WP Elevation WordPress Business Podcast

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Remkus has made a substantial name for himself in the world of website creation and is a force to be reckoned with!

Tune in at the 6.20 minute to listen to Remkus’ story and how he turned a side project of building websites into a very successful business and how he discovered WordPress.

Investing Knowledge
One of Remkus' favourite quotes is by Benjamin Franklin:

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

From day one he has always wanted to invest. He always looks at the bigger picture and when he starts something new, he asks how this relates to stuff he already knows. So he is continually learning. He learns how to extend one idea to the next idea and keep going.

WordCamp
Remkus is well known in the WordCamp space being a co-founder of WordCamp Europe. He says it hasn’t necessarily attracted clients, however, other people in the business who couldn’t take on projects within a particular scope would refer the work on to him.

It is hard to measure the success of being visible at WordCamps. It has had some benefits but it hasn’t been a conscious decision for him.

Remkus doesn’t get nervous speaking to crowds. He has had a lot of experience in public speaking: even before he got into WordPress he had been a trainer and taught 20-50 people at a time.  He also knows what he is talking about, which is the main thing! He says that if you are less secure about yourself, that will be magnified on the stage. The more you do it though, the easier it gets.

Stress Less
By nature, Remkus says that he overanalyses. He doesn’t talk shop after 8 pm and he does this to protect himself. If he does have to do something work related after 8 pm then he will sleep in a little later. When he catches himself worrying, he either meditates or uses self-hypnosis to get to sleep.

Worrying about something that might not happen is a waste of energy.

Remkus owes his success to many things but credits his ability to “turn off” worrying as a substantial advantage. He also sustains an interest in NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming). It breaks down communication into your neuro senses and your linguistic patterns. It’s a great discovery to learn about yourself.

Remkus has a family with three children and enjoys anything automobile related, particularly Mercedes and Porches. He is also an avid strength trainer and he enjoys getting out of his mind and focusing on something physical. He pushes his boundaries every time he does that.

Tune in around the 34-minute mark where Remkus talks to us about API and his predictions for WordPress.

Mind Mapping
Your conscious mind can only do a few things at the one time. The other stuff you do is on automatic pilot. You can bring stuff from your conscious mind to your unconscious mind so that it becomes an automatic thing.

If you keep a lot of stuff in your head and you're mulling it over, without getting it out of your head then you’re going to rely on your mental capabilities all the time. You need to clear your head to focus. So if you are mulling over an idea, then jot it down as a mind map.

The way it's structured makes it more pleasant to see the larger picture. You can draw them on paper or there is a software tool XMind that you can use.

Remkus' Secrets to Success

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A Bit About Joe
Joe Pulizzi is a content marketing evangelist, speaker, author and founder of Content Marketing Institute which is the leading content marketing educational resource for enterprise level brands. He writes one of the most influential content marketing blogs in the world, and also writes for Entrepreneur.com and LinkedIn.

Tune in at the 5-minute mark to find out more about Joe’s background.

Stepping Away from Working with "the Man"
Joe spent time cutting his teeth in the marketing industry at Penton Media, the largest independent business publisher in North America. While there, he ran the content marketing group and spent a lot of time working with customers who didn’t want to go the traditional advertising route for their businesses and so he decided to go out on his own.

Joe put together a 40-page strategic business plan by researching and approaching mentors who were business owners.  However, once he started his company, he never looked at it again!

What he learned from this:

• Write down your goals and review them almost every day
• What are your business goals, family goals and spiritual goals?
• Check that you are on target
• Ask yourself "is what I am going to do today going to help accomplish these goals on time?"

The act of writing it down and making it real is important. As far as a business plan goes, perhaps that isn’t as important!

Own Your Category and Be the Leading Expert
Dan Kennedy once said, “If you want to own a category, the best thing you can do is to invent that category”, and that is exactly what Joe did.

The term "Content Marketing" used to be called "Custom Publishing" or "Custom Media" when Joe started out in 2000, but nobody was interested or liked those titles. He knew he had to use another term especially to sell the idea to marketers who needed to know that the term was actually relevant to them.

Joe isn’t sure if he coined the term “Content Marketing” but he definitely was the one who got the term out there.

His advice is that if there is some ambiguity around the thing that you’re doing, it's completely ok to say “this is what we are calling it now”. Hubspot did the same thing with the term “inbound marketing”.

Differentiate
Another important piece of advice he has is to make sure you are differentiating yourself by telling a different story than everyone else.

If you are in an industry with a lot of other competitors (hello WordPress consultants!), how are you different from the next guy? What’s your story? A lot of people find their story by niching down to a smaller audience. It’s counterintuitive, but you’ll build authority much faster that way.

The goal is to build an audience, they will then trust you which will increase sales but it won’t happen immediately, it takes time.

The Business Model and Sponsorship
50% of the Content Marketing Institute's focus is actually the event that they run "Content Marketing World" which they hold all over the world. The webinars, consulting and training are the things that lead to the events.

With their events, 70% of their revenue comes from registration and 30% from sponsorship. In order for events to work you need the ecosystem of the leaners and the tech providers to be there. You are helping the sponsors too, as you have built the audience and you have the ability to put that company in front of that audience.

