have your haters and your trolls. But for the most part, it’s been incredible. And I really am not a side taker. I think it’s so silly that people think that’s worth fighting over. In fact, I just posted in a Facebook group this morning. Somebody was like, “Oh, I want to try a builder. What should I use?” And it’s like kwa kwa kwa. Every side is like…

And I said, “You know what, pick a tool and go with it.” You can build a great site in literally any of these builders. I just decided early on to stick to what… I was building sites in WordPress in general. I’m not like the best developer ever. I’m not the best designer. I’m more of the visionary type, and I can just get crapped on. But I was like, “I’m sick of trying to figure out a new theme every single time.” So I needed to find a company that had a lot of themes. And there was Elegant Themes, and they had a dozen or more, maybe 20 themes. So I thought, “I can serve any client I need to with this little toolkit.” And then before you know, it came Divi 1.0 and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Because I think they were pretty much the first builder.

Tara: Yeah, there are some others.

Stephanie: But that was the first one…

Tara: …the other ones.

Stephanie: Oh, I don’t care. That was the first one I’ve ever seen it. And it was a very early days for that whole concept kind of. Anyway. Then I’d learn about other ones and I’m like, “I want to try that.” And I was like, “No, I’ve invested in this ecosystem. I’m just going to go with it.”

Tara: Awesome. Awesome.

Liam: I couldn’t agree with you more there.

Stephanie: I was going to say, what? Are we going to fight?

Liam: No. I don’t want to say they’re all the same, but they’re all hammers, right?

Stephanie: Exactly.

Liam: Or they’ll screwdrivers.

Stephanie: Exactly.

Liam: The amount of time it takes to learn how to use a new hammer and a new screwdriver often isn’t worth it. So I agree with you. Find one that works for you and run with that and let the others live for sure. For sure. Stephanie, I want to ask you about inventing?

Stephanie: Okay.

Liam: What have you invented?

Stephanie: Oh, my gosh.

Liam: Tell us about that.

Stephanie: I’m going to have to ask you to sign a NDA first possible.

Liam: Only if it’s 14 pages long.

Stephanie: I’ve said for years I need to marry a mechanical engineer or something because I can dream up so many things, but I don’t know how to make them. I’m that person that has notebooks full of doodles of all different things. Okay, I’ll give you a couple. I’ve invented an automatic rocking chair rocker. Really useful things like that I have invented in my mind. My all-time favorite one is a new umbrella. I’ve redone the umbrella. It’s such an annoying tool that we have. The driest spot on the umbrella is taken up by the stick. You can’t ever get there. Most of my things are improvements on things that already exist but I reimagine them. So anyway, that’s like one of my favorite little goofy things to do. I love it.

Tara: It’s really cool.

Stephanie: I mean, they never come to fruition. And I’m just one of those people that gets mad when stuff is made. I’m like, “That was my idea.”

Tara: Wow.

Stephanie: Nobody ever believes you though.

Tara: Stephanie, what was your path to WordPress? How did you even get started with WordPress?

Stephanie: I had a full-time job. I lived in Atlanta, I worked for Georgia Tech. I was the web developer for the College of Engineering. We had to rebuild that site. Somehow we evaluated a bunch and I ended up using Drupal. So Drupal was the go-to for a couple of years. And then I came to my senses, I found WordPress and I moved in that direction. And I have never looked back. That’s not true.

One time I did look back. Somebody said, “I have a Drupal site. I need some help,” or you know, some small little thing. And I was like, “I built a huge Drupal site back in the day. It’s unrecognizable and you can’t do…” I had a little stint with Joomla. Remember the good old Joomla too? Also terrible. So anyway, I made my rounds. And that’s just where I ended up.

Tara: Nice. Well, we’re glad you’re here.

Stephanie: Thank you. Me too.

Tara: How about the WordPress community? So you’re in the Divi community. Before you discovered that, were you involved in the WordPress community at all? Meetup? Anything?

Stephanie: Not a ton. I really got into the community through Facebook. It blows my mind actually how useful Facebook is to me for my business and for my sanity. But none of the front-facing, none of the grandmas posting things that they forwarded without fact-checking, none of the pictures of kids, none of the politics, none of this stuff that everybody thinks is Facebook. But it’s all the behind the scenes. It’s all the groups and the messenger chats that you have, and all these connections that you make. It’s unbelievable to me. I’ve never been much of a Twitter girl. It’s like never clicked. You know how we all have our ways. We all have our platforms that we like and stuff.

As far as community goes, though, I just think you can’t be Facebook for the groups and things like that. It’s just been so incredible. I am involved in the Divi community, but not exclusively. There’s so many general WordPress things. Actually, I have a Facebook group myself, because I got a little frustrated because it was like if I wanted to ask questions or reach out to people about this plugin, or speeding up a WordPress site or using this WooCommerce tool, so many groups were so niched down that it was… There’s a lot of Devi groups that I’m in and there was so many people that became like a hashtag in there—NDR (Not Devi Related). So it was like, because they wanted…everybody had a… There’s just so many other things to talk about.

If you build WordPress websites, whether you’re a freelancer or a small team, whatever, there’s a business there. There’s so many other things. Like, how do you set up your billing? What do you use for bookkeeping? What email program do you guys use? Do you use anything for your productiv…? There’s so many business things to talk about. And sometimes you just have what I call a bad entrepreneur day and you just need to be around other people who have been there or you need to have a cry or have somebody send you some good memes to cheer you up or something like that. You know, say like, “It’s alright, this project sucks. The next one will be okay.” You just need that.

So I created a little group called Focus on Your Biz because my company is called FocusWP. Anyway, that’s where I spend a lot of time to. Sort of that’s my little tribe in addition to all the other specific things. But I love it. It’s fun.

Liam: Yeah, I get what you’re saying about, you know, niche groups are great when you need that, but I could see how it’s a challenge. Because you join a new group and you don’t want to just jump in and like, “Hey, here’s all my needs. Can everybody help me right away?”

Stephanie: Exactly.

Liam: There’s a certain like, “Let me see if I can answer a question for somebody else. Let me contribute to the conversation. Let me build some respect in this community.” And then by that time the deadline and the need has gone. So it’s kind of helpful to have a group where it is more open-ended. and that can take time to grow. How are you going about growing that?

Stephanie: It’s growing kind of slowly. We only have a few hundred members. Now we’re close to 400, I think. And part of me wants to grow… you know, I look at I see some of these other groups, and they’re like, 2,000 people, 10,000 people, all this stuff. But then again, I’ve heard people say that 500 mark is nice—other colleagues that have groups. Because once you get past that, you have to start moderating. You have to start dealing with the struggles of it and stuff.

I’m a big networker. I’m very open to just sort of meeting people and having conversations. It almost always ends up something cool happening. I love it. So anybody that I talked to I’m like, “Hey, you should join my group.” And I send them a link and they do. So it’s sort of just been most everyone in the group has been brought in by me. Some people invite others and things like that but… And I talked about it on the podcast., the Divi Chat Podcast, a bit too just because that’s in my little intro. So it’s just growing slowly. It’s not a revenue generator for me or anything like that. It’s just sort of a nice place to be.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. Before we hit the record button, Tara was anxiously looking forward to hearing about your affection for craft beer. Maybe we can steer the conversation that way a little bit. What about craft beer do you like? Do you make your own beer? Do you just enjoy the different types?

Stephanie: Oh, no, no, no, no. A few years ago, I was thinking about truly trying to niche my agency. I have an agency called Sweet Tea Marketing. Because we’re in the south. We’re in Charlotte. I had a different business partner in that business and we were so tired of how many clients we get that have been basically just screwed over by their developers before. It gives our industry a bad name. It’s almost like we’re the used car salesman of the internet. Nobody trusts us. They always think we’re trying to get one over on them and things like that.

So we were trying to go with, like, “Ah, let’s go with Southern integrity and all this stuff.” So the fact that it was a beverage name was kind of… It was just something Southern. But then it ended up going down a road where I really wanted to niche down and find something. I’ve said for a long time, like, everybody always wants to figure out, “Oh, how do I pick a niche? How do I pick a niche.” And I’ve always sort of said, like, “If I had like two or three sites in any industry, I think I could make it a niche.” Because that’s what you need really. You just need some experience in that industry and some contacts and stuff.

So we happen to be working with a few breweries. And I love craft beer. And there’s an explosion of it, I mean, everywhere in the country, but Charlotte was really a big growth center there. So I joined the Guild. I went to the conferences and I sort of spun off a side thing where I called it Sweet Tea Craft Marketing. I ended up doing a video series with some guys in the industry. Because I would have beers with these guys and I thought, “Wouldn’t this be kind of funny to do a tasting show where one of them was a Cicerone trained beer…? Oh, he’s going to kill me that I can’t remember the name. But anyway, he’s Cicerone trained. So he’s like up there. Not that like top level where there’s only like 19 in the world, but he’s the one right below that. But still impressive.

And then there was another guy who was a home brewer. He was a Cicerone server. Which for those who don’t know, Cicerone is like a sommelier of wine. Cicerone is the beer version of that. So I said, “You know what we should do, guys? We should review beers together, and like have your perspective as this big shot, have your perspective as a home brewer, and then I’ll be like, ‘yeah, tastes good.'” So I learned so much about beer and all that.

It ended up morphing into I was talking about the packaging and the branding and all that stuff. It’s how the whole thing ended. It was just super fun. It was just the thing we did to just give a little recognition in the industry.

Tara: That is really fun. What’s your favorite beer at the moment? Do you have one?

Stephanie: I am an IPA girl. I know everybody. I like a juicy IPA. It’s not a real impressive favorite, but I can’t help it. I love it

Tara: It’s kind of like what happened to Malort, right, with that thing?

Stephanie: Yeah. Sideways?

Tara: Yeah. It’s now the same thing with the IPAs, but I’m in that camp as well. Like a hazy IPAs.

Stephanie: Hazy, yeah. I just love them. They’re so good. I don’t need a lot of fruits or fancy stuff. The milkshake one I don’t need. I don’t need all that. I just like the good old hazy IPA. Give me that any day.

Tara: Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s fun. That’s cool.

Liam: I’m at the other end. I’m more of a malt drinker, malt beer, Vienna Lager, Malt’s, and old beers. That’s what I like. Yeah.

Stephanie: Nice. See, now that’s so much cooler of an answer.

Liam: It is what it is. I don’t know that I did. It’s like cool. It’s just it is what it is. If it’s an IPA, it’s got to be a double because I don’t like the really tart… It’s not the tartness. It’s more the dryness..

Stephanie: Bitter. The hoppiness.

Liam: Yeah. So for whatever reason, if they double the IPA, whatever that means, it drinks a little smoother.

Stephanie: I’ll have to send you guys a link to the show notes to these series we did where I’m a dork and I don’t know anything. They just make fun of me the way I describe them, because they’re like, “Oh, I got banana notes.” I’m like, “What? This is in your beer?” They can just taste things that I can’t taste. It’s amazing.

Tara: My husband is a home brewer and a beer…

Stephanie: Oh, cool. So we always have beer on tap, which has been really nice during the pandemic because you can have… I’d say it’s nice because you can just have a little bit. You don’t have to commit to a whole bottle. But you can also have a little bit and then a little bit and then a little bit.

Stephanie: And then a little bit more. A little bit a lot of times.

Tara: Yes. So he taught me how. I’ve done it once. But he’s got it down to us…

Stephanie: You know, you look at the brewery, like the stereotype of the guy with the beard and the tattoos and all this stuff and the beanie, and there’s a certain connotation of that. I’m telling you what, these guys are chemists. They’re unbelievable.

Tara: It’s a science project and it’s also a janitorial kind of thing too. There’s a lot of cleaning and sterilizing that goes into it as well. Actually, I’ve gone to some meetup type things, presentations with women brewers. So that’s also a really growing trend as women.

Stephanie: It is. Women in the industry is huge.

Tara: That’s how it started. Men only got involved in making beer when it started to become an industry.

Stephanie: I know.

Tara: Women started it. So in honor of women’s history month I will…

Stephanie: That’s right. Yesterday or something was International Women’s Day.

Tara: Yes. Yes. Cool. Well, we could probably talk about beer and make Hallway Chats into the beer podcast.

Stephanie: Speaking of Hallway Chats, though, the hallway chats at the brewery conferences, oh, my gosh. You go to a brewery conference, it is so different than a WordCamp. You get there and when you get your little swag bag for attending the conference, it has a cup. And you just walk around. It’s like a branded cup or mug. And there’s just people pouring beer the whole place, all over. You just drink the whole entire time. So it was a fun niche to choose.

Tara: It is.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a smart move. I like that. Stephanie, I want to ask you one of our signature questions if I can.

Stephanie: Sure.

Liam: And it’s around success. The question is really, how would you define success? What is your definition? It can be a mixture of a personal definition or a professional definition? Or maybe for you it’s a combo? How do you define success?

Stephanie: That’s such a hard question. Can’t we just keep talking about beer, Liam? I think you guys are muting because they can’t hear you laughing at my jokes. I need the feedback, you guys. Come on.

Liam: I unmuted. Go ahead.

Stephanie: Okay, good.

Stephanie: Success. Success. How do you define success? I mean, you got to wake up in the morning and feel good about what you’re doing. You got to go to bed at night feeling like you accomplished something. To me, I mean, if we’re talking success, we’re in the United States of America, there’s going to be dollars involved. So what is success for me financially is I want to be able to not have to worry about my bills, I want to be able to take care of my family when they need it, and I want to be able to take a vacation once in a while. The V word that we never get to really talk about. So success is how you feel about what you’re doing, to me, and to have something that you can really be proud of that you’re doing. I like helping people so that brings me a feeling of success a lot of times.

Liam: Let’s talk about helping people. You mentioned at the start, or Tara read at the start of the show that you’ve got a business that helps agencies grow. Tell us about that. What does that mean day to day for you? What does that look like?

Stephanie: There’s a good backstory on it, especially appropriate for this show.

Liam: Please share. Please share.

Stephanie: I was at a WordCamp and there was a little… It wasn’t exactly a hallway. It was before the sessions began. There was a little Divi coffee and donuts meetup. So I went there and I was by myself. I am clearly not shy. I’m not a shy person. I’m very gregarious. But like in a conference setting, it’s like I can’t figure out the psychology of it. But it’s so awkward to be by yourself and to approach a group of people. But I have found that if you just have somebody standing next to you and two people approach your group, it’s not weird. I don’t know what that is. And you’re thinking I’m crazy right now, but the next time we’re ever allowed in public, you watch. It’s totally true. It’s just not as awkward.

So there was another guy there who I had just sort of met just casually. We were both at the coffee thing or whatever and we just chatted just for a couple of minutes. And then I walked away and I realized he didn’t know anybody there either. And a lot of the other folks did. I went back up to him and I said, “Hey, would you like to be my conference buddy today?” And he looked at me and said, “I’m sorry., what?” And I was like, “Yeah, do you want to be conference buddies?” And he was like, “Sure.” So we hung out all day. I mean, through the whole conference.

In our little then the hallway chats that he and I had, we were talking about our agencies. My agency, I had systematized maintenance and care plans. I loved care plan. This is before care plans were like… I know it sounds so hipster me. It was before care plans were cool guy. But I was really into it. They were super profitable for me. He was in the camp that like they were a pain in the neck. So we talked about all this stuff, we talked about our pricing, we talked about all these other stuff.

Then like a week after WordCamp was over, he sends me a text and says, “I just sent you an email. Don’t freak out. Read it.” And I opened my email, and he sent me a business plan. He said, “Let’s take this model that you’ve built, let’s perfect it, let’s build more stuff around it, and let’s do this as a business.” So we started doing care plans. And we found out that it really was a useful service for people. We white labelled it, so they get all the credit. We put their logo on their ports and everything.

But then we started to realize like, now that they trusted us with their websites to care for them, they would also say like, “Could you help me figure this out? Or could you do that?” or “I have this bill. Do you guys know anybody?” So we started doing little side projects and we realized, like, gosh, there’s so many more ways we could help. So we added on development services. And then we added on copywriting services. Because these are the things that are hard to find. There’s a million developers, but to find somebody that you can trust that isn’t going to flake on your project, or that has the skill set that they say they have, or there’s quality control involved.

I mean, we’ve all had projects where we hire somebody on a recommendation, or just we found them on Upwork or whatever, and they flake midway, and then you’re up pulling all-nighters the rest of the week to get the deadline done. So we wanted something that was reliable, that was really beneficial to these agencies, and something that they could mark up so they could scale and grow. Because so many of them are just one-man shops. And there’s just a capacity there. Like you really only have so many hours, and you’re really never going to take a vacation if it’s all on you. So to help them realize you can take on more work, you can offer services that you aren’t really maybe confident in. All of those things. So it went from just care plans to these services.

Then I started to realize they actually need like pep talks and a little… It’s not coaching. I do coaching, but I have been sort of leaning down a little bit of that road to say, like, “Here’s how you do this.” We just filmed a video series with someone who… it’s just going to be like a little one off thing. It’s like I helped her create a proposal. And it’s like she would come back to me after meeting with the client and I’d say like, “Okay, that was good. Now do this.”

We just did little things because there’s so many folks that are just insecure for no reason. We’re all in our little bubble and sometimes you just need somebody to say like, “Hey, you’re doing great. And Gosh, darn it, people like you.”

Liam: Thank you Stuart. Homage to Saturday Night Live. Appreciate that.

Stephanie: That didn’t answer your question at all actually. That doesn’t tell you what my day looks like. But that’s what we do.

Liam: We can extrapolate it from that. That’s a good answer. I’ll take it. Thank you.

Stephanie: I still do have my agency. I love having an agency. It’s always been my thing. We are helping clients too. But lately, people come to me for a quote, and I’m like, “Oh, I don’t want to do that. I want to go work with agencies.”

Liam: Let’s talk about that. How do you balance that? Because I mean, we have a passion, and it sounds like your business and your passion is focused now on this business, on FocusWP. But if somebody comes to you and says, like, “Look, I got 10 grand, or I got 5 grand, or I’ve got 2 grand or whatever it is, we trust you, can you do it?” It can be a challenge to say n… And if big enough, they’re good people, and you’ll like them kind of thing, even if it’s not where you want to focus, how do you handle that? How do you approach that?

Stephanie: Well, I’m actually in a big transition period right now, because it’s been possible to do both up till this point. And I’m sort of hitting that phase where it isn’t. So outsourcing. With FocusWP, that’s one of the things I preach, and I do it. I happen to be fortunate that I have this awesome team, you know, like all these teams actually of developers and writers and everything. So I do use that to fulfill a lot of my projects.

I’m in the process now of getting it, like really tightening up all of my systems and things like that. And then at some point in the near future, like within the next year, we’re going to have to have a talk about either just scaling back or selling… Some change is coming. It’s all brewing right now. So I am in a bit of a transition phase.

Tara: Yeah, transitions are challenging, interesting, fun, all of those combined. What’s your biggest challenge? What do you find challenging?

Stephanie: Saying no.

Tara: Okay, that was a quick answer

Stephanie: Well, yeah, because I like helping people. And people come and they’re like, “Oh…” My favorite phrase always is “what if?” So people come and talk to me and I’m like, “What if you did this?” So it’s hard for me to not like… I can get on a call with somebody who needs one little thing and we can turn it into a big project, which is a really nice treat to have. That’s something I’m proud of that I can do. But at the same time, it’s hard to… I’m really trying to stick to what my agency is best at, which is branding and web. Like, let’s just stick to that. Let’s stop helping people figure out how to run a podcast on their own. Let’s stop figuring out how to help people set up their Google Mail. Let’s just stick to what I’m good at, and let other people do the other thing. That’s one of the things I’m really working on right now.

Tara: Great. Thanks for sharing that. I’m going to ask you another question that we ask all our guests, which is about advice. And if you have received some advice that you’ve implemented, that you’ve taken to heart, and that’s helped you that you would share with us.

Stephanie: This is a weird one. I’ve talked about this on a couple of other podcasts I think. It always seems to work. It wasn’t advice somebody directly gave me. But about, gosh, 15 years ago, maybe I read this book called “The year of Yes.” This kind of ironic since I just said saying no is my hardest thing. But I didn’t mean to pair those two up that way. But this book was written up… not even about business at all. It was written about dating. This girl was always choosing people that were bad for her and she realized she had a pattern. And she thought she knew what she wanted. But when it came down to it, clearly she didn’t because she kept getting into these terrible relationships. So she spent an entire year and said yes to everything. Not everything. But any person.

