WP Elevation WordPress Business Podcast

Cash Flow Problems
Colin Hewitt is no stranger to the struggles business owners face in trying to manage cash flow. That’s how he came up with the idea for Float six years ago.

After graduating from university with a degree in Computer Science, and after a year of freelancing, Colin decided to launch a digital agency. It was here that he gained first-hand experience in the issue he would eventually solve.

In order to get a sense for his business’s cash flow, Colin first managed his finances in a notebook. Then, he began using a spreadsheet. The problem was, it took hours to enter, calculate and manipulate the data. Needless to say, the process was time-consuming, error-ridden and stressful.

A Cash Flow Forecasting Solution Was Born
Colin believed there had to be a better way to answer the question:

“Do we have enough cash in the bank?”
And this is what Float is for.

Float is a cash flow projection tool that integrates with accounting software Xero and QuickBooks. It takes all the data that you’ve configured and provides you with a clearer picture of your cash flow.

My favourite feature of the app and one I swear has been a game-changer for WP Elevation, is the one that enables you to spin up different scenarios.

Want to hire someone? Want to onboard a new client? Want to expand into selling WordPress Care Plans?

Simply plug-and-play. Float tells you how these changes will affect cash flow.

But Do We Really Need Another Finance App?
Float was built to fill a need that accounting software and three-way cash flow forecasting tools had been unable to.

With accounting software, you can centralise your business’s finances. However, these tools don’t focus on cash flow necessarily. It’s more about automating the collection of data. You still have to put in work to calculate what it means for profit-and-loss as well as cash flow.

Three-way forecasting tools take care of one of these gaps, obviously. But they utilise an indirect forecasting model, which relies on the data you’ve entered into the system. In other words: “We have this Software ABC expense to pay and this recurring payment from Client X we’ll receive in January.”

You can make accurate predictions for the long-term based on what you know, but it won’t tell you what’s in your wallet. If you want to know if you have the money to pay your bills right now, in this very moment, you need a direct forecasting tool like Float.

The Future of Float
As Colin looks towards the future, it’s clear that he’s trying to build something very special, not just for Float users, but for his growing team.

He asks questions like:
“How do we make it a system that anyone can adopt?”
He also doesn’t want to leave behind users who have already have established businesses and want something with more advanced controls. Cash flow forecasting is an issue for everyone, not just a startup or small business owner, after all.

As Float improves for the user, Colin also has his sights set on making Float a positive experience for his team.

“Are people happy? Are we creating a good space?”

These are important questions to ask now as he is currently attempting to hire someone to delegate operational management tasks to.

This is something we touch on again and again. If you’re serious about building and sustaining a successful business, you have to be willing to delegate tasks that aren’t in your wheelhouse.

Having the right environment to welcome them into is just one of the key factors that will enable Colin to land that perfect new hire.

A Special Offer for Our Podcast Listeners
I can’t rave enough about Float, which is why I’m happy to share this special offer with you:

Visit https://www.wpelevation.com/float and get 25% off your first 3 months of Float.

Success is important to us all and cash flow management plays a big part in that. Float has done wonders for WP Elevation’s cash flow forecasting, which is why I’m confident it will help in yours too.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Neuro-Linguistic Processing, or NLP, is one of the many psychological coaching tools out there that some people completely swear by, while others think it’s just another pop-psychology fad.

Our guest Nick Cownie, armed with a clinical background, has made a name for himself by distilling a lot of overwrought NLP techniques down to just their most essential components, and he’s here to tell us about how to put them to good use—and tell us a harrowing tale of being kidnapped and left in the desert!

Background

Nick Cownie is a sales psychology consultant, NLP consultant and practitioner based out of Wagga Wagga. Originally trained in traditional Chinese medicine after his health sciences degree, he worked in a clinical setting for fifteen years before moving into NLP. He and his wife were early adopters of the training and coaching methods that are standard today, moving their mindset training services online back when that was unheard of in the field.

A method that matters

In a landscape pretty crowded with models and tools vying for our attention, what’s the big deal about NLP and mindset training? Nick says it matters because it’s so well-equipped to tackle the major problems he sees over and over again for people going into business for themselves:

• Low confidence. Nervousness, anxiety, and impostor syndrome, which all lead to self-sabotage for otherwise talented and capable people.
• Procrastination and lack of discipline. Feeling stuck putting off tasks you know will help you—or only getting stuff done when you really feel like it—majorly holds people back.
• Lack of influence. Being comfortable influencing others—without slipping into inauthenticity, sleaziness and manipulation—is a crucial skill to develop.

Sleaze versus science

Nick says NLP absolutely has a bad reputation with some—and in a lot of cases, it’s totally deserved. A lot of techniques and materials practitioners sell are heavily padded with unnecessary fluff, and there are entire niches of NLP dedicated to using it for manipulative sales, or even manipulation in your personal life.

