Hallway Chats

C. Shakhawat Sultan is the business development manager at CodeRex. He works hand in hand with the developers and the marketing team to create useful plugins. He is passionate about WordPress and loves to contribute to the community.

Twitter | SultanRoyal1

Walk to WordCamp Europe

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 142.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by C. Shakhawat Sultan. Shakhawat is the business development manager at CodeRex. He works hand in hand with the developers and the marketing team to create useful plugins. He is passionate about WordPress and loves to contribute to the community. Welcome, Sultan. Thanks for joining us.

Shakhawat: Thank you, Liam. And Hi, Tara. Nice to be joining you, too.

Tara: Thanks for being here today. We’re really glad that you’re here. I know it’s late where you are, so we’re grateful for you staying up or waking up to be with us.

Shakhawat: I’m excited to talk with you guys.

Tara: Oh, we’re excited too. Thanks. Would you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Shakhawat: Yeah, sure. I’m Sultan, a business development manager at CodeRex, and I work as a product manager at RexTheme which is a sister concern of CodeRex. So right now I’m in charge of developing plugins in my company and helping out my marketing team and developers to interact properly so that plugin development can be done properly. Besides that, I just completed my graduations. And not really that old I would like to think.

Tara: Do you want to tell us how old you are?

Shakhawat: I’m 27 right now. That’s a great age.

Liam: That is not as old as I am.

Tara: For our listeners, where are you located?

Shakhawat: Right now I’m talking with you from Dhaka, Bangladesh. This is where I was born. My whole life I grew up here. So that’s what I’m talking from.

Tara: Great.

Liam: And it’s very late where you are, so thank you very much for joining us and accommodating our little show to be so pleasant. Tara and I are in early afternoon. What are you? About one in the morning now?

Shakhawat: It’s 12:30 a.m. right now.

Tara: Okay. Great. So tell us a little bit about how you got started in computer stuck, WordPress, all of the above.

Shakhawat: To be honest, this industry is pretty new for me. In WordPress, I am only here for about two and a half years. Before that, I used to be part of international call centers. In fact, we used to be the guys that used to call you guys to cell phone plants and stuff like that. That’s what I was part of. Then, all of a sudden, I decided to change the industry as that cannot be taken as a career. I wanted a career that had a future. So I had to switch industries. And meanwhile, continued my education. And here I am today, thanks to CodeRex.

The owner of CodeRex knew me personally, so he mentored me from nothing to where I am now. I know about WordPress or digital marketing is basically what I’ve learned from Mr. Lincoln, the owner of CodeRex. That’s how I got into the WordPress industry. Over time, I’ve seen that things are very different in your community. I mean, if you look at other communities, people are always looking at how to deface another company and grow themselves. But the WordPress community is something where I see that everybody’s trying to improve together. And that’s what intrigued me into staying in this industry, to be honest.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point around the supportive nature of the WordPress community, especially from business to business and agency to agency. And, yeah, inevitably, there’s a little bit of competition. We want to have the best plugin or a couple of the bigger agencies might put in for work for some of these bigger enterprise clients. But by and large, it’s a supportive environment. I’m glad that you’re experiencing that as well.

You said that you just finished your studies, you just got a degree. Did I hear that correctly? What did you graduate with? What did you study?

Shakhawat: Computer Science and Engineering. This is my background. Tara asked me question that how did I get into tech. I was excited about computing ever since I was in school. So back then I used to learn coding using Visual Basic. Then, eventually, I had to learn C programming on my own. Due to my jobs, I couldn’t continue my studies for a while. But then when I got back to the university, I thought, let’s get on track with the one that I’m passionate about. So I had to get into Computer Science and Engineering.

Liam: That’s cool. So you’re in a business development role now. What does that mean? What does that look like day to day for you?

Shakhawat: Basically, I have three roles in the company now. Business development is the main role, where I have to look at how the company is presented to everybody. I have to think about how the company can grow. For example, CodeRex is a web development firm. So I have to decide how I’ll present my company to the people that are coming to us, or how people will see that this is a reliable company.

Along with that, I also need to maintain the fact that people who are working here are thinking positive about the company itself. So even though I’m not the project manager—we do have a project manager—both of us play hand in hand to make sure that our employees are always motivated, and they love to work in this environment. So that’s the main role that I follow in business development. Aside from that, obviously, we have client meetings, finding new ventures for the business. Those things are the general responsibilities of business development that I do have today.

Tara: So are you utilizing your coding and programming skill set or not as much anymore, it sounds like?

Shakhawat: Basically, since I’m more into marketing role…The RexTheme side, they are into plugin development. So I’m actually taking the lead in the marketing of all the plugins. We have about five. Under me, there are a few people who are acting as product managers. I’m also acting as a product manager for two of our core plugins because they’re more complicated.

Initially, when I joined here, I wasn’t really the business development manager. When I joined here, I was just a marketeer. I was taught to be a digital marketeer. Eventually, it was decided that maybe I could go into a larger role, and went into business development besides marketing. So the marketing side has never left me. It’s still there. I use coding to a minimum of let’s say two front end basis. That’s HTML and CSS. I don’t really get to code within the plugins and stuffs. We have developers for that. They are like 10 times more experienced than I am. So why put my hand into something that can be done better by somebody else.

Tara: Yeah, that makes sense. I understand that. Do you prefer the marketing? Are you enjoying it?

Shakhawat: Oh, definitely. As I said, I was part of a call center, and it’s all about marketing. So I’ve been in the marketing for over 10 years now. Of course, I love it. I’ll just like to share one interesting thing. When I joined digital marketing, it became so different. You see, when you are a salesman, you can actually say that okay, I’m confident, I’ll get five sales today. But when you’re in digital marketing, it’s not about sales. It’s about presenting your company and growing. And it’s so different, that you do not really target for number of sales. You actually target for reaching a lot of people, letting people know how useful you are, rather than they should buy it and pay your money. So that’s what I’m more focused on right now.

Liam: I love that perspective. That’s fantastic. What is marketing for a development agency, a plugin agency looks like in a COVID-19 world where you’re not going to WordCamps, you’re not going to local meetups, you’re not even probably going to visit the big businesses in the area that might need your services, that might benefit from your services, but you’re not going to come down and have a cup of tea or a coffee with them? What does that look like for you?

Shakhawat: I’ll just show you both ends of the swords. You see, during the lockdown, the web development side of her company suffered a lot because web development only occurs when businesses are running well. And the website we make are for business that have physical business. So during COVID, they decided that to cut up their expenses they don’t need to develop a website with a good agency. They rather stay with what they have. So any web development agency suffered a lot during the lockdown.

But, again, when you go into plugin development, it really depends on what plugins you have. Certain plugins are essential and helpful during the lockdown. For example, if I say Zoom, Zoom is an application that could be used more during the lockdown than before. Again, our company had the fortune to have WooCommerce related plugins such as Product Feed Manager, or we had a VR plugin for WP VR which people can create virtual tours. Now, these are certain things that actually boomed during the lockdown.

Real estate properties were selling only because they had a way to showcase properties online. Nobody were visiting at that time. So virtual tour or virtual reality, in fact, saw a big rise in usage. Then, the online market during COVID, UK, US they saw a huge rise in online sales. So any company that had products that are favoring for ecommerce or online sales, they actually did pretty well. The marketing wasn’t that difficult, because all you had to do is reach out to the people that have online shop. And most of them are interested because now they’re looking to sell more. They have more opportunities.

But then again the downside is people who doesn’t have those sort of plugins. If you look at plugins that are for personal use, those plugins are going to be in very, very bad shape during the lockdown. Because people who use plugins for personal satisfaction or personal use, there’ll be like, “Okay, I’m losing money. So right now I can live without it.” That’s the scenario actually.

Liam: That’s interesting. Go ahead, Tara.

Tara: I was going to ask if you and your team have always been remote. Or is that…?

Shakhawat: No. We had to be remote during COVID because our country is not really in good shape in terms of maintaining COVID. Even though the death rate is low in our country, but the affective rate is really high. So we had to make sure that we don’t let our employees get affected. So we have to move remote during that time. But it did hamper our performance a lot. Because what I believe is in terms of marketing or project management, if the people are in front of you, it’s easier to understand their mindset than when you are talking online. Because at that time, you don’t get the picture their body language, or the tone. It’s really difficult. So when we moved remote, it did affect our business. But as we said, we tried our best for our safety. Right now we’re not working remotely. We are working from our office.

Liam: So let me ask you about WordCamps back when we all used to go to them. You started part of our conversation talking about how you find that the community is quite supportive of itself and those in it. Share with us your first experience of a WordCamp. Was that something that you decided to go on your own? Did CodeRex send you? Did you bring it up to them and said, “Hey, maybe I should go to this”? Talk to us about that. What’s your experience like?

Shakhawat: I’ll tell you certain things. It’s pretty interesting. I didn’t go to any WordCamp outside my country. That’s the downside of it because I’m not experienced enough. But there was a WordCamp situated in Bangladesh, Dhaka. I’ll tell you my company was responsible. My company and there was another company. Actually, it was a total of about five web development companies that joined together to organize the whole thing. And CodeRex was one of those companies. So we had to work hand in hand in preparing stuffs for that WordCamp itself. Then again attend that as a company. That was pretty fun.

But I’ll tell you a funny story. That day I had a medical emergency with one of my family members, so I couldn’t attend the WordCamp from the beginning. Then when I managed to find some time to go there, it started raining like cats and dogs. So midway, on my way to WordCamp, I was already soaking wet. Then by the time I reached WordCamp Dhaka, it was probably the last two sessions going on. So I almost missed it. It’s sad, but yet…you know, I enjoyed the day for some reason, because I was excited about the event. When you have something hard to get, you love it more.

When I went there, it was still bust. A lot of people came in and they were all interested in knowing about each and every company. We got to meet some pretty good people from abroad as well. So it was fun. I mean, it was interesting. That was the first time I went to a WordCamp. Before that I did attend WordPress meetups, but those are all local so you don’t see foreigners there.

Before that any WordCamp to place. I was responsible for arranging the content for the company. But basically, it was the owner who visited. Lincoln himself went there. I don’t know if you remember that Walk to WordCamp event by Marcel Bootsman. Marcel is basically a close personal friend with Lincoln. So we were one of the sponsors for him. And we were covering for that. I was actually keeping track of each and everything Marcel was doing. I had to prepare content on a regular basis, keep my owner updated about what he’s doing. We had to make sure that Marcel gets all the support he gets. It was a pretty neat event and a noble one.

Liam: Didn’t he walk…? Marcel, I think, lives in Holland, right? And he walked to WordCamp Europe. You know, walk like hundreds of kilometers to raise money for some organization. I can’t remember specific, but that’s it. Right?

Shakhawat: Right. Right. So yeah, we were covering all of that. And that was pretty exciting for me, because it was not about to sponsor walking there. I could see that people were actually reaching out to him and donating money to him because they knew that the cause was to allow some people to visit WordCamp that cannot afford to go there. You see, in the WordPress community, there are people who are really rich and there are people who have a hard time. And Marcel did this event, which actually got a pretty good amount of donations. I could see the WordPress community opening up. Even you know that people open their selves to Marcel saying that they could live at their place on their way. So those things were really amazing. We didn’t expect that. I was thinking he’s going to get money to go and stay in hotels and stuff. But no, people were actually letting him live with them. So that was a big thing for me. That’s when I knew that the community is actually very different.

Tara: Yeah. Yeah. I remember that now. That does speak volumes about this community. And everyone that we’ve talked to on this podcast, who has interacted in any way with WordPress, I think has felt that support that’s very unusual in other places.

I would like to ask you a question that we ask of everyone, which is about success. So we like to ask our guests how they define success and what it means in their life.

Shakhawat: To me, I would go a different approach with success. You see, many people say that being successful is when you earn a lot of money and stuff like that. But to me, you get success every day. You see, everything you do has a purpose. To me, success is when the purpose is met. Now, it could be as simple thing as waking up at 9 a.m. If my goal last day was I’ll wake up at 9 a.m. tomorrow, and if I manage to wake up, that’s a success.

So it sounds very vague. But then again, if you look at a bigger picture, today, if I wanted that, okay, today, I’ll go to the office, and I’ll make sure I’ll present my product to people and they will like it, they’ll like my presentation. If they actually do like it, that’s also a success. I think every day you have success, and you will have failures, and you will have opportunity to learn. So success is something I would say is not a single goal. Success is when you reach any goal that you had planned for, and it worked out. Not on its own; on your own efforts. So that’s what I define success by.

Liam: I really like that. As you were talking, I was listening and jotting down, and I interpreted what you said as mindfully achieving our purpose. Mindfully achieving what we set out to do. And I really liked that because you’re pointed then make success very much almost a constant ebb and flow and it requires mental attention or requires energy, it requires dedication. But it also means that there’s another opportunity right around the corner.

Shakhawat: I’d like to add something to that as well.

Liam: Please.

Shakhawat: You see, when I say that successes every day, it doesn’t just mean that I’m just saying it for the sake of saying it. If you can be happy about every little thing you achieve, that motivates you more to do better in the next thing you do. So let’s say today, you decided that okay, my target today is completing…let’s say you’re writing articles and you plan that today I’ll complete two articles,” if you manage to do that, and you take that as success, then the next day you will take another challenge and you will feel more confident that okay, I managed to get this many success yesterday, this will also be a success.

Motivation is something that helps you achieve things that you don’t usually get being depressed or intention. To be frank, in WordPress, more people are developers and they talk in their language. When you’re creating a program, you’re trying to find an algorithm. And if your intention that, “okay, let’s say today, I don’t have time, amount of time,” if you’re worried like that your algorithm is going to get messed up no matter how much you try. But if you think that, “okay, I have enough time, I’ll do it if I’m motivated,” you will see that you need less attempts to successfully find an algorithm and start coding as fast as you can.

So when I talk about success every day, the more success I can claim, the more confident I get. And that’s when I start to see that every activity has a purpose. And I have to judge each and every purpose to define my success rather than thinking that, all right, my ultimate goal is being a millionaire. Now, that’s not a success definition to me.

Tara: I like the idea that every day is an opportunity, and an opportunity to learn. We have a tradition in my family here during the season before Christmas here, where we light candles, and we talk about three things that we’re grateful for. And we’ve added in “what did you learn today?” and I have found that to be very challenging. But yet, if you really think about it, you can think about something that you did learn. It might not be something monumental, but it might be like, I learned that pancakes with bananas burn more easily than pancakes without bananas, or something silly. But you can think about something that you learned every day. So I like that idea of success. And I think part of that is thinking about what opportunities you have every day to learn. So thank you for sharing that.

Shakhawat: It’s great.

Liam: I made pancakes breakfast today.

Tara: I saw that Liam. Actually, it was my daughter who had the pancake experience yesterday. That wasn’t my own lesson.

Liam: Well, do you have to learn directly, Tara? Or can you learn by observation?

Tara: Indirectly. This is true. This is true. Yeah. Can you talk to us a little bit about CodeRex and what kind of plugins they make?

Shakhawat: Okay. I’ll just, again, break down to CodeRex is basically for web development. Our sister concern is RexTheme, where we develop plugins. It’s the same company. It’s just we made it separate so that it’s easier for our clients to understand. So when you go to CodeRex, it’s about any types of websites you need developed, maintenance, or anything, that’s done in CodeRex. CodeRex is a company where people come to higher quality developers. We mostly provide white label services to other agencies as well. So that’s what CodeRex does.

We also decided that since it’s where we are in the WordPress niche, so why not go for a plugin development?  That’s when RexTheme came up. RexTheme is the sector where we have a set of developers and marketeers that are dedicated to individual plugins. Let’s say right now we have about five plugins. Three of them are for WooCommerce. Our most prominent one is WooCommerce Product Feed Manager. Then we have a VR plugin, WP VR, which is basically to create virtual tours. Then we have a plugin called Media Storage to Cloud. Nowadays people love to use Cloud a lot. It helps enhancing the website. The Media Storage to Cloud was basically aimed at people who wants to connect what is to their cloud storages.

Apart from this, we have a couple of small plugins, such as Variation Swatches if you know what that is. Let’s say you have a variable product that you sell. Variation Swatches lets you present that with buttons. People can choose from buttons rather than a drop-down menu. So that’s a small plugin.

But then we have another one which is very new, abandoned cart recovery. This is very useful for WooCommerce or any e-commerce actually, that when someone abandons a cart, you can reach them back. And we’re working on our funnel plugin, which is basically kind of be one of our largest projects so far.

At RexTheme, our team is not really that large. We are a team of 15 altogether in the office. And we maintain all these plugins just 15 of us. The marketing team consists of four of us, including me. Then there Jahir and Rafi and Shammi. There’s four in the marketing. We have two lead developers that works in the back end. One is Sadi and other is Sakib. We have two front end developers. One is Tipu and another one is Belal. Then we have two dedicated designers. So you obviously know that UX designers are really important. So we have dedicated UX designers, which is Mahi and Shanthi. And recently, we hired someone for video editing as we are going into YouTube nowadays. So he’s Tareq. And on top of all of us, there is the project manager, obviously. That’s Farshid. That’s our team.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a good team. I’ve imagined that virtual tour plugin is really popular right now with all of the COVID restrictions. I work with a lot of schools and they do virtual tours. I imagine a lot of organizations are doing that now. So I would guess you’ve seen an increase in that.

Shakhawat: Oh, definitely. During the COVID actually we released a huge discount as well because we knew people want that. Keeping it expensive isn’t making any beneficial for us neither for them. So we gave a huge discount, and it really boomed. But now I think in WordPress, we have over 8,000 installations on the free version itself. And we have thousands more customers that are doing pro. That plugin really boomed during COVID. Yeah, it really did.

Liam: Sultan, I want to change gears and ask you about advice. And it’s another of our signature questions. And it is around what advice have you read, been given, stumbled upon, had thrown in your face and successfully implemented in your life? What’s some advice that somebody gave to you or that you read that have made a real difference to you?

Shakhawat: It’s an advice one of my colleagues gave during my call center years. Basically, it’s really simple. Accept your mistake. It’s as simple as that. I used to be an arrogant guy. Any marketeer who is a direct salesman, they’re very arrogant. They’re like, “I’m always right.” So the main advice that came up was that I was claiming that if I take this approach it will definitely work. And he was trying to say that, “No, this is the reason why you lost the customer. You should have gone in the other way.” And I wasn’t agreeing to that. I was like, “No, there must have been something wrong with the customer. I was right.”

So that’s when he said, “Look, this will be helpful to you in future. Learn to accept your mistakes, and then you’ll see that you’ll find out how to find better opportunities.” And that has helped me along till now. I mean, when I came to WordPress, it’s not like I was perfect in learning. I mean, when you learn, you apply, you make mistakes, you learn more. So it was great that I got good support from the owner himself, Lincoln, because he studies a lot. He basically studies every day new things.

So whenever I made mistakes, he came and pointed out that those to me. And if I was the same arrogant guy as I was in a call center, I wouldn’t have learned. I would be like, “Hey, he’s insulting me.” But he’s not insulting me. He’s just saying that this is wrong, maybe you should do this way. And that’s one advice that I think everybody should learn to use that, okay, if we make a mistake, it’s possible. Nobody’s perfect. So we have to accept that. It’s nothing insulting. It’s nothing to feel criticized about. You should accept it and then find a way that “okay, how do I not repeat my mistake? Or how to improve the thing I did?”

Liam: I like that. I think a lot of the world could do a better job, myself included, about accepting our mistakes and learning from them. Or even just starting with accepting them rather than pointing fingers. That’s great advice. I like your work colleague from years gone by.

Tara: Yeah. It’s a key customer service lesson in a way you can translate it to the same the customer’s always right. And it takes some humility to be able to do that, because we all, I think, have some innate desire to always be right.

Liam: It’s helpful to be right, but…Sultan, we are running out of time here. And this has been an absolute pleasure. But before we say goodbye to you, can you share where folks can find you online?

Shakhawat: Sorry.

Liam: We’re running out of time here. We’ve been going back and forth. We’re coming up on our time. Before we say goodbye, I invite you to share where folks can find you online. Where can they learn more about you and engage with you?

Shakhawat: If they want to learn about my work, they can actually visit my website, rextheme.com or they can find me on Twitter, @SultanRoyal1. They can also find me in our company page, either CodeRex’s Facebook page or RexTheme Facebook page. If I’m not there, they asked for me…I’ll always be there because I manage those pages.

Liam: You’ll be there. All right.

Tara: Well, thanks for joining us. It’s been great to meet you. I hope you have a nice sleep this evening.

Shakhawat: I will. I was dying to sleep because the whole day I had to work really hard. No, I really enjoyed talking with you guys. And thanks for having me here. I hope in future we get another chance to talk.

Tara: Me too.

Liam: I do too, and I hope we get to meet in person before too long.

Shakhawat: Okay.

Tara: Take care.

Liam: Bye-bye for now.

Shakhawat: You too. Have a nice day.

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.

Rachel is a senior community manager at GoDaddy and has been there for five years, managing the online community and other community programs. She’s been a community professional for over 15 years. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and loves to hike, travel, and she’s a collector of many things. She also sells odds and ends online and has done so for 20 years.

Twitter | @rachelmakool

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 141.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Rachel Makool. Rachel is a senior community manager at GoDaddy and has been there for five years, managing the online community and other community programs. She’s been a community professional for over 15 years. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and loves to hike, travel, and she’s a collector of many things. She also sells odds and ends online and has done so for 20 years. Welcome, Rachel. Really glad to see you here today.

Rachel: Hey, you guys. Really, really happy to be here with you.

Liam: Oh, it’s a delight to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Rachel, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Rachel: Yeah. I’ve had a really interesting career path to share with you. I was in one career and then I got into marketing, and then that transitioned into this community profession that I’m in. It’s really been quite a journey for me. I have to say that I’m personally passionate about what I do. I just really love interacting with customers and people and believe that community is such a driver of business and learning and engaging conversation, and a great way to get to know others.

Tara: I have appreciated getting to know you in the GoDaddy community, and can sense that that is something that you’re passionate about and really good at. Tell me a little bit about this community idea or this community profession. Because it’s something that I feel is well-known in our WordPress community, because we are a community, but I’ve never really otherwise heard about it as a thing. You’ve done this at other places, I assume. How long has that been a thing? Talk a little bit more about what that’s about and how prevalent it is or isn’t.

Rachel: Well, I’m going to date myself here, you guys. I was at eBay the early days of eBay. I joined the company in the year 2000. That was really the start of kind of online communities—people getting together. Obviously, eBay was a new way for people to sell stuff online. People were learning together, and just grew this really powerful and impactful community where people would get to know each other, they’d shared challenges that they were having. Somebody else would try something, and they would share what they tried. It was amazing. And it grew really fast, and it was super inspirational.

That really led to us doing a lot of things of trying to get people connected together. One of the things that we found was a lot of our customers were solopreneurs. They were by themselves, they were working out of their homes, and they just they get lonely, and they’d want to get to know other people. Over the course of the time, and I was there for almost nine years, I saw a lot of people become really good friends. Maybe they sold the same types of things, maybe they sold different types of things, but they all had in common selling online and trying to grow businesses.

I was personally inspired by these stories, the growth stories of people. They’d start in their homes, they’d have to get a new warehouse, and then they’d have two warehouses and three warehouses and just continuing to grow their businesses. But again, the underlying power of it was that relationship building and people sharing and the excitement around it as their businesses grew.

Tara: Interesting. I’ve never thought about eBay as being a community or the first of communities in that way. So eBay people as a whole, they are a community amongst themselves. The people who sell on eBay, that’s you’re describing.

Rachel: Yeah. And then also kind of with GoDaddy, very similar. All small businesses, people who are again looking to meet other people, potentially learn some stuff from other people. And then also there’s a lot of people who are experts who have really gone through a lot, learned a lot and they’re happy to share with others, help others, mentor others in their journey. I think as a mentor too, you always learn. It doesn’t stop just because all of a sudden you’ve seen the master something.

This year I think in particular for 2020 is a good example of challenges that we all face and how you have to psychologically think about trying new things and pivoting, even if you’re an expert in something.

Liam: I think that’s a really valid point is mentors always will keep learning. I’d be really interested just to go back in time. Has social media community building becomes easier? It’s never easy. But community-building online in 2000, what did that look like?

Rachel: It was really ruckus, to be honest with you. It’s funny. Again, it was all new to me. I was a marketer. I came into eBay as a marketer. I actually was hired, which was kind of an interesting connection to my collectibles, I was hired as a collectibles category manager, which collecting is all about community. I mean, people like sharing stuff and selling stuff back and forth and getting to know again people that collect the same kinds of stuff like you. So I came in with that mentality. But it was really interesting.

I mean, there wasn’t a lot of real establishment about behavior online. The forums were really super basic. People just got in there and just did it. Then there were really early community managers that helped to drive conversation and just kind of keep people being good. eBay had a mantra of people are basically good, which I always really loved. And I really, really believe that.

Tara: It’s a great mantra.

Rachel: There’s always in life a small fringe of people that are not necessarily good, but most people are and want to do the right thing. Part of a community manager in whatever aspect of community you’re dealing with is to help people to keep on the up and up and keep the conversation positive and helpful and engaging.

Tara: I am curious about the collectors. Can you think of a collector’s group or item group of items that surprised you or that’s surprising? Something that people collect that you might never think of?

