Hallway Chats

Fairy Dharawat is a cat-loving lassie who writes and draws while diving headfirst into the wonderful world of comics, admiring their adventurous plot lines and intricate illustration. She’s also gearing towards meditation and learning about the many joys it brings.

Website | Fairy Dharawat

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 112.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Fairy Dharawat. Fairy is a cat-loving lassie who writes and draws while diving headfirst into the wonderful world of comics, admiring their adventurous plot lines and intricate illustration. She’s also gearing towards meditation and learning about the many joys it brings. Welcome, Fairy. We’re so glad you’re here.

Fairy: Thank you. Thank you. I’m really happy to be here.

Liam: Fairy, we’re delighted to have you on the show. Thanks for coming out into our hallway today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Fairy: I’m actually a writer. I’ve been a writer for more than six years. I like to write. Now I’m moving towards different kind of stuff to read like comics. I’m really trying to do new things, and that’s the exciting part. I think right now, I’m trying to read different things. That’s what I’m doing.

Tara: Would you tell us more about the comics that we talked about when we introduced you? I’m really curious to hear more about what type of comics and what you love about comics.

Fairy: I’ve always been more of a horror fan. I never knew there’s an entire huge world of horror comics. Once I got to know that, that there is actually adult novels for people like me, I was hooked. So there is this comic illustrator called Junji Ito. He’s Japanese. He is actually a manga artist. He draws and he writes intricate stuff, like so detailed, so layered.

So I was hooked onto his work. I was so into it that I finished all his work, all his horror manga comics in a span of three months. I know, three months may sound a long time, but I was doing a lot of other things. But I was so invested, and I really wanted to write more about comics, and how it really helped me to see things differently. Like reading is different. And reading comics is different because you consume the art as well. It’s not just words. Those illustrations are a story. Every panel has a story, every panel goes ahead. And that’s so fascinating.

Liam: That’s interesting that you’re deliberately – I don’t want to say transitioning, but expanding – from reading books to consuming comic books. How did that happen? Did somebody share a comic book and said, “Hey, Fairy, check this out? Or did you pass it in the shop and say, “Oh, my gosh”? Tell us about that.

Fairy: I never started with Japanese manga artists and comics. It was always more DC. When it comes to Warner Brothers and DC, that was part of a childhood while growing up. In between, we just lost it. It wasn’t before like all these Marvel and movies came. This is before that.

I mean, I was surrounded by nerds. Not geeks. There’s a huge difference. So there were naughty boys, and they were so passionate about it. And like, “Okay, I am interested in these DC comic books.” One guy actually, shared way too many comic books without me asking – and I do have it with me – but I know I found that motivation to go ahead. It was more action-oriented. If you know DC, it’s beautiful art, but I wasn’t really that much into it, but I had it. I mean, when you get stuff easily, I don’t think you value it. So I had those comics with me.

I have a huge collection, enviable collection with me right now. I didn’t have to do anything. It just came up. I just said to this fellow that, “Hey, this sounds interesting. I think it’s good,” and he just gave it to me like that. Then I just had it. And I was just clearing my system and I found this folder, like, “Let me have a look.” It had so much comics.

Then I found because I like horror, I mean, I would always watch horror shorts or horror movies and I stumbled upon Junji Ito, and I saw his work. I finished that book in a considerably less time. Then I thought, “Hey, I have these comics. Let me check it out.” So that’s how then I went back to comics. So basically, that’s how it just happened. Yes, I did meet people who were early into it and that just propelled me into that direction. I’m really happy to make that transition, honestly. And I think more people should really consider it not as children’s things, thanks to these blockbuster movies.

Liam: I have two questions for you. One is, you started as a writer, and now as an illustrator as Tara read about you, have you started considering your own comic book line? Two, maybe a bigger question. Encouraging others to get into reading comic books, what would be the number one value or a big value of getting into comic books from a perspective of a writer or a reader who’s not used to that? What would you say to people?

Fairy: I guess at first, I did attempt it. There is something on Comic-Con. Comic-Con is a global community for all comic nerds. We had it in Mumbai also. I did attend one of the workshops where I did make a superhero that makes everyone sleep.

Liam: Oh, I like that superhero. I think that made my life pretty regularly.

Fairy: It was basically about people being so overworked and they cannot rest. And there is this person who has a lot of problems, and whenever she gets problems people sleep. And this is the thing she’s living in, which is a metropolis city, and people sleep when she complains. Now there’s a bank robbery happen around, and no one can do anything. I don’t know why. But no one can do anything. They just bring this person who goes on complaining about life, and everyone sleeps. And she just saves the day without really intending to save the day.

Tara: That is so creative. I absolutely love it. I can’t wait to read it. Really brilliant. That’s really, really great.

Fairy: It was funny. I illustrated this thing also and I should probably take care of my art. I mean, this happens a lot to all writers. I think every creative…not even creatives … everyone. Whatever things we like, we tend to not keep it with us in a proper way. We’re just “huh we did this, okay.” We need to take care of any kind of art we do.

What is creativity? It’s something that you create from nothing. That is creativity. So even tech, I mean, why do we …I’m a newbie when it comes to technology, but whatever you create. — code is poetry, right? It’s amazing. I love that line code is poetry. That is art. Art and creativity it just…Everything is art, I mean, even think about it in a way. It’s a very long conversation on it, but it’s just that we don’t respect art and theater as we should be doing. Coming back to the second question, how do I make people read more? Just repeat the question again.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely. It was around what would you say to encourage readers or writers who read a lot to what would be a biggest takeaway or biggest value from transitioning into or exploring comic books from a readers perspective?

Fairy: Oh, that’s such an enriching beautiful world. Right now, as a professional who works in a corporate job, my life is so restricted. When I read comics, it broaden horizons in totally different way. It a little wide to articulate it. But what I’m trying to say is when you watch a movie, it’s there. It has a limitation. A movie has a limitation like a two-hour movie and you’re done with it.

If it is a series, come on, you’re going to binge-watch it for a day or two and then it’s done. But when it’s comics, it’s different. It makes you think. I think that’s the most beautiful part of it. It makes you think. And you do really have to consume that entire comic book. Like, you know, this happened. Because the last comic book that I read, that is DC comic called “Hush.”

Honestly, I find reading comics a little more difficult than watching the movie. The “Hush” movie was just released in July. You can check it out. It’s a good movie. But the comic book is so much better because it has written illustrations, which is very difficult to replicate that into a movie. I mean, those details are not possible, the production cost and all those things, generally, it shoots up the budget. So the makers generally simplify it. They cannot afford to bring the rich, layered illustrations on your screen.

That is one of the reasons I love comics. Because if you love art, I mean comics is way to go because the artists are crazy. I mean, that must be detailing, I’m awestruck. Because I love to draw and I do enjoy good stuff, so I know how difficult that is. And to see these people create masterpieces, wow, I’m blown away.

I think from a different perspective. I’m not saying this as a writer, but as a reader, perspective is very important that readers should change. You should change the kind of books you read to broaden your perspective. And why not comics? It’s also easy and it’s also difficult. As I said, I find reading comics and little difficult because I want to consume each small, tiny thing the artist has drawn and add it with that thought bubble that it command and the storyline. It’s fun. It’s interesting. I would really love everyone to read more comics.

Tara: I love hearing more about that. Thank you for sharing that. You are located in India, in Mumbai?

Fairy: Yes.

Tara: Can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you have become a writer and what’s led you here to this occupation as a writer?

Fairy: I do not have actually a formal degree in writing. I just like to write. I graduated in the year 2009 when the recession hit big time globally. I didn’t get a job as a writer. I just took a job as an HR consultant. I kept on writing because I really wanted to express myself and writing really help me. I really do not remember what exactly made me just continue apply in places as a writer, but I just got a job as a writer, as a journalist, which was in b2b magazine. Those people were amazing because they trained me on the job and groomed me to become a writer to research and write stories, which is how actually I started my career as a writer.

I think as long as I remember, I’ve always been a writer. I finished 10 years working in the corporate job. And out of that, six and a half years is I spent as a professional writer and getting paid for stuff that you write. It’s a really good feeling.

Liam: What do you write professionally? What kind of content are you producing?

Fairy: If I have to really say, it’s marketing stuff that goes into your spam folder.

Tara: That’s a special skill. That’s definitely not your goal.

Fairy: Not at all. So marketing stuff basically. I write stuff that makes people buy things. I write for lifestyle. I write for retail. I write branding communication. I write blogs. Anything that is online. So my forte has to be more into long-form writing that is essays. Because I’ve written so much marketing stuff like buy this, take this, it’s too capitalistic. I think right now I can take decisions to write more or find it’s pieces. I’m looking forward to writing more pieces in technology and how it affects humankind and more into experience-oriented lifestyle articles.

Tara: Is this how you’ve encountered WordPress is through your writing and how you use WordPress?

Fairy: Yes. I met some really good people who encouraged me to look at this platform. And I was like, “Really? No. Yes, I do like to talk, but on a platform? Are you kidding me? No.” But then it was good support. I mean, people really believed in me that I have something to say. I took a dive. And since 2015, I’ve been associated with WordPress. I’ve been volunteering with WordPress to organize WordCamps, and it’s been a really nice journey. I never knew that it’s going to be such a long journey, honestly, because it just happened.

Liam: How did you go from hearing about WordPress as a writer and “Okay, I guess I can maybe put it there” to getting involved with the community the point where you’re actually involved organizing WordCamps? Are you involved with the organization of WordCamp Mumbai?

Fairy: Yes, I am as well. I’m handling the writing bit. So whatever you’re going to see on the website is me. I think good people are really important. One of the reason I like WordPress community is because people are very helpful, and they really make you feel at home. They really do so.

I have one of my best friends who is a solid supporter and who keep saying that you can do this, and it’s okay to make mistakes. I have never heard that anywhere that, yes, you can make mistakes. And when you have a community who gives you permission, I hate to say the word permission, but yeah, we have the subconsciously that we cannot make mistakes. But when there is a community where you can make mistakes, I think that the way you can grow is limitless. So I think that really attracted me a lot. And that’s the reason I’ve been associated for the longest time.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a great observation. I don’t think I’ve heard the WordPress community described in that way but that’s entirely accurate. So thank you so much for sharing that. That’s wonderful. I’m going to put that in my little pocket of how I described the WordPress community.

Fairy: Thank you. Thank you. That’s lovely.

Tara: I love that too. I just saw something recently, maybe we spoke to somebody, it’s just very top of mind for me that breaking things is a good way to learn. And that’s a very much a sort of programmer approach to things is that you have to break it and break it apart in order to learn more about it. So that is embraced for sure. And maybe that translates into making mistakes and moving forward. I love that about WordPress, and I hadn’t thought about that before either.

What are some of your challenges that you face working with WordPress or in your community there, or with whatever part of your daily life? What challenges do you find that you face that you can share with us?

Fairy: When it comes to WordPress, I would love to be more technically sound. I really struggle with technology. Before this, I really struggled. The first time, Tara, when you sent me the video link I was really struggling, “Okay, how do you use Zoom?” I know, so embarrassing? So yeah, I would love to be more technologically sound. And that’s why I’m having all my friends who are very techie. Like all my friends are techie, so I hope that rubs on me as well and I’m more technologically sound.

One of my friends suggested that I learn code, and I honestly do not know if I’ll be able to do that. But I would love to be more technology-oriented. I’ve use the word so many times. But that’s one of the weakness I want to work on.

Challenges as a writer, I think for a writer to write anything they really need to know a subject inside out. If you don’t know that, I don’t think you can justify writing about it. So I don’t think it’s kind of a struggle, but it really limits on how much you can do. I would love to write about technology and artificial intelligence. But for me to be a subject matter expert, I have to put in a lot of work. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m the right person because I’m not surrounded by that kind of talent who can guide me to write something that I want. So I had to really be mindful in how I learn about something. As a writer, it always brings new challenges.

So if you’re thinking about writing one topic, you need to know it inside out. You need to know right people to ask questions. You need to know which way you want to go, how you want to go because when you write, it’s there. You’re putting something from nothing. You’re putting it into something tangible, which people might read, and it is so important that it is well thought out and well-articulated. And you back by it, because people might say that this is not right, but you have to say, no, you have given you 100%. So there is that skill, basically. The research part needs to be very, very thorough. I think for a writer, that’s one of the things that really is a challenging part.

Tara: Fairy, we love talking to people from other parts of the world. Most of the people that we have on the podcast are based in the United States like we are. So it’s I love seeing what’s happening especially I’ve seen in India a great community of women using WordPress, and it seems like it’s a very connected group. You speak English so well. I wanted to ask you a little bit about sort of your worldwide community and using your language versus using English, talking about even in your comics, I’m just curious to know how you interact internationally from India with the WordPress community and in general.

Fairy: I have really started reaching out. I didn’t because it took a lot of work for me to be this person, to be outgoing and all. And in one way is WordPress is really important facilitator. I write in English. I think in English. So I think speaking in English is natural. I mean, if you can believe that because I studied in English language. But of course, it has strong influence of Hindi, which is Indian language.

We have a lot of influences on language. I mean, I can talk a lot about languages. If you have a specific question, trust me. Because language is beautiful, I love languages. And that’s one of the reason I became a writer because it’s where you can just do anything. You can express yourself in different languages. And because I studied in English, I thought of this will be the language. And since we were children, we knew that to be successful, you need to know the global language. And English is prevalent. Like everyone where we attend, speaks in English. Even our community currently, we mostly do speak in English. So I don’t think language was ever a barrier for us.

Tara: We ask all of our guests about advice. And if there’s any advice that you have received, that you would like to share with us that’s really been impactful in your life.

Fairy: It’s to reach out people like me because I have always been very anxious to try and I would not reach out to people. So I’m not only part of WordPress community, but also different communities. The reason that was, because, in college, I was told that I should reach out to people like me. Because when I do that, you build confidence. And when you build confidence, you make things happen.

So it was second year of my college and my professor said that, that you have potential, and you should try it. Because there are not many people like me, they said, there are people like you. Don’t think that you’re alone and reach out to people like you. I think that was truly a game-changer.

I subconsciously started trying to at least meet people who were like me – people who have some shred of creative ability. Even if they’re not working in a creative field, they are working in accounting department or something else, but I find some spark in it, which I thought they’re like me, and it truly helps. It really helps to be seen. I think to be seen for what you are I think that’s very important. So reach out to people like you, they are people like you. Just reach out to them and you’ll find them.

Liam: It sounds like when you say “like you” that’s a pretty open-ended funnel, right?

Fairy: Yeah.

Liam: Fairy, anybody who’s creative, there could be a lot of differences between you and that person. So I like that. It’s almost in a sense it’s…I’m kind of almost hearing that as reach out to anybody. Not in a blind kind of way, but appreciate that connections are practically everywhere if we want them to be.

Fairy: True. True.

Liam: I’m going to ask you another question, and it’s a question around success. We ask this of all of our guests. I’m very excited to hear your answer. So the question is, how would you define success? It can be a mixture of personal definition, maybe a professional definition? Or Fairy, maybe for you it’s a mixture of both.

Fairy: Professionally, I’m a writer, and writers truly need to be pampered. So for me, as a good writer, I want emails. I want DMs telling me…I’m really active on Twitter. Twitter is amazing because you can reach out to just about anyone, just with 280 characters. I don’t think people are utilizing it at its total potential. They should. So when you are really open about stuff that you are passionate about, people reach out to you.

I have reach out to so many people, and they have reached out to me. So when I put out something and they say that this is good, it really resonated with me, whoa, that’s success for me. So whenever I create something and I get feedback, yes, that’s really makes my day. That is success for me. It is work-related. It’s writing. It’s work-related.

When it comes to personal, good health, compassion and being content – being satisfied. We think we want to be happy, but we can’t always be happy, right? It will be too exhausting, honestly. So I would like to be more content. That’s my definition of success.

Tara: That’s a good one. It’s very thorough. I’d like to ask you a little bit about the feedback. When we seek out feedback now with social media, we get answers right away. We can get validated on social media, or you can feel the opposite sometimes if you’re going to see how many people liked your tweet or didn’t comment at all. Do you find a balance with that? Do you pay a lot of attention? Do you take it personally? How do you deal with sort of the lack of feedback to on social media, especially?

Fairy: It is a double-edged sword. I only trained myself to only focus on the positives but how can I ignore negative comments, right? So you really need to build your filter. Someone said something, is it adding value? If I imbibe what they’re saying, is it going to make anything better? For example, if someone said that what I posted…I wrote an essay, and they said the essay is shit, I’m going to say like, “Okay, why?” And if they’re not giving me any reason, then I don’t think I need to pay attention to that comment.

Negative feedback also means to be productive. And I think you need to build a filter where you can realize which critique is important, and which needs to be thrown into the garbage. That’s how I try to function.

Tara: Yeah, that’s good. You make it sound very easy. Is it easy? You find it easy?

Fairy: No, it is not. But it’s good hope to work on it. Also, if you’re in the profession of writing, it’s good to have a writer buddy who gives you a perspective on what is right and which feedback to focus on and whatnot. But when it comes to Twitter, people don’t give you an explanation, and that’s why it’s better to focus only on the positives and not negative one. I block people right away if I find them trolling. So I don’t have that much patience or threshold. So that helps a lot. Just block if anyone is disagreeing you just for the heck of it. Yeah, so that helps.

Tara: That’s good advice and I appreciate you sharing that with us. I wish we could get even more from you. But we are, unfortunately, out of time already. It’s gone by so fast. I know it’s late there where you are so you’re probably ready to go to sleep. But your energy is great. And we really love chatting with you today. Fairy, can you tell us and those who are listening where they can find you online on Twitter and wherever else?

Fairy: Yes. I tend to change my handle name a lot because it’s just a quirky habit I enjoy. But my name is Fairy Dharawat, and you can just find me there right away. If you want to know what my handle name is it’s @hibernatingbear because I need to go out more often. I’m not going out. Bears are really cute. I love bears.

Liam: I love it. I love it. And where can people see your illustrations or your comics? Do you post those?

Fairy: Yes. I have my Instagram and there again it’s Fairy Dharawat. It’s a page. I call myself @theradicaldoodler because it’s radical.

Tara: I can’t wait to see this – the superhero that puts people to sleep. I love it that idea.

Fairy: I would love to do it again then.

Tara: Thanks for joining us so much. Hope to meet you in person sometime.

Fairy: Would love to. It was nice. Thank you. Thank you.

Liam: Thanks, Fairy.

Fairy: Thank you. Bye-bye

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Bye for now.

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.

Stacey Harris is marketing strategist working with entrepreneurs who are tired of spending hours online with no results. Through her podcast, membership community, and agency she supports frustrated leaders in getting results online by building connection.

Website | thestaceyharris.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 111.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Stacey Harris. Stacy is a marketing strategist working with entrepreneurs who are tired of spending hours online with no results. Through her own podcast, membership, community, and agency, she supports frustrated leaders in getting results online by building connections. Welcome, Stacy.

Stacey: Hi, thanks for having me.

Tara: Hi, Stacy, we’re really glad to meet you. Thanks for joining us. Can you please tell us more about yourself?

Stacey: Sure. In addition to running my business, I’m also a mom and a wife, and I live in Southern California. I generally can be found either in the office at Disneyland or at the beach. And that’s pretty much the entirety of my world.

Tara: Wow. So Southern California is a good place to be for you then.

Stacey: It is. It is a good place. I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, which is quite hot. So we spend just about as much time as possible not inside. Kind of always out somewhere.

Tara: That’s great. You spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs, and so you are also an entrepreneur. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey to becoming that? Have you always work for yourself or what’s your path?

Stacey: I’ve worked for myself for about eight years. I do not come from entrepreneurial stock. My parents are both in law enforcement, and before that my grandparents worked for school districts and telecom companies. Very much so like you work 25 years, you get a pension kind of people. However, I am a terrible employee. I don’t respond well to being bossed around, and I don’t like to follow a bad plan, which corporate is full of.

It’s funny, I tell my team regularly, the one answer we do not accept is we do this because it’s always been done that way. It is the one answer you’re not allowed to give me. I don’t care how long we’ve done it some way. If there’s a better way, let’s do it that way. I’ve owned my company for about eight years. It’s gone through quite the journey.

I actually started as a virtual assistant, mostly because I’d had my son, who was about two years old. I had been staying at home. I’m not built to be a stay at home mom, it takes somebody way cooler than me. I missed the part of my brain that functioned independent of a child but I didn’t really have any desire to go back to work. My degree is in audio engineering. I had worked for a record label in Phoenix before I had my son, and I didn’t really want to go back to doing any of that long hours and late nights in studios and whatnot.

And so I was like, “I wonder what I could do.” And so I googled one of the top five worst things to Google, which is “work from home.” It’s worse now than it was then. But it’s just no good thing comes from googling “work from home.” I googled that, and I learned that virtual assistants were a thing. So I was like, “I’ll try it.” Eight years later, I own a marketing agency and we run a training site to teach people how to DIY their own digital marketing.

I’ve met some of the most incredible people. All of my best friends at this point of my life are also entrepreneurs. I have a really good time with it. But no, it is not at all what I would have said in high school, “Oh, I’ll own my own business.” It did not occur to me as an option.

Liam: There’s a lot to unpack there. I want to ask you a little bit about being a terrible employee and don’t like to follow a bad plan. I heard some things in there that I probably say about myself. You talk about a team that you have at your company now. How does that work than where you know, your own approach is, “I don’t like bad plans, I’m not a good employee but you need good employees, you don’t need them to follow bad plans? But how does that work? How do you craft that? How do you respect their individuality, but also, you know, we’ve all got to row the boat the same way or we’re not going to get where we need to go?

Stacey: It’s funny because I resisted having a team for a very long time because I thought I would be a bad boss because I’ve had so many bad bosses. I mean, I think we’ve probably have all had terrible bosses. I had a real fear around this idea of being in charge of other people. I have a hard enough time being in charge of myself, I don’t know how I’m going to be in charge of anybody else.

But what I have found is communication like in any relationship form is kind of critical. I set the bar very early that if you disagree, if you have a thought, if you have an idea, I want to hear it. That’s the highest value you can bring to the team. I think we’ve all had the boss who gives on the first day their speech about their open-door policy, and then you’re like, “I’m not coming to you with anything.”

So I’m very conscientious that when the team comes to me with something that I’m listening. I’m going “Cool, tell me more.” And sometimes we go with it. But also, there is an understanding and agreement that I established very early that at the end of the day, I’m the captain of the boat. I’ll listen to your decision. And generally, we end up with some version of a high. Sometimes I tossed my plan out the window because my team comes with a way better idea, which is, you know, that’s what we hire for people smarter than us, right? But usually, it ends up with some sort of like mash-up of the two plans that’s way better than either of us would have come to you independently.

And that’s what I like most about having a team because I think it’s really easy for us to keep following a bad plan because it was our plan, and so we have some sort of attachment. I have no attachment to my plan. All I have attachment to is the end result. That, for me, I think is the most valuable thing as a leader. I don’t care how we get there just as long as it gets done. If it gets done the client’s happy, the project is successful, cool. I’m completely unattached to the roadmap that got us here except for like let’s keep it so we can use it again.

For me, it’s definitely let’s talk, let’s find out why. Communication, communication, communication. Like any relationship, that’s the most important. It was also a clarity that at the end of the day, I am the boss and I get to go, “No, I don’t wanna.”

Tara: One of the hard things about being a boss might be finding the right people to work for you and making decisions about people that maybe aren’t the right fit for you. It sounds like you have a team that you enjoy working with, the way you’re talking about them. But can you talk a little bit about your process for finding people and how you might handle people that aren’t performing the way that you expect them to?

Stacey: I think to exasperate my fear of being a boss when I launched the agency was an experience in the past in growing my business, where I had people on my team doing different things to support my business, that weren’t a great fit. Because I was like, “Well, maybe I’m just a terrible…” It really feeds that maybe I’m a terrible boss mentality.

So for me, it is definitely – and this is straight-up all advice I have been given and I’m going to steal right now. So this is no new ideas here. This idea of fire fast, hire slow, that’s been really key for me. We start everybody with a project. We don’t start with, “Hey, you’re on the team, and this is all the things you do now.” We start everybody with a project. If we can’t get through our projects, we’re not going into a larger relationship.

That’s how we work with our clients too. All of our clients start with a strategy project. If you don’t go through the strategy project, you don’t get retainer services from our agency. Because everybody needs to know that it’s the right fit. Everybody needs to know that we want to end up the same place and that we kind of work in a way that is complimentary. I won’t say the same way because I don’t think a team full of me’s would be wildly valuable. I think the fact that there’s only one me is probably for the best for everybody. But this idea that we always start with a project, we always test out not just proficiency, but personality, that plays such a part. So we always start with a test.

I also as often as possible, try and get recommendations from people or I have stolen people from others teams and been like, “Hey, I know you’re freelancing with them, but I’m looking to bring somebody in pretty full time. What do you think?” Which has always been okay with the person I stole them from. But let me be clear, I’m not like poaching in a mean way. But for me, it’s definitely personality over proficiency. We’ve trained pretty much everybody who’s on the team to really do things my way. That’s where the ‘I’m the captain of the boat’ then comes in. But yeah, personality, making sure they’re a good communicator.

Generally, I have some sort of like weird manipulative tests during the application and test project where I’ll screw something up and I’ll see if they’ll bring it to me, or how they’ll bring it to me. Because I have to know that you can be confident enough in your abilities to come up to me and say, “I don’t think this is right.” Because if you can’t tell me something I did was wrong, we’re going to have a problem because I’m going to do things wrong. I am human. I will screw. I will leave instructions out, I will forget to tell you the middle step which is why when I give instructions, it’s usually a video of me doing it because if I tell you I for sure miss the middle three steps that are just like muscle memory at this point. But yeah, I think personality and ability to come to me with something that might be less than comfortable are the two things I probably look for the most.

Tara: Your employees, are they remote? Are they local near you?

Stacey: They’re remote, which I actually really, really like because it allows us…Like I said, I’m on the west coast. Some of my team is on the East Coast. We have a lot of clients on the East Coast. It allows us to sort of have somebody around no matter what time it is. If something hits the fan at 4 am my time, great, my team is around-ish or will be soon because they’re in the office at 7 or 8.