Creating Valuable Content

• Every bit of content you put out needs to be valuable. If you’re selling something in the blog, it isn’t going to be successful.
• You need to own your own audience by having an email list. If you build your audience on social media, you don’t own that, and it can be taken away from you at any stage if they make changes. Email subscription is at the top of the hierarchy here.

Wise Words on Finding Your Niche

• Find the sweet spot between some skill area that you have and your passion point.
• Content Tilt. You have to move that area in such a way that it positions you to be telling a different story. This way you won’t get lost within the millions of others who are blogging about it.
• Go smaller. Market to the little audience and then you can still take on other work if it comes your way.
• Build the base audience and then monetise the base.
• Position yourself as the leading expert in some informational niche and build an audience.
• Be the leading expert in something.
• Go small. Market to a small audience, build your base, then you can charge whatever you want. It takes about 18 months if you do it right.
• Set proper expectations with a client and put those into the agreement.
• Get referrals by giving your customers something to talk about.
• To differentiate yourself, tell a different story than anyone else, especially if you have a lot of competitors.

There is so much more to this episode with Joe so don’t miss it! Be sure to tune in to hear all the incredible insights and wisdom Joe shares.

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A Bit About Garth
Garth Koyle has over a decade of experience in business management and internet marketing.

Tune in at the 6-minute mark to find out a bit more about his background and what led him to Event Espresso. 

Garth joined Seth Shoultes to become the co-founder of Event Espresso in 2012 and has helped the company to grow significantly since they launched. He also co-developed a Saas version of the Event Espresso plugin called Event Smart, which he intends on growing to a $100 million dollar revenue company.

Finding Balance
We all know the stresses of being an entrepreneur and finding that balance can be so hard especially when you have little ones like Garth does! So he has found that having a healthy and distracting hobby is really important. He lets his hobbies take him away for a few hours a week to recharge his battery and give his mind a break from work stresses. Garth loves bike riding around the mountains where he lives. Riding a bike means that you can't text or use your phone, it increases endorphins and helps energy levels.

Customer Focus
One of Garth's favourite quotes is:  "Management works within a system, leadership works on a system.” So he says that he is constantly evaluating the system and making changes. The company's core value is to give customers value and control through the systems that they provide.

He manages at a higher level rather than focusing on putting out fires. He says he’s learned to think about what the customer really wants. Customers generally don't care about what the technology is, so you need to focus on the solution that will better their lives and their business rather than advertise the features of the product to the client.

Building a Team
Garth says his strategy for building his team is to have an awareness of the pain being experienced in the company. “You’ll figure out what you need when it becomes painful enough” he explains. If you have support backlog or UI complaints it can become damaging to the company you, therefore, need to:

1. Listen to the pains from the customers and your employees
2. Ask yourself, can we afford to alleviate that pain?
3. Will it increase customer satisfaction?

They rarely use job postings to find staff. The staff that they hire has either approached them or they’ve found them by doing business together. Some of their staff were initially customers!

The company employs workers from the Ukraine to the West Coast of the United States.

Development of the Plugin
His company decides future development based on three factors:

1. Feedback from customers
2. Strategic Goals
3. Speed of Development

To determine the validity of a new feature, Garth says his team will:

• List the features
• Give them scores from 1-5
• Rank the importance
• Rank the ease of development
• Rank the speed of development

The team will then choose the top candidates for development and then they just table the other ones.

Measuring Success
Garth explains that it is difficult to determine the success of features in a distributed product because if you put a plugin in the WordPress repository, you’re not allowed to communicate with the users and it is, therefore, more difficult to collect data.

To combat the problem, Event Espresso uses limited surveys, watches sales, support loads, and attributes those support calls for certain features. They also build queries into the plugin to attempt to build data that will determine the usefulness of particular features in the plugin.

Marketing Freemium vs Premium Product
Event Espresso offers a free version, called Decaf which plays very little in the marketing mix for the company.  They focus most of their marketing on the fully-featured product. Garth explains that he’s gained more customers from other channels than through the free plugin and that people who are serious about marketing their events will end up using the fully featured product.

Competing on Price
Everybody has to compete on price eventually. However, in order to compete less often, you have to understand your value proposition:

• What you deliver to the customer and how you deliver it
• Understand what your product does and where it fits in the market
• Leverage those differentiating factors and communicate them well

Then the customers will understand how they need you more than they need your competitors and price will be less of an influence.

Garth's Secrets to Success

• Build a good team. Do as much for yourself as possible then when you can’t do it yourself, take the time to find the right people to help you.
• Content Marketing is a must. Garth says that in the early days the company was growing at 15% per month because of the content they offered through their website and then nurturing those customers over time.
• Get to know your customers. The more you talk to your customers, the more you understand what’s important to them. Talk to your customers and you will get better at it with practice
• Stay on track. To keep a project on track, make sure you plan ahead. Planning is expensive, but it can also help you be more profitable and meet expectations down the road. Then you need to follow the project outline as closely as possible. The due diligence up front is really invaluable.
• Get referred! Make customers happy and ensure that they’re having a good experience. You can then ask them for referrals. They use tools to gauge customer satisfaction and if it is good, they will send the customer a message asking them for referrals. They use Help Scout, surveys and simply by watching support conversations.
• Differentiate your company. Differentiating yourself is an ongoing task. Garth says that they want to be the lead provider for ticketing and registration, and that can only come as they focus on a complete product for their niche. They focus on what they do and not necessarily what their customers think they should do. 