Rachel: Oh, my God. Tara, you mentioned in my intro I’ve been a collector for a long time, and I’ve sold a lot of stuff online. I mean, there’s stuff that even now, I’ll go to an estate sale, and I’ll buy something, and my husband’s like, “You’re going to buy that? Who’s going to buy that?” And it’s amazing the stuff that I have sold online of things that you would never think somebody would buy, but they do. I sell a lot of ephemera, you know, paper goods, and just crazy stuff. People buy a lot of stuff from hotels, and travel and all sorts of things like that. But I pretty much sold just about everything online except for a car.

Tara: And that does happen too. I have a friend that bought a car on eBay. I think of the movie, the 40-Year-Old Virgin when I think of it.

Rachel: Oh, yeah. That’s really funny.

Tara: There was a store, “Sell it on eBay “or something like that.

Rachel: But getting back to one of the things that you mentioned Tara is that, again, people like to come together and they like to talk about things that they’re interested in or passionate about. So a lot of companies have communities now.

Liam, you were kind of talking a bit about social channels. The original community stuff was really on these forums. And they started way back in the mid-90s. Maybe even before that. There was a trend in the early 2000s with companies of having online communities. And then this social media thing started to boom, and everybody’s like, “Screw the forum stuff. Let’s just do social stuff.” So that kind of built. Meanwhile, there were a lot of companies that still had their communities.

It’s been a very interesting trend now, where a lot of companies have started their own communities again in the last couple of years. And that’s because there’s so many social channels, it’s really difficult for companies to manage all of the conversations. In some ways easier to just have their own community where they can kind of talk and have their customers come and share.

It’s always interesting to watch trends of what happens. It’s the same thing like with what you guys do of being part of WordPress community I’m sure. It’s really dispersed and it’s difficult to know for somebody who is newer in it, where should they go? Should they be in this group? This group? It’s really hard to give people advice on where to start because there’s so much conversation going on.

Tara: Yeah. And it’s a great opportunity for companies like GoDaddy. I think I recall back when I first started learning about the WordPress community and using WordPress, Mendel Kurland had I think just started as the evangelist, I think, was the official title that he had, which really was like a community engagement professional. And it was a very, very big benefit for me and my relationship with GoDaddy in those early days, because I felt like I knew somebody at GoDaddy who cared about my experience.

So I think there are multiple levels of benefits that having community managers, people who are focusing on that certainly is something that’s I think it’s relatively new. I think, in WordPress, it’s become very common. Most WordPress products, hosting companies have these community outreach. Customer service in some way, I guess it is, but it’s expanded so much beyond that.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, it’s really way past that, I would say. For people like what I do, it’s more of, you know, again, engaging people in conversation, having customers help each other, learning opportunities, and again, relationship building.

The other thing that’s really interesting about most companies, and I will say this definitely for our company, is you guys might meet me and you guys might hear from me, and think, “Oh, are the rest of the people at the company, do they really have that same energy and enthusiasm about me as a customer.” I’ve worked in, you know, lots of different companies and I have to say that my energy and enthusiasm around customers is very much reflected in the people that I work with. I would not work at our company if I didn’t feel that way. And the same with our leadership. I feel like they really, really care about our customers and want to do the right thing.

But again, the piece of it that I most love is you guys connecting with each other. Tara’s part of a program that I’ve run in the company, and mostly developers, the work that you guys do. The thing that I’ve loved out of the group is the relationships that have formed and the work that is being shared. Whether it’s you guys working on projects together, or it’s you can’t…it’s not the right project for you, but boy, you know somebody else that’s a friend of yours that you can trust that you would be happy to refer that customer to. And just, again, kind of watching other conversations going on the sharing and things like that. I really love that. If there was anything that I walked away from my role, it’s helping to make those connections.

Liam: That’s such an interesting role for bigger companies. Because if we think about local business and local businesses doing business locally, it’s all about “talk to Rachel, she can help with this. Talk to Tara, Oh, yeah, she deals with that. She’ll fix that for you.” It was interesting to see companies like GoDaddy and others start to roll out that kind of customer service, community builder, relationship builder all rolled into one where normally it’s a few hundred dollars a year, and you never hear from the company. Like, I’ll buy your product in that and now there becomes a real relationship and it becomes an opportunity to go to the big company and say, “I’m having this problem. Can you help me solve it?” Where if we just gave our money and left it at that, there wouldn’t have the relationship, the company wouldn’t have the interest because they wouldn’t know who we are. And we wouldn’t feel comfortable going to them.

So it’s so certainly as a business owner in a tech sector, where there’s lots and lots and lots of technical services that might meet our needs increasingly, I’m steering towards companies that have the support and the relationship where problems crop up or creep up that I can get the support that I need to address them without having to pay an arm and a leg. Always happy to pay for quality service. But just to see that not everything comes back to the dollar and it’s about relationships. So it’s really exciting to see that evolve. And to see it grow in different industries, too, for sure.

Rachel: Again, coming back to 2020, and the challenges that everybody is having, it’s more important and powerful, now more than ever, for people to connect in and learn and share, and to not feel alone. I think this year just with COVID and so many small businesses having challenges to figure out next steps and how to do things. Honestly, for me, watching what’s going on…I know a lot of people are still suffering, for sure. But there’s been so many really cool things that have come out of it. People have tried new things and talked to others and gotten some really good ideas.

One other things and Tara did this with us, we have a monthly virtual meetup that’s presented by one of our customers to share their expertise on subjects. It’s become a really popular avenue for our customers to join in here.

Certainly we have a lot of expertise in our company as well, but you guys are the ones that are doing this every single day. You’re running your businesses every single day. So other people want to hear from you. They want to hear what’s worked for you, what challenges have you had, how have you overcome your challenges. And just the reality of running a small business right now. And it’s really, really impactful for a lot of people. And I know, they’re very grateful when they’re able to hear from people who have expertise.

Liam: Running a business in COVID-19 is definitely a challenge to keep it successful. I’m going to use that as a point to ask you one of our signature questions about success. Rachel, how would you define success? It’s maybe you have a personal definition, you have a professional definition, maybe personal. Or maybe it’s a mix of both for you. How do you define success?

Rachel: That’s really interesting. I ask myself that a lot. I call it stops and starts in my career. When I look at my journey for my career and I think like overall I’ve been successful, would I have at the stops point what I have felt like I was successful? Maybe not. But when I look back on, and this is why I think it’s really important to always really look back at your journey and being able to take out the parts that you see, like, “wow. That one thing that seemed bad at the time then led me down this path to something really, really good.” Or “I met somebody who really helped to change my thought process, my attitude about something.”

So I feel like success changes every single day. Sometimes it depends on your mood. Sometimes it depends on the people you meet and interact with. I think setting goals for yourself is pretty important. But also just know that things happen in life sometimes that put seeming like stop signs up in front of you. As long as you can see around them and understand that there are green lights that happen and then you get to go again. But so much of it is just really attitude towards things.

Liam: I especially like the looking back at the journey, I think, especially in a time like COVID-19 and all the other chaos right now that we can lose the forest for the trees. Maybe we’re not hitting new sales numbers because of the chaos of the economy. But if we set a few moments quietly and reflect and say, oh, well, we learned this and we’ve made a new relationship with these folks, and we survive six months so far of a global health pandemic, and our business is still here, that’s a success. I think that’s really valuable and often overlooked in terms of trying to measure success because it can be tempting to just measure by the numbers. Numbers are part of it but they’re certainly not the whole picture.

Rachel: I think that’s a super important point. It’s always really good to have numbers and measure things business-wise. But I also think that from a personal perspective, just being able to look at “Wow, what did I learn from this? And really trying to pull out the good from the bad. I believe once we get past COVID, when that’s going to be, but I think many people are going to reflect back going like, “Wow, there was actually some really good things that came out of this.”

A great example for where I live, the bay area has been incredibly expensive for small businesses and has pushed out a lot of small businesses because of rents and all sorts of stuff. Yes, COVID is terrible, and it’s hurt us, but at the same time, I believe it’s going to help small business to thrive more so in the Bay Area now because rents have come down. People who, for instance, in the restaurant industry have been wanting to create restaurants for a long time but couldn’t get into a space because it was too expensive, or couldn’t afford staff or whatever, now we’re going to have an opportunity to come in and start businesses and stuff.

I personally believe there’s going to be a lot of really cool stuff that’s going to come out of this over the next couple of years. And we’re going to see a lot of businesses thrive.

Tara: That’s great to hear. I like that positive message. I had not heard that about rents going down. That’s really interesting.

Rachel: Oh, yeah, that’s happening everywhere.

Liam: I would expect it’s probably happening in a lot of places as the global economy realizes, “Hey, we can be productive at home.” Like you, Rachel, I’m really excited to see where all this goes. I mean, because of COVID, we’ve taken that shot from work from home trend and sped it up a million times. And suddenly everybody realizes, we all need to be in this location to thrive as a business. We’re not going to do business the same way. But it’s different.

I just want to share just briefly one of the positives of as much as we all loath being on yet another Zoom call, and we’re on a lot of…My own family, I’ve had a great opportunity to do regular Zoom calls with my wider extended family. So I’m getting to see my nieces and my nephews who I would only see once or twice a year. Now I’m seeing them every week, especially the really young ones that change. And they’re loving the digital attention. I don’t know that I would swap it. If we could go back and not have it. I don’t know that I would take that but trying to look for the positives and times of challenge.

Rachel: That is so cool. I hadn’t even really thought about that. But that’s really true. Like I had a call with my brother and sister on Sunday—a zoom call. My sister lives in Alaska, my brother lives in Wisconsin, and we maybe see each other in person if we’re lucky, once a year one, every two to three years. So now to actually be able to see each other in person and talk and stuff like that is pretty cool. We wouldn’t have done that before. We’ve never even thought about doing that before.

Tara: My family is the same. I’ve seen my kids more now than I did before COVID, even though they live across the country. So that’s true. I wonder though also because we are a little Zoom exhausted, what it means for communities because the communities that we have now are online. Some of my favorite relationships that I have are with people who aren’t in my local communities. So as we talk about communities, we become less engaged with the people across the street than we are with the people across the country or across the state or whatever. It’s a reshaping of community. I hope that we still have the opportunity to have that local connection, the local community to talk to the neighbors and reach out and have that connection as well. But I think that’s going to be harder and harder to maintain as we’re stuck inside. I’m inside in my office. I don’t see what’s going on outside.

Rachel: That’s interesting, Tara. I totally believe that it will be restored because people even if you say you don’t…I mean there’s friends of mine that jokingly say I don’t like people. And it’s like no, everybody needs people and it’s good to see people in person. Even like in a city where I live, in my street, our houses are butted up against each other. Sometimes I’ll go for months maybe not seen somebody but I always say like, we have a dog. So getting a dog out for a walk is a really great way to get to know people in your neighborhood.

Tara: Unless you have a mean dog like me. You have to cross the street.

Rachel: Yeah, that’s not good. Mine’s actually a pretty noisy dog. But that’s a great way to get to know people. We have a park right up behind her house. I’ve gotten to know more people in the neighborhood since we got our dog eight years ago than we did 10 years before that. That’s like a mini-community of people that have dogs that have gotten to know each other.

But I like that a lot because I live in a place that has earthquakes. I just go like, “If we were to have a big earthquake, it’s good to know people that are in the area, right in the neighborhood.” I don’t think that’s going to go away. In fact, my prediction is once we get past COVID, and everybody feels more comfortable gathering, we’re going to see a trend back to people gathering in person in their neighborhoods and doing fun stuff together because we’re all going to be like star for it.

Tara: I love your positivity and optimism. It’s hitting me at a perfect time.

Rachel: Oh, good. I’m glad.

Tara: Thanks. Then I’m going to take you on to another question while you’re on a roll with all this great happy stuff Do you have some advice that you’ve heard or taken and implemented into your life that you’d share with us that’s been helpful or meaningful for you?

Rachel: Yeah. One of my things that I say, and has really happened to me many times is when one door closes, look for new doors to open. I have found people who have that attitude definitely have new doors that open for them. I’ve also had people who I’ve known who do not have that attitude and continually seem like they feel like they have no doors opening for them.

I believe in positive energy. If you have positive energy, no matter how down, you may feel at a certain point in time, as long as you’re open to new opportunities coming your way, that things will come your way. You have to do some work. You can’t just sit back and hope that something’s going to come your way. You got to go for it. I’ve certainly had multiple times in my career where something has, again, seemed to be bad, something amazing has happened. That’s actually kind of how I got into doing community as a profession.

Liam: I love that you said “look for new doors to open.” Your further explanation, it’s not that new doors absolutely will open in easy, relevant ways. But they will open if you look and you consider your options and maintain a positive and open mind about what a quote-unquote, “good door” looks like. I love that. I just love that. Life is what you make of it. We can be handed the short end of the stick a lot. But sometimes the short end can prove we’re useful pry bar for the metaphor is going. I’m not sure.

Rachel: Yeah. It’s been really interesting. I’ve had some people in my life that I consider negative people. I tend to try not to surround myself with that energy. But they’re constantly saying, like, “This didn’t work. This didn’t work. This didn’t work.” And it’s like, “God, maybe you need to have an attitude adjustment.” Because who wants to deal with that—that kind of negative thing?” And also, you guys are small business people, but for people who are wanting to stay and working for companies and are looking for a job, you got to put yourself out there. I said that always. You got to get out there. You can’t just sit back and hope somebody’s going to call you about a job. That might happen but it’s more of an odds play. The more you get out there and talk to people, the better chance you are going to have to get your next job.

It’s the same thing with small businesses. If there’s something you really want to do, go out there and figure out how to do it. Start small. Trying to do grandiose plans from the very beginning. That’s really hard. But if you start small and talk to other people like you guys, you can make it and do it.

Tara: Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. That’s definitely true for small business too. You really have to go out and put yourself out there as well. It takes a lot of a lot of confidence to do. Well, Rachel, we are wrapping up on time here. It’s gone by so fast. I love chatting with you. I’m really grateful that you could join us today and share so much positive energy. Good time for that. Thanks for doing that. Where can people find you online?

Rachel: I’m on Twitter. You can find me on Facebook. You can find me on LinkedIn. I will put out a shout. We have an Open We Stand LinkedIn group, which I’d love everybody to join. It’s a growing group. We have a weekly meetup that we do that’s driven by a guy named Adam Griggs. He just interviews small business people and their stories. So, I’d love for you guys to be a part of that.

Liam: Rachel, it’s been a real pleasure to spend time with you and to get to know you a little bit. Thank you so much for joining us. And as Tara shared, I’ve really enjoyed your positivity and the energy that you’ve brought to this conversation. Thank you very much for that.

Rachel: Yeah, you’re welcome. It’s funny over my career, people always say to me, like, “Oh my God, you’re so positive” and I always joke and say, like, “I come home and beat my husband. You have no idea.” But all of us have challenges. I truly do believe that if you surround yourself with positive people, no matter how hard things are, you’re going to be okay. Let’s just get past 2020 and then just move on.

Tara: Be hopeful.

Rachel: Yeah, for sure.

Tara: All right. Thanks, Rachel. Thanks again. Bye-bye.

Rachel: Thanks, you guys. Have a good rest of the day. Take care.

Liam: Bye.

Tara: Bye.

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

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

Over the course of seven years, Hans Skillrud built a 12-person web design agency in downtown Chicago and then sold it in early 2019, to focus his attention on his new start up, Termageddon. Termageddon is an auto-updating privacy policy generator.

Twitter | @twitter.com/deepspacehans

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 140.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Hans Skillrud. Over the course of seven years, Hans built a 12-person web design agency in downtown Chicago and then sold it in early 2019 to focus his attention on his new start up Termageddon. Termageddon is an auto updating privacy policy generator. Hans, Welcome.

Hans: Thanks for having me.

Tara: Hey glad to see you here today virtually Hans. Thanks so much for joining us. I would love for you to share more of your story here. Tell us more about yourself.

Hans: Absolutely. So, I like starting, I have to pick a divide somewhere. So, I am going to start it when I found WordPress. I should date myself. Pre WordPress and post WordPress because that’s really been a big determiner of my career.

Tara: Yeah. We all have that demarcation point, I think. You can start wherever you want though. If you want to go back further, that’s fine too.

Hans: Well maybe a good example is how I got to WordPress, you know?

Tara: Sure.

Hans: I was one of the first employees of Groupon. Groupon was a hot, young company that was seemingly helping small businesses get more traffic through their doors. And I drink the Kool-Aid as we would say at Groupon. I very much believed in the model of discounting a company 50% off or more, for one day only and bringing people together to try out a place. Over the years though, that company went public and I think their priorities changed and I shared my concerns with management. They disagreed, so I quit. I was managing a sales team of about 150 people and I decided I don’t like their business model anymore and someone, a small business owner is passionate about what they do within their doors, but they aren’t necessarily passionate about bringing that information online. That was what Groupon was taking advantage of in my opinion. So, what I set off to do was to help small business owners, share what they do best online. I think that message, that was the fuel to my midnight fire, midnight oil? I’m always so bad with those things. It was the fuel to my fire to help the small business owner out. Over the course of seven years I found WordPress. I started building WordPress websites, helping small business owners with their exposure online and the company was successful. I built it up to a 12-person team in downtown Chicago. I happened to be dating a privacy attorney at the time and I told her how I used to copy and paste privacy policies over dinner and her jaw dropped. She was like what you doing? I’m like that’s what everyone does. She’s like that’s not what you do anymore, not when we’re dating. Through a few discussions, we came up with the business model for Termageddon. I now have sold my agency and focus all of my time with Donata on. Termageddon is a privacy policy generator. What’s cool about our tech is that you copy and paste an embed code from Termageddon onto the website. That’s what allows us to push updates to the policies when the laws change. We give web agencies a free set of our policies in the hopes that they like our product enough to want to offer Termageddon to their clients. They can resell it or use our affiliate programs, whatever they wish. But what we’re trying to teach the web industry is something I failed at multiple times, which is, the era of copying and pasting privacy policies is over people. Like we have to accept the future. What is about to happen especially in America with privacy laws. So that’s where my focus is now. I’m married to Donata and you guys are the first people say that publicly to, which is really cool.

Tara: Yay!

Hans: Yeah. We work from home now and we run Termageddon together and the rest is history.

Tara: Great. Great story. There’s a lot there to unpack and talk about. So, I am going to go back to the beginning part because I’m curious about Groupon as somebody who used it and hasn’t really seen much of it. It’s sounds like, and I don’t know when that was, that Groupon became a thing, but was that before small businesses had websites? Is that what you’re saying?

Hans: No. So, websites were definitely a thing.

Tara: Ok.

Hans: It was 2009 when Groupon, which was previously called The Point, which I love that website name, thepoint.com because someone would just say what’s the point? You’re like ah is this some kind of joke? But The Point became Groupon. I surely joined Groupon. But websites were still around. That was 2010 and I was uh, it was a wild ride watching a company go from 100 employees to 30,000 in two years. My career went along with it because of its growth. I was put in a position to manage people which was a wonderful opportunity. I love sales. I love sales. I love sales because I think a lot of people think of sales as bad. I always try to say no, no, no, no, no. People are bad or people are good. It is sales is just a communication channel. So, I only want to do good things with sales. That’s how I trained my sales team. That’s something I really appreciated at Groupon. They gave me the ability to do that for a while. I felt like once the company went public, priorities had changed. Now all of a sudden, we need to be focused on taking additional margins from small business owners. That sounds good and all, but when you’re talking to a small business owner, asking them to discount themselves more than 50%, and then you’re taking more than…well…it’s pubic knowledge… you’re taking more than 50% of the cut revenue raised. I don’t know, something didn’t feel right. So, that’s when I decided it was no longer a fit. At least if you look at the stock market, how Groupon’s performed over the last 10 years, I think I was correct. But who knows?

Tara: Well it’s interesting that you made a change based on sort of an ethical feeling that you had and that you were strong enough or competent enough to do that. Because it sounds like you were doing well there. This was when you were probably quite young, I’m imagining. You said maybe it was your first or second job out of school. So, you know a lot of people would ride that along and wouldn’t really think about what you’re describing. So, I think that’s really admirable and I’m glad to hear it and thanks for sharing that with us.

Hans: Yeah, absolutely. My thought is if you’re going to spend 8 to 10 hours a day of your life toward something, why would you do it towards something that doesn’t make you feel good? Like that is almost half of your life goes to something you’re not proud of. I don’t know if you remember this, but when Groupon first started, it was a 24-hour flash sale and it only went if like a 1000 or more people bought. So, it was special. It was so special because yes, the business was discounting themselves, but it wasn’t permanent. It was like a flash sale and it was meant to be that extra push to having all the people who been saying oh, I’ve been meaning to try that place to finally taking out their card and making a purchase and now committing to coming and trying a place. That’s what I loved about it.

Liam: It was small enough…

Hans: Huh?

Liam: It was small enough that you didn’t have a cupcake shop getting a 100,000 orders.

Hans: That’s exactly correct.

Liam:  How are they ever going to deliver that at three weeks and try to sell on top of that kind of thing?

Hans: The thought is just painful. But there were so many success stories during those first couple of months and years, the first year I would say. And that’s what I loved. That’s what I fell in love with. As Groupon started to turn that one day 24-hour flash sale into one week, two months, six months, ongoing…I was just like this isn’t special to me anymore. That’s when I decided to leave.

Tara: Yeah, interesting.

Liam: So, after you left and started to think about Web design and getting into supporting those smaller businesses in different ways, why WordPress?

Hans: Well, it was a phone call. I was offering social media at the time, social media services. As you all know, the barrier to entry social media marketing, to web design, they are all very low. So, me, being naïve and not really understanding everything I had my low barrier to entry. I had a lot of time on my hands and a lot of work ethic in my heart I guess. And it was a phone call from a guy. I called him. I said hey! Do you need social media services? He was like no, but can you build websites? I am sitting there with my phone against my shoulder to my ear and I am Google searching how do you build websites? I am telling him on the phone of course I can build websites as I’m Google searching how do you build websites? I remember it was…I closed in on I think it was Drupal and WordPress. I just happened to pick WordPress. At the time, it was a 50-50 I could have watched the YouTube video that talked about Drupal. So, I thank my lucky stars that I clicked the WordPress video instead of Drupal. And I was just hooked. I was just hooked. You know? When I was kid, I felt like websites were created by the warlocks or wizards of our times. You know? The magicians of our times. So, it was an extremely liberating feeling inside of me. I felt like I could really provide a service to this world and that was…it was over after that website. I was absolutely hooked from there on out. So, that’s when I used to clock in like 16-hour workdays, happily. I would put in the time because it was so exciting to learn things, like Envato. Remember? Or ThemeForest and stuff? Those were the days.

Tara: Yeah. Well how did that website turn out? It sounds like you totally did the fake it until you make it kind of thing with that guy.

Hans: Yeah. You know, at the time it wasn’t…it wasn’t fake it until you make it in my mentality. It was like I’m going to figure this out.

Tara: Right.

Hans: This guy’s going to get a great service. I think he paid me like $400 dollars. I probably put 400 hours in.

Tara: Yeah.

Hans: You’re right though. It was fake it ‘til you make it. But at the time, it was just I’m not going to stop until this guy has a working website. I had a lot riding on that mentally at least. Actually, the site came out great. I really liked it. It’s a 7-year-old site so I don’t think it’s around anymore. But it was for a bar in Lincoln Park in Chicago. It’s kind or your neighborhood bar and it was very well received. They were very happy with it.

Liam: That was long enough ago in WordPress that you still had to do a fair amount of kicking to the theme to get it to do what you wanted to do, especially if your default position is not to write code or to try to get some code from somewhere and see if the works. It doesn’t have the drag-and-drop and all-powerful things that are around today.

Tara: Yeah.

Hans: Very quickly finding myself using something called Photoshop. I got very acclimated with that platform as well. Yes. Certainly, over the years, there were quite a few things I went through. I had 75 websites get hacked overnight when Heartbleed hit. You remember Heartbleed? It was the revolution slider. They had that vulnerability and that’s when I learned that paying for cheap hosting gets you cheap support. Cheap hosting as well, so that’s when I started to think about, you know, you get what you pay for in life. That’s one of the best lessons you can learn in web development. You get what you pay for.

Liam: That’s a lot of cleanup work too. That’s not the two sites. 75?

Hans: Yeah. 75 websites. I worked 28 straight hours. 28 straight hours fixing it all. But it was extremely liberating too. I had never managed the WordPress database before. I figured that out real quick and I figured out a rhythm. Like how to identify where the hacks are and how to fix it. You know, as stressful as it was, it was also exhilarating. You know having to figure things out and everything is riding on you. You know? I loved it. I loved it. I lost all my hair because of it, but I loved it.

Tara: Well it’s interesting because what you’re describing so far in your trajectory, I’ll describe the way I am seeing it as reactive. Like you’re learning reactively. Somebody says I need this. I mean we all do this. I certainly have done it. That’s how you learn. Something says I need this, and you say I can do it and then you learn how to do it. Now transitioning to what you doing now, it’s the other way around, right? You are actually proactively going after an opportunity that you see and growing this business that you developed with your wife. I love to hear more about it. I have seen on social media about Termageddon but what you described in just in the opening is more than what I knew about it already. So, I’d love to hear little bit more about the process and working as a team with your new wife. So, tell us about that.

