In this second episode of season 2, Brian and Chris explain why they are so excited about the new WordPress editor (Gutenberg), and how this will help publishers, bloggers, marketers and readers get more out of WordPress

Brian Gardner, founder of StudioPress, and Chris Garrett, StudioPress Marketing Director at WP Engine, kick off the new season with the story behind all the changes that have taken place and are happening right now in the Genesis and WordPress communities.

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On this week’s episode, Brian and Lauren discuss their favorite moments and guests that have appeared on the show during Season One of StudioPress FM.

In this 25-minute episode Brian Gardner and Lauren Mancke discuss:

• Their favorite episodes of Season One
• The most downloaded shows
• Most memorable guests and topics
• What they’re looking forward to in Season Two

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

017.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• Follow Brian on Twitter
• Follow Lauren on Twitter

The Transcript

The Season One Recap of StudioPress FM

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I discuss our favorite moments of Season One of StudioPress FM.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, founder of StudioPress. Today, on this very last season episode for Season One, I am joined, as usual, with Lauren Mancke, vice president of StudioPress, mom of one, soon to be three. Looking forward to just wrapping up Season One.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. Thank you for joining us again this week. We’re closing out Season One and we will be doing this week a little different. We have no guests. It’s just Brian and I talking about some of our favorite moments on the podcast so far.

Brian Gardner: Typically we like to go somewhat scripted, where we prepare questions for those that we’re talking to, but Lauren and I, this morning, we’re going to just completely wing it. We have just some general idea of what we want to talk about for this closing episode. It won’t be long. It’s hard to believe it’s been 16 episodes already. I know that for you it might feel a little bit longer because you started editing the first handful of them or first half of them and then we turned that over because you have more important things to be doing, but can you believe, 16 already?

Lauren Mancke: No. It’s really flown by.

Brian Gardner: I remember when I did No Sidebar, it seemed like it took just forever to edit the shows. I wasn’t structured when I set it up and it felt like it was hard to find ideas and guests and things like that. I’m almost forcing us to close the season down because we have a lot of stuff we have to do before the end of the year, but I don’t want to, because I’ve been having so much fun. It’s been great talking to the members of the community. When I sit down and try to think of who do we want to talk to next or what series we want to have, I’m loaded with all of this, these ideas, these people. There are so many people. I want to do two episodes a week, which of course isn’t realistic. There’s just so many people to talk to and so many topics to cover. For me, it’s been fun so far.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. We’ve already got some great people lined up for next season, so it’ll be good to take a little bit of time off and get that all organized and lined up for next January.

Brian Gardner: I almost feel like we have a legit show here, where we actually follow a format and we have a good audience. We get at least a few thousand listens on every show, if not more. I don’t know. I feel really good about what we’ve done. It’s our first full-time gig together, doing the podcast thing. What do you think so far? Have you felt like this has been a successful journey?

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I’ve really been happy with who we’ve gotten a chance to talk to and hearing everyone’s story. It’s really cool how so many people have that same sort of, they were doing something else and they found WordPress and then they built this whole thing. It’s great to hear everyone’s different take on that journey.

Brian Gardner: The good thing about WordPress and the cool fascinating thing I find is that even though we have generally that same story, we all come from just much different backgrounds. We also are in the middle of just different types of expertise, where some people come in as designers, some people come in as marketers, some people come in with a technical or programming background. You’ve got a designer who was sitting at a bored day job and then you’ve got like a technical guy who was working for the man and wanted to do his own thing. There are so many different levels of skillset and just expertise that’s being represented within the WordPress space. It’s fun to watch just how many people from how many different avenues of life are coming together in this whole open source project.

Lauren Mancke: For sure. So many different types of personalities, too. It’s not just the same type of person. You’d think all these WordPress people would be maybe slightly nerdy or whatever, but it’s not true at all. It’s so many different types of people, and they’re all really cool.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. Even within the short spurt we did here at the end with the designers, even the designers that we talked to like Bill Kenney at Focus Lab and Jason Schullermega and Megan Gray, even within just one segment of that audience, you’ve got people with different personalities and flavors. Bill works and owns a creative agency and Megan’s by herself and Jason’s doing a startup. Yes, there’s a lot of resonating stories, but even within a certain sub-niche of the WordPress designer ecosystem, there’s just so many types of different people represented. That wasn’t boring because everyone brought something unique to the conversation. Hopefully, designers and people who don’t design and do other things even were able to pick up something from that as well.

Lauren Mancke: In WordPress, I think, when you mentioned the guests specifically, it makes me remember all the different things that make each one of those people unique. You got Bill, who is very, very good at being efficient and I love that about him. He has so many ways of doing that and that’s his focus. He can tell other people about that. Then you got Jason, who is; he’s just a family guy. That’s his passion and you can see that with everything he does and everything he talks about. Those are just fun and unique things that everyone who works on WordPress, they can be their own person and tailor their job and their company around those skillsets that they have.

The Most Downloaded Shows

Brian Gardner: You know one of the things I think for me that I found for me interesting as a metrics guy and somebody who looks into that kind of thing? There were certain episodes that I thought would have been more popular than others and vice versa. When I would go in and see the analytics and the number of downloads and so on for each one, there were a few that surprised me where I was like, “Okay, this one’s probably not going to do as well, maybe because of the audience. It isn’t such a widespread thing or an ‘interesting topic.'” Then those were the ones that got the most distribution and those that were shared the most. It’s funny how you can draw up a game plan. Nine times out of 10, things go the way you want, but then once in a while you get that one where I’m like, “Wow. That was the one I almost didn’t even suggest doing and it was the one that was in the top three or whatnot of most listened to shows.” That just goes to show, you never know.

Lauren Mancke: What were some of the more popular shows that we had this season?

Brian Gardner: You’re going to make me look that up, so I’m going to make you talk while I go look that up.

Lauren Mancke: You know, we can edit this, so we can break for a second.

Brian Gardner: I know. All right, so I was able to pull up the analytics. Sadly enough, three of the bottom four episodes were the first three, which were my story, your story, and the redesign of StudioPress. I don’t know if that’s an indicator of the fact that it was new, and not as many ears were on the show, or if people were just don’t find that interesting.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. Let’s go with the first.

Brian Gardner: I’m going to go with that one. Top to bottom, I’m just going to spitball these out here quickly. A Beginner’s Guide to SEO That Works is the number one show. We did that with Rebecca Gill at Web Savvy. I had a feeling that that one … SEO is a topic that a lot of people want to talk about.

Lauren Mancke: I thought that was a very informative episode. Lots of good nuggets on that one.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. I actually took the show notes to that and the transcript, and wrote up my own little iteration of that. I think I talked about this back then, that I was going to try that a couple of times with these and try to use that from a curation standpoint, a re-purposing content, and so I pulled some of the best things that Rebecca had to say and wrote a blog post about that, and tried to rank for, I think it was a Beginner’s Guide to SEO or something like that. I think last time I checked, that was on page three of Google, so it kind of sort of working. Yeah, there was definitely a lot of stuff that came out of that that was good.

Number two, and this does not surprise me just because I know that Matt and some of the folks at Automattic were helping with the distribution of this, and that was the show we did, How and Why It’s Okay to Make Money with WordPress, which of course we just talked about just all of the different types of people within WordPress, so that makes sense because that would appeal to everybody.

The next one was How to Scale a Freelance Business. That, I believe, was the one that we did with Bill Erickson. Then How to Build an Online Education Business, now this is the one I was referring to earlier that I didn’t think was going to strike a chord as much, just because it seemed a little bit more of kind of a sliver segment specific to doing an online education because that’s not what we’re all in the deal here for.

We did that with Tonya Mork. That was a good one. Great information. She’s got a ton of knowledge. She’s worked 20, 30 years in her field, so she has a ton of expertise that she brings to the table, so that was one a little bit surprising.

The How to Sustain a Profitable Creative Agency came next. The Importance of Entrepreneurial Mental Health with Cory Miller. That was probably my favorite episode that we recorded just because it kind of dove a little bit more into just the personal touchy-feely stuff, which I’m a huge fan of. Again, a lot of these were within 1% to 2% of downloads, so it’s not like certain episodes crushed other episodes, but that’s a quick recap. Then of course you and I, and our whole stories, are down there at the bottom, pulling up the caboose.

Lauren Mancke: Nobody cares about us. I’m just kidding.

Brian Gardner: Which is why we have guests on the show.

Lauren Mancke: Yes, exactly.

Brian Gardner: Because they’re the ones people will want to listen to.

Their Favorite Episodes of Season One

Lauren Mancke: I think the Cory Miller episode was very good as far as the content. I think all three of us were tearing up on that one.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. I wish I would have seen Cory’s talk at WordCamp Denver just because, and I’m sure it’s on WordPress.tv, but that is something that I think without a doubt every single person who listens to the show struggles with in some regard. Some better than others. I’ve had my seasons of even within the last six years, after we merged the company, of really struggling, especially early on. This was before we brought in the mid-level management and brought in people like you, who came in and really helped do a lot of the stuff that I do.

I remember, I think it was within the first year, we came together as partners in Boulder. I had a meltdown and I was like, “Look, guys, I’m just completely fried.” I remember Brian Clark said to me … He says, “Just take the next month and a half off. Do nothing.” I was like, “What?” Like, “No, I m a creative. I can’t do nothing.” It’s one of those things where it creeps in and life gets in the way and clients get in the way. Hard work and stuff like that do pay off, but the whole entrepreneurial mental health thing is something that I think far too many people don’t discuss or don’t have an …

It doesn’t even have to be talked about across the internet via a podcast. You got to have a couple of people in your life who even if it’s a Skype call … I know Cory a lot of times has tweeted things out saying, “Hey, I just got a message from a friend and it meant the world.” Just things off radar, offline. Just check in with the people, whether they are people who you work for, who work for you, or people like Jason, who are just peers within the community. That stuff matters, so I’m glad we had a chance to talk about that.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I think when you’re working on the internet, it’s easy to get lost in that. You’re connected to everyone, but you’re also connected to no one if you’re just in your own little bubble and you’re not really able to sit down and talk with people face to face or, like you said, even on a Skype chat or something like that, so it’s an important issue.

Brian Gardner: All right, so let’s talk about some of the other episodes. I’m just going to look down and just see. I know we talked, as I mentioned earlier, Brian and Jennifer, husband and wife team. They own their own agency and we talked a lot about … You weren’t on that episode because I think you had mom duty that day, but that was a good episode because it talked about work and family balance, which is in a way relevant to the mental health thing, where as creatives and those who do stuff online, we have access to the internet 24/7, and so it is difficult at times to balance work and home life.

I struggle with it sometimes. There are times where I literally have to just shut my laptop and tell Shelly, “Do not let me open this because I need to go play catch with Zach because that’s important, because I don’t want him growing up thinking the computer is more important than him and so on.” For you even, you’re a mom and have two more on the way, and all of that. I mean, what’s that going to look like for you next year?

Lauren Mancke: Well, I thought that episode would have been good for me to be on because I ran a creative agency with my husband, so I know a little bit about that. I even notice my son isn’t even two and a half yet and he’s already … He’ll come in and sit at my desk and say, “I’m working. I got to get on a conference call.” He picks up. He puts on the headphones and he pretends that he’s on a conference call. I’m like, “I don’t know that I want that to be my legacy with my son.” So spending more time with family is definitely a priority.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. Going back to Jason and the episode that we had with Tim, that was the one thing, over the last few years, of things that I see online that I get envious about, is the ability that some people have to do that and make that so important. By all means, I don’t shun my family. Shelly is at home all day long, so we get to talk to each other. I’m home at 3:00 o’clock when Zach comes home, so we do have our time together, but Jason, of anybody I’ve ever seen online, puts more importance on his family, his wife, especially his daughter. I can’t imagine the bond that they’re going to have throughout their life because of how much importance he placed on the balance of work versus time with them.

It’s fun and sometimes, like I said, I get envious of the fact that people are able to do that, maybe not so much as I wish I could, but yeah, it’s important too to balance that out because relationships, marriages, mother-daughters, father-sons, those types of things, in my eyes, big picture, matter way more than what we do for our jobs. Anyway, that’s the kind of thing that I think just everybody needs to hear, that it is important to balance work and life.

All right, so another one of my favorite episodes was when we had Shay Bocks on and talked about food blogging. That also is something that I thought would have been a little bit more less heard because of the fact that it was very niche-specific.

I think it resonated with a lot of people because people took things that she said out of the food blogging discussion we were having and those are the things that could have been easily applied to any other niches. So I think even thought it was a food blogging episode, a lot of the stuff that Shay talked about, things that we discussed, could have certainly been used across the sphere. Food blogging to me is interesting because it’s one of the … It sort of came out after real estate, which is sort of not really been that big a thing anymore, but the food blogging industry has exploded.

You know, Will, your husband likes to cook and you like to take photography and you’ve done a couple of food-oriented themes on StudioPress. I can’t believe how popular that still is and how many people still … Foodie has regained number one status on theme sales on StudioPress. With the exception of two, maybe three months over the last almost two and a half years now, it’s been number one every single month. Shay and I talk probably at least once a month just about stuff in general and she’s always like, “I’m waiting for the ship to sink.” I’m like, “Don’t.” I’m like, “Embrace the fact that …”

Shay has done something of a big lesson for all of us. If you do something that works, instead of trying to replicate that somewhere else, really hone in on that. She’s really crafted her business around the idea of food blogging and she re-branded her company, called Feast Design Company. How more relevant of a brand name than to work within the niche? That is also something I think has been fascinating for me to see, is people within our community really identify where they belong and then really attack at that point.

Lauren Mancke: Shay is also just a great person. It’s really great to see her succeed and all of her success. She’s just a wonderful, wonderful human being. I think too, also, food blogging, people … We’ve talked about focus on family. I mean, that’s a trend. People are spending more time, I think, focused on their family and eating and community and all of that, so I don’t see food blogging going anywhere any time soon.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. People always eat. There’s always going to be the internet and the will to make money. For people, not so much Shay, but the people who use Shay’s themes per se, that’s the dream, right? Living the dream, we talked about that with Jason, is to take your passion, something … In this case it’s something that you do at home, so you could literally be hanging out with your kids and working at the same time, and even having them help.

I recently redesigned a website called Simple as That Blog with Rebecca Cooper. She’s got to a really, really big website. She’s got four kids and she’s a great photographer. She does a lot of her DIY craft and recipe type of things with her kids. She uses them as props. They get dressed up and they do things. For her, it’s a really creative way to do that work-family balance thing because she includes her kids with her work, and so therefore there’s no … I don’t know. Just disconnect between the two, and so I think food blogging is just another example of where that can be done.

All right, so the episode that I actually wasn’t sure we would be able to do, mainly because I know Matt sometimes is a little bit slow on email as he should be … I’m sure he gets thousands of emails a day and from probably people way more important than me. I reached out to Matt Mullenweg to talk about WordPress and making money. He wrote back within like a day or two. I was very surprised and very pleased that he was very open to talking to us about that. It was a great episode. We talked almost an hour, I think, on that one, and probably could have kept going. The premise of that show was very obviously how to make and that it’s okay to make money with WordPress open source community. We did a couple of episodes on that. Also I remember we did one with Carrie Dils.

With Matt, we talked about just the WordPress ecosystem and different ways that we can make money with WordPress, that it’s okay to make money with WordPress, and the fact that he even endorses the fact that it’s okay to make money with WordPress because I think at this point, the community as a whole has identified that WordPress is a business in a sense. Even though there’s a free version of it, even though it’s an open source piece of software, there’s a full blown ecosystem, as we talked at the beginning of the show, just all the different ways that people use WordPress and can offer WordPress as a business, either as a service or like what we do with commoditized type things with selling themes and plug-ins and so on.

It was fun to talk to the guy, right? The guy who founded all of it. I was a little bit star struck, as I always am every time I talk to him. It’s a little bit difficult to … I don’t know. Feel like we were pulling our weight in that conversation, but what did you think about that show?

Lauren Mancke: Oh, we’re totally BFFs now, so it’s all good.

Brian Gardner: You guys on HipChat or Slack together? You just ping each other with ideas and whatnot. I like to think of Matt as like the mini Richard Branson because he’s always … At this point in his life, he’s probably got tons of money and he’s out travelling around. He’s out in Bali or in Antarctica. I forget that he’s probably 30-something now or late 20s or whatever, but to me he’s always going to be a kid. I don’t know. The whole thing is a great story. Just imagine how many people, their lives have been changed by what he’s done. Mine, yours, everybody who listens to the show, everyone in our company. It’s kind of crazy if you think about that.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I think he’s around my age, but yeah, he’s definitely prolific and I too am a little envious of his schedule. He gets to go everywhere and do all sorts of fun, cool things.

Brian Gardner: Again, I think that goes back to the point of, if you have some crazy idea, sometimes you just need to execute it. Like, what if he never decided to fork b2 back in the day. We all have that question in our life. What if I never left my job or what if I never asked people if they would buy a WordPress theme or any of that stuff? I think the moral of the story here is that sometimes you do need to take that risk and just do that thing, as George Costanza did in Seinfeld back in the day. Do the opposite, right? Because if what you’re doing isn’t working, maybe the opposite will. That was a great episode, by the way.

Lauren Mancke: I always get tuna on toast.

Brian Gardner: Ah, there you go. Seinfeld, one of the best shows ever, if not the best show ever.

What They re Looking Forward to in Season Two

Brian Gardner: All right, so moving forward, we are going to take break here. We ran that through our guy in charge of the podcast network and said, “Hey, we’ve got a lot of things we’re working on.” We will not be discussing any of those here on the show because they’re just fun, internal projects that will make a big splash and a big difference next year to everyone listening to the show. What are the types of things you want to do as we probably open back up in January of next year, after the holidays? Who are the types of people we want to have? Anything specific you want to see happen?

Lauren Mancke: Well, I know we have Dan from Dribbble lined up, Dan Cederholm. I’m excited about that one. He actually came up to the Northbound office a few years ago when ConvergeSE was going on. That’s a conference in Columbia, where I live. It was great to meet him and Rich, and spend time with him. It’ll be fun to have him on the show.

Brian Gardner: Now one of the things I want to do and throw out there is, we would love to hear from you guys, those who are listening to the show. At the bottom of the show notes, we’re going to put mine and Lauren’s Twitter handle. If you have any ideas or suggestions or people, if you want to nominate people, we are definitely open to hearing from the community. I know you and I are both creatives and designers, and so we err a little bit more on the side of that, in terms of show. I do want to make sure that we don’t forget our nerdy friends who are developers and programmers, and bring those types of people in as well, and talk to them because I’m sure they have a ton of wisdom to share with our audience.

I’m trying to think of who else I would want to have on the show. I know that we have a little Google doc where we keep track. I want to get outside a little bit of just the general WordPress space and just find some really big entrepreneur type people who happen to use WordPress, but it’s not their business. I know people like Paul Jarvis is a guy that I want to bring on the show, possibly Jeff Goins. From my perspective, those are a few of the people that I plan to hit up. Maybe we’ll see if we can get a guy like Chris Brogan on just to talk some sense into us all and whatnot. We’ll have to think about that over the coming weeks, who else we want to have on the show.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. We’d love to hear from the audience, of suggestions. That’s a great idea, Brian.

Brian Gardner: Hit us up on Twitter, @laurenmancke or @bgardner. We’ll put the link in the show notes. Even if you don’t even have a suggestion for the show and just want to say, “Hi. Thanks for putting together the podcast,” we would love to hear some of that feedback as well, good or bad. Let us know. We will wrap the show up. This is our 17th episode, I believe, which still amazes me. Sorry for those who really like the show and want to hear next week. We won’t be here because that will be Thanksgiving week. Actually, you know what? This will air the day before Thanksgiving.

Nonetheless, people will be out shopping. No one wants to listen to us anyway. December is really a time for that family and stuff that we talked about. We will be back in January of 2017 with Season Two of StudioPress FM. On behalf of Lauren and I and all of us within our company who touch the StudioPress brand, we thank you very much for your support as customers, as listeners and those who spread the gospel of StudioPress. Thank you very much and we will talk to you next year.

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On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Megan Gray, a passionate — probably one of the most passionate — freelance graphic designers I know. She lives on the edge of a canyon in Orange County, California, where she runs her business, House of Grays.

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In this 34-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Megan Gray discuss:

• Starting House of Grays in Orange County, CA
• Designing for the people
• Keeping focused among distraction
• Experience gained while working in a traditional agency
• The onboarding process of custom projects
• Creative outlets beyond the 9 to 5
• Following your own path instead of looking to others
• Filtering out the noise

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

0162.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• Visit House of Grays
• House of Grays’ Work
• House of Grays’ Blog
• Follow House of Grays on Twitter
• Follow House of Grays on Instagram

The Transcript

How to Stay Creative in a Distracted World

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I are joined by Megan Gray to discuss being a creative entrepreneur in a distracted and often chaotic world.

Brian Gardner: Hey everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host Brian Gardner. I am joined, as always, with my co-host, the vice president of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke.

Lauren Mancke: Thank you for joining us again this week as we continue with another episode in our series of talking to members of the design community.

Starting House of Grays in Orange County, CA

Brian Gardner: Today we are joined by Megan Gray who is a passionate, probably one of the most passionate, freelance graphic designers I know. She lives literally on the edge of a canyon in Orange County, California where she runs her business House of Grays. Megan, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome to StudioPress FM.

Megan Gray: Thank you. I am so happy to be here.

Brian Gardner: All right. Let’s talk about Megan Gray. Taken verbatim from your website, you live on the edge of a canyon which is primarily literal in your life but I’m guessing there’s some figurative relevance here. Also, why I knew you’d be a great fit to talk about being a creative entrepreneur in a distracted world. Let’s start at the beginning and go through the early years of your life all the way back from diapers, all the way to where you are now in the OC. How did all of this happen?

Megan Gray: First, I had never thought about the metaphor of how I live on the edge of a canyon. So thank you for that. Yeah, so I guess I won’t go all the way back to diapers because that will bore everybody but I will say that I had always thought of myself as a writer and that was what I did by trade for quite a while. I worked as an editor and writer for newspapers in the DC area.

I always felt like I wanted to be a designer, have a creative profession but I felt, maybe an inferiority complex, but I felt like that was something that was always out of my reach or that was better than me because I couldn’t draw, and I thought that that was what it took to be a creative professional or be an artist. If I look back from where I sit today and I look back at all the things I was interested in or the fact that I was using Photoshop to make flyers for things in college or that I would spend hours customizing my SmugMug website for my friend’s photos with HTML and CSS.

I look back and I see that’s where I was heading but I remember at the time that felt like something cool people did and I wasn’t one of them. I just kind of chugged along doing the writing and editing thing until at some point the publisher of one of the newspapers got a temper tantrum and fired the whole design team. Overnight I had to learn InDesign and layout two papers and get them to the press on time. That’s kind of when I felt like I had been beaten into the gang. I was ready to go. From then on it was all design for me.

Then we moved to California for my husband’s job. He works at Blizzard Entertainment, which is a pretty well known video game company. That really opened up a whole new world for me in design and creativity and moving to California because of the community here and just the design style. Yeah, a lot of different cool companies to work for here locally. That’s the journey.

Designing For the People

Lauren Mancke: I can relate a little bit to the traditional arts thing because I felt the same way. I’m not a great painter or drawer so when I was looking at a major I was nervous about doing just traditional graphic arts because you have to take all those classes. I can relate to that a bit. Your website says, you have a tag line on the about page that says, “Design for the people”. What is it about people that pulls you in?

Megan Gray: I guess it’s just when somebody is doing what they love. It doesn’t matter if it’s an electrical company or jewelry making or just another creative. It’s just so compelling to me and it’s almost contagious when you work around people that are passionate about what they do. It shows up in the way that they are always there. They’re always responsive. They have ideas. They’re dedicated. They’re just excited about it. That’s irresistible to me in the sense that … I don’t care what their style is, I don’t care what their industry is, I just want to partner with them in their success and bring whatever I can to the table to help them get further faster.

That is something that took me a while to realize but I used to care more about their aesthetic style or even the industry or the budget. But, now I’m just so excited to work with people who love what they do.

Brian Gardner: Does that get you into any problems? Perfect segue into just the idea of being kind of crazy and chaotic and schedules and so forth. The fact that you like people and working with people, does that enable you to possibly take on projects you shouldn’t that might not be a good fit just because immediately you’re like, “Yes, people. I want to take it.” Or are you able to filter through and say, “I love people, but I need to take on certain types of projects so I don’t kill myself trying to take on everything?”

Megan Gray: Totally. I see what you’re saying. For me, part of what I love about those people is that they tend to be respectful of my craft, which always includes them having some sort of mindset about that good work isn’t free or cheap, and that they also have some degree of success.

I guess the short answer would be that it doesn’t really create any problems because I think when you really feel sure that you know what you love and the type of work that you want to do, it makes it really clear for me when it’s not the right work or not the right person. So I have no problem anymore passing on the projects that I know aren’t right for me.

The people who are really passionate and show up and do this work and love what they do, they tend to get projects done on time, they pay quickly or early, and it just seems to be a more pointed, focused process from start to finish for me.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, we talked to Bill Erickson a little while back just about the process of his leads and how he generates leads and the filtering process. He says the contact page, there’s sort of a questionnaire type of page, if you ask enough questions, you can siphon out the people who will admit by filling out certain things that they’re not the right fit. What is your screening process on the front end before you even get to a point where you would talk to them? Is that set up in a way where, maybe it’s by budget or something that will kind of trim out those that aren’t the right fit without even having to correspond with them?

Megan Gray: Yeah, I think somewhat differently than Bill Erickson. People know more of what they want when they look for a designer. I think developers, people are a little less educated on what makes a good developer or an expert developer. They’re just happy to find one. You probably have to do a little bit more qualifying of the leads. Whereas, when you get to my site, if you don’t like peach or pastels or anything that’s a little different, you’re already not going to contact me.

There’s some trimming that already happens before I even get to people. Having a drop down default in the budget, I often get people who are like, “Is that your minimum? Because I can’t …” Then I know where they’re at with budget. People who are wary that I even ask for a budget like I’m a shady mechanic, I know we’re off to a bad start.

Then a lot of times I can tell if people are just going down the Genesis Developers list and copy and pasting a form letter. Or they say, “I’m looking for someone who doesn’t like just the pretty things” and I’m like, “Why are you contacting me? Like, did you look at I can tell if people are interested in hiring me specifically and when they are, it goes great. When they are not, it can still go great, but a lot of the times I’m not really what they’re looking for and I help them find that out.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, Lauren did a great job when we redesigned StudioPress and updated the Genesis Developers page by showcasing a select amount, I think it was four, of the latest portfolio shots of each developer. That is also sort of our way to help in that process of filtering through people. People can just scan the visuals really quickly and say, “Ah, peach and pastel. I love beachy stuff. I’m going to check her out.” Then you know it’s an alignment already built in.

Megan Gray: I totally get that. I agree with that design. I think also, I have noticed that has happened less, like the form letters, and I don’t know exactly where that comes from, but I do think there’s more of a quick visual cue now to see, “Ah, that’s not for me” or, “I love that.”

Keeping Focused Among Distraction

Brian Gardner: Okay, people; husband, kids, two kids now. How is the balancing work and family thing going on? I know that just recently you ended up … This was a question I was going to ask you later but it’s a good time now. You had recently cultivated your own office space, which is out of house, and all of that. I kind of wink at you here, because I follow you on social media and all that, and I can see the ups and downs as they come along with where you’re going with this. How is balancing work/life for you going right now?

Megan Gray: It’s really challenging. I won’t sugarcoat it. Having two kids is more than twice as difficult for balancing it all for me right now. But, I do think that I’m able to compartmentalize it. Just like if it’s not kids, it’s something else that people have outside of their work life where drawing those boundaries and just kind of … It sounds defeated, but it’s not lowering my expectations so that I’m not the person who has no kids or no family life and I can just work at all hours as long as I want whenever I want.

In that way, it has helped me be more focused about the time that I am working instead of just meandering through my day. Speaking of my studio space, when I’m there I notice that there are people who can move just at their own creative slower pace. Then there are those of us who have to pick up kids at 4 or some other commitment and we’re very heads down and focused on our work. For me, it’s just helped me be more organized. When I’m not, it’s very difficult to manage.

The office space, one of the reasons definitely, I sought that out was because I needed a little bit of a clearer boundary between my home life and my work life. Also, I think that when you work for yourself, by yourself, it’s really good to get out there. My space, in particular, is a mix of other types of creatives. It’s not all designers. At the moment, I think I’m the only designer. More photographers and event planners and sign artists because Laguna Beach is a great community for that. We’ve got guys who make surf boards from agave by hand in the back. Lots of interesting things.

I find that there are days where I just need to get out and be around other people making things and doing things. Sometimes somebody will say, “Hey, I need a logo to paint on this surf board” and then I’m right there. Or I need somebody to print business cards and it’s sort of a cooperative that way. Then there are days where I definitely need to stay at home and not go around all the energy and be really productive. It’s nice to have more options.

Lauren Mancke: I’m a bit jealous, because I really miss my old office space. It comes up a lot, it seems like, lately on these podcasts. I have planned for my new office. There’s a new coworking place in my town, too, that just opened up that looks pretty cool. It’s their second location so I might be hitting that up more frequently.

Megan Gray: Yeah, coworking is nice when you can just drop in on the days that you need to get out of your head and then retreat when you need to get back in your head. I found that coworking in some cases here, there’s a couple choices in Orange County, but I worry about my productivity where it’s a really social element. In the studio that’s over by Laguna Beach I have my own actual office instead of a drop-in desk. That’s been huge for me.

Brian Gardner: All right, let’s take a quick break here for an advertisement because at StudioPress FM that is how we roll. If you are a digital business looking to elevate your brand, Infinity Pro, a recently released theme by me, was made just for you. It’s an elegant, responsive way to introduce your online presence. With all the options we’ve packed into Infinity Pro to customize your customer’s experience, it’s also one of the most flexible StudioPress themed releases to date. Did we mention it’s compatible with WooCommerce? Find Infinity Pro, along with more than 50 other great themes, at StudioPress.com/themes.

Experience Gained While Working in a Traditional Agency

Brian Gardner: All right. Let’s turn back the clock a few years and discuss your tenure at 10up. For those who don’t know, 10up is a brilliant WordPress high-end agency led by Jake Goldman, a friend of mine and friend of Megan’s. They do high-end client’s work such as Microsoft, Google, Entertainment Weekly, to name a few. As an independent creative, how did you end up in a situation where you’re working for the man?

Megan Gray: The man Jake Goldman?

Brian Gardner: Yes.

Megan Gray: Jake actually, I think, discovered me on Twitter, if I remember correctly, and reached out to me. I hadn’t been seeking out an opportunity like that, but I was immediately interested when we discussed things. I thought, “Take a shot, level up my skills, learn from some really great engineers” and that’s pretty much what happened. I started there as a project manager, which I think that became clear pretty quickly that that was not the best fit for me. I moved into a design role and worked on some of the internal products that they were developing at the time. That’s how I found myself there and it was a great experience.

Brian Gardner: What did you learn while you were there? I had been following you and we had known each other before you went to 10up and I was actually a little bit shocked because, first of all, there’s creatives who need to work. In other words, they’re the breadwinner of their family and they have to just make decisions that sometimes aren’t necessarily what I think they would love to do.

This was one of those cases where I was like, “I don’t think Megan has to take on a full-time job in order to live and eat and all of that.” I was somewhat confused, almost, in a sense because I was like, “She seems like such an open creative.” I was curious behind the rationale as to why you would have taken that.

I think we’ve had a few people on this show who have also done that too, where you get to a point where you’re kind of done, and Lauren, we’ve talked about this before even with you in your own agency, that you get to a point where sometimes you’re just so tired trying to generate business and sometimes it’s just easier, or maybe your family situation warrants it, where you need something more stable and whatnot, so you make that call. For you, it just didn’t seem like that was the case.

Megan Gray: It wasn’t the case that I was forced into looking for a stable thing. It certainly helped and I benefited from it, but for me the drive was, and this is maybe a little crazy, but when something scares the crap out of me, I make myself do it. For me, at the time, where I was in my career, 10up was the gold standard of tough agency gigs to get into in this space. I did not feel like I was up to the challenge so I made myself do it.

When I got in there I was very intimidated, because then and now I think some of the best people in the business work there and they were good at their jobs. I was coming from a place of being a freelancer who just didn’t have that agency experience or tons of experience in general. I got good quickly.

I guess what I learned from there is just how to be a smarter designer and consider things more from an engineering perspective. When I got there I was making pretty things. I think that after leaving there I made smarter things and I made better decisions and I thought about the whole picture of web design and product development more than I did before. I made some great friendships and people I trust who I still call on today and say, “Hey, this is an idea I have. Is it crazy?” They’re still some of the people I lean on constantly.

Lauren Mancke: I think, for me, choosing to leave the agency that I had built was a big decision because it was not really the stress of generating leads. It was almost like there were too many leads coming my way. It was hard to turn everything down to make time. I knew I wanted to start a family. I couldn’t spend 80 hours a week working. What are some things in your current situation that cause you stress? Are there any things that get in the way of your productivity that you’ve been able to work out a way around those things?

Megan Gray: I think what we touched on before, the family thing, with two kids that I really want to build my life around, the idea that I can be there for them when they need me at school or when they’re sick or when they’re having a bad day. That’s been a big challenge. Also just, I would say I’m my own challenge. When I get burnout or I feel uninspired or just not into it in the moment, trying to reinvigorate that creative energy that I have.

Other challenges of just life stuff honestly. Life in southern California makes inner things chaotic and challenging. Taking that time away in my studio and just kind of re-centering and reflecting on what I’m doing has really helped me maintain that focus.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, hanging out at Disneyland every other week also does that. Although I haven’t seen you post pictures of that lately.

Megan Gray: Yeah, I don’t really do the Disneyland thing anymore. It’s a little too much for me. A little too much.

Brian Gardner: That’s not too far from where you’re at, right? That’s in Anaheim.

Megan Gray: Yeah, it’s like 20 or 30 minutes. We used to have that annual pass and then it was just like, “Hey, I don’t think we’re having fun here anymore. It’s super overwhelming to come every week. Why do we keep forcing ourselves to do this?”

The Onboarding Process of Custom Projects

Lauren Mancke: What is the typical process you have for bringing a new client on board? You touched on it a little bit earlier about some of the things, they’ve already seen your work, they like what you do. Is there any other criteria that you specifically look for when you’re talking to a person about a potential project that’s the right fit for you?

Megan Gray: Yeah, I tend to now book a couple months out and it’s usually a pretty big red flag when somebody cannot wait at all. We just talk a little bit about money and timeline and the standard housekeeping things. I really whittled down the number of email exchanges I go through before I either close the deal or move on. One of the ways I’ve done that is just a really simple pricing PDF that I have that goes over simple packages that I offer, the prices for everything and the process and what it does and does not include. That’s been a friendly little barrier to entry to working with me.

Then, when I bring them on board, I know it’s really popular to automate a lot of that process now, but I don’t feel comfortable doing that because I really like the personal connection. I like doing things similar but differently a little bit every time. So I just kind of walk them through and onboard everyone just a little bit differently because no two projects are the same. Yeah, and it’s pretty clear process of designing and building out everything from there.

Brian Gardner: Speaking of projects, are there any in particular that stand out to you as being Megan’s favorite projects and whatnot?

Megan Gray: I didn’t prepare for that. You know, I don’t think so at the moment. I’m just doing a little bit of everything. One of the projects I did earlier this year was for a pop-up dinner company that had services. Their first pop-up dinner was actually in Lima, Peru and I got to be involved in the logo, the branding, the messaging. I actually threw up a quick site with a Café Pro theme for that.

Then we actually had videography, photography. That was a really fun and meaningful project for me, although it had a smaller reach. It was really hands on, a big collaboration with different creatives and videographers. That was just called Salt. That’s in my portfolio. That was an exciting one for me and it has a little video with it.

Brian Gardner: What is your favorite element of design? You just talked about how some of them you’ve done multiple elements of the whole process. Is logo your favorite part? Is overall site design your favorite part? What part of design in general do you think is the thing that brings the most joy to your life?

Megan Gray: Right now it’s actually just the strategy and the messaging, with the copy writing, so it’s kind of going back to my roots as a writer. That’s something I’m actually helping WP Site Care with right now is just re-strategizing or re-branding their messaging, all their on boarding materials, the customer messages. Everything that is less the production design and actual visual design and more of the whole brand experience and all the little touch points from social media to just all the interactions that they have with the customer, which is new for me to be really, really engaged with that.

Creative Outlets Beyond the 9 to 5

Lauren Mancke: So outside of designing, if you’re anything like me, I have a Halloween costume problem. Basically, I just spend way too much time creating costumes and it’s just really something I enjoy. I just like to do things outside of my regular medium which is digital. Designing things that are interior design or designing labels for my hot sauce or stuff like that really, really brings me a lot of fun, enjoyment, just to do a design for myself. Is there any other types of design that you like to work on?

Megan Gray: I do a lot of those little personal projects that you were kind of describing as well. Nothing as cool as that mini Hamilton costume that you shared. It’s just little things where … I definitely am into interior design and everything in my house being my way.

Brian Gardner: Not Ron’s way. Your way.

Megan Gray: My way. Little things like I put a blend of essential oils for my kids when I was gone and I printed labels and made a whole packaging thing for them. I guess that’s not something that normal people do, now that I think about it, but it’s something I enjoy.

Lauren Mancke: The Hamilton costume really everybody is impressed because that photo is so good. My friend is a photographer. Everyone is impressed I think with the photo more than the costume.

Megan Gray: No, I don’t think so. I was interested in the gold buttons.

Lauren Mancke: Those were just brads on white duct tape. Not super time-consuming. I think we did it in under an hour.

Megan Gray: I think it’s the idea that’s impressive. The brads and the duct tape instead of buttons. Just the creativity. But, the photo is great too.

Lauren Mancke: The kid has really long hair, so that makes it too, I think.

Megan Gray: It’s perfection.

Brian Gardner: All right, so outside of being creative, I know even when we’re not being creative we’re still being creative, because that’s just sort of our human nature. What are the things, Megan, and I want to hear from Lauren too on this one. Megan, what are the things outside of even being creative when you’re not being creative that you do to pass the time? I like to run. Even in that, I find creativity but I don’t exercise creativity in that. I just, I run. What are the things you do that are completely creatively agnostic that take up your time or just help you decompress and get your mind off things and whatnot?

Megan Gray: Yeah, I’ve recently gotten into podcasts and I just consume them like crazy. They just give me all sorts of ideas and weirdly make me a better writer to listen to. Then I’ve gotten into yoga, which, I used to laugh at people who did yoga, but I really like it now. I find that, this is probably not the answer you’re expecting, but I find that when other people like to do creative things … Like at my son’s school people DIY a lot of cool stuff. They’re making an adventure playground.

I feel like I just want to do accountant, data entry stuff because I feel like I use up every bit of creativity I have at work. I feel like I want the antithesis of that when I have down time. I guess I do like to consume other people’s creative work, but when it comes to DIY or anything like that I feel totally tapped out. It’s easy to be creative digitally, because you can easily undo or reproduce or replicate things. When I go to DIY something I’m like, “Ugh, command Z”. I have to start over.

Lauren Mancke: Undo that glue.

Megan Gray: Yeah, undo that. “I want a copy of this, so I’m just going to keep cloning it. No? I have to make more myself? Huh.” It’s just interesting, because I found that I tend to like to enjoy other people’s creativity in my downtime, but as far as making things like crafty Lauren I just, I don t know, I don’t have it. I don t have it.

Lauren Mancke: I think I’m crafty to a certain extent of, that it’s something that s not … takes patience. Like painting or anything for me that has to be very meticulous, I don’t have the patience for that. If it can be something done quickly, duct tape, you know, add duct tape to a sweater, I got that. If I had to sew that, that would take too much time.

Megan Gray: Yeah, I hear you.

Following Your Own Path Instead of Looking to Others

Brian Gardner: All right. What else does Megan Gray stand for, outside of design, being a mom and a wife, and all that kind of stuff? What else would you be defined as, in terms of leaving a legacy? What are the things in your life, when you find time and can fit them into a crazy and chaotic schedule, that you want to be known as?

Megan Gray: I like to sort of be a champion for the little guy to the extent that I can. Part of my tagline, “Design for the people,” that’s kind of what that’s about as well, which is that I have never had the interest that other designers have to work on something that everyone will touch. That doesn’t inspire to me or call to me to be a big name or work for big names.

I’ve always really liked to work for the small businesses and the people trying to make it. I really like to reach out and share or be vulnerable with something, like whether it’s a postpartum experience or a growing up a certain way experience. I like to write and speak to those people. Not that I think I’m so impactful that I can help thousands, but I always believe if I can help one person make a leg up in their business or one person who is struggling with something postpartum or one person who thinks that they don’t deserve to be a designer, then to me that is something I’m really interested in. It really drives why I work independently so that I can do that.

Lauren Mancke: What advice would you give, because you’ve touched on this a little bit just a second ago and before in the podcast, about when you’re a young creative that insecurity that you feel? What advice could you give any young creatives out there listening right now?

Megan Gray: I think they key is to just go in the direction of what you love. That might not always be the popular thing or the thing that everyone else is doing. But, if you start early doing what you love and you just keep at it, you’re going to be the best person who does that thing. You are going to be happier than the people who are doing whatever is trendy or popular or lucrative at the moment. I think it’s really easy to get distracted by someone else’s podcast or someone else’s e-course or someone else’s new theme or product.

I think if those things interest you or speak to you, yes, chase them. If you just feel like you need to keep up with what everyone else is doing to stay relevant, I just think no. Do what you love if you have the position to do so. Just be who you are and that will always, I think, win out and catch up with … You would be your biggest success.

Filtering Out The Noise

Megan Gray: To expand on that I guess just a little, to maybe keep it going is, I struggle. I think we all struggle. Anyone sitting here on a podcast in a position to offer advice, even those people, we don’t know. I don’t think anyone has it figured out. I think there’s so much noise now with social media and constantly seeing what everyone is doing or one-tenth of what they’re doing, like their good spots. I think it’s really hard to, on the one hand, consume what other people are creating to inspire yourself, and then also to block out the noise and filter it to be like, “That’s great, but this is who I am, and this is what I am doing and that is enough.” It’s a real challenge to pay attention but filter out the noise.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I guess where I was going with that is, in my life, when I came up for the idea for this show, kind of a chaotic world, I think of people who are getting on a train or a bus or driving in traffic and doing what the world sees as being busy and chaotic. In my mind, I work from home and I get into my office, sit in my chair, like at 6am and do some things. I spend a lot of time online in my chair doing stuff. I’m not necessarily busy externally. In other words, I don’t have things to do and errands to do and all that kind of stuff. Thankfully, Shelly can take care of a lot of that stuff.

In my head I am very busy by way of things you mentioned, things, people you see online, the noise, the emulating that I want to do when I see something on Dribble from guys like Bill. That is, in it’s own sense, a way of being mentally busy where … This leads into my next question which is who are the people that you look up to and the ones that … When I ask that question to myself I’m like, “Well, who do I look up to? It’s the people who I wish I could emulate.” People who I want to rip off and in fun and tongue in cheek say, “I love that design. I’m going to steal it.” Who are the people in the creative space, they don’t have to necessarily be designers, they could be musicians or whatever, that bring to you a breath of fresh creative air and some inspiration and things that help bring you down from the business rather than add to it?

Megan Gray: Yeah, a designer specifically that I’ve just always admired is Jesse BC or Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain. He used to be 31Three and I think he’s with Shopify now. I’ve always loved how he is just so absolutely masterful with his craft. His designs are how I found him. I always thought, “Wow, that’s a real designer. That’s real stuff.” Back when I was just doing whatever.

Then I met him at Circles Conference and I was just blown away by how quiet and reserved and humbled he was. I introduced myself, and then awkwardly like I am, I said, “Oh, I don’t mean to keep you” and he’s like, “No, talk to me about what you’re doing, what you’re working on.” I was like, “What? What is this?” I’ve always just loved how he’s not particularly self-promoting. He’s not particularly out there trying to be the biggest and the best. He’s just quietly, comfortably kicking all kinds of ass in this way that feels really genuine and authentic to me.

Then on a more of a business perspective and somebody who is doing what they do, I still continue to think of Jake Goldman, former boss at 10up, as one of my mentors who I still reach out to who is somebody who just does not care what other people think of him. Or he does, but it does not influence his decisions. He is just everyday, everyday he is the same person. He is consistent and true to himself. That is really inspiring to me because I struggle with that. A lot of us struggle with that. Those are two people that I think I can look to when I need a little inspiration or a fresh take.

Lauren Mancke: That’s some really good advice. We’re really happy you were able to come on the show today, Megan. Thank you so much for all of the wisdom you’ve imparted. Do you have any other words for our listeners?

Megan Gray: I don’t. I think the closing is just to block out the noise and keep doing you and it will get you wherever you’re trying to go, I think.

Brian Gardner: There we go. Words from Megan Gray. Everybody at StudioPress FM. Thank you so much for listening. In the show notes, on the show page, we have all kinds of great links to Megan so you can follow her, you can look at her work. If you’re looking for someone to design something for you and you don’t mind pastels and beaches, then check out Megan’s portfolio.

Megan Gray: Thank you so much.

Brian Gardner: Until next week. Thanks again for listening.

015.jpg" alt="The Creative Entrepreneur: Living the Dream">

On this week s episode, we re joined by Jason Schuller, a designer and maker of things for the web. His MO is always focusing on elegant simplicity, endlessly being inspired by awesome creative people, and relentlessly learning by making mistakes.

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In this episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Jason Schuller discuss:

• The creative career of Jason Schuller
• Launching Press75
• The decision behind the sale of Press75
• The allure of side projects
• Prioritizing family in business decisions
• Creating Work/Life balance

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

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The Show Notes

• Follow Jason on Twitter
• Visit Jason’s Website
• Plasso
• Follow Jason on Instagram
• Follow Jason on Dribbble
• Follow Jason on Medium

The Transcript

The Creative Entrepreneur: Living the Dream

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, we are joined by Jason Schuller to discuss being a creative entrepreneur and living the dream.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone, welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner. Today I’m joined as usual, with my co-host, the Vice President of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke.

Lauren Mancke: Glad to be back this week again, everyone. Thank you for joining us as we continue our series on talking to members and experts of the design community.

Brian Gardner: Today we have the pleasure — are joined by Jason Schuller, a designer and maker of things for the web. His MO is always focusing on elegant simplicity, endlessly being inspired by awesome creative people, and relentlessly learning by making mistakes. On top of that, Jason is a personal friend of ours, and we’re very fortunate to have him on the show. Jason, welcome.

Jason Schuller: Hey, thanks guys for having me. It’s good to talk to you again.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, for sure. We always like to kick off the show by asking the same question, to some degree: Who is Jason Schuller, and what is your backstory?

Jason Schuller: It’s funny, I feel like “who I am” is a lifelong journey at this point. I’m 40 and still don’t know who I am. I was born just south of Seattle, out in the country, and grew up loving the outdoors. Snowboarding, mountain biking, things like that. I had a pretty typical childhood that way, here in the Pacific Northwest. I still enjoy all those things. Just love being out here and being creative out in nature. That’s me.

Brian Gardner: Give us a little background then, from where you started — at least from a design and being a creative — because you weren’t always that way. As you evolved through your career it leaned that way and then you became a full-blown entrepreneur.

The Creative Career of Jason Schuller

Jason Schuller: The first time I realized I wanted to be a creative person … I think it’s always in you. We all know, to a certain extent, that’s in you just growing up. But I think the first time I actually realized it was in high school. I took a drafting class, and with those tools and being the perfectionist that I am — just being able to realize the design of a house and draft it out and see something I’ve made come to life. I think that was the first time I realized I wanted to do something along those lines.

I always struggled in school. I’m dyslexic. I have a hard time reading books. I have a hard time with traditional learning. So drafting and becoming an architect was a struggle for me, because I wasn’t able to get through those required courses to realize that dream. That was the start and the end of wanting to be a creative person at that time.

Lauren Mancke: I actually have a few dyslexic people in my family, and my dad was always concerned about that when I was growing up. I never really had an issue with that, but I can imagine that would be difficult. At what point in your career did you have creative jobs? Did you start in a normal job environment, or did you always have creative jobs?

Jason Schuller: I got married really young, at the age of 23, so I was kind of forced to find a job. Because, of course, you got to pay the bills and you got to move out of your parents’ place when you get married. It’s probably a good thing. I found a job at the Boeing company here in Seattle as a technical writer, and that obviously doesn’t really get the creative juices flowing. I think it was at that time when the web really started to take off.

I didn’t have any traditional training or education in web design or development, but I had an interest in it. What I started doing while I was working at Boeing was just finding websites, downloading the source code, and playing around and making things my own. Reverse engineering and learning that way. I think that’s when I really started to catch on to what you could do with the web and how I could apply my own creativity to building things for the web.

Brian Gardner: So you and I and Cory Miller — another friend of ours at iThemes who we had on the show a few weeks ago — we all had this same sort of story. Where we were at our day jobs, relatively non-involved with WordPress or development or design or whatever, and we just — maybe out of lack of interest or being bored — tinkered around with WordPress and code and whatnot. You were at Boeing, I was at an architectural firm, and Cory was working in marketing at a church or something like that.

Let’s talk about the beginning of your WordPress “career,” because it practically coincided with mine and Cory’s. It’s great to look back on those early days when we all had day jobs and were freelancing to start out our businesses. What stands out to you the most back then and what was the funniest part of what we did as WordPress was really beginning to evolve into something more than just a blogging platform?

Jason Schuller: Just like you guys, like you said, I was working at Boeing still when I got into WordPress. Every organizational website at the Boeing company is probably still maintained using Static HTML. I was looking for a solution to that, because it seemed like a dated process for creating and maintaining websites — using Static HTML. I was poking around with Joomla, as I’m sure you did too, and WordPress came around. I immediately was drawn to it because of its simplicity. I was able to take all the website templates that Boeing had created and turn them into themes for WordPress really quickly and put together, essentially, a platform for maintaining organizational websites in the company.

That’s when I really was drawn to WordPress and the potential for creating things for WordPress. That’s what spurred me into actually leaving the company, seeing that I could do much more than what I was doing. Start going off into a freelance career. I didn’t expect to sell themes at that time. I think in doing that process — leaving the company, starting doing freelance work — that’s when I saw what you guys were doing with premium themes and starting to sell themes. I think was specifically you, Brian, and Aidi with his premium news theme that he had. That’s what really got me interested in WordPress themes and potentially branching out into that market.

What stands out the most was how easy it was to build a following within WordPress just getting off the ground. I went from working at the Boeing company, leaving, and within two months having a pretty strong following already in the WordPress community simply by blogging and sharing what I was learning at the time. That really stands out to me the most early in those days, is how easy it was to build that audience and that following.

I think the funnest part — to follow up on that question — was meeting people like you, Brian, and Cory and Aidi, and just sharing the fun in what we were doing. Making things, designing and creating themes, releasing them, and having thousands of people consume them. That was just such an exciting time. It’s something that I had never experienced before — I’m sure you hadn’t either — sharing that camaraderie with my supposed competitors, which didn’t seem like competitors at all. I think that was the funnest part.

Launching Press75

Lauren Mancke: Walk us a little bit back through the process of creating Press75. You touched on getting started with WordPress. At that time … you started in 2008, is that correct?

Jason Schuller: Yeah, I got started in 2008.

Lauren Mancke: Brian, you had the Revolution theme going then, but that was before you rebranded to StudioPress, right?

Brian Gardner: That’s for sure.

Lauren Mancke: Walk us back through the process of creating the company. You mentioned creating a following. Share with us a little bit about what made you stand out among other theme makers out there.

Jason Schuller: Sure, my start in WordPress — I actually launched a blog called WPelements. I think that’s how you came to know me, through a plugin I released.

Brian Gardner: Oh, the Feature Content Gallery.

Lauren Mancke: I remember that plugin.

Brian Gardner: Love it or hate it.

Jason Schuller: Oh my god. Again, I was just blogging through WPelements, building that following. People were downloading plugins I was making and it surprised me, because I’m not a developer by trade. I’m not a designer by trade. I was just learning and putting things out there — broken or not — and people were following along. That was just the state of what WordPress was back then. It was growing so rapidly and there was such a growing community around it, it was that easy to build that audience. But again, noticing what Brian was doing, what Aidi was doing, and what Cory was doing with the premium themes, it lead me to believe that with this following I had now I could do the same thing.

I think what stood me apart was finding my own niche doing something that I enjoyed doing, which was video. There weren’t too many video themes back then in 2008, so I took a stab at releasing a video-centric theme where you can embed videos and have it displayed in a nice grid.

My first theme I put out there on WP Elements for $5 and it sold … it was a crazy number of copies within a couple hours. I remember going for a walk with my wife and our dog and coming back and checking the computer to see if I had sold anything, and it was something like 200 copies had been sold or something like that for $5 a piece. That’s when I realized that this could be something. It spurred me to, over the next couple months, releasing a couple more themes and then eventually building Press75 and creating a dedicated theme shop out of Press75.

Brian Gardner: That’s the creative entrepreneurial dream. They say “make money while you sleep” is the big dream. You want to do that while you’re at the beach, taking a walk, or while you’re sleeping. I know when I first started selling Revolution back in the day, it was that. My favorite part of the day was when I would wake up and go to my day job and know that by then I had already made $600 or something like that. It’s part addictive, it’s part inspiring, and it’s part, “can I keep this going?”

Obviously you get to that point where you have to decide, “Should I actually leave my established day job as a young, married-type of person?” We had a kid at the time, so even more so. Thankfully, Shelly had a job, and a good job at that, so it was a little bit easier for me to take off. But I think we all as entrepreneurs get to that point where we’re not sure if we should jump or not. I remember, I think it was Chris Cree or somebody told me way back then that they had been doing stuff for themselves for seven or eight years and they just haven’t looked back. When I heard that I was like, “I don’t want to not be at that spot.”

Jason Schuller: Right, and I think now you can look back and say the same thing if somebody asked you.

Brian Gardner: For sure.

Jason Schuller: Literally, I’ve been on my own for almost nine years now, and I can’t imagine doing anything else. I can’t imagine going back to work for a company like Boeing and being in that process of a daily grind. It’s so foreign to me now. I can’t even think of going back. When anybody asks me, “Should I do it?” I always say, “Yeah, do it.” I think where we got lucky is that we did it and it worked the first time. It doesn’t always work the first time for a lot of people.