Tara: Yeah, I think I heard her on some podcasts. Yeah.

Stephanie: Any person who approached her. She lived in New York City so there was a lot of interaction with strangers and things like that. So she went on a date with a cab driver, with a homeless guy, with a rich guy. And the person she ended up with in the end—I won’t spoil in case you want to read The Year of Yes—it was somebody that she would have never in a million years thought would work. She’s super happy with, and all that.

That was a good mindset shift for me when I read that book, and it affected me in different areas of my life to stop thinking that I know what I want or need. There’s just so many opportunities and so many different things.

Liam: Yes is good. Yes is a powerful thing. I know we talk a lot about saying no, but saying yes can get us out of our comfort zone, can push us a little bit, and can open up new doors that we might not otherwise have ever thought about.

Stephanie: I call it ‘being proactively open-minded’ is my phrase that I’ve coined.

Liam: I like that. I like that. Because it’s easy to think of ourselves as open-minded, but to do it right, we have to be aware of where our limits are and acknowledge that they’re not as open as we think they might be.

Stephanie: And sometimes being open-minded is like we’re open to things that come to us if we think about being open-minded. But that’s why I think of being proactive about being open-minded. Again, with the theme of this show, is like getting into those conversations with people in the hallways at WordCamps and meetups and things. Like you guys started a whole podcast because of all the good that comes of that. And it’s different now because we can’t be in person, but you can still have that. You can still approach people. You can still build relationships. You can still network. You can still get involved in the community that is online at least. The things that come from it are incredible.

I mean, I have a whole new business and a whole passion because of a conversation that happened at a WordCamp, and then the relationships in the tribe I’ve built is all just from doing that online. It’s really a super powerful thing.

Tara: Thanks for sharing that. I totally agree. And I think part of that open-mindedness too is listening. Listening to what other people are sharing and hearing their stories and their ideas and seeing what you can take from that and implement in your own life, which I’ve really… I mean, that’s part of Hallway Chats for me is hearing people’s definitions of success and thinking, “Huh, that’s interesting. I wonder how I could implement that in my life.” So I think that’s also being open-minded is listening.

I appreciate being able to listen to you today so much. Thanks for joining us. I’m sorry that we are out of time.

Stephanie: This was fun, you guys.

Tara: Yeah. Thanks so much for being on Hallway Chats. Where can people find you online, Stephanie?

Stephanie: You can find me at focuswp.co or you can hit me up in my Facebook group. It’s called Focus on your Biz.

Tara: Great.

Liam: Stephanie, thank you so much for joining us. What a pleasure to get to know you today. I really appreciate it.

Stephanie: This was fun, you guys.

Tara: Bye-bye.

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

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

Bet discovered WordPress in 2008 and has been involved in the WordPress community since 2013 at meetups, WordCamps, and on the support team. Bet runs an agency, Bet Hannon Business Websites, where she specializes in WordPress and accessibility.

Twitter | @bethannon

Website | BHMBizSites.com

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

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

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

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 148.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Bet Hannon. Bet discovered WordPress in 2008 and has been involved in the WordPress community since 2013 at meetups, WordCamps, and on the support team. Bet runs an agency, Bet Hannon Business Websites, where she specializes in WordPress and accessibility. Bet, welcome.

Bet: Hey, great to be with you guys today.

Tara: So nice to meet you Bet. I’ve been a fan and a follower, and it’s really great to see you face to face on a Zoom.

Bet: Thanks.

Tara: Can you tell us and our listeners more about yourself and Bet Hannon Business Websites?

Bet: Yeah. I discovered WordPress in 2008. I had a 15 year plus career in nonprofit management, and near the end of that time, I’d been doing drag and drop websites and email newsletters. My organization downsized my position at the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008 and I kind of fell into… People would pay you to do those things independent of being a part of their staff.

I went to a weekend conference, and I met a guy that I knew was an iOS app developer. We were talking and I was telling him what I was doing and he said, “Oh, you should be doing those websites in WordPress.” And I said, “I don’t even know what that is.” So we both way back home and we had a phone call where we both at the same time logged into the back end. It before Zoom and all those things, right? So we logged into the back end of his WordPress website, and my mind was blown. It was just love at first sight. I got involved doing WordPress websites.

And then went to my first WordCamp in 2013. Went to WordCamp LA, and just started meeting people in the WordPress community. It was just an amazing thing to me and always still is every time I go to a WordCamp, just to meet people from all over the world. Even when you go to small little WordCamps, people come from really far away sometimes, and or just doing super cool things with WordPress. I just really love talking to people, as Liam knows. Liam and I met in 2015 when we were both on the check-in desk for WordCamp US in Philly.

Tara: Ah, okay. That’s I think when I met Liam for the first time as well was 2015 WordCamp US. Or maybe it was Philly before. Anyway, my first WordCamp was also in 2013, and I started using it a little bit later than you were, in 2010. So I’m curious about that experience of having worked in WordPress on your own for five years or so before discovering that WordPress community or WordCamps, and if that changed the way that you work, the way that you use WordPress, what you do that I guess the quality of your work, perhaps. How did that impact your work discovering WordPress community after viewing it by yourself or without the community?

Bet: Well, I had kind of been involved a little bit in the community in the sense of I found the support forums. And I’m not even sure really where I kind of ran onto those. But I discovered that I could put things together in terms of getting answers to questions or issues that have come up. So I had been already beginning to kind of do that a little bit. And I’m not even sure how I heard about WordCamp LA.

But there was a community of people. I was living in Fresno at the time and there was a kind of a growing tech community there. Some folks that were really working at and have actually done been quite successful at doing tech education and entrepreneurship and kind of trying to grow the tech economy there, but in particular, reaching out to underserved communities to help people find ways to make good living that they might not have otherwise already had. You know, people from generational systemic poverty. I had been involved in some of that community and had connections there a little bit. But yeah, it was just going to and just meeting people.

There were some particular plugins and themes that I had kind of found and were using. And then when I went to, not so much at WordCamp LA but then the next year in San Francisco, met the developers of the products that I use. And they were interested in talking to me. I was like, “Oh, that’s really different that they really were just eager to chat with people and open with…” I was seeing people who I knew that this developer and another, and developer A and developer B had competing products plugins, and yet they just seemed like they liked each other and they tease one another, and they joked around and supported one another. I just really loved that sense of community.

It was in San Francisco that I had volunteered and then someone said, “Are you staying for contributor day?” And I already had my train ticket back to Fresno. And I said, “No, I can only stay for part. What is that?” And they said, “Oh, these teams.” And they introduced me to the teams. And I thought, “Oh, I teach people about WordPress a lot. Maybe I should go to the training team. So I started the training team, and it was pretty clear that was more doing learning plans, lesson plans. And I was like, “Oh.” Yeah, that didn’t connect so much for me. But just at the other end of the table was the support team. Those are the people that do the forums. And they were having a lot of fun and joking around it.

I ended up kind of just migrating down the table and got involved with the support team and answering questions on the forums and volunteering on that. Just really that sense of community. And then every time you go to a WordCamp and you’re meeting some of those same people, but you’re also meeting new people. Actually, I will confess, I’ll make a confession on your podcast, that there have been a few WordCamps where I never actually went to a presentation. That I actually only ever did the hallway track. And I was perfectly fine with that.

Liam: Can I ask, since you’re confessing, and we’re going to go all candid now, Bet, did you even look at the schedule?

Bet: Sometimes, no. Or I would say I probably looked at it to see if there was anything that really caught my attention that I really wanted to go see. And I do go to presentations. I’m not saying I never do.

Liam: I know that. I not trying to make it bad.

Bet: No, no, no, I don’t think it’s bad to go and really just have this be about you’re there, you’re connecting with people. I mean, that’s a big piece of what the WordCamp is. It’s not just about educating people in terms of making presentations. But what it’s about, you know, connecting and making those connections and figuring out how you can make a contribution, but also when you’re networking and you can meet the people from your hosting company, and you can meet the people from the plugins that you’re using, or the themes that you’re using, or learn about new services in the new vendors’ area, and those kinds of things. I just really love going.

And in the last, I would say, three years, I really started focusing more on… I really like traveling. But if I go to WordCamps, I can write that off as a business expense.

Tara: I hear you. Yeah.

Bet: So, let’s just go to pick WordCamps until COVID. I would look at where are the WordCamps that I might want to travel. So I’ve been to London, I’ve been to Paris. It’s been kind of fun.

Liam: That’s a great way to do it. Bet, I want to ask you about accessibility. We mentioned or I mentioned specifically in your introduction that you focus and specialize on that. Talk a little bit about that, because accessibility and web has been around for a while but it’s relatively new-ish in terms of wider profile, wider understanding, wider acceptance, wider appreciation for the value. Can you chat a little bit about those things as well as how you came to focus and specialized on that?

Bet: Yeah. In early 2017, I think, we had a client that we had been doing administrative maintenance for quite some time come to us—water district in California, a large agricultural Water District. And because of the way they are connected to the state of California, they were going to be required to make their site compliant under California section 508 standards. So they came to us and asked about that. They wanted to do a redesign and make their site compliant, and I said, “Well, we don’t have any experience doing that but maybe we can help you find someone.” And they said, “No, we really like you guys and we like the work you’re doing. We’d like to all learn at this together,” which was this amazing opportunity for us.

So our team dived in and we did a lot of training and a lot of learning about accessibility and worked with the client. Their IT team is fairly sophisticated too. But lots of things. Like they have a long history of putting out PDF reports. So they had thousands of PDF reports, none of which were compliant. And putting together lots of agendas in because they’re part of the state of California and under their charter, there’s transparency rules. So they have to have things that are out there and have to have them out in accessible ways.

So we dived in and we were learning a lot about accessibility. I kind of had a sort of passing acquaintance. I think I’d heard about accessibility at a WordCamp or meetup before. But when we dived in, I first got my glimpses of what inaccessible website experience means for somebody who has a disability. And we’re not talking about just people who… you might typically we think about people who are blind or have mobility impairments. But when you think about people who are temporarily disabled because they broke their hand, and they can’t use a mouse or people who have situational challenges, like they have a screaming baby.

When you start thinking about accessibility and all the ways that it impacts people and how it really can make real differences in people’s lives, we were just hooked. Our team just got hooked on that sense of what a contribution… You’re putting out a good karma, but you’re doing something that really impacts people’s lives. So it’s not just about making websites to sell widgets anymore. Widgets in WordPress are different, but you know, economic. It’s a business.

Liam: I know where you are going.

Tara: Yeah.

Bet: So it’s not just about selling widgets, but it’s about helping people learn how to do accessibility and kind of moving people into thinking about accessibility. We’ve kind of been growing and specializing about that. I’ve long heard in terms of business that you need to niche down and specialize more. And we never really worked with any one vertical. We worked with a lot of nonprofits. We worked with a lot of different levels of businesses. But yeah, accessibility has really kind of gotten to be our thing.

So we have folks on our team that really specialized in a lot of the mechanics of that, and our content, people are helping people. Because when you do accessibility well, it also often really helps your SEO. So the content people are helping to do that. We offer training. It’s been really exciting to feel like you’re making a difference in the world as a part of what you do for a living.

Tara: Yeah. Accessibility is a huge topic. I think it’s intimidating because you hear lawsuits and things like that. I know there are lots of agencies that are leaning towards that and there are tools right that you can use now. I saw a presentation from Amber Haines. She has some kind of a testing tool. What kind of process do you go through to make it less intimidating for your clients? And since that’s your specialty, are you finding people are finding you and coming to you for accessibility specifically? Or is it “I need a website,” and then you tell them about accessibility, and they’re like, “Oh, well, then I definitely want to hire you.: What’s that process like?

Bet: Well, we get both ends. We’re getting a few people finding us that are already interested in accessibility, but then also we do a lot of educating with people along the way. Usually, when you talk to them, they’re a part of that. When we were starting to learn more about accessibility and get involved in the WordPress accessibility community, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got was, as a developer, never put accessibility on a proposal as something that can be optional.

When you start to think about it, it’s sort of like, why would you want to make it easy for the client to say, “Oh, I know. I don’t think I need that. I’m going to throw these people with disabilities under the bus. So we just don’t ever do that. That was really some of the best advice I got was we stake our reputation as developers on doing things excessively. So we go in saying, “We’re only going to make accessible websites.”

However, of course, you get clients to come back. Like we have a client now who we’re working with them and they came with their own design pieces that had already been done. And of course, their main button color doesn’t have enough color contrast. So we said, “Well, you need to darken that color to this much.” “No, we’re not going to change that.” Then I make them sign a release that says, “We’ve informed you that this color does not meet WCAG standards, and you release us from all liability in the event of a future lawsuit. You’re going to pay all of our expenses because you know that if they got sued, we as the developers would get called in to do something.” Anyway.

Liam: But I don’t want to ask you the specifics in that. But that strikes me in this day and age as a client that… I mean, when your vendors say, “If you really want us to sign a release that says we can.” That’s really interesting. Have you had more than one client willing to sign that?

Bet: Only one. Because usually, when you get to that point, they go, “Oh, maybe I should take this seriously.”

Liam: “Maybe we need to talk to counsel about this.”

Tara: But these folks are fairly large. So I’m not sure what the story is on all of that, but I was really surprised that they were willing to sign it and go forward. But maybe they’re going to come back and visit that later. So we kind of work with that. So people come. We’re educating them a little bit. And then I can’t remember the rest of the question, Tara?

Tara: Oh, it was a lot. It was a couple of questions. I was asking you also about tools and how people are finding you that way.

Bet: So there are a proliferation of accessibility testing tools out there. One of the big ones is wave.webaim.org. That’s one of the big ones that you can test. And then there’s aXe Lighthouse, and some other ones. The really important thing to remember is that those automated tools can only help you find about 30% of the issues on any website. So much really just has to be human tested.

One of the examples I would give is sort of like an automated tool can tell you whether or not you have alt tags on an image but it can’t tell you about whether they are helpful alt tags. If the alt tag is “fivetoblablabla.jpg,” the title of the image, that doesn’t really help. That’s not really compliant. They only catch some percentage of those. You always need to have some sorts of human testing going on.

Tara: Yeah, interesting. And I know it does conflict with designing a lot. It’s very challenging.

Bet: You know, the perception, the thing that we kind of fight about… I’ve been toying with maybe we should find a way to put in our tagline, you know, accessible and beautiful. Because I think the presumption is that if it’s accessible that it’s ugly and plain and very 2009. And that’s just not true. You can make really beautiful things that are accessible. Our developer has been working on doing a lot… One of the things that’s notoriously not accessible is sliders, which of course, we would rather not have them do. But there are accessible ways to do sliders or there are accessible ways to do, quote, “rotating testimonials” or some of those kinds of things. But figuring out how you can do those in accessible ways is…

Tara: Interesting. Thanks for sharing all that information. I’d like to ask you a question that we ask all of our guests, which is about your definition of success. And that can relate to as a business owner, as a human being, as a member of your community. However you define success in your life, if you would share that with us, and how you implement that philosophy.

Bet: I think success is when you’re able to make a positive difference in the lives of other people, whether that’s my family, or my community, or my customers or my employees. Just really being able to help make someone’s life better. So when we’re trying to work with all the accessibility stuff, that’s a huge piece of success for me. But also I hired and brought on employees in the business. I think we’re in our third or fourth year of offering health insurance benefits, right? So being able to do that.

When one of my employees was able to buy her first house, I think I was as excited as they were. That part of what I had done in building this business made it possible for this person to buy a house. Those kinds of things in terms of really just making a difference. Making a difference.

Liam: I like the constructive nature of that, the very tactile nature of making a positive impact in someone’s life. And it can be big and it can be small. How do you assess a day when inevitably you’ll have helped some people? Depending on your day, you might have set a few people back. And maybe there’s other people who just kind of shipped passing in the day through no fault of anybody, just no good or bad. How do you then evaluate whether a day or a week or a month or a year has been a success? What does that look like for you?

Bet: I don’t know exactly where it comes from, but I really don’t hang on to the hard stuff, awful stuff too much. There are occasional ones where it just really sticks under your skin.

Liam: You’re human.

Bet: I am. I am. Well, we won’t go into those stories. But I think even if it’s just one person, right? I happened to go out to do an errand this morning, went by the grocery store, it’s like moving a cart for someone. It doesn’t have to be big. It’s completely like really small things. I feel good with that and I hang on to that. That makes the day successful, even if there’s other things that are not as pleasant or not as easy, or I may have… Sometimes when you’re the boss, you have to come in and say things, you know, “We’re going to do it this way.” My kids are grown now, but I certainly had to do that with my kids when they were growing up.

Liam: I get that. I like that. I think it strikes me that your approach is really relevant in that we just don’t know. What seems little and simple and throw away to us in the moment can be so impactful to somebody else who, at that point in time, they’re having a terrible day, and that you a stranger, move the car out of the way so that they could get in and not have to dig their car or get out and move it themselves. It restores their little faith in humanity kind of thing. I think those are really important aspects to keep in mind. So thank you for walking us through.

Bet: Sometimes you do things that you hope will later come back to be little things like that. So like, we became grandparents for the first time in May last year…

Liam: Congratulations. Yaaay!

Bet: Thanks. She’s adorable. Our kids live east of St. Louis. So I mean, it’s a long way. And of course, COVID is restricting travel stuff and all of that. She’s nine months old now. But maybe after she was about four months old, I got the idea. Have you ever seen Postagram where you can like use a photo and send a postcard? So I have the app on my phone. And I used it before. So I got to where I was sending Lauren who’s like not able to read and very, you know, not even really paying attention to things very far along, I Postagram every week or so with a little message on it, and it has the picture. And then I sent her mom a little plastic storage cabinet so you save all of those and pull them out and read her messages from grandma.

Tara: That’s a wonderful idea.

Bet: It’s kind of like you hope that the little things that you do, especially when your grandparenting from far away, some of those little things will kind of keep building up over time.

Tara: Yeah, that’s lovely. It strikes me also in the things that you’ve mentioned that there are two different approaches to this idea of having a positive impact on people. One of them is a conscious effort and the other is sort of a natural effort. And maybe doing more conscious things leads to a habit or a natural. It’s not like you go to the grocery store saying, “Today I’m going to the grocery store, and I’m going to help someone with their cart.” But you do go and say, “Maybe this week, I’m going to send my granddaughter a card” or “this week, I’m going to send my friend a card who I knew was having a hard time” or “I’m going to choose someone to do something nice for.

So I think the combination of the two really makes it the most beautiful thing because giving it a conscious effort I think is super important in terms of just your own personal growth and feeling good about helping someone. But mixing in those little impulsiveness, instinctual things, I think they can’t be measured in the same way. So thank you for sharing that with us.

Bet: You’re welcome.

Tara: That’s really excellent. I appreciate that. I’m going to ask you the other question we ask everyone, and maybe it’ll be along the same line, but it is about advice. And we’d love it if you’d share with us some advice that you’ve received at some point and that’s meant something to you and that you’ve implemented in your life. Can you share something like that with us?

Bet: It wasn’t something I heard from anyone explicitly, but for a very long time I’ve really sort of lived, business wise, but also kind of personal life, under promise and over deliver. I used to be ages ago a person who would overpromise and then get so overwhelmed that I would not be able to sometimes follow through on everything, or I would just break myself trying to get it all done. So under promising when I sort of like internalize that, it’s like, “I got to have a realistic boundary about this.” That helps me be really conscious about that in terms of all of that.

But then delighting people. People are delighted. Other people in my life, clients, family members, when you over promise and under deliver, that’s a bad relationship. People don’t feel good. Nobody feels good. When you under promise and over deliver, everybody feels good. So if I could kind of live with more of that sort of advice, that’s… And I think it’s really important for people who are freelancing or doing development stuff thinking about that too.

Tara: It’s helpful. Do you do that in self-talk also? I don’t know, I’m trying to think of some ways. For me, let’s say, I’m going out for a run or something like that, or I’m doing a race, and I’ll say, “I’m not going to be fast.” And I tell myself that because I don’t want to just be disappointed in myself. So do you also apply that to yourself?