Well, there you have it. Some hot tips from a guy who knows how to do plugins like a boss! Let us know what you think in the comments below. What tips do you have when it comes to growing your business or developing a plugin? We'd love to hear from you.

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A Bit About Jason
Jason and his partner Dylan Kuhn co-founded a creative agency called Vernal based in Vermont. At the time of this podcast in 2015, they had just transitioned from agency to product with the release of the plugin Postmatic.

Tune in around the 5 Minute mark to find out how Jason got started with WordPress as an early adopter and grew his business. 

Working With Not-For-Profit Organisations
Jason's agency, Vernal, makes content managed open source websites for medium to large not for profit organisations. There’s a myth that there’s no money in the not-for-profit sector, but it isn’t true - they are like any business, but they are funded just happen to have a different tax status.

Jason chose this as his niche because he wanted to find work that he believed in and was passionate about. He also found not-for-profits easier to work with because the people are generally kind, understanding, patient and sometimes used to not working in a 'not so efficient' environment.

Find a Niche
How do you battle the fear of missing out when you pass on projects that aren't in your niche? Jason says that they were pretty lucky and didn't often get dry spells without work. He adds that if you pass on something, it usually works out in the end anyway.

Jason says one of the key factors in this was that they always made sure their customers were really happy. This then leads to a lot of referral work. It also helps to work in a niche such as not-for-profit because people tend to bounce around to different jobs within the not-for-profit arena.  So once you have those solid relationships, that person will recommend you to the next organisation.

Transitioning from Client Services to the Product Space
Postmatic is a plugin that enables 100% email base commenting, post notifications, and you can reply to a comment by email and it replies back to the web. It also sends emails for posts, digests, newsletters, and comments without changing your workflow.

The transition happened at a time where they were taking on large projects that would last around 12-months and it felt like shaky ground. However, they didn’t want to go back to a lot of small projects either so they decided to give Postmatic a try so they could have a regular cash flow and not have to secure job after job.

Tune in at the 28-minute mark to find out why they chose to develop Postmatic and how it works. 

The Importance of Building Relationships
When it comes to getting new client work, Jason says that they didn't do big proposals. Instead, they do phone calls and estimates. He would try to find some kind of personal connection to the potential client, which is easy when you work in a niche because people usually know each other - find out who they might know, get on the phone and sell the job that way. He has even been able to win big jobs with just a phone call!

When Jason makes a phone call, most of the call is about how they’re doing, how is the family etc. Then 40% of the call will be about business. Be sincere and just talk to people like they’re humans.

Bring an element of your offline life into your business and persona. Don’t try to be too professional. Be yourself.

And to wrap up this informative podcast, here some of the key takeaways...

• Spend time offline and in nature to find your balance
• Know who your customers are, what makes them tick and what they’re thinking
• To find customers, have a good niche and do quality work in that niche and the clients will come
• Don't worry about competing on price. Ignore the competition, do your best work and charge a fair price that takes care of you and your employees
• When Jason was doing agency work they used Pipeline Deals as their CRM and really liked it
• Reach out to old customers when you need more work and let them know you are happy to do some work at a 20% discount[/wpecallout]

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The Guys Behind Beaver Builder
Justin and Billy co-founded FastLine Media together which is a web development company. Robby came on board by applying for a job with them on Craigslist when, at the time, he was working in customer service.

All three have strengths in development, and typically serve clients from start to finish. Each partner has their specialisations- Billy serves as operations manager, Justin will work on development and Robby focuses on design.

The Beaver Builder Story
Robby explains that a lot of their clients wanted websites that would be easy to edit by themselves which really was their inspiration to create a page builder tool. They explained that on the agency side of their work, a lot of time is wasted emailing back and forth with clients about small changes and edits.

Justin started developing their own tool to solve these problems they were having. He says that it started off as a backend page builder, then they decided they wanted it on the front end. So it was basically one of those ‘scratch your own itch’ cases.

The three then decided they would try to sell the product, so they launched it as the FastLine Media Page Builder.

Launching the Product
It was brave putting the product on the market because there was a stigma amongst developers that was attached to Page builders. But they decided that they were confident that they were solving a lot of problems that other page builders hadn’t.

Once the results were being seen, they were able to overcome this stigma.

Differentiating
Some of the distinctions that lead to their success were:

It didn’t dump a lot of shortcodes into the content editor, so if you switch themes, your content is preserved. This was different to the other page builders available at the time that were using shortcodes which forces the user to basically re-write the content from scratch.

The User Interface was simple.
They also excluded features such as columns in columns to create a better user interface experience.

They chose a name that POPS! Upon advice from one of their clients, who was also a marketing genius, and mentioned that their original name - FastLine Media Page Builder, wasn’t very memorable. The team spent weeks trying to find a good name and someone suggested "Beaver Builder" as a joke. But they said that it got stuck in their heads so they gave it a go! It’s one you don’t easily forget!