Hans: I love would love to. If you wouldn’t mind, I would love to talk about a very important transition while running my agency.

Tara: Yeah.

Hans: It’s what really turned the reactive to proactive; before we jump into Termageddon if that’s ok?

Tara: Yeah. Of course.

Hans: When you say reactive, you’re absolutely right. That’s exactly how I started the agency but the fundamental shift, the fundamental shift in my agency was when I was able to start scaling it. It was when I learned how to say no. When I learned how to say no to prospects and say I’m not doing that because that’s a good fit for what I want to do and I want to offer this world, everything changed. I know I had some staff at a time. When I said no, I’m not building that website or I’m not solving that. I’m not doing another Heartbleed, you’re going to figure it out. That was the moment everything shifted. I started truly running a business in my opinion. We started generating, we created standard operating procedures, we created best practices within our space and what we also did is we got rid of social media. We got rid of email marketing, we got rid of AdWords, we got rid of Facebook ads. We just did web design and hosting and maintenance. It was crazy because in my mind I’m like oh. We are doing so much less. Things are so much worse. The opposite happened. We took on projects we loved. We started charging way more money than we would’ve ever guessed someone would pay for it. And you know, that was really when I realized I’m running a business here and I have to look out for what’s best to run this business. I need to be run a profitable company. The only way I thought I could do it was by closing in, and rather than trying to be good at everything, getting really good at one thing. That was the “aha” moment.

Tara: What was the catalyst for that? Was that like a process in and of itself? Did you have someone advising you?

Hans: I do not have anyone advising…uh…well I had a business partner that helped really unfold what standard operating procedures were and how to develop those. But I would definitely say that in the WordPress community, if you are looking for that, there are so many mastermind groups that talk about this, so many Facebook groups that talk about this. So, what I would recommend is looking to those groups. But for me it was really when…it was when I did not want to do…ok. I got it. It was when I mentally decided 16-hour workdays is not the appropriate way to run a business. That was really when I realized it. Great Hans. You got a work ethic. You take a lot of pride in your work ethic. That’s great and all. You are not helping your staff excel and have them improve themselves. When you take on the little work, because they don’t understand how to do it; when you take on that work, you are preventing them from growing. I don’t know exactly what exact situation it was, but it was when I started to say no. I’m not doing it. I felt like I was going to be a horrible boss by saying I’m not doing that. It actually was sure, there was some scraping of knees and figuring things out, but my staff, they all became far better than me in whatever area they were focused on. My designers, fast forward four or five years, there are still with me. They were just insane. Like with what they were able to do with JavaScript and CSS and my support team was just able to provide such a much better level of support than I was ever able do. So, by saying no, I opened up the opportunity for all my smart, intelligence staff to take it from there.

Liam: That’s a tough bridge to cross isn’t it? Because as the owner you’re the leader. I’ll do it. I won’t ask you to do what I won’t do kind of thing, but I couldn’t agree with you more. Unless you step back and allow others the space to learn and to grow and to fail and to support them in their failure, and not throw them over the edge and see if they can swim. But you know, throw them out into the water with a life vest on kind of thing. That’s really interesting the way that you were able to do that and how that led to an increase in, at least worldly success of your company. It sounds like, you know the kind of psychological and emotional success. You seemed like you were a lot happier once you made that transition from what I’m gathering.

Hans: Very much so. I went from stressed and poor to making money and not stressed.

Liam: Not stressed in the same way, right?

Hans: Certainly not. New levels of stress that’s for sure, but better.

Liam: Yeah. Well stress never goes away, it just changes shape.

Hans: That’s right.

Liam: The ultimate change. Let me ask you about success, Hans, if I can. One of our signature questions is focused on exactly that. How would you define success? Maybe it’s a personal definition, maybe a professional definition, maybe for you it’s a combination of both. What’s your definition of success?

Hans: My definition of success is the moment you realize that you dictate your reality and you control your future. Stoicism has been a very important part of my development as a boy to a man, I would say. Realizing that you can’t control what other people do. You can only control your perceptions of things. That is something I wish all people to experience. I hope people kind of get off social media maybe a little bit more and kind of think a bit more. Maybe they reflect a little bit more and they realize that you are in control your own destiny. No matter where you are, in any situation, you are in control of your destiny. Because it is your perception of your reality that dictates everything.

Tara: Yeah, I love that. I heard that early on in your talking about being a salesperson. I was actually going to say something about that. You can define how you view something. It does not have to be how other people view it, like you are talking about sales being something that people think negatively about, or people say they don’t like to do, and you viewed it in a completely different way. You chose to view it in a positive way, as a growth opportunity. So, I noticed that approach that you have to life early-on. So, it fits right into your definition of success. Thanks for sharing that with us. I appreciate it.

Hans: It reminds me actually right before we started recording. We were talking about the virtual wedding I just had.

Tara: Yeah.

Hans: I think a lot of people would just be upset and mad. Like I don’t get to see my family. Of course, we were upset. We’re sad that we didn’t get to see our family but what we did do is we looked at the pros. We found so many pros and so many wonderful things that came with it. I said this so many times. In life there are pros and cons. Whenever looking at a situation there are pros and cons to everything. Or it’s fact. So, why not just focus on the pros because that’s what you’re your mind is going to focus on. If you have your mind focused on positive things, then you’re going to have a positive light. I would put money on that one.

Tara: Yeah. That’s awesome. Thanks.

Hans: That was hard earned. It was something that like you come by easily. When I say success and how I define it, I’m not saying this is just something where you can turn on Hallway Chats and then all of a sudden enlightened.

Tara: Yeah, darn.

Hans: A little bit more than that.

Tara: Yeah. Do you think that you learned that? Was that something that you grew up with or do you think that you learned that on your own as an adult as you were going through these different phases of your career?

Hans: I learned it on my own for sure. The fact is the web industry is a low barrier to entry business, meaning that there’s a lot of competition that comes in. The next day they’re a web developer. That creates, well probably a whole separate Hallway chats type discussion, but it creates a very competitive environment where people feel like they need to offer low pricing to get business done. And through the struggles of finances and figuring things out, how to build websites, came a lot of reflection and thinking about what I want. Like I always want to take care of the other people, but then I realize I have to take care of myself too. That’s actually a longer-term way to take care of other people. That was kind of the start to it and everything. Then I went vegan too. That was another experience. I never would have saw it coming. I watched a documentary called Cowspiracy and I had my guard down. I thought it was like a UFO adopting cows and some government conspiracy. I thought Cowspiracy was just like a short word for that. So, I had my guard down. I was cooking a pot roast when I watched it. I watched this thing and it just knocked my socks off. I decided to go vegan. I’ve been vegan for four years now.

Tara: Wow.

Hans: This is not a become a vegan agenda by any such stretch of the word. What it was like the first time I realized like, just because I’m fed information doesn’t mean I have to think that way. I can think things differently than what the main stream thinks and there’s a lot of liberation that comes in to when you start doing things that are maybe a little bit against the grain. Or maybe you do it because inside your heart you feel a way. And you want to practice that. I would say that was another part of me kind of coming to the conclusions that I’ve come to.

Liam: An increase sense of awareness.

Hans: I would say that’s a very good description. If fact maybe another definition of success would be the ability to be in the present as much as possible.

Liam: Yeah. That’s cool. Thank you. I want to go back to one of the questions that Tara asked, and you didn’t answer. Because like Tara, I have heard of your business. I’ve heard of what you’re doing over there at Termageddon. It’s on my radar of things that…oh! I should check that out. Then then life. Then life again. Then COVID 19 in all the world. This isn’t a sales pitch or a sales podcast by any means but tell us about the product. What does it work? What’s in it for folks and how do you support them?

Hans: Yeah. So, I think before talking about a solution you always have to talk about the problem. I feel like there’s a lot of education that needs to occur in our industry. Just for American small businesses, very few people realize that there are privacy bills out there in America that will enable citizens to sue businesses for having as little as a contact form on their website. New York, for example, has this bill. New York is a very big state. Once New York passes a bill, New Yorkers will be able to sue businesses of any size and any location for having as little as a contact form on their website, without the proper disclosures, compliant with New York privacy law. This needs to be something that is shared with people and I think it all starts with a web agency. Because a web agency, they are much more in tune to tech then their end client who hired you to help with the tech. So, we all know that privacy is important. Be we kind of want to avoid it and I will admit that I tried to avoid it like the plague for very long time. But the reality is that five years from now, we’re going to be looking back at these times and saying to ourselves remember when people use to just collect your information, your name and email on forms and they wouldn’t say what they do with it? That will come. Just like an SSL certificate. Five years ago, an SSL was kind of a nice thing to have. It’s required for Ecommerce. Beyond that, it’s like a nice thing to have. Nowadays, when you go to website that’s not secure, you’re weirded out. At least I am. I’m like I don’t feel safe on this website. I think the same thing is going to happen with privacy. We have 23 privacy bills in America; each on a state-by-state basis. Each one of these will give citizens of that state certain rights. Those citizens can either complain and a business could be fined, or they can just sue the business. What needs to be understood is that these state privacy laws protect the citizens. They don’t care where the citizen is going to visit a website. So, I’m in Chicago. I don’t care…when I Google search, I could care less about where the website business operator is located. I just go to Google. I do my search and I find my search results. Here in lies the issue. It’s that if you’re a small business and you collect the personal information of people from across state lines, you not only need to comply with your state privacy laws. You need to comply with any privacy law from wherever you’re getting inquiries from. How the heck is a small business owner going to afford to have a privacy attorney monitor privacy laws and then update your privacy policies when the laws change? It will be astronomical. There are 23 privacy bills right now in America. There are three states that already have privacy laws. So, that’s why we created Termageddon. We’re $99 a year. What it is, it’s a privacy policy solution. We call it a solution because you not only can generate a privacy policy quickly through our platform but instead of copying and pasting a privacy policy onto your page, you copy and paste our embed code onto your privacy policy page. That’s what allows us at Termageddon to push updates to it when the laws change. So, our model is very simple. You pay $99 a year, it becomes our job to monitor privacy laws, notify you when new laws have gone into effect or existing laws have been amended and then push updates to your privacy policies when these laws change. Helping you stay compliant and by up-to-date when new laws go into effect. So, that’s the offering. But how do we get to the end business? I will bet just about anything there’s no small business out there, especially in America, that probably know privacy policies, they may even think ok. Maybe I should have one. But they have no idea what’s about to happen. They have no idea. Like in the privacy community, because obviously, we are very involved with privacy attorneys in the privacy community, like back when we used to have beers together, we were sitting there being like what is happening in America? It is about to get nuts. So, what we’re trying to do is trying to educate the web industry. Because that’s the industry I know. That’s the industry I love. I want to help web agencies become aware of these privacy laws and even have a solution to help their clients protect themselves. And that’s why at Termageddon, our business model, is that we give web agencies a free set of our policies. Truly free. Free forever in the hopes that they use it for their own website and also in the hopes that you love it because if you do, we offer the ability for them to resell our Termageddon licenses. They can buy licenses at wholesale rates, buy them one at a time, just each time you have a new client you can buy another wholesale license, invoice your client for a setup fee in the thing, and the license fee. Then we have an affiliate program where we will personally walk your client through the setup process. The client pays us directly and then we pay you a recurring commission for the live time of each referral. So, I’ve hit on the pain points, at least of what I had as an agency owner, which is I need more recurring revenues. I need to show more value to my clients on a recurring basis. And it hits on the client level which is I don’t want to pay an attorney 50,000 a year to my privacy laws when my website is not really doing that intensive data collection. I just have a contact form or I just have Google analytics. That’s the problem and solution.

Tara: That’s really smart. It is something that, I think WordPress now, a new install comes with a blank privacy policy page doesn’t it? Or some kind of privacy policy built into it. It’s something that clients certainly ask about. I love your marketing solution of going to agencies where you can then reach a lot of small businesses who otherwise aren’t in the loop. Here’s a tricky question.

Hans: Go ahead.

Tara: So, what kind of guarantee do you offer? Like what…because I put a privacy policy on a client’s page. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know whenever something happens, I can’t promise…just like I can’t promise they’re not going to get sued for an ADA compliance issue or something like that. We don’t make those promises. Very few agencies do. Some are ADA experts and they charge a lot of money to do that. But that similarly I am just wondering with your wife is the lawyer. So, how do you protect yourself in this case as well?

Hans: Absolutely. It’s a great question. I’ll go back to the fact that WordPress offers a privacy policy by default. It’s a wonderful step towards raising awareness that privacy policies are important. Unfortunately, the template is not compliant with any single privacy law. And if you asked the contributors who helped build that privacy policy feature of WordPress, they’ll be the first ones to say. No. These are not compliant. They’re intended to raise awareness of what’s happening. That’s why I think the WordPress adding a default privacy policy, it’s beautiful in the sense that it added awareness, it’s terrifying that I think a lot of people are using it and thinking their life is now solved. Their problem is now solved. That’s what concerns me. So, just like in life, pros and cons. So, when it comes to our side and guaranteeing, just like how you don’t guarantee ADA compliance, we cannot guarantee that you won’t get sued. Because we’re in America and obviously Termageddon services, UK and Canada as well, but we can’t…just like an attorney…we can’t guarantee you won’t get sued. Termageddon can’t guarantee you won’t get sued. But, what I would say is like looking at our set up, we have the vice chair of the American Bar Association who runs the American Bar Association’s E-privacy committee    that is in charge of ensuring that our policies are top-notch. We obviously use a lot of software and speaking with a lot of privacy attorneys on best practices, and our entire business model is focused on making sure no one gets in trouble. So, I would say that is hopefully good enough motivation to say that we try to provide the most comprehensive policies in the world. Now, the reason why we can’t offer a guarantee is because when we ask this question do you sell the personal information you collect? You could say yes, and we would be none the wiser. We can’t control what you actually do with the information your collect. So, if you say no, I don’t sell information, but you do and then you get sued, that’s why we have our disclaimer saying you know we’re not a legal service provider. We don’t know if you’re lying when you fill out this questionnaire. Obviously, what we do is we try to make the questionnaire as understandable as possible so that you can add the appropriate disclosures which are required by law.

Liam: Hans? I feel like we could go on like this for hours and hours and hours.

Hans:  I don’t know, it’s privacy policies. It’s pretty boring stuff.

Liam: (laughs) Tara’s enthralled. Let me slide in with one last question if I can. It’s really one another on of our signature ones, and it’s about advice. What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given, received, come across, read and successfully implemented in your life?

Hans: You dictate your reality. And I know that this is same answer as what you define as success, but is it is been the hallmark to my life. It has transformed my perception of how to look at things and it is by far the most influential in my life. I can put this to an example. I realize that one day I hope to have kids. I was thinking about this when I met Donata because I fell in love with her from the moment I met her. I started thinking about like long term what I want to do. When I had to come to decide do I want to sell my agency? It became a lot easier of a decision to make. It was still difficult, but it was a lot easier of a decision to make because I thought my future…I see my reality being able to raise children in my own house running a company with my wife. When we’re together and we can create an environment that nurtures our children far better than me working 12-hour days in downtown Chicago and then moving to a tiny apartment. So, that’s where I was like, you know what? I see my reality being this and that’s how I dictated it.

Liam: Yeah. I love that! That’s fantastic. What a way to take us out. Over to you Tara.

Tara: Yeah. That’s great. You’re forward thinking. You’re no longer reactive.

Hans: No longer reactive.

Tara: Completely flipped. I love seeing that. It’s great. Thank you so much for sharing all this. I could like…I just put in Slack to Liam I am engrossed. You have to ask the question. It’s been great chatting with you. I am sorry that we’re out of time. Where can people find online?

Hans: DeepSpaceHans on Twitter. My handle is @DeepSpaceHans. I hang out on Twitter when I am on social media, but you can always go to Termageddon and fill out a form submission. I am happy to talk if you haven’t noticed. So, if ever want to chat, I would love to chat.

Tara: Sounds great. Thanks so much.

Hans: Absolutely. Thank you both.

Liam and Tara: Bye for now.

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

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

Chris spent the first 20 years of her career working as an agency and freelance designer. Five years ago, she took a hard left into project management. Today she’s a hybrid project manager and designer at Reaktiv, a WordPress VIP partner.

Twitter | @ci_chrisford

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 139.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we are joined by Chris Ford. Chris spent the first 20 years of her career working as an agency and freelance designer. 5 years ago, she took a hard left into project management. Today she’s a hybrid project manager and designer at Reaktiv, a WordPress VIP partner. Hello – welcome!

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Chris Ford. Chris spent the first 20 years of her career working as an agency and freelance designer. Five years ago, she took a hard left into project management. Today, she’s a hybrid project manager and designer at Reaktiv, a WordPress VIP partner. Hi, Chris. I’m so glad you’re here. Welcome.

Chris: Thanks for having me. I’m really glad to be here, too. I have missed interactions with the WordPress community.

Liam: I think that’s fair to say that we all have. Chris, what a pleasure to meet you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Chris: My name is Chris Ford. I started working on the web in 1996 when I graduated from design school. I was supposed to be a T-shirt designer at a skateboard company and then their web guy quit and suddenly I was the new web person on staff. Fortunately, there were like five tags, so there wasn’t a whole lot to learn at the moment. We’re very excited when animated GIFs and background images came out for a little bit of context.

I did that at agencies in every industry from like skateboarding to scrapbooking, at agencies, and as a freelancer. Then five years ago, like I said, I took a really hard left into project management because I was interested in more of the business end of things. Like how do you run a profitable project, how do you managed timelines, how do you manage budgets, which is something I’ve always struggled with as a freelancer.

Now I have just recently, within the last couple of months, started dipping my toe back into the design pond, relearning everything because it’s been five years, which means nothing is the same and everything has changed. I started in WordPress. I don’t even know how long ago but it was before StudioPress was StudioPress. I had been working as a professional scrapbooker, which yes, is an actual job.

The craft industry is like the tech industry. There are bubbles in different crafts, and then those bubbles burst. So when the scrapbooking bubble burst, I knew a bunch of people with photography skills who needed websites. So I got me a copy of the Kubrick theme and added flash headers with navigation to them and started my WordPress journey.

Tara: Wow. I have so many things I want to ask you about.

Liam: I do too. I totally do. Can you start on scrapbooking, please?

Tara: I know. Okay.

Liam: Please. Please.

Tara: Yes. I did a little scrapbooking, but not professionally. Now with digital photos, whoever…I mean, do people still do it? I mean, I assume people still do but it seems like a something that it’s not a thing anymore because nobody prints out their photos.

Chris: Actually, I got into it because I started as a print designer and I loved paper. And I was working it this miserable job where every day I would go in and recreate rainbird sprinkler timers into flash. Like my whole job was to show you how the dial spins and the numbers flash and then you push this button. It was miserable and horrible. There was a scrapbooking store down the street so I would go and buy papers and things. Usually, I just hoard crafting supplies because they’re pretty but I actually used fees. And digital scrapbooking was just taking off. And that’s kind of how I got noticed because I do a lot of retouching and Photoshop was my thing.

So I got to know enough people who knew that about me that when digital scrapbooking started getting more popular, I got more people calling me saying, “Hey, we need someone to write an article.” I was the art director for Digital Scrapbooking Magazine.

Tara: Wait a second. Because I think scrapbooking and I think paper. So what is digital scrapbooking?

Chris: It was basically you would go in and it was when skeuomorphic design was really big. So I could make things look realistic. So you would go in and make something that looks like a ribbon and put it on a page or design your own patterned backgrounds that look like paper. I would do a lot where I would design my own stuff and then print it out on a printer and make kind of hybrid pages with it.

Tara: So the end product is still paper?

Chris: It was super fun.

Tara: Yeah. Oh, that’s really fun. No wonder you did it professionally. That sounds amazing.

Chris: I’d print them out and… Yeah, it was super fun. I had a Michaels in my closet. People would just send me stuff because you would get published in magazines. It was a really, really fun three years until the money ran out, where I basically just got paid to paint things.

I don’t know if anyone knows who Claudine Hellmuth is, but she’s this really amazing collage artist who does acrylic image transfers and packing tape transfers. It was you basically got paid to make crafts, which was the coolest thing in the world. But I had bills to pay so I couldn’t…It was a really competitive thing. And a lot of the people who were involved in it, it was their second job. Their husband was working, they weren’t really in it for the money. And I’m like, “Dude, this is my full-time job. I need to get paid, and I need to get paid on time. So that became a little problematic. So that’s why I transitioned out of it. But yeah, it was one of the funnest things I ever got to do. It was really cool.

I was also the first openly gay, well-known scrapbooker. It was during this really weird time right before they legalized marriage in California, and had just legalized it in Canada. It was maybe a year before that, that I got really into scrapbooking. And the very first layout I ever submitted to a publication was accepted, and I got a call back a week later that the publisher decided they couldn’t publish it, because it would cause a lot of controversy. My very last layout ever published was of my wife and I getting married at the top of Whistler Mountain in the wedding issue with every other wedding that was in there. So it seemed like a good time to kind of be like, “Okay, first chapter last chapter. Peace out.”

Tara: That’s an amazing story.

Liam: Yeah. I feel like we could spend all the time on that alone. How cool that you start effectively being rejected for who you are? Your skills and your talent was, “Yeah, you’re great. We want you.” But when they know who you are, they say no. And then three years, I know that’s a long time to wade through what you had to wade through. But at some measure, that’s a pretty quick turnaround for an industry. I don’t want to make light of what you journey through. I certainly don’t know what you journey through. But that’s pretty impressive. You’re quite the trailblazer I’m learning in our little show here, Chris. Thank you for sharing that story. That’s amazing.

Tara: Yeah.

Chris: Honestly, it’s one of my career highs. That to me was a definition of a huge career success was just being really visible someplace where it was really not a comfortable place to be and someplace where you could literally lose employment for being out. There was one website that was like the gossip website because there’s never been as much drama in a workplace as there was in scrapbooking. Someone made a website about how I wasn’t really a lesbian, how I was secretly a trans man.

And I was like, “Well, a. what difference does it make? And b. yeah, because it would be so much easier to break in as that than the other.” Like that was really my shortcut to scrapbooking success. And it was really just such a ridiculous…It was definitely the job that made me realize I’m never going to hide who I am to make other people feel comfortable. I’m never going to not speak my mind even if it puts my job in jeopardy. That was the point where I was like, “I am who I am and I’m not going to pretend I’m going to be someone I’m not to reach whatever financial success or title success.” To me, it just wasn’t worth it. So that was kind of one of those moments where you really figure out what matters to you and what doesn’t.

Tara: Yeah, and to stick with it and to stay in that community, in that industry when you’re being treated really horribly. I probably may have a stereotype of what you think about scrapbooking, and I would imagine it’s mostly women. So to see that treatment coming at you from other women, I’m sure especially that might have been just salt in the wound too.

Chris: I fell in with a group of misfits at the very beginning. We called ourselves the unscrappables because we were sort of the punk rock. Like we didn’t do what everyone else did. So that was kind of cool too. They’re the misfits all found each other. Like we had our little Island of Misfit scrapbookers. So people who had your back even though the larger community might not, same kind of thing. It’s like we talk about the WordPress community and every weird niche thing I’ve been a part of has that like little community with their hierarchies and they’re weird. But yeah, we were the fringe people.

Tara: You were scrappy.

Chris: Exactly.

Tara: Sorry.

Chris: That’s like a tough dad joke in the show notes.

Liam: I just want to go back one more time and kind of touch on what you shared around “I’m always going to be who I am. I’m always going to speak my mind. I’m not going to hide.” That’s brave and it’s healthy. And this is not the show or the place, and certainly, you and I don’t know you well enough for me to ask us and expect a detailed the answer. But I guess I’m mostly sharing that comes at a cost. That comes at a real cost. Career, I know, it’s not everything. So most of the guests on our show is career is not everything. But a well-paying career makes a lot of other life choices much, much easier. I just want to commend you on that and say that that’s really cool, and really impressive and very hard to do frankly when the rubber hits the road.

It’s one thing to say, “I’m going to stand up and fight,” and then you go look at the rent or the mortgage, or whatever the bill is and say, “Do I have to fight it this month?” So thank you. Thank you.

Chris: That character is what you do when no one’s looking? Right. I mean, I remember being super, super broke. Like no work coming in. I was talking to this company, and someone made a super homophobic remark at the beginning of the meeting and I was just like, “I just have to let you know that I’m gay and I won’t be able to work with you.” And it was really hard to do because it’s like I got bills that are stacking up but you make that one compromise and then you make another compromise and…

Tara: Where does that courage come from? Where do you think that…? I think that’s courageous to do that. It takes a lot of confidence or strength or something, courage, whatever. I don’t think I have it. That’s why I’m asking where does it come from? That’s really admirable.

Chris: Probably me having a temper.

Tara: Okay.

Chris: I do. I have a really hot temper. And as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better at controlling it. But a lot of that is just kind of my flight or fight response being like, “Oh, heck no. No.” And it comes out of my mouth before I can actually think about it. So maybe it’s more reckless than courage. One of these days it’s going to wind me up on YouTube as a meme.

Tara: Wow.

