Hallway Chats

Twitter | @MaLandra_88

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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 102.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Miranda Knee. Miranda is a web developer who strives to build appealing, responsive websites. She’s experienced in WordPress and familiar with creating custom themes. Miranda loves to learn and to grow. Outside of coding, she enjoys yoga, sci-fi and fantasy books, movies, and weightlifting. Welcome, Miranda.

Miranda: Hello.

Liam: How are you today?

Miranda: I’m doing well. I would say I’m excited and a little nervous because this is my first official podcast. So hope it goes well – that I do well.

Tara: Well, we’re so happy that you joined us. Thank you very much for being here. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself?

Miranda: Yeah, sure. I’m 30 years old and proud. I love it. I work for a nonprofit in downtown of Pittsburgh called the Allegheny Conference on Community Development. The Allegheny Conference, basically, they’re a great company. They work in many ways to make the Pittsburgh region better. And when I say Pittsburgh region, it’s typically Southwestern Pennsylvania. They do that through many means, such as trying to convince corporations to come here. And when they come here, they create jobs. So that’s good.

We have a chamber department, we have an economy department, and we have all kinds of affiliates. So all these major departments and affiliates need websites. They need a web presence and that is where I come in. I’m their web developer. I build the websites, I maintain them, I update them. That’s what I do. And I like it. It’s been a great learning experience. But I am the only web developer at the company, and so that can sometimes be challenging.

Tara: Yeah. How did you first get started and learned the trade?

Miranda: Well, I will say this is my second career choice. When I first went to school, I went to Pittsburgh Technical Institute, and I worked for Multimedia. In Multimedia, you can take two tracks. You can either go video editing or web development. In my first round, I chose to do video editing because it was fun, it was creative.

I also liked web development but at that time, I decided to go video. I did that for five years, liked it but didn’t love it. Then I had a crazy experience in my life where I broke my leg. It kind of turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life because it gave me time and time off work, time off life. And with that time, I got to really think like, “Was this the right path for me? Should I change it? What do I really want to do?” And I figured out that I wanted to build websites because I’m a problem solver, and web development allows you to solve problems every day.

So I went back to PTI in 2014, and within a year graduated with my web degree. And six months after graduating with that the Allegheny Conference decided to hire me.

Tara: Were you learning WordPress specifically or did you learn that after you got your degree?

Miranda: I was first exposed to WordPress in school. When I went back for web development, we learned what it was a content management system, how to do your basic install, how to change themes, how to update the content and get it live on the web. So we maybe spent one class on it. My most exposure to WordPress was with my first job the Allegheny Conference.

We several years ago hired a third party company to help the conference build four WordPress sites. They did a great job, and then it was my responsibility to maintain them and update them for my team at the conference. That’s really how I got deep into WordPress was through that experience. And then after that, it was like, “Okay, we have this affiliate, and we need a website or we need to redo our website, make it more modern. We want it to be WordPress. Can you do that?” “Yeah, I’ll do what I can.” From there, that’s when I started building my own custom themes using Underscores (_s).

Liam: That’s all fantastic starter them, but there’s nothing there in terms of much in the way of structure or design. How do you go about making it from the ground up there? Are you designing as well? Or is there a brand guideline that you follow – so the agency needs this, so we roll out that?

Miranda: I would love style guides and branding guidelines. But as a nonprofit, we don’t get that luxury. It’s usually, “Hey, we want this website.” They think they want WordPress because WordPress is big. It’s popular. And yes, it does a lot of great things, but our clients, my co-workers might not always understand that. They think because this is newest, latest thing, we should have it.

Sometimes I can convince them not to use WordPress. Not that WordPress is bad, but say, you only have one page, you only have a single page website, you might not need it to be WordPress or no one’s going to update the content. But to circle back to your question on how we do the design, there used to be two web developers. So the other web developer, he would do the design, come up with a mock-up, and once that was approved, it was my job to make the WordPress site look like his design.

Liam: So I’m curious on sites where you don’t use WordPress because there’s so many different tools available, so many different approaches, what are you doing with those one and two and three-page sites that aren’t likely to be updated or once a year? What are you building those with? It is just HTML? CSS? Are you using something like a Gatsby? What are you doing?

Miranda: I’m using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery. I recently have gotten into Node packages and using Gulp as a task runner, which is so much fun. Have you used Gulp?

Liam: Only when I have a really big soda. So we’re probably…

Tara: I have used it but I’m not quite sure how I used it. I followed instructions and installed it. But long ago. Did a class with Carrie Dils and kind of learned that little thing, but haven’t done it lately.

Miranda: It can be a challenge, and it can be intimidating, but that’s what I like. I like the unknown. I like learning. I like growing. Gulp basically allows me to write some task runners to say, “Hey, as I’m building on my development site, check my CSS, check my JavaScript, make sure there’s no errors. And if there’s no errors, minify it, and send it to this file. It’s a lot of fun to use. It’s frustrating when you’re getting started, but once you start to make progress and see things working, it gets exciting.

Tara: I think I used it when I was using SAS a lot more. And so it was really great to see what it would do with that in terms of minifying. Cool. What’s your favorite thing to do in your job?

Miranda: Recently, my coworkers would come to me and say that they would like this feature on their WordPress site or…we’ll stick with the WordPress site. An example I could give is we have Pittsburgh Regional Alliance Department. The Pittsburgh Regional Alliance wants to have a “See us here” section on their homepage. And the “see us here,” basically says,” Okay, this is an event going on in Pittsburgh or outside of the region, and this is the date that it’s happening, and this is our staff member who’s going to be there.”

This was actually fun for me because I had to figure out, “Okay, how can I make this happen and make my co-workers happy and meet their need? And also, how can I do it in a way that’s easy for them so that they can update it on their own and when they need to?” So there is this framework plugin called CMB2. Have you heard of it by chance?

Liam: Little bit. Sure, yeah.

Miranda: Okay. It’s one of my favorite things right now. CMB2 is a framework that allows me to create custom meta boxes on the WordPress site. So with CMB2, I created this “See us here” function. So when my co-workers go into the dashboard of WordPress, they will look on their options within the dashboard, and they’ll say, “Oh, see us here, click on that.” And when they click on that, they now can enter in dates. Here’s a start date. Here’s an end date, what’s the title of the event, what’s the location. They can select which one of our staff members are going to be there. And then they hit post and it just populates on the front page.

Liam: That’s awesome. I’m curious how as a web development department of one, or maybe there were still two there, right? You said at some point there were two. What is your research process? Somebody comes to you and says, “Brenda, the website needs to do this,” and your immediate reaction is, “I got nothing,” where do you go from?

Miranda: That happens quite a bit. I go to the internet Google, gotta love it, Udemy, Lynda. I will say Morten Rand-Hendriksen is someone who I look to a lot and I have learned so much from him using his Lynda tutorials. He’s the reason I know how to even create my own theme. He’s been great. So I would say he’s a good resource for me.

I go to meetups as well. I try to meet other people, developers, ask for their knowledge – what do they know, how do they learn, what should I know, and then I do trial and error. So I’ll try to write the code. If it doesn’t work, I keep trying until I find something that does work.

Tara: That’s very gratifying when you find that, isn’t it?

Miranda: Yeah.

Tara: Miranda, you mentioned meetups. Can you tell us a little bit about your involvement or your connection with the WordPress community in your area?

Miranda: Yeah. Pittsburgh recently started doing WordCamp, I think three years ago. And it was a big deal. Big, big deal. I went to that, met other WordPress developers. And then I found out about meetup. Typically, once a month on Tuesdays, the WordPress community will get together and talk about anything WordPress related. So I try to go to those as often as I can because I want to know what other people are doing, what’s out there, what can I learn. Recently, Rene, who I believe you guys have spoken with, she’s the one that recommended me to you guys…

Liam: We did speak with her.

Miranda: Yeah, she’s great. She asked me to do a talk on CNB2 forms.

Liam: That’s awesome. That’s awesome. You mentioned that you go to the WordPress meetup. I’m always interested to know what other meetups people go to. When you go to that’s not WordPress related, what are you drifting into? Where are you spending your time meetup wise?

Miranda: I’d have to think about that. One of my interest is yoga. I’ve done a few yoga meetups where there’s some trails within the area, Carnegie, I think is one. It’s called Yoga on the Rocks. Through meetup, I found out about this location that I never knew of. It’s in my own neighborhood. There’s this trail and you walk back this trail, and it has this little waterfall right by these large, gigantic rocks. This particular meetup, you get on top of these giant rocks and you do a yoga practice. It might sound bizarre, odd, but it was awesome.

Tara: I never thought of using meetup for yoga. That’s really cool. Wow. Thanks for sharing that.

Miranda: Sure.

Tara: We like to ask all of our guests about success, Miranda. Can you tell us how you define success, personally, professionally, or combination of the two?

Miranda: Yeah. I think that’s a great question. To me, success is how I feel about myself and my work. If I can feel good about me, and about the work that I give, then I think that success.

And how do I do that? Basically, I would say through self-care. So as a web developer, I’m sure you guys know we spend a lot of time at our desk, at the computer looking on the internet, but we need to have like a balance. So that’s where yoga comes in for me. Going to the gym, working out, making sure that I’m doing justice to my body. I try to eat a decent diet. I won’t say I’m a health freak, because I do love some junk food. So making sure I live a healthy lifestyle helps me stay balanced and helps me be more successful within my coding and outside of my coding.

Liam: That’s a great definition. I like that. And I’d like your emphasis on the well-roundedness of self-care and the like. One other thing you shared about your definition of success was how you feel about yourself, and your contributions in your work? How do you self-assess how you feel about yourself and your work?

Miranda: That’s a good question.

Liam: Sorry, it’s a hard one. I’m sorry to spring that on you.

Miranda: No, it’s fine. I think these are good things to think about. I would say, a client, a co-worker comes to me, they have a problem that they want to solve coding wise on a website. And they come to me and they look to me, and like, “How can we make this happen?” And if I can solve that problem for them or provide them a solution, then that makes me feel good.

Where I have to be careful is I like to do really good quality work that’s clean, and it’s very easy to mess things up or make them dirty. So people want things quick and fast. We don’t always spend time planning and prepping and preparing. They’re like, “We want this, when can you have it done? The sooner the better.” So sometimes when that happens a lot, things just get dumped on top of one another and it gets messy and you don’t always live in your comments or keep it clean. And then you leave it alone for like months and months, and then you need to come back to that web project, and you’re like, “Oh, what did I do here? Shit is everywhere.”

That’s something I try not to do but it does happen. One that does happen, still being able to feel proud or successful of your work kind of becomes like you question it. So I try to not go there, but it does happen.

Tara: Yeah, it happens everywhere, not just in code, but in life. So I understand that everybody does it sometimes as much as we want to be organized. I want to go back, you mentioned in the beginning about breaking your leg and how that sort of changed your direction and transformed your life in a way. Do you think that your definition of success before you broke your leg was different than what it is now?

Miranda: Likely, yeah. Very likely. I think as we go through life, we were always growing as people, and our perspective can change. How I saw success 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago probably was not the same as I see success today. I might have been harder on myself or had a higher bar set, and things have to be perfect, I always have to please people, make sure they’re happy.

Now, I would say yes, I still want those in a sense, but I don’t want to set myself up for failure, or maybe giving a client or co-worker something that really won’t help them. So now success is like feeling proud of my work and not making sure that someone else is just happy. Before it might have been just so the client or coworker or somebody else’s pleased and not really how I felt about it. Now it’s more like, again, balance. I want to feel good about what I gave them, make sure what they’re asking for is really what they need, and not just something that they requested, didn’t really need, don’t know that and I just gave it to them anyways.

Tara: Do you think your focus on self-care is something that also came out of that experience with your leg?

Miranda: Oh, yeah, for sure.

Tara: You had the time to kind of realize what was important and taking care of yourself after being injured?

Miranda: Yeah. It was making sure that I’m choosing a career path in life that makes me feel proud, and that I really enjoy doing. Also being kinder to my body and not doing reckless things that might injure it again or break another leg or arm.

Liam: What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve addressed in your life? If it’s in the past, how did you overcome it? And if it’s something ongoing, how are you dealing with it today?

Miranda: I would say…excuse me for a second. I want to take a drink. One of the biggest challenges that I face would probably be imposter syndrome – am I saying that, right? – where I don’t feel good enough or I’m not at the level I should be as a web developer, and I don’t know enough, or I’m not advanced enough for where I should be right now and comparing myself to other web developers. Maybe someone who really knows JavaScript, but I don’t know it and saying, “Okay, well, because I can’t do what this developer can do, I’m not a real developer.” That’s a challenge.

And another challenge, if you don’t mind me throwing a second one in there…

Liam: Please do. Please do.

Miranda: …is just managing others. When you’re working on a web project, and again, I’ll go back to clients or coworkers requesting things that maybe they think they need, but they don’t really need, it’s not going to solve their problem, and trying to communicate that to them and make them also understand. That’s one of my challenges because I don’t feel like I can always do that.

And when I see that happening, it’s very frustrating because I’m frustrated, yes, with them for not understanding me, but also with myself for not being able to communicate it to a way that they are understanding it. And then I have that fear of, “Okay, well, I hope we don’t go down this path and go too far or we create this project that wasn’t really needed, and it just wastes everyone’s time and nobody’s happy, and then they asked like, “Why did this happen?” “I don’t know.”

Liam: That’s making me think of those old silent movies, where someone’s on the train line, and the other person is gesticulating trying to get the attention of somebody to say, “No, no, stop, this isn’t going to go well.” I can totally see you in a meeting saying, “Oh, this is not going to end well. You don’t need that functionality. We can go a simpler route or another route. Or we already built something that’s 90% of the way there and just a sense of frustration and futility almost I imagine of that.” So yeah, I get that.

And your imposter syndrome around being a developer, I imagine that that’s probably compounded in some ways by working as the only developer in the nonprofit agency. So there’s no one to say, “Hey, you’re doing a great job. That’s some amazing work. Whether or not you figured out how to make something in HTML, or you wrote this amazing bit of JavaScript, your colleagues who don’t do this stuff are very easily impressed. But you don’t have somebody there to say, “Actually, that’s some pretty tricky development you just did, Miranda. Well done.”

Miranda: Yeah. And it’s just I don’t have that other person, that other coworker who’s a developer to say, “Hey, what do you think about this code? Do you think this is optimized? Do you think this is efficient? Is there a way I could do it better?” That kind of thing.

Liam: Yeah, that’s tricky.

Tara: How do you process that? Because you have your meetups, your connections to other people, how do you deal with that imposter syndrome?

Miranda: So I have two brothers. They’re younger, taller, both great. And the youngest, his name is Adam, he’s also a web developer. He helps me out a lot. We have these web conversations, and I tell him how I feel, and basically, like, I don’t think I’m where I’m at, or I don’t know enough. I don’t know what you know. He tells me like, “You’re doing fine.” There’s someone who told me I have that syndrome, and he said, “You can understand code, but you can explain it yet to others, so you think you’re not a developer.” He’s like, “But you are. I have that too. We’re fine.” He’s been great for that to help me deal with it.

And then just talking to other web developers. I know they have those similar thoughts. They go through the same thing. And when you share that and get it out loud, and you hear them talk about it, and that’s like, reassuring to yourself, “Okay, it’s fine. You’re doing well. So long as you’re still trying to learn you’re fine.”

Liam: Your brother sounds like he’s a good resource and a good brother to you.

Miranda: Oh, yeah, he’s great.

Tara: Miranda, can you share with us some advice that you’ve received and implemented in your life?

Miranda: Yeah. I would say some advice that I have gotten was from Wes Bos. I listened to his podcast called Syntax. One day he brought up, “Hey, if you want to learn something, learn it more, you should try teaching it as teaching to others helps you to actually learn and become more intimate with that knowledge.” And he’s right. When I lead the WordPress meetup for CMB2, that’s why I chose that because, yes, I can read, you know, the coding going on in PHP and understand what’s happening, but I only know so much, and I would like to know more. So you know what? I’m going to lead a talk about it and try to tell others about it and go through a little demo. I think Wes was definitely right. I feel more confident and explain CMB2. And I would love to do another presentation on that.

Tara: That’s great. That’s really good advice. I think that’s definitely true, and I’m glad to hear your first experience doing that was successful. Did you get some feedback from people at that talk? Do you think that they followed your talk and learned something new?

Miranda: Perhaps. I would say actually, my brother came to that as well and maybe asked the most questions and…

Tara: Awesome.

Miranda: He asked me a question about, if I created this form, we can add an image, add tags made a display on the front end, he’s like, “Cool. Now, if you update those fields, will it also update on the front end.” I was like, “Yes, of course.” We’ve done this ton of times before, I’m very confident. So we go back, we change the text, we change the image and hit publish, look on the front end didn’t update? “No.” Oh, embarrassing in front of the rest of the class of five other people. So like, “Well, what happened here?” I realized that I forgot a line of code, very important line of code. Once I added that in, you know, everything updated and worked as it should. So learning experience right there.

Liam: That’s life, though, right?

Miranda: Yeah.

Liam: I mean, we know the process, we know the thing, we’ve built it 1000 times, all sudden, someone looks over our shoulder, and we forgot even to how to spell our name right? I imagine that that advice from Wes Bos about teaching will encourage you and enable you to know it better. Imagine that you’re also going to address challenges around being able to explain yourself, because if you’re teaching it to somebody, and they don’t understand it the first way, they’re going to say, “Ah.” Then you have to say, “Okay, how am I going to explain it to this person? I need to use different words what am I going?”

Miranda: I think that’s a good point. You’re right. And I’m hoping the more I tried to teach what I’m doing to others, then yes, I can become more successful in explaining to those who are not web developers but requesting certain functions or layouts that maybe are not right for them or well suited, or there might be a better way. Me being able to better communicate that so that they can understand and we can come to an agreement and have peace and try to have less frustration with one another.

Tara: What’s been the most exciting thing about WordPress for you, whether it’s community or it’s somewhere in the software, or you finally figured something out? What’s been one of your better WordPress memories maybe is a way to say it?

Miranda: I would say WordPress is exciting because there’s so much that you can do. An example I would give was, I mentioned Morten Rand-Hendriksen, and how he’s been a great influence for me and I’ve learned so much from him. I learned how to create a customized theme from him. That moment when I created my first custom theme and showed it to my co-workers, and they were happy, ecstatic, and then asked for another one and another one, that was great.

Now I’m at a different stage where I’m using a framework plugin called CBM2 that allows me to write PHP so I can make my own custom meta boxes, and then display those on the front end of a website. I think the next stage will be creating my own plugin. So I look forward to that.

Liam: I do too. I do too.

Tara: Yeah, that sounds great. Are you also working a lot with the changes that Gutenberg has brought about? How has that been for you?

Miranda: Gutenberg actually concerned me because I wasn’t sure what it all entailed and was this great update going to affect my custom themes? Was it going to make them break? Were things going to be more difficult? None of that happened. It didn’t affect them at all.

I think Gutenberg is a good tool. I will admit that I don’t really use it. It’s hard for me to choose a custom box to put an image in when I know that I can just write the image tag myself. I think I prefer that because I feel like I’m more control and I can get what I want, whereas Gutenberg might be better for someone who doesn’t know that code and can make it easier for them to just add in the features that they want. So personally, I would say it doesn’t really affect me. At least not yet.

Liam: So Gutenberg is a conversation that we could have over weeks and hours, for sure, but we are out of time. So, Miranda, I want to thank you very, very much for joining us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure bumping into you out here in our virtual hallway. Before we say goodbye. Can you share with us where people can find you online, please?

Miranda: Yeah, I have my own personal website, mirandaknee.com. I’ll spell it out. M-I-R-A-N-D-A-K-N-E-E. You can find me there. You can find me on Twitter at @MaLandra I don’t tweet a whole lot, but I do retweet funny meme. So if you’re into memes, which I think most people are like, go ahead and give me a follow or just check me out.

Tara: Thanks so much for joining us. It’s been great chatting with you and nice to meet you, Miranda

Miranda: It was great to meet both of you. Thank you for this opportunity.

Liam: Our pleasure. We’ll see you soon.

Miranda: Yeah.

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.

Lee is a WordPress teacher, Doer and Fixer, working with small business owners. She gives her client a different perspective for their digital space so that they can find solutions that work toward their business goals.

Twitter | @leedrozak ‏

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 101.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Lee Drozak. Lee is a WordPress teacher, Doer and Fixer, working with small business owners. She gives her client a different perspective for their digital space so that they can find solutions that work toward their business goals. Welcome, Lee. We’re glad you’re here.

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

Liam: You’re most welcome. Thanks for joining us. Lee, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Lee: Yeah. I actually started out as an accountant years ago, and I realized that I had like this knack for thinking outside the box. When the mortgage bubble started to burst, I decided it was time to get out of that and do something different. I was introduced to virtual assistants, so I thought, “Well, why not? I needed something to do. I figured out very quickly I was not just a very good stay at home mom, I needed something extra. That’s where I started.

And because in college had taken for my liberal arts coding classes, I was able to quickly transition to creating my own website for my business, and then websites. Then I was introduced to WordPress, which made the whole process so much simpler. Because I think of the design and the development background, and quickly learning the marketing, I was able to transition to more of a troubleshooting implementer phase. And then it just took off from there. So here I am today with that.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about virtual assistants, because I know that term can be very broad. Where did you find your clients and what kind of work did you start out doing as a virtual assistant? Was it like administrative stuff? I think you can get virtual assistants to do anything now?

Lee: Yeah, you can. It’s a very, very broad term. I started out doing administrative assistants just to kind of get my feet wet and figure out what it was that I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I designed my website in HTML and CSS, because that long ago, that’s what was available at the time. That kind of drew a couple of different people to me saying, “Hey, I can’t update my website, can you help me with that, too? It’s slowly transitioned from administrative to the more technical. So I became like a technical virtual assistant.

Then once I was introduced to WordPress and I started to really dig into that and learn that, it kind of just morphed itself. Because I knew I didn’t want to continue with the administrative, I really liked the clients that I found. The first one was a referral to me who happened to be a coach who referred other people to me.

So since day one, I’ve been a referral business. That’s how I built it. But I knew I had to learn the marketing strategies because it was feast or famine at first, and I was always kind of hesitant to stop relying on everybody for referrals, but they just kept coming. So I got into a space that I was really lucky that because I’m an extrovert, I’m able to build those relationships. And because I’m a giver, I probably over gave, and that allowed people to easily refer me to other people knowing that they were going to get the best care possible.

Tara: How did you balance that? You mentioned just being a stay at home mom – and I don’t mean just in any kind of way other than that would be the only thing that you were doing – that wasn’t a good fit for you. So how did you balance being a mom and running this business that seems like it’s grown without even you’re intending it to grow like it has? How did you balance that?

Lee: It was really hard to balance that. I pushed every boundary that I had set for myself. It seemed like I was working 24/7 as I was building the business, and my family at one point didn’t understand to where my son in his teenage years was like, “You’re always on the computer. You never shut the computer.” And my husband was like, “What the heck are you doing? Like this was not what we signed up for when I left the job that I left.”

So I had to figure out how to set the boundaries and say no. No was probably the hardest business tool that I had to master or learn. Because I think it’s the mom and me, I think it’s the giver in me that they would say, okay, “No, I’m not going to do this, no, I don’t have time, but okay, let me just spend five minutes on it.” And five minutes became ten.

So it was just the balance of it took a long, long time until I got to the point where I was like, “Look, I didn’t start my business to be another part of my life. I started my business to give me something to do, but to give back to people in a way that I was finding was not out there.” So I had to master the delicate balance of saying no and respecting my space. I had to learn to respect my space, which I think was my biggest business lesson of all.

Tara: How long did it take you? What was the evolution of that? I have a similar story and trajectory here so I’m wondering. I think it’s taken me a long time.

Lee: Ten years. I would say probably 10 years.

Tara: It’s a long time, isn’t it? And then your kids are gone.

Lee: Yes. Five years to make the decision, “Okay, I’m going to do this,” and then five years to get it implemented. I still find myself even now backsliding occasionally. We have an RV, and so we spend a lot of time in that on the weekends and traveling. That’s where the no weekends came into play because internet can be really spotty and stressful.

Then also, there’s a whole ‘nother community like the WordPress community, there’s a camp community, and I just wanted to enjoy that time that I had. Doing the no weekends is a little easier now than it was because I have an end goal for it. But it’s still a learning…If somebody has a problem, I make sure that I have a backup to handle the problem. But sometimes you need to step in. And it’s learning to step in, handle the problem and step back out pretty quickly.

Liam: Lee, how are you learning to say no? And not necessarily practices, but when somebody comes to you and says, “Lee, can you help with this?” what are you doing internally process-wise to decide whether or not to say yes or no? Do you have a checklist of like, “Well, I only say yes if or I always say no when?

Lee: I have a mental checklist to say, “Okay, you know what? Is this a project that someone thinks is small but ends up being this major thing?” So I have to like really dig into that. And then I look at it too is if I would say no, can I give them a research source or a tool or a person that can actually help them? So it’s more like, “All my partner networks and my referral networks, is there someone else who can help them?”

Then finally is, you know, is it something or someone that I want to take on at this time and how is it going to…? Because it’s just my husband and I, now. My kids are grown so they don’t…they do factor into the decision. I don’t think your kids will never factor into the decision. But I look at it as my husband, he has the weekends free, although he has been working a lot of Saturday. So if it’s something that will be a Sunday, it’s an absolute no – that’s our time together. If it’s a Saturday, “Can I do it, and it not like really interrupt the whole weekend?”