That said, while his methods pull from a lot of classic NLP frameworks, he shies away from using a lot of their terminology, preferring to stick with the established psychological terms for the same things. While some of the wording around mindset training and mindfulness can get very hokey very quickly, Nick emphasizes that NLP terms like “anchoring” are really just psychologically-standard tools like state elicitation and associative conditioning. They’re about training your brain to stop getting stuck responding to negative stimuli, and start being able to access positive states in a predictable way.

"I'm a pragmatist,” Nick says. “All I'm interested in is results."

Influencing yourself

The trick to fixing your mindset, Nick says, is essentially to get out of your own way.

That means identifying the person you are right now, with all your pros and cons—that’s You, Version One. You have a lot of obstacles in your way—maybe fear of failure, impostor syndrome, lack of discipline—that are stopping you from succeeding.

You, Version Two, is the person who is able to succeed, because they aren’t held back. You need to identify what the differences are between Versions One and Two of yourself, and take action to clear the obstacles and gain the skills you need to bridge that gap.

Obviously, it’s easier said than done—but Nick shares one of his tools with us for getting past your fears. Tune in to learn how to use emotional states and conditioning to instantly access the most confident version of yourself!

Influencing others

Communicating effectively with others is a big part of NLP—and while the basic techniques can be used in a manipulative way, Nick stresses that won’t do you any good, in sales or in life.

Effective, influential communication using NLP tactics can get your genuine message across to clients in a way that’s most likely to reach them.

“You can do that and still be authentic without manipulating anyone,” Nick says, “and do it in a way that's more likely to have them convert if they are the right client.”

He also says that manipulation tactics are really a way of influencing the wrong people—which always comes back to bite you in the end. “You get a bunch of refunds, a bunch of bad reviews—it doesn't really work anyway.”

Nick shares one of his tools with us for learning to influence others in a genuine way—it’s easy to apply in sales settings, and it’s easy to remember, too. He uses this simple four-step acronym:

• F - Focus their attention.
• A - Access emotions.
• S -  Seed potential.
• T - Trigger the response.

An integrated method

Nick pulled a lot of useful knowledge from his time working in Chinese medicine, including a foundational concept called bian-zheng, the process of recognizing patterns in diagnosis. He uses it as a guidepost for recognizing patterns in his own work, and has found it helps him find approaches that work across different contexts and industries.

How to get started

NLT and mindset training are skills, Nick says, just like anything else. There’s no overnight solution, and every tool in the system takes time to be fully effective. He stresses to Troy that every time you show up to work on your skills, even a little, you're improving. But take the pressure off yourself to be a master overnight. Let your incremental progress add up like compound interest, and it will!

Nick is also leaving WPElevation listeners with some freebies—click here to access The Self-Sabotage Solution, which includes an infographic, a voice-guided walk-through of the mindset technique mentioned earlier, and a two-hour training video running through mindset training tools.

You can also reach him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So many of us take pride in offering high-touch, customized service experiences for our clients, where everything is tailored to each client’s specific needs—so why is this week’s guest finding so much success doing the opposite with his product?

Matt Johnson, of Pursuing Results, is a former WordPress developer who pivoted his business into a podcast production company, and he offers his production services as a full-package, standardized product. He sat down to talk with us about what that means, why it works, how other professionals can implement and scale the product model in their own businesses, and where the future of podcasting is headed.

The Beginning

Matt got his start in WordPress development building a website for a piano studio, and then later built another for his first consulting client, which led him into the world of real estate. From there, he learned the benefits of optimizing teams and processes well enough to able to step back from the day-to-day.

It was also where he first learned about turning something well-known as a service offering, like real estate sales, into a packaged product. The company made real estate transactions into a neat little product that anybody could sell.

He got into podcasting from there, starting out doing webinars for the real estate company—then a coworker pitched him on doing an actual podcast. It was B2B, and they built a lot of strong industry relationships that way—but not much of a business model.

“Initially we had no idea how to monetize it, which we would not recommend, by the way, but that's what we did and it all worked out in the end. But it did take us a longer path to figure out how to monetize. I jumped in without a plan.”

They knew they wanted to be successful influencers, and that his partner wanted to work his way into coaching, so things snowballed from there—and Matt got very good at running podcasts.

Monetizing

Matt and his partner started monetizing by selling online courses and live events, which worked for awhile but burnt them out pretty quickly. His partner moved into a virtual real estate firm, where agents could actually switch their real estate licences over to him and, in exchange for a commission percentage, gain access to all his coaching and training materials for free. This was a highly successful model for him, but it didn’t translate well into industries other than real estate.

Pursuing Results

When Matt ventured into podcasting on his own, he was doing Facebook Live shows fairly regularly, and found that in order to keep up and keep the quality high, he needed help. He assembled a team that would let him focus on the content and the conversation, while handling day-to-day stuff like bookings, backend work and social media. And, well, the team got very good.