Brian Gardner: All right, let’s take a quick break for an advertisement here, because at StudioPress FM, that’s how we roll.

Minimalism plus warmth, a winning combination, Gallery Pro is a theme that features your gorgeous galleries and pages in a minimalist style that features stunning typography. You can make Gallery Pro your own with options for a styled portfolio, multiple column classes, a flexible front page, and full color customization. Find out more on Gallery Pro, head over to StudioPress.com/Themes.

Brian and Jason s backstory

Brian Gardner: All right, we’re back. Now, as I alluded to earlier, you and I created our businesses around the same time. In fact, what many folks don’t know and they’re not aware of, is that at one point you and I actually formed a partnership for a brief period, which ended not too long after it started. Now, I want us to talk about why that partnership failed. I guess failed is a harsh word, because it obviously wasn’t terrible — we’re still friends and you’re on the show and whatnot. But let’s revisit why we decided it was better to part ways, because I think a lot of people might to relate to that and it speaks to the styles of being different types of entrepreneurs.

Jason Schuller: It might be different for you, actually, but for me, I think we are a lot alike in a lot of ways. I think that might have been our biggest problem as partners. We both wanted to do our own thing. We both wanted to lead the charge in what we were doing. I think when you have two partners that are so much alike in that way, it leads to problems. I know for certain the reason my marriage works so well is because my wife and I are completely different people. We balance each other out. And I think that’s true for business partnerships as well. When you have strengths and weaknesses and your partner can balance out those strengths and weaknesses with their own, I think that’s what leads to good partnerships.

We were both getting started. We saw the potential, and it was just really good that we recognized so early on in our partnership — because it was only a couple months — that we wanted different things. We were able to split ways before it got dirty and go back to doing our own things. And it worked out for both of us. I’m really happy with how that panned out. I don’t regret having a partnership with you at all. I learned lessons from that, and that’s important as well.

Brian Gardner: I guess it’s overdramatic because I used the word fail . I wouldn’t call it a fail. Like we said, it dissolved for very good reasons. Like you said, when you have two like-minded people, it’s tough. We just both wanted to create and do that part of it, and then no one was left to do the administrative or the marketing side of it, because all we want to do is create and move forward.

I think that the lesson here is you don’t always have to work with other people. Sometimes there are great fits and there are good marriages. I know that when I merged into Copyblogger — the five of us — that was a situation where everybody brought something unique to the table and it has worked out. Our situation is sometimes when … I wouldn’t even say that the situation came between two friends, because it didn’t. We parted amicably. You did your thing. Because you had stuff you wanted to work on, and maybe it was slightly different than the direction I wanted to go. I think we both split and still continued our success, and that was good.

Jason Schuller: I really see that as the beginning of me really branching out and being successful with Press75. I saw it as the beginning, not the end, for sure. It was a good experience for me.

Lauren Mancke: At the time, I was curious what had happened there. I think, Brian, you had mentioned to me about this. You were using his plugin on your themes and then something happened, and I never heard what happened. So that’s fun, to hear the backstory after all these years.

Brian Gardner: I was a little bit skittish back then in what I should and shouldn’t share with the public and people. It’s different than it is now. Even when Revolution — StudioPress rebranded from Revolution because of a cease and desist letter, and I got squirrelly because I was new to this. I did a lot of, “Well, it was the best thing, the great decision.” I didn’t do a lot of backstories because back then I was less into transparency and authenticity than I am now. Now I think I’m more that way because I want other people to learn from the stuff that I’ve gone through. Back then it was all new and I didn’t have any real knowledge to share other than, “This is weird, so let’s not talk about it.”

Jason Schuller: Right. I think I was the same way. You get full of yourself a little bit. You definitely don’t want to share those lessons because you’re not — it’s not apparently clear what the lesson is back then when you’re going through it. It takes sometimes a couple of years to look back, reflect, and realize who you were back then and how you want to be now.

The Decision Behind the Sale of Press75

Lauren Mancke: Let’s continue in that vein, Jason. What are some of the biggest challenges that you’ve faced with your company, Press75? I know we had a chance to talk at Circles Conference about some of the reasons you decided to sell it, and you’ve also shared with some others about your frustrations with WordPress in general. Can you give our listeners a bit of a behind the scenes on the decision to sell? And did any of the frustrations you’ve had with WordPress affect that decision?

Jason Schuller: Yeah. There’s a couple of factors that went into me wanting to sell Press75. I think the biggest challenge, first of all, of running Press75, was trying to stay true to myself and not giving in to the appeal of doing everything that everybody else was doing at the time. I think that was my biggest struggle.

I built Press75 on my own style and my own way of doing things, and that’s what made it so popular. I fell into that trap after a while of noticing what everybody else was doing and wanting to do the same thing. Wanting to grow it beyond what it was. That was one of my biggest struggles.

The second side to that is the direction WordPress was taking after a while. I think it was around 2010-2011 that WordPress really started to get, in my eyes anyways, pretty bloated compared to what it was in previous years. It was this perfect, simple, content management system that was easy to build themes for, and it became this massive CMS for doing pretty much anything you wanted to do with it. With that came the responsibility in creating themes that people wanted. What people wanted was basically all the functionality that WordPress provided, plus all the functionality that every plugin available for WordPress provided.

That’s where I started to disconnect a little bit. I wanted to continue doing my own thing, which is minimalist, simple design, and it wasn’t jiving with what the market wanted at the time, which was everything under the sun. That’s what really led me to go down the path of looking for a new owner for Press75 and wanting to do something different.

Brian Gardner: We had Cory on the show, as I mentioned earlier. He and I and Lauren discussed something very important and something that still is under-discussed, I think, in the entrepreneurial space, and that’s all about mental health. Specifically, how it pertains to being an entrepreneur.

Now, after selling Press75 during the summer of 2014, I know you went through a pretty rough time trying to process the end of that and what would be next. You went through a period of time … To whatever extent you feel comfortable, can you just talk about that a little bit? What went through your head and some of the emotions and things that were going on after the sale and before you started the next few projects?

Jason Schuller: Sure. Yeah, that was definitely a depressing couple of years for a lot of reasons. I think, primarily, when you’re in that game of building something and it’s successful — it’s the first thing you’ve done and it became a success really quickly — you have this attitude that everything you do in the future is going to be successful just like the previous thing. I kind of had that attitude getting out of Press75, thinking that whatever I did next was going to take off and be successful.

It just wasn’t the case. That was a big lesson for me to learn. But with that came a lot of depression. I can definitely say that I was the most depressed in my life — from the standpoint of my professional career — than I’ve ever been. But it was twofold, because in my personal life, my little girl had just been born in 2013. Personally, I was on a high. Professionally, I was on a low. Those two were just clashing in the middle all the time, because I had this great need to provide for my family, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. Learning that lesson that maybe I’m not as special as I thought I was and that not everything I create is going to be instantly a success.

Looking back on that, it was extremely important for me to go through that period of a reality check almost, and realize that creating successful businesses takes more work than you actually might think. It’s going to be harder the next time around, even though I have had a previous success.

That’s where I am today. And that’s when I started opening up to new opportunities of maybe joining a team or working under the umbrella of another company and seeing what that opportunity has in store for me. That’s when I joined up with Drew Wilson and Plasso. I feel like I’ve grown so much more since doing that. It was an important step for me to take.

The Allure of Side Projects

Lauren Mancke: You’ve also been working on a number of projects like Droplets and Pickle and Atmospheric. Can you talk a little bit about those and what made you decided to do each one of those?

Jason Schuller: I think Brian can relate to side projects and wanting to do everything that pops into your head. Maybe I get a little bit less focused than Brian in that way. It’s one of the things I enjoy most, is doing side projects. But it’s also a big drawback for me as well, because it distracts me from doing the things that I should be doing.

I take on these side projects. I want to see something come to life and I put it out there. Then as soon as it’s out there, I lose interest. The process of building them, giving it my all and making something work, I think that’s really a healthy thing. But putting it out there and just letting it just go stale, that’s not so healthy. I’ve been trying to learn for myself and my own sanity to focus on important things and not give in to doing everything that pops into my head. Side projects — they’re kind of a double-edged sword for me.

Brian Gardner: I for sure relate to the whole, “Have an idea, carry it out, and launch it” type of thing. I’ve had to be very specific with what I do as a “completely outside of the scope of my job” thing. I’ve only got one thing that I do there. But from a creative standpoint or from a design standpoint, I get inspirations left and right all the time. I’m always in my own head thinking, “Ah, I’ve got this great idea.” Even if it’s an idea of something I would do as a true side project, I try to channel it away and say, “That’s not the right time to actually pursue a actual side project,” but conceptually take what you’re envisioning and wrap that into something that then can become a theme that we sell on StudioPress.

Some of the things that I’ve done lately have been the ideas or creative endeavors that I wished to live out, but just dial back the execution part and say “Okay, well at least I’ve put forth some time and effort and energy into something that a) is part of my job, and then b) something that hundreds or thousands of people can benefit from and they do.”

Jason Schuller: I’m starting to do that same thing. It feels good to be able to refocus that energy in a different way that makes it available right away under what you’re supposed to be doing. Again, I’m working under Plasso right now and designing and making things for Plasso, so every time I have an idea I’ve been exactly doing what you’re saying, rechanneling that energy into something that maybe could work for Plasso. That seems to be panning out for me, because I can use that energy still and not let it go away.

Prioritizing Family in Business Decisions

Brian Gardner: We talked about some of the stuff you did at Boeing. That worked its way into WordPress and Press75. Then you sold that and you’ve had some of these fun side projects. Some have and haven’t been included or involved with WordPress. And then you’re doing work with Plasso.

But there’s more to you than that, though. I know that because I’m a friend of yours, but also because I follow your Instagram feed, which is a total window into the world outside of Jason as the guy who sits in front of a computer and does design and software and creativity stuff. From the conversations you and I have had over the years, I know that the definition of life for you far exceeds running a business and being a successful entrepreneur. I can think of two things — or shall I say two people — that matter to you more than anything. I’m guessing I’m right here.

Jason Schuller: Oh yeah, absolutely. The ability to be home with my family, my wife and my daughter, and be with them more than I actually work has been the biggest gift of my life. Again, I can’t imagine going back to working for that company eight hours a day and not seeing my daughter. Only seeing her in mornings and at night. It’s not anything I can even fathom at this point. This experience is something I’ll cherish forever. It’s actually my biggest motivator in life to keep doing what I do. To be creative, to keep pushing, and to keep learning and growing and stay relevant, so that I can maintain that lifestyle that I like so much now at this point. Because I want to maintain being able to spend as much time with my family as I can.

Brian Gardner: We talked to Brian and Jennifer Bourn a few weeks back about maintaining a work/life balance, because they spend a lot of time with their kids traveling and doing things like that. From my perspective from the outside, even though I know that personally you were going through some rough times, to see you post pictures or to talk about — even in the context of a sentence — just saying, “This is my dream. This is my world. Spending time with my daughter and watching her grow up.” From my perspective as a dad, it’s awesome. It’s great to see. And it’s also convicting, because sometimes I don’t feel like I have that much of a conviction to be that intentional about spending time with Zach and Shelly and stuff like that.

I’m around a lot. I’m here all day when he’s here. I send him off to school. I’m home when he gets home. But it’s a lesson and a great motivator, like you said, to maintain that. Because once you have that … Of course, things will change as she gets older. Because he’s 12 now and he doesn’t want anything to do with me anymore sometimes, and I’m like, “Okay.” Then you think, “A few more years, he’s going to be out of high school.” I look at Shelly and I’m like, “What are we going to be doing all day long now?” There’s that to consider. But you still have plenty of time left with her.

Creating Work/Life Balance

Jason Schuller: I look back at those couple of years where I was super depressed from a professional standpoint but just living the high life from personal standpoint … I don’t know, I just have to believe that maybe that’s way it was supposed to be. For me to be there 100 percent for my kid those first couple of years that she was growing up and becoming a person, I think that that was such a special time. I reflect and think of it that way, instead of, “Oh, I was just super depressed all the time from a professional standpoint.” I look back at it — at those pictures, all those videos, and all of those trips that we took together — and remember it that way, as the time I got to spend with my daughter growing up.

Brian Gardner: Let’s talk to Lauren. Lauren, how do you feel about the fact that you’ve been able to spend a couple years with Fox? Now you’ve got two more coming, and I don’t know if being home will actually be a good thing for you or not with all the distractions and whatnot.

Lauren Mancke: I actually was going to chime in. I think that’s one of the things I bonded with Jason over when we first met, was that family-first mentality. We discussed making business decisions based on that. Putting your family first and creating a work/life balance that gives you the opportunity to be home with your children. I think it’s really important. I heard, Jason, that you’ve got a pretty sweet setup for working from home. Brian’s actually mentioned it on another episode. I haven’t been able to set up my super sweet office yet, but I’ve got schemes and I’ve got visions. What is your favorite part of working remotely and working from home?

Jason Schuller: I think you have to make a creative space for yourself. Something that inspires you every day. Somewhere you want to actually sit and spend a good amount of time in, so that you can let those creative juices flow. For me it was building this office. It’s literally just a little room on top of my separated garage. I built it in 2009, I designed it myself. My father in-law and I built it together from the ground up. Now it’s just that space I get to go to every single day and enjoy the view from my office and just be creative. It’s quiet and it’s peaceful. I think it’s really important for us when we work at home to have that space that you can go to and feel that way and just work.

Brian Gardner: See, I don’t think I have that. Mine’s called Starbucks. I just rent that space, $6 a day. My office isn’t anything special. I’ve actually had — I still probably won’t do this, because it just would cost too much and it would be silly — but I had this vision of designing the office that I have into a Starbucks.

I have a friend of mine who his friend is actually one of the guys who architects and engineers the refurbishment of Starbucks. I was actually going to hire him and say, “Come into my room and do Starbucks stuff.” I was going to put a little live-edged countertop. Put in the floor and some lighting. Really try to emulate a Starbucks. Then I just realized that was probably money not well spent.

But I do, I see the pictures of your office. It overlooks the lake there, and you’re always posting pictures of the mountains. “Then I took a quick drive up to go mountain biking.” There are people in this world — you are one of them, Jeff Sheldon is another — who I really have envy over their lifestyle and their ability to connect in places that I don’t live near. So good for you, that you get to have that type of space.

Jason Schuller: Yeah, man, I really love living here. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I’m sure there are plenty of better places to live than Seattle, but I grew up here. I love it. I love being connected to the mountains and nature in general, and being able to do that pretty much within 20 minutes of my place. It’s super important for me to maintain. So yeah, I love it.

Brian Gardner: As we wrap this up, we asked Bill Kenney a few weeks ago — from Focus Lab — the same question. I want to do the same with you, because I got a feeling it might be a little bit different answer. I think it’s really important for our listeners to get different points of view, so here it goes: If you had a chance to speak to a group of young designers or creatives and your presentation was limited to five minutes, what would you say to them?

Jason Schuller: Wow. That’s a loaded question. Just drawing from my own experience, I think the most important thing, for me anyways, is moving forward. Is not to forget who I am and what I do, because that’s what lead me down a bad path when I was doing Press75, was paying too much attention to what everybody else was doing and trying to emulate that. When I really sat back and did my own thing and did it in my own way, that’s when I was most successful. That’s the most important point for me.

Also, making yourself a little uncomfortable at times. I got really comfortable during those years of building WordPress themes. Living that life for a couple years really didn’t challenge me all that much. I’ve noticed this last year of working for Plasso — being with a team and being challenged on a level that I’ve never been challenged before — I’ve grown so much as a person. As a creative person, as a designer, and as a developer. I don’t think I would be where I am now without that continual challenge. I think getting yourself uncomfortable is also a big lesson that you need to keep in mind as you move forward.

Brian Gardner: That’s a great answer.

Lauren Mancke: That is a great answer. Is there anything else you want to add before we wrap this thing up?

Jason Schuller: No, man, I can’t think of anything. It’s been a pleasure talking to you guys, and I wish I could chat with you more often.

Brian Gardner: We can make that happen. Whether it’s on the show or not.

Jason Schuller: I miss those WordCamps. I’m not in that WordPress scene anymore, but that was the best part of those WordCamps, coming together. Skipping all the presentations and sitting in those halls and chatting with guys like you. People that were doing the same thing.

Brian Gardner: I will say this, Circles Conference, for me, has become the new WordCamp thing. I realized I’m more of a creative than I am a WordPress guy, even though I create WordPress products. I love WordPress and I’m so thankful for what it’s done for my life, but I realized my hardcore passion is about creativity. I will say, there was an empty spot in my heart this past year because both of you guys left me. We had the luxury of being together both — all three of us, actually — last year, and I missed both of you there this year. Hopefully next year maybe we can try it again.

Jason Schuller: Oh yeah, I’ll be there next year for sure.

Lauren Mancke: I won’t be pregnant.

Jason Schuller: But you’ll have three kids running around.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah.

Brian Gardner: Will’s a soldier, he can handle it, right?

Lauren Mancke: He’s got this.

Brian Gardner: Well, Jason, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for being a good friend to us at StudioPress — to Lauren and I — and we look forward to seeing what you come up with next.

Jason Schuller: Thank you.

014.jpg" alt="Leveraging Social Media to Build a Creative Brand">

On this week s episode, we re joined by Bill Kenney. His unyielding passion for design began at a young age, but has been developed and honed over his decade in the industry. As a business owner, Bill has developed both the design acumen and business knowledge necessary for success. He s the co-founder and creative director of Focus Lab.

Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You Bylogo.png" alt="StudioPress Sites">

			
www.studiopress.com/fm">
			
Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. 
			www.studiopress.com/fm">Launch your new site today!

In this episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Bill Kenney discuss:

• Bill Kenney’s path as a creative
• Running a creative agency
• The importance of team
• Using Dribbble to create a creative following
• Repurposing content across platforms
• Complementing a service based business with products
• Finding your tribe

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

014.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• Follow Bill Kenney on Twitter
• Follow Focus Lab, LLC on Twitter
• Follow Made by Sidecar on Twitter
• Visit Focus Lab’s Website
• Made by Sidecar
• Follow Focus Lab on Dribbble

The Transcript

Leveraging Social Media to Build a Creative Brand, with Bill Kenney

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM. StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, we are joined by Bill Kenney, the co-founder and creative director of Focus Lab to discuss leveraging social media to build a creative brand.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, and always joined by vice president of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke.

Lauren Mancke: Welcome back, everyone. Thank you for joining us. We are starting a new series on talking to members of the design community.

Brian Gardner: Today, we’re joined by Bill Kenney of Focus Lab. His unyielding passion for design began at a young age, but has developed, and he’s honed that in over the last decade in his industry. As a business owner, Bill has developed both the design acumen and business knowledge necessary for success. Like I said, he’s the co-founder of Focus Lab. He’s also the creative director.

Bill, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on StudioPress FM.

Bill Kenney: Thank you. I’m excited to be here and talk to you guys.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, this’ll be good. Lauren and I are huge fans of you and what you guys do there, so it’s always fun to have people that we really look up to on the show. I’m going to get started here. I’m trying to think back. From what I remember, I’m pretty sure the first time I ever came across your work was on Dribbble.

Rafal and I have always had a back-and-forth chat session where we show each other things that are cool and really neat design stuff. I’m pretty sure he sent me a link back to the day and said something to the effect of, “Check out this Bill Kenney guy. I think you’re going to like what he does.” That was probably three, four years ago maybe. Can’t believe it’s been that long, but I know it’s been a while.

Here’s the thing. You got to love getting to interview people who you look up to. For me, that’s something for sure we’re doing here. I don’t know. It’s kind of crazy, a little bit humbling to talk to you. I know we’re good friends. We’ve hung out before down at Circles Conference and so on. So for you, it might not be a big thing, but for me, it sure is. Anyway, funny how things work out.

Let’s talk about Bill. Who is Bill? How did he become the creative director of what I call, arguably, the best creative agency on the planet?

Bill Kenney’s Path As a Creative

Bill Kenney: So much buildup. I need to live up to this now. I appreciate that. Oh boy. Who is Bill? At what point would you like me to start?

Brian Gardner: What was Bill doing when he was three that was creative, and how did that just ultimately go through school and into where you’re at right now?

Bill Kenney: Oh boy. At three, I can remember … this is going to sound like I was prepared for this question. I was not, and that was my own fault. I can remember distinctly what I would now describe as the beginning of my creative endeavors, kind of like scratching my own itch but not knowing it.

I would go to my grandmother’s house. She would always have colored construction paper. I think that was so much fun to me. I would cut out all these shapes. I would make animals out of them. I would layer it. I would cut out the green stuff first because that was the background. That was the skin. Then I’d cut out maybe yellow for the eyes. You cut that a little bit smaller so that you can still have green trim around the sides of it. You glue it on.

I don’t really remember much from my young childhood, and that’s not because I did a lot of crazy things in high school and college. That’s just because my memory doesn’t go back that far, but I can still remember things like that. Honestly, if I had to pick where it began, I think I would say all the way back then.

All kids play with coloring pencils, and they like to doodle and stuff. But I always was drawn to that more than anything. That just stayed true forever. That stayed true through high school, through college. I wouldn’t consider myself an academic by any means. It was always creative stuff that really struck the chord with me.

Brian Gardner: At what point, though, do you think you acknowledged the fact, “I am a creative,” and understood what that meant and really thought for the first time maybe, “Hey, this is something I want to either pursue further in school or actually want to become when I grow up,” that kind of thing?

Bill Kenney: Yeah, I think when it got real for me, that would have been college. I still really enjoyed art class even in high school and such, and was sending things away — as the school does, not on my own — to competitions and stuff. One of them got into this Air Force art show. I thought that that was really cool. That wasn’t a career at that point. I wasn’t even thinking career at that point in high school. I just wasn’t one of those types of high school students.

But in college, when I learned after two years of a liberal arts degree that I didn’t want to do math, I didn’t want to do science, I didn’t want to do history, and didn’t want to do any of those other things, I went, “Wow, I can become an art major. That’d be pretty flipping awesome. I could draw all day. I’d love that. I could take printing classes. That would be awesome. I could paint.”

In a way, it was a little bit of the easy way out, I think at that moment. Subliminally, I was drawn to that, so I followed the path I was supposed to follow. At that point, once I became an art major, school became awesome for me. I really enjoyed it, and I wanted to go to class. I wanted to go early. I wanted to stay late, all those types of things. That’s really when it opened up for me. That’s when it became real.

Brian Gardner: I wish I would have had that experience in college.

Bill Kenney: It was late in college, mind you. Again, I did liberal arts for a while, still trying to figure out, “What the heck am I going to do here?” When that changed, then I flipped the script. It was that much better.

Lauren Mancke: I had that kind of experience in college, except I took all those classes that you want to take right away because I really wanted to take them, all my art classes. Then my last semester, I was left with all the terrible, boring stuff.

Brian Gardner: Like the black jelly beans, right?

Bill Kenney: With my degree I went to University of Tampa in Florida. It’s not a big school in general. The art program is not big as well, but thank goodness, they had one. Who knows what I would have gotten into because I don’t know that I would have been just transferring around. I don’t know that it was that clear to me that, that was my calling.

To get your BFA — which is a Bachelor of Fine Arts, which is what my degree is — you had to at least pass college algebra, and math was always my sticking point. I kind of fumbled along through all the other classes. I wanted to keep my GPA high, and that one was the one that was always going to derail me.

So you wait till that last day before you can get a W, you can withdraw, and it doesn’t work against you. It’s very clear that there’s nothing you’re going to be able to do to bring that grade for the rest of the quarter, the semester. I actually botched that one all the way until my final semester of school. Then it was very clear to me, like, “Okay, here it is. I need to take it. My GPA is skyrocketing now because of all these art classes. I’m really excelling. I can’t let this one class bring it down.” I just really buckled down, and I ended up — this is not to pat myself on my back — getting an A in college Algebra 101.

Brian Gardner: Outstanding.

Bill Kenney: Yeah, is not outstanding by any means, but for me, for the class that I had always dodged and ducked, I was like, “I will conquer you.” I did save that one until the absolute end, and I won, thankfully.

Brian Gardner: Yep, good job.

Lauren Mancke: Let’s talk about Focus Lab for a bit. As you know, I used to run my own creative agency, so I bet we can relate a little bit on what you’re doing and how things are going. It’s been fun to watch you guys evolve over the years through social media, especially on Dribbble, which we mentioned, and we’ll talk about a little bit more. But fill us in. What’s the status of the company these days?

Running a Creative Agency

Bill Kenney: Focus Lab is going great. It’s the normal ups and downs of any business. It’s not always sunshine every day. We have the best team that we’ve ever had. We are the biggest we’ve ever been. Revenue is the highest it’s ever been. All these simple metrics, if you want to look at those, we’re doing really great. I couldn’t be happier with what we’ve been able to achieve, honestly, in the past six years now. I don’t know that I ever thought that we would get this far, honestly.

We started in a little tiny town, Savannah, Georgia. Honestly, the only reason people probably know about it, that it gets its name, is just the big tourism and the history of it all, but it is a small town with not much going on besides the history. That’s really what roots it and gives it its name.

We started this little design development shop there with aspirations to do great things, but I don’t know that six years ago I could have told you, “Hey, we’ll be 16 people, and we’ll be doing this. We’ll be doing that,” just all the other things that come with it. I think I would have been shocked, honestly, so I couldn’t be happier with where we are.

We’ve always kept a clear mind on the idea that we want to grow slowly. Growth is not the long-term goal. A success for us is not determined by, “Oh, we’ve reached 40 team members, and we make this much money.” That’s not success for us. I would say that we’ve already succeeded, and we just want to continue to build on that, which is having the team that we’ve built, honestly.

Being around the people that we get to be around, working with the clients that we get to work with, and the way of life and culture that we’ve created — that’s success for us. We’re in a wonderful spot, and it’s just constantly learning, iterating, and growing on top of that.

Brian Gardner: That’s really good to hear and very encouraging.

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Lauren Mancke: I was going to just jump in.

Brian Gardner: You’re so good.

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Brian Gardner: All right. Back to Bill. One thing I’ve seen from the outside is that people are important to you and Focus Lab as a whole. Your team matters to you. It’s clear to me that you value camaraderie in the workplace. You guys have Focus Lab retreats. You’re always sharing each other’s work on social media, attending conferences together, and whatnot.

In fact, Lauren and I got to witness this team thing firsthand last year when we saw you guys down at Circles Conference in Texas. How accurate is this diagnosis that Focus Lab and the ethos in which you operate is really built around a team?

The Importance of Team

Bill Kenney: Team is 100 percent number one. To be fair, even to myself and the recognition that I get when people see, “Oh, he has a huge following on Dribbble.” They see these things, and that’s not just because of me. We all benefit from each other. We’re all growing. Even that metric, which is Dribbble following, I really have a good amount of that because of the team, because of the work that we all do.

It’s not like I turn out all this stuff myself, and I don’t grow by myself. People don’t grow in a chamber. I’m surrounded by all these great people, and I grow in other ways, personally and all that, from the team. We all recognize that, so team is hugely important to us at Focus Lab. It’s very clear internally, and it’s nice to hear that it’s clear externally.

Lauren Mancke: I think running a creative agency is really interesting. I know as creative director you have to wear many different hats. You get to take part in so many different aspects of the company, especially when you are the one producing creative work as well as running the business as an owner.

My question is, what is your favorite part of running a creative agency? I know it doesn’t always come without challenges, but as I’ve had my fair share to deal with, I know. What is the most rewarding part of your day or week, and what makes you wake up each morning and say, “I love what I do”?

Bill Kenney: Yeah, I guess that changes year to year. As you grow a business, early on what excites you most is new projects, bigger clients, revenue increases, and all those things early on in business. That is still all so new to you, and you’re trying to go from zero to something. That could be your biggest reward metric.

At this point, it’s back to team. Team wins and team success for me is the most rewarding, so no longer am I most excited about, “Wow, I got such a great response from a client on a deliverable I sent or something I’ve posted online has been received really well.”

I get my biggest reward — and this is going to sound a little bit weird — in a way that parents would feel happier for their kids when they’re playing sports if they won a championship, their kid hits a home run, or whatever it is, that same level of proud moment, I get that. That’s what I want now. That is when I’m at my happiest. I love team member success and when they get put up on the pedestal, if you will.

A lot of what I do is to lift them up. I’m sharing all of our work through social media. I’m speaking about them. I’m shining light on them and making sure that clients know that this is not about me. Just because you happen to maybe find us or me on Dribbble first, we’re a team. That’s where my happiness comes from at this point and most of my joy.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I can certainly relate to that. On some levels, and it kind of comes and goes a little bit, people recognize me as the face of StudioPress because I founded it back in the day. Just yesterday, I had a Tweet exchange with somebody who made a comment about the newsletter we sent out, where we had sent him a bunch of traffic.

He said, “Well, I knew Brian Gardner had something to do with it.” I kind of wrote back, and I was like, “Yeah, the old Brian would have said, ‘Yup. That’s right. It was exactly me,'” but sort of like what you were just talking about, I wrote him back. I said, “You know, no, it’s not me. It’s StudioPress as a whole,” because Lauren’s there. We’ve got an entire team from a support standpoint, from a development standpoint, a design standpoint, QA, all of that stuff.

As you know, as you grow from one person to small company to bigger company with lots of customers and so forth, it does become so much more than just the person. I almost look for opportunities like that Tweet where I can kind of back myself out of it and say, like you said, just put the emphasis on the team. At this point, I sometimes feel the team does a better job at doing all of this than I do personally.

Bill Kenney: Exactly right. Yeah, that’s 100 percent. We’re in the same exact boat. We’d have past clients that say, “I don’t want to work with anybody else but you.” I think they’re persuaded by what they see, so that’s like the social following is a little bit of a double-edged sword in that regard. But now, that is not the case. Thankfully now, [inaudible 00:16:16] works to make sure that that was not the case. No one can ever come in and just say, “I want to work with you because I think you’re the best.” That’s baloney. The team at this point is so strong. They are stronger than me in a lot of things, if not most things at this point.

We’re constantly having that conversation internally. They know that. We all speak that way — to the point where, even when deliverables are sent out, even if only I, or Summer, or Alex worked on it that week, the signature at the bottom of Basecamp is still ‘Bill and the Focus Lab team’ or ‘Alex and the Focus Lab team.’ It’s pulling in that team all the time. That is where we get our strength. Regardless of whether I did 90 percent of the lifting in a given week or 10, it’s still the formula is team.

Brian Gardner: I think Dribbble, and that’s where this next question is going, they really did us all kind of a service in this regard by opening up the idea of teams on that social media platform where you could take individual accounts and put that shot up underneath the team. When I look at the home page of Dribbble, and it’s always filled with Focus Lab things, I see Focus Lab posted thumbnails and not specifically from Bill Kenney.

Bill Kenney: Yup.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, Dribbble. That’s the big thing that especially with you guys, you personally have 33,000 followers, have posted over 1,200 shots, and each one of them, no doubt, makes its way to that front page. You’ve got that following, and people just always love your stuff. What’s the deal? How do you own them in the sense of … maybe it was just you guys got started early on, on top of just always creating awesome stuff.

What’s the back story to Dribbble? More so than probably any other person or group of people that I know through the design community, Dribbble is really your sweet spot. I know that it drives a ton of leads — sometimes good, sometimes bad — but that’s where a lot of your stuff comes through, right?

Using Dribbble to Create a Creative Following

Bill Kenney: Yeah. Dribbble kind of broke us through the ice, if you will. Again, back to Savannah, this is not a knock to Savannah. Savannah’s a great city. Our headquarters are still there. Twelve of the team members live there, but it is not a thriving, West Coast, tech boom city, you know what I mean? The marketplace for growth and work for a design agency is going to be limited. What Dribbble allowed us to do was quickly bust into a world market instead of just a little local market. We relate a huge amount of our success to Dribbble, just for what it did.

It was very clear, even if you look at the numbers year over year, from the year before we were on Dribbble, and then you look at revenue numbers the year after Dribbble. You’re talking about a spike that you could have never guessed at. To be fair, it may have been the following year because it takes you time to grow the following, to get the recognition, to drive those numbers up.

But we can find that data to see like, “Wow, this is huge for us. Okay, let’s continue putting energy and muscle into this.” Basically we’ve never stopped. The game has stayed the same.

To speak to the teams thing, the teams thing was a long time coming. I’m not an early bird to Dribbble, although I was in there earlier maybe than some, but not the earliest, earliest. I was in there, and we were building a following before team accounts existed. I remember that whole transition.

Basically what happened is, we were having internal conversations about, “Okay, well, I’m posting stuff, but it would be nice to have a team feed,” so we talked about it internally, tried to figure it out how to hack the system in a way and say, “Look, okay, if we tag them all Focus Lab, people can search by tag. Therefore, we get a URL by tag. Okay, we can use that URL as the thing that we link to. Now we have a hacked team page in a way.” Then we would put that at the bottom of every shot, “Made with the Focus Lab team.” That was a link basically to just the tag that would show all of our shots.

I’m not saying that we started this, but we were early in that game of people doing that, if not the first. I don’t know. Then a lot of people started to see like, “Oh, that works, and that works well,” so then a variety of people were doing that. Then eventually the teams accounts came around, which was nice. At that point, we had been doing it so long. It was like, “Oh, this is refreshing actually to have this now and not have to do it the other way.” That was a great addition, and Dribbble’s been doing great lately with all their new updates and stuff.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, it was really cool to see the team thing. My company, Northbound, got invited to do a beta test of the team aspect by Dan and Rich, and it was fun to be one of the first teams on there.

Bill Kenney: Yeah, we were happy when that finally opened, opened up. We knew it was out there. We actually knew that people were testing it. We’re like, “Okay, we’re just waiting for this door to open,” because we’ve obviously been ready. We got this link thing here, and we’re faking teams, like a team account.

Brian Gardner: Did you have to go back and update all those links, though, when the team thing came out?

Bill Kenney: You know, that’s a good question. We put up so much content on Dribbble that any time you have to backtrack and change anything, that is so much work. I don’t know if we did. I kind of feel like we did, or maybe we didn’t. Again, we have so much volume that we’re going to push all that content so far back and down that it doesn’t really matter.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, that’s true.

Bill Kenney: It’ll just follow the new structure.

Brian Gardner: All right, so you guys started out with Dribbble. It’s obviously done very well for you, but over the last year or two, I’ve seen you guys venture out into other social media platforms in what I think is a deliberate play at leveraging those as well. I’ve seen you guys do stuff more so on Twitter than you have in the past, but also you’ve made your way into Facebook and even have written some things and published them over on Medium.

Now, you and I have had some conversations about content strategy. This led up to the whole Sidecar deal, so I had a little bit of inside information there. But how has that been going for you? I know that at Copyblogger and Rainmaker Digital as a company, we talk a lot about not digital sharecropping and investing your assets and resources in places that could potentially go down.

Let’s just say Dribbble closed the doors and completely vanished. Your efforts, especially like on Sidecar with the educational pieces and whatnot, how has that piece of strategy gone since you guys started implementing that?

Repurposing Content Across Platforms

Bill Kenney: Yeah, that’s a great question. That’s funny you talk about Dribbble as the example because that’s real. If we think about that right now, what would happen if Dribbble was wiped off the face of the earth, that would be not great for us in some ways. It’s not as if we’d lose all that content. We still have it all. We still created it all.

But the exposure, the eyeballs, the following, all of that stuff disappears, and then we have to populate it somewhere else and build all that back up — which is why when I talked to Dan three weeks ago in my podcast with him, I told him, “Don’t mess it up, Dan. We got a good thing going.” Yeah, we’re aware of that to the point we’re hyper-aware.

To be clear, so Focus Lab, we have what we call ‘Quarterlies.’ What that means is we all get together as a team onsite for an entire week each quarter, hence the name, and we don’t work on any client work. We just work on internal projects. Each one of those has a focus. In the one that was Focus Lab specific focused, which was our site and how we’re marketing ourselves, if you will, we talked about what are the new platforms, like what’s the new frontier look like for us. Dribbble is basically stay the course, if not get more aggressive. You can always post more.

The new frontiers would be basically Twitter, picking up volume there. We were already doing that, so that’s not really new. Medium would be a big new one. We don’t post a ton there yet, and when and if we do, and we will, that content will still come out first on our own platforms. So that content, if you will, to get back to the question, it is safe. It’s not like it would just disappear, but we would post it again basically through a channel like Medium for the added exposure.

I’ve already seen that work personally when I took a couple of posts that I wrote for Sidecar that got picked up, 600 recommends, and just so much traffic that they still get the traffic, that it is just so fruitful to post out there. We learned that because Dribbble’s the perfect example. It is the example of we can post whatever we want on our own website, but that doesn’t do us any good. We need to basically go where the people are. Like you read in a lot of these books, you got to go where the people are, and then bring them back to what you want to bring them back to.

Instagram has been another one. There’s been a very intentional plan for Instagram this year. We’ve gone from 1,000 followers to, I don’t know, today I think there’s like 16,000 or something. The team that focused on it, that’s been working on the Instagram account specifically, has done an amazing job with that. That will be more of a peer-facing platform, though. I don’t expect that really to drive a lot of work.

We’re talking about that. We’re making plans in and around that, but Dribbble still carries the weight. We’re on Behance. Behance is a little bit of a different beast. It’s a lot of eyeballs, but it’s not the same as Dribbble. It doesn’t really drive work.

Brian Gardner: Really, what you’re talking about is producing original content, putting it out on your own site, and then using some of these other social media outlets, kind of like in a syndication play, which is what Medium’s really known for, which is getting something that’s out there.

I think Medium itself has even embraced the fact that that’s how they know they’re being used. They’ve allowed for canonical tags to go back to the original source and whatnot. That’s where the people are. You can take the awesome work that you’ve done originally, put it out where the people are, and then just drive them back to your site. It works almost in a symbiotic relationship there as well.

Bill Kenney: For sure. We are organically creating so much content at Focus Lab that … you hate to use the word ‘repurpose’ because it sounds like we’re just spamming everything, but when you think about like a Dribbble shot, we can use that other places. That can then become an Instagram shot. It’s not as if we have to create original content every day for every platform.

We have so much artwork that we’re creating in a weekly basis, and then Alicja capturing it, us screenshotting stuff, us building presentations for clients, we’re basically already creating all this content. Then it’s up to us to decide when, how, and where we want to post it. We still have it all. It’s still ours.

Brian Gardner: Speaking of the content, and we’ve alluded to this thing called Sidecar, or Made by Sidecar a couple of times. Explain.

Lauren Mancke: I think what Brian is trying to say is, what is Made by Sidecar? Why did you guys create it? I know we talked a little bit at Circles Conference last year, which was a few months after it launched, but can you elaborate on the mission of Made by Sidecar? Has the focus of it changed at all since you first launched?

Complementing a Service-Based Business with Products

Bill Kenney: Great question. There’s two reasons here. There’s a business aspect, and then there’s also the bigger mission. Running a creative agency and a services-based company, you are reliant on client work. That can be taxing year over year over year. You are totally at the hands of, “Did we get leads, or did we not get leads? Do we need to go out and drum more up?” whatever that looks like for a company.

For us, we are blessed with the fact that we have a platform like Dribbble, and it drives a bunch through. It’s a lot more of just sifting through what’s coming through, but you’re still relying on that to live. That’s your revenue stream. We want to create a variety of revenue streams for Focus Lab.

Sidecar is an easy first step to that, but the bigger mission is not really about us and just making money. It is very much about giving back to the design community and building a community within Sidecar, a tribe if you will, that does a couple of things.

On one angle of Sidecar, we’re saying, “Here are the things we build for our clients that take us a ton of time, and our clients pay us a lot of money for. We can actually modify this, create it, and make it a template for you, and we can charge you X, which is nothing compared to the time and energy that we’ve put into it over the years to say that this works for us. Here’s your template.”

Yes, $56 or $76 might be a lot of money in a template world for a younger designer out there looking for things. How much are they gaining? How much time and experience are they gaining from that one deliverable that they can now reformat and use for their own client work? That’s the simple, high level, what we’re putting in there and what we’re selling, whether it be photography icon sets, all that stuff.

Really, the bigger greater mission for Sidecar, which will take years to play out, and it is in motion, which is the, how do we share knowledge? How do we teach? How does the community come in and help each other on a daily basis? We can build this really tight network of people that are willing to share information with each other, that are willing to encourage each other, that are happy to lift each other up, and do all of these things within the Sidecar tribe, if you will.

The goal is to build a tribe there that is that close, that has a variety of skillsets, perspectives on life, and all of these things. Right now, we have our Slack channel, which is our private Slack channel, that we invite people to. We’re starting to build up that tribe behind the scenes, if you will, that doesn’t exist on the site.

Right now on the site, we sell the products, and then we do all this free writing basically. We’re putting all this content in the journal of all the things that we know to be true, client experiences, and this is how we do this, this is how we do that. That’s our form of giving back right now, but really we want to blow those doors open and make it more of this community-driven, we’re all here for the greater good of design, if you will, to educate, to inform, to make us all better.

That’s basically seeping through from Focus Lab. That’s how we interact with each other. We all want to grow. Even today at lunch, one of our team members gave a lunch and learn on one of the books she read. It has nothing to do with design. It has to do with conversations and how to get through. The name of the book is Crucial Conversations. Just that type of stuff, doesn’t have to be design-specific.

I guess what I’m saying is Sidecar is now the outlet to do all of those things. Focus Lab still has to be what it is, which is a design agency. We can’t do all of the things that Sidecar will be able to do, so we’ve basically opened that up so that we can do that with Sidecar. I think that answers your question. I said a lot there.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, it’s great stuff. The way I see it is that Focus Lab is the creative agency that drives the revenue. Social media is the outlet in which you do things like build authority, get leads, and so on, but Sidecar seems to be that middle piece, which may have been lacking up until it was created, where you can take some of the stuff that, as you say, learn and have figured out through your experiences at Focus Lab. Sidecar is kind of the distribution channel for sending that out to social media.

Most of the stuff that you guys do on social media, that’s not necessarily just visual posting pictures, but more like the content side of it is actually through Sidecar and these, what you call, free writings, lessons, or tutorials where you’re really trying to help teach people. Not necessarily in a way that you hope that they come back and become clients, but just equip them as being tribe members of Focus Lab as a whole and all that.

Bill Kenney: Yeah. Focus Lab is very much the client-facing. We have this give back part of who we are, all of us in the team, like in our DNA, but we can’t be so peer-facing as a design agency. We have to be appealing to the clients, so there’s a little bit of a conundrum there when you’re like, “We’re writing for the Focus Lab blog, but really it’s purely peer-facing.” It’s a little bit silly. As your company continues to grow, the company has a focus, and it’s driven by what it’s trying to achieve.

Sidecar now becomes the peer outlet. In the Slack room, I’m in there interacting with all these people, and they’re saying, “Hey, can I call you up and just ask you this question about what to do?” Now they have direct access to us and to the team, which is awesome, because we want to be able to do that, but Focus Lab can’t function that way. Sidecar opens that door.

Lauren Mancke: Fun question. If you had to pick one, just one social media platform, to build a creative business around, what would it be, and why?

Bill’s Favorite Social Media Platform Is

Bill Kenney: Well, I think the entire world knows what my answer is going to be to that.

Brian Gardner: Okay, you can’t answer Dribbble.

Bill Kenney: Oh okay, all right. We’ll take that out of it then [00:33:48].

Brian Gardner: This is not you as Bill. This is you, like what advice would you give to somebody who’s starting up? Aside from your own plot of land, what would be the most fruitful opportunity for someone to help spread their own word?

Bill Kenney: I don’t know how it could be something else, honestly, and here’s why. I can say Twitter. That’s not a niche demographic there, so you’re going to have to fight your way through crowds, which is fine. I think you still want to be on there as well. You want to play amongst the different fields, but Dribbble gives you such a unique opportunity to the fact that it’s super-low cost. You have no price barrier coming in as a younger creative or someone that’s looking to start an agency.

You have immediate exposure to both huge players and small players, people that you’re going to be immediately able to interact with on a peer level to say like, “Okay, I feel equal to you. You will interact with me. I don’t know if I can go interact with that person yet. Maybe I feel too shy. Maybe they’d be totally chill,” like I am, and I’ll talk to anybody. It doesn’t matter, but you don’t see that when you first come in. It couldn’t be anything else.

I guess here’s the other thing. I am a little bit biased, and that’s fair. I can recognize that. You could do really well on other platforms, like Instagram proves itself really well for type designers. You see a lot of people get really far in type on that, and they actually get client leads and stuff.

It’s just a little bit harder for me to speak to because that’s not been our path. Therefore, I don’t know that I could give that advice, but I guess if I knew if they were in a specific realm, I could point them in a different direction. As an overall creative, and if they wanted to follow a similar path as us, I paved the way. Basically just do what we did. We’re not magic makers. I didn’t come in with some secret sauce. I didn’t start with a ton of money and was able to get ahead and all these other things. We just got in and got our hands dirty, and Dribbble is the platform to do it.

I do think that some people get ahead on Behance. I have a massive following on Behance. I have a couple hundred thousand followers on Behance, significantly larger than I have on Dribbble. I can tell you that it doesn’t even touch the return as far as revenue, and it doesn’t touch the connections I make on a peer level from all walks of life, junior designer all the way through to people that I would look up to and respect.

I could try to break away from Dribbble and say like, “Okay, let me try to think of something else.” I think that would be bad information. I tell everybody, “As a younger creative, just get on Dribbble. Put some energy into it and make it work,” because we did, and I know it works.

Brian Gardner: You know what, though? That’s kind of an unfair question, though, now that I think about it. We used the word ‘creative.’ We didn’t ask you specifically, what would you tell a designer, right? Because a creative is more than just a designer. It’s a guy who’s a photographer. He’s a videographer or a writer, and in that case, Medium is a much better place for a writer to go.

Bill Kenney: Right.

Brian Gardner: Backing up and letting you take the easy route with Dribbble, for sure, as a designer, that’s absolutely the place. I wouldn’t have even asked you to say something other than Dribbble just to answer the question because, yeah, designers need to go to Dribbble. If you’re another type of creative, obviously there’s different types of outlets like that that are probably better suited for you. Let’s not see a copywriter try to use Dribbble to expand their platform.

Finding Your Tribe

Bill Kenney: Yeah, for sure. When I am posed with that question, which is from anybody, “How should I get out there?” and even if we’re thinking about new angles or new things that we want to release, new products, or whatever, it’s still following the same model, which is go find where your tribe is basically. Focus Lab’s tribe just happened to be on Dribbble. It continues to be there for now.

But depending on what industry you’re in, you’re basically going to go out and find your tribe, hang out amongst them, make yourself a name within that group, and then bring that tribe back to where you need them to come back to — whether it’s your personal site, whether it’s a book you’re releasing, or whatever. Yeah, you want to go out there and find your tribe, so whether that be Dribbble, Medium, whatever photography site, community. It’s just about the community. You got to find your own community.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, let’s talk about that. Alicja, who works with you guys a lot, is a photographer. Let’s just use an example. Ironically, I think you guys did their logo design, the photography site that just recently you guys launched a design for. It’s sort of the photography version of Dribbble, right?

Bill Kenney: Yes and no. To be clear, yes, we did do the branding work for 500px. They’re an amazing client, such a great team, and they are a really large community. It is interesting, though. I don’t have much experience on that platform in the sense of how we use Dribbble, so I don’t know if each community, if the result is the same. I don’t know that there are Hire Me buttons, CTAs, and stuff that really help to drive that type of action that come from Dribbble.

But yes, I would always tell people in other industries to at least do what you can to find your Dribbble. I’ve said that many times to many people in different industries, even to developers. “I don’t know where it is. I don’t know what to tell you, but you need to find your Dribbble. You need to find your version of what I did.” That’s the easy first step as far as I’m concerned. All it takes is time and energy. If you don’t have time and energy, you obviously don’t care enough about whatever you’re trying to start or what you’re trying to accomplish.

For every industry, it’s going to be different. I think that design is one that Dribbble specifically just worked out great. I don’t know that there is one for every industry. I think that’s really tough for other industries to figure out. Like, “Oh, I don’t know where the tribe is,” and there could be other huge barriers even if you figure out where it is. How the hell do you get into it, and how do you interact?

Brian Gardner: It always seems like an opportunity, if those don’t exist for certain media, to actually be the person like … is it Dan Cederholm? He’s the one who did Dribbble, right? He’s got his co-founder, Rich?

Bill Kenney: Yeah, but I think Dan seems to get the crown the most. I don’t know if that’s just because he has the most exposure. He’s actually on Dribbble with the big following up on the first page. But yes, it’s both of them.

Brian Gardner: My point, though, is that even if you’re a creative, and we do this with our software at our company a lot, if it’s not out there and we need it, we build it. To the really, really savvy entrepreneur who’s a creative, if that medium or that Dribbble doesn’t exist within their niche, that’s an opportunity. It’s just an opportunity to go try to create that thing, be the next Dribbble founder or the next whatever founder.

Bill Kenney: Yeah, absolutely. I agree with that 100 percent. If you’re a developer and you say, “I wish there was a …” Well, I think there have been some small attempts, but yes, I agree 100 percent. If you remember Forrst, Forrst was before Dribbble, right around the same time, but that was a play to designers and developers. You could actually post code and stuff on there. That was a little bit earlier.

I don’t know that people were searching around and hiring as much as they are now from a client perspective. The community was smaller, just because that was a while ago, just like Dribbble’s community was smaller, but there seemed to be other kind of platforms that poke around, but yeah, if you had the opportunity to create one in whatever your space is, it works.

That’s the only thing I can ever say to the path we’ve taken is it works. I don’t think I did anything magical. I think I set a course, and I said, “This is what I’m going to achieve, and I’m going to achieve that by doing A, B, and C.” I did A, B, and C, and it worked out. Everybody’s path is different, but it wasn’t rocket science, I can tell you that. Look, it took me until the end of my college career to get the college algebra thing crossed off.

Lauren Mancke: Speaking of that, who are some of your heroes or people that you look up to, respect, and say, “I wish I could do X like X”?

Who Bill Looks Up To

Bill Kenney: Oh, that’s a great question. My answer is not going to contain names I would have read about in art school. The reason is simple. It’s not because I don’t respect what they’ve done and basically the foundation that they laid for design and art in general, and the history of the world, if you will. When I was a sponge and I was coming into the who am I looking up to when I was fresh into, deeper into the design world, if you will, it would have been all of a sudden the bigger names that I would have seen on Dribbble.

I hate to go back to Dribbble, but that is such a big part of my evolution over the past six years. When I think about the people that I look up to or that I respect, those are the people I’ve been around the most and have seen the most volume from, week over week. They would just pop out in my mind to be the people that I would look up to. I can tell you typically what I look up to most, whether it be a big name or a small name, would be people that do things that I don’t do or that I can’t do.

I love it when I see really great motion work come out of the variety of people that do motion work now. Motion’s really blowing up. When I see that stuff, and we have now a motion designer on our team, Will Kesling. He is awesome. That’s the stuff when you want to get down on your hands and knees and just say, “I am not worthy.” It’s like when I look at people that do the things that don’t cross my plate typically, which are going to be just amazing typography.

I just started following these two girls on Dribbble. They do really awesome felt fabric figurines. It’s so obscure. I would never even known that I would have found that. I was just kind of trolling around on Dribbble, not to say that I’m a troll. I just found these accounts. I’m like, “Wow, people make little people, but purely out of felt.” They make little mini Pepsi cans, but the scale of it is like a fingertip. It’s all felt. That’s the stuff. That’s what inspires me. I’m like, “Holy crap. That is amazing. What is that thing?”

To say that I look up to somebody, and this is in the most humble voice ever, in the branding space or even a web space, there are people that I’m like, “Wow, you do really great work, and I respect you,” but that’s not really what kind of tickles my feathers, if you will. It’s when I see the really funky stuff that’s completely unexpected. It seems like type illustration, motion work, new mediums, three-dimensional stuff, and blending platforms doing three-dimensional stuff with flat stuff and motion — all that stuff paired together. It’s crazy to me, and that’s what I really love. I think what you were looking for is for me to name drop somebody, but I haven’t done that yet [00:45:09].

Brian Gardner: Give me two or three names. Come on, two or three designers that you want to emulate, not copy, but you know what I mean? A lot of these people are on a much higher pedestal on my level than they are your level. For you, these might be peers, but I want to know two or three people that you say, “Man, that guy or that gal has just killed it in design.”

Bill Kenney: Oh, man, that’s so tough. I’m such a people pleaser. It’s like, “Oh, I got to make sure I name the right people.” Let me think about the people that I know that constantly do great work, and let me also make sure that it’s clear that I would consider these people very good people, too. That is important to who we are and who I am.

I would say Kerem is somebody that I’ve looked up to for a long time. Kerem can be found on Dribbble. He’s out of San Francisco as well. He’s West Coast at least. Kerem’s last name is Suer, I believe. He does really, really solid work, really great person. He was one when I first started on Dribbble, you’d look up and you’d go like, “Oh my God, I can never touch that level.” Then you finally get to meet them in person, and you have grown as well. Now they’re aware of you, and you’re interacting on a peer level. You’re like, “Wow, this is amazing.” I would definitely say that Kerem is one.

You know who jumps out lately who’s totally crushing stuff is Bethany Heck. She just moved on from the IBM team, or I’m sorry, sorry, the Microsoft team. She’s moving on to her new position. I actually forget where it is, but the type stuff that she’s putting out. She just did this thing with Fonts.com when she put out all these baseball card posters using all this new type that they have for sale.

That’s the kind of stuff. I saw that poster. I was like, “OMG! I need to have that. That’s amazing.” I would say that she is somebody that I’d look up to, for sure, to this day. Right now when I look at her stuff, I’m like, “Wow, this is really great.”

That covers two platforms. That covers basically UI because Kerem’s more of a UI product guy. She does a lot, but a lot of type. What other funk do you want? I could throw out the cliché names, like Draplin. Draplin’s awesome. I love hearing him talk. He does rad work, but like everybody says Draplin. I don’t need to say Draplin. Who else? Who is on your list, Brian? I’m curious to know who you [crosstalk 00:47:38].

Brian Gardner: Well, there was one person, and I don’t know, I kind of assumed that maybe it’s just too obvious. I know that you not saying him isn’t in any way a form of disrespect. Maybe you just didn’t want to say it, but I was thinking GoPro.

Bill Kenney: Were you thinking Charlie Waite?

Brian Gardner: I was thinking Charlie Waite.