Again, I don’t have a huge attachment to how things are done. So I don’t need people to be in the office with me from 9 to 5 to get a project done. I don’t like that. I have a separate office from my house. So at some point, maybe we might have people in the office. But for right now, everybody is remote, which for right now I really like.

Tara: Can you tell us a little bit about your connection with WordPress? We do talk to people who we connect with here, we don’t necessarily talk all about WordPress, but we connect with them because they use WordPress. So can you tell us a little bit about that? You use that in your company or personally?

Stacey: Yeah. The entirety of my business is really built on the back of WordPress because our membership site is built on WordPress, my sites are all built on working. I got started with WordPress, oh my goodness, probably eight years ago when I started the business. I built my first site on WordPress. I for a long time as part of my virtual assistant services offered WordPress support and management.

I am what I would classify as sort of a power user. I’m by no means a designer and/or developer but I can solve a problem or at least identify the problem enough that we can bring the right person in to fix it. But I’ve built everything I’ve ever had on the internet, the home base has always been on WordPress. So for me, without WordPress…I mean, I’m sure without WordPress, I would have found another solution. But it’s my shop. It’s my sign in the world.

Liam: Are you involved with your local WordPress community?

Stacey: Not here in Southern California. But I was in Phoenix. I spoke at WordCamp Phoenix, oh gosh, three times in the last five-ish years. At WordCamp Phoenix. My best friend actually runs a meetup in Phoenix for WordPress. So I’ve been to that and I’ve spoken at that a couple of times. So yes, I’m very involved…not WordPress in Southern California because I never actually met up with anybody here. But in Phoenix, yes. They are responsible for all of the things I know how to do mostly. Because I would break something and be like, “Come help me.”

Tara: There are a lot of marketing people who use WordPress as you’re describing it but I’ve been to plenty of meetups where the topics are not WordPress-oriented – WordPress meetups, where the topics are more marketing strategy, social media. How did you learn how to do what you do with marketing and the strategy that you do?

Stacey: Some of it is trial and error, I’ll be honest. Some of it is, “let’s see if we can break sort of like WordPress. Let’s see if this breaks it. Okay, it didn’t. I don’t have to restore the backup. We’re good.” But a lot of it is trial and error.

It’s funny. Like I said, I started as a virtual assistant and I found that I really liked the social media stuff. I remember as I was doing this thing, and starting this, that when I was in school, that was my first job in the music industry was I went and found bands and tried to get them to submit to a web radio station that my boss was launching. And by the way, this is pre any modern music service. This was like an HTML player embedded on a website. This is like the days of Myspace. That’s what I used Myspace for was to basically connect with these bands between shows and say, “Hey, I’m coming to see you. Can we talk?”

Because, a, I was a 19-year-old girl. And when a 19-year-old girl goes and walks up to boys and bands and say, “Hey, I really liked your music, do you want to submit to the station?” they do not believe you. So you need some credibility and having connected with them previously, and been like, “No, I work for this label. We want to dah, dah, dah.”

So I realized that I had kind of always used these tools for some sort of business end. There was a purpose to it. it was not just amusement. And so I was like, “Oh, I really like that. Let me explore that.” So I played a lot. Then I started offering services to clients and saying, “Hey, I want to see if I can replicate this working with this system sort of outside of my business.” If I’m doing this for someone else does it still work? And it did. So we kept doing it.

Social media specifically changes so quickly, that you’re kind of always just testing. You’re kind of always seeing what’s going on work now. So we still kind of just see if we can break stuff, see if we can get something to work better than it did before.

Liam: I like that, that let’s just see if we can break stuff. That seems a good metaphor for life.

Stacey: It’s true.

Liam: And speaking of life, let me ask you one of our questions that we like to ask all of our guests. And it’s around success. Stacy, how would you define success? And it can be a mixture of personal or professional definitions.

Stacey: I describe success in sort of the same way I describe this idea of work-life balance. If I get to be 100% present in whatever I’m doing right now, I’m cool. If I can be 100% with my family when I’m with my family and 100% working when I’m working, that for me is success. I don’t have to be pulled in all the things I should be doing or could be doing instead.

I think presence for me is really, really critical. And I think that that comes from really intentionally and successfully building a life you want to be living. Otherwise, you tend to be thinking about the things you’d rather be doing than the thing you’re doing. And I won’t lie, occasionally I have to like, I don’t know, go to a parent-teacher conference that I’m not super excited about. Parents don’t want to attend any more what the children do. They’re not super fun times. But I get to be 100% present to it. I get to be 100% in that moment. I don’t have to be thinking, “Oh, I have to leave here in three minutes so that I can make it to my office before my boss finds out I’m late.” I don’t ever have to be in that moment. That to me is success.

Tara: I would think that there’s also some challenges associated with that, especially with the kind of situation that you’ve described and when you first introduced yourself and talk about yourself being a mom. Can talk a little bit about balancing that? Because when you’re working for yourself, there’s also kind of no expected end time of the day and start time of the day, and there’s no maybe consistent paycheck. So what kind of challenges do you face being an entrepreneur and maybe combining that with being a mom?

Stacey: I think that when you’re a parent, mom or dad, I think there’s always this, am I doing enough? Am I doing this right? And I think when you’re an entrepreneur, there’s also a fair amount of am I my doing enough and am I doing it right. So there’s a fair amount of you always in this constant, like conversation with yourself around enoughness. Like, “Is this going to work?” I think that’s a weird thing we have to sort of navigate in our brain.

My son is 10. He’ll be 11 in October. I started the business when he was two. He doesn’t remember a time where I didn’t do this. That helps I think because it’s just normal for him. I’ve also always been obnoxiously honest with him. When I make a big decision, when we choose to…

Here’s an example. We retired my husband four or five years ago. 2015. That’s four and a half years ago. Before we did that, we sat down as a family and had a conversation. Here’s what this means, here’s what this might result in. And we all got to vote. He gets to vote like everybody else. When I’ve made investments in my business and masterminds or bringing on team, he sits on the board of directors, and we sit down and we talked about it. So he’s invested in what’s happening, which I think makes it a little easier when I’m in those seasons of business or life, where I am working a bit more than I would prefer to be working. When I do go directly from the office to wherever the thing was, I’m not home, wherever the soccer game, whatever kid event thing there is instead of coming home and having dinner and talking about it and going together.

I don’t take him to soccer practice. I don’t take him to scouts. My husband does that. Charles is my husband. Charles is usually the one at home when he gets home from school. So it helps that Charles is a full-time dad, and he still has that solidness. Also, I’ve been doing this long enough, and I built my business very intentionally so that most days I am home when he gets home.

I built a hard stop into my day recently, because I was having a harder time stopping working. I’m somebody who my family saves my life, I am workaholic by nature. I would just work. I would just live in my office and work all the time if left to my own devices. And so we build in things that sort of forced me to be done at the end of the day so that I can go and be with them.

Then I come back to this idea of presence. It’s not about balance. It’s not about equal. It’s about when I’m there, I’m all the way there. But on the flip side, when I’m heading to a She Podcasts LIVE in October to speak, when I’m there, I’ll call once a day. That’s it. I’m there. I’m not, “Hey, Mom, where’s my belt? No, talk to your dad. This is not a mom duty time.” And I think that’s helpful. He knows those rules. He understands those rules. He understands why because he’s so involved in the conversation. But on the flip side, when I’m with him, I’m not checking my phone. I’m not in Slack with my team. I’m not on social. I’m 100% with him. He has my undivided attention. So I think that helps more than trying to strike the balance.

Tara: For sure, yeah, it’s hard to get to that point. It sounds like you’ve achieved it. Has it always been that way or have you learned that? Did you use to have your phone out or have you always been that way?

Stacey: It’s a moving target. Some days are better than others?

Tara: Okay, good. just clarifying that you’re not a perfect saint.

Stacey: No. Like parenting, some days you end the day, and you’re like, “Well, that didn’t go well.” And some days you’re like, “Oh, I really, really wanted that today.” Again, I think I do a pretty good job of being aware with kind of what’s happening. But absolutely, we’ve been through those seasons of life in business where we’re launching something or we’ve got clients who are launching something, and it just needs more of my attention than it normally does. We’re still building out the team to remove me more and more from the client stuff. But there are times when it’s like, “Well, no, I’m going to work till 7 or 8 o’clock tonight because this project has to be done. And that’s the way it is.

Tara: You mentioned a membership site, do you have a membership site? Can tell us a little bit about that?

Stacey: We do. We’ve got a site called Hit the Mic Backstage. My podcast is called Hit the Mic and the membership is called Hit the Mic Backstage. It’s essentially the next level of the podcast. We teach strategy in there, we teach how to analyze your results, because if you aren’t looking at the numbers you can’t make the best next decision. We’ve got guides on how to use Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and sort of how to use…we have a how to launch a podcast guide. We’ve run it for four years now on WordPress.

I think the biggest reason we’ve had some of those members who joined us from the beginning stay is it sort of you’re trusted resource of what’s new. So when Facebook makes a change to the algorithm, or Instagram has a new feature, my members is having a place where they can go, “Hey, do I need this? Hey, do I need to pay attention to this? Hey, do I need to be freaked out?”

Because unfortunately, there are a lot of people who do what I do, who are really in the fear business, who are really in the business of scaring entrepreneurs into thinking that they’re the only ones that hold the solution. I hate that. It drives me absolutely crazy. I don’t think anyone makes a good decision-based in fear. It’s my job to give them information, pros, and cons of something, and let them do what whatever they’re going to do.

And so we often have discussions in there, “Hey, this new thing is live. I know so and so said I need to be doing it.” Let’s say Facebook Live, for example, you know, “so and so said I have to be doing Facebook lives every day. Do you think that’s true?” “No. Will your audience watch you on Facebook Live every day?” If they won’t, you don’t need to. I very rarely do Facebook Live. You want to know why? My audience won’t watch them. They’d much rather listen to a podcast while they’re walking their dog than deal with Facebook Live.

Sometimes I will get them to turn on the Facebook Live and shove it in their pocket and listen to it as if it’s a podcast. But I’m not getting them to sit down and engage with me for a 30-minute video on Facebook Live. That’s just not my audience. And so we talked a lot about what’s right for you, instead of this is the only way to do it box of this is right and this is wrong.

Liam: Yeah, I think that’s really valuable with social media because things are constantly changing and very rarely are the businesses, at least that I work with, do they need to be cutting edge. So well, let’s make sure Facebook Live takes off before we even start to think about it. There’s so many places to be on social media. That’s just not possible. There’s only so much outsourcing of social media you can do. At some point, the company just has to do it. You can’t outsource a live video of the Director of Product because then it won’t be the Director of Product. So yeah, I like your approach. I respect that a lot. I think you’re right, there is a big challenge in digital marketing where “Oh, you have to be everywhere all the time and on top of the trends.” Well, maybe if you’re Beyoncé. Maybe. I don’t know.

Stacey: No, people will just go Beyoncé and that will be anywhere. It’s true. That’s a question I get into question I get a lot. “Do I have to be everywhere?” We always talk about the rules of two. Choose two primary networks. These are the networks you’re going to show up most days, these are the places you’re going to prioritize, these are the places you’re going to schedule a foundation of content so that if you don’t show up, something happens.

What I mean my show up live is not necessarily a live video, but you’re going in and you’re engaging with comments, you’re posting sort of what’s happening, those kind of things. Choose those. Rock those. The reason I say two instead of one is when Facebook makes a change, or Facebook goes down, we have someplace else they can find you besides your website. They know of another place to find you. Pick two.

Once you have two and you’re really nailing to then yeah, let’s maybe we can add some support pieces. We call those secondary networks. That way, if something happens to one of the primary networks, we have a secondary network we’ve kind of been working on, we can slide into that place. But we don’t even talk about those until you’re nailing two networks.

Tara: Your membership site and all this advice that you’re sharing, that’s actually for people who log into your site. I’m curious because I know a lot of companies have chosen a Facebook group because people are already logged in there and aren’t going to go login somewhere else. So where are they joining?

Stacey: All the content in a private forum exist on one side, hitthemicbackstage.com. All of it lives there. We do also have a Facebook group for people who are maybe on Facebook, and they can share in there, “Hey, I just saw this post, do I need to know?” We have that as well. But we also have everything you would need inside of one environment on one site. Because again, and this is something I think a lot of membership site leaders and business owners they’re giving a lot of attention and time to building a Facebook group, which is awesome, you’re building a community, I’m absolutely pro community. However, if Facebook decides they don’t like your group or something, or Facebook goes down, those people have no place to go.

So we do have a forum on site, along with all of the trainings in one place, so that we’re completely self-sufficient as it were. We’re completely self-housed sort of off the social media grid should social media go down? I mean, we’re still screwed if the internet goes down, because you know, it’s the internet. So we’re not reliant on Facebook.

Tara: Well, that fits in with the WordPress open source own your stuff mentality as well. So I can definitely appreciate that. Stacey, we like to ask our guests about advice. Can you share with us some advice that comes to mind that sticks out? Something that’s meant a lot to you and that you’ve implemented in your life?

Stacey: I think for me, the reminder that I get most often is you’re in charge. I think as entrepreneurs and in business, we get a lot of advice from mentors or coaches or other people in the space. And it can feel like we need to go down their road because their road was successful for them, or in the case of social media, their road looks like it’s successful for them. But at the end of the day, we have to make our own choice. We have to figure out what’s going to work for us. That means a little bit of trial and error, it comes back to this idea of can I break it?

But I think ultimately we have to take ownership of our own decisions. And maybe that’s just a human thing that if we all agree just took ownership of our decisions a little more often it would be a better place. But I think for me, that’s the thing that I remind myself of, and that I heard early in my business the most often is you have to make the decision that’s right for you. Sure, go and get nine kinds of advice, and then find the pieces of each of those that works for you.

In many, many, many cases, the amount of communication we have with Collin my son about the business wouldn’t make sense. Like kids wouldn’t respond to it or something. And many relationships, Charles being a stay at home dad, and occasionally helping me out in the business would not be something that would work for them. We have to figure out what works for us so that we’re executing in a way that is in alignment with us because it’s the fastest way to find your version of success

Liam: And I think that holds true with a lot of the other items you shared about being mindful and being in the moment and kind of owning who you are. So thank you. I appreciate that.

Stacey: I appreciate hearing that. It’s sometimes easier to talk about than execute. I won’t lie. Because we all sort of want to be handed this sort of magical book of like, these are all the right things to do. That would be great.

Liam: Show me the place so I can get a touchdown. Yeah.

Stacey: Absolutely. And it’s funny because I live and die by strategy. It’s what we do. It’s what I do. It’s how I built my business. It’s how we’ve grown. It’s how I’ve been able to do all the things I’ve been able to do. So it’s easy to say, “Just give me the blueprint, and I’ll follow it.” There really is no master blueprint that’s going to work for everybody. There’s really not a whole lot of wrong ways to do it. I mean, there’s some like real sketchy ways to do it. But most positive action will get you will positive place. It just might take longer than others.

Liam: Probably true for life.

Stacey: I guess it’s probably very true for life

Tara: It is. I’m going to be curious to see what your son ends up doing, if he becomes an entrepreneur since you’ve involved him in this from such an early age. It’s really fascinating that he’s participated like that. Or whether he’ll run in the complete opposite direction.

Stacey: He’s very much so the opposite of me. He’s very quiet. The boy likes the plan. He wants to know what’s happening now. He wants to know what’s happening next. He wants to know what’s happening after that. I’m just like, “At the end of the day, we’re going to end up with dinner. Like, let’s just see what happens between now and then.” He’s like, “No, I want to know what’s happening minute by minute.” So I don’t know. I’ll be curious to see. Although I’m nothing like I was at 10. So who knows what happens in our adulthood?

Tara: That’s right. That’s right. Well, unfortunately, we’re out of time, Stacey. It’s been great chatting with you. I really loved meeting you, and your energy is contagious. I’m feeling like I’m ready to take the day. So I appreciate your sharing that too. I know it’s earlier there than it is here. So thanks for kicking off your day with us. Where can people find you online? You’ve mentioned your membership site and your podcast. Where else can people find you?

Stacey: Sort of the best place to start is thestaceyharris.com. That’ll link you to everything else. That will link you over to the agency Uncommonly More. It’ll link you to the training site Mic Backstage. We do live events. We do live workshop days. That’ll link you everywhere.

Tara: Great, thank you.

Stacey: Awesome. Thanks for having me.

Liam: Thanks, Stacey. It was a pleasure to meet you and spend some time with you.

Stacey: Thank you.

Tara: Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.

Liam: 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.

Paul is a self-proclaimed crazy, old dude, who wishes it were still the 1970s, but who also loves 21st-century technology.

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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 110.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Paul Oyler. Paul is a self-proclaimed crazy, old dude, who wishes it were still the 1970s, but who also loves 21st-century technology. Paul is a follower of Jesus, a husband, a dad, a Pappy, a WordPress user, a Deadhead music lover and a fan of the Buffalo Sabres and the Bills. Welcome, Paul.

Paul: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Tara: Thanks for being here today, Paul. I’m really happy that you’ve joined us. I love that intro. There’s so much packed in there that’s not even WordPress related that I want to ask about. I’ll start by saying that one of my favorite playlists to listen to on any streaming is 1970s music. So among my favorite brings me back to being a kid and listening to Chicago and all these bands that you don’t hear on the regular radio very often. So I love 70s as well. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Paul: Well, I currently live in Butler, Pennsylvania, which is north of Pittsburgh. I’m right in the middle of Steeler country, so I’m a Bills fan in Steeler country. I like the Steelers too. I was born in Buffalo, so that’s how I got to be the Sabres and Bills fan.

I consider Roanoke, Virginia home because that’s where my dad was from, and that’s where I did most of my growing up. I lived there till I was about 25. Then I moved to Georgia, went to college at 25, and I met my first wife there who was from Western Pennsylvania. That’s how I’ve been ever since. I’ve been in western Pennsylvania since 88, now I think it is.

Tara: That explains your somewhat Southern accent. I’ve always wondered that. When I’ve heard you speaking, you don’t really have like a Pittsburgh-ish accent. You’ve maintained your Southern accent there.

Paul: Yeah. People tell me. I still like to say y’all. I just haven’t got the yen. Exactly, right.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about your WordPress background, how you got started with it and what you do with WordPress.

Paul: I started using WordPress right after it first came out. I mean it was I think the second version after they had forked from CafePress. Before that, I had been doing websites for some local racetrack drivers. I started out using front page, then I switched over to Dreamweaver. And then I was looking for something that was just a little less complicated, and so I started using some of the Nuke software, like PHP-Nuke and PostNuke and several others. I didn’t like them. I just didn’t like the way it was going.

Somebody said, “Check out this new thing that’s just come out called WordPress.” And so I started using it. I figured out, even before there were themes, how to kind of make it look somewhat like I wanted to. In fact, I probably was better designing with the old version before I knew what I was doing then with the current versions. I’ve been using WordPress ever since. That’s pretty much how I got into WordPress. I’m not really a designer, I’m not a developer, but I muck around and I can make sites. Specialty is just taking care of sites.

Tara: How do you get your clients? Were you involved in a racing community? Is that what you started with?

Paul: That’s how I started, and I’ve still got one racer that I still do websites for. In fact, I was just updating his website just a little while ago. He won this last weekend at Lernerville Speedway, so I was getting his site updated with the latest win.

Then I did a lot of churches and I still do a lot of churches and ministries. Then started being just word of mouth. Lately, I’ve been in kind of a lull and I’m trying to figure out how to get customers. My health isn’t the best, I don’t get out a whole lot. So half the time, I kind of sit here just waiting for a customer to fall into my lap, and that just isn’t happening. So I’ve got to work on that.

Liam: What are your thoughts on that? How do you see that moving ahead? You know, I think I agree with you that customers don’t fall into lap all that often.

Paul: I’ve been trying to get some referrals from some of my current clients. But the last several that have been referred to me are people that want $200 websites. For a long time, I’ve vastly undervalued what I do, and I did those kinds of sites and I’m not going back to that. So I’ve got to find a way to network without actually being able to physically get out because it just doesn’t work for me very often. So I’m not sure really what my answer is going to be.

Tara: Do you have I guess some outlets or some…? I know you’re involved in some Slack groups to help you come up with ideas for marketing, and there are lots of people. There are many people actually. We’ve spoken to a few WordPress freelance solo printer people who also are limited physically and can’t get out. And it is a challenge to try to find new customers when you can’t go to your chamber of commerce, but then there are lots of people who don’t do those things and who have other ways of getting business online through online networking.

Paul: I’m trying to develop that a little bit more, and I’m in the process of doing a major redesign of my own website. Well, right now I’ve got it actually in maintenance mode, so nobody can look at it because it was just a mess, and I just didn’t want anybody looking at it. I’m going to redo it, and I’m going to try to make use of some of the great SEO tips that I’m getting from the Slack groups and from you and from Sarah and some of the other ones and trying to do it.

So maybe I’ll start showing up, people are looking for somebody to take care of their websites. I think that’s going to be more of my push is helping people to have WordPress websites but don’t know what to do with them. Maybe I’m going to try to start pushing that a little bit more.

Tara: That seems like a good direction. And then you’re not limited to just local people either that way because you can work with people anywhere. What’s your favorite thing to do with WordPress? You said you like helping taken care of websites for people. Do you probably free to do that overbuilding them or doing other kinds of development?

Paul: Yeah, I like taking care of them, keeping plugins updated, making sure the backups are done. I’ve taken over a couple of sites where they were using a WordPress version that was like two or three versions out of date, and they were afraid to update it because they didn’t know what was going to happen. And I’m finding that there’s a lot of people out there that don’t know what’s going to happen. They see these little red numbers over there that said their updates, but they don’t know what’s going to happen if they press that update button. So I like just helping those people out.

I’ve got a church that I just started helping recently. They had 40-some plugins, and five of them were different types of page builders. Basically, I just went in and blew their site up and started over for them because it was a mess. I liked doing that, solving that for them. And even though I’m not a designer, I’ve got to know enough people in different Slack groups that I can ask, “Does this work or what works best here?” I try something, see what works and just go from there.

Tara: Yeah, problem-solving.

Paul: Yeah, that’s it.

Tara: I’m sure your clients appreciate that, too. Paul. What do you find to be the biggest challenge? I know you talked about getting business. Let’s put that aside because that’s a challenge that many of us face. But in addition to that, what do you find your biggest challenge to be with your business?

Paul: Trying to code something for special needs. I’m not a coder. I can read PHP, and I can figure out a little bit but my specialty with coding is doing something so that it comes up with a fatal error. That seems to be something I’m real good at. But I’d like to get at least a little bit better with PHP. I love messing with CSS. When it first came out, I was all over it, and I went through a couple of years of sort of being out of the loop, and I’ve been playing catch up ever since. But I love playing with CSS and the things you can do with that.

Tara: Yeah, that’s really fun.

Liam: Yeah, CSS is pretty amazing. Paul, I just want to spend one little bit of the conversation and ask you about updating your own site, because I think that’s a particularly difficult project to stare at your own work and your own portfolio and your own design when it’s about you and say, “Does this reflect me? Does this reflect my business?” How’s your process for approaching that? Because I know it’s something I’ve struggled with.

Paul: So far, my main process has been beating my head off of my desk several times. I have a hard time with it. The thoughts crossed my mind to see about hiring somebody to do my website. But I thought, “That’s kind of weird too if I do other people’s websites and hire somebody to do mine.” But I’m not good at my mine. I’ve just got this huge mental block of what to do and how to present myself.

Tara: I thought about that too. I think sometimes about hairdressers, right? They can’t necessarily cut their own hair. So somebody has to do that for them. It’s hard to look at your own site and be objective about it.

Liam: I was talking with another little practice like myself, and we were all of huge hair away from agreeing to swap, they would build our site and we would build theirs. We couldn’t figure out how we’re going to do, or what if we didn’t like the design, then what do we do?

Paul: Right. Right.

Liam: “You just make it and make it how you want and we’ll make yours and go from there.”

Paul: I’m learning Beaver Builder now too. I was really starting to get into Beaver Builder a year and a half ago and I went through a series of six eye surgeries. So I was like a year with not using it, so everything I had learned no longer applied it seemed like, and a lot of stuff has changed a little bit. I’m still learning it, tweaking it. I’ve got a couple of sandbox sites that I just play with and I think I want to start doing that on my own site while I’ve got it in maintenance mode and see what happens. But my problem with Beaver Builder, sometimes I overthink it and make it too…There are too many neat things I find that I can do with it and then all of a sudden, it’s not exactly what I want at all.

Tara: It’s easy to go down some rabbit holes there. You said you had a number of eyes surgeries. How did that impact your business? And I’m wondering if you were working at all, if you had the opportunity to employ some accessibility features if your vision was impaired or low during that time. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?

Paul: Yeah. I didn’t do a whole lot of anything. I was fortunate that I had somebody from one of the Slack groups that I’m in. It was Benjamin from WPStudio was actually helping me out a lot with maintaining my sites. I just didn’t do a whole lot because I went almost a year without being able to see. It was really frustrating.

Liam: Wow. A year is a long time.

Paul: Yeah.

Tara: That’s a long time.

Paul: It was a lot longer than I had thought it was going to be. I was thinking it was going to be like maybe a six-week process. I had a couple of complications. And when we thought it was finally right, something happened again and my eyes shifted so I had some more trouble with it.

Tara: Were you online during that time with other websites? I guess you may have had a unique perspective on utilizing the web.

Paul: I didn’t take advantage of it the way I should have. I put stuff in extra-large print and just used it the way I had been doing it. I didn’t take advantage of some of the accessibility features that I should have so that I could have learned more about accessibility.

Tara: Well, it’s interesting that you were able to utilize the web with what you’ve just described, you know, using larger typing, something that you didn’t have to use. So that’s an interesting discovery right there. That some of those accessibility features maybe aren’t necessary depending on how limited your vision is.

Paul: Right.

Tara: That was an easy thing to do to zoom in and see the type larger. That’s interesting.

Liam: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And what a challenge to your point, Paul to have a big challenge like severely impaired vision and you think it’s going to be six weeks and it turns out to be 12 months. That’s going to be difficult to keep spirits up and keep focused and keep going and keep trying to keep on keeping on. I wonder if your love of music helped you deal with that in any way?

