Hallway Chats

Tom is the CEO of Convesio, a new managed WordPress platform. Tom lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and four kids. Originally from Fort Myers, Florida, he served in the army right out of high school. After serving in the army, Tom went on to music school and then started his tech career in agencies.

Website | Convesio

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 122.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Tom Fanelli. Tom is the CEO of Convesio, a new managed WordPress platform. Tom lives in the San Francisco Bay area with his wife and four kids. Originally from Fort Myers, Florida, he served in the army right out of high school. After serving in the army, Tom went on to music school and then started his tech career in agencies. Welcome, Tom. It’s great to have you on Hallway Chats.

Tom: Thank you, Tara, and thank you, Liam. Really great to be here.

Liam: We’re excited to meet you and get to know you. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please, Tom?

Tom: Yeah, sure. As you mentioned, it was really when I was in music school that I realized I was actually better at technology than I was the artistry of being a musician. And so I gravitated a lot towards computers and the application of computers and recording. I realized I was pretty good at it. Desktop publishing, Photoshop was still in its early days. I got some of those software packages, started playing around with it and I found myself working in a newspaper doing publishing of ads, scanning on drum scanners. I’m kind of dating myself here.

But eventually, that led to me becoming a freelancer. Then it led to me becoming an agency owner and grew that agency to like seven employees. Did that for seven or eight years, went through the dot-com first. I was building websites at that time using a product called Adobe PageMill, which was super early…I see your reaction, Tara. That was way before WordPress was around. Eventually, decided that I got burnout on the agency life a little bit, and then I went into work in a soft company.

I loved that because it married the ability for me to be technical and almost do some product type of stuff but also do marketing. And so I’m kind of one of these people where my superpower is. I’m a technical marketer. So I can code a web page, but I can also write really good copy. Really what wound up happening was I started my career in what I refer to as in house at these businesses.

Then after doing that for, gosh, I don’t know, maybe six or seven more years, I had a major pivot point in my life. And that was the opportunity to roll the dice on a startup in San Francisco. I relocated my family from Florida – I had two kids at the time – relocated them to the Bay Area, went to work for this startup. At the time, I don’t think I really realized the risk involved in that because I moved and relocated everything to come out here. As everyone knows, startups have a high rate of failure. So basically did that.

We got really fortunate. We had a great product and a great set of founders. We sold the company about a year after I got here. Then that company we took public that we sold it to. Within a couple years, I had this great success story of startup to acquisition to IPO. I continued to work at that company, which is a top 10 sass company – it’s in the real estate space called RealPage – and I lead a very large global team. I was the SVP of consumer marketing for them for about six years. Then that led to a larger company where I ran product for marketing and services tools. We can get into that. But after that, I founded Convesio. That’s my life story in a condensed format.

Tara: Wow, that’s a long trajectory. You don’t look like you’re that old. It looks like you’ve done a lot of things. I’m going to go backwards. We have actually spoken to a lot of musicians on the show, a lot of people who transition from music to code and music to tech. Talk a little bit about that and what specifically in music you studied, and if you still enjoy that and how that translated for you into this world of tech.

Tom: Good question. I’m a drummer. I feel like that’s a confession you have to make when you’re…it’s not right. I’m a drummer. I was going to school for just general music, and so I did concert bands and jazz bands. I basically ran the gamut as far as music curriculum. About two years into college doing music, I realized that this thing that I love to do for fun was becoming really burdensome. It was like I was in this grind of music education.

It was at that point that I pivoted my education to recording. My degree is in recording, and I spent a bunch of time in the studio. For a long time, I thought I was going to be a studio musician. But that pivot to recording is what really introduced me to technology because even back then being sort of a dinosaur in that there were still computers being used for very basic recording purposes. And so I got my hands on a computer. This was the mid-90s, probably late 90s – mid to late 90s. That’s what got me into technology.

Since I moved to the Bay Area, I don’t really play very much, but my kids have got the music bug and the theater bug which I was never a theater person. But they’ve got the performance bug. I’m happy to report it’s passed down a generation. So that’s good.

Liam: That’s awesome. I love that story. It was interesting that in your story you got picked up by a company out of San Francisco to the startup that ultimately was very successful. Fort Myers is a long way from San Francisco, and I just been done in a geographic way. Nothing more. What were you doing professionally or personally? Was it a friend of yours from a long time ago that says, “Hey, Tom, you want to come out here?” Had you done some work for a client and that drifted through? How did that connection come about? Because as you know, that’s not a “Can you come work for an agency up the street?” kind of way or “can you move up to Jacksonville?” That’s a significant change. How did that happen? How did you land on your radar?

Tom: This is a tremendous story about the power of connections. I don’t know if you guys are like me and you can do this. I meet people that are like, “Oh, yeah, I do this all the time.” But I can trace back the thing that has gotten me here in life. All the way back to some of the earliest people I knew 20 years ago making a connection of introductions in my life that had this amazingly influential effect on getting me where I’m at right now. Even through to my marriage. I mean, when I was in the agency, my business partner whom I knew is really the reason I met my wife. It’s amazing to trace back and look at your life in hindsight like this.

But to answer your question, I’d gone to work in the software company and they were in the field service dispatch space. Like air conditioners, electricians, plumbers. They did dispatching software inventory. But it was a dying company and they needed someone to turn things around. They had a legacy product that was on like Doss, they were late into the windows world, they thought it was a fad, it’s kind of comical, and they have trouble transitioning to selling a modern software product.

One of the things I figured out when I first got there was we needed to do a few things that really would move the needle quickly. One of those was integrating with QuickBooks. We were one of the first 10 products to integrate with QuickBooks. The timing was amazing. That’s another force in life that’s just tremendous is the right timing. Intuit had just opened its developer program and they were looking for various products in different verticals to integrate with. We were one of the very first products to do that, and we had tremendous success.

Through that connection, we went out to the Bay Area. I met people at Intuit. One of the people that I met was a dear friend of mine, Monica, who was a VP at Intuit. We became friends – we’re friends to this day – and she introduced me to the person who owned the startup that I went to work for. His name was Cena. Basically, I was doing some consulting on the side, and he needed someone to help consult on the early marketing and sales of the startup. We happen to hit it off, and we really became good friends. He got to know me. Eventually, the conversation turned into this “You’re a really smart guy. Why are you in Fort Myers, Florida? Come to the Bay Area. You need to come out here. This is where your people are.” Eventually, the timing worked out and I made the leap. That’s how I ended up getting to the Bay Area.

Tara: Wow.

Liam: I feel like there’s a whole show just in that story alone, but I’ll turn it back over to Tara.

Tara: That’s a great story. As somebody who uses QuickBooks quite a bit, I can appreciate software that works with it because not a lot of things do. That must have been a victory to have that connection and make that work.

Tom: It was. It was a tremendous lift for us. In fact, I think in a year, we did an astronomical amount of sales in integrated QuickBooks bundling. It was a real turnaround for that company.

Tara: That’s cool. Tell us a little bit about having four children and moving from Florida to San Francisco. That’s quite a different dynamic. Raising a family there, tell us a little bit about what that’s been like for you.

Tom: This is a story in taking risks. Not all the time risk span out for us. But in this case, it’s funny, I always wanted to come to San Francisco because for me being a technologist and a marketer, it’s kind of the place to be for technology. I really thought for a long time I was going to make it out there, but I had gotten to a place in my career where I was really successful at this company. In Fort Myers, Florid there’s not a lot of software companies, as you can imagine, so I was already doing what I loved in a company I had tremendous success with. It was relatively a small company under 40 employees.

Basically, I had given up on the dream. And it’s funny how life has this way of things wind up happening when you let go of things. I had given up on this idea of going to San Francisco and it’s at that very moment the opportunity dropped out of the sky to go there. It was a hard decision. We sort of gave it a lot of thought. It was no financial upside salary-wise for me. In fact, if I were to write to you the pros and cons of this on paper, a huge chunk of people will be like, “This is too risky.”

I had to liquidate my 401k to move and to sustain myself. I pushed all of the chips in on this startup. The one big difference that I had gotten was equity in the company, which is very common in startups. I remember us thinking and rationalizing “Well, there’s a whole network of people we’re going to meet.” The kids were relatively young at the time. My oldest is 15 and my second oldest is 14. The second two are native to California. But they were still relatively young. There wasn’t a whole lot of turmoil in their lives.

But it was a big deal moving away from all of our support network. Our whole family’s there. My wife has got a really large family. She’s the oldest of five. There’s like 14 and growing grandkids, including ours. We left our entire support network to move to California and the first few years personally were really hard because it takes a while to develop roots in a new place.

Professionally, it was amazing. There was this sort of turmoil in my life for the first five years. It was hard personally to develop relationships and friends. I mean, we left everyone. But professionally, I was thriving. The challenge and just energy of working for a startup in San Francisco in downtown in the financial district, I used to walk to work in the morning and look at the buildings and go, “I can’t even believe that I’m here.” Because it was so different than Fort Myers, Florida. It was a great experience professionally. Eventually, we developed roots. Now we’ve got a lot of great relationships here and sort of it’s taken hold but in the beginning, it was hard and it was a lot of risks.

Liam: Yeah, there was a lot of risks there. You just keep on unfolding these great little stories and you’re doing a good job and keep keeping them succinct. But I feel like there’s a whole nother strand of conversation right there. Tom, I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about what you’re doing right now. We heard that you’re starting or in the process of growing a managed WordPress host. Maybe tell us a little bit about it, please.

Tom: Sure, sure. Sub thread of my professional career here since I’ve been in San Francisco, I’ve been working in businesses at a very large scale that have had marketing services and websites. Myself, last company was called Deluxe and it was similar to an EIG. They were sort of an aggregator of shared hosting. They acquired a lot of shared hosting companies. I, of course, have been hosting sites in some capacity for 20 years and I’ve always been really frustrated that there’s been a lack of product innovation in the hosting space.

Let’s face it. Most hosting providers are all the same. They all use cPanel, they all use Linux servers, they all use the same type of thing. Now, they do things in better ways. There’s managed hosting providers out there that do a better job, but they’re not doing anything technology-wise radically or revolutionary narrowly different. That’s the word. I’ve always been frustrated by this. And I’ve always looked at the enterprise space and go, “Man, enterprises got such great technology. They’ve got all this cutting edge stuff like redundancy and scaling and high availability, but it’s not trickled down into the small and medium-sized businesses.” And for those enterprise solutions, they’re extremely expensive. And so for the vast majority of agencies, they can’t make a markup on any of that. In some cases, they’re just way too expensive for them to sell to their customers.

I was plagued by this and was plagued for a number of years. In fact, I heard a great saying that said…someone asked, “When should you do a startup?” It’s when you can no longer not do it. I got to the point where I just had to see if I could fix this problem. That was a couple years ago. And so Convesio was started as an R&D project, not even sure if we could do it. But we thought, “What if we just wipe the slate clean and thought from the ground up? What if we could build a state of the art, fully redundant, all the modern technology, built on AWS and the Google Cloud infrastructure stack for hosting WordPress that’s radically different than all the rest of the solutions out there?”

That has been the journey that we’ve been on. This is another one of those places in life where I’ve really pushed all the chips in on this business. And so we are in I call it almost out of beta stage. We’ve got about a thousand sites we’re hosting on the platform. We’ve been working on it continuously for the last couple of years. Our team is about eight people.

About six months ago, I came to the conclusion that we’re going to need some additional capital to do this. So, like any good Bay Area startup guy, I was like, “Let me go see if I can raise VC money.” I had a buddy of mine come to me and say, “You should look at this new funding method called Equity Crowdfunding, which is sort of like this Kickstarter meets investing.” We’ve raised somewhere around $1.3 million in equity in VC money. I call it venture capital, but its equity crowdfunding capital. About almost 850 investors have participated in it. So it’s small investments. We’re really excited to, in 2020, be taking this product to market. I would say we’ve validated really great product market fit with agencies. The agencies that are using the product, love it. So I’m super excited about what 2020 is going to bring. You’re going to hear a lot more about our company and our product throughout the year.

Tara: What’s your main point of differentiation and who is your target audience? Agencies, you mentioned?

Tom: Right. I mean, we feel like the problems agencies have with traditional hosting is compounded because they manage a portfolio of 50 or 100, many hundreds of websites. The differentiation on our platform is we have a much more streamlined interface for managing your sites. We just did a little bit of a research tally on this. On the sites that we’ve been monitoring, on average are about 239% faster than where they moved from. We’ve migrated people from all the leading hosts Kinsta, SiteGround, Pantheon, CloudWave, Flywheel, WP Engine. And the list goes on and on. So we’re faster, we are easier to use for agencies, and we do auto-scaling, which is probably one of the unique things that we do.

The way our platform works is your WordPress site runs in a container. A container is like a microserver that just runs WordPress. Every site on our platform sits behind load-balancers. So we have the ability to be able to scale your site up in seconds to replicate it and then distribute the load over multiple servers. And we do this in a very cost-effective way. Our initial packages started $15 per site per month, and you only pay for what you use. Let’s say you’ve done a marketing campaign, you get a surge of traffic, traditionally, your site might slow down, it might crash. Let’s say you do a newsletter blast and you get a lot of people that are clicking all at once on your newsletter. These are moments where traditional hosting providers will either lack in performance or they’ll just hit a wall and something will crash.

In our platform, you don’t pay for that excess overhead all the time. You only pay for it when you need it, and then your site automatically scales back down. I’ll give you a great example of a use case everyone can really understand. Churches. I love this one because it’s so clear cut. A lot of churches are streaming on Sunday mornings, and basically, they have a surge of traffic Sunday morning, and a lot of people online but then nothing on Monday night. This is a great example where a church doesn’t have to invest in a large server or large hosting package and not use it six days a week but use it only when they needed on Sunday morning. They can get us and then just scale up when they need the capacity and then they scale back down. And overall it’s cheaper for them.

Liam: That sounds very exciting and yet again, there’s a lot to talk about. But I want to swing around if I can. We’ve talked about taking risks. We’ve talked about starting businesses. We’ve talked about growing businesses. And all of this is leading me to think about success. I want to ask you, what is your definition of success? Is it about personal definition or professional? Maybe a mix of both. Can you share that with us?

Tom: Sure. This is a question I’ve thought a lot about. I think if you look at it from just generic worldly standards, you would see my career path, at least definitely over the last 10 years I’ve been in California and you would define it as very successful. But since I’ve started working Convesio, which is really…I would always tell you in the past I loved what I did. I never had a moment where it was like, “I dread going to work.” But the ability to give back to the community and the WordPress community, how it bands together and supports people, has been so rewarding to me professionally that I’m kind of going through this identity crisis of what I think successes. Because I would have told you success would be how much money you make, how many people report to you, how much revenue you’re responsible for. I got really high in that – hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue responsibility in my last company, 300 people globally in my organization.

Now that I’m in this startup, because it’s a product that I believe in, and I’m solving a problem I’m passionate about, there’s this whole other more rewarding aspect of success that I’ve been sort of awakened to. If you guys have ever met those people that are serial entrepreneurs or serial startup people, I used to hear them talk about this and I used to think, “Why are you so addicted to being in a startup? It’s not all that great. I’m in a big company. I’ve got all this money and resources.”

What I now realize that people are addicted to is the magic of when you see people fall in love with your product, and they want to actually use it. That is such an amazing feeling that it’s sort of redefined what I think successes. And so I think success now is building something people love and participating in a community of people that you are like-minded with. That’s so reflected in what it’s like to build a product for the WordPress community.

Tara: I love seeing how passionate you are about that. It must be a great motivation to go to work every day and work on something that you feel great about. Not to be a downer, but I guess when you’re working on a startup, they’re probably days where you wonder, “Is this really going to work?” Or “Is it just me who loves it?” Or those types of questions? Can you share with us some of the challenges that you have in starting up a business like this a product?

Tom: Sure, sure. Absolutely. I think one of the challenges that people have just in a material sense is being able to bootstrap something either with your own money. I was fortunate enough to have had money to be able to invest in the business to get it started. But I think one of the challenges as we grow, it’s not necessarily the grind of going to work every day, but it’s the fear of letting down all the people that have invested and believe in what we’re doing.

For me, I’ve had almost moments where you could call them sort of micro panic attacks, I guess, where we’ve raised money from 850 people, a huge chunk of which are my closest friends and family put in a huge majority of that money. And I look at that going, “Oh my gosh, there are moments where you just out of the blue, you worry about, “Am I going to do this? Is this going to be successful?” I’ve had other founders tell me that’s normal, and it’s natural, and if you weren’t concerned about that, there’d be something wrong with you. I think that’s probably one of the more mental challenges of running a startup is realizing that, you know, if this thing succeeds or fails, ultimately, it’s all on me. I’ve again, put all my chips in on this business and I’ve convinced a bunch of people I really care about to put their chips in on it. That’s a bit of a weight to bear. It’s a responsibility really.

Tara: Sure. I’m not sure I can do that. That sounds very stressful.

Tom: Well, if you have something you really believe in, it makes it a whole lot easier. That’s really been the thing. I’m a huge believer in this product. It’s been fortunate that we’ve been able to get such really good validation in what we’re doing early on. I know some people build products, and they believe in it so much, but they don’t get the validation from external sources, therefore, they go to market to raise money on something that possibly isn’t something that’s viable. I’ve been really excited. That’s one of the things that excites me is to see how much our customers love the product. That makes it a little bit easier.

Tara: I think a lot of the things that you’re telling us include some advice to people who are listening. Can you share with us some advice that you received and implemented in your life?

Tom: Yeah. I think that the biggest advice that I try to follow in my life, and this isn’t something that I’ve received in terms of no one’s really sat down and told me this, but I’ve had the opportunity to work with some really great leaders that I look up to and admire, and they do this. This is really the advice I’m mimicking that I see people do. Which is to really be transparent in your relationships you have. What you see is what you get with me. This is who I am if we’re sitting down alone having coffee or if I was up on a stage in front of 3,000 people.

I think that when you can learn to be true to yourself, it really will help you in the business world. Now, I will put a little plugin. I think another thing I’m really good at is casting a vision and communicating to people. Another skill that I’ve picked up from watching people. I think that’s an extremely powerful tool to have in our arsenal. If you’re good at rallying people behind a vision, that’s really a great skill to have.

Liam: I think transparency, particularly in today’s world, is undervalued. But I couldn’t agree with you more. Tom. I think that’s a major factor of happiness at work, particularly at home, and certainly out and about in the community. It’s really important. So thank you for sharing that with us.

Tom: Sure.

Liam: Sorry, Tara and I are going back and forth. “You said something. I have a question.” I want to ask you just briefly. I’m looking at the clock and realizing we’re almost out of time, but maybe you can share us a little bit…You talked about the excitement of being involved with the WordPress community. Tell us a little bit about how you are involved.

Tom: Good question. It’s funny. I’ve been involved in WordPress for a long time but I’ve never really been involved in the community up until the last year. My first WordCamp was last year. I went to WordCamp US, and we’re going to be attending WordCamp Phoenix and Miami and a whole long laundry list of new WordCamps.

One of the things that I was really just taken aback by WordCamp US was the open friendliness and inclusiveness of the WordPress community. We’re pledging our time as a company to WordPress. So we’re involved in hosting groups for WordPress, so we’re participating and contributor days. I’m planning on being an organizer at some WordCamps this year. That’s one of the things that I want to do. I’ve also submitted to speak at several WordCamps. I’ve been working with a team of people about how can we either get a message out about business in your agency.

The two talks I’ve submitted that I’m sort of pitching to WordCamps is a basic beginner’s guide to hosting and then how to raise money for your WordPress startup using crowdfunding, which I think is a unique thing that we’ve done that I haven’t seen really any other WordPress business raise money through that. And so it’s been really successful for us. And if I can help other people and WordPress do that, that would be awesome. But really, it’s participating in WordCamps, organizing them, participating in meetups, contributing in the hosting group, and really just starting to build what I call her extended friends and family in the WordPress community.

Tara: Wonderful.

Tom: And podcasts.

Liam: And podcasts, for sure.

Tara: I look forward to meeting you in person at a WordCamp this year.

Tom: Great.

Tara: It’s great. Well, we are out of time. This has gone by so quickly. And it’s like the end of the day so everything feels like it gets compressed. I’m glad we were able to take our time to chat with you. Thanks so much for reaching out and for joining us. Where can people find you online, Tom?

Tom: They can find us at convesio.com. They can find me on Twitter, @tfanelli or LinkedIn. I’m happy to answer any questions or have folks connect with me. I’d love to meet you.

Tara: Great, thanks again.

Liam: Thanks, Tom. It was a real pleasure getting to know you a little bit. Have a great day.

Tara: Thanks.

Tom: Thank you. Bye-bye.

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

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

Natasha is a digital marketing and SEO specialist. She lives near Toronto, Canada and enjoys sailing, hiking, skiing, playing trombone, soccer in Toronto FC.

Website | NatashaBD

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 121.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries. After realizing that teaching and childcare just weren’t for her, Natasha is now living the agency life as a digital marketing and SEO specialist. She lives near Toronto, Canada and enjoys sailing, hiking, skiing, playing trombone, soccer in Toronto FC. Welcome, Natasha.

Natasha: Hey guys, how are you doing?

Tara: Hey, it’s great to meet you, Natasha. Thanks for joining us on Hallway Chats today. Would you please start by telling us a little bit more about yourself than what Liam just described?

Natasha: My name is Natasha. I’m 25 years old. In the last two years or so, I took an interesting little career pivot into the digital marketing world. For years, I was heading towards a career in social work, teaching. I’d always enjoyed working with kids. That’s my parents’ background, so just following them into that social services, mental health, just helping the community as a field of employment world.

I started into it after university and it was a mix of not really being able to pinpoint why but just knowing maybe it wasn’t the place I wanted to be for the next 20 or 30 years of my life as much as I loved it and knew I was good at it and got good feedback about how great I was at it. Also just a lack of long term opportunities. We all know some of the struggles of being young in today’s world. Even regardless of your age, just part-time employment, the gig economy, it’s getting harder and harder to find that stable fulltime long term job that you stay at for life.

I did my best. I had a great job for a year out of university where I went up to pull back for a year working in French-speaking school helping to teach English. That was a really great full job at university experience. Living in a French-speaking area, it was absolutely gorgeous where I was living. It was really great chance to just work and explore and have some fun while still making enough money and getting some good employment experience.

But when I came back to the Toronto area, it was just, you know, I could never find that full-time job. I was bouncing between two or three part-time jobs at once. I worked with some great people and had some great experiences along the way, but I was just like, “I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I got to move out of my mom’s house at some point, I got to know be able to live on my own and not always be working evenings and weekends.” There were times where I’d be waking up at 5 in the morning to start work at six and not getting home till 9 o’clock at night. Did it for a few years, but it just wasn’t a long term plan.

I did a bit of volunteer work for youth organization University kind of brand new advocacy and youth rights and participation. I did the communications and social media side of things for them. Through that I discovered I really enjoyed marketing communications. I got some feedback that I was really great at it. So it was something I toyed around for a while maybe going back to school for marketing.

But what really made me make that jump was two or three summers ago, I spent the summer working up in Northern Ontario. I don’t know how far north it is from Toronto, but if you know where Thunder Bay Ontario is, which is the north end of Lake Superior, I lived in a community 400 and then another one 600 kilometers north of there. So remote communities with only a few hundred people. Unless it’s the winter they’re only accessible by planes. You know, tiny airplanes landing on gravel runways. It was quite the experience up there. You know, limited internet access. Life can be tough up on those reserves.

My first three weeks up there I had extremely limited internet access. Only at the school we worked in. We didn’t have it at home so sometimes on the weekends we would want to get on the internet so we’d go and sit outside the school with like one bar of Wi-Fi. And to sit there using this like slow Satellite Internet while being bitten by bugs and having the rez dog staying there with us. It was a summer of memories. Then the next community we lived in, we had internet at home, which was nice.

One thing I said to myself was like, “After the school year wrapped up in that job, I going to start looking for something else as much as I enjoyed my job at the time.” I just applied for marketing programs. I said, “Let’s just do it.” I applied to a few different ones but I had my eye on one and I got in and started in January. I got amazing summer camp that continued into a part-time job.

I actually got hired into my current job just over a year ago. I guess I got hired about two months before I graduate. I started part-time six weeks before I finished school. I just found my calling. I went through a really great program in school and I’ve met some great people along the way. But that’s how I ended up in my job right now and discovered a particular love for SEO.

If you’d asked me even two years ago if I’d ever end up in your business or marketing program and doing what I do now, I’d be like, “You need to stop taking whatever drugs you’re on. That’s crazy.” But here I have been enjoying the journey and adventure.

Tara: That’s a lot of background. I have to say when I first read your intro, and you talked about childcare, I assume that you had children …

Natasha: Oh, no.

Tara: Now that makes sense that you were teaching children. There’s a lot there. What an interesting path you’ve taken at a young age. I’m particularly fascinated with what prompted you to go live in the middle of sounds like pretty much nowhere where you had no internet. Did that experience, being so disconnected, impact your desire to be very connected now and to work actually on the internet?

Natasha: That’s an interesting question. Never really thought of that before. I don’t think it really impacted it. But being removed from a disconnected world, in one sense, everything we enjoy from the internet, but also just those basic things you take for granted like just always having stores available and even healthcare, they just simply aren’t as good in those remote indigenous communities as we have down south.