Liam: I do want to ask you about your pivot to project management because that was really interesting to me. That, as I understood it, you noticed a skill set shortcoming in or understanding in how do you make it all work and get paid and get paid what you think you’re going to get paid and equate to the hours? And then you said, “Okay, that’s what I’m going to do.” Talk us through that. Because I would expect that you had to develop some level of skill and then have somebody hire you to do that job. What did that look like for you?

Chris: So I was freelancing and I got a call from Chris Lema and the first words out of his mouth were: “I have a question for you. Please don’t hang up on me.” Which is always a good way to get someone to not hang up on you, because that’s an intriguing call. He said that we’ve done some coaching and we kind of talked a lot about like branding and things like that.” He basically asked me to come on as a project manager at Crowd Favorite. I was kind of in a space where with my freelance design, I just felt like I had sort of reached the limits of what I could do, I was a little bit burned out, there was like a certain ceiling on projects. I was being forced to design things that I knew how to build and not design things that I knew would do what I wanted them to do. So I was really open to the idea.

Also since I’ve been in design school, like my dream job has been to be a creative director somewhere. And not like the kind of creative director who likes to show off what a great designer they are, of which there are a multitude, but the kind of creative director who works with younger designers and kind of mentors them and helps their career. One of the things I’ve noticed pretty consistently working on design projects, even at agencies was that design projects tend to not be super profitable. It’s just something I’ve noticed my entire life. Timelines go, budgets go.

And I know me as a freelancer, I wouldn’t be able to let things go to make money because there was a certain level of pride I took in my work. So what I needed to learn to do was pick up the skills that would eventually let me be able to help run design projects that made money and got done on time and didn’t drive the designer crazy, and were still super high quality. You know, how do you coordinate a team? The cool sideline I found was that being a project manager is a lot about designing a user experience, both internal processes for your team, and the user experience for the client. Everything from onboarding to offboarding. So it just wound up being a really good fit. I’ve talked about like design and project management merging in terms of WordCamp talks. So if you’re interested in more of those, I will blab on endlessly on WordPress TV.<

Chris: I think that eventually, there are a lot of good designers out there. There are fewer good design managers. I think it requires a different skillset to be a badass design leader and manager than it does being a badass designer. One is much more about people who aren’t you. Like you’re trying to balance client needs and the needs of the people on your team. To me, those are the problems that are really interesting to solve.

I still love design challenges. But one thing I’ve discovered is every problem I’ve had as a project manager has been some kind of communication problem. So figuring out. Like we talked about design, right? It’s got visual language, and it’s all about communication. There’s just a lot of really good lessons. That was actually a talk I pitched to WordCamp US because I knew it was coming. It was how being a project manager has made me a better designer. Because it’s had such a huge impact on both sides, like a willingness to…what did I call it the other day.

I told my wife, I was really proud of myself because there was this SVG animation thing I wanted to do and the developer and I were having a really hard time getting it to work the way I wanted. So I know what it was. I told her, “I sacrificed the integrity of my design so that it didn’t affect the timeline and budget today.” And I was super proud. I wanted one of those I Adulted! stickers. So I sacrifice the integrity of my design.

Tara: Yeah, you learn a lot when you’re the communication between the client and the designer. You learn a lot. You see things differently too when you’re so close to the design. Sometimes you don’t see that all the rest of the picture. So that’s really interesting.

Chris, I’m going to ask you a question we asked everyone. We’ve talked, gosh, I could just keep going down either of these two things that we’ve talked about. It’s so interesting. It speaks a lot to your background and your personality and character and skills. And how does all that tie together? I want to ask you about success, and how you define success, what that means to you, and how you apply that to your life, your plans, goals.

Tara: I definitely think not so much about financial success as financial stability. It’s easy to say money isn’t everything when you have some. I’ve been poor. So just like being comfortable without having to constantly live paycheck to paycheck and worry about making sure you’re going to make the rent. To me, knowing I can retire, I really don’t need a lot, but having that taken care of is definitely a part of it. Let’s be real.

But to me, the main thing is there’s this designer Massimo Vignelli, and he and his wife ran a design studio together for years called Vignelli Associates. He did the original American Airlines logo. He did the New York transit subway map. He passed away when he was 83 years old. And was like really joyfully doing what he loved to do right up until he passed away. To me, when I think about success, I’m like, “Whatever it is I am doing at that time in my life, I want to do it with the same joy that he did his stuff.”

There’s this great documentary called Design is One. I don’t think it’s on Netflix anymore. But he’s just such a like…you watch him and everything about him is just so happy and content, and you know that he’s doing exactly what he was put on this earth to do. I mean, my purpose changes every five years, I think. So you just kind of stay flexible. And whatever you’re doing at that time, I want to be doing it as joyfully as possible.

Liam: Again, I keep feeling like as I’m saying I don’t know you that well, but on what you’ve shared with us, that strikes me as probably something that you’ve held inside you for a while, believed for a while, you talked about scrapping and designing websites and doing t-shirts designs. There’s a string of creativity and a string of design through it all. But that is not a straight line and it’s doing a lot of different types of things in a very wide creative sector. It sounds like that definition of success is probably one that you’ve developed over a period of time and have lived for a number of years as well. This is not a recent revelation or inner finding for yourself.

Chris: When I watched the documentary years ago, that’s kind of where I had that realization, where it was just, I want to be that guy. At the end of my life, I want to look back and say I learned things up until the end, I was willing to be flexible up until the end, I was just willing to take everything that life had to offer. I want to slide into home base at the end dirty and beat up and having experienced all kinds of things. I’m a huge Brene Brown fan. One of her things is about if you’re going to be vulnerable, if you’re going to live a wholehearted life, you are going to get kicked into the dirt. You just have to keep standing up. So that’s how my whole life has gone, where it’s like, “Okay, this has gone horribly wrong. How do we get out of this?”

Liam: You’re smiling as you tell that story. I love it.

Chris: Well, if you don’t, you’re crying.

Liam: Yeah, yeah. Best not to do that on podcast, too. Right? We’ve all been there. We’ve all been there. Let me ask you one of our other questions if I can. It’s around advice. We’re coming up. We got a few minutes left here. You’ve shared such valuable information and stories and things about yourself that I’m really interested in your answer to this next question. The question is, what’s the best advice that you’ve been given, or you’ve received, or you heard in a song, or you read in a book, and successfully implemented in your life?

Chris: I think the best work advice I ever got was reading or someone telling me at one time nobody likes to feel stupid. Because I was not the nicest person in the world at 25. I thought snarky was a personality trait. That was a big lesson for me to learn is like you don’t like feeling stupid. Nobody likes to feel stupid. Give people the benefit of the doubt. That’s just one that whenever I think about advice comes to the forefront because it helped me change how I interact with people so much. And don’t get me wrong. The snarky 25-year-old Chris will still occasionally slither out. But for the most part, I try to remember that no one likes to feel dumb It’s a horrible place to be, and really it ends any progress on solving a problem as soon as you get arrogant and start treating someone as less than you are.

For just general life advice, one of the things I started doing four years ago is opening up my bubble and following more people who aren’t like me on Twitter. Like seeking out black people, or trans people, or queer people, or different perspectives so that you can start understanding other people. We talk a lot about diversity and inclusion. For me, that’s just about understanding where other people are coming from. Trying to understand it as much as I can without having very lived experience. That’s made a huge impact in my life. Plus, I have been exposed to all kinds of awesome new music, and awesome new books that I never would have known about if I hadn’t opened up from the same people I always follow.

Tara: Both of those things come from a place of kindness. I think there’s a woeful lack of it these days. It’s really helpful to hear. I think the idea of people don’t like to feel stupid comes from just being kind. But it gives it a spin that is really interesting to me, because I think we can come across as maybe not intending to make people feel stupid, but just coming across that way. So being aware of that is something I’m going to take out of this conversation because I think I’m guilty of that a lot. Something that you’re not intending to do, but you certainly can make people feel that way if you step back and look back at it. So that’s really helpful. Thanks for sharing that.

Liam: I think that’s especially true in work environments or in design. As a senior designer, as an art director, the question is always, is it wrong? Or is it just different? Because that designer is bringing his or her, their experience. There’s definitely wrong design. But there’s a lot of right design. And that’s one thing I always struggle with is, is what I’m looking at and not liking wrong, or is it just stylistically something that I wouldn’t go with? That’s learning how to say that in a way that doesn’t attack the integrity and intelligence and creativity of the creator. It takes a little bit to figure out how to do that.

Chris: I was really lucky I went to community college for a certificate in design. The woman who ran the program, Candice Lopez is just amazing. She built the design program up. One of the graduates was the 2012 Obama design director. It was just this scrappy design department. The best thing I ever learned from her if she could look at any design from any student, and find one nice thing to say about it, whether it was their use of type, for their use of color, or their choice of photography, or even just how neatly everything was presented. Like there was always one nice thing.

Because there were times when you’d be looking at something up on the chalkboard and just be like, I don’t know how she’s going to do it this time.” And she always did. I really like that’s one of the top five things I remember from design school is just during a crit, if you can lead off with the nice thing before you have to get into the things that don’t work as well, it makes a huge difference.

Tara: That’s great. What a great role model to head into your career to have somebody treat you that way. That’s great. You gave her a shout out. And use the word scrappy. So we’re back where we started. We’re out of time.

Liam: That’s all we’ve got time for on Hallway scrapbooking. Thanks. Chris, before we say goodbye to you, please share where folks can find you online?

Chris: I actually have let my old website lapse. So you get a 404 error because it’s not even hosted anywhere because I’ve had a steady job for almost four years. I am on Twitter, @ci_chrisford. Although it is primarily political, ranting and music commentary, and occasional design and WordPress stuff in there. If you’re feeling adventurous, you can check me out there and you’ll either love me or hate me within 30 seconds.

Tara: Well, I think I follow you and I love you. I’m glad you’re here. Thanks again for joining us, Chris.

Liam: Thanks.

Chris: Thank you so much for having me. This was super fun.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Bye, Chris. It was our pleasure.

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.

Winstina is an Assistant Regional Planner for the Maryland Department of Transportation. She created her first WordPress blog for a Geographic Information Systems assignment, and followed it soon after with one on community development and suburban planning. She has presented at WordCamp NYC, WordCamp US, and WordCamp Austin. A WordPress Meetup co-organizer, Winstina led WordCamp NYC 2018.

Photo credit: Photo of Winstina by Tim Parker at the Open film premier in 2019 at WCUS.

Twitter | @planningwrite

HeroPress | We Are the Same

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 138.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by when Winstina Hughes. Winstina is an assistant regional planner for the Maryland Department of Transportation. She created her first WordPress blog for a geographic information systems assignment and followed it soon after with one on community development and suburban planning. She has presented at WordCamp New York City, WordCamp US, and WordCamp Austin. A WordPress meetup co-organizer, Winstina led WordCamp New York in 2018. Welcome, Winstina. We’re so glad you’re here.

Winstina: Thanks for having me, Tara. Thanks for having me, Liam. I’m excited to join you.

Liam: We’re so excited to spend some time with you, Winstina. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Winstina: Okay, I can tell you a bit more about myself. I grew up in northern Jersey in south Orange Maplewood. My family immigrated from Sierra Leone, West Africa, and somehow fate brought me back to Maryland where we settled initially. So I am living and working in Baltimore.

Liam: That’s fantastic. There’s a lot there that we could delve into. But let me just talk a little bit about growing up there since you started with it. How old were you moved from Sierra Leone? Do you remember your country of birth, or were you young enough to not have any memory?

Winstina: I have memories of playing in our backyard. Like the lush greenness of it, the red dirt. Just kind of outside where we lived. I remember just how right it was. I remember listening to my dad calling to see how I was. Just the memory of knowing that my parents were with me, and just really happy to hear his voice.

When we moved here, this is really where I grew up. Those memories are of like a child. When we moved here, that’s when things really start forming. That’s when I started thinking about school. As a kid, I think, when youngest, four or five, things are just kind of like impressions. But then we hit an age where we start understanding what’s around us and we start having a sense of the places where we’re going and the people that we’re spending time with. When we immigrated here, that was the time where things really started forming for me as a child and being aware of the spaces I was in.

I grew up here and every part of who I am is really the experience of being raised here in the states and being raised in South Orange Maplewood.

Tara: Have you been back to Sierra Leone?

Winstina: I haven’t been back. I’m one of those children that hasn’t traveled back since I first came.

Tara: Do you have family there still though?

Winstina: I do. I do have aunts and uncles and I have cousins that are from back home. I have on some cousins that have traveled here and they’ve gone back. But I’ve lived here since we came and it’s been a continuous experience.

Tara: Thank you for sharing your story of coming to this country and growing up here. Tell us a little bit about your experience. I think you talked, before we started recording, about going to school, to grad school. Can you tell us a little bit about your education background and how WordPress fits into that picture?

Winstina: Yes. You mentioned that I’m an assistant regional planner and I went to college for city planning. I went to grad school as well for city and regional planning. It’s really a way of looking at the world, a way of looking and identifying spaces and areas that you can contribute to and you can improve. That’s what I really love about what I studied.

I really enjoy the work that I do currently. I work for MDOT, and works specifically with state highway. We see the tangible results of the projects that we work on. Like when we go to meetings, the individuals that we speak with, there’s a realness to it as opposed to if I were in an office. We spend a fair amount of time in the office, but it’s not like a policy document I’m writing. It’s like I can go and see where I work is and I can listen to understand what the needs are of those who live in the communities that we go to. That’s really what’s always been exciting for me as a planner.

I did some community organizing work as well. Not only that, I worked for the nonprofit in DC as an intern, and I had a chance to look at Housing Trust Fund. I had the chance to look at how they went about organizing around housing issues and even organizing around immigration issues. It’s so exciting to work in a field that touches on all those different areas. It’s that fluidness of the field, working in infrastructure or working with community issues, or working on economic development that led me to writing about what I learned in school. And then writing about it is what really got me more involved within the WordPress community.

First, that JS blog that I wrote in college. Then when I graduated, I started writing a blog on community development for Maplewood. Just in the process of it, all the positive experiences moved me from just blogging on wordpress.com to building my own sites. There’s so much that evolved from that as well, from writing to becoming a meetup organizer and a WordCamp speaker. Just all those opportunities came from just blogging and sharing my thoughts about an area that I’m so passionate about, that I am so fortunate to work in.

Liam: What a lovely story. I mean, you shared so much and I have thousands of questions, but we don’t have days to talk. Thank you for that. I love when you shared that it started with a blog post or a blog and it just went from there and writing about things that you’re very passionate about. And I can tell from your tone of voice, that community involvement, community development, these things really do matter to you.

I would love to know a little bit more about what assistant regional manager for…I’m sorry, planner. I’m sorry I misspoke. Planner does. Because I’m thinking you’re talking about highways. But there’s a lot of roads that a State Department Transportation Agency has input over and control over. And it’s thinking about people’s lives and not just how much is this going to cost to build this new highway or to upgrade the highway. Can you spend just a little bit of time and talk to us about what you actually do, and the kind of day to day, week to week type of thing?

Winstina: On a day to day, what I do is…there are a lot of different components to it. And you’re absolutely right. At the core of it, we’re impacting lives where we’re seeking to improve the quality of life of the people that we serve. A lot of it becomes a question of, how can we improve the experiences that they have as the residents of our state travel home, they traveled to work, they pick up their children or they’re going to different activities, or they’re going to the doctor?

We’re really thinking about how we can get residents safely to where they have to go. I’m part of that process. It’s a very large…how to describe it? Our organization, our business unit, it’s a very large organization. We don’t really call it that. We call it business units. MDOT has several of them, and I’m just a small part of that. I’m a part that gets to go to a county, and really listen to what their concerns are, and what their priorities are. I’m a part of the whole that gets to attend Metropolitan Planning Organization meetings to listen to what their interests are, and to share what the status and impact of our projects are within the boundaries that they’re focused on, that they’re responsible for.

There are 23 counties in our state, and Baltimore City is independent. Our division is really divided amongst these counties. We work together. But the needs are so diverse and the state is so large that we’re assigned to specific places. I’ve had the pleasure of going to Western Maryland and seeing beautiful hills. Absolutely beautiful. I’ve had the pleasure of going to the eastern shore and just seeing the water. I have the pleasure of going to the whole Washington Metro area south, and then going from very urban space into more of a rural space between our counties. Prince George’s County to Charles County.

Maryland is a gorgeous state. I don’t just say that, for the sake of saying is. Having seen different parts of it. It’s like you really don’t get a sense of the whole geography until you have an opportunity to work for the business unit that I do, and then you have an opportunity to travel. And everywhere you go, it becomes very clear that the infrastructure that supports those areas supports them and in different ways. The roads that you have and the hills are different from the ones that you have in a more urban area just by virtue of the number of people that commute on it, as well as the geography itself from urban neighborhoods to more rural ones.

Our work allows us to go to these specific towns or to offices and specific cities and to really have tangible conversations about what we’re committed to and the work that we’re doing together to meet the expectations and the priorities of the counties that we serve. It’s a very broad area if you think about regional planning.

The business unit that I work for understands that. And just because of that, we’re assigned and we’re subject matter specialists for the different regions that were assigned to. That’s a lot of the work that I do as a regional planner. It’s not like agency-specific in terms of…it’s not like a document that comes my way. It’s the focus of the work that I do, and it’s how it ties into the major projects that my business unit works on, from capital projects, from roads to bridges. That’s the role that I fit into it.

Tara: It’s really interesting. It’s something I never think about really. Hardly ever when I drive on roads. I drive through Maryland a good amount actually. I live in Northern Virginia. I don’t really think that much about the process that goes into planning the roads. I did have experience in my neighborhood several years ago where they were changing some of the corner configurations. And that was very contentious because the planners were trying to do some things to improve, to slow down traffic at certain intersections. And they were doing things. I don’t know if this is the kind of thing you do. But they faced a lot of pushback from neighbors and had support from others.

And I’m wondering if, when you go into these situations, it sounds like you have a lot of interaction with the communities, if they welcome you, what that relationship is like. Because I think a lot of times local government, people have…there’s a pothole or they’re focusing on problems. So tell us a little bit about how you manage that interaction, what your relationship is like.

Winstina: That’s a great way of looking at where planners work. And I’ll say that because as a student and now as a professional, I’ve had the opportunity to intern at the local level. Now I’m working at the state level. What you described is a planner who’s working within a locality, and they’re working with the roads and the infrastructure there. There’s some work that our offices are building and maintaining, but the type of experience that you just described is something that a local planner would be more engaged with.

This would be someone who works in the town or works in the city, and they’re tasked with managing the relationships with the residents directly. And they are looking at making roads. Not just handling the potholes. But you have planners that are thinking about ADA compliant, sidewalks, you have planners that are thinking about Vision Zero initiatives. You have a lot of cities and towns that are now committed to zero deaths. And that means going about and understanding spaces differently.

So what a local planner would do is go and look at how people are using the sidewalks, how they’re crossing the roads, looking at how drivers are turning, making a left turn or a right turn, or just really trying to understand the movement and how people are living their lives in those spaces. Then they step back and they think, “Well, what if we move the sidewalk here? What if we change the light? The amount of time in between the different signals?” Or “What if we put on a cross, one of those signs over here? What if we add an image of a bicycle as a way of letting pedestrians know that, yes, they’re crossing, but then, as a way of letting pedestrians also know they’re cyclists that are also going down the stretch of road? It’s a way for drivers to look up and see, “Oh, yeah, I’m having this space with people who are biking and cyclists and people who are walking, pedestrians.”

Liam: I’m going to ask you about success. We ask all of our guests about their definition of success. And it might be a personal definition, it might be a professional definition, Winstina. For you it might be a mixture of both. How do you define success?

Winstina: I see success as an ongoing experience. There was a time when I equated success to achievements. You know, equating it to graduating from college, equating it to getting my graduate degree, equating it to my first job, equating success to a relationship. “Oh, wow, I’m celebrating my friendship with my best friend. Like we’ve known each other for 20 years.” I used to equate successes to these milestones. But now I see it more as an ongoing experience. It’s not the amount of time that I’ve had her as a part of my life, it’s the experiences that we’ve had over these 20 years.

It’s not the degree that’s that success. It’s the experience of having earned it and having achieved that goal. It’s not the job that I have. It’s the ability to see tangible results that we accomplish every day. That’s what I’ve come to see success as. Also I’m starting to see success as opportunity to experience and share the things that I now either possess or have achieved with somebody else. That’s how I see, and that’s how I just define success.

Tara: Lovely. That’s great. I love the thought of experiences of success. I’m not sure we’ve heard that explained that way before, but I think it’s excellent. Thank you for sharing that.

Winstina: Thank you.

Tara: I’m going to ask some WordPress stuff now, because we don’t talk…this is not a WordPress podcast, but we talk to people who use WordPress, and that’s how we know you. So can you tell us a little bit? You’ve spoken at some WordCamps. So obviously, as we said in the intro, you’ve used WordPress. So tell us a little bit about how you found WordPress. You talked about your blog, how you found the community specifically, and got involved in speaking and being an organizer.

Winstina: Well, I started using WordPress…after the course, I started attending meetups. I actually started using and creating and building sites when I started attending WordPress New York City’s meetups. Steve Brunner, he was the organizer that I had a chance to meet when I was attending those events. I ended up going to the ones after class and it was just great.

It was an opportunity to kind of jump in and to learn and to experience what it’s like to build something and break it. You put a site online and you’re learning, you’ve never done it before, and it’s kind of like, “Well, what happens if I add this? What happens if I do that?” When you’re in a space that encourages you to just try it, then you do. And I did. That’s really what keeps bringing me back to meetups, to attending them, and to participating in our different events. Even attending WordCamps.

I love to imagine ways of using the CMS and I love training others on features, and I love empowering people who are beginners and they just don’t know where to start, or they feel really overwhelmed. I love getting them to a place where they want to jump in like I did. That really speaks to having been welcomed into such a great community, and then being supported to continue contributing within New York City and being able to branch out of New York City into other cities as a WordCamp speaker. That’s really the flow of how my experience has been within the community.

Tara: What did you speak about? Are they the same general talks, or what?

Winstina: I always approach the world through the lens of a planner, and I approach using WordPress from the perspective of a planner that wants to engage communities. There’s a part of our work which is community engagement. In fact, it’s often mandated by the government. And community engagement reflects in different ways, whether you’re at the state level, or the local level, or at the county level. Whenever you have projects, oftentimes, the community has the opportunity, and in fact, they have to have a commenting process. You don’t have a choice in it. And this is how we’re better able to serve the needs of those who we meet by giving them spaces to comment.

There was a time when you would have meetings and people would physically come. I love being in this time now, where social media is a way that you can get people to comment on a development that’s coming. I love, the idea of building a blog, which is where we’ve moved into. We’re even expanding beyond that into crowdsourcing. So I started looking at using WordPress blogs as a place for local people to come and comment on the plannings happening locally. Whether or not it’s a street, or it’s a house, or it’s an apartment building, or there’s a store relocating, having a place online where they can go and share their thoughts, constructive criticism or observations, it’s really great to create it and to see it.

I started with the blog for Maplewood. And having these really amazing responses, like families, like moms and dads commenting, like our mayor commented. It was phenomenal to see folks just talking about what they’re observing and asking questions. Then it was great because it was pushing me to think differently and to seek out the right answers. Like doing research or talking to local experts to better answer the questions. The ability to do that is great. It’s great to be able to create spaces like that.

I moved from building a blog to joining a competition. It was sustainable New Jersey and putting together an eCommerce site from the perspective of a planning department. There was a local government that was looking at ways of increasing economic development for residents. So I put together a WooCommerce site where residents could sell their products. It’s like using WordPress in these creative ways that give the everyday person like you and me a chance to share our thoughts or even support each other. That’s just really how it’s flowed from me.

Liam: You do so much there. You’re such an amazing conversationalist and you say things at so many different levels. I’m not sure where to go.

Winstina: You’re lying.

Liam: I’m serious. I’m sincere. One of the things that I picked up on really was how your involvement with WordPress or using WordPress as a platform to garner feedback and have conversations from folks in the communities that you’re trying to serve through planning have forced you to think outside what is your definition of a box, and to consider what other people think of the box, so to speak. So really made you kind of think in new ways and do more work to get a better understanding of what quote-unquote, “the right answer” is.

Winstina: Absolutely. And I work with engineers too. Planners are very conceptual, and we’re very creative. Every day I’m on calls with engineers, and they approach the world so differently. Our goals are the same. Our commitment is the same. What we are doing is the same. But they see things differently. That’s what we’re tasked with is seeing things outside of the boxes that we’re used to.

Liam: Winstina, we only have a couple of minutes left, but you’re onto something that I want to ask for your insight on. Thinking outside our own mental box is hard. There’s a lot of work. There’s a lot of effort. Not just psychologically, but emotionally. We’ve got to commit to it. No, that person isn’t stupid. No, that person isn’t mean. They’re thinking about it in ways that they have experiences that I don’t have. I think at this point in time in our history, I think we can all probably agree that there’s a lot of value in trying to think as others think and appreciate their experience. Certainly in the United States, there’s a lot of people who struggled to do that. I wonder if you can share with us what either skills or tips you’ve gotten to kind of address that, to make that a little easier.

Winstina: That’s a really great question. There is one point that someone brought up with me after a professional enrichment program. It was the last day and we were kind of reflecting on how great it was and how much we enjoyed it. They were also sharing their experiences with me, and he said something that was really great. He was like, “You know what you know, but you don’t know what you don’t know.” And that floored me.