Paul: Yeah, I listened to a lot of music. I’ll be honest, I struggle with depression and when all of that was going on, that was a real struggle. And so there was a lot of days I would just put on some music. Grateful Dead in particular just seemed to pick me up. And I just put them on and just listened to three or four hours of a jam and seemed like it helped get me through.

Liam: Yeah, the Dead can jam for that long too. You don’t have to play the album on repeat.

Paul: Nope. One time I think I was adding it up, and with all of the tapes that I’ve got in albums and concerts recorded. I’ve probably got a little over 2500 hours’ worth of Grateful Dead music that I could listen to without repeating anything.

Tara: Wow. Wow. Have you attended a lot of concerts as well?

Paul: Not as many as I wished I could have.

Tara: But you can get them recorded?

Paul: Yeah. They’re on the internet archive, archive.org. I’ve got just a boatload of them. I’ve also got a plugin on my own website, that when I log in on the admin page, it’s this day I’m Grateful Dead history. And so different concerts that were played on this day in history. It’s kind of cool. I like it.

Tara: That’s awesome.

Paul: And so everyone, I say, “Oh, they were in Roanoke on this day.” So I’ll go and listen to what they were playing in Roanoke.

Tara: That’s awesome. Do you have a favorite song?

Paul: Probably “Fire in the Mountain.” There’s so many. “Scarlet Begonias,” “Sugar Magnolia.”

Tara: Nice. Well, thanks for sharing that with us. I’m glad you found that to be something that helped you when you were feeling down. And I’m glad to hear that your vision has come back and hopefully that’s how as well getting through the hard time you had.

Paul: Yeah.

Tara: Paul, we like to ask everybody about success and what their definition of success is, how they view it and implement their idea about success into their daily life. How do you define success?

Paul: That seems to be a process for me that’s changing. It used to be success was I’d have enough money that I could do whatever I wanted to. Now success is I’ve got a very good marriage, my wife’s happy, I’m happy, we get to see our grandkids, we’ve got a house to live in. To me, that’s success anymore. I mean, I don’t have these grandiose dreams of getting rich because that’s not going to happen for me. My whole perspective just seems like it’s changed and I’m learning to be content with what I have. I don’t know how else to word that. That’s a hard one for me to…I saw that on the questions you guys might ask and I was thinking, “I still don’t know exactly how I define success.”

Liam: I love the way you’ve interwoven the priorities for your life now versus when you were a younger Paul. Maybe still going to those Grateful Dead shows. And it went from money, and probably not money just for money sake, but money to live the life you wanted to now it’s your relationship with your wife, that relationship you have with your grandchildren, the fact that you have somewhere to call home and you’re rooted there, and it’s not going anywhere. You have a lot of stability, you know, probably to be who you are, right?

Paul: Right. That’s a lot of it. And I’ll be honest without getting off on a side tangent, but my relationship with Jesus has changed a lot of things. It’s just changed my perspective on so much. I mean, 40 years ago, my perspective was, where am I going to get my next tie?” And now it’s like spending some more quality time with my wife is like the best thing in the world.

Liam: Yeah, perspective changes with time and we’re lucky that, you know, for those of us who were on a good spot, our perspective way changes in ways that make us happy and comfortable and not the other way around.

Paul: Yes, exactly.

Tara: I think not taking that for granted, the fact that you acknowledge it and realize how your priorities have changed. You’ve shared that you’ve had some health issues and struggle with depression, so being able to kind of look down from another perspective at your life and recognize those things and how they’ve all contributed to where you are now sounds like your definition of success has evolved in a way that’s leading you to a contentment that helps you overcome those challenges that you’ve described. So, I think that that makes a lot of sense. And I’m glad to hear that you’re happy. That’s good.

Paul: I’ve had a lot of life experiences that’s made me who I am today. I mean, starting with the day I turned 13, my dad was killed in a truck wreck. And I was real close with my grandma, and she died. I’ve been through a divorce that I never wanted. When I got married, I thought I was going to be married once and that was it forever happily ever after, all that jazz, and my current wife is my third wife. I never thought I’d say that.

My second wife died very unexpectedly, and I didn’t think I’d come out of that. That put me into a nosedive that I didn’t think I’d come out of. But a year and a half later, I was married again. And I can’t believe how happy I am now. But all of those experiences put together has made me who I am today.

Tara: Thank you for sharing that. You’ve had a lot of life experiences. I can’t imagine losing your dad at 13. I just watched an interview with Stephen Colbert [SP] and Anderson Cooper. They both lost their fathers when they were around 10 or around that age as well, and they really poignantly described how that’s impacted their life in sort of the before and after way that they define their life. Do you have siblings that you could rely on during that time or was your mom there? Talk a little bit about that.

Paul: I’ve got one younger brother. We’re close but not close like some people are close with their siblings. I mean, we’d stand up and fight for each other in a second. He lives in Arizona now and I’m here and we see each other, maybe if we’re lucky, once a year.

My mom died about six years ago, but I leaned on her a lot. My second wife, when she first went into the hospital, I was calling my mom every night. I continued that until my mom was no longer able to talk. I just talked to my mom every day. So that was really important. It was even more important to me because of what I put my mom through as a teenager. With my dad die and when he did I was, I was a typical 70s rebellious teenager, and I did a lot of stuff that I know, it broke my mom’s heart. I was glad I had the end of her life we were super close

Tara: Well, and having both of you having lost a spouse that probably gave you another bunch.

Paul: Yeah. In fact, my current wife and I, part of what makes us such a good match is that we both had a first marriage that we thought was going to be our forever marriage and didn’t work out. We both had a second marriage and our spouse died. And then we met each other. And we’re at the point like where we knew exactly what we wanted, what works, what doesn’t work. Yeah, we’re very happy together.

Liam: That’s really lovely. Thank you for sharing that. From great turmoil comes great joy, it sounds.

Paul: Yeah. What’s cool is we met online. We met on ChristianMingle. And we weren’t supposed to. We were both outside of each other’s parameters, and yet somehow, it came across. I think I smiled at her and she smiled back, and a week later we met and eight weeks later, we were married.

Liam: Oh, my, that’s great. That’s great. Was she in your geographic area, though? She must have been right?

Paul: Yeah. Yeah. We just celebrated our seventh anniversary.

Liam: That’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. That’s wonderful. I’m thrilled for you too. Congratulations.

Paul: Thank you.

Liam: Paul, you’ve shared a number of really big stories with us. I haven’t delved into any of them too terribly deeply. I guess we’re just kind of chatting as we go here. But I want to ask you about advice. As you’ve gone about your life and lifted as you have, what’s been the best advice that you’ve received and successfully implemented into your life?

Paul: I guess the best advice I can think of would be to love my neighbor as I’d love myself. I mean, that was a teaching of Jesus and it’s one that I’ve taken to heart. I put God first, and then I try to love everybody. It’s cliché, but I try to treat everybody the way I’d want to be treated. That’s important to me. I put a high value on other people. It’s hard sometimes, but I try to respond. Even if people don’t respond the way I like to I still try to respond back with love. So I guess love one another and putting it into practice. It’s easier said than done, but that’s the best advice I’ve ever gotten.

Liam: Yeah, I definitely agree with you that it’s easier said than done, but that you’re doing it and especially that you’re doing it probably in some ways through work and through people who might be upset that their website isn’t doing what they want, when they want, and how they want, deal with that and fix it and try to make them happy, all while being polite and treating them with love.

Paul: Yeah. I’ve got a lot of clients who aren’t exactly web savvy or tech-savvy and trying to explain things to them. It’s funny, somebody, in one of our Slack groups, was talking about how one of their clients wanted to know why somebody left a review on Google, and they thought it was on their website. And I deal with that a lot. It’s hard for me sometimes to remember because I do it all the time, but a lot of people just don’t get how the internet works and how websites work. And I have to catch them myself sometimes to put it into language they understand.

My stepfather never used a computer until after my mom died. He was 78. And I was teaching him how to use a computer, and I didn’t realize how hard it was to teach somebody how to use a mouse. Because it’s something I do every day, and it’s like…I always, compared, how do you teach somebody how to play catch. I mean, it’s just something you do. And that’s just the way I feel about a lot of this stuff.

Even with websites I work on, it’s so easy to me, but there’s a lot of people that just don’t get it and they don’t understand it. So things I think are nothing that are so simple, a lot of my clients think I’m Superman because I can do this for them. I don’t know, that’s kind of cool.

Tara: And balancing that with not making them feel that you’re frustrated with them or that they aren’t smart or any of those things can be hard too. You don’t want to seem patronizing. I think the advice that you share about treating others as you would want to be treated, that must come into play because we’ve all been in situations where we felt like we were being put down or we felt not smart. So to have that in your mind and realize how you would like to be treated in that circumstance, I’m sure makes you a great partner for those people that you’re helping. And that shows in your business and how people feel about working with you. So applying that advice to your personal life as well as your work life, in your case, sounds like you’re doing that.

Paul: I give it my best shot.

Liam: That’s all we can do, though, right? I mean, all we can do is try. And someday we achieve, another day we fail, but all we can do is try.

Paul: Yeah. I love when I’m working with somebody, especially one of the churches that I’m helping out with and… In fact, that one I just took over helping with, the lady that’s actually running it, it just sort of was dumped into her lap, and everyone saw it. She just sent me an email out of the blue, just saying, “Thank you so much for what you do. You’re such a blessing.” That’s a highlight of a day when I get an email like that. And I get it from some of my other clients, that they’re like…there’s one lady that sends me an email every once in a while. It just says giant letters. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” That’s cool because I get down on myself, I think, “I’m not anything special.” But other people think it’s pretty special. So I have to remind myself that sometimes too.

Tara: Those are good things to save and put in a special folder or something so that when you’re feeling down, you can go back and refer to that, right?

Paul: Yeah, yeah.

Liam: That’s an important thing to do because it’s easy day to day to forget the value that we have, but also what we bring to others sometimes in moments of uncertainty or depressing, having some kind of document to says, “Oh, yeah, I really helped that one person out. It took me five minutes and it didn’t mean that anything to me in terms of challenges to overcome, but it just made the world for them.” So that’s a good technique, Tara. Thank you for sharing that.

Paul, I feel like we could go on for hours and hours and hours here, but we’re coming up to the limits of our time together. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure learning about you and getting to know you a little bit.

Paul: Well, thank you for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve enjoyed talking with y’all. It’s been a really good time.

Tara: I’m glad you could join us and we could get to know you a little bit more. Where can people find you online?

Paul: On Twitter, I’m @PappyOyler. I’ve got my business websites, oylercreative.com, but don’t go there now because there’s nothing there. I do have a personal blog that I’m starting up that I do write a lot about my personal stuff, and that’s pauloyler.online.

Tara: Great. Thanks again for sharing with us so openly, Paul. It’s really great to spend this time with you. Hope to see you soon.

Paul: Thank you.

Liam: Thanks, Paul. Bye for now.

Paul: Bye.

Tara: 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.

Reed Gustow is active in his local WordPress community. A local meetup organizer and former WordCamp organizer, Reed has been building websites and teaching WordPress for a long while now. Reed calls Philadelphia home.

Website | deltaangel.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 109.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Reed Gustow.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Reed Gustow. Reed is active in his local WordPress community. A local meetup organizer and former WordCamp organizer, Reed has been building websites and teaching WordPress for a long while now. Reed calls Philadelphia home. Welcome, Reed. We’re glad you’re here today. Thanks for joining us.

Reed: Hello, Tara. Hello, Liam.

Liam: Hey, Reed. Thanks for joining us. Great to see you again, old friend. Tell us a little bit more about yourself beyond what Tara shared, please.

Reed: Well, I’m a lifelong Philadelphian although I went to school in New York. Went to NYU. I did live in Boston for a couple of years, but it’s not anywhere near as good as Philadelphia. I mean that sincerely. It’s not being facetious.

For most of my life, I worked for the American Red Cross Blood Services. Blood donation is still something that’s very important to me. I helped organize blood drives at my co-working space in the hall, which works with National Mechanics to do blood drives three times a year. That’s something that’s not WordPress, but very important to me. I retired about eight years ago from the Red Cross, and I’ve been mostly doing WordPress since then, and lately into photography.

Liam: Reed, you and I have known each other a few years through our Philadelphia WordPress community.

Reed: Yeah.

Liam: I think I described you at one point by saying, “There’s nobody in Philadelphia who has a computer who doesn’t know Reed.” You are very, very active, not just in the WordPress community, but also, as you noted, in your local meetup and other tech communities. Would you share a little bit about the other communities that you engage with and support and take part of?

Reed: Sure. That was a very flattering and grossly exaggerated statement, but I’ll take it. Well, for a long time, until last December, I was on the board of the Philadelphia Area New Media Association – PANMA. PANMA is an organization that’s been around since 1996 that serves to connect people in the digital development community – anyone who works with websites. That has grown to be so pervasive and ubiquitous that it encompasses many, many fields. That was not the case seven years ago. I was on the board. I was the treasurer, and I helped plan events and scope out the way we would operate. That was something I spent a lot of time with.

I’m also was still on the board of the Philadelphia Area Computer Society, which is an old fashioned user group that started in 1976 when people were making computers such as they were with kits and soldering irons, and that kind of thing. Very old school. It’s kind of faded out over the years. User groups used to be about the only way that people who are not experts in the field could gain expertise and share information. But since the internet has become the way we all live, their utility has markedly decreased their usefulness, and so has the numbers of the organization. But it’s still fun. I was presenting on WordPress there for several years.

I also go to BarCamp every year and I do sessions on WordCamp. If someone’s not familiar with BarCamp, it’s a classic conference where you know the date and the venue but you don’t know who’s going to talk about what till you get there.

Tara: So how did you get started as an organizer? I know you’ve been really involved in the community there.

Reed: Well, when the WordPress Meetup started in 2010, and that was I think started by Brad Williams and Doug Stewart, I went because I was still pretty new to WordPress at that point and it was a great way to learn about it. I went and made a presentation or two and thought it would be nice if I could help out because those two fellows were having to organize everything. I asked, “Do you need other people?” And they did. One thing led to another and I just stayed with it.

Liam: So you’re still running the meetup in Philadelphia?

Reed: Running is…I mean, there’s six of us.

Liam: With a number of people.

Reed: Yes.

Liam: Not the Reed Gustow show. I appreciate.

Reed: No, it is not. But, yeah I am.

Liam: That’s a long-running meetup, and you’ve been involved with that for a long time.

Reed: Yeah. It’s a very good meetup. We get a great selection of people. Most of the presentations are not done by the co-organizers, which I think is very important so it doesn’t become the Reed and Susan and Brad show. Most of them come from the attendees’ great selection of difficulty range of topics from design, SEO code, everything else. We like to be able to do that. We run it 12 months a year. Of course, in December we have a happy hour instead of a formal meeting. It’s always fun.

Tara: I recognize you because you walk around WordCamps with a camera oftentimes. Are you a photographer? Is that your hobby? Is that something that you’ve done as a profession? Tell us a little bit about your photography skills.

Reed: I’ve been taking pictures since I was probably 16, which is a very long time. But I’ve only gotten serious about it – serious, as in taking courses and learning how all those settings in the cameras work at a much deeper level – for the last year or so. I’ve taken, oh, God knows how many thousand pictures of various tech events, mostly WordPress events, but also in the Hall Arts and the Super Meetup and BarCamp and everything else that I go to.

It’s something I really like a lot. I’m spending a lot more time with it now, and I intend to spend even more time with it over the next…well, as long as I can. I’m taking courses, and I’m going to continue to do that as a way of learning and going to camera meetups as opposed to just WordPress meetups, and getting very into it and trying not to have gear acquisition syndrome, which you say, “Oh, there’s a great lens, I need to have that,” and go out and buy it. So I’m trying to hold that down.

Tara: I like that gear acquisition syndrome. We always talk about shiny object syndrome when we’re downloading things, but I guess that’s doesn’t really apply as much. Although I guess cameras have shiny objects as well. But that’s…

Reed: Oh, yeah. Lot of them. It’s worse than golf or fishing or something like that. There’s no limits in number of lenses and gadgets and filters, and who knows what all, nevermind, cameras.

Tara: Talk a little bit about what it’s like to walk around WordCamp with a camera. Because I would bet that you see things differently at a WordCamp. We talked about WordCamp a lot on this podcast because many, many of the people that we’ve spoken to find WordCamp to be a transformative experience for them professionally and also in terms of becoming part of the WordPress community and learning what that’s about. You can walk around in a daze your first few times, and then after that, I find myself at WordCamps so happy to be surrounded by my – it’s like a family reunion – by my friends that I haven’t seen for a while. So I walk around, probably it was one thing in mind. But I wonder if you can speak a little bit to what it’s like walking around with a camera and if that changes your WordCamp experience?

Reed: Well, I would echo what you felt about WordCamps. I think WordCamps are terrific way. I’m very glad we run them because one of the main things I think WordPress community needs to do is be open to new people. And that’s how we get more experienced people as we bring in more and more new people, and they hang around and learn stuff and talk. And it is part of the community and you do feel like you’re part of something when you go. It’s a very good feeling.

The camera I’m taking pictures does remove you a bit from that because you are paying attention to…I. I’m paying attention to what would be a good way to show, to the extent that I can, what’s going on in the people’s heads – the attendees. I don’t like to take closed pictures, except the certain ones where that’s appropriate – you want to catch the speakers and maybe have them give you a headshot sort of thing.

But in general, for the attendees, you’re looking to catch them with an expression of engagement or questioning or maybe even being worried or something or happy, to catch something that tells you what’s going on with them and how they’re feeling. And that’s what makes it a good picture. Because I mean, frankly, if you look at 100 pictures of people at WordCamps, they can all look alike.

Also, I think there’s another role to this. I think it’s important to show the diversity of the people that attend WordCamps, at least the ones I’ve been to, and to not take either just the speakers or concentrate on the…we have some outstanding people and concentrate on them. I want to take pictures of the person standing in the corner that’s not saying much, and so forth. And just make sure that whoever’s looking at the pictures knows that all kinds of people of all ethnicities and races and ages, and men and women, and anybody’s welcome. So you want to capture that and not just have the same 12 stars, so to speak, show up.

The process of taking pictures does…you are removed a little because you have to pull back. You’re not talking to anyone. In fact, you don’t want people to come up to you and talk to you because you’re kind of on duty, taking the picture. You just have to build that in because people are going to do that. Because hey, it’s working. People talk to one another.

Tara: I’m glad you mentioned the role that you play in terms of showcasing the diversity and the people who are standing in the corner. That’s one of the reasons that Liam and I are doing this podcast is to…So when you’re taking their picture next time, perhaps you can tell them about Hallway Chats and ask if they’d like to be on our podcast.

Reed: I’d be glad to. I’d be glad to.

Tara: You should give us their headshots to use.

Reed: Yeah. I mean, I should have a little card from you too to hand them. “Here’s the URL. Go check it out.”

Tara: (Laughing) The birth of an idea, right here. That’s great.

Liam: Reed, tell me a little bit about what you do with WordPress outside of meetups and WordCamps. We shared earlier that you build websites and you teach. But what does that look like for you day to day, week to week?

Reed: Well, currently, I took the last couple of years. I’ve had a couple of main clients that have really taken up most of the time. Then there’s a whole bunch of people that I’ve done something for over the last number of years, and they’ll send me a text and say, “Hey, I need this little thing. I need that little thing.” That’s some of it. But mostly is with a couple of two, three big – well, big to me – clients that soak up most of the time, and their companies have a fairly elaborate website…well, I guess the mission is stated simply in a sentence or two. But getting that done is a very complicated process. And there’s all kinds of things in the website they’re intending to facilitate that.

So day to day, it’s mostly that. And that’s fine. I don’t have to work 40, 50 hours a week on this. That’s fine with me. I’ve plenty of other things to do. It is amazing how it’s quite true that whatever you have will take up all the time you have. When I was working, I don’t know how I planned the jobs in here. I mean, I obviously don’t have an actual job. I don’t know. Does that answer your question? I don’t know.

Liam: It does. It does. It does. It does. Let me ask you about success, Reed. One of the questions that we ask all of our guests is about their own definition of success. And I wonder if you’ll share with us your definition. It might be a personal definition, a professional definition. Maybe it’s a combo of both. How do you define success?

Reed: I guess at different times in my life I might have answered this differently. But for quite a while I would tell you that it’s when I feel that I’ve done something constructive and useful and accomplished something that was useful and constructive for myself and other people.

Tara: That makes sense. Sounds like you do that in all the involvement that you have in the various communities that you’re in.

Tara: So, you mentioned your role before for this with the Red Cross?

Reed: Yes.

Tara: And can you tell us a little bit more about that, and how you got there, and how you’re still involved.

Reed: Wow. Yeah. Sure.

Tara: I think that relates to your idea of success, by the way, which is what made me think of it.

Reed: It may. It’s a completely out of the blue. I mean, I never in my life would have said, “Oh, I’m going to work for 34 years for the American Red Cross.” It could never have occurred to me to do that. I was in my 20s, I needed a job. A friend of mine worked there, and they were expanding at the time. And he said, “Why don’t you apply and I’ll give you a reference.” I did and they hired me.

The first job was delivering blood to hospitals. So I thought, “Oh, this will last six months to a year and then I’ll find what I really want to do with my life. You know, one of those big things.” I really didn’t know and didn’t figure that out for some more decades. But working at the Red Cross was a good thing to do.

So I delivered blood to hospitals and then I got to be on the phone talking to the hospitals so that I can tell the people delivering it what to deliver. Then I was put in charge of the department. One thing led to another and…I mean, over 34 years, I’ve done a whole lot of things. I wound up in the finance end of it in the biomedical finance for the field units in the northeastern part of the United States – about 10 of our field offices – working with those offices on their budgets and variances and helping them figure out how much money they could spend on this, that, and the other thing. That’s what I did pretty much for the last I’m going to say 10 or 12 years that I worked there. That was a lot of it.

Tara: How did you end up in Philadelphia?

Reed: Well, I was born here. I went to NYU and I came back. Then as I said, I lived for a few years in Boston. When I returned from Boston, I was looking for a job. And that’s when I started with a Red Cross in my late 20s. I really liked Philly really a lot. And it’s really, really changed so significantly.

I mean, certainly, over the last 10 years, everybody I know who’s been here for 10 years has seen that. But over the last 30 or 40 years, it’s not the same city. It’s not even close. It’s much more forward-looking. It’s got tons of problems. I know we have big problems, especially in the school system, and so forth, a very high poverty rate. Worst among the 10 big cities.

When I was growing up, there was nothing to do other than…I mean, if you wanted to go out at night, you could get a pizza or cheesesteak. Or if you had way more money than we had, there were a couple of high-end restaurants. That was about it. There was no…I’ll call it a scene. You know, there was no clubs and casual places the way they have now sprinkled all over the place. There was nothing like a coffee shop. Nothing like that. It just didn’t exist.

It was also a much more backward-looking city in the sense that it was run pretty much the way it’s been run in the 1950s. Very complacent and somewhat corrupt, and not thinking about the future very much. It’s more of the same, all the same. That started to change in the 60s. The last 20 years you really have seen a big change.

In 1970, there was this thing called the Restaurant Renaissance. I believe is a man named Steve Poses who opened the restaurant school, which taught people not just how to cook, but how to run a restaurant business. Because a lot of people go in the restaurant business because they’re very creative, and so forth but in a business sense, not so much. He taught them how to run a successful business that will be around in a few years. That enabled a great deal of change and there was a little more to do. Things built on that and that was the…I’m rambling over here. But that was part of the origin of change. I mean, I’ve looked at this and every time I look around, I think, “Wow, this is so much better than when I was growing up.”

Liam: Have you lived in different parts of Philly or are you living in the same neighborhood that you grew up in?

Reed: I grew up in West Mount Airy. And I live there for…

Liam: That’s over near the museum for people who don’t know?

Reed: No.

Liam: Isn’t it?

Reed: No. West Mount Airy is south of Chestnut Hill and north of Germantown. I live in the middle of the northwestern wing and there’s kind of a Y. It’s kind of in the middle of that. I grew up there. When I came back from New York, I stayed there for a number of years. When I came back from Boston, I lived there.

It wasn’t till I got married that I moved downtown where my wife lived. It made a lot more sense to do that. Downtown is terrific. Everything is here that we need. You can walk to everything. And given the traffic and construction, we pretty much have to walk to everything. It’s really very convenient.

Liam: Reed, I really like the way you, I’ll say, dabble. And I mean that with just being silly. You dabble in a lot of different tech communities in and around Philadelphia. Was that something that started with WordPress and you said, “This is fun and this is a great community, and let me see what else is out there?” Or were you active in other communities and then, as you said, Brad Williams and Doug Stewart started the Philadelphia WordPress meetup so you started going to that? What’s the chicken and what’s the egg here? Where did you start in terms of tech communities?

Reed: Oh, in terms of tech communities, I guess you could say kind of Indy Hall. I met a couple of folks there ran this all-day workshop on WordPress back when it was in version 2.6 or 2.7. Way, way early. Well, pretty early. I went to that and thought, “This is outstanding. This is a whole lot easier than trying to figure out all this hand-rolled PHP.” Clunky as it was, it was really slick compared to what I was doing. So I guess I got started from that workshop. That was probably in 2009. I just fooled around, fooled around. Then WordPress evolved and I got more involved with it. Especially after I retired, I had more time to do it because, you know, job.

My whole life, I’ve always had different crowds of people that I knew. They would sometimes overlap, but not always, and we’re not interested in the same things. And I’ve always been a generalist. For a long time, I thought that was a problem. I really needed to specialize a lot more. But I haven’t thought that for a while because it’s turned out to be just fine. It turned out to be a good thing.

Tara: What’s been your biggest…

Liam: I want to let Tara talk what she wants to talk about.

Tara: I was going to say, what’s been your biggest challenge as you’ve been in this transition?

Reed: In life?

Tara: No, no, in your day to day work and becoming more involved in WordPress and using it more. Or in life too. You can talk about that if you want as well.

Reed: Probably it’s staying focused. When I have work to do and a fair amount of time to do it, probably the hardest thing is buckling down to it when the deadline is there, but it’s kind of far out. You know, “I’ve got a couple of days I can do this.” And then there’s other things, “Let me look at this. Let me look at that.” And trying to really concentrate on something that probably wouldn’t take all that much time. I sometimes struggle. That’s probably the thing I would improve if I had a magic wand.