So both removing myself from the internet and just all the regular amenities and luxuries of our daily life, you don’t really think of them as a luxury. But once you’ve been up there…I don’t know if it’s impacted anything but it definitely gives you a different perspective when you come home and just makes you more appreciative for the things you do have.

Especially those three weeks where I didn’t have much internet, I think it removed some my dependence on you know, just being able to go online and search up a recipe or news or the weather and even just not being able to just text friends or family for quick questions or problems or whatever. It’s hard to really say in words the impact it’s had but it definitely gives you the different perspective and definitely remove some of my constant reliance on my phone.

Tara: Do you miss being disconnected?

Natasha: Sometimes.

Tara: Do you look back fondly in it?

Natasha: At the end of the day, I think the benefits of being connected are much greater than those of being disconnected. But the nice thing about where I live now is that you can make the choice to be disconnected instead of having it forced upon you. So it’s almost hard to compare the situations because they’re so different but I think it also just makes me better at taking a few hours away from my phone or turning off your notifications to be able to focus on something. Definitely happier being connected, but some of the benefits of being disconnected continued on too.

Liam: Also about playing trombone, that is not a super common instrument in any kind of venue. Tell us about how you play. Are you jazz? Are you classical? What do you play?

Natasha: I’ve always played an instrument pretty much as long as I can remember. I started playing violin in elementary school. I picked up the flute in middle school and made the very natural jump from flute to trombone in high school. I remember our conductor just said they really needed trombone players. I’m like, “Oh, it seems cool. Why not?”

My high school had a very strong music program. So I went from playing flute in the grade nine and more junior orchestras to jumping into the senior jazz band and orchestra in grade 10 with an instrument I’d only played in a few months. Music was really big for me in high school. I think partially just because we had such a dedicated and strong music program, lots of opportunities there and really great community I found through that.

I think part of the reason I always enjoyed music too was I was a smart kid. The academic stuff was really easy for me so it just gave me more of a challenging outlet into something just to really throw myself into. Outside of high school, I joined a well-known youth jazz band in our community. That gave me some really cool opportunities to just play in a lot of venues locally.

Then my last year in the band, we actually had the chance to travel through France and Switzerland for three weeks, which was pretty cool. We played at Juno Beach in Canada, which was really special. We played at the Vienne Jazz Festival, the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. A lot of people would just nod their heads and have no idea what I’m talking about. Other people are like blown away by that. I just enjoyed trombone from the minute I picked it up. It’s a fun instrument to play. You get some fun parts and get to be loud. But I think just music in general has always been just a challenging and exciting venue, and met lots of new people and gotten some really cool opportunities to travel.

I took a number of years off just in university with living in different places and not being able to commit to a group. But Just this year, I joined a local community orchestra in the New City I’m living in. So that’s been so nice to be playing again. You don’t really realize how much you miss something until you’re back into it. I like to joke that most people in the orchestra are a good 20 years older than me, but it’s still nice to meet new people and just get out of the house and be involved in the community beyond work.

Liam: Sure. I was going to ask you if you’re still playing. It strikes me that trombone is not the kind of instrument one can practice quietly or quietly at home without letting the neighbors know that Natasha is practicing.

Natasha: Yeah, yeah. Someone in my high school bands actually lived next door to me, and they’re like, “Yeah, I hear you practicing sometimes.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” Right now, unfortunately, I’m just stuck playing with a mute in. That’s one thing I love most about rehearsals actually you have to take that mute out and play properly.

Liam: Can you tell from playing with him you if you’re hitting a note right? Is there a correlational scale that mute – and I don’t know anything about music – but muted f sound relatively on some sliding scale, like unmuted f so you know you hit the note right? Are you just practicing the physical moving of your fingers and not blowing?

Natasha: Once you practice all the right notes and everything, it impacts the pitch and sound a little bit but it’s better than not practicing at all. You make deal with what you can and hopefully my neighbor doesn’t hate me too much for it.

Liam: I get that. I get that. Natasha, tell us a little bit about word WordPress. You and I met recently at WordCamp Niagara up in Canada. You did fantastic. I think it was your first talk ever if I remember correctly.

Natasha: I’ve done talks to other conferences but my first talk in a WordCamp and first in the marketing world.

Liam: Excellent. Well, I’m glad to have been there. Tell us a little bit about how you stumbled into WordPress and how you use it on a regular basis.

Natasha: I guess my first experiences with WordPress would have been back in university probably about six years ago. I just decided to start a blog, just wordpress.com one. What possessed me to do that, I honestly couldn’t tell you but I’ve always enjoyed writing. I’ve always just enjoyed being in the community and a bit of an interest in politics. I think that was some of my initial writings. I lived in London, Ontario. I went to Western University, so they have a pretty strong online community there. I initially joined it through Twitter, branch down into blogging. That’s probably my best memory of how I got started.

As a kid, I’d always been interested in a bit of what website development and learned HTML and CSS probably starting around when I was like 10 or so. I think I made some good old Geocities websites back in the day. I think as far as WordPress goes, I think I just moved from wordpress.com wordpress.org a full more professional site just to be able to do more with it, especially in terms of SEO once I started learning more about and teaching with SEO.

From that personal use, that youth organization I talked about before, we used a WordPress site and now working professionally in marketing. I work for an agency. We’re full service agency, but obviously these days we’re more focused on digital things. So we do our own web development in house. While I’m not involved in the development or building side of things, obviously their SEO specialist, I do a lot of work on our website. So all of our websites through there are WordPress.

Liam: Cool. What do you do day to day nine to five as a marketing and SEO specialist?

Natasha: Everything. I’m our only person working on SEO aside from some help with others, like our account coordinators for blogging and content creation. I do everything from the initial strategy and research through to reporting on results.

Typical day for me what probably involved just working on one or two clients. I try to spread them out so I’ve touched on different people multiple times throughout the month. I try not to just work on one person per day, otherwise, I just lose it. It’s a bit too much if I’m fresher and bring in better ideas when I just do a few hours at a time. Especially for some of our industrial or manufacturing clients, I can only work on those for a few hours at a time. No offense to them.

I always start off my day with a quick check-in on rankings to make sure nobody’s taking a set of nose dive or anything, celebrate if they’ve taken a nice spike up, which is always nice to see at 8 o’clock in the morning. Then as far as the work goes, it varies a lot on the client based on how much time I have to work on them, the stage they’re at in their campaign and also just their unique industry and website but. You know, working on on-site optimizations, building and editing landing pages, content creation through blogging.

Like I said in the past, often the coordinator will do the blogging for me, because I just don’t have time to do it all. But lately I’ve been doing a lot more blog, which has been nice. It’s nice to do a bit more about creative style of writing. Keeping up with technical SEO. Definitely not my area, great expertise. ut I know what I need to know for my specific sites and clients. Sometimes involves figuring out what needs to be done for them. So just kind that ongoing content creation and onsite work and just constant monitoring and readjusting is necessary.

Tara: Sounds like a nice variety that you get to explore each day. I’d like to ask you a question, Natasha that we ask all of our guests, which is how you define success. Even though I would say you are at a young age in your life, you’ve done a lot of different things, really super interesting things actually, including what you’re doing now. How do you tie it all together? Do you tie it all together and do you think about what success means to you at this point in your life and what does that mean for you?

Natasha: That is a difficult question to answer because I think my definition of success has just really evolved, especially in the last few years. I mean, there are days where being successful maybe more of a work-oriented thing. I mean, going back to school fulltime and a challenging program and commuting to Toronto and completing that really and doing really well, it was a huge success.

Then there are other times are just like making it through the day or like making it through the day without crying or losing it is a huge success too. The week before I went back to school fulltime after being at a school for about two and a half years and working, the week before I went back to school, my aunt was actually diagnosed with brain cancer and had surgery four days after that diagnosis. Monday at 8 am, she had surgery. The next Monday at 8 pm was my first class. That was a whirlwind and all the treatment and challenges that followed.

That was one of those times or sometimes being successful was just making it through the day and keeping everybody healthy and somewhat sane and fed and the house clean. Thankfully that’s quieted down. So I think evolving from that success is…I guess for a while success wasn’t about me. It was about other people. Right now I’m able to be a bit more selfish and focus on myself, which is nice.

I think a big part of success for me has always just been about, one, just feeling you’re moving forward and accomplishing things, whether that’s learning, producing something. I think a big part of success has also been just being able to help other people. I’ve changed careers and what I’ve been doing in life, but I think that’s always been suddenly I’ve tried to incorporate throughout, whether that’s my actual job or volunteering.

Recently, I’ve been taking on a little bit of mentorship just connecting with some old students in the program I went to school and just talking to them giving some advice. I’ve been back to the classes a few times just to give a bit of an alumni talk, sharing my experiences in the program and how I’ve moved on from there. Success, I guess it’s just about surviving, moving forward. And sometimes moving forward is big steps and sometimes it’s baby ones. But as long as it’s forward, that’s what matters.

Tara: That’s a good perspective. I like that very much. I like the outward focus. I’m glad to hear things have come down for you after a very difficult time. I’m curious, what did you talk about at the WordCamp, at your first WordCamp talk?

Natasha: I did a talk about blogging and making blog posts SEO friendly – kind of tips and tricks for boosting your performance and writing good posts and all the on-site optimizations you can do. Somehow turning my job into a half-hour presentation. I had to talk fast to fit it all in.

Tara: Did you enjoy that process? Was it a goal that you set for yourself?

Natasha: It was a lot of fun. I love talking and sharing. I was on vacation that week leading up to the WordCamp, which was a bit of a challenge. I probably wasn’t as prepared as I could have been. I’m not afraid to admit that but it was good to just get that first experience of getting up there and sharing over with. Now I can take that experience and get ready for the next one.

Tara: Hopefully you’ll do another one.

Liam: You did a great job. I want to ask about soccer. Do you play? Do you just watch? I know you’re Toronto FC fan.

Natasha: I do play soccer. Similar to music, I played it growing up. I come from a soccer family. One half is English, one half is Dutch, so it’s quite literally in my blood. I always like to joke that my father takes time off of work whenever the World Cup comes around to sit at home and watch soccer on TV. And before his dad passed away, he would fly from Winnipeg to our house to sit at home with him and watch soccer on TV. That is the kind of soccer family I come from.

I played all growing up. Again took a break during University just because life gets in the way. For about three years, I’ve just started playing again and a local adult league. I’m not the greatest, I’m not terrible, but it’s a great way to be active and have some fun. Of course, I’m Toronto FC fan and anyone who follows me on twitter will definitely know that. I mean, it’s fun to follow…

Liam: They just won the MLS cup?

Natasha: No, we didn’t win. We lost.

Liam: Was it last year?

Natasha: We won in 2017.

Liam: That long ago. All right. I’m sorry.

Natasha: We just played a few weeks ago and unfortunately lost to Seattle. But it’s okay, I’m recovered. We’ll get over it. We’ve been following Toronto FC since the start. I’ve got photos of me at Toronto FC games wearing braces. It’s just a big family thing too. It’s lots of fun, lots of good family memories there with my dad and stepmom going to games and got season seats. So looking forward to next season already.

Tara: I’d like to ask you about your experience doing childcare and in sort of…it sound like it was education-related as well when you’re working with children. We hear from a lot of people who take their experience and teach others. So you’ve done a WordCamp talk, is there any part of you that thinks about your role combining your experiences as a teacher with your experience as a digital marketing person and doing some teaching?

Natasha: For sure. People thought I was crazy for making the jump from teaching to marketing but there’s honestly a lot more parallels than people realize. I think just in the day to day job itself, it’s about communication, very different tactics and then goals, but at the end of the day, it’s communication, getting your message across, getting people to understand something, convincing them of something.

One skill I think that really transferred from teaching to marketing while especially in my experience teaching English to French kids was just thinking how do you best present something, what medium should I use, what order do I present it in, even what specific words to use. Sometimes the very specific words with my French kids were really important because if you explained something as a word that’s very similar to French, it makes it easier for them to understand. It’s really not obvious transferable skills, but I really do feel like a lot of teaching and working with kids prepared me well for marketing.

Then also in the client relation aspect of it, I don’t have a largely client-facing role but I do take on the role sometimes of explaining more in depth things about SEO or things that might be a bit beyond our coordinator’s ability to explain. Even just explaining things to the rest of my team that they don’t quite grasp as much as I do. You may be able to tell from this I’m not always the world’s most concise speaker, but just the idea of taking a concept then just translate into a way that people understand and event that they value is definitely something that I took from education and childcare into the marketing world. Even just how to make things exciting and interesting, especially my time from summer camp prepared me well for that.

Liam: Natasha, I want to ask you about advice. It’s another one of our signature questions. The question is, is what advice have you been given or have you encountered and successfully implemented in your life? What’s the best advice that you took on board, worked well for you and you would want to pass on to somebody else?

Natasha: I think the best advice in general and also just in the sense that taking it had a really phenomenal impact on my life was by grade nine music teacher. It was after I picked up trombone, and I remember my music class that year fell second semester. So he encouraged me to not just play flute in that class, which I already knew, but to play trombone for the class.

I did one of my playing tests one day, and he asked me, “Are you going to audition for the senior jazz band?” And I looked at him, I was like, “No. Why would I do that?” He was talking about, “Oh, I think he could do it, whatever.” I was like, “Well, maybe. I’ll think about it.” In my head being like, “Absolutely not. You’re nuts.” But finally, what he asked was like, “Are you interested in it? Would you want to do it?” I was like, “Well, for sure. It would be really cool. I think it would be great experience.” He said, “Okay, well, let’s make it happen.”

I mean, to be honest, I probably got into that bandwidth maybe a little bit of a lower level ability than maybe some other people, but I think he just really believed in my potential and ability to work to get up to that standard that I need to be. I went on to have a really great musical career in high school and beyond. I often look back on that advice and just think, “Stop thinking about the barriers, stop thinking about the things go wrong.” Unfortunately, everything in life just because you want it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen, but I think more often than not, if you say, “I really want to do this, I want to work towards it,” and you make that choice, then you can make it happen.

Liam: I love that. I think, to your point, it may not happen if you try but it’s certainly not going to happen if you don’t try it all.

Natasha: Absolutely. If you choose not to go for it, then you’re guaranteeing it won’t happen.

Liam: Absolutely, absolutely. Do you stay in touch with that teacher at all?

Natasha: I haven’t recently. It’s been one of those people it’s been on my list to say hi, do a check-in with but unfortunately, the list of people I need to check in with is long. I’m not always the greatest at staying in touch, especially if people aren’t on social media. But will work on that list. Good reminder. Thank you.

Liam: I’m not throwing stone. I’m not throwing stones. Maybe invite him to one of your upcoming shows.

Tara: There you go. That’s a good idea. Well, it sounds like that also set you up for being open to new opportunities when they come your way in terms of the path that you’ve taken since then as well. I think music is a great mind opener for people and I wish that I had more musical talent, but I encourage my kids to do a lot of music because I do think that if you can get over the geeky music nerd stuff in middle school, then it really it’s so many good things for your brain.

Natasha: So many life lessons.

Tara: Yeah, messing up, forgetting where you’re supposed to play, performing, all those things, being part of a team. That’s great. I’m glad to hear that it sounds it’s impacted you in more ways in music too. Well, and I guess playing soccer, teamwork too. You’ve been well-prepped for all of that.

Liam: Natasha, we are getting close to the end of our time together. Before we say goodbye to you, I want to ask if you can share where people can find you online, please.

Natasha: Yeah. The best way to connect with me would be on Twitter. You can follow me at @natasha_bd. You can also find my personal website online, natashabd.ca. Those are the best way to connect with me online. The only content that’s probably will interest you guys.

Tara: Well, I’m sorry we ran out of time so quickly. I was about to ask you another question and then I caught myself at the time so we’ll have to chat again.

Liam: Oh, go on Tara, ask the question. Come on now you’re making us feel bad.

Tara: I’ve already forgotten it. I’ve already forgotten what it was.

Liam: Natasha, it was a real pleasure to reconnect again with you. Thank you so much for joining us out here in our virtual hallway.

Tara: Thanks, Natasha.

Natasha: Thanks. It was great to talk to you, guys. Thanks for having me.

Liam: Bye.

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

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

Shannon is a mom, travel enthusiast, book lover, and doer of WordPress stuff. A self-proclaimed geek, Shannon owns Purple Finch studios, a small digital agency located in Pennsylvania.

Website | Purple Finch Studios

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 120.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Shannon Shaffer. Shannon is a mom, travel enthusiast, book lover, and doer of WordPress stuff. A self-proclaimed geek, Shannon owns purple Finch studios, a small digital agency located in Pennsylvania. Welcome, Shannon.

Shannon: Hi Tara and Liam. Thanks for having me.

Tara: We’re really glad to have you here. Shannon. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell everyone a little bit more about yourself?

Shannon: Sure. I’m Shannon Shaffer and I live in a town in Wyoming called Wyomissing, Pennsylvania. I’ve lived all of my 44 years here in Pennsylvania, so I’m kind of a home buddy. I love my state. I am a reformed blogger as I like to call it. About 13 years ago, I started a blog that changed my life. I was in corporate finance for a long time and decided one day to start writing on the internet.

All these years later, I’ve been in the WordPress space and it literally has taken me from being, like I like to call it, corporate soldier going into work from nine to five every day to being someone who lives the best lifestyle that I can imagine, being able to work from anywhere, and have a fantastic team that’s distributed throughout the world. I have really no complaints.

Tara: That’s great. What a great story. What is the blog that you started? What started this path I guess?

Shannon: I was working in corporate finance, and I went online and I read this blog and I’m like, “I can do this.” And so I started writing about saving money. I had a degree in finance. I started on blogger. Then I think it was around late 2006, maybe early 2007 I found WordPress and I just started writing my little blog and found Twitter, and somehow found about 100 million website views a year. So it grew…

Tara: 100 million?

Shannon: Yes. It grew from just me to a team, to a network of blogs, which I then in 2014 sold to a media company.

Tara: Wow. Amazing. You built something with that many views without having a background in blogging and online digital marketing.

Shannon: And at that time, if you really think about it, nobody really had a background in digital marketing. When I started there was no Twitter. Facebook was just for colleges. Basically, people ask what I do, and Am I a designer, am I a developer and I just say, “No, I’m a doer of WordPress stuff.” So it’s kind of a title that’s funny because I don’t have a technical background. But in the process of blogging and growing my team and growing my websites, you learn these things. I just learned as I went, learned how to code. You don’t want me to code anything because I’m the worst developer on the planet. But one thing that I did learn was how to convert people on a website.

Tara: Wow. I think Liam and I are still both a little bit stuck on the 100 million views number. Is that on one website or is that on all the websites?

Shannon: No, one website.

Tara: Oh, my goodness gracious. I want to just ask you so many questions about that. Was there SEO involved in that or was it organically grown?

Shannon: So funny because I had no idea what SEO was at the time. I remember one day somebody saying, “Hey, you’re outranking Huggies when I searched for Huggies discounts on Google.” I was like, “I don’t really know what that means but that’s awesome.” So it was by accident. Really it was an accident. Just writing and you learn to just kind of go with the flow. Eventually I learned what SEO was and I learned what keywords were in metadata and alt tags and all that. But not on purpose. It was all by accident.

Tara: Fascinating.

Shannon: It was a different time then too.

Tara: Sure. But I imagine having that statistic, that fact about your experience must help you win a lot of business because people must just be like, “Oh, well, if she can do that, then she can do that to me.”

Shannon: I don’t use it. It’s not a statistic that I really use in my marketing today. My view…

Tara: Did you use it when you started?

Shannon: No, I didn’t, to be honest. I knew a lot of people locally. A lot of people followed my blog locally. So that’s probably how I got started, but not really using that statistic as a metric to say, “this is what I did.”Because honestly, I think that statistic, then and now are two different animals. To get traffic now is a lot harder than it was back then. I don’t typically use it, but it’s an interesting one to throw out for podcasts.

Liam: It’s a humble way to look at it. But even in 2007, 2008, 2009, 100 million? That’s a lot of legwork. That’s a lot of legwork to do that. That’s impressive. That’s very impressive. I have kind of a silliest question on this. You just started blogging and writing about personal finances and presumably, the focus shifted a little bit if you’re outranking Huggies. Maybe you are writing about how to save and Huggies or something like that.

Shannon: It was specifically for moms because my goal was I was working this corporate job that was sucking my soul out of me and taking you away from my child, and so I wanted to figure out how I could save money and be home with my kid and give up a six-figure job to be home. So I just started writing about saving money geared towards moms. It was stay at home mom was my target. So what did we want to save money on? Huggies, food and all things. That’s kind of how it evolved.

Over time, you just being in the trenches, you learn all these things that are out there. My MBA is in marketing, and so the marketing part, the finance part all kind of came together. I never intended. It was just to be a small income replacement for while my son was in elementary school, and then I was going to go back to work.

I learned so much during those years that when I sold my business I know what it’s like to be an entrepreneur who starts something and you’re so involved with it and you get to a point where you can no longer handle what you have, and the success of your business is riding on your digital presence. That’s kind of where my business now came to life from being able to relate to that. I understand the business part of it being that I was there, being an entrepreneur, but I also understand the technical part of it.

So when I started this business, the first thing that I did was as soon as I had enough money, I hired a developer who knew way more than me. He’s been with me for four years. We have 10 people on our team now. The business kind of was created from a need that I had all those years ago. It’s really that, being able to understand and empathize with the business owner, but also be able to have conversation with your developer and kind of bridge. I think that’s what’s really giving me unique advantage. When you’re after that 100 million comes into play, it really doesn’t. It just being able to relate so. It’s a really unique story in the WordPress space.

Tara: It is. How did it go then leaving that job and saving up money to hire a developer? How did you find a developer and grow your team? I’m always interested in this question because I have a small agency as well with a couple of part-time people and it was a huge, huge mental shift to hire somebody. I don’t have a full-time staff but to have people’s livelihood rely on you or to make a payroll or to just shift that way of thinking to having people that are responsible to you and that you’re responsible for. Talk a little bit about that, about being a business owner.

Shannon: I think for me when I came into this agency life, it was a little bit different because I had sold the business or a good deal of cash and I had that security behind me. But the first employee that I had with my blogging business was my sister. Our contract was done in a Starbucks on a napkin. In fact, she just texted it to me laughing. The only promise I made to her was that there would be hot coffee every day because that’s the only thing that I knew I could definitely do. And she took a big risk when she left her job

One of the biggest things I think is that we often get like afraid to make a commitment to pay people. But I think making that commitment to pay people does two things. One, you know that you have a payroll to make and it motivates you like hell. It just makes you want to do better for the people that work for you. And two, I think it gives us the resources to get the work done while we think about growing our business. Because a lot of times when we’re doing everything ourselves, we’re so consumed with the deliverable for the client that we can’t think about running our business. I often see what happens with people is they invest in their first employee, and they experience this growth that they couldn’t have happened with just themselves. It’s a scary thing, but it’s a great thing.

When I hired my developer, my business could not afford him most definitely. But if I didn’t hire him, I wouldn’t have gotten here. It’s kind of cart horse, horse cart. If you have to do one without the other – I don’t know that you can get anywhere. So you can only go so far. It’s a big leap but you don’t know until you try, right?

Tara: Yeah. Can you talk about your WordPress community? Do you have one there or you kind of came in this as a blogger? I’ve seen you at some WordPress events recently so I know that you do involve yourself with it. Tell us a little bit about that path.

Shannon: I have been a really big community member. Like Terrible. Early on, I participated in the WordPress community and probably for good six years just disappeared. To be honest and forthcoming because I think this is a safe space, I have anxiety things that really made it tough for me to be out there. So one of my goals and one of the reasons that I am here is because I feel like getting past some of those anxiety things I think that WordPress community has grown that we are allowed to say the things that are maybe not our best qualities. I think the WordPress community has given us a space to talk about those things.

I am one of the few people who use the quiet place spaces as WordCamps, so on comp place. At WordCamp US, I spent some time each day in those spaces recharging, regrouping group. Conversations are a lot for me to deal with. I haven’t been the greatest in the community but I’m hoping to change that. And I’m hoping also by talking about it that other people who may struggle with social anxiety can find their voice as well.

Liam: Thank you. Thank you for sharing that, for that trust in us and our show. Tara and I are both grateful for that. I guess I just kind of add or maybe think about, you know, I’m not the greatest community member is your greatness comes in all shapes and forms. The most visible and the most outspoken doesn’t necessarily mean overall greatest. There’s a lot of people who Tara and I know who hang out in the quiet spaces and contribute to the community in ways that are enormously great. So I invite you to consider yourself one of the greatest if you’d like, that you don’t have to denigrate yourself there.

Shannon: Well, I appreciate that. It’s just sometimes it’s hard. I’m going to make a complete effort. I have a kiddo now who’s an adult so I have time and energy. When I started in the WordPress community, he was just a five-year-old. Now he is a an adult, I feel like I have that room and space to be able to do that, to be able to take like an extra day on the end of travel, to recharge and regroup and do those things.