Bill Kenney: Mr. Charlie Waite. Let’s talk about Charlie Waite for a minute. Charlie Waite will love this. He listens to all my stuff. Right, Charlie? You’re going to listen to this. Charlie Waite is a great person. That’s easy. You can say that. You can call me biased, but that is the truth.

Brian Gardner: And full disclosure, Charlie used to work at Focus Lab. Let’s put that out there, so everyone who’s listening knows that this is all [crosstalk 00:48:17].

Bill Kenney: Right, which is why I’m biased. Yes, Charlie Waite, so Charlie Waite worked at Focus Lab for three years. You can call him number three in command. You have me, my business partner Erik Reagan, and then Charlie Waite was next in line. Charlie is an amazing, well-rounded designer. He’s amazing in two ways. I’m glad you put me on to Charlie because this is just good design discussion. We have this talk now all the time with like, “Should designers be able to code and design it all?” and all of a sudden, it’s like we’re supposed to be everything.

Charlie, from a design perspective, taking code out, but from a design perspective, was extremely well-rounded. Projects come in, and they need all this illustration work. Charlie just whips it up. I’m like, “Wow, sh*t, I didn’t think you’d be able to do that much that good that fast. Okay.” UI work, he did branding projects. The well-roundedness of Charlie, and to be really strong basically when I worked with Charlie and Charlie got a project, and although I was his boss — we don’t even like to use that word — I had no fear. I didn’t even feel like I had to check in. Charlie just knocked stuff out.

Charlie now works at GoPro, and he leads design over there. I actually just had dinner with Charlie and his wife in the city this weekend because they were on the East Coast. They came in. It was the first time I had actually seen him in a year since Circles, like we were just talking about. Such a good time to see him. Me and Charlie Waite are still the greatest of friends. Leaving a company is always tricky in any regard, especially when there’s friendship, too.

Brian Gardner: You understood, though. You sent him off well because I know that he’s always been sort of a California, West Coast boy. You really embraced that, understood that, and knew that he was growing into a bigger position. That’s kind of important, though, right?

Letting Your Staff Grow into Bigger Positions Even When It’s Not with Your Company

Bill Kenney: Absolutely. Yes. That is important to us at Focus Lab in general. It’s easier said than done, but Charlie spent an amazing three years with us. He helped us achieve a lot as well. When it was time for him to leave it wasn’t as if he just said, “Oh, hey, I got this new gig. Thanks for helping my exposure grow on Dribbble, and I’m out of here. Good luck.”

He hit me up all along the way as people … here’s the interesting dynamic that happens at Focus Lab. People join Focus Lab, they’re strong. I can see that they’re strong. They’re not at the level where all of a sudden Apple’s going to go out and hire them because their portfolio is not there yet. It’s not been proven to those types of companies.

I can see they’re great people. They come into Focus Lab, they turn into even better people, not because I’m there for any reason. It’s just because the Focus Lab ecosystem is such an environment for growth because of all of us that are there. We all encourage it. We all want it. Followings grow. Exposure grows. Here comes the poachers, everybody. That’s fair. It is what it is. You can’t stop that. All of a sudden, all the team members get job requests from everybody because they see all the work all the time, the Instagrams, the Googles, the Pinterests, the Microsofts, everybody.

Charlie was very transparent with that. He said, “Listen, I’m getting approached by a lot of people, blah, blah, blah. I don’t plan on doing anything.” As time went by, GoPro was the perfect storm for him. It was a great opportunity for a lot of reasons.

He got to move back to the West Coast where he grew up. He actually lives in the town that he grew up in. His daughters now are going to the school that he went to school at. He’s a surfer. He was living in Alabama — time to get out of Alabama, time to go back to the West Coast, and take the great new job. Yeah, let’s put Charlie on the list. I wouldn’t have thought that initially just because it wouldn’t have crossed my mind. Honestly, right now, I would have been looking for the big names, if you will. Charlie is great all around.

Lauren Mancke: Do you have any parting words for creative entrepreneurs or just entrepreneurs in general? Any secret tips or recipes for killing it online?

Bill’s Secret Tip for Success

Bill Kenney: Oh gosh. The secret tip is you got to put your hard hat on, go out there every single day, and bang it against the wall. Some days are amazing, and some months, some quarters, and some years are amazing. Some days, some months, quarters, and years are really a grind. I think the thing for me, and the thing for us at Focus Lab, it’s the longevity. It’s the stay the course. Course correct as needed. Motivate as needed. It looks all sunshine and like it’s all easy every day from the outside perspective.

To be fair, it is 90 percent of that, but there are the days where you’re like, “Oh, can I post another thing here? Can I grind out another amazing deliverable on top of the one I just spit out?” That becomes quite a challenge. It’s being a creative on top of running a business and all of these things.

It’s not necessarily easy. I think it’s the, can you weather the length of time that you may be doing it — whether it’s three years or 30 years — and can you also weather the storms when they come? Because they’re going to come for sure. When you get on the flip side of it, you’re a bigger, better, stronger person. But can you weather that?

That would be my only advice. For me, it’s a time, energy, and intention game. If you put in the right amount of time, the right amount of energy, and the right amount of intention, you should be moving forward. That ball should be moving forward, and it should be growing for you. Just keep doing it. It’s the old ‘don’t give up’ speech, but it’s so the truth. Year after year, that starts to become pretty hard. Where do you find your motivation?

Brian Gardner: Yup. Words of wisdom from little Bill Kenney of the big ship, Focus Lab.

Bill Kenney: Thanks.

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This week we’re joined by Chris Lema. Chris is a Product Strategist, a people manager, a speaker, and a blogger. He also works with companies to help them build better software products, run better software development teams, improve their marketing messages, and bring their products to market.

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In this episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Chris Lema discuss:

• Aligning your work with your areas of expertise
• Making a course correction in your career
• Defining leadership by difficult decisions
• Leveraging WordPress in your business
• Leadership that requires a move beyond good
• Taking the leap to achieving success
• Being sold on yourself to become the leader you were meant to be

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

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The Show Notes

• Follow Chris on Twitter
• Visit ChrisLema.com
• Chris’ Online Courses
• Chris’ Books and Products
• Beyond Good
• CaboPress

The Transcript

How to Be a Great Community Leader, with Chris Lema

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM. StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Chris Lema to discuss how to be a good and effective community leader.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, and I’m joined, as always, with the vice president of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke.

Lauren Mancke: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us this week. We are continuing our series on talking to members of the WordPress community.

Brian Gardner: Now, when we refer to them as ‘members,’ we also refer to them as ‘experts’ because, in fact, these people are. I’m very happy today. We are joined by Chris Lema. Chris is a product strategist, people manager, a speaker, and a blogger. He also works with companies to help them build better software products, run better software development teams, improve their marketing messages, and bring their products to market.

Chris, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome.

Chris Lema: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Brian Gardner: You’re one of those guys who I knew for a fact, even back when we were first talking about StudioPress FM, I said, “We have to have Chris on the show.” It was just a matter of trying to figure out what topic in particular. There’s probably about 10 that I could’ve approached you with. I’m glad that you decided to talk to us. We are talking about leadership and how to be a good and effective community leader.

We oversee a pretty big community ourselves in our little world here at StudioPress. We are close to 200,000 strong. A lot of them are active in the community as developers, designers, and users. I thought it would be a great fit to have you on the show, so let’s kick this off.

I know you’re a humble guy, right? From what I’ve seen on your website and the experiences I’ve personally had with you, you don’t love to talk about yourself. In fact, we had an email exchange just over the weekend, and you made a joke and said, “Oh, gosh. This is all about me.” I know you were sort of kidding. This is our interview and our show, so I’m calling the shots here. Give us the skinny on who you are, what you do, and how you came about.

The Skinny on Chris

Chris Lema: I am a guy who’s had the privilege of doing, roughly speaking, the same thing for more than 20 years. If you are a travel agent or a photographer and your world got pulled out from under you, through no fault of your own, because technology changed, then that’s a bummer, right? For me, I started working with the web in ’94 and started building applications, websites that were functional verses just kind of brochure-ware, back then. That has taken off, and we’ve changed the name of what those applications are from ASP to SaaS. That has also gone up and to the right.

I’m a guy who’s just been in a really lucky place where there’s been just tremendous growth, and I’ve been given the opportunity to build software, lead people, and do that for a whole bunch of years. In the midst of that, about 10 years ago, 11 years ago, I started working with WordPress and about five and a half years ago started trying to get involved in the community.

Lauren Mancke: On the front page of your website you have a section that says, “I speak. I coach. I write.” Such a simple, great breakdown. Which of those, though, is your favorite and why? Also, touch on which one of those is maybe your least favorite.

Public Speaking vs. Writing

Chris Lema: My favorite is public speaking. When I get to stand on a stage, when I get to speak and tell stories, and watch people engage, watch the aha moment when they realize you’re telling a story, but the story has a point — “I’m trying to predict what the point is. Then I’m trying to figure out how it relates to me, and then, aha, now I saw it. I get it, and this means so many things for me” — that’s my all-time favorite.

Probably the hardest one for me is writing. When I first started writing, it was hard to figure out how to use my everyday voice and my storytelling voice in writing. I felt like, “Okay, I am not a writer,” and so you’d sit down to write and feel like, “Okay. That’s probably not the right words, or that’s not the right sentence structure.” Writing is harder. Public speaking is a lot easier for me. I love doing it. Thankfully, I get the opportunity to do it. It’s a lot of fun.

Brian Gardner: Now, it’s funny and, Lauren, I think you can probably side with me on this one. You know where I’m going with this one. It’s funny, Chris, to hear you say, “I love public speaking. It comes easy to me. I enjoy that, but the writing thing … ” As a person who much prefers to write over public speak, and I’m sure Lauren’s the same way, it’s interesting. It shows two different types of minds, skillsets, and all of that.

In my mind, I’m thinking to myself, “Oh, my gosh. You put me on stage. I’m going to freeze,” but I can control the mood, control what I say and how I say it when I write. I can prepare it all ahead of time, and then I can kind of caress it. Yes, I don’t get the aha moment, necessarily, that you might get, and there are people like you who I have envy for, sure, who can go up on stage and speak. Jerod Morris from our company is another one of those guys where I just want to walk out of the room when I see him talk. It’s funny because I’m sure Lauren and I resonate. I’m sure others resonate as well with that. It’s just interesting to hear you say that.

Chris Lema: Well, part of it is I’m just very comfortable adjusting and connecting as I’m speaking. I’m doing this constant calculus of where to take it, how far to go — do I veer off course or not — based on the feedback I’m getting from an audience, or at least the first set of rows of an audience. In writing, that feedback is only in your head. There’s no one reading it as you’re writing and giving you the, “Yeah. I’m with you,” or, “I think you lost me,” or, “Go deeper into that.” It’s harder for me to do that.

Brian Gardner: Well, different strokes for different folks, right? We’re all wired differently. If we were all writers and no one could speak, we’d live in a pretty bad world.

All right. Speaking of speaking — ha-ha, pun intended — I think of you as a guy who’s all over the place all the time. About five years ago, there was this movie that came out. My wife dragged me to it. It was with Sarah Jessica Parker. I think it was called something like I Don’t Know How She Does it. It was about this mom who had a job, kids, and all of these responsibilities. She was everywhere, all over the place. It was fine. We got through the movie and all that, but it makes me think of you.

Before we go any further, I have to just ask, Chris. As a person who writes, speaks, blogs, coaches, and travels almost as much as Brian and Jennifer Bourn seem to, although they’re more local, but you fly everywhere, man. How do you do it? How do you do all the things that you do? — and you do them well. You’re always traveling, whether it be at conferences, vacations with your family, or combinations of the two. You’re blogging. You’re teaching. You’re consulting. You’re everywhere. How do you do it?

Aligning Your Work with Your Areas of Expertise

Chris Lema: I think it goes back to I try and do a few things, and then do them more often than not and try and leverage the benefit of them a lot. Let me explain what I’m talking about. I gave a talk this last week in Fargo, North Dakota, but the talk that I gave to a group, the Association of Advertising, that talk I gave had a lot of material that is going into a new book. I’m re-purposing both bits of that, but it comes out of having spent three years consulting and coaching people on some of the same material.

I think part of the issue is because I don’t have to change what I do over and over again. Because my industry, what I do, and the way I work is consistent and constant, I get the benefit of being able to just leverage a lot of what I’m doing in a lot of different ways. If I had to come up with brand-new research for every talk I was giving, brand-new research for every post I was writing, and brand-new research for every bit of coaching or consulting I was doing, it would blow up the amount of work I had to do.

I try and keep everything … maybe the word we’re talking about here is ‘alignment.’ By keeping strong alignment around two or three areas that I focus on, I get to benefit from that when I go to do all the different stuff I’m doing.

Brian Gardner: That’s interesting. You’re speaking to something that we talk about a lot on the blog at Copyblogger and us as a company at Rainmaker Digital, which is re-purposing content — whether it be taking podcast interviews and re-purposing that into blog posts or, in your case, experience with consulting and then taking that and putting it into blog posts, but maybe extracting some of that and using that in keynote speeches and stuff like that.

From a content standpoint, re-purposing would be the way that you move efficiently, right? Is that what you’re saying?

Chris Lema: Yup.

Brian Gardner: Interesting.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. That sounds really smart. Let’s talk a little bit about WordPress specifically. You touched on it a little bit earlier. Let’s talk about how it pertains to you and what you’re doing. How did you get involved with WordPress, and where do you see your current role in the community?

Making a Course Correction in Your Career

Chris Lema: I started using the product 11 years ago. It was mostly to save work. In those days, either you were using pure HTML or … I was playing with both websites that were pure HTML and others that were CMSs like PHP-Nuke or other solutions. The whole point was to try and give a website to a client and let them manage their content without calling you back — again, to make your life far more efficient and aligned.

I chanced upon WordPress one weekend, and that changed it up for me. I just started doing everything with WordPress. I was coaching a lot of startups in the time. Mostly, I was doing product strategy, but every now and then startups would need a website. I would help them get that site up, so WordPress was really great.

About five and a half years ago, we moved from Northern California in Silicon Valley. We moved to San Diego, and I had no coaching clients down here. I had no consulting gigs down here. I had no places that asked me to speak because I was a non-known entity down here. I said, “Oh. Why don’t I blog?” I thought, “What would I blog about?” It took a couple weeks and months to figure out. I said, “You know what? Maybe I can help in the WordPress space, but with something different.”

I’m constantly someone who says, “Try and take a corner that isn’t congested and doesn’t have someone taking it because it’s a lot easier to take that corner than if you’re writing the same posts that 40 other people are writing.”

For me, the business side of WordPress was an easy corner to take. Other than Bill Erickson giving a talk here or there, which always was fantastic and phenomenal, nobody else was really talking about the business side. I said, “Well, I have a lot of business expertise in the software space. Maybe I can help there.” I started writing about that and started writing about some of the more complex notions of WordPress that people weren’t spending a lot of time on. It blossomed from there.

Brian Gardner: It’s funny you say that ¬– there weren’t a lot of people writing about business and WordPress. From my perspective, there’s probably a degree of fear, fear of, “I don’t want to share my secrets,” the trade secrets that brought me from a guy sitting at a desk job to making six figures a month in selling WordPress themes. There’s a lot of business expertise I could have shared, but of course, there’s a part of me that was like, “Why would I want to share that?” As un-open source as that might seem, that’s just the reality of it.

It’s nice to see that you come in at it from the perspective of a guy with business knowledge and bringing it to the WordPress community — rather than just someone who’s talking about their success within WordPress. What took you so long, though? You said that you started WordPress 10 or 11 years ago, but you only got into the community five or six years. What happened in that first five or six years, and then what changed? What made you decide now it’s time to jump in and really just become ultimately what you are now, which is a leader?

Chris Lema: I don’t ever really predict where it’s going to end up. I want to be clear about that. A lot of people I think try and be the next ______, the next Brian Gardner, the next Brian Clark, the next whoever — whatever name you put in there. You’re like, “I want to be the next Carrie Dils.” You’re like, “Hold on, I can’t be those things. I can be me.”

I think part of the transition was figuring out what I knew, what I liked, what I felt like I could give, and what was comfortable and easy in that context. Part of it was moving to a new place, not knowing anyone, and saying, “I’m going to have to resort to a different skill,” which is writing versus public speaking.

Part of it was saying, “I have a prediction about this WordPress thing. I have a feeling that, over the course of time, marketing companies will stop wanting to use their IT departments and want to do it themselves. I think I found a tool that they will like, but as they do that big companies will start using WordPress. Currently, the ecosystem that’s here is not mature enough to understand how to work with big companies, but I have that background. Maybe I can help them start thinking through what they’re doing and also in the long run help WordPress grow into something that can be adopted and worked with in the enterprise level. That’s where I bring some value.”

I think it’s a lot of those things coming together and saying, “All right. Let’s give this a shot.” You take little risks, you invest in little bits, and then you see, “Am I getting any positive feedback?” The feedback takes a little while. Then, over time, it starts building on. Then you go, “Oh. Hey, look. It’s all working out.”

Defining Leadership by Difficult Decisions

Brian Gardner: That’s great perspective. I like that, a lot actually. That’s really good food for thought, even for me, just moving forward in what I want to continue to do and thinking about just the legacy I want to leave and so forth.

So a few years ago, you were invited by the folks and some of your friends over at Crowd Favorite, a big WordPress company, to serve on their board of directors. Not even two years later — I think it was, what, 19 months I think your bog post said — 19 months later you stepped down.

In your words, you said, “I love WordPress. Nothing about that is changing. I love all of my friends at Crowd Favorite. That’s not changing either, but professionally, it’s time to make a course correction.” Interesting phrase that you used there. I think a good leader really shines when he or she has to make a difficult decision. It’s easy to be a leader when things are going great, but when it’s time to say, “We have to shift, to adjust, or what not,” and to then have to communicate that to the people who are in your world at that point, and that was a difficult decision for you. That I know.

With so many people looking up to you in the community and the risk of letting some of them down, walk us through the decision and how you made that. It just seems like it would have been easier to just stay on. You disrupted your life and, in a way, probably much more beneficially than I can imagine, by making the decision, but I think it’s just helpful to know, hey, what do people think of when they make these bigger decisions?

Chris Lema: I had been on the board for about a year before I joined the company. I joined the company for about 18 months, a year and a half, 19 months, I think. Then it was time to go. It was probably two or three months before that where several different things came to a head.

When I first joined Crowd Favorite, one of the things we talked about was, “Let’s clean this up and tighten it up, and get it really running full steam ahead,” which is the stuff that I know how to do professionally. The blogging and those things are all nice. They’ve been on the side. My day job has been managing software engineers.

They’re like, “Come in. Let’s clean this up and tighten it up. Then we can look at building a product side.” My background is in products, not in services, not consulting. I’ve worked with and helped lead consulting organizations, but only in the context that they are consultants for our product. I’m a product guy. I went in, and I started doing it. The first six months, we did a lot of stuff. At the 12-month mark, we had a lot more done, and everything was going really well.

Somewhere after that, we were more shifting into what I call for my life ‘maintenance mode,’ where you’re just keeping things running. That’s not really my style. I’m not that guy, and it was a service company. I didn’t wake up in the morning going, “Oh, my god. This is going to be amazing because I’m building a product.” It was, “Okay. Let’s lead these people well.” I think there was a part of me that was itching.

But I’ll be honest. Maybe there are other folks like me. After 10 months of doing anything, I get an itch. Like, “Oh. I should go do something else.” I’ve had to develop the discipline to not jump when that itch comes because staying power teaches you something else about yourself. It helps you go deeper in certain areas that you wouldn’t if you just keep jumping. I recognize, “Oh, yeah. It’s a little after 12, 13 months. I’m getting a little itch, but you know what? That’s not something we act on, and just focus in, get some stuff done, and lead well.”

On top of that, we get to this point where my wife had some emergency surgery. It was very scary. I sat there I’m a kind of person who can think in a lot of different directions and then think through what happens after that and what happens after that. But in this particular case, as she went into surgery, I couldn’t think past the next step. Like, “What happens if this doesn’t work out?” I fell asleep. It was four or five in the morning, and I fell asleep. By seven, they were waking me up and telling me she was okay, which was great news, but I was sitting in the spot where I went, “What am I … ?”

I think everyone goes through that. You go through some hard part, and then you go, “What am I doing in life? Am I just sitting in a mode where I’m just doing all the same routine without focus, without drive, without energy, and without alignment to the rest of my life?” We sat down. We talked about it a little. She’s like, “Well, don’t make any rash decisions,” because we were literally right at January one. She’s like, “Don’t make any rash decisions.” I said, “No. I’m going to just work this through.”

It took a little bit of time. Then, finally, in April I said, “Okay. It really is time to move on.” Part of the lesson out of that is you should always be willing to sit, even when you get fidgety, for a little bit because you don’t know what is there for you to grow and develop by not jumping every time something doesn’t work out or something is a little boring. When hard times come, I think it’s important to figure out what’s really important.

I think ultimately even when you know you’re going to make a decision, timing is critical. If you just bolt and you just walk out I could have left a lot of damage at Crowd Favorite by stepping out at the wrong time. You wait a few months. You try and get some things in place. You try and make sure that when you leave it will be better than when you got there and that you leave in a way that leaves that community whole, leaves that company fine, and allows you to step out.

I did all that and have spent the last several months doing some consulting and other things, but hoping to hold off making the next major choice through the rest of this year. Then in 2017, you start looking at, “Okay, what’s the next big thing?”

Lauren Mancke: Anyone who’s heard you speak knows you’re a leader. You just have that way about you. You’ve got that power to compel people to follow you. Have you always felt this? Have you always felt that you were a leader? When you were younger, did you know it? Are there any examples of when you were a kid maybe where you led or you had an instance where you took the reins? Maybe not. Maybe it was when you were older. At what point in your life did you realize you had this gift?

Chris Lema: I was horrible in junior high — like you’d try out for ASB. You run a campaign, and I lost, badly. I don’t even think I was trying for VP or president. I was I think maybe for treasurer. There was definitely not one of those things where you realize at a young age, “I’m a leader.” You’re like, “I suck.” Part of that was, I think, the way I thought about leadership. I thought about it as an important title that makes you important, and that is not leadership at all.

It wasn’t until probably in the middle of high school, as I started learning to serve and take care of others, that I felt like, “Okay. The leadership is happening without me wanting it. It’s happening because I’m developing trust and rapport with people who want my say — but it’s because I’m in their corner.”

I leaned into that in college and spent a lot of time figuring out what kind of leader and how I led. By that point in college, it was a really clear juxtaposition when you see someone who’s leading for the title versus someone who’s leading for the impact. Those two people look different. They act different.

For me, I think it was somewhere around being 20 and middle of college. I felt like, “Okay. I have a couple tools in my tool belt. I can align both public speaking with some one-on-one coaching, with some professional empathy, with a vision, being able to see for other people where they could go, see what’s best for them, or see things in them that was there, but they weren’t willing to own or accept themselves simply out of insecurity.”

So I lean into it, and I’ve leaned into it ever since. I actually have a master’s degree in leadership because I, in the middle of working at Emphasis, I was a little bored. Instead of jumping ship I said, “I think I want to go back and study.” The company said, “Hey, we’ll pay for your masters if you stick around longer.” I said, “Okay.” I went back and studied even more about leadership.

Brian Gardner: There you go. Chris Lema definitely has the right to say he’s a leader. He’s got the master’s degree in leadership, so we certainly chose the right person to have on the show.

Okay. We’ve talked about you and your experience in the business world. We’ve talked about you and your experience in WordPress a little bit. As we all know, there’s many types of leaders all over the place. Let’s talk about WordPress specifically. Who would you consider to be some of the best leaders in the WordPress community?

I’m not talking specifically about financially successful and things like that, but just things that you’ve seen people do either that you resonate with or you do that, “Yes. I’m so glad they did that,” type of thing.” Give us a few names and maybe just a sentence or two on why you think each of those people are demonstrations of a good leader.

Good Leadership Exemplified

Chris Lema: Sure. Steve Zehngut is a friend of mine down here in Orange County. He runs a company called Zeek. They do a bunch of WordPress and mobile stuff. He started a meetup so that he could build this community of WordPress people. Then he started showing other people how he did it and giving them the opportunity to use his physical space for their own meetups. I think Steve’s meetup has birthed something like 12 other meetups in the whole area. They all start by using his space, and then they eventually branch out into other spaces. That is a leader — someone who says, “I can have an impact here. Let me help out. Let me help other people. Then let me give them the space to grow into themselves.” I think he’s a fantastic example.

Jennifer Bourn is a good friend of mine who is up in Sacramento. Her ability to connect and help people around branding in the WordPress ecosystem is fantastic. Where most people get up and they do a talk at a conference, and they rattle off stories, like I do — rattle off stories, have a main point, get off stage. You go, “Hey, that was entertaining.” Jennifer shows up with a whole packet of worksheets, hands it to you, and walks you through how to get yourself better. Anyone who’s committing their time, without necessarily getting paid, to help you be a better you, they’re my idol. I think they’re fantastic.

Another guy, Jason Cohen, is the CTO over at WP Engine. He’s a guy that is consistently helping people think better about what they’re doing. He does that at work. He does that in WP Engine, but he does that outside of it. You hang out and talk with him, and every conversation I walk away with something additional.

All of these people are leading in a way that helps the other people they interact with get better. Some people do it through writing, obviously. You guys know Brian Clark. These are some of the people that I’ve invited to my own conference that I run for WordPress businesses, products, and service companies, an event called CaboPress. I go to these leaders, and I say, “Come join me in Cabo and have these discussions with other people who want to get better.” They say, “Yes.” Those are the people that I look up to and say, “These are great people. I want to hang out with them.”

Being Sold on Yourself to Become the Leader You Were Meant to Be

Brian Gardner: I’m going to jump ahead to the question I had for you a little bit further on because it piggy backs on exactly what you were just talking about. When I go to your website, the first thing I see at the top of it is a quote or a testimonial. It says, “Chris Lema doesn’t sell you on himself. He sells you on yourself.” Now, basically everything you’ve said up to this point on our interview — talking about leadership by serving, leadership by example, and leadership in the form of putting the emphasis on teaching people, enabling people, all of that other stuff.

Your form of leadership, which I really, really love and appreciate, is not about building yourself up, but building others up, and maybe, as a byproduct of that, that helps with your brand and all that kind of stuff. I actually remember our conversation. We sat down and had breakfast last summer in Denver. I wanted to pick your brain about some things. I came away from that conversation almost feeling selfish and saying, “Man, this was all about me.”

Then I realized, to some degree, that was what you wanted that conversation to be about, right? It’s not about Chris. It’s about those that he’s with. Just speak to that just in general. My guess is that you do the same sort of thing when you lead your family. It’s always about your wife, your kids, or stuff like that. Is that just who you are?

Chris Lema: I think it’s who I’m trying to be. I think that quote on my website is as much to center and ground me as it is to share that with others. I really appreciate Mika’s statement. I wasn’t even in the room when she shared it in Chicago several years ago, but I got all the Tweets and heard about it. I went, “That is amazing and wonderful. I’m going to cherish that.”

At the core of it, I think you need to constantly ground yourself — especially if you’re getting any level of popularity. At least for me, I have consistently tried to take action that says, “Remind yourself that you put your pants on the same way every day.”

When Silicon Valley was getting hot, startups were growing, and I was selling companies, I moved out to the East Bay to say, “I’m going to live in a normal town with normal people, drive a normal car, so that I am grounded in the fact that I don’t need the very next thing.” The same thing happens to the WordPress community. I think it’s a tactic, a habit I use to say, “You stay grounded by remembering that you’re here to help other people, not just to aggrandize yourself,” but I think what I’ve discovered over the years is, it works.

When you focus on someone else and you help them get better, especially if what’s holding them back is just insecurity. It’s not a certain skillset they’re missing. It’s not something they can’t do anything about. It’s really just the fact that they are insecure — and so many of us walk around with that insecurity that holds people back — and you just go, “Let me just break that open for you a little bit. Let me just show you that, no, you actually have what you need. You can take this next step,” or, “Let me show you a step you didn’t know you could take and take it.” I think it ends up being incredibly helpful.

The phrase that runs in my head all the time is “comfort, come alongside.” Leading for me is, how do you come alongside someone in their journey — not the journey you have for them, but the journey they have for themselves? Then how do you comfort them when they have the insecurity to encourage them to take next steps? Most of us, we have a special puzzle piece in our pocket, and we think, “Yeah. I found this puzzle piece. This is mine,” and we stick it in our pocket. You’re like, “No, no, no. The piece has to go on the broad. That’s what makes it awesome is when the whole picture comes together.” That’s what I spend my time doing.

Lauren Mancke: Speaking of helping others, let’s talk a little bit more about your website, ChrisLema.com. You’ve got a tagline on there, “Helping businesses leverage WordPress, and helping WordPress businesses find leverage.” How are you writing on your blog to successfully do that? What else would you write about that also helps with this?

Leveraging WordPress in Your Business

Chris Lema: Part of the thing is I bring companies to WordPress. Companies that are like, “I don’t know if WordPress can do this,” I write posts that say, “WordPress can. You can use WordPress to do these things you want to do.” That’s bringing small businesses and big businesses who are trying to figure out, “Can this really work this way?”

Then, I work with WordPress companies, products and service companies to help them with their marketing and to get their message out better. Often, I am writing posts about them and redirecting some sunlight to them, or I am highlighting what they’re doing in a way that causes people to go, “Oh, that’s interesting.” Then, of course, consulting and coaching is to help them with their segmentation, their marketing strategy, their communication, and all that kind of stuff.

The blog is a key part of it, so yes, I think it’s successful in doing what I want it to do. I think just so I don’t get bored, I write about a couple other things here and there. There are some posts on public speaking. There’s a couple other posts in there that are personal, but predominantly, that blog is about WordPress and that attempt to help different groups of people connect to it on the site.

Lauren Mancke: Speaking of connecting people, what is your favorite part of leading and community building?

Leadership That Requires a Move Beyond Good

Chris Lema: I think my all-time favorite part is shining a light on someone that you didn’t know or a product that you had never heard of, a company that you weren’t aware of, and what they’re doing and how they’re doing it. When I get to do that and when it works, it’s a wonderful component and incredibly exciting for me to see the result when that happens.

It doesn’t always happen, but if I can say, “Hey, check out this company. Look what they’re doing, or look at what they just released in a product.” Then they contact me a couple weeks later and they go, “Oh my god. You don’t even know what just happened over here,” I’m like, “That’s awesome.” That’s my favorite part.

Brian Gardner: All right. ChrisLema.com is all about WordPress and business. Just recently you just launched a blog called Beyond Good. It’s on one of our themes, which of course we’re thankful that you’re using. You use that one specifically to teach about leadership and how you can encourage folks and teach them how to take their leadership to a new level.

You say, “Leadership is hard. Most of the time we settle for good enough. Leading people requires more, requires that we move beyond good.” That reminds me a lot about the book Jim Collins wrote called Good to Great, where he writes about why some companies make the leap and others don’t. What do you think stands in the way — whether it be individuals as entrepreneurs, small businesses, or even bigger businesses — from taking the leap to achieving that success from good to great?

Taking the Leap to Achieving Success

Chris Lema: Insecurity. Insecurity I think everything boils down to. When a person doesn’t have the courage to take a step that is different than what they’ve done before, when a company doesn’t have the courage to hire someone that is different than what they’ve hired before — whatever it is that they’re doing — and they don’t have the temerity or the courage to step into it, more often than not, when you dig into, it’s not the numbers. It’s not the prediction. It is insecurity. It is a fear of, “What if I do this wrong? What if this turns out wrong? What will other people think of me?”

A lot of what holds people back is that insecurity. I spend a lot of time personally, one-on-one, doing the work of trying to mitigate that. Now, that said, there’s a lot of little reasons why companies just don’t lead well, that it’s just because they don’t know better. The blog tries to solve that problem.

I can’t really solve insecurity just on a blog. When I’m coaching, I will work that through, but when I’m writing, I’m mostly trying to give some of the other tips, the other ways to think about things, the other questions to answer on the blog Beyond Good.

Lauren Mancke: Let’s get into a little bit of recommendations. Do you have any favorite blogs or books that you can recommend to the StudioPress FM audience?

Chris’ Reading Recommendations

Chris Lema: I always have book recommendations because I’m always reading. There’s a meaty book that I like called Learn or Die. I find that it’s quite good. There’s another one called Peak, which is focusing on the new science of expertise, which I’m also reading. There’s another book called Strategic Storytelling, which I would recommend only because my storytelling book isn’t done yet. All of those I’d say are really great.

Brian Gardner: Does that go along with your ‘cool story, bro’ thing?

Chris Lema: Yeah. Exactly. I love stories and the power of stories.

Brian Gardner: Okay. What about blogs? You gave us a few books. Just people that digest better reading individual blog posts or what not, whether it be on leadership, WordPress-type stuff, who’s blogs do you frequent that you just get a lot out of and like to share from?

Chris Lema: Well, let me caveat that for one quick second to say, if you’re not reading books, you should. The reality is, when you’re writing a blog post, normally that’s a five-minute investment. When you read a book, it may be several hours of investment. Part of the dynamic is, if you’re not making the investment to read depth, I think your leadership thoughts and your leadership understanding are all still pretty shallow. That’s not to say you can’t read good blogs. I’m just saying you should make time and build the habit of reading books because they’re worth doing.

Now, that said, Michael Hyatt is a fantastic guy to read if you want to read a blog. John Maxwell is another guy whose blog is awesome. Dan Rockwell, who I’m pretty sure Dan’s writing a WordPress blog. Actually, I think Michael Hyatt’s is well. Dan’s is Something.WordPress.com I think, Leadership Freak. Those are definitely ones that I would point to and say, “Hey, check those out because I think you’ll dig them.”

Brian Gardner: As we wrap this up, if we were to give you the opportunity to do a 60-second speech right here on the show, what is the one piece of advice to anyone listening regarding the topic of leadership that you would want to give?

Chris’ Epic Advice on Leadership: Lead As Only You Can Lead

Chris Lema: Sixty seconds on leadership. Asking me to do anything in 60 seconds is hard.

Brian Gardner: Loaded question.

Chris Lema: Let’s try it. Here we go. In your pursuit to lead others well, in your pursuit to be someone who is considered a leader, never make the mistake of looking to someone else to determine who you are. Never look at someone else to tell you who you should be. Never look at someone else’s journey and say, “That’s the journey I need to have,” because the reality is, you’re unique. You are completely unique. To that end, your journey will be unique, and the way you lead and help others will be unique. So figure out you.

My one piece of advice is, figure out what motivates you. Figure out how you work best. Figure out what is easy for you and, at the same time, aligns with your passion, your interest in helping others. When you figure all that out, when you figure out how to be you, then find the leadership route that works best for that. In that way, you’re leading as only you can lead.

Brian Gardner: That was brilliance in 48 seconds.

Lauren Mancke: Wow.

Brian Gardner: Man, we got to clip that out and use that or put it in a blog. I’m going to re-purpose that. Chris, do I have your permission?

Chris Lema: You totally have my permission.

Brian Gardner: Of course, we will link to you. I will link to you when I do that. I’m almost speechless. I honestly don’t know what I should say next — other than the call to action, which I have here on my script. This is great. It’s a great segue. If you are convinced that Chris is the right guy for you, whether it be to hire — I know you make available yourself via phone calls, also various ways to be consulted with and so on — or if you just want to read Chris’ stuff. All of it’s good.

Do you want to be sold on yourself or become the leader you were meant to be? Chris obviously has a ton of knowledge, shares his wealth with that knowledge in the form of articles, books, courses, videos. Pretty much any media you can imagine, he’s done it. For more of that information, you can check him out at ChrisLema.com and his leadership blog at BeyondGood.com.

Lauren Mancke: If you liked what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at StudioPress.FM. You can also help Brian and I hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes. It’s a great way to never ever miss an episode. We want to thank Chris for coming on the show. It’s been great.

Chris Lema: Thanks, guys.

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This week we re joined by Seth Spears. Seth s company (Spears Marketing) helps small business owners and bloggers build a reliable and profitable web presence that works… even when you’re not working. His primary focus is on digital marketing strategy.

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Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. 
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Seth is a husband, a father, and fanatical about the Cincinnati Reds and the Cincinnati Bengals. He s a staunch free-market advocate and often called a renaissance man. Last, but certainly not least, Seth is a part of the brotherhood I founded two years ago called Brocation, where a group of entrepreneurs take a few days each winter and hang out in the mountains of Colorado.

In this episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Seth Spears discuss:

• The founding of Spears Marketing in 2009
• Focusing on your core competencies
• Tools to build your online presence
• Branching out into the Wellness space
• The power of an effective marketing campaign
• Common marketing mistakes made by small businesses
• Successful marketing for the biggest ROI
• Repurposing content for multiple distribution channels
• The value of networking with like-minded entrepreneurs

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

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The Show Notes

• Follow Spears Marketing on Twitter
• Visit SpearsMarketing.com
• Like Spears Marketing on Facebook
• Follow Spears Marketing on Instagram
• Wellness Media
• Brocation

The Transcript

The One Thing That Can Make or Break Your Creative Business

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM. StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I are joined by Seth Spears of Spears Marketing to discuss why a marketing campaign can make or break your creative business.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I’m your host, Brian Gardner, and today I’m joined, as always, with the vice president of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke.

Lauren Mancke: Hello, hello. Thanks for joining us this week. We are continuing our series on talking to members of the WordPress community.

Brian Gardner: Today we’re joined by Seth Spears. Seth’s company (Spears Marketing) helps small business owners and bloggers build a reliable and profitable web presence that works. His primary focus is on digital marketing strategy. He is a husband, a father, fanatical about the Cincinnati Reds and the Cincinnati Bengals, though I don’t know why, and he’s a staunch free-market advocate and often called a Renaissance man.

Last but certainly not least, Seth is a part of the brotherhood I founded two years ago called Brocation, where a group of us entrepreneurs take a few days each winter and hang out in the mountains of Colorado. Anyway Seth, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome.

Seth Spears: Thanks, Brian. Hi, guys, how are you?

Brian Gardner: We’re doing good. Lauren?

Lauren Mancke: Good, good, good.

Brian Gardner: Good, we’re all good, so let’s start talking.

Seth Spears: It’s good to be good.

Brian Gardner: Yes it is. All right, so you founded Spears Marketing in 2009 as a one-man band in the digital marketing area. It’s a digital marketing shop that you created. What’s the prequel to that? What were you doing before 2009?

The Founding of Spears Marketing in 2009

Seth Spears: Yeah, it’s a great question, Brian. Prior to that I was working for a college in Nashville, Tennessee, and I was the assistant director of admissions there. I was doing a lot traveling around, recruiting students, encouraging them to attend the college that I was working for. I ended up leaving there after about four years, kind of got burnt out and was sick of it, and decided I was going to go out on my own and do independent consulting for homeschooled students preparing for college.

Obviously, I had the background on what it took to get into college working for the university, and I was also homeschooled in high school. I was intimately familiar with that process as well. So doing that, I realized that if I was going to do consulting, I had to have a website, so I began researching on how to build a website.

I’ve always been a tech early adopter and played around with different software, social media. I had heard of WordPress. I think I’d played with WordPress.com a little bit and Blogger, and I actually had started a couple of blogs back in 2005, 2006, but nothing big. Definitely wasn’t an expert in HTML, CSS, or anything digital marketing at the time, although I did have a marketing degree.

I began reading as much as I could on building a website, promoting yourself, and using social media in order to do that. It just so happened that, while the consulting gig I was doing there didn’t become that successful, I learned a whole lot about online marketing, using WordPress, building websites, and social media that it turned into a lot of friends and family members asking me to help them to build a website for them. It kind of led into a natural progression of starting a web design and digital marketing agency.

Lauren Mancke: Your company started out as a freelance business and then grew into a boutique agency, but then you scaled back to a one-on-one targeted approach. I can probably guess the answer to this based on my own experience with scaling back my agency, but talk to us a little bit about how all that went down, why you started to focus exclusively on client strategy and consulting, and moved away from service implementation.

Focusing on Your Core Competencies

Seth Spears: I got burnt out. I grew things from just me doing everything and being a one-man shop to growing it into a mini-agency where I had a couple employees, outsourced some other services, and was taking on anything and everything. If there was money to be made there in the online world, I was doing it — everything from the web design, from social media, creation, strategy, implementation, SEO work, some banner creation logo stuff. Just a little bit of everything, really.

Wherever I saw an opportunity, I was taking it, and I got burnt out. I realized, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. It’s more important to focus on what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and really narrow down the focus on your core competencies. I realized what I really enjoy and what I’m good at is the consulting and strategy — working with other online business owners and bloggers, helping them to figure out what works best and to grow, and market their site and their business for more traffic and increased revenue.

Brian Gardner: Now, did you come into our space through Copyblogger or through StudioPress? I’m trying to remember how I first met you, and I was thinking about that.

How Seth Found His Way to StudioPress

Seth Spears: I guess it would be Copyblogger, sort of. I’ve always been very entrepreneurially minded, and even before I started doing the independent consulting in 2009, I was familiar with Copyblogger. I’m thinking that was around 2007, 2008. I was, I wouldn’t say a regular reader of Copyblogger, but I was familiar with it, and I did read many articles just trying to improve myself, learn more marketing strategies, and things like that.

I became familiar with StudioPress when I was trying to teach myself web design and learning about WordPress, and I was looking for themes that I liked. This would’ve been late 2009. I think around October or November, and I ran across StudioPress and the Pro Plus Package. I was broke and looking for the best deal I could possibly find on as many really good-looking themes. I found some coupon code for the StudioPress Pro Plus Package, and I think I spent $99 to get all of them.

I was like, “Oh, this is the best deal, and I really like some of the themes.” This was pre-Genesis even, and I’ve been hooked ever since. I think I made the best decision possible there, and I’ve said before, that was the best $99 I’ve ever spent in business.

Brian Gardner: All right. Everyone listening? It’s not $99 anymore, or never was supposed to be, but apparently back then it got through.

Seth Spears: Yeah, somehow. Some little coupon code that … I don’t even know.

Brian Gardner: Yeah.

Lauren Mancke: How do the tools we that we offer help make running your business smoother and easier?

Tools to Build Your Online Presence

Seth Spears: Most of the clients that I work with now, they’re bloggers. Even the ones that are not bloggers, they just have a business and a web presence. Probably 95 percent of them are on WordPress, and since we all know that Genesis is the de facto standard when it comes to WordPress frameworks and themes, it just works. It’s so extensible. You can do so much with it. It’s safe. It’s secure. It’s fast, and it’s SEO friendly.

Just the themes themselves are fantastic. I host many sites on Synthesis, which is great. The fact that it has the Scribe SEO plugin built in is a major benefit to that. That definitely helps with client sites in order to improve their search engine optimization and help them to rank a little bit better.

All the information that Copyblogger puts out, either through the membership and now all the podcasts and everything let’s not forget the conferences — I’ve been to every single one. I’m coming to the next one, too. The information is just great. You’d be hard pressed to find somewhere other than Copyblogger and Rainmaker Digital that puts out as much quality information as you guys do.

Brian Gardner: And we don’t even need to continue the show anymore. This was just a commercial for our company.

Seth Spears: I’m not even being paid for that.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, we did not pay him for that plug.

Seth Spears: No, I looked back one time and realized I have purchased every single thing that Rainmaker Digital now has put out with the exception of Third Tribe, I think, and that’s because it came before I was even in the industry. If that’s still around, you can get me a copy of that. That’d be great, Brian.

Brian Gardner: I think it’s evolved since then.

Seth Spears: Yeah, sure.

Brian Gardner: Aside from what you do at Spears Marketing, you run another business — which probably, I’m guessing, takes as much if not more time out of your day — called media.com">Wellness Media, which is a network of blogs in the health, wellness, and natural living space. How did that whole thing come about?

Branching Out into the Wellness Space

Seth Spears: I began working a whole lot with health and wellness mama bloggers. One of my first and biggest clients is WellnessMama.com. So working with Katie over the years and helping her to grow her site, I became acclimated to the industry — health, wellness, natural living, fitness — and began working with a lot of those bloggers as well. Kind of began to specialize in that.

Then I saw a need. A lot of bloggers starting out, a lot of online business owners, they had great information — and they had a desire to share that — but they didn’t really know the best way, the best strategies. So Wellness Media started meeting a need to help train them and give them more information so that they could grow and prosper.

It’s evolved a lot since then. Now it’s a network of sites where we put out great information in the health, wellness, natural living space, then monetize that through affiliates, advertising, and things like that. It’s the combined effort of all of them helps everything grow. You’re right, though, it does take a lot of time. Still trying to figure out the ins and outs of it.

Brian Gardner: All right. Let’s talk a little bit more about Wellness Mama specifically. What role do you play there at Wellness Mama, and how has that impacted what you do online?

Seth’s Role at Wellness Mama and How It’s Impacted What He Does Online

Seth Spears: I’ve handled the majority of the marketing strategy for Wellness Mama over the years. Everything from social media implementation and SEO, looking for new opportunities, and just everything in regards to the online presence. I focused a lot on the site over the past six to 12 months on site speed and optimization, just slimming things up and making it faster, and just a better user experience.

Katie does all of the writing, all of the content. Then I handle a lot of the other aspects of it that don’t relate to that, more like the technical side.

Lauren Mancke: I noticed Wellness Mama used to run a custom Genesis Theme, but you recently moved it over to Rainmaker. Can you tell us a little bit about that process, and why you made the change?

Why Seth Made the Change to the Rainmaker Platform

Seth Spears: Actually, the main site, WellnessMama.com, is still on WordPress, and it is still a custom Genesis Child Theme, but there is a membership site that is on Rainmaker. It’s on a subdomain, My.WellnessMama.com, and that is over on Rainmaker. That powers Katie’s member content library. It’s got a couple courses that she sells. It handles all of the e-commerce for her ebooks, free downloads, and resources. The podcast is run through there.

We basically offloaded all the heavy lifting that was slowing down the site and taking up resources. We were going to get rid of a whole bunch of plugins and things, and offload them onto Rainmaker. The main content hub is now a lot slimmer, leaner, and performs better. Katie can focus on just creating content over there, and then I handle the technical stuff over on Rainmaker, which has made it a lot better for everyone. It’s been a great experience doing that.

Brian Gardner: And then we can stop the episode again because that is another commercial. It’s funny. Seth has been a raving Copyblogger/Rainmaker Digital fan over the years. As he said, he’s bought all our products, and that’s not why he’s on this show. Seth has a tremendous amount of knowledge when it comes to marketing and stuff online. That’s, more importantly, what we’re here to discuss.

Seth, the tagline on your site says, quote, “Helping small business owners and bloggers build a reliable and profitable web presence that works even when you’re not working.” Obviously, you’re a marketer, and you believe in the power of that type of thing, effective marketing campaign, and so on. What’s the sales pitch you have? When you’re talking to clients or perspective clients, what is it? How do you convince them to choose your company over someone else?

The Power of an Effective Marketing Campaign

Seth Spears: That’s a great question, and I don’t think I’ve perfected that yet. I think that’s always a work in progress. I guess the first thing is, I don’t think of marketing as a campaign. A campaign is something that has a beginning and an end date. Marketing, if it’s working — and working, to me, is that it’s continuing to bring in more traffic, more subscribers, more fans, more revenue — then that’s something that doesn’t have an end date. You continue to do that until it stops working. Then you pivot and do something else that is.

I guess what I bring to the table, and what I’ve been able to do for a lot of clients over the years, is to help them find the low-hanging fruit. So many business owners, they can’t see the forest through the trees. They’re so wrapped up in their own business that it’s hard for them to figure out what works — or what they’re missing.

Are there new ways to monetize their site? Are there opportunities that they’re missing? How can they better optimize things from the technical side, both for search engine optimization, for increased social media engagement? New content opportunities, maybe additional products that they could create and sell. All of those different ways that is going to improve their web presence, improve their customer service, their relationship with their readers, with their customers, and just to provide a better experience all around.

Lauren Mancke: Not being able to see the forest through the trees reminds me of a phrase my father always used about, “Too busy cutting down trees to sharpen the ax.” I’ve always kept that in mind. What are some of the common marketing mistakes you see around the Internet? What impact do you think those mistakes have on a business?

Common Marketing Mistakes Made by Small Businesses

Seth Spears: The biggest thing that I’m seeing right now is there’s a lot of copycats online. Someone will see what’s working for someone else — this business will say, “Oh, this strategy or this type of content is working for that company or that business. We should do the same thing because it’s working.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work. You can copy the exact words that someone writes, but unfortunately, you can’t copy their customer service or the relationship that they have built with their audience. That’s what makes it intrinsic to them.

I’m seeing a lot of that. That’s one of the biggest pitfalls that I’ve seen, especially in the health and wellness space, but I’m sure it happens in a lot of others as well. The antidote to that is to be unique, to really find your voice, to find what works. If you’re not a naturally humorous, funny person, don’t try to be funny. You can’t mimic humor. It’s something people either have it or they don’t.

The same with if you’re a really studious person and you like to read science journals, medical journals, then you should focus on that in your writing. If that’s not what you’re into, then trying to duplicate that, it’s just going to seem contrived. Just avoiding some of those things, definitely. Being authentic.

Brian Gardner: Authenticity, one of my favorite words. Yeah, I love it.

Seth Spears: Yeah, that’s what it really comes down to — being as authentic as possible and staying true to your mission, your vision, and your audience, giving them what they want.

I guess another pitfall that I’ve seen a lot is, people still trying to push market — and this would be other industries primarily, not online as much — but using social media as just another outlet to try to push their message and not try to engage and interact with their readers and potential customers. Those would be the two biggest things: lack of authenticity and not using social media tools the best way that they can.

Brian Gardner: Good stuff, good stuff. Let’s talk about successful marketing tips. You obviously run a company. You run multimillion visitor sites and so on, so you know what you’re doing. What have you seen lately as one of the more effective bang for the company marketing’s buck? In other words, where’s the biggest ROI happening these days?

I know that’s a loaded question. It’s probably different for niches and things like things that. But as a whole, where do you think right now you see a successful person spending some marketing money?

Successful Marketing for the Biggest ROI

Seth Spears: It definitely depends on the industry, but just as a general rule, I would say to niche down. You see a lot of companies where they have line extension, where they’re constantly trying to see, “How can I expand here or there. Let’s add this product or that service.” They forget about the 80/20 principle — what is the 20 percent that we’re doing that’s bringing in 80 percent of our success?

What I’m seeing that’s really working is, if companies, businesses, online business owners, bloggers, et cetera, if they can narrow their focus to really their core competency — what they are really good at, what they really enjoy — they tend to get more traffic, build up more fans and followers, sell more products. services. They have more fun with it, too. They’re focusing on what they’re good at and what they enjoy and not just those things that will necessarily bring in a few additional dollars here or there, where it takes more time than it’s really worth.

Doing that is something that doesn’t really cost you any money. At first when you do it, you may lose a little bit of income from the services or products that you’re no longer offering. But in the long run, you end up making a lot more just from everything that I’ve seen.

Lauren Mancke: What is your definition of a marketing client? What are the types of people that you like to work with?

How Seth Defines ‘Marketing Client’

Seth Spears: Primarily, online business owners who like creating content — whether that’s a blogger or someone who just has an online business, someone who’s good at creating the content, but they haven’t been strategic with it — maybe they’re not that tech-oriented as well.

My core competency is helping to break down and simplify things for them to help them understand where the low-hanging fruit is and what they can do to really grow their business using all those tools, like we’ve talked about, and basic strategies. Whether it’s search engine optimization, social media, or just improving their website and web presence so that they can make more money and gain a better following.

Brian Gardner: Are there any industries that you’ve seen that are either super ripe or less ripe for marketing campaigns? I know all of the online businesses out there, and entrepreneurs, need to have it in some fashion, but are there certain industries or niches that it’s a lot more critical to have a marketing campaign, maybe because of competition or just because of the ROI or the ability to get to a quick ROI? What have you seen?

When (and Why) a Marketing Campaign Is Critical

Seth Spears: One of the biggest things that I’ve seen is your offline service businesses, like your old-school ones that are primarily doing direct sales and things like that. They have the most to gain right now because the competition is so much less. There’s still so few businesses that have a really solid web presence.

Those that do have a website, or a decent one, they’re still not putting that much information about. The more information that a business can put out, no matter what it is, the more likely they’re going to be seen as an expert and, again, more likely that potential customers are going to want to do business with them.

Builders are a great example. Had a client a few years ago who I worked with — built them a new website, helped them a little bit with their social media, their SEO stuff. I was encouraging them to begin blogging, start writing tutorials. They were a very specialized builder of log and timber frame, so I encouraged them to really begin talking about how they do certain aspects of their business.

They were very hesitant to do so because, “This is our trade secret. Our competitors will steal it, or those who need it, they’ll just take and do it themselves.” I don’t believe that’s true. Yes, some competitors may take it and do it. But if they’re looking for this information and they find it, maybe they’ll try to implement it themselves, but when they fail, they’re going to call back because this company is now the expert. Or if they decide they don’t want to do it, they’re going to call them because they’re the expert.

Most people, if they’re trying to do it themselves, they’re going to be really budget-conscious anyway. They’re not a good customer, so they’re never going to get that business. I would say the low-hanging fruit there is those businesses who are really not focused online, but begin to transition that way. There’s so many other ways that you can monetize things there also. Whether that’s through affiliate income or maybe some advertising. If you have eyeballs, you’re always going to be able to monetize it.

Lauren Mancke: So you’ve touched on this a little bit, but can you give us a few examples of what marketing campaigns have worked for you? I’m sure our listeners could benefit from a few simple tips or nuggets of information that you have to share.

Seth Spears: Yeah. Obviously, email opt-ins are still huge, having some type of free offer. There’s all kinds of different philosophies and so many different tools as far as collecting email addresses — whether that’s a popup, a slideup, an above the post opt-in, or below the post. The thing that I’ve found to be the most valuable is, as far as email collection — and you’re going to get less from doing this, but the quality is greater — putting your email opt-in at the bottom of your post.

The reason for this, at least from what I’ve seen, is that if someone has gone through and read through all of your content, then they’re much more likely to be engaged with you and actually want whatever it is that you’re giving them away for free, or the reason you’re asking for their email address.

Yeah, you’re probably going to get more if it’s just a popup, but everybody hates them. Nobody likes them, but they do work. From what I’ve seen, you tend to get more unsubscribes from those types of opt-ins than if someone is fully engaged and has read through the full piece of content and then signs up for your list. That would be a big one.