Bet: I try. I say, “I’m just going to get on the treadmill for 10 minutes. Just 10 minutes.” And I was really good at the beginning of January, and then… that’ll crash. That’s what I tell myself in my head. “I only need to do 10 minutes, five minutes. I could just do five minutes.” And of course, invariably when I get there, I do a little bit longer. But you know, it’s kind of like, yeah, I do try to get myself motivated that way.

Tara: Yeah, yeah. You do the same strategy with yourself.

Bet: For sure.

Liam: I really like the undersell and over deliver or under promise and over deliver.

Bet: Under promise.

Liam: Yeah, not undersell. Under promise and over deliver. You talked about that as something that you’ve always been able to do? What was that journey like for you? What was that transition like? Was that something that you just made a call one day and like, “You know what, I’ve been burned enough by my own approach, I’m doing it different” or did it take time?

Bet: I don’t know that I was burned, but it was definitely just feeling the stress of it. That it’s more stressful. And realizing, “Oh my gosh,” if I did even just a little bit more than what I had said, if I deliver this project a week before I said I would deliver it, how excited people are? I would much rather people be excited like that than to be more complicated or have those negative sort of interactions with people.

Liam: Yeah, I get that. I get that. And speaking of positive feelings, we are running out of time. I can’t believe it’s been 30 minutes already. But thank you so much for joining us. Before we say goodbye, can you please share where people can find you online?

Bet: Yeah. You can reach me on Twitter at @BetHannon. Our website is bhmbizsites.com, and there’s a contact form there.

Tara: Great. Thank you so much, Bet. Great having you today on the show. Appreciate it. Hope to meet you in person soon.

Bet: Me too.

Liam: Bye for now, Bet. We’ll see you soon.

Bet: Bye-bye.

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

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

Patrick is obsessed with eCommerce. He’s created eCommerce websites for clients, worked at WooCommerce in support, development, and product management, and he creates courses on LinkedIn Learning for WooCommerce. He’s written several books on eCommerce, and also runs WooSesh, an online conference all about WooCommerce.

Twitter | @BFTrick

Website | Speaking In Bytes

Game Website | LaidBackGames.com

Nexcess | Optimize WooCommerce, Store Builder

Preferred Pronouns | He/Him

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

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

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 147.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Patrick Rauland. Patrick is obsessed with eCommerce. He’s created eCommerce websites for clients, worked at WooCommerce in support, development, and product management, and he creates courses on LinkedIn Learning for WooCommerce. He’s written several books on eCommerce, and also runs WooSesh, an online conference all about WooCommerce. Patrick, welcome. Thank you for joining us today.

Patrick: Thanks for having me.

Tara: Thanks for being here. We’re really glad to have the opportunity to get to know you better and have a little chat. Can you tell us more about yourself?

Patrick: Yeah. I did forget to write down one thing. I now work at Nexcess as a product marketing manager, and we specialize in eCommerce hosting. So I’m still doing even more eCommerce. Then I also was the lead organizer for WordCamp Denver the last couple of years. Let’s see. And I think just in personal life I also love everything board game.

Tara: Woo, I’m excited to talk about that because there’s been a lot of board gaming, like probably a lot of people have over the years. Pandemic lockdown, cozy up at home kind of stuff. My daughter came home from college and she’s obsessed with this game that has trains in it and you have to connect the trains across the country.

Patrick: Ticket to Ride.

Tara: Ticket to Ride is the name. I’m terrible at it. I don’t like it. You cannot multitask in that game, which is something that really bothers me. But there’s apparently versions like in Scandinavia versions and all these different versions, which would make it much harder if you’re not familiar with what’s where. The game I’m newly familiar with.

Patrick: In that board game world, that’s a gateway game, we’d call it. So it’s a game to get people into the hobby. So, if that’s too much, many other…all the games on…I know, this is a podcast and most people can’t see behind me, but most of the games behind me are more complex than that.

Tara: Okay. I’m not sure it’s the complexity. It’s the singular thing you can do on a turn. Like why can’t you get tickets and build a train? I didn’t understand that. But you got me going. I like Scrabble.

Patrick: I’m terrible at word games. I can guarantee everyone in the world can beat me at any word game. My brain doesn’t work that way. So I give you kudos.

Tara: Fun, fun. Are a lot of new games out?

Patrick: Yeah. People are still launching games on Kickstarter, and games are still coming out. My friend’s game behind me, which I’m pointing to is called the Alpha. That just came out this summer. Games are like a long production cycle. So this is so nerdy. This is not related to WordPress at all. But games have like a two-year development cycle for most. So by the time you license a game to a publisher as a game designer, then they’ll usually take one to three years, probably around two years on average to figure out how big the box should be, how much it should cost, come up with the artwork and then release it.

Tara: Cool. Have you ever made a game? Do you have any game?

Patrick: Yes. Yeah. I have a game. It’s super tiny behind me. It’s called Fry Thief, and it’s a game about stealing French fries because they’re delicious. And then I just licensed my first—that I self-published. I just licensed my first game called Kintsugi, which is about fixing objects with gold rather than throwing them away and buying a new one, it’s a Japanese tradition called Kintsugi, a couple of weeks ago. So in about two years, you’ll see it on Kickstarter.

Tara: Cool.

Liam: I’m going to add that to my Christmas list for 2022 or 2023.

Patrick: There we go. There we go. It’s a fun hobby. Although I’m glad, the margins in the board game world are tiny. It’s much easier to like sell a WordPress website to someone than to sell someone a board game and keep 50 cents.

Liam: Let me just ask you briefly if I can about your creative process for board games. Are you loving the creative concept of what would be a great way to have a game and have a challenge? Are you a writer and you love to tell a story? You said you send it off to designers to do all the design work. So where is your focus? What get your goad on this?

Patrick: First of all, the main reason I like board games is I like being around the table and just experiencing things with people. If I were to be like, “Hey, Liam, let’s sit down for two hours and stare into each other’s eyes,” you’re probably going to feel a little bit awkward about that. Whereas if I say, “Hey, let’s play a game,” we can play Ticket to Ride. That’s about an hour-long game. “Let’s play Ticket to Ride for an hour.” That feels so much more comfortable. People, in general, are comfortable with it. So that’s why I love board games.

And then the question in the board game world is do you start with a theme or mechanic? Theme is like, wouldn’t it be cool to make a game about trains? Mechanic for Ticket to Ride, for those of you who know, it would be like…this is a set collection game where if you get four green cards, then you can build a line on the green part of the board. That’s the mechanics of Ticket to Ride. Oh, man. I guess it’s some sort of blend between the two is I like to have a clear, concise idea of the mechanics and I really care about the theme.

Some people design board games just mechanics. It’s like, this is a game where we’re making widgets. And then they figure out all the cool ways to I get two widgets, you get one widget, she gets three widgets. And they sell them to a publisher, and the publisher will come up with a theme for them, which is not my style at all. But some people do do that.

Tara: Interesting. I think we could probably talk about board games a lot. And on my mind, I had a dream that I was told that I watched too much TV with my husband, and we should do some more interactive things than just watch shows. So we have started playing some games, which is fun. How about cards? Do you play cards, too?

Patrick: I do like cards. I think one of my favorite memories ever of all time is this fishing trip I took when I was 14 or something. It was me my dad, my cousin and my grandpa. And we played hours and hours and hours and hours of Euchre. There we go. I love that. I love the trick-taking games in general, but that sort of card play is very fun, very enjoyable. But you do need to be with a group of people who like it. If three people like Euchre and the fourth person’s like, “What’s a trick-taking game?” it’s not going to be a good experience. But I do love card games.

Tara: Cool. All right, let’s talk a little bit about WordPress. So WordPress and WooCommerce because WooCommerce is your thing. And certainly all the buzz, right? WooCommerce is a pretty popular thing now. It’s really part of WordPress, actually. So talk a little bit about how you got into it.

Patrick: One of the best things that I ever did was I helped kickstart a meetup group way back. I live in Denver now. I lived in Green Bay, Wisconsin then, and there was this like WordPress Meetup group just sitting there. People were registered, but no one was running the meetings, so I started running the meetings. And it was from one of those meetings that someone I was asking about eCommerce for a client’s project, what would end up being my first WooCommerce site. And I was like, “How do we sell things online?” It was great. It came from this Meetup group that was just sitting there on untapped potential.

Several people in my meetup all said that WooCommerce is great. I tried this one, it didn’t work. I tried this one, it didn’t work. And I came back to WooCommerce and it’s great. So it’s really cool that it came from my local Meetup group. I built it for a client site.

I think this is helpful is the very first site I built it with was like a catalog site. Like you couldn’t buy anything online right then but they wanted to add eCommerce later. And so there’s just a cool extension called catalog visibility options that lets you turn your online store into just a catalog. It turns off the “add to cart” button in the cart feature. It was the best way to get started with WooCommerce because you dealt with all the front end stuff without like, “Oh, God, what are the taxes on this side?” That’s really scary. I feel like I was gently escorted into WooCommerce.

Liam: That sounds a nice way into it. Because there is “we’ll just settle on online.” And especially in COVID. “You have to sell online.” To some extent the selling is easy. It’s the taxes, the shipping, the tracking order, the shipment rate for physical products. It gets pretty complicated or at least convoluted in a hurry, doesn’t it?

Patrick: Yeah, it can. Whenever I go to WordCamps, I have an intro to WooCommerce chat that I give. My the three things that I bring up in the intro to WooCommerce is like it really is a WordPress site with shipping payments and taxes added on. So if you can understand those three things, you’re good to go. But those three things are our big things. Like you can’t just look it up in an hour and know everything about shipping and know everything about tax, and everything about payment gateways. And I think it’s all very manageable.

When a client comes to you for a new WordPress site, and they’re like, “Hey, I want to have this thing where it’s like Facebook and it does this, and does this and it does this,” you’re like, “Whoa, let’s start a little bit smaller.” And I think if people knew how to do that with WooCommerce, then people would be less scared of eCommerce. Like, “Right, we’re going to start by selling one product with USPS and we’re going to use Stripe.” We can always grow from there with more products and bundles and cool free express shipping on $200 or more. There’s things you can do later, but let’s just start with the simple stuff.” Because otherwise you do get overwhelmed.

Liam: Yeah, yeah, I hear that. And I’m going to take this opportunity to give a shout out to the folks at Nexcess, not because you’re on the show, but because you’re on the show. I had the opportunity, somebody came to me and said, “Hey, I have a WooCommerce site. I’m on a well-known host, the site’s really slow. Can you help me?” And I said, “Look, I am not an expert at WooCommerce. You don’t want me digging in to try to speed optimize. But I can tell you out of the box, good hosting matters. Maybe we should move it.”

So your colleagues walked them onto the server from their existing host, they managed the whole process, and WooCommerce on Nexcess, frighteningly fast. I have never been on a fast WooCommerce site until I did it for this client. And my client thinks I’m just amazing. And I was candid about it to my client. I’m like, “They’re going to do all the work. I’m just going to make sure that you don’t have to talk to them directly.” And what a great service! What a really exciting thing! Thank you to you and your colleagues for putting that together. Because that was amazing. I was really blown away by that.

Patrick: Wow. Thank you. That’s great. I was not prepared to hear that. So it’s very exciting to hear there’s…I think I want to bring up two things quick is number one, there is a 15 day performance challenge. If you just want to see what your website looks like a Nexcess, you can just google it. 15 day performance challenge.

The other thing is, I don’t think people realize this, but it’s totally different to optimize a static site versus a dynamic site. So Nexcess is all about dynamic sites, which is why we specialize in eCommerce and membership sites. Because that’s hard and that’s why we like to focus on the hard thing. But it is very different than if you’re used to optimizing, speed…If you’ve only ever built WordPress sites and someone says, “Hey, can you speed up my WooCommerce site?” I’m like, “Cool, I’ll cache every page.” And it’s like, well, you might not want to do that because caching an eCommerce can have problems. So it’s a whole different ballgame.

Tara: I thought you were going to give a shout out also, because Nexcess and Liquidweb sponsor our podcast, or they host our podcast.

Liam: They do that too. I just didn’t want to shout out too much and too often about the great support we get from them. But that WooCommerce experience isn’t because they’re sponsors. This is a little bit self-serving, too, because now this saves me having to write a blog post about how great service was because I’ll just link to this show. But it was fantastic. Everything from the technology, the stack, the new customer portal continues to get even better. And just the speed of the server, my client can’t believe it. I don’t have to do anything more to my site. It’s good. I’m done.

Patrick: Right. I think about this a lot. I want everyone to do the thing that they’re best at. So if you are best at building sites, then you shouldn’t be spending a significant amount of your time on hosting. And if you’re good at hosting sites, don’t spend time building them. That’s why I like to find people who are very good at what they do just in all areas of life, even outside of WordPress. I think that’s the goal is you’re good at building websites, you do that. We’ll figure out how to keep it online and speedy.

Tara: Yeah, yeah. A lot of companies are acquiring other companies that are good at things so that they can be good at them too, right?

Patrick: Yeah.

Tara: That’s the other trend we’re seeing happening for sure. Patrick, I’m going to ask you a question we ask all of our guests, which is how they define success. So whether it’s your personal life, professional life, a combination of the two or more, how do you define success?

Patrick: Good question. Fun side fact, I run a Board Game Design podcast, and I ask a question called: What does success look like to you? So what’s great is I actually am used to asking this question, and I’m not used to answering it.

I have a weird definition for success in that I don’t like goals, because goals are the thing that you fail at every day until you hit the goal. In the last specially five years, let’s say, I’ve been focusing on building habits. And those habits that will eventually lead to some sort of success. So rather than saying, “I want to have a world-famous blog,” I will say, “I want to write a post once a week.” So I set these habitual things that are easier to do. And then success eventually comes.

I guess it feels like mathematically eventually it’s going to happen as opposed to “I need to get a book deal. I will just write enough blog posts.” The first time I ever wrote a book about WooCommerce, I just wrote a blog post about WooCommerce, and then a publisher came to me. That’s incredibly fortunate. But also I’ve written over 100 blog posts about WooCommerce. So when they did a little bit of research to find someone to write for them, they came across my site.

So I think I’m a big fan of like creating systems and habits that are super easy to follow rather than like, “I want to have 50,000 visits a year,” or “I want to make $10,000 a year on my board game website.” One of my resolutions for this year is I want to get better about my personal finances. I’ve always been fine, I’ve just like never like… but now I just have a monthly check in. It’s in my to-do list. I check it off monthly. It only takes me like an hour just to grab all my numbers and put a little spreadsheet.

I feel so much better just knowing, “Okay, good. Oh, could we pay down that debt? Good. Oh, we added some to our retirement account. Great. We’re all on track here.” And before it was just willy nilly chaos whenever I had money. Anyways, that’s how I define success is by creating little systems that are very easy to run, rather than setting big lofty goals that are depressing until you hit them.

Tara: Have you read the book “Atomic Habits”? Sounds like some of what you’re saying is kind of…

Patrick: This is embarrassing, but I don’t think I’ve finished it. I actually love it. I have like a million bookmarks. And for whatever reason I left the book alone, and I think I’ve gone back to podcast. I think it’s about halfway done. I love it. James Clear. Right?

Liam: Yeah. I think you got the gist of it, though, from what your approach in terms of building these incremental habits to reach goals is… That’s kind of the method behind that. And making it easy to have those habits. Like, if you want to drink more water, you know, fill up two water bottles and keep them on your desk so that when you run out you have a backup. Like I just showed you. So yeah, little things like that. Setting up systems to help you be successful with your habits. Thank you for sharing your view of success. It’s fun to answer after asking it, hopefully. Liam and I asked each other that about once a year, and it is fun to think about it in our own perspective.

Patrick: Yeah.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely. And Patrick, I like that shifting perspective. You’re not saying that the goal or whatever it is, isn’t kind of out there in some ethereal kind of way. But it’s not the primary focus. The primary focus is to better yourself in some substantive way. I like that a lot.

How far does that go in your life in the sense of, you’re doing it professionally, you’re doing a little bit around your personal finances? Does that come into play? You know, I want to eat better, I want to be a nicer person. Not to say that you’re not nice. Whatever your kind of personal growth and development goals, how does that play out for you?

Patrick: I try to put it into everything I do. Hold on. At the top of my head here, let’s talk about productivity books. So Atomic Habits. The one thing, essentialism, smarter, faster, better. There’s a million books about this that I just… I do try to apply to everything in my life.

I think a good example is…this is so nerdy. So there is a little contest in my company to get the most steps every month. We have a little Fitbit challenge. I love walks. I walk my dog twice a day. And then my partner walks the dog twice a day. So I walk my dog twice a day, which is a lot already. And this person was beating me and I wanted more outside time, and I wanted time to listen to my podcasts.

So at the start of this pandemic, I’m like, “You know what? I’m going to set up a system that is so unbeatable that I will destroy this person at steps every month.” So I added a four-mile walk at the end of my workday. And guess who destroyed the step challenge every month? They had to change the rules, you can only win once a year. So it’s weird.

And the pandemic helps because now I have more free time, but I added a four-mile walk, which is an hour and 20 minutes to the end of my work. So that is the end of my workday when I’m done with that, this is my office, then I go into the living room. And it’s a nice transition from the end of the workday. But I also set aside the time, right? So I apply the success and goals and systems to every part of my life, including step challenges.

Tara: Yeah, I can tell there’s something that you might define yourself by as competitiveness. Combine your board games and that story…hmm. Are you competitive in board games?

Patrick: I don’t know how to answer that.  Hmmm. Here’s the best way to say this. I like optimization. So in games, it’s like, Hmm, I can trade in one square and get two circles. That’s great. Or I can even trade one square and get three triangles. That’s great. That’s a better move if triangles are more valuable or the same value. I like optimization, I like getting better, but I never want to do it at the expense of someone else.

There’s a problem in gaming in general. I also play tabletop games with a little miniatures and video games where it’s like owning people. There’s never a point where I want someone to have a feel [unintelligible 00:20:20]. I never want someone have a bad experience playing a game with me. So there is an extent that that goes to, which is why when I play a new game with someone for the first time, it’s almost always like a quick…they’re called filler games, like a 20 minute game that’s like, “We’re going to do this. We’re going to do this.” “Oh, cool. Look a one.” And there’s like more luck in those games. So I never want them to have a bad experience. But yes, if I can get super nerdy and competitive with someone who knows the game, oh, we’re going to have that competitive match.

Tara: Sounds like empathetic competition. That’s a new phrase that I just coined?

Patrick: Coin it. There you go. You’ll be famous.

Liam: Yeah, I like it. You heard it here first, folks. Patrick, what about eCommerce that keeps you excited for so long. And you talked a little bit about optimization and you shared earlier or I shared about you that, you know, you’ve done client work, you’ve done product work actually on an eCommerce platform, you’ve done some training, you’ve written some books about it, and now you’re working with a host that’s really trying to gear their services, among other things, to folks running eCommerce sites and business. What about it that makes you say, “Yeah, sign me up for another year?”?

Patrick: Great question. If it was possible, I would like everyone in America to have a side hustle or in the world. Why America? The whole world could have a side hustle. I think there’s something powerful about owning your own thing and owning your own business and being responsible for something. I worked for myself for roughly the last two, maybe three years. And that’s been great. It’s been a great experience. I get to move very fast when I work by myself and get to execute very quickly, and get to see things through to exactly my vision.

Now at Nexcess, we’re a company of about a thousand people, and there’s levels and layers and bureaucracy that you have to go through. And it slows things down, but it’s also this more like comprehensive, fully-featured, fully thought through product. I think it’s just good for people to have both experiences. If my boss was ever like, “Patrick, you need to work the next 10 weekends in a row,” I’d be like, “No, I’m out of here.” Because I have my own side business. I can run my LinkedIn Learning and books and courses and stuff. I could absolutely pivot and do that full time if I wanted.

I think there’s something powerful about that. It’s giving yourself an option to work for yourself in case you have a horrible boss. There’s that expression people join companies and quit because of bosses. I’m sorry, I messed that up. You can Google it. But it’s something along those lines. I’ve been acquired before. I’ve had randomly new bosses have been added above me. And if you don’t get along with them, there’s usually very little you can do. So think it’s just about like independence and having a backup plan. I wish more people had backup plans and have their own little enterprises.