I hope that in 2020 that by getting out there and being able to tell my story and give people encouragement that, number one, not coming from a technical background that there’s a place for you in the WordPress community, and also for people who may struggle with anxiety and depression and all those things. That this is a judgment-free zone, and nobody’s going to judge you for saying that and maybe needing to step back and recharge and regroup. I think the WordPress community has done a great job in the last few years from when I came previously to recognizing that there are all different types of humans, and that’s amazing.

Tara: It is a great thing about the WordPress community. And thank you for sharing that with us here, Shannon. I’m grateful that you’re here with us. I can relate to having your children be grown and that sort of changes your participation level and for some reason, that just kind of clears up some space, just in your way of thinking about your own life and your own time. I hope you enjoy that phase as hard as it can be when your kids grow.

Shannon: There may be some tears this spring and summer but yeah, it’s a lovely transition, right?

Tara: It is. I can share that with you with a hug next time we see each other because that’s hard. But you can look at it as…there’s this saying that I keep seeing out there. I just saw it on Twitter yesterday from somebody else. But the idea of “I get to” instead of “I have to.” Like, I get to go to this conference, not that I have to go. Then you can tag on, like you said, tag on some extra time or view it as opportunities rather than obligations.

Shannon: Absolutely.

Tara: Great. Thanks for sharing that. I’m going to ask you about success. I think we started off talking about this amazing number and selling a business and running a business but how do you define success for yourself personally professionally or a combination of the two?

Shannon: First of all, when I hear the word success, it actually kind of gives me a little bit of anxiety because I think there are so many metrics out there that we use as a society. For me, all those metrics mean nothing. The success for me in my life is being able to participate and be where I want to be. It doesn’t have anything to do with money. It’s just being able to have the time for my family and for my friends and to do all the things.

One of the most successful things in my life is that I’ve been able to take my parents, my mom and my dad who’s no longer with us, on vacations and my son and spend weeks of time with them without looking at a phone or computer or worrying about work. To me, that is the most successful thing about my life is being able to take the time for my family. All of that is due to what I do as a job, I believe, and making that a priority. It’s an odd measure for some people because I sold a company and done well financially and all those things, but I don’t think that they really, really matter at the end of the day.

Tara: Yeah, I agree. We actually haven’t had anybody come out and say that it’s all about the money that they make. Certainly providing for your family is important and people do talk about that, but I think we hear a lot about flexibility and…

Shannon: I think it’s very common in this day.

Tara: It is.

Shannon: I think in [inaudible 00:17:46] of the WordPress community, in corporate spaces and things like that, you will hear lots more about title and money and privilege and all those things. Don’t get me started on privilege. But those are all things that people look at.

Liam: We can go there.

Shannon: Do you really want to do that?

Liam: For the record, you’ll open the door.

Shannon: I will. No one can see me, but if you don’t know me already, I am a black woman, so diversity and inclusion and privilege are topics that I’m extremely passionate about. If I can someday get over this social anxiety thing, I would love to talk about those things in a public forum because I think that they are hugely important.

Another reason quite frankly that I want to start showing up more is because I think it’s super important for young women, specifically young minority women to see the people who look like them who have some level of success and also not just success but in charge running companies, doing things other than traditional jobs that women are in. It’s one of my, one of the things that’s near and dear to me is to make sure that young women can see other women who are stepping outside of the boxes that sometimes society puts us into.

Liam: Well, I’m excited to hear you present on that. I think you’re absolutely right that certainly the WordPress community can do more and can do better with people of color and women of color. We’ve done a fantastic job around sexual orientation and gender identity. We’re not bad and race and culture, but I don’t think we’re as strong there.

Within the US, some of that might be more a reflection of our nation’s history than a reflection of the WordPress community. So I think, yeah, I’d love to find a way to help you use the platform of your success to assist our wider community on. Sure, the focus may be on people of color but certainly, people who are not of color, white people will benefit from your example and from your leadership. So thank you.

I know that’s not an easy road to walk through. There are great costs to saying things, to doing things, to be the one that up the pulpit. And I mean that in a supportive way. I don’t mean you’re a bully pulpit or anything like that. So thank you. Thank you.

Shannon: I think one of the biggest issues is that when we leave inclusion and diversity to people who, and Liam, no offense, but when we leave inclusion and diversity to typically white men, and typically middle-aged white men, they do inclusion and diversity and the only way that they know how. And I think sometimes the mark is significantly missed. I think the intentions are good. And in full disclosure, I am married to a wonderful middle-aged white man for 20 years. I just think that there’s a lack of foresight that you cannot have without experiencing some of the things. That’s why I think it’s important for more people of color and more women.

Also, when I think about inclusion, people with disabilities and things to step up and be part of the planning process, because I think that’s the only true way that we check all those boxes when it comes to diversity and inclusion. Sometimes that’s a mouthful to say.

Liam: It totally is. And the bigger the audience, the harder it is to say.

Shannon: I think that’s really important. Hopefully, that’s part of the future is that instead of trying to figure out of a room full of people who have never experienced try to figure out the things that would make these people feel included, let’s have those people in the room. That’s the conversation that I would like to see from the beginning of planning of events and things is let’s make sure the right people are in the room and included and heard not just in the room for these conversations.

Tara: I think that’s true. It’s also really apparent at conferences that the representation of minorities is very low. And I don’t know what comes first. Think often about the schools and education and kids being encouraged to pursue tech and the drive toward that and where’s the focus there. There are lots of girls, Girls Who Code and that type of thing trying to get more women involved. But I think I’d like to see the population shift. And so where does that start? How do you shift that?

Shannon: I had an interesting conversation at WordCamp US. I was just standing outside and a random person, a random man that I never met, we just started having a really good conversation. We’re about 45 minutes into the conversation and it’s like, “Can I ask your question.” I’m like, “What did I say or do?” And he’s like, you know, he said, “I have been trying really hard to bring in women and minorities into our group.” He said, “We’re really struggling to get them to apply.” I asked him a question, I said, “Do you have a website?” I said, “Do you have your leadership team on the website.” He’s like, “Yeah.” And I said, “Can I see them?”

I opened up his website, I scrolled and I said, “This is your problem.” And he said, “I don’t get it.” He goes, “We’re all very inclusive. We want people.” I said that see, your leadership team tells me that you’re not inclusive because your leadership team is all white men.” And he said, “Well, but we have female employees so we have women.” I said, “But your leadership team is men.”

It took him a few minutes to realize that as a minority, I want to see if there’s an opportunity for me in the organization. And when you have no one in your leadership, that looks like me or is a woman or is a minority, it tells me that while you may want to be inclusive, that truly you only have this leadership team of white men making decisions. I think it has to really start there.

And he was like, “I’ve asked a lot of people this question,” and he goes, “Sometimes they get angry. Sometimes they give me some crazy answer.” He said, “This is probably the most insightful.” I said, “Your number one task is to go recruit somebody to be on your leadership team who doesn’t have glasses or beard.” And he’s like, “Okay, I’m going to do that.” So random stranger. If we can have conversations like that with random strangers, I think it could be amazing.”

Tara: Liam don’t have glasses but there’s a beard.

Shannon: Again, my husband has a beard and glasses.

Liam: But your point is a good one. Just going back to what you said earlier is that all of us can only speak to our own experience. We might be able to empathize with the experience of those not like us, but we don’t really know it. And even if they share it with us, whether it’s in a book or a blog post or an article or even a really lengthy conversation, none of that is 40 years of experience that that person has living as whoever they are.

I think it’s hard to minimize the value of that and how to minimize just how different people really are. And doesn’t mean that we can’t all get along and it’ll be done a flippin way. But that we can’t come together and work together and do amazing things together. But we’re very different people with very different experiences and that’s going to affect how we do things. That’s great. Thank you for sharing. Thank you.

Tara: Yeah, thanks. That was a good conversation.

Shannon: Sorry, no intention of going there.

Liam: Oh, well, no, no, it’s an important topic.

Tara: It really is. I don’t think we talk about it too much really. I think it’s important. And the more you talk about it, the more ideas you get on how to move forward from it. So thanks. I’m going to ask you another question. Oh, Liam, you were going to ask a question. Go ahead, Liam.

Liam: I was going to ask the question that you were going to ask. So either way, all right. I want to ask you about advice. What advice have you been given or received or what’s the best advice that you’ve been given, received or read and successfully implemented in your life?

Shannon: When I was in my early 20s, I worked for a woman who was an entrepreneur and I just watched her, she was amazing, incredible, and I said, “How have you done this? What is your secret?” And the best advice, and I’ve been given a lot over the years, she said to me, “Simply take time for yourself every single day.” It’s been the most incredible thing. That’s how I became a lover of books. I read 75 to 100 books a year, and it is my time for myself.

Every single day, no matter what is going on, whether it’s five minutes, 15 minutes, 30 minutes, take that time that is only for you. I think it helps us stay grounded in who we are and remember that we have to take care of ourselves before we can take care of anybody else. I think doing that every day for yourself, you will find that when you prioritize your wellbeing that you are able to accomplish so much more. That was it from her and she was extremely successful.

You can do that so many different ways. Some people it’s the gym, some people…I love reading and gaining knowledge. And it’s only for me, not for anybody else. It has to be something that nobody else benefits. It can’t be your kids, can’t be your husband, your wife. It has to be just you. If you can find a way to do that every day, I think it helps. It can help you in so many different ways.

Tara: Do you set aside the same time every day or do you grab it when you can? How does that work?

Shannon: No, I typically try to schedule it in my plan for the day because obviously, I have appointments and things like that. But I typically try to schedule it. In fact, when we’re done here. I’m going to go and grab a coffee and it’ll be my time to read.

Tara: Nonfiction, fiction, a combination of the two?

Shannon: I try to mix it up.

Tara: All right. What’s the best book you read this year?

Shannon: I would have to say that…I read so many and I like so many. I can’t give you one.

Tara: All right.

Liam: I was going to reduce the pressure. I thought that was a huge pressure question. What are some of your favorites? Sorry, Tara.

Tara: No, it’s okay. I knew that would be very tough to just pick one.

Shannon: Yeah, picking just one. I have so many favorites that…this is like a prank. Nobody told me that I was going to have to answer this.

Tara: No, sorry to throw that at you. If you’d ask me the same I wouldn’t have answered. I don’t read 75 books a year but I can’t answer that either. So good job. Are you on Goodreads?

Shannon: I just deleted my account.

Tara: So I can’t go see what your favorites are there either?

Shannon: Yeah. I just deleted because I was getting really competitive. I told you up front that I’m a geek. So I just made a decision to delete my account.

Tara: Oh my gosh, that’s how I remember what I read. That’s the only way I can remember because I will forget.

Shannon: The people that we read about the same amount of books as I do, we’re always talking about what we read. And I’m just looking to get books for Christmas and I went through Goodreads to see what [inaudible 00:31:25] that I could buy.

Tara: Good idea.

Shannon: So maybe I’ll be back, but I just needed to stop obsessing about reading.

Tara: Interesting. Well, you have to keep a list then, like a manual list so you remember for yourself, right?

Shannon: Absolutely.

Tara: Well, we can now go down this rabbit hole of books for a while, but we’re out of time, Shannon, and I’m sorry that we’re out of time. It’s been so great talking to you really appreciate your joining us here and putting yourself out there. So thanks for doing that too. Where can people find you online?

Shannon: You can find me on Twitter, @shannontshaffer and LinkedIn.

Tara: And your website?

Shannon: Oh, sure, my website, purplefinchstudios.com.

Tara: Great. Well, thanks so much. Look forward to seeing you in person sometime this year.

Shannon: All right. Thank you, guys.

Liam: Shannon, what a pleasure. Thanks for your time. Lovely meeting you.

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

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

Keanan is the CTO at Alpha Particle, a digital consultancy that helps their clients plan and execute their digital projects. He believes that technology isn’t always the answer, but when it is, it’s important to get it right.

Website | Alpha Particle

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 119.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Keanan Koppenhaver. Keanan is the CTO at Alpha Particle, a digital consultancy that helps their clients plan and execute their digital projects. He believes that technology isn’t always the answer, but when it is, it’s important to get it right. Hi Keanan.

Keanan: Hey, Tara and Liam, thanks for having me.

Tara: Nice to see you, Keanan. Thanks for joining us. Can you start out by telling us a little bit more about yourself?

Keanan: Sure. Like Liam said, I’m Keenan, I run a company in Chicago here. We’re in the Merchandise Mart for those of you who know the area and currently enjoying a very mild winter, which is great. I hope I didn’t jinx anything by bringing that up now.

I’ve been in the WordPress space for six or seven years. I really enjoy it. I enjoy getting to know the community and the people in it, which is why, Tara when you and I were talking about Hallway Chats, it was really interesting community that you kind of gathered this community around your podcast. So I’m happy to be here and talk to you guys.

Tara: What is your journey to WordPress?

Keanan: I kind of on a lark in college decided I wanted to build a website which of course I thought was going to be the next billion-dollar thing. I didn’t really know anything about it, so I started just kind of googling like “how to build a website” and stuff like that, and very quickly realized that there were already lots of tools to help people do these sorts of things.

I experimented with a couple of those on my own but then ended up taking an internship with an agency here in Chicago that was primarily a WordPress shop. So most of what they did was WordPress. Throughout the course of my internship and when I eventually took a full-time position with them, day in day out was WordPress, working in client sites and things like that.

I found it really interesting as a platform and really powerful and able to help people work on the web on their own without necessarily needing a developer like me, which is super empowering for clients and people who run their own businesses and things. I never looked back at that point.

We still do a lot of WordPress, but also we’ve been expanding into other PHP frameworks and things too. But really what stuck with WordPress for me was how easy it was and how powerful it was for people, but then also the kinds of people that were involved in the community like we talked about a little bit, who spend a lot of their time giving back and helping other people come up behind them and get started doing the same thing.

Tara: Alpha Particle, are you one of the founders of that company?

Keanan: Yeah. It’s myself and my business partner, Jay. We started the company in May of 2017 so we’ve been around just about two and a half years. Initially when we started the company, especially if you were looking around searching for an answer to a WordPress problem or looking at me personally, WordPress answers will be what would back in Google. So that’s why a lot of our early work was WordPress. We still do a lot of that at our core, but we also have expanded into digital strategy and things that aren’t necessarily code as well.

Tara: What was your transition to starting your own company?

Keanan: Jay and I have worked together previously a couple of jobs ago and I kind of went off and was just a pure developer for a while. But a couple of years after we parted ways at our last company, he approached me and said, “Hey, I’m interested in starting my own thing. I’d really like for you to come on board and work with me on it.

He and I get along really well. We always have. We do even more so now I’d say after sharing some Airbnbs early on in the company days. But I really enjoy the fact that we’re in control of our own destiny in a lot of ways. We can choose the kind of clients we want to work with, we can choose where we think we have the most impact. We have the capability to say, “Hey, we know that somebody told you that WordPress would be good for this project, but we don’t really think that’s the case” or “Have you considered WordPress? We think it’d be really good for you.” We just like having the ability to make those decisions and advise our clients in that way that we didn’t necessarily get to do that before when we were employees.

Liam: There’s a lot of change in the WordPress environment right now with respect to the CMS. We had Gutenberg about a year or so ago, we’ve been getting Gatsby at a lot of static sites and there are some challenges with the community. We’re seeing other content management systems come up. At the risk of going too deep because that’s not really where our show focuses, what other platforms are you using in? And could you talk a little bit about why this platform or that platform is a strength over WordPress for this type or that type of client need?

Keanan: Sure. We’ve started to get relatively deep into the Laravel ecosystem. Laravel, for those who don’t know, is a PHP framework. It’s not as focused on content management per se, but they have a great package called Nova, which kind of gives you an admin area that’s similar to the WordPress admin. But it’s a lot more customizable. The reason we choose Laravel and that sort of stuff over WordPress is you get less out of the box but you’re also able to make more easier, to make things like associations between objects, which in WordPress would be considered post types I guess.

For a couple of our clients that have wanted more of a web app as opposed to a blog or a content site, we’ve chosen Laravel. We end up bringing in the CMS portion of it too because there’s always some need to manage content. But we really like that. We’ve only just started to get into the static site stuff.

It’s interesting to me how things are cyclical such that when the web started, everyone’s just like building HTML pages and all that stuff. And now it’s kind of going back to that after having gone super heavy into like, “Oh, everything comes with database,” and all that.”

We’re really liking the stuff that we’re seeing with React and Gatsby just because obviously, it’s great to have your site load quicker than you can snap your fingers, and the interesting hybrid between getting that performance and still being able to edit your content in WordPress.

The downside there that we’ve seen is it’s a little more work to make it work if you’re building a site that has a ton of content on it just because a lot of those workflows are based around like constantly having the site rebuild whenever you make changes. For some of our clients who are publishing 15 to 20 posts a day or they have five different writers that are putting content up, we’ve looked into it and haven’t been able to use that. But WordPress definitely supports that as well, and you can do a lot of stuff with caching and stuff like that.

That’s kind of our thing is we’re not necessarily prescriptive when we use the same tool on every project. It’s kind of like we want to talk to you as a client and see what problem you’re trying to solve is. We like having a lot of different tools in our toolbox for that reason.

Liam: That was a good answer. Thank you for that. Tara, I see you fired up a question?

Tara: Well, I was going to actually kind of back up a little bit more before we get too far down technology and chat a little bit about having your own business and doing the variety of things that you’re doing. How do you go about getting clients?

Keanan: It depends. We do a fair amount of referral business. Chicago is a big city but the tech scene in Chicago is relatively small, especially for the kind of work that we do. There are two or three meetups that we attend pretty regularly. We speak pretty regularly at those. We have a pretty broad network of people from those kinds of events. They’re happy to have us work with that potential client because they know it’s a win for them to have referred somebody. They want the project to be successful, even if it’s not them who’s taking it on.

We do a fair amount of speaking in other cities at other conferences, so WordCamps or even conferences like in the broader PHP community. I personally just really enjoy traveling and speaking and meeting people.

I have random YouTube video tutorials or things that are scattered around the internet that are every once in a while. Someone will email me and say, “Hey, this solved my problem. Thank you. But I know I’m going to have other issues on this project. Are you guys available for code review or consulting or stuff like that?”

It’s kind of we have a lot of different methods and sources for work. Some of them are better than others. And so we’re trying to grow those that are getting us good clients and getting us the kind of work and the outcomes that we want. That’s been how we’ve done it for the past couple of years.

Tara: Since you are on the higher level dev end of things, are your clients mostly agencies?

Keanan: We do a lot of work for agencies. We do a lot of work for bigger publishers in the WordPress space. We recently just wrapped up a project for Penske Media. They wanted a plugin built out. They have devs internally, but they were booked up with other projects. And so they said, “Hey, could you guys come in and build this plugin?” And we did.

It took some of their code that was already running and just kind of packaged up so they could roll it out across a bunch of other sites. That’s right now it’s running on sites like Footwear News and Rolling Stone, and a bunch of their properties.

Because the bigger agencies and the bigger publishing shops and stuff like that are the ones who really are more invested in custom development, we do a lot of work for people like that. But also our friends who are freelancers, a lot of them really specialize in themes and doing stuff on the front end. And so if they get a request from one of their clients, like, “Hey, can you build me this plugin?” sometimes we help them out and do the plugin stuff that they’re not necessarily as adept at doing. That goes to the way to if there’s really a project that fits right up their alley and that’s not necessarily our proficiency, we’ll get that done as well.

Tara: How do you divide up work with your partner? How do you guys work together?

Keanan: Jay has a pretty heavy background in project management and business operations. So it’s really nice for me. I’ve tried freelancing just on my own a couple of times in the past and the things that bogged me down were figuring out contracts and making sure I’m doing all the HR stuff properly. He’s really great at that and really great at managing projects that they come in and interacting with clients, making sure everyone kind of knows what’s going on. The stuff that falls to me is the actual coding.

Liam: Keanan, tell us a little bit of how you first got involved with the WordPress community.

Keanan: Sure. Back when I was working at the agency job here in Chicago, we were a WordPress VIP partner. We were working on really big WordPress projects, like a lot of these other agencies you hear about 10up and Human Made and others. But I noticed that they were sharing their work via open source, they were speaking at conferences and doing all that stuff, but we weren’t necessarily doing the same. And so I thought we could benefit from that.

I kind of just raised it as a question to the company, like, “Who would be interested in doing this?” But developers as a general rule aren’t super psyched about going and speaking and all that sort of stuff. So everybody just looked at me and said, like, “Okay, well, you could do that.” That’s how it started.

I started applying to speak at WordCamps and just going and meeting people. They were all in cities that I hadn’t known anybody in previously so it was really cool to be able to get involved with the local WordPress communities there. I think what sealed it for me was then after I had gone to all those local events, going to WordCamp US my first year back when it was in Philadelphia and seeing all these people that I had met at the local camps and it was kind of like a real in a lot of ways, which is pretty cool, and seeing kind of the bigger community come together was really awesome for me. I’ve been engaging at WordCamps, speaking at WordCamps and going to WordPress events ever since.

Tara: We met at PressNomics, right?

Keanan: Yeah, PressNomics done in Tucson this year, which was really cool. That one was one I had heard about in the past and never been able to make it to. So when it was announced this year, I told Jay, I was like, “Yeah, let’s buy tickets. We’re going to go because I heard this going to be awesome.” And it was cool.

I really enjoy the WordPress community. I have a lot of great friends online and some that I’ve been able to meet in person, which is really cool. Jay and I both are on the organizing committee for WordCamp Chicago next year. So we’re hoping that a lot of that same energy comes to us here in Chicago as well.

Tara: Great. Well, maybe I’ll get out there for that one. Keanan, I’d like to ask you kind of get off direct business and tech, although you may come back to it with your answer, but I wouldn’t ask you about success. What can you define success as what it means to you?

Keanan: I think we chatted about this a little bit earlier that there’s kind of professional success versus personal success. Those are two different things to me I think. Maybe because I enjoy the work that I do, they’re more tied in for me than most people.

Professionally, I think when you start your own company, or whatever, you kind of have this idea that it’s going to be the next huge thing or you’re going to sell it for $20 million and retire or whatever. But now, for me that I’ve been in it, I think, success is really that we’re able to keep the lights on and keep everybody who we want to work with employed and be able to work with the people we want to work with and do work that we can really be proud of.

When you run your own company or you work as a developer, whatever, you get a lot of awesome opportunities that you wouldn’t necessarily get working in other industries. Things like going to conferences and taking trips to see clients and things like that. I’m really excited and happy that we’re able to do all that as part of our company. So I think that success is seeing where we are and not necessarily shooting for 20 million or 50 million or whatever number it is, but just kind of gradually improving and feeling proud of the work you’re doing day-to-day at the same time.

Personally, I’m very lucky to have an apartment that I love in a city that’s awesome and lots of friends to hang out with and a cat who walks across my keyboard way too often and is fun to hang out with even when he’s being very annoying. For me, that’s the kind of stuff that’s important and makes me feel successful even on bad days and days that aren’t going so great.

Tara: I had a cat that would not get off my keyboard yesterday. I can relate to that. I’m not sure I would describe that as being a pleasant experience, but the cat at times is pleasant. That’s true. I think Liam and I both can speak to a passion for Chicago. Liam probably more than me because he grew up there, but I lived there for a bit as well. It’s a great city.

Liam: Pizza, Italian sauce, beef Campbell with cheese and hot peppers.

Keanan: There you go. Those are your credentials established right there. You got it.

Tara: Which pizza?

Liam: Susie’s on Montrose before 4 am. It’s an all right roll.

Keanan: Which pizza was the question. My family always went to Geo Donalds when we were growing up so that’s one of my favorites. But I like it all as well.

Liam: Yeah, you can’t go wrong with Geo Donalds. I’m a lose guy myself.

Keanan: I was just there last weekend, so I feel you on that.

Liam: Now you’re just showing off. Pizzaaa. Pizzaaa

Tara: I’ve been known to take those on the plane coming back east. And get them so you can cook them at home.

Liam: Keanan, you touched on something in success around – and I’m not going to get a verbatim – but success is being able to continue to employ the people that you want to work with. As an employer, I imagine that’s a burden. You and Jay are seeing, “Hey, this is our pipeline. This is our cash. This is what we’ve agreed to pay the other people that work for us. We can take more or less out of the company as we need. We can skip paying ourselves, but we can’t do that with our people.” That’s just not going to endear them well to you and it’s not going to take care of them in the way that you probably want. How do you manage the stress of that? Because every successful business even though it’s doing well it’s all down to cash. Not so much how do you manage the logistics of money. I don’t want to get into that. But I really want to get into the how do you manage the stress of making sure that dinner goes home on the table of your employees regardless of what’s coming in the door that week?

Keanan: For sure. I mean, when you look back at when we hired our first full-time person, we were relatively conservative. We honestly probably could have hired someone sooner and taken some of the street dev work off of my plate sooner. But we had a lot of conversations around. We really wanted to be sure that we felt we had the brand recognition, the pipeline, and all this stuff to keep the work flowing in even when we had commitments and full-time employees and stuff like that.

I think the biggest thing for us and how I look at it is we’ve been around for two and a half years, we’ve been through a lot of cycles of we have a ton of work and then we finish that work and we have no work. We’ve just seen that we either have people we can reach out to or through luck or coincidence or whatever, when we’re running out of work, we get a referral comes in. That’s a big win for us. Things like that.