That is the first I would say tip that I’ve gotten from me to look outside of my box and to try to better understand other frameworks and to help me try to understand what’s around me. Now I’ll just ask questions like, “Is there a question I should have asked you that I didn’t?” That’s now how I approach conversations, you know, fully understanding that there are things I don’t even know to ask, there are things that I don’t even know exist. It’s the only way that I can manage that handicap is by asking the person who is across from me, the person who I’m on the phone with after we’ve talked, you know, is there a question I should have asked you that I didn’t is? Is there something that you want to share with me that I didn’t think to bring up? That’s really helped me a lot since the conversation. That was about a year ago that we had it. And it’s just shifted things for me a lot.

Tara: That’s excellent advice. We always ask people to share advice with us, and I don’t think Liam was even heading necessarily directly there, but we got there. That’s fabulous. Thank you so much for sharing that.

Winstina: I hope I answered the question.

Tara: Sure. I have to say, is there anything that we haven’t asked you that you’d like to talk about?

Winstina: Anything that you haven’t asked me but I’d like to talk about. I think that we’ve covered a lot. I know I talked a lot about planning and I love it. But I really enjoy being a part of this community. I’m going to miss not being able to go to WordCamp Philly and see. I’m going to miss not being able to go to WordCamp Baltimore and New York City.

I’m just excited that we have moved into the Zoom space, having webinars and moving into these conversations. It’s just exciting for me. So I’m just looking forward to seeing how much more we can stay in touch with each other. I do want to share that New York City has Women of WordPress group. And we’ve gotten such great feedback from it, from women and other parts of the world. We’re looking at seeing if we can actually have events as a part of…just whole women from around the world just hosting events in their cities, but being one. That’s something that I would really love to share. I hope that the possibility is really expand with that. I hope there’s more that I can share in the future to see how it evolves.

Tara: That’s wonderful. We’ve spoken to some women in other countries who are women in WordPress meetups, and it’s fabulous to see how that’s grown and become a thing. So that’s great that you have that going on in New York City. Thanks for sharing.

Winstina: Thank you. Thank you. Our men are very supportive.

Tara: You’re starting in Baltimore?

Winstina: Well, New York is home. New York, New Jersey is home. And the great thing about it now that we’re home by ourselves with Zoom is that we’re no longer tied to geographic space. That’s one of the most beautiful things right now, I think.

Tara: Yeah, for sure. For sure.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Winstina, this has been an absolute pleasure.

Winstina: Thank you.

Liam: You’re very welcome. Thank you. Where can folks find you online?

Winstina: You can find me at a New York City meetup, whoever there. I have a website, winstinahughes.com that touches on the things that I’ve done. My handle is @planningright. I do some training as well with WordPress. So you can find me with my handle @planning right or on my website, winstinahughes.com. There are ways to connect there as well.

Tara: Great. Thank you so much again. It’s really been delightful to share this time with you.

Winstina: Thanks for having me. I’m excited. It’s great to talk to you, Tara. I enjoyed this. Thank you, Liam.

Liam: You’re very welcome. Thank you for joining us. Bye for now.

Winstina: Thanks. 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.

Emily is the director of growth at GoWP. She lives just outside Atlanta, Georgia with her two daughters and her husband. When not working, Emily loves running both on the road and trails. On weekends, she also loves hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Twitter | @emalihu

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Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

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 137.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Emily Hunkler. Emily is the director of growth at GoWP. She lives just outside Atlanta, Georgia with her two daughters and her husband. When not working, Emily loves running both on the road and trails. On weekends, she also loves hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Welcome, Emily. Glad to see you today.

Emily: Hi, happy to be here.

Liam: Really happy to have you join us. Thanks, Emily. How are you? And tell us a little bit more about yourself, please.

Emily: Thank you for having me. This is great. I am, like you said, live just outside Atlanta. I have two daughters. One will be turning four in November and the other one is 16 months. So that is a lot of what defines me these days I’d say. Apart from that, I am the director of growth at GoWP. I handle all the marketing stuff and community growth and customer success and that sort of thing.

I live here in Atlanta with my family, who’s my two girls and my husband, Mark, who is from a small town outside Barcelona, Spain, where we previously were living for the last six years up until 2018. I’m originally from Ohio. I mean, that sums me up at the moment, I’d say.

Tara: I was reminded of a guest we interviewed recently who is from the UK and he’s living in Spain as well. So I want to ask you a little bit about that experience. What sent you there and what it was like being an expat? Seems like maybe a more popular thing that I knew of with having two guests on our show who both were expats in Spain or at one time were.

Emily: Yeah, it’s super popular in Spain specifically, I think too because of the weather, I guess, and cost of living and those sorts of things. For me, I had previously been working at a newspaper up in the Adirondacks as a newspaper reporter. I worked there for a year and kind of just needed a change. I don’t know if it’s the extreme winters that there are up there or what, but I was looking for something new. I originally went to Spain as an English language assistant. In the public school system there, it’s a program that they’re government runs. You can apply and they’ll place you somewhere.

I had requested Barcelona and they gave me Igualada, which is a town just outside Barcelona. So not quite what you asked for, but it all ended up great in the end. I was there for one year doing that. Came back to the States and spent the next two years traveling through Central America and doing a travel blog on traveling Central American on $20 a day. Then decided that…I don’t know if I decided or kind of just got tired of living on $20 a day. Well, I should say that I had met Mark, my now husband the first year I was in Spain.

Two years later, I decided to follow my heart and pursue that relationship further. But at the same time, kind of listening to my brain and enrolling in a digital marketing master’s program there as well. So I had my bases covered in case things didn’t work out one way or the other. But luckily they both did. So I ended up staying there for six years and having one daughter and getting married. That worked out great. And I love Spain. I would go back in a second, although for me, it’s kind of the work thing. I’m able to get a more ideal work or job I should say here in the States that’s really in line with what I want to do as opposed to the kind of jobs I was finding over there. Which were great but not exactly in line with…they weren’t keeping me engaged as much as I would want I guess I could say,

Tara: You work remotely though, correct?

Emily: I do work remotely. So I guess in theory, I could just go back.

Tara: Maybe your husband can get a job there. I don’t know.

Emily: Yeah.

Tara: That’s really interesting. $20 a day. I lived in Europe for a year. I lived in France. And I remember also challenging myself out of necessity to live on even less than that. And also, how much of that was made up of alcohol.

Emily: That’s it. The travel blog I had, it was for $20 a day in Central America. So it’s much more feasible than doing that in Europe. But the $20 a day always included like one of those big beers that you can buy. That was always included in the $20 bill a day.

Tara: What an adventure. That’s really neat. Are you raising your children to speak Spanish and English, both?

Emily: Yeah. Actually, Spanish and Catalan.

Tara: Oh, yeah. Okay.

Emily: My husband is a proud Catalan and his family and friends, everyone, obviously they all know Spanish and can speak it. But at home, at work and everything like that they all speak Catalan. So it’s important to him and to me that they learn that as well. So he speaks to them in Catalan. I speak to them in English. As they’re so young right now, we have a nanny, and she’s Venezuelan. We prioritize that to have her speak to them in Spanish. So yes, it is something that we’re really prioritizing in their lives.

Liam: That’s a great gift to give your children the ability to have so many languages. And then inevitably, I imagine they will find picking up French and German and Italian or what other languages interests them as they grow much easier because their brain is used to. That’s a new word. I can learn that word. That’s a new structure. I can learn that. That’s fantastic.

Emily: Yeah. I think so. I think it’s really important. It’s so hard to learn a language when you’re older, so it’s good to learn it earlier.

Liam: When I moved back to the US, my family spent a number of years in the UK, my wife and I. And we had our two children there. When we moved back, my oldest was only going into kindergarten. So we went off to new parent’s night and that was very different for us because we never had experienced US educational systems as adults and as parents.

At the end of the kind of welcome to kindergarten, we went up to the teacher and said, “Hey, we just moved back. We’re from the US but our daughter has never lived here. She has an English accent and she will say words to you that you will understand the words but that phrase means nothing to you. And you will say words to her and she will understand those words, but the phrase doesn’t mean anything to her. Just you know, give her a second.” And the teacher looks at us and says, “Well, have you tried or tested for ESL, English as a second language?

Emily: Really?

Liam: Okay, I’m going to start this over. You just move back from England…

Emily: Oh, my gosh.

Liam: All right. Whatever. Moving on. The show is not about me. I love telling that story. Your daughters are learning different languages.

Tara: Your blog is the $20 day. Is that what started you into this sort of digital world? Is that how you then pursued your digital marketing certificate or degree?

Emily: It is, yeah. I didn’t say this, but my undergrad was in journalism and I worked at a newspaper, like I said. Working at the newspaper, I mean, I loved it. and I have the utmost respect for every journalist out there, but the pay is really low and the work is really hard. That just discouraged me, I guess. I wasn’t in it for the long haul. And I wanted to kind of explore other things. So yeah, I did the travel blog, and that was my first foray into WordPress and to building a website and trying to get it out there, trying to promote it, get people to contribute and engage, all that kind of stuff.

Emily: So through that I realized—I don’t know if it was a passion at that point—but an interest at the very least in digital marketing and those kinds of strategies, and wanting to be able to do more there. So through that, I was like, “Okay, you know, let’s…” I always saw myself getting a master’s degree in something, and that just felt right. So that’s what I went for.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. Were you able to earn $20 a day on your blog? You started writing and just to share and just to kind of learn, but were you able to garner any kind of sponsorship or…?

Emily: No. To be honest, I didn’t try too hard. I mean, I didn’t try hard. I didn’t do anything. The most I did in terms of marketing for that was putting stickers up in hostels, and doing partnerships, I guess you could say with hostels, and saying, “If you look through and say mention Border Tramp—Border Tramp is the name of the blog—if you mentioned Border Tramp, you’ll get 10% off your diving certificate or you’ll get 10% off this hostel or something like that.

But in terms of myself earning anything, I never got to that point with it. I did garner definitely a following. The blog still gets traffic and ranks for some things because nobody else has the bus schedule in Nicaragua for getting to the coast. So people still hit it up for that. It’s outdated. So if you’re listening to this do not trust that bus schedule. But yeah, I never figured out the monetization of that blog. It’s a passion project, I guess you could say.

Liam: Yeah, no, that’s perfectly fine. I just wasn’t sure where you took it now suggesting that you needed to take it in a single direction.

Emily: It’s still running though. I could do something with that.

Liam: What was the tech side of things in that? So if you’re on $20 a day, you’re moving a lot, you’re relying on other people’s internet. I don’t know exactly when you were doing this if the portable hotspots were a thing or at least reliable. So how did you manage that from a tech standpoint? You had a laptop and a cord but then what?

Emily: It was a lot of mostly when I knew I’d be going to a location that would have more reliable internet. So not an island. Somewhere that was more of a city setting. Although I didn’t go to any major cities. I didn’t stay long in any major cities. But bigger towns where you could have a hotel room instead of a hostel that had a desk where you could work. And I would say, “Okay, I’m going to spend three days in this town and just update the blog.”

Then I had a notebook where I would take all my notes, whenever I would get to a town, go grab all the hostels, get prices, get information on that, take my pictures out of my little SD cards. I was still using a digital camera then, plugging in you and all that kind of stuff. When was this? It would have been 2012 and 2013, I guess through those two years.

Liam: So you were taking very much a journalistic approach rather than just waiting for you to go? You were…

Emily: Yeah. I mean, it was a lot of work into it.

Liam: Yeah, that’s awesome. I love that. I love.

Emily: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. Again, the main goal was me traveling. No two ways about that. But I wanted to also feel purposeful, I guess, in doing that. So that was the idea behind the blog.

Tara: And you were alone? You traveled alone?

Emily: I did some alone. I did a few trips with my dad actually who he loves it down there. He’s an old hippie from the 60s and 70s. So he spent a lot of time down there during those times. He kind of instilled that travel theory in me of taking local buses, doing it on the cheap, staying at hostels, getting to know people, not staying at the resorts, and that kind of thing. We never did that growing up. So yeah, I did a few trips with him. I did one trip with my sister.

So what I would do is go down for a couple two or three months at a time, come back home, work, save up money, go back down and do it again. You know, start where I left off the last time. I did a trip with an old neighbor of mine. So a childhood friend, we did a trip together because she was in between jobs. And she’s like, “Hey, are you doing this again?” I said, “Yeah, do you want to come again?” “She’s like, “Yeah, I’m coming.” She actually was in the process of getting her MBA and targeted to something she could get course credit for. So that worked out great for her as well.

Tara: Wow. That’s great. What a great adventure on…it’s not your youth. Young years you had. That’s great. You have that always in your life to build upon and instill in your kids too. Have you been traveling with them? I guess not right now during COVID.

Emily: Not right now. But yeah, it’s definitely something we try to do. So now our family situation, being that my husband’s family’s in Spain and my family’s here, our vacations, vacations like days off, paid time off or whatever you want to call it, right now we’re really limited to we go to Barcelona or when we were living in Barcelona, we go to Ohio. Those kinds of things. So we’re trying to as we kind of get settled and manage this better to do one trip that’s there.

My work is flexible, but he’s an engineer. So through Coronavirus, his job is realizing, “Oh, you don’t have to be in the office.” So we’re hoping that maybe that will make his job a little bit more flexible, where we could maybe go to Barcelona, visit family but still be working during that time, some of it, and not have to use all his time off. And then we can do a trip as a family somewhere else as well. So it’s definitely something we want to instill.

Liam: That’s definitely a challenge is when you live far away from family. Having done in the UK, you know, the vacation became travel to see family. And that’s wonderful. But at some point, we just want to go somewhere and just do us.

Emily: Yeah.

Liam: So I get that. That’s a tough thing.

Emily: It’s a big challenge.

Liam: To your point, COVID-19 might be really beneficial with your husband’s company in realizing, maybe you don’t need to be in the office five days a week and still do really valuable work. Maybe you can live six months in Barcelona and six months in Atlanta or something like that. A lot of opportunities there. So I’m excited to see where that all comes together.

Emily: Me too. Especially being in a relationship where one of us is fully remote—right now both of us are—but one of us is fully remote and one of us is very tied to the nine to five office situation. So it’s like, “Oh, there’s so much potential, but we can’t realize any of it.” So yeah.

Liam: Emily, I want to get into one of our signature questions with you if I can. And it’s around success. You’ve talked about your career a little bit, you shared with us about your family and your daughters and some of the things you’re doing there and your husband. I want to ask you about your definition of success. Maybe it’s a personal definition, maybe it’s professional, maybe it’s both for you. Can you define success for us in your own words?

Emily: Yeah. I actually learned about this…I think we all know it, but I learned the actual framework around it when I was doing my masters. And it’s kind of the flow theory. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the author Mihaly. That’s not how you spell it at all. He’s Hungarian. It’s like Mihaly and then 17 consonants all in a row. But he wrote the book. I think it’s just called Flow. It talks about the channel of productivity that is sandwiched in between anxiety and boredom.

So for me, success is kind of an ongoing definition where I’m constantly feeling challenged, but at the same time, I’m feeling capable of overcoming that challenge. And that applies to my personal life, it applies to work, anything. So where I’m kind of constantly feeling engaged, right? Like, I’m not just pressing buttons and pulling the levers and all of that. But actually, there’s a challenge, I know that I can figure out the solution, I can feel it inside me, but I have to figure it out. Obviously, you don’t have that all the time with every task in life, but making sure there’s some people going on, something that I’m working on somewhere in my life that has that kind of philosophy in it.

Liam: That’s an interesting approach. So it’s a stasis of sort or stasis of uncertainty. Let me ask you a question that immediately popped into my head. Maybe that’s two questions. How do you deal with when there’s not enough certainty? You talked about there’s kind of two ends. One is uncertainty and one is predictability, maybe you got the word from, but it’s kind of that somewhere in between. So how do you deal with when you’re drifting one way or the other? What does that look like? What does that feel like and what do you do to say, “I got to get closer to that balance?”

Emily: You can pull from everywhere in life, right? So when I’m feeling like anxious or uncertain or stressed at work and nothing’s coming and it just keeps getting harder and more frustrating, and I keep feeling more defeated or something, then maybe I’ll go for a run. I’ll put it aside and I go for a run. A lot of times for me that helps a lot. Or maybe I’ll go bake bread or something like that. Like go somewhere where there’s something I can control, I know that I’m good at it or I know it’ll make me feel good at the end. Maybe it won’t bring the solution but it’ll bring my mental state back to stasis, and then I can take it on again, I guess.

Tara: I think we met running. So talk a little bit about how that works for you. Because I find that to get out and run, to do that when I have a lot going on is really hard. Because it’s hard for me to stop and to go do that. Once I’m out there doing it, it helps me. So do you run harder? Do you challenge yourself more? How do you work that into this process?

Emily: I don’t think I ever necessarily run harder in that sort of situation. Whenever I run harder, it’s more so like a running challenge, like, “Oh, I want to get faster. So I’m going to focus on running.” But more so for me, running is kind of to refocus other parts. So I do run regularly. I try to go at least three times a week. Sometimes while I’m on that run, I don’t know if it’s a meditation or what, but thoughts come into your head, you start thinking. If the thoughts are going good, I’ll just keep running. And I’ll run longer. For me, it’s more of a distance thing. So if I feel like the run is being productive, I’ll run 10k instead of the usual 5k because I’m getting somewhere mentally with it, I guess.

Tara: Yeah, I’m glad to hear that. I know in your intro we talked about the fact that you enjoy running, so I wanted to have you talk about that a little bit too. Can you talk to us about what you do at GoWP and maybe how that also fits into this whole idea of being challenged and uncertainty and all of that?

Emily: Yeah. I’ve been with GoWP for almost two years now. I’m on the growth team. So that’s me and Brad, our founder, and Caylin White as well. It’s everything. It’s marketing, it’s customer success, and it’s sales. I don’t do a whole lot on the sales ends, but I’ve been involved there.

We have a big community of our target audience, kind of if you want to call it that. But we have a Facebook group and we have them as partners in our client portal. And it’s always coming up with ways and new ideas of how to engage them and how to help them. I mean, I know you probably always say this, but it really is the heart our marketing strategy is to help our agency owners and let them be our evangelists, I guess you could call it.

So coming up with new strategies of like, “What is it that could help them? What are some tools and resources that I feel capable of creating or figuring out how to create anyway or figure out who to ask to help me, that kind of thing, that could actually make a difference and help them out?” By that, then they say, you know, “Oh, we love GoWP. They help us with so many things. They have these great templates.” That kind of stuff.

On my runs, I guess bringing it back to that, a lot of times I’m thinking about that and thinking about, “Oh, what are some other things that we know that this would help them but I have no idea how to create that or where do you take that.” And then on my run, I might think, “Oh, you know, who knows about that?” Some thought that would never come into my head. And be like, “Oh, I’m going to reach out to them.” And it’s just when you’re outside of the computer screen desk situation, you have different thoughts. Different avenues open up and new solutions kind of present themselves.

Liam: Is running for you something you can do right from your home? I mean, I know you said you live in suburban Atlanta. So I know you can just run outside your house? Or are you the kind of person that wants to go and drive to the trail? What I’m getting at with this is when you need that mental shift, you need that break time, is that just running clothes on, shoes on, out the door, “mom will be back in whenever she’s back”? Or is it, you know, pack the bag, grab the water, get the keys, make sure I’ve got my cell phone? What does that escape approach look like for you or that rebalance approach look like?

Emily: For me, it’s really just throwing on my running clothes and shoes and getting out the door. I live in, like I said before, the heart of the suburbs. And it’s a big suburban neighborhood. I mean, if I wanted to run like every single sidewalk in this neighborhood, it would probably be marathon. If I ever did that, but I don’t. But there’s plenty of it.

We have a little trail system thing here. So sometimes I’ll run on the road and then come back on the trails, that kind of thing. I do love being able to jump in the car and go somewhere beautiful and really disconnect. That’s something that I don’t get to do as often. But I treasure those moments because they are something I did before having children and my husband and I would do it together and it’d be great. That’s something we don’t get to do too often now.

Tara: Do you have a running group or running friends that you go with?

Emily: Not here. Not here in Georgia. I still feel like we’re pretty new. But when I was living in Barcelona, I would run with friends there. I didn’t have an actual group, but I had some different friends here and there and I would say, “Hey, I’m going to go for a run. Do you want to join?” And we could go together. But here it’s kind of just when I see the opportunity, I grab it and go. No time to wait around.

Liam: Emily, what’s your involvement with the WordPress community? I know you said that your travel blog was the impetus to kind of get into WordPress and blogging and the software side of things. I know that you’re active now through your job in the WordPress community, but how did the technology or what was the journey from those initial blogging days to involvement with the community? What does that look like for you?

Emily: I would say I didn’t really get involved until starting with GoWP. I don’t think I realized there was such a community when I had my blog. I knew a little bit about it. I knew Matt Mullenweg. I listened to some of his interviews and stuff. I really admired the WordPress project, and I had an idea of what was going on. But I didn’t really know about WordCamp. I didn’t know about the thousands and thousands of people that are in this community and that are so wonderful.

My first WordCamp that I went to was WordCamp US and it was in Nashville. So WordCamp US 2018, I guess it would have been. I was just three months into the job with GoWP. So that was like just jump in the deep end of the pool. And I very much had that imposter syndrome feeling. When I got there, everybody was best friends. I had no idea what was going on. I didn’t realize that if you’re there, you’re best friends with everybody. That’s just how it is, right? Like you just say hi, and everyone’s friendly and everybody’s welcoming. So I felt very much as an outsider to the community and didn’t want to impose myself.

So I wasn’t able to make the most of that first WordCamp experience. I knew it when I was there and I knew it when I got home, but I’ve been to many more now and I feel absolutely at home. I love that everybody’s just there and willing to help each other. It’s great. I mean, it’s really one of the best things I’ve gotten from working with GoWP.

Liam: WordCamp US or WordCamp Europe I’ve never been but I imagine these enormous WordCamps can be a bit much as a starting point. I could see you being overwhelmed by that and like, “How do all of you know each other?”

Emily: Exactly. That’s what it felt like. It felt like everybody knew each other, everybody went to high school together and I was the outsider.

Tara: Emily, I’m going to change gears and ask you another one of our signature questions, which is about advice. So if you can share with us, do you have any advice that you’ve received and implemented in your life that’s meant something to you that we can pass on to our listeners?

Emily: Yes. This one is would have to say that I got this when I was working at eDreams, which is an online travel agent in Europe. They’re the biggest one in Europe. So it’s kind of like the Priceline or Orbitz I guess of Europe. I was working there as a – what was I? I can’t remember my title. Content creator, copywriter. I was doing the content on the site and the app for them.

They had their own in house built CMS so everything was very specific to that company. So nothing I’d ever worked with before. You had to do everything via spreadsheets, all of the content on spreadsheets that was just very foreign to anything I’d done before. I remember one time I updated the content to the CMS and basically like a whole page crashed. And this is a page like literally millions of people look at.

Nobody knew that it happened except for me and my coworker, Roy, who had been working there for quite some time. It was right after I’d finished onboarding this happened. And it’s just because I put a comma somewhere that it didn’t belong or something. And I was like, “Oh, my God, Roy, I crashed the site. This is crazy.” He was just like, “Did you fix it?” Like, “Hey, it’s fixed. It’s fine now.” He’s like, “What’s big deal?” I was like, “Well, it was down for maybe an hour or something.” And he was like, “What’s the big deal?” He was like, “Did you fix it.” I was like, “Yeah.”

Just that concept of like, you’re working in this company, it’s a seven-story building, thousands of people working there, millions of people using the site, I did something that had a huge impact, but what’s the big deal? It’s fixed. Like, “Did anybody die? “No.” What happened? Nothing. It wasn’t like something that cost them money actually. It wasn’t like the order sheet was down or anything like that. And it was just that whole idea of like, “What’s the big deal? What’s the worst that can happen? Can you fix it, fix it and move on?” Like the stress, the worry, all of that is completely unnecessary and just hurting yourself and not helping anything.

So I have taken that and just applied it to whenever I’m feeling stressed. And it’s like, “No, not a big deal.” Then relax. Everything’s going to be okay.

Liam: That’s great advice. I think, especially when you’re working on a website. It’s easy to think that everybody’s paying attention to every little thing. To blow it out of proportion is easy to do.

Emily: Yeah.

Liam: There was no clock, like the clock ticks on our head when the website is down.

Emily: Yeah, it’s a hard one.

Tara: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for sharing everything. It’s really been great job with you. We’re winding down on the end of our interview time today. It’s been great seeing you again. I hope to be able to run with you in person sometime again sometime soon.

Emily: I know. Me too.

Tara: Yeah, it’s a strange time. It’s a strange time. Thanks for sharing your exciting adventures. I hope you have many more. Where can people find you online, Emily?

Emily: The best place to find me is I guess on Twitter. I’m @emalihu. That’s Emily Alicia Hunkler. So like the first letters from each of those. Then other than that, on Facebook, I’m in the Niche Agency Owners Facebook group every day doing stuff there. That’s the community we’ve built with GoWP. So those are the best two places to find me.

Tara: Great. Thanks.

Liam: Emily, thanks so much for joining us. What a pleasure to get to know you a little bit! Thanks for your time.