When word spread through his podcasting audience about how he was managing to churn out such a high volume of high-quality work, people started asking to effectively rent out his production team. This worked for awhile, but customizing the approach for every single client generated a lot of mixed results, and so Matt and his team got down to standardizing their offering into a clear, defined product that would meet client needs and deliver, well, results.

Podcasts As a product

For Matt and PursuingResults, specializing their service down into a packaged-up product offering—that is, a clearly-defined service designed to meet a particular need, with minimal customization—has been hugely successful. Matt stresses that, while less customization might seem limiting at first, the reality is anything but.

“We're not saying hey, go ahead and fit your round peg into my square hole, because it's easier for me to deliver, because I want to take more time off on Friday afternoons. It's not about that. It's about starting with the ideal client and what gets them the best results. It's starting with a methodology and finding an ideal result, and then going out and finding as many of those ideal clients as possible, and giving them that exact methodology. To me, that's actually serving them at a higher level.”

Matt’s tips for moving from product to service:

1. Let go of the ego. Your clients think their problems are completely unique; you think your services are completely unique, but it most cases, neither of those things are really true.
2. Find your ideal client. Who are you best equipped to serve? What kind of client are you very good at delivering to—and, for that matter, very excited to deliver to?
3. Find the process for that client. Once you know what kind of client you want to work for, nail down the exact, specific processes that will meet these clients’ particular needs best and deliver the very best results.
4. Find and market to those specific clients. Find your niche, and own your niche. When your work is highly specialized, you gain access to tight-knit networks of similar clients, and their testimonials about your product will connect well with others in the niche.

Process

As he gets more and more hands-off with his production company, turning more day-to-day responsibilities over to his team, Matt has a defined approach for making sure everyone is still turning out great results. He calls it “I do it, we do it, you do it.” It’s pretty simple: Initially, he goes through all the processes himself, documenting as he goes. Then, he goes through them together with his team, tweaking where necessary and making things as clear as possible so that everyone can understand the system. Only when the processes are optimized and clear to everyone does he move to the handoff, a.k.a. the “you do it” stage, where team members can follow the process themselves with no trouble.

The other part of assuring quality, for him, is continuously applying and revisiting processes. He and his team make heavy use of checklists in Trello, and if any deviation from the standard procedure needs to happen, they update the list to account for it. When mistakes happen, his first step is always to refer back to the process. If it was followed correctly and a mistake still happened, the process needs fixing. If it wasn’t followed correctly, then it was human error—and the process still needs fixing. Matt really believes in using systems and processes to account for natural human behaviour, rather than leaning on the unreasonable assumption that everyone on his team will be giving it 100%, forty hours a week, every single week.

What’s Next For Podcasts?

Matt says he’s seen podcasting go through a few different phases. First, the agency phase, where lots and lots of podcast production agencies popped up to do customized, end-to-end, hands-off production delivery, or as he calls it, the Done-For-You model. Next came the DIY wave, where podcast producers went the route of selling courses and tutorials to teach clients how they could make their own podcasts from scratch, with their own people and their own equipment—the Do It Yourself model.

So what comes after DIY? Matt thinks it’s a bit of a blend: the Done-With-You model, as he calls it, where companies seeking to leverage podcasts for their businesses will want to train one person on their teams to manage podcasts as part of their overall branding and social media. He thinks the podcast production company’s role will be to bring in training, tools and systems to these businesses so that they can bring their podcasting in-house, with a promise of producer support along the way.

You can check out what Matt does at Pursuing Results, or find him on Twitter @PursingResults.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In a world with more distractions than ever before, people are flocking to productivity apps and organization tools to try to keep themselves on-task from day to day. With messages, articles, ads and notifications competing for our attention every minute, it’s no surprise that we’re jumping at the promise of a high-tech solution to help us manage our priorities.

However is getting your life together really a matter of finding the right app to do it for you? Entrepreneur Adam Jelic doesn’t think so. In an increasingly app-focused market, Adam has found success with his line of artfully-designed goal-setting stationery. Good old-fashioned paper stationery.

Unconventional goals

Originally from Melbourne, Adam Jelic founded goal-centric stationery company MiGoals in 2010 out of his garage - in true entrepreneurial fashion.

It's a bit ironic that becoming a professional planner wasn’t what he originally set out to do. First, Adam took some graphic design classes, had his try at professional soccer, enrolled in and promptly dropped out of university and worked a series of odd jobs.

It wasn't until after he got married, started building a house from scratch, and found out he and his wife were expecting their first child that he landed on his golden idea.

You could say he’s a man who thrives under pressure. Not content with the “safe” life plan his parents had set out for him—school, more school, and lifelong job security—Adam got comfortable with being uncomfortable from an early age, and decided that taking a few creative risks was well worth it.