It definitely is stressful at times, but we just do our best to show up every day and do good work and proactively make connections and things that could help us if we get into kind of trouble periods. But like you said, things ebb and flow. And we’ve seen enough of those that it kind of every time we’re down in a trough and we come back up out of it, it kind of increases our confidence, like, “Yeah, there are things we can do even if we get in a rough situation.”

Having a bigger team has actually only helped us smooth that out. Because before, when we took on more work, we’d stopped doing marketing, we’d stop doing outreach because we were just heads down in the work. But now that we have people to help us with the actual work, Jay and I can continue to do some of that outreach and marketing and we have a lot of project work going on.

I think it’s kind of a flywheel where it’s definitely hard at the start because you’re seeing all that fluctuation and you don’t have a business savings account necessarily to fall back on or anything like that. But I think as we go, we’ve seen those peaks and troughs come and go and we have the confidence internally to know that if we’re in a trough right now we’ll be able to find another peak sometime shortly.

Tara: Do you guys have like a five-year plan or business plan for years out of where you want to be?

Keanan: We’ve talked about it. We don’t have anything formal or written down. We always have at least the next year kind of sketched out in terms of, you know, here’s the work we want to do, what kind of revenue numbers are we trying to hit or are we trying to bring on more people or we want to stay where we’re at.

We have a vision for the company. It’s not point by point here’s what we have to do every three months for five years out. I’d love to I love to see us grow into not a huge agency. We’ve talked about seeing ourselves between maybe 10 and 20 people just kind of here in Chicago, some people are remote or whatever, but just really focused on doing the work that we want to do and helping support the people who are helping us do that work as well.

Tara: You’ve talked about a little bit about some challenges. What is your biggest challenge day-to-day? This extends into my personal life as well but I would say probably saying yes to too many things. This is a big one for me where…and the couple times that I talked about before where I tried being a freelancer and then ended up going back to a full-time job was because I would just say yes to every project or every opportunity, even if it wasn’t a really good fit for me, and then I would get overbooked and things will get crazy. That’s a good problem to have normally, but at some point, it can be a lot.

I think especially when you’re starting out and doing new business, there are so many different things that you could be doing. I’ve had to try to focus on like, “Here are the three things that are actually going to help us get where we want to go and actually move the needle as opposed to just things that are interesting, but end up being busy work or just not actually meaningful, things for our business. I guess that extended to my personal life as well. I have a lot of different things going on. In 2020, one of my goals is to focus a little bit more and kind of do this stuff that I want to be doing not do the stuff that I just said yes to because I felt like I should.

Liam: Keanan we’ve talked a lot about work. What do you do when you’re not working?

Keanan: Well like I said I have a cat at home. He is very demanding of my time and likes to hang out which is great. I like, like I said, traveling for work and not for work as well. I like traveling around the country. Hoping to have a couple more international trips and in 2020. So we’ll see.

I also just like hanging out in our awesome city. We have some really cool restaurants and neighborhoods to hang out in. Like walking or hanging out down by the lake in the summer is really nice. Not so much in the next couple of months here as we get into January in February but I split my time between doing stuff like that. My family’s out in the northwest suburbs just about 45 minutes away so I’m very lucky to be able to get out and see them and play in the church band that my dad runs and stuff like that. I love music, which was almost my college major until I transferred sophomore year.

Tara: What do you play?

Keanan: I primarily play the piano. I do a little bit of guitar. My college instrument was French horn. That’s what I played from fifth grade all the way up through college. But now it’s more just piano and stuff. You can look me up on Spotify if you’d like.

Tara: All right.

Liam: Totally going to.

Keanan: We got two pieces from college up there and one that I did as kind of a summer camp with a trio of instruments.

Tara: So cool. That’s a good one. I remember when my son started playing it, he was told that – not that this matter to him, I guess – but that colleges are looking for people who play the French horn, so that seemed appealing as a parent.

Liam: I want to ask you about advice, Keanan. What’s the best advice that you’ve ever been given or read or taken on board anyway, and successfully implemented in your life?

Keanan: Well, this kind of comes through in my bio that you read earlier a little bit. Both my dad and my grandpa would always say growing up, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. It was always their thing when they’d see a new something in an infomercial or whatever, and they’d say, like, “This device lets you cook 20 pancakes at the same time,” or something like that, and they’d say, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.”

That’s definitely something that we’ve taken on board at Alpha Particle and in my personal life as well. We’ve heard from our clients that a lot of our competitors when they’re pitching the same work that we’re pitching, say, “Okay, we’re going to take your website, and your tech and throw it out, we’re going to rewrite it in React and do all this stuff.” And to a lot of people who have built up a business, that’s pretty intimidating.

What we try to do is work with what they’ve got, work within the bounds of “Yeah, they may have a thing that’s three versions out of date and WordPress, but can we update that incrementally and do that.” With all of the shiny new stuff in tech, just because you could doesn’t mean you should. That’s been big for me. And I think that if more developers maybe took on that stuff, we could slow down the pace a little bit and find the things that “here’s where technology really works, or here’s what this technology really works for.” That’s what we try to do today.

Tara: Yes. This goes back to what you said in your intro about technology is sometimes, or however you said it, sometimes the answer not always…

Keanan: Yeah. Again, this really comes through on a client we had in the past where they were trying to do a huge build-out, we were all kind of scrambling to get stuff done for the deadline, and there were a lot of feature requests that were coming in that could be solved by just telling your editors not to upload this type of image to the website. And so you can pay me to build 10 hours of development into making the software force you to upload the right type of image, or you can solve that with a business rule and communication internally.

I’m not saying that’s a feature that never gets built but you can save a lot of time and a lot of money, especially with some of the clients we work with who are building new things on a tight timeline or a tight budget. That’s why I always put that in there is because developers and myself included, love to play with new technology or find the absolute correct programming solution to every single problem. But some problems aren’t tech problems and that’s okay.

Liam: Or they don’t have to be tech problems.

Keanan: Absolutely.

Liam: They can be but they don’t have to be.

Keanan: Sometimes when you implement technology you have more tech problems than you had in the first place.

Liam: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think it’s just being candid with clients. With technology, there’s there are nine ways to resolve this technical hurdle and one of which is just send an email to everybody and tell them not to do that. Depending on the size of the organization and the time tables, you’re absolutely right, that can be effective. Now, if there’s 4000 people that have access to that, then that may not be a good solution.

Keanan, we are running out of time, and it’s hard to believe that half an hour has already gone.

Keanan: That was quick.

Liam: But before we, before we officially wrap up, please share with us where people can find you online.

Keanan: You can definitely look up our company site, alphaparticle.com. If you look for us in Google, you’ll probably get links to Wikipedia and a bunch of chemistry answers. So you can just type in “alphaparticle.com.”

Tara: I did exactly that, by the way.

Keanan: We were paying for AdWords for a while just to try and get us to the top of the search results, and it only worked okay. So we’re going to revisit that in 2020.

Tara: I like the color scheme.

Keanan: That’s how Jay got me on board. Purple’s been my favorite color for a long time. The deciding factor for me joining the company was him coloring it purple. So it’s alphaparticle.com. We’ve got a blog up there where we post interesting tech experiments when we are doing stuff like that. Then I am at keanan.dev as well. I was able to snap that up on that when it went up for sale. Those are probably the two best places. I’m on Twitter at @kkoppenhaver. I do a lot of retweeting of other people’s cool things. I’m not so much tweeting myself, but if you’re a Twitter person, you can find me there as well.

Tara: And Spotify.

Keanan: And Spotify. That’s true. My three songs that are up there.

Tara: Awesome. Thanks for joining us today. It’s great seeing you virtually after meeting you in person, so hope to see you again maybe in Chicago.

Keanan: Hope you guys can make it. We’re WordCamp in May. So hopefully we’ll see you. Thanks for having me on today.

Tara: Thanks, Keanan Bye.

Liam: Thanks, Keanan. Nice meeting you. Catch you online soon.

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

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

Allie is a self-taught WordPress user who has done the agency thing, done the freelance thing, done the business owner thing… and is now doing the community thing! She does support and community outreach at GiveWP and is a GoDaddy Pro Ambassador. Her biggest joy comes from talking to other community members about how to maintain and foster positive and inclusive environments on the web.

Website | AllieNimmons.com

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 118.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Allie Nimmons. Allie is a self-taught WordPress user who has done the agency thing, she’s done the freelancing thing, the business owner thing and is now doing the community thing. She does support and community outreach at GiveWP and she’s a GoDaddy Pro ambassador. Her biggest joy comes from talking to other community members about how to maintain and foster positive and inclusive environments on the web. Welcome, Allie. It’s so great to have you here today.

Allie: Hi, Tara. Hi, Liam. I’m really happy to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Liam: You’re most welcome. Thanks for joining us out here in the Hallway. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Allie: Yeah, sure. I started using WordPress probably about five, six years ago. I made the transition from theater to web design. I remember finding WordPress and just thinking like, “Wow, this is great. I can build a website without having to learn how to code.” I’ve been using WordPress for work ever since. I live in North Miami, Florida. Tara and I just made a joke that even though it is pretty much winter by now, I’m in short sleeves and she’s in a sweater. I live in Miami with my fiancé. We’ve been together for three years. That’s pretty much me.

Tara: Did you say theater before this?

Allie: Yeah. I did theater the majority of my life. The first production I was when I was five. I did theater all through my childhood and through my adolescence. I went to Florida State University and I majored in theater. Halfway through that, I was just sort of like, “I don’t really like this as much as I thought I did. I don’t want to make a living out of this and being super competitive in this industry.” So I made a hard left turn into infotech, which is actually more similar than you would think. But yeah, I realized when I was in my very early 20s that that wasn’t really what I wanted to do.

Tara: I have a personal interest in asking that question because my daughter is currently a theater major in college, and she also is kind of discovering new aspects of herself. I think I don’t ever see her doing tech, but you never know. But I think that’s true, when you do it when you’re younger, as you get older and it becomes more competitive, you have to decide if you want to go all in. Like people who want to do it, they have to be all in and not do other things too.

Allie: It is very intense. I compare it to sports. There are statistics about so many kids play sports when they’re young but only like 1% are going to make it to a major league or something. And very, very, very few people quote-unquote make it in the performing arts. It’s very, very competitive. It’s an interesting industry to have worked in for so long and then come into the WordPress community where, at least as far as I’ve experienced, there’s almost no competitive feelings. Like if you go to a WordCamp, you have the two host companies in the sponsor booth can sit side by side and talk shop. People give all their secrets away in their talks, in their workshops without worrying about another agency stealing their idea. There’s none of that. That’s been a really interesting comparison coming from theatre into an industry like this.

Tara: Do you think that your background in theatre plays a part in what you’re doing now?

Allie: Oh, absolutely.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about what you might think about that.

Allie: Totally. I see it almost as a one to one comparison. Because with theatre – more so than maybe film or television, but there’s similarities – with theater, you start with a plan, like a script. And you have that as an outline, and you bring together people who have different strengths and different backgrounds, and you collaborate, and you iterate and you rehearse, and you test, and you figure out what works and what doesn’t, and then you put it up for people to look at. And even then you usually perform it a few times, and you can make changes to it.

I see the process of launching a product, whether it’s a website or an application or something like that, it’s identical. You start with the idea you, you wireframe it or you prototype it, you bring in different people who have different strengths, you know, designers, developers, copywriters, security experts, like whoever, and you work together and you iterate it and you test it and then at some point you publish it. But it’s always up for change. It’s always up for adaptation and tweaking and so on.

Or for somebody else to fork it and do something that they want to do with it, I think it’s an incredibly similar process that I think about a lot in my process is in the things that I do. It’s incredibly similar as far as the process goes. And the community aspect of it too, where you’re relying on other people. You have to rely on other people for help and support.

Something like WordPress, WordPress as a huge thing is only successful when we have people collaborating together. There’s not usually one star of the show. It’s 600 plus people contributing to core and making it something amazing.

Liam: There’s a lot of talking community in the last year or two around what is the nature of the community and what is it health and is it good, is it bad, is it flourishing, is it not? Not is it intrinsically good, but more is it flourishing? Your comment just around having a star and the like…it is a challenge I see as a community to have 600 people on stage. And I don’t mean that as a negative challenge or one not worth taking. I wonder your thoughts on how do we do that so that kind of singing about 600 voices, they don’t need to all sing as one but they all need to at least sing as a series of groups so that we can understand. I wonder your thoughts on that particularly from building a community and crafting a community.

Tara: You’re getting deep right off the bat here, Liam?

Liam: Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. We can go lighter if you want.

Allie: No, it’s such an interesting question. That is something I think about a lot as a relatively new community member who is really observing and being very mindful about exactly what you just said, like what our community is and how it grows and the goods and the bads and all of that. And I think it’s definitely a challenge.

I think that when we consistently community communicate to people, that their contribution is essential and is worthwhile. Whether it is a large or a small contribution, it plays into that. So if you have somebody who contributed to course A for example, and maybe it was a very small thing that they did, and every time they use WordPress moving forward, they think about that little thing or they see that little thing that is there because of them. That feeling of not necessarily ownership, but…I’m having a hard time finding the word on the tip of my tongue. But there’s this feeling of part of this is mine, part of this belongs to me, part of me is in this thing. I think that’s incredibly powerful because it makes us care about the community as a whole. We don’t look at it now it’s just a piece of software or just a means to an end. It’s something that we feel a personal connection to.

I think when it comes to having a large number of people that come in building in leadership at different levels, which is something that we would see in theater. So you have a director, but you also would have an assistant director. If you have a chorus, you’re going to have a chorus manager. If you have an orchestra, you have somebody in charge of those individuals. And so you don’t just have one director for a production that has 200 people in it. You have delegation and you have leadership at various levels. I think that sort of a structure is so imperative and it’s why we are able to succeed because you have leads in different areas who can give those people the focus and the help and the attention and the support that they need.

But yeah, I think that’s a giant question that we’re going to answer over time. But that’s always the way that I see it is building in leadership to the system at various levels.

Liam: That’s always a challenge when effective leadership depends on communication and transparency and accountability in any community. Even a community of two, we struggle with those kinds of things. There’s a lot to unpack there. Maybe we should back up a little bit and go where go lighter where we started.

Allie when Tara read about you at the start of the show, she mentioned that you’ve done the agency thing, the freelance thing, and the business owner thing. Can you tell us through some of your experience with that? What was that like for you?

Allie: Yeah. When I decided that I was going to be a web designer, because I very much woke up one day and I was like, “This is what I’m going to do,” the first job that I got I was a junior designer at a local agency – a really, really small agency here in South Florida. I learned so much. I learned so much. I was introduced to WordPress. I was introduced to things like SEO, I was introduced to things like websites security and all of these different aspects. I learned a lot about how not to run a business. I ran into almost any pitfall that you could…anybody who’s ever worked at an agency and struggled with working at an agency, I touched on pretty much every single one of those things.

I left that agency knowing that “Okay, now I have, after 12 months, a set of skills that I don’t want to lose. And so I started freelancing because I was in such a place emotionally that I felt like I didn’t want to work for somebody else, but I wanted to build sites with WordPress. I started building sites for friends and family, for peanuts, for nothing just to get some experience. And every site I charged a little bit more and a little bit more and a little bit more, and I learned how to run my own businesses.

The freelancing morphed into a business owner thing. I’ve said this before. I think that the difference between freelancing and owning a business is kind of the commitment that you’ve made to yourself that this isn’t something I’m doing on the side to make a bit of extra money. This is something that I’m going to put tons and tons and tons of work and effort and planning into. And so freelancing turned into having a business.

I did that for about three years, and it was sustainable but very shaky all the time. I was always worried about all these hats that I was having to wear. This year specifically was the year that I changed absolutely everything. And it was going back to community because that’s where I end up. I started becoming more integrated in this community and meeting people and actually staying in touch with people after attending a meetup or a WordCamp. I realized that through all of these things that I’ve done, I was now marketable to another company. Like my skills were good enough that I could walk into an interview and say, “These are the things that I know how to do, and I can make your business better because of the things that I know how to do.”

Being, a, activity community member opened up certain doors to me that I was able to find a place that I really want it to work and find people that I really wanted to work with. When I look back on it now, it was a very clear and smooth…I wouldn’t even say smooth. It was a very clear evolution in my career of where I started and where I ended up. But it was very not smooth. Smooth is definitely not the word I would use to describe it.

Liam: Let me ask you. When you started to involve yourself more in the community, I’m guessing you probably started locally, and you shared that you were keeping up with the people more. So you’d meet them at the meetup on a Tuesday night, but then you’d engage with them and not just wait for the next time. Was that a tactical career choice or that was…I really liked that person, why do I have to wait until the next month to talk to them? So it was kind of more of an organic community and then you said, “You know what? A few months down the road, I could do this profession? What was your process?

Allie: It was entirely tactical. I’m not afraid to say that. It was 100% tactical. It was that moment…

Liam: Well, I don’t mean that in a negative way when I asked that question. That’s not trying to paint you as mean.

Allie: I appreciate that. But no, yes, it was definitely intentional. What spurred that was meeting Adam Warner WordCamp Miami this year, 2019. He saw me speak and he liked the talk that I did. We started talking about the GoDaddy Pro speaker ambassadorship, where basically GoDaddy sends me to various camps to talk and to represent the company. I was like, “Well, I’m 27. I really want to travel and talk. This is the dream.” So I said yes right away.

I realized that if I’m going to be going to all of these different camps, and I’m going to be meeting all of these different people, I need to do it right and I need to engage in the community. I can’t just make this a thing that I go somewhere and I talk and then I go somewhere else and I talk and I don’t really immerse myself in it and make the best out of it that I possibly can. So yeah, it was a very direct thought process of like, “I need to be on Twitter more. I need to dedicate 15 to 30 minutes a day being on Twitter and talking to people and following people and being a community member.”

The first podcast that I was on was a result of that decision. It was Michelle William’s podcast, WPCoffeeTalk. I didn’t even know her. I wasn’t following her. Somebody that I know shared her call for a speaker and I was like, “I’ll do that.” I was her very first speaker, and through her, I learned about the job opportunity that was open at GiveWP. So again, it was a very direct line of events. My decision to become more active, completely paid off and mean as far as me getting a job but also me now being somebody that I can go to something like WordCamp US and say, “I work at GiveWP,” and people are like, “I know what that is and I know the people there and they’re great.” It was definitely intentional and it worked. It definitely worked.

Tara: It really struck a chord with me what you said about freelance, the word “freelance” and that being a business owner and how that’s different. And I think I love how intentional you are and how thoughtful you are about approaching your life more as a business and as a freelancer. I think your definition is really accurate and I hadn’t really heard that before. I was just having a conversation with someone in my slack group yesterday about that very thing, about the word “freelancer,” which is a controversial term. Some people see it as not being a respected term. But I think the way you say it really makes sense.

I wonder how all of this relates to a question that we always ask, which is about success. It sounds like even if it’s been not necessarily smooth path, you’ve had a very intentional evolution and where you’ve come over the past couple of years. How does that relate to success and how do you define success?

Allie: I think about that a lot. I think success is different for everyone and success doesn’t mean one thing. I think Allie from two years ago had a different idea of success than Allie today or Allie in five years. Even though I think about it a lot, I don’t think I have a solid definition of success because it’s like, okay, if I have a solid definition of what success is and I get to that definition, then what?

I think at this point I feel successful in that I have the opportunity to do the things that I want to do and I have people who support me and support me doing the things that I want to do. One of those definitely being Adam Warner. I run almost everything I do by him and my coworkers and my bosses at Give. I think it’s a hard question for me to answer because right now I do feel successful. I feel that I can do the things that I want to do. But I know that there’s also a lot of things in the future that I want to do and there’s a lot of things that I want to accomplish. And when that happens, I’ll feel successful then. I don’t know. It’s a tough question to answer.

Tara: I don’t think it has to be necessarily a concrete thing. It may be an approach. And you’re young, so it will change over time. I’m not as young but mine changes all the time as well. I think having it in your mind is what success mean to me right now or how will I feel successful this week, this month, this year, today. There are different time timeframes for success as well. Thanks for sharing that. I like Adam Warner a lot too.

Allie: He’s greatest.

Tara: Shout to Adam.

Allie: Shout out to Adam for sure. I call him GoDad. I feel successful now being on this podcast with you guys. This is an honor. It’s really fun and it’s great to be able to have these sorts of conversations that I know my friends and new friends will be able to hear. That feels like a success.

The fact that a couple of years ago, I never would have reached out and been like, “Hey, I want to be on your podcast. I think I would be great.” The overcoming of the imposter syndrome in the last few years has been a success I think to take off. It happens on a daily basis. It happens over long periods of time. I like the way that you phrase that for sure.

Tara: I want to ask you about the role that you’ve played in some WordCamps as a speaker or a panel member in your participation in the conversation around inclusiveness and diversity in WordPress. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Allie: Sure. One of these days people are going to get sick of me talking about this stuff because every time I have a WordPress-based conversation I manage to steer this conversation in this direction. So I’m glad that you did that.

I think more directly maybe we’re talking about the workshop that we did at WordCamp US. Me and Jill Binder, Aurooba Ahmed and David Wolfpaw did a workshop on diverse and inclusive spaces. And that came directly out of a blog post that I wrote called How to be a WordPress Ally, which is exactly what it sounds like. I broke down what allyship is, and I broke down why it’s necessary specifically in this community. Then I talked about actionable things that we can all do to be better allies for each other.

That came out of a ton of hallway talks where I was able to answer a lot of interesting questions that I think that people in our community have been afraid to ask or embarrassed to ask. I’ve been able to ask them a lot of questions and try to challenge the way that they think about what diversity means and what inclusiveness means and what mindfulness means. Like being mindful of the way that you talk to people and the way that you organize your spaces.

Even though I think that the WordPress community is incredibly diverse, especially compared to other tech-specific communities, we have a lot of work to do. I think it’s such an amazing opportunity because almost everyone that I’ve spoken to over the past nine months of being really active in the community, everyone has been willing to listen to me, and everyone has had questions, and everyone has expressed ideas like, “Well, I want to make my team more diverse, but I’m afraid to tokenize people. So how do I go about doing that?”

That worry tells me that people want to talk about this stuff, they want to have these conversations, it’s just incredibly awkward. And people get analysis paralysis. They get so concerned about how to talk about it that they don’t talk about it. So I found myself in this interesting position where people want to talk to me about it.

A few people have asked me or kind of mentioned that as a woman or as a person of color, or as someone who identifies as queer that it’s not my job to teach people about diversity because it’s something that I struggled through from that end of things. My response to that is always if people want to learn and willing to teach. If people ask me questions that are combative or disrespectful, that’s not ever a conversation I’m prepared to have. I don’t have the energy for that. But to sit down and have a conversation with somebody about how they in an active manner can make our community better, like why would I not have that conversation?

The workshop from WordCamp US was a great way for me and other people with other perspectives to kind of challenged the way that people think a little bit and give them some actionable items that they can implement, not only into their everyday lives, but into their businesses, into their agencies, into their WordCamps, into their meetups that will enrich our community for the better. As long as people keep asking me questions, and people keep wanting to talk about this kind of stuff, I’m here, and I’ll do that.

Liam: Thank you.

Allie: You’re welcome.

Liam: You shared a lot and there’s a lot to respond to and comment on. But I want to start just by saying and you were kind of self-effacing and so people are probably getting sick of you talking about it. That would be a nice problem to get to where what you were sharing wasn’t necessary anymore or was so common understanding in our culture and our different cultures that while culturally we might be different in this way or that way, our default is, how can I show the most respect to this human being? So I would love to be disappointed when I am sick of you. We saw that years ago, Allie. Well, I would love to get there. And we’re not.

I know that what you’re sharing comes at a cost. WordPress community is fantastic. It’s much better than the wider society in the sense of it’s much easier to have these conversations at a WordCamp or in a WordPress meetup than it is in the office or on the street as it were. So the community is absolutely to be commended for that, but it’s not universal.

I know that when you talk about things, or I talk about things, or Tara talks about these things, and we take a stance towards inclusivity, towards respect, towards welcoming, it comes at a cost. The dynamics that you mentioned, you know, you’re a woman of color, you’re a woman, you identify as queer, all of these are, in a sense, making you an even bigger target for those who don’t believe and respect and value that. Thank you very much for what you’re doing and I’m grateful to you for that.

Allie: Thank you. I appreciate hearing that. One of the things that I’ve always found so amazing is that when I first started talking about this stuff more publicly than just one on one with a friend, I genuinely expected maybe once, maybe twice to get some kind of knockback. Because 9.5 out of 10 people in our community are fantastic. There’s a small margin of people who are not here for these conversations. I’m aware of that.

What’s so amazing to me is that I’ve never, ever gotten any sort of blowback from anything that I’ve said. I don’t know. It makes me wonder if that’s ever going to happen. It’s not something that I obsess about or worried about overtly, but it’s just something that I’ve wondered about like, “Are there people out there who I make angry by any of these comments?” Because when you think about any time that people rock the boat, or anytime people try to shake things up, or anytime people try to ask difficult questions, there are always people who don’t like hearing it. It’s just how we are. And that has never happened, which I think is commendable to the way that our community is if there’s somebody out there who does want to say something to me or send me a nasty message, they don’t, for whatever reason. And that’s pretty awesome.