And just the last thing is I’m also a personal finance nerd. I don’t know why, but like we give small business owners so many deductions compared to regular workers. Also if you have a small business, and I get noise-cancelling headphones for podcast interview, now it’s a write-off. So you can save some money by running a small business.

Tara: You have an entrepreneurial background? How did you get started in in tech? Tell a little bit about that.

Patrick: I went to school at University of Wisconsin Green Bay, and then I got into a custom web development shop basically halfway through my senior year. So it was great. This was 2008, 2009. Sorry, I don’t remember the exact year. But it was like not a good time. I had a job lined up and we were building really cool custom stuff for people which I liked. Not even using WordPress, just custom PHP stuff.

Later on, I joined other web companies and agencies and did stuff. But there was this super tiny, little entrepreneurial community in Green Bay, and I got really involved. I gave presentations about the things that I knew, which is custom PHP and WordPress. Then I gave presentations about Drupal and Ruby on Rails and this and this and this. I attended…there was a startup weekend event in Green Bay.

So I love that entrepreneurial spirit. It’s hard to say you were into the startup world when you’re in Green Bay. But as much of a startup world as there was, I was into it. I love it. It’s very cool to see people’s dreams come true. You know what I mean? It’s very cool to see people build things from scratch. I’m a big fan of that world.

Sorry, just quick shout out because I live in Denver. I love it. There’s this amazing thing called Startup Week Denver. If you’re ever anywhere near Denver in September, you got to come. It’s just phenomenal free sessions about startups night. I still go to it every year. It’s amazing. And I love it. I don’t know if I want to work for startup, but I love that culture.

Tara: Yeah, cool. Thanks for sharing that. I do want to come to Denver. So maybe I’ll make it correspond with that.

Patrick: Yeah.

Liam: Patrick, I want to ask you about advice. Our other question is really focused on what advice you might have picked up, read, encountered in a board game then you’ve worked successfully into your life? So something that you brought in and made a habit of, and you’ve reaped the rewards. What would you share with others from that?

Patrick: Great. I have a thing rattling around my head. I won’t be able to remember the attribution who originally said it, but someone said we…oh, boy. Let’s see if I can get this out here. “We believe we can get more done in a year but less done in 10 years.” So I think we say, “In a year, I want to start my business.” And maybe that’s too much in a year.

A silly example of board games, that usually takes two years to come from like a solid mechanical idea to launching a Kickstarter campaign. I ran one of those, and it did. It took me think like a year and a half from start to finish, maybe even two years. So I think we don’t realize how long certain things take. But then we also give them up at like six months, or a year or a year and a half. And if we just continued for 10 years, you’d be amazed where you are.

I feel like I’ve been in WordPress for probably around 10 years. And it’s cool to think that you know what? I was a student web developer back at UW Green Bay and I was taking courses on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on LinkedIn Learning, which was formerly lynda.com at the time. And it’s weird to think that seven years later, I would be teaching those courses. So I think we undervalue underestimate how much we can get done in 10 years and overestimate how much we can done in one year.

So there’s something about sticking to certain things that you think are going to make money or be good for your career, or whatever. But that’s also really hard because everything you do takes time and effort. I love this Board Game podcast I run, and I know I could turn it into something in 10 years, but I think it’s also time to end it and do something new. So there’s a really hard balance between continuing things for couple of years and then deciding when to let them go.

Tara: Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. Definitely. You’re also hitting on something else I really related to the whole habit goal topic, which is setting achievable goals. I mean, you can even take what you say about a year and 10 years and into a day. Like if I have 20 things I need to do this week, I’m going to put them all on my to-do list for today, and then I’m going to feel crappy at the end of the day because I didn’t do all 20 things, instead of spreading it out into four things a day over the week, right? Or saying, “This week, I have to build this website.” And saying, “Monday, I’m going to make the homepage and Tuesday I’m going to make the header and footer” or whatever those things are.

Just the way that you approach your goals really makes a difference in how you feel about yourself and about those goals. I think that is related to the idea of overestimating, and underestimating what you can get done. Thanks for sharing that. That’s great advice.

Patrick: I just want to add a little thing there is I do this to myself all the time. I would think after reading five bazillion books that I could just do it naturally. But I’ll always do like, “Sell board game on Facebook marketplace.” All board games I don’t need anymore. And really it’s take pictures of board games. That’s step one. Number two, figure out how much I can reasonably get for this board game. Great. Number three post it on a Facebook group.

And if I write it, literally it’s a nine day difference between I’ve seen it right the three steps and it’s so easy to just “Oh, take your photos of it. Got it. Okay, that was easy. All right. Oh, look up. Sure. What are the people selling it for? Oh, that’s easy. And post on Facebook. I already have the photos on my phone. This is so easy. And right now my post-it note says, “Sell Batman on a board game group.” And I haven’t done it because it’s three steps that I wrote down as one step. So it’s amazing how powerful that is.

Tara: It is. I could talk about that stuff all day. I love the book “The 12 Week Year” is another kind of life-changing approach to goal setting. But I geek out on that kind of stuff all the time.

Liam: You totally do.

Tara: I do.

Liam: I love you for that.

Tara: It’s amazing that I get as little done as I do given how much attention I pay to how to get things done.

Liam: You’re busy learning about how to get them done. Time to actually do it.

Tara: It’s true. It’s fun learning than doing.

Liam: I’m being silly, Tara. You get more done than most people I know.

Tara: Well. So Liam, do you have anything else to ask Patrick before we wrap up? We’re almost out of time.

Liam: Yeah, I do. Patrick, we’re a year into COVID, eCommerce, and websites is generally pretty…It’s changed very quickly in the last year. What are your thoughts, predictions? What do you like to see? What are you expecting to happen mostly around eCommerce now that everybody is buying online, we’re shipping, we’re getting sent to our houses, buying online is easier, all that kind of stuff. What are your expectations for the near future?

Patrick: It’s a big question. If you read the headlines, you’ll see lots of headlines about basically COVID accelerated existing trends. So every year eCommerce was getting bigger and bigger by like one or 2% every year of total retail sales. And it did. It jumped ahead by about 10 years in eCommerce. I forget the exact numbers. But it jumped basically to 10 years of growth in like a couple of months. I do think for the most part that’s here to stay. eCommerce is going to continue to grow.

So if you’re already doing eCommerce, especially if you’re doing something that was like weights at home, or if you’re selling Peloton, right, there are certain industries that are just crushing it right now, like personal fitness, and probably home repair and probably board games. There are certain industries that are doing really well.

I’m actually a big fan of try to also have some sort of brick and mortar tie in. I think lots of people like to still buy in a store. Maybe want to order it online, but I still want to return it to the store if it doesn’t work. Like there’s a great board game store down the road from me called Wizards Chest, and they have board game demos. I like painting miniatures. They have people that give you painting tips, and they have all these things that I can’t get from an online store. And so I just don’t want people to think…just because COVID happened, do not assume that 100% of sales are going to be online. There are still a huge, huge, huge number of people who really like at least picking up an item at curbside pickup or returning it in person. And I don’t think we should forget about that. But I am very excited to see eCommerce growth.

Would you like to know a very interesting near term problem? In the US, unemployment rate is 7%. Those 7% of people generally hospitality services sectors are doing terribly bad. The other 93% of people are doing pretty well. We are ordering so much more stuff from China right now that we do not have enough boats and shipping containers to put it all in. So we may actually see consumer good prices increase in the near term future. So little plastic toys and stuff because they just have to pay more for containers, which is a crazy problem that we’ve never had before. So that’s a weird short term problem that we’ll have to deal with.

Tara: Yeah, interesting. Thanks for sharing all that.

Patrick: Welcome.

Tara: I’m not sure if that’s like…

Liam: You answered it very well for the amount of time we had left in the show.

Tara: You did.

Liam: So thank you very much. That was fantastic. That was fantastic.

Tara: I’m not sure that’s ending on a positive note or not. But thank you for sharing. Where can people find you online?

Liam: There’s good news, bad news, and it’s life. It’s good. It’s a good way. I like it. I vote to approve that ending.

Tara: Okay. We’ll stick with it. Patrick, where can people find you online?

Patrick: You can hit me up on Twitter. I am @BFTrick. And here’s my podcast signup. B is in Board game, F is in fun, and trick T is in trick-taking games. So BFTrick on Twitter. And then also Speaking in Bytes is my website. I have over 100 articles about WooCommerce. Feel free to rummage around. You’ll probably find some neat things you can customize in WooCommerce. I have courses on LinkedIn Learning. WooSesh is this online conference that I do every year. So you can sign up now and when it comes around to the September, October timeline, we’ll get out emails about that. Oh, and if you are interested in board games, go to laidback.games. That is my board game company where I sell Fry Thief. I think that’s all the places.

Tara: Thanks, Patrick.

Patrick: Thank you.

Tara: I’m going to look up Fry Thief. I think I’ve seen that maybe from you or someone else on Twitter.

Patrick: I’ll give you a little Easter egg. My top pledge on Kickstarter was you can add your likeness to the game. Several people in the WordPress world are in the game.

Tara: Oh, fun. Okay, I will have to look that up. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thanks for joining us.

Patrick: Thank you for having me.

Tara: Hope to see you in real life.

Liam: Patrick, what a pleasure!

Patrick: Sounds good.

Tara: Bye-bye.

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

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

Ken lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where he is a full-time webmaster at a law firm. He’s also a co-owner of BKreative Media Solutions, an agency that supports small and medium businesses with digital branding solutions. He’s a core organizer of his local WordPress meetup, which is on a bit of a hiatus to the COVID.

Website | BKreative Media Solutions: bkreative.net

Preferred Pronouns | He/Him

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

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

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 146.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Ken Elliot. Ken lives in Columbia, South Carolina, where he is a full-time webmaster at a law firm. He’s also a co-owner of BKreative Media Solutions, an agency that supports small and medium businesses with digital branding solutions. He’s a core organizer of his local WordPress meetup, which is on a bit of a hiatus to the COVID. Welcome, Ken.

Ken: Thank you. Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Tara: We’re glad you’re here too. Thanks so much for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Ken: Yes. Pretty much what I do is provide brand solutions to small and medium-sized businesses that are looking to kind of grow and scale for those companies that they don’t know where to get started with their actual online branding space. I provide them with kind of general solutions to get them going so they can kind of reach out to their audience.

Tara: So are you more of a front end web person than a designer? Or do you also…I see your T-shirt. I know no one else can see that see this. So tell us a little bit about your skillset when it comes to being a webmaster and also doing the branding that you do.

Ken: Yeah, absolutely. I started out doing web development pretty much we’ll say 22 years ago. So I learned how to build my first website. I was in AOL Chat Rooms, which was super popular 22 years ago. And then someone else was doing a website, they said, “I build websites.” I was like, “Well, if you build a website, so can I.” So I ended up making my first website using Microsoft Word, which was the only way I knew how to make a website at the time.

Then I also proceeded to learn how to go into the view source and grab code and go into the bookstore, looking at different resources at the bookstore on how to learn different coding. So you can kind of say I’m a bit of both. I learned HTML CSS before I entered college, and did not learn how to do PHP in databasing while I was in college. So I learned a lot of stuff pre WordPress—before I even learned what WordPress was.

Tara: Wow, that’s great. You’ve got a pretty thorough background there going back a long way. How did you get started in the branding aspect of things?

Ken: Well, what I ended up realizing was when I would build websites for some of my clients, they didn’t know what to do next. It was, “Here’s a website,” and it’s like, “Okay, thank you.” And then I guess they just assumed that the website would bring people to them. And so I was like, “Okay, so let me help guide you on how to reach your audience now that this website is here. Maybe you should put some more strategy into social media. Maybe you need some business cards and actually go and be in front of the actual audience that you need to reach out to. That way you could jump some business.” It’s not like the field of dreams with a website. It just doesn’t happen. You have to do the work to get people in.

Liam: That’s a tough lesson for a lot of businesses to learn. I mean, maybe less so in a COVID world where everybody really appreciate the online factor. But if you’re going back 20 some odd years, you know, if I have a website, isn’t that enough? Yeah, that’s a tough lesson. I want to talk a little bit just for old times’ sake about buying books about writing code and making websites because I think the three of us have probably all done that. There’s a certain nostalgia that you stirred up in me, Ken when you mentioned that. Share with us about the books you bought, and what did you get? What was that experience like?

Ken: I honestly wish I still had my books. I took them all in the office because it’s kind of like they are reminder of humble beginnings. So every time you look at the books, it’s like, “Wow, look at what I used to do 10, 20 years ago.” And then I look at how stuff is now where you could just easily go on Stack Overflow, or YouTube or whatever. You can just copy and paste code.

So when you get the books back in the day, you had to actually read through and actually do trial and error. “Okay, let me type it in. Let me figure out if this works with the actual solution that I’m trying to get it to do. And if it doesn’t, okay, well, maybe I need to go find another book.” So it could be a costly investment for us on the front end. But it’s almost that reminder of “Wow, look at these pages I had to flip through and actually read the code and figure out what actually will apply to my solution.”

Liam: Yeah, that’s definitely there. Right? “Am I reading it correctly? Did I missed something? Why isn’t this working and there’s nothing more on that page. I’ve checked the index and there’s…” Yeah, it’s a different world. It’s a different world.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about WordPress and how you discovered WordPress and your history with it.

Ken: I’ll say I wasn’t searching for WordPress. I think it was more so WordPress found me in that moment because I was in a kind of a bit of a point where I was trying to build, like everybody, a quote-unquote, “social media network.” At this time, it was kind of like a nightlife website in which the PHP in a database would manage all of the details of the website. That way, you wouldn’t have to worry about going in and out and whatnot, having to change the code and all of that stuff.

And so I was trying to find an easier way to make updates to these websites without having to do a whole bunch of PHP coding. And so I realized that WordPress allowed for the ability to add content, make changes. You know, and it did all this stuff I already knew in PHP and MySQL. And so I just kind of got into it, tried it out, see how I liked it. Of course, I had to make some minor changes to it and the PHP to do exactly what I wanted to do. But that’s kind of was my entry into WordPress.

Liam: And then how about the WordPress community? Where did that come about?

Ken: Oh, wow. What’s funny was when I first was introduced to WordPress, it was 2010. And I was still kind of on the fence of “Okay, do I really like WordPress?” I feel like I’m cheating because there’s a part of you that wants to still do HTML hard code. You want to prove that yeah, I’m still the original. So I felt like WordPress is just kind of a cheapskate solution to web design.

But then, as I kind of continued to learn and appreciate what WordPress was providing, I was already a big user of one of the hosting providers out there. So they sent me an email in 2016, saying, “Hey, you should come to the WordCamp meetup in Atlanta,” which was my first WordCamp ever. And I went. Just to say the least, that was probably a life changing event for me.

Liam: Yeah, we hear that a lot. What caught your attention the most? What made the biggest impact on you that day?

Ken: Well, when I showed up that day, of course, like any conference, you’re kind of overwhelmed with all that’s going on. You’re just like, “Wow, there’s a lot here.” Especially if you’ve been to Atlanta, you know Atlanta is one of the larger ones in the nation. So you’re talking about a good 300, 400, or 500 people. So I was like, “Wow, I didn’t realize this place could fit 300, 400, or 500 people. And so when I walked in, I was like, “Wow, I’m a little bit overwhelmed.”

And then there was this one young lady, she walked up to me, I guess because she saw looked very puzzled. She was like, “Hey, you look like you’re a little bit lost.” I was like, “Yeah, I’m a little bit overwhelmed right now.” She’s like, “Hey, we don’t worry. This is where everything is at.” And she pointed me to “Okay, here’s the vendors. This is where the assessors are at.” As a matter of fact, she even took the time to escort me to where she was sitting out with a couple of other people from the WordPress community that she wanted to introduce me to.

So it was almost like there was this natural loving care. Just care of, “Hey, you’re a part of the community. Let me show you the people who are here, and let me help guide you around what is a WordCamp.”

Liam: That’s a great experience. That’s fantastic. Having been to Atlanta, I think I was there in 2018, it’s an enormous WordCamp spread over at least two and maybe like two and a half or three floors. There’s a lot to get overwhelmed by. I’m so delighted that you had such a welcoming experience.

And that then at some point led you to think about getting involved with being an organizer yourself. We shared earlier in our conversation that you help organize your local meetup. Tell us a little bit about that. How did you get involved with that?

Ken: So what I wanted to do was after kind of going to these amazing WordCamps in the region, I eventually was like, “It would be great if we have something like this in Columbia.” So I ended up kind of doing a little digging and I ended up reaching out to the original organizer of the one in Columbia. And I was asking her, “Hey, I see that you haven’t had a meet up in a little bit. Is it possible? Are you looking for help? Are you planning to have other meetups in the future?”

So what ended up happening was she kind of had to step back because she was just like all of us, we’re so busy with so much stuff. You can’t do everything at the same time. And being that she was the only organizer, she didn’t have anybody to help a sister. And I said, “Hey, well, I’ve been to numerous WordCamps and WordPress meetups. I will love to assist if you need some help with anything.” She says, “Sure, absolutely.”

So she added me on as a co-organizer. I think at this point, we haven’t had a meetup yet just because kind of COVID has put a lot of things to hold. But we would love the opportunity to do that. And that’s how I kind of got involved with the Colombia meetup for WordPress.

Liam: I love that. I love that. Just, you know, “Hey, this is a great community. I had a great experience. I’m engaging with that community. We’re not doing anything locally. Can I help address that?” Fantastic. And then of course, you know, COVID changes everything. It changes everything. Tara, I’m going to share the mic a little bit. Now I’m going to keep hogging, apparently. Tara and I are waving at each other back and forth.

Tara: I think you’re probably going to do what I was just going to do. So keep going. You’re on a roll.

Liam: All right. So I was going to ask one more question before we got to anything else. Did you want me to jump into something specific, Tara? All right. Ken, you work full time at a law firm as a webmaster, and then you have this additional project or this additional business, I’m sorry, it’s more than just a project, on top of that. What’s your experience of “I’ve got this full-time job. I’m doing stuff I presumably like because I’m working there full time. It’s not fulfilling everything that I need or want. I’m going to do something else.” Can you just explain a little bit about kind of the intellectual emotional impetus behind starting BKreative?

Ken: Yeah. My business partner was the one who approached me about BKreative. So really, when I started my full time a little over 10 years ago, it was the idea, “Okay, full time, I got to make some money because I have a student loan. I got to take care of my student loans, which of course, is what everybody’s mindset is when you come out of college.

But then also, my business partner approached me honestly, either before or after I got the full-time job saying, “Hey, I see that you do websites. I do graphics. I would love the opportunity for us to kind of collaborate on this project and maybe build something.” And so really, I’m full-time in my business, but my co-partner has been kind of married hip to hip because we’ve been doing it the same amount of time. So kind of emotionally, I think both of them supply a need, where my full time I’m taking…

I think you do both of them kind of together. So like with your full time, you take some of the business aspects of what you learn from the full time and you apply to your actual business. And you take all the coding from actually what you do as a business and you could apply some of those different techniques and strategies to the actual coding that you’re doing in a full-time.

Liam: Did you know your business partner before you were approached to join. Obviously, you probably knew who they were but was it a close friend, longtime associate, something like that? So it was a kind of a natural fit it sounds like.

Ken: We ended up actually knowing each other from a part-time job at a grocery store that we worked at. We were both baggers. He knew I actually did web design. I didn’t know too much about him doing graphic design at that point. But I guess, you know, through Facebook, because we kind of connected on Facebook or whatnot, he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I see that you do some graphic work. I do some web work. Maybe we should consider doing this project together.”

Because I think he was doing like a website for his church and he understood the graphics. But of course, he’d understand the website aspect. So he reached out to me and said, “Hey, can you help with the website portion of it and I do the graphics?” I was like, “Sure, absolutely.” So that’s how we ended up kind of growing into BKreative Media Solutions now.

Tara: Great. Good story. Thanks for sharing that. I’m going to pivot to a question that we ask all of our guests, which is about success. So I want to ask you what you consider a definition of success that you work with in your life and how you implement it in your life or how you view it.