Emily: Thank you, guys. This has been so much fun. Thank you so much.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Bye-bye.

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

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

Annejeanette is a teacher at both the elementary and collegiate level. She teaches children at a school in western Florida, and college students in Fort Lauderdale. Annejeanette is a WordPress advocate, blogger, and WordCamp presenter.

Twitter | @ProfessaDiva954

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 136.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Annejeanette Washington Collins. Annejeanette is a teacher at both the elementary and collegiate level. She teaches children at a school in western Florida, and college students in Fort Lauderdale. Annejeanette is a WordPress advocate, blogger, and WordCamp presenter. Welcome, Annejeanette. Thanks for being here today.

Annejeanette: Hello, everybody. Tara, Liam, thank you so much for the invite.

Tara: Thanks for joining us today. We’re really happy that you’re here as well. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, a little more introduction?

Annejeanette: Yeah. This is my 28th year of teaching in Broward County, which is sandwiched between Miami and West Palm Beach. This is my 18th year as a college professor. I love what I do. I definitely am an advocate for WordPress. I’m really blessed to be in this career for the long haul. And I’m happily married to a Major, and I have a miracle daughter named Jada. And love family, love the beach, love serving in the community.

Tara: That’s wonderful. What do you teach?

Annejeanette: So presently, I am a fifth grade teacher in western Florida. I teach ELA, language arts, social studies, and technology. At the collegiate level, I teach computer science.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about your background in computer science. Did you learn that in order to teach it or how did that become part of your teaching repertoire?

Annejeanette: About 20 years ago, at that time, I was a middle school teacher, my principal had noticed that I had a knack for breaking down computers, literally breaking them apart and putting them back together. So she encouraged me to pursue my master’s degree in educational technology and curriculum. When I turned 30, one of the goals that I had for myself was to go back and get my master’s degree. So that’s how I began this journey. And it’s been a fun ride for the past 20 years working with students, working with college students, working with nonprofit and profit organizations, and really learning and mastering the craft of educational technology.

Liam: That’s such an evolving field, right? I mean, 28 years ago—I’m trying to think when that was—I mean, there were computers in the classroom, but not a ton. And there was internet in the classroom, but not a lot of classrooms and not trickled in and not reliable stuff in. Now we’re seeing in the last three to five months that that technology, because of COVID, is forcibly changing again. You have probably seen more than most people have seen. Talk about that, that evolution of technology, and what that looks like over the years in teaching.

Annejeanette: When I went to college at the University of Miami, my senior year we had a computer lab that was using a little Apple Books. I mean, not Apple books. It’s like those hard Apple…I think they were Apple At Ease. They were just boxy and little. And then Hurricane Andrew hit. So we went from having computers to having nothing.

When I graduated, I just remember, “Okay, where do we start?” So I landed my first teaching job in a middle school in Fort Lauderdale. They had a computer lab, but not as heavy as it began to happen in 2000. 2000 we had a whole overhaul where classrooms were actually getting computers. We had Apple with the colors in the back. You could pick your color to match your classroom. So I did that for a while.

Then my district moved from Apple to Windows. So during this whole, as you call it, process, I’ve been learning how to do dual language in technology. You had to know Apple, and you had to know Windows.

Liam: Those are really different in the early days. That was literally apples and oranges (no pun intended).

Annejeanette: So I had to learn that so that I can empower and teach my college students, my middle school students. Even taught high school. So just had to really master learning two languages in technology.

Then in about 2005, I was offered the position of the computer science teacher at the elementary level. And that’s how I ended up at the school where I’ve been now for 15 years. Even at the school that I’m at, it has evolved, where it was elective and now it is pretty much in everyday instruction I have to use my computer. And not just one computer. Sometimes I’m literally maneuvering three. Which leads me into the WordPress.

Because when I first started WordPress it was just to play around with it, see what it’s about. Then now I find myself teaching my fifth graders how to blog their essays or respond to a classmate’s post or publish their STEM work—A STEM project that they’ve created where they put their research, and their PowerPoint, or their sway into the WordPress platform. So it has truly been a roller coaster ride, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

Tara: That’s so wonderful. I love hearing that you’re using WordPress with kids in school. It seems like something that is evolving. But I don’t hear that much about WordPress being used by kids in schools. So that’s really great. How did you discover WordPress?

Annejeanette: Graduate school. I used it in graduate school. Then I introduced it to my college students because I was teaching them what…at that time, the word blog and vlog were new. So I had to teach them, “Okay, this is a blog and this is the software you can use.” Then I took a break from it for a while. Then 2016, 2017 is when I got very much involved, because of my daughter, with WordCamp. She was invited to speak and that’s what rekindled the fire again for me to use WordPress in my classroom and at home.

Liam: Wow. I feel like we could do weeks of conversation on what you’ve shared in the opening minutes here, whether it’s technology or teaching or WordPress, and you teaching children to use it. There’s just a ton there.

Annejeanette: It is.

Liam: I’m always interested when I come to technology, and I use it a certain way, and I have my flow. And then I show it to somebody or teach somebody, and I come back a period of time later, and they’re doing something totally different that my brain just would never have landed on. I’m wondering since you’re seeing so many young people, whether it’s grade-schoolers or college-age folks using WordPress, I wonder…and this is kind of going to put you on the spot to think of something. So sorry about that. But what’s been some of the more interesting examples of somebody taking WordPress and you say, “Well, yeah, I guess I can do that. That’s amazing. I never would have thought about using it that way. That’s really cool.”

Annejeanette: I would have to say going to WordCamp and seeing the high schoolers take the basics of it and create…I saw a young lady. She literally created her own business online e-business, e-commerce. She competed in… this was a virtual technology conference for high schoolers, won a scholarship right here in South Florida. The young people, it’s like a sponge with them. They just take it, they absorb it, and they make it their own.

I just sit back and I’m kind of like the cheerleader. Do you. Or as I was saying, “Go on girl. Do your thing.” Because what we teach them is just to light the fire, then they just let it burn. Or basically like a thing of clay. We show them how to mold it wet it, sculpt it, and then make it into something that is theirs. Whether it’s a bowl, a vase, a cup. That’s pretty much the analogy I think I can use with WordPress that the generation born from 2000, I would say, moving forward, that’s exactly what they’ve done to any and everything they touch.

This generation, my daughter would be in this category, my niece, Victoria would be in there this category, the students that I’ve had over the last 20 years, they just take it, they make it, and they own it. And I love it because what worked for me in 2000, or even in 2015 isn’t going to work into 2021. So my job is to just teach them fundamentals and then let them see what they can create and innovate on their own. Let them have some critical thinking with it. Let them think about what they’re going to do with it. And then let them use their imagination, their creativity, and just own it and make it theirs.

This is an exciting time. If we continue to use that, I think it’s an exciting time for WordPress. It’s an exciting time for those of us in the field of educational technology, and it’s definitely an exciting time for those who have a passion with technology to really watch and see it evolve.

Tara: Do you find that your students have an easy time or stumble at any point when they’re learning WordPress?

Annejeanette: Oh they stumble. And that’s part of the process. I’m okay with them stumbling. But I realize there’s a tenacity with this generation. They stumble, they’ll get frustrated, and then they’ll get right back up again and try it again until it works for them. That’s what I’ve seen.

Tara: Are they learning basic posts? Are you teaching them theme editing and all that type of thing? How deep are you going with these kids?

Annejeanette: Well, as a writing teacher, I want to see their process. I always look at the processes of their writing. So they may post something in early September, and I realized they haven’t gotten to the meat of their thesis and their evidence and their claims. But by April, they’re writing a full five-paragraph essay. So what I like is for them to see their evolution as a writer, and if they add sound or links, or this or that. So that’s what I look at.

Then I notice in that journey, they begin to discover other things and publish other things. And I’m like, “Okay, I see you’re onto something.” That’s what I look at as both elementary teacher and even in my college students when they’re blogging or creating things.

Liam: Annejeanette, I’m just thinking as you’re talking here, and I love that you’re using WordPress for that. Because they could use a Google Docs to do their writing. But to see the evolution of the writing, that’s so much easier to do in a blog where you just go to the next post, next post, next post. So if you have a month archive, you jump from September to May of the following year. And you can do that so much easier on your phone. What a great way! What a fantastic way to go about that! I am just kind of sitting here in awe by your wisdom and your approach.

Annejeanette: They need to see the journey. They need to see the process. They need to see the struggle. A lot of times they don’t see it until the end of the year and see what they’ve been able to do. Even my daughter. She hasn’t blogged in a while but when she was, I’ve seen her processes as well. So it’s important that we take a look at our process in learning.

Tara: Agreed. Agreed. We ask all of our guests, Annejeanette about success. So I’m going to ask you that question now, which is how you define success and maybe even how you measure it or what it means to you in terms of following up on being successful. What does that mean for you?

Annejeanette: Being successful for me, I have a three-word acronym. I should say, 3Fs. My faith, my family, and my focus. Those are my three things that I focus on that to find success for me. My faith—I live by that daily. Having faith and being grounded in my faith. My family, and definitely the ability to focus in whatever I’m being assigned or taxed to and completing it. That is the definition of success.

Annejeanette: I like that. The 3Fs. Those are all good words to live by. So your daughter, you’ve mentioned is using WordPress. I know I got to see her for a moment when we first met. Can you tell us a little bit about Jada and what she is doing with WordPress as well?

Annejeanette: Jada, she’s definitely my miracle child. We are involved in an organization called Black Girls Code. There was a workshop that was presented on using WordPress, and one of the instructors are very well known WordPress user here in South Florida, namely Nora, just began to introduce it to her. At that time, she was only 8-years-old. She learned, she built her own website. She was asked to speak at WordCamp. From that event till this past summer, she has taken the use of technology with WordPress and made it her own networking, coding, blogging, building. It’s been a wonderful journey to watch her become her and at such a young age.

I like the networking pool here in South Florida. A gentleman by the name of David Bisset and his wife have embraced the young people in South Florida to get involved with WordPress. As a matter of fact, we have our own little mini-conference during WordCamps. So the young people get to sit and learn e-commerce, and blogging, and STEM. I just loved it. I bring my students to the WordCamp here in Miami because Lenore and David Bisset and some of the other organizers are just fully committed to what I’m fully committed to. And that’s empowering the young people in WordPress. So she has become a part of that. So I’m excited.

My husband is slowly learning. He does a website called DadsBeonDuty and he’s blogging. So now I’m trying to move him over to WordPress. We’re going to try to make this a family thing. Then I have my magnific mom moments where I just reflect on what it’s like being a mom in the 21st century. So we’re slowly transitioning our family, if you will, to WordPress slowly.

Tara: That’s so wonderful. Shout out to David Bisset and what he’s done with the community in the Miami area and his team that works with him there. You’re among them, and I know William Jackson and Ada, they all participate in just an amazing, amazing campaign to get kids using WordPress and learning tech and learning code and loving it. It’s amazing what they’ve done. I’ve seen it evolving over the years.

Can you tell us a little bit about Black Girls Who Code because I am a big supporter of that organization? Haven’t seen it in my area actively. Is that very active where you are? What can you tell us about that?

Annejeanette: Well, because COVID-19 we’ve actually gone virtual. So they’ve been having a lot of virtual events nationwide. Kimberly Bryant is the founder. She’s out of the west coast in the Oakland, California area. So she set up this movement for young girls of color to learn and get involved with STEM. I’ve been involved now for almost five years through my daughter. And it’s just such a joy to see the organization. no matter what city they’re in, just begin to evolve. The mentoring that they do, the matches, the camaraderie. So it’s just really nice to be a part of that.

My daughter is also with a group called ITWomen where they also have a mentor who you’re matched to. That’s just another this Girls Who Code. So many. But those are the three that I can say have impacted my daughter and myself. WordPress for sure, and WordCamp. I’d see women, Claire Marrero, and of course Black Girls Code with Kimberly Bryant.

Liam: There’s a lot of work to pivot what was previously in-person training to online. And I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. I’m involved with an organization up here in Philly called Philly Tech Sistas, and it is focused on helping women of color get into careers in tech. So typically adult women who are looking to position into some kind of programming, development, technology-based career.

And we’ve been trying to put together online programs because all there come to a Saturday, come to a Saturday and Sunday weekend training course and pay a reasonable amount of money to walk away with a lot of knowledge and a lot of context of folks who are willing to mentor and teach and guide. You just can’t do eight hours on a Saturday. So how do you take eight hours on a Saturday and turn that into two-hour chunks. It’s a lot of work. So shout out to you and do your colleagues and to the folks that you’ve mentioned that are making that transition in no short order.

This is not like, “Hey, this is the way technology is going. We should evolve this way.” Technology just changed about three months ago when we were told to stay home. We got to make this happen. And it’s all-volunteer which makes it even more challenging because there’s the home chaos of everybody being at home because of COVID-19. There’s a lot. So thank you for the work that you’re doing and for the work that the women that you’ve mentioned are doing as well.

Annejeanette: Thank you. As busy and challenging as it is, it’s also an opportunity. I always love serving in the community. I do a lot of volunteer work, both with my church and just with other organizations. But to now streamline that to strictly virtual, I look at it as an opportunity. Yes, you got to do a lot of reorganizing a lot of planning, and you got to make sure things are up and running, but it’s just a great opportunity for those who are willing to do the work. And they can make it work.

I had to do some training with Canvas and some other virtual learning management systems. And you’re right, taking eight hours of training and breaking it into chunks. I was working with the organization to just do the training and I realized, okay, what I could do in eight hours face to face, we’ve got to look at times and dividing it by four, divided by three. But we made it happen. But like I said, it’s a lot of planning, a lot of thinking outside the box. It can work.

Liam: I’m hearing, Annejeanette, a lot of practical instances of your three F’s, your faith, your family, and your focus coming through in that. I loved your definition. I didn’t get a chance to share that back with you. But I love seeing it really clear that that is your life, and that it is a commitment that you’ve made. It sounds like you really get a lot of value and joy and functionality out of as well.

Well done for figuring that out. There’s a lot of us who we don’t always know that. I want to change gears and ask you about advice. And the question is not the advice that you would share, Annejeanette, but what some advice that you’ve been given, or you read or you stumbled upon, or you saw on a sign somewhere and successfully implemented in your life.

Annejeanette: This dedicated to my mother. My mother is probably one of the strongest women I know. And I say that because she was a widow at 33 years old. She’s a lupus survivor. She’s a breast cancer survivor. So it was a season of my life I was going through some things and I just said I can’t make it through the day. And she said, “Well, if you don’t make it through the day, try to make it through one hour. If you can’t make it through one hour, make it through the minute. And the minutes do add up.” And that’s all she said to me.

That was about 15 years ago. Looking now, she was right. Just if the day just doesn’t work for you and you’re overwhelmed by the day, just take it minute by minute or hour by hour. She always said they do add up and you’ll find yourself getting through or working through the process. So that is probably the best advice from my mom, Lynette that was ever given to me.

Liam: That seems so timeless. It seems particularly valid and relevant for the chaos we find ourselves in these days.

Annejeanette: Mmh. Mmh. When she was going through chemo and going through different things, and she was having her bad moments, she would just say, “Okay, I don’t like this day, but I’m going to make it through the next few minutes or the next hour. And we just watched her. And she did it. And now she’s been cancer-free 10 years, and lupus, no markers in the last 15 years. I just have learned so much from my mom. To me that advice, like you said, it’s priceless and timeless.

Tara: Yeah. That’s great to hear that your mom’s doing so well after all this time. It sounds like she’s given advice that she has learned herself. So getting through those hard times, sometimes it is just counting one hour at a time or running a race one mile at a time, however you break it down. But try not to look too far ahead. And seeing that big, long journey ahead of you, which, as Liam mentioned, right now is where we can tend to go sometimes in our heads when you have this kind of uncertain time ahead of you. So thank you for sharing that. That’s really helpful advice. I’m sure I’ll be taking that to heart as well.

Speaking of these uncertain times that we’re in right now, and being a teacher, I’d like to ask you about how you are feeling about approaching remote learning both for your college students and for your younger students. How challenging that will be for you? You sound like you’ve got a really positive attitude. So how are you approaching that? Also for your daughter, as a parent, how are you thinking about that this time ahead for the uncertainty of school situation?

Annejeanette: My district, Broward County Schools has voted for 100% virtual learning. I am very grateful for that because it gives me a peace of mind with how instruction is going to be. For my daughter, I think for her, it’s a little bittersweet because she loves that socializing and being in sports, that kind of thing. But right now, with the numbers that they’re looking in Florida, I think it’s the right thing. I’m pretty comfortable with eLearning virtually. I had a blast with my students from March to June, and I will continue to instruct with excitement and compassion. I think that has to also be a part of the equation.

We could teach teach teach, and we can tech tech tech, but we’ve got to have some compassion with this as well. Because a lot of families in South Florida have been greatly impacted around the globe. We need to show some compassion. But I’m excited and looking forward to teaching virtually until things are better.

Liam: Things like compassion empathy is important. Yeah, go ahead, Tara.

Tara: Nope. I was going to say thank you for sharing. It’s comforting to hear your approach being positive and compassionate.

Annejeanette: Oh, yes. Yesterday I was on a six-hour course with making sure that is a part of the equation. I’ve always been committed to that but now even more so.

Liam: I’m delighted to hear that. And I feel like this is a conversation that we could continue for hours. But we are at our time limit and I’m afraid it’s gone by so, so quickly. Annejeanette, thank you so much for joining us. Before we say goodbye, can you share where folks can find you online?

Annejeanette: Yes. I got a lot of places. The first place is of course on Twitter @ProfessaDiva954. On Instagram, @professordiva954. You can just find me with WordCamp Miami on previous conferences, Annejeanette Washington Collins. Google it and you’ll see my involvement with that. And of course on my school, Manatee Bay Elementary. Shout out to the Bay.

Liam: Yaay!

Annejeanette: Definitely.

Liam: Thank you so much. What a pleasure to get to know you a little bit here. Thank you for your time and for your energy, and your insightful words.

Annejeanette: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure

Tara: Thanks. Bye-bye.

Annejeanette: 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.

David has been working in SEO for about 12 years, five years on his own as Reliable Acorn. Over the past couple of years, he’s been speaking at WordCamps about SEO and client management.

Twitter | @reliableacorn

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by David Zimmerman. David has been working in SEO for about 12 years, five years on his own as Reliable Acorn. Over the past couple of years, he’s been speaking at WordCamps about SEO and client management. Under the current COVID-19 shutdown, he misses the friends he’s made in the hallway track. Welcome, David.

David: Hello. Nice to be with you two, today.

Tara: We are glad to have you in our virtual hallway. Thanks for joining us today, David. Can you tell us and our listeners a little bit more about yourself?

David: Yeah, I see. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with my wife who is just really of about nine months now. It’s been a great time to get to know my wife in quarantine over the last few months. It’s kind of a new thing for us. And we’ve been having a good time doing it. She has been here working from home, getting used to me, who’ve been working from home for a long time now.

Tara: So you’re newly married, and then right after you got married you ended up in this work together? Did I understand that correctly?

David: Yeah. Sorry, that wasn’t very clear, was it? We got married a few months before the pandemic. So about March when she was working from home, she got to join me who have already been working from home for a long time. So it’s been a fun way to kind of get to know someone even closer.

Tara: Yeah. I know when you have a vacation where you stay at home you call it a staycation. What do you call a honeymoon when you’re stuck at home?

David: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Tara: Well, excellent. Tell us about how you’ve discovered WordPress. You say you have an SEO agency and SEO doesn’t always mean WordPress. So tell us a little bit about your connection with WordPress.

David: I’ve been kind of a half developer, half marketer for years, and then someone introduced me to the concept of SEO. It appealed to both my technical side and my content creative side. It was a kind of a weird culmination. As someone who came from that background, WordPress was a kind of a natural fit. It just was easy to use and had the flexibility where I could dink around with it. I don’t call myself a developer, I really don’t do that. But WordPress allowed me to have enough.

For instance, I eventually built my own little theme from scratch just to really familiarize myself with how WordPress worked. I learned a lot in the process. Now the theme is really super ugly because I am definitely not a designer. But it taught me how WordPress renders things. It taught me how to speak to designers and developers who are building WordPress websites, so I can give them the best technical SEO advice I can being that I understand how the platform works.

I took that and I started going and traveling around to different WordCamps around the southeastern United States and meeting friends, speaking on things that I was excited to speak about. Now I feel like I’m pretty involved in the community. I was on the organization team to organize WordCamps Charlotte this year. Was. So maybe next year.

Liam: Hopefully next year, right? Hopefully next year. David, I want to talk a little bit about your diving into that WordPress theme and making that. I’m a big fan of knowing a lot about the ancillary roles to mine. I’m in the design and marketing side, not the development and marketing. Very much in the design and marketing. But dabble enough in code not to write a theme that I would ever put on a public-facing website, but to your point to be able to talk to developers and to talk to clients where we could do this technically and that technically.

I know that is simpler than this other task I have no idea how to do either. But I know that that’s simpler than that is more complicated. I’m interested, when you were going to make this WordPress theme, was that just an educational idea? Or were you really thinking, “You know, maybe I’ll sell it” or “maybe I’ll design it up and use it on my own?” Where are you going with it?

David: Because I knew it would be ugly, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sell it. I actually stole someone’s design in a way. There is somebody who developed this idea called the fluid baseline grid. He developed this very simple CSS system that handled text really well and introduced me to concepts like letting and design concepts like that. It was also responsive before responsive was really a thing. It was mobile-first. It was my first experience with mobile-first web design. And that really changed the way things happened.

So it was an intellectual exercise to understand WordPress, because I was taking these important concepts like mobile-first and responsive web design, doing it using someone else’s idea and trying to convert it into WordPress. So now when I go to a developer, I can tell you did not design this from a mobile-first perspective. And I can say, “Remember, Google is evaluating your site from a mobile-first experience when they’re deciding to rank your site.”

So when you build a mobile-first design, what you’re doing is you are building it in light of how Google would like to think of your site rather than designers who build desktop and then crack it down to mobile, which ends up being usually a very cumbersome site. It can be a real big SEO problem. So that’s kind of how I approached it.

Learning the things that then WordPress could do with that helped me a lot. For instance, one of the biggest SEO problems on WordPress is the idea that if you have an entirety of a blog post on a category page, and then you have the same blog post on a date page, you are duplicating your own content. Google doesn’t like that. Why would Google want to serve up those pages if it’s the same stuff on every other? So you have to use the preview.

You can do that manually. You can go in there and then little line the read more tag. But Gosh, it’s a whole lot easier if you know there’s a function that you can put in your functions of PHP file to say, “Hey, only show the preview on archival pages.” Once you know that, oh, that’s a million times easier. And it was things like that I discovered that I could build into the theme. And now when I work with a developer to build a site, I say, “Hey, I need you to crack open the functions of PHP theme file and I need you to go and you need to fix this code problem.”

Tara: That’s really interesting. When I think of SEOs, I think there are a lot of SEOs, maybe less nowadays, but that actually understand and know about those kinds of technical things that do definitely impact SEO. SEO agencies are often not building websites or understanding theming and functions file. So you’re way more of a developer than you let on at the beginning there I think, David?

David: Oh, yeah. Well, you’ve not seen any of the code I’ve produced.

Liam: Well, there’s certainly value in doing enough code so that it works, right? If you’re treating it as an exercise in learning, and not, you know, this is necessarily the fastest or the most efficient way to code or latest trend of coding. It’s really, what is this doing? How does this work? That’s a different project. Let me ask you one last question on this topic. And it’s really how long did you plan to spend on developing your theme as an educational exercise? And then how long did you actually spend?

David: Wow, that’s a great question. I don’t remember. I did it while I was working at an agency before I went on my own. So that was kind of a fun hobby project. I don’t know now that I’m on my own if I would have the time or desire to do this. Because here I am sitting in my office all day. I don’t want to do this after hours. I want to go upstairs. I want to walk around. But I think it took me a good year of off time to work on it.

If no one is looking at the technical documentation on WordPress site, it’s really good. Someone like me who doesn’t have a background in computer science can read it and follow it. Anybody can do it. It just takes time. My first foray into development was—and this will date me—writing programs with compilers. It literally took me two years to write a program that was 5k. It was teeny tiny, and it took me two years to do it. It was great. It was a lot of fun. It was, again, a hobby kind of thing. But eventually, it worked, and it actually became pretty popular and had a little bit of income.

So, thankfully, if you have that disposable time you can dedicate to it. But maybe if you are a real experienced developer, it would a lot faster for you to build from scratch than it would be to try to take a theme and make a child of it, and then adjust it to what you need.

Tara: Yeah. Do you do SEO for other websites that are not built with WordPress or do you exclusively work with WordPress?

David: I really only have one or two clients who work on WordPress. I mean, I use it for all of my sites. But some of my clients, it’s one client had a really bad developer experience. I’m sure everybody who works in WordPress understands this. You get a bad developer and the WordPress can’t be updated. So guess what happens? You get hacked, and then the client gets really frustrated. The client got so frustrated, they swore they would never do WordPress ever again. Even though it really was the best solution for them and their price point, they were just burned by WordPress. But they were really burned by a cheap developer who didn’t build it properly.