The other one regarding email opt-ins is content upgrades. If you’ve got a piece of content that does really well maybe a blog post. Maybe it’s a recipe — if someone’s a food blogger, and they’ve got a really popular recipe that gets a lot of traffic. If you have a content upgrade, maybe just like a little box — LeadBoxes is really good for this — where you have a little box halfway through the post or at the bottom, and it says, “If you like this recipe, click here to get three more that are variations of this,” or something like that. Then they enter their name, email address, and boom, they get it sent back to them. That’s a really good way to collect more.

Repurposing Content for Multiple Distribution Channels

Seth Spears: Then I guess a third thing I’ve seen is content repurposing. I had a client several years ago who had been recording webinars for his customers and clients for years. He was in the automotive repair consulting business, so he helped automotive repair shop owners to market, market their business better, work on their budgeting, staffing, and everything that goes along with that.

He had been doing weekly webinars for them for something like five or six years. I began working with him on increasing his online strategy so that he could bring in new clients and better serve his current customers. We developed the strategy where he would take those webinars, he would strip out the audio, and he would create a podcast. He had slides already set up for the webinars, so he would strip those out, add those slides to SlideShare. Then he’s got a slide deck that he can use for them.

The webinars, he would export them as a video and put it up on video. The transcript he would export and put it as a blog post. He had one piece of content that he had originally created, and now he has multiple different channels that he can use that for, to hit people on different levels. Everyone has different modalities of learning, of how they prefer to consume content. Some people, they prefer to read. Some prefer to listen. Some prefer to watch. Some prefer all of the above.

The more ways that you can give a potential customer, reader, subscriber, access to that information so that it’s easier for them to consume your content, the better it is. That was a really good strategy that’s worked really well. I’ve seen several other industries that have used something similar, that do this very well also.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I love that you bring up the repurposing thing, something we do a lot at Copyblogger, or Rainmaker.

Seth Spears: Yeah, you guys are the champs at that.

Brian Gardner: Yes. In fact, we actually write posts on how to do that. One thing I’ve done people have probably seen it from the outside, but they don’t know necessarily the strategy behind it. But one thing I’ve actually started doing on my own site, BrianGardner.com, is taking a couple of the podcasts that Lauren and I have done, StudioPress FM, and once the transcripts have been made available, I’ll actually write a post on my own site that summarizes that. Very intentionally going after a couple of different keywords, just to see as an experiment if I take some quotes from stuff that our guests have said, and then write around that, editorialize it a bit, and come up with a full post. That doesn’t take me all that long.

For instance, if you Google “make money food blogging,” I show up on the second page of Google, and that was an example of something that I repurposed, the interview we did with Shay Bocks about food blogging. I thought, “Hey, let’s see if this works.” The site has authority, so ranking pretty good in that. I’m doing that a number of different times and may even do that with this show that we’re recording right now. For sure, good stuff.

Seth Spears: Oh yeah, that’s great. That was a great interview you did with Shay. I really connected with that one.

Brian Gardner: Cool. All right, so last year, you and I, along with eight other guys, attended this thing that I talked about earlier called Brocation. We’re sort of departing a little bit here from the show, but I’m getting to a point. For those who don’t know, Brocation is an unofficial event I organize each year, where a group of us head to the mountains for some skiing, snowboarding, food, fine wine, that kind of stuff.

Anyway, the reason I started that was I wanted to bring together a number of guys who are in the online space and just have great conversation about running online businesses. Yes, it’s time to get away and do the man thing, but the people who go there are very specifically chosen. We share our stories and encourage each other about the stuff that we’re doing.

I like to think of this Brocation event as almost like a networking focus group type of thing. It does bring a number of us together to talk about that kind of stuff. Would you say that, in some form, Brocation or any other of these networking events or focus groups can be an effective marketing tool or, at the very least, help be the sparks of what could potentially be marketing tools for other people?

The Value of Networking with Like-Minded Entrepreneurs

Seth Spears: Oh yeah, by all means. I’ve gone to numerous conferences, mastermind events, and networking things over the years, and you always leave with something, some little nugget that you’re going to pick up from someone else. There’s a certain dynamic when you’re hanging out with other entrepreneurs, other business owners — whether they are in the same niche or a completely different one.

Actually, a lot of times it’s better if they’re in a completely separate niche. They’re probably doing things that you haven’t even thought of, and you can take that back and implement it in your own business. Like I said, I’ve been to numerous ones over the past several years, and I always leave with some little chunk of gold that I’m able to go back home and begin implementing right away.

Yeah, by all means, for people listening, if you’re able to network or mastermind with other people that are like-minded and similar in your outlook on business and life, that’s very beneficial.

Lauren Mancke: I can’t hear the word ‘Brocation’ without picturing you guys doing a lot of high-fiving.

Seth Spears: There might have been some of that.

Brian Gardner: It’s funny, I think I remember when we were all hanging out in the hot tub, I was sitting there — me, little Brian Gardner — in the context of Joshua Becker, Marc Chernoff from MarcandAngel.com, and Seth. I was starting to add up because I’ve done work with all you guys behind the scenes, and I know the amount of traffic and Facebook reach you guys have — I was thinking to myself, “Man, I’m here with half the Internet now,” because of the reach you guys have.

Obviously, it’s all in different areas. But again, we got together. We talked, and in the context of 10, it’s hard to have a big round table. The little conversations that just happened through the few days that we were up there, for sure inspired me to go out and do things — things that you would share, other folks would share.

Of course, we’re not telling everyone to go out and necessarily plan a trip together, but whether they’re Skype calls or whatever, you may pull something from someone that they’re doing and apply it to your niche, which is completely different from their niche. And it might be something that completely opens the door to new traffic, new users, new email subscribers, and so on.

More than anything, that was just a long way of saying to try to get yourself involved and network with other people who are online.

Seth Spears: Yeah, by all means. I’ve put together several different events through Wellness Media over the years, where other online business owners and bloggers, we get together in specific locations and just hang out for a few days — for anywhere from two to three days, to as long as a week or so. It’s amazing the connections that you make and the friendships, and the business knowledge that’s gained.

There’s just massive value in that, especially when you do go somewhere else. You’re a little bit out of your comfort zone. I really think the only time you’re really learning and growing is when you’re on the edge of your comfort zone — or out of it. That’s when you’re pushed, and you got to make a change.

Brian Gardner: Well, words of wisdom from Seth Spears on all things Internet, all things marketing. If you or your company are looking for digital marketing strategy, WordPress website consulting, or search and social optimization strategy, we just want to put in a good word for our friend Seth and his company, Spears Marketing.

You can check them out on the Internet at SpearsMarketing.com, and from there, you can see all that Seth does and can do for you.

Lauren Mancke: If you like what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at, you guessed it, StudioPress.FM. You can also help us hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes. It’s a great way to never, ever miss an episode.

Brian Gardner: Seth, yes, it was definitely a pleasure to have you on the show. We’re very thankful that you’re able to share your years of knowledge with our listeners. Thank you for being an ongoing advocate and supporter of all that we do within our company. It definitely helps push things.

Seth Spears: You’re very welcome. Thanks for having me. I enjoyed it.

Lauren Mancke: Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

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This week, we have the very distinct pleasure of talking to a gentleman who is not only a talented member of the WordPress community … but the one responsible for it.

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www.studiopress.com/fm">
			
Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. 
			www.studiopress.com/fm">Launch your new site today!

Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress, which currently powers over 26% of sites on the web. The WordPress website says it s “a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform.”

More importantly, WordPress is a part of who Matt is.

In this episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Matt Mullenweg discuss:

• Matt s start with WordPress
• Founding Automattic in 2005
• The difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org
• Analysis of the premium theme market
• Generating revenue in the WordPress Ecosystem
• The spirit of GPL in Open Source
• Adding paid themes to WordPress.com
• Making a profit with premium plugins
• The future of WordPress

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

0112.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• Follow Matt on Twitter
• Visit Matt’s Website
• Read Matt’s Blog
• WordPress.com
• WordPress.org
• Automattic

The Transcript

How (and Why It’s Ok) to Make Money with WordPress, with Matt Mullenweg

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I are joined by Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Automattic, to discuss how (and why it’s okay) to make money with WordPress.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, and I’m joined as usual by my co-host, the vice president of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke.

Lauren Mancke: Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us this week. We are continuing our series on talking to members of the WordPress community.

Brian Gardner: Now, today we have the very distinct pleasure of talking not just to a member of the WordPress community, but one of the people responsible for it. Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of WordPress, which, as it stands to date, powers over 26 percent of the web. Probably more even at that point. The WordPress website says it’s a “state of the art semantic personal publishing platform,” but more importantly to Matt, WordPress is a part of who he is. Matt, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on the show StudioPress FM, welcome.

Matt Mullenweg: Awesome. I’m very excited to be here.

Brian Gardner: There is a huge back story to all of this. For those of you who have been following StudioPress and me over the years, you know that I got started in WordPress in 2006, 2007. I can’t believe it’s been that long. We were just talking about that. I wanted to start at the beginning of your journey. I know in 2005 you founded Automattic and that is the secret force behind WordPress, Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, IntenseDebate, and a number of other smaller entities.

This story for you goes further back though. Before Automattic formed, you and Mike Little forked this little blogging platform called b2. Run through us the early years of WordPress and what it was back then you were hoping to achieve.

Matt’s Start with WordPress

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, our goals were very modest. I would say that back then we were just looking to have some good software for ourselves. To have something that we could use and continue. B2 had a pretty good community around it. There were some forums we would participate in. It had a pretty cool active little thing going on, and it just seemed a shame that it was slowing down. Mike and I had already interacted on the forums a lot. We followed each other’s blogs. He was releasing code and I was releasing code. He’s also a super nice guy, so it just seemed very natural to work together. It’s funny though, that we didn’t actually get to meet in person until many years later.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. I find that to be — Lauren and I are good examples of that. We met probably three or four years ago in person, but had known each other five or six years even before that. It’s funny how we can, in our Internet lives, finally get to that point where you get to do that ‘in real life’ thing with people who you’ve met, or known, or entrusted with a business, or even just become really good friends. To not really get to meet them in person for years down the road … Quick question though with Mike. You met on the forums. At what point did you think to yourselves, “We need to fork the software,” and then just take it and do your own thing with it?

Matt Mullenweg: At the point when it was no longer being developed and it didn’t appear like there was a way forward. In some ways, for a period of time there, b2 was abandoned. When proprietary software gets abandoned you’re just out of luck. If open source gets abandoned, you can pick it up and run with it. So there was a fumble, we picked the ball, and we tried to take it to the end zone. And that is the extent of my sports metaphors I have the knowledge to make.

Brian Gardner: Especially in San Francisco, right? We won’t talk about the 49ers right now.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s funny you talked about meeting people though. We actually have a tool inside Automattic that tracks who you’ve met in person. So you have a percentage and everything. Right now, because we just had our grand meet up, I’m at 81%, which is pretty high. That means I’ve met 404 of the 501 total Automatticians.

Brian Gardner: I just saw the picture of you guys. You guys were on Whistler, right?

Matt Mullenweg: We were, Whistler, British Columbia.

Brian Gardner: I just saw the picture and I was thinking to myself, “That is a lot of people.”

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I agree.

Brian Gardner: Did you think that back then when you and Mike forked this piece of software, that 10, 12 years later, however long it’s been, you would be in charge of a company with 400 or 500 people?

Matt Mullenweg: Never in a million years. If I had had a big ambition at that time it was maybe to be a really good webmaster or have a little hosting company with 500 clients or something. It was very modest. I think the big business plan idea was I could get 500 people paying me $20 a month. That was it. I was like, “Then I can just retire.”

Lauren Mancke: Some people get confused with WordPress initially because there’s WordPress.com and WordPress.org and they might not know the difference. For our listeners, can you give us a little explanation about which one is for who?

The Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

Matt Mullenweg: It’s all WordPress in that WordPress.com runs the WordPress software. I would say WordPress.com is a good place to go if you just want to dip your toes in. As you’re first getting started, it’s a great place to start. It’s got our great community features built in. It’s got built-in live chat support, so if you ever get stuck there’s someone there to help you. And it’s pretty difficult to break it, so there’s nothing you can do there that can’t be fixed pretty easily. It also showcases some of the latest interface work around what we call Calypso, which is essentially a next-generation interface for WordPress. So WordPress.com is a very good place to start.

An advantage is that if you ever outgrow it — which many people never do — that it’s very easy to move to a web host where, if you wanted to run specific plug-ins or modify the code on your theme, you could do so. That’s what in the community we call WordPress.org. This idea that you went to website WordPress.org, downloaded the software and installed it yourself. The terminology is a little confusing, and I hope someday we come up with something that makes a little more sense. But you can think of it as, if you want to modify code you’ll want to run the software someplace other than WordPress.com. If you’re not planning to modify the code, WordPress.com’s probably the best place.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. I’ve been on the outside looking in on WordPress.com stuff, primarily because when I first got started with blogging I was playing around with Blogger, which really was a competitor and still is — not so much anymore. Then I jumped right over WordPress.com and went right into the self-hosted version which is WordPress.org where you can download the software and install it. It’s been interesting to not really have that experience with WordPress.com but be able to watch you guys develop that over the years, knowing that it is the precursor to what’s coming into the .org side of things.

This is maybe a bad diagnosis, but in my eyes I’ve always seen WordPress.com as the place where Automattic makes money and WordPress.org is where the community makes its money. I realize there are opportunities on both for us all to make money, but is that a fairly safe generalization to make, that WordPress.com is the focal point from a revenue standpoint for Automattic, whereas the community side is left to WordPress.org?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. It’s not a perfect characterization, both because Automattic has a diversified business which makes money in several different places and several different ways — including WordPress.org — and that the community utilizing WordPress software and the freedoms of the GPL can make money from WordPress.com, and does quite a bit, but also can leverage it in many other ways, some of which don’t even look like WordPress on the surface.

Lauren Mancke: Let’s jump back to 2007. As you know, Brian launched a commercial theme called Revolution. What were your initial thoughts on this, the fact that someone chose to commoditize something you created? At this time WordPress was seen as less of a CMS and more for blogging. A lot of the themes were free. Was this something you expected to see?

The Spirit of GPL in Open Source

Matt Mullenweg: The first freedom of the GPL is the freedom to use the software for any purpose. You can modify it, you can see how it works, and you can distribute those modifications. There’s absolutely nothing, and has never been anything wrong with selling things on top of WordPress. Yeah, I think it was a very natural conclusion, especially because themes value in scarcity. Versus plug-ins or core, which has value in abundance.

Brian Gardner: For me though, I don’t know. It’s safe to say at the beginning with this whole Revolution thing it was unclear. To me it was unclear whether or not selling themes was legal, primarily because, if anything, that was an ignorance to what the GPL actually is and what it stands for. There was a lot of discussion going around back then. In my eyes all that confusion was rooted in that licensing issue. I know that it got to a point where I flew to San Francisco to talk to you and Tony about that. What it really means, what we’re allowed to do, and all of that. I take full blame for a lot of that initial confusion and some of the business models that may or may not have been in line with “the spirit of the GPL.”

The question I have for you is this — it’s more a comment than anything, but I’m glad that we’re through that period, because that’s was kind of a roller coaster thing. I think that, more than anything, it’s just a community trying to figure out what it is and isn’t allowed to do. Would you agree that it’s nice to be out of that period and into a different period where things are on the table and everybody knows what’s good, what’s not good, that type of thing?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, and I know there was some confusion around licensing at the time and what license was Revolution under versus the GPL. Was the GPL compatible? Did it violate WordPress’s license? Those sorts of things are pretty natural for this idea that WordPress had grown beyond just the early open source adopters, and folks coming in wanting to build businesses — including yourself — who might not have been as deeply rooted in the philosophy of open source naturally had a fear. I’m not saying this to you in particular, but we still see this today where people say, “Wait, if it’s free and open and users have these rights associated with it, how will I ever build a business? How will I ever make money?” That’s scary for folks, initially.

Especially then because there were no examples. Now we have the better part of eight or nine years of not just some money being made, but tens or hundreds of millions of dollars being made on 100 percent GPL, completely free code. You can no longer say, “Can I build a business on open source?” That question’s been resolved for even the biggest skeptics.

Brian Gardner: I would agree with that.

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Lauren Mancke: I think one of the biggest stamp of approvals the community has gotten over the years was when you guys decided to list commercial themes on the WordPress.org website. Can you tell us a little bit about that decision to incorporate those and the impact it’s made on both WordPress and those developing themes for it?

Matt Mullenweg: Sure. Something I’ve always been a big proponent of through the years is sometimes, especially on the community side … You could look at the theme of your team or different areas around this today — we can be a little disciplinarian where we want to say, “This is wrong,” or punish people who do things wrong. I think it is even more powerful — this old southern idea that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar — to highlight good behavior versus trying to punish the bad behavior. The commercial themes list was just a way for us to highlight the good behavior, the people who were doing the right thing in the right way. It’s a carrot more than a stick that we could put out there for good people. Yet another reason to do the right thing besides it just being the right thing.

Brian Gardner: I think I bit pretty hard on that carrot. One example of rewarding that good behavior — and to this day I wonder where my life would be if I actually never saw this comment from you. On a blog post from Ian Stewart on ThemeShaper way back in the day, this was after we had released some themes that were against the spirit of GPL and proprietary and all that, I saw a comment that said something to the effect of, “I will gladly promote any theme shop that goes completely GPL.”

It was at that point when I saw that comment I almost immediately emailed you and that’s what instigated the trip to San Francisco, the idea that you would reward and put in front of the hundreds and thousands back then — not to know that in the future it would have turned into millions of people — using WordPress. That was an opportunity to — I wouldn’t say come to the light side, because I wasn’t necessarily on the dark side — I just realized that that was an opportunity to come alongside the bigger fish rather than swim against it. An example from you was exactly that, your willingness to promote and help people who were doing things that were in line with the licensing of WordPress. That is a decision I absolutely will never regret.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, and that’s very much in line with … There’s WordPress the software that you download and run. There’s WordPress.org which is a website, a community hub for everyone working on WordPress and interested in WordPress. It’s an editorial product. The things that we choose to highlight and promote there are showing a point of view. Something I’ve always been big on since the site first started was being thoughtful and deliberate about what we choose to link to from there, highlight from there, promote from there. Because it is an endorsement, and you’re defined by what you endorse in many ways.

Adding Paid Themes to WordPress.com

Brian Gardner: As well as those who you do endorse are defined by who’s endorsing you. Aside from listing themes on WordPress.org that we had just talked about, you also opened up that same capability to a smaller degree on WordPress.com. You invited some premium theme developers back then and gave them a way to make money with a very big distribution pool, the user base of WordPress.com.

That was a sign that I realized, as I alluded to earlier, that WordPress.com is what I would always in my head call “Matt’s baby.” I always felt that that was something that you govern and protected more than the .org site. Not that at any point did you — I don’t think it was favoritism. But I always knew that was the focal point, at least, for Automattic. So opening that door to allowing people to sell themes on WordPress.com was a huge declaration of that willingness to expose and open up the possibilities of making money with WordPress more on the .com side here.

It’s also something I know you guys at Automattic have joined as well, because I know you have some themes there and are participating in that. I’m curious, how is that going? It’s been probably what, four, five years maybe, since WordPress.com has opened up the ability for folks to purchase premium themes and all that. Is that going well and continuing to go well for both the users and the developers?

Matt Mullenweg: There’s a couple of things there. It’d be good to dive into history and then also talk about the present. On the history, my memory’s kind of fuzzy here, but part of what caused some of the premium theme stuff was we had actually announced that program and then didn’t follow through on it. And hadn’t you developed a theme and you’re like, “Okay, I’m just going to release this because it’s not going to be for sale on WordPress.com.” Or was that later?

Brian Gardner: It may have been later. I do know we were one of the three initial groups, but that does sound vaguely familiar, that there was a little bit of that happening back then.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah, I think it was probably early 2007, or maybe even 2006. It seemed like a cool idea to have a marketplace. We reached out to folks, I don’t remember exactly what happened, but there was something where we didn’t launch it. But I had announced it in WordCamp Argentina, which was the first international WordCamp, and talked about it on stage. And then, I think because of the GPL issue, we put it off. We couldn’t decide how to make the code available while also preventing people from it being available. Then people just started to release them themselves — including the Revolution team — which we thought was really good. Yeah, of course. I think it was you, might have been Chris Pearson —

Brian Gardner: You want to open that box?

Matt Mullenweg: — that were the first ones that we reached out to because y’all had some of the best and coolest free themes. Today it’s been interesting. In the beginning, everyone was worried about GPL affecting their business. The reality is that business is just hard, full-stop. Even if you’re not open source, it’s really tough. Even if you’re not open source, people can copy your features. We have Wix and Squarespace. They don’t use any of WordPress’s code, but they’ve copied a lot of our features and are good competitors.

Analysis of the Premium Theme Market

Matt Mullenweg: The thing that’s happened with the success of premium themes more broadly is that a lot of people have gone into the market, so even though the pie has grown, it gets sliced thinner and thinner and thinner for each individual theme shop. I think overall, themes have grown. Sites like ThemeForest have really driven a commodification so that individual theme shops that maybe used to make six figures a month, they’re now making five figures a month or less. That has been a trend. But it’s also a natural thing that you can expect with a successful market. People, including yourself, Brian, who talked about how successful it was — that draws people in.

On WordPress.com we’ve seen a little less of that, partially because we don’t allow everyone in, so there’s less commodification of the general size of it. Also, a lot of our theme authors — we’ve been trying to switch everyone towards subscriptions and away from one-time purchases. As you might be familiar, with our WordPress.com business plan you can have access to any premium theme, all of them, and you can switch them 10 times. You don’t have to buy them individually.

What we do is we take a portion of that business subscription and we pay it back to the theme author. That recurs every year, versus being a one-time sale. You get that over and over and over as long as that person is a WordPress.com customer, which creates a much more stable and sustainable business. I think it’d be cool as well to have this in our premium plan, which has a lot more subscribers than our business plan, which is $300 a year. We can facilitate people to profit from a subscription model. I think that that helps create more stable businesses that are less boom and bust, particularly in the theme space. As you know, people can only run one theme at a time.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. I wish I would’ve had that advice years ago when StudioPress started and I made the decision to do that as a transactional thing. There was never a point where I personally, up until the merger at Copyblogger, did I ever want to make the switch over to a recurring plan — even though there were other folks who were starting to move in that direction. For whatever reason I just thought to myself, “I don’t know if I can make that move.” And, of course, StudioPress merged into Copyblogger. We are still transactional at StudioPress, but we have the benefit of having other products and software and services around WordPress that are on a recurring basis so that we’ve never really had to make that change. That’s interesting.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s the best. If you can do it, it works really well. Something that was really obvious to me early on is that you buy a theme and you get support forever. I was like, “Support costs money, so if I’m giving you money once and then I’m costing you money indefinitely, forever into the future, at some point that might actually cross over.”

Brian Gardner: Yeah, WooThemes was an example. I think they were transactional at one point and then they transparently talked about why they made that decision, because of the fact that they just couldn’t scale the support and that “unlimited support” for them in the way that they were handling their business just wasn’t doable anymore. So they made a switch at one point then to go recurring.

Matt Mullenweg: They did, and that I think was pretty controversial for them.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, they got a lot of backlash.

Matt Mullenweg: It was before the acquisition that we did, so I wasn’t 100 percent privy to it. But definitely saw some of that from afar and didn’t envy their position. They were essentially saying, “Hey, this thing that used to be included is now no longer included,” which is tough to do.

Lauren Mancke: I think the recurring payments is something I brought up when I first came on board at StudioPress because I saw some other companies doing it. But it is definitely tricky with the backlash. We’ve talked about themes, and that’s an obvious way for members of the WordPress community to make money, but there’s so many other ways for an individual or company to generate a profit using WordPress. Can you share with us a little bit of the other ways you’ve seen the community generate revenue?

Generating Revenue in the WordPress Ecosystem

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, I was actually coming on this podcast to say you’re not allowed to make money with WordPress under any circumstances. Sorry. Was there a miscommunication beforehand?

Brian Gardner: I guess we’ll scrap the episode.

Matt Mullenweg: Cool. Yeah, I mean y’all have seen it. Where to start? Anything that creates value for someone who is getting from point A to point B. No one wakes up in the morning — well some of us do, but most people don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I want to use WordPress today.” They’re probably saying, “I want more customers in my restaurant,” or “I want to sell more of my widget,” or “I want an audience for my blog that someday I want to turn into a book or leverage into speaking opportunities or something.” They have some goals.

WordPress is a means to an end. As WordPress reaches a larger and larger number of people — because it does a really good job doing most of what people want — even the very niche users like, “I want to use WordPress to sell houses,” become valuable niches. If you can help people do that and you generate a lot of value for them, they will be willing to pay you back some of that. Open their wallet in some regard, whether that’s buying something directly from you, whether that’s coming to your events, whether that’s reading your site and clicking on the ads — whatever it is. There are a lot of opportunities there.

As many different ways as there are to be in business in general, there’s ways to make money with WordPress, because making money with WordPress is no different from making money in the world. It’s just that you’re getting the benefit of this huge open source platform and community as a distribution mechanism. And you’re part of a community that is a bit more conscious and awake about, “How do we keep this sustainable going forward? How do we give back and make sure that 10 years from now WordPress is just as vibrant?” But other than that it’s pretty much the same as any other business you do.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I would say over the 10 years I’ve been doing stuff with WordPress, I’ve covered a lot of the different ways to make money. Even before selling themes I was selling my services on customizing themes. So there would be money for hire on a freelance level. Then, of course, I started selling themes, so there was the commodity or transactional version of making money through WordPress. And then we took StudioPress and merged it into Copyblogger where we, like you say, sell some of the training or the assistance. Helping people who are either on it or trying to use it themselves. We obviously have a small hosting division. And then we have Rainmaker, so there’s a software as a service. I feel like I’ve had a really broad experience, and I’m sure there are even …

Matt Mullenweg: You’ve done them all.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, exactly. Well, I’m sure there are even other ways. Plug-ins became a big thing after the premium theme market. Folks like Gravity Forms and WooCommerce are two huge examples — Pippin with Easy Digital Downloads. So plug-ins — there’s a huge market for that. Where do you see holes though in the WordPress community in terms of that opportunity to make money? Is there anything or are there any areas that you think yourself, “Man, I wish somebody would go out and go do X?”

Matt Mullenweg: You know, having a company in the space, when I think that, we usually do it.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I walked right into that one. But there’s got to be smaller stuff. Things that aren’t important enough for you guys to cover. You would think, “Hey, it’d be great if a little company just came alongside and did this.”

Matt Mullenweg: I would say to follow my blog and follow my Twitter. Because I put out — it is true that I probably have 10 or 100 times more ideas than we’ll ever be able to get to. My philosophy is to always just put them out there, and if they happen that’s great.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I’ve been asked, probably on a number of different occasions on different podcasts, “Why doesn’t Genesis do X,” or “Why aren’t you guys going after this particular market?” Like you, I say, “You know what? We’ve only got so many developers and designers and people in-house. We’re just not going to spend our time going there.” But I always throw it up as a layup. I say, “Hey, this is a great opportunity for someone to come alongside, wink wink, and take over and take that opportunity.” I think I’ve seen it a few times where someone’s taken that bait and then gone and done it. We, like you, try to reward people and our community who do good work and try to expose them and help promote their stuff too.

That’s a good idea though, to leave a breadcrumb trail of ideas and things that might be of interest or have value or potential for monetization that we can’t get to. At least you’re leaving that open for others to see.

Matt Mullenweg: Totally, and also it’s just good to share.

Making a Profit with Premium Plug-ins

Lauren Mancke: Let’s jump back. You mentioned some premium plug-ins. Let’s jump back to those. Matt, can you give us an example of plug-ins that are being sold right now that you think are a great and solid solution for WordPress users?

Matt Mullenweg: The obvious ones I don’t want to unfairly advantage, because there’s a lot of really good ones. I don’t want to mention one and not another, so I’m just going to mention ours.

Brian Gardner: Safely.

Matt Mullenweg: The things that Automattic sells — we have some service plug-ins available generally through Jetpack, but you can get VaultPress or Akismet, which are backup and security services and anti-spam services. These are essentially lightweight plug-ins. What they do is they connect you to an external service that, in the case of a Akismet, uses the intelligence of seeing hundreds of millions of things a day to help keep spam off your sites. VaultPress takes a copy of your blog and stores it literally in 12 places. So even if a meteor hits 11 of them, we would still have a copy of your blog that would be safe and available to restore. Those are the lightweight things.

We also have plug-ins largely that came in through the WooThemes acquisition, including WooCommerce — there’s over 300 extensions for WooCommerce — and smaller things like WordPress Job Manager or Sensei that are essentially like little miniature applications that you can put on top of WordPress that transform it. In the case of Sensei, it turns it into a learning management system, something if you wanted to run classes online and help people it’s all there.

Brian Gardner: Let’s talk about the acquisition of Woo for a little bit. I think in the big picture of the WordPress community that was the big, “Oh my gosh. Did you hear?” type of thing. I know when I read it there was … Adii and I, back in the day, started things out side-by-side and were really big competitors back when WooThemes got started and all of that. You run this race with people and when you see something like this, “Automattic acquires WooThemes and WooCommerce,” and you start hearing figures of seven and eight figures, my instinct was to instantly get jealous and think, “Oh, that sucks. Why can’t that happen to me?” But then you realize that …

Matt Mullenweg: Well, you got to reach out.

Brian Gardner: Is that how it works?

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. We’ll talk after the podcast.

Brian Gardner: We’ll have a follow-up phone call. No, in all honesty though, it made sense for WordPress as a platform to try to go after the e-commerce thing. So yes, you have to realize that there was a lot of wisdom in that acquisition. Is that the type of thing that you guys look for specifically? I know there’s a lot of people making money all over the place, but I’m sure there’s lots of things like that on your radar where you say, “We want to go after a certain type of market or a certain type of user. These folks or that business already has built a solid piece of that and it’s a good idea for us to then go pursue.” Is that what happened, just the movement towards e-commerce through WordPress and the acquisition of Woo and WooCommerce?

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. It was really driven, first and foremost, by e-commerce as a category. From Automattic’s point of view, we were hearing for a really long time the demand from our users on WordPress.com that they wanted e-commerce. The demand from our partners, places like Web hosts, that sometimes as many as half their customers signing up were saying they wanted to sell things online and the solutions there were not good.

We really did look holistically at all the WordPress add-ons, including Woo, Easy Digital Downloads, WP commerce — there’s probably even more. All the services: Shopify, Ecwid, BigCommerce, PresstaShop — everything out there. And the big guys: eBay, Amazon, Etsy, the more centralized approaches. And began to really map it out and explore different options, including talking to folks like Shopify a lot. I think Shopify has a really great user experience and has built a pretty interesting business there.

What they built at Woo was super impressive — the team that was putting it together and the breadth of its adoption and the ecosystem around it. I had been trying to signal for several years that Automattic was going to move into e-commerce. We’re a big elephant in the room, so I don’t like for there to be surprises for people. In fact, prior to the acquisition I reached out to the other folks and said, “Hey, just so you know, this is going to happen and be announced next week or next month,” or whenever it was. Just because I feel like that’s the polite thing to do. But probably what drove the decision there was that e-commerce for WordPress needs to be a platform, meaning that the core software that drives the commerce engine needs to be available as widely as possible, really robust.

It needs to be something that scales from a small store selling just a handful of T-shirts to really huge stores with 60, 70,000 skews doing tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. We wanted that to be something that lots of other businesses could be built on, and Woo was the best fit that we identified at the time.

That was just about a year ago, and a lot has happened over the past year. We joined these two different companies into one. Woo had a lot of similarities to Automattic, so that made it a bit easier both in how they were distributed and how they ran the company, everything. But we then started to look at, How can we grow this?” We’ve increased the size of the Woo team by over 40 percent and that’s still growing. The developers on the core software and the core areas have gone up by 5x, so a lot more people working on the software. We’re looking at it from a very long-term view. Automattic has a very strong business already. What can we subsidize or invest in or support to make Woo a platform that, just like WordPress, is one that’s a commerce engine for the next decade?

Brian Gardner: Well, just like you, we’ve been asked by our users all the time also, “When are you going to have e-commerce themes?” and things like that. Back before the acquisition it was always like, “We can’t design for WooCommerce because they’re technically a competitor.” I got all weirded out about all of that. But when the acquisition took place I started thinking to myself, “Okay, there’s a bigger vision here for all of us here, and it goes beyond just trying to compete or not compete against other people.” I wouldn’t call this an announcement, because I have alluded to it a little bit here on social media in the same way you sometimes do, but we’re very excited that we are focusing our themes — I’m literally designing one as we speak that will be WooCommerce compatible.

Matt Mullenweg: Oh, cool. That is news to me, so thank you.

Brian Gardner: The writing, for sure, is on the wall, and we’re now at a point where we can focus and dedicate some of our time. This may take a little bit of time, but my hope is to take all of our existing themes on StudioPress and work in the WooCommerce component. At the very least to make WooCommerce out of the box look good.

Our emphasis, then, will be on continuing to design and develop themes for the Genesis framework and all of that, but as a side note to that, all of them will be styled at a basic level for anyone who wants to use a theme and start selling stuff. So WooCommerce and e-commerce for us is definitely on the radar and the roadmap. That’s very fun for me to — I wouldn’t call it announce, because it’s not a big announcement yet. But it’s been on my mind for six months to a year for sure, as Lauren knows. We’ve had conversations.

Matt Mullenweg: Cool.

Lauren Mancke: Yes. It’s been on my mind for a couple years now.

Brian Gardner: I’m like, “I’m going to do it. This makes sense to me.” That will be coming — the first theme — probably in the next couple weeks, so I’m excited about that.

Matt Mullenweg: I think that’s something I’ve always tried to do with Automattic as well, is that we can compete and cooperate at the same time, especially if you think long-term. If we said there were 10 WordPress sites in the world and you and I were going to duke it out for getting them to use your theme or one of the themes that Automattic sells, sure, that’s zero sum. The reality is there are 10 sites today and I’m working on taking that to being 100 sites so we can both get a ton and work together. Automattic works with all the web hosts. We also compete with them with WordPress.com.

I just try to think of it from the point of view of what is the best long-term thing for WordPress as a whole. Never let what our particular business might be there …. For example, I love working with other e-commerce platforms besides WooCommerce. There are reasons for people to use something instead of Woo. We could pretend they don’t exist, like Google or Facebook do, or we could just say “Hey, how can we help everyone here with what we’re learning and maybe services we can provide — whether that’s hosting or something else — to make this pretty awesome for whatever people want to choose?”

Brian Gardner: That’s a good way to look at it.

Lauren Mancke: Matt, you said earlier that you don’t like to have surprises from Automattic. Is there anything you want to hint at for the future?

Matt Mullenweg: That’s a good question. Nothing I’m ready to say today. I appreciate the swing at the bat there.

Lauren Mancke: It was a try.

Brian Gardner: Nice try, Lauren.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah.

Brian Gardner: Back in the day, I know you weren’t a fan of how the whole licensing and theme things went down and we’ve moved well beyond that. Are there any areas right now within WordPress — within the community, that is — where you see things that you wish would be going a little bit differently? Not that you can control it or anything like that. But is there anything out there that we should just be aware of that maybe there’s room for improvement, or a better way to do a business model, or something like that?

Matt Mullenweg: I think the area that — there’s a ton of stuff in core and some really great things that Helen’s working on for Four Seven. Thinking beyond that even, I’d say broader, the thing that I feel like we have the most room for improvement is probably in our directories, both the plug-in and theme directory. When you think of the directories as essentially an interface for users, I think they could be pretty frustrating in terms of how search works. How you discover things. How you get support for it after you’ve used it. And how you know whether things are compatible or not, including having a different approach. With plug-ins, we accept everything and then worry about quality through reviews and reports. With themes, we try to look at everything beforehand.

For, honestly a few years, we’ve been pretty behind. You might submit a theme to WordPress and it could take — the WordPress Theme Directory, and it could take months before it goes up. And then we’re still not requiring things like it to be responsive, which is kind of wild in a day when cell phones are a big deal. Maybe even smart phones in the future.

There’s good reasons for this, but I think sometimes you can get pretty far down a path by just putting one foot in front of another and not think, “Am I heading in the right direction?” One of the things I’m looking forward to — there’s some good conversations going on in the weekly meetings on Slack. I’ve been talking to a lot of folks and seeing how can we iterate there — both in the design and presentation of the directories, which we’ve done some work for, especially on the plug-in directory. But also in our processes and how we approach them.

Lauren Mancke: Matt, is there anything you regret with WordPress? Have there been any decisions made, whether by you or others, that you wish hadn’t happened?

Matt Mullenweg: I don’t live with a lot of regrets, so I don’t know if I’d resonate with that particular word. But there are certainly things that in hindsight, if I were doing them today, I would do differently. The theme licensing stuff, especially in 2007 through 2010, has come up a few times. I think part of why that was such trouble was I was less mature as a leader and I thought the best way to hash these issues out was to talk about it and correct everyone in blog comments and do blog posts.

Lauren Mancke: And go on Mixergy.

Matt Mullenweg: Go on Mixergy. Just prove everyone wrong. We got from point A to point B, but maybe I should’ve done more of what you did, Brian, which is get on a plane and talk to people. Perhaps we could’ve avoided a lot of the back-and-forth and drama that we had. Because we were on the same side of things. You wanted to build a business with WordPress and sell themes, and I wanted more people using WordPress. Those are highly complementary goals.

I think now, as a leader — and this has also been something I’ve learned through many of the great people I have the good fortune to work with every day at Automattic — you can approach that differently and really look at talking things through. If one medium of communication — be it email, or Slack, or text, or twitter, or blog post comments hurled across the interwebs — isn’t working, switch to another one.

Brian Gardner: I have a question that I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time now. I hope that you don’t take this in a narcissistic way, because I’m not at all looking for the answer that some people might think. Do you think that the whole premium theme movement has had some degree of impact on the growth and the use of WordPress as we talk about it now, 25% of the Internet and all that kind of stuff?

Do you think that without that — I guess that in a natural evolution would’ve always happened at some point, but do you think … ? I was thinking to myself like, “Wow, I was part of the big area of growth within WordPress.” Because I think premium themes proved that. Of course, there’s lots of people involved. This is not at all me trying to take credit for anything. But I always think in the back of my mind that at least I was a part of a movement that helped open WordPress up to a significant amount of users who may not have ever thought of it as anything more than just a little blog platform.

Matt Mullenweg: That’s a interesting question. It’s actually one I’ve thought about a lot. Because, if the answer is yes, then what we should be doing is trying to have everything be premium, right? If the answer is no, then we should try to eliminate premium themes. Or maybe it’s someplace in the middle. Based on the data, it’s someplace in the middle. Here’s what I mean by that. In absolute terms, it’s undeniable. You can look at your numbers and say, “I have sold X tens of thousands,” or, for some folks, into the hundreds of thousands of copies of this theme. I’m sure everyone has heard from customers — especially because many premium theme sellers are really good at marketing. I would say better than WordPress.org and better than Automattic in some cases.

They say, “I wasn’t going to use WordPress, but I found this theme and I decided to use it.” Have you heard that before? Yeah, so that’s undeniable on an absolute sense. The relative sense, meaning, “Does it change the growth curve of WordPress?” The numbers — because we’re able to track through the update system how many of every theme is run. If you added up all the premium themes, or let’s say all themes not in the directory, which is a good proxy for premium themes — although, as you know, there are some that have up-sells or pro versions of things — it comes to be cumulatively 10 percent, 12 percent. It’s had an impact, but still the vast majority of the overall growth is driven by some of the default themes and the many free ones out there.

I think that if you think about this, it makes sense a little bit. Although some people start with WordPress from our premium theme, it might be more likely that when they’re comparing things they’re probably comparing WordPress … They’re either getting it from their web host, and I would say that web hosts have been a big driver of WordPress adoption and growth because it’s one click and they get started there — or they’re comparing it to other solutions like Squarespace, Weebly, etc.

They start with WordPress. They’re probably going to start with a free theme because they’re not sure whether it’s going to work for them or not. Then, once they figure it out and they say “Hey, okay this is something I can use to solve my problems,” then they go to premium themes. That’s for everyday users.

The other thing that drives this market a lot is developers. It’s folks who know WordPress and they’re being hired to build WordPress sites for people. They have a theme that they love because it enables them to make great-looking client sites really quickly. It’s got the functionality and they know it as a platform on top of WordPress. It’s their go-to. So they’ll buy a copy for every single one of their customers as they build it out. Do they have to? No. But do they want to support you so you’ll make more themes? Of course.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I think the definition of premium, back in the day — I think we at one point even had conversations of calling them paid themes versus premium, because premium’s kind of a subjective term. I’ve seen themes that are free that are probably better coded and better designed than some of the ones I’ve seen being sold.

Matt Mullenweg: I think that’s what we call them on WordPress.org too. I think we call them paid themes.

Brian Gardner: Paid themes, yeah. Okay, let’s talk about the future of WordPress.

Matt Mullenweg: Wait, does that answer makes sense to you?

Brian Gardner: It totally does. I realized that when I take myself out of the equation that WordPress is huge. There’s just — like you alluded to, even the hosting. That seems like within the last few years, especially with movements like Go Daddy doing one-click installs, and Bluehost and so on, that the hosting companies could say the very same thing. Saying, “Well, from 2010 on we really had a big role in the growth of WordPress,” and all of that. I’ve just always thought about that one back in the day. It was like, “What would’ve happened if … ?” type of thing. If it wasn’t me, it would’ve been someone else, so it certainly wasn’t my intuition.

Matt Mullenweg: It’s also something to keep an eye on. Maybe that percentage of what’s driving changes over time. And also looking at new users, not just total users. I’ll keep an eye on it. I love data.

The Future of WordPress

Brian Gardner: All right. Let’s talk just about the future of WordPress. We alluded to it a little bit earlier with e-commerce and stuff like that. Not necessarily how folks can make money from it, but where do you see WordPress going and what are the things that maybe stand as the biggest hurdles in terms of growth for Automattic and WordPress and all of that?

Matt Mullenweg: I think that what’s cool about WordPress as a platform is that it can do a lot at once, meaning that I believe that WordPress is going to grow hugely as a blogging platform. Some people might think that blogging is dead, but I see the next six billion people coming online and blogging being an interesting thing for a lot of them. It’s growing as an e-commerce platform. It’s growing as a site creator. It’s growing as a platform that people build things — maybe even just using the API, whether that’s a REST API or a PHP APIs, to make applications. Whether they’re using WordPress as a development platform to do things that don’t look like a blog at all.

The challenges and threats is that, in every single one of those areas that we’re in, there are some purpose-built tools. And, in fact, an entire company is dedicated to that small area, which are in some cases doing a really good job. If I’m starting a store today, I’m going to compare how easy it is to get started with Woo to how easy it is to get started with Shopify. And today that comparison looks pretty good for Shopify because they’re quite good at providing the hosted service that really on-boards you in a slick way.

The same thing in the CMS space and small business space. We’re getting some very good competition from Weebly, Squarespace, and Wix. Wix in particular, has really used marketing to leverage some breakout growth there. We have to keep in mind that they are spending $40 million dollars a quarter, so $160 million dollars this year, which is a big number, in advertising to drive people signing up for Wix. In certain markets now — you can go and the barista at the coffee shop might ask you about Wix. They might see your WordPress shirt and ask you about Wix.

If they’re able to create a flywheel effect of that advertising driving brand awareness, driving people asking for Wix, that’s going to start to drive developers away as well, which could be very bad for WordPress. These are the things that we have to keep in mind and also do some coordination across the community. One thing that I’m sure about WordPress is that if we all run our own directions and just try to localize or maximize our own profit and everything, we’ll be outgunned by these other companies.

The truth is that Wix’s $300 million dollars in revenue is bigger than any company I am aware of in the WordPress space individually, but it’s much smaller than we are collectively. The question becomes, “How can we work together? How can we team up? And how do we get the right philosophies and the right ways of doing business and everything out there? The best practices so that as we do our own things in our own places, we’re heading in the same direction in a way that, honestly, no company could ever compete with?” Just like the Encyclopedia Britannica could never compete with Wikipedia.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, it’s that crowd-sourced approach, whether it be intentional or unintentional. I guess what you’re saying is that you guys at Automattic necessarily can’t, by yourselves, go out and compete against Squarespace or X. But through the enlistment of other, bigger, smaller companies that would themselves go after and cater to the types of people who would be using Squarespace — that is the bigger army. The WordPress as a whole army versus Automattic as the one company behind it.

The more companies that are out there trying to build their own things off of WordPress, but to a user that might be interested in using Weebly or Wix or Squarespace, that that’s also a bigger win for you guys or just all of us as a whole. To think we are the ones that are out in the field trying to do the things, so the more we can do for ourselves, ultimately, goes up to the top.

Matt Mullenweg: Yeah. It’s all about being long-term. If you think truly long-term about this, that’s how we can win. That’s how we’ve won in the past against competitors like Six Apart that had more people and were better funded, and it’s how we’re going to win against all the ones down the road. We kind of have to. You have a lot of business owners listening to this. Think about what makes this business relevant? What makes the WordPress ecosystem relevant in 10 years. Are you orienting your business to make that a reality? Are you going towards it or away from it?

Brian Gardner: Well, I think those are great words for us to close by. I really do want to be sensitive to your time, because I know that you have a lot of things to do, a lot of responsibilities. First of all, before we go though, I do want to personally thank you for WordPress. Without a question, I’m not sitting in the house that I’m in if WordPress wasn’t around.

I know that on behalf of all of our users and developers and designers — people who build off of Genesis, which was really built off of WordPress — you have created an ecosystem and an environment which, as you alluded to at the beginning of this call, you probably didn’t even forecast or even think of. It was just a matter of trying to build something for yourself that you could use to do something X. Little did you know, 10 years from now you will have companies making 8 figures a year in revenue and enabling — our company has 60 people.

We have 60 people whose families are fed by way of, ultimately, what WordPress has enabled us to do. The stuff like that. I want to thank you. I should text you every once in a while or just shoot you an email and remind you, and say “thank you” and all that. I was a byproduct of your vision. You have put me on WordPress.org before to showcase some good work and stuff like that, so I just didn’t want that going unsaid. As much as I appreciate you being on the show, I also more importantly appreciate for what you’ve allowed me in my life and my family to experience because of the stuff that you did back in the day.

Matt Mullenweg: Thank you. I wish I could take credit, but the reality is you’re part of that too. We all are. So let’s all give ourselves a round of applause there, because what we’ve created is pretty impressive and I hope that you can have 10 more houses in the future.

Brian Gardner: My wife would like that too. No.

Lauren Mancke: Matt, thank you for coming on the show. Everyone, if you like what you heard on today’s show you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at StudioPress.FM. You can also help Brian and I hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes. It’s a great way to never ever miss an episode. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

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Today we’re joined by Cory Miller. Cory is a former newspaper journalist turned full-time entrepreneur. In 2008, he started iThemes, which builds web design software and offers cutting-edge web design training for thousands of customers around the globe.

Cory is a passionate entrepreneur who believes in finding and maintaining work happiness (for himself and others) that aligns with your purpose and plays to your strengths, talents and ambitions, while challenging you to do great things with your life.

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Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. 
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In this 43-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Cory Miller discuss:

• The founding of iThemes in 2008
• Comradery and Co-opetition in the WordPress community
• What lies beneath the surface of entrepreneurship
• The importance of talking openly about mental health
• How mental health can affect your business
• How to find lasting career happiness

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

0103.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• Follow Cory on Twitter
• Visit CoryMiller.com
• It s Time To Start Talking Openly About Mental Health
• iThemes
• Leader.team: A Business Podcast by Cory Miller and Matt Danner
• The Div

The Transcript

The Importance of Entrepreneurial Mental Health

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM. StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder, Brian Gardner, and VP of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke, share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I are joined by Cory Miller, the founder of iThemes, to discuss the importance of mental health in being an entrepreneur.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner. I am joined, as usual, with the Vice President of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke.

Lauren Mancke: Hello, everyone. We are starting a new series on the show this week, one that we’re very excited about. We’re taking a step outside of the Genesis community and talking with members of the WordPress community.

Brian Gardner: Today, we’re joined by Cory Miller. Cory is a former newspaper journalist turned full-time entrepreneur, like many of us — the entrepreneur part, not so much the journalist part. In 2008, he started iThemes, which builds web design software and offers cutting edge web design training for thousands of customers around the globe. Cory is a passionate entrepreneur who believes in finding and maintaining work happiness for himself and for others that aligns also with your purpose and plays to your strengths, talents, ambitions, while challenging you to do great things with your life. That’s a mouthful. That’s awesome. Cory, it’s a huge pleasure to have you here on the show, StudioPress FM. Welcome.

Cory Miller: Thanks, Brian and Lauren, for having me on the show.

Brian Gardner: This is going to be a good one. I’m excited about this, mainly because it’s a little bit of a departure from the stuff we had been talking about, which was general business practice. Covering a number of different things. And it’s something that I know is very important to you, as it is to me. In a way, I’ve almost become envious of the way that you’ve been able to communicate and — I wouldn’t say grow an audience around this, but talk to a very particular topic that I think is important to all of us.

I want to get this started by setting the foundation for you and I, going back to the beginning. You and I have known each other for almost 10 years, believe it or not. A time when we were both working normal 40 hour a week jobs. Back then, we were tinkering around with WordPress as a hobby. I think back to that time and remember all of the conversations you and I have had on Gmail chat.

I wish I would have somehow saved those, because those were groundbreaking and set the foundation of where we are here today. It’d be fun to look back — almost in a diary sense — to see what were the things and feelings and stuff like that we were talking about. I want to ask you, what stands out in those early years about our relationship, but more importantly, what we discussed and built and started back then? How did that lay the foundation of where you and iThemes and those who work for you — where that’s all at right now.

The Founding of iThemes in 2008

Cory Miller: Yeah, those were the glory days, right, Brian? Those were the fun days. How I originally met Brian was I needed a theme for my WordPress blog. I found one of his great themes. I was trying to think what the name of that was. I have to find that. Found this guy named Brian Gardner and decided to read his blog and thought, “Man, we have a lot in common.”

I reached out, and before you know it we struck up this great friendship. I think we knew each other probably over a year before we actually met in person. What strikes me about that time back then, Brian, and I hope this is resonating for you too, is comradery. We were one of the first to be doing what we’re doing back then. The theme market was pretty abysmal and you had already released a number of themes. I was behind you trying to do the same, going, “I just want to learn.”

You were a great help to me and a resource as I tried to learn WordPress, web design, HTML, CSS, and put out free themes. When I think back — it’s comradery. Our Gmail chats you’re talking about, it makes me smile thinking about those, because it was just another person going through the same or similar experiences I was. We could just go, “What do you think about this?” “Ah, this is what I think.” “Well, what do you think about this?” Being each other’s sidekicks, I guess, is the way I felt about the early days.

Of course, that laid the huge foundation for what would eventually become iThemes and StudioPress. You quit your job before me. I quit my job after you. But I think we started on the same date, if my history, my memory serves me correctly. That was just a fun experience of going … Two kids is how I thought of myself, trying to make business of this. Man, looking back, when you said 10 years it’s like, “Holy cow, it’s been 10 years.” It’s crazy to think back about all of that. It’s been an awesome ride. That was, of course, the foundation for everything I’ve done. The success that I’ve enjoyed at iThemes and WordPress.

Lauren Mancke: I think a lot of people have a similar story of when they’re starting out in WordPress. That’s a great thing about the community. They’ve teamed up with these other people and they’ve gotten to know people and have helped them along the way. What about WordPress drew you in, and why were you so willing to back then to hitch your wagon to WordPress?

Cory Miller: When I found WordPress — I had originally started out on Blogger. I’m one of those original story people that started out in Blogger then went to WordPress and saw the light. The organization I was working for, we were trying to rebuild our website. We were looking at a bunch of options and one of them was Joomla. I thought, “That looks like a helicopter dashboard. It’s so overwhelming.” Then I installed WordPress and I’m like, “This is just easy to use.” I think it was just easy to use software.

I think WordPress as a learning tool was the biggest help for me. WordPress is just awesome. I think it’s still a key foundational tool for learning web design and web development, because it’s an awesome platform. Being so easy to use and simple to use. I can write posts, click publish, and I’m going. The five-minute install back then, being able to quickly install WordPress. It helped me become a web designer. Now, I’m not a web designer today. My team keeps me away from code or anything that’s sensitive. It’s just a great tool for learning.

Brian Gardner: It’s funny. People could say now the same thing you said about Joomla, that WordPress in and of itself sometimes feels like a helicopter dashboard. That’s just to speak to the evolution over the last 7, or 8, or 10 years of stuff. It’s had to evolve because of the fact that it became more than just a blogging platform, so I say that somewhat tongue in cheek. But you’re right, WordPress back then was such an easy tool. Obviously you and I both learned our way through it.

Hundreds and thousands of other community members — both as users, developers, or designers — they’ve all been able to teach themselves that stuff. Yeah, I love that WordPress came into my life and has obviously changed it. The same thing can be said for you as well, Cory, and Lauren — all of us here. Most of those listening — probably the same thing. It’s safe to say we share the start of our entrepreneurial journey together. We talked about the Gmail chats. And in those chats we got really deep with each other. We shared our revenue numbers. We shared business plans. We were close. In fact, years ago — it’s probably been, gosh, 6 or 7 years since we took that cruise together.

Comradery and Co-opetition in the WordPress Community

Brian Gardner: In the WordPress space, our relationship was probably one of the first examples of what you call that comradery. In layman’s terms it’s called this co-opetition thing, a term that we now use to describe the beauty of the open source community where members who are competitors help each other work through this thing we call life. Talk to us about that. I wouldn’t call it a brotherhood, but how that co-opetiton back then helped start iThemes. More importantly, why it’s been so important for you to continue that over the years. I’ve seen that from the outside as you and I have gone our own ways to some degree. I can still see from where I’m at that that has been an important thing for you and that you’ve maintained that all this time.

Cory Miller: I think entrepreneurship is a lonely, tough job most times. In the beginning — you were a few steps ahead of me, of course. You were so gracious and generous to share what you were doing, what you were learning. That helped me tremendously. I think I took that example of being generous from you, and also the spirit of WordPress and open source software, and continued that. I try to help people as best I can going forward.