Marketing
The guys talk about how they were all pretty clueless when it came to marketing at the beginning, but some of their key marketing strategies were:

Leveraging Influencers
The team reached out to the WordPress community and provided evaluation copies for writers to review.

One of the influencers that they reached out to was Chris Lema and they got lucky because Chris wrote an article about the best page builders out there and Beaver Builder was one of his clear favourites. They then contacted him to receive a testimonial.

Other testimonials on the site were obtained organically through twitter, email and support forums. They kept it simple and just added these testimonials to a Google doc to keep track of them.

Metrics
One of the things the guys from BeaverBuilder want to improve on is their ability to keep up with analytics and metric tracking. Currently, the team has only been tracking traffic numbers and orders.

Robby says he’s learning from KISSMetrics about how to follow the metrics to see how they’re converting traffic to purchase. Growing in their ability to track conversions, the team is using Google Analytics to track sources of traffic to conversions.

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A Bit About Sherry
Sherry has a PhD in Clinical Psychology and specialises in helping entrepreneurs and executives who are trying make their way in the world of business. It’s a tough path to travel and there are many rewards but it is important that we tell the truth about how hard it is to carve out our own livelihood.

She started out as a professor and did a lot of research into traumatic stress and became curious about how we can prevent long-term mental health problems when people are under stress. She started asking these questions about various populations such as military officers and physicians before she started asking them about founders.

Sherry is married to Rob Walling who is a well-known entrepreneur and author.  Sherry tells Troy that one day in 2012, she found Rob crying in his office as he had just learned that Aaron Schwartz (founder of Reddit) had taken his own life. This had affected him because he could relate to the tough journey of an entrepreneur. The two of them then started asking the question of how they can help founders and entrepreneurs.

When they launched Zen Founder they started with conference presentations then added a podcast which built a strong following. All of these pieces just built on each other until, in the last 18 months, Zen Founder and Zen Tribe have been able to become her full-time vocation.

What Is Zen Founder and How Does It Help Entrepreneurs?
Zen Founder helps entrepreneurs with mental health. Sherry explains that she spends 45% of her time talking about how important it is for us to firstly just notice our mental health. So a big part of her role is education and making mental health a normative conversation.

Sherry encourages people to pay attention to themselves and provides a safe space to allow people to talk. Sherry also helps founders remove the mental blocks which may be holding them back. Loneliness is a big block and is very common for freelancers, but even people with teams still feel lonely sometimes. There are other blocks such as fear of failure or even success. Often people self-sabotage and get scared when they're on the brink of success.

What Can You Do If  You Feel Isolated or Stressed?
Sherry says that one of the most powerful practices that you can do is journaling. It may sound fluffy but there is actually a science behind it.

Her advice is to put your thoughts on paper and look at it objectively. Get it out of your inner world and look at it in a neutral way. Track your metrics: How are you sleeping? What’s your mood like? What are the highs and lows of your day? You can learn a lot about yourself by being the observer. Keep a dream journal or a thought record. This is all a part of collecting data, measuring and understanding yourself.

Our thoughts are important, but they are only one part of us. They feel so loud when they live in the echo chamber of our mind but they sound and feel different when they are outside of us. Troy mentions the book "The Artist's Way" where the author recommends getting into the habit of just writing whatever is on your mind every morning. A great book! Check out the link at the end of the show notes.

Sherry has a morning routine where she gets up at 5.30 am and goes to the gym or for a  run. She likes the quiet and needs that space for her brain to wake up and be internal. She then feels like she has accomplished something and it is still only 7 am!

The Zen Founder Team
Zen Founder is a blanket name for the things that they do. They have the podcast series as well as her consulting work where Sherry helps entrepreneurs who are in transitions, crises and need an objective helper. She also plans retreats for organisations so that they can run a meaningful retreat.

Zen Tribes is like mental health boot camp where she partners with other founders to help small groups of entrepreneurs. They meet for 8 weeks and talk about taking care of your body and have conversations which are targeted towards the unique challenges that founders face.

The Book
Sherry and Rob released their book "The Entrepreneurs Guide to Keeping Your S**t Together" on February 21st, 2018. This awesome title was actually their 11-year old's idea. It’s a book based on the best of what they have learned from their podcasts over the last few years. It's action-packed with some shared personal stories and practical and implementable strategies that people can use.

Sherry wrote most of the book and Rob did most of the editing and revisions. She wishes that she could say it was an easy process but it took about a year and ended up being a difficult year for her personally. It required a lot of her but she was glad of the routine of writing as it provided structure and accomplishment amidst a lot of things that she couldn’t control.

How Sherry Looks After Her Mental Health
Sherry has her own therapist and she also has great friends. She also says that her yoga teacher is her mental health guru and it has been a really important practice for her to integrate body, mind and soul and be able to breathe and let go. Because this practice has helped her so much she also combines yoga and therapy to help people work through stress and anxiety.

We love these simple and important tips from Sherry. Is there anything that has helped you to get through stressful times? Let us know in the comments below. It's important to make sure we all don't feel alone on this journey so please reach out. We'd love to hear your thoughts on this podcast too!