Liam: Has that no ever stun you in ways that have been really problematic?

Lee: It was because sometimes I’ve said no in a totally selfish manner as far as my time, and the person I’ve said no to was like taken aback that I wasn’t there for them. I’ve had some people who stopped talking to me because I’ve started to say no to them. At first, I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve lost a friend, how can this happen?” But then in retrospect, I look at it and say, “The only time they called me was when they needed something.” So by saying no I actually opened myself up for other opportunities.

I think it’s just the guilt – dealing with the guilt of saying no, like, how is it going to affect the person on the other end. I had to learn to flip it to say, “By me saying no or yes, how is it going to affect me internally instead of just them?”

Tara: I also wonder if there’s a difference between “no” and “not now.” I think about a lot that the sense of urgency that we can have, especially when you’re working on something that’s live on the web, it’s not working right now, I need to fix it right now. So there’s always this sense of urgency that it has to be done right now. So when you say no, you’re closing the door completely. But do you also sometimes say not now?

Lee: I do. I think I look at the urgency. I actually had someone in my mastermind group who had a WordPress site that was pieced together. It was bad. It was bad. He couldn’t even make edits. He would try to go make edits, and he was getting a white screen. And he was in the middle of this promotion, so he was like, “I need my whole site redone I think, but in the interim, I need this.”

So I was like, “Okay, let’s put off the whole I need my site redone thing and figure out what the immediate problem is.” And then I was like, “Okay, can it wait until Monday?” Because I think it was late on a Friday. Yeah, it was late on a Friday.

Tara: It’s always late on a Friday.

Lee: Of course. He was kind of stuck, and he was like, “I’m really starting the promotion on Monday. So you could just at least get it so I could update things.” I took a step back, and I said, “You know what? Let me just look at it. If I can fix this within a half an hour, I will at least get you functioning.” Which, fortunately, it was just disabling a few plugins that were conflicting, and so I was able to easily…and I said, “You know what? I did what I could right now. I can relook at it Monday if you want to continue with this.” And he was like, “Yeah, sure.” Then that built a whole ‘nother relationship for us.

So I think it’s just finding people that can respect it’s not the fire that you think it is kind of thing, and then moving forward from there. But then there are times too where it’s like, “not now.” and I’ve lost opportunities, because I’ve said, “I can’t get to this right now.” It’s not in my space right now and for them, the need was immediately and they moved on.

Tara: I’m going to ask you about success, Lee. It sounds like you’ve made an evolution in your business, and you’re making good choices about putting yourself first in a lot of cases and compartmentalizing your work and personal life. And that may relate for you to this topic that we asked all of our guests, which is, how do you define success, personally, professionally, or combination or separately or both?

Lee: I think professionally and personally they go hand in hand. I define success is am I actually living the freedom that I was hoping to. Am I just punching a time clock or is this another job? I don’t work the traditional 9-to-5, I found that my best times are in the morning. And then later in the day, like I hit that afternoon wall between 12 and 2. And instead of just trying to struggle through it, I’m like, “Nope”, I’m going to eat lunch, I’m going to go take a walk, maybe I’ll have a nap, whatever, maybe I’ll just sit back and read. That really plays into the success.

Then, of course, there’s the financial. Am I making money? Because if you’re not making money, you just have an expensive hobby, which I don’t want. I have found that my income continues to increase, because I’m diversifying a little bit, but more importantly, because I’m really honing my skills process.

So instead of saying I have to charge $10,000 for a website that I know my clients can afford $5,000 for, I figured out how to hone my process so that I can stay at that level and still make a good profit from it. And being a numbers person, I always look at my numbers. I’m always looking at ways that I can cut costs, or can I eliminate this and replace it for this? Or can I create something that I don’t have to outlay the cost for which will up my profit margin so that I can continue to grow my income and make more money?

Tara: Do you base your profit on hours? Do you track your hours very carefully in order to determine that or when you talk about what things cost, are you thinking about overhead expenses?

Lee: It’s both. I track my hours because I don’t think that you can really create a solid process without knowing how much time everything takes. Then I look at those hours and say, “Can I do something differently or is there an app that I can use that will take the place of that?”

A great case in point is this online scheduling programs that are out there. I mean, that’s a huge time saver for anyone. Then also I look at how much time I wasted with email. So now I use inbox pause to stop my inbox, except once a day so that I’m not stopping and starting and stopping and starting. And I noticed I saved huge chunks of time with that.

But then I look at the tools. Can I find something on AppSumo for 49 bucks that will replace something else? Or with Adobe Creative Suite, I just got a notification in one of my groups that said, “Hey, they’re having this $29 special.” So of course, I’m on live chat, I bought the $29 special. I think I do this every single year, and every single year it’s been “No, that’s only for new people. Sorry, we can’t do this.” But this time, they were like, “Yeah, sure, no problem.”

So I cut that expense almost in half just by doing a 10-minute live chat. So it’s I think it’s a combination of everything. But it is important that even if you don’t charge by the hour, you still track your hour that it takes you or your hourly time so that you can figure out where you need to improve on that process.

Tara: What do you use to track your time?

Lee: I use Toggle for because they have a Chrome extension, and then they also have an app for Mac that I don’t have to necessarily be online, I can still track there. Then sometimes I just write it. Like I’ll just say, “I stopped working x time and then started at x time if it’s something where I close a computer, and I want to do some non-online stuff.

I have a probably more online that I track than offline, but it seems like I’m always tracking my time anymore just to make myself way more efficient.

Liam: I’m going to interrupt here because I let you two go off on apps and efficiency. So that’s going to be an add to this conversation. And I say that with laughter on my a…

Tara: AppSumo crack, we call it.

Liam: I want to talk to you about the WordPress community, Lee. You had talked about how you came across WordPress as a way to stop having to do everything with static HTML and CSS. Tell us about how you encountered the WordPress community and kind of where that went, and what that journey was like and where you are with it today.

Lee: I was introduced to WordPress through a blog a good while ago. Then I realized that if I learned this, it would be much easier to create my website and websites for my clients. Then I’m a lifelong learner, so it wasn’t just enough to find WordPress. I also found that there was this huge community of sharers who were teaching you how to use it, different tips and tricks. And then people were sharing the different code that they were writing to solve a problem or resources, and I was like, “Wow, this is a very supportive community.”

Then I attended my first WordCamp. And I think then I realized that there was a whole ‘nother ecosystem of people, that it wasn’t just the themes and the app and WordPress itself, but there was so many people who were willing to share and collaborate and just brainstorm with each other to continue to keep these businesses thriving, but the WordPress framework itself thriving. It was just fascinating to me the amount of resources and people resources that were out there.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely. What was the first WordCamp you attended?

Lee: The first one I attended was WordCamp KENT, I believe. Then right after that, I did the first WordCamp US. And you want to talk about like over. It was just a lot because I went from this a wonderful WordCamp KENT – I loved it. It was a wonderful small WordCamp – to WordCamp US where there was just like people everywhere and activity everywhere, and just so much going on.

This was really when I learned how huge the community was, and how helpful the community was. Then they had the happiness bar to help people out and the sponsors who were. And then just the Hallway Chats, which is how you guys came about. So it was just really a great experience for me. But as an extrovert, it was very overwhelming for me to say. I looked at it like, “Oh my gosh, if people are introverts, how could they handle all this? This is a lot today, God.” So it was just the whole experience was just amazing.

Liam: That’s a great story. Thank you. What do you do with WordPress community now? Are you a meetup regular? You have WordCamps on a regular basis? You talked about, you’ve got a camping RV community and a WordPress community. Tell me about your involvement week to week, month to month with your local WordPress community.

Lee: I do a lot of WordCamps.

Lee: I have been putting myself out there in a speaking capacity as well. Then I’m in a few Slack groups and Facebook groups too with different themes and plugins in the WordPress community as a whole. I found that the Slack groups are mostly people who are immersed as designers, developers, in that sense, and Facebook, it’s the people who are using WordPress from a DIY standpoint, which is really my target market. So it’s kind of like the best of both worlds. Then, of course, you have Twitter, which there’s a whole ‘nother ecosystem on there, too.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely. What’s been your biggest challenge in growing your business? You mentioned kind of learning to say no. Was that a challenge or is something else that might have given you more grief and headache and required more work?

Lee: I think the biggest was learning what to let go of, learning what services to let go of. I found that from a development standpoint, I’m better when I hire developers for specific tasks or programs. I still like to do the design because it brings the creative out in me, but I found that I am much better as a teacher and a fixer like getting in there and figuring out what’s wrong and fixing it. So it was just coming to that mindset of I don’t have to do it all. There are people that I can partner with that will help me do it all without doing it all.

Then just trying to make the decisions of what to offer and where to go from here. That to me was the hardest part was, what is it that I want to do for the next five years in my business? And what is it that I’ve done in the last five years that kind of don’t give me joy or that I don’t enjoy anymore? And who can I find to do that for me?

Liam: That takes time, doesn’t it? Because you don’t know if you don’t like it or if you really like it until you’ve done it a few times, right?

Lee: Yeah. I think sometimes I do like it. There are times where I like to dig into the code just because it makes my mind think differently. But then I think, “You know what? This isn’t something that I want to continue to do day in and day out.” So I need to find someone who has the same work style that I have but still knows the programs that I’m using at that point in time. So hiring anyone else is a really delicate balance of skill set and personality. Because someone can be the best of the best, but if you can’t communicate get along with them, then it’s a really bad experience.

Liam: Yeah, absolutely, it is. I want to ask you about advice, Lee. I want to ask you about advice that you’ve received and implemented in your life. What’s been the best advice that you were given or read or encountered, and successfully implemented in your life or business?

Lee: I think the best advice was self-care. Don’t forget about your self-care. And that’s just business and personal. I think as a business person, we tend to put ourselves last all the time. And as a mom, we tend to put ourselves last all the time. Even as a family giver, I had to learn that for me, you need to put yourself first.

On June 30, 2015, I had open heart surgery. I knew that I had a problem with my heart. I knew that it had to be fixed. My surgeon was like, “Yeah, we go in there and we…” It was supposed to be minimally invasive. I didn’t know until I woke up, which I think was a blessing. But at that point, I realized I had to do a lot of things differently, both in my life and in my business.

Fortunately, for me, my clients that I had, I told them, “I’m going in for this surgery, I will be out for two weeks, I’ll be back at it.” And that didn’t happen, and they were all really great about it. I had a support system that they were able to rely on while I was recovering. But there was a lot of changes that I had to make.

That was the time that I realized that you know what, if you don’t start putting yourself first, you can’t be the best business owner that you can be, you can’t be the best mom that you can be, you can be the best friend that you can be. So that was when the light bulb went off for me that things had to really change and I needed to start eating lunch at a normal hour or making sure that I hydrate during the day, or even getting up and moving. Like I can’t sit there for hours at a time working on a website, I need to get up and move around.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about your weekend RV travels and how that came about and just what you do, where you go with that?

Lee: We’ve camped since I was little. We started out at tent and then we went to a travel trailer and then my mom and dad ended up with a Class A Motorhome. So I’ve always traveled in motorhomes. When people say camping, I kind of cringe if it involves a tent, and no water or electric because I’m not used to it.

Then, when my kids started to get a little older and we figured we needed to do something for my husband and I, he wanted to buy a camp like in the middle of nowhere because he was a hunter and fisher. And I was like, “That’s fine with me. But you know what? I’m not going. I am not doing that. I can’t do the same thing over and over again, I get bored with it. And I have young kids, what am I going to do with them in the middle of nowhere?”

So we decided to buy our first RV. And he said, “I will give it a year. And that is if when the year is done, we’re buying a piece of property and sticking it there.” And we just had such a great time that it’s been 12 13 years now. We just bought a new fifth wheel because we want to do more long term traveling now that he’s getting ready to retire and I can work anywhere. We want to do four to six-week trips, maybe even longer, and then still do our weekends away. But we’ve gone so many places.

And sometimes we go in an RV and sometimes we just run an Airbnb or we rent a house. It just depends on where we want to be at the time. But it’s great for location independent traveling.

Tara: Do you like to drive or does your husband do most of the driving?

Lee: My husband does most of driving because I’m a bad driver in a car let alone with it and RV. I could kill you. But I do learn. This new RV, I have not taken it out and learn to drive it, but that is something…Even when we were younger, my mom learned to drive the AR that we had. You have to learn as a backup just in case. So I will learn it, but I will not be primary driver.

Tara: That would intimidate me. I also eat a lot of junk food when I have to drive and stay awake. I have trouble staying awake in the car. But I love the idea of it and I kind of would think that it gives you so much flexibility and independence like you have with your job. Here is where it sort of fits together, I guess. You don’t have to stay in hotels or choose hotels. You’re in your own space that only you have been in. So that’s really neat. I love that.

Lee: Yeah, it’s nice because you’re in your own space. But especially when you’re working on top of traveling, I know that I always have everything that I need. I have a WiFi extender and I have all of the things that I need to run my business, electricity. Then just the creature comforts that you don’t find in a hotel.

While living in an RV is not the same as living in a home, it does give you the creature comforts that you need to make things doable and comfortable.

Tara: What’s your farthest trip that you’ve been on? How far?

Lee: The further trip has been in Florida. We’ve gone down the east coast of Florida. I’ve been to the west coast but not in an RV. That’s on our bucket list for next year. I’ve done the West Coast travel mostly flying. I would love to do a train across the United States too. I think that would be such a cool trip. And the Midwest. We haven’t spent a lot of time in the Midwest, so that’s on the radar as well.

Tara: Sounds like you have some good plans for your husband’s retirement and your self-care working and traveling in the RV. It sounds really interesting. I look forward to hearing about it and maybe following you. We are out of time, so that leads me to ask where people can find you online and follow you.

Lee: You can find me on my website at leedrozak.com. I’m on Twitter @leedrozak. Facebook, my personal is @leedrozak, and my business is @leedrozakbiz. Then I’m sure if you google me, you’ll find everywhere else that I am too.

Tara: Great. I’m going to look for some RV stuff. Hopefully, you post your travels. That would be neat to see. Thanks for joining us, Lee. It’s been really great talking to you. I really enjoyed meeting you at WordCamp a few weeks ago and it’s great to have you on Hallway Chats.

Lee: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Liam: Thank, Lee. It’s been a real pleasure getting to know you. Thanks for your time today.

Lee: Thank you, Liam.

Tara: Bye.

Liam: Will see you soon. Bye-bye.

Lee: 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.

Carrie is a web developer instructor and freelance coach. She teaches front end web development and WordPress courses over at LinkedIn Learning.

Twitter | @cdils

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 100.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Carrie Dils. Carrie is a web developer instructor and freelance coach. And she is one of our very first supporters of our podcast. When Tara and I were starting to consider and getting ready to launch this podcast, we reached out to Carrie, who is a very accomplished podcaster in her own right to ask for advice and for guidance. She shared a lot of logistics, and there’s a lot of emotional support as well. Then when we first started to ask for financial support of our podcast, she was the first and dare I say only individual to contribute to the costs associated with running this podcast.

Just one more bit of introduction for Carrie, before I welcome her properly to the show, is to show that when we have guests on to the show, we asked them to complete a form with just some logistics information so we can describe them and read an introduction about them. And one of the questions that we asked our to-be guests is, who in the WordPress community do they respect but have yet to meet? And I can say that Carrie Dils name comes up more often than any others as someone in the WordPress community who people respect, but they’ve yet to meet.

So as we celebrate our 100th episode, it is with great joy and happiness that we welcome Carrie to the show. Welcome, Carrie.

Carrie: Thank you so much. What an intro.

Tara: Carrie, we’re so excited. Thank you very much for joining us on Hallway Chats. For those who don’t know you and for those who do, can you tell us a little bit more about who you are and what you do?

Carrie: Sure. [sound cut off]  Over the past few years have gone more into education. I teach front end web development and WordPress courses over at LinkedIn Learning. Also, as you guys said, I have a podcast and then run a series of courses called The Fearless Freelancer, just teaching basic business skills to those getting started in their web development businesses.

Liam: Carrie, I’ve looked up to you for years now as a friendly business leader, and certainly my headphones have carried your voice many times as I’ve cut my grass trying to figure out how to make my little practice better. How did you fall into all of this? Because web technology is relatively new, podcasting is new. Figuring out how to be a successful business owner in an environment that’s always changing, how did that come to be? Can you talk us through that story a little bit?

Carrie: Sure. I probably embarked into it a little bit about 20 years ago. Oh, my gosh, I’ve been out of college like 25 years. Oh my gosh. I don’t know. After I graduated college, I didn’t really have too many marketable skills, other than I learned just basic HTML to make websites. So I found out that I really enjoyed that and just kind of fell into freelancing.

At that point in time, you would actually look in the classifieds for web work. And did that. Then maybe six, seven years ago at this point, somebody told me about WordPress. I’d gotten out of the web development industry and was thinking about making a career change and somebody told me about WordPress. I guess the rest is kind of history. But in terms of the business side of it, entrepreneurial spirit has always been with me.

Liam: As you discovered WordPress, and were thinking, “Okay, maybe I don’t want to leave development yet,” where did WordPress go with your career or where did you take it? What about it? Where did you latch on to? Did you continue to be basically a WordPress consultant offering development and the like? Or how did that come about or proceed? What happened?

Carrie: When I first got started with WordPress you mean? Yeah. I was looking to make a career change. At that point, I had been with the Starbucks Corporation for about a decade and I was tired of the coffee business and frankly, tired of being in the service industry and looking for a change. So I fell back on what was that old skill in web development. I obviously needed a lot of dusting off.

It was somebody that I worked with at Starbucks that actually told me about WordPress. So I started working with it, playing with it. I honestly don’t even remember how I found my first WordPress client. It might have been a referral or friend of a friend. I’ve slept too many times to remember. Just kind of slowly started dipping my way back into offering client services while I was still working at Starbucks. And then there came a tipping point where it was much more financially attractive to let go of the Starbucks work and go freelance full time.

Tara: Your transition then from that, from doing client work, how long did you do client work before you started teaching, I guess?

Carrie: A couple of years. Maybe two, three years. And the teaching, I kind of backed into that too. It was as I was learning WordPress, I would blog about my experience and blog in the form of tutorials, mostly to help me remember what it was I was learning. But I got a lot of good feedback on those that people were finding them helpful. So that led me to start being more purposeful about writing tutorials and things that would be helpful for other people.

Tara: So you taught yourself and then your documentation of that was blogging, which then turned into another business outlet for you?

Carrie: It did.

Tara: Did you find that you liked that more than doing client work? Because it seems like your business really transitioned more and then into teaching freelancers how to be freelancers. You’re a teacher at heart, would you say?

Carrie: You know, I would have never thought of myself that way, but I have found that work to be very gratifying. I guess maybe so. I’ve never thought of myself as a teacher or ever necessarily wanting a career in education. But it’s really fun to watch somebody want to learn how to do something and get to have a hand and teaching them and then see them go be successful in whatever, whether that’s creating a website or filing their official papers for their business, or whatever it is. It’s cool to be part of that journey.

Tara: Yeah, I can definitely see that. And I think your personality is comfortable and fun so you make it interesting for people to want to interact with you on that level. When it comes to your running a business, how have you found that transition from client work to being a teacher? Because teachers don’t get paid as much as business people, right? Or that is not true in the LinkedIn and WordPress world?

Carrie: Well, I mean, certainly, it’s not part of traditional education which certainly our teachers are grossly underpaid. But thankfully, I don’t rely on government budgets to set my salary restrictions. That was a little bit of a juggling act to make the leap. It wasn’t really even a leap, it was just kind of a slow overlap of doing the educational stuff and doing client services along with it until I had enough income coming into let the client services go. A lot of hustle.

Liam: Yeah, Yeah. And you told me, Carrie, but I would imagine it was LinkedIn says, “Hey, would you like to put together a course?” And you say, “Okay, sure.” And then you realize or learn about the difference between a well-documented blog post in a formal LinkedIn Learning course and the level of preparation and energy and hours, frankly, that you would have to put into that. What was that all like?

Carrie: Oh, yeah. That’s been an education on its own just learning how to do courses at a professional level. Thankfully, I write all the courses, I plan all the courses, and then I show up and record them. But they do the heavy lifting in terms of the production and whatnot.

But yeah, from a planning perspective, it’s a pretty significant upfront time investment that goes into creating the materials. Of course, I’m working with some of their staff to make sure that what I’m thinking of actually sound like it makes sense. So there’s some collaboration there. Kind of learning that model, it’s not like it’s any big secret or difficulty. Every course just starts off with first, what’s the learning objective, what do you want to teach somebody, and then creating an outline. Okay, here’s the big five bases we want to cover. And then within each of those bases, maybe there’s five or six subtopics.

So just coming up with that initial outline for a course has helped me think through how I wrote my Fearless Freelance or courses, how I structure blog post now. It’s even helped me in just if I’m preparing to talk at a WordCamp or something. Again, it’s not like it’s any big magic, but it was just something I had not been exposed to. I’ve gotten in education in the process.

Tara: How do you balance imposter syndrome with this? Obviously, there’s a lot of talk in our space about imposter syndrome, and I think teaching sometimes helps you learn something more. I found giving talks is helpful because I feel like I learn things and I realize that I know more than I think I do. Is that hold true? Do you think that this process has helped you if you ever did have imposter syndrome to I guess work on that? Maybe not get over it, but work on it?

Carrie: Yeah, I did and I do still have imposter syndrome based on the scenario. But I think the teaching and repeated showing up in those capacities has helped build my confidence. And of course, when people will give you feedback, it’s not always positive. Or I should say it’s constructive but not always necessarily in a praise way. But when you hear enough people responding positively, it helps you say, “Okay, I guess I do know what I’m talking about or I guess I have been helpful. So I’m going to try to put my imposter syndrome on the shelf a little bit.”

Liam: Yeah, that’s a thing that never goes away. Carrie, you mentioned talking at a WordCamp, and I want to ask you about how you first encountered the WordPress community and maybe even your first WordCamp – how that came about and what you made of it all back then?

Carrie: This was I think maybe 2013. I’d never heard of a WordCamp. I had started working with WordPress, and of course, just googling, finding tutorials and stuff like that and I came across Billy Erickson’s website, who’s a very talented developer that I look up to. He’s based out of Texas, which is where I was based out of. Somehow I was poking around on his website, looking at something and I saw a reference to a WordCamp. I was like, “What?”

Trace it back, I find the link to the WordCamp site, and I realized that I’ve just missed – maybe this is 2012, I can’t remember – but I realized that I’ve just missed whatever Texas camp had happened. It was probably working in Boston. So I just waited until the next year till it rolled around again and I went. And I think I was just jaw-dropping the floor that all these people were interested in this software, and we’re coming together and giving away information at such a ridiculously low cost. Of course, it was fun.

I remember that was the first time I met Chris Lema in person, the first time I met Megan Gray in person, Bill Erickson, and Jared Atchison. All these people that I had interacted with online, and respected. And it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, like, I’m standing in the same room with you.” Of course, that just started a trend of attending as many WordCamps as I could manage to get to.

Tara: They are pretty life-changing. We’ve talked to so many people who had that experience, myself included, and I think we give a lot of credit to WordCamp for changing people’s interaction with WordPress in their business and their life, I guess.

I’m going to ask you about success, Carrie. We like to ask everybody about that topic just to explore your definition of success, personal professional, either or both, how they fit together. If you could share that with us, that’d be great.

Carrie: Sure. Personally, I guess I would say that success looks like your relationships – having people that love you and support you and being able to give that love and support back to your friends or your family. If you got that, you’re the richest person in the world. Professionally, I’ve always been kind of a work to live not a live to work person. So I’m not super driven by corporate ladders or promotions. Not that those things are bad, that’s just not the way that I’m wired. I would much rather find something that makes me just enough money that I can go to whatever lifestyle I want. In my case that happens to currently be driving around the country and camping out of my car and just enjoying this beautiful green earth we live on. So the flexibility, to be able to do that, that’s maybe kind of simple, but I don’t need much.

Liam: I liked the simplicity of your definitions, both the personal level of being able to not only get love and support from those around us but be able to give back and to share and support them. Because it really is a two-way street, doesn’t it? It has to be. And if it’s not, it’s not a healthy situation. And I think your approach of working to live also emphasizes that healthy relationship, healthy exchange of enough money to do what I want, but not focusing too much on money and not focusing too much on what I want. Thank you for sharing that with us, Carrie.

Carrie: Sure. Thanks for asking.

Tara: What are some things that you do in your daily life toward those ideas? Do you have a schedule, a plan, goals? How do you set that up?

Carrie: Yeah. The current place I’m in, in my life, is not representative of maybe what the past five or six years looked like. I’ve moved out of my home, ended significant relationship and have not really put down my route yet. So the one thing I have missed is actually having some sort of a set schedule. Right now it’s more of, “all right, when can I get to a Starbucks and take advantage of the Wi-Fi and get some work done?” Work comes in some odd time pockets. So let’s say this time is not really representative.

Previously, and Tara I know you’re familiar with the 12 Week Year, I would set out to do 12 Week Year. So usually in either mid to late December, early January kind of plan out what I wanted to get done for the year, and then break that into those quarterly segments. I’ve been in masterminds at various points with people who help to keep me on track or help make sure I’m reaching after my goals. But I like that model of having a big picture plan, but then having the flexibility to change direction if need be, or if an unexpected opportunity comes up.

Tara: Even with your change in your routine, is there something that you that you’ve hung on to, something that you do every day?