Ken: So when I first started out, I mean, you are right out of college. That’s even before, you know, success is all about how much you make, money, how much is in the bank account, all that stuff. I think now I’m kind of at a juncture, especially with the pandemic, it has given me time to do a little self-discovery and figuring out exactly what is most important for me in my life. So I tell people this all the time now, especially this year, if success is what actually makes me happy, what do I feel like? What are the things that I do that truly make me happy in life? And then along with that, what can I offer to someone else to make them happy? Which is the purpose.

So I want to make sure that my passion, that what I do that help fulfill me also helps someone else fulfill their purpose in life. I think that’s what truly makes me happy. So when I do websites, websites are solely to help a small business or medium-sized business to grow, and hopefully, put them in a position where they can help someone else with their passion and their purpose. I think that’s what I kind of title success as is helping someone else to help someone else.

Tara: I like that. I mean, it’s a win-win all around then when you feel good about what you’re doing. So when you are selecting businesses to work with, are they certain types of businesses that you’re helping? Or is there a broad range?

Ken: I’m very particular in regards to I want to make sure that they know exactly where they see themselves let’s say 5, 10 years from now. It’s not just “Hey, I woke up this morning. I want a website.” “Oh, okay. Tell me more about what this website is going to be about.” And then, “Okay, well, where do you see this business going in five years?” And they can tell you. I like to have people and organizations that could easily rattle off, “Okay, this is my company’s mission. This is the vision. This is the audience. This is who we’re trying to strive to go after.”

That way, when it’s time for us to build a website for whatever their goal is, we can just say, “Okay, understanding what your goal is, this is how we should lay out the website and workflow it this way so that you can reach the desired audience that you’re trying to capture.”

Liam: Can I ask you a kind of a business workflow logistics question?

Ken: Sure.

Liam: How do you engage with your clients, your BKreative Media clients if you’re 40 hours a week in somebody’s law firm? Does your business partner lead on that? Is it mostly email? Because you’ve established a flow that I think a lot of our listeners would like to emulate in some way, and I just wondered a little bit how you manage that.

Ken: I’ll say this. A lot of our clientele comes from word of mouth. And so when word of mouth is really good, it’s easy to get business. You don’t have to worry about, “Okay, well, let me put something on Facebook to find some leads,” or “let me cold call people who might be websites.” You just rely on your clientele to do it for you.

So if you could do one really good website and ask that person, “Hey, do you know two or three other people who could use our services?” And then hopefully, maybe you can ask them for a virtual introduction, or “hey, can I get their number so I can call them and get in touch with them?” that makes it a whole lot easier instead of doing so much of the, “Okay, who’s going to be the next lead? Who’s going to be next person? I got to go here to search actively for this.” It makes that process a whole lot easier.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. And I want to ask you about that. Because it’s one thing to ask a client with whom you’ve worked for the last few months, “Hey, can you give me a recommendation?” And then they might even say, “Yeah, I’ll introduce you to these three other folks.” What’s that first phone call like? How do you deal with that? I mean, if you’re used to email, if you’re good at text message, and all sudden, it’s a phone call, and “hey, hire me because I’m good” or “hire us because we’re good,” That’s a different kind of conversation that can be a challenge. Have you done that? And what has worked for you?

Ken: Actually, phone calls are better for me. Here’s the thing about phone calls. Because during that time, just like any face to face, like when you’re hearing people’s voice, you kind of get an idea of their passion for their project. So when you hear my voice saying, “Hey, I would love to do your website. I’m interested in your actual project. If you would, can I get your email, all this information, and I’ll send you this questionnaire and we can go ahead and get started on your project, start kind of figuring out if we want to do it,” that type of stuff. I mean, they’ll get an idea, okay, this individual is truly invested in what we’re trying to do and then they’re more inclined to actually…

Because you know how email or text is. I’ll come back to it when I want to come back it. Necessarily, you can put your phone on the side, you can never… But for most people, when they get a phone call, they’re going to pick up the phone because in most cases the phone either vibrates or rings and it lights up. So you can’t help but pay attention. With a text or email, you can choose if you want to answer it or not.

Tara: Yeah, I’m looking at your website now and your phone number is very prominent. So I imagine you’re encouraging people to call you. And that makes a lot of sense. Do you find that the people who call you are good leads, they’re ready to be in the market to hire? Are they kind of – what do they call it? What do they call it when you’re checking the tires? What do they call it?

Ken: Kick the tires.

Tara: Kicking the tires.

Ken: I’ll tell you. It depends on who they are in kind of what they’re looking for. So we use our website not so much as a lead magnet, but more as a reinforcement of what we’ve already talked about prior to. So when a lot of people, we talk to them on a phone, you say, “Hey, we heard what you wanted, we’re interested in helping. Have you taken a look at our website?” In most cases, they have.

So we say, “Hey, take a look at our website. Let us know what you think. If you love what we do, which I’m pretty sure you will, just give us a call. We’d love to chat with you.” Or we’ll say, “Hey, we’ll shoot you an email with our questionnaire. You can fill out the questionnaire.” And hopefully, between those two items, they’ll follow back up with us.

And if they don’t follow back up, I give more week. I’ll come back in a week. “Hey, just wanted to see what’s going on. I know you’re busy, life is busy, so I want to make sure that you’re still interested in that website.” And then if they are, they’ll most likely finish the questionnaire. If not, then we might try another couple of weeks to say, “Hey, hope you didn’t forget about us. I know life is hard. We just want to make sure that you’re still interested in the website.” So it’s just kind of the repeat process of making sure that they’re still interested.

Tara: Yeah, yeah. It’s like the consummate sales process, making sure you follow up with those leads and all that. So sounds like it’s a good process that you have in place. Ken, I want to ask you about underrepresented in tech, which is how we found you. I know that’s a new initiative by Allie Nimmons and I think Michelle Frechette. I really love what they’re doing. And so I want to ask how you found out about that, and what it’s meant for you if you’ve heard from other people. Talk a little bit about that, if you would.

Ken: Yeah, absolutely. I want to say that Michelle and Allie actually reached out to me, which they’re awesome. I’ll just go ahead and give them…

Tara: Yes, they are.

Ken: I’ll give them as much kudos as possible. Haven’t chatted with them because I hadn’t been on Twitter as much. I’ve been on Clubhouse.

Tara: Oh, my gosh. Have you? Okay, I have that too but I haven’t gone down that rabbit hole yet.

Ken: Yeah, stay away from that rabbit hole because you can spend a ton of time on there. So make sure you put limits on that. But when I am on Twitter, I would reach out to them out again. And a lot of times, I’ll just reach out to them in messengers just to say, “Hey, how you doing? Just making sure you are good.” Checking in because I like to check in with everybody.

But they ended up reaching out to me and saying, “Hey, we have this new initiative, we want you to test it out and see how you like it because we want to help underrepresented communities to be recognized in spaces where we all feel we should be in.” Anyway, it should be equal in that aspect. So the big thing was, “Hey, test it out. Let us know what you think. Let us know if the workflow is good. Is it something that you would use? Of course, I said yes because it is something I’d use. But anytime, anything I could use to help, actually, for the betterment of an underrepresented community, I am willing to help as much as possible.

Liam: Yeah, we’re so glad that you did. We’re delighted that you’re here. Ken, you and I had chatted in advance of this call. And one of the challenges that we have with Hallway Chat because we don’t want it to just be the Tara and Liam friends show is we don’t know who we don’t know. And because the WordPress community is global as well as it is local, it’s tough, especially with no more WordCamps. We can’t meet you in the hallway at WordCamp Atlanta, at least not in the immediately foreseeable future.

That the kind of tool like underrepresented in tech affords podcast folks and other people who really do want to step outside of their own circles and engage with people who are hugely valuable in every sense of the word, it’s great. So we’re delighted that you were on there. We’re delighted to have found you and we’re so delighted to be spending time with you today.

Ken: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Tara: Yeah, it’s a great website. I was introduced to a lot of people that I hadn’t heard of and was happy to read about their skill set and what they’re doing and looking for. How do you know Allie and Michelle? Have you met them in person at WordCamp or just from online?

Ken: Most of the people I meet are online, which is really funny. And kind of is, you know, hindsight 2020. I regret it now. But I wish I would have went down to Miami in 2020. If I’d have known that would have been the last major WordCamp pre-pandemic, I would have been right there. I didn’t go into Greenville. And I’ve met a lot of people in Greenville doing the same thing.

What’s really funny for me is I do a lot of conversations in the hallway, which is exactly like I’ll go into sessions. But then I’m so excited to catch up with all of my peers or friends in the WordPress community. I think I’ll spend 75% of my time in the hallway talking with everybody who I haven’t seen in so long, just catching up making sure they’re good, to make sure they’re well. So I’ll love to introduce myself to people.

So when I see them online, I try to make sure, “Hey, when I see you, and hopefully, post-pandemic, two, three years, hopefully, that’s when we’ll be back together, but hopefully when I see them again, I can like, hey, a big hug. Maybe hopefully we can do a hug. We’ll see.

Tara: Yeah, I know. I know.

Liam: Ken, hallways and WordCamps are a great place to get advice. And I’m going to use that to segue into our second signature question. And it’s around advice. And it’s what advice have you been given or have you read or have you picked up from someone else and successfully implemented in your life? What’s the best bit of advice that you’ve heard or received and worked into your life?

Ken: Wow. I feel like it’s hard because I know sometimes they’ll say, especially in tech, that you should always be changing and you should always be kind of in a pivoting position where you’re always able to receive whatever or learn whatever because nothing stays constant. So always be in a place where you can always change.

But even for me recently, I think the one I’ve kind of picked up on more now is being empathetic and being compassionate. Always be because you never know when someone just needs a can word, or just needs an ear to listen to. So just sitting there, hearing what they’re saying. Sometimes, “I understand, I agree, I feel your pain.”

And really, that’s what customers want a lot of time because they don’t know what they want until you tell them what they want. So they have this big idea in their head but the idea hasn’t been conceptualized enough for them to understand, “Okay, this is how this will look.” And so they come to us with the idea of “okay, can you tell me what this big idea in my head is? And can you help express it to me?

So my job is to listen intently and hopefully, based on what they’re giving me… Because, you know, sometimes you can’t get in their heads. Their minds are always larger than what they’re saying. And so I’m trying to get as much out of them from their words so I can actually piece together what they need done. So I think compassion and empathy, just understanding what the issue is and kind of understand what their pain points are, figure out what they’re trying to really accomplish helps you to understand what the overall goal and what their real purpose is.

Tara: That’s good advice. I think it applies to so much these days. I think a lot of us don’t take the time to listen or think about where someone else is coming from. And it gets us in a lot of the troubles that we see happening around us today. So it applies to business as a client service company, and it applies to being a human being in the world. So I appreciate your sharing that on both levels. Thanks so much.

Ken: Absolutely.

Liam: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with you more than an active commitment to empathy is… It’s never going to go wrong for you. You might not get what you want out of this relationship or that relationship, but that may just be because the other side of the equation. And giving people the time and trying to see their point of view, even if you don’t agree with it is I think always a worthwhile endeavor. I get that. Thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that.

Ken: Absolutely.

Liam: Ken, we have just a few minutes left in our time together. It’s hard to believe that 30 minutes is almost gone. I wanted to ask you—you seem a very positive person and clearly you’re empathetic—what’s one really good thing that has come out of just COVID world for you? Obviously, maybe not unbalanced, you would want it in light of all the tragedy and toughness that’s happened. But what’s one good thing that’s happened for you either personally or professionally?

Ken: I think it goes back to, like I said, last year. I had my mind made up on so many things that I wanted to accomplish in 2020. It’s just like, “Yay, new decade, new year, we’re going to do so many amazing things in 2020.” And you’re so excited about it. But then you realize, when the pandemic actually hit, “Oh, my goodness. It wasn’t meant to be.”

So it gave me an opportunity to, as I mentioned earlier, rediscover what is really my purpose. What’s really the reason why I’m here? Why am I here? Who am I supposed to be serving? Who am I supposed to be taking care of? Who am I supposed to be helping to grow and build in their life so that…? Sometimes you know how we are, especially in social media. We always want to be in the limelight. We want to be first and we want to be seen, and we want to have a million followers. Oh, Whoop-de-doo for a million followers.

But how are you impacting those millions? I would rather impact 50, 100 people and have them really appreciate what I’m offering to them and doing for them as a service than to impact without a million people who don’t even know what I do on a day to day basis. I think that’s really important is to be in a position where you’ll always be of service to somebody. And I think that was the most important thing from the pandemic is to remember it’s not about me; it’s about how I’m helping those around me. I think that’s just super important.

Tara: That’s excellent. What an excellent wrap up to this conversation. Thank you for sharing that and inspiring others to take the same approach and the same view of the pandemic and of moving forward out of it, too. So thank you so much, Ken. It’s really been a pleasure to have you on Hallway Chats today. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you online?

Ken: You can find me under my handle @Kennethspeaks on Twitter, Instagram. You can probably find me on Facebook as well and on LinkedIn if you want to follow me there. But I’m using Twitter more than any of them. That’s pretty much the big ones. We’ll see if Kenneth Speaks gets a website in the future. We’ll see. Not sure. I have a couple of website projects, personal brand projects that must be. So we’ll see what happens.

Tara: Great. Thanks again for joining us.

Ken: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Liam: Thanks, Ken. What a pleasure.

Tara: Bye-bye.

Ken: Bye-bye.

Liam: Bye-bye.

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

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

Kyle is the Director of Operations at Sandhills Development which is a WordPress plugin company. He loves bringing people together and has a passion for making music and craft beer.

Website | KyleBlog.net

Preferred Pronouns | He/Him

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

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

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 145.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Kyle Maurer. Kyle is the director of operations at Sandhills Development, which is a WordPress plugin company. He loves bringing people together and has a passion for making music and craft beer. He’s also officially the biggest Hallway Chats fan, yay for us, and he could not be more excited to be on the show today. Welcome, Kyle. We’re so happy that you’re here. Thanks for joining us.

Kyle: Thank you, Tara and Liam. I’m so thrilled to be with you all today. This is amazing.

Liam: Kyle, we’re absolutely thrilled to have you here, and my ego in particular is grateful for your presence. So flattery can continue as long as you would like to do. It is very welcome. Welcome.

Kyle: I am happy to. I have an abundance of comments and just thoughts on this wonderful show. I would love…

Liam: To interrupt you, maybe you can start by telling us a little bit more about yourself beyond what Tara has already shared.

Kyle: Well, that’s totally fine. That’s what the show is about, right? I have a story that’s no more interesting than the next person’s and we can run through that I suppose. I’ve been doing the WordPress thing for a while just like you have and all the other amazing guests that you’ve had on this fantastic show. I was fortunate in many ways when I was younger, but if there is one thing I look back that I lacked, it was probably role models and mentors. I spend a lot of time in my early career wandering about not knowing what to do or where I was supposed to end up. I milked cows, I ran registers, I shelved books, I powerwashed houses.

I did all this random stuff not knowing where to end up until I finally got…not finally. I was pretty young at the time. But I got married and bought my first house and started to get really serious about needing to accelerate my career development. I did a lot of research and eventually found that if I learned just a little bit of web programming in my spare time, it could open doors much faster than the dead-end jobs I was working at the time. I don’t remember why. I started with PHP, took some tutorials, dropped some acronyms on my resume, and immediately had takers.

I turned an internship at an agency into a position and a full-time position, and then a director of technology role, and then eventually had to leave that company because I caught on to how shady the owners really were. But then I started my own company with an abundance of unearned competence and ran a marketing agency with a business partner for five years. And that was the time period when I got the most invested into the WordPress world. At the time, when we started our business WordPress was emerging as the leader of the options at the time but was by no means ubiquitous dominator in the scene that it is today. So it was a little more chanced that we ended up choosing it from the beginning.

But we built many, many, many websites on WordPress and I got interested in plugin development. I did all the things that you can do in the little WordPress world over those five years, and then eventually joined a plugin company when I decided I didn’t want to do that marketing agency thing anymore. I wanted to work for a product company and with some great people that I could learn from and grow. And it’s been fantastic so far. We make a lot of great things here at Sandhills Development. I work with some of the best people in the business. I love the role that I have, which is really at the end of the day, trying to make sure everybody’s job is rewarding and fulfilling, everybody loves what they do, everybody works together efficiently and this company continues to grow.

Kyle: I know Sandhills development does a lot of WordPress plugins, but I also know that Pippin has started his own craft beer company as well, brewery. And I’m wondering if you were already a craft beer fan before that, or is that something that you…you mentioned it in your intro. Is that something that you had to do in order to stay as an employee of Santos? Does everybody have to be a beer drinker and a beer crafter?

Kyle: You have to be a beer drinker. That’s the requirement. I’m kidding. I’m kidding. There are plenty of people in the company who don’t really have a passion or an interest in the beer-making and that side. But we do have a craft beer culture I think within our team, currently 28 people distributed around the world. The company does own two brewery locations both in Kansas. I’ve been able to visit both of them and enjoy lots of Sandhills beer over the years, which is some of the best out there. If you ever have an opportunity to pass through Kansas, make sure you find a way to stop by and pick up a can or two.

Tara: Yeah, that sounds great. I know Liam and I both enjoy a good beer. I’ve heard of it and would love to try it sometime. I’m a fan of the company as well. I do a lot of great things. I also am a fan of yours, as you know, because I have listened to a couple of your shows, and participated in them as well. And I know, you’ve spoken a bit about the transition from being a business owner to being an employee of another business. And I wondered if you’d talk a little bit about that, because I like hearing what you have to say about it, what it’s meant for you.

Kyle: Okay, sure, Tara. Thank you. And I do want to say that I’ve been a fan of yours as well for a long time—your company, the way you run your business, and the shows that you participated in. That’s a really good one. I’ve had a lot of other peers in this industry who have left entrepreneurship behind. And I’ve joked with some of them at times about creating like a former entrepreneurs support group to talk about this sort of stuff together. But being an entrepreneur does change you. Being on that side of the table running the business, somehow there’s no really going back after that. You’re a different type of worker.

But I did learn a lot of lessons in that transition. Maybe the principal lesson that I learned was that what was ultimately important to me was ownership, not in the sense of legal equity in a business, but ownership over what I was responsible for. That’s what’s most important. I want and need the freedom to do what I think is right to make the impact that I think is needed and help them in whatever way I think is best for the business. So as long as I have ownership over my domain, whatever my responsibilities are, I am satisfied and happy at the end of the day.

And other things matter. I want the opportunity to continue to grow, I want to be able to learn from good people around me, but ownership does matter but not in the sense that I thought when I was younger when I had a lot of pride in the fact that I didn’t have a boss to answer to. I built too much pride in that. It was caught up in my identity. And I had to decouple myself from that and from my business, which was actually a painful process. It took years for me to actually do. Even when I was aware that I wasn’t doing really what I felt like I was supposed to be doing with my life, to just separate myself from the brand I’d made was extremely difficult.

Liam: That’s a topic I feel like I could go for hours, if not weeks on end with you is where does the role of humility come into life work and everything, and the painful journey that that is for all of us? Thank you for sharing that so candidly with us, Kyle. I wonder if I can riff on that and talk a little bit about you talked about how your perspective as an employee, as a worker, as a professional has changed and that the lessons that you learned as an entrepreneur you’re bringing to your new role or your current role where you have that level of control and you can make the kind of difference that you want to make. What’s carried through? What are some of the perspectives that you bring with you and continue to add value to you and your team and your colleagues at Sandhills are trying to achieve?

Kyle: I like that question. This is, like you said, the kind of thing that we could talk about for a while. The first examples that come to mind things that have carried through, after running my own business for five years, my perspective changed radically. A lot of that does stay with me. I think I continue to look at the whole company, not just specifically about my area of responsibility. I think that that has carried through my passion for the success of this enterprise. I’m thinking about it holistically. So even if my responsibilities are just marketing or just support, or just development or something like that, I’m still thinking about how this fits into the bigger picture and what impact this is making to the company and the success of all of us. Because I look around and want all of us to succeed and want this company to move forward.

So I think that having been in that leader role for a while helped me understand that perspective and also have a lot of empathy for our founder, who I know that when you’re at the top of the hierarchy, you get all of the worst tasks to do, all of the most stressful decisions to make the biggest challenges float up. I have been able to provide a lot of assistance and help in this context. That’s why I’m in the operations role. It wasn’t my original role at the company. I started doing part-time support, and then took on a marketing lead role before I was offered the operations role. I think that my ability to perform in this role has a lot to do with how I have experience thinking holistically about a business and doing everything that I can to try make it succeed. That’s one example. We could probably go on and on about that.