Tara: I think it would be sad if there were people in this community who actually did that. I have another perspective or point and I’m almost afraid to make it because, I mean, it’s so wonderful that you’re welcoming and answering questions. For me, I’m 52 years old. I’ve been a stay at home mom for the majority of my adulthood, so I’ve kind of lived under a rock to a certain degree. I’ve been in the WordPress community for a number of years. I’m so afraid of saying the wrong thing unintentionally using the wrong terms.

My daughter, as I mentioned is a theater major. I’m always feeling like I’m just afraid of my lack of understanding showing through because it’s not that I don’t respect or anything like that, it’s that I just genuinely don’t have the information and have not been in a community where that’s something that I’ve been exposed to. So I put myself in opportunities to learn that and people like you are helpful to people like me who are trying to learn more and really have a desire to be more inclusive. But there’s a fear that in that process that you’re going to reveal that you don’t know what you’re talking about, or maybe say the wrong thing.

I say that here at great risk – like I feel nervous having voiced that truth about myself. But I think it’s great for similarly for you to put yourself out there to answer those questions and hopefully make people like me feel more comfortable in learning and being better.

Allie: Absolutely. And thank you for sharing that. Because I think maybe that’s part of the reason why people ask me these questions is because I recognize that your experience is your experience. I can’t assume that you understand just off the bat where I’m coming from. I can’t assume that anybody does. We’ve lived different lives. That is a virtue. That’s a good thing.

The willingness to learn I think is so inherent in this community. If you just look at WordPress, when you look at WordPress, and how in order for you to use WordPress, you have to learn how. It’s not a 1, 2, 3 Wix website, I just press a few buttons and I’m done. There is this constant feeling of learning in our community and admitting, “Hey, I don’t know how to do this. Can we work through this? Can somebody show me how? Can somebody point me to a video, whatever?”

I think it’s the same thing in this regard. If people can admit that, “Hey, I don’t know, I don’t know something, can you explain it to me?” The worst way of handling these sorts of situations is declaring that you do know something that you don’t. That’s always when we run into problems is when people declare that they know about everything, because of the experiences that they’ve had and they can admit a gap in their knowledge. And so I think that you not knowing and asking questions makes you stronger.

Tara: Thanks. Well, now I’m going to ask you a lot of questions off…

Allie: Please do. That’s part of the reason that I think we need instances where people can have one on one or hallway talks or small, not super-duper public conversation is about these so that you can ask questions and not feel shame for asking the question. You should never feel shame for asking a question.

Tara: Thanks.

Allie: You’re welcome.

Tara: I could talk about this for a long time. I want to ask you another question that we asked everyone because we are running out of time. And that is about advice. If you can think of any advice that you’ve received that’s really stuck with you and that you have implemented into your life that you’d share with us.

Allie: I’ve gotten so much good advice over the past few months.

Liam: Not to put you on the spot. Oh, go ahead. You’ve got something.

Allie: Yeah, I kind of got something.

Liam: Go, go, go.

Allie: The advice that I would give is to give value to others. Like when I decided that I was going to be more active in the community, that wasn’t me posting a bunch of stuff about myself all the time, like tweeting about myself or tweeting my thoughts or this and that. It was, “Hey, I’m going to retweet this thing that this person said, or I’m going to reply to this thing that this person said” or “I met these two people and I’m going to try to connect them because they couldn’t find value in meeting each other.”

I think that has made me feel way more like a community member than quote-unquote, “putting myself out there.” Which I think a lot of people get afraid about when they think about being super active on social media feel very vulnerable or going to a meetup and going to a WordCamp and speaking it feels very vulnerable, like you’re giving a piece of yourself away. I think in a way you are, but you get so much back almost right away, especially from this community. So to simply say that, don’t be afraid of giving pieces of yourself away as long as you are getting pieces back. If you’re feeling like you’re giving yourself away and you’re starting to feel drained and empty because of that, then it’s not worth it. But contributing and then taking I think is a healthy way of going about it.

Liam: I totally agree with that. And I think it’s really important to say when we’re learning about the different life experiences of others is to think about what am I getting back and to try to keep an open mind on what that may look like. I’m sure we both have experiences where somebody has contributed and they throw up their hands and frustration, but I didn’t get any work out of it. Well, that’s one way to get back from the community but it’s not the only way or necessarily the most valuable way. Thank you for sharing that a bit of advice. I think it’s great to give value to others.

Allie, Tara made it pretty clear earlier in the conversation that we could go on for hours but we do have a 30-minute show format and we’re over time here. Before we say goodbye to you, can you share where people can find you online and catch up with you?

Allie: Absolutely. I’m most active on Twitter, @allie_nimmons and my website is allienimmons.com. I try to be pretty regularly putting out content there. Those are really the two main places to find me.

Tara: Thanks, Allie. It’s been great having you on the show. Appreciate it.

Allie: Thank you, guys. I really loved being here.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Thanks, Allie.

Allie: Bye.

Liam: See you soon. Bye-bye.

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

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

Allison is a journalist turned marketer who transforms tech talk into irresistible stories. An avid reader, she has a penchant for books, chocolate, and content first design.

Website | aesmithcontent.com (under construction)

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 117.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Allison Smith. Allison is a journalist turned marketer who transformed tech talk into irresistible stories. An avid reader, she has a penchant for books, chocolate, and content first design. Welcome, Allison.

Allison: Thank you. And thank you so much for having me on. I am excited.

Tara: We are excited too. Thanks for joining us. Allison, why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit of your story about yourself.

Allison: So journalist turned marketer, that happened about six years ago. Before that, I had had a lot of experience in community journalism up here in Canada in the Ontario Niagara area, if you’ve ever been here. I wrote about everything from the economy, to my city council, to sports and pretty much everything you find a newspaper, took the photos, laid out the paper, and every Monday got it out. That was fantastic for a few years.

Then I kind of found myself out of work and jumped around doing a few stints and various gigs. Through serendipity and meeting a bunch of people in my local co-working community, I made the transition to copywriting and marketing. Since then, I’ve found a real passion for helping tech-focused businesses and manufacturers. Because they have amazing stories and they’re so very passionate about what they do, but sometimes I think they have trouble themselves and talking about themselves and marketing themselves. So I love helping them. That’s me.

Tara: It’s really interesting. I think a lot of people have trouble marketing themselves. Do you find that problem for yourself? Because it’s sometimes easy to market other people but how about yourself. What do you do to market yourself? Do you set a good example?

Allison: Oh, for myself, I find it difficult too. Talking about my clients and talking about how passionate I am about what I do is easy because you’re telling a story, you’re focusing on somebody else. But the minute I’m asked to give like an elevator speech or any kind of bio…right now I’m in the final stages of writing my own website and it’s a special kind of torture I think for everyone – even for marketers.

Tara: Making your own website?

Allison: Yeah. You just do the best you can. I think the key is more to focus on your audience and that one person you want to talk to, like your ideal client, rather than yourself if you’re nervous. It’s really about having a conversation. Marketing should really be about two people, maybe more, in a conversation, right? That’s kind of what I tell myself is that it’s a two-way street.

Tara: Do you find yourself laboring over what you’re writing on your own website whereas probably you felt like it was clients who labor over it on their own content. Talk a little bit about your process and your perfectionism or how you…it sounds like you struggled to get your website out. Was it perfectionism getting in the way or other work getting in the way? What made that a more challenging process for you?

Allison: Probably both. Because you as a business owner, you’re trying to balance everything. You’re trying to balance client work, networking, admin stuff – everything is on your plate all at once – and somewhere in there trying to see your family and have a life. Part of that is I guess really forcing myself to see myself as other people see me. That can get difficult.

So the way I overcame that was to start asking around and saying like, “Okay, how would you describe me in three words?” As uncomfortable as it sometimes is, it’s sometimes about talking to your clients and saying, “What did you find that was unique to me? Why did you hire me? What pain points do I solve for you? How was I able to help you?” Those types of questions really illuminate where to focus on and where your talents lie, and how you bring value.

That’s really what clients want to know is that, how are you going to bring value to my business and how are you going to help me? What will be different than the way it is now, the way it was before? How do you want people to feel when they interact with you?

Tara: Those client’s questions it’s a really great suggestion. And I think there’s a lot of fear in doing that because number one you don’t want to bother people. You know, people don’t want to take the time to have a conversation like that. It’s hard to ask that. And then I guess maybe we are afraid to hear what they’re going to say? Maybe they won’t come up with something. When you present that idea to your clients for them to ask their clients, what kind of reaction do you get? Are they all for it?

Allison: They’re sometimes leery because they’ve been in various stages of actually asking their clients or they have probably the same fears I do. Like, how do we approach them without bothering them? I think it’s a common thing in business. Everybody wants to know, how am I doing? And then getting those answers is kind of an unknown, right? It’s a question mark until you have the conversation.

So ideas I’ve seen come up include doing something small for them even if it’s inviting them to lunch, or coffee, or if you’re able to give a discount or something. It really kind of opens up the lines of communication. Testimonials they’re expected. You kind of want to see those on a website. So getting them is important.

What I found is especially effective…because people they get these email requests, and they’re like, “I don’t have time for this. I’ll do it next week.” And then that next week never comes. So I tend to write something up for them and say, “Is this what you would have said?” And kind of check it with them and say, “I took the liberty of writing a little something for you. Does this sound good?” So totally saying, “You totally don’t have to, we don’t have to use this if it’s not what you would have thought or feel free to make changes or even feel free to back out, no worries.” Most of the time, they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, thanks for doing that. Go to it.”

The real, like, the real hump, I find is the actual writing for them. They dread coming up with words in a testimonial. Because either they think they don’t have anything valuable to say or they’re like, “Well, you did this thing for us, what do you want me to say?” type thing. Luckily, I’ve gotten better at doing that. It’s a really weird feeling to ghostwrite testimonials for people to put on your own website. I don’t think that ever goes away but you just do it because it’s like…

Liam: Yeah, it probably gets easier.

Allison: It’s part of the sausage making process.

Liam: Allison, how do you look for clients? How do you do your business development?

Allison: I get sometimes referrals. I’ve also joined a co-working space in my local area and that’s been huge for building relationships. Stuff takes time, and honestly getting clients has been one of my major stumbling blocks. What I found most effective is thinking outside the box. Because I’m a freelancer…I don’t really want to say freelancer, but because I consult, I’m small. I am a one-woman company. So I don’t have a huge marketing budget. But what really works is face networking. So going to business and industry events where my I target clients are, going to Business After Five for my Chamber of Commerce.

Today I went to this economic development speech in my local area here in Niagara, and interestingly enough, some of those people are kind of connector people, and they’re just interesting people to keep in contact with because they know what’s going on in the region and they’re apparently more than willing to admit they know you and maybe connect you with somebody.

Somebody suggested today since some of my clients are manufacturing people, they said, “Go to our local Industrial Association meeting. So really targeted groups like that. Go to a meeting of software people and developers if you want to get in with them and do things for other people and say like, ‘What small thing can I do for this person today?'” Not that I like to be transactional about it, but sometimes it’s just good to get outside of my own head and say like, “If things aren’t going really well, what happiness can I bring to others? What can I do for them on Twitter? What mentions can I give them?” Because everybody’s kind of in the same boat, it goes around and comes around.

Liam: You certainly have given a lot of yourself recently. You and I met each other through WordCamp Niagara, which was in October, and you were one of two organizers for the WordCamp.

Allison: Yes.

Liam: Tell us a little bit about how you got involved with WordPress in your journey to putting together a WordCamp. Talk about that.

Allison: Well, when I first started my business, I built cobbled together a WordPress website. That was probably in like 2014, so five years ago. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of changes with WordPress. The community and the CMS has really progressed in that time, and they’re constantly evolving.

One of my main things has been to be involved in communities. I especially love tech communities. They’re just so fascinating. So when I found a local meetup group for WordPress in Niagara, I started to really buy into it and I started to participate. And then I found there are WordCamp in Hamilton, and there’s a WordCamp in Rochester. I went to a couple of those. And then last year I spoke at Hamilton.

For the past two years, I’ve co-organized our WordCamp here in Niagara. And it’s just a fantastic way to meet people and kind of that camaraderie in that solidarity with the community I find is energizing and recharging. Organizing is just a rush. It’s fun being on the inside. And it’s an amazing way to give back.

Liam: Yeah, it certainly is. Tara, did you have something to add?

Tara: I was just going to say that I have not organized a WordCamp before. I’ve only volunteered. So I can only imagine how much work it is. But it’s nice to hear that is also a rush. I was actually going to ask you about success, because we like to talk about that on the show, and it’s always interesting to hear how people define it. So can you tell us how you define success, Allison? Whether it is a combination of professional and personal one or the other, whatever you’d like to share. What does success mean to you?

Allison: To me, it’s always meant making enough money to support myself and live a comfortable life. Not even a diva-like life. Just enough money to live comfortably. Do some traveling definitely. I’d love to do some traveling to the States or Europe. I’m always watching the WordCamp wrap-ups, and they always have these amazing pictures of a WordCamp US and WordCamps all over the world. That’s really opened my eyes to the fact that I would like to do that. And being successful enough to consistently give back whether that’s contributing time or donating some money to my community.

Also I’ve realized that I really like organizing in that I get to help other people be successful. I get to put them on stage as speakers. I get to introduce them to the WordPress community, I get them to find out what this WordPress thing is all about become volunteers. I get to send them an email saying, “We’ve accepted your speaker application,” and watch them grow from that. That really is success to me.

Liam: I like the community focus of that, the giving back, the some level of, you know, I’ve got to live I want to see the world a little bit. But it’s much more about doing so in a holistic way. That’s very kind of you.

Allison: I really like to be engaged and working towards a common purpose. I love working on teams. I’m an introvert, but I like being part of a team. That’s one of my big things is that I’m in marketing and marketing sometimes gets a bad rap for being just like take, take, take and not thinking like, okay, what’s the other side of that? What do we actually do for our customers? And how do we bring value and how do you really bring value as a human, like human to human? That’s really what it’s all about.

Tara: That’s interesting that when you say that marketing gets a bad rap. I don’t know. I mean, I think selling can be overdone. Maybe that’s where that comes from. I’m not quite sure. But most of us who are probably listening to this podcast are marketing, whether we’re actually calling ourselves marketers, or we’re building websites for people are developing websites. We’re all doing things to help other people make money ultimately. Whether it’s a donation to a nonprofit or a big company. So that’s what makes the world go round to a certain degree. I think it gets a bad rap because sometimes it’s not done in a very admirable way maybe. There’s a lot happening in the world that’s not ethical. So maybe that’s where that comes from. But I think in general, marketing’s a good thing.

Allison: Totally. And there are so many people who do it right. Those are the people I truly look up to. A lot of them are in the WordPress community. It’s just fantastic to see that, “Look, you can run a business and market ethically.” Part of what people like to support nowadays is people who have, like, they somehow integrate some type of like social good or values or values are kind of like the front feature of their business, right? They live them every day. Those are the people I like to look up to and support. That’s what I love about the WordPress community is that we all kind of support each other.

Tara: Yes, we do, that’s for sure.

Liam: I’m going to ask maybe a challenging question. When you find yourself with a client who you’ve got a good relationship, you’re working with, you enjoy them, they enjoy your company, not buddy, buddy, but just they’re nice people you like working with them, they pay your bills, you enjoy writing for them, have you run into a situation where they want to do something that kind of maybe puts the ethical hair on the back your neck up a little bit? And if so, how did you handle that?

Allison: That is interesting.

Liam: I don’t really know what ethical hair on the back of your neck is. That was kind of a weird little analogy. Sorry.

Allison: Yeah, no worries. I think for me, since I’ve been in journalism, and this is like part of the crux of what I’ve always dealt with, is that you can make a lot of money if you don’t have any scruples about the stuff. And I have major scruples about this stuff. So it’s like finding the clients out there that I get good vibes about and then having a conversation about what I can do for them.

In the tech and manufacturing world, I think it’s really about establishing expectations with prospects and customers and everything and being proud of your products and services but not overselling them and being authentic and honest. Authentic is a cliché for a reason. There’s a reason like everybody wants to say, “I’m authentic,” because it’s one of the major things people value about people they do business with today. They need that authenticity.

I think part of our duty as marketers is to make sure that that happens. Ethics and authenticity and all that good stuff are huge questions, and how do we keep that at the forefront, how do we balance and even promote that in terms of…like, how do we help the good guys win has always been like a question in my mind.

Liam: and that can be a challenge if the business is struggling, right? It’s all well and good and easy to say we’re going to always do the right thing when we have money in the bank. But when we’re behind on bills…not to say that we shouldn’t do the right thing when money’s low but it becomes a lot harder, especially if maybe it is a manufacturing company and they’ve got 35 or 100 employees who need that bi-weekly or fortnightly paycheck to pay the rent, to pay the mortgage, to pay the food. It’s a challenge. It really is.

Allison: And I think if somebody wanted to make some claim on their website that I knew wasn’t totally accurate, I’d have to caution them against that. I have to say, “In my professional opinion…” I’d have to find a way to template it and say, like, “People are going to find out, and they’re going to be pissed off. They will be mad.”

Tara: Yeah, you have to.

Allison: This is always, always, always one of the pillars of public relations is that you don’t want to try to outrun the truth. Especially in the age of social media, it just doesn’t work anymore. There’s so much more scrutiny and so many more ways to find out what companies are up to today. I’d say don’t bother, just be honest, and be transparent.

Tara: If you have to try to be authentic, you’re probably not really being authentic, right?

Allison: Yeah. And don’t compare yourself because a lot of what’s out there on social media is I expect at the very least stretching the truth.

Liam: I think I’d agree with you on that.

Allison: Don’t compare your returns or your success to what you see on social media. I mean, I’ve done it before. I’ve fallen for it, but you just have to keep in mind that, like, how accurate is that stuff?

Liam: I love the line “Don’t try to outrun the truth.” That’s a great bit of advice. And with that backdrop, I want to ask you about advice. I wonder if you can share with us the best advice that you’ve ever received or been given or read and successfully implemented in your life. It might be something someone said to you, maybe something you read.

Allison: This is a work in progress. But some of the best advice I’ve ever received is from…She’s like a business coach. She does all kinds of cool things in our community. Her name is Ruth Unruh. I’ve seen her speak so many times in the past five years, and I know her pretty well. One of the things that she said that has really stuck out for me is not to make fear-based decisions. Because so many of the decisions that get made in business and personally are fear-based.

Fear is a really powerful thing. That is at the core of so many of the things people do – fear and anxiety – and it can cause like so many problems whether is just kind of hanging back and holding yourself back or doing things or saying things that you wouldn’t necessarily do or say on your best days and in your best situations. It’s a death knell for business. I think it’s a lot more prevalent than people want to admit. So fear-based decisions.

Tara: I think I was going to challenge that but then I actually want to come at it from a different direction, not necessarily fear-based decisions, but not avoiding things that scare you. Those are two different things. I think if you avoided fear in general, you would never do anything because we all start something new or do things that we’re afraid of. So I just want to say that I understand what you’re saying about not making a decision based on fear, like not doing something because you’re afraid of something bad happening, but also not doing some because you’re afraid to do it as well. Right?

Allison: Yeah. Which famous lady said, do something that scares you every day? I’m blanking on it right now. But that’s another piece of advice I’m trying to live up to and something I’m trying to do that’s pretty new. Every day is pretty big.

Tara: Yeah. Well, I’m being involved in WordCamps, probably talked to a lot of people who are speaking for the first time. You know, everybody gets afraid before they speak in front of an audience or most people do I think so. So you must have to share advice with people about overcoming their fears as well.

Allison: I did it for the first time in Hamilton in 2018. And seeing your name on that placard is a new experience when you haven’t done that before. When you see your name on there, it’s like, “Well, I can’t back out now without some medical emergency or everybody knowing that I just didn’t.” At that point, it’s like, “Well I’m here in my solar my slides and so are these people. So guess what? It’s time to get up there.”

The WordPress community is so patient and forgiving I find with new speakers. That’s another reason I love it is that they’re very kind. It’s a challenge, but I think a lot of the challenge was within myself.

Tara: Were you pleased with how it went? Did you feel fine afterwards?

Allison: Yeah, totally fine. I mean, better than I would have if I had kind of said, “On second thought let me just sit down here and watch somebody else do it.” I really came from watching other people do it and be okay. Be like, “Well, I think you should do it and it’ll be okay.”

Tara: Yeah, you will be. You mentioned your…

Liam: Tara just muted herself, so I’ll jump in.

Tara: Sorry, my finger hit the mouse there.

Allison: No worries.

Tara: Go ahead, Liam. Pick it up where I was muted.

Liam: I was mostly just going to start talking so we had a conversation. Let me just start over again. Do you want to do a little sound clap? We got about two minutes and 15 seconds left.

Tara: Just keep quiet for a moment.

Liam: Allison, I’ve been fortunate enough to be up in your corner of the world on location and it’s a really lovely little corner of the world, and it makes me wonder what do you do when you’re not writing copy or organizing a WordCamp or attending networking events? What do you do outside of your office?

Allison: When I’m not at my desk or running haphazardly all over the place organizing, I really like to grab my camera and go for a hike or go to a local event and take some pictures. Photography is another one of my passion. I really love just snapping some shots. Just spontaneously saying, “What’s going on this weekend?” and then going to those things. I really love just the community aspect of doing that.

Liam: It sounds like you go places where people are and watch – in a good way, in a supportive way. Sorry, that came out wrong.

Allison: I know what you’re saying. I love people watching. People are so interesting. And it’s a great way to get ideas. It’s a great way to remember that we’re all human. Overhearing conversations is…I just had a discussion with somebody about this last night. You’ll hear the funniest things if you just listen or curious about the world and other people, and ask questions. If you’re interested in other people, they’ll probably eventually take an interest in you. I mean, you remember that outside of your internal mental voice or bubble that we’re really not all that different from each other when it comes down to it.

Tara: Thank you for sharing that. Thanks for sharing that. Thanks for sharing all of this. Do you use Instagram or some other platform for these photos that you take?

Allison: Instagram, sometimes. Lately, I’ve been posting them to Flickr. I posted our WordCamp photos to Flickr. Instagram has been a big one for me. I actually split up the Instagram account I had, because I would take my weekend photos and then go to work and be like, “Business Allison, here’s some advice on content.” I was maybe confusing people a little bit so I created a second Instagram account just for my…here’s my community stuff and followed all different people. It’s really interesting the identity you can take online, like, “Here’s weekend Allison and here’s social Allison.”

Tara: Well on that note, Allison, we’re going to wrap up today. I’m sorry we’re out of time. But we always end by asking people to share where they can be found. So we’ve already started that conversation here. Where can people find you online?

Allison: They can find me on Instagram @aesmithcontent. The same on twitter @aesmithcontent on there. My website is under construction right now. It’s almost done. It’s at aesmithcontent.com.

Tara: Great. Thanks for joining us. It’s a pleasure to meet you and have a conversation with another Canadian. Thanks for having me.

Liam: Thanks for joining us today, Allison. It’s been an absolute pleasure catching up with you and getting to know you a little bit more.

Allison: I was really honored to have you say, “Hey, let’s do a Hallway Chat.”

Liam: It’s all our honor, all our privilege. Thank you.

Tara: Thanks, Allison. Bye.

Allison: Thank you.

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

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

Matthew is a recovering IT consultant who now builds websites for a living. Based out of the Washington DC area, Matthew has found success with his turnkey website service and enjoys sharing his experiences running it with other web consultants.

Website | Turnkey Websites Blueprint

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 116.

Liam: Welcome to the Hallway Chat. I’m Liam Dempsey.

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Matthew Rodela. Matthew is a recovering IT consultant who now builds websites for a living. Based out of the Washington DC area, Matthew has found success with his turnkey website service and enjoys sharing his experiences running it with other web consultants. Welcome, Matthew. We’re glad to have you here today.

Matthew: Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Liam: Hey, Matt, thanks for joining us out here in the virtual hallway. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Matthew: Yeah. I come from an IT background. I started computers and doing computer support and help desk as my career. I did that for about seven years. As I was going up through the ranks of IT, I realized that I would start to need to be going into management positions, and a lot of red tapes and a lot of stuff that just wasn’t fun and just wasn’t what I wanted to do. So I decided to go off on my own and do IT consulting, and start a business doing that.

I started doing that around…gosh, what is it? 2011. As I was doing that, naturally, my customers would ask me to build them websites for their businesses as well. And I had been building websites for fun for a while. I started building with WordPress back in I think around 2007, 2008 timeframe. So that’s what I use to build customer’s websites. I found that that was my favorite thing to do, so I decided to focus on that. Focused on that for a while.

Then I kind of stumbled upon the idea of turnkey websites, which we can get into a little bit later. But I’m basically using WordPress multisite to automate the website delivery process so that customers who have low budget and aren’t shy to kind of build out the website themselves, I provide a platform for them to do that easily for their particular industry. That’s what I’m focusing on now. It’s not only building my own turnkey platform for my customers but also teaching other web developers and web consultants how to build out their own turnkey platform on multisite as well.