The Art of Ambition

Growing up, Adam was surrounded by people who shied away from big, bold ambitions. He was raised with a strong awareness of barriers—namely, that you needed to start with money and connections, and if you didn’t have those, you’d be better off playing it safe.

Adam wasn’t buying it. He set out to prove to his family and friends that it was possible for him to do bigger and better things—all he needed was a plan.

“People would say, ‘Stop dreaming! You're a dreamer—get back to reality.’ I was always battling the people around me, to say it was possible to do something.”

This determination was what got him fixated on goal-setting as a process, and he drew further inspiration from sources like Steve Jobs and Jim Stynes to help cement his ambition.

Do You Need More RAM?

So what makes Adam’s MiGoals stationery such a big deal? Mostly, the philosophy behind it. MiGoals planners aren’t just a place to write down your to-do list—it’s a personal coach on paper. Built into each diary is a space for setting your goals, and then taking time to revisit them every single month. By building regular check-ins into the system, Adam has designed the planners to be a far cry from the classic set-it-and-forget-it New Year’s resolutions we’re all too familiar with.

He uses the acronym RAM—reflect, acknowledge, move. A lack of reflection, he says, is a big part of why so many people let their ambitions get away from them. If you aren’t revisiting your goals, checking in on your progress and planning your next moves, it can be easy to get off-track. MiGoals builds the RAM check-in right into its day planner, to help users get into the habit of goal assessment.

“Life takes over, there's too much noise, we get distracted. And I think what it is is that we're overstimulated. Something new pops up all the time. We're looking for a quick fix, and we don't realize that it takes a lot of work and a lot of willpower.”

How To Troubleshoot Your Goals

Adam also gives Troy some advice on getting better at sticking with planning tools. It can be tough for anyone to stay focused and motivated enough to keep up with a daily planner, but Adam stresses that it’s all about building momentum.

He says not to worry too much about not getting everything done on your to-do list—instead, really take the time to prioritize. Figure out what would be nice to get done, sure, but pare it down to which tasks each week are crucial to advancing toward your goals, and go from there. He also says it’s key to block out some dedicated time every week to do your planning, instead of trying to cram it in at random times when you’re busy and distracted.

What’s Next

So, what kind of goals does a professional goal-setter have? MiGoals’ products are currently available in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and the US, and Adam hopes to expand into Asian markets soon as well. Long-term, he’s still uncertain about venturing into more high-tech solutions, but he is interested in expanding into tools for children, health and fitness goals—and on an even grander scale, he shares his ideas for a MiGoals concept store, a one-stop life organisation shop.

Resources

Steve Jobs’ “Connecting the Dots” commencement speech

“Heroes” by Jim Stynes, Jon Carnegie and Paul Currie

MiGoals official website

The Eisenhower Matrix

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You can’t be a successful entrepreneur without learning to love sleazy sales tactics and marketing yourself like crazy, right? Wrong! It really doesn't have to be that way.

This week's guest, Dave Foy is nothing short of an icon in WordPress design circles, and he’s pretty popular with us here at WP Elevation. Despite his humble beginnings as an HTML hobbyist in the late 90s, he’s made a serious name for himself as an instructor with his Design Build Web online courses and YouTube tutorials. Tune in to hear exactly how Dave found his success.

Background

Dave started out as a teacher in his early twenties, mostly teaching primary school kids. He enjoyed the actual teaching part, but he struggled a lot with the bureaucracy in schools, as well as the impermanence. Programs were frequently abandoned and replaced, kids were constantly moving on to new classes, and he hated not being able to see things through until they were finished.

Leap of Faith #1

Dave felt a need to actually make things. He wanted to make real finished products that would exist  (well, real online). Products that he could show to people. And he’d had more bureaucracy than he could take. So in 2003 he took a serious leap of faith—a bit of a recurring theme for him—and plunged into the world of web design. With a coding background left over from his days making websites for his band back in the late nineties—a familiar story for a lot of entrepreneurs—Dave was able to upgrade his skills, and he worked successfully as a web designer for around fifteen years.

Things weren’t perfect though, and he found himself returning periodically to teaching. He missed the work, but he still hated the bureaucracy and did several stints as a volunteer and a supply teacher, but ultimately found the problems that had driven him away were just getting worse over time.

Teamwork

Things weren’t so great on the dev side of things either as time went on. Dave found that it was getting hard to find jobs that he was really interested in, and even harder to find jobs he could actually charge enough for. On top of that, he hated marketing, which seemed to be the only way to solve his problems.

So around 2010 he began working with his friend, Gareth, and the two learnt a lot from each other. Gareth was the kind of guy who would learn about new tools and ideas and jump right into implementing them straight away, while Dave tended to weigh his options for a lot longer first.