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A Bit of Background
Most notably John Jantsch is the founder of Duct Tape Marketing. It’s the name of a podcast, a blog and a book but essentially it is a marketing system.

John started his own marketing consultancy about 20 years ago and loved working with small business owners. However, the difficulty was that small businesses usually have no budget and a short attention span. So he decided to create a system to overcome this problem.

It's actually really hard to buy marketing services these days. Everyone is selling a piece of the puzzle, including Google. The fact that this was a full strategy at a fixed cost was pretty remarkable.

Before John wrote the book, he was a practising consultant. He was selling the Duct Tape Marketing methodology as an online course and it was doing so well that he had people approach him to ask when he was going to write the book. It had been on his mind to do this but it took someone to say, "here is the money and a deadline" to give him that extra push.

Writing the book amplified the business and took it to a larger stage. It didn’t change what John was doing day to day, as he was already doing a lot of speaking, but the book opened it up to an international audience and for him to speak at larger conferences. He was also able to quadruple his prices.

John then had marketing consultants approach him and ask if they could learn the Duct Tape Marketing system so that they could then help small businesses. So John formed a network of independent marketing consultants that licence the Duct Tape Marketing methodology. They collaborate to help each other grow their businesses.

Explaining the Importance of Marketing to a Small Business
The idea of Duct Tape Marketing is that marketing is a system. That appeals to a lot of small business owners because usually, they feel they have no control over marketing. How he sells the idea is to first offer all services and give them what they want so that then you can have the conversation about what they actually need and educate them on how a system will help the business. Then this is just the gateway to show them how marketing is a system.

Marketing is hard to sell because a lot of the time people don’t even know what it is or how to measure it. So he tries his hardest to sell it as a product at a set price.  This made the sales cycle so much shorter because he didn’t have to do "the proposal dance." It instantly repels the wrong people and attracts the right people.

Managing Quality Control
John stays involved in the strategy and he often says that his role is "spotting the landmines." He has built a repeatable process so that he can train his marketing assistants to give them the tools and processes to effectively do a great deal of the client work that needs to be done. They are then assigned to the clients as account managers and John oversees them and adds insight to what is being done.

Another model of Duct Tape Marketing is that they will train someone within a company to become the expert. So Duct Tape Marketing do the strategic work but this person will be doing the day to day marketing such as the social posts. This model works for businesses that have a marketing person but perhaps they aren’t being directed properly if the owner of the business doesn’t have the expertise.

Operations
At one point John got out of doing client work and was doing a lot of speaking, writing and travelling. Now he is doing more creation around processes and tools.

John has five full-time staff members who are doing the work with the network, clients and their own marketing. They have created systems and thoroughly documented all of the processes so that if someone goes on maternity leave or holiday then anyone can jump into the role very easily.

They have tried a few different tools for documenting but they keep coming back to Google drive and docs. Their project management tools are Asana which they use internally and Base Camp which they use with their clients. They do this because they had trouble getting clients to use Asana as it as it is a little more complex than Base Camp.

The Consulting Network
He created the system in 2001, and gave it a name because he wanted it to be a brand, not a "John Jantz fan club". Although some people still identify Duct Tape Marketing with him, he has an onboarding team and account managers who will look after the clients. They soon realise that John is spread so thinly that it is best to work with the team and just have John's brain involved.

Advice on Licencing Out
Firstly, you need to ask - where am I going to go with this? To transfer all of your years of expertise and knowledge to someone who doesn’t have any experience is a lot more work than you think.

When he first started licencing out there was no quality control. But over the last couple of years, they have it so thoroughly documented that it is easier for someone to follow the system than wing it on their own.

Passion for Small Businesses
John loves helping people that love what they do and are great at it, but the marketing side is sucking the life out of them. He says that if he can give people their life back then that’s the thing that keeps him going.

At the end of the podcast, Troy asks how the name "Duct Tape Marketing" came about. There’s a funny reason why. Tune in around the 28 minute of the podcast to find out!

And that's a wrap! Have you read the book? Was it a game changer for you? We would love to hear your thoughts on this podcast and the Duct Tape Marketing methodology in the comments below.

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Watch the video podcast here.

A Bit About Christina
Christina started off working in the Defence Department as a management analyst, so her job entailed a lot of technology. She then got married to a marine, so that trajectory changed for her as they needed to move around for his work.

Christina got a job in tech support at a bank and whilst she was working there she got to know some of the programmers who told her about Homestead. This caught her interest and so, in 1997 she built her first website.

She then decided to make websites and although she didn’t have any experience, not many people did at the time. She loved it and knew she could do it from anywhere and so she founded GlobalSpex in 1999. She now has four virtual contractors based in Argentina, India and the two in the US.

The GlobalSpex Niche
Christina's customers are typically in engineering, energy and healthcare. Her "thing" is problem-solving, so she attracts those types of customers who have that analytical brain and appreciates analysis and research. She would never call herself a web-designer - she is a problem solver and a consultant.

Christina wrote a great blog post for WP Elevation because she got so fed up with people telling her that her services are too expensive when they could create something cheaper and more easily with Squarespace or Wix. The blog explains that it's not about the website, it is about the right colours, the right codes, the right things to say in the right place. Check out the link to this post in the link section below - it's a great one.