Liam: I like we could, especially if we had a couple of beers in front of us.

Kyle: You know it.

Liam: Let me ask you what is our signature question or one of them, Kyle. You’ve covered a lot of ground in your intro and it sounds like you were talking about not just career success, but also your own life journey. And that’s really what this question is about is definitions of success. Kyle, what is your definition of success?

Kyle: Success is being on the Hallway Chats podcast, of course.

Tara: Thanks, Kyle.

Liam: All right. Now, we’re just getting into boldface…

Tara: You’ve made it. You’re done.

Kyle: Yes. Here I am. It’s quite a treat. I really mean that very sincerely. I gave this question a lot of thought, because, of course, I’m loyal listener to this podcast and of course, I don’t show up to meetings unprepared. The question about success is such a good question. And it’s trying to come up with an answer that is not a cliché. At least from my perspective is not very straightforward. But I believe that success is not like a finish line you need to try and cross one time. There’s not a before success and an after success. It’s more about succeeding in your current moment. Maybe it’s a journey, I don’t know, I feel goofy putting it this way. But it just doesn’t have a finish line. As long as you are moving forward, you are succeeding.

So to me, the question is, am I succeeding right now, and not have I achieved something specific, or have I crossed a specific line? I evaluate my own success based primarily on my self-esteem, and secondarily on my freedom. If I finish my days with this feeling like I can hold my head high, then I’m succeeding. I want to feel like I am making a difference doing good work, bringing real value, and so on. This is something that I’ve grown to appreciate as I have changed roles and done a variety of different things in my career. I’m in a job now where I’m able to finish most days feeling like I did all right today, I helped, I contributed, I delivered some value, I justified my existence, whatever you want to say. Like I am proud of what I have done, I’m proud of who I am, and the contribution I’m making, and the role that I’m playing.

I don’t know if that’s an unusual way to look at it or not, but it is a strong signal to me that I am succeeding. Because there’s been so many chapters in my life where, you know, we all appreciate how elusive this feeling can be. We always second guess ourselves and fall into the comparison trap and find reasons to, at the end of the day feel like we missed the mark. But I feel successful now because most days I’m proud of what I have done and who I am.

And secondarily, the freedom aspect. I think a lot of your former guests have mentioned how important it is to be free to do what you want and look at that as a success metric. Maybe to have the means and the confidence and the opportunities that really matters and to be able to say no to things. Freedom is extremely powerful

Tara: Yeah. Agreed. Agreed. I like your definition of success and it’s ongoingness. I definitely share that approach. I read your year in review. You are among our first guests of 2021. And a lot of people have written yours in review about a year that is notoriously…well, notorious 2020. And, you know, not to get into clichés there as well. But you wrote a very descriptive, heartfelt, and just fascinating review of your last year.

I would like to ask you a couple of questions about your year because your family has grown and talking about flexibility with your career and having the ability to have your family grow as it has. If you’d like to share that with us. I know you and Liam have something in common that you both have a lot of siblings. So you come from large families, and I find it like what your family has undertaken with your children. And I’m just curious how you’re incorporating that into your approach to 2021 and your view of success and your career. That’s a lot. Take what you want. Go with what you want.

Liam: And I’m just going to throw in a challenge. Can you do that in 10 words or less? In Haiku format, please.

Tara: Interrupt.

Kyle: Oh, my gosh, you guys. You’re not making this easy. But okay. Okay. Thank you, Tara. There’s a lot. There’s a lot to… I don’t even know where to start to be honest. This is not just in this context. This is coming up all the time. Every day I’m having a meeting with somebody who’s asking the same question. And I never know how to answer this. What’s going on? How are we doing? I don’t even know how we’re doing. I don’t know how we’re getting by. I’m just trying to make it to bedtime every single day. That’s all that matters. That’s as far ahead as I’m thinking at this point.

But last year was challenging. There’s no doubt about it. It was surprising. It was unusual. A lot of things didn’t go as planned. Hardly anything did go as planned at all. You alluded to a few different things that I don’t know whether it’s timely or useful to recap in their entirety. Maybe the most life-changing for me was this unexpected significant growth of my family. We started the year looking into foster care and hoping that we could bring a second child into our home. We’ve been pursuing adoption again for the second time. We have one daughter already. And we thought, two kids, we can do that. That would be great. It’d be great for our daughter to have a sibling. Let’s look into that.

And then summer came along and we got our license for foster care and our agency immediately asked us if we would take a placement of two boys, ages two and three, which wasn’t exactly what we had envisioned, but we still agreed to take it on. And a couple of weeks later, we were contacted by our daughter’s birth mother, who after telling us that she was expecting and asked us if we would adopt that child as well, the biological sibling of our other daughter, which there was no way we could say no to.

And then a week later, she found out it was twins, and then another week they were born. So within the span of one month, we went from one kid to five kids. Of course, that’s not what we expected to happen. That’s not what we planned to happen. But somehow, we’re figuring out how to make it work. It’s definitely not easy. I don’t know how to do it. But you find a way. You all find a way. We’re still kind of in the same circumstance seven months later.

Tara: Thanks for sharing that. I know you might be a little bit tired of sharing it. It is a fascinating story that is unusual and inspiring at the same time. I think people take on things not knowing what lies ahead. That’s a lot. That’s a lot. Not only do you have five kids, but they’re all quite young. It’s a good thing you have flexibility in your job, I guess.

Kyle: That was great. That’s great work has been fantastic. I’m in a very privileged position to be able to do whatever I need to do. If I need to take time off, I can. If I need to work flexibly, I can’t. We’re all stuck at home anyway, but I can work, I can continue to be productive. I’m able to support this household. And things work out. I think a lot of other people would have a much harder time with it than we do. We still have a hard time with it. But we manage. I guess I don’t know what else to say about it.

Liam: Kyle, thank you for sharing that. That’s a very moving story. I hear tiredness in your voice. But I hear love and I hear humility, and I hear acceptance in a good way. Not acceptance in a negative way. But you and your wife I’m guessing accepted that which is coming your way because they’re children, they’re humans, they need love, they need support. And I just hear you saying, “We’ll find a way. We’ll find a way.” And I love that. Thank you for bravely putting yourself at the feet of others. It’s not easy to do.

Kyle: Geez, you guys are so nice. Thank you, Liam. That’s very kind.

Tara: They’re really cute too. I’m sure at times you are overwhelmed and at times it must be just unbelievably cute sometimes too.

Kyle: Yeah, there’s no doubt. Those twin babies are adorable. Twins are pretty fun. Actually. I’ll give them that.

Liam: Are they fraternal?

Kyle: Yeah, yeah, we have a boy and a girl.

Liam: Okay. That’s good. That’s good. That’s good.

Kyle: That’s great.

Liam: Let’s move a little bit and talk about beer. We’ve talked about how Sandhills brews beer, but I have a feeling that I think I heard you say that you’re a bit of a home brewer yourself. Did I make that up?

Tara: In your spare time.

Kyle: What is that? What is that? I forget. Yeah, definitely. I’ve brewed my share in the past over the years. I used to co-host a local WordPress meetup for some years, and I have a friend named Peter who started that group back in 2012. I helped him co-host that for about eight or nine years or something, until last year, whatever that would be. He taught me all about WordPress, basically everything that I know. And he introduced me to WordCamps, which changed my life. And he taught me how to homebrew beer. So I can’t give Peter enough credit for introducing me to all these things that became a big part of my life. But at this point, I probably brew my batch every year. So that gets me by. In these times where there’s not a lot of socialization, it’s just beer for me. It’s more than that I can drink on my own.

Liam: Yeah, fair enough. I brewed beer once, maybe twice. I made two batches. And I enjoyed it. But at the end, I kind of did the assessment and I’ll just save my money a little more and buy good beer than just wait too long to do all the work. If you love it. It’s fantastic. But I just didn’t love it enough. But for those who do…

Tara: A lot of work.

Kyle: It is.

Tara: It’s a lot of work.

Kyle: When the batches doesn’t work out, it’s pretty disappointing.

Tara: Yeah, yeah. My husband makes it every other week or so. I forget, every few weeks. So we have it on top. Which is nice, because then you can just have a little bit. But I don’t think it’s necessarily like a financial savings or anything. It’s a lot of time, but it’s a hobby, and a science experiment ongoing. I made it one time. I learned. But I don’t think I could replicate it. It’s fun.

Kyle: I want to talk more about your guys’ show. This is such a cool show.

Tara: Thanks. I was going to ask you about your show.

Kyle: My show is not as good as your show. Hallway Chats is really special. And I don’t know that you guys get the credit that you deserve for putting this together and doing it so consistently for so long. I used to have an interview show too. It was not nearly as good as this. It was long time ago. But you know, there were always interview shows at the time. And back then I used to listen to and watch the DragCast and Matt Report and WordPress Weekly, and WPBacon and WP Elevation and all those. And it seems to me like it was generally the same people appearing on every show. I really wanted to see how far I could go without ever repeating a guest. And it turned out to be not that hard for me, mostly because I was able to get out and meet a lot of people. I was pretty social. But then you guys started Hallway Chats and it was so much better than what I was doing.

Tara: No.

Kyle: I started to feel more like the community didn’t need what I was doing. You guys were taking care of it. They should all just listen to you instead. I eventually hung that up.

Tara: Oh, Kyle. The Roundtable was an inspiration for doing Hallway Chats. I think the conversations that you had we’re really similar.

Liam: Totally.

Tara: And you’ve continued with Adam doing The Get Options Podcast for a long, long time. And that’s one of my go-to shows. It’s a good combination of entertainment and information

Kyle: Tara, you’ve been a great guest on both of my programs. You appeared on the Roundtable Show back in March of 2018, I think, and several times on Get Options. But yeah, you guys have been going since June of 2017. That’s amazing. So consistently, so many episodes and so many great people. Hats off to you. And if you don’t mind, I want to just comment on how good you guys are at this. I really think you are.

Liam: We know there’s no fee for paying it. We don’t pay our debts. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Kyle: If someone has run an interview show for a long time, I did it for I think five years and hardly missed any weeks in that time period. And I know how challenging it can be. You know, finding guests isn’t always easy, scheduling can be quite the hassle, expanding beyond your own borders, which is something that you’re enthusiastic about. That’s not easy to do. Also, not all guests are really great at being interviewed. I know this from experience. I had guests who would take my first question about their origins and just ramble on for about an hour about that and no more input from me, and then other guests who over and over gave me like one or two-word answers to my questions and forced me to do all the work to get anything interesting.

I know when you show up week after week, you’re not going to feel 100% interested and enthusiastic every single time. That’s a real challenge. But you have to do your thing anyway. But in spite of those challenges, you both do this incredibly well every single week. And you’re both so genuine and have a real knack for making the show interesting no matter what or who the guest is.

I think you both have really special qualities. Liam is kind of like the Terry Gross with your creative thought-provoking original questions. And Tara may be more of like a Joe Rogan type because you like to connect with and relate to the guests no matter what the subject matter is in really special way. I think you two are the pinnacle of WordPress podcast hosts.

Tara: Ah, thank you very much. Thank you. That’s awfully sweet really.

Liam: Very, very kind of you. Thank you. It means a lot.

Kyle: I thought of a suggestion too that I wanted to throw at you. I love your anniversary episode. That’s fantastic. You guys did that some months back. That’s really, really special. I would suggest that you guys consider doing those a little more frequently. Maybe every quarter or something like that, have an episode where it’s just the two of you reflecting on takeaways from recent episodes. I would love to hear that. You guys have such great takeaways and get a lot of good advice from your very thought-provoking questions from your guests.

Tara: That’s a great suggestion. Thank you. And so now you’ve just given me the segue for one of our other signature questions, which is advice. So Kyle, do you have any advice that you’ve received and implemented, that you would share with our listeners and with us?

Kyle: Of course, I’d be happy to. The advice which had the greatest impact on my career was expressed by multiple different people in different times in different ways. But the essence of it is that I think you should—at least this really speaks to people like me who are very ambitious—you should do the job you want not the job that you have. Originally, this came in the form of a suggestion by a mentor of sorts who told me that I should probably dress for the job that I wanted when I had an in-person job at a library.

So I was skeptical, but I took his advice. And instead of shorts and a T-shirt, I tucked in my shirt and put on a button up and I started dressing a little more professionally. The effect was almost immediate and surprising. It kind of blew me away how differently I was treated in the workplace and how soon it was that young Kyle was invited to be on this task force or join this committee or interview for this position, and so on and so forth, and be generally respected by peers.

Another context I was given very similar advice about making your boss look good, do their job. Don’t wait to be given the promotion to start doing that work. Do the work that is above your paygrade. Look at the organizational hierarchy. And if you want to get to that next level above where you are now, start doing that work. Immediately, let’s start doing what is a higher role is responsible for than what you are currently working on. That’s what I strive to do.

Tara: That is interesting. I could really dig into that a little bit and maybe debate you on that to some degree. Because I think it’s great advice to have to do the job you want not the job you have. When you are working in an organization, though, how do you avoid, to put it kindly, pissing people off by doing more? I think I’ve gotten in trouble in the past for being somebody who is pretty proactive, sees a problem, and wants to solve it. And there are people who may not appreciate that effort because they’re threatened by it or you’ve somehow maybe not done it the way that they would have. So what do you think about that? Has that always been helpful advice or can it go the other way, do you think?

Kyle: Well, it certainly can. And there have been cases where I have experienced maybe, I don’t know that I want to say, being unappreciated or my efforts not being appreciated. But generally, I take a lot of that as a signal that I am in the wrong place or maybe working for the wrong people if that is generally their attitude. That’s a problem with them and not a problem with you. Not all of us have the flexibility and freedom to just say, “Okay, too bad, I’ll go somewhere else.” I acknowledge that.

But my point is that it’s their problem and not yours. This is something that you do want to be careful with and tactful and respectful. And you have responsibilities that you must take care of them first and foremost. But if you have higher aspirations like I do, then don’t wait for those opportunities to be given to you. Take them.

Tara: Fair enough.

Liam: I think there’s a tact to, well, if I want to do Kyle’s job, yeah, I don’t want to step all over his toes and show up with the meeting agenda. But I can know that the last three agendas he’s always talked about this. So I’m going to make sure that I have constructive advice or ideas or I’ve done the homework on that. Or I know that Kyle always wants to see this done, so I’m going to do that right. And then support him on the things that matter to him. I love that. I love that.

For me, that gets back to one of the pieces of advice that I received years ago was “no matter who’s paying your salary, you always work for yourself.” And that’s not a selfish like, you know, me first and the gimme, gimmes kind of thing. But it’s maintain that perspective of—to what you were saying, Kyle—ownership. Own it. Drive it forward, make it your own, but ultimately know that you’re working for yourself.

Kyle: Absolutely. Yeah, that’s what I believe. I don’t know that it’s perfect for every personality of people at different stages in their careers. But if you’re like me, this is what works. This is what has made a difference to me.

Tara: Thank you. Thanks for sharing that. We are almost out of time and I want to ask more questions, but then we’re going to go over time.

Liam: I feel the same, Tara. I feel the same way. Maybe what we should do is ask Kyle to share where folks can learn more about him and connect with him online. And then after we stop recording, we’ll just keep chatting to him.

Tara: Okay.

Kyle: Perfect. That’s fine. I’m happy.

Liam: Kyle, where can folks find you online and connect with you?

Kyle: Great. I am online all over the place. It’s Kyle Maurer. It is pretty easy to find in some searches. But I have a blog, kyleblog.net. I am occasionally not that much on the social media stuff, but I’ll be available on Twitter @MrKyleMaurer. I’m in a lot of Slack groups you can probably find me in too.

Tara: Great. I’m so glad you joined us because now my day is made by just feeling good about myself, which you are very good at doing. So thank you for all of your kind words. And back at you, you are a wonderful person and we are very fortunate that you joined us here and that we call you a friend. So thanks.

Kyle: Thank you so much.

Liam: Thanks, Kyle.

Tara: See you in person sometime. Thanks.

Kyle: Thank you.

Tara: Bye.

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

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

Heather is the founder and CEO of Blue Steel Solutions. Heather started her marketing agency 10 and a half years ago because she was tired of seeing great people fail just because they couldn’t clearly communicate their value.

Websites | bluesteelesolutions.com, problemsolvermethod.com

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

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

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

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 144.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Heather Steele. Heather is the founder and CEO of Blue Steel Solutions. Heather started her marketing agency 10 and a half years ago because she was tired of seeing great people fail just because they couldn’t clearly communicate their value. We’re glad you’re here. Thanks for joining us, Heather. How are you?

Heather: I’m great. Thanks, Tara. Thanks, Liam. I’m excited to be here.

Liam: And we’re so excited to have you here today. Very nice to meet you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Heather: Sure. I’m Heather Steele, as Tara said. I run an agency called Blue Steel Solutions. We help businesses create really great messaging for their websites and funnel programs that make people want to learn more about their business, helps drive leads for them, and ultimately grow their business. 

Liam: What caught my attention when you were saying that…well, when Tara was saying, to be perfectly honest, that you started it 10 years ago when you were noticing and struggling at the fact that so many people were struggling with their messaging. I wonder what were you doing before you started your own business, where that particular issue around messaging came to your attention and was something that you decided you needed to fix.

Heather: I was actually working in house at a broker-dealer. So we were an independent broker-dealer that supported financial advisors who basically were running their own business, their own advisory services, but we provided some backend support to them. One of the things that we did was help them with some marketing. I would see a lot of people who came from a captive world, which is, if you think like Merrill Lynch, some of the ones where they’re direct employees, and they have lots of support, everything’s kind of handed to them and all they have to do is run their book of business, then suddenly, they go independent, and they’re a business owner, things are a lot different. They’re having to go out and generate their own leads and grow their business themselves instead of just focusing on kind of their day to day workload. 

I would see people make this transition and it didn’t always go well. It was difficult. It was something that they really struggled with. Because you had people that were top performers that had always done really well and then all of a sudden, things aren’t working very well for them. I would see that there was other marketing companies who would kind of come in and just act like vultures and take advantage of these people, and charge them outrageous fees to give them very templated, cookie-cutter solutions that didn’t actually do anything to help them grow their business.

So now these people felt like, “Well, I’ve wasted my entire marketing budget, I’m still not getting anywhere with this business, and I’m starting to feel really like I just don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe I’m not as good at this whole running a business thing as I thought I would be.” So that was really what I was driven by when I started this company was to provide, not only great services but to help those people to see that it’s not that they’re doing something necessarily wrong with their business or they’re not great at what they do, they’re just not necessarily great at communicating their unique value. So that became the cornerstone for kind of everything that we do. Everything starts with that messaging, great content that makes people really want to learn more, that says, “I think you can solve my problems, and I need to learn more about that.” And then we build out from there for websites, landing pages, email campaigns, you know, everything that’s going to help them generate more leads for their business.

Tara: It’s so thorough what you’ve described. I love your approach and your enthusiasm about getting this messaging out there. Can you talk a little bit about how your business has grown and how you have transitioned into working with different types of clients and how they find you?

Heather: Yeah, definitely. I think I started kind of like everybody does, where it was, “Outsource your marketing department to me and I will figure out a way to do everything. Most of it’ll be done pretty well. Maybe not all of it, but it’ll get done.” Over the years, like everyone does, I kind of every year try to stop and look at okay, what am I delivering that’s helping my clients grow their business? What’s really standing out as something that’s actually helping them? And where can I be profitable and efficient with how I’m delivering those things? Also, where do I feel really confident? When I sit down to write the proposal, if I’m feeling really anxious, if I’m feeling nervous, if I’m feeling like maybe my pricing isn’t right, maybe I don’t really know enough about this approach or the solution, those are things I need to take out of my offering. So every year it’s it’s gotten more and more and more narrow as I look at those things and take away different offerings.

For example, for a long time, we did SEO, part of it in-house part of it with an agency that we outsource to. And every single time that I wrote one of those proposals, I felt really anxious because I didn’t quite feel like that was our best area that we were really strong there. So we took it away. And we’re able to focus more on the things that we do really well and then let the other work go to the people that specialize in those things.