Carrie: I try to take a walk every day. And that’s not necessarily work-related, but it is just a way to kind of clear some space in my head, and also use that time to listen to a business book or taking a podcast. That’s a habit that I’ve tried to…that’s good for my mental health and sanity. And I can do that anywhere in the world.

Tara: Yeah, for sure.

Liam: Where have you been lately? You said you’ve been traveling, and so you’ve piqued my interest and even maybe a little jealous. Where have you gone? What have you seen?

Carrie: I started in Texas. One of my missions was to just see as many national parks as I could in 2019. This is another great thing about the WordPress world. You meet people from all over the place. So you can just put your finger on a map and there’s probably somebody from WordPress that lives there. But I went to Oklahoma. So Corey and Lindsay Miller, spend some time with them. Saw my old college roommate. Then cut across to Colorado. I tried to go to the Grand Canyon but it was snowing tremendously and the road was closed that I needed to use. So I skipped the Grand Canyon this time around.

Liam: Yeah, that’s not a ditch you want to slide into accidentally, is it?

Carrie: No, no. I was really disappointed to miss it, but I’ll be back I’m sure. Let’s see. I spent some time in Arizona and gotten to spend time with folks from the Phoenix WordPress community. Utah, I’ve been to the Four Corners, but that was about my extent to spending time in Utah.

Liam: You checked the Utah box. Well done.

Carrie: I got my border picture and then I moved on. From there, I spent most of my time in California. I didn’t quite expect to spend as long out here as I have but had the opportunity to do some pet sitting for a friend and so stayed out here a little bit longer. In the middle of that, I’ve gone back to Texas and spent about a month visiting with friends and catching up there.

Then tomorrow I’m going to start heading up the coastline of California and hopefully, by this weekend to be in Yosemite. Well, we’ll see how the Wi-Fi connection is.

Tara: Sounds like a great adventure and a lot of driving. Do you listen to a podcast when you’re driving? I eat a lot of candy when I drive and I know that you and I both enjoy good Hot Tamales.

Carrie: We do enjoy a good Hot Tamale. Oh, my goodness, yeah. They are so good for keeping you awake when you’re driving. I’ll listen to podcast. Not necessarily business or WordPress podcast, but a lot of NPR shows, and then listen to – I was going to say books on tape – audio books, and sometimes music. Just kind of depends on the mood.

Tara: Have you had any surprising encounters or episodes or views or Vistas, surprising/favorite things with all the driving?

Carrie: Oh, probably the most surprising happened fairly…This was back in January. I had just been to the Four Corners monument and snapped my picture there, and was headed to the Grand Canyon and making my way in that general direction. And there was a beautiful dog that was on the road. I pulled over and… I had some goldfish that I’ve been snacking on. Not Hot Tamales. I was in a salty mood I guess! But I use the goldfish to coax the dog into the car with me and ended up kind of a fun story or at least fun for anybody who’s a dog lover.

Took him, made sure that he didn’t blonde anybody, he wasn’t chipped. Got his shots, his vaccinations and then ended up with the help of the inner webs, and kind of putting up the call finding a foster home for him. And I did a lot of driving to get him there, but that was a really fun experience.

I remember at one point taking a client call. And I was in some place with just terrible cell connection, and I had this dog – I kind of nicknamed him Floofy because he was big fluffy. So I had Floofy sleeping in the back of my car, I was trying to transport him, and I had terrible cell reception. So I was on a rest up on the side of the road trying to have this call with a client. Thankfully, the client was very gracious person because it was not exactly the smoothest. That was unexpected.

Tara: That’s a great story for your freelancing advice. Maybe don’t take client calls in the car with that cell service and a stray dog.

Carrie: Yeah, yeah. The planning on that one could have been better for sure.

Tara: But it worked out. It worked out.

Liam: Carrie, I want to ask you about advice. One of the questions that we like to ask our guests here is around not so much advice that they’ve shared, but advice that they’ve heard or read and embraced and successfully implemented in their lives. Can you share with us some piece of advice that you’ve received and implemented successfully in your own life?

Carrie: Oh, what a great question. Man, I’m trying to just pick one because thankfully, I’ve had a lot of mentors speak a lot of wisdom in my life. I think probably the most recent would be my dad who I’ve always had tremendous respect for both professionally and personally. He is also a college professor. He was talking about when he tells the students to kind of go with their bent. Everybody has a natural bent, whether they’re implying to athleticism or they’re inclined to work with their hands or inclined to be a helper or take care of people. Everybody has their bent. And when you lean into that is where you find kind of the least resistance and can find some success.

My dad, of course, knows me pretty well, and he was just telling me some stories from my childhood and we were talking about my bent. So it was just kind of encouraging to hear as I think about kind of what’s this next chapter in my life look like career-wise, especially, what is my natural bent. And it is definitely towards entrepreneurial adventure, and how does that play out and how can I lean into that? I guess I haven’t really implemented it yet. It’s still kind of knocking around the noggin.

Tara: Yeah, I like that idea of your bent, your skill. Have you done any of these like personality tests that are all the rage, the enneagram or all these things, that help you identify your personality type or I guess your bent in a way?

Carrie: Oh, yeah. I kind of love those tests.

Tara: They’re addictive, aren’t they?

Carrie: Yeah. Probably the Myers Briggs. I don’t know. I did that a year ago or so – probably the most recent one. I feel like I straddle the middle on a lot of things. I’m like, “That’s not helpful.” My bent is I don’t have a bent. Apparently just right down the middle. I do love taking those things.

Liam: I’m curious about the manner in which your father shared that advice. Was that when you were out visiting, and it was the two of you on the back porch, maybe having a beer as the sun went down, and he kind of looked over and says, “Carrie, let’s talk”? Or will you just shooting the bowl and asking for advice? I just love dad and advice stories. Can you share about that?

Carrie: Well, at a really neat experience this past fall, I got to go to Spain with my dad and spend five weeks with him hiking across the country.

Liam: Wow.

Carrie: So we have a lot of opportunities to talk. So we were just talking about figuring out what you want to be when you grow up. He’s 70. And he told me, he still didn’t know what he wanted to be. And I said, “Well, that is so discouraging. You don’t know and you’re 70. How is that helping me?” That was the context.

Liam: What a great experience. Five weeks just hanging out with your dad, walking, talking, probably doing a lot of nothing too in terms of just walking and focusing on the road and introspection. What a blessing to have that.

Carrie: Yeah, I treasure that. I will always treasure that. I would say to anybody if they get a chance to spend time with their parents like that – and of course, not everybody is as good relationships or that opportunity. But if it does come up, I highly recommend taking it.

Tara: Yeah, and having a freelance lifestyle that allows you to do that I imagine.

Carrie: Exactly.

Tara: Did you have Wi-Fi in your travels? Did you work at all or did you completely disconnect?

Carrie: I completely disconnected. Other than uploading some photos to Instagram and phone calls of family.

Tara: So you just told clients that you were going to be gone and you gave them a person to contact?

Carrie: For about six months, I had been working towards having that space cleared on my calendar. I picked two active clients at that time and I introduced them to someone else who could take care of them just in case there was an emergency or they needed something while I was gone.

Tara: Excellent. Wow. That’s something to keep in the back of one’s mind is having that opportunity and having the courage to do it. I think that’s a big thing. Very cool. Thanks for sharing that with us.

We are running out of time. I want to acknowledge Carrie. And thank you for not only being a supporter of the show but for being a supporter of me and the WordPress community that I found, which really started with your live podcast. I have so many friends in the WordPress community that came from that show, and I’ve learned a lot from you. So personally, I want to say thank you for that. I probably wouldn’t be here right now if it weren’t for you. So thanks.

Carrie: Oh, thank you.

Tara: Thanks for being here on the show, and being part of my journey too.

Carrie: Thank you that means the world to me.

Liam: Carrie, it’s been such a pleasure. I’ve long admired you from afar and listened to your show. So to have you on our little show today is just a wonderful way for us to celebrate our 100th episode. Thank you so much for joining us.

Carrie: Absolutely. Thanks for having me guys, and congrats again on number 100.

Tara: Thanks for your support. Where can people find you online if they haven’t already?

Carrie: You can find me at carriedils.com or on Twitter @cdils.

Tara: Thanks again, Carrie. Hope to see you soon. Bye-bye.

Carrie: Thanks, guys.

Liam: Thanks, Carrie.

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.

Kerry is passionate about helping others. She educates, inspires, and networks with freelancers, sharing her experience, teaching skills, and offering actionable attitudes to shift mindset in the direction of success.

Twitter | @kerrycarron

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 99.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Kerry Carron. Kerry is passionate about helping others. She educates, inspires, and networks with freelancers, sharing her experience, teaching skills, and offering actionable attitudes to shift mindset in the direction of success. Welcome, Kerry.

Kerry: Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure meeting you both and being here with you guys today.

Tara: We’re excited that you’re here, too. Thanks so much for joining us. Can you start by telling us a little bit more about yourself?

Kerry: Sure. I live in southern New Mexico in a city called Alamogordo. I try to say it for everybody because spelling it out, nobody ever knows how to say it. I am married to my husband Michael. He is the love of my life and the man of my dreams. We are now empty nesters after raising three boys who are current in their 20s and their 30s. I’m a freelancer who is now able to completely work 100% of the time from home.

Tara: Wow. There’s a lot there to talk about that isn’t even talking about WordPress too much. How awesome to hear somebody who’s been married for a long time say that they’re married to the love of their life. That’s pretty cool. And he must be supportive of your business and you being an entrepreneur and working from home, I would think or it would be hard to love somebody if they didn’t like that.

Kerry: Absolutely. We’ve actually been married for coming up on 25 years. It has been a journey, and it continues to be a journey. He is very supportive as I am as well with him. I think a lot of that has to do with our faith. We are very much faith-based, and we just love life and happy to be here and help one another.

Tara: Excellent. Excellent. Are your children nearby or are they all over the place – your boys?

Kerry: No. Our boys are about 12 hours away from us. Two of them live in San Diego and one lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Tara: So you really are empty nests with not even anybody popping in for a visit or a dinner?

Kerry: That is very true. In fact, this last month, unfortunately, we lost our last fur child, so we are also petless at this point. So true empty nesters, and we’re embracing it and moving forward and going to try to take advantage of some travel time I think.

Tara: Yeah, that becomes easier when you don’t have pets, even if it’s sad that they’re gone. That is, you look at the opportunities that come your way as a result. Kerry, tell us a little bit about your business, what you do and how you got started in working for yourself and in WordPress, be it what you did before that or what your path was to finding it.

Kerry: Absolutely is I’ve been a freelancer since 2009. Prior to that, I had a career in air traffic control. I did that for about 17 and a half years – military veteran. Got my training for air traffic through the Air Force. After that, I went into the Federal Aviation Administration, which gives me a lot of great skills, which I’m hoping we’ll get a chance to talk about a little bit later. But in 2009, I was laid off, not from air traffic, but a related position, and I’ve been a freelancer since. I also have an accountability in a small group leader since 2012.

I got into web design and development when I started developing over 20 of my own personal sites. And then friends started asking me to help them with their sites, and then started building client sites. I was introduced to WordPress probably somewhere around 2007. So not as long as some of the freelancers I know and work with, but again is one of those journeys and it’s a passion of mine. So I absolutely love it.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a significant amount of time. What were your 20 websites I have to ask? Were they all related topics, or how does one person have 20 websites?

Kerry: I think it started out with being a domain hog. I just collected them for a while. But in reality, what I did, it was probably not too long after the dot-com craze, and I realized the importance of owning one’s name as their domain. So I purchased all of our family’s names. So I have my children’s websites with their names. My husband and I both have websites with our name. Then, of course, I knew I wanted to start a small business, so I grabbed up some domain names for that.

My very first website was actually an affiliate marketing website. I did Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge, and it really inspired me to develop something along those lines of helping other people learn how to do it, and at the same time build up my own websites. So I just kind of got into it that way, I guess.

Liam: What’s the bulk of your services now? Are you mostly buildings clients’ sites? Are you building, maintaining? Is there some other aspect of consultancy?

Kerry: Yeah, it’s morphed over the years. It started out just helping us update their sites because they were afraid to push the button, especially if things broke. But I offer my clients WordPress website hosting, maintenance, security updates, customer support for questions, problems, or site additions or changes.

The way I have my hosting setup is I do more or less highly recommend – we’ll just put it that way. Highly recommend you allow me to host your website. I have a dedicated server that I have split up into different sections and IP addresses, and I have a team of other freelancers, and designers and developers who are helping me to come up with a standard for how we want everybody’s website to be on the server, with an emphasis on really super secure websites as well as our server. So if you’re on our server, you get our service. If you’re not on our server, you can still get our service, but it’s going to be a lot more limited and we can’t ensure that you’re going to have a secure website as if you’re on our server.

Liam: What’s your client based on? Who are you serving?

Kerry: Wow, that’s a great question. Sometimes I asked myself that same thing. I have this horrible habit of learning to be just above average in pretty much everything I do. Unfortunately, I’m not a master at anything. So I would say anybody who is…let’s go with my ideal client. My ideal client would be somebody who needs a website because they know they need it, not because they want it, and they want to run the business and they want me to run their website. I’m a much better team player than I am an individual person – as contrary as that is to me being a type A personality. But I do much better when I’m working with a team of people, or I’m helping somebody do something for them.

Tara: That’s a good insight to have about yourself. Did you have to learn that the hard way? I mean, you work for yourself, so do you have a team, or how is that insight come to be? Because I liked it very much. It sounds like you’ve given it a lot of thought.

Kerry: It again has morphed from where I began. Wow, let’s see where to begin with that. I guess it kind of leads into how I learned what I’m good at and what I’m not good at. I’m very good at designing and creating processes that ensure that nothing’s missed in developing anything. I’m also a firm believer in automating as much as possible. So I’ve always been intrigued with systems.

I suppose my military and federal aviation administration career probably contributed a lot to that. As you can imagine, in air traffic, procedures are quite stringent and rules must be followed, and checklists continually being used. So I used those skills to develop standard operating procedures for my own business. As I learned, what was working and what wasn’t working, I just simply shared that with other people, and it started carrying over into helping others with what they were doing.

What it ended up leaving to was working with other designers and developers, educating them, inspiring them, networking with them, and assisting them or even providing similar services to them and or their clients. So it’s just kind of been this big melting pot of a business with the idea of eventually replacing the active income that I have to trade my time for money with into something that will hopefully evolve into something that is more than 50% passive-type income.

Tara: Processes are important but there’s something that I think a lot of times when you’re running your own business we – I can speak for myself – but we often don’t take the time to do because we are busy producing work and actually finding the time and organizational capacity to put together those procedures. Is that something that you’ve ever considered marketing in and of itself to other people like you? I know there are some other people in the WordPress space.

I think of Jennifer Bourn, for example, who has taken her processes for project management and sells them as a program and a package that people can participate in and get her tools and her emails and all that type of thing. That seems like something that I can tell from talking to you. And I appreciate your reference to your background and the types of things that you needed to do in the FAA, applying that to other people in your same type of business. Or maybe you already do that.

Kerry: I have thought about that actually, and I’ve actually participated in some of Jennifer’s courses that she had through iThemes. Her processes are incredible. I don’t think I’m quite organized enough yet myself to be able to do that. However, I have recently started working with a highly visible individual in the WordPress community, and I’m helping to put his procedures that he has in his head onto paper and help him with managing his company. For now, I’m going to leave his name unknown. We’ll just leave that. I’ll let him make that announcement at some point in time…

Tara: That’s cool. Interesting. That’s cool. Thanks for sharing that.

Kerry: And it’s literally just started like within the last two weeks. So we’re going to be coming up with a title for me, I think. That’s it’s always exciting for me. I love titles. Like major go-getter or…

Liam: Titles can be a reflection of success. And I wonder, Kerry your definition of success. What does it mean to you personally, professionally, maybe some are both? How would you define it?

Kerry: It’s a little bit of everything I think. When I think of it in terms of success, and what I feel I am successful at or whatnot, I think it’s mostly to be able to do what I want to do when I want to do it. I alluded to it a bit ago to have more than 50% of my business based on a more passive type of income than having to be tied to a desk having to trade my time for money.

A lot of it is financially based, but at the same time, I don’t want that at the risk of giving up my peace. I don’t want to trade my peace for my passion either. So it’s a balance. I guess success to me as being able to successfully balance everything. I don’t know how to answer that.

Tara: What’s your favorite thing to do?

Kerry: My favorite thing to do is to find solutions for people and provide them with options so that they get to choose what solution is best for them. That’s on a professional level of course. My favorite thing to do personally is spending time with my husband. He’s my best friend. We like to travel. We’re into hiking, working out together. Or sometimes it could be as simple as that picking the next TV series to watch.

Tara: What’s the current one?

Kerry: I think it’s the witches one. There’s something about…I don’t even know the name of it. We just pick one and we go with it. We’re big sci-fi and adventure, action, drama kind of thing. I don’t know. We could watch anything, it doesn’t matter.

Tara: It becomes a concert comfortable thing to do together.

Kerry: Yes.

Liam: Does he participate in your business at all? Is he active in it at all? Does he run a business as well?

Kerry: He does not run a business. He is actually a master auto technician. It’s interesting our careers are very similar, even though they’re very different. Which is very like our relationship. We are very similar, but we’re very different. We always get to whatever solution it is by he goes this way; I go this way. He goes the short way; I go the long way.

He jokes with me a lot that I do everything the hard way. I think some of that has to do with the fact that although I’m quite capable of learning to do anything, it does sometimes take me a longer period of time to be able to learn it. But once I know it or once I learn it, I really know it.

Back to the question, is he involved in my business? One of the things I absolutely hate doing in my business is bookkeeping. I don’t know that he likes doing it, but he’s much better at it than I am. So he does take care of the books for me.

Liam: Well played on that one. Well played on that one.

Kerry: I have too many other things that my mind is actively trying to do within the business to have to worry about that. Mentally, I pretty much know where everything is. It’s not like I go out and don’t have a budget. I understand bookkeeping, I just don’t like to do it. He is a 1% owner, and that’s on purpose. We are an LLC, so it’s more for the legal protection of the business and the entity itself. And It’s a learning process. Everything in life for us is a learning process.

Liam: Well said. I want to go back to your definition of success. You talked about not wanting to trade effectively professional success, the ability to do what you want when you want for peace and that it’s a balance. How do you measure that? How do you measure that balance? How do you measure how much peace is enough or how much money is enough as compared to your stock of peace?

Kerry: For me, personally, it has a lot to do with my faith, being a Christian, leading a Christian-like life, trying to lead by example. I think that if you ask anybody who knows me, they’ll be like, “Oh, she’s so successful, she’s got everything together.” It couldn’t be farther from the truth.

However, I have a peace with where I’m at and I know it’s not where I need to stay. I also believe that there is nothing that’s going to be put in front of me that I can’t handle in some way, shape, or form. So I just handle what I can, and when I can’t, I try to take a deep breath and build in some breathing room, and I study about it, and I pray about it, and I learn about it. At times, I’m out of control, but I am still able to control myself. So things might be completely out of control but…

One of the things I’ve told a couple of my friends a number of times when they get very stressed out is, whenever I’m feeling super stressed, if I take my emotion out of it, and deal in fact, then everything becomes crystal clear. That doesn’t mean don’t be emotional, it just means approach it from a perspective that is free of emotion, because you can always bring that emotion back afterwards.

One of the most difficult things that I recently had to do was give up on a particular aspect of my side business, one of my 20 websites. It was sucking all of my time, all of my energy. I loved doing it, but there was no return whatsoever, other than the peace of mind of knowing that I was doing good work and putting great information out there. But it wasn’t an equal trade, and I ended up having to give that up.

Within a week of giving that up is when this other door opened, and a new opportunity was there in front of me. And so, it’s a matter of learning to continually evaluate where you are, decide whether it’s where you want to be and leading you to where you want to go. If it’s not, then you need to find the graceful way of stepping back and allowing this a new opportunity, the new door to open in front of you so that you can continue to grow and you can continue to move beyond where you are to get where it is you really want to be.

Liam: That’s a good approach, and it’s one that requires an active level of self-critical reflection to discern is this the right road and should I be at this point on this road at this point in time?

Kerry: Absolutely. One of the things both my husband and I try to build into our life every day is we’re always trying to learn something new. Now, that can be a drawback if you’re trying to focus on one thing and become a master at it. But at the same time, there’s a certain level of me, a certain perspective inside me where I don’t feel I’m successful if I’ve stopped learning. I can’t grow if I’ve stopped learning. And I’m nowhere near where I have the potential to be.

So I need to continue to learn at least one new thing every day. And more importantly than learning it is potentially being able to apply it. If you can’t apply what it is you learn, then there’s no sense in learning. You might as well learn something to be able to apply. I try to do that both in my business as well as in my personal life, in my relationships, in my finances, in my business, everything across the board. Try to learn something new every day and apply it.

Liam: That’s a good idea. I like that. Kerry, you mentioned that you first encountered WordPress in 2007. How did you learn it and how have you shared it with others?

Kerry: As early as probably, I’m going to go out on a limb and say had to be near 2000, is when computers really started becoming popular. Everybody had a computer at home. I loved spending time on my computer. But I didn’t like wasting time on my computer. And I thought to myself, there has to be a way that I can do something on this wonderful piece of technology that will allow me to have an income and work from home. It was in the back of my mind.

At that point in time in my career, I had just resigned from being an air traffic controller due to illness in the family, and I needed to care for an individual. So my husband and I were at a place where we pretty much had no income at all so I was out there looking. We got involved with a Hockey Association, and we dedicated all of our time and energy to this Hockey Association. Traded membership to the Hockey Association for time that we gave to the association basically managing this ice rink.

They needed a webpage. So there were web pages all over. You could build a web page here. So I set out to learn HTML. And so I learned HTML – taught myself – then I built a webpage, and I’m like, “There has to be an easier way to do this. I’m having to recreate this page millions of times. Why can’t it just automatically fill?” Well, there’s PHP and MySQL, imagine that.

So somebody said, “You should try WordPress.” And I went over. Of course, I’m like everybody else at the beginning. I don’t know the difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org and I couldn’t figure it out. I’m like, “This is way above me. I don’t understand anything about this.” So I didn’t. We had somebody else build a… A friend of mine needed a website for some vacation rentals, and so he built the site. And I told him, I said, “I am going to be your client from hell, because I like to know how things work and I need to understand this.”

So I would go in and I learned about servers, I learned how to manipulate all of the files and change files. Didn’t know about when you updated it will erase everything. So there was a lot of back and forth. Then it wasn’t working out for him because I was the client from hell, but I knew I was the client from hell. So I knew that if I was going to build a website, I had to do it myself because otherwise, I was going to drive whoever was trying to take care of me totally crazy. So I tried WordPress again.

And I mentioned the first website I built was an affiliate website – it was built on WordPress, but at the time, I didn’t know it was built on WordPress because the person and the system that I was using was a third party system that you would go in and manage WordPress through their system. Suddenly, I realized, “Hey, this is WordPress.” So then I started building my own websites from WordPress, but using their system to install it because they were one of the first one click install type of things.

So I just started doing these one-click installs and started working with this guy who literally had over 600 websites and managing all of his websites on the server. And it just built in grew and grew and grew. As you can imagine, with 600 websites, you learn how to use WordPress pretty quick because you learn how to do one thing, and then you do it on 600 sites. You learn another thing and you do it on 600 sites. You do it 600 times, eventually, you figure it out. So that’s how I got into learning WordPress.

Tara: Wow.

Kerry: I remember one particular thing, another individual that I was good friends with online, I did not understand how widgets worked and the widget areas in the back. And I’m all confused about how to do something and he’s like, “Just use a widget.” I’m like, “I don’t know what that is.” And he’s like, “Oh, let me show you.” He showed me widgets in widget areas, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, this is incredible.” So I just from there and then I started building my own plugins, building my own themes. Mostly themes. I started with themes because I was working with iThemes and their builder and I was just creating hundreds and hundreds of child themes. I loved it.

Tara: That’s a great story. I mean, it sounds like it must have been overwhelming, but yet a good way to learn. I want to go back because you shared some advice with us about your views on learning something every day. We’d like to ask people about advice that they’ve received and that they could pass on as well. Can you share with us or think of any advice that someone’s giving you that you’ve taken to heart and adopted that you can share with us as well?

Kerry: Absolutely. When I first started and I was doing the affiliate marketing, I was good friends with another gentleman who had just recently figured out affiliate marketing to the point where he could retire. I was asking him tons of questions. “How do you know what system to use for affiliate marketing?” And he said, “It really doesn’t matter which one you use, just pick one and stick with it.” So I’ve kind of adapted that mindset.

If you’re a designer or a developer in WordPress, you know there are so many ways to do the same thing and have it work. So just like his advice was to me, that would be my advice to others who are learning, is pick something that resonates with you and sticks with it. Start with a theme or a theme system that you like, and that you can learn and understand and then add to it after you really know it and really understand it.

Tara: That fits into your personality of being process.

Kerry: Yes, thank you.

Tara: We’re running out of time, but I just wanted to remark on something that you said that I noted earlier. And maybe this is a good way to wrap things up, but I love that you said that “I have peace where I’m at, but that’s not necessarily where I want to stay.” On that kind of final thought, I just want to say, where do you see yourself going from here?