So how does Christina have that 'client fee' conversation with potential clients? She doesn’t tell them why her services are more expensive, she takes them down the path by asking them questions. Such as, “What kind of shipping are you going to have?” “How are you going to measure that?” “What’s your merchant?” Most of these questions are things that they have never thought about and have no idea. They realise that this isn't their thing, there is a lot involved and usually, they won’t want to deal with it.

What Are the Challenges of Having Your Own Business?
For a long time, Christina didn’t value her own skills and wasn’t compensated for it. When she became a WP Elevation member, it helped her to stand up for herself and to stop undervaluing her services. She changed the prices of her care plans which increased her recurring revenue.

When you’re starting out it’s hard to charge more but each person has to find what makes them special. It will take a little while to figure out what you’re really good at, but once you do you can then get compensated for that.

When the customer comes back and gives you good feedback it helps your confidence. You're always going to have doubts and everyone has imposter syndrome no matter how skilled they are, but you need to keep learning the tools, researching, and tweaking along the way.

As you grow and expand you can start outsourcing the things that you don't like doing. You're going to have trial and errors to find the right person and it is never going to be perfect. Christina says that she has been through many contractors and has refined the trial process more and more each time and you work out the type of people that you work best with too.

Her advice is, to be honest with the contractor and tell them how you work, what your processes are and ask if they can work this way. Try not to feel bad if it isn't working out and remember that it is business, gently tell them it isn’t working and move on.

The Worries
Christina is a mum with a husband who works long hours, so she is juggling a lot and sometimes things get missed. However, she has gotten better because she has built so many systems and processes to minimise those panic moments. She has templates and checklists to help with the overwhelm.

Christina uses TeamWork which she says has been invaluable to help keep a track of what everyone in the team is doing. She also uses Process Street, email templates in Google drive, and is currently building an intranet so that all of the tools are in the one place. They track the milestones of a project so that they can get back to the client and tell them that they won't make the deadline if they don’t get the content to them by a particular date.

Scope Creep and Communicating with Customers
GlobalSpex has an onboarding process for customers with emails that go out, an initial meeting and then weekly phone calls.

Christina documents everything so if they come to her with a change that is beyond the scope, she puts that in an email. It needs to be in writing because they forget or they don’t realise that they're breaking the scope.

Balance
Christina has a 16 and a 10-year-old and a husband that works a lot, so how does she balance it all? She says that she doesn’t balance it! There are days when she needs to be with the kids and days when she needs to work. They are quite independent and wash their clothes and do the dishes which helps. They take vacations together and she can go with them anytime and work anywhere. She doesn’t believe in balance, there is no such thing!

What Next for GlobalSpex?
There is so much change going on in the area of digital marketing so Christina is trying to pull away from custom design websites. She is trying to look at the bigger picture of generating revenue for the customer. She doesn't want to separate PPC, email marketing and SEO; they are part of the whole package to get more customers.

Christina says that you need to find the right contractors and the right customers who also understand that. They come in with their own viewpoint of what they need, so you need to educate them.

Advice for the Newbies
At a local meetup recently a young guy who had just got into WordPress attended. His first question was “How do I make money?”

Christina's advice was this:

Always have a contract.
Set your boundaries and let the customer know from the very beginning about the process and how they should best be communicating with you.
Figure out what piece of it you really love and focus on that. Hone in on it, become really good at it and get known for it. “Find the thing” that will be your point of difference. Once you have the knowledge in this area your confidence comes across to the client.

Christina's Favourite Tools
Christina's tools that she can't live without are:

Beaver Builder
Premium Yoast - she is taking some of their courses at the moment to dive into it deeply.
Zapier

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Watch the video podcast here.

Jurgen's Story
Jurgen's journey is quite an interesting one. He started off with 27 years of experience in corporate marketing and enjoyed both the challenges and being able to work his way up. However, in the last few years, things changed - he is driven by serving his clients and the company that he was working for wasn’t putting an emphasis on relationships and he didn't want to be a part of something that wasn't in line with his values.

Jurgen went off on his own and started a business which he initially thought would be a marketing and business consultancy (because that was his background). However, he soon came to realise that his marketing was based on corporate experience which didn’t work well with small business. The Global Financial Crises also got in the way at the time and people were cutting back on marketing expenses. Jurgen realised that in those meetings people would often tell him that they needed websites. Aha! Lightbulb moment!

Jurgen decided to figure out how to make websites and discovered WordPress. He built a website for a client who was impressed that they were able to get leads pretty quickly. It was then that he decided to change his company focus to building websites as a marketing tool.

Building Self Taught Websites
Jurgen taught himself how to use WordPress with some courses along the way. He isn’t great at coding so he has people to help him. He decided that it wasn’t a good use of his time to learn something that he wasn’t interested in. He was better off focussing on his strengths.

What is Jurgen's Niche?
He has niched his business down in the last 12-18 months to focus more on targeting business coaches. He had a range of different clients but his marketing is focussed towards business coaches now as they are the people who respond well to his message. There is no point in trying to get your message across to the wrong audience!