Tara: Interesting. How did you get this idea? Was it a project and then you kind of grew it out from there? Tell us a little bit about the background of that.

Matthew: I had been writing a blog and doing a podcast for IT business owners. I was running an IT business. myself and I figured I would share my experiences. I like writing. And so I thought I’d kind of build following that way and see what happens. I started to build an audience around that, a lot of other IT business owners. Through that process, someone approached me who had a product called Tech Site Builder. What Tech Site Builder was, it was a customized WordPress theme that he would sell and package it with videos that would walk you through how to install it on your own WordPress instance on your own hosting, how to set it up, how to do some basic marketing and stuff like that. He package that up and sold it for a few hundred bucks.

He was looking to get out of the game and change industries, so he was looking for someone to acquire Tech Site Builder. He turned to me because I had this following from my blog and podcast and said, “Hey, do you want to take this on because I know you work with websites as well. So I thought that was a great opportunity to kind of play around with product key kind of thing with WordPress.

But I realized right away that just charging one price for this theme and videos was going to cause a support nightmare because these guys were constantly requesting support from him when they install a plugin that breaks the site, and they figure they got the theme from him, so they go to him for support. I quickly realized that needed to be some kind of recurring revenue product.

Then I thought, “Well, there’s things like Squarespace and WordPress.com that are out there where they kind of are leasing the platform to build your own website for a low monthly fee. What if I did something like that with Tech Site Builder?” That was kind of the crazy idea I had and it took me about a year of experimenting and trying different approaches until I finally had kind of what it is now at TechSiteBuilder.com, which is kind of what I like to call the Squarespace for it consultants. It’s working well now. I’ve got about 200 customers on it. It’s all automated, so they sign up and they get a website and they can start building it out. I’ve got onboarding videos and a knowledge base to kind of help them along the way.

And then, only then when they maybe stumble or need additional support will they reach out to me. Sometimes customers on the platform I never hear from because the whole thing’s completely automated, which has been kind of a cool thing to have going.

Tara: Fascinating concept. Do your customers know or even care that WordPress is involved in this? It almost sounds like you have your own CMS in a way, right?

Matthew: Yeah. I mean, it is using WordPress and I use plugins To kind of re-theme the dashboard a little bit, so it’s a customized looking dashboard. I use a couple plugins to like edit and consolidate and simplify the admin menu and the toolbar menu and stuff like that. So if someone had limited experience with WordPress, they might not recognize it as WordPress, but if someone has used WordPress before for a little bit, they’d probably recognize that it is a modified version of WordPress. Some people comment on that most of them don’t.

Tara: That’s not why they’re joining up?

Matthew: No.

Tara: I’ve seen this concept with, like, plastic surgeons and dental. They have their own sort of vertical where they have multisite like this and the content is populated automatically, and then they can go in and edit it and customize it. So you also have content on there?

Matthew: Yeah, we have some starter content, and then through the onboarding process, we encourage them to go And, you know, replace it with their own stuff. But if they’re in a rush, and they just need to get something out really quick, then the start of content is there to at least have something that looks like a fully fleshed out website from the very beginning.

Liam: That’s really interesting. I’m eager to know and hear your thoughts on how you walked from making a website or two as a hobby to being able to run a multisite with hundreds of customers, not just from a technology but also from a product standpoint. You said it took you about a year, and I can imagine and that’s a lot of trial and error and customer feedback. But can you talk to us a little bit about that, Matt?

Matthew: Right. Luckily for the turnkey website, that kind of took a different path from what I would call my agency, which started out just as me and now it’s I have a couple of contractors that work for me, where we build customized bespoke websites. And I still do that. I like that I’m able to dig in deeply to a project and do customer discovery and build out a customized website and all of that. So I still do that, but I just don’t need to do that as often now, because I have the kind of the recurring revenue from the turnkey platform.

For the turnkey platform, it really helped that I had that blog, and that podcast and I’ve been doing that for a few years before I was approached with the Tech Site Builder project. I think that that is important for this kind of turnkey model to work. Either you yourself need to have spent the time to build an audience around a certain industry vertical, or I’ve seen other people have success where they build the platform and then they partner with somebody else like a well-known person in that industry, who has a lot of followers. Because with something like turnkey websites where you’re delivering the product at a low cost, you’re really looking for scale in order to make a decent revenue. So you need a lot of eyeballs on the product and you need a lot of people signing up for it.

So for me, I was able to do that on my own just by building up the audience over a few years. But for those of you who don’t have a few years to build up an audience, then you can reach out to partners, or other people in the space who might have a blog or a podcast or some other complementary product in the industry and then approach them and say, “Hey, I’ve got this cool website platform I’m working on. What do you say we partner up?”

Tara: That’s really interesting. There’s so much talk about specializing in verticals. It’s great to see you’ve taken something and to actually take it even further with this whole multisite concept. What kind of challenges, if any, do you face with a multisite? I’ll practice for a second and say, we’re not a tech podcast, so that’s not like necessarily a tech question, but just wondering about that.

Matthew: There are tech challenges, but luckily, these days they’re a lot less. When I was starting, and this was only four years ago, but we know how quickly things change in the WordPress space. For years ago, there were very few tools or off the shelf plugins to help facilitate this kind of business model. Really WPMU DEV was the only company out there that was building multisite type of things. But now, there’s a great plugin called WP Ultimo that really kind of facilitates this type of business model.

So you can install the plugin on multisite and it facilitates having customers sign up, choose a plan, pay for the plan, and then they get a website in multisite that’s created from a template of a site that you’ve already created on multisite. And then it assigns it to that customer and they can go in and start building it out. So that plugin didn’t exist when I started. I wish it did, but now it does, so it makes the whole process a lot easier. That gets rid of a lot of technical challenges.

Then from kind of a business perspective, I think the biggest challenge is just getting the customers, getting the eyeballs because a lot of the things you do in a traditional website agency don’t work when you’re talking about a very low cost, a very product type of service. So things like doing long discovery calls, or spending a lot of time prospecting, or Facebook ads, spending a lot of money on ads doesn’t really work.

So instead you got to look for things like content marketing works really well, where you released a lot of helpful content that gets a lot of eyeballs and they sign up for a newsletter, a mailing list, and then you continue to build a following that way. That’s been really helpful. And then, of course, word of mouth. The biggest challenge has been just getting enough people on the platform to make sure it’s turning a profit.

Then support was an issue at first. Luckily, the time has taught me that I’m able to anticipate people’s questions and build up a nice knowledge base so that people can self-help themselves. But that took time to build up and to get the questions from people. So now it’s pretty easy to support. I only get a handful of support requests per week. But it took time to kind of buildup that library of issues and questions and answers.

Liam: Matt, I want to ask you a question about customers. You talked about the challenges around content and getting new ones in the door. I wonder if you’ve had the challenge of a customer taking up too much support time or too many complaints? And if you have, how did you approach that? How do you deal with that, and how did you resolve it?

Matthew: I hear that’s a big fear of people when they’re thinking about doing the turnkey model, but they hesitate because they know they’ve had clients in the past that will monopolize their time as far as support requests and that kind of thing. So in a traditional agency model, you’re taught, well, okay, just charge a lot and anticipate that this might happen. So you have to charge enough to be able to absorb that kind of customer and that kind of back and forth, whereas with the turnkey model you don’t have that luxury.

What I found though, is that the expectations is of the customers really were these, I guess issues start. When you approach it from an agency perspective, you’re spending that one-on-one time with the customer, so they expect to be able to talk to you and get face time with you every now and then, whereas, with the turnkey model, they’re signing up for the service without ever talking to a human being. So it’s kind of like a SAS where you go, and you sign up, and you pay and you get access to the software or whatever. So the customers’ expectations are a lot lower as to what they can expect from support.

So I find that just through the business, delivering it that way helps to reduce the kind of support requests that I might get from a typical agency customer. So I don’t get customers contacting me saying, “Hey, I need you to update my logo every week or change colors or that kind of thing. We make it clear to them that it’s a DIY platform. So it’s up to the customer to build out and add content and do everything to get their website set up. Support is there to, you know, answer any questions if they’re not sure where to go to update something or how to do something.

But we also offer add on services. And that’s kind of another level of this thing where if they want, you know, maybe they want things to be SEO optimized, maybe they need content written for them, because they don’t have a writer, they’re not good at it, we do offer add on services so they can pay additional fees for content writing, and graphic design, and SEO. Those are basically the three add on services we provide. And then they pay extra and then they can get that kind of extra level of support.

Liam: Sure. Let me ask you, and you don’t have to answer but is what you’re doing with this turnkey site, is that enough to be a full-time job? I know you have some consultancy on the side, and I wasn’t sure if that was just from a professional interest or if from a business standpoint, you’re running both for business reasons.

Matthew: I think it’s like anything where if you put the focus into it and the time into building it out as a full-time thing you could do that. I think it’s very similar to if you wanted to go out and develop a plugin and start selling it, or develop a theme and start selling it. It’s something you can see examples of people doing that full time, companies that are selling plugins full time. But most people who have developed a plugin and most plugins that are out there are developed by someone who is also doing something else, whether it’s agency work, or whether they’re working a full-time job or something like that.

So is it possible? Yes. But it’s probably better suited as a side thing like it is for me. I tend to not like to put all my eggs in one basket business-wise. So if all my turnkey customers dry up or something happens and that goes away, then I still have my agency or vice versa.

Tara: Thanks for sharing all that information. That’s really cool. I’m going to change gears and talk to you about success. We ask all of our guests how they define success, whether it’s personally, professionally, a combination of the two, separate, however, you want to address it. But when you think about success, what does that mean to you?

Matthew: That’s a tough question. It’s always a moving goalpost for me. I’ve come to kind of the conclusion over time that for me successes is not a destination, it’s the journey that you go on to get there. So I’m always going to be looking for the next level to get to and the next milestone to reach. So the goal of success is always been a change.

But for me what success looks like is am I able to live the lifestyle that I want to live as I’m doing that. So I’m able to work from home, I’m able to set my own hours, I’m able to now finally and it’s taken a while, take time off on the weekends and in the evenings to do you know other things besides business. I’m able to travel a little bit. To me, that’s that success. Am I able to live the kind of life I want to live while I’m also doing work I love, and then whatever the goal happens to be for that work will change? But I think the successes in the journey and am I having fun? Am I having a good time and am I living the life I want to live on the way?

Tara: Right. So that implies that it probably evolves over time, right? You’re on a journey, but there’s not really it’s a hard and fast destination. If your IT site business changes and you decide to do something else with it, you’re still on that journey, right?

Matthew: Right. And that’s how it’s gone up to this point. I mean, I never predicted that I would have started a turnkey website when I started my business. So all of these opportunities that come along, you know, if they look like something I’d enjoy or I’m interested in, I’ll take them on and see where they go. I like that approach to business. I like having that flexibility. I’m not a 5-year or 10-year goal kind of person in business. As long as I’m moving forward, and I feel like I’m making progress on whatever projects I’m working on, and like I said, I’m living a lifestyle I want to live, I think to me I like that approach.

Liam: That seems a balanced way forward. Matt, I want to talk to you about the WordPress community. And clearly if you’re running multisite, you’re in your eyeballs with WordPress all day long, but what’s your involvement with your local WordPress community or the wider WordPress community?

Matthew: I really appreciate and that’s why I got interested in WordPress in the first place is I appreciate the community that’s around it and how involved and active it is. I mean there’s meetups all over the place and of course, WordCamps all over the place and then not to mention the myriad of Facebook groups and other groups that you can join online. Like probably most of us, I’m a bit of an introvert so, I started my WordPress community journey online and just joined some LinkedIn groups and different Facebook groups and not necessarily local groups, but just WordPress in general.

So through that, I’ve made friends in the WordPress space from all over the country and all over the world. Like last year, I traveled to the UK to attend a WordPress agency event, and I knew half the people there because I had been in contact with them online. Then I try to get to the local WordCamps, WordCamp Baltimore or WordCamp DC. I’m in the DC area. And then there’s a few small business meetups that are focused around WordPress businesses that I try to get out and go to maybe once a quarter or something like that.

So I like the idea that I can connect with lots of people online, but then, you know, it’s healthy to get out and actually interface with people one-on-one. I do try to get myself to do that occasionally, and WordPress community makes it super easy because there’s so many different opportunities.

Tara: I see you’re wearing a WordCamp DC t-shirt today…I just lost my question. Make a mental note of that time, Tara. I just going to ask you something about that. Sorry, total black. I’m going to a different question because we only have about five minutes left. Let me ask you another question, Matt, that we asked everyone which is about advice. If you’ve received some advice that you can share that’s had an impact on your life and that you’ve implemented to help you on your journey to success?

Matthew: Yeah. This is one I’ve heard from a couple of different business coach type people or folks who have found success scaling a product similar to Tech Site Builder, and that is to have an abundance mentality. So not think that by telling people how you do things or giving away free advice or talking about what you’re doing and kind of pulling back the curtain and showing what you’re doing that you’re taking something away from yourself by doing that. Really what you’re doing is you’re sharing the prosperity, sharing what you’ve learned, and through doing that, people will trust you more, and they’ll learn more, and they’ll be successful on their own, and then they will kind of attribute that success maybe not overtly, but even subconsciously back to the advice you gave that contributed to that.

So, if I am able to take something away from someone and be successful with that, why not continue to share that and continue to pay it forward. So that abundance mentality is something that I try to take with me in every project I do and share the wins and the losses. And if people want to know how I did it, I let them know. I’m not afraid of competition. There’s plenty of work to go around and plenty of clients to be had. And that’s not an issue for me. For me, it’s just sharing the knowledge and building that community and building that network. And so far it’s worked very well for me.

Liam: I love that. I’m on the same mindset. I heard it from the Advanced Selling podcast years ago. The question was, what if everybody that needs a website suddenly called you and said, “Hey, can you make a website for me tomorrow?” We just implode from the amount of work that we have to do. So to follow your advice there, we got to give it away and share and give ourselves the opportunity to contribute to the community and that’s only going to come back in folds.

Matthew: Totally,

Tara: It seems like that also kind of carrying things forward, you’ve made an example of that with what you’ve done with your business, taking it from where someone else had left it and moving it forward.

Matthew: Absolutely.

Liam: It’s admittedly an interesting, and some might suggest counterintuitive, at least in the early days approach to business. Matt, I wonder, did you buy into it right away? Did you dip your toe in it? Did you say, “I’m going to try this, but I feel like I might regret this in six weeks”? How did you wade into it?

Matthew: With every kind of new project I take on, I’m not the kind of person that just jumps into the next shiny thing that looks like it might be successful. I take the time to think about it and do some research on it and try to find other people who have been successful doing that same model. And if they talk about their journey, I follow that and try to learn from their mistakes and stuff.

So while I do try to take on different projects and try new focuses in my business and new avenues, I do take the time to make sure that that’s going to be a good approach for me. I’m a big fan of testing the market and talking about what I’m doing and getting feedback from people. With Tech Site Builder, before I redid it as a turnkey platform, I reached out to the existing Tech Site Builder users and said, “Hey, I’m thinking about turning this into kind of like a Squarespace type of thing. What do you think of that? What kind of pricing would make sense?”

So I tried to talk to my target customer and figure out what they are looking for. If you talk to a group of customers and ask them what they’re looking for, and you build what they’re looking for, it’s hard not to be successful. So I kind of take that approach of kind of being careful and asking questions and then building something that I think would make sense for them.

Tara: Thanks for that, too. Matt, we are just about out of time. We really appreciate your joining us today. Thank you so much for telling your story and I’m excited to look at your website too and see how that’s working. Sounds like a great concept. I’m really into the idea of specializing myself. So I’ll take a look at that. Where can we find you online? And I know I can find you in person since you’re in the DC area. Where can we find you online?

Matthew: Twitter, I’m @rodela_wp. On Facebook, you can search for Turnkey Websites Blueprint. That’s where I talk about building out the turnkey websites model on multisite and we have a group around that and answer any questions there. Then turnkeywebsitesblueprint.com is the website where I blog about building the turnkey model on multisite.

Tara: Great, thanks. I’ll definitely check it out. We appreciate your being here, and I look forward to meeting you in person sometime.

Matthew: All right, sounds good.

Tara: Thanks for joining us.

Matthew: Thank you.

Liam: Thanks, Matt. Really enjoyed it. Take care.

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

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

Shayna loves WordPress, CSS art, clean-code, accessible websites & building inclusion in the tech community. She co-founded Shift/Enter to help people, especially those who are underrepresented, succeed in technology-related careers. She also loves rocks.

Website | Shift/Enter

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 115.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Shayna Diamond. Shayna loves WordPress, CSS, art, clean code, accessible website and building inclusion in the tech community. She co-founded Shift/Enter to help people, especially those who are underrepresented succeed in technology-related careers. She also loves rocks. Welcome, Shayna.

Shayna: Hi. Thanks.

Tara: Hey, Shayna. It’s great to see you. Thanks for joining us on Hallway Chats. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Shayna: Sure. I came into technology sideways, I would say to the side door after being a jewelry artist and rock hound and nomad for about 10 years. Then I started studying web development and started building sites in WordPress, where most of my career has been working in WordPress building custom sites and customizing themes and all the usual handful that goes with being a developer in the WordPress world.

I became a chapter leader for my local chapter of Girl Develop It to help mostly women get started and launch their careers in technology. I really felt like with the women in tech communities and the WordPress communities I had found my people, my clan sort of for the first time in my adult life. So I wanted to help other people who were intrigued by that workspace break in.

During this time, I became good friends with a woman who works as a software manager, I believe is her title. She was on hiring committees and she had been for longer than I’d been working in tech and had discovered this paradox of knowing people through organizations who were talented people looking for jobs who could never find the jobs they needed. As a hiring manager, looking for talented employees and not being able to find them for jobs she had openings for and felt like there has to be a way to get these two communities to find each other.

So last year, we started an organization called Shift/Enter to run career-centric conferences, teaching interview skills and job search skills negotiation. We’re launching a larger conference this coming year with a track specifically for hiring managers, for them to get us help in writing job requisition and how it to find diverse candidates. My last job, we were hiring an engineer and my boss said, “I’m not against hiring minorities or women but they don’t apply for the opening.” So what does that mean about the way the job description might be written or where you’re posting it? That’s our current goal, and that’s my recent drive.

Tara: So it has a little bit of an element of like a match.com for business. Am I understanding that correctly? Is it an online system?

Shayna: It’s not an online system right now. Right now it is conferences primarily to help teach these skills. At the previous two, we did one on one mock interviews and resume reviews to help job seekers figure out how to make their application stand out and then how to make themselves stand out in an interview to how do you answer some of those tricky questions. We had a whiteboard practice. For coding challenges, which are extremely intimidating, especially if you didn’t come through a traditional background into tech, it never occurred to me until I started going to interviews that I was going to be asked to write code in front of people. That it’s intimidating for the whole cohort of workers now who’ve come through bootcamps or been self-taught developers.

So we did a lot of that kind of thing. What are they really looking for? You don’t need to write code on a whiteboard that could be plugged in exactly and run. We know that. That’s not how people write, but it’s still a tool hiring managers use. So we’ve been doing these past two conferences, we’re focused on job seekers. Then the next one is going to add this line for employers.

The idea of a match.com situation or actually helping them pair each other is fabulous. And that might be something we iterate into. We have a vision for something like that for mentorship, to have a way for mentors to provide profiles and times of availability, and people seeking mentors to read through these profiles and say, “This person has the job or the career path I want.” But that is kind of on the 2021 timetable for us.

Tara: I see. That would be cool. It’s a really interesting concept. How have you found it? This is like a side hustle for you or is this your fulltime job?

Shayna: This is completely volunteer and on the side. There’s no compensation right now. We like the idea of offering classes like in the Girl Develop It model essentially, to offer inexpensive paid coding classes and maybe other professional development classes. And I believe that anybody who teaches anything should get paid for teaching it. So, at that point, they may be some financial reward for some of us. But at this point, it’s just a passion project.

Tara: What kind of challenges have you faced with it?

Shayna: Logistics—-finding venues in order to have a lot of one on one time. We have a great venue for the smaller conferences, but we are now looking for a larger space that can accommodate three tracks of speakers and has small spaces for five or six consecutive one on one meetings and mock interviews and things like that. That has been huge.

We expected fundraising to be a major hurdle, but our local tech community has been so supportive that we were turning down donations last time around, saying, “We don’t have an MPO above us. We’re working on forming one so that we can have an actual bank account and just take donations.” But we for the last two conferences, we’ve been saying, “We need somebody to pay for lunch, and here’s the bill,” and they paid the vendor directly. We actually had people coming up from local tech companies wanting to support us and we had run out of things for them to pay for, which was just overwhelming. It’s been such a positive experience in those regards.

Tara: I’m going to switch gears and ask you about what a rock hound is and what your rock relationship is?

Shayna: Rocks are friends. I’m a rock hound is a person who looks for rocks and minerals out in the world in nature. That is one of my passions. I’ve been rock hounding since I was a kid in Florida. It was mostly fossils and shells. I grew up in South Florida. Then I’ve dug for garnets in Connecticut and tourmaline in Maine and geodes and rhyolites in New Mexico. It’s a tremendous amount of fun. It’s a treasure hunt. It’s going to an area where you know certain minerals can be found and digging in the dirt until you find them. I think there’s very few things that are more gratifying than pulling a shiny quartz crystal out of the dirt. It’s absolutely wonderful.

Rocks are friends is a line from the Labyrinth. I don’t know if it’s Jim Henson’s movie “Labyrinth” that he calls the rocks and they come and help them. So rocks are friends. That’s how I feel. They’re all over my house and life and world.

Tara: Interesting. I love the sort of the pastimes and the side hobbies of people that chatted with like video games or different things like that. We have yet to meet someone who’s a rock hound. So that’s really interesting.

Shayna: My first passion. A lot of women say that at some point, usually in high school, they got the impression that math and science were not for girls and or not for them and they were steered towards art and other things or English. I was always very much involved in art and literature. But I do remember the time in my high school math class when I thought I wanted to go into geology and study crystology and mineral formations, and really basically being told that math was not my direction.

I know so many women who say that they had one of those moments and decided that they couldn’t be a developer or a computer scientist. For me, it was the moment that I probably decided not to become a geologist. But I’m fascinated by what nature does.

Liam: That’s pretty clear from the sound of your voice and the way that you’re talking about it. I wonder the gift flip the time when you said you were in high school when you were told the math was not for you really indicating probably that you’re a woman rather than anything reflective of your ability and your grades, that kind of close that science door for you, at least in the immediate future. Did you realize that at the time?

Shayna: No.

Liam: Or is this a more recent…revelation?

Shayna: Revelation.

Liam: How did that figure into the work that you’re doing now with shift into? Was that an impetus start? Did you start it and then kind of the memory came back? Talk to us about that.

Shayna: Prior to Shift/Enter, I was involved with Girl Develop It for several years. I started as an attendee of the mentoring sessions and then I became an organizer and eventually a chapter leader. And it was incumbent…

Liam: Let me just interrupt you if I can. Did you share with us where you’re based, where you work and where you live?

Shayna: No, no, I don’t think I did. Sorry. I’m right now I’m actually living in Scottsville, Virginia, which is about 20 miles south of Charlottesville. So Charlottesville is my talent and where my tech community is, but I live in a tiny little downtown. That’s a town of about 300 people and I can walk to everything. I love it here.

Liam: Lovely. Sorry to interrupt. go ahead.

Shayna: No, that’s fine. I realize I’ve mentioned Girl Develop It a couple of times without mentioning what it is. Girl Develop It as a national organization that teaches coding and development skills to women working or wanting to work in the technology world. So, through my involvement with Girl Develop It, GDI, I met a number of women who shared those kinds of stories with me that. They signed up for a computer science class, and they were the only girl in the room so they never took another one. And if they had, they would have continued to pursue technology-related fields then. But now here they were 15 years later, maybe after having kids still playing on their computer at home and deciding they want to get into the workforce. And so I’d had a lot of those conversations with people.

Then I’m a member of a rock club that meets near here. I was talking to somebody who was going to school to be a geologist and it was one of those, “Yeah, I thought I wanted to be a geologist when I was a kid, and I kind of had to figure out what when did that change?” And I flashed back to this conversation with a high school geometry teacher…trigonometry actually was the class. I had her for geometry also, but it was intrigued that she told me that I shouldn’t bother taking more math and science classes that I had to because art was really my thing, which it kind of was too, but now I make them both work. I’m sure I would have then.

Liam: Yeah, that’s so interesting the way that “Oh, I see you’re very good at art, you shouldn’t take math.” or “I see you’re very good at math, don’t bother with art. Don’t bother with English. Don’t bother.” It’s such a unique siloing when as human beings we tend to flourish when we’re well rounded and we have different interests. That’s a shame in a lot of ways.

Shayna: Yeah. Yeah, it is. It’s as if being really well rounded and broadly educated is a bad thing.

Liam: Let me ask you about…You said previously that you made jewelry and then you became a developer. I wonder your thought process as your interest in making websites grows and deepened. And then how did you approach do I want to design do I want to develop? Do I want to do both? Do I want to be 80% developer 20% designer or flip flop it? How did that work for you? How did that all come together?