Liam: So I feel like I could talk proposals all day long but that’s not really the focus of our show. I want to ask you one question about taking SEO out and not necessarily that it’s SEO, but you’re taking out a service and freelancers growing their own businesses into businesses and small businesses. You know, those little services can be the hook that may be you make a couple 100 bucks on a 1000s of dollars project on, whatever that little service hook is, but it’s the decision making. “Well, if I can get it all at once, yeah. I’ll go with Heather. I’ll go with Tara. I’ll go with Liam, because it’s all in one.” How do you approach that psychologically when you know you’re risking sales? No, okay, probably, in retrospect, you’re going to do better because you’re not going to stress about SEO in your case. But how do you approach that? What does that decision process look like for you?

Heather: For me, one thing that makes it easier as I do have a great network. So over the years, you meet other people in this space. Especially in the WordPress community, I mean, it’s kind of like no other business community where everyone really does want to help each other. And there can be really great positive relationships. So anything that I’m not able to do, I can feel pretty comfortable that I could go to my network and find someone that can help fill that gap. And then we can do a really good job of integrating with and working well together.

At the end of the day, if that’s not the right fit for a client, if they really want everything under one roof, then I’m okay with letting that go. We’re at a point now where definitely there were hard times to do that. But over time as you grow and build a reputation and it just becomes easier to get leads and to get new customers, it became something that I was just really comfortable with saying, if the way I do business isn’t a good fit for you, then I’m not a good fit for you. And that’s fine. And I’ll help you even find someone who is a good fit. But I’m not going to continue to do things that either I don’t feel comfortable delivering or that you can get better from somewhere else. 

Tara: It’s so liberating to be at a point where you can say that, right?

Heather: Yeah. 

Tara: When you start out, that’s not where you start. That’s not where most people start out when they start their business. But it is such a great feeling to be able to say that. And it takes a lot of confidence to get there. And I know your business has grown to get to that point. What are your favorite and least favorite things to do in your business?

Heather: My least favorite, I’ll start with that, is actually writing proposals. I don’t know why. I just always found it to be a labor that is not fun for me. I don’t know. It’s very necessary but it’s not my favorite thing to do. I really love problem-solving. When someone has a unique issue, whether it be something that they need to do on their WordPress site or if it’s something that they’re just trying to accomplish in their business, trying to put the pieces together and problem solve is something that I just really enjoy. It can almost be to a point distracting for me, because, as you all know, Tara, if someone has a tricky problem, I’m like the first one to try to jump in and figure it out even if it’s not what I need to be doing that day.

Tara: Yes, you’re amazing that way. As a matter of fact, I have a very recent experience with that wonderfulness about you. Heather and I are in a business and WordPress slack group and she is very active there in helping people solve their problems. I don’t know how you fit it into your day to do that, but you’re like multi-talented and knowledgeable in so many different things that you’re a great resource and you’re nice to share your knowledge with everyone. Have you had mentors or people that have guided you as you’ve gotten to this point?

Heather: Definitely. No one that’s been kind of a stand in long term mentor but just people that, again, especially in WordPress, that are so open about their own businesses, their own experiences, and what they’ve learned from. I think one of the first early on people that I connected with that really helped me to learn the ropes of this was Carrie Dils. I mean, she was like an open book, gave me leads, helped me with problems. It’s just a really great person to be a sounding board and a friend in the space. I mean, there’s so many people like her too, that it might just be a brief interaction that we have that they dropped some little piece of knowledge that sticks around forever or those more long term relationships. There’s just too many to even name. I think it’s kind of the community as a whole has been a good mentor.

Tara: Thanks for mentioning Carrie. She’s actually been a longtime supporter of Hallway Chats, and one of our guests. So shout out to Carrie Dils.

Liam: Absolutely. She’s a fantastic person. I got a lot of time for her. I miss her podcast. I used to spend many, many an hour listening to…

Tara: Me too. 

Liam: Boy, I can see the graphic, but I am struggling to come up with the name of…

Tara: Office Hours.

Liam: There you go. There you go.

Tara: So just said something about restarting it, which would be great. But she used to do it live and I would tune in live. I met some good friends there. I mean, some of my very first WordPress friends I met through the interaction on Carrie’s podcast.

Heather: So fun. She actually lived about 45 minutes from me for a very long time. Now she’s in California. I’ll forgive her for that. She was really good at connecting local people. She’s just an awesome person. I could talk about her all day.

Liam: Heather, I want to ask you one of our signature questions. But before I get to that, I’m going to take a little Liberty here and ask you: given that you shared that you really like solving problems and problem-solving, and in an era of Zoom calls and Slacks and emails, and Twitter, and all the craziness in the world generally, how do you structure your day or time to be able to problem-solve beyond the quick fix that helps the client but doesn’t really move the project along? How do you get problem-solving time into your day? 

Heather: That’s a great question. So my schedule is actually something that’s kind of an anomaly for people that know me. I only get about three dedicated work hours a day. I have a special needs child who’s here all but about those three hours a day and makes it very difficult to sit down and focus. So I learned a long time ago to be very good at time blocking. So I give myself basically 20-minute blocks for those three dedicated hours, which, you know, you guys are getting a couple of blocks today. I’m very good at structuring how I’m going to spend that time and – what is it? Is it that Graham’s theorem of every task will expand or contract to the time that you give it? So I’ve learned how to take, you know, if I’m going to write an article or blog post, it’s going to get done in 20 minutes. If I’m going to focus on a problem, I’m going to get myself 20 minutes. And hopefully, I can get it done in that time. If not, I’ll move it to a later time slot. But that’s helped a lot. Time blocking is something that works really well for me.

I’m a procrastinator big time so I need those very stringent guidelines on how to use my time too. And I’ve also just become really good at multitasking on the phone. So that’s something that I can use throughout the day when I’m running around, helping with my kiddo and, making sure he’s taken care of and not destroying the house. I can be on my phone and my Slack groups and chatting with people or making notes on my phone. I do a lot of my brainstorming. I use an app called Sphere that’s really nice for kind of visually storyboarding out content or ideas. I do a lot of that in kind of micro-moments on my phone as I can, and then use my time blocking hours to really dive in and get more deep work done.

Fortunately, I’ve been doing this long enough that most of what we offer to our clients is very structured. It’s very, almost productizes. If we’re going to do a funnel campaign, it’s not like we’re starting from scratch and saying, “Okay, well, what’s this funnel going to look like? What are these emails going to be? I don’t know.” No, we have a very succinct, structured approach to it. So it’s not that I’m needing the time to sit down and think up a brand new strategy. It’s really just kind of taking, okay, what are the building blocks that we always use in these kinds of projects and how are we going to put it together for this specific need?

Liam: Thank you for that. I want to be mindful of your time here. We’re grateful for the gift of it. 

Heather: Oh, no…

Liam: No, I’m not saying that to be rude to you. I do mean it. Your time is a gift to us and to our listeners. So thank you for that. And now I will ask you one of our questions, and it’s about success. I wonder, how do you define success? Is that a personal definition of professional definition? Maybe you mix the two. How do you define success?

Heather: It’s definitely a mix of the two. I’ll be completely transparent that I’m very profit-oriented when it comes to my business. I feel like that’s a good indicator of success for me. As special needs parent, I have a child that’s going to need me for the rest of my life. They will need full-time support for the rest of his. So making sure that every minute that I put into my business pays back over and over and over again is super important. So I consider that to be something that is very closely tied to my personal success.

I also really just love influencing and helping others to get to a point where they feel confident in their business. And so anytime that I am able to share an experience or give advice or share something that I did horribly wrong so that someone can do it differently, I feel like that’s also a piece of my success. Anytime that someone tells me that something I shared or helped them with has helped them feel more confident in what they’re doing in their business, that’s the other half of it for me.

Tara: You know what I find – I don’t know the right word – fascinating, interesting inspiring is the combination of profit-driven business with the desire to be helpful and kind and good. I think a lot of times when you are driven by profit, it’s assumed that you are cold and that you are not also altruistic. As you’re describing that you are and I know that you are. So I’m wondering how that comes back around and how those things work together. Because sometimes I feel like if I want to be helpful and good I’m not making any money, right, I’m offering to help, and I’m not charging for that, or I’m not charging as much. So can you talk a little bit about that balance and how you work that out in your own mind and in your business?

Heather: Yeah, definitely. I used to be very bad about just giving. Give, give, give all the time. We would do workshops and webinars and give away our templates and eBooks. Every bit of knowledge was just given away. It became really apparent that when we did that, just gave and gave and gave and gave that people didn’t really appreciate or even understand the value of what we’re giving. So I had to kind of reel that back in and take more control over it. So I kind of consider now that anything I can give in like a bite-sized format is appropriate for me. 

If it’s I’m going to take 10 minutes and show you how I did something or I’m going to write a blog post or an article or share something on a podcast like this, but if it’s I’m going to complete a project for you, or I’m going to take on workload, that’s not the right fit for me. I’m never going to be the person that says, “Hey, nonprofit, I like what you do, I’m going to build you a website.” That’s not what’s right for me. But those kind of more bite-sized pieces that I can give to people and hopefully help them in that way, that fits really well with my schedule. It’s a good brain break when I can take that little moment and then it feels good.

Usually, it comes back around. People like people that are nice. So I get lots of referrals and help from the community I think because I’m willing to jump in and be helpful where I can. To me, it’s not giving away the whole farm because people won’t find value in that. They typically won’t appreciate it. But giving just small pieces here and there where I can and making it as meaningful as I can and not really expecting much out of it, it does come back around.

Liam: You spoke volumes there and I won’t try to recap it. You did a great job on that. Thank you. Then one thing I just want to go back to you shared that your profit-driven and then you went right into explaining your family situation and your son and that his needs are the drive behind the profit. I see that very much is a passionate or compassionate side of money. It’s not I need money so that I can live a lifestyle or be able to say I made X or I made Y this year, but it’s fulfilling a very real need that a parent has to want to provide for their child. That’s pretty impressive. I love that you’re just putting it out there that, you know, I have to make money and therefore I don’t give away a website to a nonprofit because…

Heather: I am the nonprofit. 

Liam: No, I didn’t mean it like that. But I really liked the way that you qualified the why behind profit, because money is just a tool. The way that you described it made it very clear that you are a very loving parent. And I respect that a lot about you.

Heather: Thank you for that. And don’t get me wrong, like if I can do that and go to the beach a few times a year, then I’m going to do that.

Tara: There’s nothing wrong with that.

Liam: Ain’t nothing wrong with that. Ain’t nothing wrong with that.

Tara: Making money to enjoy your life is perfectly fine. 

Heather: I think I’ve mentioned this to Tara before, but there’s not a whole lot of role models of people who have, I don’t want to say been Uber successful, but even just living a comfortable life with someone that they are going to care for forever. That requires a different lifestyle. Like what my husband and I have with my son, there’s not a whole lot of people that you can look to to say, “Okay, that’s how that works.” Part of what I would love to do is to be able to share with other families like this is one way that you might make it work to have what you need to take care of your children but also to be comfortable, to be able to work a 15 hour Work Week, and still meet everyone’s needs, and be able to be comfortable. 

Because most special needs families barely get by. I mean, that’s just the way it is in our country. There’s not a lot of support. Therapies are very expensive or insurances, incredibly expensive. The school districts don’t supply our special advance, very, very special needs kids a whole lot. It also parents. So I think if I can figure out some ways to make this work and share those with other people, I would love to be able to do that and to be able to show other moms, especially that that diagnosis is not a life sentence of being broke and never having a purpose in your life outside of your children ever again. There’s other things you can do. It’s not going to look like the typical situation of most people’s workdays or most people’s businesses, but there are some things you can do that’ll make it work. 

Liam: Thank you. Thank you very much for that.

Tara: I’m struggling with some words to reply to that because I find it overwhelmingly positive. Wonderful. That’s so hard to find I think when today, as well as when you’re in a situation where you do have a long-term care plan that you have to have for your child. Wow, hats off to you, Heather, to be able to face it with not only a positive attitude but a desire to help others to have a positive attitude and to have a positive life. So I think that’s just awesome. It’s amazing. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Heather: Thank you for letting me know.

Liam: You’re very welcome. You’re very welcome. Tell us a little bit about how you drifted into or jumped into or dove into the WordPress community.

Heather: I way, way backtrack. I always thought I wanted to be a veterinarian, so just go for pre-vet. And in my junior year of college, I had randomly gotten a job working in our technical writing lab on campus. I finally decided to admit that I really am not that good at math or science, which is pretty important to go into vet school. So I made a sharp right turn and decided to do technical writing for my focus. I started doing a lot of contract and freelance work while I was still in school just to kind of catch up because that’s what you have to do when you’re changing your major at the last minute. 

I ended up with a job at Match.com randomly in their marketing department. I just really loved what they were doing. So I started kind of shifting gears and taking what I learned in technical writing, which I think is why messaging is so important to me because I’ve got a really strong foundation in communication and how to communicate to people in the way that works best for them. Anyway, took that right turn into marketing while I was still in school at the time finishing up the new degree that I was working on. 

We had a group project that it required us to build a website. The guy in my group that took on that part of the task, he built it on Joomla. And I was like, “Wow, I’ve been using Dreamweaver to kind of mess around and do some little sites on the side. This seems a whole lot better.” So I started using Joomla just doing kind of freelance sites and sites for myself, kind of fun stuff. I did one for a company that I worked for. So when I actually started my business, I was still using Joomla. The first couple of sites that I did for Blue Steele were Joomla sites. 

I had a client who had the requirement of using WordPress. So it was like, “Well, it can’t be that hard. It’s like a blog software. And I’ll check it out.” The first time that I went to just look up something, you know, when you’re doing any kind of development work, you get stuck, you go to Google, and you’re like, “How you bla, bla, bla, bla, bla.” And I found these communities that actually had help in English, which most of the Joomla community I think at that time was just not English speakers. It was very hard for me to find help from people that actually spoke English. And it just was this amazing community of people that wanted to help each other, that would answer questions. The platform was honestly much simpler and easier. Joomla had just gone from like their 1.0, and then 1.5, and then 2.0 and it was like he had to rebuild the site every single time. So WordPress just seemed like such a better solution. So I made a switch and just said, “You know what? I’m not going back to Joomla. I’m just going to use WordPress until I find something better.” That was probably nine years ago.

Tara: I’m gonna switch to another question that we ask all of our guests in a second but…well, I’ll just switch to it now. And maybe it will relate a little bit to what you’re describing with your experience with WordPress community. Can you share some advice with us that you’ve received and that you’ve implemented that’s helped you in your personal or professional development?

Heather: Oh, man, picking one thing is hard. I think instead of something that’s helped me kind of along the way, because I just can’t really think of anything off top my head, I heard something recently that just made so much sense and was so simple that I wish I had thought about it sooner. But I heard a guy, his name is Hal Runkel. He’s actually like a parenting expert, but he was on a business podcast. He was talking about leadership.

He was talking about how anytime you’re going into a confrontation or a potential confrontation, that your only job is to have the lowest heart rate in the room. He says this from the standpoint really of parenting, which obviously hits home for me quite a bit, because my heart rate gets pretty high a lot of the times. But even just from the standpoint of those difficult conversations with clients, negotiating with clients, writing a proposal, sending stuff off for review, like all these situations that I find myself feeling anxious and nervous about, just that idea that if my only job, the only thing I’m focusing on is making sure I have the lowest heart rate in the room, I am the calmness, steadiest person, that’s going to drive trust, that’s going to drive respect, and that’s going to keep me from feeling exhausted at the end of the day. That’s something that I wish I had heard a long, long, long time ago because it’s so common sense. But it’s something that I think I’ll try to remind myself of every day.

Tara: Yeah. How do you control that? Do you have a tech technique, like breathing or how do you keep your heart rate down?

Heather: I don’t know, vodka. To me, it’s more of a just I can tell myself like, “Hey, chill out. You’re overreacting. Calm down.”

Tara: Yeah, the mentality. 

Heather: I like to think what’s the absolute worst thing that can happen? They could cuss me out, they could scream at me, they could hate what I’ve done, they could think I’m too expensive. And all that’s gonna do is make me either decide they’re not a good fit for me, or it’s gonna make me make my approach better next time. Not a whole lot worse can happen. When I can put that mindset to it, it is pretty easy to just kind of, “You know, okay, whatever. We’re gonna do this and it’ll go well. And if it doesn’t, the next one will.”

Tara: Yeah, cool. Thank you. 

Liam: That’s a really good approach. Just maintaining inner calm, inner peace, and giving yourself the space to answer and respond in ways that you’re going to be happy with the next morning or the next evening or whatever it is. Thank you so much for sharing that.

We are running out of time here, surprisingly. I didn’t realize how quickly this half-hour has gone. Heather, before we say goodbye to you all, thank you for joining us today. And ask you to share where people can find you online, please.

Heather: My website is BlueSteeleSolutions.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn just @heathersteele.

Tara: Great. Thanks again, Heather. Really appreciate your joining us and so glad that we’re able to share your story here on Hallway Chats today. Have a great day.

Heather: You too.

Liam: Thanks, Heather. Bye for now.

Heather: Thanks, y’all.

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

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

Machielle is a mommy, a marketer, photographer, and a dreamer. She’s currently the senior brand manager for Bluehost, and most of her time is spent chasing her tiny terrorist, or finding the best tacos in her hometown of Austin, Texas.

Twitter | @machiellethomas

Preferred Pronouns | She/Her

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

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

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 143.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Machielle Thomas. Machielle is a mommy, a marketer, photographer, and a dreamer. She’s currently the senior brand manager for Bluehost, and most of her time is spent chasing her tiny terrorist, or finding the best tacos in her hometown of Austin, Texas. So glad to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Machielle: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Liam: Machielle, it’s our pleasure. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself beyond what Tara shared?

Machielle: Yeah. I always laugh when someone else says tiny terrorist because all of my friends finds it funny. My son is four and we live here in Austin. He’s a very rambunctious 4-year-old. He’s like the epitome of a little bitty terrorist. I call him my little ankle biter because I try all the time chasing him around and him jumping on me. I was born and raised in Austin, Texas, where I currently live. I currently work for the Bluehost brand. It’s been for a few years now that I’ve been there, been to a ton of WordCamps, and spoken at about six or seven of them, I think. Really missing them this year. It’s been a really, really hard year after going from 10 to 15 camps to none. But yeah, I’m just a daydreamer and I love writing, reading all things, all things on the internet really.

Tara: Oh. How did you get started in WordPress or tech? WordPress, I guess, let’s start there.

Machielle: I actually was a user. I used WordPress for a financial services company that I worked for about eight years ago. And I use it just to manage the blog. Then I started working as a contractor for a couple of marketing agencies in Austin as well. And I used it again to manage their blog and posting. That way I didn’t really understand or really had never even heard about the community behind WordPress, and the people behind it until I started with Bluehost.

I started with Bluehost four months after my son was born. It was a really weird time for me, obviously. There’s a ton of hormones going on, and exhaustion from not sleeping. I kind of was like thrown into this world I didn’t really know anything about. I thought I was just going to be managing content and it turned out that I was also being invited to camps.

I went to my first camp in Phoenix in October 2017, and they were like, “You should speak next time.” And I was like, “Wait, what? Me? Are you sure? I don’t know anything about WordPress. I’m not a developer. I’m not a designer.” And were like, “No, anybody can speak about anything.” That was the one year they had a really quick turnaround on their camps. They did October and then February the next year. And I came back in February and I did content for the modern world. And it was all about content in this new age of media and understanding your target audience and stuff like that and how it can really impact you. So from there, I’ve just been all over the world at camps.

Last year was my first WordCamp Europe. That was my first time there last year in Berlin. It was awesome, amazing experience. But I’ve been to I guess – what? Four WordCamp US at this point. It’s been great. I love being a user. I love helping people learn it. It’s part of my job as well. So yeah, it’s great.

Liam: I’m interested now that you’re that you’re working with Bluehost, they’re a provider of WordPress hosting and many other services, and given your senior brand manager role at Bluehost, are you actually in WordPress anymore? Are you higher up now that you don’t get to log in, you just review and write from further afield?