I get real touchy about … I don’t want to say competition or frenemies or anything like that. In my traditional — probably the way I was either built or whatever — is I think of competition and I want to squash competition. I want to beat them. I don’t like that when I have so many good friends that are technically my competitors. I don’t like thinking about people as my competition. That’s always been this hard thing. I think you set a great example in the beginning to say, “Hey, everybody can do good together.”

We shared pretty intimate, detailed stuff about what we were doing in the very beginning. I would say, I don’t get to that degree as far as now — business plans and financial stuff with people. I haven’t shared my revenue number, I don’t think, in a very long time. The principles of what are really good for you and I, being sidekicks even though we had separate businesses — trying to help each other and doing good together. What I’ve gotten the most out of the relationships I’ve had with you and going forward has been just knowing I’m not alone. That we can be technically competitors but there’s enough space for all of us to do good and do well.

The comradery — back to that — saying, “Hey, I remember …” I think you’re going to ask me about this at some point, but when I was going through my divorce in 2010 I had a good friend of mine named Grant Griffiths give me a call and go, “Hey man, what’s going on? You just don’t look good.” I shared everything that pretty much five people on the planet knew about at that point. That was just one example of saying that I think the most I’ve gotten out of the friendships I’ve had — who happened to be competitors too — has been the emotional support of knowing there’s people going through the same things I’m going through, the highs and the lows.

Brian Gardner: Some of these people, would you consider them friends first and then either competitors or business acquaintances second?

Cory Miller: I think I’ve tended to always think of them as friends first. Then sometimes I realize that not everyone values that friendship as much as I do. At some point you realize, “If I’m not in the business, are we going to be talking as much and doing all these things?” It’s a reminder. We had some friends in Oklahoma City in July, about 25 people. I realized it was really special that we were able to have our friends come into town and roll out the red carpet for them.

But then the question hit the back of my mind, to be honest with you. It was like, “If I’m not the CEO of iThemes and doing this stuff in WordPress …” Those people are amazing people, like you, Brian. I’m like, “We probably won’t have as much in common if I’m not a part of the WordPress community or iThemes.” I don’t know. That was probably a little refresher.

I tend to think friend first because I’m a very loyal person. Then realize, “Okay, this is how we met.” Brian, you introduced me to Jason Schuller 00:12:01 back in the day, I think 2008. I count him as one of my most dear friends in life. He lives in Seattle thousands of miles away and isn’t even in the WordPress community anymore, but I value that friendship. I think there are those that have transcended the business competition, partnership — whatever you want to call it. They’ve become really dear friends that I care about and want to keep in touch with.

Brian Gardner: We’re going to take a quick break, but we’ll be right back with StudioPress FM.

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. To get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

What Lies Beneath the Surface of Entrepreneurship

Lauren Mancke: Aside from iThemes, you are involved in a number of other projects. You maintain a personal blog at CoryMiller.com. A few years ago you started an organization called The Div, and recently, a business podcast at Leader.Team. Can you share a little bit about each one of those?

Cory Miller: I think I’m like Brian, if I don’t continue to do new projects I get bored. I subscribe to those newsletters and this podcast and stuff. That’s what we shared a long time ago. “Hey, here’s a new project I’m doing.” “Okay, that’s awesome. I’m going to do this project too.” It’s always having to have a project in front of you, I think. My personal blog is just to share experiences and expertise that I’ve learned that might not fit our iThemes audience. It’s more focused on entrepreneurship and leadership.

The Div is something I’m very proud of. It’s our nonprofit we started five years ago. The mission of The Div is basically to teach kids technology, help kids learn code, light the spark that Brian and I began learning 10 years ago or whatever — that lit our fire. Helping do that for kids earlier on. I’m excited about The Div. I’m glad you asked me about it today, because we just got accepted to be a regional partner for Oklahoma for Code.org. Next week, our Executive Director, McKaylan Danner, and I and my partner Jay will be at the White House learning about next steps at Code.org. We’re super excited about that partnership. It’s just trying to do good for the last couple years and then realizing Code.org has everything that we wanted to do here in Oklahoma to help kids learn technology.

The last you asked about, Leader.Team, was essentially — one of my best friends, my sidekick, my COO Matt Danner and I just realized we’ve made a lot of mistakes in eight and a half years. We want to share those experiences and what we learned, and let people take the truth or the things that they need from those stories. Again, I think Brian and I are a lot alike. If we don’t have a project in front of us we get bored.

Brian Gardner: You said mistakes. This was not on the agenda, but it made me think of last week when I was in Dallas at Circles Conference. I was on a panel onstage and we were asked, “What were the reasons you may have rebranded your company?” I immediately raised my hand and mentioned that for me it was a cease and desist letter that I had gotten way back in the day. That’s why I rebranded to StudioPress. This idea of entrepreneurs and business and making mistakes is fresh in my mind and you just brought it up. I’m going to ask an impromptu question, if you don’t mind. I’m sure you don’t, because you’re such a transparent guy. Give us a few examples of a few mistakes you’ve made over the years. Ultimately, these are probably things that at the core maybe have bubbled up into some of the stuff that we’re going to talk about a little bit later on with mental health and so on.

Cory Miller: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you asking the question too. I remember that cease and desist letter. I remember that chat. You going, “Hey, we just got hit with this.” I’m like, “Oh my gosh. I’m sorry.” All the emotions around that. I felt that empathetically because you were going through that and we were chatting quite a bit.

As far as mistakes goes, I try to stay as positive as I can. Mistakes are always learning lessons for me, or I at least try to make them learning lessons for me. I would say the biggest mistakes or learning lessons have been around people. We’ve had to part ways with team members in the past — with customers too. I think the biggest mistakes are probably just making sure we’re doing right by everybody, but thinking through the learning aspects of, “Okay, how do we do this different so we don’t replicate this?” When we have to let someone go from the team or whatever, that’s a tremendously impactful thing — often negatively, but in the long haul positively for everyone involved. How do we get better as we do that? We’ve made some hiring mistakes, team mistakes over the years. We’ve really tried not to do that as much. We’ve made a number of product and brand mistakes.

I don’t know if that’s exactly where you wanted the question to go, Brian, but we pulled WebDesign.com into the iThemes brand and we thought, “Yeah, just turn on the domain name and it would go bezonkers,” and all that kind of stuff. It didn’t. We eventually let that go back. Some of the product mistakes have been obviously huge. I don’t know if you classify those as mistakes. Probably in 2008, 2009, exploring movable type themes — that was interesting and costly. I’m trying to think back some. It’s not that I don’t have a wealth of mistakes, by the way.

How Mental Health Can Affect Your Business

Brian Gardner: Yeah, right. I hear you. Okay, let’s get into the mental health element of it, because that’s really what this is all about and what I want to pick your brain about. It’s safe to say that we can all agree this is an issue we face as entrepreneurs. You mentioned that at the very beginning that being an entrepreneur can be a very lonely job. It’s something I’ve experienced a multitude of times in a number of different ways over the years.

Quite honestly, it’s had a significant impact on how we run our business. It’s hard to separate personal from business or mental health from business, because at some point they’re going to intersect. It happens daily and hourly. For me it’s almost every other hour. “Oh my gosh, should I do this or should I go do that?” It’s always at the top of my mind. It’s something that I’ve struggled with over the years. Something that I’ve allowed to affect the relationship we’ve had over the years. At what point did you encounter the initial wave of it’s not just all peaches and roses ?

Cory Miller: Gosh, probably that first year as we had to let people go. The whole thing in the background about WordPress and the GPO controversy that was going on around themes. That was the first wave of, “This isn’t all peaches and cream. It’s a tough job. It’s a tough sport. It’s a tough game to play.” Having played it for eight and a half years, both of us, in the ups and downs, it’s a cold shower to say, “Okay, it’s just not going to be all good. There’s going to be some really trying times for that.”

I think that some of the ones along the way over the last eight and a half years — the biggest was when I went through my divorce in 2010. That affected the entire team, the business, and me, obviously, personally. Trying to get through that. That’s when personal life and business life — my personal affected business in a tremendous way. Gosh, looking back, Brian, to when we started themes back 10 years ago. Golly, 10 years. There were few people doing themes or even quality themes. Now today, you look and there are themes and premium theme companies all over the place. Not to mention StudioPress’s long tenure in the space. But also you’ve got ThemeForce, which has gotten substantially better. A lot of offerings there. It kind of commoditized that market in so many ways.

The constant competition, which is good, I think. I don’t like to admit that always. But the constant competition within WordPress makes everything better. That means we’ve always got to be a step ahead. We derive about two to three percent of our revenue from themes today. Eight years ago we derived 100 percent of our revenue from themes. How much that has changed in the few short years here and how it’s going to change in the future, too. We don’t know where that necessarily is always going to be taking us. To be ready for that.

The constant competition — it’s a resetting thing for me every single day almost. You’ll come in from a weekend and look at yourselves in the mirror and go, “Oh, gosh.” You’ll start feeling bad about yourself. You have a down week or whatever that is. I think it happens to everybody, by the way. There are some that are more open with it and honest about it. We all have the down days. That first day probably that happened in the first year, second year, when you’re like, “Is the server down? Are sales not happening today?” You think the sky is falling.

When team members leave — either voluntarily or involuntarily — that’s always a down moment in business. I think preparing myself to be resilient. Each issue I’ve gone through over the last few years — trying to build more and more resilient muscle to myself, knowing that it’s only a matter of time when there’s going to be another dip.

Lauren Mancke: Being an entrepreneur is definitely a difficult job. It’s really something you put your whole self into, like you said. It’s only natural for that to spill out into other aspects of your life. Your personal life can spill back into your business life. That can happen when you work remotely. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, if you work remotely. You said that someone saw you and they said, “What’s going on with you? You don’t look well.” When you work remotely, you don’t have people who can actually see you and see what’s going on with you. What do you think is so difficult for entrepreneurs to deal with, and what major contributions do you see?

The Importance of Talking Openly About Mental Health

Cory Miller: The way I look at being an entrepreneur is when you guys have been asking me about experiences and stories, the down and the highs, I always think about an iceberg sitting out in the middle of an ocean. That’s the way I think most of us entrepreneurs live our lives. At the top is everything you see. That’s the success. That’s the happiness. That’s the, “Hey everything is awesome, going great.” It’s the Tweets, it’s the Instagram posts with cute kids, and being on exotic vacations, or whatever it is. That’s all that success stuff that most of us only see.

The other 70% that you don’t see is the suffering below it. How I’ve been able to look at my life as an entrepreneur and deal with it better is thinking of the iceberg and going, “There’s stuff underneath the surface that I’m not sharing that I’m suffering with, struggling with.” Not every single day do I feel depression or do I have some particular pain that’s just killing me. There’s things under the surface that affects the top of the surface.

I think the more we can share those things that are happening with trusted like-minded people, the healthier we’re going to be. I talk a lot about having a professional counselor that I see, on average, four times a year. I put it on my calendar every quarter to make an appointment with Kyle, my counselor, to talk through the issues. Just knowing that I needed some outside perspective, a professional that’s trained and licensed to help me walk through some of the things that I deal with on a day to day basis. Even if I think there are not many things underneath the surface, I still try to do that. Going back and knowing that I was very unhealthy in the early part of our business, consumed with jealousy and envy, anger, frustration — all those things.

Now I go, “If I’m going to live a healthy life and continue to do this job for the next 10 years, then I’ve got to be healthy.” And I want to be healthy and happy doing that. I think to your question, Lauren, is why don’t we do that? Why don’t we share the issues? There was about a six month period where I was going through a lot of personal pain and didn’t share it with hardly anyone that actually cared about me, that loved me, that wanted the best for me. I kept that in for about six months. I think the reason why is there’s a healthy sense of pride, a healthy sense of ego, and a healthy sense of fear. I think those things get in our way. We don’t want to ask for help but we know we need it.

These things of fear, pride, ego, or whatever, they get in the way to be willing to say, “I’m hurting. I need some help.” It took me being on my face and being dragged across gravel to realize I needed to go reach out for help. The first people I asked help for were my parents, then eventually counselors and other friends that rushed into my life as other people were running out of my life.

I’m trying to get down to it because I still do it today, let things get in the way so that I don’t share what I’m really going through. I trace it back to fear. “Am I going to be embarrassed? Are people going to use this against me? Will people really know the real me?” Those things that are obstacles to sharing the stuff underneath the surface are the things that I try to work on. I’m not saying I’m perfect, but I’m trying to work on them so I can be healthier and happier as a result of it.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. Leo from Buffer set the trend, at least for me, to do the transparency thing more from a business and numbers standpoint. When I think of it in terms of who out there — and not even just the WordPress space, but the online entrepreneurial space — who has started to set that trend of the personal transparency, obviously you come to mind.

In fact, as I was preparing for all this I thought it would be fun to Google “Cory Miller mental health.” I know it’s kind of a funny phrase, but I have the ability to be able to find what I need to on Google. I’m like, “That’s perfectly phrased for what I was looking for.” It’s quite obvious how important this is to you, because I see results all over Google with that search term. There’s articles in Inc. Magazine, a podcast you did on Office Hours with Carrie Dills and Pippin Williamson, and a slew of other results that came in like that.

The one that stands out to me the most, though, is the piece you just published not too long ago on your own site titled, “It’s Time to Start Talking Openly about Mental Health.” You had just spoken at WordCamp Denver, and in your words, shared the most “personal, intimate, transparent, open, and perhaps the most impactful” talk you’ve ever given.

I followed that up with the one on your site. I wanted to read a little bit of that just for our listeners. Cory says, “It’s not too often that I cry, let alone cry in public, let alone cry on stage, but I did. Sharing some of the most personal stories of my life, many of which I’ve never shared publicly was intense to say the least. Thinking about the people who’ve made a difference in my life, often the life-saving difference, just opened up a part of me I don’t share too often … and I lost it.”

In that talk, you shared some intimate things you’ve alluded to a couple of times here already on the show with your divorce, the solitary confinement you put yourself in for six months, and your general insecurities, and as you’ve also said, fear. You have thousands of customers at iThemes, more than that who follow you through social media, and a slew of folks who look up to you — what was the straw that broke the camel’s back? Why did you finally break down and decide to go against the grain and set this trend, and just say, “It’s okay to be real and it’s okay to struggle?”

Cory Miller: I remember telling my wife Lindsay — we’ve been married 5 years in July — I said, “Hey I’m submitting this talk.” A lot of things I wanted to share earlier but couldn’t for a number of reasons. I said, “I’m submitting this talk and when I push publish here on this talk, I’m afraid they might actually want me to do it. But once I’m done I’m committed.” Sure enough, they did it. There was probably three talks I submitted. Sure enough, they said, “Yes, we want you to do that.” I was like, “Okay, now I got to do that.” Man, leading up to that week to being able to share the story publicly — that basically I had been through a divorce and all the things that you mentioned above. It was just time, I think.

I want to be clear. It wasn’t therapeutic. It wasn’t intended for my own therapy. It was intended to help others. I know as I’ve shared my struggles in the past with depression, struggles with divorce, struggles with being an entrepreneur like we talked about, it’s always resonated with people. It always seems to be the most impactful thing I’ve ever done in my life, to share simply my story and being open and honest about it.

It was just time. It had been a couple years since all those things had happened. I had put them to rest in my heart and soul. I thought, “It’s time now to share with other people.” Going through and just sharing this story, being on stage and my emotions coming through me, I said, “It’s time.” I’ve experienced more success than I ever could have dreamed of in my life. That doesn’t necessarily mean financial stuff, just more success in my life than I ever thought possible. I’m so thankful for where my life is now and what it would have been five, six, eight years ago. It’s gotten better even through some adversity.

I thought, “There needs to be more honesty and transparency and genuineness in entrepreneurship.” We always put these facades up. This mask of “everything is awesome.” And all that above surface stuff. I thought, “There’s a time for vulnerability to share stories that resonates and helps people.” For one day alone, to help somebody else by sharing my story, to go, “I’m not alone, there’s other people going through the same thing.” Pooling some of the impact and the influence we’ve been able to have through WordPress just saying, “Okay, well if someone that’s been in this business eight years and been in WordPress 10 can share their story, then I can go and get help and seek help.” That’s really what it was. It was time to share the story to help other people.

Lauren Mancke: It sounds like that speech in WordCamp Denver was very powerful. What kind of reaction did you get from people? Did they come up to you afterwards? Did they say, “You really touched me with this?”

Cory Miller: It’s pretty incredible. Not even expected. I’m sitting up there sharing the story, opening my soul to everybody there. I ended up crying, Brian mentioned this. I’m sitting there, trying to get myself together. My wife is in the audience. Our longest-tenured team member was in the audience. Another awesome team member was in the audience. Sharing all that in front of all them was pretty tough. What happened was I shared the story and I’m sitting there basically going, “I want to go in a hole and cry now.” I got a standing ovation, which I didn’t expect. The thing that I wanted to do is just say, “I don’t care what happens. I just want to get this out.” That was incredible to have people really affirm after you’re sitting up there crying at a WordCamp talking about nothing about really technology.

The other thing that was one of the most treasured things I’ll take in my life, was there was a Q&A session. I ended early, but people kept coming to the mic and not asking a question of me, just sharing their story, getting it out there. I thought, “Wow, there’s something magical about just sharing your story.” Doesn’t have to have my name attached to it. I don’t need to get credit for it. When you share your story authentically and genuinely, it opens up this humanness between people.

Four or five people got up and weren’t asking me questions at all. They would say, “Thanks for sharing your story, and here’s mine,” in front 150 people, whatever was in that room. That was pretty magical. After that was the realization for me that I’m not going to stop sharing my story. If my story helps somebody else, I’m going to keep doing it bigger and broader and better. That’s what I’ve done since Denver, over a year ago now.

Brian Gardner: Another quick impromptu question. Have you ever thought of writing a book that speaks very specifically to this? Not just feeling agnostic general business and entrepreneurial stuff, but an entire book either about your story or the importance of mental health through your story and what not?

Cory Miller: You’ve been reading my email again, Brian. I totally do want to do that. But I always give the disclaimer, “I’m not a professional licensed or trained counselor. I’m just an entrepreneur sharing my mental health stories.” I want to do something that says here are not just my stories, but other stories. Brian Gardner’s stories. Your challenges with the highs and lows of business.

I want to get a bunch of entrepreneurs and get their stories. Then I want to find a writing partner that could be that professional trained counselor to say, “Here are some things.” I don’t want to give advice. I’m not professionally trained, I’m just sharing my experiences and what helped me most. I’d like to have somebody to do that. I want that to happen. I just need a bigger … I need to kick my own pants here and get it going, because it’s a message that needs to get out there.

Brian Gardner: I know you’ve gone through a lot over the years. We’re all sorry to hear that in your story you’ve had to deal with those things. We all have our own stuff to deal with. I’m going to try to get through this question. I don’t know if I’m actually going to be able to.

More importantly, I’m sorry for anything — this is sort of impromptu. I don’t know. I’m sorry for anything I did back then that contributed to any part of your story that wasn’t happy. I know we talked about how in the early days the comradery was there, and at some point I think I let the bad side of entrepreneurialism and competition get the best of me. I think it ultimately affected where our friendship went. I knew that when I flew to Oklahoma City to talk to you about that and to apologize for that … Sorry, reality TV right here on the … Oh, gosh. Anyway, I think you know where I’m going with this, that I’m sorry.

Cory Miller: Absolutely.

Brian Gardner: I’m not a narcissist. I’m not going to take credit for all the pain you went through. But I do know that in your early stages, the fear and the competitive or the “I’m not good enough” stuff may have been derived from stuff that I did — whether it was on purpose or not. Anyway, I want to move through that a little bit and apologize for that.

I guess I can say that I went through my own seasons, many seasons of online immaturity. It affected our relationship. Moving through that, what I didn’t truly embrace back then was the idea that one plus one could equal three and how important working alongside our peers can be. I know that at the beginning of our relationship it was that way. It’s better to go with people than trying to outrun them, is something that, looking back in hindsight, I wish I would have — especially with you — embraced more.

Back to the idea of co-opetition, where do you see opportunities right now in the WordPress space? Things that aren’t happening, but looking outside — if you could play a marionette and say, “Gosh, I wish this person could go with that person.” Or, “I wish these people would get along better.” Our audience is Genesis-specific but also very WordPress-specific. There’s a lot of general WordPress community people who listen to the show. Where do you see those opportunities? Where do you wish things would be just a little bit different?

How to Find Lasting Career Happiness

Cory Miller: First and foremost, I got to go back to your comments. Thank you so much for that, Brian. But you and I put those things … Forgive and forget way back, a long time ago. I do appreciate that. I totally accept that, and I hope you’ll do the same for me. It takes two, brother. It takes two. I’m thankful that I get the opportunity to talk to you again and hopefully rekindle those things. Anything that happened — which is private between you and I — is all in the past. I so much appreciate you doing that in this venue, even if I feel like you didn’t have to. I do appreciate it. I know I can always be a better friend, better person, better leader.

Okay, back to your question. I think the biggest thing is emotional support and friendship, that comradery like you and I had back in 2007, 2008, and beyond. Maybe we don’t have to share numbers and business plans per say, but just going, “Hey, man, how are things? How are your kids?” Taking that cruise with you every so often. I’d pin you and go, “How’s Z, man?” You had children before I did. Seeing him grow up on Facebook and Instgram is pretty awesome. He’s a great kid — young man, excuse me.

I think it’s that emotional support and friendship. Along the way, I think there will be times when we can help each other out. Like, “Hey, Brian, I just saw” — just like we did back in the day — “I saw you did this. Would you mind sharing how you did that?” Being generous with those types of things but not feeling that … I’ve got a great business group here in Oklahoma City. We have different businesses. We don’t have anywhere like competitive-type businesses against each other or anything. It’s awesome to have that emotional friendship-type of support to go, “Hey, we’re going through the same stuff. We have the same problems just different names attached to those.”

That’s the same with any entrepreneur, I believe. Same problems, different name, whether it’s cash, people, conflict, communication — whatever it is. Same issues, different names. I think that opportunity in WordPress is pretty special because we get together at WordCamps or different venues online or offline. The opportunity to say, “Let’s just be humans” — we sit behind computers and type all day at a desk. We have the opportunity to also be — with the spirit of open source software and spirit of WordPress — to be human to each other too. I think that is the biggest key for the opportunities that happen in WordPress.

Brian Gardner: I’ll take that as a swift kick in the pants to go out there and to seek those opportunities. Not the opportunities to take, but the opportunities to give. Thank you for that.

Lauren Mancke: Cory, you’ve shared so many great points with us. I know it’s resonated with me and makes me recall a lot of the struggles I went through starting my business. I think that’s the beauty of what you’re doing. You’re letting people know that they aren’t alone, that you don’t have to be a rock. It’s okay to be open and vulnerable. Do you have any other final thoughts you want to discuss about anything we’ve covered? Any words of wisdom for those who are starting or thinking about starting or actually just in the bottoms of the entrepreneurial journey?

Cory Miller: There’s typically always a tomorrow. You hear the typical cliché thing, “this too shall pass.” I think trying to — as I’m going through the bad times, the dark times is — savor that for a moment. To say “I’m valuing what my life is. What I’m going through now helps me really truly understand the value of my experiences,” and all that. To be thankful for every moment in life, because even the bad times have shaped me profoundly into a positive thing.

I think that’s the key we miss. Number one like you said, “I’m not alone.” When you go through the bad times, you got to remind yourself, “I’m not alone.” The second is there’s something to learn here. There’s something to learn and grow and do and be better about to make sure your life can go on to bigger greatness, whatever that may be.

I think remembering those core things, like reaching out to find somebody else to help, whether that be your spouse, your significant other, a professional counselor, another business colleague. The second, to know that “there’s something I need to learn through this experience.” Make sure you savor that and everything that is part of your life. I think gratefulness has been an antidote for a lot of the tough times that I’ve had in my life. It’s hard to remember, but it’s key to do.

Brian Gardner: Well, we appreciate you being willing to open up and to share on the show. There’s so much more to you and your story and all the knowledge that you have outside of what you’ve shared here. We wanted to give people an opportunity to look deeper into that part of your life. Cory’s written a number of books on entrepreneurship and career-focused types of things. These cover topics such as young people trying to get hired all the way to the new rules for what you call entrepreneurship and how to find lasting career happiness, which is I think what we all are looking for.

If you’re looking for information about stuff like that, I definitely recommend the stuff that Cory writes. You can visit his website CoryMiller.com/Books to see all that he’s written. If you’re interested in interviewing Cory or having him speak at your workshop, seminar, or conference, he’s always open to that. You can hit him up at CoryMiller.com/Contact, I believe is his contact page. Like I said, we’re very thankful to have your story here on the show.

Cory Miller: Appreciate you guys being open to share this.

Lauren Mancke: If you like what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at, you guessed it, StudioPress.FM. You can also help us hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes. It’s a great way to never ever miss an episode. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

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On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Brian and Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative. They are a vibrant, creative studio that delivers purpose-driven design and engaging experiences for businesses who want to stand out and step into the spotlight.

Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You Bylogo.png" alt="StudioPress Sites">

			
www.studiopress.com/fm">
			
Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. 
			www.studiopress.com/fm">Launch your new site today!

Brian and Jennifer love challenges and deadlines, and are brand building, WordPress wielding, Lego playing nerds dedicated to creating beautiful, flexible, and powerful platforms for rapidly growing businesses.

In this 38-minute episode Brian Gardner, Jennifer Bourn, and Brian Bourn discuss:

• The founding of Bourn Creative
• Using Genesis within a Creative Agency
• Choosing a business size that fits your lifestyle
• Tips for maintaining a consistent workflow from home
• Creating a work/life balance that revolves around family
• The importance of scheduling and client communication
• Building a profit margin into your client services
• Creating partnerships to create recurring revenue streams
• Evaluating expenses on a consistent basis

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

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The Show Notes

• This episode is brought to you by Digital Commerce Summit
• Follow Bourn Creative on Twitter
• Follow Brian on Twitter
• Follow Jennifer on Twitter
• Visit Bourn Creative on Facebook
• Inspired Imperfection
• Visit Inspired Imperfection on Facebook

The Transcript

How to Sustain a Profitable Creative Agency

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it’s hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for me, is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers — people like you — more easily. Here are a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to? Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything — the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connected with both people who are putting it on and then the other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit.

Voicevoer : StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian talks with Jennifer and Brian Bourn of Bourn Creative on how to sustain a profitable creative agency.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone, welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner. Unfortunately, I’m on my own today because Lauren is out. It worked out well because today we have two guests: husband and wife, Brian and Jennifer Bourn. Very excited to talk to them as we continue the series with the members of our Genesis community.

Today we’re joined by Brian and Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative. They are a vibrant creative studio that delivers purpose-driven design and engaging experiences for businesses who want to stand out and step into the spotlight. Brian and Jennifer love challenges and deadlines, and are brand-building, WordPress-wielding, Lego-playing nerds dedicated to creating beautiful, flexible, powerful platforms for rapidly growing businesses. They are also very good with words, because that was a mouthful and well said. There you go. It’s a huge pleasure to have you guys on the show. Welcome and thank you for being here.

Brian Bourn: Thanks for inviting us.

Jennifer Bourn: Thanks for having us.

Brian Gardner: This will be a fun challenge because I’ve got two of you. Hopefully what I’ll do is address questions to either/or and then we’ll have things open. There’s no process here, so we’ll just do our thing.

Brian Bourn: Sounds great.

Jennifer Bourn: Sounds great.

Using Genesis Within a Creative Agency

Brian Gardner: There we go. Let’s talk about WordPress and Genesis, in that very order. Brian, why don’t you talk about how you guys got involved with WordPress? Then, Jen, maybe you can talk about the Genesis side.

Brian Bourn: Perfect. Yeah, they’re all intermingled. We’ve been in business now for 11 years. In July we passed our 11th year. Just think, 11 years ago when we first were into web — when Jen was on her own, which she’ll talk about later, the roots of some of our agency — everything was done in static HTML. Then we transferred over to a private label content management system and designed and built custom templates for that. We quickly reached the limitations and then were looking for something more, something better, something more capability-focused. We then made that switch to WordPress. I don’t know the exact year of that, but I do know it was around version 2.7, 2.8, somewhere right in there. It was the upper 2-point-whatever version.

Jennifer Bourn: It was the end of 2008, the beginning of 2009.

Brian Bourn: Yeah, and as far as WordPress, we started out designing and building completely one-offs, custom themes. I know for a fact that Jennifer bought some [revolution themes inaudible 00:05:16], some of your very early origins, and then migrated. She also bought some themes from StudioPress before Genesis was ever a thing, when the themes used to be standalone. Then when Genesis came out, and the whole child theming concept, and WordPress sites were getting more complex, we were looking for a good starting point that would aid our development and make our product better for our clients. Once we tried Genesis a few times we haven’t looked back and we’ve built every single site on Genesis since.

Jennifer Bourn: That pretty much covers that.

Brian Gardner: Okay. In that case then, Jen, you get the next question. How about that?

Jennifer Bourn: Sure.

Brian Gardner: You guys are obviously a husband and wife team. You have your own agency. You’ve managed to do very well for yourselves and probably could grow way bigger than you are now. I’m pretty sure I know the answer to this question, but why the decision to I know you work with a few people outside of yourselves, but why the decision to keep it smaller scale than growing into a huge agency?

Choosing a Business Size That Fits Your Lifestyle

Jennifer Bourn: We’ve gone back and forth about growth. Do we grow? Do we not grow? I think it’s something that a lot of people wrestle with. We grew and expanded for a while and found that the structure of our business at the time didn’t support that and our freedom at the same time.

Our kids are now 10 and 13 and they’re not going to be at home for much longer. Natalie is in eighth grade now. In five years she’s going to be gone. Carter not that much longer after her. We really looked at what we wanted for our life, and we want to do really great work for great clients that we enjoy working with, but at the same time we want to really live life and enjoy the kids while they want to hang out with us, while they want to spend time with us — and they’re fun. We want to be able to have the flexibility and the freedom in our schedule to be able to structure our client work around travel and vacations and family adventures and all of those things.

Also, looking at the way that we’ve structured our business, duplicating ourselves is really difficult. The market is highly competitive, and finding the right people to fill in the gaps that you need is tough. We have some subcontractors that we work with who are amazing. They allow us to keep the train moving when we’re traveling and help fill in some of the holes of where we might not be the strongest. For right now, we’re really happy with the size that we’re at, the projects that we’re doing, the clients that we’ve got, and the flexibility to be able to do tons of fun things with the kids all the time. I don’t think I know anybody that takes more vacations than we do.

Brian Gardner: I was going to bring that up later. We’ll get to that later, because it’s true.

Jennifer Bourn: That’s not to say that we aren’t taking away conversations in the background about growth and looking at what that looks like for us.

Brian Gardner: It’s refreshing. We recently spoke with Bill Ericson and he also talked about work-life balance and how important that is for him. I see in my little community and ecosystem — which includes people like you and Bill, and even Rafal and Jason Shuler, who is another one we talked about — people who have probably the chops and the capability of growing bigger than they are, but they refuse to because they want to put so much emphasis on family and spending time.

As I mentioned on Bill’s show, it’s so refreshing to be around people who share that sentiment. It is huge, I know. My son is 12 and in seventh grade, and we also have only a few years left. There’s time to go crazy and work harder and grow and get bigger when they’re gone. As they say, the days go by slow, the years go by fast. I don’t want to look back and be like, “I built a great business, but not a great relationship with him or with Shelly” or whatever. It’s so great to hear that from you guys.

Jennifer Bourn: That’s the thing. You’re never going to look back and be like, “I’m glad I took that extra meeting,” but you’re going to say, “I’m glad we took that trip.”

Brian Gardner: Yeah.

Jennifer Bourn: You’re never going to look back and wish that you answered more email or you sat in front of your desk any longer that you did. I think one of the things that’s unique about the WordPress ecosystem is that so many people share what’s going on in their business — challenges and struggles — and you get these sneak peeks into other people’s businesses. From some of the people that we’re friends with we’ve been able to see what happens behind the scenes at some of these larger agencies. Brian and I have both said, “I don’t want that life.” Unless we can do it the way that will fulfill our personal life just as much as our professional life, then we don’t need to go there.

I think it’s different for everybody, and I think, too, personal experiences and personal stories drive that too. Brian had gallbladder cancer a few years ago, and facing the mortality of somebody that you love or yourself really puts things in perspective. We didn’t always do this much fun stuff. We worked a lot more and did a lot less fun things. Life experiences put things in perspective for us too.

The Founding of Bourn Creative

Brian Gardner: Yeah, they always seem to do that. In some fashion we all, I think, have that to some degree. Brian, walk us through the process you guys went through when you started the agency years ago. I know a lot of things have changed on the web — tools, software, trends, that kind of thing. What are some of the early challenges you guys faced when making the decision to go out on your own and to start this as your thing?

Brian Bourn: In the early days in the very beginning, Jennifer was on her own. She was an in-house designer at a PR agency and we had our daughter, which was two-years-old. Jennifer found out she was pregnant with my son — I had a different career at the time. It was one of those It was not working for us family-wise. We made the scariest choice that we’ve ever done, but at the same time one of the best decisions we’ve ever made looking back. At the time it was terrifying to do that. We knew that for our own sanity and raising a family that it was the best thing to do for us, and Jen went out on her own. That early challenge was: how do you pay the bills that come due in 30 days the day after your last day?

Jennifer Bourn: We had just bought a ridiculously ginormous house and I was pregnant.

Brian Bourn: Based on the salary of two full-time employees with benefit packages and all that sort of thing. Then one them decides to We decide to start the company.

Jennifer Bourn: Yeah, when I started my business it was, “If you’re not working you’re not getting paid.” I worked all the way up until the day that I had Carter and then was back at work two weeks later. Those first years were tough.

Brian Bourn: That was an extreme challenge, having a newborn and a toddler in the very early years of the business. In the very early days, all I did with Jennifer was the admin side of the business. None of the client-facing work that was being output, just the admin while I had my day job. Until I left that job and joined her full-time, the first few years of the company Jennifer was on her own.

That was very difficult too, when one person is a freelancer and then the other person has a salaried position with paid vacation and sick leave. It creates very different demands and dynamics in our personal relationships and professional relationships. It was navigating not just that, but navigating us on a personal level. Figuring out, “How do we make this work around raising kids? Around getting client work done? Around trying to take vacations and do things? The human side of it was very challenging in the early days.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I bet.

Jennifer Bourn: 2008, 2009, and in 2010 we took almost no vacations and did almost If you look at our stock of all the digital photos by year, there’s the tiniest amount because I worked from 4:00 in the morning to 1:00 at night, seven days a week. It was ridiculous. Now I’m reaping the rewards of that.

Brian Gardner: I was going to say, it’s a far cry from what you guys are doing now.

Jennifer Bourn: It was tough, but it was one of those things that we looked at as short-term sacrifice, long-term gain. “It’s only going to be a few years to build a brand, build a reputation in the market, and get a solid base of clients. The kids are going to get older.” When we first started the business it was, “Let’s hang on until the kids hit kindergarten. Then we can start looking at growth. Then we can start looking at where do we want to take the business. Then we can really start looking at more than ‘let’s do enough client work to pay all our bills and make sure everything’s good and get the kids to kindergarten.'”

Then it was, “Once Carter’s in first grade and they’re both in school full-time, then let’s look at what can we do with the business and where we can go.” Then it was, “When Brian’s parents are both retired and we have tons of babysitting then we can travel and go to WordCamps and we can do stuff together. That’s the next phase.” Now we’ve gone through phases of life, our business has mirrored the phases of life as we’ve grown.

Tips for Managing a Consistent Workflow from Home

Brian Gardner: It’s definitely something I can see from the outside. Good stuff. Brian, you manage the business. We talked about the team, day-to-day operations, and so forth. What’s a typical day look like for you now that you’re at home and working as part of the business?

Brian Bourn: This is something that I definitely have room for improvement, my own personal time management. I found the best thing for me to manage my day, to keep a typical day, is to keep a very regimented regular schedule. I keep certain rules, no calls on Mondays. I never schedule calls on Mondays. If I do have calls, I only ever do no more than two in a single day. Things that interrupt that work flow, I’ve found — especially anyone who does design or development work or anything like that — you can’t get anything done in 30-minute blocks, you need good solid hours of uninterrupted time.

I have switched my day-to-day schedule around to where I am ruthless with my schedule and maintain some very large chunks of time, especially in the morning, those early hours from when I This time of year, when I drop the kids off at school until I take my lunch break I don’t open my email, I stay off social media, and I use those key hours in the day to get my work done. Then, as the after lunch time, you start getting distracted. I’ll use that time to do email or work on short tasks. Things like — maybe I’m working on a proposal or clearing out my inbox, back and forth with sales leads, looking at GitHub, seeing what’s going on with the partners that we work with, looking at commits, and reviewing code. Using those small tasks that it’s okay to get interrupted and saving those for the afternoon.

Because I am managing the primary sales funnel and a lot of this other business aspects, I’ll go days at a time where I don’t write a single line of code because I’m doing business operations. By keeping a regimented schedule of “these certain days of the week are reserved for these certain things,” it allows those chunks of time which keeps me overall within a semi-normal working schedule, day to day.

Brian Gardner: Semi-normal, is that a thing?

Brian Bourn: Normal is as defined by the person.

Brian Gardner: Yes, for sure. Jen, what about you? You consult on brand, website, and digital strategy. You lead all the design projects — specifically within WordPress, that’s your specialty. Same question I have for you here, what does your typical day look like? I’m sure it’s somewhat similar but also somewhat different than Brian’s.

Jennifer Bourn: My typical day is so much better now that Brian does all the business admin. Brian came in and now does all the things I don’t like doing, and it’s amazing. Typically I am the same, I keep email closed, keep social media closed, keep all the distractions — mainly because we want our evenings and weekends free. The more we can cram in that 9:00 to 5:00, the better everything is. We stay highly focused there.

I, right now, am lead organizer for WordCamp Sacramento, which is happening in October. I’m really busy with that. We’ve got regular client work and then I’ve got my new blog that I started, Inspired Imperfection, where I’m sharing recipes and our family adventures and things like that. I’m juggling all of it right now.

The great thing is we’ve shifted our agency over the last probably 2 years to 18 months from being very heavy in design work to being very heavy in development work. If I get to my desk before 9:00, it’s my own personal stuff. At 9:00 I start client work and I look at, “What’s the big project I have to get done during the day?” I try to only have one big time suck, energy suck comprehensive project per day. A theme design, something that’s going to take a bunch of time. I do that first to get it done and get it out of the way and get that client deadline met. Then I’ll knock out any other small client projects we’ve got, then I’ll pop over and I’ll work on WordCamp stuff or I’ll work on stuff for Inspired Imperfection, things like that.

Brian Gardner: Man, you guys have a lot going on. All good stuff, because you’re doing it well. You’re profiting, you’re living the dream with your kids and all that. We talked about the question I was going to ask next which is, aside from running the business you guys are parents and love to travel, that’s very obvious. Anyone who follows you on Facebook or social media clearly can see the things that are important to you. It’s funny how social media works.

I love watching you guys go on vacations. You talk about it ahead of time and then I get to follow along day after day. “They’re going here now. Now they’ve gone here.” Whether it’s Instagram or Facebook, it’s fun to watch — not just you guys, but others in the community when they go on vacations. It’s that, “Vicariously live through them and get to experience other places.” Aside from when you guys travel to conferences, your trips are generally what seem to be, a) outdoors, and always with the kids, minus a Grateful Dead concert here or there. I swear, just recently you took them to a concert too, didn’t you?

Jennifer Bourn: We took them to three in a row. We did a road trip. We did Portland, then one in Washington at the Gorge, and then the shoreline on the way to San Diego.

Creating a Work-Life Balance That Revolves Around Family

Brian Gardner: I got you. This all leads to a bigger question I have, which is what we talked about a little bit earlier about work-life balance. How do you guys manage to do it all? Not just do it all, you do it well. Do you work a lot while you travel, or do you not and shut it off and then work a lot before and after you travel? It seems like that would be a slippery slope in some fashion.

Jennifer Bourn: Most people don’t believe me when I tell them this. When we first started traveling together there would be this big ramp up before we left of tons of work that had to get done. We’d work like maniacs. We’d go and be exhausted when we’d go on vacation, and then we’d come home to this massive amount of work that was waiting for us. We slowly learned how to manage that to the point now that we don’t have a big ramp up before we go on a trip, we usually can take the day before we go on a trip off so we can pack and we’re not stressed out. When we come home there isn’t a giant stack of work waiting for us, there’s a normal workload waiting for us. We don’t have that stress anymore.

The biggest thing that allows us to manage work and travel and balance all of this is a ginormous three-foot by four-foot wall calendar that hangs in my office. A lot of people talk about wanting to do fun things but they never end up doing the fun things because family obligations and life and errands and all of these other things get in the way. It was true for us too for a long time.

Brian Bourn: A very long time.

Jennifer Bourn: When we started putting this giant wall calendar in my office, what it allowed us to do — part of it was Brian’s previous career where he had to pick every vacation day and holiday in December for the following year. Every day that he got off was picked a year in advance. When he left that career we kept the same tradition going.

This year in December we’ll print out our 2017 calendar and at the beginning of December we’ll line out all the days that the kids have no school and then we’ll look at, “Okay, spring break is here, where do we want to go?” We put it on the calendar in a sharpie. It doesn’t come off, and it’s marked on the calendar. Then we’ll look at what business conferences or WordCamps do we already know the dates for that we want to go to and we can work into our schedule. We can say, “Put it all on the calendar,” because then it’s a commitment to get it done.

When a concert comes we do the same thing. When a concert pops up on Facebook — this weekend there’s a Saints of Circumstance, they’re a local band that we love, there’s a concert in Mountain Ranch. We said, “We want to go to that.” We put it on the calendar in sharpie, and it’s a commitment and we go. What that allows us to do is when other things come up — even family stuff — we can say, “We’ve already committed that day.”

Brian Gardner: Yeah, that sounds a lot like our baseball schedule where we know in advance which weekends we have tournaments. We put them all out on the calendar and when other people or family or travel comes up and they want to “Hey, can we hang out and do something this weekend?” We’ll say, “Nope, that weekend in July we have planned. We’re going to a tournament and we’re playing.” Those types of things take precedence. I think it’s good to keep track of that type of thing, especially when it comes to travel, because you guys travel a lot.

Jennifer Bourn: You can’t feel bad about telling people, “Nope, I’m busy.” Even if it’s for fun stuff. At the beginning of the summer we looked at our schedule and we laughed and said, “My god, we’re booked every weekend until October with fun stuff and no obligatory crap stuff. This is amazing.” Then family is like, “Can you do this?” Nope, we’re gone. Can you do this? Nope, we’re gone. You have to be okay with not feeling guilty about that.

The Importance of Scheduling and Client Communication

Jennifer Bourn: The other thing that that big calendar allows us to do is communicate clearly with clients about our schedule. People are also like, “How are your clients okay with this?” We’ve never ever had an issue with a client that’s not been okay with our travel schedule. A lot of clients we are in Basecamp with, so we put our travel schedule, when we’re going to be out of the office, in the Basecamp calendar, in a shared calendar. We communicate with them up front in advance, “Here’s when we’re going to be gone. Here’s when we’re going to be back. Here’s the status of your projects. Here’s where we’re going to get the project to before we go.”

We usually start planning a few weeks before we’re going to be gone to get their project to a point where it’s pushed onto their plate. If we’re in design, we give them the design drafts right before we’re going to go on a trip. If we’re doing copywriting, we’re going to get them the drafts before they go on the trip. If it’s a big development push So that it’s on their plate and it’s their work while we’re gone. They’re moving the project forward while we’re gone. We communicate with them that a subcontractor is going to be working on certain parts of the project so they know exactly where the project’s at, exactly what’s going to be happening while we’re gone, and what we’re going to be tackling when we get back.

The other thing too, is when I’m gone, I’m gone. I don’t work at all. I barely check email. Brian checks email every morning and checks in with Basecamp every morning, mainly because it allows him to be more relaxed when he can check all of those things. And he does manage all the sales funnels. The big calendar and communicating with clients far in advance and that active project management so that they know exactly where it’s at allows us to do it with very little impact to our work and our deadlines.

Brian Gardner: Okay, you guys take a lot of trips with the family and you also take a lot of trips for business, whether it be WordCamps or conferences like the one that we put on at Authority, which is where we had a chance to meet and sit down and talk. How do you guys stay — this is the question I have with you guys. There’s a couple of other people — like for Jeff and Marla Sarris of SPYR, I have the same question, because it seems like they’re always traveling somewhere.

My question is more about how do you guys stay profitable with that much expense? Travel expenses, hotels, flights, driving and stuff like that. How do you get the work done when you’re traveling so much? To deliver that on time and to make sure the clients are satisfied. It seems like every other weekend you guys are going somewhere. How do they afford that? How does that work in their budget? I’m not trying to ask a personal question, more from the business standpoint. How do you justify that? Is there ROI when you go to these conferences such as WordCamps and so forth?

Brian Bourn: Sure. The one thing is, if you were to look at a map on Follow our Instagram feed. We are very fortunate to live in northern California, which is an amazing spot in the world and we do tons of — we call them Super Saturdays, where we leave at 7:00 in the morning and we don’t get home until late at night. We ice chest a bunch of food and there are national parks, national forests — literally a lifetime of adventure possibilities all within a two-hour radius of our house.

Jennifer Bourn: That are cheap.

Building a Profit Margin Into Your Client Services

Brian Bourn: That are free. You park and you hike and you go do outdoors. That’s one part of that. As far as conference goes — it talks about what the focus of the whole interview is about: running a profitable agency. Oftentimes when we talk to other freelancers or other small agency owners like ourselves, is the failure to build in a profit margin to your projects. Not only when we estimate a project do we cover all of our time and our cost, but we also build in a margin. Every business has margins. Cars, they don’t sell cars at cost, there’s always a profit margin. The same should be done with client services.

We take all of our costs — ongoing software to the hard business costs — add in our salaries that we pay ourselves, and then we add in a profit margin and then divide It’s a little bit of a math worksheet that I did. I know exactly on a regular basis how much we need to charge to cover all of our time expenses and then have that profit margin. That profit margin we use for reinvestment. Things like traveling to Authority or traveling to a WordCamp. It’s paid for out of that margin that we build into the business.

We don’t believe there is an immediate ROI to this, but there’s definitely a long-term return that we have focused in on. Some of our greatest personal friends now are ones that we’ve met through the WordCamp community events. People that have influenced the way that I have run our company and the decisions I’ve made because we’ve met at WordCamps or Pressnomics, or some of these other non-WordPress focused events and have become friends have been there to ask questions and have some mentorship roles with me as far as, “Hey, what should I do, I’m in this weird situation?” That has been critical. Through a very long-term way, it has eventually led to referrals for clients and even new clients. But it’s definitely a long game, where the ROI is there but it’s going to be into the future, not immediate.

Jennifer Bourn: Let’s also look at the strategic management of travel. The business pays for all of our business travel, but then all of those points and things — it’s leveraging some of those opportunities to make family travel even more affordable and more doable. You can do more of those things if your hotel stays are free or your flights are free.

Brian Gardner: Okay, a little bit personal question here, and this is more specifically regarding the efficiency and the profitability of the company and stuff like that. What is, at this point — not everything’s perfect, we don’t run everything 100% the way it should be run — what is the Achilles heel of your company, Brian? What do you feel like there are areas where you can improve on, whether it’s time or delegation or any of that stuff that gets in the way of that profitability or the ability to scale where you want to go and do the things that you guys want to do?

Brian Bourn: Sure. Some of that is what I consider our Scaling ourselves and the intrinsic skills that me and Jennifer both bring to the table. As a partnership, we complement each other very well in our skill set. The ability to scale that beyond the amount of hours that we have in a week is our biggest issue to getting bigger. At the same time, we choose not to do that by choice in order to create the personal life that we want right now while the kids are young.

Down the road we know that if we do want to expand and bring on more team members, that it will be a very difficult task to find people to replace some of the things that we do internally for the company. We need to be able to turn those specific tasks over to them, whether it’s print design or front-end development, or whatever it may be — or project management. To find that key person that we can say, “All right, this is your thing now. Go forth and do well.” I find, for me, that’s the hardest issue that I see moving forward.

Jennifer Bourn: I think that one of the things we’ve gotten way better at — and part of it is time — but I think there’s still room for improvement, is core project management. For a while in the early days when things were hairy and we were doing a ridiculous number of projects a year — at one point in time we were doing a custom Genesis site, one per week — our project management was terrible. It was not active, it was passive.

We’ve gotten, over the years, a lot better at being active, borderline aggressive, with our project management. Partly for our own time management and partly so clients are really clear about where we’re at. I always think that, in terms of managing those projects and managing scope change, there’s always room for improvement. I don’t care where you’re at, I think it always could be done better.

Brian Gardner: All right, I’m going to go even deeper, because this is fun. We have never had a husband and wife on the show. I’m going to ask Brian first — this is almost like one of those things you see on The Bachelor or something like that. Brian, tell me what is the one thing about Jennifer — this is not about profitability and all that, but I think it helps in the bigger context to understand how these dynamics work — what is the one thing about Jennifer you wish would change about what she brings to the business? I’m going to give her the shot to then do the same thing. This is not throwing each other under the bus, this is more about room for improvement, let’s say.

Brian Bourn: As you know — I’m not BS’ing here — Jennifer is an extremely talented person, more so than probably anyone I’ve ever met. The one area, as far as related to an agency, is not telling her boss to screw off so often. No, it’s one of those things I’ve never even thought about it. We’ve been firing on all cylinders now for a while.

I definitely would say Jen has a habit of When we go on a trip or something like that she loves to clear her plate and dish everything off, which then tends to mean that half the time it’s kicking onto my plate before we go somewhere. I wish that it would not wait until Not do that. That is the one area I wish would improve, is to manage not just her timeline as good as she does, but to look at it as the company as a whole timeline and what that does to everyone.

Brian Gardner: That’s the answer I was trying to get to. Perfectly answered for what I was going for. This would have been a fun question five years ago to ask when things weren’t quite running on all the cylinders that it’s running on now. Jen, your turn to throw Brian under the bus.

Jennifer Bourn: I would say where Brian …

Brian Bourn: There’s not enough time in the show for all this.

Brian Gardner: It’s another episode, a follow-up episode.

Jennifer Bourn: No, I would say where Brian could improve is he drastically underestimates his own skills and abilities and talents. Projects will come in that he will turn down and shoo away because he thinks, “I don’t know if we can do that,” or maybe, “that isn’t something I’ve necessarily tackled before.” There are things that I know that he could do with his hands tied behind his back, but sometimes I think we all doubt ourselves. I think that he tends to do that and doesn’t take some projects because of that. Then the other — he would totally agree — is Brian has a hard time shutting down at 5:00. Part of it is because he has to do all the development and all the business stuff too, so his work plate is much fuller than mine. But he has a little bit of a harder time shutting off.

Brian Gardner: You guys are brilliant because you ad-libbed answers that were building each other up in the context of talking about … That’s wonderful. I see you guys as totally a type A and B relationship. Shelly and I are the same way. She’s very type A, admin focused, very process-based, and I’m more of the creative. I think you guys are probably a flip flop of that. Do you guys have any final tips and tricks? Things that you would Nuggets of wisdom to pass along.

Creating Partnerships to Create Recurring Revenue Streams

Brian Bourn: Yeah, the thing that has led to the most growth on effective hourly rate and as far as profitability as a company — which then leads to personal freedoms and the things that we talked about a lot on this call — is, from a client services perspective, looking at your clients not on a per project basis but as a partnership with them. It’s not just thinking, “Okay, I’m going to design and build a WordPress theme and launch it. Here you go, great.” And then going from project to project.

Every client we take on now — they are more of a partnership model where, yes, we are going to build a site for you, but we are going to continue working with you at bare minimum ongoing support and maintenance to create recurring revenue stream in the agency. Most of our clients stick with us either on a monthly basis for a retainer for ongoing consulting support, strategy, additional development, and design work. That means being very selective with your clients. This took us a long time to get here, where we work with fewer clients per year than we ever have, but we work with them not just on one project that’s siloed off and then it’s done. We work with them to create and launch the project and then continue working with them on an ongoing basis.

As anyone will tell you, it’s easier to sell to an existing customer than a new customer by tenfold. When there is none of that discovery and they already trust you and they’ve already paid you, it’s a simple matter of, “Well, let’s get this done.” “No problem, it will be this much.” You do the work and you get paid. By creating that ongoing partnership with your clients and being a critical role in their business success online, it has led to where we are at today.

Brian Gardner: Good stuff. Jen?

Evaluating Expenses on a Consistent Basis

Jennifer Bourn: I think the other thing to note is that a lot of people talk about wanting to make more money or have more income that they can have available to do whatever it is that they might want to do. The focus on that a lot of times is always, “I need to make more money, which means I need to do more work,” or “I need more clients,” or “I need bigger projects.” One of the things that we have really focused on is not just looking at profits coming from more clients or more projects, but looking at how we’re spending, how we’re using, and how we’re putting the money we’re already making to work for us. It’s looking at regular expenses.

For example, we had for years a subscription to Shutterstock, which we used the heck out of because we had certain retainer clients where we were doing print work every single week and we needed access to stock imagery every week. When we were building full custom Genesis sites every week, we used a ridiculous amount of stock photography. Our business has shifted so much that we’re using so much less. It’s looking at where are the expenses that you can trim and what expenses can you scale back? We were able to get rid of that subscription, so we saved $250 a month. We switched from Infusionsoft after we were with them for so many years. We switched from Infusionsoft to Agile CRM and we saved $300 a month.

Evaluating where is your money going, where are you spending it, and do you need to spend it there or is there a better solution? You look at those two things — we cut our monthly expenses down by almost $600. That could be less client work that you are under pressure to sell.

Brian Gardner: That’s a great set of guidelines for us, even outside of the business world, even in our homes. As you were talking, all I could think of was Joshua Becker talking about that type of thing within our own personal lives. The message that he talks over at Becoming Minimalist. It’s not about making more, it’s about saving and spending and having less, and so on.

Jennifer Bourn: Yeah.

Brian Gardner: That’s a great segue into the last thing I want to talk about, which is work and life balance. As you say, they aren’t separated into neat little boxes, they are mixed together, integrated, and part of each other. Jennifer, your new personal blog, Inspired Imperfection, which you talked about and we’ll link to in the show notes, encourages everyone to live an inspired life, embracing imperfection and creating the life that nourishes our soul with our kids in tow. I love that.

For those listening, if you want to follow them you can follow Brian and Jennifer — their business perspective — at Bourn Creative, also in the show notes. To see how they balance their work life with their kids and go on vacations and all that stuff, you can check out Jen’s personal blog at InspiredImperfection.com.