Their skills complemented each other—and more than that, Dave learned about how taking risks could lead to serious success. He learnt that marketing wasn’t all sleaziness and tricks when it was done right. This partnership set him on the path to his next big move.

Leap of Faith #2

Things were going really well, but Dave had an idea around 2015 that he couldn’t ignore: how could he combine his love of teaching and his love of web design in a way that made sense? As you can probably guess, he decided to build WordPress courses. However, starting from zero, all on his own was a real risk. A serious, throw-the-cards-in-the-air, burn-the-ships risk.

Luckily, Dave’s partner Vicki trusted him and his vision. And that’s really what it was - Dave didn’t have a formal business plan with specific targets and numbers; he just had a vision of an audience whose needs he could meet. Armed with that, he dove in.

Building Real Relationships

The heart of Dave’s business model was his email list, and he built it up from there. Inspired in part by Pat Flynn’s book, “Will It Fly?”, he focused on really engaging with his specific audience and finding out how to deliver them what they wanted.

Dave had already identified his specific niche: non-coders who were creative and wanted to learn. He knew that thanks to the advent of new tools like Elementor, making websites was more accessible than it’s ever been and he wanted to empower people to get started.

Where Was the Money Coming From?

Starting a new venture is a big risk for any entrepreneur, but it was especially big for Dave. He hadn’t saved much in advance to prepare for the leap; on the contrary, he and his partner had to seriously skimp on their expenses to make ends meet while things were getting going.

The one ace Dave had up his sleeve was an old, loyal client from his solo dev days, the only one he still worked with, who was effectively willing to pay him a retainer of between 500 and 1000 pounds a month. Even with that, though, Dave and Vicki had to cash out a life insurance policy to get by while Dave made his vision a reality.

Inaction…and Then Lots of Action

The good news was that people were really interested in the Elementor course! Dave got to work on developing it, knowing there was an audience waiting. However, the struggles with his own perfectionism dragged it behind schedule. Then he realised that a lot of people in his target audience actually needed help with WordPress itself, which led him to develop a prerequisite course to deliver some WordPress fundamentals.

Dave planned to knock the course out in two weeks, but it managed to expand into an eight-month process. He did very little marketing for it, and was dragging his heels a lot on the release, as perfectionists often do…but then he kicked himself into gear, pulling three all-nighters in a row, and managed to hammer out a Black Friday release.

You’ll want to tune in to hear Troy’s jaw drop at the actual sales numbers Dave made on the course after that—but suffice to say they were pretty worth it.

Validation

Dave saw his vision—and the investment he’d made into his audience relationships—pay off in a major way, and he’d done it without resorting to the sleazy, grabby marketing tactics he was so averse to. He sees this as serious support for the methods he used and the risks he took—and engaging continuously with his user base is a major part of his formula for success.

What’s Next

Dave plans to streamline and automate his course launch processes with an Evergreen system—and he’s working on a new course on sales funnels that’s coming out later in October. He has high hopes for reaching his audience with a skill he knows they need; just as his No-Stress WordPress course was aimed at web development for non-web-developers, the new course will essentially be marketing for non-marketers.

• Identify your skills.
• Find an audience who needs those skills.
• Build relationships with that audience.
• Deliver content that adds genuine value for them.
• Keep listening, engaging and delivering![/wpecallout]

Beyond that, Dave says the real trouble for him these days is keeping his ideas under control, because he has more right now than he knows what to do with. He’s also making his solo operation a little less solo, having finally brought a few more people on board to support him.

Links

Design Build Web, Dave Foy’s online WordPress resource.

Follow him on Twitter @designbuildweb

Will It Fly? By Pat Flynn

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Watch the video of this podcast here.

Profit First: A Lesson Learned
The recording above is a lengthy one, but I’ll try to do it justice by summarizing the essential bits for you here. Be sure to watch it in full as Mike not only digs into his history as an entrepreneur but also tells the story of what motivated him to begin writing books about profit. I suspect many of you will have experienced similar lessons of your own at some point.

Mike’s Story
Money matters a great deal in the grand scheme of success… so why do many business owners handle it so poorly?

Take Mike, for example. Over the course of his career as an entrepreneur, he owned and sold over a dozen businesses. His first two sales netted him a good profit, but he let his arrogance and ignorance dictate his next moves… which ultimately led to his downfall.

“I thought I was god’s gift to entrepreneurship and became a dick.”

As a result, he lost everything after 10 new businesses he hastily launched as an Angel investor all collapsed.

How Insomnia Inspired a New Start
After informing his family that he’d lost everything, he sank into a dark period where depression, drinking and insomnia became a part of his daily routine.

But it was a late-night fitness program on a local public broadcasting station that inspired a major turnaround.

As he listened to the fitness guru talk about how to develop a strategy that works, he realized how similar physical fitness and fiscal fitness are. Unlike what we’re often taught about having to make major shifts in order to see any gains, this fitness guru spouted a whole new mindset and approach entirely:

A monumental shift will only hamper progress. It’s small consecutive steps that ultimately lead to better outcomes.