Shayna: It’s kind of interesting. I’ve avoided most of those definitions that put you in boxes for a lot of this process for me. I was nomadic and I had built my first website on BlogSpot, actually, because my brother used BlogSpot for his writing. He taught me just enough HTML and CSS to change the colors and put in images. It was just a record of where I had been, shows I was going to, pictures of my jewelry.

I would show it to people to other vendors at some of these events, and they were, “You’ve got a website? How did you get a website?” This was maybe 2008, 2010. They were also amazed that I had a website. Some of them would ask if I could make one for them, and I’d laugh and say, “No, this is really, really amateurish. I wouldn’t pay someone to make this for me. I just did it.” But I’d tell them, you know, “It’s BlogSpot. It’s free. Here’s what it is and where you can do it.”

That kind of went on for a while. Eventually, I got tired of being a nomad. Things in my personal life were changing and I decided to stop traveling and moved back to South Florida where I’d grown up and where my dad was a professor of photography at The Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale. So children of faculty could take classes for free.

So while I was no longer going to be nomadic, and trying to figure out if I could convert my jewelry business model to one that didn’t require me to be nomadic, I’d take some website classes. So if nothing else, I would have a better site that I was proud of. And when people said, “Can you build one for me?” I’d say, “Yes, and this is what you can pay me for it.” So that was my original plan was really just to freelance building sites.

I then discovered the joy of salary And decided I didn’t want to freelance as a primary form of revenue. So things evolved. In school, at that school, there was one program for website design and development. The professors would tell us, “Most of you will discover that you want to follow one path more than the other. And that’s great. You pick something and excel in it.” And my design teachers thought that I was going to be a designer, and my development teachers thought I was going to be a developer. And I really refused to choose between them. I felt like especially if I was going to freelance I probably wind up doing a little bit of both. And that was going to have to be okay.

If I took a job I would I’d like working with designers. I don’t think that I’m…I’m a good designer when I’m given a starting place. I don’t like coming up with ideas out of thin air. I really love working with a designer who can come up with a color palette and a look and feel for a site and maybe design the homepage and one or two interior pages and then I can take it from there and build additional pages within that look and feel. But I like to at least have colors before I get started. Otherwise, they all wind up looking very, very similar. Because I guess I just don’t get that creative with my ideas or my layout. I like what I like. It doesn’t always what other people are looking for. That’s kind of that balance. I don’t remember the second part of your question.

Tara: I don’t remember the second part of his question either, but I’ll ask a new one. I love the evolution of you know, so many people, myself included, you learn something out of necessity and then it becomes something that you do. So, the fact that you learned how to build websites without the intention of doing that for a living is a great way to approach a new career.

I want to ask you about success, Shayna. We ask all of our guests this question because it’s interesting to hear how people define success, whether it’s in their personal life or their professional life, what success means to you. Can you share that with us?

Shayna: Yeah. I really like to look at the small components that make up the big picture. So I really love setting small, attainable goals. And I every time I meet one of those, that’s a success. That’s a small success, or sometimes it’s a monumental success. I consider our Shift/Enter conferences to have been successful because I’ve had people come up and tell me that they credit their job to the fact that they attended the conference.

I feel like my personal life I’m successful if financial success and all of those if I’m meeting my goals, which is to keep debt down and pay my bills and not have the electric turned off, which has not happened in many years at this point. So, based on that, I consider myself successful. But I think for each individual, it’s about meeting the goals you set for yourself, whatever that is. If somebody feels like they need family, then that is what they’ll need to be successful. But I like setting small, realistic goals and meeting them. It keeps me feeling good.

Tara: What’s your process for setting those goals and tracking them?

Shayna: I don’t know that I have a well-defined process. I get very scattered. I have a lot of balls in the air at the time. So if none of them break that success if I don’t really smash and drop something. I think that I do like my spreadsheets, but I don’t follow them completely. I like creating them. I do this a lot where I’ll create a budget, and then never look at it again. And then six months later, I’ll go through my records and see how close to that budget I was, not necessarily as a measure of success, but as a measure of whether or not I’m realistic with myself. I don’t know.

Liam: I’m always curious about it. I’ve read a lot of books about setting goals and productivity and all that kind of thing. So it’s always in interesting to hear. Spreadsheets are marvelous. I’m a huge fan of spreadsheets. I think they’re great to get your thoughts out. Sometimes they become unwieldy though and then they’re hard to actually implement or apply because they become so intimidating. At least I find that with some of the ones that I’ve made.

Shayna: Not if you make them and then ignore them for six months, so then they stay exactly the same size.

Tara: Mostly that’s what happens, right?

Shayna: Yeah. It’s hard to say. The other thing, I don’t know if it really spoke to Liam’s question, or if it was just one of the phrases that popped into my head when he was asking it, but about the transition from jewelry to website development. When I was first, trying to freelance and looking for clients, one of the things that I had in my bio, I think, was that I’m a physical, I’m a maker. It wasn’t just jewelry, I did ceramics my first college degree, and I love to make things and build things. And to me, just like all the websites, it’s a combination of something that is aesthetically pleasing and functional.

There’s similarity in the way these things work. That no matter how attractive something that piece of jewelry or a piece of clothing is, if it’s uncomfortable and hard to wear, then that is bad. And the same thing with a beautiful website that provides an awful user experience. I think that’s part of why I really care about things like accessibility and building intuitive user experiences and interfaces. I think that’s something I carry over from working in physical tactile mediums.

Liam: That’s really neat. I feel like we could go on for hours on that one. But I’m just I’m going to ask you about your involvement in the WordPress community. How are you involved, and what do you do, and what works for you, and what do you like?

Shayna: I’m less involved now than I was this time last year. And then I’m was a little bit less involved than I was this time the year before. I blame employment on that. When I was freelancing, I went to WordCamps. I tried to go four times a year. I looked to go every quarter to at least one WordCamp. I started speaking, I spoke at a few of them: Lancaster, DC, Hampton Roads.

For a while, I was volunteering with the theme review committee. I tried to volunteer with the accessibility community but it was a little bit hard for me to schedule working with them. I’ve done some support on the forums, answering questions and things like that. But last May, I quit the job that I was working at that used WordPress primarily, and now I’m using WordPress occasionally at work still for all of my side projects. But the company I now work for is transitioning off of WordPress sites for reasons I don’t completely understand. But that decision was made before my hiring.

We used to have a really great WordPress meetup here in Charlottesville. And then attendance numbers started falling and it’s been a little difficult for the last six months or so. I don’t think that has been…we may have had one session but I couldn’t make it. I miss the WordPress community and I miss being very involved with it. I was surprised that when I was looking for work this summer I didn’t wind up at a more heavily WordPress oriented company. But that’s the way the cards landed.

Tara: Well, I imagine with your Girl Develop It experience, you are exposed to a broader community than WordPress because Girl Develop It isn’t necessarily WordPress focused.

Shayna: Sure, that’s definitely true. We work with the whole suite of languages. I taught all of our WordPress classes and PHP. I really like working in PHP, which is why I wound up where I am, because although they’re not WordPress, they are a PHP. So yeah, it definitely helped to broaden my horizons.

When I first started working as a developer, I did not want to work in WordPress. Eight years ago, I guess I was saying, “In school, I built the custom CMS. Why would I use one that already exists?” And I know that’s a very common sentiment. It didn’t take long to realize how wrong I was and how much WordPress had to offer. But I recognize the value of WordPress when I started building a lot of sites in it. But I didn’t really fall in love with the platform until I got involved with the WordPress community. WordCamp Lancaster was my first WordCamp. And it was one of those “these are my peeps” kind of moments for me.

Tara: Yeah, we love the WordPress community too. I imagine that it is an adjustment not being as involved as you used to be.

Shayna: It really is. It really is. When my jobs stopped sending me to camps, and then I would go anyway if I could get the time and money together.

Tara: Is your Shift/Enter community? Do you think that reflects a little bit on your experience in the WordPress community? Did you carry some of that ethos with you there? It sounds like you’re really passionate about doing that work, and it seems to have some similarities.

Shayna: Definitely. Well, the desire to bring together a community of people who are interested in code and development and the whole world exists in both places definitely. When I build these conferences, I’m modeling them in many ways after WordCamps because they were my favorite conferences ever to attend. So it’s definitely a huge influence on that.

I would talk to people outside of WordPress community who would talk about the lack of integration, gender, racial and other forms of integration in the tech community, and I would go to a WordCamp and say, “I don’t see it.” And it’s really amazing to me how much more inclusive and accepting WordPress community is than the broader tech community. Comparing WordCamp US to NationJS, they look like completely different industries in the makeup of the attendees.

Tara: So have you ever attended these other conferences?

Shayna: I went to NationJS two or three years ago

Tara: It’s interesting because I think there’s a lot of conversation that WordPress community about getting better at being inclusive and having a better balance of speakers, gender and better balance racially as well in our community because it is…I think it’s less homogeneous, but it is a conversation that comes up often. So I’m wondering, is that conversation happening in other places or is WordPress ahead of other communities, do you think?

Shayna: I think it I’m not as involved in other communities. I think it is happening there, but not at the same level. And I think WordPress was ahead of the curve on talking about these issues, probably because it is open source and backwards compatible and all of the efforts that are made in the development world of WordPress to make it accessible to everyone. I remember Matt saying that in one of his State of the Word addresses about how important it was to have everybody have access.

I think that when a community feels that way, in general, they’re going to feel that way about exclusivity.

Tara: I’m going to finish with one final question. I know we’re almost out of time. Maybe we are out of time. But we always ask people about advice. This has gone by so fast that I lost track of time. So if you can share with us some advice that you’ve received that you’d like to pass on to our listeners that you’ve implemented in your life.

Shayna: I thought maybe you were letting me slide on that one when I saw the time disappear.

Tara: No, no.

Liam: Yeah, nope.

Shayna: Yeah, no, I get it. I get it. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, actually, because I listen to the podcast. So I’ve known it was coming. It kind of goes back to the other question you ask everybody about success. And that is that the advice would be that it is perfectly acceptable to change your goals, that it is not failure to change directions. I know that when I gave up my first business, which I still do a little bit part-time, tiny scale. It felt like a failure. It felt like this wasn’t the thing that was going to support me and I put so much into it. And I was told by many people, it’s not failure to recognize that it’s time for change. And I think that not to beat oneself up for changing direction is really good advice I was given.

Tara: I think you nailed it. Absolutely. Thank you so much.

Liam: Yeah, yeah. That’s fantastic.

Tara: Great way to end the show, Shayna. Thank you.

Shayna: Thanks. Oh, my pleasure.

Tara: Can you share with everyone where they can find you online?

Shayna: Yeah. I’m on Twitter at @whosyourwebsite? And I’m on LinkedIn. I think it’s Shayna LD.

Tara: Thank you so much for joining us. It’s really great to see you. I know we’ve met before so it’s good to see you again after a while.

Shayna: Likewise.

Tara: I hope to see you again.

Shayna: I’m fingers crossed for WordCamp Lancaster this year.

Tara: All right. Thank you.

Liam: We hope to see you there, Shayna. Thank you. Thank you for your time.

Shayna: You’re welcome.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Bye.

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

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

Joe says he’s very passionate about inclusive design for WordPress and considers himself a web accessibility advocate. He travels around the US giving presentations to WordPress developers, designers, and agencies about web accessibility.

Website | St. Pete Design

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 114.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Joe LoPreste. Joe says he’s very passionate about inclusive design for WordPress and considers himself a web accessibility advocate. He travels around the US giving presentations to WordPress developers, designers, and agencies about web accessibility. Welcome, Joe.

Joe: Hello, how are you?

Tara: Hi, Joe. Welcome to Hallway Chats. Thanks for joining us today. Can you talk a little bit more about yourself?

Joe: Sure. I’m from Florida. I have two daughters, 18 and 15. I’ve been dealing with WordPress for a few years now. Like you said, I like to consider myself accessibility advocate. Well, we’ll see you. I guess only time will tell.

Tara: How did you get involved in that? How did you get started in a very hot topic, the past, I don’t know, a couple of years especially? But I know before that, too, but especially it seems to be growing. So tell us a little bit about how you got involved in accessibility specifically?

Joe: Sure. Well, me and my lifelong friends started a web development company about five years ago, and we just specialized in WordPress. Shortly after we started that, we got a call from a local government agency that was asking about Web accessibility, and if we could do it. I guess every good developer would, in the beginning, we took the job. We started our research phase of that, and that’s really when it grabbed hold of me.

I just saw the individuals that needed the help, I saw the ability to help, and I saw the lacking of help. Not that people aren’t out there helping but I just really saw like I could help. And it’s just kind of grown from there. The more I learn about it, the more enamored I get with it. That’s really about it. It’s just grown from there

Tara: And it’s not just specific to WordPress what you’re doing. I assume that you’re working on accessibility beyond just that platform.

Joe: Yes. We work on pretty much all CMS’s. It’s not really WordPress specific, but that is where I did get the start. I’m much better at the WordPress aspect of accessibility but we do all of them.

Tara: I have a confession that when I test sites, and I use some of the browser tools for accessibility, it always frustrates me because it seems like a nearly impossible task to check all of the boxes. How accurate is that? How deep do you go with that? I know that certain organizations need to have higher levels and others, they have requirements to meet legally. How do you approach that? Do you check all those boxes?

Joe: Oh, yeah, definitely. We have to. As far as accuracy goes, the automated tools are not very accurate. There’s lots of false positives. Lots of, I won’t say false negatives, but they don’t show a lot of the stuff. Really, in my opinion, the automated testing tools are meant to just kind of get the low hanging fruit that really should have been caught in development before it was launched. So I use a testing tools as just a starting point to get familiar with the site to get familiar with some of the problems. But that’s really about it.

Liam: Joe, can you share some of the more common accessibility challenges that you find on almost all the sites? So somebody brings you in and says, “Hey, can you help us?” and you say, “Yeah, here are the five of the ten things that I always see?” And if you just kind of list them?

Joe: Yes, absolutely. Contrast ratio is a huge thing. That’s in a lot of themes spit out great text for some odd reason. I consider myself an advocate against great text as well. Link descriptions are always a problem. You know, the click here, the read more, those are always issues. Alternative texts are always major issues for images and all noncontent, but mostly images. Lots of different input fields always tend to be either mislabeled or not labeled. Text spacing is a pretty big problem. I can pretty much go to 90% of the websites on the internet and fail on just for those few things.

Liam: Yeah, those are big ones. What does text spacing mean? Can you describe that a little bit?

Joe: Sure. When we’re building a site, we tend to build them on our laptop, but nowadays, like everybody knows mobiles kind of where it’s at. So when you shrink that, you got to make sure that your text doesn’t overlap or a lot of assistive technologies. Low vision individuals use those to increase the font size. So the actual recommendation is if your font sizes increased by 400%, that it still needs to maintain its proper spacing. No overlapping. You shouldn’t have to scroll left or right to read it. Things like that. Really it also gets into just the ease of use as far as properly spacing your letters from each other, proper line spacing.

Tara: Do you mostly take sites that are built and then you fix them, or are you building sites from scratch or a combination of both?

Joe: Well, at this point the most of our work is for remediation. Now that all entails either fixing a site or if you get a really large site with a lot of custom elements and stuff like that, we’ll just go in and fix that. But if it’s a smaller site, sometimes we’ll just rebuild it. A lot of times, it’s just easier to rebuild the site, because we’ve created some accessible themes, and we’ve gotten pretty good at it. So we’re used to just building come out.

Sometimes that’s a much cheaper option because for us to fix a site, first we have to audit the site, and then we come in and remediate it. Sometimes we just tell the client, “Listen, it’ll be better and cheaper if we just rebuild it from scratch.” We can make your site look…we tell them about 90% the same, but it’ll be compliant.

Tara: Do most of the people who find you, are they doing remediation because they’ve been caught and snagged or because they have a desire to do better?

Joe: Like you’d mentioned in the beginning, accessibility is becoming a hot topic, because of all the lawsuits and everything, including the drive by lawyers. So most people that contact us, most of them have not been sued, but they all know about…they’ll either have a friend that was sued or colleague that was sued, or they’ll get noticed from the company saying, “We’re worried about this.” So they’ll reach out to contact us. We have dealt with a few companies that are in the middle of a lawsuit, but the majority of them are not.

Liam: Joe, I’m guessing from what I’m hearing you share so far that your background is more in development than in design. Is that correct?

Joe: Yes. I am not a developer. I mean, I can do some stuff with the assistance of Google and YouTube and all that stuff. I mean, I can do things, but I am not the go-to developer.

Liam: Is your then your expertise is around accessibility knowledge then, right? And then so presumably, other people in your company handle the development and the design, which you’re just flagging up the accessibility challenges in there or some shortcomings?

Joe: Yeah, for the most part. I mean, I will jump in…

Liam: I don’t mean just by the way. There’s a lot to that, I just…

Joe: Yeah. No, absolutely. That’s pretty much it for the most part. It’s mostly about time management. Because, you know, I’ll break down a website and I’ll make a big list, and I have all my steps to go through. I’ll work very closely with the development team every step of the way. I did get my started development. When we started the company, it was just me and my partner. We were everything. We were the developers, designers. We were everything just like I’m sure you too know, just have to wear all hats.

Tara: Joe, I’m going to move away from some technical stuff, because I know I could probably keep talking about this for a long time. And we’ll probably end up coming back to it because it’s a fascinating topic, and like your clients, I hear all this accessibility talk and worry about my own sites. And like I said, when I tell them sometimes I fix things, and sometimes I’m not sure what is actually broken.

But anyway, I wanted to ask you a question we ask everyone. I’m going to take it in a little bit of a direction as well. Because accessibility is something that serves others, and so I want to ask you, how you define success and how that fits into your professional work that you’re doing for accessibility if it relates at all to the service that you’re providing. In general, how you define success, but also related to the work you’re doing.

Joe: Right. Success is so different for everybody. Me personally, my personal success is finding that happy medium between a professional success and a personal success with my family. So it’s a tough question. I find the most value when my kids really are able to…they make comments here and there just about showing them that you don’t have to do a nine to five. You don’t have to work for somebody else. You can make your own way in this world, regardless of which way it is and make your own path.

And being able to bestow that and show it as an example to my daughters, that’s a big deal to me. That’s a really, really big deal to me just because I see so many people on a day to day grind, they’re just miserable. They can have amazing jobs, and be making tons of money, and they’re just not happy. Something’s just missing. So I really try to make a point to have that medium to where I kind of work when I want and I make plenty of time for the kids. And they see that.

They’ve actually made some comments before about being quote-unquote, “an entrepreneur” or just kind of work for yourself and make your own way. I try to just tell them that everybody out there making this world the way it is no smarter than then we are. We have every opportunity so we don’t have to follow in somebody else’s path or shadow.

That’s kind of how I define success, really just showing my kids that you can do it, and then we can live a happy life, and go and do things all the time not because of money, but because of the freedom that I’ve created by not following in somebody else’s footsteps or shadows. I don’t if that makes sense or not

Tara: Yeah, it totally does. We hear that from people. A lot of people that we have on Hallway Chats are self-employed people or people who have that flexibility of schedule, and they often list that as something that they consider related to their definition of success.

Going a little bit deeper into this, what I was talking about earlier in terms of what you’re doing with the web development for accessibility, I think all of us who build websites for other people, organizations, we feel good about helping their business and building a website that works well, and it’s user friendly, and checks all of those boxes. But for you, accessibility means a lot more than that. I mean, it is related not only to the website owner, but it’s really for the users of the websites, which of course, we think about when we’re building websites, but not to the degree that you are, which you are potentially making a huge difference for people to be able to use a website that they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to use. So paying attention to that. I’m just wondering how that feeds your feeling of success and your feeling of pride in what you do.

Joe: Oh, absolutely. No doubt about it. That is absolutely how I feel. I feel like I’m actually helping people, which is a good feeling.

Tara: Have you done user testing? I’ve gone to workshops and seminars where they show…the voice assessed…What’s the name of that? Why am I forgetting the name of that? Text reader.

Joe: Oh, like screen reader or something?

Tara: Yes. screen reader.

Joe: Okay. Yeah.

Tara: I mean, have you watched people seeing the impact of the work that you’re doing on people who need it?

Joe: Well, I mean, I haven’t watch somebody use a site that I’ve worked on. I’ll say this, through my travels of the US and WordCamps and stuff, I’ve met a lot of low vision individuals that are just as excited about helping me as I am helping them. So we will have them take a look at some websites that we have fixed or unmediated, and look at their feedback. And I have had on a few occasions them say, “Hey, that was actually really pleasant for me to navigate and use, and tell me that they appreciated what I was doing. So I don’t know if that’s quite on par with what you asked.

Liam: It is. No, it totally is. When I think about that there’s an extra level of motivation and satisfaction that I think that you may have that others may not when they’re just building websites. Without that focus, I guess is my point I’m kind of having a hard time putting my thoughts into words today.

Joe: Yes, absolutely. I mean, there’s over one billion people in the world that have a disability in. Like 250 million people have a vision disability. When I go to these WordCamps and stuff, I’m talking to developers and on my mind, every developer I can help, I just say they can help 100 people by building an accessible site. So I started doing the math and I just started smiling.

Tara: Yeah, that’s great. My brother is legally blind, and I know he has a hard time often on the web. Thankfully, now more with the ability to talk to text and that type of thing, they’re helped by that a lot, I think but it doesn’t help to navigate the website for sure.

Joe: Right, right.

Tara: Thanks for sharing that.

Liam: Joe, who are the bulk of your clients? Is it mostly government or private business?

Joe: At this point, the bulk of our clients are governments or individuals doing government contract work. Because to do government contract work, you actually have to sign a piece of paper saying your website is Section 508 accessible. And really, a lot of people just sign them away. Not really too worried about it. But that tends to be the bulk. We do get tons of other stuff. I mean, there’s recently we did a local Marina. So there are tons of random companies. But I would say at least 75% are government agencies or people doing business with them or nonprofit.

Liam: You mentioned Section 508 accessible. Can you talk about that a little bit? What is that?

Joe: Yeah. Well, Section 508 is the actual law the government put out stating that websites have to be accessible. They’re not 100%. There’s some gray area in there, but what they do is they refer back to WCAG. The WCAG guidelines. You’ve got AA and AAA. They say as long as you’re at least double AA compliant of the WCAG guidelines, you’re section 508 compliant. So section 508 is more the American version of the law, and the WCAG guidelines are the worldwide standards.

Liam: Those standards have been around for a while. Back when I was UK-based, the UK was probably about five or six years ahead of the US, at least, in terms of government legislation to accessibility. I’m glad to see it finally making its way here and making the web more accessible for people on this side of the ocean as well.

Joe: Yeah, absolutely.

Liam: Joe, we mentioned in your introduction that you go to WordCamps and you talk to people? How much traveling are you doing for your business these days?

Joe: Quite a bit, actually. Just this year alone, I’ve been to Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville, Atlanta, Raleigh, Durham, Birmingham, LA. I just came back from Nevada, and New York. That was a personal I was a personal achievement of mine gave a presentation right off of in Manhattan, right off of Times Square that as a big deal. I’m headed out to Philly in a couple of weeks, and then we’re doing Dallas few two weeks after that.

I’ll probably take November and December off just because I want to kind of relax a little bit. Hopefully, I’ll have the opportunity to pick it right back up next year. Because I request to speak here and they can they get tons of requests. So I look at it as Hey, next year, I might not be able to do this. So I’m taking all the opportunities that I can that’s laid before me in the moment.

Liam: Yeah, I appreciate that. How do you balance client deliverables when you’re traveling as much as you do? I appreciate that you’re giving to the community and you’re sharing your knowledge, and that’s great, and I support that, and I applaud you for that. But at some point, you also got to get back on the computer and finish that project.

Joe: Right, right. Well, the reason why we got into the software business, at least for me was the dream of a digital nomad – not being locked down at a desk or a house. No matter where I go, as long as I have internet, I can work and I can generate income, and do what I need to do to maintain. So I’ve really looked at this last year 2019 as the opportunity to really put that into practice. Because I work on my laptop at home or from my other companies office, stuff like that, but I’ve never really taking it on the road. I had dreams. So I’ve kind of been able to make that a reality this year.

So you know, I’ll fly in on a Friday. Friday night, I usually hang out in a hotel, do some work, and then the next day, I’ll give a talk and then go out and experience the city, do some more work that night in the hotel room and then Sunday fly home.

Liam: That sounds like a productive way to go. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about your adventures and digital nomadism? What’s something you’re willing to share, like, “Oh, yeah, if you’re thinking about doing this, don’t because so it seems like a good idea, but turns out it’s not”?

Joe: I see a lot of similarities with the digital nomad as I did when I first got into business for myself. It takes a lot of self-discipline. Because it’s so easy to say, “I’ll do it tomorrow,” and you don’t have a boss screaming down your throat. You don’t have these necessarily the deadlines you would have. We do have deadlines, of course. You got to have that self-discipline, and you got to be able to stay focused. It’s real easy to lose focus.

Once I first started doing this traveling, I really kind of lost myself in going to these new places because I’ve never been out to the west coast before. So just going around there, you know, I got to reset and refocus, be like, “Oh, yeah, there’s a reason I’m here.” And you got to be able to do that. And if you’re not able to do that, it’s going to be a tough run.