Kerry: I think it’s going to be a lot more of the same difficult time learning, but really, truly understanding. I don’t know exactly where I’m going. And as much as I’d like to control it, I know I’m better off not trying to control it. Regardless, I will see success. I don’t ever see myself not being successful. I was raised and taught that I can do anything, and I truly believe that.

Now the doesn’t mean I’m going to be a basketball star because I’m five foot two. That’s just not going to happen. However, I can dream big and I can reach my goals. So I’m just going to continue to set goals and continue to grow and learn and see where my journey leads me.

Tara: Great. Thank you for sharing that. Kerry, we are out of time. It’s flown by. We really loved chatting with you and getting to know you better. So thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you online?

Kerry: Oh, people can find me at ultimate-solution.com. That’s my business website. Or of course, you can always find me at kerrycarron.com. That’s where I’m at.

Tara: Thank you.

Liam: Kerry, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you out here on our little virtual hallway. Thanks so much.

Kerry: You’re very welcome. And thank you so much for having me. I hope you all the best. And to everybody listening, go for your dreams.

Tara: Thanks, Kerry. Bye-bye.

Liam: Thanks, Kerry.

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.

Michelle says she is an overextended, over-committed entrepreneur, author, blogger and social butterfly. As a WordPress fanatic, Michelle is the Head of Customer Success at GiveWP.

Twitter | @michelleames

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we are joined by Michelle Ames. Michelle says she is an overextended, overcommitted entrepreneur, author, blogger and social butterfly. She’s an avid Scrabble player, a mother, a serial volunteer, a marketing enthusiast, and 11th hour expert. As a WordPress fanatic, Michelle is the Head of Customer Success at GiveWP. Welcome, Michelle.

Michelle: Thank you. It’s good to be here.

Tara: So glad to have you. And what litany of great things to chat with you about today. But I’ll let you start out by maybe telling us in a nutshell a little bit more about you.

Michelle: Sure. Well, as you can hear from my little intro there, I’m a very busy person, but I like to be busy. Busy is what keeps me going and gets me up every morning, and keeps me as an active part of society and WordPress and all the different parts that are in my life. They always say if you want something done, ask a busy person, which is why my list gets longer every single day.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about your background with WordPress and tech. How did you get started and how long have you been in WordPress?

Michelle: I was in higher education for 20 years. And while I was working at the University of Rochester, I worked on my MBA. It was the early 2000s and the e-commerce boom had just started. That’s what every single website was considered e-commerce – you might remember – and every single school suddenly had an e-commerce truck that you could do.

So I was working on my MBA with a concentration in information systems, marketing, and e-commerce. And by the time I graduated, the bottom had fallen out of the market, and suddenly websites were selling for $1.99, whereas before they were selling for $100 or $50. So suddenly, I was like, “Well, I guess I’m going to keep working in higher education for a while longer. And I did.

I was the director of a massage school for five years, and one of my best friends who was a graduate, she said, “I really want to start a nonprofit organization for massage therapist to help them continue their careers.” So we said to her husband who was a WordPress guy, “Hey, build us a website.” So he built us the shell of a website and then the next thing he said is, “Here are your logins, go ahead and put the content in yourself.”

So I remember logging in that very first day terrified that I would do something to break the internet. Not just my website, but the whole internet. And so, I very timidly started clicking links, and within about 10 minutes was like, “This is really cool.” And I became a WordPress fanatic I think right from that first day.

I had no idea though how to go from, “Hey, I bought a URL” to “Hey, I have a WordPress website.” So I said to her husband, I said, “Would you teach me how to do that?” They had five kids. They said, “If you come over and make dinner while she’s working, I will teach you how to build a website.” So I went over, I made a big spaghetti dinner for the kids, and afterwards, we sat down and he said, “Look, I could teach you this whole one button install a new-fangled thing that we do, but I want to show you how to set up a WordPress website.”

So I learned how to download the WordPress install. I learned how to upload it, how to change the salt keys, how to change the WP config files so that I had a really good understanding of what WordPress was and how it actually worked. By the end of that night, I had hosting, and I had my first website set up. That was about eight years ago. Since that time, I’ve built over a little over 300 websites total in those eight years. Some of them are one page, just landing pages but every single one counts. Every single one is a notch on my keyboard. And yeah, it’s been fun.

So for about six years, I started a freelance business doing marketing and web design. A little over a year ago I took a full-time job with Give, and so now I am the Head of Customer Success at Impress.org and doing what I do for our GiveWP customers and also our WP Business Review customers. And I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.

Started WordCamp Rochester four years ago. I’ve spoken at think about to 16 or 17 WordCamps now, and I’ve got to keynotes coming up this year. I’m going to be keynoting at WordCamp Buffalo next week, and then WordCamp Kent in June. So I’m very excited.

Tara: Wow. Gosh, there’s so many things I want to talk to you about. What a wonderful story. I just love to hear how you made dinner and learn WordPress over spaghetti dinner trade. That’s awesome.

Michelle: That’s the trade I ever made.

[crosstalk 00:05:12]

Liam: …salad or Italian bread or anything? Was it just straight up pasta sauce, and that was it? I mean, I don’t minimize the value of that but just…

Tara: Were they jarred sauce or homemade?

Michelle: Oh, no, it was definitely jar sauce. And the oldest kid just said I was awesome. She actually named her hermit crab after me once upon a time. She was like, “Well, “I’ll make the salad if you want.” And I was like, “Well, if you insist.”

Liam: Well played, Michelle. Well played.

Michelle: I know how to bother.

Tara: You must be a very fast learner too because that sounds like you learned a lot in that first night.

Michelle: I actually wrote four notes. I had a whole notebook with me. I had step 1, 2, 3 and 4. When I got back to my house, and I was trying to recreate it, I was like, “Oh, man, that’s where YouTube and that’s where googling comes in because you’re never going to call the guy up and say, “Okay, what was step three again?” Kind of figure it out from there.

Tara: How wonderful. That was great. How did you know how to then transition that knowledge into running your own business and building 300 websites? Were they all mostly local word of mouth? How did that happen?

Michelle: Well, that’s a great question because I was at the point at the massage school where I felt like it was killing my soul, I didn’t appreciate the job I was working for, I wasn’t appreciated at the job and it was time to move on. I said to my husband at the time, “I really need to quit my job and I don’t have anything to go to. I know we have a small nest egg we could use right now, can I take the month off to look for a job and just kind of regroup from this five-year experience that I didn’t appreciate?” He said, “Let’s do it. We’ll find a way to make it through.”

I hadn’t even left that position yet, and I posted on Facebook, “Hey, I’m looking to transition to a new job, I don’t know what I’m doing, but in the meantime, if anybody needs help with marketing, or anybody needs a website, I’m your girl.” Within two weeks, I had so many customers, I actually had a business. So I was like, “Well, I’m not going to look for a job anymore. I’m just going to hang a shingle.

I named my business in a heartbeat, I created a website in about three hours, I developed my logo in about 20 minutes, all of which I wrote a book last year, all of which I said, “Don’t do it the way I did it because that was really foolish and it could have backfired at a million ways.” But it didn’t. And it worked really well. So I had a business going on six years.

When I decided to go fulltime, I thought, ” I’ll work full time and I’ll have all these customers on the side,” and very quickly thought “That’s not realistic for me.” So I was able to redirect customers to other great providers and continue to work on some of the things that I love, doing a lot of the volunteer type work that I do, and then really focus on growing this department for Give.

Tara: Wow. What were your hardest moments running your own business? Did you have difficult clients stories like you hear all the time? You must have learned a lot in six years. And did you have a support network or someone that you learned from as you went through running your own business to having a small agency or freelance business in this space? There are so many people that do it. We learn from each other. Talk a little bit about how that developed for you.

Michelle: The local WordPress meetup was phenomenal. The local WordPress meetup answered so many of those questions that you can’t afford necessarily to go pay thousands of dollars for a consultant to answer because you do have a little question here, a little question there. Our meetup is very active. We have a Facebook group. Literally, you post a question, and within 20 minutes, there’s four different peoples with four different solutions for you. And so they’re really, really helpful community. I try to pay back the community, pay for the community all those things that people have done for me, but have that active community.

Also, I joined a networking group, and that networking group really took my business from where it was at Level A all the way up to Level D, by that sharing who I was and telling people about me. And so within that first year of working in that networking group, I probably built 10 websites for 10 local businesses. But I also had people on Facebook recommending me to people outside the area. So I had customers all over North America. I built a website for an organization in the Philippines. I had customers in Puerto Rico. So it was fun building this whole organization and having all these customers sharing word of mouth that all sudden you get a phone call from like Indiana and you’re like, “How did you hear about me.” And they have an interesting story about how your business card ended up on their desk. Pretty exciting stuff.

Tara: Sure. For sure. Did you have a specialty – a special type of client or niche that you worked in?

Michelle: I didn’t actually. I took the stand that I could pretty much learn anything enough to build a site about it. So if somebody came to me, and they said, “I’m a massage therapist, can you build a site for me?” I would learn as much as I could about what you would need on a massage therapy site.

I actually had somebody come and say, “We’re commercial cleaners, and we’re in – I think they were in West Virginia – and we need a website.” And so, I read about 100 different websites on commercial cleaning to understand what kinds of things probably needed to be involved. So I considered myself kind of my niche really was that small business, as opposed to any particular kind of business, is helping those entrepreneurs take themselves from business cards to on the web.

My favorite stories though are those phone calls where you have to find your own value. Because I think when you’re starting out, and forgive me, Liam, but I think that a lot of women especially actually have this issue, where we undervalue our own skill sets, especially in the technology world, and we have to find our own chutzpah, and actually discover our own worth.

When I was first starting out, I would sell a website for $300 or $400, which wasn’t paying the bills, but it was making me feel…and you kind of convince yourself, “Oh, I’m building a portfolio.” How many $300 websites do you need in your portfolio is the question. So you get to the point where you get a phone call – and I had two phone calls the very same day, which I thought was a very interesting experience. The first phone call was a woman and she said, “A friend recommended you that you build websites? How much do you charge?” I hate when that’s the first question because it’s not an easy answer because it depends on what you need. Do you need five pages, or am I putting in a 200 item e-commerce site? There’s all these different opportunities.

I said, “Well, what do you need?” And she said, “Well, would you build a site with Wix?” And I said, “No, I don’t build with Wix.” I said, “I build a WordPress, that’s my area of expertise, but you can build your own website with Wix if that’s what you need.” And she said, “Well, what’s your absolute lowest price?” And I said, “Well, right now when I just build a basic website, “I charge $2000.” And I actually heard, “hhhm” on the other end of the phone. To her credit, she said, “You must be very good at what you do,” which I thought was a very wonderful way to come back to me. She said, “I just can’t afford that right now.”

So I gave her some advice on things that she could do, ways that she could start building through a Facebook page, for example, and other things she could do, and other ways that she could contact the community for people who are just starting out and might be able to help her along the way. She was very nice. She said, “Well, if I can afford you in a year, I’ll give you a callback and we’ll work together.” I said, “That’s wonderful. Please keep my number.”

Fast forward, about four hours, I get a phone call again. Somebody recommended me. I answer the phone and he starts using language that I have come to see as red flags – “just” and “only.” So when somebody calls you up and they say, “I just need a website for my band. It’s only three pages. I only need three pages.” And I said, “Well, what are the three pages?” “We need a “homepage,” a “contact us” and an “about us?”” I said you don’t want to page that talks about your upcoming gigs? “Oh, yeah, we should probably have one of those too.” I said, “How many members are in the band?” “Five?” “Well, does each person need a page for themselves?” “Well, yeah, but just that.”

I said, “We’re already up to nine pages.” He said, “How much it’s going to cost.” I said without any reservation, “My site starts at $2,000.” And he let out a few expletives, it was not family friendly, and said, “How do you get off charging that much?” I used the words from that morning, I said, “Well, I’m very good at what I do.”

Liam: I love that.

Michelle: He says, “We can’t afford that.” I said, “At some point, if you’re good enough, you come back and see me.”

Tara: That’s awesome. I hope that line worked on some people that they actually hired you as well. I would imagine so.

Michelle: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Liam: So can I ask, on the calls that you took the previous day, did you say 300?

Michelle: I did not. It takes a while to build up to that point. My very first site, and I have talked about this in some WordPress talks before. So if you see me on WordPress TV, you might hear this. My very first site, sitting at a desk that’s not even completely built yet, and a little chippy [SP], because the right-hand side doesn’t have all the legs up, I take a call and this woman says, “I need a site just like this other site that I know you manage. They recommended me.” I said, “That’s great.” And I’m thinking all I have to do is clone the site, use the same templates, etc., $300. Well, it needs to have e-commerce so I’m going to be selling some things. Now in my brain, I’m thinking, “Well, how long can that take?” I’m like, “Hhhm, $500.” She wrote that check so fast, that should have been my first…

Liam: That should have been a sign, right?

Michelle: That should have been the first time that I might be underpricing myself. I probably worked 100 hours on that site for $500. But I will tell you what, what I didn’t get paid in cash, I considered my payment for my own education in this business. I learned so much building that site. I won’t even tell you the site name because it still exists, and it looks like my first site. It looks like oh, did somebody learn how to build a site on this one? But I learned so much building that website.

So the next site I built, I said $1,000 and I was terrified. My knees were shaking under the table like somebody ‘s getting an imposter syndrome, somebody’s going to say, “It’s not worth that.” And they said, “Okay, who do I make the check out to?” And I was like, “Oh, hhh.” And within two years, I was charging 2000 and more for those websites.

So it really does come down to valuing yourself and also valuing the money that you put into your own business. I’m not using free themes, and I’m not using all free plugins. I’m paying for those services that make good websites and paying for the form builders that I like, I’m paying for the themes that I appreciate, I’m paying for those other plugins, and I need to value that. I’m paying for hosting if I’m hosting this person’s website. And so I need to value not only my time, and my skill set, but also the amount of money that I’ve put into building the business.

Liam: That’s a big part of the equation there. Michelle, you’ve talked us through the growth and success of your own business. And that’s some of the times painful growth and sometimes fun and sometimes a little payback, when you can say, “I’m good at my job.”

Michelle: That’s right.

Liam: But I want to ask you question about success.

Michelle: Sure.

Liam: The question is, how do you define success? What is your definition of success? And it can be a personal definition a professional definition or maybe for you, it’s a combination of both?

Michelle: It’s a good question because I think as we age that answer changes a little bit. When you’re in your 20s success is, “Oh, my gosh, I got hired and I’m making enough money to buy a car.” And your success might be based on money or it might be based on that your name those in the newspaper, or hanging out a shingle outside the door.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that for me, success is happiness in what I do, the ability to share that with other people. So whether it’s my skills, or my time, or my whatever I’m investing, and then also to be able to pay the bills at the same time and perhaps have a little bit of leftover at the end of the day to do something fun. But it really comes down to that. I don’t want to you know, be the cat’s in the cradle on my deathbed, and everybody says, “Well, you were never there for me. You spend it all on toys, but you never actually use them.” I want to know that when I hit that last day, whether it’s tomorrow or 50 years from now that I can say, “I’ve lived a good life, I had a lot of fun and I helped people along the way.”

Liam: That’s a holistic approach. And it sounds like it’s one that’s been based on life experience.

Michelle: Absolutely.

Liam: If you had to pick one, because I wrote down four things, you said, “Happiness in what I do, sharing skills, knowledge in some way with others, of course, paying bills, and then maybe a little extra for something fun.” Appreciative of that, depending on the day and immediate situation that you find yourself in any one of those four is going to float to the top. But in your heart of hearts, what’s the real focus for you?

Michelle: It’s the happiness It absolutely is. I was a single mom for years and trying to make ends meet with a daughter who’s now 27. But during those years while I was raising a child and going to school for my MBA, and doing all these other things, my goal was always provide for her, but make sure she was happy. And I discovered that in providing for her making sure she was happy, I was happy too.

So I think that if using those other things that I said, after that happiness part, doing those other things bubble up to make me a happy person. So as long as I’m keeping all of the legs on the floor, the three-legged stool kind of approach, those are the three-legged stool, and over the top of that is the happiness.

Liam: I get that. I really liked that caring for your daughter, providing for not just her physical needs, but I’ll say her emotional well-being and all the other kinds of well-being really brought you happiness is absolutely lovely. I love that sense of service to others is a way to bring fulfillment for our own lives.

Michelle: I thought she’d be a WordPress kid; she wants nothing to do with it.

Liam: Did she go Drupal?

Michelle: She doesn’t do web design at all. What she took from me wasn’t necessarily the actual tools that I use. What she does is she does a lot of what I did but in different areas. So for example, she is the vice president of the African-American Resource Group for M&T Bank in Buffalo, and she enjoys giving back to the community through those kinds of things. The apple doesn’t fall far, just doesn’t use the same tools that mom did.

Tara: And that’s okay. I think a lot of times our kids do take those values and things but they don’t want to look like us or talk like us.

Michelle: And that’s fine. She’s her own person. I love it.

Tara: That’s right.

Michelle: Love it.

Tara: I’d like to ask you about Give and your transition from working solo to working for a company. I’m quite familiar with Give. I’ve been among their first users and fans of that plugin and what you all offer for not just for web developers, but for our clients. Talk a little bit about it, because you have this volunteer spirit as well, your decision to work with Give, had you been using the plugin beforehand, and what that’s meant for your life and your definition of success and happiness.

Michelle: Thank you. I actually first heard about give when I was speaking at WordCamp Pittsburgh a few years back. A year later, I was speaking at WordCamp, Ottawa, and Jason Knill from Give was there and Bridget who used to work at Give was there as well. And I said to them, “I’ve used your plugin on a couple of different websites after having learned about it in Pittsburgh. As a matter of fact, one of the sites I’ve used it on is a nonprofit that raises money to feed children in South Sudan.

So they said, “Hey, can we interview you and do a blog post about that website that you did. So the day two of the event, I sat down and I talked to them. I was talking about how exciting the website was, and they liked the website, and the photos were awesome that they were able to give us to use on the website. At the end of that, I said to Jason, I said, “You know, yours is probably one of the only companies I consider shutting down my shop for, to go to work for. If you ever have an opening at Give, please let me know.” Within three months, I was talking to them about opening up the customer success department, and by January 1, I was an employee of Give.

Tara: Wow.

Michelle: It was like manifesting or something. It was Kismet. It was karma. It was whatever it was to make it happen. Just a little over a year ago, a year and a quarter ago, I started my first day, logged into the Slack channel and met everybody because we are a distributed company with a pocket of people in San Diego. And then we just opened an office in Rochester, New York this week, actually.

I actually have hired some employees here in Rochester, and so I have a customer success team now that we’re building here. I talk to people all over the world that worked for the company, and I talk to people all over the world who are customers. And what Customer Success does is we’re not tech support, but if you purchase Give for the first time one of us is going to call you within a couple of days and say, “Hey, welcome to the family. Do you have any questions?”

I just actually met online with a woman this afternoon before I talked to you all in Glasgow, Scotland. She was setting up her first Give forms, she was hesitant and nervous about how to do the payment gateways, etc, and we did a screen share. So, she showed me her screen, I walked her through the process, I spent 20 minutes with her. At the end, she felt very confident and how to use it, how to set up the forms that she needs to use in Give. She thanked me, we signed off. She probably went to bed because I think they’re about five hours ahead of us. And now she’s all ready and set to collect money for an organization that does amazing things over there.

Earlier this morning, I talked to a woman who has an organization where they have horseback riding for children who have chronic and failed illnesses so they’re making the world a better place by being able to bring happiness to those children. So I feel like I’ve always volunteered, I’ve always been part of these bigger organizations. Now I get to do that on a global level, by helping all those organizations raise money to make the world a better place. And honestly, nothing makes me happier. At the end of the day, I go to bed, I wake up the next morning ready to get up and go to work because I love it so much.

Tara: That sounds wonderful. And you’re not really working with clients anymore. You have seen a steady paycheck and you can clock in and clock out. You’re not working at 11 o’clock to deploy a site and answering an urgent email from someone whose website is down and that type of thing.

Michelle: I don’t miss that part.

Tara: The lifestyle changed for you. Do you miss actually building websites?

Michelle: I still do a little bit of that on the side, but mostly for nonprofit organizations in my area that I can help do that. I run a hackathon once a year here in Rochester. I help support those organizations. I’ve recently branched out on my own doing consulting and job and career counseling. So I’ve been doing a lot of coaching with people and working one-on-one for them to bring their web businesses and growing their web businesses. So I’m really enjoying that aspect of it too.

Tara: How many hours are in your day? Mine is still 24. I don’t know. It sounds like you have a few more than that.

Michelle: Well, my daughter is grown and gone, I have three cats and me, so if I don’t just want to sit and watch TV at night, I find other things to do.

Tara: Excellent. I am envious of that good feeling you must get all the time. I love working with clients who do good in the world. And I know Liam works with several as well. It’s a great feeling to participate in a good cause for sure.

Michelle: It really is. Absolutely.

Liam: So I want to ask you about advice. It’s one of our signature questions here. And it’s not so much the advice that you might give, but rather the advice that you’ve received or read or stumbled upon at some point in your travels. So what’s the best bit of advice that you were ever given or received and successfully implemented into your life?

Michelle: I have three things: one, two, and three. The first thing is that the janitor and the plumber and the person who’s sweeping the sidewalk are just as important as the president and CEO. So learn their names, know who they are. That’s been truly helpful my entire life is to just treat everybody the same and know who people are in my organization so that if I have a problem anywhere and can appreciate everybody in the organization.

The second one is, never pass up an opportunity to charge my cell phone because you never know how long the battery’s going to last when you might need it. Similarly, the third one is, never pass up an opportunity to use the restroom, is you may never know how long it is to get to the next one.

Tara: Those last two are key. I follow those pretty closely myself, actually. I’m pretty connected to my cell phone and it dying is just sadly terrifying thought.

Michelle: Exactly.

Liam: Can I add one more to the list?

Michelle: Yeah.

Liam: Never turned down coffee.

Michelle: Oh, that’s a good one, too. Or a glass of wine. I don’t know how you feel about that, but a glass of wine is always on the list at the end of the day.

Tara: That’s excellent advice.

Michelle: Absolutely. Sounds like you have a very full schedule. I just love what I do so I try to make every minute count.

Tara: The community that you have in Rochester also sounds like it’s a very close-knit WordPress community. Can you tell us a little bit about that? You said the meetup was really helpful to you as you grew, and it sounds like you’re really involved in it.

Michelle: To me, the key thing about a really tight-knit community is how those people treat each other and how they pull other people into the fold. We could all be considering ourselves competitors for the most part, even if it’s somebody who’s building their own WordPress website for their business, but instead, everybody embraces one another, helps each other and wants to see everybody else in the community succeed.

Last year, I was moving out of my home into an apartment by myself. I posted on Facebook that on that Tuesday if anybody had the ability to help me move, to show up at my address, with cars and whatever they could fit in at five o’clock. I thought maybe two or three people would show up to help me. Fifteen people came, and ten of those were only people that I knew only through WordPress. So the WordPress community, some of them drove an hour to help me move and I was only moving it out a mile across town, but it was something I couldn’t do for myself.

So when I think about the fact that my brother, two or three high school friends and ten people from the WordPress community showed up with vans, helped me finish packing and helped me move into my new apartment. And when we got there, two of them realized I didn’t have sheets that fit on the bed, I didn’t have a shower curtain, they went to the store in town without me even knowing and came back and hung a shower curtain and put sheets on my bed before the end of the day. So I have some place to lay my head down at night.

Tara: Wow.

Michelle: That’s what WordPress is to me. And that’s why I feel it’s a pay it forward, pay it back kind of tight-knit community. The title of my keynote address coming up is “The Care and Feeding of the WordPress Community: Me, You, & Us,” and how we can help keep ourselves healthy, how we hold each other accountable for our own mental health and physical health, and how we can help maintain the health of the WordPress community in general. That’s all from experience and that’s all from what people have taught and showed me their love and just showered blessings on me in the eight or so years that I’ve been part of the WordPress community.

Tara: I have to admit my eyes are tearing up a little bit, and not to be super sappy about it…

Michelle: I get tearful too.

Tara: One of my favorite movies is “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But just the idea of your community rallying for you is I think just something everybody craves and would like to have. It says a lot about the community, but it says a lot about you, that you’ve cultivated these relationships, and I’m sure done things for people and it’s coming back around for you. So thank you for sharing that and so many really wonderful stories. It’s been such a great time talking to you and you’ve got so much energy. You’ve inspired me. I’ve really enjoyed this chat, and I’m really sorry that we are down to the final seconds.

Michelle: Me too. Where can people find you online, Michelle?

Michelle: They can find me at allthethingsbymichelle.com, and they can find me on Twitter at @michelleames. So thank you so much for having me as a guest today. It’s been wonderful to share stories with you and to know more about you as well.

Tara: Thanks. I hope to meet you in person.

Michelle: I can’t wait for it.

Liam: Thanks, Michelle. This was an absolute joy. Thank you for sharing so candidly.

Michelle: Thank you.

Liam: See you soon.

Michelle: Take care.

Tara: Bye.

Michelle: 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.

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.

Sophia is a young WordPresser who’s interested in multiple aspects of life. She’s a taskmaster and the chief lover of dinosaurs.

Twitter | @Erin_Go_Blog

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 97.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today, we’re joined by Sophia DeRosia. Sophia is a young WordPresser who’s interested in multiple aspects of life. She’s a taskmaster and the chief lover of dinosaurs. Hi, Sophia. Thanks for joining us today.

Sophia: Hi Tara.