Another client of mine works in cybersecurity space, and they are really afraid of WordPress getting hacked. I feel like WordPress is very, very secure if you maintain it properly. But being in the cybersecurity space, they just couldn’t take a chance like that. So they moved away from WordPress. Another client of mine just work with a developer who always uses another system. We’ve had to hack the heck out of that system to even make it basically SEO friendly despite what their website says on it. We basically hacked to the CMS to make it into WordPress. Because WordPress just out of the box does things right.

Liam: David, how are you doing business development? How you are you getting clients in a COVID-19 world where you’re not buying coffees or speaking at local meetups? What are you doing these days?

David: I think that primarily what I’m doing is…The truth is, I get most of my clients from referrals. I do SEO for a living, but the cobblers kid has no shoes. And that’s not where I get my leads from. I spend my time for SEO on my clients. And because of that, they do well and then they refer me to someone else. So I feel like my clients are happy. And when they hear of someone who needs my services, they recommend me.

Now, it’s been a really rough couple of months for clients. I’ve seen clients’ traffic just plummet over the last couple of months. I’ve seen a couple of clients that have done AdWords with cost per clicks have grown exponentially almost…Google is suggesting they spend $1,000 just for a click. That’s not a lead. That’s a click.

Liam: And are they selling a $20,000 product or are they selling something for a couple hundred bucks.

David: They are selling a significant product. But normally they pay a 10th of that per click. So what I’ve experienced, I’m saying that to say the market is down for everybody. Everybody is scraping for the little opportunities that are out there. It’s a brutal place right now. I’m starting to see things recover for my clients. I’m starting to see traffic return. Google Trends is suggesting that more and more searches are coming.

I think we’re starting to see not business back to normal but pent up demand from people not wanting to make decisions over the last couple of months because they don’t know what’s going on. And now it’s too late, they have to commit to something. So demand is starting to return to some of these in businesses.

What I experienced at the beginning, which was really similar to when I kind of got started in SEO was around the time of the last economic downturn. At the beginning of the economic downturn, everybody goes, “Oh, no, we’ve not done any marketing. We better start doing marketing.” And they invest heavily in such marketing. My phone was ringing off the hook at the beginning of the pandemic, and then really quickly, it dried up. Because then people started freaking out. They started hoarding…maybe that’s being wise with their money. Like, let’s not just waste money on marketing and throw money hoping it works.

But I noticed that too at the last economic downturn. When I got started, everything was huge booming, and then quickly things kind of as money ran out, they applied less money into marketing. But marketing is like networking. You do it when you don’t need to do it. When you have to have marketing results, that’s almost the worst time to do marketing because now it’s like we’re panic marketing. We’re throwing things at the wall and hoping it sticks and blowing burning money that we might not have in a couple of months.

Liam: Yeah, there’s not the time to do strategy. Yeah, absolutely.

David: Well, that’s the good of SEO. The things we’re doing now for SEO or maybe not having as huge of an impact because demand is down, but in a couple of months, the stuff we’re doing now will start to make an impact. Other marketing channels don’t have that same benefit. If your social media is “what do you do for me? what have you done for me lately?” you can be forgotten in a couple of months if you’re not keeping up with it and you’re starting from scratch. With SEO, we’re not starting from scratch, we’re starting on what we build on.

So SEO now is a really good investment, especially for companies that have more time than money. Because you can take the time that you never had to do these SEO projects. Great. Let’s take the time. And let’s invest in the SEO issues and initiatives that will pay off in a couple of months.

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: You make that search engine program a success.

David: Right.

Tara: Nicely done with that segue Liam. I’m going to ask you about success. How do you define success, David? What does it mean for you in your work life, business life, personal life, combination?

David: I think of success in two different ways. When I think about it for my clients, success is, are they making money from my efforts? They should be paying me less than they’re making. And my goal is always like, what is the ROI on this investment? You need to be making more money than what you’re paying me. If you’re not, you need to stop paying me.

When it comes to SEO, people get distracted by vanity metrics. “Where do I rank?” Who cares? Like this is not a game of I’m better than you. This is a game I’m making more money so that your business can be sustained. I don’t apply that metric to myself. When I think of success, what I like to think of is being in a position to be able to help others. That’s really what I want to be able to do.

Even when it comes to SEO, I had a friend one time, we’re having cocktails and she’s like, “You know, you can talk about something besides SEO, David.” And I’m like, “But I really love what I do. I really like sharing what I’ve learned. I really like helping people out.” It wasn’t me talking work, it was me trying to share the knowledge that I gained.” And I think that’s success.

I am successful if I can share what I’ve learned. And that’s the joy of going to WordCamps and talking about SEO. Let’s face it, I am where I am because other people have kind of helped me get here. And if I can go to a WordCamps and help a junior SEO person start to think about SEO in a different way or small business person stop thinking about vanity metrics and start thinking about whether this is actually producing more sales for them and income, then that’s going to help them. And I feel that’s a successful visit to WordCamps.

Tara: Yeah. I like talking about SEO as well. What elements plural or singular of SEO do you like talking about the most? And what do you think people like hearing about or asking about or learning about? Because SEO is pretty broad. Is there a specific aspect of SEO that you focus on?

David: I like to think of SEO as having four parts that are really all equally important. Measurement is the starting point for any SEO campaign. You have to understand what you’re trying to accomplish and be able to measure what you’re trying to accomplish. Sometimes we skip that step and we move straight on to is the [unintelligible 00:20:46]

The second step is just technical SEO. Making sure your site is set up right, making sure Google is able to read it right, and this is coming into problems. Thankfully, we run WordPress and we don’t have to worry about advanced complicated pre-rendering of JavaScript frameworks and “Oh, Lord, these are horrible concepts that sabotage many a site.” WordPress doesn’t have to worry about that. But there’s some technical issues with WordPress, and we got to fix them.

Once we get the technical stuff and Google can read it, then we get to what most people think of when it comes to SEO, which is the content. Does your page have the word? Are you putting it in your title tag kinds of stuff? That’s like third in there. Because we first need to make sure that Google can read it. And then before we do that, we need to have a goal that we’re trying to accomplish.

The final step of SEO is the link building aspect, which is probably the most controversial part, but the fundamental part of how Google was a different as a search engine. Google started fundamentally about using links to rank pages. It’s not about having the incurrence of the same word on the page more than everybody else, is what the other websites say your website is about, and what do other websites say is the credible site and the topic. And that’s what links are.

Once people understand that, they go into way dangerous areas. And links can be so important that you can really get your website in big trouble with Google even kicked out of the index if you try to corners there. But that being said, links are still an important part of the algorithm. You have to consider that when you’re doing a real SEO campaign. We just got to do it in a way that is not trying to game the system. Google is smarter than that. Like, really? Are we really trading links now? I mean, really?

It’s like Google explicitly says, “Do not trade links.” They’re looking for that. You’re not the first person to think about that idea. That’s where SEO becomes real marketing. Why would anybody link to your site? Maybe we should ask that question before we ask, “How do I get a link to my site?” That’s SEO. Some of that is people have heard of many times before, sometimes people overlook things or get confused.

Tara: Yeah. Do you have case studies and do you share…? I mean, marketing is a very esoteric thing in many ways. It’s hard to tie a particular effort to a specific result. But SEO, you actually can look at rankings and you can take some credit for having some quote-unquote, “success.” With that, how do you sell that? How do you track that with your customers? What does success mean in terms of SEO?

David: Yeah, I actually write it into my contract that, number one, I do not report on ranking because ranking is kind of a false positive. We can rank you for things but just because we rank you for it doesn’t mean anybody else is searching for it. And that’s where these fly by night $50 a month SEO programs trick you. Like they come up with some arbitrary phrase that no one’s looking for and say, “See, we got you ranked. Aren’t you happy? Pat yourself on the back?” Who cares? It doesn’t help.

Tara: Zero volume.

David: Yeah. I just say, “Listen, we’re not going to play that game. We’re going to look at a rank that leads to traffic. Traffic in and of itself isn’t the end goal either, right? Because we could be getting a lot of traffic, but it could be completely irrelevant for what we do. So we want to look at ranking that leads to traffic, that leads to some sort of goal that is as close as we can get to the actual income that your company makes. If you’re selling things online, that’s easy. You’ve sold the product. We know where you got that traffic from, and presumably from where you ranked. But when it comes to like a lead service-oriented business, a lead generation thing, then we’re tracking as close as we can if we’re setting up a CRM system to make sure your sales team is closing the lead. That’s what we want.

The other part of my contracts is not only I don’t report ranking so we don’t get distracted by things that don’t really help you, but you get a monthly report every month showing where you’re getting traffic from. And of that traffic, how much is producing actual business for you. Because I want my clients to know whether or not I’m generating an ROI for them. They need to be making more money for their business than they’re paying me. And that monthly report holds me accountable to that. If I’m not, you need to put your marketing dollars into something else.

Liam: That’s really good advice for clients is to focus on the money. Being number one in a search is great, but only if that delivers customers, or if that delivers products sold, or referrals or what again. To your point, whatever the target can be, right? If you’re a law firm, you’re not selling through your website, right? Unless you’re LegalZoom, chances are you’re using it as a way to get names.

Speaking of advice, I want to ask you our other signature question, David. And it’s around advice that you’ve stumbled upon, been given, read, saw somewhere, and successfully implemented in your life. What’s been the best advice that you’ve ever taken, followed, and really benefited from?

David: Wow. What is the best advice I’ve ever felt? I think the best advice I ever received was from Nathan Ingram, who is kind of a friend and mentor of mine. He speaks in a lot of WordCamps. I’m going to say it very poorly, but he’s often talked about imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome, I think is really debilitating to a lot of us who work for ourselves. Especially comes when we really step out and do something, take a chance.

For instance, I just recently launched a new product called Curious Ants that is basically taking the processes I use for my clients and helps people who want to DIY their own SEO campaign follow the processes I use, and they can do their own SEO campaign. I’ve worked hard on this. I made sure that the processes I use that seem to get results can be followed by other people. But it took me months and months and months and months and months to drag my feet and do it.

Pretty soon I realized that the real reason I was dragging my feet because all the processes were written down. I’ve been using them for years and updating them constantly. The real thing that was holding me back with imposter syndrome. Am I fooling myself that this is going to work for someone else?

Nathan and I kind of talked about this in how I was reaching a money where your mouth is kind of thing and I didn’t want to release open to the public the Curious Ants thing because I was just afraid “Oh, no. What if I’m fooling myself here? What if I’ve just been lucky with my other clients—some of whom have been with me for years? Those things kind of sank in.

Nathan and I talked about it. And then what I realized, the next day, I actually said to myself, “Okay, I’m going to start applying the Curious Ants process to the Curious Ants website. And I felt really good because it’s like, “Oh, that’s right. I kind of forgot to do this,” or “the cobblers kids got no shoes. I kind of forgot to do this thing. Oh, yeah, I forgot to do that. And oh, I should do this.”

Next week, I started seeing some traffic to my own site. I’m like, “Huh.” And then the next week is like triple the traffic. So I’m like, “Wow, this is your stuff really works.” And it was like, “Oh. I was fooling myself. I do have experience in this.” I know what I’m doing sometimes. I’m not perfect. It’s okay not to be perfect. So it’s like stepping out and taking that chance of doing it helped me overcome my own imposter syndrome.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a good feeling. That’s a good feeling. Thanks for sharing that and thanks to Nathan as well for sharing that advice. We are friends of Nathan as well. We, unfortunately, are out of time, David. It’s been so great chatting with you and hearing your story and your passion for what you do. It’s wonderful. I love it so much. Probably after we stop recording, I’ll probably hit you up with some SEO questions.

David: Of course.

Tara: Where can people find you online?

David: Well, Reliable Acorn is the main company where I service clients. And then curiousants.com is my new SEO product where you can take what I do with my clients and do it yourself.

Tara: Great. Congratulations.

David: Thank you.

Tara: Thanks so much.

Liam: David, thanks so much for your time today. I really enjoyed meeting you and spending time with you out here in our hallway. Thank you.

David: It’s great to join you both.

Tara: Bye.

David: 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.

Caylin is the growth manager at GoWP. She’s a marketer and an artist who shares her art on CBCinked.com.

Twitter | @cbcinked

GoWP Website | GoWP

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 134.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Caylin White. Caylin is the growth manager at GoWP. She’s a marketer and an artist who shares her art on Cbcinked.com. Welcome, Caylin. We’re glad to have you today.

Caylin: Thanks so much. I’m so excited to be here.

Liam: We’re excited for you to be here, Caylin Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Caylin: Absolutely. I am so excited to connect with you guys on this. I work at GoWP, like she mentioned, in growth and marketing. It’s been my world for, I don’t know, years. 12 plus now makes me sound a little ancient. I’m originally from Michigan, but I’m here now at Atlanta, Georgia. I’ve been here for quite some time—10 plus years. And I am a huge fan of WordPress. I think it’s been almost four or five yours now in this space.

One of my favorite things to do is connect with people like you. So I’m excited to kind of dig into this. Tara and I met on the GoWP Niche Agency Owners Facebook group as part of the GoWP world. And then I got a chance to connect with Liam. So I’m excited to talk to you guys today.

Tara: We’re happy to have you here. Can you tell us what growth marketing is? What is that?

Caylin: It’s a new term. Do you like it?

Tara: I do. I mean, I think marketing is about growth. So I’m wondering, is it redundant or what’s it? I’m sure it’s not. So tell us about it.

Caylin: It’s a hybrid term actually. It’s a hybrid term. I don’t know if you realize this, but the word “sales” is starting to leave the vocabulary of selling. So it’s a hybrid term for sale and marketing. It’s a two-part role, which is kind of my favorite part, is you get to do the digital marketing like content and social media and networking and partnerships like this. And then you get to help those leads that come in and help answer the questions and jump on calls with them and have a chance to explain how we can help their agencies grow.

We actually do a lot of calls with people that are just starting out and they are growing beyond their capacity. So it’s kind of fun to hear each agency owner’s story. You’ve got the sales and the marketing side in one, and then really they just created the term growth for all things growing. We want all avenues growing. So marketing and sales and happy customers. I actually really like the term. It’s been, I think, a year or two since they kind of transitioned from the sales and marketing manager, which is what I’ve been or just a marketing manager or sales team lead. Growth is definitely an all-encompassing sort of term for it. I like it.

Tara: Is it replacing sales?

Caylin: I don’t think so. I think it’s just transitioning the way that you sell. For instance, the way that I think of it is you don’t really pitch yourself any longer. It’s not the sort of that door to door salesman style, sales technique any longer. It’s about connection and human to human interaction, being real, and understanding how they think. I think it’s not about sort of the cold call any longer. That kind of sales mentality is just not the way the growth side does things.

One of the things I love about GoWP is they’re always like, you know, you don’t have to sell them what you’re selling. Just explain how we can help. And if it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit. But it’s so nice to walk into each call that we have with an agency owner and just say, “Let’s take that off your plate for you and you get to go out and do the things that you love.” And so we’ve met a lot of great people along the way. But yeah, that technique is a little transitioned. It’s more about educating people, instead of “this is what we do. This is what we do. This is what we do. I’m selling.” It’s more so just, “Hey, we’re putting out helpful content, we’re educating you on how to do things and hopefully these free resources will help you do what you want to do.”

For instance, just like you guys, you know, owning businesses and working and sending out work, that’s amazing. That’s exactly why we do what we do. And I love it. I love my role. I’ve been doing it for so long, it’s evolved so much and it’s exciting. I actually love the avenue that it’s taking online and in the social world, which is why I love the WordPress community because they’re so awesome online. Anyway.

Liam: I like the idea of growth marketing because really sales at its most efficient is about solving problems, right, solving customers’ problems. And if they don’t have a problem that my business or your business, Tara or GoWP can solve, then we can still support them and be friendly and have a relationship. But there’s no point trying to sell them circle screws for square holes. It’s not going to work. They’re not going to be happy. We’re not going to be happy trying to explain to them how to get the screws into that square hole. So I really like that idea.

Caylin: And then the other half of it is that if it doesn’t work out client relationship, 99% of the time, there are other ways that you can support them, promote them. I’m big in the content world. So writing blogs featuring. And then of course, our fun Facebook groups. Stuff like that. It’s been a nice balance between the two sort of partnerships and client relationships. That’s been fun.

Liam: Yeah. And I think it takes the pressure off sales, not only to hit targets, although targets are important, right? If we don’t have enough sales, we don’t pay people. But also just the “Oh, crikey! She’s calling. That’s going to be a sales call.” If it’s just a good fit, then it’s “What are you going to charge me for that? How does that work with what I’m doing? Do I want to pay for that? Do I think there’s value there?” And we can talk candidly about it. It just makes it a lot more transparent and less pressure.

Caylin: Absolutely.

Liam: I applaud you and your colleague for taking that route. It’s certainly one that I use in my own business.

Caylin: Yes. Awesome. Thank you. I coined it the human-centric approach. I don’t even know if that’s a word. If it is, I might have made about made it up. But we’ve been talking a lot in the Facebook group about profits and how to just help people. Chris Lemma mentioned, if you have to pitch the sale, you’ve already lost it. So if you’re on a call with someone and it’s someone that’s really truly interested, you’re basically just walking through the technical details seeing if you work well. That’s a great way to look at it.

Liam: I really like that. And you know what, guess what, as we’re talking all about this, I realized that I don’t have a very firm grasp on what GoWP does. We’re not a sales show but maybe you can give us a thirty second, one-minute overview of what actually the company does.

Caylin: I know a little bit about GoWP. I’m happy to help. We provide white label WordPress services. Basically, our motto is we just want to help grow agencies. Things that they don’t want to do: website maintenance, content edits. We just offered our new page build service, which is really exciting and very popular building out landing pages.

The thing I love about the team is that they’re super communicative. I’ve never been with a team so much that just communicates about whatever it may be. Like, we need to help this guy, we have a new client or we want to send out mugs, or whatever it is to make us happy. The team is…this is why it works so well is because they have such great communication. That’s what we do.

Our team is growing by the day. We’ve got new hires, I think one this weekend, one last week. So that’s really exciting to me. Of course, I love all things growth. So that helps, but that’s what we do. Emily, our director of growth, runs the Niche Agency Owners Facebook group, which is taking off as well. We have a lot of great members there. Where else are we? I think that’s where we’re at, and that’s what we do.

Tara: How many people are at GoWP now?

Caylin: Total, I think we’re almost at 15. Somewhere around there. It’s growing every day.

Tara: That’s good. Let’s take a step backward and talk about your path and your background, and how you ended up doing what you’re doing, both in WordPress and in marketing in GoWP.

Caylin: That is about a three-hour phone call.

Tara: Give us the short version.

Caylin: I’m just kidding. My adventure is long, has had many different paths. I’m sort of a hobbit when it comes to adventuring. But basically what happened was, I became…I’m from a family of artists. My mom was an art teacher; my dad wrote for all these different publications. So art is in our family. And with art comes creativity and comes selling online and comes learning about marketing and learning about sales. And so it naturally kind of just drove me to that.

About 10 years ago, I opened my own WordPress site on my own with my own little knowledge, which was none at that time, and created CBC Inked—and I create positive affirmations for daily wellness. So they’re basically drawings of positive ways to start your day. That evolved and brought me more to the digital marketing side where I kicked off this journey of content marketing and social media marketing.

All along that path, it was various companies, but all along that path, WordPress was sort of there. It always was a part of what I did, and what I shared and things like that. But the types of roles that I’ve had have all been wonderful roles and blessed to work for the people that I have. Honestly, each role has taught me something thing that brought me to where I am. So I love that and I love the people that I’ve worked with.

But I had a chance to kind of transition into software maybe about five or six years ago. You don’t know this about me but I am a huge nerd when it comes to learning new software, learning a new skill, or trade online like learning integrations and all that fun data. And so, I started to kind of certify myself, like get into WordPress myself and teach myself and take the courses. I got content marketing certified with HubSpot, which was a journey over three or four years. So very fun for me along the way.

Then I was able to sort of mesh the two together with GoWP. I went to a few WordCamps, I met Brad, we talked about all these different ways that we were growing, and I loved the way that the team works. And so the stars aligned and here we are. But it was funny, I was telling, you know, in the Facebook group about, I basically approached Brad and I was like, “I love what you guys are doing here. I would love to join the team.” I didn’t go through any of the application process the way you’re supposed to do it. I didn’t do any of that. And they basically created a role because they were growing so much, and they needed help with both marketing and sales. And so I thought that was really amazing to sort of fit in there. But that’s been my journey.

I get to paint and draw on the weekends and I get to play with WordPress and help agencies grow on the weekdays. And somewhere in there I sit playing with my dog and going outside and watching fun stuff. That’s sort of been my path. There’s much more in there, the ups and the downs, but like I said, that’s a three-hour podcast.

Tara: I have a background before coming to WordPress in artistic stuff as well and marketing too. Do you enjoy I guess the coding and that type of thing with WordPress? You said you like digging into technology and tools. But then I find sometimes artists are very hesitant to get into the technical stuff and so they leave that to others. And me, as an artistic minded person, I just love CSS. I’m using that to change the way things look So talk a little bit about the marriage of those two ideas.

Caylin: That’s so funny. I agree with you. It evolved for me. At first, I was very like, “Oh, I don’t understand this. It’s like the matrix.” And then once you start to grasp the small things and it starts to make sense, I think that’s why I like it. It’s like a puzzle. I’m a big gamer. My husband and I are big video gamers. And the thing I love about playing video games is solving the puzzle. It’s like you look at something you’re like, “I want to figure out how this works. And I want to do it myself without looking at it.” So it’s been an interesting journey.

I am nowhere near even medium expertise. I am just starting out in the code world. Like, I can read some HTML and I can understand what people are sort of saying and manipulate it a bit. But that’s sort of on my bucket list to get better and better at. I also love learning new software like the tools that I use for productivity and marketing every day. Like that saves me minutes. Anytime I can cut time off my day by loopholes and hotkeys, I’m all about that. So those are fun things to do, too. But I am like you and my technical brain. There must be a certain creativity evolving.

Liam: I’ll save Tara the effort. Can you talk a little bit about the tools and the tips that you use, the tricks that you use? Because she’s a big tools guru.

Tara: Thank you, Liam. You’re going to regret getting us started down that path.

Caylin: Right. I’m compiling a list of them right now because honestly, they’ve saved me, oh my gosh, so much time. So, 100% the ones that I use every single day are TextExpander. Are you familiar with it? It’s an amazing tool. I love the company too. I met them at a WordCamp. Fantastic. We use Notion—is a piece of software for internal GoWP. Complete organizational tool. You can collaborate, communicate, have whiteboard sessions with like Nero boards. It’s truly amazing.

Obviously, there’s small graphics things that I use. To me, my calendar and my integrations from whether it be an email or whatever it needs to be, if it doesn’t go in my calendar, it doesn’t happen in my life. So I take the time to filter through my Gmail messages with all of the things and the different avenues. So they all have their own folders, they all have their own kind of reminders and tasks associated. I don’t know if you know this, but there’s a new task feature on Macs that you can set up for your day. Kind of like those reminders that go off in your computer. I know they can be annoying, but they save your life sometimes. So calendars for sure.

Other software that I use, honestly, we do a lot of Buffer. Buffer saves me so much time with social media automation. And Canva is our quick and easy branding graphics tool. Those are sort of the ones that are quick and easy. But TextExpander saves me a lot because we do a lot of repeat typing throughout the day social posts and like landing pages and going back and forth in the WordPress admin panel. So much, much appreciative of their company.

I’m sure that there are others. I was actually thinking of putting together a blog post on all the productivity tools. We just did a webinar or a workshop with James Rose from Content Snare, and I was furiously writing notes because he was recommending so many good ones.

Tara: Yeah, he has a lot of good ones.

Caylin: I’ll share that with you guys for sure. Thanks.

Tara: Thanks. I have a website where I have a list of all the tools. I used to use TextExpander but then I’m also a Mac user, and then I was already using Alfred. Alfred added snippets which are like TextExpander so then I didn’t have to have two tools. Because Alfred is also amazing if you don’t know that.

Caylin: It is a free tool?

Tara: You pay for it but it’s not that much. It’s like $100 a year. But it has snippets in it but it also does other things. I don’t even scratch the surface of what all it does.

Caylin: It saves you so much time.

Tara: Yes. I know when you’re on another device that doesn’t have it—I mean, just to type my email address, I just have to type three letters and it pops in, that type of stuff—you realize how spoiled you are.

Caylin: Very true.

Tara: We ask our guests about success, Caylin, and how they define it and what it means to them. Can you talk to us a little bit about your definition of success?

Caylin: Sure. Big word. It’s a big term. I don’t even know if I’ve hit it yet. I’ll let you know when I do. Because I kind of think it’s an everyday…sort of, every day is different. Like your definition of success is different every day. I think you evolve with it. For me, a successful day goal, whether that be now or in the future is, did I put my best effort in to make it happen? Did I just talk about it or did I actually do it? Did I actually put those tasks in action? Did I actually schedule the call? Did I actually publish a post? Did I actually sell the piece? Whatever it means to me, did I actually do it or did I just talk about it and then didn’t do it? So, to me, every day it’s getting things done.

My sticky notes are always full with tasks. And I don’t know if you guys do this, you probably don’t. It’s a super nerd alert. I make little boxes around next to my task list and I literally, physically check them off. Yeah, I physically have to check them off and in my brain, there’s something that’s like, “Yay.” Just a little celebration of those wins. That’s success to me is like okay, every day you put your all in, you’re either talked about it, or you did it. That’s what I’ve been working on.