During our chat, Mike referenced Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, a book written by Chip and Dan Heath. In it, they explain how one experiment proved that lowering the bar can actually help people reach their goals as opposed to keeping the bar unrealistically and unattainably high.

With 83% of businesses failing to achieve profitability, Mike similarly works on helping entrepreneurs to readjust their mindset in order to turn that around.

A Profit First Formula
Mike tells us that the main reason why businesses fail is that entrepreneurs don’t prioritize profitability.

This is the formula many business owners use to assess their fiscal health:

Sales - Expenses = Profit

But this leaves them focused on how much money they’re spending. How much sales outreach to do. How much time to commit to marketing. How many shiny new software subscriptions to buy. Without a laser-trained focus on profit--which some will leave until the end of the year to review--it’s easy to lose sight of the health of one’s business.

This is why the formula needs to be:

Sales - Profit = Expenses

If you’re willing to put your profits first, you’ll also be more willing to commit to actions that make them change for the better.

The 5 Foundational Accounts a Profit First Business Needs
Mike suggests that entrepreneurs break their company’s finances into five foundational accounts:

Income: This is the revenue your business generates. You are never to “eat” directly from this account. Always dole out the correct percentages to the accounts below--and in the order in which they appear. You’ll then draw from them for those express purposes.

Profit: This is the percentage of the money you set aside as a “reward” for taking the risk to launch and successfully manage your business. Never use this to pay for your personal expenses.

Owner’s comp: This is the percentage of the money you pay yourself as a salary. It is what will fund your lifestyle, so calculate this correctly.

Tax: Everyone owes money to the government at some point in the year. Create a dedicated account where you set aside the correct percentage. And keep it safe!

OpEx: You may not have many operating expenses as a WordPress consultant, but they still must factor into the equation. Allocate a percentage of your income that should go to this.

Wrap-Up
Why does any of this matter? If you have enough in your bank account to cover your living expenses and take the occasional vacation, doesn’t that make your business profitable?

Here’s the truth: you might be able to get by with that mentality, but it won’t be enough. As Mike said:

“We feel that we need to be struggling.”

But that’s erroneous thinking on our part. Customers want to work with stable businesses that will be around for the long haul. If you’re not taking care of your fiscal health and sustaining high levels of profitability (and not just eking by), how can you expect to take care of anyone else?

For those of you who aren’t sure you have what it takes to run a profit first business, take a look at Profit First Professionals. Mike and his team of accountants, bookkeepers and coaches guide business owners like yourselves towards healthier profitability.

And even if you decide you don’t need a trainer, I would implore you to pick up a copy of his book. I’ve used it in my own mission to improve WP Elevation (as well as myself) and believe the lessons contained within it are invaluable.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Watch the video of this podcast here.

A Brief Intro to Jamie Hill
Jamie Hill considers himself a dad (to three kids, two dogs, and two cats) first and a business owner second. He and his wife partnered together six years ago to purchase and operate iNovate Marketing, a web design and marketing agency. While it’s seen lots of success in that time, it wasn’t allowing Jamie to focus on his top priority very well.

Before the Blueprint
Like the influencers he follows (Gary Vaynerchuk and Grant Cardone), Jamie was all about the grind before signing up for the Blueprint course. As you can imagine, 16 hours of work a day, 3 hours of sleep every night, and making time for the family in between can only lead to one thing:

Burnout.

When Jamie first encountered WP Elevation, he worried that his business wasn’t the target audience as many of the webinars seemed to be geared towards freelancers and small agencies. His company, on the other hand, was well-established, had 20 or so employees, and was quite profitable at the time. But something had to change.

After consulting with his wife, she wholeheartedly encouraged him to sign up for WP Elevation. Four years later, Jamie is now in a position where he’s able to slow down, step back from running the business, and take time to focus on his family… all while the company continues to be profitable.

100% Completion of the Blueprint
Upon joining the Blueprint course, Jamie realized how complex all of the processes in his company were.

Throughout the six-week program and with the help of the coaches, he was able to quickly implement about half of the material and bring major changes to the way his company was run. He then took time to complete the course and work with his team of designers to implement the changes that would drastically improve their workflows.

As he explains in the podcast, the self-pacing of Blueprint is one of the best parts of the program. It allows you to take what you need from it at the right time. And, once you realise how beneficial the processes, organisational tips, and tools are, you’ll save a ton of time and money while making your life exponentially easier.

A Valuable Lesson Learned
One of the most common WordPress consultant fears is:

“What will happen if I get sick or injured and I can’t work for some time?”

Jamie says that a Mastermind workshop led by Troy helped him through this particular situation a year-and-a-half ago when he became too ill to work. He stepped away from the business for three months and left it in the hands of his team who effectively managed it on their own.