Liam: Hi Sophia. How are you? Thanks for joining us today. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Sophia: I’m homeschooled. I spend my whole life being homeschooled. I’ve also spent my whole life growing up in the WordPress community, which has been a really interesting childhood, but pretty fun. There isn’t a whole lot to tell. I mean, I’m a lot like any other normal kid.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about, I guess, for those who might not recognize your last name, why you’ve grown up in the WordPress community, what’s brought you to that.

Sophia: My dad got into building websites back before it was really a thing, and then throughout the years, got into WordPress – I think after my parents were married – and then made multiple friends. Then he got my mom to do it. Ever since I was super little, either. My dad has worked in WordPress, or we’ve just been involved in that community for as long as I can remember.

Tara: And what does it mean to be involved in the community? You’re going to WordCamps and meetups and that type of thing?

Sophia: When I was really little, my dad would go to some WordCamps. Not as many when I was little, but the older I got usually the more that he would go. I think when I was in like seventh grade my parents started to travel more and go to more WordCamps.

Tara: And you would go with them?

Sophia: It depends. Normally, we would stay home, especially the older we got. Like now we hardly ever go with them to WordCamps. The meetup for Grand Rapids, we’ve always been pretty involved in. I know Brian Richards was … I’m pretty sure he was in charge of it a couple of years ago, and then once they started to have more little kids, then my parents started to kind of take it over. So we’ve been pretty involved in that over the last couple of years.

Tara: How many WordPress t-shirts do you have?

Sophia: I don’t actually have that many.

Tara: Really?

Sophia: I got a ton in seventh grade when I thought they were cool, and then I realized that I don’t want to have a ton of oversized t-shirts that I don’t know what they’re about. So I got rid of all of them.

Tara: So because your parents are so involved in WordPress, and we mentioned the beginning that you consider yourself to be a WordPresser or so, there must be something about it that attracted you to it. I think we’ve spoken to other people on this show who have children. I have children as well. Liam does too. My children want pretty much nothing to do with WordPress. So tell us a little bit about your decision to learn to use it and what you do with it?

Sophia: I got a blog when I was 10 because my parents made me and I never wrote anything on it because like, what does a 10-year-old write on a blog? I’m a writer at heart. My whole family is. So the older I got, the more that I realized how much I love writing. That’s what I primarily use WordPress for as an outlet for my writing. And then just growing up, that was the thing my dad did. That was the coolest thing ever. I don’t know, it just felt cool to get sucked into that, be involved in it.

Tara: Okay. So you are you’re the child’s that many parents want to have who thinks that thinks that their parents do is cool. That must make your dad feel very good.

Sophia: I don’t know.

Tara: That’s nice. What kind of things do you write about on your blog?

Sophia: I write about all the crap in life. So just things that I learned here and there. Just a lot of my failures and the things that I learned through those so that other people have the opportunity to learn from my mistakes, and gain the wisdom that I did to help guide them through their circumstances.

Tara: Who are writing for? Are you writing for your peers, people your age?

Sophia: It’s not for just people my age. Part of being the WordPress community is I’m really comfortable talking to adults. I’m really comfortable talking to anyone in any age. So I’d like to think that my writing can help someone like an adult. It isn’t really geared toward a specific audience. I like to think all the things that I learned anyone can learn.

Liam: When you write and you publish your posts about your mistakes and your trials and your tribulations and your challenges, and that what you’ve learned, do you just write it and hit publish and leave it? Do you then send links to people who might be interested? Are you on social media? Do you tweet about it? How far are you putting it out there? Because my own experience, it’s one thing to have a blog for me and nobody visits my blog so I can pretty much write whatever I want and nobody reads it. But I wonder in the sense of giving back how far are you pushing it out there as a vehicle? That takes bravery, and that’s, I guess, where I’m going.

Sophia: I haven’t pushed super hard. Not because I’m afraid to, just because I don’t know how necessary … I’m, learning how to – I can’t think of the right word for that – but just get everything out there and gain a social media presence. I’m trying to decide how much I want to get out there. My blog has always been totally empty. Like, I never got any feedback from anyone. I think I got two comments and it totally scared me because somebody else that I didn’t know was talking to me. So I was trying to figure out what I was going to do in those situations. And if that was something I wanted to keep doing, because I like the idea of having a community, but I don’t know how to stay safe necessarily if that makes any sense.

Liam: Yeah, that totally does. It totally does. It’s interesting. It’s one thing to push it out there and it’s quite another then to if you realize people actually read it and then they engage in it. But to do so in a safe way, that’s wonderful. But sometimes it can be a little scary. I think I shared this with you before the show, but somebody saw you present at a WordCamp and were very impressed by you. And that’s why we reached out and asked you if you wanted to be on the show. Can you tell us a little bit about your WordCamp talk, and what was it about? And how did that come about? Did you just say I want to do that or maybe there were some gentle pushing and support from the parents? What was that whole process like for you, Sophia?

Sophia: So there was no pushing at all. My parents encouraged it but they didn’t make me do it at all.

Liam: Sure, sure.

Sophia: A couple of years ago, I saw a need at my church for … it wasn’t exactly a need, but it would have been helpful to have a place that was safe for a ton of all the youth group kids to be able to talk to each other because we had an age range from 11 to like 18. So I decided to use BuddyPress and make a social media site for everyone that was completely safe and secure but we would all be able to talk to each other. And there were leaders and potentially parents who could be on the site. And so my BuddyPress talk, that’s what it was. It was a BuddyPress talk. It was very basic because I’d never spoken before. So it just gave a layout of the widgets that I used and how I made it and the people that I got help from. I just chose to do it because it sounded fun. It was when my mom was organizing WordCamp Grand Rapids, so I said, “Hey, I can do that.” Because actually, I love to speak and write presentations and everything. It was fun.

Tara: That’s impressive. Not a lot of people are really comfortable doing that.

Sophia: No.

Tara: So it sounds like you do more than write. Do you enjoy the technology aspects of WordPress? You were talking about widgets and BuddyPress. BuddyPress is not exactly an easy thing to work with.

Sophia: It is not. I am not really a technical person. I can be but I don’t enjoy it a ton, so I don’t necessarily like … I wouldn’t dive into it. But I could be if I tried to do.

Tara: And how about the design aspects of it? I think your artistic. Do fiddle with design in WordPress? Do you know any CSS code or anything like that?

Sophia: Not really. I tried to do some CSS when I was creating the BuddyPress site and without my dad’s help, I could not figure it out. I think I would enjoy it more if I tried, but it’s just not my thing. I’m not like, “Oh my gosh, CSS. I love CSS.”

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: Yeah, if you’re not interested in something it’s hard to dive deep into it. Absolutely. So how did the site turnout? Do your youth group use it a lot? Did everybody engage with? Was it fun? What happened?

Sophia: So nobody used it. It was one of those situations where it’s a great idea, and it totally fits a need. People are sheep. People aren’t going start using something unless you make them use it. And so, just to say nobody used it, and it just died. It was way too much for me to try to handle, try to keep it up to date and everything. So, but I did learn a lot about project management and trying to get people who aren’t being paid to do a certain job. It’s not fun. Don’t do it ever.

Tara: Volunteering to organize something and be in charge you end up doing a lot of the work yourself.

Sophia: Oh, yeah.

Tara: Definitely true.

Sophia: Especially with teenagers.

Tara: I can imagine. I would bet that they probably prefer a Facebook group over a custom BuddyPress to interact with each other. Tell us a little bit about this dinosaur thing.

Sophia: I just love dinosaurs. My sister and I growing up, she always loved dragons and so that was a huge part of just our childhood. We’d go to the lake and be terrified because there was a Loch Ness Monster in this teeny tiny lake. I just like dinosaurs. They’re just cute and fun.

Liam: Do you have a favorite one?

Sophia: I do but I don’t remember what it’s called. It the basic long-neck dinosaur that eats plants and has a super long tail. I can’t think what it’s called.

Liam: Brontosaurus?

Sophia: Probably.

Liam: Or maybe it’s Brachiosaurus? I’ll tell you the least favorite one I have is, you know, that one that’s like has long as—

Sophia: Every letter of the alphabet.

Liam: And it’s an alligator. It’s basically like a Megalodon.

Sophia: Yes.

Liam: That scares me.

Tara: Sophia, what does success mean to you? How would you define it?

Sophia: I would define success as discovering and utilizing your gifts as well as possible and in the best way that you can.

Tara: Do you have a way of identifying your gifts? Do you think they change over time?

Sophia: I don’t think that they change. I think each person is built with a certain skill set. And no matter what they’re doing, they have the ability to use those skills in any situation. You said, “How would you define your skill set?”

Tara: Your gift. How do you identify it? You said success is utilizing your gifts. Do you know what your gifts are or is it something that you’re still trying to figure out?

Sophia: I guess it depends on how you define gifts. I’m a Christian so I tend to focus on spiritual. When I think of gifts, I think of spiritual gifts. The things that you’re good at. Mine is wisdom. I tend to think deeply, I guess. I tend to consider every option and try to pick the best one. I don’t think lazily about something. I guess, to figure out what gifts you would have is to just think about the things that you do. When you’re in a situation what would you lean towards? If you have to pick a pen or pencil or an eraser, which one would you pick? Once permanent, one can be erased and one doesn’t leave any marks.

Tara: I like that. Very introspective.

Sophia: Thank you.

Tara: So your wisdom you think is your gift. So making the most of your wisdom is success. How do you implement that?

Sophia: I just use it in any situation that I can. I use it through my writing. I use it when I talk to people. I use it in my decision making which is very valuable and really, really annoying. Just in any stage of life that I’m in I try to just kind of like think naturally. Not overthink it, but trying to make the best decisions that I can.

Tara: I like that. What role has homeschooling played in your trajectory to where you are as a young person maturing, becoming an adult?

Sophia: I like to think that it’s helped me become quite the adults. I’m a social person, which helps with that, but ever since I was little I could talk to adults. So I’m not afraid to talk to adults. I’m not afraid to answer questions. I hate talking on the phone, but that’s a whole ‘nother thing. Homeschooling, it’s helped me be really independent. That’s one of the main reasons my mom wanted me to be homeschooled. A lot of homeschoolers that are Christians, you think, “Oh, well, they’re homeschooled, because they don’t want to be … Well, the other kids, you know, they are sinners.” Don’t quote me on that. But my mom wanted to keep us homeschooled so that we wouldn’t be pressured by other people. So that we would be ourselves. And it gave us the freedom to be ourselves and to develop who we are and what we’d like to do without feeling pressure or judgment from other people.

Tara: Two things. Tell us the hardest thing about being homeschooled and the best thing about being homeschooled.

Sophia: The hardest thing about being homeschooled, for me, is the unknown. I like having a plan. When you go to public school, it’s laid out. You take four years of classes, and then you take the SAT and then you go to college. But with homeschooling, it’s completely flexible. Like my sister and I both, we took a year. Or I’m going to take a year and she took a year to finish up some school. I think the best thing about me homeschooling is that you can play to your strengths. I’m not good at math in any way, shape, or form. So a lot of the times my mom would be able to look at it, even if I got every single question wrong, my mom will be able to say, “Okay, so you understand this, you just have a problem with the little things. I wouldn’t add something right, I wouldn’t multiply something right, but I would know the core of what the problem was. So she would let me pass. So I didn’t have to be perfect at something, I just had to know what it was, how to do it, if I needed how to do it in the future. And it’s my favorite thing in the world that I don’t have to be perfect in every situation. Like when you go to public school, you’ll get judged for not having good grades, or you’ll be expected to be, you’d be really good at this thing that you’re just not made to do.

Tara: I know that your dad has worked for himself as a contractor, having his own business and work for others. Have they instilled in you any sense of independence, entrepreneurial ventures type of thing? What would be the ideal employment situation for you when you grow up, let’s say?

Sophia: It’s given me the realization that there are options. There was a while when I wanted to be a freelance photographer. There was a while when I considered making BuddyPress sites for people. At the moment, I want to be a teacher because of how much I’ve learned from being homeschooled and how screwed up the school system is. I want to be there for the kids who are can’t understand some things the way that I couldn’t necessarily. But I like that, I know that there are options. Part of the reason my mom wanted us to learn WordPress was so that when we were growing up, and if we couldn’t get a job, then we would be like, “Okay, we can learn how to do this thing in WordPress, and then make money off of it without having to leave our house.” So it gives us the freedom and independence that we wanted.

Liam: It sounds like freedom and independence pretty important to you. A number of times you’ve mentioned if not those exact words, kind of that theme.

Sophia: Yeah, it’s kind of always been a part of my life. I mean, my dad’s always worked at home, and we’ve always been homeschooled, and my mom didn’t start working until a couple of years ago. So if we wanted to just get up and go, we could. So part of it was just being used to that lifestyle.

Liam: Yeah, I could definitely see liking that. I’ve worked for myself for a long time, but my wife does not. She has a career as an academic. And it’s only so far that you can go from the school building and get there every day before it gets a little tricky. Sophie, you had mentioned when we were just chatting before we hit the record button out here on our virtual little hallway that you’re pretty artistic. You shared with us that you like to write. But what other sorts of ways do you express yourself artistically?

Sophia: Through photography, definitely. I’m not super into it. I was when I was little but now I just kind of focused on phone photography. I kind of want to sell stock photos at some point, but I’ve been so busy, I haven’t the opportunity to look into that. I love writing haikus. There’s so much fun. I know a lot of people hate them …

Liam: Really? People hate haikus?

Sophia: Well, hate writing them. Well, maybe everybody likes to read them, right?

Tara: It’s true.

Sophia: They are fantastic.

Liam: Can you crank out a haiku as we speak? Haiku on command. And I never remember. Is it 5-7-5?

Sophia: 5-7-5.

Liam: 5-7-5. All right. 5-7-5. I won’t put you through that, Sophia. That’s hard to do. What do you write haikus about? Everything? Something in particular? Focus on dinosaurs?

Sophia: You know what? I’m a really emotional person. So my writing, my art, it’s all usually a strain of whatever I’m feeling at that moment. So if I’m super depressed, I’ll just throw whatever I’m feeling on a piece of paper. If I feel really attached to a certain person, I’ll write a haiku about them. Whatever I’m feeling it’s just the root of my art, which is interesting because that means that music and sounds and feelings can also affect what comes out of the art? You know, like what the end product is.

Liam: Where do you record your art, your writing? Do you journal? Do they all make it up on your blog? Do you kind of put it down on paper and it sits on your desk or in your room for a while and then eventually life happens and they get thrown away or something? What’s your medium? How do you record?

Sophia: Primarily through my blog. I publish twice a week. Most of my art I try to keep off social media only because when I was little, I was the youngest of my sister and two cousins. We basically grew up together. All of us are artistic and so I always thought that I wasn’t as good as them because I was like two years younger than two of them and five years younger than one of them. So they had a head start. But also I would look at other people’s art and think, “Well, it needs to look like that. It’s not good unless it looks like that.” So just by keeping it off social media, I’ve learned it helps me not compare my art. It helps me see that art is dependent on what people think and what people feel, which is why some people are going to like my art and some people won’t. That doesn’t make me a bad artist. That just means it that it means something different to other people.

Liam: Yeah, art is very subjective. Very, very subjective. I’d agree with you there.

Tara: Has being homeschooled allowed you, you think, to pursue more in different art than you would have if you had gone to traditional school?

Sophia: I don’t know. I didn’t really fall in love with drawing until two years ago. And so I wonder if I had been in a public school, like if I would have found that sooner, and had more opportunities for art classes and references and just experience in general. But being homeschooled, it’s given me the freedom to teach myself, which I like. One of the best ways that I learned is just through trial and error. And just learning by myself and figuring things out by myself.

Liam: Figuring out by yourself as a not a bad skill set to have.

Sophia: No.

Liam: But I wonder if I can ask your question about advice, where maybe you figured something out not by yourself. I appreciate you’re still young by my measure and by Tara’s measure, but what’s the best advice that someone’s ever given you, shared with you, and that you’ve successfully worked into your life in some way?

Sophia: There are no mistakes, only happy little accidents by Bob Ross. That has changed my entire life. It’s taught me that it takes the pressure off. A lot of the times you think … I’m a musician, too, so I’ll be singing in church or trying to record something or something and think it needs to be perfect. And actually, I kind of worked through this yesterday. But you think that he needs to be perfect, and it doesn’t. No one actually expects you to be perfect. It’s really more yourself who tells you that it needs to be this perfect thing and nothing can go wrong. But people are people. People make mistakes. So if I miss a chord while I’m playing guitar, or if I miss a note or something, that’s fine. That’s how it was supposed to go. That’s just how it happened this time. That doesn’t make it bad. That doesn’t make me a worse musician. That’s just how it went this time.

Liam: That’s a very healthy perspective that allows us not to beat ourselves up and still leave room improvement without painting us in a corner of unhappiness or failure or rejection.

Sophia: And a lot of the times, our mistakes turn into something a lot better. Like a lot of the times, I’ll be painting something and totally screw something up and just roll with it because it’s too late to go back now.

Liam: It was just a little bush and it just needs a little bit more color here.

Sophia: Right.

Liam: You learned that from Bob Ross. That’s the artist, right? Was that like in a quote book or were you watching the TV show on some kind of rerun? How did you stumble upon that?

Sophia: I don’t remember. My parents told me about him at one point. Then I actually went to a church retreat at Lake end camp and they had painting with Ben Ross. He was just one of their counselors at the camp and he just taught us how to paint and it was so much fun. And that kind of what kick-started me into Bob Ross. I just wanted to like—

Liam: They are related or that just happened to be that guy’s name?

Sophia: No, his name was Ben, and so they just gave him a blonde like curly wig and he was Ben Ross from there. It was hilarious.

Liam: When you paint? What do you like to paint? Are you a landscape person? Are you an abstract artist? Are you doing stills? Are you painting the apple bowl on the kitchen table? What inspires you?

Sophia: I paint everything. I paint what’s in my head. So sometimes it’s landscapes. Sometimes it’s a person looking at something. I’ve noticed a lot of my art is … I don’t know if it’s just because I can’t draw faces or what but a lot of my landscape is people looking at something. I like to think that it’s people like somebody searching for something a lot of the times or like walking towards something, leading towards something.

Liam: Do you ever go to do art somewhere? So do you take your paint set to the lake or do you take your paint to the town square or something like that?

Sophia: I do not.

Liam: You deliberately putting yourself out there?

Sophia: If I go to my grandparents’ house or something, I’ll take it with me and go in the woods sometimes and will draw. I haven’t taken them anywhere. But I’ll draw. I haven’t actually tried a ton of different things. I’m still getting used to it a little bit.

Tara: I’d like to see your art. And that brings us to wrapping up our chat with you today, Sophia. Can you tell us where people can find you or your art?

Sophia: I am on twitter @Erin_Go_Blog. And then my art and my writing are at my website, eringoblog.org.

Tara: Tell us a little bit about that name because your name’s not Erin.

Sophia: When my cousin and my sister and I were little, we would make games. And so we’d always have these made-up names for each other. And one I made up before we grew up and got out of it was Erin. That was the most recent one. So that was always just my name for everything. I still use it. So that was going to be my pen name when I was 10. My mom suggested the name Erin Go Blog because it’s similar to Erin Go Bragh. I don’t exactly remember what it means. It’s like a chance or something. Or it’s not a chance. I can’t even think of what it’s called, but like an encouraging phrase that they would use.

Tara: You do have a couple of Irish people here. Liam?

Liam: I think you’ve got it, Tara.

Tara: No, you go for it.

Liam: If I remember correctly, it’s “Ireland Forever.”

Tara: I think that’s it.

Sophia: Oh, yeah.

Liam: I’m not sure of that.

Tara: I punted to you in case—

Liam: Yeah, in case. You set me up. You set me up.

Tara: I set us up as Irish experts.

Liam: That’s entertaining. Sophia, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to know you a little bit.

Tara: It’s been great.

Sophia: Thank you for having me.

Tara: Thanks so much for joining us.

Liam: We’ll see you soon, I hope.

Tara: Bye.

Sophia: 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.

Chris is a former WordPress guy who helped people build websites. Chris is now a consultant helping various startups and nonprofits ramp up sales and support teams.

Twitter | @Squirex2

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 96.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Chris Lauzon, a farmer WordPress guy who helped people build websites. Chris is now a consultant helping various startups and nonprofits ramp up sales and support teams. Welcome, Chris. It’s great to have you here today.

Chris: Hey, there. Great to be here.

Liam: Hey, Chris. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself more than what Tara shared?

Chris: Yeah. I’m a huge nerd just generally. I love helping people a whole lot. Tech support has been my passion since about 2001. I’ve done internet tech support, hardware support, but my real passion is for SAS and working in SAS businesses. Since then, I’ve grown up, gotten older, gotten wiser. I’m working with a lot of different technologies now. I have a lot of great coworkers I’m working with. I’ve made a lot of good friends in tech community that serves as a great black book for me whenever I need help in the wider support community.

Liam: That’s really cool. I want to jump right in and ask you about the work you’re doing now as a consultant. Tara shared that you’re helping startups and nonprofits wrap up sales and support teams. Are you doing that then from a tech standpoint? Are you doing it from more of an HR standpoint? Is it a collective of both? What does your services look like? What do your services look like?

Chris: Well, I don’t know how many people have ever worked for early stage startups, but you could sit down with somebody and go, “Hey, I need you to do just tech support. I need you to take a little bit of product, take a look at our support tickets and our ecosystem, and then give us recommendations for how to build teams and what you do and all that kind of stuff.” But what actually happens is that you jump in, and stuff happens because early-stage startups especially can be very chaotic. A person will end up, if they’re doing things correctly, at least or painting in there correctly, they will be wearing multiple hats. So for me, I have sales experience, support experience, marketing experience, HR experience, product management experience and technically QA experience, just because throughout the years I’ve had to wear so many different hats at once. It’s just the nature of the beast. Every day there’s something different, new week comes new challenges, and that’s just how it goes. It’s a roller coaster that sometimes…Well, most of the time it’s fun.

Tara: It sounds like you have so many things to choose from. What’s your favorite?

Chris: I don’t have a favorite. I like to kind of go all over the place – and it’s part of why I love working with smaller companies. I generally prefer just smaller teams in general because I’m able to jump all over the place. With a bigger company, it feels like a lot of roles starts to part in and you start to have almost kind of mini walled gardens within your company where you have the sales department, they do the sales stuff, and the support department, they do the support stuff. I like all of the above usually.

Liam: So you’re jumping in and putting out whatever the biggest fire is, and then as that starts to get under control, you look at the other fires around and begin to try to build systems that help prevent fires?

Chris: Yeah. It’s more like trying not to put too much gasoline on the fire.

Liam: That’s awesome. So how are you getting new clients in the door? How does that work for you? And how long have you been a consultant in this current iteration of your career?

Chris: I don’t even know anymore. About over a year, has it been? Two years? I don’t remember now. Maybe it’s about a year. The people I work with haven’t changed that much. I’m pretty loyal. Once I like working with somebody, I’ll work with them long term. Where I get the most action in terms of different types of work switching around is in the nonprofit area. I live in Ventura, California, which is kind of like a beach community, and there’s community college that has actually a pretty decent computer science program. Additionally, we’re not that far away from like UC Santa Barbara, which also has a pretty interesting tech community. There’s some strange tech startups that actually are based out here in an area like Lynda. I think LinkedIn has a huge office here now. And a couple of places like that. So I’ve been really trying to do things online with different groups of people and starting some things where we can try to get more diversity into startups. Specifically, a lot more women just because they’re so underrepresented right now with all the different tech startups here in the area. So just doing stuff like that has been a lot more in flux, just because with like a nonprofit or a meetup group, or something like that, there’s momentum that starts to pick up. And if something takes off, the group becomes very, very big and that becomes kind of self-sustainable, and I move on from the organizational aspect, though I stay within that community and participate in it. But I’m no longer the leader or organizer or anything like that. That’s kind of where I get the most action. The way I get those customers is just a word of mouth. I’m a big believer in with the people I’ve met throughout my career, the ones that are really, really good, and just know what you’re talking about the whole time, so I always try to stay in touch with them and vice versa. They do the same with me. So more often than not, if I really desperately need to work on something else because I’m bored or whatever, I can usually just shout out across all my different channels and say, “Hey, is anything going?” and I’ll have a list of opportunities to choose from.

Liam: That’s really cool. Thank you for sharing that. I want to chat a little bit about your community building and your efforts at diversification of the local tech startup. That’s a fantastic thing to be doing. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the logistics of how you’re doing that. What’s a formula or approach that works for you. And it can be ad hoc. It can be like, “I just try to connect people.” I’m not saying that you figured out the magic wand and you will wave it everywhere and problems will be solved. But what are you doing and how’s that coming along?

Chris: So it goes back to why do we want to do this. Unfortunately, I worked with certain groups where they tend to tap the diversity line because it seems like the thing to do. It’s like the latest trend. And there’s like a lack of sincerity when it comes to like honestly trying to reach out to different groups of people. For the folks that I’ve been working with that have been most successful, they themselves are part of the story. They are an underrepresented memory member of the tech community, whether they themselves are a woman, they’re part of the LGBTQA community or someone with a different ethnic background that isn’t Caucasian. Those folks that step up and want to do something, are generally the ones I’ve seen…Let me go back. The ones that have experienced that that lack of diversity for themselves and wanting to not be alone anymore are usually the ones I think have the most sincere and best messaging and best outreach strategies for that. What I’m more focused on is budget, like really unsexy stuff like, this is how much it costs to have an office, this is how much email marketing campaign would be, you know, that kind of stuff. I make sure to help them as much as I can with whatever technology stack they happen to use to be successful.