If you like what you heard on today’s show here at Studio Press FM, you can find more episodes of it at, you guessed it, Studiopress.FM. You can also help Lauren and I hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes, that would be helpful, very much appreciated. It is also a great way to never miss an episode.

Brian, Jen, on behalf of Lauren and I and everyone in our company and the podcast network, we’re very thankful to have you guys on the show.

Brian Bourn: Thanks for having us, it was fun.

Jennifer Bourn: Thanks for having us.

Brian Gardner: All right, we’ll talk soon I’m sure. Everyone who’s listening, we’ll see you next week.

008.jpg" alt="How to Scale a Freelance Business">

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Bill Erickson. Bill is a WordPress Developer, an entrepreneur, a husband, a father, a skier, an avid reader, a gardener, and a winemaker living in Georgetown, TX. He s been developing with WordPress and contributing to the community since 2006.

Bill has written 20 WordPress plugins, which have been downloaded 668,661 times and has spoken at 13 conferences regarding WordPress. Last, but certainly not least, Bill is a core contributor to our very own Genesis Framework project.

In this 40-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Bill Erickson discuss:

• Bill’s decision to become a freelancer
• Transitioning from Thesis to the Genesis Framework
• Building your brand and your business with shareable content
• Using your website to prequalify potential clients
• Scaling your business through efficiency
• The importance of contracts
• Building a work/life balance that works for you

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

008.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• This episode is brought to you by Digital Commerce Summit
• Follow Bill on Twitter
• Visit BillErickson.net
• Bill’s WordPress Plugins
• Bill’s Code Snippets
• Matt Report: Systemizing Your Way to More Revenue
• Freelance WordPress Developer Bill Erickson

The Transcript

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services.

You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer. For now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us:

Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for me, is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps them pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host the conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers people like you more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to?” and, “Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything the speakers have been awesome but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and the other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

Voiceover: StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner, and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I are joined by Bill Erickson to discuss how freelancers can scale their businesses.

Brian Gardner: Hey everyone, welcome back to StudioPress FM. I am your host Brian Gardner, and I am joined as usual with my cohost, vice president of StudioPress Lauren Mancke. Today we are, as always, very excited about the show, because we get to continue our series with members of the Genesis community, and that’s always been fun so far.

Today we are joined by Bill Erickson. Bill is a WordPress developer, an entrepreneur, a husband, a father, a skier, an avid reader, a gardener, and a winemaker, living in Georgetown, Texas, which I think is just north of Austin. He’s been developing with WordPress and contributing to the community since 2006. Bill has written 20 plugins, which has been downloaded almost 700,000 times, and has spoken at 13 conferences regarding WordPress. Last but certainly not least, Bill is a core contributor to our very own Genesis Framework project.

Bill, it is a huge pleasure to have you on StudioPress FM. Welcome to the show.

Bill Erickson: It’s great to be here, thanks for having me.

Beginnings in the Development World

Brian Gardner: When I decided to have this series Lauren and I spoke about who we wanted to have on the show, and without a doubt you were on the top of that list, and so I’m thankful you took that invitation to heart and you’re here. I want to start here with a very obvious question, one that helps set the foundation of what the rest of the stuff that we’ll be talking about will be. Tell us how you got into development, and have you always been a nerd?

Bill Erickson: Well yes, I’ve always been a nerd, but my past in development’s been a bit of a roundabout approach. In high school I got a summer job working at a print shop where we made brochures, business cards, basically all the print materials for a business. Then some of the businesses will come in wanting websites too, and they didn’t do that. I figured, It can’t be that much more difficult than designing a brochure, so I decided to do it on the side and partner with a friend who knew how to code HTML and CSS. Then a little later on I decided I wanted to figure out the HTML and CSS part myself and realized I’m a much better coder than I am a designer, so I made the switch.

Brian Gardner: A lot of people can do one really well. Lauren happens to be one of those people. I knew she was a great designer when she first came around, and as I realized that she was also capable of coding, that’s when the light bulb went off. I was like, “I can let her take over a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing, because she can do it all! Like the Renaissance woman, you know?

Lauren Mancke: Sometimes you just want to design, your brain is on fire, and you’re creative. Sometimes development is a good switch, for me, anyway. I like to just, A to B, do exactly what I need to do.

Bill, why did you start building your business around WordPress? What is it about CMS that you find so appealing?

Bill Erickson: I had been building sites, like I said, with just static HTML and CSS, and then I got into the business of having to do text changes for clients. It was very boring for me, and I’m sure my clients didn’t appreciate paying me to make small text changes. This is about 2006, and I started looking around for what CMS tool I can use. WordPress, at that time, and it still is, one of the easiest tools to use for end user, for the client, but it’s also really easy for a beginner developer to learn.

That’s one thing a lot of the professional developers discount, is they say WordPress is messy in its procedural code, but I think it’s one of the keys to its success. It has a low barrier to entry, so if you want to just get started you can find a filter to change Read More text, and then once you accomplish that it’s very easy to work your way up to something more complex, rather than having to grasp a deep knowledge of something. I got into it both because it was something that I could grasp when I was first learning, but also because it was really easy for my customers to use, and it has only become more so.

Brian Gardner: The good thing about WordPress, and even Genesis now as a whole, is that there’s so many people who have understood how to do it hands-on by themselves, and then have written about it, that there’s so much documentation. You can go to Google and figure out anything, pretty much, how to do this in WordPress, or how to do that in Genesis. People like yourself who’ve written tutorials, and Jerod and I and other people who’ve done code snippets, it’s very easy for someone who’s new to go in and, kind of behind the scenes because no one knows they’re doing it, they Google, they learn … There’s not just a book you have to read, or a class or a course you have to take, you can Google your way into the community from the development side. That’s one thing I like about it.

Bill Erickson: Yeah, and a lot of us got started that way. I know I got started by Googling and searching for code snippets, and that’s how I learned. As I progressed I was developing these code snippets, so I put them out to help others, but also to help myself so I’d be able to find those later. It’s sort of a community where we’re all sort of learning together, and just the knowledge gets documented, so everyone can jump in at any point.

Transitioning from Thesis to the Genesis Framework

Brian Gardner: We spoke last week with Carrie Dils about just the open source community, and just how that sort of pay it forward mentality really helps grow the product, grow the software and the communities around it. Typically what we do is ask our guests how they got started in Genesis specifically, but your story’s a good one, and something I want to tell, because I was directly involved with that.

Before Genesis, or before you knew better for that matter, Bill was working on Thesis, and he was a Thesis developer and had done a lot of client work around Thesis. About six years ago … I can’t believe it’s been that long, Chris Pearson, the developer of Thesis, had a falling out with my current business partner, Brian Clarke. The too-long-don’t-read version of that whole story is that their partnership fell apart. Brian reached out to me and a couple others, and we formed the company that we have now, which is Rainmaker Digital.

Bill, you saw the writing on the wall as this was all going down back then, and reached out to me. I think it was on Twitter DM, and asked about Genesis. I knew you as a Thesis developer, so as the opportunist in me, I jumped on that right away. I think we got on a Skype call within five minutes of when you sent that. Is that, how I remember, how you got into the Genesis community? Am I missing anything here?

Bill Erickson: No, that pretty much covers it. I just want to say thanks again for all the help you provided in that transition. I’d been building with Thesis for years at that point I think, like two or three years, and every single one of my leads was coming from them. We had this symbiotic relationship where I’d build a really cool site, you get featured on their website, which would then generate more leads coming to me, which worked well, but as Thesis was going one direction and the rest of WordPress was going a different, it was sort of getting stuck in an area where I wasn’t having the freedom to move where I wanted.

That’s what I was talking to you about, is I wanted to make the transition to something that was more WordPress based, where it followed more of the WordPress standards. My problem was, all of my work was coming from Thesis, and you really helped me through that transition by sending me a lot of great leads. I think it was about a six-month period from when I was 100% Thesis-based work to 100% Genesis-based work. I never could have bridged that gap if it wasn’t for you sending me all those great leads.

Brian Gardner: That’s good to hear.

Bill s Decision to Become a Freelancer

Lauren Mancke: Okay, so let’s talk freelancing. I think you and I, our paths crossed when you did make the switch to Genesis, so go back a little bit before that and tell us about at what point you decided to branch out on your own and start freelancing.

Bill Erickson: It was all about timing for me. I was actually in college getting a finance degree, and building WordPress websites on the side. I was a student worker making about $10 an hour on university websites, but it was something I enjoyed doing. Then the 2008 financial crisis happened, and all the finance internships disappeared, and I figured it’d be a good time to focus on my other passion, WordPress.

Right as I graduated college, my goal was just, I was going to experiment for a year and see if I could cover my living costs for a year. Luckily I was a poor college student so those costs were fairly low, and I was able to just make it. Then it worked out, and I just kept going, and got a little better and a little better, and now we’re about 10 years into me being a freelancer, so that worked out pretty well. Or, seven years I think now, full time.

Brian Gardner: A few years ago you did an interview with our friends over at iThemes about freelancing. I love how they open up the post. They say, “Bill Erickson is a freelance WordPress developer who gives back.” We just talked about that, and we’ll talk to it a little bit later also in the show.

First off, it’s true, as I’ve witnessed first hand just how much you help, both in the Genesis and the WordPress community. You have code snippets on your site, and you publish tutorials and stuff like that, but you also, I see you in Slack, and on our Genesis GitHub repository, and just within the general community, just helping where you can. I know you’re busy, and I know you realize that it’s important, even still, to give back, and I appreciate that.

You’re also a busy guy, which of course means you’ve got a pretty long lead time in case somebody wants to hire you as a freelancer, and you’re pretty selective now at this point, which is a good place to be, right?

Bill Erickson: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Building Your Brand and Your Business with Shareable Content

Brian Gardner: It seems like a lot of freelancers these days are kind of in that starving artist mode, where everyone’s starting up and there’s saturated markets and so forth. I guess they’re trying to fight for their food. What’s your secret at this point, to being so busy as a freelancer?

Bill Erickson: At this point a lot of it came down to luck and timing. I got started in WordPress, like I said, about 10 years ago, and in that time the freelance WordPress development space was nowhere near as competitive as it is now. There just weren’t that many of them, so I was able to make a name for myself a lot easier. Now that I’ve been doing it for so long, I have a long client list and a lot of those clients really enjoyed working with me, so they keep coming back. About 50% of my work right now is either past clients or people who have directly recommended from past clients.

A lot of it is establishing your business, establishing your name, and building that reputation. And I built my reputation by giving back, by writing blog posts and code snippets, and contributing to Genesis and writing plugins. I don’t want to stop what was working, so I do make a point of, even when I’m busy, doing what I can to give back. I find that finding where your … Look at what you produce, and see what you can easily turn into a shareable thing.

For me a lot of it revolves around plugins and code snippets, so as I’m building out a project, they need some specific feature, I’ll put in a little bit more time really cleaning up and extending this feature a bit more than a client actually needs so that I can turn it into a plugin that I can then share. I’m going to put in 20 hours building this feature, maybe I could put in 30 and make it something that I can release, and will help others, and will also promote myself, because then people will find it and want to hire me. Right now a lot of my work is based on my past reputation and my past experience with clients, because a lot of past clients are coming back, but I got to that point by giving back, and that’s why I still do it.

Brian Gardner: That’s pretty funny. The last couple weeks I have published two different blog posts on my blog, tutorials on how to do something in Genesis, and I was literally in the process of developing a theme and adding that feature. As soon as I would add that and had the code ready, instead of just finishing the theme and so on and going back to it, I stopped right then and there, that evening, one night, and just wrote the tutorial. Because I had just implemented it, it was fresh on my mind, it was something that I knew somebody was going to want.

I hear what you’re saying there, which is, it’s kind of cool to document the stuff that you’re doing for something else, and then use that to benefit, a) the community, but also yourself, in that now you have shareable content, yet another thing that could get your name out there. For anyone out there freelancing, that’s kind of unsolicited advice there, how to help build your brand and how to move forward your business by doing things in that kind of way.

Bill Erickson: It’s not purely a marketing tool or a self-promotion tool. It’s actually really useful in your business, because I spend a lot of time thinking about a problem and what’s the best way to solve it, so I create that solution. Six months down the line I might need that again. Instead of spending the hours trying to figure out what it is and finding the right hooks and filters, if I’m in that mindset right after I solve the problem, if I document it, I can look back at that so that I know that’s how I do it. I don’t have to keep it in my mind, I just have to remember, yeah, I wrote about it on my blog, so I can scroll through and find it. That’s how it all started for me. It was just documenting what I was doing so that I could find that information later on. The side effect was, other people started using that information and it helped my SEO.

Brian Gardner: So you’re your own reader, blogger.

Bill Erickson: Yes.

Brian Gardner: You bookmark your own pages, how narcissistic. No I’m kidding, I do the same thing with my code snippets too. I put them on my site just so I have a place for me to go back to and say, “Hey, check out this greatly designed site. Oh look, it’s mine.” Stuff like that. Definitely wise there.

Using Your Website to Prequalify Potential Clients

Lauren Mancke: I want to follow up on Brian’s question from before. We have a page dedicated on StudioPress where we recommend Genesis developers and designers to the community. You’re on that page and you have been for a while. What impact, if any, has that source been for you in terms of acquiring leads and getting new business?

Bill Erickson: I still get a ton of great leads from StudioPress. Even though there’s a ton of people on there, it used to be only two or three other developers on the recommended list. Even now that you have such a larger community, and a lot of other great resources, I still get a lot of excellent clients from there. The StudioPress recommended developers page, it’s like a fire hose of leads, and it’s up to you to qualify them.

Because the StudioPress community and your customers, they have such a wide range of needs. Some just need tiny minor tweaks like changing some colors, or adding a small feature. Some hear about the benefits of the SEO of Genesis and don’t want to do anything themselves, and they want a custom theme and everything built for them. There’s a wide range of what someone might want, so you need to make sure you’re not just getting a ton of emails and having to filter that. You want to use your website to describe what it is you do, what your expertise is, so that the incoming leads can self-select, and select a person who is best fitted for that job.

What I’ve found is, there is a need to qualify your leads, and that’s something you can do with your website. Just review your emails, and if you see that you’re doing a lot of responses saying, “I’m not a good fit for this,” whether it’s for the type of work, or your timeline, or your budget, just make a note to include that information on your site. Because if you’re getting emails about that, that means you haven’t educated the prospect.

Lauren Mancke: We had a form on our Northbound site that led people, basically them thinking about their project. A lot of people contact you that haven’t really thought through what they need, so our contact form had different areas that they needed to figure out before they even contacted us, or have answers to. That way we could review those before we got back in touch with the person.

Bill Erickson: Yeah, definitely, like a client onboarding process. Because the average person who needs a website, they’ve never done this before, or if they did it was five or six years ago. You do it all the time. They don’t know what the process is. They don’t even know what questions they should be asking or what information to provide, so whatever you can do to help their job of finding someone to help them will definitely help.

Brian Gardner: We’ve been asked probably a number of times if there’s a way that we can assist in that process by somehow categorizing people on the developers list, especially since the list has gotten longer and the skills that are on that page vary from technical programming to straight up graphic design. Yes, to some degree that’s our responsibility, to see if we can try to tag that a little bit better.

But I like what you said, though, with prequalifying the leads. A lot of people just have a contact form on their website, which is basically, in my opinion, an advertisement to just copy and paste a request for a job, or a submittal or something like that. Then it’s not a great fit. With all the forms out there these days, gravity forms and ninja forms, you have the ability to build a complex form that prequalifies these inquiries, and saves A, you a lot of time, and B, them time too.

Bill Erickson: Yeah, it would be nice if StudioPress had some sort of layers of filters to help qualify them, but at the end of the day, every service provider on that page has different requirements, different services they offer, different budgets and timelines. There’s not a one size fits all categorical system that could apply. The easiest thing to do is just give all their information, and then allow those providers to do their own qualifications on their website.

Brian Gardner: Aside from the fact that it would take us a little bit of time to do that, that’s kind of what I come down to. Because I realize there’s also a vibe thing, that when you land on someone’s site you get a vibe whether or not, “Hey, this is a person I could do work with. They’re my style or they’re not. I don’t want to qualify anybody out of that by some sort of check system that, Oh, well, I’m looking for a project under $5,000, so immediately Bill Erickson doesn’t show up. Whereas maybe it would have been a good fit, and maybe you’re slow a little bit, and you would pick up a job that might be less than $5,000. I don’t want to take that away from you either.

Lauren Mancke: I also, when I was redesigning that page, I wanted to include on the actual page the screen captures of some of the recent projects that they’ve done. Because I think visually that tells someone the types of projects that that developer has experience with, that they can visually scan that and see what might be a good fit in that way as well.

Bill Erickson: That’s a great idea. That’s what a lot of people, when they’re shopping, looking for a developer to build their website, they’re just going straight to portfolios. To be able to have that in one spot so they don’t have to open all the sites would be a useful tool.

Brian Gardner: I didn’t like that decision at the very beginning, Lauren, because when I first saw the page it was really, really long. Then as I thought through it I’m like, “Okay, this is not above the fold mentality from 10 years ago. This is more about doing what you said, providing little snapshots. Even if it’s just the most recent four or whatever. At least you can just scroll up and down the page and get that vibe sort of thing that I was talking about.

Now speaking of people on the page and whatnot, Bill, I know that part of your strategy at this point, because you are so busy, are somewhat selective on the stuff that you take on, you have kind of a … sort of like a little referral system. Not necessarily in exchange for money, but just people who you pass referrals on to that are, a) that you know and respect and feel comfortable passing those along to. Jared Atchison is a good friend of yours and ours. He’s the first person that comes to mind there as an example of a developer you might send client inquiry to.

Scaling Your Business Through Efficiency

This leads to a bigger question in situations within the freelance world. How do you scale your business? I know you take your projects and pass them on to other people, but how do you scale your business specifically to make more money? Because there’s only so many hours in a day. What have you done over the last couple years, or what have you learned as a more efficient way to do business, so that you can become more profitable?

Bill Erickson: There’s a lot of ways you can scale your business. One that I’m particularly fond of is through efficiency. You can build websites a lot faster using Genesis because it does a lot of it for you, and then you can focus only on the custom features. Then the code you build can be reused on future projects, so when I build a great events calendar I can then, six months later, reapply that to a new project and then change the styling. There’s some code efficiencies you can do, and Genesis really helps with that.

Another one is moving yourself up the value chain. When I got started I was basically doing just markup. I was doing PSD to Genesis websites. Most of them were $500 to $1,000, and I’d turn them around in a week. As I got more experienced I did work on more complex websites, and built more custom features, and charge more. Now I’m no longer doing just the development aspect. When someone comes to me we offer sort of a full package, so we have a $12,000 project minimum. It’s a team of three: a content strategist, a designer, and a developer, and we typically spend at least 12 weeks on a project.

We’re really just working with the client to understand their needs, and design and implement it all in one house. Rather than, a lot of times when I was working with, saying I was just doing development, clients would go off to 99designs and get a design that doesn’t really serve their needs very well. I’d build it for them, but it’s not the best use of my time and the resources they have, so I’ve actually gone out and partnered with designers that I know do a great job of turning that around. Combining our services together we provide a much more valuable service.

Brian Gardner: Is that why you took down the PSD to Genesis page?

Bill Erickson: Yes and no. PSD to Genesis, it was a fun business to problem. Like I said, it’s the value. As I start charging more for my time, there’s less value that can be got out of that. There was a lot of people who do PSD to Genesis, and if I’m charging three or four times not many people are going to want to come to me, because at the end of the day I’m just converting a design into a website. I’m not providing as much value there. I saw that we could do better in a different direction. I found a designer that I really like working with, and a content strategist that I really like working with.

I still do some sites where a design is provided for me, but I’m a bit more selective on that, because I really do enjoy being able to start from the beginning and identify what problems need solving. The change from that start to finish is so much larger than, they hand me a design and then the only measure of quality at that time is, Did you do what we told you to do? Does the design match? Is the site loading fast? It’s a lot more fun to do that problem solving stuff.

Lauren Mancke: It’s probably a lot more fun to work with a good design too, than something that might not look very good.

Bill Erickson: That’s the other thing, yeah, when you don’t know the design. Especially when you’re trying to provide a quote and the design hasn’t been done yet, and you don’t know who the designer is. You really leave yourself open to some uncomfortable weeks where you’re just plowing through a design that’s horrible. That’s another reason why I stick with one designer for the most part.

Brian Gardner: I wasn’t setting you up for anything there, I just noticed. As I was preparing for the show I was actually going to link to that page, and then I kept Googling and I’m like, “Where is it?” I went to your site, I tried searching, and then I figured that at some point you kind of outgrew that. It is sort of like an entry into a community type of play, and I think there’s a need for it to some degree. What that basically does at this point, it frees that up for a few other people in the community to offer that service, which I know they’ve done. Yeah, I wasn’t mad or anything like that.

Bill Erickson: No, and I took it down, I think, with the most recent redesign, where I was focusing more on this integration with my current designer. I took it down mostly because I’m no longer focusing on it, but also because I was getting very few projects that actually utilize that. Because like you said, there’s a lot of great people in the community who are providing it, I was charging a bit more for that than anyone else was, and so yeah, I was getting maybe one every two or three months. It didn’t seem like a good reason to focus my sight on that.

Tools that Allow You to be More Efficient with Your Time

Lauren Mancke: Bill, let’s talk about workflow. This is obviously something that really goes along with scaling your business, you kind of touched on, and it’s something in particular that you have spent a lot of time perfecting, and you’ve taken time to share your processes with others. I know we’ve had a few conversations about it. Can you give our listeners some insight to some of the tools that you use, and some that you’ve built yourself, which allow you to be more efficient with your time?

Bill Erickson: Yeah, so like I was talking about growing your business with efficiency. There’s code efficiency, technical efficiency, but then there’s also business efficiency. A lot of your time is spent actually just running your business. Whether that’s responding to emails, or trying to manage projects, if you can find ways to optimize that process you’ll just open more time up for profitable activities.

My website is really focused on qualifying leads so I don’t have to spend a lot of time responding to emails that aren’t a good fit. I’m always iterating it, adding or changing features. One that I added in the past year or two that’s been really helpful is the, When I can start, because I’ve found that most of the emails where I just immediately say “Sorry, I’m not a good fit” are the ones where they say, “We need a site live in the next three weeks,” and I wouldn’t be able to start for two months. Things like that, where you can give them the information they need to know you’re not a good fit.

Then once I do get a quality lead, a lead that would fit well with me, they fill out the form, it comes to me, and I provide a nice detailed response. The email also shows up in a custom CRM that me and Jared Atchison developed, and we use it for all sorts of things. We use it for tracking lead data, so, Where are we getting sources of leads? Where are we getting sources of projects? You might find that 90% of your leads are coming from Google, but those aren’t really good leads, and that 80% of your work is coming from past clients.

Having that knowledge can help you decide where to direct your marketing efforts. We also use the CRM to manage the projects, our active projects, and to track data on completed projects, like overall profitability. Put in the amount we build, what we estimate it would take us to build it out, how much time we actually spent on initial development and changes. Come up with the effective hourly rate, just so we could track how well our estimates are doing.

Then on the design side, my team, we use Sketch exclusively, which works out really well. My content strategist uses it for the sitemaps and wireframes, then when we get to the design stage, the designer uses those same files and converts the wireframes into finalized designs, and then I take the finalized designs and turn them into a website. We save quite a bit of time by using the same tool throughout the entire process. We used to use Sketch for wire frames and then rebuild everything in Photoshop, but switching to Sketch has really helped out.

Then finally, from a code perspective, I have a base child theme that I’ve developed. It’s very similar to the starter theme from StudioPress, but it just has some of my own style and code tweaks that I like in there. Then I have my code snippets where I keep useful bits and some plugins that I’ve developed. I try my best to, when I build something, build it once really well, and then put it somewhere where I know so that I can access it later.

Brian Gardner: That speaks back to the efficiency thing, to have your own starter theme. Because when I start with stuff I pull something down, do all the Brian-isms in it, which takes anywhere between 10 and 20 minutes to knock things out and do things and rearrange things a different way. At some point, I don’t even have my own starter theme, believe it or not, at this point, because we iterate so much through StudioPress, and things get tested and added and whatever, and I’m like, okay, usually I just grab the latest theme that we’ve done, because I know that it’s probably the most currently coded well and tested, and go from there.

Lauren Mancke: You start it with the one that I made. I made a starter theme for us to use.

Brian Gardner: Like I said, I don’t have my own starter theme. But yes, I did I’m working on two themes right now. One is a free theme that I’ll probably be releasing within the next week or so called 27 Pro, and that was based off of the Genesis sample’s child theme. Then the other one, which will be on StudioPress for sale, and I haven’t named it yet because I’m pondering that, but that one was based off of the base theme that you have developed internally for us in house.

The Importance of Contracts

Brian Gardner: Bill, you talked a little bit about the data there in your last segment, and you also did another interview with Matt Medeiros over at Matt Report. This was a little bit more on the technical side of business and being a freelancer, talking about systems and data and contracts and stuff like that. Let’s talk about contracts, because you mentioned in the interview that you live and die by them. I thought I would ask you to speak to that, because I think a lot of people get themselves into trouble and become inefficient because contracts aren’t clear and things like that. Is there anything that you want to elaborate on what you mean by that, and why that’s so important?

Bill Erickson: Yeah, a good contract is incredibly important. The goal is it lays out what each party is expected to do. You should have a lawyer look it over because it is a legal document, but I also highly recommend you make it not overly complex, because your client needs to be able to read and understand it. It really should be a distillation of all your communication expectations. When there are questions throughout the project you’ll both refer to that document. Refer back to all the phone calls, and your notes, and the emails, take all that information that’s been provided, and come up with a single document that describes exactly what you’re going to do, when you’re going to do it, how much you’re going to charge, and then have the client agree to it. That’s basically what the contract is.

The key sections that I include are the scope of work, which is where I say what it is I’m going to do, payment schedule, timeline, licensing of code. I like to be able to reuse my code, and so I make sure I note it that I’m never going to sell their site in whole to someone else, but unique pieces of functionality that I might develop I might reuse. The governing law, which is a legal thing, so that you could say, If we do get in a legal fight, this is where we’re going to do it. And then, any other aspects that you think are important to clarify. I include notes about migrations and phone calls and acceptable file types for designs, because those have all been areas of issues and past projects and I don’t want to repeat them.

That’s why I use a contract. I use it as a way to guide the client through what we’re going to do, what he’s responsible for, what I’m responsible for, what we’re building together, so that throughout this three-month process or however long it is, we can all go back to that document and know what we’re talking about.

Brian Gardner: Do you have any examples of, authenticity moment here, of an instance or a circumstance, one of the reasons why it became so important to you?

Bill Erickson: Yeah, that’s the key of what the scope of work is. A lot of times I’ll get a design, I’ll provide a quote on it. Let’s say someone emails you a PSD file and you’re like, “Yeah, I think it’ll take me X many hours to build it, I’ll charge you $3,000 for this.” Then you’re like, Great, and so you start building it, and then when you send the site for review, the client comes back and was like, “Well, this isn’t working at all as I expected, because I thought this was going to do this, and that’s going to do that.” You might have seen the picture, but you didn’t really fully understand the functionality, or both of your understandings were different.

The scope of work really just describes every key piece of functionality in the site, so then when a client comes back and says, “This is missing,” or, “This isn’t working right,” we look at that document and say, “Yeah, it doesn’t match what we describe here? Yes? Then it’s done right. If not, then let’s fix it.” That’s the most common area, is just not describing the functionality as well. The design is usually not a question. We’re both looking at the same designs, and if they don’t look the same then there’s something wrong. But functionality-wise, that’s a key area of issues.

Then also just little things, like the acceptable file type. I don’t like working with Illustrator. I just don’t enjoy it at all. So when I get Someone who ll send me JPEG files of a design and I’m like, “Oh, it looks great,” and then I quote on it, and then they send me the final assets as Illustrator files, and I’m like, “Oh, this is going to take me so much longer.” Stuff like that. Specifying what you need. I’ve gotten design files in PowerPoint before, which is not an acceptable format for me. So yeah, it s stuff like that.

It’s just, every time you finish a product, do a quick post-mortem of it, see how things went well, what didn’t go well, what could you have done to prevent it, and a lot of that is stuff that should’ve been communicated earlier on, like what is the migration process? How are you going to deal with, it takes four months to build the site, and our content is now out of date because the live site’s been updated, what’s going to happen? You should clarify these things ahead of time.

Lauren Mancke: I think from my personal experience, any time a project doesn’t go smoothly it comes down to communication, like you said. It’s usually related to expectations, either from you as the developer expecting the client to do certain things, or the client expecting you to do certain things. Having that on the forefront of the project of communication, and defining the project’s scope before you begin, is really, really key.

Bill Erickson: Yeah, I completely agree. Basically, I like contracts because it’s a communication tool. It forces you to verbalize all the things you’re assuming and the client’s assuming.

Bill s Favorite Types of Projects

Lauren Mancke: I also know from personal experience that you probably have too much work coming in, and so with that I know you have the luxury of being selective in choosing clients that you think would be enjoyable, or you can wait on larger projects like you’ve discussed that might have a bigger budget. What are some of your favorite clients, and what are some of the favorite types of projects you like to work on?

Bill Erickson: My favorite projects are the ones where the clients trust our expertise. We have this whole process that works really well, and you’re hiring a great developer, a great designer. Trust them to do their work. Don’t redesign it. My designer will give you a great initial mockup, and then you go through and change up the design in a ton of different ways, which affects the usability, especially on mobile. The ones where they really just sit back and say, “I’m hiring the experts, I trust what you’re doing here, I’ll give you all the information, but let’s see where you can take it.” Those always come out the best.

Some examples of that, The Kerouac Project. It’s a nonprofit for writers. It’s basically a place where writers can go for a few months and hone their craft. They gave us, basically, freedom to do what we thought would be best, and we came up with a beautiful design on that one that really emphasizes what they do. It’s like a design based around typography. Another one is Down Home Ranch. It’s a working ranch for Down syndrome people in the Austin area. That’s another one where we had a lot of fun with, and we were really able to capture the essence of the ranch, and provide them a beautiful design that’s really easy to use.

Building a Work/Life Balance that Works for You

Brian Gardner: You and I met six years ago, as we talked about, and a lot has happened since you and I met. You married Tara, a lovely person who I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. You guys have since then had a baby. What impact have both of these milestones had, for better or worse, on your freelance business?

Because when you started out it was just you. Like you said, even a long time ago, it was just you in college, and you had little responsibilities and didn’t require a lot of money and stuff like that. As your career has progressed, and I’m not going to say complicated because that’s completely wrong word, you’ve enlarged the scope of your responsibilities by getting married and having kids. How does that affect things now? Because I’m sure it’s different, your workflow and your responsibilities and the way you do things now, is different than it was maybe five years ago.

Bill Erickson: Tara and I actually met just months after I started freelancing, so she’s been with me from the very start all the way to where we are here. Yeah, we started with poor college kids who were just having fun and making by, and now we work our own, and we have a family, and we have a house and a baby, and we have a lot of fun. Earlier we were talking about how … different ways to scale your businesses, and I said a focus on efficiency.

That’s one way to grow your business, but you can also use it to maintain a certain level of income and work less. That’s one of the things that I’ve found. As my family’s grown I value my time a lot more, and so I focus on work life balance. I’ve found over the past few years, the amount of time I spend working goes down bit by bit, so I’m working a lot less now than I was a few years ago, because I’m able to spend more time with my family. I have to value my time in that way so I raise my rates, because my time is if I’m going to spend this time away from my family I’d better be getting compensated for it.

On the negative side, I actually had to move my home office. I was downstairs, and now we have a baby running around, and she’d run, bang on the door yelling “Da-da,” wanting to play, so now I’m upstairs in a small guest room so that they have free range downstairs.

Brian Gardner: Hey Lauren, do you know anything about that? Kids running around? With two buns in the oven and one running around already, your life’s about to get … You may need a separate building.

Lauren Mancke: I have a plan for that. At our old house we built this really cool workshop in the back yard. It’s got skylights, it’s got everything. I want to bring it over to his house, because we’re renting that house out. I want to bring it over to this house and use it as my office, so I will be in a separate building. But it’s still here, so I can come back if needed. But yes, it is very difficult to focus with little people that don’t understand that the door means that you’re working.

Brian Gardner: A great example of that kind of a space is Jason Schuller, a good friend of ours from back in the day. He ran Press75 and sold that, and he’s still doing some stuff online, but he built and refurbished his office on top of his garage. He does have his sort of own space.

Back to the work life balance thing, if there’s anybody who I’m friends with online that I’ve seen so intentional about, not necessarily working more, but charging more to have more time for family, it’s Jason, because he’s put so much emphasis on his daughter. Every time I see an Instagram shot, it’s him, they’re there on a trail, or on a beach.

Bill, you also spoke to that work life balancing, because I think it’s intuitive to want to just work more to make more money, instead of working more to then actually get to, “All I need is X amount,” and then start working back, and it s freeing up more time to have balance. Because as we know, we can work 24 hours a day if we want online, and sometimes we do, but also, to be respectful enough of your own family and the commitments you have to say, “I don’t need to make more money, I just need to make this money.” Then to become more efficient and charge more and whatnot, so that you can then spend more time with your family, is so refreshing to hear.

Bill Erickson: That’s basically my approach. I don t work I enjoy what I do, but the reason I work is so that I can provide for my family and spend time with my family. The more I can make, the less I have to work, and then I can enjoy the fruits of my labor more.

Advice for Aspiring Freelancers

Lauren Mancke: Okay, so last but not least, what advice can you give a person who’s got some training and experience in development, and they’re trying to branch out as a freelancer? Any pro tips that you think they should hear before we go?

Bill Erickson: Network with other freelancers, especially those that compliment your services. As a developer you’re always looking for good designers and copywriters, and on the reverse it’s the same, so just get out there and know people who you might partner with on projects, and who might recommend you.

If you’re a developer, contribute to open source projects. When I’m looking for Genesis developers to recommend, I look to those who contribute to Genesis who have written patches or extensions to my personal Genesis plugins, or who’re writing their own Genesis plugins. I like to see their code, but I also like to see how they interact with other developers and users reporting issues. That gives you a little insight on their communication abilities in addition to their coding abilities.

Brian Gardner: That’s good stuff, good stuff Bill. Normally we do a little call to action here at the end, and because there’s no PSD to Genesis for me to pitch for you, I’m just going to tell anybody who’s listening, if you’re looking to redesign your website, or start a website, or do something of the sort, we have all of Bill’s links, all the things that you would need to access and contact Bill, down in the show notes. BillErickson.net is his domain name.

Bill comes highly recommended by us, all of us here at StudioPress. It’s been a pleasure working with him over the years. If you need anything, Bill is there and he’s the right guy, and if he’s not, he’ll set you up with the right person as well.

I just want to thank you, Bill, for being on the show, taking the time out. I know, as we talked about, you’re busy, but I also know that this is your way of giving back, as well as marketing yourself a little bit, and that’s why we’re having you on the show. Hopefully, we can send you some business through this episode.

For those listening, if you liked what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM over at, you guessed it, StudioPress.FM. You can also help us hit the main stage by subscribing to the show on iTunes. It’s a great way to never ever miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

007.jpg" alt="Why Open-Source-Based Communities Are So Powerful">

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Carrie Dils. Carrie has been around the Genesis community for a number of years. She s a WordPress developer, consultant, speaker, and teacher.

She loves sharing what she s learned with others to help them be more successful in their business. She hosts a weekly WordPress podcast at OfficeHours.fm and is a course instructor for Lynda.com.

In this 29-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Carrie Dils discuss:

• What open-source means
• How open-source projects can be attractive to developers
• The pros and cons of open-source
• Using helpfulness to build authority
• The benefits of an open-source ecosystem
• The expansion of the Office Hours podcast

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

007.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• Follow Carrie on Twitter
• Visit CarrieDils.com
• The Office Hours Podcast
• 1.html">Carrie on Lynda.com
• The Utility Pro Theme
• The Genesis Facebook Group

The Transcript

Why Open-Source-Based Communities Are So Powerful

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to?” and, “Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

Voiceover: StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I are joined by Carrie Dils to discuss why an open-source-based community is so powerful.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host Brian Gardner, and I’m joined, as usual, with the Vice President of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke. We are very excited about today’s show because we are continuing the series where we talk to members of the Genesis community.

Today, we’re joined by Carrie Dils. Carrie has been around the genesis community for a number of years. She’s a WordPress developer, a consultant, a speaker, a teacher, among many other things. She loves sharing what she’s learned with others, and she wants to help them be more successful in their business. She hosts a weekly WordPress podcast called OfficeHours.fm and is a course instructor over at 1.html">Lynda.com.

Carrie, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on StudioPress FM. Welcome to the show.

Carrie Dils: Hey, Brian and Lauren. It’s so great to be here.

Brian Gardner: Now this is full circle for us both as we’ve both been individually guests on your show, and now we get to come back to the point where you are a guest on our show.

Carrie Dils: Yeah, and just to be clear, there’s no money swapping hands there for the podcast swapping.

Brian Gardner: This is like a weird version of linking back and forth, reciprocal linking, right?

Carrie Dils: I’ll link to you if you link to me.

Brian Gardner: I’ll have you on my show if you’ll have me on your show, that kind of thing. All right, let’s get this going.

Carrie Dils: Let’s do it.

Brian Gardner: Carrie, you’ve been developing websites for many years, almost 20 to be exact. We won’t ask how old you are, but you built your first site back in 1997. Some of our listeners may not have even been born then. That’s funny, but give us the low down on your career path — how you became a developer, when WordPress came into the picture, and also what got you involved with Genesis.

How Open-Source Projects Can Be Attractive to Developers

Carrie Dils: Just to be clear, I was a toddler when I started developing websites. That’s how I started in 1997 and still have this great youth about me. I started working with websites back when it was plain old basic HTML days, working with FrontPage and other cringe-worthy tools at that time. My career has taken many winding roads, but five years ago, I discovered WordPress and was in love with it and the power of what it could do right out of the box, started tinkering with the code base, and got into starting to customizing themes.

As I was getting into the theme space, I tried out a bunch of different themes and eventually stumbled on Genesis. What I liked about Genesis, for some reason it clicked. It clicked to me the way that it’s built around action hooks and filters. I felt at home with that and started to dig in there. I think that was four, five years ago. Feels like forever.

Lauren Mancke: I also built my first website 20 years ago. I was in middle school, so toddler is very impressive to me.

Brian Gardner: Now you guys are making me feel old because, 20 years ago, I was out of high school, out of college, and a grown adult so let’s move on.

Lauren Mancke: Anyone who’s listened to your podcast knows you are from Texas, and you’re a fan of craft beer. You actually picked a pretty good one out when I was down in Texas last. Another little fact about you is that you worked at Starbucks as a barista. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that experience?

Carrie Dils: Yeah. First of all, when I found out that Brian Gardner loves Starbucks as much as he did, I immediately started to bribe him with coffee. I had this wild hair in my mid-20s. I thought, “I want to open up a coffee shop,” but I didn’t know a thing about business or running, specifically, a café for that matter. So I decided to go learn on somebody else’s dime. That somebody was Starbucks. I was with them almost nine years in various capacities. At the end of that career, I’ve decided that under no circumstances do I want to own a coffee shop.

Brian Gardner: Now the beauty of being an online entrepreneur is that a) you can work in your underwear and b) work whenever you want. As I know, I worked in a convenience store, retail really is the pits if you’re not overly passionate or making a ton of money from it because then you’re working for someone else, the holidays, weekends and nights, and things like that. I’m sure with you at Starbucks that probably was the same way.

Carrie Dils: Oh yeah. No pun intended, but the grind of it was tough. My weekends happened on a Tuesday and a Wednesday. The hours were odd. Sometimes I would be there at five in the morning, and other times I wouldn’t be leaving until close to midnight. It’s just a weird … it’s for young people. I’m too old for it now.

Brian Gardner: Its for people who were not 20 in 1997.

Carrie Dils: Just to come clean, I’m in the plus-40 crowd now. I lied about the toddler thing.

Brian Gardner: Lauren’s the one drinking Similac these days, right? All right, back to nerd talk. WordPress open source, Genesis open source — coincidence? Or are you someone who truly believes in the open-source community? In other words, did you choose these platforms which happen to be open source, or did you choose them because they are open source?

Carrie Dils: That did not even enter my thought process. I can’t say when I started that I fully even understood what open-source software meant, so it turns out that it’s a happy coincidence. Having now worked in an open-source community, there’s so many things that I love about it. Not just the community of people, but the actual process of developing open-source software, it’s cool.

Of course, Genesis, too, you guys wisely or unwisely gave me access to the repo, and I’ve gotten to contribute a couple lines of code to the Genesis project. It’s fun. It’s fun to have your name on something bigger than yourself, and I think open-source software lets you do that.

Lauren Mancke: Speaking of WordPress and open source, there seems to be a lot of drama involved when it comes to the word ‘open source’ because it could be the interpretation of what it actually means, but it seems like there are a lot of people who point fingers of other people misusing it. Would you agree or disagree with that sort of thing?

Carrie Dils: I try to steer clear of all DramaPress, as WordPress drama is lovingly called. I think there is a misunderstanding of what open source means and maybe what the ‘rights,’ big ol’ air quotes there, are of people being able to contribute to a project. I think the misunderstanding there is that, yes, while anyone can contribute, it’s not a free for all.

There’s process. There are ultimately decision makers deciding what goes into a code base and what doesn’t. I think there’s disagreement there about whether the decision makers are either the right decision makers or making the right decisions. That’s the drama I just try to steer clear of.

What Open-Source Means

Brian Gardner: I’m going to jump ahead to a question I have because I realize there’s a good chance some of our listeners don’t know what open source actually is. I don’t want to assume that they do, so I’m going to actually read the definition from the website.

“Open-source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared in modified or unmodified form by anyone. Open-source software is made by many people and distributed under licenses that comply with the open-source definition.”

Basically, you can inherit the code base of any project and do what you want with it — and this is the big thing — as long as you also then release whatever derivative you do or come up with, with the same license.

Basically, it’s a kumbaya-ish feel where opportunists have a tendency to come in, and this is where the drama starts, to try to selfishly monetize and then close off pieces and parts of their business. The phrase that we use is the ‘spirit of the GPL,’ which is the General Public License. That’s more or less open source and what WordPress is released under.

You have a good thing. You have someone with some bad motives come in. Then all of a sudden drama starts. The hope is that everyone really freely … it’s an open community. They help each other. They take code from somebody. Then they better it, or they use it to build something else. Both WordPress and Genesis work within that ecosystem. There’s clearly some perceived downsides in an open-source community, but at the core of it all are some values that we all share, as I just mentioned.

WordPress has grown tremendously, as has StudioPress and our Genesis community. Do you think the growth of all of that, as a whole, would be less if the software that we’re working with was proprietary?

The Benefits of an Open-Source Ecosystem

Carrie Dils: I think so. I don’t have any solid data to actually back that up, but my gut is that because of that spirit you mentioned it, kind of that helpful spirit of, “Hey even if you’re my competitor, let me show you my code and how I fixed this problem.” That pushes the software forward more quickly than if that was not the case. Again, just conjecture, but I think definitely the fact that it’s open source has made it as popular as it is.

Brian Gardner: What was that noise?

Carrie Dils: That was my dog shaking.

Lauren Mancke: That’s a big dog.

Brian Gardner: No kidding. That was an earthquake.

Carrie Dils: Actually, you mentioned I was in Texas. I have a couple of horses in the house.

Brian Gardner: Horses, armadillos, rattlesnakes. Genesis, the community that we’ve built, for sure has grown, at least in my opinion, because of the fact that it’s open source, and we’ve basically given the license or the ability of people to build off of that in any way that they want — whether that’s taking code and teaching and training around that or whether it’s taking our themes and developing other themes as derivative works of our themes.

There’s been, as you know, with your Utility Pro Theme, a lot of work that has gone into it from our end, but the community has given back so much. I just got 20 emails overnight from Gary Jones, committing to the core project of Genesis.

The good thing is, when it is working the way it should, I realize Gary has incentive to help build Genesis the framework. He has a business built around that, and if he can contribute code back to the main project, that helps benefit him and helps expedite and speed up processes by which he uses our work to then make money off of it by doing free-lance projects and so on. I’m totally cool with that. It’s win-win.

He helps us with his work and his code, as you have, Carrie. Then you get the benefit of that. Bill Erickson and Jared Atchison, two other guys I know that have come to us and said, “Hey, happy to help because this will help me and my freelance business.”

Carrie Dils: That’s where the beauty of it comes in. People are giving and taking, and we’re all benefiting from it. You mentioned even sharing code with competitors. We call that ‘co-opetition,’ where we’re going up against each other, but also helping. The hope is that 1+1 really becomes three. A lot of times your competitors are the ones who get too busy and then have to refer work even to you then because they just can’t take it all. It’s really a great system when it’s working properly.

Carrie Dils: Yeah, it’s an interesting ecosystem. You’re so right, that co-opetition term is an interesting one, one I’ve spent quite a bit of time thinking about and won’t ramble on here on your show. But I think there is certainly a ‘you get back what you give,’ and even if you’re giving with some ulterior motive. Ulterior motive doesn’t have to be negative. It could be somewhat self-serving, but you’re still contributing and giving and doing that.

One of the things that folks that are new to WordPress, or even new specifically to Genesis, I always encourage them to dive in, start getting involved in the community. The best way to do that is through forums, just answering questions. Even if you’ve been around WordPress one week, then you know more than somebody who’s only been around it one day. You have the knowledge to start contributing back by just helping somebody else.

Lauren Mancke: We talk a lot about all the good things of the Genesis community, the WordPress community. That’s only natural for this show to do that. But what are some things that you’d like to see differently in the Genesis community?

The Pros and Cons of Open-Source

Carrie Dils: This isn’t going to be specific to Genesis, but I see it a lot in Genesis because that’s one of the communities I’m more heavily involved in, but there’s this disparity between … let me just get down to the point. I hope that I’m not going to offend anyone. No names mentioned, but I had a support request come through — and this is not a one-time deal, it’s happened multiple times — where someone is being paid as a web developer or a web designer to deliver a website for a client, and what they’re asking for in support forums is for the work to be done for them.

I realize I’m painting in broad strokes. That’s not everyone. What I would love to see is that, if people are going to take this on professionally, that they actually are professional about it and take the time, invest the time to learn the skills to do that. I think that type of individual can devalue what a lot of people are doing legitimately and well, if that makes sense.

Brian Gardner: I know you’re not referring specifically to the people who really just don’t know how to do something and are really asking for help on how to accomplish a task. Rather, you’re addressing more the people who I guess ‘lazy’ would be the right word. “Oh, will you just do all this work for me, so I don’t have to do it for my client?”

That’s one of the downsides, then, of this open-source community — and this gets into that dark side — is that there’s a tendency for certain behaviors or patterns for people to come in and, to some degree, can be toxic. There’s an expectation that, “All of a sudden I’m going to start mooching off of and expecting … ” I think of the TV show Survivor. We’re huge fans of survivor. Once in a while, you get somebody who comes in there, and he starts eating more rice than he should. He’s drinking more water than he should, and he’s not playing fair. He’s sort of disrupting that community by being self-serving and selfish.

The open-source community is more of a servant-first mentality, and everything in life, not everything is perfect. And I’ve seen it, and I try to address it and encourage behaviors to change or otherwise. A lot of times the community corrects itself, which is good. I can see what you’re saying, that there are people who have a tendency to come in and take more than they give. I guess we all go through seasons that we have to, but the hope is, at some point, that person says, “I’ve taken enough. I’ve built a business around this with the help of a lot of other people. Now it’s my turn to give back.”

Carrie Dils: Yeah, absolutely. I’ve been that person asking questions in support forums when I was first starting out — so certainly not at all. To your point, being clear about I’m not talking about people who genuinely don’t know and want to understand. It’s, I guess, maybe a difference in attitude.

I wish I could attribute this quote to the right person because I just heard it, and I don’t remember who said it, but in regards to seeking help in an open-source community. It was, “For every question you ask, answer another question” — that idea of balance and being reciprocal with your knowledge. Rather than just showing up and taking, to also give back. People that are new to WordPress or new to open source, I don’t think they maybe even know that conceptually that’s a thing they ought to be doing. Maybe we have to teach other people how to be good stewards of open-source relationships.

Giving Back to the WordPress Community

Brian Gardner: We speak about this in terms of Genesis, but also, to some small degree, I do feel a bit of conviction myself just with StudioPress and our company as a whole that we’ve benefited so much from the creation of WordPress, what Matt did back in the day, and all of that. I feel like over the last few years we’ve been so busy and doing our thing that we’ve probably taken a little bit more than we’ve given. So we’ve tried to do our best.

Maybe it’s come out in just by providing opportunities for people like you and others in the community, just a way to monetize and build a business around it. I know that, as we move forward, there’s a few things we’re doing within our company to help give back to the big project of WordPress. One of those things is we’re going to take some of Nathan’s time — Nathan Rice, our lead developer — and earmark some of his time throughout the week to give back to WordPress, the big project, as a way to pay that back. There’s a few other things.

I’ve actually tried to spend a little more time on the support forums at WordPress just to help people out because I forget. It’s easy to get complacent, on cruise control, and say, “Thanks, WordPress, for helping us kick start our business,” and then to go back and remember that there’s so many people who are new and just need help. Their questions aren’t dumb and things like that. Moving forward, I’m trying to go out of my way to help bring back a communal sense that I felt years ago that I’ve lost over the last couple of years.

Carrie Dils: That’s awesome. That’s really exciting to hear about Nathan.

Brian Gardner: So going along with what we just talked about, by far, in my opinion, the best thing about the Genesis community is the Genesis community. There are so many folks out there willing to lend a hand, whether it be, like you said, in the forums, or the Genesis Facebook Group, even the Twitter hashtag. That’s a great place for people to ask questions and to give back, like we talked about.

No question here really. I just wanted to thank you as a member of that community. I’ve seen you on a number of occasions go out of your way to help people. You write tutorials, and you do all of this stuff for people. I know a lot of people have helped you along the way, too. No question here, really — just a way of saying thank you for your participation and helping build our ecosystem. I know that you have your own incentives for that. You’re building a business, which is great, and I hope that that continues to grow and to flourish. Just wanted to say thank you for what you’ve done.

Carrie Dils: I appreciate that. Right back at you. You guys have had an incredible way of supporting the developers and people in the Genesis community that want to build businesses around it. It’s kind of great. StudioPress can make money off of WordPress, and StudioPress customers can make money off of StudioPress. It’s a giant circle of life.

Brian Gardner: Yes, we love it.

Lauren Mancke: So speaking of making money off of a wonderful community, is there a strategy involved for how being helpful and having the gift of teaching can affect your business?

Using Helpfulness to Build Authority

Carrie Dils: Absolutely! It wasn’t something I started out with in mind. Really, giving back to the community was something I started doing just as a thanks for all the community had given me. As I started to blog tutorials and that sort of thing and grow an audience that needed help with WordPress or Genesis, I saw opportunity there.

Definitely, Brian, I can’t remember the exact phrase you used, but yes, there is an incentive for me to continue giving back to the community. I guess it comes back to me in indirect ways, but certainly helps to build authority and teaching courses. Helping other people just lends back to the credibility and my personal brand. As always, even now in my 40s, I’m not sure what my personal brand is, but I know that it’s a good thing for it.

Brian Gardner: We talked about your podcast, OfficeHours.fm. A lot of people may not know this — it started out as a Genesis podcast, one that I was on a number of times, as was Lauren. Midway through, you switched to just Office Hours. In other words, you ditched the Genesis name, which I am completely okay with. In fact, I don’t know if I ever told you this, but I applauded that move. I realized that, to some degree, Genesis within the context of the whole Internet is a very small piece of the pie.

WordPress, in and of itself, is a bigger piece of the pie, and there’s even more outside of that. So I commended you for that in my head. I think it’s a smart move. I completely understand that. Just talk to our audience a little bit about why you made that transition and how that’s been for you since then.

The Expansion of the Office Hours Podcast

Carrie Dils: First, thank you for that. I appreciate that. I started realizing that the topics that we were talking about, they could apply to broader WordPress principles. We’re talking about development tools, or hosting environments, or process and things that would apply to anyone working with WordPress.

I was limiting my audience to people who thought we were just talking about Genesis all the time, so if someone wasn’t familiar with Genesis or wasn’t using Genesis, they were never ever going to tune into the show. By dropping the name Genesis and just going with OfficeHours.fm, I felt like that was my opportunity to stretch my legs a little bit and invite other people within the WordPress community on to share their knowledge.

Even since that transition from Genesis to just plain Office Hours, the show has shifted. It’s still somewhat techy, but it’s not super techy. It’s really been more focused around the business of WordPress and those of who either provide services or products based around WordPress, what are some of the business skills and things that we can do to be more successful. That’s more the recent direction of the podcast, and that’s kind of a sweet spot for me. I’m going to go ramble again.

Brian Gardner: Ramble away.

Carrie Dils: As web developers or designers, we’re technicians, right? We like to get in code. We like to solve problems — whether we’re solving it with code or with a beautiful user interface. Those are the things that we’re good at, but actually running a business is not a skill that is inherent to most people.

Unless you grew up as a kid working in a family business or unless, Brian, like you did, working in a convenient store, and just being around business, you don’t know that. You just get stuck. Here, you’re a technician and you want to be successful and make money doing web development and doing the thing you do, but if you don’t have the right business skills, then you kind of stagnant there.

When I say my ‘sweet spot,’ I really enjoy business. That sounds nerdy, but I like the numbers. I like everything that goes along with the mechanics of running a business. To be able to take that knowledge and share it with people who are like me, other technical people like me, my hope is that they can be more successful in their business just by doing things a little smarter.

Brian Gardner: When Lauren and I were heavily asked by those in our company to come up with StudioPress FM, one of the big concerns I had would’ve been the same thing you felt with that Genesis name, in that people would think we’re only going to talk about StudioPress stuff or Genesis stuff, try to sell our products, or whatever.

This series is the first step in trying to go outside of just that perception. I didn’t want the same 30 people to be listening to our show, and I wanted to open it up to topics and things that, even though they pertain to Genesis and our ecosystem, can go well outside of that.