Years ago, however, Jamie never would have been able to do this as he exerted tight control over his company and was too afraid to give his team the freedom to work on their own. As Troy explained, it’s important to let go and allow them to fail. If you can’t trust that they’ll pick themselves back up and fix their errors, how will they ever learn?

The Community
Jamie is one of our members who really thrives in the WP Elevation community. Not only is it a resource he trusts greatly and continues to learn from on a regular basis, but he actively seeks out opportunities to mentor freelancers trying to make big moves with their own businesses.

Jamie’s Favorite Tools
There are a number of tools from the program that have made a big impact on Jamie’s business.

• The bonus content dripped out during the course was immensely helpful (and a welcome addition since he found himself impatiently waiting for the next modules to arrive).
• He’s a big fan of the web auditing system for his marketing work.
• His wife and design team have adopted Beaver Builder as their go-to WordPress tool (having previously relied on Genesis and Divi).

Wrap-Up
As Troy often explains, it’s best to hire people who are smarter than you, rather than waste your time trying to learn something you’re not very good at. As such, Jamie has recently hired someone to manage the day-to-day of iNovate MarketingMarketing for him. It’s saved him money, time, and unnecessary headaches while enabling the company to provide better quality work to clients.

With this free time, he aims to launch a white label process for small agency partners who need help delivering on marketing and SEO services to clients.

We always love seeing what sort of passion projects the Blueprint has enabled our members to get involved in. This one, in particular, is very exciting as it will help many others in the WordPress community do better work and make more money in the process!

P.S. We've created a 10% discount code for the listeners of the WPE podcast. Simply add the code GOELEVATE upon payment of the Blueprint course. The deal is valid until the 21st September 2018.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This special episode of the WP Elevation podcast comes from a conversation I had with Mike, the author of Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine. Originally, this was recorded for WP Elevation members only. However, because this concept of “profit first” is such a valuable one for WordPress professionals to learn, I wanted to open this up to all of our readers.

Watch the video of this podcast here.

A Brief Background for Monique Dubbelman
Monique Dubbelman has played a role in design for a few decades now. Back in the late ‘80s, she trained to be a graphical engineer. That role eventually led to management positions in the print industry, which eventually gave way to the digital world we all know and work in now.

After print died down, Monique made a decision to move away, both literally and figuratively, from her work. She moved to the countryside in the Netherlands about 15 years ago and built her own webshop for organic gardening. And this was just the start.

Life Before the Blueprint
Monique officially began building websites with BOE!media in 2011. While she was happy working as a designer and a builder, she found that her business model was not scalable. She was working on demand and compromising on price for the small business clients she worked for.

So, she began looking for the next phase of her career.

It was at that time when Beaver Builder pointed her in the direction of WP Elevation and the Blueprint program. She was skeptical at first though, saying:

“You get lots of opportunities and big promises [from programs like these], so I was a bit sceptical in the beginning.”

Skeptical of the Blueprint
It’s not uncommon that we encounter people who are skeptical of the Blueprint.

For WordPress professionals and consultants that are in a tough spot - feeling burned out, overloaded, and bleeding money - the investment in WP Elevation might seem like an unwise choice. However, once they start looking at what they get in return, it’s when that skepticism will begin to fade away.

That’s exactly what happened for Monique. After examining the Blueprint further, she asked herself, “Will this help me get the right mindset and actually do the work?”

The answer was, “Yes”.

Making Positive Changes with the Blueprint
As Monique so deftly pointed out, the Blueprint program works because it motivates Elevators to actually use the tools and strategies provided to them. Although Monique only began the Blueprint about six months ago, she’s already been able to make positive changes to her business.

Here are some ways in which the Blueprint has helped her:

• She did away with clients that didn’t fit well with the new way of working.
• Other clients who didn’t understand the value of her services left on their own accord, leaving her free to connect with better clients.
• The free giveaway guide inspired her to bring some of her ebooks out of retirement and put them back into circulation.
• She has used a number of tools and materials provided by the Blueprint, translated them for her audience, and really made them work for her specific business.

While she has gone through the Blueprint and made big strides with what she’s done so far, she continues to return to it to find new ways to improve her workflow and make it work for her clients.

Her Take on the Community
The WP Elevation community has proven to be a welcoming environment for Monique to trust in as she hones her business model.

As she explained in the podcast, everyone in the community is open and stands on equal footing, no matter how long they’ve been at this. And because it’s okay to be vulnerable and talk about the bad as much as the good, it has encouraged her to do more with the Blueprint.

Monique's accountability partner has also been helpful in motivating her to work through it. Hers happens to live near her in the Netherlands and they meet (by video chat now) every two to three weeks. They talk about what they’ve been doing as well as plans for the future, supporting each other along the way.

Favourite Tools
There are two tools Monique gives a special shout-out to.