Liam: Well, budget, admittedly, it’s not very sexy, but it’s how it gets done. Right?

Chris: Yeah. It’s a necessary evil that you have to think about. I mean, whether your nonprofit business, etc., you have to think about how much do things costs and plan ahead. I think businesses, especially businesses that have been funded, often don’t do that early enough. Especially when they get that big round of funding they’re like, “Whoa, we can take everybody to do a special onsite or we can take everybody to movies one day and spend all this money. We’ll worry about the budget later.” It doesn’t work that way.

Liam: That’s really cool. Thank you for that. Tara.

Tara: No, I was going to echo that. And then I was going to ask him because it sounds like he’s doing a lot to help other organization to be successful. So I wanted to ask him about success and how he defined success. So I’ll ask you that. Chris, how do you define success? What does it mean to you in your personal life, your private life, your professional life? However, you want to define it. It sounds like you are really involving yourself in other people’s success as part of that.

Chris: Professionally, do I do something to contribute positively to the business? The easiest way to measure that, obviously is, what was my revenue impact based on the work that I did. On top of that, and this has been more of a trend I’ve seen with companies I worked for in the past, seven or eight years or so, there’s generally some additional mission, some additional goal outside of just the financial impact and success of a business. Like democratizing the web is a big WordPress one, right? So contributing to that as well is really important for me. And making sure that I’m enhancing the company’s mission statement in some way. Personally, for me, I’ve had a lot of different challenges in the past couple of years. I used to define success as what ends up in my bank account and how much money I have left over after I pay my bills and what I can do with that. But ever since I’ve kind of gotten older and I have nephews and godchildren and all this kind of stuff, and I overcame a lot of health challenges myself, waking up in the morning and just appreciating the day is, for me, success on a personal level.

Tara: What kind of things do you like to do for fun?

Chris: I listen to a lot of music. A lot of music. I love video games. I love sci-fi, fantasy, movie movies and books and anything to do with that genre. I am a huge tabletop role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons.

Liam: Okay. Chris, I want to go back and chat a little bit more about your personal definition of success and how that changed in recent years. And I’m paraphrasing your word, but it used to be centered on money and leftover income and those sorts of measures. And now it’s about appreciating the day. You mentioned a couple of different things there. You had some personal health challenges, and some family growth, nephews and godchildren and the like. What was that mental trends process from money to appreciating the day? Was that an overnight thing? Did that come to you in time? Was there an aha moment? Walk us through your experience?

Chris: It was overnight. It really started when I started to realize I had some serious mental health issues. But even then, I didn’t really fully manifest my appreciation for life until my doctor told me one day after an issue with my sinuses, “Hey, there’s something in your cranium that is blocking your sinuses and we need to take it out.” That just turned out to have cancer cells and that changed everything for me. So when I got went through treatment, and all that kind of stuff, and went through all the impacts of having to deal with the fallout of chemo and all that kind of stuff, I never felt sicker in my whole life. I swore to myself that in the moment I become healthy again, I will seriously change my whole entire outlook on life and reorder my priorities. And I did.

Tara: Wow. How long ago was that?

Chris: Four and a half years ago, I want to say or three and a half years ago.

Tara: Wow, congratulations.

Chris: I’m great with time, by the way. You can tell. My time race is [inaudible 00:15:25] five or six years ago?

Tara: Did you actually have brain surgery or did you have…?

Chris: They go through your nose? It’s really creepy actually. Some of the prototypes of sinus is like there’s this big, long needle that goes in and it can go in deeper and it starts crawling all over the place. It’s really creepy.

Tara: I mean, you always hear about things like this – people promising to change if they make it through things like that – and I always wonder how easy or hard it is to stick to that. It sounds like you’ve made a big commitment to it. Does it make it easier to stick to it when you have that always in the back of your mind?

Chris: Yeah. I mean, my therapist said that one of the easiest ways to get somebody to change is that they suffer from trauma, or they suffer some sort of trauma. So for me, some of the fallout of my symptoms was memory loss, losing entire months set of time of not really remembering what I did specifically. That wasn’t fun. And then just not being able to eat very consistently. Now I can, unfortunately, much to the dismay of my stomach. But just things like that. I had an issue for a period of time where I couldn’t close my right hand all the way. and it only lasted a day. I know there are people that suffer from stuff like that for a lot longer and never even get the ability to use their hand again and whatnot. But just being able to do this afterwards is a big deal for me. Like squeezing my right hand is just huge. So it was little things like that I don’t take for granted anymore.

Tara: As far as that impact on your career, and what you’re focusing on, has that led you to this sort of more mission driven agenda that you have with helping?

Chris: Yeah, it’s that, and it’s also I’m much more cognizant now of work-life balance. Less than two years ago, I had no concept of giving myself any kind of free time. My whole life was work, work, work, work, work, and that just wasn’t sustainable. Now, when I’m talking to my boss or somebody like that, and I go, “I need time off. I’m not going to have a 9 pm meeting with you, because I’m done working at 5 pm today,” I need the person I work with to respect that and understand that. It is actually one of qualifiers just working with people is like, do they respect work-life balance? Do they respect their fellow human beings time? A lot of people don’t. So that’s just an important thing to me. When I was 25, I remember being 25 and being a Support Manager, and a 36-year-old told me that he’s having a mental health issue and he wanted to take time off. And I said to him, and I totally regret saying this now, “You want to take time off because you feel sad?” Like I totally took it for granted. Now that role’s reverse, it’s like, “Wow, mental health is everything. Your health is everything.” If you have no balance in your life and bad health, you’re completely useless to any anything you do like business wise, personal life wise, hobby wise. You can’t really participate as well as other people if you don’t take care of yourself.

Tara: Wow, that’s amazing that you may remember saying that, and the impact it has on you know. Are you still in touch with that person that you said that to?

Chris: Yes. I actually helped him find a job. So I feel like I made up for it. But I actually became really good friends with him after the fact too. I told him when I got diagnosed with depression a couple of years ago that I’m a jerk and I really am really, really sorry about it.

Liam: Wow, that’s really cool. A lot of times we do things in our past and we can’t reconcile with the person that we did something to. So that’s really great. I wasn’t expecting you to say that. That’s really neat. Well, we often ask people about their biggest challenges, but I think you’ve probably touched on that quite significantly with your health issues. What about in what you do day to day in your job? What are the biggest challenges that you face there?

Chris: Just how to prioritize issues. I mentioned earlier that being in startup or tech companies in general, it’s very much like a roller coaster. You can choose how to write it if that makes sense. We’re always going to have work. There’s always going to be more work than you can do assuming the businesses growing and is successful. So just sitting down and deciding, “Okay, I’m going to work on 1, 2, 3 today, and 5, 6, 7, 8 are not going to happen. And I need to be okay with that. Because 1, 2, 3 needs to be done, and it needs to be executed perfectly. I think generally when I talk to my colleagues also their challenge is “What do I work on next? What do I prioritize next?” That’s always like the most important thing and the most important challenge.

Liam: How do you figure out what the most important thing is?

Chris: Trial and error.

Liam: Fair enough.

Chris: Failing a lot.

Liam: Yeah, right. Good. The changes, right? The most important thing this week might not be the most important thing next week. The only thing that’s changed is the environment in which we’re operating. That’s a good point. There’s no science to it. I mean, there’s some science, but it’s just a heck of a lot of art and good luck, right?

Chris: Yeah. And it’s harder and harder if the company you’re working for is producing a product that no one’s ever made before. So there’s no market standard, there’s no concept of like, “what is right and wrong in this market?” You kind of has to define that. Oftentimes, I learn more from what not to do, rather than what to do if that makes sense.

Tara: Yes. Learning from mistakes, you mean?

Chris: Mm-mmh.

Liam: Yeah. How do you prioritize? Do you have a method that you use? You said trial and error, but do you have a specific way of approaching each day or each week or each month?

Chris: Yeah. Especially when I started off in a new company, I always give myself one to two months to ramp up. The first thing I want to do is do a deep dive in the product and also the ecosystem that’s wrapped around it. So an example of like WordPress. My first WordPress job was at WP Engine. I knew enough about WordPress in the e-commerce sense because I came from the e-commerce CMS world before I even came to the WordPress community. And so, I was very comfortable with e-commerce stuff all the concepts that that whole ecosystem has. With WordPress, I didn’t know anything about the blog aspect of it, the publication aspect of it. So in addition to learning how the hosting platform is going to work and how we can support customers, I obsessively read everything I possibly could about WordPress. I went to WordCamp to network with WordPress people. I got to know as much as I could about everything with WordPress. So I think a good support person who joins a company and they have a product, you should do yourself a favor and learn everything, not just how to support it: Why do people use the product? What’s the marketing? Who are the competitors? What does the whole space look like? Once you have a good understanding of that, you can then proceed to doing things like, “Okay, I know for sure, when we prioritize support tickets, for example, we need to focus on these types of customers first. I know in order for me to do that, we’re going to set up our support ticket flow in such a way that it’s going to prioritize these tickets. And it becomes kind of like a cascading waterfall effect. So essentially, in short, you know the product, you know the ecosystem. And then from there, you can kind of start guessing, “Okay, if we do this and this what happens?” And you just give it time to kind of fester a little bit and mature and grow. After like a month or so, we take a look at the metrics and say like, “Where does our satisfaction rating stand? What’s the feedback from our customers? Let’s do some customer development and figure out and hear their perspective as well. And most importantly, where is our MR right now?” Based on all that, you just kind of rinse and repeat. And the more you do it, the more you can perfect things and start narrowing down more what you should be working on. For me, when you get to that point, then you can start saying, “Okay, today, we need to work on documentation, so I need the support team to focus more in documentation today, rather than support tickets. Or there is an outage, please drop all side projects and do only support tickets.” That’s kind of how it works. Sometimes you don’t get to decide how to prioritize things. In the [sport? 00:24:53] world, if a bug gets released into the world, or even something like that doesn’t even directly impact you. Because like the other day, for example, Facebook was down, and there were products that use Facebook ask to use it, and there were you know, all kinds of things just stopped working. I actually had some customers that use, I think it was HubSpot. They use HubSpot, they use like Facebook’s off with the HubSpot account and it dropped the whole HubSpot. So little things like that they come up and as a support person you have to deal with it and just go with the flow.

Tara: Jeez. I thought there was some flag and support that when they saw my name coming through that I would be the first priority. I guess that’s not the way it works, is it?

Chris: Well, it depends.

Tara: This is squeaky wheel gets the grease. Is that how it works?

Chris: Yeah.

Tara: We like to ask another question on this show with everyone, which is about advice. So I’ll ask you if you have any advice that someone has shared with you that you can pass along that you’ve implemented in your own life. One piece of advice that’s really stuck with you

Chris: Never ever stop growing. A human being either improves or they start falling apart. It’s like a muscle. If you work it out, it will remain strong or get stronger. If you do not work it out, it will atrophy. For me, my talent is its own muscle, like my ability to do support and do sales and communicate and consult. I have to actively, constantly learn new things, make contacts with people, have conversations with people about how they do things in their company and learn from them. Even if it’s somebody that is new to working. Like I got a tweet last night about…I’m doing something right now with systems API, doing a little project. And I had contacted this support person I knew who I vaguely remember from a WordCamp and he was 15 years younger than means and this is his first tech support job. But just the way he approached explaining everything to me was done in such a way I never had heard it that way before. And I just thought it was masterful. So it doesn’t matter how talented somebody is or how experienced they are, they will have their own perspective. And any person can inspire you to grow and change and learn.

Liam: That’s a great bit of advice. I like that. How do you address that holistically? If we’re never going to stop growing, there’s a lot of different ways to do so. You talked about how your I’ll say growing professionally by learning more and talking to people and reading and staying active there. What about the other things in life? You know, the personal side, the inner growth, the physical growth of our bodies are aging or what have you. What are your thoughts on that? How do you manage that? What do you prioritize? What works for you? How do you live that advice?

Chris: It has to be intentional at all times. Like I woke up this morning, it was 5 am. I just couldn’t sleep. I could lay in bed and read Facebook and Twitter or I can get my lazy butt up and go run. There’s no like holisticness to that. It’s a choice. You have to be methodical and do things on purpose to be able to grow. I’ve never naturally started jogging just for the heck of it. I have to like put on my outfit stretch, start running, stop for a second think okay, “I think I’ve gone long enough. No, it’s only been five minutes. Keep going, keep going.” And then just keep going.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. I like that. Let me ask you a little bit about what Tara shared about you earlier in our conversation as a former WordPress guy. Tell us a little bit about that. What was your foray into WordPress and what did you do? You shared where you are now but what was your engagement with WordPress? And it sounds like you’re doing a lot community wise now out there. I’m not sure. I wonder what your engagement with the WordPress community has been over the years.

Chris: I mean, I love the WordPress community. Some of my best friends are still full-time WordPress people. Bless them. I want WordPress to succeed. I think more open source is great. For me, even by the time I got to WP Engine, I was already seven years in working on content management systems. Granted they were for e-commerce but they were nonetheless content management systems. And everything was about building websites. Even after a period of time, the same questions I got working at my first e-commerce company were identical to the WordPress questions I got. How do I make something look this way that way? So I just got a little burned out with that part of everything and I really wanted to do something completely different. So I wanted to stay away from the content management system piece entirely. And the things that excited me were just things like documentation tools, AI, VR, chatbots, all the crazy stuff that is kind of brand new. That’s what’s keeping me awake and excited at night working on. So WordPress, WP Engine was awesome. I worked out [inaudible 00:30:31]. That was awesome too. Everybody that I know in the WordPress community are some of the smartest, most caring wonderful people I’ve ever met. And it’s a very supportive community. I know if I go on Twitter sometimes it may not seem that way, especially lately, but I know so many people in the WordPress community that are the main drivers of the whole community and their hearts are made of pure gold and they really want to make the world better. And I love that about everybody.

Tara: I agree. That’s been my experience and many of the people that we’ve spoken to. I think we’re all invested in that WordPress community and it inspires you to kind of give back to it as well. What kind of things have you done? Do you have a local community there that you participate in still?

Chris: We used to have one. If you’ve ever been to Ventura before, the whole Ventura County area is very spread apart. So it’s very hard to build any kind of a community. I had more success just doing it online, like having Zoom sessions with people all across Ventura County. I’ve definitely been inspired by watching people put together WordCamp and stuff like that. We did have WordCamp Ventura. I think it was 2014 once and it was actually great. And it was awesome because I was like a 50 person WordCamp, which I’ve never been to a WordCamp that small before. But it was awesome. It was intimate. It was great. WordCamp LA, WordCamp Orange County still happen around here. I haven’t been in one of those in a while. I don’t know if I plan to anytime soon but my partner is very active in the WordPress community still so I still get to hear about all the fun WordPress stuff.

Liam: Yeah, that must be interesting to be outside looking in and fun memories. But also you talked about wanting to move on and seeing new challenges that way. So kind of come back in when you want and stay away when it’s right for you. We’ve got just a little bit of time here left, and before we say goodbye to you, Chris, I want to thank you for joining us out here in our virtual Hallway. I want to ask you where people can find you online, please.

Chris: I have a Twitter account @squireX2. I’m not that active on Twitter, though. I do have a Facebook account. Some people can find it, but it’s mostly for private stuff. My favorite spot for people to find me on is on Instagram @squireX2. I love food, I love Disneyland, and I love nerdy stuff so you’ll see a lot of pictures of me during all that kind of stuff. It’s really just the best place to follow me.

Tara: That sounds great. I’ll have to check it out. Thanks so much for joining us, Chris. It’s really been a pleasure chatting with you and we appreciate your sharing with us today.

Chris: Oh, thank you.

Liam: Thanks, Chris. Will talk to you soon. 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.

Marius is an all-round work potato with a passion for helping others help others. Marius enjoys flying under the radar and represents the WordPress.org support community.

Plugin | Health Check Plugin

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 95.

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

Tara: And I’m Tara Claeys. Today we’re joined by Marius Jensen. Marius is an all-around work potato, with a passion for helping others help others. Marius enjoys flying under the radar and represents the wordpress.org support community. Welcome Marius. We’re so glad to have you with us today.

Marius: Thanks for having me.

Liam: It’s our pleasure, Marius. Thanks for joining us here in the Hallways. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself, please?

Marius: Well, I’m early 30s man from Norway in a little town called Sola. It’s really hard to say in English. I basically spend my days mostly working for a small midsize company that does everything for other businesses, company wise or IT wise. So we cover websites and even hardware. So kind of interesting like that.

Tara: What’s your background? How did you get into WordPress and computer science? Did you study it in school?

Marius: That’s actually kind of interesting because I just had a passion for computers, but I started out working at an ice rink. So the company I worked for now, did the IT at the ice rink and just randomly saw me typing away at Linux one day on my computer. And that’s how they found me because they needed somebody who could do Linux.

Liam: Were you supposed to be heading out the rental skates. I mean, what we were supposed to be doing when you were typing at Linux at an ice rink?

Marius: Oh, man, I should probably have been doing that. I started out doing the card duty, which is basically skating around on the ice, making sure everybody’s okay and doing first aid if anybody gets hurt. And then I progressed up and I did rentals stuff as well. But in the end, I managed the rental section and all the people who bathed at the concession stands. And that’s when they found me because, during day time, there’s not much going on.

Liam: So, were you writing some kind of Linux-based software to manage the skate rentals or were you just messing about on the laptop? In LA, we need that skill set. Can you quit your day job and come work for us?

Marius: I actually was working on IRC Network. we had a pretty big one back in the days for a lot of kids. So much of my free time went to just administration stuff there. One day I randomly got a text message from an unknown number, but just the text, “Do you have MSN?” which obviously should have been a red flag. I’m not going to lie. But that turned out to be my now boss, who was just trying to reach out and see if I was looking for something new within IT.

Tara: Tell me about ice skating in Norway. Does everybody ice skate. I’m just curious about the hobby of ice skating. Is it a common past time? I live near an ice rink outside of Washington, DC and we have a very popular NHL hockey team here. So people really gotten into skating. It’s become really popular and the rink is busy a lot. Is it an indoor, outdoor? What was that like?

Marius: Ours is indoor. I would say in our region, it’s definitely become very popular after one of our local teams started playing in, well, what we consider the Norwegian playoffs. They’re not as big as the NHL obviously, but the local team really got big, and that’s when things exploded. But I’ve always enjoyed it. My mother and my grandmother worked at the ice rink earlier, so basically, we’ve been raised there to an extent.

Tara: So do you still go there and skate now? Are you supporting them now? The company you work for, you said does work for the ice rink, but do you still skate?

Marius: It’s been a while. It’s a little bit tedious to get to it from where I live now because I rely on public transport, which is kind of hitting mess.

Tara: So let’s talk about WordPress little bit, Marius. How did you decide cover WordPress, and what do you do with it? You said that you help with support, but tell us a little bit about before that even how you get started with it.

Marius: Well, that was actually through work. We had a project for the ice rink, actually. They needed a reservation system, and we were redoing their website at the same time. So I figured, “Okay, actually, this is really flexible. Let’s see what we can do.” So we ended up actually making the ordering system and management of ice times and such between the different teams and schools and stuff with then WordPress admin. But in doing so, I discovered I knew very little about WordPress. So I landed in their IRC channel way before Slack was a thing. People that were just really friendly and willing to help so it kind of stuck with me. I spend a couple of years just hanging around not saying much, just observing, which obviously terrible if you want to get involved, but fun if you’re just learning.

Tara: No, that’s how you start, right?

Marius: Yeah, a little bit carefully checking the waters. And one day somebody pulled me into the support and documentation team weekly meeting, and kind of snowballed from there.

Tara: So what is IRC?

Marius: Oh, yeah.

Tara: That may be a question showing my technical ignorance maybe, but can you tell me what that is?

Marius: Quite the opposite, it is a chat platform. Basically, all the IMs, and even Slack uses or is based off it or uses it as a basis. So it’s a chat, really just to text back and forth.

Tara: Do you know what it stands for, IRC?

Marius: It is Internet Relay Chat.

Tara: Okay.

Marius: It’s been around for quite a while. Not as popular these days, because there’s shiny plugins that you can use instead.

Tara: Right, right. Okay. Thanks.

Liam: It had seemed to have kind of died off once things like AOL, MSN, and ultimately Slack with the user interfaces all up. Pretty people care about it.

Marius: Yeah, they want stuff to be pretty basically. They want shiny things.

Liam: Shiny is nice. What do you do for your current company? You you’ve talked about you worked in WordPress and wrote a reservation management system within WordPress. Is that what you do most days there? You had said the company does a lot of different stuff. And if you’re writing Linux, you know, you can’t be doing stuff outside of WordPress as well. Can you tell us about that? What do you do every day?

Marius: Yeah. I ask myself the same question.

Liam: That sounded a lot more accusatory than I meant it. I’m sorry about that.

Marius: No problem at all. I say the same pretty much every week. Currently, I try to do as much or as little work as possible. I do internal systems and such. Looking for a little bit of – what do we call it? A little bit of a reset after a little bout with a personal wall kind of deal last year. So I’m kind of just trying to calm down the client work and do everything internal. I’ve been with the company for almost 10 years, so I can do pretty much anything at this point. I can answer invoicing questions, I can do tech support, I can do, you know, websites. So we do websites with WordPress. That’s kind of what we focus on out to clients for public facing stuff. But we also do custom coding or even internet solutions with Laravel and solutions like that.

Tara: Marius, we like to ask everyone that we talk to on this show about success, and how they define success and what it means to them. Can you share with us your definition of success? What it means to you both personally and professionally, if you can.

Marius: Yeah, I can try. It’s a difficult subject, I guess, in some ways. For me, it is just actually being able to do stuff like this even though I don’t do it often. You know, talking with people and participating in chats like this. I would say just getting out there and being available and interacting with people. For me, at least that’s personal success. I’m not a big fan of people in many cases, not to be mean to people.

Tara: No, I get you. Totally. I see a T-shirts that pops up on my Instagram like an advertisement and it says something like, “I like coffee and a few people.”

Marius: Yeah, basically. Like, at WordCamps and stuff, I will just go out and I’ll be part of it. I’ll join chats if I can, stuff like that, but at the same time, it would be exhausting in a way because you don’t always feel like you’re filling in or participating as much as you could be. But professionally, I would say just that feeling of achievement whenever you manage something new that you’ve been looking for. For example, looking into a really hard problem and actually finding an elegant or really neat…Can we say neat?

Tara: Yeah.

Marius: …approach to solving those things. That’s a really good feeling I would say.

Tara: Thank you for sharing that. And Liam’s been quiet because his Zoom locked out. This has happened now a couple of time. Can we hear you now, Liam?

Liam: I hope so. I’m not going to touch any buttons right now. I wasn’t ignoring you, Marius.

Tara: I hope you were able to hear his definition.

Marius: I was.

Marius: That’s good.

Tara: What’s your biggest challenge that you face?

Marius: Are we talking professionally, personally, WordPress wise?

Tara: Well, you could tackle any one, two, or three of those. Whatever you’re comfortable sharing. It’s always good to hear about challenges. And also how you work on overcoming it or how you have overcome your challenge or how you work on it on a regular basis.

Marius: All right. My personal challenge, as I mentioned, people. I do actually do – and I’m kind of open about it if people ask me – I do therapy once a week for not liking people and social anxiety. I believe it’s called. Yeah, that’s the actual term. And depression. So just getting out there, putting myself out there, that’s always exciting, exhausting. After WordCamps, I’ll usually have a couple of days just in bed home because I’m just totally worn out. But WordPress wise, I would say just trying to motivate people. As you mentioned in my introduction, I am the current support lead for the wordpress.org. So trying to just keep people happy and engaging with them, hoping that they at least like what I do.

Liam: It’s a massive task, right? Because I spent a little bit of time working with the support team a couple of years ago, and the team itself is pretty massive, it’s spread out all over the world. So there’s a challenge of coordinating all those activities. And then the challenge of actually providing the very generous support that you and your team does and all the people just come into the forums looking for help, looking for answers, looking for solutions to that thing that just needs to work. How did you kind of get into that? I mean, you talked about you used to hang out on IRC, then you got pulled into the Slack or the team meetings. But what drew you to being as involved as you are at kind of an administrative level? Because once you become the lead of a project, there’s the work, but it’s much more about managing the project.

Marius: Yeah. I just really enjoy the element of it. I think that support is one of the best ways to learn WordPress, because there’s always that interesting problem that engages you as well. So you spend your time learning about that thing so that you can help other people. Even if it’s stuff you don’t know yourself, at least if you have like a little bit of a passion for it. But I would say I don’t really do as much administrative work as you would think. That’s where I like helping others help others. I really like facilitating, making it easier for people to help – doing little projects that empower our support. True? Yeah, that’s a good word. Like a browser extension that shows if anybody else is already looking at this question, very popular. Not…

Liam: I remember when that came in. That was great.

Marius: Yeah. Not originally mine. I won’t take credit for that. I just made some modifications to it later times. But sitting at a WordCamp and realizing we do this one thing with every single person and they always say, “Yeah, I’ve done these steps but it’s still not working,” and we know they’re lying, not because they’re malicious, they just have you turned off all your plugins, that is a really big ask of somebody whose website is acting up. So that’s where our Health Check plugin, which I love talking about, comes into play, which is actually lets you do that without affecting site visitors. And that’s really helped us actually get people to do the testing that we asked them to do.