For instance, we had Rebecca Gill talking about SEO, and that’s clearly not a Genesis thing. It’s not even necessarily a WordPress thing. It’s something that a general business owner, or someone who’s online trying to become an entrepreneur, that’s something that they can take away. The hope is, I’m sure this is the same case for you, when you shed that and go more ambiguous, you turn it from a ‘I’m just going to talk to my people’ to a potential lead generator, right?

Getting people from the outside who don’t even know who you are, what products you build, or any of that. The hope is they’ll say, “Wow, I like what these people are doing or what Carrie’s saying,” and it’s an authority opportunity where you can teach somebody something they may not know, then bring them in.

The podcast for you, now that you shed the name of Genesis, really, I think there’s a lot of opportunities, especially Office Hours. That’s a very broad term, and you could do all kinds of things with that. I look forward to seeing where you go.

Carrie Dils: Thank you.

Lauren Mancke: What does the future hold for Carrie Dils? What are some things that you’re working on, and what should we expect to see from you in the next year or two?

What to Expect in the Future From Carrie

Carrie Dils: Well, you mentioned Rebecca Gill and SEO. I’m not sure what all you guys talked about, but I’m actually partnering with her to do an SEO Bootcamp in early 2017 that I’m very excited about. I’ve always admired Rebecca, professionally and personally, and this is an opportunity to get to work with her and partner with her on something. Super excited about that.

The podcast season two comes to an end with tomorrow’s show. Then I’m going to take a little break and revamp, redo some things under the hood, and then the launch season three of the podcast later this fall. I can’t tell you what all it is going to be, but it’s going to be awesome.

Also, it’s on my bucket list in 2016 to write a book, so I don’t know.

Brian Gardner: You’ve got three months to do that.

Carrie Dils: I’ve got three months. I’ve been told that, that might be a little ambitious, but we’ll see.

Lauren Mancke: You can do it.

Brian Gardner: If you’re looking for something to do, in five or 10 minutes when we’re off this, you can go listen to the episode of StudioPress FM with Rebecca because it’s being published probably as we speak. And yes, we did promote the SEO Bootcamp conference on that, so hopefully that will, at the very least, bring a few people interested over there to you guys. Hopefully, that will work out.

Carrie Dils: Thanks! Much appreciated.

Where (and) When to Catch Carrie’s Show

Brian Gardner: So everybody listening, are you looking for success through leveraging WordPress as both a tool and a platform? If so, we heavily encourage you to check out Office Hours, Carrie’s podcast, especially with season three coming up. You can tune in live every Thursday at 2 o’clock Eastern as she interviews a variety of folks within the WordPress ecosystem — from plugin developers to marketers, to business owners. For more information on that, visit OfficeHours.fm.

And if you like what you heard on today’s show, StudioPress FM, you can of course find us there at StudioPress.FM. You can also help us hit the main stage by subscribing to this show in iTunes. It’s a great way to never ever miss an episode.

Carrie, we want to thank you so much for being on the show. As we look forward to doing more episodes, we’d love to have you back to talk more specifically about some of things that you’re doing as a way to take that expertise you have and bring that to our audience.

Carrie Dils: Thanks, guys. I always enjoy chatting with y’all.

006.jpg" alt="How to Build an Online Education Business">

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Tonya Mork of Know the Code. Tonya likes to rethink the way she does things to find a better path, one that is more efficient, effective, leads us forward, and is balanced with intent.

She likes to share ideas, plant seeds, and inspire folks to consider a different approach. Her blog (Hello from Tonya) is all about the way she thinks. It’s meant to inspire you to stop, assess, and rethink the way you are doing things.

In this 30-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Tonya Mork discuss:

• Tonya’s 30-year career
• Not letting an ugly twist in life stop you
• Monetization strategies for an educational business
• Being an expert before you’re an educator
• Expanding beyond your current training areas
• Opportunities in the community for educators

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

006.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• Follow Tonya on Twitter
• Follow Know the Code on Twitter
• Hello from Tonya
• Know The Code
• Visit Know The Code on Facebook
• Finding your Purpose in Life

The Transcript

How to Build an Online Education Business

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to?” and, “Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

Voiceover: StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I will discuss ways to build an educational Genesis business with Tonya Mork from Know the Code.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, and I’m joined, as usual, with the vice president of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke. I’m very excited about today’s show because we’re continuing our series where we talk to members and experts, mind you, of the Genesis community.

Today, we’re joined by Tonya Mork of Know the Code. Tonya likes to rethink the way she does things to find a better path, one that is more efficient, effective, leads us forward, and is balanced with intent. She likes to share her ideas, plant seeds, inspire folks to consider a different approach. Her blog, Hello from Tonya, is all about the way she thinks. It’s meant to inspire you to stop, assess, and rethink the way you are doing things.

Tonya, it’s a huge pleasure to have you on StudioPress FM. Welcome to the show.

Tonya Mork: Hi, Brian. Hi, Lauren. Hi, everybody. Glad to be here with you guys.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, we’re glad you’re on the show.

Brian Gardner: Now is this the first time you guys have talked to each other, probably?

Tonya Mork: Yeah, it is, actually.

Lauren Mancke: In person, yeah.

Brian Gardner: Cool. Yeah, Tonya and I have had a couple of good calls, which we’ll allude to throughout the course of the show. I’m going to just kick off and start a little bit personal.

Tonya, on the home page of your personal blog, you have 16 circles of words that describe you. I’m going to make it fun, and I’m going to ask you to pick three of those that most personify who you are, and why do you think that those three would be the top three?

Tonya Mork: Wow. Try to define a person in three different characteristics. That’s a tough thing.

Brian Gardner: Well, 16 seems like a lot, so I figured if we narrowed them down to the best of the best, you could tell us in a nutshell who you are.

The Three Characteristics That Define Tonya

Tonya Mork: Okay. I think what defines me the most is that I unlock potential. I’ve been doing that my entire career — not only with people, but processes, with technology, and so on. The way that I do that is that I’m able to see what could be possible, what’s not there right now, and then I’m able to map out a way to move us to where we want to be.

If I were to look on that page, I’d say, okay, potential unlocker is one, and then the visionary leader is another. It takes a lot of vision to not only educate people, but lead people, manage people. To build websites, too, it takes a lot of vision.

The other thing to know about me is I’m a very happy person. Everything that I do, even back in engineering days when there was some tough problems, it didn’t matter. If I was in a boardroom or on the floor, I like to have fun. There’s a time for being serious, but you can still temper that with making sure that you’re having a good time and enjoying what you’re doing.

Lauren Mancke: You mentioned you’ve been in engineering. We know that WordPress has been around for just over 10 years of that time, but you’ve got a career that lasts more than 30 years. Can you give us a little bit of background about what you were doing before WordPress?

Tonya’s 30-Year Career

Tonya Mork: Sure. I’ve been in engineering since the mid-1980s. I used to be in the high-tech world, so the automation world. This world, for folks who don’t know, if you can think about anything — your computer that you’re looking at, your phone, your car — all these things are mass-produced. To put those things together, it takes a lot of automated equipment, robotic, different cells, instrumentation, quality-type processes that go through and they assemble, test, make, those types of things. That’s the world that I used to belong to. I held many different roles in that.

I started off as a tech, and then I moved into engineering. Then I went into some project management. I went into staff management, executive management, and so on. I had a whole path and trajectory that I went through long before I came to WordPress. Then life threw me a curve ball. There’s a chapter two that I know we’ll talk about. Then I found WordPress. This is how I ended up here, and we’ll talk about that here, I’m sure, as we move along in the interview.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. There’s so many people in the WordPress community, many of which are really new, new to blogging, new to development or design, or any of that. One of the things I like most about you and I’m going to say this with no disrespect because you have a long career. We just mentioned you’ve been around for 30 years, which means you’re older than some people in our field. This comes out in your website and in the way you talk and in the way you explain things — you have a tremendous amount of knowledge for process, for analyzing things.

There are not many people that I know of, if at all, who probably bring to the table what you do. To our community, I’m so thankful that you can bring that area of expertise because I think there’s probably holes and gaps here and there that exist. You certainly fill a big one. Thank you for that.

Tonya Mork: Thank you. Gosh, that was very nice of you. I appreciate it.

Brian Gardner: Okay. You alluded to a chapter two, and I hope that this is okay to ask. I read the very personal story you shared on HeroPress about finding your purpose in life. Clearly, you have a story to tell. You talked about it just a few minutes ago. In 2007, in your words, your life took an ugly twist. In whatever detail you feel comfortable, talk to us about that because I think that formulated kind of who you are now and where you’re at.

Not Letting an Ugly Twist in Life Stop You

Tonya Mork: Sure. It’s a big shift, and I wrote that article for a couple of purposes. One is to explain how can someone with the experience that I have, why aren’t I back in that market? Why am I here in WordPress, and why am I trying to help people? It needed to be told so that people wanting to know who I am and trust me as I’m trying to help folks and the reason, the impetus why. That’s why I wrote it. Then, two, I wrote it to kind of help inspire that sometimes life does just take an ugly twist. We all go through things. It can be anything from losing somebody to divorce, to losing your job, whatever.

What happened to me in 2007, my engineering company was flourishing. We were doing really, really well, very profitable, and then I got ill. That’s one of those things you can’t predict. The kind of illness that I had, they basically went down a path and said, “You have something that’s extremely rare. I mean very rare, and there’s basically nothing we can do for you.” I had to lock myself away because everything in the world made me so ill that I wasn’t able to function. I basically became a prisoner in my own home.

If you can imagine what that feels like to be so ill that lights, noise, a bird flying, being in a car watching things go by would send you into a seizure and then put me into the type of situation that was life-threatening, you can imagine how my life would be then. I was pretty much stuck here in this house except when it was time to go to a doctor or the hospital.

That was it for many, many years. Going from being a type-A person who had a company, who had people, families that were counting on me, was very, very difficult. We lost everything. We watched them take everything from us. I lost friends. We lost our home. Everything that we had built throughout our career was all gone, all the savings, all gone, everything.

The people that I employed were my friends. They were part of a family, and they lost everything, too. We’d built this together, and they had to go out and find different employment that didn’t have that same feel to it. It took them a while to get back on their feet again as well. It was a devastating loss for all of us. I was black for a while, just in a hole of darkness.

Then somewhere along the way, I got sick of that. I got to get back to the essence of me, and that is I got to be happy again. I made a conscious choice that, “Okay, I’m locked in these walls. So what? I can extend out and do something in the world outside these walls, and I can do it virtually so that things outside, I could still control my environment so that I’m not ill, but I have a way of still being able to do something and have a purpose in the world.” That’s where I found WordPress.

We were using it in my engineering company just for the blog, so I knew about it. Then I started a nonprofit to help people that were like me, and we spun up BuddyPress. I spun up the website for it. Then I started tinkering. And, “I really want to know this thing.” That engineer came out in me again, and then that educator came out.

It was like I was looking at questions people were asking, and it’s like, “Wow, folks come from a different background than what I’m in. They don’t necessarily understand software principles and the fundamentals.” So I started answering questions. That led me on the path that I’m on now for helping people.

Brian Gardner: Thank you, first of all, for sharing your story. I know it’s not easy. I’m a person who has had multiple chapters in my life as well, some online, some off. I think we have a tendency to glorify life online and being an Internet entrepreneur. Especially with social media, it’s so easy to portray just how good life is. Instagram, Facebook, all of that stuff, filters, all of that stuff. I’m a huge proponent of trying to keep it real.

One person that comes to mind is Cory Miller, who speaks very much about mental health and trying to help those who are online doing things, entrepreneurs, that kind of thing. I hope to have him on the show in a future episode just to talk to that. I think there’s a reality that we all — whether we’re business owners, writers, bloggers, designers, or whatever — there is parts of our life that aren’t happy. It’s okay to go there and to figure that out so that you can become happy. For our listeners, those who are listening, understand that Tonya has a great story, and we’re just thankful for hearing that.

Tonya Mork: Thank you. I’m thankful to the community because the community gave me purpose. If you go read my story, you’ll see that I found my purpose because of this community, you guys all welcomed me in, that I could then contribute. So many people contributed to the knowledge that I have in my brain. I just want to give that back to people.

The end story of chapter two was that I got so ill, my body gave up, and I passed away. I got a miracle, and I came back. I said, “That’s it. I’m going to be a different person now, and I want to give back.” That’s what I’m trying to do now to help all of you guys to do more, make more money, be more efficient — obviously, I love Genesis — to help you to be able to know, to maximize what you can do for your clients with it.

Brian Gardner: That’s a great segue.

Lauren Mancke: I think there’s a lot of appeal with Genesis and in the WordPress community to have the flexibility, your schedule, and things that you can do that you might not be able to work in a traditional work environment. I think a lot of people can relate to that. When did Genesis become part of your picture?

Why the Efficiency of Genesis First Attracted Tonya

Tonya Mork: Let’s see, pretty much close to when Brian put it together. I forget the article that I saw, but something drew me to it. I started looking at it. I like to break things apart and just understand how they work. As it started progressing, it was like, “Hmm, I like the way this is put together.” It really feeds that developer sense that you can go in and do what you need to do. Out of the box, it comes up. You’re able to build a site immediately. Then just with a few tweaks here and there, you can get a custom experience.

I like that versus just every time out of the box, you’ve got to go and write a totally different experience. That’s not highly effective to be able to do that, whereas Genesis allows you to be very effective and efficient. That’s what drew me to it. I would say it was pretty close to the beginning, not obviously right at the beginning, but pretty close to it.

Brian Gardner: One of the things I like about the Genesis community, aside from the people that are in that, is the array of multiple opportunities that folks can … WordPress is kind of the same way. I always feel like Genesis is a smaller version of WordPress in that there’s just so many different ways to make money. You can design. You could develop. You can train. There’s just so many different opportunities there.

One thing that, as I alluded to earlier, there’s gaps, or there were gaps, in the Genesis community, the educational side of Genesis and WordPress, coding, and developing, all in itself, that was sort of there. A lot of people take for granted, I do all the time, in my eyes, how easy it is to pick things up and to learn, and how to move things around. But I fail to understand or embrace, a lot of times, the reality that there’s hundreds and thousands of people who were once like me way back in the day — new to it all, don’t understand it, need a little handholding, and stuff like that.

When I came across Know the Code, I was, first of all, instantly like, “Who is this person? What is she doing, and why is she doing it?” It just was an onslaught of this awesomeness. I was like, “I got to pay attention to this and put this on my radar.”

I reached out to you shortly after it to just touch base and all of that. Obviously, Know the Code is a passion project of yours. You’re passionate about what you do. It’s something that I’ve seen you sort of, and we’ve talked about a little bit, very intentionally and smartly, might I add, monetizing because we all have to make money.

Passion is great, but if you have the opportunity to make money from it, that’s also great because we need jobs, right?

Tonya Mork: Right.

Brian Gardner: What is the hope you have behind it? Obviously, you’re teaching and training people, and enabling them to pursue their version of a journey. From your perspective as an entrepreneur, but also from the perspective of the customer of yours, what is your hope there?

Monetization Strategies for an Educational Business

Tonya Mork: Just to be clear so that people understand what Know the Code is, yes, I teach Genesis, but I teach web development. I teach software principles, which feeds anybody from any stage in their career. It can start from a beginner through a seasoned pro like myself. It’s part of feeding that continuous learning process that we all have to do.

It’s technology-based. It’s intentionally targeted at professional developers or people who want to be professional developers, who maybe along the way got into writing some code. They didn’t learn about things like solid principles and modular design, configuration designs, and how to troubleshoot and write code in such a way that it’s very efficient and reduces your cost. These are types of things that I teach.

From an entrepreneurial standpoint, if you’re going after people who are going to make money off of what you’re teaching them, then it makes sense to monetize that. “I’m helping you to make more money, so okay, you should then pay something to me for my expertise as I’m enabling you to go off and make more money.” That’s why I put a monetizing paywall up in front of it. There’s a lot of free content, too, that people can then use as well. Again, that’s the educator in me. I’d love to be able to give everything away for free, but I got to eat, too.

Brian Gardner: Yup.

Tonya Mork: I have bills to pay, too. I’d like to live in my house in chapter three, you know?

Brian Gardner: Although your advantage, though, is you live up in Wisconsin in Two Rivers, right?

Tonya Mork: Yup, right.

Brian Gardner: There’s a much lower cost of living there. At least you have that going for you, whereas I live in Chicago.

Tonya Mork: Absolutely.

Brian Gardner: I get hosed on my property taxes. There’s more pressure for me.

Tonya Mork: I could imagine living where you’re at, yeah. We intentionally moved here. We used to live in downtown Milwaukee, so I know how expensive it can be. We moved here intentionally for the lower cost. From the perspective of my clients and customers who come to me, you’re the type of person who just wants to do more. You want to be more effective at what you do, you want to better serve your clients, and you want to make more money. You’re a professional, and that’s what I’m helping you to do.

Lauren Mancke: What have been some of your challenges that you faced when you started Know the Code? Is there some unexpected things that you’ve had to deal with that you didn’t foresee?

Challenges Tonya Faced When Starting Know the Code

Tonya Mork: Everybody who ever starts a business always has some things that you learn, right? It’s one of those where I tell people, they want to know what entrepreneurship is like, well, you’re standing on an edge of a cliff, and it’s black out there. You have a vision in your mind, and you jump out. You start flying. Sometimes you’ll sink a bit. You’ve got to be innovative enough to be able to see that coming, then be able to adjust your path, so you can start to soar again.

With Know the Code, some of the things are I produce a lot of content. Because of the format and how I do it, I’m able to just turn on the camera and just do a brain dump from me to you. It’s more like a cable, from my head to yours. That means I can produce a lot of content fast.

One of the things I didn’t foresee was, “Wow, how am I going to organize all of this content, so you can quickly find it?” You can’t just dump it into a library. People aren’t going to be able to find that easily, so what I’m doing right now is going through a process of content discovery and working on the user experience, too, that you can, within a few clicks, find what you’re looking for.

Brian Gardner: Sounds like a Dewey Decimal System, if we’re using the library analogy.

Tonya Mork: Sure.

Brian Gardner: I have a 30-second timeout because I want to ask you a fun question. Are you personally responsible for the designs both behind Hello from Tonya and also Know the Code?

Tonya’s Hand in Designing Her Sites

Tonya Mork: First one, yes. Second one, no. Yes, I did my personal site. It’s just something I’ve been playing with. I like playing in the sandbox, so you’ll come back it may be different. It’s just my expression of that designer that’s been unlocked in me. Know the Code, though, has a team behind it. We have a couple of professional developers who are designers who put that together.

Brian Gardner: I kind of had a suspicion that you had your hands in at least one of the site designs. They’re both great. I love them both. I love the color schemes in them all. I can tell that you’re as meticulous with the design of your site as you are with the content on the site — so kudos to you.

Tonya Mork: Thank you. Now, I did influence the color palette on Know the Code, because you’re going to notice I like green. That’s my favorite color, so yeah, I did influence that color there. I also like orange. There’s orange everywhere.

Lauren Mancke: Speaking of Know the Code, do you have some sort of process in which you determine the types of things that you teach there? Do you have a way to determine what will resonate with your audience?

Being an Expert Before You’re an Educator

Tonya Mork: That’s a good question, Lauren. When I first started, I thought, “Well, who knows me the most? Where do I start?” Web development, software development is huge. Just the principles alone that you go through to learn how to sit down and write code from scratch. That’s what I’m trying to get folks to do, write it from scratch. There’s a lot to it.

What I said was, “I’ve been in the Genesis community. The Genesis folks know me, so I’m going to start there.” I look at questions that people ask, and I say, “Hmm, okay, I can answer that question for you, and name that tune in X amount of notes.” That’s what I try to do — look at what questions people are asking, and then put that together.

Then I kind of have a path for myself. I have a road map that I put together, and I’m taking you on a journey from where you’re at today. I looked at a big part of the market and where I believe the skillsets are at today and where I’m trying to drive you to, which is to be able to build anything and code from scratch if you want to. I’ve put together a trajectory for that.

I’m sprinkling in some of the questions that you have to make sure it resonates with you because I’d really like to break it down into the basic elements so that it’s easy for you to adapt and take it away, not just one context, and trying to sprinkle in some of those questions with answers so that it clicks on the lightbulbs for you.

Brian Gardner: That makes a lot of sense. I love that. I really do. On a recent call we had, you and I, we discussed the possibility of branching out with your business plan, right?

Tonya Mork: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Expanding Beyond Your Current Training Areas

Brian Gardner: We agreed that, as great as Genesis is, to the greater of the Internet, it’s just a very small sliver of audience and opportunity. I’m not territorial about that. I encourage anybody who’s building a Genesis-based business to think outside of the box, outside of the Genesis community, because there’s so much more opportunity to reach people on a broader level.

The same can be said about WordPress to some degree because, even outside of WordPress, there’s still more space. We talked about broadening the training and the types of things you’d teach to cover ‘business people’ as opposed to ‘WordPress or Genesis people.’ Where are you at with that? I know it was only about a week or so ago we talked, but have you started thinking more about just things about general business? For example, I know we talked about things like legal types of things, such as trademarks, and all that kind of stuff.

Tonya Mork: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Right. Know the Code itself is about writing software. It’s not just WordPress. I teach you PHP. I teach you jQuery, SQL, everything. That can allow you to build any kind of site that you want. If you think about it, as you just said, there’s this whole business side, even for developers. You’re stepping out, and you’re really good at code. Or you’re a designer and you’re really good at designing — but do you have that business ability as well?

It takes a lot. There’s sales. There’s marketing. There’s all the legal stuff. There’s accounting. There’s a lot to running even your own little agency or freelance business.

What Brian and I were talking about that I had mentioned was, after I did the Matt Report, some folks started asking me questions about, “Okay, well, how did you run businesses?” because I used to run a multimillion dollar businesses. “How did you do that?” What we’re doing to start with is I’m going to start writing just blog posts about business, just to share some ideas. That’s part of what my personal blog site is, just to get you to think about different ideas.

I started a Little Green Book series. Some of those will be code. I just published a book, Refactoring Tweaks, which is on code to make your code better. The next one will probably be something in business.

I can write these quick little ebooks that are less than 100 pages, or around 100 pages, to teach you something about technology or something about business, whether that’s marketing or whatever. Then that can then lead into something else that you and I talked about, too, which is then, “Okay, well, you’ve got a book. You’ve got written content.” Then we can move into something like maybe master programs where I can spin up a webinar or some sort of course and take you on a path.

Brian Gardner: Now, Lauren is going to run the rest of the show while I go out and register KnowtheBusiness.io, because that’s how my brain thinks. Immediately, as you were talking, I’m like, “I’m going to recommend that you go off and think about what would be … ” If in fact you do get that response from people on your personal blog, people who are interested in starting a business and learning all of that stuff, what is the Know the Code version of what that website might look like?

Tonya Mork: Oh sure, I’m on there right now registering it. Boom. Got it.

Brian Gardner: I wouldn’t doubt it.

Tonya Mork: Might as well while we’re talking, right?

Brian Gardner: What’s $8?

Tonya Mork: You inspired the idea.

Lauren Mancke: Do you see any holes in the community as it stands now for different types of training, like on Know the Code? In other words, are there other opportunities that people can come in and offer something of value, that they can then make money at?

Opportunities in the Community for Educators

Tonya Mork: Oh absolutely. The whole thing, if you’re going to be an educator, you really need to know your stuff. You need to be able to do this. Let me take just a moment to teach you something, too, and then I’ll answer the question. You need to be able to start where that person’s at, and then map out a trajectory that moves them from where they’re at to where you’re trying to move them to. Then make it adaptable so that they can go off and make it their own, and not just teach one use case.

Okay, I teach you how to build this one widget. “Well, great. I know how to build one widget. Whoopee.” No, it’s, “I know how to build a widget, which means I know how to write code. I know how to do this.” Okay.

From an education standpoint, that’s what great educators do. They know how to get you to think and adapt the information that they’re giving you, and then that inspires you to go do other stuff. In the space, I’m here to help teach code, the proper way of building code to be efficient and make money at it, but there’s other things. Think about WordPress and what we’re doing.

There’s content strategies, right? So you could be someone who needs to be out there teaching how to work with your clients to make the content first. Designs are great. We can put a pretty label on something and so on, but what’s going to keep people coming back to a website is that content. If the content isn’t right, then people are going to look at the pretty site, and they’re just not going to come back.

Teaching strategies on content strategy itself, how to work with clients, that’s an area that could easily be done up. There’s things in SEO. There’s lots of different opportunities. You may think, “Well, that’s kind of saturated. Some folks are already doing that.” Find a way to do it differently. Find a way that’s uniquely your voice and that you have a true expertise in, and then you can go out and share that knowledge and educate others.

Just remember, though, it’s about others. It’s not about you. It’s making sure that you’re truly delivering value to help other people do more things.

Brian Gardner: I love what you said there. Last year at our Authority conference, Sally Hogshead was one of the main speakers. One thing she said, and you just basically said the same thing, was, “Different is better than better.” First of all, there’s a lot of people who claim to be knowledgeable in doing what they’re doing, not necessarily in the Genesis community, but there’s a lot of fluff out there where people are really good marketers, could design a good sales page, or something to that effect.

One thing that I for sure know about you is that you completely back it up, almost more than you need to, not really, but a lot of people you can just tell, “Oh, this is a good sales page,” but there’s going to be not much to it after that. With you, it’s like you open the door, and there’s a mansion of knowledge.

Development, for me, isn’t as interesting as design is. That’s just me personally, but there’s a ton of people out there in the WordPress space, in the Genesis space, and even outside of all that, just who are mega developers or people who want to just develop and don’t have the artistically creative side where design would appeal to them. For them, it’s all about code and knowing the code. I sincerely think you have an opportunity to do a lot more good work for the people everywhere.

Tonya Mork: Thank you. Yeah, design is another area where folks could jump there’s a lot of elements to design that you could go in and start teaching with.

Brian Gardner: Now you’re going to register KnowtheDesign.io.

Tonya Mork: No, no.

Brian Gardner: KnowtheEverything.io.

Tonya Mork: Well, I’m not a designer. I will tell you right now, I am not a designer. I wouldn’t even want to try to teach that. There are great eyes out there, and mine aren’t it. If you want to know ones and zeroes, that’s me.

Brian Gardner: Well, that’s the great thing about a good ecosystem — everybody knows their skills and their part, and they kind of just play and usually stay within that, which is good. Then it gives people a place, a good resource to go, to learn, and to do all of that stuff.

Tonya Mork: Yeah. If you’re thinking about education and helping others, make sure that you really have an expertise in that. You’re right. I get a lot of emails where people say, “I could teach you how to blah, blah, blah.” My first question is, “Have you done it successfully? What’s your background?” That’s why I tried to push my background out there, so it didn’t just sound all fluffy and, “Well, okay, why is she teaching this? Does she really know her stuff?” I think you need to make sure you know your stuff and be able to back it up and prove that, yeah, you really do.

Brian Gardner: Yup. Those are great words of wisdom. I want to do this with a number of the people that we have on the show because I feel like we could just keep going and talking and talking and talking. In the spirit of trying to keep this to a digestible level, I want to for sure have you back on the show, either in a follow-up fashion or to just pick your brain in another area that would be applicable to those who are listening.

Where to Learn From Tonya

Brian Gardner: I do want to ask our audience, as I always do at the end of the show, I have a question for you. Do you want to be a more awesome and in-demand professional developer? If you do, learn how to level up as a WordPress developer with Tonya at Know the Code, and get a hands-on, practical web development approach with screencasts which will help advance you to the next level in your career. For more info, visit her website, KnowtheCode.io.

If you like what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at, you guessed it, StudioPress.FM. You can also help us hit the main stage by subscribing to the show in iTunes. It’s a great way to never ever miss an episode.

Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Tonya, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for your time.

Tonya Mork: Thank you, Brian. Thank you, Lauren.

Lauren Mancke: Thank you.

005.jpg" alt="The Business of Food Blogging: Is it Lucrative?">

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Shay Bocks of Feast Design Company. Shay started hustlin’ in 2008 to connect her creative gifts and ravenous curiosity with the ambition of creative entrepreneurs. Nowadays, that dream has manifested into a full-time operation serving other dreamers just like herself.

Within the Genesis community, Shay is best known for her Foodie Pro theme, one that has continually been the #1 selling theme on StudioPress. She followed that up with a theme called Brunch Pro, and just recently released another one called Cook’d Pro.

In this 31-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Shay Bocks discuss:

• How Shay’s first 7 jobs shaped what she does today
• Challenges she faces as a small business owner
• The popularity of the Foodie Pro Theme
• What makes a successful food blogging brand
• A recipe solution: the Cookbook Plugin

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

005.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• Follow Feast Design Co. on Twitter
• FeastDesignCo.com
• Foodie Pro Theme
• Brunch Pro Theme
• Cookbook Plugin

The Transcript

The Business of Food Blogging: Is it Lucrative?

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with the people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host the conference a every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot, and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to?” and, “Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with those people who are putting it on and then other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

Voiceover: StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, Brian and I will discuss the business of food blogging with Shay Bocks of Feast Design Company.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, and I’m joined, as usual, with the vice president of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke. We’re excited to talk to Shay today because we’re continuing our series here where we’re talking to members and experts, mind you, of the Genesis community. We’re going to just jump right into it.

Today, we’re joined by Shay Bocks of Feast Design Company. Shay started hustling in 2008 to connect her creative gifts and ravenous curiosity with the ambition of creative entrepreneurs. Nowadays, that dream has manifested into a full-time operation of serving other dreamers just like herself.

Now, within the Genesis community, Shay is best known for her Foodie Pro Theme, one that has continually been the number one selling theme on StudioPress. She followed that up with a theme called Brunch Pro and just recently released a new third food-blogging theme called Cook’d Pro. Shay, it’s a huge pleasure for Lauren and I to have you on the show today. Welcome.

Shay Bocks: Thank you. I’m super honored to be here with the likes of you guys. Y’all are my heroes, so this is awesome.

Brian Gardner: Ah, the y’all has already started.

Shay Bocks: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Brian Gardner: I love talking to you because you have such a great accent. It’s awesome. I love it. It makes me smile.

Lauren Mancke: I didn’t even notice. That’s how we talk around here.

Shay Bocks: Exactly. Lauren knows what I mean.

Brian Gardner: So I’m the outsider is what you’re saying?

Shay Bocks: Yeah.

Shay Bocks: Before we start talking to Shay, the Shay of 2016, I thought it would be fun to head back in time a little bit. Last week on Twitter, there was this hashtag going around called the #FirstSevenJobs. Everybody would Tweet the first seven jobs that they had, and then they used the hashtag. Anyone you were following, you can kind of see what they were up to in years past. Some people flipped hamburgers, and other people were DJs and stuff like that.

Let’s talk about when you were younger — you’re still young — but younger than you are now. Before you became this Internet powerhouse, what did you do before this?

How Shay’s First 7 Jobs Shaped What She Does Today

Shay Bocks: I’m super excited you asked this. A lot of times, those hashtags go around, and it’s kind of silly what people do. But when I actually sat down and wrote out my first seven jobs, it was a realization as to how all of those previous, kind of insignificant jobs, that you start out with really informed what I’m doing now. It’s kind of cool to see how that turned out.

The first job I had was actually when I was 15. I became a youth facilitator for a major nonviolence organization. I got to travel around the world with McGruff the Crime Dog, if you remember him. I also got to work with a lot of teens and teach adults how to work with teens, and we lobbied politicians.

The biggest thing that I got out of that was that, when I got this insight into using creative solutions to solve problems because we worked with these teens to create media campaigns and we sat in think tanks with refugees from Uganda and different things like that, that had to be the best job that I could have ever hoped for, especially when I was only 15 years old.

Brian Gardner: Sure.

Shay Bocks: From there, I did something way more boring. I worked as a service coordinator for an HVAC company. I had to switch gears from that and do something a little bit more exciting. I went to New York to live as a live-in nanny. I worked for a single mom, who was really this big-shot corporate creative in New York — really got to see how she leveraged her skills for what she was doing at the time. I’m sure she’s still doing amazing things.

After that job was over with, I came back to Chesapeake, Virginia, and worked as an office manager at a radiator repair shop. It was owned by friends of ours. I would say that one taught me how to work with difficult people and how to get invoices paid, but in a very nice way, to make sure the people were happy at the end of the day.

Once I was done with that job, I actually left there to move to Texas with my husband at the time, and because we were in an area full of other Army wives, it was so difficult to find a job. I ended up working as a makeup artist at Glamour Shots. I would say that this job was least in-line with my own personality and my values. But now looking back, I can say that’s definitively where I learned how to use Photoshop and how to make a sale.

Once my husband deployed and I had our baby — Steve deployed when our baby was two months old — I didn’t want to leave the baby, so I decided to become certified in Army childcare. I ran a 24-hour care for infants out of my home. At any given time, I would have four infants at my house, like all the time. That was my first lucrative business venture. Even though what I was doing was very different from what I’m doing now, I learned so much about business by doing that.

I have to tell a short little story and say that the way I got most of my clients, or families that I worked with, was actually by turning a Myspace page into a website. I didn’t know much about web design at the time, but I knew how to manipulate the HTML in Myspace. When someone would come to my Myspace page, it looked like a website. It didn’t look anything like a Myspace page. That seemed to impress families for some reason.

Brian Gardner: Lauren, did she just say Myspace?

Shay Bocks: I did.

Brian Gardner: Let’s talk GeoCities and Myspace on StudioPress FM. That’s awesome. Go on.

Shay Bocks: That’s how I learned how to code, just being straight up with you.

Brian Gardner: Hey, that’s what we want to hear.

Shay Bocks: After doing that, I decided to start designing for other Army wives, and thinking back on it now, it was really kind of desperate and ridiculous. But I created graphics for Army wives so that, while their soldiers were gone it was like these little blinky graphics with pictures of them and their soldiers, and “Oh I love you,” “I miss you,” and all of that kind of stuff.

Then, from there I realized that, “Well, these same Army wives are starting to build their own businesses, and they need websites.” There were a lot of bloggers, so I figured out how to create blog designs for these Army wives, which then went down a whole path that led me to where I am now.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. I had two jobs, basically, before this web thing. The first was a manager at a convenient store, and that gave me the experience of customer service and how important that is. That is something that, for very obvious reasons, has come through when I started StudioPress and having to deal with people and why giving them the benefit of the doubt and being as helpful and generous as I can.

Then, the second job after that was project manager at an architectural firm. That experience put me in front of a computer all day, which basically gave me access to teach myself everything I know now, which was, back in that day, all Microsoft Windows, Excel, Word, Outlook, and all that stuff.

When I was kind of getting bored with what I was doing, I went online and started teaching myself things. So, yes, to your point, when you look back at the jobs that you had, in some fashion you could probably pull some nugget of how that helped you establish your Internet entrepreneurship that we all have. You know what I mean?

Shay Bocks: Absolutely. I completely agree with you on that.

Lauren Mancke: Shay, you’re clearly a talented designer, and you’re quite savvy from a business side of things. How did you decide to become an Internet entrepreneur?

Why Shay Decided to Become an Internet Entrepreneur

Shay Bocks: That’s a loaded question. I think the best Internet entrepreneurs get to call themselves that because they followed some kind of magnetic pull from the universe, I guess. That might be kind of a woo-woo way of explaining it. I know that, in my case, all I did was allowed myself to be curious and to dig in when I really didn’t know what I was doing — then to recognize opportunities that intersected with the path that I was already on.

I was open to success and so it has found me — and it’s still finding me. I think I am just at the beginning of this journey, but that’s not to discredit the intense amount of work I’ve put into my business or how I’ve leveraged my skillset to do it. I guess that’s just my attempt at a balanced answer for you.

Lauren Mancke: I know having kids and being a single mom is probably difficult. What other challenges do you face with running your business?

Challenges Shay Faces As a Small Business Owner

Shay Bocks: I think I have a very unique perspective that’s valuable to the audience I serve. My current challenge is being able to scale that and to build a team that serves even more bloggers seamlessly, just as I would. For me, I want to do so many things. My list is big.

But you’re right — I’m a mom, and a single mom at that, without a lot of support on the home front. Being able to balance this ambition with the recognition of what I can actually get done in a day is really hard. That’s where my team is coming in, and I can’t even begin to describe what a difference that’s made for me and the people that we’re serving.

Speaking of my team. Last month, I got to promote my creative assistant to full-time designer, and I’m super excited because he’s coming with me to Circles next month. You’ll get to meet him while we’re there.

Brian Gardner: That’s awesome. I know last year that was the first time you and I got a chance to meet face to face.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah and us too.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. Lauren, unfortunately, can’t join us this year because of family reasons.

Shay Bocks: Oh pooh.

Lauren Mancke: I’m in the family way.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. You’ve got a couple buns in the oven, now that we’re going with this food and baking concept. We will definitely miss you, Lauren, there at Circles conference, but Shay, I cannot wait to see you again.

Shay Bocks: Same here.

Brian Gardner: We’ll get to, Shay, how you and I kind of met online here in a minute. As an outsider looking in, I’m always fascinated, and we just talked to Rebecca at savvy-marketing.com/">Web Savvy Marketing about this, there are things about people that I see from my perspective that really make me happy and proud to call people as friends and fellow entrepreneurs.

Watching your journey from when we first met as struggling single mom trying to make money and kind of figure this out, to where you’re at now, having developed a team, multiple products. You just announced some stuff, which we’ll also get to, and knowing the road ahead for you is probably way longer than it is behind you, it’s just so fun.

As a cheerleader, kind of sit on the sidelines of your life and your journey and just watch that stuff go down. See how things play out and pictures that you post. Having people to your place to do pictures and staging, all of that stuff. I’m so happy and proud of where you’ve gone, and I cannot wait to see where you go — quick aside there.

Let’s go back because I want to talk about Foodie. I mean that’s the elephant in the room. At some point, we’re all going to look back and say that just changed and revolutionized food blogging as it is now. Foodie Pro was a theme that you designed. It’s really where our paths crossed on the Internet.

I think you were on my radar, and I saw a link to something. Someone Tweeted something. I went there, and I instantly said, “That is a theme we have to have on StudioPress.” I don’t remember the exact chain of events, but I’m sure I probably just emailed you and said, “Hey. I’m Brian, founder of StudioPress. Want to sell your theme? See a lot of opportunity. Are you interested?” From that, it’s probably a pretty obvious question to answer here, but what is the effect that Foodie itself has had on your business as it is right now?

The Popularity of the Foodie Pro Theme

Shay Bocks: Yeah, absolutely. That moment that you just talked about, where you reached out to me and said, “Hey, I want to sell this on StudioPress,” that was a pivotal moment in my journey. I was already on the path towards working more with food bloggers. I think I saw where things were headed with this industry, and I wanted to be a part of that. But it was really getting Foodie on StudioPress and opening that up to such a bigger audience and such a wider breadth of online contributors that really kind of set all of this into motion.

I think just being able to have something like Foodie online in a mass setting for all of these newbie food bloggers who are just starting out, who don’t even know yet if they have something to contribute to the online world, but being able to say, “Hey, this is a theme that was built for me, and this is how I can get started.” I think that has been tremendous, at least for the food bloggers I’ve talked to. They have at least a starting point.

Once they have that WordPress installed, the Genesis Framework installed, and the Foodie child theme installed, they know that now they can just write something, press publish, and worry about the rest later, figure it out later. Foodie is giving them that start, which I think is incredible.

Brian Gardner: So quick aside here — Lauren and I, every month we get a report of sales on StudioPress, and every month we think to ourselves, “Is this the month?” Lauren, correct me if I’m wrong. I think there was one month at one point.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, there was one month.

Brian Gardner: Every month we wait to get the report. We’re like, “Ah, she did it again. Foodie’s the number one selling theme on StudioPress,” which, of course, is not us being selfish. It’s just more of a fun game than anything.

So food blogging — that’s obviously something that we want to talk about today. It’s quite the rage, and has been probably for at least two or three years. Now, I don’t necessarily think it’s in a saturated state, but it’s sort of getting close. But it’s so popular, and people are still doing it.

People are still starting it. It seems like every day people are starting up a new food blog. A lot of popular sites out there, such as Pinch of Yum, Minimalist Baker, run by John and Dana. John’s a good friend of mine. Cookie and Kate is another one. What’s the deal? The whole food-blogging theme, just talk to us about what it is and why it’s such a rage.

Why a Personal Brand Is Essential to Building a Successful Food Blog

Shay Bocks: Yeah. I think food blogging may be big, and you’re right — some people may even say it’s an industry that’s getting over-saturated. I actually hope to hear more voices getting into this food conversation. There are so many food blogs out there, but you know why? It’s because of the mom that’s sitting down every Sunday afternoon wondering what the hell she’s going to get into her kids bellies this week, or the millions of people who are suffering with chronic conditions and are looking at their diets to help them tackle the challenges that they’re facing.

There’s so much room in this space because eating is a need that humans will always have. Discovering ways to use food to make life easier, happier, sexier, and even divinely inspired, that’s where food bloggers come in. I don’t think people realize how incredibly influential this industry is.

These bloggers are the ones behind the recipes and magazines that you read, the cookbooks you rely on, on the cooking shows you’re watching, and especially in the recipes that you seek out on Pinterest. Brands notice, too. That’s why so many food bloggers are doing so well online.

Lauren Mancke: My husband, he actually went to culinary school, just for fun, so he’s a classically trained chef. People are always telling us that we should start a food blog because I can take the pictures, he can cook the food. And is it really all that simple? I think about how much time and effort that would take, and I think it’s a common misconception about building a successful food blog is that it’s that easy. What do you think about that?

Shay Bocks: Yeah. I definitely have to agree with you. It’s not some fly-by-night operation. I would say that I think you should start a food blog because I would certainly read it. I would enjoy it. I think it would be valuable to a lot of people, but I would not say it’s all that easy to do. It’s easy to do as a hobby. If you’re looking to really make an impact with your blog, it’s not a hobby.

In order to really build an influential food blog, you have to have a personal brand. A lot of work goes into building a personal brand. That’s just my take on it. Getting started is easy, but actually making an impact with your blog, that’s not easy. The people who are doing it, they need to be recognized for the work they’re putting into their blogs.

Brian Gardner: One of my favorite decisions you’ve made, and you and I had many conversations during the success of Foodie when it started out — “What’s next for Shay? What’s phase two? What’s the next thing?” We have kind of joked — at some point, that ship will sail, right?

Shay Bocks: Right.

Brian Gardner: We talked about just different ideas of themes that you could do next, so one of the things you did that made me super proud, and I was just so excited, was when you decided to go with the second theme, also food blogging. At that point, I think you kind of said, “This is where I’m going to plant my flag. I’m not going to try to just go all over and be everything. I’m going to become the food blog person.”

As I mentioned earlier on the show, we’ve got a third theme that just came out called Cook’d. It’s been fun to watch you stick with that and ride that horse further past Foodie by introducing a couple of other well-designed themes. Then, of course, you renamed your business Feast Design Company, obviously to go along with the food-blogging theme, which I thought was another brilliant move.

Lauren Mancke: I love that.

Brian Gardner: Yeah.

Shay Bocks: Thank you.

Brian Gardner: Kudos to you.

Lauren Mancke: I saw that, and I was like, “Oh yes, I love that.”

Shay Bocks: That means a lot to me that you say that. We went through a lot of hemming and hawing over that, about what we should call ourselves. It’s hard to name anything. I just kept saying to myself, “Feast your eyes on this.” The word ‘feast’ just kept coming up, and because it’s such food-related and reminds people of jubilant Thanksgivings or a time when people are coming together, that’s what we went with.

Brian Gardner: Okay. Walk us through some of the typical, and sometimes very lucrative, monetization strategies. I mentioned, Pinch of Yum, they have a course. John and Dana at Minimalist Baker, they have things that they’re doing. There are a lot of opportunities for people outside of just the advertisement or things like that. How can people make money with the food blog?

How to Make Money with a Food Blog

Shay Bocks: Yeah. We get new food bloggers in, and they’re like, “Oh, I want to monetize. Let me put some Google Ads on my website,” and I have to kind of sit down and educate them and say, “You’re not really going to make money that way.” Ads are valuable for blogs that have a ton of traffic, but we’re starting to see food bloggers branch out into other avenues of monetizing, which is really exciting.

You see sites like I Am Baker, where she has a huge partnership with a big brand, McCormick Seasonings, and she’s putting out content left and right. That’s supported by that brand that supports her online business, but it’s also extremely valuable to the people that she’s writing for. Then we have, you mentioned Pinch of Yum and Minimalist Baker. They do make a lot of money on ad revenue because they have the traffic to support it, but they’re also diversified revenue.

They have products of their own. They’re using affiliate links. They’re just tapping into every lucrative avenue they can get their hands on, and it’s working for them, which is wonderful.

Then you have other big hitters like Pioneer Woman. She started as a blogger, and she leveraged her personal brand to put out a cookbook. I think she has her own Food Network show. There are endless possibilities. What I’m looking forward to seeing is even more creative solutions, stuff we haven’t even seen before.

Brian Gardner: If you’re looking for those types of ideas — I know John and Dana do this at Minimalist Baker, I’m not sure how often — but a lot of these popular food blogs are doing the transparency thing with their monthly reports, right? Where they go top to bottom and actually show you how diversified their income stream is. There’s things that even I see on there where I’m like, “Wow, I would have never thought of trying to monetize that way.”

A lot of them are even supported by web-hosting companies for people who are searching for how to start a food blog, right? They go through and walk you through, and they recommend themes, such as the ones that you have with us on StudioPress and hosting, so there’s that and the obvious courses. Food Photography School, I think, is a course. I can’t remember if that’s Pinch of Yum?

Shay Bocks: Both Pinch of Yum and Minimalist Baker have photography courses, which is awesome.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. Education and training — if you have thousands of followers that are trying to basically replicate your success, that’s a great opportunity to basically teach them how you did what you did, which gives them value and you revenue. Lots of opportunities to make money in food blogs.

Shay Bocks: Absolutely.

Lauren Mancke: Say I was going to start a food blog, or have some sort of food-blogging aspect to a website, what do you think some of the obstacles I would face would be in order to make it big?

Obstacles to Growing a Big, Successful Food Blog

Shay Bocks: I think the first thing that I see most new food bloggers doing is that they’re trying too much to be just like the people who are successful at food blogging. Brian, you mentioned a second ago that Pinch of Yum and Minimalist Baker have some education and training aspects to their products. I think those kinds of things are incredibly valuable, but the problem comes in when a new food blogger tries to copy exactly what they’re doing.

New food bloggers coming into the realm need to take that information, learn from it, but then also figure out what’s making them unique. There may be a 100,000 paleo blogs out there, but your unique perspective is what’s going to make your blog different, what’s going to make it stand out, or what’s going to make people want to link to it. What people are going to want to consume and eat up.

Brian Gardner: No pun intended, right?

Shay Bocks: Yeah, exactly.

Lauren Mancke: Pun intended.

Brian Gardner: She walked right into that one.

Shay Bocks: Yeah. I think it’s really important to set yourself apart, but doing it in a way that’s not competitive. This blue ocean strategy — if anyone knows about me — it’s being able to have a unique perspective, something valuable to present to the world, but in a way that’s really collaborative with others in the space.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. Food blogging isn’t the only space. We even see that within the Genesis ecosystem and people who are selling themes. The unique voice, I’m so glad that you alluded to that. That is so important because so many people just try to replicate success without there being any kind of unique positioning.

Back in the day, I don’t know if you know who this is, but Jeremy Shoemaker, a guy named ShoeMoney back in the day, made a ton of money doing stuff with the ringtones. So everybody wanted to be the next ShoeMoney and do the exact same thing. So all of a sudden, you had a bunch of cloned sites.

Even back when Darren Rowse was starting out with ProBlogger and all of that, everyone, kind of like a flock of sheep, just tried to basically do the same thing on a different domain name. So I think, now, in this even not so saturated market with food blogging, there’s still so many opportunities.

You even mentioned it earlier, just the different types of sort of layers within that where you can create — whether it’s paleo, whether it’s this or that, or how it applies to wellness, like Katie is doing at Wellness Mama, just kind of how that allows you the opportunity to serve a very specific audience. Maybe it’s gluten-free. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s desserts. Food blogging is a big, big ocean.

We would encourage anyone who was looking to start a food blog to just find a unique element. Maybe it applies to you as a person and your personality. Maybe there’s some flamboyance involved, so you’re like RedHotChef.com or something like that, where you bring a certain kind of flavor to it.

Okay. Give our listeners who are interested in food blogging some trade secrets. In other words, what are some things that they should focus on when they are trying to start their successful food-blogging brand?

Where to Focus Your Food-Blogging Brand: A Unique Perspective and a Specific Audience

Shay Bocks: I’d say the number one point is, what I said before, building your personal brand and focusing on what makes your prospective unique. Second, I would say speaking to a specific reader or target audience. When I do strategy sessions with potential clients or some of the people we work with on themes, we get really specific about who the target audience is.

I don’t mean 35- to 45-year-old women with a college education. I mean like what are this person’s deep desires, fears? What are her mantras? What does she get up in the morning for? What makes her frustrated, sad, or discouraged? Then speaking to that one particular person in everything that you write or any image you put up online or anything. Have that person in your mind when you’re putting anything up online.

Then, I would say the last point is just following your intuition about what opportunities make the most sense in building your own online empire. Not all solutions are going to be right for you, so you have to have kind of a gut check with anything you do.

A Recipe Solution: The Cookbook Plugin

Brian Gardner: Okay. Here’s where I’m going to jump in and ask the bonus question: The Cookbook Plugin. Yesterday, you made a big announcement online with the folks at WP Site Care about a plugin I knew about for some time. In fact, you and I had separate conversations about something we were going to consider doing, but never did. For our listeners, I’m going to read this straight from your sales page, just so they know what we are talking about.

Here’s what Shay and friends have to say. “Start and grow your blog with a recipe plugin that actually works. All the existing WordPress recipe plugins are busted, poorly supported, hard to use, or just plan ugly. We’ve built a feature-rich recipe solution that is crafted with care, well-built, it looks beautiful, and works the way that food bloggers do. You can get excited about publishing new recipes again.” Care to go more into this, Shay?

Shay Bocks: Well, it’s interesting, when you say it, that sounds a little harsh. I will say that there are a lot of well-meaning developers out there who are trying to solve the issue of recipe plugins for food bloggers. Anyone familiar with this space knows the past few months have been really volatile when it comes to recipe plugins. Some plugins are being dropped completely. Some are just not being well-supported. The ones that are being well-supported are just kind of really overly bloated, ugly, or not easy to use.

Those are harsh judgments, but these are the things we’re hearing from our customers on a daily basis. They want to know, “Which recipe plugin do you recommend?” I have to honestly say I can’t in good faith recommend any of them. I’ll tell them what their options are. I’ll tell them what I think the pros and cons are, but I don’t feel comfortable about any of them.

It was in this moment of frustration, really — actually, a few years of frustration — talking with some colleagues over at WP Site Care, figuring out that what people need is a supported plugin that’s going to stick around, be well-developed, and be beautiful.

So we decided to build it. We decided we’re tired of waiting for other people to do it. It’s time for us to do something about this. I think bloggers are tired of every week trying to figure out, “Should I switch plugins? What’s the right software to install this week?” Bloggers need something consistent and something that’s really dedicated to working the way they do.

That’s why we started on this path. We’ve got a solid plugin that is in its final stages of just wrapping it up, getting it tested, and getting it ready for everyone to use. We decided to go ahead and announce it yesterday and let everyone know that it’s coming. We’re excited about what this going to mean for recipe publishers.

Brian Gardner: To me, it makes a lot of sense. We do the same thing at Copyblogger or excuse me, Rainmaker Digital is our new name. If we get frustrated with a solution that’s out there or we need something for our own internal use, we just go ahead and build it. Then if it makes sense, we release that to the public.

For you, so many people who are using the food-blogging themes that you’re designing, even from your prospective, it probably makes it easier to have the control over what does this plugin or the functionality for what most food bloggers are going to need.

It’s easy to work with that because you built it rather than having to be frustrated with the reliance on somebody else’s development, and sometimes changing code, markup, or whatever. It’s kind of like in-housing the solution. Obvious reasons include you guys get to make money on it yourself, and things like that. Then, it just makes it much more of a pitch to say, “Hey, I recommend this because it works well with the stuff that we’ve built.” Kudos to you guys for ceasing that opportunity and running with it.

Shay Bocks: Thank you. I want to say #truth. All of that is wonderful. I completely agree with you.

Lauren Mancke: I’ve really enjoyed all your thoughts, Shay. Do you have anything else to add?

Shay Bocks: Just that I’m honored to be able to connect food bloggers with the amazing tools over at StudioPress. Of the major contributions in this space, you guys are such a big hitter, and I so appreciate how you’ve embraced me and my people.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. Well, that’s going to continue to go even further. I have some ideas that, Shay, you and I will talk about offline, just about how to leverage the stuff that you’ve built, the stuff that we’ve built, our audience, and how to put that together and really present a unified front when it comes to food blogging and people building their personal brands for that.

Speaking of personal brands, I have a question for those who are listening in. Are you looking to build a better brand for your blog? Well, Shay has created an actionable five-part challenge, and with that, you’ll have just the right tactics you need to build a digital design and brand. This will help lead you to a profitable website — and best of all, it’s free. Sign up, and get your first challenge delivered immediately. For more information, you can check it out over at FeastDesignCo.com/5-days. We’ll also include a link to that on the show page.

If you like what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at, you guessed it, StudioPress.FM. You can also help Lauren and I hit the main stage by subscribing to the show on iTunes. It’s a great way to never, ever miss an episode. Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.

004.jpg" alt="A Beginner’s Guide to SEO that Works">

On this week’s episode, we’re joined by Rebecca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing. She is a WordPress developer, an SEO consultant, and a general business consultant.

She s an active member of the WordPress community, participating as a WordCamp speaker, podcast guest, and SEO educator.

Her company, Web Savvy Marketing, was founded in 2009 and is a creative agency based in Southeastern Michigan. They work with clients across the globe who range from bloggers and small businesses to large enterprises and universities.

The Web Savvy online store offers more than 20 professionally designed Genesis themes ideal for businesses, marketers, educational institutions, and bloggers.