Tara: What’s your favorite thing to do?

Reed: My favorite thing to do of everything?

Tara: Sure. Yeah.

Reed: Oh, my God. Probably right now it’s taking pics. I would say that. I would say photography is my favorite thing to do. That’s a definable thing to do. That’s it.

Liam: Well, now Tara’s asking me to talk to you and I forgot what I wanted to ask you about before. Let me ask you about advice, Reed. One of the questions that we like to ask our guests is about just that advice. What’s the best advice that you’ve been given or received or read and successfully worked into your life?

Reed: Probably the most comprehensively useful advice that I’ve gotten is “live within your means. Live below your means.” And the best advice I would give someone who heard that already is “the long run always shows up.”

Liam: I like that. I have two questions. Who told you to live within your means? Was that your parents telling you that?

Reed: Yes, definitely.

Reed: No, there’s no particular incident or time when “Oh, my God, the long run does show up.” I just always thought that way. It’s always in mind when I’m doing things. I’m not saying I never forget about it and do something really foolish that might be fun or interesting in the short run that has some disastrous long term consequences. Fortunately, none of the disasters have been what I would really call a disaster, because I’m still here talking to you. And not everybody got away with that.

But, in general, I’ve kind of always thought, “Down the road, what’s going to happen?” I mean, I have no particular ability to predict what’s going to happen, I just know that things will not be as they are now, that things will be different. Some of it ties to if you live within your means or below your means, you’ll probably have more money in the bank than if you don’t. And that’s not a bad thing when you get to my age or any age really.

Tara: I think that times have changed a lot and that’s not advice that people are given very often anymore, unfortunately.

Reed: They’re not. They’re told the opposite. One of my things that irritates me the most is that some of the brightest, most creative, hard-working, best-educated people we have in our culture find great success in marketing. And they’ve been building on the decades and decades. Probably, modern marketing era started maybe 1920, something like that, and every decade, we accumulate more information, more science goes into it, more sociology, more psychology, every other branch of science basically geared to get people to buy more stuff.

Now, that did give us a $21 trillion GDP, which is very useful. It’s a good thing to have. But an awful lot of it is built on hot air. And a lot of people are much worse off than they should be or could be if they could be taught maybe back off on that a little bit. You don’t really need to have every shiny object that’s out there.

Tara: Yeah, there’s immediate gratification that I think the internet has given people the expectation for. And that’s the ease of ordering something on Amazon and having it arrived the next day or even the same day. You can’t even wait for it to arrive. So I’m guilty of that very much. It’s not necessarily a good thing for your pocketbook or…

Liam: Especially if you don’t have to pay for it, right? I mean, we do…

Tara: It goes on the credit card.

Liam: …but it goes right onto the credit card, and there was no handing over the cash and say, “Wait a minute, I need those hundred dollar bills because I’ve got this and I’ve got that.” It can be tricky to manage impulsivity when it comes to internet expenses or internet purchases. That’s for sure. As we sit around and talk over the internet with…

Reed: Of course. I mean, the internet’s just like fire. It’s really, really necessary and really useful. YAnd you can get awful hurt with it too.

Liam: There you go. That’s I think our phrase for the podcast. The internet is just like fire, Tara Claeys. It’s just like fire.

Reed: Oh, boy.

Tara: Well …

Liam: Reed, let me ask you. We’ve got about a minute left and I want to ask you, what is one of your most poignant memories of a WordCamp? You’ve been to a ton, you’ve spoken at some, you’ve organized more than a handful, which one is the most memorable experiences, either something you witnessed or you saw or happened to you at a WordCamp?

Reed: Wow, that’s a big one. I’ll say what springs to mind immediately. So it must be important to me. There was a person that we know, who I will not name, who is shy and not comfortable, as many people are not, speaking in public. And speaking in a WordCamp is speaking to a whole lot of public. And even though it’s a very friendly crowd, I mean, no one is hostile there and it’s a very welcoming thing, it is nonetheless very scary to get up and talk to a bunch of people, especially if you haven’t done it very often. You can hear and see the body language and the voice and so forth. Nonetheless, plowed through it, got through it, and did a terrific job, great content, slides with a little bit humor and making the points well, and got through the whole thing. And I thought, “Well, you know, hat’s off to you.”

Tara: It’s nice. It’s nice to see someone making that step and growing. It’s good. And it’s good to see that happening often in our community where a lot of people are sort of shy. If we can encourage them to do that at WordCamps or meetups, it’s a great way to learn. And I think one of the great things about the WordPress community is that it is so collaborative and encouraging in that way. So thanks for sharing that.

And thank you for joining us today, Reed. I think we are out of time. We are very grateful for you being here and it’s great to see you and get to know you a little bit better.

Reed: Hey.

Tara: Where can people find you online?

Reed: Oh, I’m easy to find. If you just Google my name you’ll find deltaangel.com, which is my business. You will see my Twitter account under @tangofoxtrot. I’m on Instagram as Angel Foxtrot. Not sure why.

Liam: You do a lot of different kinds of trots and echoes.

Reed: I cannot dance any of those.

Liam: Fantastic. Thank you so much. It was an absolute pleasure.

Reed: You’re welcome.

Tara: Thank you, Reed. Take care. Bye.

Reed: 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.

Christina is a frontend developer, support specialist, trainer and community leader in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her favorite things include furry creatures, the colour purple, tea, Wapuu, and Brit TV.

Website | Amethyst Answers

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Christina Workman. Christina is a front end developer, support specialist, trainer, and community leader in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Her favorite things include furry creatures, the color purple, tea, Wapuu, and BritTV. Welcome, Christina.

Christina: Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Tara: Hi, Christina, we’re glad you’re with us today. Would you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Christina: Yeah. As Liam said, I’m in Calgary, and I’m a very big part of our WordPress community here. I really love the community. I’ve been organizing the meetups and some of the most recent WordCamps and brought KidsCamp to Calgary. We did our first contributor day. I’ve been using WordPress for about 10 years now as a freelancer, and I’m taking the next step pretty soon into another company.

Tara: What have you enjoyed about being a freelancer, and what has been your motivation for joining a company?

Christina: I love the flexibility and the fact that I can sleep as much as I want or as much as I need to. It’s been a really big help in my mental health, being able to take care of myself and do what I need to do on my own timeline. But I’m ready to join the bigger, more global WordPress community. I want to be more involved and I think joining the right company is a really good step. So being able to still have some flexibility, and being able to work on all the things I love and still talk to people in the community was really important, then being able to work from home still.

Tara: That sounds exciting. How did you get started in WordPress and web development?

Christina: Sort of a strange story. I was working for a local company, and due to various reasons, both personal and at work, I ended up…I don’t know if you really say you ended up with depression. But I got depression or became…

Liam: Experienced it.

Christina: And took some time off and reevaluated things and realized that I really needed to get away from that environment, and thought, “What am I going to do?” The answer turned out to be Reiki, not WordPress. But Reiki was sort of stopgap. I found I was meeting more fellow practitioners who needed help with computer issues, and I was able to provide that for them and still understand where they were coming from. That turned into helping them with all things online and building websites. Eventually, the Reiki got left behind and WordPress became the forefront.

Liam: Can you just explain briefly what Reiki is. I’m not sure that everybody knows.

Christina: Yeah. Essentially, at its most basic, it’s energy healing system. You are a channel for good energy flowing into the person you’re working on, which could be yourself and helping negative energy be released. Lots of people can feel the warmth in the area that you’re currently working on, and yeah, just works with energy. Which I know some people think sounds hokey, but I like to remind them of the fact that I used to use watches as an example and how the quartz crystal helps power the watch with energy. But now, even better is all of these touchscreen devices that we have. It’s not a matter of how much pressure we’re putting on, but it’s the energy from our fingertips that’s actually opening up an app on our iPhone, or whatever it is. So if you think about that little bit of energy that’s coming out of you. We’re all full of energy, and it’s all manipulatical if that’s a word.

Liam: Right. So it’s like a yoga or therapy or massage type of thing. Not perfect analogies, but it’s that sort of thing.

Christina: It’s in that sort of, yeah. And it follows lots of the same points as acupuncture as well.

Liam: There you go. So you started doing WordPress development for your friends and contacts and colleagues in Reiki and then that developed enough to be a freelance business for you?

Christina: Yeah. I started with just wordpress.com and then learned about self-hosted and started dabbling in that. Way back when I was in university, I had – and I can’t even remember now – I think it was an Angelfire. But maybe I had an Angelfire energy or cities. I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure I had Angelfire, though, for my guinea pigs. And so I learned a bit of HTML back then. I remember enjoying it. Math and languages have always been my best subjects, and so coding to me, just kind of makes sense because of the structure to it.

So I just did some free courses online to sort of renew my HTML and learn more about what CSS was. And that was sort of the gateway code into developing.

Tara: So would you say also that Reiki is a language. Just curious, when you said math and Reiki. I mean, what’s the training like to learn that?

Christina: I guess in a way there’s a bit of a language. It’s not so structured like most oral languages are. But there is sort of a communication happening there. So yeah, there would be.

Tara: Interesting. So you’re in Canada, and you mentioned that you’re involved in the WordPress community. What do you do in the WordPress community there and how has that helped you grow?

Christina: I first learned about our community from meetups.com and found our Meetup group. From there, I learned about WordCamps, because there was a WordCamp happening north of us in Edmonton. It was being promoted on our group as well. So I went up to that, and had a great time, learned a lot and kept going to our meetups.

Then one day I was asked to join the organizing team of our WordCamp, and I became pretty good friends with the person who’s running the meetups. He needed to step down, so then I took over organizing the meetups. I have some other people that I do that with now. I was the lead organizer for our WordCamp for two years. Then last year 2018, we started our first KidsCamp. And so I run that. And that’s the whole second…we do two days for camp, and so KidsCamp is the whole second day.

Then we did it again this past year and had even more kids show up. So it was really exciting to see that it’s growing already and that people are really interested. I really like teaching kids in general, but also especially with coding, and giving them tools that they’re going to need. And the sooner they learn that they can do it and that they get exposed to it, the more likely they are to continue. Especially girls and minorities to know that it’s not a boy thing or…anybody and everybody can code and have fun and keep going with it.

Liam: What does a KidsCamp look like in Calgary? What does that entail? I mean, if you’ve got to keep children effectively entertained, you’re educating them, but you also have to entertain them, what does that look like?

Christina: It’s pretty low key right now. We started off with talking to them about what WordPress is at a pretty simple level. Then we walk through getting them set up with their own wordpress.com account. And then we showed them how to create a page and a post, and add images, and embed YouTube videos if that’s what they want to do, and pick a theme and change the colors and all that kind of stuff. And so that hopefully, at the end of the day, they’ve got a bit of a blog started. We like to have them, if they will want to, come up and put their blog up on the screen and tell everybody what it is that they created. And just the pride on their faces is so awesome.

Next year, we’re hoping to maybe add for people returning or people who already have some experience, some HTML and CSS learning. We’re still in baby stages but have big plans.

Tara: It’s been really interesting. We’ve spoken to some other folks who have gotten involved in teaching kids and her WordCamps have started to really expand and offer KidsCamp components of their WordCamps. Do you have any kids that come to your meetups?

Christina: We did once, but it was more of being dragged along because it was there was nobody to watch him. But no, not yet. We don’t.

Tara: It’s an interesting question. For the KidsCamp, is it mostly children of people who are attending or are these kids who discover this or their parents discover it for them, but the parents themselves are not involved?

Christina: Yeah, this year, it was mostly kids who I don’t know how they found out about it. But it wasn’t that their parents were attending. We had a couple, especially some last-minute people that were there on the first day, and then heard more about it and like, “I’m going to bring my kids tomorrow.” But yeah, I didn’t get a chance to ask them how they found out but most of them just kind of registered.

Tara: That’s great. When you have done your freelance work, how have you grown that business? Is it mostly local? Are you building websites…

Christina: It’s mostly local.

Tara: …from start to finish or are you doing just development? How does that look?

Christina: It started off being me just making sites by myself. About four years ago now, I hooked up with a lady who’s a graphic designer. So as often as possible, we try to work together. She was looking for a developer at the time because she had some of her clients that said, “Hey, do you build websites?” and she tried, but you know, there’s a lot of things to know about WordPress and building a site and she didn’t know them and recognize that.

And likewise, I am not a fan of digging really deep into design stuff. I have creative bones in my body and I can recognize when something works and doesn’t work, but I prefer to leave that to her. So luckily, we’ve able to partner up a lot in the last few years and have become best friends in the process too.

Liam: And is your colleague active in WordPress or is your colleague just a designer and doesn’t care if you use WordPress, or Joomla or something else?

Christina: When it comes to websites, she does what I tell her. She basically refers to me – and we’re WordPress only. But just as she’s taught me some things about graphic design, she’s learned about different things with websites. And so she kind of understands WordPress now as well. She’s actually also joined the WordPress community organizing our camps as part of the organizing team. I forgot to mention also on the WordCamp US, organizing team this year, and she’s ended up joining as well. I bring her along.

Tara: Have you been to WordCamp US before?

Christina: I was lucky to go last year. It was my first time outside of Alberta for a WordCamp. It was amazing. I actually volunteered at the registration table the whole weekend. So I got to see everybody coming and going and it was a lot of fun. I am a big fan of swag. So I ended up with four tote bags sort of, I think.

Tara: Wow. There’s a lot of swag at WordCamps. What’s your favorite swag you ever gotten?

Christina: I have become a huge fan of the Wapuu pins. I have turned my son into a fan of them as well. So now I come home with stuff, and he’s like, “Hey, can I have that one?” We fight over it, and I say no. And he has to find his own, but any doubles I get for him.

Liam: There you go. There you go. Christina, I want to ask you one of our more signature questions, and it’s around success. You’ve talked about freelance and you’ve talked about some of the value that you’ve gotten from Reiki and how you’re transitioning into a job with a company now. Can you share with us your definition of success? And it can be a personal definition or a professional definition, or maybe for you, it’s a mix of both.

Christina: It’s definitely a bit of a mix and not just one single definition. I think that there’s sort of a broader, more grand scheme version of success, which is overall that I’m happy and healthy and doing things that I want to be doing. But then just daily successes, smaller successes are just achieving those goals that we’ve set out for ourselves. So whether that’s getting landing a particular client that I was really excited about or finishing a project to maybe one day renovating our basement. But I think that if you’re not setting goals for yourself, then you end up sort of just floating along and not achieving much. So for me, success is essentially achieving those goals that I’d set up.

Tara: So I’m a goal setter or have become one. Is there a process that you use? And I guess, you know, goal they change over time or you achieve them and make new one. Do you have a formal process? Or is it something more that you just…do you have Post-it Note, or know in your head, or a journal? Talk a little bit about your process for coming up with goals and setting them.

Christina: It varies too. I try sometimes, usually at the beginning of the year, to sit down and set some goals for business for the year. And so those involved looking at, you know, for something’s looking at what happened in the past year, and ways to improve that and thinking about things that I that I’m really excited about and want to make sure that I work towards. Because something like a KidsCamp, for example, you can’t just decide the day of, “Hey, we’re going to do a kid’s camp, right?” You have to actively be planning for that. So to make sure that those are set up. And then try to set some target dates. But more or less I find as long as I’m decided that I want to do something and keep it top of mind, then I follow through and be able to achieve that.

Tara: So is it like yearly goals that you set?

Christina: For business, yeah. But then again, like you said, things change all the time and new opportunities come up. So those are just sort of a bit of an outline, I guess, a starting point.

Tara: Yeah. Yeah.

Liam: Christina you shared that when you keep your goals top of mind you pretty well are getting them achieved or reaching them. And I kind of wonder about what do you do to keep them top of mind? Because you’ve talked about career, you’ve talked about all the work you’re doing in the WordPress community, we’re fortunate enough to meet your puppy and your son before we started recording. So you clearly have some family obligations and goals there. And you’ve got a house that you’re looking after and taking care of. So there’s a variety of different things. How do you manage all that? What does that look like for you?

Christina: Managing all that can be pretty chaotic sometimes. Especially in my house, I am the one that kind of keeps all of the dates and the important things and all that. This is something that I seem to be a natural at. I don’t even know how I do that, particularly. But I know one of the ways anyways, that I keep things top of mind is making sure to share them with other people. So if I have a goal, that I want to achieve something great, and I don’t tell anybody, chances are I’m not going to do much. Not only am I not going to do much to move forward in achieving that goal, but a big part of achieving the goals is the help along the way, right? The opportunities that present themselves and the little ways that other people can influence.

You know, if somebody doesn’t know that you’re, say, looking for a new job, when a new job comes up that they think you’d be perfect for, they might not tell you about it because they think you’re happy doing what you want. So sharing with people helps also just keep it top of mind for myself.

Tara: Yeah, it also holds you accountable in some ways too.

Christina: Exactly.

Tara: Accountability is a big thing. So do you have a group that you rely on, your WordPress friends, your family, all of the above?

Christina: My colleague is a huge part of that. My husband also, he’s a great support and helps me keep on track and keep going. And then I think the WordPress community is really great. I’ve got a few Facebook groups and Slack groups and different things like that that help keep me on task when I need to. And if I need some help or support or whatever, then there’s always somewhere I can turn for that.

Liam: Christina, we’ve talked with different guests who have gone from employment with others to their own freelance and some have gone from freelance to employment of others, and some have joined partnerships and then gone freelance, all sorts of different ways. That often comes from a desire to face a new challenge, take on a new goal or some other thing like that. And I wonder if you can talk about your experience in thinking about and pondering about and working through the process to which you came to decision that employment is going to be the right choice for you over a freelance career or freelance position.

Christina: A lot of its come down to, again, those goals and wanting to expand more in the WordPress community. I think our community down here is really – Down here. We’re up from you – is really small in comparison to a lot of them in the States. And I want to have a bigger impact, I guess.

And so I know some people are quite good at taking their companies and really growing them, but for me, as a freelancer, I really like that one on one relationship with my clients that I have. But that wasn’t going to allow me to expand into the global community as much as I want it to. And I just love WordPress so much that I just want to do it all the time.

Tara: We love WordPress too. That’s why we are doing this. We love chatting with people who love WordPress and for whom WordPress has done more than just, you know…it’s more than just a work thing. It’s more than just a career. It’s a community. And so I can sense that that’s thing for you. And so I’m excited to see where you’re going with that too.

Liam: Let’s talk about advice. Christina, what’s the best advice or some valuable advice that you’ve been given or received or read and successfully implemented in your own life?

Christina: I think one of my business coaches started planting this into my head and I’ve taken it a bit and expanded on it. It comes down to those goals again. Not even necessarily goals, but wins and your tiny little successes that you maybe didn’t even plan for. The idea is to keep track of those. Make sure that you’re somewhere, wherever it works for you, to write down all the things that have been a win.

And sometimes something that didn’t go well as a win to you because you made it through or you learned a lesson. So I would have things like got a referral from a client. And then that referral, if it turned into an actual client, that would be a win, as well. And then the great thing is, it serves a couple of great purposes. One is at the end of the year, you can take a look back and see all of the things that you have achieved. And if you are the kind of person who’s planning your goals out for the next year, and you’re trying to remember what you did this past year, you’ve already got a list going.

But the other really great thing is when you’re having those down moments because I mean, we all experienced them in general. But when you’re freelancing too, you can have some pretty severe slumps sometimes and when you’re doubting yourself and whether you should be doing this and all those negative kinds of thoughts. So being able to then look and see, “Oh, no, I am good at what I’m doing and people do want to work with me and all of those other things.” And throwing any, anytime somebody says something nice, that’s the beauty of email, and text, when they come through, is always copy those and put those in as well so that I actually have the actual words that people have said thanking me for helping them solve a problem or whatever it might be. So tracking all of your wins.

Tara: It’s a good mental health exercise. I think working alone a lot, as many freelancers do, as many WordPress people do, it’s easy to get in a slump as you mentioned. And so I love the idea of keeping track of all the positive things in order to help you when you’re going through negative stuff. It’s really good advice.

Christina: And you don’t need anybody’s help to do it, right? You can do it all on your own and you can make it look however you want. And it’s not dependent on anybody or anything except you.

Tara: That’s great advice.

Liam: Yeah, that’s advice I share with work I do with an organization that helps people on transition. That it’s so easy to forget those little bits of nice words and those little wins and those little successes and you know, look back six months later, and “I haven’t done anything.” I call it an I Love Me Book. If we just keep an I love Me Book, and just as you do, copy and paste out emails, throw the text messages in there, just a little one line note, it’s so valuable, because it just starts some memory, “Oh, yeah, that was hard day. And I got a meeting with that person. And I didn’t get any business, but they never take meetings from anybody and they took mine. So yay.”

Christina: Exactly. And you never know where those things will lead to. For people who are very visual, I kept a spreadsheet or I keep a spreadsheet of my wins, and then I’ve got a sheet of paper that has 100 circles on it. And I put a sticker on each circle to correspond with whatever I’ve added to my Spreadsheet. So not only do I have this list, but I also have a fun sticker sheet.

Tara: I love that. And Liam would not be surprised to know that I probably will now have yet another spreadsheet.

Liam: In Google Docs. No doubt.

Tara: Sure. I’m starting one as we speak right now. Do you rate them like best wins, medium wins, little wins?

Christina: No. As far as that spreadsheet is concerned, they’re all important.

Tara: That’s great.

Christina: I do try to put the date. Sometimes I forget to update it and I have to kind of remember back a week or two. So I don’t necessarily have the exact date, but try to date it as well.

Tara: I think that’s good parenting advice. Do you share that in your family as well? I think kids these days, it’s easy with social media to get focused on negative stuff and miss all the positive encouragement that they might get.

Christina: I haven’t actually shared that with my son. Although when he has his moments, I’m that spreadsheet for him.

Tara: I love that. “I’m that spreadsheet.” That’s great.

Liam: That’s an important role fto fill.

Christina: Yeah. We got to keep encouraging them and lifting them up, right?

Tara: Yeah. How do you balance your parenting family life with your work when you’re working from home?

Christina: One of the great things about being my own boss and having the flexibility, particularly when my son was a bit younger, there were a lot of volunteer opportunities in school. So I was really happy that I could take time off whenever I wanted to, and then shift when I was working so that I could go in and do that. Now he’s almost a teenager, and he’s a lot more self-reliant. So during the days, right now being summer, he’s pretty self-sufficient, but I try to make sure that we have time to either go for a walk into Pokémon or go see a movie, take him to the zoo, different things like that so that we’re spending some time together.

And then just being here whenever he needs me. He has a couple of special needs, and so it’s really important for me to be here for him and to understand him. He said to me a couple nights ago, you know, as kids do, but he said, “You know, you’re the best mom ever.” And I thought because that balance is tricky, you know, and I said, “No, I’m not. I don’t do lots of things.” Because as much as I try to do things, there’s still lots…you know, you always compare and you think, “Oh, that mom does all of these things, and I don’t.” He actually got really, really upset when I said that I wasn’t the best mom and that I could be better. And he’s like, “No, you understand me.” That was probably the biggest thing for him was that I understood him and I took time with him.

Tara: Yeah, it’s easy to compare yourself. I hope you put that on your win sheet.

Christina: Yeah.

Tara: That’s an ultimate win to hear that from your child. That’s awesome.

Christina: Luckily.

Tara: That’s great.

Liam: I think especially where our children think differently than the normal typical world, if you will, as their parents, we understand them. Even if we don’t think like them, and we can’t always predict the way that they’ll think, that they know and trust that we understand where they are, and what they’re doing, and where they’re coming from, and where their needs are. That’s invaluable. My hat’s off to you for achieving that. That’s a huge win. That’s patience. That’s a lot of patience. It’s a lot of love. So, congrats, and thank you.

Christina: Thank you. Well, he’s a pretty good kid.

Liam: I don’t doubt it.

Christina: Yeah, he’s worth it.

Tara: Christina, I’m afraid we are out of time. I have just really enjoyed chatting with you and getting to know you a little bit, and I look forward to meeting you in person at WordCamp US.

Christina: That’d be great.

Tara: Where can people find you online?

Christina: I’m pretty much online everywhere as Amethyst Answers. I might be changing that soon to just Christina Workman. So we’ll have to see. So if you find Amethyst Answers doesn’t exist anymore, look for Christina Workman. And I can be emailed at [email protected].

Tara: Great. Thanks again for joining us.

Christina: Thank you for having me.

Liam: Thanks so much, Christina. It was an absolute pleasure. I really enjoyed it.

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.

A former MousePlanet MouseStation Podcast co-host, Mike Demo is a lover of open source first, specific tools later. Before joining BoldGrid as a community evangelist, Mike spent years in the financial and insurance industries. He believes in sharing his business acumen and marketing insight. He presents regularly on open source topics like WordPress and Joomla! – where he was a board member of that project.

Website | Bold Grid

Referenced in this Show:

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 107.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Mike Demo, a former Mouseplanet, MouseStation podcast co-host. Mike Demo is a lover of open source first, specific tools later. Before joining BoldGrid as a community evangelist, Mike spent years in the financial and insurance industries. He believes in sharing his business acumen and marketing insight. He presents regularly on open source topics like WordPress and Joomla, where he was a board member of that project. Welcome, Mike. We’re glad to have you here today.

Mike: My pleasure.

Liam: Mike, thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Mike: Yeah. My name is Mike Demo, and I am open source evangelist. So I travel around the world and I go to things like WordCamps and hosting conferences, and just connect with community. I’ve been in making websites ever since middle school. I used to code all my papers in HTML.

Tara: Wow. Let’s ask a little bit about the Disney because I can see behind you some Disney stuff, Disney posters, and it sounds like you are involved in some Disney podcast stuff. So tell us a little bit about your Disney.

Mike: I’m a huge Disney fanatic probably more so than most anyone else in the WordPress community. And I am including Roy in that. My wife and I, live in Minnesota but we have annual passes to both Disney World and Disneyland. We go about once a month. I used to work for the company. I learned a lot. I ended up becoming friends and get to know some of the executives that are in the company.