Liam: I like that. In a world of lists and checklists, and success being really getting through that to-do list or being reasonable, how do you deal with when you didn’t, in your definition, win and maybe you did slack off and not because you’re tired or you’re exhausted or there’s a family something else but you, on a scale of 1 to 10, you pulled a 6. I’m not pointing at you in a negative way, I do the same. How do you cope with that? What’s your list kind of look like? What does that mean for, Caylin?

Caylin: What a great question. And that’s every day probably. I mean, do you really check everything off every single day? No. But realistically, you made an attempt. For me, I attempted the Pomodoro Technique. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with the Pomodoro Journal. It’s basically one page, you literally only can put five things on there. My problem, and I know this about myself, is that I put 95 things on my list per day instead of the five Pomodoro Technique that you’re supposed to.

So I then have a secondary list over here. These are the ones that you have to get done today, and then you have your other big worldly list. I can’t tell you how much stock I have in sticky notes. I literally have an entire cartridge there. But that’s the way that I do it is I wake up, I’m like, “All right. I dialed down my big list into my little list, get it down to the five.” And if I haven’t checked off the five I’m just being lazy at that point. At that point, I got to kick it up into gear.

And every day at the end of the day, you can’t get mad at yourself if you haven’t done it. That took me years to do. Especially working remotely, that took me years to say, “Oh my gosh, I haven’t done with my list. I’m going to have to work through dinner. I’m going to have to work this weekend.” All of that. You can’t really do that. You need to be able to manage what you have on the shortlist, unplug, understand that it’s going to get done and move forward. That’s been a work in progress for sure.

Tara: I can relate to all of that. So you were you already working remotely before COVID happened?

Caylin: I was, for about five years now, which I feel very blessed and very lucky to have had that. I feel very grateful to have still had work during that time. And it felt not that unnatural.

Tara: Yeah it’s not that different. Your productivity approach hasn’t changed because of the shutdown.

Caylin: Well, it’s been harder to focus and harder to do it. But these connections are literally…I don’t know. Liam, I might have told you this already, but these are what kind of kept me going because it was like, we started the happiness hour and we got to connect and I got to get on Michelle’s WP Coffee Talk podcast. That productivity, that being able to connect with people at that time, I think literally was what kind of got me through on a productive level for sure. So that sort of focused and help. I don’t know if you guys experienced the same thing, but you kind of get swept away in it. And you know, reconnecting with people online has been a lifesaver.

Tara: I found, we were saying before this that I kind of now just tune out all the Zoom stuff because they’re so many. And so, I can’t even put them all on my schedule because it’s just too much. I find I’ve actually been doing less of the sort of group things on Zoom. But what’s interesting from a personal standpoint for me is I found that I’ve been reaching out to longtime connections. And I’ve read this too. It’s like nostalgia or comfort or something to center yourself in who you are in your history. So reaching out to college friends in high school friends. And that type of thing has been more of my focus on connection than actually WordPress groups.

Caylin: Absolutely. The best. Those are the best connections for sure. I was going to say that might be one of the nice things that to come out of this, you know, is just the reconnect. Definitely important at this time for sure. And I’m feeling sort of that we’re coming out into a nice place. We all need to make some changes. I think it’s going to be a nice avenue for us. Everybody’s just trying harder and we’re all sort of coming together. It’s kind of hopeful. We’ll put some hope out there.

Liam: Well, we certainly need some hope. As we’re recording this, many states are actively relaxing stay at home orders and expect that a number of us are wondering what the health effects are those going to be as excited as we are to get back out in public and help the economy, particularly retail and hospitality industries.

Caylin, I want to ask you about advice. I want to ask you one of our signature questions and it’s around advice at youth been given or you’ve received or you’ve encountered maybe in a book or on a sign or in a poem or somebody shared with you? What’s been a big piece of advice that you’ve adopted and successfully implemented in your own life?

Caylin: That’s a good question. Another big question. This might be kind of funny, but I had a mentor in college. And also my husband has told me this many times, but the gist is one word. Just listen. Because I am a passionate person. Growing up my family was always like, “Caylin, you’re too loud. You’re talking too much.” I got excessive socialization on my report card, all these fun things where I just “brah, my personality.”

And the best piece of advice I’ve ever gotten is to listen. To literally just slow down and listen. That has been something I’ve been kind of working on myself professionally personally. And also to just listen to myself too. You know, all three. It’s definitely been something that I think has helped me not only with just hearing, observing but my reactions to things and slowly processing. As an Italian passionate creative, you just kind of want to “brah, I changed the world.” So you need to listen.

Tara: That’s great advice. Also as an Italian passionate, artistic person, creative person, I have that problem too. Do you catch yourself not listening and remind yourself of that? Because I don’t think I’ve heard of the term “excessive socialization”

Liam: Is it like anti-social distancing or something like that?

Tara: I find that fascinating. As somebody who’s diagnosed with that, is that by your fourth grade teacher? It must not necessarily come naturally. It probably comes naturally to most of us to listen. And I think now we’re spending a lot more time thinking about that word “listen.” I know I am and I find it very hard. Especially when you get passionate, and when you get in a heated conversation, you get excited. I interrupt people and that type of thing. Do you have a tip on how to remind yourself of that in the moment and not after when you realize that you weren’t listening?

Caylin: When you’ve already messed up. It’s so hard. It is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, honestly. And working on myself, it’s so hard. And it’s a combination of things. There’s no one answer to that. To me, the biggest thing I think that’s helped me is my meditation app, my Calm app. And not really for the meditation. I mean, I love meditation. It’s so hard. I’ve never mastered it. But there’s a breathing exercise on there that it’s just time and tones. I’ve done it for a few years, and I’ve used the process of implementing. Because meditation is not supposed to be on the time when you’re on the apps doing it. That’s a training for you to actually incorporate it into your day on a daily minute by minute basis.

So I’ve been using their techniques and incorporating them into my conversation. And I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had to bite my tongue. And I have literally typed things out, and then just deleted them. I read things three times, I take out all the exclamation points. How many exclamation points can I possibly have? Take out all this excessive noise. I dial it down to the most simplest thing in my brain before I speak and on my emails and chats. I literally just take a beat. I take a step second and I just…it’s the hardest thing ever.

But the breathing thing, I kind of go back to that where it’s like you’re not allowed to respond until after you take a breath or something. There’s some sort of like fun rule where you listen, and then you you’re not allowed to respond until you’ve taken a breath. And it’s this weird silence where you’re going to want to do it and you’re going to want to react. But that forces your brain to just kind of put the information together that you need but not going to react poorly. I’ve been working on that, and I’m not good at it. I’m still trying but the hardest part is just not bursting with that passion. But I definitely recommend that app. I’ve got Calm and Headspace but I think Calm is the best one.

Tara: I have Headspace and I don’t use it very often.

Caylin: Headspace is different. It’s more of like a wake-up. And they do a lot of like exercises, like brain things. Calm applies it to your life. Those are I guess the two differences. To me, I like an application process. I can always lay with headphones in bed and listen to a meditation app, but if it trains you how to put it into your life and your schedule and when you need it, that’s kind of what helps me.

Tara: Thanks for sharing that. That’s great advice.

Liam: I feel like I could listen to this conversation all day long. I think there’s a lot to unpack there. As Tara kind of touched on a little bit, certainly in an era in the United States anyway where there’s a lot of conversations going on around social justice and equality and racism and the value of black lives in American society that many of us are questioning our ability to listen in the first place and trying to develop that skill set. So thank you very much for flagging that up and for joining us today.

Caylin: Absolutely. So great to connect with you guys on this. I didn’t get a chance to hear much about you guys. I’ve been following you so long. I’d love to ask you a question. I heard that was allowed, right?

Tara: People have done that before, though I’m getting a little bit nervous.

Caylin: I promise.

Liam: We’ve got to get this out if we need to.

Tara: That’s true.

Caylin: I just wondered, you know, now that you know a little bit about me and my journey, in both WordPress and artistically and you, Tara seems like a much like me, what advice do you have for me going into this next phase of my life. I’m excited to kick start more art for people and I’m excited to grow in the WordPress community. What advice do you have for someone like me where I’m at now?

Tara: Wow. I don’t know if I’m qualified to answer that question. I mean, it sounds like you have a lot of good things going on and the practices that you’re bringing into your life from a productivity standpoint are really important. You’ve mentioned that the path that you took to not beat yourself up for not getting everything done. So I think being kind to yourself sounds like something that you’re working on. So I would recommend that. And making sure that you do develop a habit, a practice of not working too much. I wish I could take my own advice in that regard, but you have your art. And so keep that because it’s easy. I used to do a lot more of that and now I don’t anymore. And I don’t really necessarily miss it, but it’s because I can’t remember it. Don’t let it go. I guess that’d be my advice to you.

Caylin: Great advice. And I promise I will keep creative.

Liam: Hold on, Tara. Hold on.

Caylin: She’s qualified. She’s qualified.

Liam: I think she is. I think she is. I concur. All righty. Well, on that note, shall we call it a day here? But before we do say goodbye, actually, Caylin, let me catch myself and ask, where can people find you online to connect with you?

Caylin: Sure. And I would love that. My work is at GoWP Support on all social. My personal is at CBC Inked on all social or CBCInked.com. I’m happy to connect with you guys. This was awesome.

Tara: Yeah. Thank you so much. Great to chat with you.

Caylin: Thanks for having me.

Liam: Thanks, Caylin.

Caylin: All right. Take care.

Liam: Bye for now.

Caylin: 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.

Anyssa Ferreira is a designer and front-end developer from São Paulo, Brazil. She is co-founder of Haste, an agency focused on delivering great user experience with WordPress. Anyssa is also part of the WordCamp São Paulo organizing team.

Twitter | @anyssaferreira

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 133.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we are joined by Anyssa Ferreira. Anyssa is a designer and front-end developer from São Paulo, Brazil. She is co-founder of Haste, an agency focused on delivering great user experience with WordPress. Anyssa is also part of the WordCamp São Paulo organizing team. Welcome!

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Anyssa Ferreira. Anyssa is a designer and front end developer from São Paulo, Brazil. She is the co-founder of Haste, an agency focused on delivering great user experience with WordPress. Anyssa is also part of the WordCamp São Paulo organizing team. Hello, Anyssa. Welcome.

Anyssa: Hello. Thank you for having me here today.

Tara: So glad to have you. Glad to have someone from the other side of the world in a vertical sense. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Anyssa: Yes, sure. As Liam said, I am a designer and front end developer. I started playing with FrontPage in my teenage. I ended up here today with you with WordPress. Now I have my own agency where I work with a variety of clients, developing everything from corporate websites and e-commerce and plugins and everything that WordPress can do.

Tara: I used FrontPage a long time ago as well. How did you discover WordPress?

Anyssa: Well, after I played with FrontPage, I realized that I had to learn something different if I wanted to really create professional websites. So when I was looking for a platform to build my portfolio, I guess I was in college at the time. I went to a graphic designer college. So I was looking for a platform to just build a simple portfolio and put some images.

I found WordPress, and I didn’t really like it at first. I kind of build a portfolio, didn’t like it and I left. I went to BlogSpot and I built my portfolio there. When I had to build a more robust website, I went back to WordPress, and I thought, “Well, this will be more appropriate for this kind of website this time.”

Liam: That’s super interesting around going with FrontPage and then…I didn’t start with FrontPage. I was Dreamweaver and just coding in text editors and the like. But definitely more of a marketing and designer than a developer. But now you have described yourself as a front end developer. Talk about your transition or introduction or at least willingness to dive into code to the point where you publicly declare that you code, which is something I always reluctantly share. I never describe myself as a developer. And it’s not a bridge that ultimately I wanted to cross. I’d be interested in hearing your story.

Anyssa: Well, that was exactly it. I was reluctant too because I always saw myself as a designer. “I am a designer. I’m not a coder. I’m not a developer.” As I was trying to boot my portfolio in with BlogSpot, I realized that they had these themes or templates and that I could customize to some extent. So I had to learn a little CSS to do this and a little HTML. So I started learning, and soon enough it was, oh, I really wanted to change this little part that I cannot change in this platform. So I started to build my own websites with pure HTML and CSS, and some JavaScript.

I got a freelance job that I had to build the layout of a website. My client asked me if I could build it, and I said, “Okay, I can.” And then I built it. Then the client really liked it. She said, “Oh, let’s work together. You maintain the website, and I’ll pay you to do this.” And I was like, “Oh, I can really work with this.” So I really started working as a developer than a designer. It was my first job, and I really was surprised because someone saw that I could develop something and I really didn’t believe that I could.

At this point, I was like, “Okay, maybe I should really start to take this seriously.” Because at the college, I didn’t have any coding classes—just a really basic one—I had to learn by myself. So I started studying and really put effort on the coding side of my skills.

Tara: That’s really interesting. What is the community like where you live? The WordPress community.

Anyssa: Well do community here is a very dedicated one. But also we are going through a rough period. We need to understand what is happening right now in our community to bring more people, to engage more people. Because three or four years ago, we had this huge community, and all of a sudden, it really shrunk a bit. Now we don’t have many WordCamps. We have like two in a year for contrast because Brazil is not much. So we really need to give some attention to the base work and talk to people and engage them. Because WordPress is really huge here, but the community is not really representing the size of the engagement we have here.

Liam: You might not have the answer, so I’m not trying to put you on the spot. The decline of the activity of the Brazilian WordPress community, is that likely to be related to COVID-19? Or do you think there’s another factor there?

Anyssa: Well, COVID certainly had an impact. But it was even before that all the pandemic and quarantine. I think that WordPress is really to…we have different tools here that have a bigger marketing approach. I don’t know how to express this. The other tools I think make more effort to make…Sorry.

Liam: No, you’re doing fine. Your English is fantastic compared to my Brazilian, my Portuguese. So carry on. I’m definitely following you. It’s a different approach, but just take your time and share it as you’d like. We’re definitely understanding.

Anyssa: Okay. The other tools like Wix or other e-commerce platforms, they are really investing in marketing and people are migrating to these other tools. Sometimes people still see WordPress as the armature tools.

Liam: Yeah, armature tools. Sure.

Anyssa: Like something that is not an enterprise or something that is for you to build just a simple blog, is not really a professional tool. So we really have this work of educating the market here. That’s why I said that our community is super…because everyone works day and night telling people, “No, WordPress does not have security problems.” It has some security problems as any other software would have. So we have to keep educating people in the very basic stuff. That’s most of the difficulty of the community we have here is about this.

Liam: That’s a real challenge to educate folks about the realities of WordPress because, of course, it has its security flaws and risks. But every content management system does. And to say that WordPress is more vulnerable than others is…I mean, it’s difficult as a small agency to have any kind of scientific data that says, actually, it’s no more so. I mean, anecdotally and professionally we can say it’s not but there’s just…At least I’m aware of. Tara, do you know of anywhere you could point to a study or a blog post that says these are the topmost insecure content management system? Because WordPress might be hacked the most, but it’s also the most widely used. So inevitably, it’s going to be the most hacked. That makes sense. Yeah, that’s a challenge.

Tara: Yeah, for sure. I’m also curious when we talk about challenges if you would talk to us a little bit about being the co-founder of an agency and what challenges you found doing that, being your own boss and running an agency and working with clients. Talk to us a little bit about your experience there and what the challenges are.

Anyssa: Well, it certainly was a challenge. It still is. But I feel like the first challenge is that we were very young at the time we founded. I was 19.

Tara: Wow, that’s impressive.

Anyssa: I said that working with website development was my first job. It also was my only job. So I just had this one job. Then I went, “Oh, you know what, let’s start our own thing.” This was the first challenge. We didn’t have much experience and network and anything. We just knew that we wanted to do something different than we were experienced in our jobs.

Then we started studying and learning everything we could. The WordPress community really helped us at a key moment in our company because we started doing everything we could about design. Like, “Do you need some print or logo?” Anything you could think of we would do. So when we started seeing that building websites with WordPress were a possibility, we went to the community and we asked a lot of help. First to build our own website, and then what we learned, we started doing for clients.

This was one of the biggest challenges is to learn how to adapt really fast because we didn’t have so much previous experience. I think those were the main challenges. Now is like, how can we keep a sustainable business and think about growing and bringing more business? And also the pandemic, right, it’s a big challenge for everyone.

Tara: Yeah, for sure. So you started this with a friend. How has that worked out?

Anyssa: Yeah, I started this with my boyfriend, Allyson. We really work well together. We complement each other’s skills. He’s a back end developer. He tends to deal more with the business side and I tend to deal more with the creative side. So it went really well. In the last couple of years, we hired some stuff and we have another partner now, Max. We are getting really well.

This is really weird because at first, we thought, “Oh, we have to separate personal one, and business life and things. We have to be really mindful of that.” It wasn’t really that hard. I think we really knew how to complement each other’s, not only skills but knowledge, everything. I think when you work with someone that you know and you like, it’s really the best because you are leaving with the person for many hours and you have to communicate well, you have to be able to understand, and all those soft skills get really easier to deal with that.

Tara: We’ve chatted with a few couples who work together, and I think it’s amazing to be able to do that, actually. Because I think it is a struggle to separate work from life in general. And then to have that be part of your relationship as well, it says a lot about the strength of a relationship to do that. And I think you have to make a concerted effort. As you said, you talked about that. So how many years have you been doing this together then?

Anyssa: Well, we started working together in 2009. So it’s 11 years now.

Tara: Wow. That’s impressive. Congratulations. That’s great. That’s great.

I’d like to ask you about success. We ask everyone this question and I love hearing the different answers that we hear. What does success mean to you? How do you define it? And how do you incorporate that definition into your life?

Anyssa: I think success is reaching a goal. It doesn’t matter what goal it is. I really think success is not really caring about what other people think success is. When we started working and we started our own agency, I thought a lot about this. And I thought, “Well, when will I feel like I accomplished success? Will that be when, I don’t know, I have my first million dollars? Or when I have over 200 people company? What will success look like?”

Now today I don’t have any of this. But I feel I can work the same amount of hours in my week, I can have my time of entertainment and doing nothing, I have my weekends and I have my mental health. I have my health in general. So I think this is starting to look like success for me. Of course, I want to do a lot more. But I am seeing that I’m getting the small successes. And this is like compounding the big success that I want.

Liam: I really like that idea of a bunch of small successes heading up to an overall feeling of success. I just want to go back to something you said about success is not concerning yourself with the definition of other people’s success. I just love that. I love that confidence. And not a bravado, or hubris, or false pride, but really just I am who I am and I understand who I am and what matters to me, and not matter to you and that’s okay. It matters to me and I’m going to make that my work and my goal. That’s fantastic. Thank you for sharing that.

Anyssa: Thank you. I think we live like in a moment in history where we see people getting one billion dollars at age 23. And we look at this and we are like, “Oh my God. What am I doing with my life?” And I get this sometimes. A lot. But I really just, you know what? I don’t care. I’m doing my own thing. I know all of the steps I had to take to reach where I am. So it couldn’t be different. I did my best, and of course, could have done some things differently. But we cannot think about this. We cannot mess with timelines. “You know, what if I had done this well? Something good could come up of this.” But I could be something bad too. So there is no point of thinking “What could I have done?” or “What would my life be if something would be different?”

Tara: And I think having started your own company at age 19, your definition of success naturally will evolve as you get older and as your business shifts and changes. So thank you for sharing that.

Anyssa: Yeah, it definitely changed a lot, and I definitely learned a lot. I hope it keeps changing, I don’t know, until the end. Because it’s not really something that I think is fixed. It’s something that needs to keep changing. Even if I really just reach the goal that I set before, I need to set other words. So really we keep going.

Liam: Yeah, that makes sense. I want to ask you about your business and about business development in a COVID-19 economy. We shared before the show that both Brazil, where you live, and the United States, where Tara and I live have various stages of locked down orders in place throughout our respective countries. How are you and your business partner going about bringing in work, doing business development in this type of environment? What does that look like for you?

Anyssa: We are working 100% percent remotely. We started early on, March, I guess. We didn’t even have a lockdown order here in Brazil when we started. But we already had some experience working remotely. Our company was not remote at the time, but part of it was. We always had the tools. We always used Slack. Everything was in GitHub or our files were in the cloud. Everything was set up to work remotely; we just prefer to go to the office.

When we had to make the shift to work remotely, it was kind of smooth. We didn’t have a lot of problems. We just had to adjust the communication process because we felt really isolated. We were used to working side by side. So we just worked there. And when we need to talk to someone, we just turn to the side and say something. Since we didn’t have this, we had to set up daily meetings and weekly meetings.

Now we are trying to understand what we can do to bring more business because we need to think about the future and how can we bring more business. We actually saw an opportunity in working with clients from other countries that we didn’t really have the opportunity before. Since now everyone is remote, we can focus on this. So now we are talking with people from other countries and trying to get business in not only Brazil but in the world.

Liam: Yeah, that’s really interesting—he globalization due to the little lockdown that enables folks to communicate and do business outside of their own geographic limitations. I suppose, you know, going east and west gets a bit tricky with time zones, but you can go up and down your same time zone. And there’s plenty of folks in it and you don’t have to deal with time zone. That’s really interesting.

I want to change gears on us and talk a little bit about advice. My question for you is, what’s the best advice that you’ve ever been given or read or encountered and successfully implemented in your life?

Anyssa: Well, it was an advice from a YouTube video. I don’t have it anymore. But it was a really simple YouTube video about drawing. It really can be applied to anything. It’s just like do something a lot of times and you’ll get good in it. It doesn’t matter what it is. The man was talking about drawing a character. But it’s just simple. There is no magic in how do I become good in something. There is no magic. Just do this thing as many times as you can do and you’ll be good at it eventually. So pretty much anything can be achieved through training.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. I find myself needing to remind myself of that from time to time, that you know, this is cumbersome and laborious. And I keep hitting my virtual foot on the same stump and it’s really just because I don’t know what I’m doing. And if I do it more and more, it becomes easier. Tara, I can see from the look on your face that you wanted to share something, so I’m going to be quiet.

Tara: No, I was going to be in agreement on that concept. I was also going to ask what you do for fun when you’re not working.

Anyssa: Well, I draw. I like to draw a lot. I like to play video games. Pretty much anything that involves creativity. I like to write, to do manual work. I really try to do very different things for my hobby that does not involve only the computer or something electronic because I get so much time in front of screens. Especially now in quarantine, I just need some daylight eventually. But I try to draw a lot. In the last couple of days, I’ve been drawing a lot.

Liam: What do you like to draw? Sorry, to interrupt.

Tara: Now I’m drawing Manga. So I’m drawing Japanese style comics. I am really liking it. It’s usually something that teenagers do. I’m a little late to the party but it’s never too late. I’m really enjoying

Tara: When you work in WordPress, do you work with an English version of it or do you use a translated version? I know it’s been something that has been talked about a lot and I haven’t really explored it much myself, but I’m curious as to how you interact with WordPress in your language or in English.

Anyssa: I use it in Brazilian Portuguese. I am part of the translation team. I am one of the translators in our community. I even translate plugins and themes too. This is why WordPress is so successful here in Brazil because we have a really good translation team. They are real fast. We work really hard to ensure that WordPress is available in Portuguese as soon as they release a new version. Only 5% of the Brazilians speak English, so we have to translate it. I ended up using it in Portuguese almost all the time.

Tara: I love hearing that. It’s something that I think we’re so centered on ourselves in the English language that I don’t think that we think about that very often. And whenever I encounter blog posts or information about the translating teams, I’m always fascinated to hear about what they’re doing and how to make WordPress available to people who don’t speak English. It’s wonderful. And that’s one of the reasons I’m sure why WordPress is so widely used. Are other platforms like Squarespace, and Wix, and those, do they have translations? Or are they only in English? I wonder. Do you know?

Anyssa: Wix I know they have a Portuguese version. I’m not aware if Squarespace has. But I guess they have.

Tara: Okay. I guess that’s the benefit of being open sources is you have people contributing from all over the world in their own languages rather than having to hire people to do that. Thank you for contributing to the WordPress community and to your community in Brazil to make WordPress more accessible to everybody. That’s great. It’s a big commitment I’m sure.

Liam: And I’ll second that. Thanks. The translation teams who give up their time and their talent and their multi-language skills are a huge part of what makes the WordPress community global. If folks like you, Anyssa weren’t skilled enough and generous enough to do that, we wouldn’t be able to have the great, not just community but also just the economy, the diversity, the plugins made by folks from all over the world. So thank you for your contributions that way. Even though we’re not in Brazil, we’re certainly benefiting from your work translated into Portuguese. Thank you.

Anyssa: You’re welcome.

Liam: We are sadly out of time here, but before we say goodbye, I’d love for you to share where people can find you online, and maybe if you share them and people can see some of your drawings online too.

Anyssa: You can find me on Twitter. I am @anyssaferreira on Twitter. In almost every other social media, I am Anyssa Ferreira too. There are indeed some drawings on Twitter right now. And you can find me at my website, which is hastedesign.com.br. That’s it.

Tara:  Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure meeting you. I hope that you stay safe.

Anyssa: You too. Stay safe, everyone.

Liam: Bye for now, Anyssa. Take care.

Anyssa: 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.