Tara: How does that work?

Marius: Well, it’s a plugin. Some of it is going into WordPress core now for 5.2, which is really exciting. But the troubleshooting aspect of it actually makes a private session for your user, where it disables all your plugins and uses 2019 or any other default theme. And then you can turn them on one at a time to find out which plugin actually caused a problem for you on your site. That’s really handy.

Liam: And it only does that for you if you’re logged in user?

Marius: Yeah.

Tara: Also it can affect the front end of your site?

Marius: Well, it does affect the front end, but only for you, your user there and then.

Tara: Oh, wow. That’s awesome. I didn’t know about that.

Liam: Yeah. How did I not know about that? This is awesome.

Tara: Wow, yes.

Marius: Yes. We just passed 100,000 active users. So really excited.

Tara: Now, the will totally know I am lying when I say I’ve turned off all the plugins and I haven’t. Oh, that’s really cool.

Marius: Yeah. So making tools like that, I love doing that more so than administrative tasks, because administrative as a representative for any of the teams is, by and large, very much about writing chat summaries from gatherings and things like that. It’s not a whole lot outside of that. You can make it more, but it’s really hard. In our case, for example, we have the international forums, which are just wordpress.org/support, but we also have all these receptors sites for all the other languages, which have their own teams and their own little communities. So you’re not really one massive community. Well, you are one massive community, but you’re a massive community of many small ones. So there’s not a whole lot you do in that regard because they all manage themselves, mostly. And we just try to poke at them and see, how are things going? Is there anything we can help you with on like a grander level?

Liam: Cool. You’ve been very candid and open with us about some of the challenges you face around interacting with larger groups of people, and you shared that you came to WordPress through IRC, perhaps an easy amount of medium of communication. Would you talk to us about your first WordCamp experience, and what that looks like?

Marius: Oh, I would love to. My first one was actually the very last WordCamp San Francisco before WordCamp US became a thing. I was invited over because the Community Summit was happening. I already knew like I don’t make a whole lot of money, I couldn’t actually travel there. So it was really lucky to get one of those scholarships that they were doing at the time. I had no idea what I was going to. My only experience is with something similar were, well, not a system I would say at that point. It was fantastic really. Getting over there, really nervous obviously. I’d done a little bit of traveling before to the states for a family reunion and stuff like that but never, I would say, in this regard to meet a lot of people with the same interests. I would say, the first one, I didn’t really know what I was going into, so I just went to every single talk, which in itself can be exhausting. Since then I’ve noticed that I do the talks where I would say I’m a good acquaintance or friends with the one talking because it’s always nice to show support like that.

Liam: Sure.

Marius: But I find myself doing a whole lot of just being in the hallway and being dragged into conversations more so than striking up conversations. So that’s interesting. The people are just so friendly. Even though it’s really exhausting in the end, and you just end up, as I mentioned, going home and sleeping for a couple of days, it’s also liberating, because I feel more free with people with the same interests like this.

Tara: Is there a community there that you participate in?

Marius: Obviously, my support people. My peeps. They are the ones who invited me and they encouraged me to take the scholarship to join the first year. And everybody was just so friendly on the level, I would say, I hadn’t experienced before. It’s like, “Yeah, I’ll cover dinner this night. We’ve got the taxi, don’t worry about it.” Stuff like that. I wouldn’t say I’m a starving student, but as a starving adults almost, that was just amazing that you didn’t have to basically spend your grocery money that week on just getting around at a WordCamp to be able to participate in the things that are happening outside the camp as well.

Liam: I remember after WordCamp US when it was in Philly, I don’t know if was 2015 or it was 2016, but a bunch of support team moved over to Dave and Buster’s in Philly the next day and hung out there. I was lucky enough to tag along. It was really, really heartwarming to see the interaction and the support and the real friendship between the different team members there who clearly from where they’re flying home to that afternoon or that evening, don’t spend much time at all with each other in real life, but still really close and friendly. The silly banter back and forth and the supportive kind of friendly gesturing was absolutely wonderful to see.

Marius: Yeah, that’s right. You’re with us at Dave and Buster’s.

Liam: I was. I was. I was.

Marius: My memory is terrible. I totally forgot that. Well, there you go. I remember being at Dave and Buster’s.

Marius: It was there. It happened.

Liam: We actually went back the year after as well, brought some new people at the time. Had a great time. I love that place. I wish we had more arcades.

Liam: So I’m going to ask you about advice if I can. One of the questions we like to ask our guests is around the advice that they have received. So the question is, what advice have you received? What’s the best advice you’ve ever received in your life and successfully implemented into your life? And it could have been something you read. It could have been something, you know, your grandfather shared with you. Really any advice from anywhere. It can be personal or professional. Can you share that with us?

Marius: I was thinking about that because somebody asked me something similar not long ago. And I must admit, I don’t have anything that stands out, which is just terrible to think about. You have those little tidbits that you just bring with you throughout life that you never really consider advice. One of the things I do always keep with me though is my grandmother who passed away a couple of years ago – just the way I treat people in, in general in service industry and such. Bus drivers. I have this weird habit. You get strange looks on the bus when you do it, but I always greet the driver when I get on and I always, you know, give them “have a nice day” when I get off. If you’re getting off at the back of the bus, you give them a little nod and a wave. That kind of thing. Which you just carry with you. That might actually be a thing you carry with you because I am generally friendly with people who I meet. Maybe that’s it.

Liam: Yeah, I like that. I also thank the bus driver. I always say, “Thanks for the ride.”

Marius: Which people give you weird looks here. Also, the whole concept feet on the seat in the bus. Oh, I hate it. Had a teenager threaten me last week. No, not last week. A couple of weeks ago because I told him to get his feet off the seat. It really grinds my gears.

Liam: What specifically? Because it’s getting snow in the dirt or on the seat? Is it because when you were growing up your mom always used to make you keep them down? What specifically?

Marius: I would say it’s the apparent lack of respect for both the public transport system but also whoever comes on next and has to sit down. You don’t do that. You don’t put your shoes on the couch back home. Why do it on the bus? It really bothers me. Sometimes I speak up, most of the times I don’t. But that day, just had enough of it.

Liam: Let me ask you a different question. We’ve talked about a little bit about your work. We’ve talked about how you used to skate. We’ve talked about WordPress support forums. What do you do when you’re not in front of the computer and not in a work meeting? What do you do outside of work? What do you do outside of WordPress supports?

Marius: See, you mentioned not in front of the computer. That makes it difficult. Well, we often play a lot of games. Most of my friends are from other parts of the world so we just sit online and play. But I do enjoy hiking. As I mentioned, I’m from a little part in Norway, where we have some kind of famous nature positions. Wow. Like the Pulpit Rock, the big cliff thing, which a lot of people have seen. Something called Kjeragbolten, which is a boulder wedged between two mountains that you can stand on.

Liam: That sounds cool.

Marius: Yeah. So really nice stuff like that. I’ve never done a lot of it. I started doing hiking with my family year or two ago. But before then, never really been to any of these places.

Liam: It’s always amazing to visit wherever we live, whether it’s your corner of Norway and people come from afar to visit these wonderful things near us, whether it’s the museum or this natural rock between two mountains or some waterfall. And all the locals. I’ve never been there. I haven’t been since high school. Took me when I was 10 years old, kind of like that. But some interesting human phenomenal.

Marius: Yeah, it makes so little sense. It’s these fantastic things. And you’re just, “I live here,” and you either think, “I’ll have time later or I live here or I see it every day. Why should I bother?” It’s one of those things. But once you’re actually out there at those places, they’re usually really amazing.

Tara: Yeah, it’s nice to have people visit you because then it forces you to do those things that you don’t do. Entertaining people. I’ve learned more about where I live just by doing that.

Liam: You’ve been entertaining a lot of people lately.

Tara: Yeah, yeah. What are your goals? What’s next for you, Marius?

Marius: Oh, I don’t actually know. I guess just short term surviving this WordPress release. I did not anticipate it to be this stressful just to get a little bit of code going from one of my own projects. But long term, I would say just keep pushing on and passing those little personal hurdles that come up along the way.

Liam: Yeah, that’s not always a tiny little thing to achieve. I mean, we talk about them, that they’re little personal hurdles, but sometimes those little personal hurdles, depending on where we are in the week, look like massive personal mountains. “And how the heck am I ever going to get over those?”

Tara: Well, yeah, sometimes the goal is to get through the day.

Marius: Yeah. Some days are worse, some days are better. But at least getting out there, still continuing to try and do little things like joining in here. Just putting yourself a little bit out there.

Tara: Yeah, we’re really glad that you’re here with us today. It’s been interesting talking to you and hearing your story and what you’re working on. Thank you for all that you do for WordPress too. I definitely am going to look into that plugin. That sounds really neat.

Marius: Oh, my pleasure.

Tara: And very helpful. Very helpful.

Liam: Did you write that plugin? Is it kind of your plugin? Did the support team put it all together? How did that happen?

Marius: Well, I don’t want to take anybody’s thunder. I would say it’s my baby. It’s gotten input and suggestions and a little bit of enhancements here and there from other participants, by all means. I mean, it is open source. It’s available for all. But the basis of it, I would say is mine, yes.

Liam: That’s awesome. Congratulations and thank you.

Marius: I’m happy to have been of assistance.

Liam: Marius, we are coming to the end of our time here. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure chatting with you and getting to know you a little bit more.

Marius: It’s been my pleasure. That went way faster than I anticipated. Wow.

Tara: Where can people find you online?

Marius: Well, I have a blog, clorith.net, which I’m not very good at updating. I’m also @ClorithMJ on Twitter because my normal name was taken, or just Clorith on Slack. I’m always open for questions or people wanting to reach out so.

Tara: Wonderful. Well, thanks again for joining us, and I hope to meet you in person sometime, Marius. Take care.

Marius: Thank you, and likewise.

Liam: Bye, Marius. We’ll see you at WordCamp soon, I hope

Tara: Bye.

Marius: 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.

Alex is a father, a husband, a son, director of NewPath Consulting, contributor in the WordPress Toronto community, a trumpet player and a University of Michigan football fanatic.

Twitter | @alexsirota

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 94.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Alex Sirota. Alex is a father, a husband, a son, the director of New Path Consulting, a contributor in the WordPress Toronto community, a trumpet player and a University of Michigan football fanatic who wants to see software make the world a better place. Welcome Alex.

Alex: Hi Everybody. Hi Tara. Hi Liam. It’s very nice to meet you.

Tara: It’s great to have you with us today. Thanks so much for joining us Alex. Can you tell us more about yourself please?

Alex: Sure. I live in Toronto Ontario Canada. It’s also known as the great white north. Actually, I’m looking outside the window now and it’s a sunny spring day. We’ve had a very long winter and it’s very nice to see that it’s warming up. Everyone is coming out of their hibernation mode. I have lived in Toronto for 22 years. I’m originally from Michigan. I grew up in the Detroit suburbs area. I came here actually in December of 1996 for a job and I stayed here. I actually emigrated from the US to Canada, which is pretty unusual. There are about a million of Americans who live in Canada (that’s the estimate) and most people here are economic immigrants, meaning that they came here for some sort of opportunity or maybe got married to someone and they came here. But we do have actually…Canada is very interesting. We have about a quarter of a million immigrants from all around the world coming here now. About 100 to 150 thousand per year for the last probably 10 years have come to Toronto or greater Toronto area. It’s grown extraordinarily over the last few years. Their infrastructure is really getting tasked quite a bit.

Liam: I want to go back to Detroit for just a minute. This is more about me than about you. I’m originally from the suburbs of Chicago. I’m a big fan of Chicago style pizza. I met a guy recently who is from Detroit and talked to me about Detroit pizza and said it’s the best ever. Do you have an opinion on that?

Alex: They have a Detroit style pizza … I am not sure … there’s something about it. There’s a company there that kind of made it big called Buddy’s. Buddy’s pizza.

Liam: That’s the one.

Alex: It’s kind of like a local chain. You know? It’s a marketing thing really. It’s a special kind of feeling. It’s deep dish. I don’t really remember to be honest with you. I haven’t had it in a long time. There’s another one called Jet’s deep dish. It’s like crusty on the ends but I don’t think it’s as good as Chicago style. It’s good. It’s pizza, right? It’s a Midwestern thing cheese, bread, you know?

Liam: Well we can keep you on the show then. All right. Chicago’s the best. We are going to turn it back over Tara.

Tara: Well cheese and bread are popular topics too. But I think we’re going to talk a little bit more about you and your background and how relate to WordPress and in general how you relate to the world. So Alex what’s your background? How did you find your way to WordPress and a guest on our show today?

Alex: Yeah. Wow. WordPress is one of these technology platforms that I kind of look at. I am a technologist for the most part. I have a computer science degree. I have a development background. The reason why I came to Toronto was actually for a product management opportunity when I was in my twenties. Product management is interesting because it’s kind of like this idea of marketing technology. The idea of developing a product. WordPress caught my attention in the 2. something days when I worked for the Ontario government as a project manager. In Ontario…Ontario is a big place. Like it’s a very large province which is what we call states here in Canada. It’s probably the size of California or Texas in physical space but only about 10 to 12 million people live here. But a third of the country live in Ontario. We have very large Ontario government and they’re looking at technology to use. WordPress is actually actively being used in Ontario government, Toronto a whole bunch of different technology, Drupal as well. We were looking at it as a platform to do collaboration for an internal project. I just kind of looked at it as one of the potential platforms and I discounted it at the time because it still hadn’t really evolved to being what I thought was a modern content management system. This was probably before the idea of custom post types in WordPress 3.0. So I looked it I think just maybe a year or two before it became something very different. Then I started my own business in 2014 doing consulting. I was looking for a good technology platform to build out websites of a transactional nature. I kind of looked at it again and what really impacted me was not necessarily technology (which had grown by then by leaps and bounds quite a bit) but the more particular was the community was being formed around it. I was honestly blown away because I’d be on the Internet (you kind of see my gray hair on the video) but I have had email address since 1989 on the Internet. I went to the University of Michigan. So I’ve been on the Internet pretty much since the Internet or the World Wide Web I guess started. There’s always this conflict between proprietary software and open source software. It’s always been the case. Most open source software doesn’t really gather the attention for end-users. Like Linux not withstanding, it’s kind of a server side in technology. But WordPress was the first technology from my whole life that I saw that captured the imagination of a non-technologist. Publishers and stay-at-home moms and you know scientists and you know just hobbyists. I just saw this really interesting kind of paradigm shift that’s happening where people that don’t have a technology background are setting up WordPress and tweaking it and making unbelievable things. I also had an experience doing some content management systems work in the early 2000’s (during the dot .com days) and I saw the expensive content management systems that existed. Six figures/7seven figures and here I am looking at this product and technically and functionally it’s equivalent to those systems. It’s available for free. The community really captured my imagination because here’s thousands of people, tens of thousands, who are actively contributing and then there are millions of people who are using this product, kind of taking it for granted to some extent. And that’s the thing where I kind of said you know there is this really interesting thing happening and I want to be part of it. So we started to kind of do some work in it and I started learning more about it. And really I’m not like one of these WordPress people who have been in it for a while. I’m really interested in kind of how average people use a fairly advanced piece of technology to accomplish some really amazing things.

Liam: Alex? You shared that the community caught your attention when you were exploring WordPress as a content management system. You said that was right around 2014 or so when you set up your own consultancy. What was your first experience with the community? Did you go to a WordCamp? Did you find blog posts and were surprised that people were sharing this? Did you stumble on a Meetup? What was your initial experience?

Alex: It was strictly the plugin and theme ecosystem, right? There was nothing actually in person. I remember looking at where it stood in 20? I don’t know 2010 or 2009? So like 10 years ago. It was kind of like there’s a system and there are these plugins and themes. But it wasn’t really that developed. You know, 10 years later I looked at it and there’s tens of thousands of examples and functionality tweaks that really stood head and shoulders above anything else that was out there. Visibility, and I think that still is the case for a lot of people looking at it. They look at it from the perspective (and I look at it from the perspective) as here is a core thing what it does. But look at all the things you can do it and how inexpensive and/or compelling it is to try these things. To this day it’s kind of the pro and the con at the same time. You can do all these things. But the way you approach doing it could really be a good thing or a bad thing. It has this dual edged sword in a sense that you can choose the right plugins and themes and just do amazing things. You could choose the wrong ones and get yourself to a world of hurt. But the community of people contributing and building their own businesses, you can clearly easily see that there is this ecosystem built around the product. Having an ecosystem built around an open source product is extremely unusual. It’s just to this extent, I can’t think of anything else that’s actually been in the open source community that’s been this successful and continues to drive and capture people’s imaginations. Yeah. So that was first thing. It was just the sheer breadth of the ecosystem.

Liam: How do you engage with community these days?

Alex: Yeah. So, I am kind of a connector. I like to observe to be honest with you how people use technology in general. I do that because that’s how I see the pain points, where people have challenges. That’s how I like to have my consultancy address those pain points. I use my involvement in the community to really be obviously to participate in helping to grow this and helping the Toronto community grow the last couple years (which I will get into in a second) but also to learn and kind of become an observer of the challenges that people face which are quite dramatic. So in Toronto we’ve had for over a decade we’ve had various individuals that of been actually involved in the community. One of them is actually Andy McIlwain, who works for Go Daddy now. Andy has been kind of like a shining star in Toronto. Way back to the beginning he’s been very actively involved along with a few other folks here to kind of build the WordPress Toronto community. Then, a couple of years ago I met Andy and said I’d like to have a Meetup. Toronto is a big city, like New York and Chicago. We have a lot of geographic areas. It’s kind of hard to get around. And so we decided to have a strategy to create points of presence and have different parts of the region to have their own Meetups. So I volunteered to run the North York Meetup which is a northern suburb of Toronto, the furthest northern suburb which is fairly close to where I live. I started to have a Meetup there. We were kind of doing the typical thing like have somebody speak. About a year and a half ago or so we stumbled onto a format which we continued doing now which has totally changed the way that our Meetup attracts people. Basically the Meetup that we pivoted to, (because we were having trouble getting traction) was a let’s fix your website. Basically the name of the Meetup is let’s fix your website. So it’s essentially a group happiness bar. That’s essentially what it is. We get regularly between 20 and 30 people showing up to the event, even during the summer. It’s literally people putting on their Meetup. I have a problem with my site and here’s my url. Here’s the problem. I’ve tried to do this, this and that. They come to the event and it’s a free event. And it’s just one after the other. What’s your challenge? What are you trying to accomplish? We will put the website up on the screen. We will try to diagnose it in groups. So it’s kind of like a group therapy session. And it astounds me; it honestly astounds me to the degree to which people build amazing things and the degree to which people can totally mess up their WordPress site.

Tara: Yes. It makes you see how not easy WordPress is for people in a lot of ways as well. Liam and I both run local Meetups. It’s really interesting that you mention that because I run sort of an ancillary Meetup outside of DC, that’s part of DC. We get 20 to 30 people as well. But it’s always a struggle to find a topic and to find a speaker. So the last Meetup that I had was, it wasn’t let’s fix your website but it was an open Q&A. So bring your questions. People would come and write their questions down and we would just take them one by one. It was a really great format. I think for a place like Toronto, Washington, Philadelphia, cities that have maybe a more formal Meetup where there’s a speaker and a presentation, it might be really nice to offer that. So you have a pretty consistent following. Do you ever have trouble getting to everybody’s issues during those Meetups?

Alex: Every single time.

Tara: Yeah.

Alex: Every single time.

Tara: Do you break up into groups and sort of split people up, like theme issues and plugin issues?

Alex: No not yet. The Meetup naturally breaks itself up because sometimes it’s so big that there’s these natural…we’re not really like…it’s more like I kind of facilitate it. What’s interesting is we have naturally some people that are more expert. So they provide the input. Other people that have… they’re more new to it so they are more learning and listening. But really it’s kind of like almost like well, what do you all think? What’s the best approach? Inevitably one of the common refrains is (which I hope maybe the technology at its core will eventually address is) when you make changes you need to have backups. When you do things with WordPress you are managing a technology stack. So we start talking about this stuff, which I’d rather not talk about frankly. Like this is a code base. This is a database. This is a technology platform. I wish I didn’t have to explain it but I do because people sort of think well, it was just like Microsoft word, it just kind of works. No it’s like you own, you’re maintaining a technology platform. Therefore, when you make changes you should treat it as such. To be honest with you, I hope one of the things in the future happens is that you don’t have to consider it that way. It becomes a lot more resilient to changes and there’s a way to make changes that don’t require you to know the fact that you know you make a change and you can blow up your site. It’s pretty tricky. With the plugins that are out there and themes are extremely complex. Some of them are, with the way we describe them is, we kind of agree to saying it’s like a whole another piece of software on top of WordPress. So you’re not just maintaining your WordPress you’re also maintaining a piece of software that you’ve added. As a result a lot of people get an appreciation for that. But I feel bad sometimes to be honest with you because people get into these situations where they are out of their element by a long shot. It’s so complex. So when Gutenberg came out I was a big (and I still am a big proponent) not with standing all issues is that by far the biggest issue is Page Builders and how people get sort of lost in the myriad of options that are there. What is supposed to be a fairly user-friendly experience becomes extremely un user-friendly and it becomes like you are inheriting a site that somebody built. They have no idea how to manage the site. I’m actually really happy that there’s going to be this evolution of the product to make it much more friendly, to build more interesting looking websites without depending on fairly proprietary solutions. Not withstanding there’s a lot of other stuff that happens around WordPress that is fairly complex. On the other hand I also see people building some really cool technology that would of cost many thousands of dollars totally on their own. That’s just enlightening to see how productive people are.

Liam: I think there’s a lot of mixed messaging around WordPress and around making websites generally. We certainly hear advertising make your own custom WordPress website in minutes. Yet we would never do design your own custom house in minutes or design your own bulletproof in court contract in minutes for $15 a month. I know there’s legal solutions out there. But yeah, there’s a whole range of options and a lot of it is just around communication to try to clarify that. Speaking of communication and clarifying and what is right and what is wrong and what is good and what is different, I am going to change gears on this and ask you about success. One of the questions we like to ask our guests is what is your definition of success? That definition might be a personal definition, it might be a professional definition or it might be a mix both. I welcome your thoughts. How do you define success?

Alex: You know it’s probably something that my life, I think it’s changed over time because I think when I was young, I think the definition of success was very much career and money oriented and try to like become somebody that somebody knows something about. Like have a name for yourself and have all these accomplishments and stuff. As I get older I found it was a very ego driven sort of approach to accomplish and do all these amazing things. You know? It comes in my case at a cost. Like it’s very hard for people I think (especially when their young) to recognize what was important what’s not. So success now, I am in my late 40s, I think success now is building something that you can be proud of and that helps the world become a better place frankly. Like, it doesn’t have to be huge. It could be extremely local and something that people get value out of and enjoy and something that other people can get behind. You don’t put yourself as the central point of a relationship for example. So to clarify that a little bit more I feel successful in a technology project when the people that I work with, my clients actually internalize what they built and they feel proud of it and they can actually continue to operate it on their own. They’re not beholden to our company to be sort of dependent on them. I think a lot of technology, especially up until probably like when you have the cloud and mobile devices. Technology was really frankly a hostage-taking situation. My observation was that technology was sold in general and when you bought it you had to always, you had to derive the value out it. All the risk was with the customer. So for me success is to de-risk that, to actually make it so that customers can manage their own things, to be completely in control and to be able to manage costs and how much time is spent. So I look for people and solutions that actually are very customer centric and oriented as opposed to the solutions that are proprietary and lock people in because I think actually in general people can be more successful with those kind solutions. So that’s a philosophy that I have my business. Like we try to build systems. I try for example to write as little code as possible if I can. So I have people, I have regular subcontractors come to me say well, we’ve got to write this code Alex. I actually, no let’s try build stuff that doesn’t require code because I want our customers to be able to maintain this on their own somehow. That’s very hard to do. It’s very hard not to put yourself and say we need to create proprietary type of stuff. With WordPress, it’s interesting because you can actually write proprietary systems. But because of the license you have to use GPL. So it forces these business models to evolve so it’s just not proprietary it’s value-added. You can still help people and still make a business out of it but you still have a lot of control with your customers. I think success actually makes sure that you’re not sort of stumbling block, you’re not a bottleneck in the process. When I say you’re it means your business or your a director of a company and that your enabler to help people to do better things. So I try to do that as much as possible.

Tara: Thank you for sharing that. I’m going to talk a little bit more about running your own business because you mentioned early on that you opened your own business (I think you said it was in 2014). Talk a little bit about that decision and how you knew how to do that, where that came from and how that’s gone for you. Maybe what your challenges have been in being a business owner. It sounds like you have a good handle on serving your clients and you treat them well. What are your challenges and how did that come about?