And then I started a podcast with my really good friend Mark Goldhaber who used to write for a mouseplanet.com. And we did that for years and years. So if you want to listen to a five straight months of my voice, you can go to mouseplanet.com/podcast. But I still love it and we go all the time.

Tara: Wow. What’s your favorite thing to do at Disney World?

Mike: At Disney World, it would probably go to the Polynesian Resort to go to Trader Sam’s Grog Grotto which is their kind of hit in a way Interactive Tiki Bar.

Tara: So you do the adulting stuff?

Mike: I do everything. I ask your character breakfast. But the thing that we have to do every time is go to Trader Sam’s.

Tara: All right. And do you have a preference of Disneyland over Disney World or vice versa?

Mike: You can’t really compare it two. Disneyland is the original. It’s small. It’s intimate. But there’s something special there because that was the part that Walt actually saw in operation. The best analogy I’ve ever heard between Disneyland and Disney World is Disneyland is like the Museum of Natural History. You can do it in a day or two and has lots of classic things to see. And it’s something that’s worth going to. Whereas Disney World is like the Smithsonian where you could spend a week but not even scratched the surface.

Tara: All right. That’s helpful. That’s helpful.

Liam: So to clarify, land in California, world in Florida?

Mike: Correct, if you’re talking about the US domestic parks. Some of them still have the international parks a lot and still use the land for the rest of those. But yeah.

Tara: I think people get them confused. I’ve only ever been to Disney World, and not that often. But it amazes me how well run it is and how they just seem to plan for everything.

Mike: I mean, they have a lot of contingencies all about the guest experience and the fact they don’t call customers but they call them guests, you know, just really changes the mindset. And I would kind of latch on to that. In fact, my wife and I were just at Disneyland a few weeks ago to see the new Star Wars land that just opened up.

Tara: I think I’ve heard this before or read it somewhere that the sort of translating that philosophy that they have to other parts of life and other businesses, this whole idea of guests and planning for everything. Have you seen that applied in your business life?

Mike: Yes. There’s actually two books I really recommend on this topic. One of them is called “Be Our Guest,” which is published by the Disney Institute. Disney actually has a professional development arm that you can, you know, go to classes and things for. And they travel around, and they have conferences. Then the other one I think it’s called “Creating Magic.” And that’s by Lee Cockerell. And he’s the former Executive Vice President of Walt Disney World.

When I was an intern, I sent him an email saying, “Hey, I would love to have lunch with you,” and he replied back, “Sure.” There’s 55,000 cast members at Disney World. So the fact I went from intern to the executive vice president ruffled a few feathers, but I got to know Lee. And him and I still communicate to this day, even though he’s in retirement. But it’s all about, you know, how do you make the guest experience better, and how do you try to deal with contingency?

A good example of that is actually the new Star Wars Galaxies that just opened in Disneyland. So Pandora, when the Pandora land opened at Disney World, the wait to get into the land, when it first opened was like seven hours to even get into the land, to get into line for the rides. So a lot of people complained about that. But it has business effects too. Because if you’re in line, what are you not doing? You’re not shopping, you’re not eating, you’re not spending that money, which Disney loves to get. Full disclosure, I also am a shareholder of the company.

So for the new Star Wars land, they’re like, “Well, Star Wars is bigger than Avatar, what are we going to do?” So now you grab your phone, and you can get into a board, or you get a boarding pass. And then you can experience the rest of the resort, not stand in line, and your phone will buzz when it’s your time to enter the land. But what are you doing during that time, you’re spending money by shopping, dining, and you’re having a great experience because you are not in line and you get to go on other rides and things like that.

And you guess, satisfaction goes up and the revenue for the company goes up. And it’s just a win-win overall. So they always are looking for things like that. And I was lucky to work on a couple of those projects for the resort arm when I was working at the corporate office.

Liam: Tell me about Lee Cockerell. I stumbled on him as a podcast listener a few years ago. And while I don’t listen to his show, as often as I did, I really enjoyed hearing him speak. It was very much that could be anybody’s grandfather there. Usually professionally accomplished. But his tone, his demeanor, the choice of words, his intonation struck me as very welcoming, and very kind and very down to earth despite the fact that he ran an enormously successful and enormous business. What was that like sitting down with him for the first time?

Mike: Sitting down with him for the first time was a little scary because I was just an intern. But I saw him speak a couple of times before then. He is just like a grandfather. I’ve been able to interview him in the past when we had our podcast. He’s very down to earth. He could be wearing a cowboy hat and he looks like that old classic, just like, you know, teddy bear of a guy. But he has so much knowledge.

He started in Marriott and become a GM at Marriott. He has some amazing stories from his time in hospitality there. He opened Euro Disneyland. When that first opened, it was a huge failure. They were losing about a million euros a day in operations because they expected like, oh, the French will want French type of food and all of this stuff. And everyone was expecting an American experience. And so they had to make a lot of changes. Now it’s called Disneyland Paris, etc. But he did so much for the company.

He really cared about cast members. He really cared about the frontline employee. He would meet with anybody. It wasn’t just, “Oh, I have an open door policy.” He would literally meet with anybody. Even after I left the company, he stayed in touch with me. He still runs consulting, like talks and things through different events. If you get a chance to see him speak, I highly recommend it. He is retired.

I was talking to his son, who actually used to be the, I believe the President of Magic Kingdom. Now he’s also doing consulting too, and they kind of a tag team thing. I was talking to his son last year because we’re both speaking at the same conference. He’s like, “Yeah, I walked in and dad was taking a nap, and I’m like, ‘What are you doing? You supposed to be productive.'” He’s like, “But I scheduled it. I scheduled the nap.” And the best thing that Lee’s probably known for in the company and for cast members is this time management course.

So he actually has made that online. He sells it as a time management course. And he has a book called “Time Management Magic.” It’s the best time management thing I’ve ever seen. So if you are needing help to manage your time or your calendar, that is probably his best professional product that I’ve seen he released quite frankly,

Tara: Ooh, shiny object for Tara. Looking it up right now.

Liam: Mike, tell me about your road into open source. And particularly it sounds like you went to Joomla first if you’re a board member there.

Mike: I actually went to PHP-Nuke first. And that was a funny story. So started on PHP-Nuke, was making websites. I did a couple of sites in OsCommerce and then CRE Loaded for the e-commerce side. I was looking for a new CMS, so I loaded up MyHost and I loaded up Fantastico, if you’ll remember that before Soft Techless came out. I just started installing CMSs.

Then I found this thing called Mambo and I was like, “Oh, this is cool.” Made some sites in Mambo. This was one month before the fall. And I was not in the community. And then I’m like, “This thing’s not getting a lot of updates.” And then I started looking for another CMS.” And then I found Joomla and I’m like, “This looks a lot like Mambo.” It wasn’t until like a year later that I realized it was just the fork when all the developers went off to do Joomla. And that is really my first major open source project that I started getting involved in.

I started to work at an agency, contributing. I ended up on the finance team. And then I was on to Joomla World Conference team, which is their annual conference. I ran JoomlaDay in Minnesota, which is like a WordCamp, but for Joomla stuff. That did pretty well. Our second year, we had about 500 tickets sold, which is not bad.

I ended up becoming the treasurer due to just different circumstances. I was the treasurer for about a term and a half because I joined halfway through one person’s term who had to leave early due to personal reasons. And then I had another full term of myself. I got to see how a project like that can work from a governance standpoint. I just really fell in love with the community.

Then I started looking for evangelist jobs. When I was working the Joomla booth as a volunteer at HostingCon in New Orleans two years ago, I ran into Todd, who is a co-owner of BoldGrid, and we knew each other from some other Joomla stuff. He was like, “I got this WordPress thing. Would you consider working at WordPress?” I said the stereotypical khaki, you know, tribalism “no, but maybe let me look at it.” I fell in love with BoldGrid. Then that got me to look at WordPress.

Now I speak on open source about of tribalism because I see in every open source community I participate in WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc., that there is this weird “my team is better than any other team,” when really it’s not WordPress versus Joomla versus Drupal versus whatever. It’s open source versus proprietary. And all these close source SAS solutions. The projects aren’t fighting. The leadership of the projects aren’t fighting. And that’s what I think a lot of end-users who want to feel like they’re part of a winning team forget. And that’s something I give a lot of those talks about now.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about BoldGrid.

Mike: Sure. BoldGrid is a suite of plugins that tries to make your WordPress experience easier. It’s about eight different plugins right now. It’s all modular. So you can use one or seven or whatever you want to do. The thing we’re probably best known for is our Post and Page Builder. Then we also have something called BoldGrid Inspirations which is kind of like a Wizard experience onboard ramp into WordPress, if you’ve never used it before. Think like that Wix or Weebly, like click-through wizard, we kind of bring that into the WordPress space. But then at the end of the day, it’s still WordPress, do what you want.

We have a backup plugin, which is growing pretty well. We have different things like a gallery. We integrate into Stock images inside the media manager so you can search for free Stock images or paid stock images that are about 70% off retail if found that same image like in Shutterstock or something. And we’re just trying to help people kind of move the bar forward. We have some cloud services. So you can spin up a free sandbox WordPress account. No credit card needed at any time. Just to test stuff out. We’re just trying to give back to the community and provide different services that people may find useful.

Liam: Who’s a typical client for BoldGrid.

Mike: It really depends on the product we’re talking about. Inspirations, it’s a lot of DIYers, first-time people that haven’t used WordPress before. But we also have a Theme Framework, and agencies use that. A lot of agencies like our custom block builders so they can build their own blocks and share them to their clients. A lot of developers like our backup and quick note Sandbox so they can test something, you know, without having to deal with local. So it’s really kind of the whole swath, but it really depends on what product you’re talking about. So we’re best known, I think, for the DIY market, but we really appeal to the whole thing, if people kind of look at all of our products and not just think of us as a page builder.

Tara: Cool. I’ve seen your team or people, I don’t know if I’ve met you in person, but I think I have a BoldGrid T-shirt. So I’m familiar a little bit with what you do. And I imagine with the emphasis on blocks, and not just talk about that it makes a lot more sense to people now, too. So thanks for explaining that.

I want to switch over to a question that we ask all of our guests, which is how you define success. And I’ve loved hearing about your implementation of some Disney philosophies and the open source thoughts that you have. So that may come into play here. But if you can share with us how you define success, that would be great.

Mike: I know it’s a candid answer to say, “Oh, so that you can do what you love every day,” and all that stuff. But for me, what is kind of hit me like a ton of bricks is when I first started in this open source community, I really had a hard time just making ends meet at all. Now I have a talk where I lay out all the lessons that I made mistakes on so that people can hopefully not do that when they freelance.

For me, it’s to be able to go to a Disney park and buy a piece of art that, you know, five years ago, I would never be able to comprehend. And some of this art can be fairly expensive, but we plan for it, and we budget for it. But just to have that freedom is really nice, and not have it be a big deal. We don’t have that money pressure that we did maybe five, ten years ago when we were just living paycheck to paycheck, and “Oh, my God, I got $1,000 contract on…Yaay, we can pay off some bills now and things like that.” So that’s how it affects me.

Also just being able to make a bunch of friendships. I have met so many people in most every major city, not in the world, quite frankly, and being able to connect with those people and hang out with them. My wife always makes jokes that we hang out with our friends more when we’re not in where we live in Minnesota. If we traveled to this city or that city, there’s always people we are meeting up with. But we have no friends locally. Or the friends we have locally, I never see them in Minnesota. I always see them at a WordCamp or hosting event or something else in another state or city. It’s not a firm answer, but that’s kind of how it works for me.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. I think the stress and pressure of financial constraints particularly where bills aren’t being paid in a timely fashion can’t be understated. That’s an enormous, enormous stress. And it’s difficult to focus on the important things when the rent is due, and the refrigerator is empty and something else on the car breaks. So I’m delighted to hear that you’re in a position where you have the flexibility to enjoy the things that make life more meaningful for you.

Let me ask you. Did your wife do WordPress? Is she involved in the community? It sounds like she might travel to some of the WordCamps with you.

Mike: She does do WordPress and Joomla, not by choice. I have a few freelance clients that I still had before I took the BoldGrid job. I haven’t added any more or whatever since then. But there are times when I am in another country, and there’s something that comes up and I’m like, “Hey, honey, can you do X, Y, Z?” And she knows enough to do basic management of all the sites. And she does. I always just say, “Hey, you’re spending the money too.”

So she’s really learned Joomla not by choice, WordPress a little bit. But now she has her own freelance clients, believe it or not. And she’s doing WordPress stuff on her own that, you know, not at all involved with me or any of my recommendations. And that’s exciting. She used to volunteer at a bunch of Joomla events. She hasn’t been to any WordPress things yet, mainly because she prefers to save the miles for a time she can spend time with me. Because if it’s a WordCamp, that’s just not going to happen.

She’s going to go to our first WordCamp in Orlando next month though. We’re doing a week vacation in California for Disneyland and Universal. And then we’re taking a red eye over to Florida for a WordCamp Orlando. And then if we add a couple of days to go to Disney World, that may happen. I can’t make any promises.

Liam: That’s awesome. That is awesome.

Tara: I wanted to ask you another question that we ask everyone, which is about advice. So we ask you to share with us a piece of advice that you’ve implemented in your life and that you’d share with us – something that’s been important to you.

Mike: This came from John Rampton. He was rated like one of the top online influencers on the internet by Time Magazine. He writes for all bunch of big publications. He used to own host.com. Now he owns due.com, which is just a payment service. But he told me that he tries to help everybody he comes in contact with as much as possible. Because he said, “I’ve done the math, Demo.” And these are paraphrase. They are not the exact numbers.

He’s like, “Every 10 people I come in contact with, it’s going to equal X number of dollars in my pocket. Every hundred dollars’ people I help, it’s going to equal X dollars, every thousand people I help, it’s going to equal X dollars.” And the thousands of really, you know, it’s like a seven-figure number. So he doesn’t go to a community event to say, “Let me tell you about my business, and why it’s great and why you should buy my stuff.” He tries to honestly generally help people. And I’ve tried to mimic that as much as I can.

For example, I met a speaker just this weekend at WordCamp Ottawa. She was a first time speaking at a WordCamp, but she has a lot of just general entrepreneurship topics for people that are just starting out. I’m like, “Oh, my goodness. This is an amazing conference that’s all about turning what you love into what you do. It’s in Florida, and the call for speakers ends on Monday. You should definitely apply.” And then she emailed me on Sunday night, and said, “I applied, hope for the best.” I try to connect people as much as I can. Because most time when I go to these events, I’m just trying to figure out how I can help. And it does come back in multiples down the line.

Tara: Thanks for sharing that. I wanted to ask you going back to your comment when you were an intern, that you reached out and asked for this meeting, and people were sort of flabbergasted by that concept. Where did that come from, that sort of chutzpah to reach out to somebody high up when you were an intern? Did you expect a response or were you surprised by that? And is that how you were raised? Where did that come from?

Mike: I expected a response. Because Lee Cockerell, there was an internal Career Day where he could like to talk to people in different departments, because obviously, Disney has lots of different moving parts from hospitality to engineering, to etc., to creative and merchandising and all that. So they had an inner office Career Day where you could come and listen to different departments, learn about different roles, maybe sign up for what they call Cross-U where you can do a day in someone else’s shoes. And Lee gave a talk. And he’s like, “My email is right there. If you ever want to talk or whatever, I’m here all the time. I’m going to talk to any cast member.”

When he was the Executive Vice President and Alan Weiss was the Executive President and they both gave a talk, but Lee Cockerell was the only one who gave an active, like, saying, “Hey, you can reach out to me.” So I did. I just shot him an email in his email address. He replied with a day. And then he replied, “And I’ll make sure your leadership that you have that time off.” So that’s when he went down to say, “Hey, this cast member needs this time blah, blah, blah.”

It was a little scary. I had my manager pull me apart and say, “Why did you reach out to Lee. What are we doing? What’s wrong? Blah, blah, blah.” And I’m like, “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to get an opportunity to meet him and talk to him. But because of that, I think I had different opportunities. Because I was at Pop Century in the resort track for interns, to begin with, I was one of like 200 cast members just at the front desk. Just the front desk of this resort there’s 200 cast members. Not the resort, just the front desk.

It went from me being fairly unknown to then me, when I applied to be a trainer, I was accepted as a trainer as an intern, which is very rare. Then I ended up to be able to work in the back office as an intern, which was not done before. Then I had opportunity to go to Team Disney, which as a basic intern, I wasn’t a professional intern, never was done before. It was me and one other person in our resort. And I just had a lot of good opportunities. And I think, because I marked myself, that kind of gave me those opportunities. I don’t think it was Lee doing anything. It was just because Lee was meeting with me that people started paying attention. And I had great managers as well.

And because I met with him at that lunch, when he went into retirement, and I’ve seen him socially in some other things, we’ve been able to keep that relationship alive. I knew him when he was my vice president. I don’t know, I just really have a lot of respect for the man.

Liam: Yeah, I can tell. That shows. That shows. So you might have said it, and it might have been a blip in my headset. Did you say that he responded to your email within a day?

Mike: Yeah, it was like few hours.

Liam: That’s pretty impressive. And that he had the wherewithal to make sure that you had the time off as well, knowing that as an intern you probably didn’t have a lot of control over your schedule and that he wouldn’t make sure. But I suppose to give your immediate manager a little bit of understanding. I can totally get that. “Hey, the head of the company just said I got to give you Tuesday off. What is going on?” I could see how that would be a little disconcerting.

Mike: Oh, I mean, yeah. When I went into management and stuff too, I mean, I get it. Because, yeah, 55,000 cast members, and I was at the bottom of that totem pole.

Liam: When you say cast members, you mean employee, right? You weren’t in a costume dressed up as anybody? You just mean anybody on the payroll, right?

Mike: Yeah, anyone that works at Disney is a cast member and at Disney World. Just at the Disney World location, they have 55,000 cast members just at that location. Disney is the largest single site employer in the US.

Liam: Awesome.

Tara: So you did not wear a costume? Were you ever a character?

Mike: I did wear a costume.

Tara: All right.

Mike: But you would probably call it a uniform.

Tara: Okay. So not as a character.

Mike: Mickey is Mickey. Mickey is Mickey. There’s only one of them.

Tara: There’s only one that works all the time.

Mike: You’ll never hear me say otherwise. Now, I do have lots of friends who are close personal friends with certain characters like Mickey and Tinkerbell. But they were just close friends. There’s only one Mickey.

Tara: Yes. And Buzz Lightyear.

Mike: There’s only one of them. But there’s lots of really close friends with those characters. And I’m friends with lots of their close personal friends.

Tara: Cool.

Liam: Mike, let me ask you. You’ve been to a lot of WordCamps. What was your experience of your very first WordCamp? And talk about it also in the context – Were you on the clock with BoldGrid by then? Were you just exploring? Talk about that.

Mike: I was “CMS curious.” Actually, I’ve stolen a quote from Jessica Dunbar, the concrete5 Evangelist that I’m not married to a CMS. I’m in open source relationship. Actually, BoldGrid sent me as my last step of my interview to a WordCamp Salt Lake City to see if I would, I don’t know, burn when I walk in the door or something – if I’d shoot into flames. And so yeah, I went there not involved, but to kind of hang out with the team at WordCamp and just to kind of get to know people. And I had a great experience in Salt Lake City.

But I’ve also had weird experiences too where I still had to this day when people heard I was a board member, which I’m not an anymore, they would come up to me and be like, “Oh, well, you shouldn’t be here or Joomla sucks and all that.” I’m like, “Tools are tools. Don’t be one.” And that’s kind of become my catchphrase. If you want to use WordPress, it’s an amazing CMS, use WordPress. If you want to use concrete5, or papaya or Joomla or Drupal or whatever, that’s cool too. I’m just a fan of open source and giving people the freedom and the tools to do what they want. And I love WordPress. It’s now my default CMS. But I have a soft spot for kind of how I got here.

Liam: I think I support that position. Use whatever tool you know and you like and works. If it doesn’t work, find a new one. Ultimately, they’re all just tools. They are hammers, they are screwdrivers, they are the wrenches. And if you don’t know how to use a monkey wrench, pick up a crescent wrench. I totally agree with that.

Tara: What’s your biggest challenge day to day?

Mike: Honestly probably just logistics. It’s really hard to be on the road as much as I am. My biggest travel year I did 157 days on the road. And being able to still try to connect with the team at the office and the team that’s making our Grid product. I’m fortunate enough to connect with our users. But there’s a whole team behind us that are building it and doing the support and the marketing and everything else. So I would say that’s my biggest challenge to try to be connected with the community but also still trying to connect with the wonderful people that make BoldGrid what it is. Stop me, I just I’m lucky enough to talk to people about it.

Liam: So let me ask you about that. How do you organize and pass back constructive feedback? You know, things like, “Hey, team, this is the fourth time in the last six weeks that I’ve heard x, or this is the ninth time that people have praised Y?” How do you put that in a way so that you’re not emailing them at 3 in the morning four times a week? That it feeds into a system? What does that look for you and for your colleagues?

Mike: It started out just a lot of verbal stuff. But then it was like I felt like I was campaigning. Like I would talk to Person A about issue B and then I would have to talk to a Person C about issue B. And it felt a lot like I was just in politics. And it wasn’t like I had to be able to talk about it to all those people. It was just the conversations and talking about the opportunity I had.

We now have a system where we have another community manager who does more like online stuff. His name’s Jesse Owens. I usually talk to him. We have a system where we can record it officially and make tickets and things. And I am also recording. If I’m doing like a user’s journey test for somebody, I’ll record the audio and the video of it, and then just give that to the appropriate teams.

We have also hired good UX people. So when people have feedback, I have a little card that can give them say, “Hey, please fill it out here. That’s a special link, it will definitely get the eyes of it. And here’s my personal card if you feel like you’re not being heard.” And then yeah, there are times that there might be an urgent issue that I might need to get on Slack. But mostly it’s, “Oh, I didn’t know you did this” or, “I thought this was this.” No product’s perfect, and we just try to make it better each and every time we do release.

Liam: That is awesome. I feel like we could talk about this for a long, long time. But Mike, we are out of time, I’m afraid. It’s flown by between Disney and Joomla, and Lee Cockerell, and learning about sharing feedback. Before we say goodbye to you, where can people find you online, please?

Mike: Twitter’s probably the best place. I’m @mpmike, which used to stand for a MousePlanet Mike. Now it’s just MP Mike. I also do a podcast with BoldGrid called BoldGrid Bold Life that you can find wherever your favorite podcasts are sold.

Tara: Thanks so much for joining us. Really nice to meet you and hope to catch you at a WordCamp this year.

Mike: Likewise, thanks.

Liam: Thanks, Mike. We’ll 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.

Courtney has a background in teaching WordPress, working as a contractor with Modern Tribe, The Events Calendar, and first started using WordPress with version 2.5.

Website | CourtneyEngle.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 106.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Courtney Robertson. Courtney has a background in teaching WordPress, working as a contractor with Modern Tribe, The Events Calendar, and first started using WordPress with version 2.5. She’s a mom of two toddlers and will share with us how she juggles work-life balance. I’m looking forward to hearing about that. Thanks for joining us. Hello, Courtney.

Courtney: Hi, there. It’s great to see some familiar faces today.

Liam: It totally is. How are you, Courtney? Welcome to the show. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Courtney: Yeah. My background is that I was a high school business education teacher. So, think the computer programming teacher. I was in the public schools for probably six years or so, and then I decided to let go of that and start running my own web agency. I did that for I want to say about eight years, and then babies came along.

Now I’m an independent contractor. I could still freelance on the side, but I do a lot of work at The Events Calendar. I speak and attend a lot of the WordCamps in the Mid-Atlantic region. I’m located near Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, so that’s a little west of Gettysburg.

Tara: How did you get started as a teacher?

Courtney: Wow, that one, I think I just really always wanted to be in the computer lab when I was in high school. And so I would get passes during all of my study halls and any bit of free time that I had to go play around on Dos and Windows 95 before we had the internet available in schools.

I started in college with a major in social studies, and then I switched over to business said because again, I just kept gravitating back to the computers. Funny college story, my one coding class in college was in a lab that was brightly lit at sunset with a dim projector before they had computers available for the students to learn simple C. We would take the notes on paper, trek over to the computer lab, put our disks in, mount them to the drive, write them in PICO and VI, and telnet in the whole business. I decided I didn’t like doing things that way, and I wanted to teach kids a better way how to do that.

Tara: Wow, that is old school. When you started teaching, was the technology advanced by then or were you making the transition from that old fashioned way as a teacher?

Courtney: Well, the first year I had a cart and I pushed it classroom to classroom, and I had chalkboards and overhead. And we would visit computer labs depending on the class subject that I taught. I kind of taught a little bit of everything within business education. The next year, I had a SMART Board. A few years later, I switched school districts and jumped about 10 years back in time because of the way that the state-owned public school worked.

It was a unique school. And it sadly is no more. But the way that that school worked, they wouldn’t only allow us to use what the government itself was using at the Capitol. So our network was very behind the times. And again, it was a bit daunting and frustrating. That was also close to the end of my time in the classroom.

Tara: Did you teach WordPress at all? How did WordPress get wrapped up into this?

Courtney: When I was teaching, it was before WordPress really was making a scene, you know, jumping in at 2.5. That’s about what it was when I left the classroom. I was learning how to use WordPress a bit personally at that time, but I was teaching basic HTML and CSS at that point. And again, probably using a lot of the Macromedia products for that, I believe.

But then, fast forward a few years, one of my teacher friends had a surgery that put him out on bed rest for about half a year. So I was in at a vo-tech, a technical high school in my area. And I was teaching WordPress in that setting. Although we didn’t pitch it to the school, as “I’m going to come teach your students WordPress.” We positioned it as they’re going to learn some PHP, some JavaScript, some basic server maintenance, how to maintain a content management system – all that WordPress was able to solve for a lot of the needs that fit the standards that that classroom had to meet.

Liam: That’s pretty cool. I appreciate this is probably going to be a question that we have more time than we have more time to dig into. But how do you go ahead and put together a training program that delivers value on such an enormous, wide-ranging topic like you’ve just discussed? When did you have student for business education? Maybe one hour a week maybe two, or something like that?