Machielle: So I actually don’t really write that often. I do use WordPress still. A lot of my job it isn’t a newer role. I manage WordPress content, specifically for the most of the time that I’ve been at Bluehost. But I kind of think we’re at a point where we’re having to figure out how do we make products or services that are easier for people who are managing multiple WordPress sites, web professionals, and people in the WordPress space, and the community.

We actually did come out with a new product recently called Maestro. It’s kind of like an all in one solution for web professionals. So the idea there was no matter who your clients are hosting with, you can kind of go in one place and manage all of them and kind of make your life a little bit easier in WP admin. So I write things about our products. I write content about our products or things that we’re coming out with. Mostly there’s like campaigns. I work with our content team still. I still manage content for the most part. We have writers there, but I also still use WordPress. I was in WordPress today a couple of times. I’m not that far removed yet, Liam.

Liam: Well, I wasn’t sure if your team was like, “Oh, no, she’s getting into WordPress, make sure we hit the backup button before we let her in?”

Machielle: No. I actually spent most of my time trying to write content for how to use WordPress for an everyday user. In WordCamp US 2019, I think, we brought our blueprint for beginners, which was the blueprint for beginner WordPress users. And that book was my first baby on teaching people who don’t build sites. So I do write about WordPress a lot, but I also use WordPress a lot, too.

Liam: I believe you. I believe you.

Machielle: I’m also a serial domainer. I have like 17 domains in. That’s why I was like, “This is actually really nice because I have a lot of domains, and going between all these different accounts can get really exhausting.”

Tara: I think I’ve heard people having hundreds of domains. So 17 is not actually that many, right?

Machielle: Thank you. I say the same thing.

Tara: It makes you feel better. It’s not a lot.

Machielle: Everyone makes fun of me.

Tara: I finally just let one go this week, actually, because it was a $35 one and I thought, “I don’t really think I’m going to use that one.”

Machielle: That’s fair. I’ve had a couple of those.

Liam: You get an employee discount on domains.

Machielle: No.

Liam: Or it’s just the way that domains work? Is it all you pay as you go just like everyone else?

Machielle: Yeah. I think legally, everyone has to pay for domains, which is why a lot of people don’t really have free domain offerings. It’s kind of like you get the hosting, but you pay for the domain. So yeah.

Tara: Most domains are not that much. But yeah.

Machielle: 12 bucks, then domain privacy…

Tara: But they add up if you have a hundred of them.

Machielle: I’m really trying to stop myself. I have a new idea day. It seems like they pop up and I’m like, “I got to buy the domain before somebody else get it.”

Tara: I know. I do that too. Well, because it’s like, okay, $12. So, what’s the big deal?

Machielle: Right. I do that too.

Tara: Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. So what’s your background? I’m impressed that you went to a WordCamp…I mean, I met other people who have done this, but not in like a six-month period of time, where you went to a WordCamp, and then six months later you were talking to people about what you know, which there’s always a lot of imposter syndrome, especially I know, like the first time that you’re speaking in front of a crowd and acting like you know what you’re talking about. I’m sure you do, but you kind of wonder. So talk a little bit about that process and how you learned to be a writer and to be a marketing focus writer, and to talk about it.

Machielle: I think, for me, it was actually pretty simple. From the time I was in middle school, high school, I always knew I wanted to be an author. I kind of took this journey of “you can’t make money writing” with family. “You can’t make money writing, you got to get a real job.” So I was like, “Okay, well, I’ll go to school for finance because I love money, talking about money and helping people organize money and things like that.”

And I started it, and I was just like, “As much as I love this thing, this is not like my why.” So I switched and I went back to media study. So Mass Communications, and PR, and advertising was kind of my focus. I think I just always knew I wanted to write. I think the thing that I needed to understand is that anyone can write anything if they understand who they’re writing it to or for some. If you can identify who that person is, what their problem is, and how you can solve it, it makes it easy.

So I think when I went to that first camp, I was watching people talk and I was like, “I could do this. This is something that scares me. I should run towards it. I should do it.” I’ve spoken before, but never at a place where I don’t know how many people may come. I don’t know how many people will be in this talk versus that talk. So it was really a lot of unknowns for me.

My biggest fear, actually was the QA because I thought that everyone was going to ask me about something in WordPress that I didn’t know yet, or didn’t understand yet. And it didn’t happen that way at all. Everyone wanted to know about SEO, everyone wanted to know about, how can I start ranking? How do I figure out a target audience? What tools do I use? So after that, I was like, “This is actually really comfortable.”

And then I started branching out from not just talking about writing or content, but I had to talk about finding in the right clients and how that can affect your business long term. I also sat on the women WordPress panel. So how to talk about setting yourself up to be paid properly really as a woman in tech. So I’ve kind of like allowed myself to spread my wings a little bit and say, “You know, I don’t have to just talk about the one thing. We all have multiple things that we understand that we can share with someone else.”

Liam: There’s so much there. Something that you said really caught my attention. Wow, that scares me. I should run towards it. I love that. You’re amazing.

Machielle: Thank you.

Liam: I want to go back again a little bit to your introduction about photography. I have dabbled in photography, but it’s been years, and it was never beyond something fun, which is an end in and of itself. But tell us about your photography and how you got into it. What do you like to do? And what makes you happy in and about photography?

Machielle: Yeah, thank you. This is actually a huge passion of mine. I don’t really talk about it enough, I don’t think. I started with photography when I was in high school. I learned in the darkroom. I didn’t understand digital or anything at the time. So I loved the idea of seeing nothing and then starting to see an image come out. Originally, when I decided to go to school, I was really torn between photojournalism and media studies or mass communication. So what that is, is a really big struggle for me, because I didn’t know that I wanted to work for a news station but I really liked the idea of storytelling. And I feel like images do that. And I just found a way to kind of use that in a new type of business.

So basically, I am a wedding and portrait photographer. So I shoot weddings and I shoot senior photos for graduating students, and families irregularly. But I have a whole collection of things I’ve never shared. And those are the things that I love the most. It’s not people usually. It’s animals or nature, or a piece of tree bark that was just following the right way or things like that. So I really liked the idea of finding beauty and everything and just really understanding that everything has a story behind it.

So like when I’m shooting someone’s wedding day, I try to find the storyline of it and use that for journalism that’s in my head to create their perfect album, if you will. So that’s kind of what I shoot and how I shoot. I try to stick to real colors. I don’t over edit. I like to really focus on what people actually look like on that day and really just capturing a part of themselves, making them laugh naturally, having them interact with each other naturally, and just capturing those moments.

Tara: You have a lot of creative outlets it sounds like. It sounds like you have more business job now as you’ve moved up in Bluehost and some tech too. But you get to write and then you get this photographic outlet as well. Where does that come from, and where does that fit in? Have you always been a creative person? Is it the way that you were raised? Is it that you learned in school? Talk a little bit about creativity and what that means to you?

Machielle: I definitely think it’s innate. I felt like it’s something I was born with. I wouldn’t say my family is super creative people. My sister is. She is really good was designing a home or flower arrangements. She’s really good at that, creating beautiful cards, homemade cards, and some of that. That’s not my style at all. I don’t do any of those things well. I think my biggest struggle was I was always creative. I always knew I was creative. But I think like most creative people, you question yourself and there’s a ton of imposter syndrome that comes from like, “This is not good enough. This is not my best work. And so I just won’t share it at all.”

If I literally told you how many novels I’ve started and rip them up and started over because I’m like, “This is going to be terrible. It’s going to be the worst thing ever.” And I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve just gotten to a point where I’m like, “If it’s terrible, it’s practice work.” Like everything that I create is from a moment that I felt at that time. Whether it’s good or bad, it’s mine. It’s my moment to share or not share. I think that it gives me a lot of peace I think by seeing something come…especially things like photography and writing, to see like a storyline kind of unfold or an image kind of come out of nowhere. I try to be intentional about everything that I do everything that I write. Like what is its purpose? What is the value? That kind of thing.

I do still get to be really creative actually at my job outside of writing. I do a lot of video directing and getting to know our customers and telling their stories, which is something that I really, really love to do. So I get to do it in a lot of different ways. I’m actually surprised I’m not in creative overdrive, where I just can’t create any more, because I’m doing it everywhere, for myself, at work, with my kid. You know, how do we make a new puzzle for you today? Whatever it is.

Tara: I was going to ask you how being a mom fits in because you added that to your introduction. And I appreciate that a lot and chatting about your little boy and how that fits into your creativity. Certainly, it can inspire it, I’m sure. But also, at times, you’re probably exhausted.

Machielle: Most of the time I’m exhausted. But you know what? I think when I had him, the thing that pushed more creativity forward was just seeing…and I think anybody who’s a parent or around children can see this. When you’re around kids, especially little kids, you start noticing how they notice everything in the world. And it’s such a big deal. And you’re like, “It’s just a cloud.” And then you start to really sit back and think like, “Wow, how about overlooks cars every day? How do I not notice that that tree does that thing?”

I think he helped me to slow down a lot and to start taking in more things and appreciating the things that are miraculous to him. And like seeing that light in his eyes when he sees something new just kind of inspires me and it makes me realize that’s how people are. Even adults can feel like that when they see something new or they feel a new feeling, or they see you know, some video or some photo that really ignites something in them. And I think that that’s what I try to hold on to

Tara: Yeah, yeah, thanks for sharing that. And thanks for talking about creativity. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. I feel like I’ve gotten less creative over time, because I do it for work. So I think having that sort of as your side thing that you keep as part of your life is really important to do. When you turn your passion into your career, people say that’s a great thing to do. I think it’s hard to maintain the passion for the creativity when it comes to that. So yeah.

Machielle: That’s why you have to have your own projects. If you’re only doing it for money, you’ll get burned out pretty easily I think.

Liam: I think I’d agree with that. And this seems a good way to segue into a question about success. Machielle, I wonder if you can share with us your definition of success. And maybe that is a professional definition for you, maybe it’s personal, maybe for you it’s a mix of both. How do you define success, Machielle?

Machielle: I’d say I felt like success is relative. I think where people’s values lie, that’s what they deem to be success. I think, for me, success looks like waking up every day and not feeling exhausted in the sense that I’m dreading doing the things that I have to do. I think success feels like peace. It feels a little bit like stress-relieving a little bit, if you will. I think success to me is like obviously there’s a financial part of it, where I can take care of my family, I can do the things that I need to do, but am I passionate about what I do? Do I understand my why? Do I understand why I’m doing the thing? And am I being able to be pushed forward constantly? Because I feel like we can become stagnant if we’re doing the same thing, if we’re surrounded around the same environment. But I really feel like if you can constantly be pushed forward and you’re not dreading doing the things that you need to do or want to do, then I feel like to me that’s peaceful. I would define that success for me.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. Thank you for sharing that.

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: A question popped in my mind as you were talking was that sense of you shared…and I’m going to paraphrase very badly. But as long as I’m moving forward, as long as I’m feeling up for the challenge, as long as I’m waking up with energy to go about the day and meet the challenges, I’m successful. How do you discern between just you’re up late with your son, so you’re tired versus this is not success, this is not where I need to be? How does Machielle start to think about and address that?

Machielle: I’m very big on your gut. Your gut tells you everything you need to know, whether you’re stressed, somebody makes you uncomfortable. My gut tells me everything. I think I am just really in tune with myself to say, “I’m clearly tired. I didn’t sleep. Well, this happened, XYZ happened.” I think it comes down to when I start…there are moments when you wake up and you feel exhausted. Maybe I didn’t say that the right way. But you’ll wake up and you’ll feel tired or exhausted or…

Liam: Yeah, I know what you mean. Like you’re up late before you’re physically tired. But it’s emotional, and all that comes with it.

Machielle: And to be honest, even when you love your job, or love what you do every day, whether it’s a job or not, you can still feel emotionally tired. Even if it’s not that you didn’t rest, there’s still emotional things that are happening within you that make you exhausted or whatever. I would say that for me, it comes down to like when I start doing the work, do I get the energy that pushes me? That’s also how I read people. I want to be around people that when I start talking to them, I feel renewed, and I feel more energy than I did before I started.

And so I feel like work is the same way. When I start doing it, can I get into a groove and start feeling more comfortable with it? Or do I still feel like, “Man, it’s just too hard. I don’t want to do this today.” And there’s always days like that. But when the majority of your days are that way, I feel like that’s a sign that you’re not doing what you should be doing.

Tara: I love your energy and your perspective on sort of moving forward and energy. I can sense that I get a lot of energy from you, too. So I’m glad you’re here to share that with us. How do you work with your local community, your local WordPress community? You’re in Texas, right?

Machielle: I am. We’re in Austin, and there’s not a huge community here. We do have WP Engine here as well. So they’re really strong into it. I don’t know if either of you have met Devin Sears.

Tara: Of course.

Machielle: I thought so. I mean, I’ve seen both of you around as well, but…he’s our field marketing manager. He actually organized WordCamp Austin this year. Honestly, I think being here makes it harder. When I go to a camp, it’s easy for me to be super involved. But when I’m at home, it’s like family ties and all the things that you have to do at work. It gets really hard for me to do that. I’ve gone to a few meetups, but I haven’t really been able to really cement a place here. And I don’t think it’s anything to do with the people or anything like that. I think it’s just when you’re in your element sometimes you go through the motions, and you kind of…when I step out of that, and I go away to a camp, I don’t feel the guilt, like the mom guilt of being away from my child or not doing the things. “I need to clean my house. I didn’t do that tonight. I got to go home.”

So I won’t say that I have a really strong tie here but I think they’re great. I think they’ve done great work here. I hate that we didn’t have a camp last year, but I’m glad that we were able to bring it back this year.

Tara: Yeah. Is your job remote? I mean, maybe right now it is for sure.

Machielle: Right now it’s remote. We do have an Austin office. That’s where our marketing team sits. But we’ve been home since the first week of March. And we don’t really have any plans to go back for at least another year.

Tara: Wow, a year.

Machielle: It’ll be a while. I think they’re trying to play it really safe, which we all appreciate. And there’s really not a need. We have six offices worldwide. We’re on calls with different offices everywhere. So really, I mean, you just go in the office to hop on a call with someone else. So it really worked for us. I think our productivity is still up to par if not better really.

Tara: WordCamp Austin, was that the virtual one they had where they had the people playing music in the…?

Machielle: Yeah, yeah.

Tara: I got peeked into that one.

Machielle: Yeah, it was the music.

Tara: Yeah. Cool.

Machielle: I mean, it only makes sense for Austin. Love music…

Tara: That’s why it stood out to me. I don’t have the attention span for Zoom WordCamps. But that one intrigued me. So I did check it out. And that’s the one where they had like the rooms you could go in?

Machielle: Yes. Yeah.

Tara: That was very advanced.

Machielle: Yeah, Zoom fatigue is real this year. It’s very real.

Tara: Yeah, yeah. I mean, people are making the most of it for sure.

Machielle: Absolutely.

Liam: I want to get to the real heart of the matter here and kind of go back to what we started with. The best tacos in the hometown of Austin Texas.

Tara: Yes, tacos.

Liam: Calling you out on it, Machielle. What do you got for us?

Machielle: Oh, man, I feel like everybody’s going to troll me for this if I say the wrong answer. It depends on what you’re eating. I like a place up the street for me for breakfast. And it’s called El Rincón.

Liam: It doesn’t matter if it’s breakfast. Lunch, and dinner. All this is great.

Machielle: Breakfast tacos are our thing. You got to love the breakfast tacos. Torchy’s is really popular here. So it’s taco deli but Torchy’s is like really, really popular in Austin. I love Torchy’s Trailer Park taco. So it’s like fried chicken with avocado and kaiso and lettuce and tomato. It’s a whole thing. It’s great. It’s amazing. So I will say I like Torchy’s for that kind of thing. But there’s also a lot of really small taco shops that are just…I don’t even know their names to be honest. Taco trucks that are just really good.

Tara: Are you born and raised there?

Machielle: I was. I’m one of like probably 20 left, and 19 of them are my family.

Tara: You don’t have that in Texas accent. Is Austin agnostic on the accent?

Machielle: Everyone tells me that. I feel like there’s an accent here but I guess I didn’t realize I didn’t have it. So I’ll take it. I’m international. No one knows where I’m from.

Tara: Nice. Well, now we know where to go when we come to Austin for tacos. So thank you for that advice. Now, I’m going to ask you for some other advice.

Machielle: Oh.

Tara: We ask our guests to share with us some advice that they’ve received and implemented into their lives that they can then pass along to people who are listening.

Machielle: Oh, that’s a good one. I’m going to say this is a hard one because I initially want to go for something that my grandmother or my mom or somebody told me, but I’m actually going to go with something that I actually did not talk to someone about. It’s something that I read before and it made me completely change the way I viewed myself. And it basically talks about, like, whenever an opportunity presents itself, there’s always going to be a cloud of uncertainty or fog of uncertainty with it. I kind of combine that with everything that’s beautiful or great is on the other side of fear.

I think those two things and say that when something feels scary or uncertain, that’s usually when opportunity comes up. You can kind of rise to the occasion or you can back down from it. So a lot of times I walk myself into positions that I’m not qualified for. And I don’t mean necessarily in work, but I just mean in life. I try to find things that are bigger than me and I’m like, “I’ll go into it. I’ll just go into it.” Because if it’s not scary, if it’s not uncertain, then that means I’m probably just being too comfortable. I would say that that’s kind of the thing that’s always driven me to push myself forward.

Liam: I like a lot of what you say, Machielle.

Machielle: Thank you. Thank you.

Liam: There’s something about that which is truly beautiful is on the other side of fear. I like that. I’m going to go towards things that scare me. I’m going to go towards things that are bigger than me. I like you. Thank you. This is wonderful.

Machielle: I appreciate that. Thank you.

Tara: Sure. Thank you. It’s good advice. It’s very hard to absorb that. I think that it’s very important. As a mom to raise your child to have that attitude as well is good. Because I think you can get overwhelmed with social media on how you don’t measure up. So that’s really good is to have the competence to go for things that aren’t comfortable. Thank you for sharing that.

Machielle: Thank you.

Liam: How do you head check yourself on that? Inevitably, when we try to take on something that is above where we are right now, we’re going to slip and fall at some point.

Machielle: Absolutely.

Liam: We stub our toe or slam our elbow into something. How do you deal with that? How do you cope with that? How do you figure out for you this is just a slip up versus oh, this is not the mountain I need to climb?

Machielle: Right. Right. I think the biggest thing is to understand your capacity. There’s something about saying, “Obviously, I’m going to run towards things that scare me.” You can’t do everything, right? And I think that when you stop taking things personal, even failures, which I like to call practice rounds, you take your practice round, and it’s like, I could take this personal and say that I wasn’t good enough, this is not what I’m good at, or I should have done better. But if you really focus on, like, “I have the capacity…” If I really felt within myself that I have the capacity to do this, then I really just need to put in the work, put in the focus, put in the drive that I really need to be successful.

And understanding when you need to ask for help. Whether that be a mentor, or even…I mean, I really feel like it’s really easy these days because you don’t have to have a personal mentor anymore. You can go on the internet and find 100 TED Talks that inspire you. You can call your mom and say, “Oh, tell me I’m beautiful. Tell me I’m great.” There’s so many ways for you to get that ego boost that you kind of need to push forward. But understanding your capacity and not taking things personal, even your practice rounds.

Tara: What a great connection! I never thought about that that way before that as to take it personally. What a great thing to move on from failure and not beat yourself up for it and think that you can’t keep going. So yeah, thank you for sharing that. And speaking of keeping going, we can’t keep going because our time is up.

Machielle: Ooh.

Tara: It’s been wonderful to chat with you and to meet you. I’m so glad you joined us today. Where can people find you online?

Machielle: I am most available on Twitter @MachielleThomas. My name is spelled a little more complicated than most. So it’s @MachielleThomas on Twitter.

Tara: Great. Thank you. Thanks.

Machielle: Thank you.

Liam: Thanks, Machielle. What a pleasure getting to know you. Really appreciate your time today.

Machielle: You as well. Thank you.

Tara: Bye.

Machielle: I can’t wait to see you guys in real life.

Tara: I know.

Liam: I know. I know. We’re going to come to WordCamp Austin and have tacos.

Machielle: Do it.

Tara: We can’t wait. We can’t wait.

Machielle: We’re going to do a taco tour.

Tara: Bye.

Machielle: Bye everybody.

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

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