Alex: I ran my own consulting business for a few years in 2001 and 2002. Then I started working for the Ontario government for about 11+ years. While I was working there I always wanted to start my own business again. I found the opportunity in 2014. I was basically, you know, let go effectively. I was running my business while I was working there on side, you know the side hustle thing. I think at some point we both realized my employer and myself that it would be best if I run my own business. So I got a bit of runway to do that. What captured my imagination was what I mentioned was this idea of these tools that are being developed that are aimed at consumers directly. Not at technology companies, not at IT departments but rather at everyday people that are going to use technology to make their lives better businesses, their businesses better. I started researching a bunch of products that did this. They’re all cloud based products. What I tried to do is two things. I tried to select products that I thought I could make use of and I think my customers could make use of, create almost like a Microsoft office of these cloud products. And I wouldn’t be building them myself. I’d actually be using them and reselling access them and recommending them. What I wanted to do is basically introduce them to small businesses and organizations so that they could assemble them together like Lego blocks to build solutions sets. I think this is actually technologically continues to be something that’s on the mind of a lot of people. Like how do I accomplish truly amazing things but without having to break the bank on technology spend. Actually, a lot of small business organizations…as I started working and targeting small businesses and organizations and not for profits, I saw how little they spend on technology and how little they use technology in general. I think there’s a reason for that because with technology you can easily spend a lot of money on technology. So it’s not a good idea for small business to do that. Inevitably, if you write custom code, if you do custom things, if you do things that you think are specifically are for you, you’re going to spend a lot of money. So a lot of small businesses chose to do exactly the opposite of this. Which just means that they run their whole business in Microsoft office. Or they run their whole business with their website and go almost no technology whatsoever. When they introduce technology it’s usually the owner, or a volunteer, or somebody that actually kind of says hey. You should try this thing. You try that thing. They kind of do that almost ad hoc. That’s ok. That’s actually what these technology companies these Software As A Service providers want you to do. So I thought that I could be more like a guide to this whole huge ecosystem of thousands of products that do all kinds of different things and aimed at all kinds of different companies and to try to assemble them together. So I selected several solutions. As my company evolved I had almost like a testing ground of a whole bunch of different products. In the last couple years I’ve settled on more of a targeted approach. I have like three or four products that I think I’m focusing more on. As part of my business practice I’ve actually built relationships with the makers of those products. There’s one called Wild Apricot, FormStack, and WebMerge. These are products that are automation products that have high value add for our customers but they require partnerships and in some cases they require some support from companies like ours. So I’ve tried to align myself with those partners so that they can help and refer business to me. So one of the things I found in almost all my clients is that they have difficulty getting customers. Like every single small business in the world has difficulty. I think a lot of them don’t rely on partnerships as much as that should. I think in the Internet you should be building relationships with partners that can help you. It’s a really powerful concept. So to be honest with you that was the turning point. When I started doing that, seeing myself as a part of an ecosystem as opposed to somebody that’s trying to change the world and seeing myself as a service delivery agent on behalf of these larger companies (WordPress being one of those) although there isn’t really a referral ecosystem it’s more about building a name for yourself to some extent. That’s actually when things really started to take off. They’re still sort of developing but from a marketing perspective it’s really helped my company. You can see that in the bottom line. You see that in the opportunities I get to do and speak at different conferences and stuff. It’s changed. By being part of this partnership ecosystem it’s really changed the way I look at, not just the way I my business but even how I talk to customers and say hey. You shouldn’t be doing this all by yourself. You should be looking at where your business model supports partnerships.

Tara: Right. That’s really smart. That’s a good business plan approach that you have partnering and becoming sort of that is your specialty or your niche in a way. I am going to consider that to be advice because that probably is something that a lot of us who run WordPress agencies could benefit from. It’s sort of deciding on an alliance with a product and becoming a specialist and a recommended specialist with that product. So I am going to consider that advice but then I’m going to turn it over to you and ask you if you have received any advice that you have really taken to heart, the most important perhaps piece of advice you received that you would share with us and that you’ve implemented in your life.

Alex: When I was at Apple, my first job out of school I was just like a software developer in a large call center in Austin Texas. Apple has to this day several hundred (maybe more now) people running and answering phone calls for support. My first manager’s name was David. And I was like this eager employee right out of school and I was working at this great company and I wanted to please everybody. We were using Microsoft outlook if you can believe that to answer emails. Outlook has this feature where

Tara: That’s funny.

Alex: you get an email (this was like in the mid-90s) so you get an email. It’s just like Slack, right? It bings and says hey you’ve got email and you see this bolded email messages kind of piling up. I would literally site there and be like ok. I’ve got to reply to this email. I wanted to please everyone. He observed this and said you know Alex? If you reply to every single email that comes in within like an hour so, first of all you’re probably not going to get anything done. Second of all, you’re going to develop this expectation that if you don’t respond to an email within a particular amount of time to the person that’s emailing you they’re going to think that they did something wrong and they’re going to think that you don’t like then anymore. So by setting up his expectation you’re going to get yourself into a really difficult position of not being as productive as you can be and also potentially setting yourself up for failure with other people. So he’s like look. If somebody really needs to get an answer from you or something, they’ll email you at least three times. Then eventually they’ll call you. It was a real issue. He was basically the first person that described to me how email can be abused. This was well before inbox zero and all this kind of stuff. He said to me don’t respond to every single email message. Just look at it and say it’s information. The expectation is not; this is not supposed to be like this real-time response system. And to this day, email to me is like a necessary evil to be honest with you. It’s like one of these technological things that everybody uses. It’s the one application on line that everybody uses no matter what. But it’s become extremely, it’s not good a design pattern for working. There are very particular use cases for it so I am really happy to see companies actually observing this and saying look collaboration shouldn’t be this sort of gotcha thing where people actually send each other emails and expect each other and there are all these politics around email. The blind carbon copy, and the cc and all this signaling, it’s just a really bad thing. As I kind of work with clients and stuff like that and I see how difficult it is for clients to wean themselves off email. We actually introduced Slack for our clients. We say look. If you’re going to work with us we’re going to introduce Slack. You can email us, but we’re going to prioritize Slack channels over email. Some of them are like no. I need you to have email. That’s fine. Just try it. You’ll see what we mean when we actually want to talk to each other like human beings as opposed to like sending an email with a whole bunch of pages and expect some sort of like formal response where it’s just not the way that people work. That piece of advice was really fundamental in my thinking about collaboration and how technology can actually be a really bad think if you let it be that way.

Tara: That’s excellent advice. I talk a lot about email and productivity and how it is a love-hate relationship. You have to use it but it’s so easy to get in the habit of mis-using it and checking it too often and responding to often. So that’s great advice. Thank you so much for sharing that on this show. I don’t think we’ve heard that before but it’s very helpful. We appreciate it. On that note, we will need to say farewell at this point Alex. It’s been great having on the show. I’m sorry that we’re out of time because Liam knows that when you start talking to me about email and productivity I get a little bit excited and can go on and on. Thank you for joining us. Where can people find you on line Alex?

Alex: Sure. I’m on Twitter @alexsirota. My website is www.newpathconsulting.com.

Liam: Alex? Thanks so much for joining us here. It’s been a real pleasure getting to know you just a little bit. I hope to see you again real soon.

Alex: Absolutely. Thank you.

Tara: Bye. Bye.

Alex: Thanks Liam and Tara. Take care.

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

Up until last year, Rahul’s only public speaking had been once – in 4th grade. Last year, he stepped out of his comfort zone and now speaks at meetups and WordCamps about once a month. Rahul is the co-founder and CEO of Scale Dynamix, where he manages thousands of WordPress websites.

Twitter | @ngingxreload

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 93.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Rahul Nagare. Up until last year, Rahul’s only public speaking had been once, in fourth grade. Last year, he stepped out of his comfort zone and now speaks at meetups and WordCamps about once a month. Rahul is a co-founder and CEO of Scale Dynamix where he manages thousands of WordPress websites. Hi, Rahul.

Rahul: Hey, Liam.

Tara: Hi, welcome Rahul. It’s really nice to meet you and have you here on Hallway Chats. Can you tell us more about yourself, please?

Rahul: Yeah. I’m speaking from beautiful Knoxville, Tennessee where it’s lovely 35 degrees today. I’ve been living here for a couple of years now. Before this, I’ve been all over the place, all over the world. I grew up in India in a city near Mumbai. It wasn’t one of the largest cities, probably a second largest. So I’ve always been used to the hustle and bustle of the big city. From there, I directly moved to Lubbock, Texas where they had three cars in the rush hour. And it was fun. After that, I’ve been sort of moving to different places in US, I travel a lot, and it has been really great.

Tara: So what brought you to the US? Did you go to school in Lubbock, Texas?

Rahul: My wife went to Lubbock, Texas. She did her PhD from Texas State. And because I work remotely, I can just follow her anywhere I go. I just need good WiFi.

Tara: Yeah, I imagine that was a culture shock going there. That was kind of in the middle of nowhere.

Rahul: It had its moments and it was fun.

Tara: Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your trajectory to computers, and WordPress, and what your background is, your education or how you got involved in this field?

Rahul: Yeah, computers, this is something I’ve always done. I built my first computer when I was in third grade. By built, I mean I just put together the cards and everything. Back then, it was the DOS operating system and Basic programming. I’ve always been into that sort of thing. I enjoy doing programming more than going out. Even back in those days, I used to prefer typing on my computer rather than going out and playing with friends or doing outdoor activities.

Tara: Are you still that way?

Rahul: Yes. Pretty much.

Liam: You don’t have to be sheepish about it. We can be bold.

Tara: A lot of us are.

Rahul: Yeah. A lot of people don’t like admitting that I would rather be indoors and work on my computer than go out for a run or something. But lately, I started doing more and more exercise, taking my dog out for hikes and stuff. But still, if it was an option, I would just spend time on my computer.

Tara: Yeah, there is a comfort in it and there are so many things to do. There’s an endless list of things to learn and see and do on the computer so it is very satisfying, I agree with you. Tell us about your relationship with WordPress?

Rahul: I’ve been using WordPress since 2008, 2009. I used to work for a web hosting company before that, I used to do some sort of web design. But back in those days, WordPress was sort of new to the market and only a few people were using that. Every now and then, I had to support customers who had websites built on WordPress. And I was aware of the community aspect of that, but I wasn’t. I was mostly focused on the server side of things, dev ops, making sure WordPress is safe, and that sort of thing. I didn’t get actually into programming for WordPress until last couple of years. Since then, I started seeing WordPress come up more and more. In 2014, I started a managed WordPress hosting company Nestify and now we host around 12,000 sites on that. These days, I mostly spend my time on– we started another division at Nestify called Scale Dynamix. It’s only focused on websites that have a couple of million visitors per month, and at that point, WordPress needs special attention and different set of skills to keep it online, keep it secure, keep it faster. That’s what we do at Scale Dynamix now.

Liam: That’s pretty interesting. Talk about your process or your journey from– it sounded like you were working for somebody else when you were beginning to learn WordPress and getting into hosting and all that kind of stuff. Then you started Nestify, I think you said, and then from Nestify, you’ve added on a new service called Scale Dynamix. What was that transition like? Going from, “I’m working for this person. I might want to work for myself. Like this. Now I’m going to do even more.” Talk us through your journey, would you?

Rahul: Yeah. It has been an interesting journey. I’m one of those people that have always only worked remotely all their life. I’ve spent maybe a week in office and I’ve been working for 15 years now. Back when I were graduating from high school, I had the similar job. I used to do Linux administration for a couple of hosting companies and back then, it was just a hobby but they started paying really well and I started adding more hours and then it became a full-time job. I sort of jumped into that and started learning more and more about Linux, web hosting, web servers, that sort of thing. Then, eventually, I had to learn about security and performance. And at a point, I was hosting most of my friends’ websites. I also had some customers and I was sort of doing that on the side. One day, I just decided to make the jump and start my own company and just do that full time.

Tara: So you just made this jump but you’re doing some very delicate work there, you’re working with obviously a customer, a website that has millions of visitors that cares a lot about their website and their performance because it means a lot when you have that much traffic. How do you market yourself to these large clients if you’re just jumping into being a business owner? Tell us about that path and finding customers, marketing your business, and then handling such a large scale type of business must be a bit stressful, I would guess? I don’t know, maybe not. You don’t seem like you’re stressed at all. I’m feeling stressed about it.

Rahul: I sort of lucked into serving these types of high traffic websites and customers. When I started, it was just your average managed WordPress hosting. We would take care of backups and stuff and security for you. But the way we have set up the server, it used to support a lot more customers because we were on a budget back then. I used to put a lot of customers on single server. To keep all of them fast and secure, I had to do some things on the server side. One of my friends had a website that was doing a few million visits per month, and he tried everything, AWS and some other solutions. And none of them worked so he asked me, “Can you do something about that?” I thought it might be a fun experiment, I hosted it on one of my servers and it just performed extremely well than what he was used to before. He used to show ads on the site so he started making more money. That sort of clicked like, “This is something I should do, I can charge.” People like this are willing to pay hundred times more than your average website customer. And it seems like this technology works. I should just try and find that second customer or maybe third. And because I already had one guy as an example, and that was doing few million hits a month, it was easier to go and have that conversation with someone else. And then I sort of had to keep doing that and made a lot of mistakes along the way. Now I have some sort of formal sales process around this. And because we serve some interesting customers, this conversation gets easier every time you talk to someone new.

Liam: Let me ask you about going from customer one to two and two to three. The first customer was an easy pickup, right? Your friend said to you, “Hey, Rahul. Can you help?” And you said, “Yeah.” Now you’ve got a customer. Presumably, your friend’s site is reasonably well-known at least to their audience if they’re getting that kind of traffic. But for that second customer, that third customer, did you know anybody else with that kind of traffic levels or did you just pick one of your favorite sites that gets a lot of traffic and sent them an email and said, “Hey, here’s what I did for this site over here. Are you interested?” How did you go about that? Because as you said, these higher-traffic sites are willing to pay more, but they must get all sorts of fly by night and you’re not a fly by night. How do you show up out of the blue and say, “Hey, I’m not a fly by night operation, let’s talk.” How did that happen? What was that like?

Rahul: Yeah, that was pretty painful and difficult process because the first customer, I lucked into it, I had no idea where to find the second one. I sort of did all sorts of things like– because I was from engineering background, I had no idea about the sales process, outreach, lead generation, and so on. I did stuff like posting on Reddit, asking people to do beta testing on this and Facebook groups, that sort of thing. Basically, I did everything that you can read on how to start a business blog post. most of that didn’t work, then I started hanging out at LinkedIn groups and at first, when you start– because you’re an engineer and you start a software company, you think your target customers are developers and that’s what I thought and I only hung out on developer groups and that sort of thing. My wife also had some business background. One day, she sat with me and asked me to find my ideal customer. That sort of forced me to get out of my comfort zone and instead of saying, “Hey, anyone who uses WordPress is my target customer.” I was able to define websites that get one million or more visitors per month. From there, we sort of narrowed a list of websites, started contacting them. And again, as anyone who has started a business, the first time you have to email someone, it’s the most terrifying thing you have to do. What do I say and what if they just block me or publish this email on Twitter and say, “Hey, look at this guy. He’s spamming me.” And that sort of thing. Basically, the answer is you just have to go and find people that might find your service useful and talk to them. They will either try it or say, “No, thank you.” But that’s probably the worst thing that can happen.

Liam: So that second customer, was that a paying customer or did you do a, “Hey, would you beta test on my server for X number of months and I’ll do it for free, and then if you like it, you’ll start to pay?” I’m really interested in how do you garner the trust from someone whose entire business really relies on a quality server.

Rahul: I’m glad you’re asking that because I sort of went through these thoughts. Do I give them for free? Offer them free service? Will they be more willing if I charge them from day one? And I sort of tried both approaches. Every time I ask someone to try this for free for a couple of months, they just try it, never took it seriously and they sort of gave some good advice but it never went anywhere. And for people, the second customer, I think it was All-Star Lacrosse website. Again, it was similar like the first customer, they were running ads on the site and up time was an issue if they had any games or events going on. The website would crash and they used to lose ad revenue just when it was the perfect time, when people would go to their website. So instead of trying this, “Hey, we’ll give it for free.” I just said, “We’ll migrate it for free and you can just test it for a day. You will see the performance difference and then we can talk pricing.” He was okay with that and he said, “Yeah, sure. That’s not that big of a risk for me.” We migrated everything bad so loading was faster, site was faster. He basically said, “Where do I sign up?” I sort of threw together a Stripe form and started charging him. I also sent that same form to my first customer and said, “Hey, now we have a billing system. You can just enter your credit card here.” And I went from zero customers to two customers using that approach.

Tara: That’s a good story and one would define that as a success story so I’m going to ask you a question about success because I think that sounds really exciting. It must have been really cool to see that you were able to make that kind of an impact. You must have felt and still do feel accomplished and successful, I’m guessing. But let’s see how do you define success personally, professionally? I think maybe you can even talk a little bit about your background? And having lived in a lot of different places, how that might also impact your thoughts on success?

Rahul: Sure. My definition of success is same for personal and professional life. I define success as having the ability to help others achieve whatever they’re trying to achieve in their life. Professionally, it can mean being able to help someone with their WordPress issues or if they’re struggling with their website or something. And if you’re in the position to help them, that means you’re doing good in your field – you know a lot. You’re successful by any measure. Same goes in personal life as well. I wouldn’t say having the ability to help others necessarily, just having the freedom to spend time with your family and not having half your attention at work when you’re there. I would call that success or being able to volunteer at your community, or church, or any event, or just being able to write a big check to someone that needs it and not expecting anything in back, that is success. And you don’t have to be a millionaire to do these sort of things, it’s just a matter of perspective. If you aim for this, your satisfaction level about your life goes up and I say that’s the measuring stick I try to use when I’m doing things from day to day.

Liam: I like that it’s a matter of perspective. You don’t need a big check to make a big difference. And when you help somebody out, you don’t need to, I don’t know, turn their life around 100%. Sometimes just giving them a gentle hand to help that turns them maybe one degree that, in due course helps a lot. I really like the kind of kind simplistic approach of that definition. Thank you for sharing that.

Rahul: Sure.

Tara: Yes, thank you. Tell us a little bit about the transition from living in India to living in the US and not just Texas but can you tell us a little bit about your background in India and do you go back there, do you have stuff there?

Rahul: Nestify and Scale Dynamix are both fully remote. We can hire people all over the world, we don’t have any physical office. And a lot of my engineering team is back in India, my parents also live in India and I go there maybe once a year. It was definitely, I wouldn’t say culture shock, but moving from India to US was certainly different in a lot of ways. Like I said, I moved to Lubbock, Texas and the first thing I noticed was how quiet everything was, in a good way. I could really get some thinking done, get some work done, and that was really nice compared to the chaos that goes on on the streets of India. Then there were other things like, I started getting more and more involved in community, meeting new people. And everyone is just so welcoming here in US. And you have a part of that in India but it just felt so different to me and that’s where I started to get more and more involved in community meetups, meeting new people, having the comfort to speak in public, that sort of thing. To me, that was life-changing, I should say.

Tara: Yeah, it sounds like it. I like in your intro that you kind of told a little story about– Liam told your story about how you really didn’t have any experience since elementary school in speaking and now you’re speaking, is it really once a month? Are you sponsoring WordCamps, are you speaking only at WordPress things? What kind of speaking are you doing?

Rahul: Yeah, I spoke in 4th grade as part of school project and after that, I– that went okay, I guess. I won a participation trophy or something. But after that, I sort of never considered this as an option, sharing what you know or speaking somewhere. Last year, because I was– with Scale Dynamix, I had to meet more and more people and I thought this would be a good opportunity to maybe talk at a few conferences and that will probably help me get to know more people and so on. So I applied at a couple of WordCamps and Baltimore was the first one that accepted me, and that was the first WordCamp I ever spoke at. Experience was so nice I just kept doing that. Now I mostly speak at WordCamps but then there are events like SaaStr, some other bootstrapping events, small business conferences, stuff like that. But for the most part, I speak at WordCamps. My company also sponsored a few WordCamps. I think I met Liam at WordCamp, Atlanta last year.

Liam: We sure did.

Rahul: But now my focus is more and more on speaking at WordCamps because it helps not only share what you know but I also spend a lot of time at the Happiness Bar and talking to people. That’s sort of what attracted me to Hallway Chats. It was like being at WordCamp but from the comfort of your home.

Tara: Yeah.

Liam: Just through your keyboard.

Tara: That’s right. What kind of things do you speak about? What are your favorite things, your favorite talks that you’ve given?

Rahul: Mostly, I’ve spoken about WooCommerce, security, Scaling WordPress, AWS, that sort of thing. Even some of the upcoming talks are about WooCommerce and security. I also like to talk about bootstrapping a business working remotely. Apart from the talk, the conversations I have at hallways or Happiness Bar are mostly related to asking people what they’re struggling with, what are their challenges. And you can learn a lot and you can also apply some of those learnings in your business or sometimes you are able to offer some assistance or offer some help, sometimes you can be just a good listener and everyone wins from that conversation.

Tara: Yeah. Tell us is there a question or an answer that you get that you hear most often? Is there a trend or a theme that you hear when you ask people about their challenges? Is there anything that stands out that you’ve heard from doing it so many times?

Rahul: More often than not, people think they have a WordPress challenge or WordPress question. But a lot of the times, they’re trying to basically get more people to their website or get more customers, that sort of thing. When you ask a question and someone says, “So how do I do this in WordPress?” And now I have started asking them, “But what are you trying to achieve?” And then they say, “I want this popup to show.”, “No, but after that popup shows up, what are you actually trying to achieve?”, “They will give me their email address and–“, “No, but after you have the email address, what’s your end goal?” That sort of helps people to think, “Oh, yeah. What I’m really trying to do is reach more people.” Sometimes you can say, “Popup is not the best way to do that. Maybe go to your network of friends or go to your current customers. If you have 10 customers, just ask each one of them, can you introduce me to one more person? The results you will get that way will be better than maybe adding a popup on your website.” That really resonates with a lot of people that I talk to.

Tara: Yeah, being strategic about it and thinking about the reasons before, we get so wrapped up in the technicalities of things that we sometimes forget what the ultimate goal and our initial objective was. I’m sure that’s really helpful and people probably are taken aback by that question sometimes.

Rahul: Yeah. I did all of these mistakes when I was starting Nestify. I know what they’re thinking when they’re trying to add a popup on their website or do something with WordPress or do something with their website. It sort of feels funny that I used to do the same thing hoping that this will move the needle in my business, but actually, I should have been doing this and just sharing that is really helpful. Sometimes, you learn different use cases about WordPress. Someone is trying to do something that you have never seen before and a lot of the times, I’m surprised that, huh, you can do that with WordPress and you learn something new, so that’s always fun.

Liam: So you were talking about advice and helping out at Happiness Bar and sharing so I want to ask you about that. Rahul, what’s the best piece of advice that someone’s ever given you that you’ve successfully implemented in your life? Or maybe it came from a book or a song or one of your travels, what’s the best advice you ever discovered, heard, and implemented in your life?

Rahul: Probably the best advice I got in terms of building a product and on the business side of things was two months ago at this conference, SaaStr, in San Francisco, someone told me the best thing you can do when you’re building a product is just go to someone you have never met, give them your laptop and tell them to use your product, and just watch them for 15 minutes. Amount of things you learn in that 15 minutes will be more than analyzing six months of analytics, and different things, and logs, and so on. And all sorts of usability testing reports. I sort of implemented that at WordCamp Phoenix, I also did some testing at some meetups in Knoxville. I sort of just give my laptop to someone and tell them, “Hey, can you just do whatever you want with this software.” And the body language of that person or the reactions, you can learn so much. This sounds like obvious advice, have users use your product. But that’s completely changed my life and I’ve learned so much in last two weeks or three weeks compared to everything I’ve done since the starting of my company.

Tara: Interesting. Was it a WordPress person who gave you that advice, was it a business owner?

Rahul: That was someone from sales background.

Tara: Yeah, that’s a great suggestion. I always recommend that to clients and we very rarely do that on client websites but I always think it would be fascinating to do. I think most people think that they know what their customer wants or how somebody will use their website or their product and maybe they’re a little bit of afraid. So it’s brave of you to do that because you make more work for yourself, and the things that you think are working or what you think is getting across is not getting across at all and then that means more work for you. It takes some courage to do that, I think.

Rahul: Yeah, and the beauty of this is this sounds so obvious advice, but when you do that and the things you learn, that really makes a difference.

Liam: Yeah, it does. And I imagine being there in person and you’re not just watching where the mouse is going, you can see where their eyes are gazing, you can watch their body language as they say, “Ungh, I don’t get this.” Or, “Oh.” When they click on something and it does it, and really having that intimate experience of watching them use a product. What’s your biggest challenge and whether it’s relating to work or it’s something in your own private life, personal life? What’s your biggest challenge and how did you overcome it or how are you working on it currently?

Rahul: I come from engineering background and running a business, it’s a completely different challenge than just building something on your laptop. This is something I struggle with a lot still and I’m trying to get better at that. It’s delegating things to others and actually spending time on working on business and not just adding a new feature to your product or whatever you’re building. And to do that, I sort of– having concrete goals for the week, for the month helps. And most of those goals, if they’re on the business side of things, to achieve them, you have to spend more time not engineering or not building features but actually going out and talking to people, having meetings and so on. Again, bit of planning and scheduling helps with that. Every day, I’m trying to get better at this, at delegating things that others can do more and more.

Liam: That can be a real challenge, that’s for sure. That can be definitely a challenge. And with that, speaking of organizing our time and planning, we are out of time. Rahul, it’s been an absolute pleasure to spend some time with you out here on our little virtual hallway. Before we wrap this up, will you please share where people can find you online?

Rahul: Yes. I’m on Twitter at @ngingxreload and my company website is scaledynamix.com.

Tara: Thank you so much for joining us today. I really enjoyed meeting you and hearing about your business and your approach to your business, and thanks for sharing your story, Rahul.

Rahul: Thanks for having me.

Liam: Thanks Rahul, we look forward to seeing you speak at a WordCamp soon. Take care, bye-bye.

Tara: Bye.

Rahul: Bye.

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

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