Courtney: Well at the vo-tech setting, so if I focus it in on when I was teaching WordPress more recently, that was about three years ago. In that context, I first started them with, “We’re going to install WordPress.” I had a license given to us by desktop server so that we could run a local install. We ran into a lot of headaches because our computers on the network were set to basically wipe back to a standard as soon as we rebooted. Of course, then that really put a damper into a few of our options. With a lot of work, we were able to get something set up and working.

I taught them first how to work install WordPress. And then once the five-minute install process was done, I taught them basically how to be a good user, and the difference between posts, pages, custom post types, how to use some of the default themes. Then we went with how to modify some of the main themes. I was able to work out with Studio Press and a few other theme shops to get a license of one of their themes for our classrooms. So I taught them a little of how to tweak, make a child theme, tweak something as simple as the font color for headings in that child theme.

Then we looked at a little bit of how to write a really bare bone Hello Dolly style plugin, and just turn it on, make it work. But it was building as we went. I was using the LearnDash Learning Management System plugin, which is what a lot of people that are using, whether it is in a public school setting, or if they are creating courses and selling their courses themselves out on the web just for anyone to learn dash. Just one of the really solid programs for that.

So I was actually using that also as my grade book for my students. So I would have my own site that they would walk through the tutorials, and they could do this at home. I would record my SMART Board lessons as a screencast and stick it all inside the class. I really actually want to get back to doing some of that and build that program back up. But of course, I got a little bit waylaid in having children.

Liam: That’s a good reason to be waylaid, I should think. So, you left the classroom, you did freelance, you said for about eight years. Talk about that freelance. I imagine you just kind of had enough of the classroom and some of the headaches and the frustrations there and saw an opportunity to have a little bit more independence and open schedule. But what was freelancing like for you?

Courtney: I really enjoyed it. I covered a wide variety really of what a basic small business would need. So I worked a lot in my area with realtors. I helped them with their websites and then built it out to show them a little bit more tools on how to use social media effectively, starting with their own blog for the listing of their houses that were on the market or what was coming up.

Then I worked with a few more to help them integrate creating YouTube videos of the properties. And this was really right before we saw a lot of drones hit the market. But they would create videos and then I would show them how to link them back to their websites and get the most SEO value out of that. I really enjoyed working on that aspect of things. And I certainly won’t rule it out if it would fit my schedule at this time for work like that. I just find that I really also enjoy contracting and working with the big team now, and not needing to think as much about managing all areas of my business when I also am managing diapers.

Liam: Well, that I get. It’s hard when there are little mouths that have lots of needs and they can’t manage to care for themselves except smile very happily.

Courtney: Right.

Liam: Tell us a little bit about Modern Tribe. What are you doing there, and how did that come about? That’s a highly respected organization.

Courtney: Yeah. Just two months ago, we got back from a fantastic team trip to Panama. It’s probably the highlight of my two years with them. I work primarily within what we would call the support team. So that answers questions. Like when Tara sent a question, and I noticed it was Tara, I said, “That’s my ticket. I’m going to answer that one.”

Liam: And did you just deleted it, or did you actually answer it?

Courtney: No, I definitely tried to answer that one. I think we were looking at a very unique way to customize our filter bar option.

Tara: Great memory.

Courtney: I definitely enjoy answering clients. That was something that was super well suited to the nap schedule chaos that was happening in my home. Because I had two newborns in the course of basically my time with Modern Tribe. I had my babies back to back, and we’re happily done with that now. But being able to quickly turn my computer on, clock in, do some work, and then, “oh, I got to go. Baby needs me,” clock out, go do something else and come back at any hour of the day has been really, really helpful during that time span.

Since then, I’m starting to grow into a bit more of a role managing our knowledge base. And so when people come to us with questions, we want to provide answers. They don’t have to wait on us to be able to get to that. We’re looking at some really unique ways of how we’re going to integrate that. But in the meantime, content has to be written. We’ve got new features coming out in our plugins or the screenshots change where we introduce Gutenberg. We were one of the plugins that was really pushing on getting Gutenberg out. Our developers are fantastic at jumping on something like that and running with it.

But of course, then you now have screenshots, videos, materials to support both in classic mode and in block editor mode. And what does that look like? And rushing to be one of the early people in on the market, there’s just nuances to that that we’re still ironing out, I’ll say it that way, getting things lined up visually. And making sure that a lot of the features are consistent between the two methods has been interesting.

It’s a lot to maintain a whole knowledge base that way. We’ve got over 260 articles right now and a lot of plans for more. I’ve been handling a lot of that. That still pulls into my teacher mindset, I think, of informing people how to do something in a way that meets them at their learning level.

Tara: You must be exhausted at the end of the day because it sounds like in your home and your work role, you are serving a lot of people and being asked to help people all day long. You sound like you stay home with your kids and work from home. Do they go to preschool or do you have care for them in the house? Or you’re juggling it all?

Courtney: I work at this point about 15 to 20 hours a week, which is nice. I can set my schedule. And outside of one or two meetings a week, it’s my schedule to set however I would like. So that’s been really great. And the support from the company has been fantastic. You know, being understanding of what that role looks like for our family has been huge. That’s a rare come by. I think even the culture there is a rare combine – even in other web agencies to similar to this.

But at the end of the day, working part-time having the children home with me, I love that I get to go do things like library story times, swim classes, all of those types of activities with my kids. And so far, no preschool yet because we were even too young for that. My oldest won’t be three until next month. I have to be on top of my schedule and know what’s going on and account for that.

Tara: You live for nap time. I can tell right now, I bet.

Courtney: Yeah. And the really early hours, my husband gets up for work at 5 am. So I’m up at the same time. I go out and I do my gardening then. I do some hobby stuff during the early hours. Or if it’s a rainy day, I work then and go out and play during nap time.

Tara: That’s great. That’s great. You said you’re going to talk to us about how you juggle your work-life balance. So you’ve described it a little bit. You have a husband who’s helpful in the morning, and you’re a good time planner. What other strategies do you have to juggle that work life, children, mom thing?

Courtney: Being a former school teacher, I can write curriculum. Being a business teacher, I already have a mindset for marketing. I wouldn’t call myself a marketing expert, but I’ve got an idea and a bit of a background and training in that. But I had to narrow my focus of what all I’m capable of doing. Because if you throw technology at me, I feel pretty comfortable to figure it out and help someone else that doesn’t know what they’re doing, figure it out too.

But I had to scale that way down and say, “What is manageable for this season per right now? What am I okay with doing because I’ve got this set of priorities? And where do I want to grow into and what do I want to do? And can I find some work that will let me grow with it as the situation evolves here at home?” That’s been a big benefit for us.

Likewise, knowing what’s on the calendar, planning in quiet dedicated work hours. If we’ve got a big product release going on, that tends to involve a bit more work on my end, getting all my material in and ready. So a lot of open lines of communication with our developers making sure that I’ve got enough of a heads up to give the other people that proofread things a heads up, making sure that I don’t plan too many activities for my family the days right before something going on.

And just again, stopping to reflect on what are my priorities, what’s going to bring a good balance to home, to work, to all of these things, and making decisions from that. I really have to rein myself in because I want to do all the things all the time all at once. And that doesn’t work well.

Liam: It sounds like you’re very structured. I want to ask a question as it relates to Gutenberg and documentation for The Events Calendar, and being a mom of two young babies. Gutenberg, perhaps not as much anymore, but in the earlier days changed daily, weekly, fortnightly. I can imagine a situation where Modern Tribe wants to launch version x, point y of its plugin on Tuesday, and Sunday evening, a new Gutenberg update comes out and it moves that one piece that you’re talking about in all of your screenshots and short videos. Has that happened? And if so, not to place blame, the question then becomes is how do you manage all of that if you’ve kept off life family schedule because the product of x point y is coming out? But that’s you have to go back and redo the four-hour work you’ve already done or the two or whatever the time block. How does that all work for you? And how do you not just pack it all in and say, “All right, we’re moving to the mountains, I’m out”?

Courtney: Oh, we’ve had those days. Actually, it hasn’t been Gutenberg. It was WooCommerce just a few weeks ago. They shifted update right around the time that we were about to integrate some newer features. I focus within The Events Calendar family of plugins. I’m now focusing in on event tickets, event tickets plus, community events and community tickets. So those are four plugins that I’ll deal with if you want to sell or get an RSVP free thing on your website and sell a ticket.

So we had a big release coming out, and we had to postpone it basically about a week just a couple weeks ago because we shipped something. It really didn’t so much impact the knowledge base type of work, thankfully. But what we are doing a little bit more proactively now, whether it is looking at our third-party integrations like with Woo, or core integrations, such as WordPress, I personally am running a staging site locally for all of my testing and checking client issues that is the Bleeding Edge [nightly?]. Risks with that because Bleeding Edge [Nightly?] mean that I might turn it on, and the next time it runs and update, the whole thing is broken. But the flip side is I get a quick eye on what’s coming, and if we’re having a conflict with that. So some of us are doing some testing like that.

Other times it is reading the release posts over on the P2 on the Make site, looking at what’s coming, waiting until maybe… the developers usually wait a little bit more towards release candidate status before they start doing conflict testing on things, especially if we’ve got a big feature coming out. So those are some of the ways that as a company overall we’re handling things as far as the knowledge base. Thus far, I haven’t run into a whole lot of issues other than now I just need to go back and show the blocks way to do all the same things again. That’s been the main issue.

Tara: You’ve got your eye on a lot of things. I’m going to transition over to the question that we asked everyone about success, because you’ve talked about what you do in your job and at home. Would you share with us, Courtney, how you define success, whether it is in your personal life as a mom, as a wife, as a person, and/or as an employee of a company, as a teacher? Any or all of the above. Maybe they all fit together somehow. But how do you define success?

Courtney: I think that I would look at it as, “have I done my best in all the areas that are my responsibility that I am committing to taking care of or taking a part in? Have I done my best? And have I gotten the support maybe that I need along the way? Anything that impacts other people, is it working out also with them?”

So if I were to take that down to my toddler – and one of them has some sensory processing issues, he was born prematurely, and we think it’s probably tied to that – the way his senses work is a little bit different than when you or I would have those same experiences. So transitions, we come home from one activity and we start doing something else, or there’s nothing on the schedule, we’re staying home to play. And oh, it’s raining, so now our normal routine is thrown off.

If I just decide to bully my way through, and “here’s what we’re doing today” with no transition for him that’s at his speed, that’s not going to work. I might say I did my best to try and do something constructive with that time with him, but if it doesn’t come off to him that well, then I need to work on what’s that look like, how does that work out.

The same thing would be true even in a work context for me. If I do my best, but ultimately, it wasn’t what the company needed, then I might need to get some support or do something different. I just have to be real about what are the facts of where we are, where do we want to go, and how are we in that process, I guess.

Tara: It’s interesting the way that you describe working with your toddler, and with your education background. I’m thinking that that must really come into play as well. It must be part of your personality, but doing customer support, you probably have people like your toddler. You know, people that you need to sort of discern that they’re really frustrated, and they’re not being nice to you, and you can’t take it personally.

I certainly have been guilty of sending some very frustrated emails to support people and then later realizing that I was out of line for being so frustrated. On the other hand, when you’re really frustrated, it’s hard to hide that sometimes. Do you think about that when you’re working with frustrated people? Most people who are asking for support probably are frustrated at least a little bit maybe or curious?

Courtney: Yeah. We’ve had a couple of people come in that, frankly, got fired as clients. I’ll say that. If they’re just flat out belittling somebody, if they’re unkind repeatedly, and a manager’s warning does not ease them, we might part ways with that client. But overall, most people come in, they may not necessarily be really happy to interact with us because they need something, but they come in and have at least a polite tone of voice.

When you get a question that is a little more irate, you have to brush it off. I think of myself in that situation like I’m the substitute teacher, and the kid is just livid about why the teacher is out and what’s going on, and what kind of a ruckus can I make to get my problem solved or get what I want. As best as I can, I try and just smile and help them. Physically, I try to smile. Even though I’m sitting there typing, it’s like, I have to think of how do I help this person, hears their need, and even if their emotions are all in the way, how do I get the answer to them. Sometimes that turns a customer around and they decide because you helped me this way, I want to put your product on all my other sites, or I want to increase my product usage to include other plugins. We’ve seen some of that happen. So it’s just a mindset shift to have I think sometimes about that.

Tara: And you’re also not face to face with them. Do you miss that interaction from being a teacher in a school where you are actually seeing people’s face light up when they figure something out?

Courtney: I think I lean on that need being fulfilled with our team meetings. I have two meetings a week, roughly, that are FaceTime with people. So I still get a little bit of that interaction there. If I’ve got a lot of upset customers, I certainly don’t miss seeing faces like that.

Liam: Fair enough. Fair enough. I want to flip back, if I can, Courtney, and talk a little bit about sensory processing. My own son has challenges in that area. And one of the things that you said, struck me is really important, and probably helps. And I want to ask you, but I wonder if it helps with the work you’re doing for Modern Tribe and support. You were talking about when something doesn’t go as planned for any number of reasons in the family schedule/life, you need to think about the way that your son thinks about things, even though it is very different to the way that your brain works. And you need to be cognizant of that and come up with a plan that will address that.

Certainly, I appreciate that very much in my own family. And it’s really enabled me to take whatever comes at me and say, “What is going on here?” Not “Why am I being yelled at?” And I just kind of wonder what your son might have taught you about that and how that plays into technical support, customer support at Tribe.

Courtney: Oh, that’s a good one. My son and students that I’ve had along the way, students that have similar situations, a lot of times this shows up in ADHD and autism. Even independently of those two, it can show up. So just realizing and having that empathy and that understanding of not just everybody else’s got different learning styles. But then you add to it, the sensory thing, and that amplifies the need to address their learning styles to have empathy.

And I think that my son very much puts it front and center in my mind it’s the time to practice it all the time for me. I can’t just think about it, and then at the end of the day, like I’m a school teacher, pack my bag and go home. I’m home with him all the time. And so, I’m the one coming up with the schedule and the routine. We’re in the early years, so I’m the one wrangling all of that. But it’s a nonstop thing.

You need to be aware of when you’re with other people what they need as well. And sometimes that is a very direct conversation that is at their current ability level. My son can’t always express everything in his head. But most adults, you can ask them and say, “I don’t mean to be in any way offensive, I want to be very understanding of your situation. Can you help me figure out how to better help you?”

So with customers, sometimes that is a very clear, “here’s how to take a screenshot, please don’t hold your phone up to your computer or whatever. Don’t attach it in a Word file because I don’t have that, but here’s a good tool to go use to take a screenshot. Please send me exactly what you’re seeing. Or if you can take a video, here’s where to take a video, send that to me, and I’ll better understand how I can help you. I could see what you can see then.” To the best of my ability. I tried to practice that, but…

Liam: Yeah, that’s a good practice. I feel like I could talk about this for hours. But in the interest of our conversation, Courtney, let me ask you about advice. The question I’d like to ask you is, what advice have you been given or received or read and successfully implemented in your life? What’s the best advice that you’ve ever implemented?

Courtney: I would bring this back into my faith, and I would say to love others. The way that I would look at my faith is to say, to love others the way that God loves us. As a Christian that meant even going to a great sacrifice, and to still see that there’s a value. I mean, to be willing to take such a drastic measure, and I’m not saying that everybody needs to go to that degree necessarily, but to be willing to have such compassion and empathy, that you will go through so much for people that are not necessarily right in front of you at that moment in time, that’s still pretty profound.

I think in my own daily life, it’s expressing that empathy and compassion, whether it’s here at home with people I know all the time, with my coworkers that I interact with frequently, or if it’s a total stranger that I meet. I don’t necessarily need to get into the intricacies of their life, but I need to see the value of that person and to be able to express empathy at the right moment.

Liam: That’s good advice. That’s not always easy to do with people we don’t know intimately, especially if they’re irritating us, not a lot of us. To see them as human beings worthy of value, that’s hard to do.

What’s the technique or a tip that that… you know, how do you pinch yourself, so to speak, to remind yourself to do it when you’re just about to do something you don’t want to do? How do you work that back? How do you remind yourself? How do you follow that advice in the moment?

Courtney: In the moment, I’ve gotten to a point – and this was good practice in the classroom – of just taking a very quick second inwardly to say, “Okay, I need to calm down,” take a deep breath, step away from the situation. When dealing with children that have been crying for two and a half hours, sometimes I need to literally just go quickly to the restroom by myself, and they will deal with themselves. And I’ll come back out and I’ll be a little more composed.

With another adult, if I have said something, and I realized, “Whoops, I shouldn’t have said that,” to go back to them after the fact and say, “Oh, I’m sorry, if that came off weird. That wasn’t my intent.” and not pursue the conversation any further than it has to go. Just to acknowledge, “Whoops, I messed up. And let’s work on this.”

Tara: Yeah, it’s good communication. That’s central to most things. And you’ve talked a lot about empathy. And I think that also is at the root of a lot of good relationships. So thank you for sharing that with us. And thank you for sharing your story with us today. We are out of time already, Courtney. I don’t know how that went by so fast. But it’s really been a pleasure getting to know you a little bit better and hearing about what you do with your day. Where can people find you online?

Courtney: You can reach me on twitter, @courtneyengle.

Tara: Okay. And we can also put in support tickets on Modern Tribe event tickets and probably hear from you there as well.

Courtney: We’ve changed our process and I can no longer cherry pick and say, “I know Tara.” Sad.

Tara: I know how to find you on Slack. Thanks so much, Courtney. Really enjoyed chatting with you today. Have a great day.

Courtney: Thanks. You too.

Liam: Thanks, Courtney. What a pleasure. Have a great day. 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.

Starting from the back of a van while touring the world with his band, Vito made the transition from a freelancer to an agency, growing to six figures by the end of year one, and to a team of 12 by the end of year three.

Website | WP Feedback

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 105.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Vito Peleg. Starting from the back of a van while touring the world with his band, Vito later made the transition from a freelancer to an agency, growing to six figures by the end of year one, and to a team of 12 by the end of year three. He is now focused on WP Feedback. Welcome Vito.

Vito: Hi. How are you doing? It’s great to be here, guys.

Tara: We’re so glad to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What an interesting introduction! I want to hear more.

Vito: Yeah, sure. Like Liam said, I started by building websites for clients from the back of a van. Actually my first experience with website was when I was 14. I was experimenting with like HTML and CSS, building something for skateboarding crew that I had when I was in school. That was back in GeoCities, even way before WordPress was even born.

The first time that I actually started doing this professionally, was while I was touring. And that was a kind of cool story because the band that I started with also kind of got known through digital and through the stuff that I’m doing right now with the agency and with a new product that I’m working on. And really quickly within a span of literally 30 days after we launched a digital campaign from my hometown – I’m from Israel, originally – we got signed here in the UK. That allowed us all to move on to here and start touring the world.

We went through the standard band process. We started with like 10 people in the crowd, then a few dozens, a few hundreds, a few thousands. And then the band broke up one day. Even though it looked like we were making it, and we were selling albums, and we’re touring and doing exactly what we wanted, we were all still very much broke. There was no money in that thing. That’s what drove me into starting building websites for clients after people saw what I did with the band and the activity that I’ve done online.

Once the band broke up, I said, “Okay. I was a bit lost for a little while trying to figure out what’s the next step. I’ve been into music for 15 years up until then, and I figured out I already have a little pool of clients here in London. So let’s see how far I can take this thing.”

I went for it. Within the first year, like Liam said, I already broke the six-figure mark that I put as a goal for myself before I started. Then I just kept scaling up, get scaling up, bringing on more projects and more and more people. And that’s when things started becoming a little dicey when it comes to managing multiple projects at the same time, and getting the clients to do what we need from them in order for us to progress the project. I’m sure you guys know what I’m talking about.

While I was doing the investigation of where does all the profit go when we have a team of 12 and everything should be running smoothly by that point, I noticed that it always came down to client communications. That was the source of all evil. So I really researched that and go right into it and try to figure out why this is happening and why this is breaking down.

The more I looked into it, I saw that it’s a huge, huge issue within our ecosystem, in the WordPress community, especially, mostly because most of us, when we start working on websites, we kind of want to do things, we just want to design, we just want to do something creative. And once we start, we realize that we’re not really our own bosses like we thought we would be. That now we have multiple bosses that are kind of pulling us in different directions. And unless we have a really structured way of pushing them down this process, things become a nightmare.

That’s when WP Feedback came to fruition with the idea of taking everything that is good about the process that we tried over a course, a few years, which is using emails, which was really efficient for us. And specifically using a support desk. But in terms of getting all the information we need, the best way was either screencasting, or with Zoom or Skype or stuff like that, or through having the client sitting right next to us.

So with WP Feedback, we took the advantages of each one and created a hybrid that allows people to literally put stickers on the live website – kind of like Post IT notes for your own website. And it collects a lot of crucial data for us as developers and as designers like… First of all, it binds the request to a div so exactly where the problem is. Wherever you’re coming from, you’re being redirected to the exact location where you see it with your own eyes. It also tells you which screen size the client was on, which browser he had on. So we’re basically killing all of this back and forth communications with clients, and making things just a lot finer and easier for both sides – for the client and for us. That’s where we are now.

Liam: That’s awesome. WP Feedback sounds really cool. I absolutely want to hear about that more. First, I’m a music fan. So I need to hear about your band. Let’s talk about it. What kind of music? What style? What did you play? Were you the singer? Talk to us a little bit about that.

Vito: I was the lead singer and a guitar player. I was all so the manager and the guy that does all the marketing. It’s like you’re having a small business. You do everything, especially when in an indie band, only that you have four guys with you that need to work for free. That makes it even harder to manage.

The band was a hard rock band. We’re influenced by AC/DC, and Guns N’ Roses and that kind of stuff with a bit of a modern twist to it. Yeah, very, very niche. I think that actually worked to our advantage. Because, same as with business and with agencies, the more you niche down, the easier it is to find your audience and speak directly to them. It just came to be like that because that’s the music we grew up on and that’s the music we love listening to. You know, Zeppelin and AC/DC and all this kind of stuff.

Liam: Is any of your band’s music online still?

Vito: Yes. On YouTube, you can find a bunch of videos. It’s called Chase the Ace. Also on Spotify, I think it’s still up there.

Liam: Wow. We’re going to pause this recording while I go to YouTube.

Vito: We were good. We’re pretty good. For the time, that was an amazing experience to have.

Tara: Do you still play music on your own? Are you in the band now just for fun?

Vito: Now it’s just for fun. Usually, between my wife and I, she’s an amazing singer. Much, much better than I ever was. At home in the evenings, we just jam together. I’m on the piano and the guitar, and she sings. That’s the extent of my music career at this point.

Tara: That’s good that you have that sort of unwinding thing. Do you work long hours? Your office is not your home? Or is it?

Vito: It was for years. Up until last year, we were…even all the guys were coming to my home. We had a room that started as being like just my own room, but then just adding more tables and stuff. Pretty much like the rooms that you guys are sitting in, only with four other people in the same space. We were bumping into each other every time. But now we have our offices here in London. I have the team in house and there’s a bunch of people abroad as well. So it’s divided between this and that.

I am working crazy hours, but I like it. I enjoy working and I don’t see it as a chore or as something that I’m wasting something. I’m actually looking at it as I’m investing into something that I like and I believe in.

Tara: How was the transition for you working for yourself and growing quickly, as it seems like you did and now having a staff? How have you learned to make that adjustment, manage other people, have the commitment of paying other people, all of those things, and then also transitioning from a client service business to now a product business? Talk a little bit about that transition.

Vito: It wasn’t an easy transition at all. More than anything, I would say it’s mindset. Because once you are in control of everything, being a freelancer, being a one-man band, I mean, you kind of feel that you have the responsibility over every little aspect of the business. And as you grow, as you scale, you need to relinquish this power and actually, give the employees the power to do what they feel is right and what they feel they need to do to expand themselves as well.

That was a tough thing to crack. At first, I was really micromanaging. And even when it comes to design, “You should move this logo three pixels to the right, and you should move that thing.” So that was hard to stop doing. And I think you said something really true, Tara. When it comes to having this team with you, you have a huge overhead that you need to maintain every single month. I kind of use that overhead as the driving force for the growth.

So whenever I felt that I can, even though I didn’t have enough work to give to another employee, whenever I felt that it’s going to happen soon, I hired someone already. Then it just kind of pushed me to bring in more work and systemized things better, so that once the end of the month comes, I’m not pulling my hair out.

About the transition to a product, once the team was already here, and as we were doing more and more client work, we got some really interesting projects over the years. It was still really hard to manage on a larger scale. And I think everyone talks about this kind of glass ceiling that the agency model has, that you reach like 20k, 25k per month, and then from there, it’s just a nightmare to scale further. And that’s usually because you have so many moving parts with the agency model. And people have their own desires, they have their own plans, they have their own way of doing things. So managing clients on a high scale and managing the team on a high scale became really hard.

That’s actually when I really looked into it. Like I said, the idea for WP Feedback came from that specific problem. Even though I knew that the next step for me, if I want to keep growing, I have to go product. And this is something that is really important to understand. That if you really want to go big, the agency model is not the right place to be. It’s not a sustainable model for years to come, that you can actually keep expanding your activity every single month.

In terms of also systems that you have in place, even driving clients in, everything is customized. Even if you niche down and you know who your target audience is, we build our solution based on the request of the client. So you can’t really do something that is out of the box, if you will.

So every time it’s just reinventing yourself. Which is a huge and an amazing learning experience, especially when you want to go into product later on because you’re basically launching products on a monthly basis, say five times a month, say 10 times a month. But once you give that product away, that’s it. You can’t profit from it anymore unless you do more work that is bound by man hours.

Liam: Let me ask you a question about building a team. You built a team to provide a service. So you’re an agency, you’re delivering design and development and probably some related consultancies. And there are people who really like the service side of that, the human interaction, the “Hey, this is a new problem that we’ve never dealt with, let’s go and solve it as a team.” Those aren’t necessarily the same people who want to make a product. Not to say that that product doesn’t create challenges or that it can’t be team building or anything. I’m not a product person, but product is you’re working on some actual data software, and you’re trying to fine tune that software, you’re listening to people who use it and trying to make that better. You’re not providing a service. You’re not answering one client’s business need.

Vito: Exactly.