The Process
The key thing for Jurgen was setting up good systems. He developed a transformational marketing map with the stages that he uses in his own business and the businesses that he works with:

First, the potential client has to find out about you and build trust
Then get them interested in what you have to offer by understanding their problem and matching their needs.

You then go through the relationship building stage - generating, nurturing and converting leads.

By the time you get to the sales part it should be easy (or you haven’t done enough work!)

The sale isn’t over yet though, you need to deliver an exceptional product. Jurgen helps his client's develop systems for onboarding and building referrals and then makes sure it can be scaled.

The revelation for him was to get clear with his target audience - getting really clear about who they are to the point where you can give them a name, an image and a story that you can attach a whole lot of information to (a tip he learned from the WP Elevation Blueprint!).

Ask yourself - what are their needs, behaviours, hobbies, beliefs, values, frustrations and aspirations. That way you can communicate with them. Find out where they hang out. Such as LinkedIn, Facebook, or in real life are they in a Chamber of Commerce. You can even attend those meetings, or find where their meetups are.

Building Trust
You can build trust quite quickly by giving away free information or services and creating clear processes such as Jurgen's transformational marketing map (download the detailed map on his website).

Jurgen also blogs and has a podcast series which helps position himself as an expert. The content is on social media, with a lot of it automated to get his blogs and articles posted and shared easily. However, he also spends time engaging with people and sharing other people's content.

Innovabiz also has a weekly newsletter. Typically they include a variety of relevant articles in there, two of which will be their own, the rest are written by other people. This shows the client that they care about their success, even if it is to share another person's knowledge with them.

Podcasting
Jurgen's advice is that if you are thinking of doing a podcast- just do it! If you want help, there is a lot of support within the WP Community.

Jurgen had some personal coaching with Troy and one of the things Troy suggested was to start a podcast. He isn’t afraid to get on camera and talk to people so he found the idea of simply having a conversation with someone not daunting at all.

When Jurgen was in corporate, he had made many international contacts which weren't helpful for him when he was trying to get local business. However, he realised with a podcast he could leverage these relationships and speak to some really successful people doing innovative things. Hence the theme - innovation.

What If You Are an Introvert?
Jurgen's advice - forget about yourself and think about the audience. You have a gift and something to contribute to the audience. So get over yourself, get out there and make it about the audience and how you can help them.

Has the Podcast Helped Jurgen's Business?
It is hard to quantify but the reason they did it was for positioning. They an opportunity to land a large corporate client due to the fact that the CEO of that business was a guest on the podcast. So the podcast was the critical factor in that.

A number of small business clients also told him that they had a number of options, but the fact that they had listened to his podcast swayed them his way!

What Has Been the Biggest Challenge in Running His Business?
Jurgen says that cash flow has made it stressful at times. You get to a point where you spend a lot of money, put out a lot of proposals and you're counting on getting a lot of money coming in, but client's delay. However, when it rains, it pours and sometimes you can take on too many clients!

A few years ago he changed his business model from building websites as a single service, to monthly retainer payments from most of his clients which definitely helps with the cash flow situation and building long-term relationships.

Jurgen tells the client up front that if they want a website build with him that they need to go onto a care plan. That usually works pretty well. With the bigger projects, he tends to do it over a 12 month period so it gives them the chance to scale it and show them how it is working. The idea then of course, is that they continue on.

Mindset
How does Jurgen stay positive? He says that you have good and bad days but he tries to remind himself that at any given time in this world there is someone out there that is desperate for the magic that only you can provide and you can transform their lives. So you need to find a way to get out there and find those people, get in front of them and build your business in a way that feels good for you and makes you profit and growth.

Understand that there might be people that you think are doing things better than you, but that there are clients who will be a better fit for you and what you do. So there is no need to compare!

Balance
Jurgen takes time to get out on his bike for an hour or so first thing in the morning. When he is on his own a lot of good ideas come to him. If he skips a day then he doesn't feel right.

He says to do whatever you're passionate about to get away from work and switch off a bit.

He had an interesting conversation with guest Dr Fiona Kerr on his podcast recently who is a neuroscientist and talked about how when we switch off the mind we actually become more creative and it helps you develop new ideas. Find the link to this in the links section below.

Day to day Tools: 

• Ryver, which is a Slack alternative, where they do all their communication
• Zoom link for live chats
• Zapier for integration
• Paperform which is similar to Gravity Forms

Where to From Here?
Listen in at the end to find out where his business is going and his exciting upcoming plans. Including a joint venture which will include training programs and his annual business planning retreat with the next one being in Vanuatu. So Stay tuned for that one!

And that's a wrap! Jurgen is a wealth of knowledge, so please feel free to ask him any questions in the comments section below and he will get back to you.

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Watch the video podcast here.

About Matt
Matt started out in IT after he left the military but eventually got tired of the corporate world and decided to go out on his own six years ago and start an IT company working as an IT consultant.

He had been building websites for years as a hobby and as he was consulting his clients, they either had bad websites or none at all. So being their IT guy they started talking to him about it. Not thinking it would be a full-time thing, he made a few websites and realised he was pretty good at it and that he enjoyed doing it. So 2.5 years ago, he transitioned to web development and hasn’t looked back since.