Tara: Can you tell us a little bit about WordPress as it applies to accessibility? I don’t want to get deep in the weeds here, but I know, there’s been a lot of talk, and I know we had some leads on the accessibility team leads in the past year. How is WordPress doing in your opinion when it comes to accessibility?

Joe: Well, there was a lot of backlash when they switch to Gutenberg because it did take a step backwards. But at the same point, part of that, in my opinion, is nobody likes change. So when change happens, there’s always that initial pushback and backlash. I think a lot of that had to do with just people didn’t want change.

But also I’m part of the WordPress accessibility team, and we have a Slack meeting every Friday. They have a list of bugs and errors that are strictly for accessibility. And these people are working their butts off one by one to knock these out. There’s an amazing amount of open communication and a tremendous amount of help. It really is amazing. Before I got to that point to get on that team, I kind of felt the same way a lot other because I’m reading all the same things everybody else is reading. So I kind of was having the same feeling. But then I got involved and I started to see that these men and women are working really hard. They’re just as passionate about it as I am, if not even more so, and they’re way smarter than I am. So that really makes me feel good about WordPress and accessibility. They are moving in the proper direction, and it’s because of these individuals working tirelessly to get it done.

WordPress is a community CMS and it’s really shining. On the back end with accessibility, 99.9% of the people in the world who use WordPress don’t see that, don’t see how hard these people are working on the back end. I don’t know if that answered the question.

Tara: It does, and thanks for sharing that. No, I really appreciate it. I think a lot of times, it’s easy to be critical when you don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes. I had worked on Capitol Hill for a long time, and we always especially in these days, a lot of people are very critical of government officials and politicians. While I’m sure there are many who don’t meet up to expectations, there are a lot who work really hard there too. So similar kind of thing. It’s easy to judge when you’re not there seeing how hard people are working. So I appreciate your sharing that experience with us.

Another question that we ask everyone on the show, Joe is about advice. If you would share with us some advice that you’ve received and implemented in your life that has been important and impactful for you?

Joe: Oh, yeah. I mean, just general advice that’s not specific to what I’m doing would really just be follow your heart. Do what your gut tells you to do because the world is a tough place. And this is one thing I really try to teach my kids that there’s a very good possibility that you’re going to be surrounded naysayers and people not wanting you to succeed for whatever reason. Not for some nefarious reason or anything, but it’s just our society has kind of, in my opinion, turned that way. So just to be able to block that out, or really, in my case, use that as fuel to continue what your heart and your gut tells you you should be doing. And if you do what’s right, and if you do what you think, is helping people, the money will come. Everything else will come after that. So do what you want to do, and how you want to do it. Make your own path.

And don’t listen to anybody else. Because they will try to steer you onto the path that’s already been laid because that’s where they went, or that’s where their parents went or whatever the case may be. Don’t listen to them. Shut all that out and do what you knows best. And you’ll be thankful for it in the end. Fail or succeed, you’ll be thankful.

Liam: I like that. Joe, how do you discern what your gut is telling you to do? And I’ll ask that in kind of two ways. One, big and thematically, I want to go into business for myself is one thing. But then, okay, I definitely want to do that. What is my gut telling me to do is a practical action stuff to get there. So kind of that? How do you do it at the big level, and then how do you trust yourself or learn to trust yourself or discern what your the probiotics in your gut are telling you to do as far as the next step?

Joe: Well, that’s a tough one because your guts going to be telling you one thing in your mind’s going to be super fearful, because that’s I think, just our natural reaction, and that’s good. They say that brave is just is scared as a scared…or whatever the saying is. You only need to be brave for one or two seconds more.

That’s a good question. You definitely have to weigh out everything. You have to think real long and hard because your gut will tell you one thing, and your mind’s going to be telling you another thing, and you’ve got to do your due diligence really to figure out what path you should be taking. In my opinion, if everything’s equal, go with your gut. But there are times where common sense or your mind lays out a very good case to not do something. And sometimes you have to listen to that. I guess just like everything else, you got to find the medium. You got to find that in-between what your guts telling you and make sense. I guess that’s about it.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a good one. That’s a good one. I want to go back to what you you shared about your definition of success around the medium. One of the things that I picked up on was the medium between work and time with your family and your particular with your daughters. How do you navigate that kind of week in week out? I get that it’s a priority for you. But if you’re traveling, and you got a new project in the door, and you’re trying to get land to this other project, that can be challenged to balance at all. What works for you? How do you try to keep yourself on the right path?

Joe: I’m in a unique situation to where I am separated from my wife so I have my kids 50% of the time, which is, we do a little bit different than other people. We do a three and a half days a week. So they’re with mom, three and a half they are with me three and a half. So I travel on the three days that I don’t have the kids. And if I can’t make it back, I won’t even sign up for that WordCamp. So the traveling part doesn’t take me away from the kids.

Then also being able to work on my own time. When the kids are at school, I’ll do some work in the afternoon. And then I’m always picking them up. And then when they go to bed, I’ll do a couple of hours work at night. I’m able to kind of spread my workout so it doesn’t interfere with that time. But at the same time, I also make it a point to do work sometimes in front of them to show them that it’s not all fun and games. That I’m not working and someone’s just depositing checks in my account. I really am working for this. I think I’ve done a pretty decent job with that.

Before the whole digital development company, I have a restaurant and this is kind of where I learned this because I completely overly entrenched myself and my original company, which is a restaurant and I overdid it. I just had to steered back to the center and just set up personal boundaries for myself to make sure that doesn’t happen because I’m kind of a workaholic. If you let me go, I’ll just work and work and work and work because I love what I’m doing.

Tara: Yeah, restaurants are hard to have a balance between work and life.

Joe: It was very difficult. But I wouldn’t change it because it led me to where I’m at. I’m just in a good spot.

Liam: That sounds like that’s a conversation we can go off for hours on is trying to find the balance of work and doing what we love. But alas, Joe we are coming up on our the end of our time together, which makes me sad in some ways because I’ve really enjoyed this. Before we say goodbye, can you share with us where our listeners and audience can find you online, please?

Joe: Sure. Our website is stpetedesign.com. I’m on Twitter @JosephLopreste. That’s pretty much about it.

Tara: Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Joe.

Joe: Oh, thank you for having me. Absolutely. I really appreciate you guys and your time. Thank you.

Tara: You too.

Liam: It’s our pleasure, Joe.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: See you soon.

Joe: Bye. Thank you.

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

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

Monique is an independent UX designer from the Netherlands. She builds websites for small business owners and teaches at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science. When she’s not behind her computer, she likes to whisper to earthworms in her garden.

Website | Boe Media

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 113.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Monique Dubbelman. Monique is an independent UX designer from the Netherlands. She builds websites for small business owners and teaches at the Amsterdam University of Applied Science. When she’s not behind her computer, she likes to whisper to earthworms in her garden. How lovely! Welcome, Monique. Thanks for joining us.

Monique: Thanks for having me.

Liam: Monique, it’s our pleasure. Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Monique: Well, I live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I’ve been working independently since 2011, I think. I have a background in graphical design, the graphical industries. I abandoned that when I was in my early 30s. I think I had my first midlife crisis then or maybe the second already, I don’t know. I moved to a rural area, started my own web shop in organic gardening. That crisis really hit me when I was doing that so I had to go back to my old profession. I’ve always been doing web design on the side so I decided to pick that up professionally. That’s how I got where I am today.

Tara: How did you find WordPress?

Monique: Well, the web shop I had was building open source software. And it’s not that back in the days that I really understood open source, I was just looking for free software, to be honest. I originally build it with OsCommerce and after that with Magento, but I also felt the need to sort of do stories on my own garden and tell people my experiences. Not just only be salesy but also have stories to tell. I had that on wordpress.com, which was pretty fashionable back then.

Because I’ve been doing static web design, just HTML and CSS, but when I started doing it professionally, I sort of asked on Twitter like, “What are you all using?” I knew Drupal…In the meantime, I knew what open source was and I enjoyed open source, working with open source. So I asked around, like, what do people prefer Drupal, Joomla, and most of them said WordPress. Since I knew the backend already from the.com blog, that was sort of a no-brainer for me.

Tara: In Amsterdam, what’s the WordPress community like there? Have you connected with them, and how did you discover them?

Monique: I’ve only been living in Amsterdam full-time for a year now. I had a long-distance relationship before that. I lived in Leiden, which is a slightly smaller town in the Netherlands that hosted the first European WordCamp before I ever heard of the WordPress community at all.

In Leiden, I organize a meetup with Rian Rietveld. But in Amsterdam, there isn’t really active community, I learned. The question is why? And everybody keeps asking themselves that question. Until this summer in WordCamp up in Berlin, I met people from all over the world I knew and I met people from Amsterdam I didn’t know. It was like, “Oh, you live around the corner and I don’t know you.” Again, we asked that question: Why is nothing happening in Amsterdam?

So I actually picked up the glove and started organizing meetups again very low profile. It’s like a drink now – just networking drink. My philosophy is we can all hold the glass and talk. So I’m sort of slowly building up. No expectations.

Tara: I like that philosophy, “We can all hold the glass.” That’s great. How many people do you have attending this? Is it growing or did it start out pretty strong?

Monique: Yeah. The last sort of more formal meetup with speakers and all that was in 2016. So nothing has happened since then. This summer, I launched WPDrinks. We had I think nearly 40 people attending. We were lucky to have a good number of core team in town so they all joined us, which was good. Actually, the next one was going to be in September, but then I attended PressNomics in Tucson, so I wasn’t around. So I rescheduled it for October. I want to do another drink around Christmas, and then from January on. I’ve got some sponsors offering money so I can find a location and maybe get some refunding for travel for speaker. So next year, I’ll start doing more knowledge sharing meetups probably.

Liam: I love the organic kind of minimum viable product – we’ll just meet and talk and everybody can hold a drink. So whether they want to coffee or tea or a beer, there’s an opportunity to get together. I love that.

Monique: Yeah. It’s like a Hallway Chats in a way. It’s the hallway track that I’m only organizing and not the official program. For me, to philosophy is, I think, but it’s an assumption that one of the things why the Amsterdam community sort of bled to death is because since it’s our capital, people sort of want to show off like, “Oh, since we’re the largest capital, we have to have really good and professional speakers or really have a big setup.” I don’t know if that’s the reason.

And then the aim is so high that it makes it really hard to sort of…because we’ve got a lot of jobs, we’ve got other stuff to do, it makes it really hard for people to actually start doing it because they have to have locations, they have to have speakers, they have to promote and they’re like, “Oh, I’m too busy to do all this.” So for me now it’s sort of getting more activity in the community. It’s not my party. I don’t want to do this by myself. But if it runs, then people will automatically become more enthusiasts to join, I think.

Tara: Do you find the people that are attending, are they at all different levels in WordPress? Are they beginner developers? What do you find there?

Monique: With the Drinks, it was really like all levels from like core commuters to WordPress, to people who just had their websites designed, and they were a business owner of hairdressing or manicure or something like that. I enjoyed that. I like the informal setting that gives it this broad opportunity.

With the other meetups, I noticed that it depends on the speakers we have. So if we have more like a SEO, or marketing or content type of talks, it will be more business owners or people who have no technical experience with WordPress. If we have more talks on performance or stuff like that, we tend to get more developer. The speakers are important to see what type of people you get.

Tara: That makes sense. That makes sense. Let’s talk about your agency in your business and your passions within that. I know a little bit about you. I know that you’ve worked with Accessibility team and that you are involved a lot in UX. Can you talk a little bit about that, and what UX is, and how you got started with that as a designer?

Monique: Yeah. I’m involved in the design team for WordPress as a volunteer. I do a lot with Accessibility, and that’s because I work a lot with Rian Rietveld. She’s my friend, and for her accessibility is like, “Everyone should practice it.” And I agree with her. I wasn’t aware of all the stuff happening there, and for a few years now I am, so I can’t do my work without it. So whenever I design websites, it’s in my base process.

The same goes for UX for user experience. In a way, it’s what I’ve always been doing, I just didn’t know it had a name. My website says that I design websites with great usability because I think if you can’t use it, why bother anyway? So for me, that’s one of my core values. Actually the past few years, I sort of found out there’s a technique behind it. But basically, for me, it’s common sense always think about your end-user, because they’re the ones you’re building your website for. If not, you can just leave it on your local computer and not put it on the internet.

Tara: Yeah, I get that. I mean, I think every website should be built with that in mind. But when we’re talking about Accessibility, it’s a whole ‘nother level. Would you say that, I guess formal UX usability is sort of between that making the website usable and accessibility is like a medium level there because it’s more than just say…like you said, you didn’t know there was a name for it and now you know the process to it – so to step up from that?

Monique: Well, I’m actually going to write a blog post on what is UX actually.

Tara: Excellent.

Monique: What I see it as an, there’s probably tons of people disagree, but UX for me is sort of the umbrella for a lot of different specialties within user experience. So Accessibility is part of a user experience. You know, if a website’s not accessible, it’s for user experience. If buttons are unfindable, or if people have to look for support on a website, it can be very accessible, but it’s still unusable and you have a bad user experience.

My specialty lies in information architecture. I did part-time studies in information management as well, and that’s all about structuring your content, have good menus, have labels that make sense. That’s part of UX as well. So there’s all these little columns under a big umbrella called UX design, and you have generally some people who are more specialized in parts of it.

Tara: What’s the process like working with clients and getting them on board with that? Because I think a lot of times clients have in mind and they’re sort of their bubble. And we all are like this, when we’re working on our own things, right? We have a tunnel vision, and we know what we want, and we think that everybody else will understand it. Do you have a process that you use with your clients to make your process more effective in building good UX?

Monique: Yeah, well, I think one of the things is awareness. Just make them aware of the fact that it is a thing. It depends a little bit. I work with small businesses, and I understand they don’t have big budgets for doing full user research, discovery sessions and stuff like that. So I try to make it usable for them as well. If I sort of bombard them with like, “Oh, you have to comply to this and to this in your code,” and they’re like, “Okay, not for me.” So let’s try to make it very tangible. And say like, “If you put a link in your text – because usually, they’re the ones writing their own content- don’t say click here, but make it descriptive.”

Google is usually a really good way to sell things because every client wants to be found on Google. And I say, “If you make your links more descriptive, Google will understand them better as well, or have an alt tag with your images.” Just try to make it more selfish for them is a pretty good approach usually.

Liam: I was just going to ask a clarifying question building on Tara’s. You had talked about working with smaller clients and trying to make it manageable for them. One of the things that I share with my clients is if we look at Coca Cola as we handle brand management, we can go into the shop and whether or not it’s Diet Coke with lime or some other new flavor, we always know who made it. We might not like it, but at least we know the brand. I wonder what approaches and you’ve already shared the try to make it about them in a business case, but I wonder what other techniques or ideas you have to have to take the big UX strategies and ideas and system and scale them down for a non-Coca Cola budget, a smaller business budget. What else can you share, please?

Monique: That’s a good question. A great thing for them is that persona. Just think of their ideal clients that that’s usually something they can manage. Also have a client in place that they already know, instead of thinking something out of the blue. A recent technique I’ve been using is not just writing a user profile and user story, but actually, have them think about jobs people tend to do on their website. Like, what do you want them to achieve? What do you want them to do on your websites? And how is your website currently facilitating that or not?

So not saying like, “Oh, my client is a 30-year-old person, and he’s got a dog and he lives in the city, and he, he likes to drink Cola, whatever.” But also if he comes to your website, what problem are you trying to solve for them and what is their journey to get to that problem solved? And conversion rates, like, sometimes they see people come to their websites, but they don’t get actual leads out of it. So they don’t really see the use of it.

So to make that more tangible, what they actually want them to achieve, and that’s sometimes really a lot of strategic talks we have to do to start sort of pull that out of them. Because they have never expressed it. They have never actually said, “This is what I want them to achieve.” So it sometimes takes a lot of thinking and digging with clients to do that. That’s usually one of my approaches as well to start it and ‘what should they do? What do you want from them?”

Tara: So that actually becomes a measurable goal?

Monique: Yeah, which makes it easier for me to sort of meet to their goals and know why they’re happy with what I did for them.

Tara: It’s not just subjective, though. There’s actually some facts behind it. Monique, I’m going to ask you a question that we ask everyone in Hallway Chats, which is, how do you define success? What does success mean to you, either in your personal life, your professional life, both, separate, together?

Monique: I found that a really hard question. It’s something I think about myself as well. When is someone successful? We tend to look at people who’ve made a lot of money or are famous. That doesn’t define success for me personally, to be honest. I’ve sort of had my career in the printing industries. I was a manager at a company, I had the good money, a new house, and everything. So maybe back then that was success, but it didn’t make me happy.

And I think that’s one of the core things for me, that if I enjoy what I’m doing and I can do the things in my private life, it facilitates that as well, I have enough time to do that, it’s a good balance, good work-life balance, both financially and time-wise, I think that’s where I’m successful. Also learning new stuff, you know, evolving in what I’m doing. That’s one of the very important things to me as well.

Success on the other end is when clients are happy with what I’ve done for them regardless of how big a project is. I don’t think I’m successful if people are disappointed with the work I’ve been doing. I did my job wrong. So managing expectations, and have happy clients. Maybe that’s a good summary.

Liam: That’s a very good summary. We hear a lot, Monique from people like yourself who share that they make learning a part of their definition of success. If we set aside learning about work-related attention to the stuff, what is the emphasis on working outside, looking outside of work? You’ve talked about gardening, and I wonder if you have other areas of interest or exploration where you make a point to dedicate time to learn more, get better, explore?

Monique: Yeah, too many to be honest. It’s also about dedication in a way because I’d love to learn and play an instrument, but I’ve tried so many times, and I don’t have any talent. It takes me so much effort and no joy at all, so I skipped that altogether. And now I go to bands and listen to people who can play instruments, which gives me so much more joy.

Tara: I’m there with you.

Monique: I learned something there. I learned to appreciate I can’t do anything. So it take some time to go there. I really like cooking. I like to explore new things in cooking new foods. But learning, for me, is a bit broader. It’s being aware of not assuming too many things. That something I’ve learned lately from my work, but I also try not try to do that in private life. Like, have an opinion on something or someone. I mean, we all know the social media. Everything is so opinionated. Without actually knowing what’s going on, we have our say. I try to learn there as well on all aspects of life. Also in my personal life, not to judge people too quick. I’ve learned from my work that there’s always a different story. Try to be the better person there who’s sort of steps back in time, which is hard every now and then.

Tara: It’s very hard, but it’s very valuable when you can do it. Thanks for sharing that. I think that’s a great point to make about learning.

Monique: I think it will also take the rest of my life to master that I think because we’re all humans as well, and sometimes we’re not that sane as we want to be.

Liam: Monique, as we’ve been chatting here for 15 minutes or so, it suddenly occurs to me that you and I have met each other briefly in real life in person.

Monique: Have we?

Liam: When you mentioned Rian, she gave a presentation at WordCamp US when it was in Nashville the first year, and I happen to be the emcee for the room. So I was chatting with her, and you came up at the last moment to offer all sorts of support and camaraderie to your friend.

Monique: That’s true, because I was speaking there as well, and I remember I was sitting in front at her talk. Yeah, that’s true. So we did me. It’s good.

Liam: It’s a small world.

Monique: The WordPress world is very small. We’ve been meeting people on and offline. Also, I knew Tara from offline but we also met in person when we’re all together into Tucson, which is good because she just sort of…it’s easy to pick up with people that have mutual interests. That’s one of the things I really like about WordPress. You sort of connects in a very organic way.

Tara: Yeah, I think we are a natural family. We are pretty immediately comfortable with each other. It’s amazing what online relationships can do when they’re in real life.

Monique: Exactly.

Liam: I like that. It provides an opportunity to explore other cultures as well. There are people using WordPress all over, and if we can get together and talk a little bit about UX, or widgets, or WordPress, this or “Oh, I hate it when this happens,” it just kind of reduces the barriers between us and allows us to develop relationship with people that’s experience is very a different… That’s pretty powerful stuff.

Monique: That’s one of the things I learned as well with design because I never realized being Dutch would be an advantage because it’s such a language spoken by, I don’t know, very few people. But I’ve learned within design, especially with polylingual things like WordPress, most of the designs in WordPress are made from English. And if you would have a button with a word saying “add,” in Dutch that would take up so much more space, so your whole design will go bonkers. I know a bit of German and I know the Germans have even more characters to say the same things.

So knowing other languages or culture, it helps you become a better designer because you can understand what they need. So that’s one of the things I’m learning as well, to have a broader view on these things. And see that being Dutch is an advantage that way.

Liam: Yeah, that’s really interesting insight. I want to change gears on this a little bit here and I want to ask you about advice and ask you to talk about…we’d like to ask our guests about the best advice that they’ve received or read in a book or come across in some way, and then successfully implemented in their life. What’s the best advice that you follow or delve into?

Monique: I have to think about that. There’s one thing that pops my mind straight away. So that’s probably the best thing I ever learned. When I started my own business, I already thought like, “What can I add because there are so many people doing this already?” And then one of my friends said, “You’re adding you, and you’re unique.” And then I started. That was a big insight, like, I’m the only one who can do it my way.

Tara: Yeah, that’s true.

Liam: I love that.

Tara: And that’s how many of us at least how we start, I think. How do you communicate that and what does that mean? What does that mean? How would you describe yourself to someone? What’s uniquely you? What are your characteristics?

Monique: You’re asking me that? I was just philosophizing on…

Tara: It could be, but I guess I am asking that.

Monique: Okay. I guess I’m very practical, down to earth, I’m straightforward. It’s my Dutch directness. We’re born with that, right? I’m a good communicator I think. I think that’s what people value. I can also translate. Like, I have technical knowledge. I also had that in the printing industry, but I can translate it to nontechnical people, so they still understand what’s going on.

So with the training I do, the teaching I do, that’s a huge advantage. People say to me, like, “When you say it to me, I actually understand it without knowing what it is about.” So I think that’s one of the things I can add value to. Also, the fact that I have a broad understanding of all types of things that people need. Even without being able to do it myself, I know where to find solutions and help people out. So I think I can add a lot of value there.

Liam: Excellent. I want to ask you about teaching. Tell us about the teaching that you do, which you brought it up.

Monique: I do it as a freelancer. So lucky me I’m not in front of a class of 18-year-olds full time because I would go crazy, I think. But yeah, on the University of Applied Science. So it’s sort of Bachelor level. It’s one level below mass university.

There’s this study, currently called Digital Business, they keep changing it every two years, and it’s a sort of mixture between information media and communication studies. What I’ve been teaching is content management, and…what was the other part? Digital media, they call it. What we actually did is people had to make their own website in WordPress that they didn’t really learn, but got, you know, an outdated guide on like, here’s how you do it and it didn’t have Gutenberg included yet. It was not about WordPress, but they had to learn how to structure their information, think about templates for certain posts types like if you want to do a recipe, or if you want to do a job opening and structure that and sort of define the parts in a post that you need metadata. Stuff like that.

The other part was where they had to do a bit of marketing as well and sort out process on how to measure certain parts in a sales process on a website. Another part was prototyping. So very broad. Like how to prototype websites and what you should, where, and how do you design it. And I could do some accessibility, usability, readability there as well.

Liam: How many days a week are you in the classroom with them?

Monique: It’s in blocks. So I was doing it in spring, not at the moment. Probably I will do it for two months in spring again, and that will be like, I don’t know, around six to eight hours a week. And then it will be reading their tests and stuff like that.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a completely different mental process and workflow process from building websites.

Monique: Yeah. Also the freedom I have now to sort of go over my day myself, but then I have to be there at 2:30 because there’s 20 people waiting for me in a classroom and come things like, “The sun is shining. Let’s skip work this afternoon.” That’s one of the things I don’t want to have others decide on my agenda all week all day. I like it every now and then. And it’s good because you get a lot of feedback from the young kids how they look at things and learn from them as well.

Tara: It keeps you needing to be on top of what’s happening as well. So I think speaking at WordCamps is another thing to do to accomplish that as well. Do you have any WordCamp speaking engagements coming up?

Monique: Not a WordCamp. I’ll be speaking at Paris Web, just try to break out of the WordPress bubble every now and then. I just did WordCamp New York. I spoke there on the 100DaysOfCode I’m doing as a non-coder, where I think it’s important. Even if you’re designing, we should learn how to code, which was great fun. Next month, I’ll probably go over what’s going on next year and see where I can apply a speaker. Because I pay for all the expenses myself, so I have to be picky on where to go, how much it costs.

Tara: Right, right. Well, I hope we get to see you at a WordCamp here or there at some point coming up. It was lovely spending time with you in Tucson and it’s nice to have you on the show. Unfortunately, we’re out of time.

Monique: Oh, dear. It went quick.

Tara: It was great. Can you share with us where you can be found online?

Monique: Yeah. Most of the things I go by with is my company name which is not very international, called BOE!media, and you can find me on Slack, Instagram, Twitter, wordpress.org. Anywhere.

Tara: Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time with us and sharing your story. It’s been really delightful chatting with you, Monique.

Monique: Thanks for having me. I enjoyed talking to you.

Liam: Thanks, Monique. Good to spend time with you and reconnect with you. Thank you.

Monique: Thank you.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Bye.

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

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