Liam: How has the transition for your team been? Have you gotten anybody say, “Hey, Vito, you hired me to be a designer for clients and I love that one day we’re working with this agency and the next month we’re working with that kind of firm, and then we’re working with the local council, and then we’re doing this. Now all I’m doing is building UI for a product.” How have you managed that? How does your team flow through that?

Vito: The bigger we grew; I went for bigger projects. So it got to a point where we were working on… other than the new clients that are coming in and getting those smaller websites, let’s say, we had already a few pillars within the business, which are products or businesses that require us to do modifications and to expand and add more features on a monthly basis. So we had some of that already by that point.

Liam: Exactly you were building someone else’s product? Am I understanding you correctly?

Vito: Yes. We joined with a few startup founders that didn’t really have… well, it was basically just selling out hours to them. But they weren’t really technical people, so they needed a technical guy on their side or technical agency on their side to get their vision out there. And the vision evolved like a product should have.

I keep telling this to my clients. That website never ends. It’s always an iterative process to make it better and to increase the value that you and your visitors can get out of it. So we did a lot of that. But to be honest, and I think that the guys would agree with me here. As soon as we moved to the product, things became so much easier. It’s unbelievable.

When you make a sale, that’s it. When you’re doing an agency work, you make a sale, and then a storm starts and everything starts moving, and all of these pieces need to work together properly. There’s a lot more laid back feeling to it when it comes to development. And you can focus on things that you believe will actually drive this thing forward. Even though we’re listening to the customers, especially WP Feedback, this is the main value that extended here.

So within the Facebook group, most of the features that we’re launching are just based on customer requests, and people that are telling me that this would be amazing for their workflow. And if a few people like that post, boom, it’s done a week or two weeks later.

Liam: Cool. It’s a lot more laid back. And it’s a lot easier to manage on a larger scale. I can’t fault this model, maybe because it’s really new to me. So I haven’t seen everything still burning and crashing down like I experienced with the freelancing model and with the agency model sometimes. But for now, everything is incredible.

Liam: That’s awesome. I like that. We’ve talked about going from band member to freelancer, to agency owner, to product owner. And that’s been a journey. And as you were just touching on, it seems to be a journey of success, and inevitably success comes on the back of heartaches and challenges overcome.

Vito: Exactly.

Liam: I wonder with that in mind if you can share your definition of success with us, please. Whether it’s a personal definition or a professional definition, or a mix of both.

Vito: I would say there are two things to it. In terms of what is the success as the goal, what is the goal and there’s the way of how do you get there. What you need to get there. I would say that passion is the most, most important thing. Every time that I felt that I’m not doing something that I really enjoy doing, I didn’t stop, because that’s not a good thing for business. But I already started looking for the next step and what I can do to improve my experience of my business, and how I can reach further. So passion is number one. There’s nothing that can replace that.

After that, I would say that its focus. This is something that I learned…I already had this entrepreneurial spirit. When I was even younger, and even in school, I always had these things happening, these little schemes running. As I grew, I learned that the more you focus, the more you decide on one thing that you’re going to be the best in the world in, that’s a lot more powerful than trying to split your energy and split your resources to five different ventures, five different ideas. And it took me years to actually implement this because I was all over the place for years.

Liam: Well, focus can be hard to develop. If passion and focus are the tools of success, what’s the single most important thing you can do every day to be successful?

Vito: The best thing that you can do is have a daily plan. The way that I would say is what I like to do is I plan tomorrow, today. That’s how I call it. So every evening, I just sit down and figure out, “Okay, what’s going to happen tomorrow?” I also have my 30-day attack plan, as I like to call it, which is like every 30 days you have the goals for the month, and what you need to achieve by the end of this month. The daily thing is just a breakdown of the plan that you’ve done before that.

But by doing this, you’re not thinking. Again, it comes back to that focus. You don’t need to spread yourself too thin if you are just executing. If you know what the days looks like, and you just follow the plan that you stated a day before, and you just follow your own instructions, then you’re not going to end up spending an hour on Facebook mindlessly scrolling down. Or if something wasn’t done, you wouldn’t allow yourself to go and watch Netflix or do these kinds of stuff that are just sucking out energy in my mind. So planning generates focus, and execution generates success.

Tara: Yeah. Is that something that you learned as you’ve grown this business? Or did you have this same model when you were in your band – you always been organized and productive focused?

Vito: I was very productive focused, but I was very far from being organized. It was all like things were just thrown my way, and I’ll just be turning fires and just running with different ideas and every new shiny thing was just was drawing me to it. I had to learn it.

And it’s something that you do over time. I guess the more you’re in business, or the more you’re doing entrepreneurial activities, you’re recognizing patterns. You see the ups and you see the lows, and you’re starting seeing things from a little bigger perspective that allows you to not jump on everything that comes your way and just say, “Okay, this will pass because I saw with similar stuff that happened. And if not, I can jump on the bandwagon later on, and that will still be fine. So right now, I’m just going to focus on what I already planned on doing.” It took a long time to get this down.

I still need structure and discipline to make it happen every day. It’s not easy. It’s a lot easier to just end up walking around talking to the team, just scrolling on Facebook and doing all these kind of random things. But it all comes down to just that list. I knew that at 1:30 today, I’m meeting you guys. So there’s no way I’m going to lose my focus on that.

Tara: Right. Well, it sounds like that’s probably helped you get to where you are with your company and with your business. Do you use it at all to help you stop working? Because I can tell you’re passionate about what you’re doing. And you said that you work a lot and that you love it. But you’ve also said that you love music and you’re able to spend time in the evenings doing that. So do you structure that to force yourself to stop working? For me, that’s important, and I’m not very good at it. So I’m wondering if you have any tips or if you’re successful in that way.

Vito: And I’m not that successful in that way. I do keep working. If something needs to be done, I’ll make it happen. That’s my mindset around this. Even if it means trying to work on a Saturday or a few more hours later. I just try to make sure that the load that I’m giving myself will be spread out throughout the week. So I don’t need to do that. But especially now with the launch and everything, hours are piling up because once I finished my day stuff, then the other stuff are still there. The stuff that didn’t get attention while I was focused doing my day to day work, like replying to sales requests or making sure that everything is happening on plan with the roadmap and all of these kinds of things that are just on top.

Running Facebook ads, that’s now the big focus for me in the past few days. So I would say that in addition to the action to the intense action hours of the day, I do have a couple of hours that are allocated to learning. And whatever is left after that, I try to make it happen. If not, they’re just going to be rolled over to the next day because I didn’t plan tomorrow today.

But I think that learning is a huge, huge part of this. And this is something that I never stopped doing. I love buying courses. This is another passion of mine. I buy courses, and I just implement as much as I can. Even if it’s a massive course, and I can only take two nuggets, two gold nuggets out of it, that’s fine with me. I’ll just take these and say thank you and move on to the next piece of information I can consume.

Tara: That’s a lot of information. You’ve shared a lot of good ideas and thoughts and I guess in its own way advice with us, which is something else that we ask our guests to share. And that’s if you’ve received any advice that has been really meaningful and helpful to you that you’ve incorporated into your life that you can share with us. Is there one thing that comes to mind when you approach your day or your business that has really stuck with you that you can share?

Vito: Yes. I have my inspiration wall. I can show you guys because I have the camera here. But this is something that… Let me show you. My entire office wall is like a huge cork… What do you call that? Cork wall?

Liam: Corkboard. You have it. Corkboard.

Vito: Exactly. It’s a wallpaper of corkboard where I just add all of my ideas and all of my aspirations. So whenever I look up, it’s there right in front of me with my immediate goals. This is something that I took from Sam Ovens, who has an amazing course. I don’t know if you heard of this guy. But he is the guy behind consulting.com. His course is just incredible.

He talked about just having a small corkboard with a few ideas next to you. But I exaggerated it as I often do. So now the whole wall is just filled with ideas and concepts and my client avatars and my funnels and my journey from before until three years ahead and my immediate goal in terms of how much revenue per month, my immediate goal in terms of how many clients or users. Now it’s changed to users. Everything is up there.

Liam: Is that overwhelming at all?

Vito: Actually, it gives you clarity because instead of shuffling through your mind, which that’s… Because my mind is racing, or it’s always racing with kind of different stuff all the time. And just having it out there and knowing that this is what I need to look at and this is what I need to focus actually gives you a lot more clarity than trying to run these ideas again and again.

Liam: Yeah, I can see that where if it’s up there, and it’s clearly laid out, – we got a quick view of it, but it looked like it was pretty well structured – that it would be helpful to have those regular reminders.

Vito: Yeah, yeah. I try to go there like once. There’s even something cool here that within the beta group while we’re doing this product, I posted something on there. As soon as you post something on a Facebook group, you can see who saw it. As soon as you click there’s who seen this post. So as soon as I click there, literally seconds after there was only like five people in there, but they all look the same. So it’s all like black and white pictures, scruffy, had a bit of a beard, bald, most of them. Liam, you’re exactly my target audience.

Liam: I don’t have a scruffy beard. I trimmed it today. I trimmed it. Come on now.

Vito: That kind of laid back, not suited up kind of people. So I took this picture, and I was like, “Oh my god, this is so amazing.” I printed it out and now it’s there on the wall. So I see these five people every time I go into the office. And these are my bosses as of now.

Liam: Vito, we’ve got a couple of minutes left, and I want to ask you a different question. If you had a magic wand, and you could bring your band back to life and live that dream, or wave your magic wand and maybe be six months to a year down the road with WP Feedback, and everything’s going swimmingly, what would you do? What would you do? What is your heart telling you?

Vito: When it comes to the band, I wouldn’t do it again, to be honest. A lot of times when we’re doing something out of passion, we lose track of reality. Even though it was an amazing experience, and this is exactly what we imagined when we were 14 in our bedroom, jumping up and down with the guitars, it was really hard. When you live on the road and you don’t have your headquarters, it makes life tough. I wouldn’t do that again.

With WP Feedback, yes, I would jump ahead. I would definitely jump six months ahead just to see, even if it’s just put a glimpse, to see what’s going on, and to see if all the stuff that I’m doing now actually worked. Because you never know. Whatever you do, only in retrospect you can say this was a great move or not. So yeah, that I would.

Liam: Fair enough. Well, on that note, we’re going to have to leave it here because we are out of time. Vito, what an absolute pleasure getting to spend time with you today on our virtual hallway. Thank you so much for joining us.

Vito: Yeah, it was definitely my pleasure.

Tara: Thank you.

Liam: Before we say goodbye to you, Vito, please share where people can find you online.

Vito: Sure. You can go to wpfeedback.co. It’s a really revolutionary kind of tool, so you definitely want to check that out. Also if you have some questions, or you want to reach out to me, you can go to our Facebook group, which is WP Feedback Community. There’s a really interesting and a really nice buzz. This group is buzzing. I’ve done these things many times before and I haven’t really had this similar experience with how much people just love something, how they feel as passionate as I am about this product. So you should join us at the WP Feedback Community. I think that’s it.

Tara: Thank you. I look forward to checking that out, and your band.

Vito: Thanks.

Liam: Chase the Ace. Thanks, Vito. We’ll see you soon. Bye for now.

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.

Liam and Tara review the past year of the Hallway Chats podcast, discuss their views about success, share advice and announce plans for year 3.

Tara on Twitter | @taraclaeys

Liam on Twitter | @liamdempsey

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 104.

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

Liam: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re going to do something a little bit different because this is our 104th episode, which means it is our first episode of our third year of doing this podcast because we post every week. We wanted to review as we did last year, review what we’ve done and talk about some of our favorite moments perhaps and what our plans are for the future and interview each other. So here we are with episode 104.

Liam: Three years, Tara Claeys. Three years.

Tara: Already year three, it’s gone by really fast.

Liam: It has. It has. Can I ask you a question?

Tara: Yes, that’s what we’re here for.

Liam: Did you think when we were first starting to talk back in January of 2017 that we would roll in year three?

Tara: No, only because I didn’t think that far ahead. I guess you got to take some of these things one step at a time, and you keep doing it for as long as you can, or as long as you want to, which is what we’ve agreed to do on a year by year basis. So I guess since we’re starting year three, we can start by saying we are going to continue for another year, right?

Liam: Yes. Yes, we are. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely, we’re going to continue for another year. I think that’s one of the things I really liked about our approach among other things, is that we take it in stages – where are you at with life this year, do you want to do it next year one more time, rather than some kind of indefinite commitment, or “this is our ride to the top, or probably our ride to the bottom.”

It’s just let’s keep doing it while we’re having fun, while people seem to be enjoying it, while our guests are enjoying it, while our audience seems to be getting value out of it. Let’s just keep it going. That’s been a lot of fun.

Tara: How about you? Did you imagine that we would still be doing this at this point when we started?

Liam: I think my answer is going to be similar to yours. That I had learned from years of running chickenmonkeydog, kind of a silly, quirky blog that I started with my brother. We eventually had a whole number of writers and for probably the better part of at least several years, we were publishing five days a week, 52 weeks a year. And it was great, and it was fun, and it was really valuable in terms of learning to be creative, or at least productive on-demand.

But when we got to the point where life prevented that from happening, because we didn’t really say, “Hey, let’s commit to this until we can’t,” there was a lot of maybe inner turmoil or an angst on my part. Not that I lost sleep, but it just, “I really should be doing it, I really should be doing it.” And I feel by approaching Hallway Chats with a “let’s give it a year and see, let’s give it a year and see, let’s give it a year and see,” it takes that burden away and really just makes it so that we can assess it as a labor of love. And as long as it is one, we keep going.

Tara: I’m going to say this, and I don’t want it to sound like it probably will, but we set low or no expectations, which makes it easy and fun because we’re not trying to hit a goal, there’s no bar that we’re trying to reach. We’re doing this because it’s a labor of love as you said because we enjoy it. It’s something that just I think adds some variety to our otherwise business oriented day.

For me anyway, I think that’s true to have something else to schedule into the week and really to meet new people, which was really…if we did have a goal that was it. It was to meet new people and give them an opportunity to be on a podcast. So I think that’s made it easier to continue because we’re not trying to grow it or improve upon it.

Liam: I suppose I’d even add the low hurdle bar. You and I didn’t really know each other that well as we got started. We didn’t really know each other at all. We knew of each other and we could probably pick each other out of a police lineup, but that would have been about it. So I think possibly some of our reluctance to agree to more than a year was \”what if he’s a jerk after a while? What if he doesn’t do any other work?”

Tara: “What if we don’t work well together?”

Liam: Yeah, exactly.

Tara: In that regard, I think we both feel that it’s gone really smoothly and we’ve complemented each other in our skill set and our interest in what we do in terms of dividing up the not that extensive workload involved with publishing a podcast as we have been. And when I said we’re not looking to improve on it, I also didn’t mean that…I mean, we certainly do talk about how to make this better and what else you might like to do with it, but it’s not a pressure thing. I think, for me, it’s just interesting being a member of the community and working as a team the best way that we can.

Liam: I think we’ve lucked out in the way that we’ve divvied up the work between us. It’s kind of been a natural progression of you like these kinds of tasks, I don’t; I like those kinds of tasks, you don’t. And we just self-selected and it’s worked out pretty nicely. And we swapped some of the tasks from time to time, haven’t we? But we’ve never said, “I’m done with this, you have it back.”

Sometimes we said, “Hey, I can take that for a while and give you a little bit of break from the tedium of that.” But it’s been interesting from that. I mean, we’re not business partners in any sense of the word. We don’t make any money out of this. That’s not our focus. But we communicate and work together heck a lot on this, anywhere from two to four hours a week on this, don’t we?

Tara: Yeah. Yeah. Thank goodness for Slack.

Liam: Oh, yeah. That’s for sure. That’s for sure. You can always count on me to mention a tool or two on one of these shows.

Tara: That’s something I wanted to touch on because you talked about how we didn’t really have a plan to make it better, and then you kind of said, “Well, we always want to make it better but there wasn’t outside pressure to do so.” We’re not trying to hit a target or anything.

I’ve been thinking a lot in recent weeks and months. I think I mentioned it once or twice to you, around how the types of questions, the follow up questions, the responses to what our guest says, say, changes. It’d be really interesting to sit down and listen to all 103 previous episodes and see where our respective focus as individuals has changed in the two years and what that might say about ourselves.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a good point. I wonder if it has. Possibly. We do have a formula of asking a couple of the same questions each time. And hopefully that’s not getting old. I always enjoy hearing what people have to say. And I think, as we’ve talked about it among ourselves too, that answer to those questions about success and advice, I adopt some of them into my life when I hear them. And I think that one’s opinion of what success is, changes over time. So I like hearing what other people have to say about that. And sometimes it reinforces a feeling that I already have or introduces something new.

Liam: I definitely like the successful question. It’s probably my favorite. And really the different flavors that we get, and while we can group some of them together into this category, or that category, or this general message and that general message, it’s really interesting to me to see how each of our guest tweaks and tailor that to their individual situation and experience.

Tara: I agree. So you want to talk about that? Do you want to talk about success in our own views and where they are now versus a year ago?

Liam: Yeah, sure. I don’t remember. Did I ask you first? I think I asked you first.

Tara: I think I went first last time. Yes.

Liam: Do you want me to go first this time, then?

Tara: Yes, please.

Liam: All right. We both confessed to each other earlier before we hit the record button that neither of us had listened to previous episode of what we shared the year before. But as you and I were talking, Tara, I definitely went and searched the transcript and read my definition of success from last year. So that’s another reason why we should continue to do transcripts and continue to do transcripts.

Tara: Yes. Good for you. I’m going to go blind. So we’ll have to see if mine is the same or not.

Liam: If anything, I would say that my definition is the same in the last year. And I’ll get to what the definition in just a second. But the experience that I’ve had in the last year has made me all the more committed to that definition, all the more convinced of its veracity, and all the more dedicated to following that definition toward success.

And not quoting verbatim, although I quite literally could because the transcript is directly in front of me, it was really that success for me is living as mindfully as I can around my relationship with God. So being very aware of God’s presence in my life, and trying to make sure that I live accordingly. And if we wanted to turn this into a Christian podcast, we could break that down in a lot of different ways. But I’ll just leave it at that for now. It’s just really being mindful of that.

And then the way that that plays out in every situation, in everyday life, I often fail miserably at trying to live that way, but when I do live that way, it’s a great reminder of the benefit and value of doing that.

Tara: I respect that about you, that you stick with that. I think we’ve chatted with a lot of people, their faith is very central to their definition of success and happiness and their life. Well, I probably wouldn’t give that answer myself as a number one thing. It’s something that I respect, and that I do have in my life even if it’s not my number one answer.

Liam: Sure. And I think I stick with it because it works for me. It’s not that I’m sticking with it because I should believe in and I should follow that. It has had a demonstrably beneficial effect on my life in many, many different levels and no negative effects. So all the more reason to keep at it.

Tara: Right. So that’s my answer. And in advance of maybe if we do year four, I’ll have to come back and read the transcript again to see what I said. Let me ask you. You said you weren’t going to go back and look and read.

Tara: No.

Liam: So this will be all the more interesting to me.

Tara: Yeah, I did not go back.

Liam: What is your definition of success?

Tara: I think I have a vague recollection of what I said last year, which related to the idea that it changes over time. And I think my definition of success is probably not that different either than it was if I can remember what it was last year, which has to do with sort of being my best self and being better person every day. And that maybe relate to my faith and to what I believe that God has in store for me or for once how I can live my best self as it relates to say, what would Jesus do. But I think I just have an inner compass myself of how I can be the best person I can be.

I would think that over the past year that’s evolved a little bit into how can I live my life in a way that inspires other people to also want to live their best life. So by example, finding ways to give back, finding patience with people and situations in the world that are frustrating, looking at each day with a positive attitude and a hopeful attitude. All of those things, living that way can seem really corny when you’re not able to, I think, to adopt that perspective. But for me, I have found myself inspired by others who approach every day like that. And so I hope that by living that way myself I’m inspiring those around me to do the same. So that may be how my definition of success has evolved to sort of spread out beyond myself.

Liam: I like that. When you talked about this approach might be corny, I think so much of anyone’s individual definition of success. If they really truly embrace it certainly runs the risk of being corny because we’re all humans and we have a shared human experience at some level. You know, the philosophy, the approach, the mantra, the activities and aspects of life that really make your heart tick, and your life work are not necessarily going to be the same for me and the same for the next person, and the next person. They all run the risk of being corny. “Well, that will never work for me. Why would I do that?” But I love to see that you’re embracing it and living that. That’s great.

Tara: Thanks. When I say corny, I also think it can be annoying for people because right now in my life, I feel very fortunate that a lot of things are going well. And so it’s easy to say life is great and to wake up grateful for the morning and the sunshine when you have a lot to be grateful for and happy about and things are going well and you’re comfortable.

So I acknowledge that it comes from sort of a place of privilege to be able to do that. But I also believe that it’s a mindset and that you can find a positive attitude no matter what your circumstances are. There are lots of examples of that in the world. But I also believe that people who have depression and who are struggling, that the message of wake up and have a sunny day is corny and annoying, and so it’s not for everybody. But I think that at some point in everybody’s life, it’s applicable, hopefully.

Liam: I’d agree with that. And I liked the caveat around mental well-being. It’s not always easy to take a positive approach when there’s mental illness there. There are so many different causes of mental and wellness. Again, that’s a whole ‘nother episode right there if we wanted to. But yeah, I get that and I like those caveats. I liked what you’ve done that. Thank you.

Tara: Sure.

Liam: We also ask our guests about advice. The best advice that you’ve ever received. And last year, you shared a really good one that I don’t know that I share that story with people all the time or that often. That I certainly generally completely out of context, except for me because I know the backstory just tell people to be the pilot all the time now. And what the heck does that mean? Don’t worry about that, just do want to do. I love that little phrase. Be the pilot. Be the pilot.

Tara: That’s awesome. I had a sign made for my office and everything is sort of…I looked for the domain and as a matter of fact of course because we are web people. But I suppose that would still be my best advice. I was looking back at some other episodes to see and to try to remind myself of advice that other people had shared, and Rene Morozowich had shared something that had to do with sort of my view of success. The advice that she had was that you control your life, that it’s in your hands of where you’re going to take it. And so I’ve adopted that a lot into my year since we spoke with her. So I would say that’s a new piece of advice that I would share.

Liam: That’s a good one. That’s a good one. And it kind of relates back to your definition of success around keeping a positive outlook and life happens and it’s just what you make of it kind of thing.

Tara: You shared last year, I think it was something about apologizing. Being the first to apologize. That was your advice last year.

Liam: Absolutely it was. Thank you. Good memory. That was advice I had from my father. I still think that’s a really good bit of advice. It certainly, given the way I live, I have plenty of opportunities to apologize. And it’s still a good one.

But if it’s okay, I’d want to share a different one that I recently stumbled upon. It was in a book I was reading. And in advance of this conversation, I was kind of flipping through the various books I’m reading trying to find it, and I can’t. So I don’t know what book it was in. So I can’t give attribution.

But it was around the virtue of humility. What I paraphrased from it is that humility is a virtue that has to be lived publicly. Humility is a virtue that has to be lived publicly – practiced publicly. That really caught my attention. A couple of years ago, a few years ago, my colleague, Lauren Pittenger and I spent, I don’t even know how many hours coming up with keywords and a mission statement for LBDesign, my company. One of our core words, our core values was humility.

That’s a virtue that speaks a lot to me in that it’s easy to get on our high horse and say, “Look at the great things going on around this. We made this all happen, aren’t we awesome?” But it’s the humility that saysI got here because other people helped, I got here because I was given opportunities, I got here because this person blocks that person that enabled me to go over there.

And not to say that we didn’t work hard or to denigrate our own contributions to our success, but in every level just kind of stripping ourselves back and in a positive way knowing our place in the universe. And not in our knowing our place, like, “Know your place, Liam. That’s above you.” I don’t mean that. But just kind of how we stand, we’re no better than anybody else. And not an intrinsic worth.

And practicing that in public is something I’ve been trying to work on in the recent years. And that’s not easy for me to do. But then to read that, and to have that put succinctly, that humility is a virtue that has to be practiced in public. That’s my additional advice for the start of year three.

Tara: I have a couple of thoughts about that. My initial thought was that that’s interesting, of course, because that seems like it’s relating to the idea of leading by example. That you are inspiring others to be humble by being humble yourself, which is grooving with my view of success at the moment. But I also wonder, as a business owner, how that applies to your business.

I find when I am on a call with potential clients now, as I’ve gotten better at what I’m doing, and really passionate about what I’m doing and feel like I’m decent at it, to be humble a little bit there but not completely. How do you combine humility with selling yourself as being good at what you do, and giving yourself credit for doing a good job for something in order to get a new business?

Liam: I think humility is often confused and conflicted with other virtues and vices. Humility isn’t saying I don’t know what I’m doing. Humility isn’t saying I shouldn’t be or I don’t belong. Humility isn’t constantly self-deprecating…

Tara: No. Sorry to interrupt you. I’m not saying that. I’m saying it’s also not saying, “Look at how great I am. Isn’t that humility or not?”

Liam: You know, I think that’s part of it. But I would put humility more in kind of going back to what I said briefly earlier is knowing our place in the universe and in existence and where we stand. In that sense, as a human being, I have a certain worth and value. And my value is no more than yours or any other human beings. Whether they’re the best, most generous self-giving person in the world, or the least, their intrinsic value is still the same. Instrumental value can vary differently. And certainly, somebody who is always giving them themselves has a great instrumental value than somebody who is always taking and being mean and being vicious.

So when I talk about humility, it’s really knowing and appreciating that I am just one part of everything, and the part that I have is for me to discern my role in that. Talking about a client meeting, I have the opportunity to help these clients get to wherever they want to go. And with the skills and experience and knowledge that I’ve gained over the years, I can help them get there.

I also know that I’m not the only one that can help them get there and that I may not even be the best person to help them get there. And I’m certainly not the best at the types of services that I provide. But I also can know even humbly so that that which I do provide, because I’m willing to work hard, because I willing to learn, I’m willing to come at it in a way that enables me to continue to get better at it, that I can still bring real value to them. So I can talk about it candidly and openly without failing to be humble.

Tara: That’s helpful.

Liam: That’s the theory anyway, Tara. That’s the theory.

Tara: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s important to have confidence when you are running your own business and selling your services to someone. You need to be confident about that. And so I guess maybe where’s the line between confidence and lack of humility? What’s the opposite of humility?