Matt's Companies
Matt has three companies at the moment- His first being the web design company Aledor (his surname backwards!) where he builds and redesigns websites for service professionals such as accountants and lawyers.

His second company is Tech Site Builder which is a turnkey website platform specifically designed for computer repair workshops. He acquired this company when he was running his own IT consultancy. Through his podcast series, he made a lot of contacts in the computer repair industry. A fellow podcaster had created Tech Site Builder as a WordPress theme and was selling it packaged with tutorials. However, he wanted to get out of the industry and so he sold the theme to Matt.

Matt then transitioned it from a theme to a turnkey website. Similar to Squarespace, you sign up for a low monthly fee and you get a starter website template with all the tools and plugins that they need. He has been doing this now for two years and it has created a recurring revenue for him with little input as most of it, including the onboarding process, is all automated.

His final project is TurnKey Websites BluePrint which teaches other website consultants how to build their own turnkey website. This will be launched in a couple of months.

How Does He Stay Focussed on Multiple Projects?
Research shows that multitasking isn’t efficient and you get the best work done when you focus on one thing at a time. So with his separate projects, he likes to focus on it, get it launched and then come up with a process to keep it going with minimal involvement from himself. He has a VA who looks after a lot of things as well.

Matt says that he didn’t go out searching for these new projects - they fell into his lap. When you're doing what you love, then this is what happens!

Staff
He has a part-time VA who works four hours a day as well as a part-time developer. The developer is based in Eastern Europe and the VA is in the States. Matt found her accidentally on Upwork when he hired her to do some photo edits. She had such a great manner that he asked her to be his VA because it is hard to find a good person online.

Matt has been through many freelancers and VAs and learned from his mistakes so you need to hold onto a good person when you find them!

What is Matt's Sweet Spot?
It has evolved over the years and he has seen the common thread throughout everything he has done - he is really good at communicating, breaking things down and being able to explain complex tech stuff.

He has so many aspects of his job that he enjoys doing, but he knows this is his strength and so he builds on it. He outsources the tech side of things and is slowly trying to let others take the reins a little bit. He finds it hard to let go of that control but once you find the right people that are even better than you at what they do, then that makes it much easier.

What Has Been the Biggest Challenge?
His biggest challenge when growing his business has been budgeting and understating how to put the money where it's most useful. Matt has gone through phases of Shiny Object Syndrome and blowing all his money on new tools for the business. So what helped him get over this was the book “Profit First” which teaches you how to budget your business finances.

Pricing
The key for Matt was finding his niche. The more you narrow down your services, the clearer the pricing becomes as well as the marketing and the message. Once he was able to find his focus, then people were coming to him and he was able to increase his prices to filter out the people who price shop to find the people who are really serious about working with him to get a great result.

Through his sweet spot, Matt was able to find his niche. But what about people starting just up and who need to be everything to everyone? How should they find their niche?

It's something that comes with time and can't be forced. The key is to know that you will eventually need a niche, but that you will need to be everything to everyone while you're starting out. It has to be something that you learn over time through the type of client that is attracted to you, or by discovering what area you are best at.

It seems counter-intuitive to focus on a niche because you have a fear of missing out and won't be able to help as many people. But he said that it has had the opposite effect on his business. Word gets around the industry that is your niche and you are seen as the expert in their industry.

Mindset
Everyone has times when they're ready to throw the towel in when it comes to running your own business. Matt says that the struggle never ends and sometimes it gets more exaggerated as you get more experience. You need persistence and to stay positive.

To get out of any dips in the business he has had to change focus. When he was working on the web development it was a struggle to get clients through the door, so he realised that he needed a different focus that would bring him recurring revenue.

When he hits a problem, by changing focus he is able to go back to what wasn't working. With a fresh mind he can then tackle it from a different angle and take it to the next level. Through doing that he changes perspectives and builds mini businesses so that if one crashes and burns, he still has the others to rely on. Matt likes to hedge his bets!

Balance
So how does Matt balance personal and professional life? He purposely built these businesses to be flexible so he can work anytime from anywhere. He is a big fan of taking an afternoon off to go to the mall or places that are busy on the weekend and then sometimes working weekends instead. He also plays the trumpet, so he has the flexibility to play a gig and then sleep in.

How Does He See His Businesses Evolving?
Matt doesn’t like to plan ahead too much. He waits for opportunities to come to him. If he had a five-year plan for his IT business he may not have jumped on these opportunities that came to him. He likes to have short-term goals for his business and change them up. For example, subscriber, revenue or retention-based goals. But he keeps his mind open and businesses flexible to allow new opportunities to come to him.

Tools
Theme: His favourite WordPress theme is the Genesis Framework by StudioPress. Sometimes he builds a custom child theme off that.

Plugin: He is a big fan of Restrict Content Pro he has been using it as a membership plugin and also for the sign-up process on his website. You can also use it to sell products online through a login process for the customer.

Day to day tools: The stack he uses is Slack, Trello, Freshdesk (for support desk for all of his platforms), Process Street (for processes and checklists), and Active Campaign (for email marketing). He then ties them all together with Zapier.

He likes the flexible solutions!

Well, there you go... Matt's formula for success! I hope you got some inspiration from today's podcast. Let us know what you think in the comments below.

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