The first is ManageWP. As she explained, she’s now hired someone to handle the maintenance side of her business. However, she still really enjoys how easy ManageWP has made it to care for multiple client websites at once.

She also is a big fan of Beaver Builder, the company that referred her to WP Elevation in the first place. While she’s spent a lot of time exploring page builders, in general, she appreciates Beaver Builder’s continued embrace of web developers as users. As other builders move further away from web development in the hopes of making more universally user-friendly tools (ahem… Gutenberg), Beaver Builder is one that continues to support the way she prefers to work.

A Personal Approach to the Blueprint
That’s one of the key things Monique has gotten from the Blueprint: the fact that you don’t have to grow your business in the same direction as everyone else. You can use it to improve your workflow, but do it in a way that makes sense for the way that you want to work.

Although she was tempted to get carried away with the Blueprint at first, she quickly realised that she needed to consider what was the most important to her. Then, she could take those elements from the Blueprint and put them to work.

As such, she still works on her own and doesn’t have any major plans for expansion. While she outsources maintenance to someone else (because it’s something she dislikes), she’s reluctant to hand over the design piece as it’s something she’s always had a passion for.

Wrap-Up
In the near future, Monique plans to do more strategic one-on-one work, which means that she may have to outsource that piece eventually.

For now, she’s designing her business the way she wants to with the Blueprint. We hope other Elevators are encouraged by this who may feel intimidated by others whose aspirations appear larger or more impressive in scope than their own. The future looks different for everyone and you can shape it however you see fit with the Blueprint.

P.S. We've created a 10% discount code for the listeners of the WPE podcast. Simply add the code GOELEVATE upon payment of the Blueprint course. The deal is valid until the 21st September 2018.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Watch the video of this podcast here.

A Brief Introduction to Shane Syddall
Shane Syddall unofficially entered the digital marketing space nine years ago when he began designing websites for clients. The number of clients who asked for help outside of web design was increasing, so he pivoted his business three years ago to focus on digital marketing services such as SEO.

He currently owns and operates Sparta Digital which brings digital marketing and web design services to small businesses looking to compete with enterprises.

Before the Blueprint Course
As Shane explains in the podcast, he began his career in coding. That’s what he excelled at and so the business management piece was something he struggled with before the Blueprint. It was so hard for him, in fact, that he had to take money from his family in order to put food on the table.

There were a number of reasons why Shane struggled in the beginning:

1. He didn’t charge enough for his services.
2. He wasn’t putting together good proposals.
3. He was attracting low-paying and low-quality clients and accepting any and everyone.

As he felt himself on the brink of giving up until someone suggested he look into WP Elevation and the Blueprint course. He had seen ads for it, but hadn’t given it any serious consideration previously. He assumed it would be too expensive and only make things worse, but he was desperate. So, he decided to give it a shot and, if it didn’t work, he’d throw in the towel completely.

“How wrong was I?!” he said.

How the Blueprint Has Changed Everything
Although Shane has yet to fully complete the Blueprint course, his business has exploded (in a good way) over a very short period of time.

In just two months with the Blueprint, Shane quadrupled his business and he’s been able to maintain those levels of success for the last three months.

How has he done this so quickly? Well, he attributes it to a number of things.

To start, there’s the website worksheet (which you can download here). This enabled him to weed out the cheap clients he used to attract.

Then, he learned how to create professional proposals (you can download a proposal template here). This gave his business a refined edge and more readily convinced high-quality clients that he was a legit marketer and web designer.

He’s also since learned that it’s okay to say “no” to clients that don’t fit.

All of this success and influx of cash, has now enabled him to delegate much of the work he was doing on his own before to three new hires: a web developer, a marketing student, and a writer. And the WP Elevation course has encouraged him to push himself even harder, so he now works with a business coach.

And Speaking of Coaches…
Since Shane has been too busy running a very busy and successful company since implementing the Blueprint, he hasn’t had time yet to try any of the tools available through the course. That said, he finds that the quality of coaching and community support have been more than valuable in that respect.

In addition to attending webinars led by our highly knowledgeable coaches, he also finds the feedback and support he gets from the community to be a huge help in his business’s growth.

Lessons Learned
When asked what words of wisdom he’d give someone mulling the decision to join WP Elevation, Shane said, “Just do it.”

Wrap-Up
Shane’s advice may seem simple enough, but the story he has shared with us is not. Look at where he was just a few years ago to what he’s been able to accomplish in just a few month’s time. As he quickly discovered, finding the right mentor to help guide you in smarter directions can make a world of difference for your business.

We look forward to staying in touch with Shane and to see where his next implementations of the Blueprint take him.

P.S. We've created a 10% discount code for the listeners of the WPE podcast. Simply add the code GOELEVATE upon payment of the Blueprint course. The deal is valid until the 21st September 2018.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.