Liam: Probably false pride. I kind of think of humility and confidence, maybe like some example of Bruce Lee, that great martial artist who was renowned as one of the fastest martial artists. Any really skilled martial artists that I’ve ever met had a quiet, humble confidence. They didn’t need to show off their martial art skills, or their punching or their kicking, or how they could kill me with half a pinky without even trying. That last bit is a bit silly. But they didn’t have to show off their skills because they were confident in them.

And the way that they presented themselves, the way that they talked about it, the way that they tried to share their knowledge with me made it very clear, that holy cow, this woman is an amazing martial artist. That’s amazing. But that martial artist didn’t say, “Look at me, I’m so fast, I could kill you in a second with my pinky.” That’s kind of the difference. It’s not that we can’t be confident. We can what we know in our instrumental value. But we presented in a way that reflects our limitations.

Tara: We could really talk about this a lot because then my mind goes to you and I both are in marketing, so there you also are responsible for telling everybody how great your clients are. So not to belabor the point, but it’s an interesting conversation.

Liam: Oh, it totally is. And we see that, right? Somebody goes so over the top with their marketing that it just comes across as disingenuous.

Tara: Right. And you always hear that your headlines, your messaging should be talking about how you’re going to help someone not how great you are. So I guess that applies to the idea that you’re talking about? Of course, clients usually want to talk about how great they are.

Liam: It’s just shifting the needle a few degrees. Not so much we are great but we’ve got to deliver great results for our clients.

Tara: Good point.

Liam: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Tara: Let us talk about year three.

Liam: Let’s. We’ve mentioned probably in the previous episode – not previous 103 but previous from last year – that one of our challenges really is around finding guests who we don’t previously know. Not that we don’t like people that we know, but we really do want to get out into the far corners from us. All those respectively far corners are the center of their own, and rightfully so. But all the different places and people where WordPress thrives and exists even, we want to get there.

We have struggled, in addition to running our own businesses and having our families in our lives, to schedule guests and meet guests in a timeframe that doesn’t leave a scrambling a lot of times, which from a labor of love perspective, at some level reduces the love of the labor.

Tara: And we are committed to the schedule that we set for ourselves. So while we don’t have thousands and thousands of followers who are going to say, “Where’s the podcast?” on Thursday at 5:30 in the morning.  They’re not sitting there waiting for it. So I think, in reality, if we were to have missed a week, or published a day late, it would not have been anything anyone would have been disappointed about. I don’t think. Except for we have committed to this, and you and I both sort of have a sense of duty in that way.

So It’s great that we have not really missed the mark on that, at least not intentionally, at all. And so that’s been a good thing. But it has been more challenging in the last few months to schedule guests to publish every week.

Liam: To that end, we are going to revert back to actually our original plan. We were originally going to publish twice a month, every other week, once a fortnight. And we did that for one episode, and then we got a really nice positive response so we switched to weekly. But for the next year, we’re going to publish every other week.

We think this will be a benefit in a number of different ways. One, it’ll be a little bit easier on us logistically. I’ve certainly noticed that depending on what’s happening in my life, I don’t always have the time that I would like to dedicate to sharing each of the podcasts that comes out. I feel like I do some of our guests more of a disservice by not tweeting as often as the previous guests or maybe the previous guests before that. And it’s not because I didn’t like that show or I didn’t want to share that show or I thought less of this guest over that guests. It’s more just life had me, deadlines had me, I tweeted when I could.

If we can spread the tweeting out over and the social media sharing and promotion out over two weeks instead of one, that makes it a little bit easier for us to treat all of our guests equally.

Tara: Yes. And from a technical standpoint, it’s twice a month preparing the episode. So doing the audio, and then we have someone who transcribes for us, and go through, and edit that and prepare it for publication. So that workload gets cut in half as well as the expense of that. Which is our main expense with this podcast is the transcription, which we do because we feel it’s important to offer a transcription of the entire episode that people can read. It’s more accessible. And so we’re committed to that. But it is a significant expense. So it’s not our main reason for going to twice a month, but it does reduce our cost.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely it does. But I would just kind of like that really it’s the timing, and it’s the finding the guests that’s proving the challenge. Tara and I have shared in a number of WordCamp talks that we’ve given what our costs here, and this isn’t the place to talk about that. But we’ve agreed at the start of every year, “are you prepared to cover your half of the cost? Is that something you want to do? and we always do that. But the real challenge is finding guests and because of the commitment, and the fact that we want to honor that commitment, I would definitely feel bad if we were on a Thursday and our podcast didn’t go out. I would not be pleased with that. I’d be disappointed in myself for that.

So this makes it a little bit easier for us to reach that without sacrificing the quality and our commitment. And it’s only a one-year commitment. So who knows, maybe next year we’re going to be a daily podcast.

Tara: Maybe.

Liam: Or probably not.

Tara: So with that in mind, since our main impetus for making this timing change was because it’s been a little bit frazzled to get people scheduled at the last minute, we are always looking for guests and it would make it really helpful if we could have scheduled out into future weeks several guests that we could then prepare and do in advance rather than at the last minute.

So I’d like to put a call out for people. If you’ve been on the show already, and I suspect that a lot of our listeners have been on our show, if you’ve been on the show and you would share with others who might be interested in joining us as well. Also, we have a form on our website where you can recommend people to us and we will reach out to them. We love meeting new people and that’s what we’re all about.

Liam: Absolutely. And people from all over the world, every culture, everybody using WordPress is somebody we want to talk to. Tara, thank you for two solid years. I look forward to a third.

Tara: Thanks, Liam. This was fun.

Liam: It sure was. We’ll see you in the next episode.

Tara: Alrighty.

Liam: Bye-bye.

Tara: 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.

Eric Karkovack has been a web designer since 1996, back when static HTML and Netscape ruled the web. In 1999, he became a home-based freelancer and has been there ever since.

Twitter | @karks88

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 103.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Eric Karkovak. Eric has been a web designer since 1996, back when static HTML and Netscape ruled the web. In 1999, he became a home-based freelancer and has been there ever since. He’s also a writer for publications such as Speckyboy, 1stWebDesigner, and ACF. Welcome, Eric.

Eric: Hi, there. Thanks for having me on.

Liam: You’re very welcome, Eric, thanks for joining us out here in the virtual hallway. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Eric: Well, I’m basically a self-taught web designer. I started off in high school way back in the 90s. Right out of high school, I got a job at my local newspaper, The Carlisle Sentinel. I was their first full time web designer. Back in those days it was interesting. Everything was static. There was no such thing as WordPress. There were no content management systems at all that I knew of. I learned a lot there.

Worked a couple corporate places after that, and really didn’t find that I was moving forward like I wanted to. So in 1999, I started off on my own. It’s been quite a 20-year journey here, and I’m just thrilled to still be around, still learn something every day. And I’m crazy about WordPress.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about this. So 20 years you’ve been doing freelancing. When you started, that was before the craze of WordPress and all of that, how did you learn how to work for yourself and get clients and develop your skills to keep serving them as time has gone on?

Eric: Well, it wasn’t so easy. I thought it was going to be easy when I started. I thought okay, “I’ll just sit at home.” I have a better computer at home than I ever had in the offices I worked at. So I figured I could find clients and just make lots of money and drive a Porsche or something, but it definitely wasn’t that easy. I was very fortunate right away to get a steady agency client who fed me regular amounts of work. He also let me experiment a lot with what I was doing just to be able to learn new things.

As time went on, clients started asking for more and more complicated websites. It wasn’t just a five-page static brochure site anymore. And really, that’s how I came to find WordPress. It was through basically a need to do more with the web. I had to have a way for folks to use a shopping cart or even something as simple as a forum or a photo gallery. Everything was done manually before.

I was hand typing HTML, working in Photoshop and slicing up images a million different ways, and every kind of hack I could find to make things work. So really, it was just an evolution over time. And as clients needed more, that’s what forced me to, to up my game a little bit.

Liam: There’s a lot to unpack there. I want to go back to the fact that you started freelancing in 1999. That was before you could call a client because you probably didn’t do a ton of email in 99. I mean, it was around but it wasn’t as pervasive. Nobody had smartphones, right? Or they were just maybe kind of starting. They weren’t pervasive anyway. And you couldn’t say, “Hey, let’s meet at the coffee shop for a meeting.” That was still culturally weird, or kind of a little hippy-dippy.

Aside from this one corporate client, how did the ebb and flow of managing it and trying to look professional before working from home, meeting in coffee shops, working remotely was such an accepted practice? What was that like?

Eric: It was difficult. To tell the truth, it was hard because first of all, I was very young. I was like 21. So a lot of people just didn’t want to take me seriously. It was one of those situations, even if I knew what I was talking about – and I admit I didn’t always know – it was still really difficult to get people to understand what I was saying. It was trying to go in wearing ties, which I was not at all comfortable with, still not, trying to go into these different settings – it might be a small business, it might be a corporate setting – and trying to sell them on what I knew and what I thought I could do for them. It was definitely a challenge.

And as you said, email was not really an accepted form of communication for a lot of these people. They insisted on phone calls. I can even remember, when I worked at the newspaper, the publisher of the paper literally was like 20 feet away from me in his office, every five minutes he would call me and asked me to walk into his office just to mention something to me. So it was a completely different time. People just didn’t know what to make of the internet yet. It definitely hadn’t become a mainstream necessity like it is now.

Liam: Yeah, that’s really cool. I could sit and talk about this for hours, but I suppose we probably should move on a little bit. Tell us a little bit about writing and how that came into your freelance work and your balance between, you talking about being a web designer and a writer. A little bit about that.

Eric: Well, I’d always wanted to write ever since I was little. This was something that, I don’t know, was kind of like a natural thing I had. I wasn’t an athlete, I wasn’t an artist, so to speak, or anything, but I could write. As I got more into WordPress and I got into the community, I started finding out that it was just so much about sharing knowledge. People really loved to share what they knew. And so I wanted to try to do that in a way too.

So I started submitting articles to Speckyboy, which is speckyboy.com that have been around forever. They take unsolicited articles. And so I thought I’ll just write something and see if they like it. The fellow that runs the site, Paul Andrew, he published it right away. So he liked it. He said, “Anytime you want to write something, just let me know.” And I kept doing it, he kept publishing it and it became eventually a gig. It’s kind of spread on to some other places as well.

But I love that I can do both because I can write about my experiences, I can write about the things that I’ve done wrong, that I can share with other people. And I’ve done a lot of things wrong so hopefully, I’ve prevented some disasters for others. It also forces me to learn more about new technologies, things I might be playing around with otherwise.

Liam: So let me ask you about that because I’m a big fan of signing up to give talks, and things I don’t know about, but feel a professional need or desire to learn about. So I volunteer to give a talk in six weeks on this or that. What’s your process? Do you say, “Hey, I’ll write an article about this and give your time because I just looked at it, and I already understand it now or I’m three weeks into learning it, or do you just volunteer and then use that volunteerism as a form of deadline?

Eric: I really just go off my experience. A lot of what I write about is just informed through my client work. For example, this year, I took on a large multi-site network. It’s about 80 sites. I’ve never done anything quite like it. It’s version control which I had no idea how to do. I never used Git really before. So I’ve kind of started writing about the experiences I’ve had with that.

It’s a site built by somebody else, so I was kind of writing about the land mines I was stepping on as I was going through it. That’s really my process. It’s about figuring out where I am in my everyday work, and then just kind of relating that experience to others. Because I know I’m not the first person to step into a site that I have no idea how it was built or going to maintain it. But you have to learn as you go. So that’s really what I like to do.

Liam: At the risk of asking you to out yourself, Eric, I wonder, this Ed site, multi-site, and then you’re writing about it, do you have any concern about your client reading that news story or blog post? What’s the balance there?

Eric: Well, I don’t identify people. That’s the first thing. I try to speak in general terms. So I don’t say, “Oh, man, the people that built this site are terrible. They just ruined it.”

Liam: No, I guess I don’t mean that. I’m going to cut you off just a second. More along the lines of, and I’m kind of being silly about it tongue in cheek, “I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s a big project. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.” I don’t mean to paint you in any kind of bad light. We’ve all been there. We all do that and that’s how we grow professionally. But how do you walk that line as a writer trying to share, trying to be genuine, trying to grow with also you’ve got a web design business that you’ve got to manage too? How do you walk that line?

Eric: Well, I try to be honest with clients too. That’s the first thing. I don’t go ahead and claim to be an expert at something I’m not. I found over the years that people will ask for things, and if I’m not a good fit for it, I just tell them flat out because I don’t want to disappoint them, I don’t want to take their money for something I may be not good at.

So even going into this project, it was discussed that, hey, this is something I’m going to have to learn. I just use it to help inform my writing too. It’s not something where I’m necessarily admitting I had zero clues what I’m doing, because I have some idea, or else I wouldn’t take it on. But I just try and be straightforward with folks about it.

I understand that the question is it is a fine line you don’t want to talk in terms of “Oh, my gosh, I just hit the nuke button  on this site,” and then have a client read it. That’s not something I would want to share with the world. But I’ll share more generalized mistakes that I’ve made.

Tara: I think there’s a challenge in doing what Liam’s asking, which is sharing within your community what you’re learning and what your process is and your struggles as a freelancer, and also communicating to your clients and trying to get new clients and show yourself as being an expert. I want to ask about imposter syndrome as it relates to that because you talked about Git.

In the WordPress space, in the developer space, Git is something that all good developers use. It’s really popular. You put your GitHub link on things and people share all of their code and things that they’ve done. You have to know Git pretty much. But I think to get by for 20 years – and for me, I’ve gotten by a long time without doing very much at all on Git – how have you worked on embracing that and how have you felt up until now not using it? I mean, is it a relief to be using it and do you consider yourself to be more professional or a better developer because you’re doing Git or does that make a difference? It’s kind of a long question, but you can answer it however you want to?

Eric: Well, I think it does make me better. I feel better having the experience. A lot of the struggles I’ve had over the years have been because I’ve been afraid – afraid of what I don’t know. Like for the longest time e-commerce scared me to death. I don’t want to be responsible when someone’s cart doesn’t work. If that transaction doesn’t process, I don’t want to be the one that has to deal with it. But eventually, WordPress has kind of helped me with this. I’ve just started like forcing myself to do it.

I’ve taken on clients that I know are going to be a challenge because I want to learn it, I want to be better at it. And that to me is, why else am I in business if I’m just going to continue to do the same thing for 20 years and it’s not really worth it? To me, if I’m not growing, if the next site isn’t better than the last one, then it’s not worth it to me. So I’m always trying to force myself into learning.

So for a tool like Git, I mean, I go to these WordCamps, I see these folks that are just unbelievably smart and can articulate exactly how they’re doing this and that and it’s still over my head. But that’s just what I’m aspiring to try and get to a level somewhere in that same area code if not right with them.

Tara: How do you define success, Eric? What does success mean to you?

Eric: For me, it’s just being able to get up every day and do something I like. Hopefully, I can make a living at it. Hopefully, I can have a roof over my head and food and all the good stuff, and toys for my cat and all that, and my kid. But just being able to get up every day and do something that is enjoyable, and hopefully help other people learn just as other people have helped me.

Liam: What counts as something enjoyable. I mean, nice coffee, pretty enjoyable. But if you like coffee, or I don’t know that you do…

Eric: I do.

Liam: But that’s a different kind of joy than experiencing your child learn to walk or say mama or dada for the first time. How do you qualify or quantify “something I enjoy”?

Eric: For me, it’s creativity. I love being in that zone, where I’m creating something, whether it’s through a design work, it can be through code just figuring out how something works, and writing. I really get interested in that. I mean, it’s just something where I can just get into a zone where I’m creating something and I get excited about it. There’s just something about that to really gets my juices flowing I guess.

Just as an example, recently, I did an essay for HeroPress. As soon as they accepted to move forward and said, “Hey, you can do the essay,” I wrote it in a day. It was like 1600 words and I wrote it in a day because I was so excited. So I guess if that may be the best example of how something’s enjoyable to me. I get passionate about it.

Liam: Yeah, I get that. What do you write if you’re not writing for HeroPress or about your career or what you’re learning? Do you write creatively on the side? Anything else?

Eric: I don’t really do a lot of formal writing outside of that. My little goofy thing that I’ve done for years is I like to come up with little raps. Isn’t that stupid things. I can remember a few years ago, my wife had a box of borax sitting out in the kitchen. And I wrote this thing down, this goofy rhyme about borax being the favorite cleaning tool of the lorax. It’s goofy stuff just like that that it’s funny only to me. But I do remember my daughter bringing get into her second-grade class because they were studying poetry and teacher apparently read it out loud, and I got a kick out of that.

Tara: That’s fun. There’s a WordPress podcast called Got Options with Kyle Maurer and Adam Silver. They do a lot of rapping and it’s usually WordPress related. So you might check that out.

Eric: Oh, nice.

Liam: And Jason Coleman of Paid Memberships Pro did an entire WordPress rap on YouTube at some point. Geez, this is probably going back five years ago, six years ago. So maybe I’ll grab that out. I’ll tweet that at some point next week.

Eric: Definitely. I’d like to see it.

Tara: There’s a fair amount of WordPress rapping going on around the world, I think.

Eric: I guess the market is already covered. I won’t start.

Tara: You can always add to it. Always.

Liam: It’s fertile ground. They always need new blood in there.

Eric: Maybe I’ll call myself WP Kanye.

Tara: Eric, what’s been your biggest challenge aside from starting your own business 20 years ago?

Eric: Ah, well, a life challenge maybe. I think six years ago, I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. That was a pretty big challenge. In my former life, I was someone who crusaded to bring back Surge soda. That was like my biggest thing. I had a website that went viral years ago, and I was so intensely into it.

And it’s funny, the year it came back, Coke brought it back, and I got diabetes the same year so I couldn’t even drink it. So it was just a lot of lifestyle changes, a lot of learning to eat better exercise and get over the feeling sorry for yourself stage. So I’d say that was probably the biggest challenge I faced outside of career.

Liam: So Type 1 is, as you noted, a pretty significant life-changing diagnosis. I have some family members who as teenagers were diagnosed. And since you mentioned about getting over the feeling sorry for myself to use your words, how did you get through that? What was that like for you? What worked? What didn’t work? How are you doing it if you are doing it still?

Eric: I am? I mean, they’re days you’re going to get frustrated. That’s just all there is to it. Part of it I thought for me was just seeing a good doctor who answered questions, who was patient. But for me, it became like a whole quest of self-discipline, I guess. I have always been disciplined about work, but like, outside of work, not so much. I would eat all the junk food. I would lay on the couch for hours watching TV.

It just finally hit me. It’s like, “Okay, if I want to be there for my daughter, if I want to grow old, then I better start exercising, I better stop the junk food. It’s just something’s just kind of clicked in my head. But there was probably that first year or two where it was very difficult because I kept trying to live the way I had been living. It’s like, “Okay, go ahead eat the brownies, after the pizza, and the surge, whatever.” And then you check your blood sugar, and you’re like, “No, this isn’t going to work anymore.”

So now, I mean, even like birthday parties, I usually abstain from cake. If I do have cake, I go home, and I run on the treadmill for like a half hour and burn it off right away, or else I’m going to feel guilty. So it’s just I found a discipline in me that I probably never had. And if any of my high school teachers saw that right now, they probably laugh because it’s about the complete opposite of what I was back then. But I guess that’s what they call growing up.

Tara: Yeah. That’s really interesting to hear that about your motivations, and how you made this dramatic change. I think for a lot of us, we look at change as something that we do to achieve a goal. Like, “I’m going to lose 10 pounds, and I’m going to change to it.” And then you and then you lose 10 pounds and you fall back into your old habits. But with a lifelong health issue like diabetes, there’s no end to it. It’s something that you have to stick with forever. Do you find it daunting to have that view? Do you look at it as a day by day thing? Are there some days like you said, some days you might have the cake and you figure out how to deal with that? It’s not like, I’ll never have a piece of cake again? So how do you deal with this sort of long term…?

Eric: It’s funny. If it goes well for a while, like if my blood sugars are in good shape, you get that in the back of your head that I can do this other thing, I can go have some pizza, I can go do this other thing. And then you realize after you eat it, it’s like, okay, no, diabetes doesn’t take a day off. You might take a day off, but the diabetes is still there.

Tara: I like how you said that.

Eric: For me, it’s just every day just trying to win that day. It’s kind of goofy that…it’s like I become very regimented about it. I eat the same things all the time because I know what it’s going to do to my blood sugar, maybe a little obsessive in some ways, and not as fun for some people. But I like having the stability and just the knowledge of like, “Okay, I know what I’m doing. I know what the results are going to be. And so that’s going to help me get through today. And then tomorrow, I can do the same thing again, and just feel better about myself because of it.”

Tara: You mentioned that you’re disciplined when it comes to work. And I suppose working for yourself, that’s a necessity. You have to be so organized and disciplined to get the work done. How do you accomplish that? What kind of a system or planning or approach do you have to your work life and your discipline there?

Eric: That’s something I really had to learn. When I first started my business, I had this idea of like, okay, I work at home, if I want to go play golf for six hours, I’ll just go do that. And you find out it doesn’t work that way. I mean, I work when my clients work. So I’m here all day. I don’t usually leave unless it’s to take my daughter to school or pick her up from school.

I basically learned that I have to keep a list, like I keep a Trello board these days of just all the things I have to do that day, and some of the longer term things I’m working on. So I’ll try to dedicate a little bit of time each day to each of those tasks. And if I have a little bit of time left over, maybe I’ll use it to write something that just kind of struck me or try to get some extra work done.

But really I find like if I’m not organized, and I’m not going to be able to take care of everybody like I need to. So organizations just a big deal for me. As opposed to when I started, it was just like, “Okay, what’s coming in the email next. Then that’s what I did. But you learn pretty quickly that you can’t do that forever.

Liam: Yeah. Pass management by email is not productive in the long run. Eric, I want to ask you about advice. And I’d like to ask you about the best advice that you’ve ever received, and successfully implemented in your life. So what’s something that somebody else shared with you that’s worked out really well for you?

Eric: That’s a good question. I think years ago, I was at a wedding with my wife and her great uncle was there. And he’d worked for IBM for many years. He was retired and living a good life in Florida. And he said, “In this industry, you either keep learning or you just stand still and you become pretty much like dust.” You have to keep learning. If you don’t up your skills, if you don’t continue to study those latest technologies, then you’re going to get left behind. So I think that was something that really stuck with me over the years.

Liam: Yeah, that’s good advice. And we hear that pretty often. Perhaps not surprising in a tech field. How have you applied that advice to aspects of your life outside of web design, web development technology day job?

Eric: Actually, as I’ve gotten older, I started having like, I like to call them old man hobbies. I love taking pictures, not necessarily even to share with anyone. I just like going out even if it’s just in my backyard taking pictures of wildlife. I’ve really become into bird watching. I got my feeders all set up in the backyard. On a nice summer day, I love to go out at lunch and just see what different birds show up and study their personalities and how they behave with one another. You noticed some are a little more angry than others when it comes to sharing the food. But I found different things that excite me.

Even reading, I’ve always been someone who reads newspapers and magazines. In the last year, I read like six books, and I can’t even believe that. My whole youth, I’ve probably never read six books, including the ones I’m supposed to read for school. So it just funny how things change a little bit as I’ve aged. Not that I’m old.

Liam: Not at all. Very young. Very young. Very young.

Eric: Barely can drive.

Tara: We should reveal that. Before we started recording we were talking about our ailments – our old age elements and medical cures.

Liam: And Eric said he didn’t have any and he’s not old.

Tara: That’s very true. That’s right.

Eric: I didn’t say I didn’t have ailments, but I’m not old.

Liam: Probably the youngest guests we’ve had on the show, I think.

Eric: My mom just let me come on.

Tara: And you’ve been working for yourself for 20 years so mmh.

Liam: Second grade.

Eric: It could happen.

Liam: You’re living proof. You’re living proof.

Liam: Eric, let me ask you a little bit about your engagement involvement with the WordPress community. You’ve talked about you write a lot about how you use WordPress. How do you engage with it in other ways?

Eric: I love going to WordCamps. Generally, I try to stay the ones around my area, Baltimore and Lancaster, occasionally Philadelphia. I really get into just talking with other people about it. I know during the whole Gutenberg thing last year, that was such a controversial thing. So I’ve tried to put a lot of that in my writing. I was trying to be fair, I was trying to be…not taking too many sides, but also pointing out things that I thought were wrong when I thought they were wrong. And hopefully, I didn’t anger too many people on the way of that.

I like talking to other people in the community. Not as much during a WordCamp because I’m kind of shy, to be honest. If you see me at the WordCamps, I’m probably just going to be huddled in the corner watching the presentations. And you’re always welcome to come say hi, but I’m probably not one to come up and purge too many people. But I love doing interviews with folks who are in the community and see what they’ve done and how WordPress helps them further their careers and even their lives.

Liam: Yeah, that’s a great experience of WordCamps to do that. Is there much in the way of our local WordPress community out where you live?

Eric: Yeah, we do have a meetup in town. Unfortunately, it meets on the night, but I can’t get there. But from what I know, we do get about 20 people of a meetup, which is pretty good for our town of like 20,000 people. And we’ve got a nice development community in central PA. I’ve always thought there’s a possibility of a WordCamp here because I think there are a lot of folks that use WordPress and it’s kind of like a confluence of highways and you know…it’s two hours from Philly. It’s two hours from Pittsburgh, it’s hour and a half from Baltimore. So it’s always kind of right there in the middle. So maybe, as I get older and have more time can be something I do want to know.

Tara: Well, Pennsylvania has a good number of WordCamps. So as you mentioned, you’re within driving distance to a couple of good ones. So it’s nice that you’re able to connect with people like us. And on that note, Eric, it’s time for us to wrap up. We are out of time, and it’s gone by really fast. We’ve enjoyed hearing your story and chatting with you. Thanks so much for joining us. Where can people find you online?

Eric: Well, thanks. You can go to my website. It’s karks.com. I’m also on Twitter @karks88. And I’m happy to connect.

Tara: Thanks again for joining us.

Eric: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Liam: Thanks for joining us, Eric. Great chatting with you.

Eric: Thank you. You too, Liam.

Liam: Bye for now.

Tara: 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.