In this 39-minute episode Brian Gardner, Lauren Mancke, and Rebecca Gill discuss:

• The accidental entrepreneur
• Empowerment in training others
• A holistic approach to SEO
• How to avoid risky black hat tactics
• The 3 most important elements of SEO
• Long-term SEO strategies

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

004.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• Follow Rebecca on Twitter
• RebeccaGill.com
• savvy-marketing.com/">Web Savvy Marketing
• savvy-marketing.com/store/">Web Savvy Marketing Themes
• savvy-marketing.com/seo-consulting/">SEO Consulting
• DIY SEO Courses
• SEO Bootcamp

The Transcript

A Beginner’s Guide to SEO that Works

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/summit. That’s Rainmaker.FM/summit. We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is the being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to the people who are here for the first time, people who ve been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for, me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily and seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host the conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers — people like you — more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It s really fun. I think it s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it s a single-track conference where you don t get distracted by, Which sessions should I go to? Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything — the speakers have been awesome — but I think the coolest aspect, for me, has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That s it for now. There is a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/summit. That s Rainmaker.FM/summit.

Voiceover: StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder, Brian Gardner, and VP of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke, share their expertise on web design, strategy and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On today s episode, we are talking search engine optimization with Rebeca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing. We ll cover this topic from all angles, so listen in.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone, welcome to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner. I m joined, as usual, with the VP of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke. We are very excited about the show because right now we are starting a new series where we are talking to members and experts, mind you, of the Genesis Community. Lauren, what do you think about that?

Lauren Mancke: Very excited to have everyone on.

Brian Gardner: We could probably go 30 or 40 episodes deep easily with people that I want to talk to. We ll break them up into little compartments. But it s going to definitely be fun for us. Today we’re joined by Rebecca Gill of Web Savvy Marketing. Rebecca is a WordPress developer, an SEO consultant, and a general business consultant as well. She s an active member of the WordPress community with a variety of participation as WordCamp speaker, podcast guest, and SEO educator.

Her company, savvy-marketing.com/">Web Savvy Marketing, was founded in 2009 and is a creative agency based in Southeastern Michigan. They work with clients across the globe who range from bloggers and small businesses to large enterprises and universities. The Web Savvy online store offers more than 20 professionally designed Genesis themes, ideal for businesses, marketers, educational institutions, and bloggers. Rebecca, it s our pleasure to welcome you to the show. How are you?

Rebecca Gill: I m great. Thanks so much for having me here.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, it s funny. When I sat down to think of the people who I wanted to have on the show there were a few names that instantly popped up, and yours was one of them. I was kind of hoping at some point, and maybe … I know down the road we have another series that I m going to talk to Chris Cree who worked with you very closely and just recently left. We ll be able to tackle both sides of your business where he also was involved. Let s kick this off. I ve known you for a number of years. You’ve been around the WordPress space for some time. Walk us through the early years of how you got started as an online entrepreneur and how you created Web Savvy?

The Accidental Entrepreneur

Rebecca Gill: I didn t set out to be an entrepreneur. I was at a small company and I was their VP of Marketing. I was with them for about 10 years in total. The company dynamic shifted and it was evident that I really needed to leave, but it was the heart of the recession and there were no jobs in the Detroit area. The situation in the company got so bad that I was so distraught and distracted from it I actually mixed up my medication, put myself on the ER for eight hours, and ended up on the couch for a week recovering. It was at that point my husband and I were like, You know what? It doesn t matter what s going on with the economy, you need to leave It just it was affecting our personal life more than we could tolerate, so I quit.

I was going to go into SEO consulting and I started to do that. I actually had some initial success, but I quickly realized that the companies I was working with didn t have access to their websites. Everything was in HTML and nobody could actually go in and make implementations of my SEO recommendations. I went back to my experience with Joomla and WordPress and started to work on web development. That was just a means to be able to get the SEO out there that I needed to for the small businesses. I quickly fell in love with the WordPress community and dove in. We started creating custom themes and development, and then when Genesis came out we jumped on the Genesis bandwagon and it s been a great ride ever since.

Brian Gardner: It s funny how many stories start with, “How I became an entrepreneur online more out of need than want.” Not many people have the luxury of saying, I just think I m going to wake up and one day I m going to start this. It s really, “I got fired,” or “I had to leave my job,” or, “My husband lost a job and so I had to basically figure out how to make money online.” It sounds like your story is somewhat that way. Sometimes it s also health-related and things like that. thank you for sharing that. It s encouraging to other people to hear how that type of thing gets started.

Rebecca Gill: I always joke that I m the accidental entrepreneur. My husband jokes that I can usually slip and fall but I always end up smelling like roses at the end, and I think this is a good example of that.

Lauren Mancke: Running a small business isn t always easy, what are some of the things that you struggle with?

Rebecca Gill: I think, for me, my biggest struggle is a mental struggle, because I now have an agency and I hadn t planned in having an agency. I spend a lot of time on operations and worrying about payroll and receivables and things like that, checking on projects. That s all things that I don t like. I would rather be doing SEO consulting and training and marketing and sales, because that s really what makes me happy. I think if I were to say what is my struggle, that s the biggest struggle. That I don t get to focus on what I really want to focus on and where I know I m really good. I have to focus on these other things. That can be a mental challenge that you just have to overcome and push through daily.

Brian Gardner: For me in StudioPress back in the day — I think at the core that all comes down to that struggle and how it affects us mentally. It’s sometimes related to our inabilities to let go off control. When we as independent people start something and do it all on our own, obviously it comes to a point where we need to scale and get bigger. With that comes the pain of doing things that we don t want to do. For me it was support — as much as I love working with people, it just got to a point where I couldn t work 85 hours a week. You have to entrust people — as you have, and have done successfully. Start to grow the company and entrust those responsibilities to other people so that you don t become a nut case. That s what I had to do. You know what I mean?

Rebecca Gill: That s so true.

Brian Gardner: Genesis — let s go right into this because you were one of the big, popular, most known Genesis agencies, along with Brian and Jennifer Bourn. Talk us through how Genesis came into your picture.

Rebecca Gill: I actually tried the beta version of it. When it didn t have trial themes. I created a website that is still out there today, that is using that original version. That was me going in –that was still when it was me hacking themes and customizing myself, which I shouldn t be doing. I m not allowed to do that anymore. I had a familiarity with it, but then Chris Cree, who you mentioned earlier — when you came out with the real Genesis framework and the trial themes, he said, We need to start using this. He explained to me how we can have a base trial theme of the things that I like and we can use that as our box that we are going to play in.

We started with it and I quickly found that it was just such a good path for us. Not only do you all produce really good code and a great framework for us to work within, it creates a box for my team where we have a set of best practices and standards. We’re all beating at the same drum. I think that from agency owner’s perspective that s really invaluable to me. Plus, I just know that my clients — somebody has got their back besides me. If I get hit by a train — or whatever reason Web Savvy goes away — I know they have you and they ve got the Genesis community that can pick right up where we left off. That makes me really happy. We made that decision early on, jointly with me and Chris. We ve never strayed from it and I ve never regretted it.

Brian Gardner: That s music to our ears, right, Lauren?

Lauren Mancke: Definitely.

Rebecca Gill: I m a Genesis cheerleader, I can t help it.

Brian Gardner: We like those.

Empowerment in Training Others

Lauren Mancke: Aside from the general services you offer. I heard you ve gotten recently into training. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Rebecca Gill: I ve actually been doing group training since 1995. First it was an operational training. My first job out of college I was an Operations Manager. Then, when I worked for the ERP Software Company, I was doing training for the user base. I d go onsite for five days and walk people through the setup of the system and talk about everything from bill of materials and manufacturing production lines through the general ledger and accounting. That s been in my blood.

I haven t done it for years because I ve been so busy building up the agency, just with the daily to-dos. We ve got a really good project manager now who manages all of our custom developments. That s freed me up so that I could go back to training and start really using my SEO education and sharing that. The reason I ve been doing it is because, from an SEO standpoint, it s a lot of labor. There is only so much of me to go around and I only have so many hours in the week. I don t want to be working those 85 hours that Brian mentioned.

I ve been starting to do more and more training — both in the course and then with the boot camp — so we can really spread that education and empower people. Let them have that education so they can have a long-term path. Honestly, I love it. It s like Chris creating the support forum, he loves that and I love training. You just empower people and you make them happy. The light bulb goes off and they are thrilled with that. Then you know that you ve given them a foundation that they’re taking forward with them.

Brian Gardner: When I started StudioPress, training was definitely not something on my radar. Only because — like I said earlier — I was so busy trying to keep up with the creation, the ideas. This even was before Genesis, back in the days of Revolution. I was just creating the product and micro-training in the sense of writing tutorials and things like that. For me it never clicked, there was never that, Hey, you should do paid training. That s basically a way to scale your time because you can create something and then charge for it and then build that out.

Not until StudioPress merged into Copyblogger did I really understand. Back then, Teaching Sells was our big training thing. I realized very quickly that there was a lot of opportunity, just in general, across the Internet space for training. You see places like Lynda.com and stuff like that now. It seems like everyone’s doing training. That s interesting. On your website, you have a dedicated section to SEO consulting. As you mentioned, you like to teach, you like to do SEO, and folks can hire you to do SEO consultant. In fact, I just recommended you within the Genesis Facebook group. Someone asked about SEO. They lost their SEO person. I don t know if they contacted you or not, hopefully they did.

Let s talk about what got you interested in SEO. From a web standpoint, from a design and development it’s less appealing. It s that almost taboo word where people are too afraid to even mess with it because they’re not sure what it is or how to do it. It s easy to make something pretty and put it online, but as I ve always said, a well-designed website without traffic is a well-designed website without traffic. Talk to us about SEO and how that came into your life from an important standpoint, and just a little bit about the consulting that you do.

Rebecca Gill: My background with SEO was at my prior job where I was the head of marketing. We didn t have a big marketing budget, and I taught myself SEO because I was in the marketing department. I competed against people like SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle — really large organizations that had teams of marketing people and teams of SEO people. I quickly learned that that team environment was very fragmented and they didn t have a good structure. If I could just learn and apply I could beat them and get on page one. I grew the sales that we brought in from the Internet — it became our lead source and the majority of our sales.

We grew the company 400% in two years. When you are selling a $100,000 product, that s a lot, that s a huge shift. To me that was empowerment. I really fell in love with SEO then, because I realized how much control you have over things and how much good you can do when you just work hard and do the right thing in the right path. That really got me set. I had SEO on our website for a while but then I pulled it back because I didn t have time to do it. I was so busy with custom work that I didn t have time to work on the projects. Again, bringing Mary back on with project management — it’s freed some of my time up so that I can do consulting projects with people.

Now we do a mix of both. From an SEO project standpoint, I will work through the project with you — keyword research, sitemapping, down to optimizing your content. We also do customized boot camps on-site for SEO, blogging, and social media. Now we ve got the courses that we re offering at diyseocourses.com, as well as the seobootcamp.com, which is our new in-person training in a group setting in Dallas. We ve evolved it, and it s really my effort of trying to help as many people as I can and teach them the right way to do things.

I don t want to everything for everybody because I don t think that that s good for them long term, but I want to teach and I want to train. That s the heart of our SEO. Even when we’re doing a project with somebody, I m not going to just do everything for you. I m educating you along the way with best practices and the right way to do things, so when I m gone you can take that forward and continue on your path and have good success.

Brian Gardner: That s like the whole “teach a man to fish and he eats forever” type of thing. The Facebook group — when someone says, I lost my SEO, if they’re not taught good SEO or at the very least, the fundamentals of what the person that hired them to do has done, then they feel completely lost. Like this person probably says, Oh my gosh, my person fell off the radar,” or they closed their business or whatever, “What will I do? The services that you offer — it s great that you teach them at least the basics. That way, if something would happen to you, God forbid, they don t feel completely in the dark. They can at least take that and try to apply it towards the stuff that they produce there in the future.

Rebecca Gill: One of the questions that I ask people — it s an onboarding question when I first get an inquiry in about SEO — I always ask them, “Have you hired an SEO consultant in the past and what did they do for you?” You would be surprised at how many people have hired somebody and it s not just one, it s two or four or five at different stages through their business, but they have no idea what the SEO company did. They don t know what they were doing behind the scenes, if they were doing anything. Every time I hear that — and it s like 80% of the time I get that response — it makes me sick to my stomach.

That s like the guy in Facebook. He may not even know what his SEO person was doing, if they were doing anything. It s tainted the SEO industry and the consultants. There’s a lot of really good SEO consultants, but there’s a lot of less aboveground people that are really doing high-quality work, telling their client what they are doing, and showing them what they are doing and educating along the way, which is the way it really should be.

Lauren Mancke: That s true, that there’s a lot of stereotypes in the SEO world. You say on your website that you have a more holistic approach. What does that mean?

A Holistic Approach to SEO

Rebecca Gill: For us, I m not going to just do for you. We’re going to take you in the process from start to finish and you’re going to learn along the way. Whether I m doing a consulting project, whether you’re taking my course — which is 8 hours and, I think, 65 lessons — or whether you are doing our boot camp. Holistic, to me, is we first start with your target market, we define who that is and who you are selling to, and what are their pain points and what solution you offer. That kind of information. We look at your competitors. You do research.

From that research, now you ve got some data that you can start to plan and start to strategize. Then as you work through that, now it s under education. Then you look at analysis to see what worked and what didn t work. You go back and you rinse and you repeat. That s about keyword research and sitemapping and investigating competitors, auditing your content in your existing site, down to writing the really good content that s going to be good for the user and optimizing it. Then, off page, link building and things like that.

Unfortunately, a lot of old-school SEO consultants still focus on link building. That s their primary focus because they can control that themselves and they don t need the client involved. They can do it all on their own, so they say, That s what you’re paying me for. That s the wrong approach in today s world of Google and Bing. You have to have holistic. You have to have the user, the website visitor at the forefront of your objectives and goals to make sure that they’re happy. Because if they’re happy, that makes the search engines happy, and the search engines will reward you with more traffic. When I say holistic, it s a full circle from start to finish. With, again, education along the way, because I want people empowered.

Brian Gardner: Before I get to my next question, I want to go back. You ve said these phrases a couple of times now, and I want our listeners to understand. You said, keyword research and sitemapping in particular. Let s do a quick definition of a what each of those are just to give them an idea, for those who don t know.

Rebecca Gill: A lot of people, when you talk to them they will write a piece of content and throw it up in the web, which is great. I wrote the rant I had the other day about SEO, but before I actually posted that I did some keyword research to see what phrases would relate to that so I could utilize that within the post and optimize it. That s one form of keyword research, and that s the shortest version. The other version is really doing a full plan to say, “What is a phrase or multiple phrases that people might search to reach my site or my blog?” What are they searching for, whether it s their pain points or it s solutions or it s people — going through analysis.

You start with a seed list. You generate your seed list. You come up with all of your potential possibilities that you think. Then you look at your competitors and you learn from them. You do things like you look at Google auto-suggest and related searches and you add that. Now you go to keyword tools to see what volumes and what other variations you can have. Then you look at that and you compare that to your existing site and what your future content may hold. You start mapping one keyword or phrase to a particular piece of content. That s the sitemapping part.

That part is not a quick process. It takes weeks to do it if you are doing it right, because it s data, it s analysis, and it s research. That s the part everybody skips. They just go and they jump to content, and they may or may not have a keyword for the content. Or, worse yet — and I hear this from mid-market companies, which is a dagger through my heart — they say, We look at the website as a whole. Our website is optimized for X, Y and Z. But they never actually assign it to content. What the problem with that is, is when you’re doing that you’re asking the search engines to decide which piece of content is the best one for a given phrase.

That s the wrong approach. Keep a simple form, don t make them think. Make it easy for the search engines to find the exact right page or post or product for a given phrase. There is no question if they know this piece of content on your website is the best piece of content for this phrase. That s the whole purpose of keyword research and sitemapping, is to do that. Once you get yourself into that process you ll never leave it, because you ll realize it just makes common sense. You’re doing what s right for the visitor as well as the search engines and it helps you win in the end.

Brian Gardner: Not only does it make common sense, it s probably something that bears fruit, too. I think the way you explained SEO probably resembles to some degree the idea of — and this is a great time for us to talk about it because the Olympics are going on — it sounds like SEO … There is a lot of training in a lot of endurance in things like that where you have to do the right steps. You can t just hop off a couch and run. You have to eat well. You have to sleep well. You have to train well. To some degree, it sounds like you can cut corners in SEO but then you just won t run as far and things like that.

Rebecca Gill: Correct, and it s short-lived. The one problem that I see all the time on people s website is you ask them and they say, My focus keyword is X, Y, and Z.” You say, Okay, tell me what piece of content on your website is reflective of that. They either give you 10 or they have no idea. That s the same problem with the search engines. They are not going to know either.

If you do and it s short term — you’re trying to build a long-term plan for yourself, your visitors, and the search engines. The more research and planning you put into that and more due diligence at the front of the process, the more results you have and the longer your results are going to sustain. There are still people sitting on page one of Google for highly competitive phrases that I helped optimize eight years ago. That s because they did it the right way and they had the planning before the actual execution.

Brian Gardner: House built on solid rock versus house built on sand?

Rebecca Gill: Yes. It s hard to get people to do that because they want to rush ahead. They want to see that end fruit and they want to just plow ahead. It’s like, No, no, no. You’re pulling the reins back and not letting them do it. Sometimes I feel like I’ve got to lock them in a cage and say, No we’re not doing that.

Lauren Mancke: I had a client one time ask us to call Google. They wanted us to call them and get them on the front page.

Rebecca Gill: Isn t that funny? There is consultants that promise that. That say, I know Google, I know exactly what the algorithm is. That s BS, you don t. You don t know people at Google. Just because Matt Cutts may have tweeted you five years ago doesn t mean you know people. You surely don t know the algorithms. You may suspect elements of the algorithms and what factors are, and you may have learned something through trial-and-error, but you don t know precisely every single algorithm, and you’re supposed to because the search engines don t want you to.

The 3 Most Important Elements of SEO

Lauren Mancke: For people that are a little bit overwhelmed when it comes to SEO — they hear the phrase and they are just like, I don t even know where to begin. Can you break it down into the three most important elements of SEO?

Rebecca Gill: My three most important would be keyword research, sitemapping, and then high-quality content. Granted, there is a lot that falls underneath each of those, but those are the buckets. I ve structured my online course to have that. You start with basics, then you go to keyword research, the next segment is sitemapping, the next segment is content, and then you have the gravy that is the offsite stuff. If you skip those three blocks you are going to never succeed. Because the offsite activity that people want to do is pointing to a bunch of garbage that s gobbledygook that the search engines can t understand. The offsite that you’re doing will never help unless you ve got that core foundation set.

Brian Gardner: We talked about keyword research, and you also mentioned how you got your clients on page one of Google eight years ago. It reminds me back to eight years ago — remember the shoe money days and all of that stuff? I want to be very specific , keyword research is not the same thing as keyword stuffing, which is something that back in the day — people don t even know what that is anymore because it s so archaic in a sense. This was back when Google actually cared about the keywords that you would put into the post meta that would show up in the source heading. Google finally said, People are obviously stuffing keywords by trying to cram them in and make every other word ‘jewelry,’ ‘diamonds,’ and stuff like that, to try to whatever.

Even back in the day — Rebecca and Lauren, you guys probably both remember — I think I even tried this at one point, where at the bottom of your page you would write a bunch of keywords and then change the font color to white so no one would see it. Google finally got smart enough to realize that that would — and they would then penalize you. There was actually a non-benefit to doing something like that. It reminds of all of the black hat tactics that would be used by either people who didn t know any better or people who were just following like sheep the people who said, Hey, this black hat stuff works.

How to Avoid Risky Black Hat Tactics

Brian Gardner: You, Rebecca, you’re stand up. You certainly prefer to keep your hat white. What are the points of establishing a I guess this goes along with the three most important elements of SEO that we just talked about. The encouragement to do it the right way. To keep your hat white, which is what s called white hat SEO, which basically means you are just doing it the right way. You are not trying to trick the system. I m assuming you are an advocate of that and you would encourage anyone who is trying to really invest in SEO to do that, right?

Rebecca Gill: Yes. First, your point of the hidden keywords at the bottom and the meta keywords in the source code stuffed with just a bunch of words — I still encounter that every single week with prospects or clients. You called it old school. You know it s old school, I know it s old school, but people still do it today. There’s still that philosophy that that s what works, but it doesn t. If you break down white hat SEO to this: to be successful in search you have to make the search engines happy. Let s take Google, for example. What is their goal? Their goal is to make money. They are a for-profit company. They sell ads, they have other products, but that s their goal.

The only way they’re going to do that is if they keep people happy. People come to the search engines, they search for something, they get good results that take them to a good website or blog that answers their question. If you veer off from that and you don t pay attention to the actual user and the visitor to your website and keeping them happy, you are not going to be successful with the search engines because you are not helping them be successful. That s white hat. It s focusing on your visitor. Writing content for the visitor. Making sure that it s fast, it got great performance, it s designed well so it s easier to read and the site flows. Keeping that visitor happy will make the search engines happy, because that visitor will come back to the search engines and use them again.

White hat is focusing on that. That s your primary goal. When you start to look at any of the cheats — any time you start to want to manipulate the search engines with quick link building or hiding that text or keyword stuffing or having five pages of the same content with just slightly varied keyword-focused phrases — none of that s going to work. That s all black hat, and the search engines are way too smart for that today. They’re putting more emphasis on bounce rates and click-through rates. That tells us that they are moving even further ahead with a focus on the user experience.

Brian Gardner: One thing we didn t talk about with black hat SEO is — I m sure you ve encountered this too — some of these SEO consultants that we ll call black hat, not only are they trying to trick Google and the search engines into stuff that benefits the client. They actually go — I don t even know if it s a blacker SEO or blacker hat SEO, where they would actually go in and try to manipulate the results so that it benefits them as the SEO consultant. In other words, they are stuffing these words at the bottom of the page that may link to their website, which is even worse than trying to do it for the client. They are actually trying to mooch off of that themselves.

That s just definitely not a thing that should be happening. It s obviously something that when folks hire SEO consultants like you they really should find someone that they can trust, find someone that has been referred to by them as a successful, holistic, white hat SEO type of consultant. Even if that means pay the extra money, because you do go get what you pay for at times.

Let s shift this a little bit away from the technicalities of SEO. For our listeners, who many of which are just starting out on the web. Maybe we call them the DIY-types where they are just trying to get online and just start. They’re not ready yet to hire an SEO consultant in all of that. You believe that great SEO begins well before the website goes live, right? Which means you have to plan before you even just launch?

Rebecca Gill: Yes. If we’re doing a custom development project with a small urban market company, for example, and the project includes both SEO and design and then the buildout in WordPress, we don t even start design until we work first on SEO. Going through research, planning and sitemapping and talking about their website personas and mapping the paths for the website that the users are going to take. Then, after we go through all of that, now is when we actually start the design process with the graphic designer. After the things are built out and content is going in, we come back and optimize again, but that design phase doesn t even start yet.

I think that that s a mistake that a lot of people make. They look for a theme that makes them happy as opposed to saying, What do I need? What does my visitor need? What kind of content do I need to display? What visitor paths do they have? Then looking for a theme that matches that. They jump ahead. So you get those questions from people and email all the time, and I m sure you guys do too is, “What theme should I pick?”

I don t know what theme you should pick. I don t know enough about your content and your personas and your visitor flows and your paths and your objectives to be able to pick a theme for you. That s a process. It should be a process. I think that those are the steps that you need to do before a launch, as opposed to launching a pretty site and then adding in SEO after the fact. That s the wrong path and it creates extra work and a lot of delays and a lot of frustration.

Lauren Mancke: I definitely agree with the content-first mentality when it comes to design. I run into that issue all the time with people of stressing how we need to go through the content first because they think that that s just an afterthought, which is definitely not the case. What are some other common mistakes you see businesses and bloggers making?

Long-term SEO Strategies

Rebecca Gill: I think a big one with SEO is expecting immediate results. It doesn t happen. Can you get immediate results within a week or two for a long tail keyword? Yes. Can you get it for something that s competitive with 20,000 searches per month? No. That s going to take time to work up and build and you have to be really focused. I encourage people to have a couple of those, three to five of those high value phrases and know that it s going to take time to build up. That s definitely one mistake. Skipping the research and the planning phase is a huge mistake as well because, like I said, people want to jump ahead and they’re eager. That s just the wrong way to go.

I think the last one, I would say, is outsourcing everything. Don t outsource everything, educate yourself. Read high-quality blogs. Take an online course. Educate yourself on the process and then hire someone to help you execute that. In that way, you are knowledgeable, you know who you’re hiring and whether or not they have a good approach to SEO and whether they are solid. That way you ll have success today and success five years from now. Like I said, eight years from now they are still sitting on Google, even though they may not even be doing anything.

Brian Gardner: Dictionary Brian jumping back in. You mentioned a phrase that I want to go over because this is huge. I think another one of the mistakes is people focus on these keyword phrases that are just too broad. You brought up the term “long tail search.” I know what means and I ve gone into my own analytics and seen the effect of long tail search. It s changed the way I — whether it s on StudioPress or the Copyblogger stuff that I write or even my own blog — I try to change how I m trying to write and which words I m trying to write for because I see the benefit of long tail search. Can you explain to our listeners what long tail search is?

Rebecca Gill: Sure. When you look at the keywords, you ve got really broad, which in our case would be design. You could be designing anything. You could be designing diapers, or a car, or a website, it s too broad. Now you go into the next category which is more focused, which is website design. Much more focused, although that is still kind of broad because it could be website design in Joomla or Drupal or small business or enterprise. Now go a little bit more focused, which is WordPress website design. Now, from a service page that s a great keyword, because it is your target market, it s what you do. It s going to drive conversions when they actually hit the website.

A long tail, which would be more usually focused on a blogpost, could be a problem that someone is having and it could relate to a plugin for a specific function. That s a long tail search. It s very precise, it s very focused. Those are much easier to win on and have success with than something that s very broad like design or web design. What people usually forget is you don t want design. You don t want web design because a lot of those aren t going to convert. You want specific to what you do so the traffic you are getting is precisely focused on your offering and how you can help them. That s really going after that long tail and making sure that you’re providing very focused value to your visitors. That s what leads to success with conversions. Brian Gardner: Not that I particularly care for conversions, especially with this blogpost that I wrote. But an example of the difference between a broad term and more of a long tail search term is a post on my blog where I wrote about my experience buying a MacBook Pro — how I returned my thirteen inch MacBook Air for a Mac Book Pro with retina display. I certainly don t get traffic when people type in “MacBook Pro.” I get a ton of traffic when people search derivatives of how much does a MacBook Pro weigh, which is a much longer term.

I will get zero hits. In fact, I probably won t even be on the first 100 pages of Google for something as generic as “MacBook Pro.” But when you write something, and again, there was no intention here. I had no intention of trying to capture traffic or do anything with it. It was just to share a story. When you write something that s a little bit more — maybe answers a question. When you think of writing something, write out in your mind, “What would people Google for?” When you type in, “How much does a MacBook Pro weigh?” I come out, I think I m number one in Google. I might even be in the snippet that shows up at the very top now for that particular question.

Start to think about that when you write your content, unless your site is extremely authoritative and gets a lot of Google juice. You may have to bank on the fact that the long tail search type of thing will bring more traffic in the long run.

Rebecca Gill: It really adds up. People always want to go after that high volume, that 20,000 searches a month. Guess what? You end up sitting on page 100 in Google and no one ever sees you. Even if you’re on page 3 people rarely see you. But if you take 10 long tail phrases that each have 50 searches per month, that adds up quickly. Now, not only do you have 500 visitors coming, they are very targeted to what you do. It s in your benefit to focus on the long tail. It s easier for you. It converts better. It s easier to win. And it overall will make everybody happy.

Brian Gardner: Rebecca, you mentioned a little bit earlier in passing, SEO boot camp. It s something that you just recently that came out with. I m going to do a direct pitch for our audience. I have a question: Have you ever wondered why your online marketing efforts haven t been successful? Learn the right way to do SEO with Rebecca from Web Savvy Marketing, along with other friends of ours, Carrie Dils who will be on a future episode, as well as Coy Miller of iThemes, who is a friend of mine and also will be on a future episode here at StudioPress FM. Jumpstart your website by attending their SEO boot camp conference on January 11th through 13th, 2017 in Dallas, Texas. If you want more information on that you can check it out at seobootcamp.com.

If you like what you heard on today’s show, you can find more episodes of StudioPress FM at — you guessed it — StudioPress.FM. You can also help Lauren and I hit the main stage by subscribing to our show on iTunes. It s a great way to never ever miss an episode. Thanks for listening, and we ll see you next week.

003.jpg" alt="The Creative Process Behind the StudioPress.com Redesign">

In this week’s episode, we discuss the creative process behind the latest StudioPress.com redesign …

In this 29-minute episode Brian Gardner and Lauren Mancke discuss:

• The goals of the StudioPress redesign
• Changes to the existing logo
• Choices in typography and color
• Design of the Studicons font
• Styling and shooting the site’s photography
• Updates to functionality
• Plans for the future

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

003.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• StudioPress.com
• StudioPress 101
• Shop for Themes
• Unsplash
• Brian Gardner on Twitter
• Lauren Mancke on Twitter

The Transcript

The Creative Process Behind the StudioPress.com Redesign

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Well, some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital product and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service our customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to?” and, “Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

Voiceover: StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke On this week’s episode, we’ll discuss the creative process behind the latest redesign of StudioPress.com.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to StudioPress FM. I am your host, Brian Gardner, founder of StudioPress. Today, as always, I’m very excited to have Lauren Mancke come alongside again as the co-host of the show. Lauren, how are you doing this morning?

Lauren Mancke: Good, how are you?

Brian Gardner: I’m doing good. We get to talk about more fun stuff with StudioPress today. We are going to be talking about something fun and something that you and I worked together with. That is the latest redesign of the site. We figured the first couple weeks we’d talk about our stories. We would talk about the StudioPress redesign in the third part of this initial series here on the show.

The Goals of the StudioPress Redesign

Brian Gardner: Let’s just go right into it. January of this year, we launched a brand-new redesign at StudioPress. I think it had been three years. I think it was, what, back in 2013? And that was a Rafal design back in the day. Am I right there?

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I think the previous one was at the end of 2013.

Brian Gardner: Okay, so a good two, two and a half years, which in my world is forever because I like to redesign every two months. As we know, it’s important for brand consistency to not do that. I think even before that, that must have been my design, the one that predated Rafal’s.

Believe it or not, I went onto Google and searched Google Images under StudioPress to see all of the various site design and things like that. It’s quite embarrassing because the way it looks now is incredible compared to the stuff that I did back in the day, which is completely embarrassing. So good job. And yes, by the way, we are going to give all design credit to everything StudioPress these days to you. How do you feel about that?

Lauren Mancke: Okay.

Brian Gardner: You’re good with that, right?

Lauren Mancke: Yeah.

Brian Gardner: All right. Here’s the thing. Let’s start at the top. You and I talked about the best way to talk through the redesign. We thought it would be maybe helpful or interesting to people who are fans of StudioPress for us to just break it down and just talk about the design process, from top to bottom, of the current site.

Changes to the Existing Logo

Brian Gardner: It’s interesting, the logo that we have, even though it’s evolved a little bit and the colors have changed, that was the original StudioPress logo from back in the day.

I don’t know if you remember this. Kevin Flahaut, he’s the one of the guys that works at Rocketgenius, the guys behind Gravity Forms, he actually came up with the original StudioPress concept for me back in the day, the three little rectangles and squares thing. Of course, since then, you’ve cleaned it up and have made it look much better and tighter. It’s cool to see the evolution from the silver gradient black and orange days to the flat black and blue and white days.

Let’s talk about the logo. I’m going to let you take the mic and just talk briefly about what we did with it and maybe why.

Lauren Mancke: Overall with the goals of the redesign, we really wanted to update the entire look and feel of the site. I think that first started with the logo design. We talked about tightening up that mark and making sure it was pixel perfect down at the favicon size all the way up to regular size, full size. The logo has transitioned over the years to different iterations.

We took that previous blue color and made it bolder, stronger, and brighter. We switched the font to Proxima Nova, and it’s very similar to the previous font. I think really the most noticeable letter is the R is a bit different.

Brian Gardner: Do you remember, I can’t remember off the top of my head what the previous font was that we used for the logo?

Lauren Mancke: I think it was Museo Sans.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, that sounds right because that’s Rafal’s favorite font. Everything Copyblogger and Rainmaker is Museo. To be honest, I think even before that, the original, original logo may have been Arial, which of course is laughable now. Yet people think Proxima Nova has been around for a while, but it’s such a timeless typeface. I’m looking at it now. I’m looking right at the screen. It looks so good. I like the rounded S’s and stuff like that. You did a great job tightening up the squares and just making it to a point where we can scale it up and down.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, I think I started with that because it always bothered me that the lines weren’t crisp on the favicon. I started with that one pixel line.

Brian Gardner: That’s Lauren’s way of calling me out, by the way. That’s what happens when you’re not a trained designer. You open up Photoshop Elements and put some blocks together and then make it smaller and bigger, and it doesn’t quite look the way it should. Your designer steps in and takes care of it for you. There you go. Okay, that’s the logo mark.

Choices in Typography and Color

Brian Gardner: Also, when we talked about doing the redesign, there was some color things that we wanted to incorporate just top to bottom throughout the entire site, front to back as well.

Lauren Mancke: I think our first discussions were about really deliberate color choices and using more bold colors. The full site, we talked about using full-width imagery, large-scale typography, a lot of intentional whitespace, pulling back the blue texture and removing some of that green color, adding a little more white to the site was where we started.

Brian Gardner: It’s no secret that I’m a huge fan of minimal design, whitespace, and emphasis on typography, which, of course, it worked well because you and I, even though we have different tastes to some degree, we also are very like-minded. It was easy and fun to work together on this. I would just throw a few things out there and let you run with it. I didn’t have to worry about you coming back with something I didn’t like.

I think the intentional part of this with the colors, the spacing, and the typography, I’m thrilled with the way it turned out. I know that we went through a few minor evolutions within this redesign process, but I’ve been pleased with it.

Lauren Mancke: Also we talked about really creating a well-organized light interface so that the content could shine through. I think that is the goal of minimal design, to let what you really need speak for itself.

Brian Gardner: Well, obviously at Copyblogger, for us, content is pretty much everything. Obviously, that is not blasphemous to design because that is just as important, especially here at StudioPress because we are the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. We need to maintain that. For us to do a redesign — which felt like the design before was around five years — by the time we got to the redesign, I was really ready to move forward and do something new.

As we’ve discussed, Proxima Nova, like I said, it’s a timeless font. I love it. Some of the elite designers have a tendency to look down on it because it’s so used all over the Internet. I think there’s a reason for that. What do you think about that?

Design of the Studicons Font

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I wanted to stay true to the brand identity. We had been using Proxima Nova on a lot of things with Museo Sans. I thought it would definitely fit with keeping that consistency. We went with a thinner version though for the large titles, I think made it look a little bit fresher. We continue to use that bold uppercase version for small titles to keep that consistency with the previous versions.

Brian Gardner: As I think about it, we approached StudioPress’ site from a design standpoint. When we designed Copyblogger, it was obviously different audiences. The bold headlines work more in a content or marketing-based industry. For us here at StudioPress, more design-focused and more emphasis on keeping up with the latest trends and all of that. I love the thin headlines, and I think they stand out. I think it was a departure from what we had. I think they look great.

Lauren Mancke: I think, too, that this wasn’t really a complete overhaul of the structure of the site because we had already done so much conversion testing for what was there that we were really just focusing on the look. I think lightening up that typography really helped.

Styling and Shooting the Site’s Photography

Brian Gardner: All right. Let’s go to the homepage. Let’s talk a little bit about that. Obviously, we talked about the logo and the branding up there on the header. Obviously the links need to be there. Those are very intentionally placed.

The photography and we’ll talk and about this many times here in the future and probably have in the past. One of the great things about Lauren is that not only is she a great graphic designer, she’s a complete creative. She edits these podcast episodes, believe it or not, and she’s a great photographer.

A lot of the photography that we see in the themes that we’ve recently released have been shots taken by Lauren. Anyway, it was important for us to not just grab stock photography for StudioPress. We had a reputation to uphold. As pioneers in the creative world, it just made sense that, as part of the design, that you would go out and organize shoots and do photography so that we can use that on our own site.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, the previous site we discussed, when we were talking about the redesign, the goals for the redesign, the previous site didn’t have any specific photography. There was a few head shots from testimonials, but really nothing for the site itself.

I thought since a lot of what we do is based on this awesome online community, I really wanted to show people, along with the product, a lot of thought went into the styling of the shots. I wanted to use natural lighting — light, bright, really organic feel. A lot of the photos are very high contrast. The subject matter isn’t very colorful. It’s mostly a desaturated color palette.

Brian Gardner: Yeah. One of the reasons, aside from I think it just looks better to have, I’m talking more so now in our own themed demos and stuff like that. The photography that we use, we talked probably years ago about starting to do our own photography. The reason behind that is because everyone uses Unsplash. It’s a great resource for people, especially people who are blogging and need featured images and stuff like that.

It gets to a point where I think, at least on WordPress-themed demos, it’s almost clichéd to see the same mountain shot, and somewhat boring and, quite honestly, lazy to just default to that. There are times and still will be times where, depending on the theme, I’ll just go grab shots on Unsplash because it just works. Those shots are actually perfect for what we’re going for.

Cafe’s a perfect example because, at the time, there wasn’t a lot of food imagery over at Unsplash. It’s like, “How are we going to do a restaurant-style theme without putting shots of trees and mountains in there?” I think that was when we first started talking about it. You said, “I’ll just go out and take some shots.” The same thing with StudioPress. We could have put some boring laptop shot on a homepage, something from Unsplash or from somewhere else.

I’m looking right now at our ‘getting started’ page. If you go to StudioPress’ website, if you go to the StudioPress 101 link, which is right next to our logo, you’ll see which one I’m talking about. We can drop this down in the show notes also. The shot itself, it just looks so much like it fits with the rest of the site and the design and the colors and the high contrast, as you mentioned, and the blues and the whites and the blacks. I think it just feels very native where it’s at.

Lauren Mancke: The model actually in the photos is my husband Will. He is very good about volunteering for these kinds of things. He stepped in. It’s funny that you mention Cafe Pro because he actually made all the food for that. He made the mussels. He baked that bread, so I could take pictures of it. He’s just always willing to help out in these types of scenarios, whatever crazy thing I come up with.

Using Custom Icons

Brian Gardner: Okay. Speaking of that page, as I scroll down, there are some great examples of other things outside of just photography and web design. Part of it is an element of web design. It’s the icons that we use, kind of like Unsplash. Yes, we could have gone out and used something that was out there that everybody else uses, but another tool that you have is the ability to design custom icons, which you’ve done for the site.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, the icons are just some simple thin line icons. I think they really mirror that thin typography in the headlines. There’s nothing hugely unique about them. They just really fit with the rest of the design.

Brian Gardner: I think sometimes what people do is go out and find icons and then try to craft their content around it. In other words, you can’t go to Ionicons, Genericons, or Dashicons and find spark plugs and car icons. You can find something that may be conceptually insinuated that, but then it wouldn’t look like it really, really fit, that you were trying too hard, or people might get confused.

For us, in this case, we had the luxury of having Lauren just create exactly what we needed to have from an icon standpoint. They can scale on various devices and so on. That is another element of the entire site design as a whole that is good. Everything is custom on the site — and that I love.

Updates to Functionality

Brian Gardner: Moving forward, this is probably by far the most important page and the one that we probably put the most amount of attention and detail towards is our Themes page. Obviously, StudioPress top-level domain is probably what gets hit the most. But then immediately people know us as designing and developing WordPress themes. Their next instinct would be shop for themes, right?

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I think we spent a lot of time playing with the amount of themes on the page. We ultimately settled on a two-column layout to really let those big images showcase the themes themselves.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I struggled with that because we probably have, what, 50-some themes on that page? Instinctively I thought, we got to trim it down to three columns so that it’s not as tall, so you don’t have to scroll as much. When we did that, it just felt really busy, which, of course, goes against what we had discussed previously on the front page and other areas where this breathability and whitespace.

I think the old-school way of thinking is the above-the-fold, cram-everything-up so that you don’t have to scroll as much. But times have changed, and especially with the amount of devices and various screen sizes that are out there. For me, it came down to seeing it in two columns was a breath of fresh air. It was like, “Wow.” First of all, you can actually see the screenshot because it’s bigger. Even if you have to scroll more, big deal, right? Everything else on the page looks good.

Lauren Mancke: I think we also took that idea and went with that also on the singular theme page. That top section is dark to let that screenshot shine where you can really see the themes. A lot of our themes are white, light color palette. We went with a darker header for those pages individually.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I’m a huge fan of that decision. Typically, I’m not an advocate of white text on black or dark backgrounds and all of that, but because of the fact that, yes, we wanted to emphasize the design of each theme, I think in this case it worked. It also helps the call to action button, which in this case is green. We wanted that very specific thing to stand out a little bit more than just the regular blue. I think it would have blended in more and would have been maybe less converting or harder to see.

I love how we inverted the colors of the logo and the navigation as well, the menu items to go white as well. I think that also helps make things a little bit interesting. It’s not quite as templated throughout the entire site where you’ve got a little bit of variety. You get to the Theme page, and all of a sudden you’re like, “Oh wow, this is attention grabbing,” and makes me want to scroll down.

With the features of each theme down below the icons and the descriptions of the theme features, I think having the dark above helps contrast and doesn’t wash that out. Again, total fan of what you did. Then, of course, below of that is the pricing section, which is black and white. It is a mix of the two sections above. Huge fan as always.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah. I think we also use that mindset of wanting it to be easier to read in with the changes we made to the dashboard. We wanted a seamless experience between switching from the regular site, the sales site into where you log in and you have all of your resources. We wanted to keep a lot of the features that people have come to be familiar with, but we also wanted to make that dashboard really easy to read, really easy to navigate and get to what content you need.

Improving the My StudioPress User Experience

Brian Gardner: All right. That’s a great segue. We’re going to move from StudioPress.com now over to the My StudioPress member area, which, in and of itself, has a lot of little nuances and things that maybe we didn’t anticipate from a user experience standpoint and having to display certain types of informations and to get people from here to there. I think my favorite part of the My StudioPress experience is the blue bar at the top.

There’s no real reason to have that throughout the site itself, but from a member standpoint, you have the additional member profile, the member links that are necessary. We were trying to figure out how exactly we were going to display that. I think you came up with this blue bar. When I saw it, I was like, “That’s absolutely perfect.” It sits above the header, so it feels like just that additional piece. It stays out of the way, but it’s there. That was just a great way of coming up with that solution.

Lauren Mancke: The previous site had a blue bar, but it was actually just in a different location. I moved it up to make it more of a dashboard feel. I think we have a lot of GitHub tickets right now. There’s still more work to be done on the dashboard itself. But that’s the nature of the redesign. The design is never done. Isn’t there a Leonardo da Vinci quote, “Art is never finished, only abandoned”?

Brian Gardner: Yes. It also reminds me of the whole concept of the Golden Gate Bridge and how, when they get done painting it, it’s time to go back and start over just because there’s so much work to be done. At some point, you got to go back and fine-tune what you’ve already worked on.

Lauren Mancke: Exactly.

Brian Gardner: Like I said, with the My StudioPress member area, just so many different things to consider — like a downloads page and all the documentation that we have for code snippets, tutorials, and stuff like that. I would have taken the shortcut and just made those regular pages and boring with a side bar.

But you’ve done a really good job of, especially on the downloads page, using columns and design and icons just to help make that even a better experience for our users. That was for sure one area where you totally rose above where I would have taken it. That’s why you’re designing the StudioPress site and I am not. Of course, we do have static pages on the site and the StudioPress Blog. You did a great job laying things out there.

Plans for the Future

Brian Gardner: I just thought it was fun that we would talk about the redesign and just start this whole podcast off with the three part series of who I am, who Lauren is, the StudioPress redesign. The next series is going to be probably my favorite and the one that I’m most looking forward to.

We’re going to be taking a break, a week off. We’re going to do segmented series here. I’m hoping maybe four to six shows. We are going to reach out to the community, the StudioPress and Genesis community, and talk to those who are working with our product and have built businesses around our products. There’s all kinds of people, couples and design agencies. You’ve got developers on their own and every type of thing in between.

We’re going to reach out to some folks and hopefully have them on the show that will represent different parts of our ecosystem. I am looking forward to that. What about you?

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that. I think that’s what makes StudioPress and Genesis so great — the community. There’s lots of different types of people who are working with it and making it better and creating that community.

Brian Gardner: That is something that you can look forward to as much as we will. Thank you for listening to the show, StudioPress FM. See you on the next one.

002.jpg" alt="The Story of the VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke">

On this week’s episode, we’ll explore Lauren’s story and how she went from Principal and Creative Director at Northbound Design to Vice President of the seven-figure line of business we call StudioPress.

In this 30-minute episode Brian Gardner and Lauren Mancke discuss:

• The start of Lauren’s career as a creative
• How a mix of formal education and self-teaching contribute to what she does now
• The beginnings of Brian and Lauren’s nearly 10-year professional working relationship
• Her experience in Creative Entrepreneurship
• Building an agency on the Genesis Framework
• Why she left her business in pursuit of something greater

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

002.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• StudioPress.com
• NorthboundDesign.com
• Find out more about Brian on BrianGardner.com
• Find out more about Lauren on laurenmancke.com
• Follow Brian on Twitter at @bgardner
• Follow Lauren on Twitter at @laurenmancke

The Transcript

The Story of the VP of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerrod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver, it’s called Digital Commerce Summit. It is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit, that’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference, for me, is being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference, for me, is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree. One of the biggest reasons we host the conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers — people like you — more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to? Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything — the speakers have been awesome — but I think the coolest aspect, for me, has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then the other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit. I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit, that’s Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

Voiceover: StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder, Brian Gardner, and VP of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke, share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Brian Gardner: On this week’s episode, we’re going to explore Lauren’s story and how she went from Creative Director at Northbound Design, her own agency, to the Vice President of the seven-figure line of business we call StudioPress.

Hey, everybody, welcome back to StudioPress FM. I’m your host, Brian Gardner. I am here with Vice President of StudioPress, Lauren Mancke.

Lauren Mancke: Hello.

Brian Gardner: Hello, there she is. To recap, last week we talked a little bit about my story — how I went from a struggling, flailing college kid to the accidental Internet entrepreneur. That was fun. This week we have the pleasure of talking to Lauren about her story. I know everyone wants to know how she went from little kid to Vice President of a line of business that brings in seven figures a year for our company.

The Start of Lauren’s Career as a Creative

Brian Gardner: The best thing to do, I suppose, is start at the beginning. What kind of kid were you? Were you a tomboy? Maybe you were always a creative — I wasn’t — but maybe some creatives are always creative. Tell us about the early stages of your “career.”

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, I definitely was always creative and into art. A bit of a tomboy. I was a classic overachiever when it came to projects. I can remember when I was in sixth grade I made this crazy pyramid out of foam core board and sand paper. It opened up and it was an exact replica of the Mummy’s. Everything, every room was perfect. Other kids just turned in like a piece of paper. That was just me. I always went overboard.

I became interested in computers really early on. I built my first website, actually, in sixth grade. My dad got me a copy of FrontPage for Christmas and I played around with it on our family’s computer. He asked me if I could use it to make his company’s website. That was actually — my first client was in sixth grade, and I did the website for his company.

Brian Gardner: That’s funny. When I was younger I was a different type of creative, I really liked to write. My parents were divorced when I was nine. Even as a nine-year-old, which was third, fourth grade, something like that. For me, writing was my therapy. I didn’t even know it was a creative gift at the time. I was creative in a different way. I merged creativity with things I was interested in, for instance, and still am. I’m a baseball fan. I created this game with dice where I would roll dice, and depending on what numbers came up that would give a particular player at the time an at bat. “You hit a single,” or whatever.

I channeled my creativity in unique ways like that, atypical. Invented games and things like that that I thought was fun.

It wasn’t until I grew up and went through high school and college and went through some other stuff that I was really able to channel that. Since you were more of a creative as a kid than I was, do these interests stick with you as you’ve gotten older and whatnot?

Lauren Mancke: Definitely, I’m always interested in projects. I still make things. It’s definitely a large part of why I do what I do. In high school I was always the one taking pictures and making videos, and turning in projects that were out of the ordinary than just a paper. I never really was into writing, so I’d come up with ways to do a project that didn’t involve writing.

I actually created a computer class at my high school. I went to a small school, so the computer class that we had was just intro to typing, really basic stuff. I petitioned the school to basically create a higher level computer class, and we worked on the school’s website and helped build the school’s website. It was a really fun learning experience. All of my friends signed up. It was a great first step into doing a larger website beyond what I had done before.

Brian Gardner: All right. Now, what year did you graduate high school?

Lauren Mancke: 2003.

Brian Gardner: Okay, that’s what I thought. I thought I was about ten years older than you. So the difference between you and I here is that when you graduated high school computers and technology was a lot further along than when I graduated high school. Back then, of course, the Internet wasn’t even around. You millennials have a leg up on us. It’s not fair, I think.

Lauren Mancke: Well, I didn’t always have a computer. I definitely was an early adopter. I got my first Mac in 2002, maybe. My dad was like, “Oh Mac, why do you want that?” I never looked back. 2003 is when I started NorthBound Design, right after high school. I graduated from high school and I got all my paperwork in order and was very well informed and went to the bank. The Bank of America guy who was the Small Business Account Manager was very off put by how young I was. He was sure that I didn’t everything in order. I answered all of his questions, had all the paperwork, everything was A-okay.

I opened up the NorthBound account and started taking on a lot of videography jobs. Photography jobs was my main interest at that time. I did some graphic design in high school. I did invitation design, T-shirts for class T-shirts. I didn’t really have a lot of the equipment that I have now, or the software.

When I was in middle school, actually, I opened up a clip art file from Microsoft Word — whatever version that was so long ago. I could break it apart and see that it’s made up of all these different shapes. That’s how I started to understand digital design, was these different vector shapes that made the whole picture. I would manipulate those, and I did my first design work very rudimentary in Microsoft Word.

Brian Gardner: Now what’s interesting about Lauren, for all you who are listening, is that Lauren is more than just a graphic designer. As a creative — there’s so many other elements to her that over the last seven or eight years that we’ve known each other that I’ve learned incrementally along the way. What I mean by that is I first got to know you as a graphic designer and web designer, and then along the way I’ve learned other things, like how great of a photographer you are. It’s been fun to use that skill of yours as well with what we do at StudioPress. A lot of the pictures that you now see in the themes that we’re releasing are shots that Lauren has taken.

In fact, the café pro theme that we did was a fun experiment. We conceptually knew what we wanted to create, so we just sent her out into the local bistro and said, “Take some shots of food.” The resource at the time we’d been using, Unsplash, they don’t have a lot of great food, or certain types of shots. We just had you go out and take them. There’s a few other themes of late that we’ve done you’ve done the same thing with. In fact, it’s probably been almost a year because I think I got the domain renewal on Minimography, which is a fun little side project you and I have done where you’ve taken your photos, and you’ve put them up and made them available. I also know that you’ve moved some of that stuff over to Unsplash as well.

On top of that, even just a few weeks ago I realized just how good of a creative you are when it comes to audio mixing. You and I have been going back and forth on picking music for the show. I came up with my little rendition of how it would start and I sent it over to you and Robert. You did your own version and totally smoked me. I’m like, “Okay, she’s a better audio person than I am too, this is great.”

Back to NorthBound Design. You started this right out of high school. I’m always interested in knowing the evolution of a name. Talk to us about how you came up with that name.

Lauren Mancke: I actually came up with the name when I was seven, with my sister on a trip to Ohio. My parents are from Ohio. We’d go there every year on a long road trip. We were heading up there and we were talking about what we were going to do when we grew up. We decided we were both going to be architects because we had always been interested in design and things like that. My dad is a builder and a civil engineer and a structural engineer, so it just seemed like a natural fit for us to both be architects. We could be designers — and also the technical aspects of architecture.

We came up with the name NorthBound Design for our architecture firm that we were going to start when we grew up. We thought it was a great name. We were heading up to Ohio, but we also thought it extended beyond that. It had to do with buildings and all sorts of stuff. My dad always encouraged us to be entrepreneurs. He’s an entrepreneur himself and he comes from a family of entrepreneurs. His brothers and sisters all have their own businesses. He raised us to be thinking that way, that we were going to go out and do our own thing, we weren’t necessarily going to fall in the rat race. I think his guidance has really helped me in my career path.

How a Mix of Formal Education and Self-teaching Contribute to What Lauren Does Now

Brian Gardner: All right, so you started NorthBound shortly after you got out of high school, but I also know you went to college. Talk to me about the things that went on in your college days, what types of things did you study and how did NorthBound fit into that at the time?

Lauren Mancke: Well, at the time I got a scholarship to go to where my sister went to school, which is University of South Carolina. I was thinking about going into engineering — or my parents really wanted me to go into engineering. I was thinking I’d like to do something more artisti, or more creative, because that seemed to fit me better. I think my senior year in high school I talked to a friend that was in the media arts program, and I had never even heard of a media arts major. He was telling me more about it, and it focused on photography, videography — everything I was interested in. It was a way to do an art degree but not necessarily traditional arts of painting and drawing, which I didn’t think were very sustainable. I’m not the best at drawing and painting, I’m better with a computer.

I was thinking, “This seems like a perfect major.” I decided to major in media arts, and I also studied business administration because I was thinking that would help me with NorthBound Design. During college I actually had four jobs to pay my way through the school along with my scholarship. I did the photography lab, the dorm key checking, and I was a Sprint cell phone salesman out on the — not in the store — then I did NorthBound. During the summer … a lot of the early NorthBound projects were video and photography, like I said. I didn’t really get into web design until after college. Most of my classes didn’t really touch on that in college, so I had to learn myself on that front.

During the summer I worked as a Technical Assistance Manager for a mission group. We’d go out on these mission trips and I would train everyone to build the website, build the video presentation, and take the photographs of all of the people helping on the mission trip. Each week it was very stressful. You had to have the whole video completed for the last night, so it’d be long hours and we were sleeping on the floor and showering in portable trailers, things like that. That really taught me to hone my skills because I had no time to mess around. I really just had to learn and get things done. I think that really helped me with my work ethic.

Brian Gardner: You get through college, graduate in 2007. Did you think about continuing this freelance thing, as unstable as freelancing can sometimes be? Typically, when you get out of college, one wants to just get a stable job and then start making money. Then get an apartment or condo, or whatnot.

Lauren Mancke: Like you said, when I graduated I was like, “Ugh, I gotta go out in the real world.” At the beginning of college I was thinking I’d probably take NorthBound full time. But after four years of spending a lot of time getting straight A’s and doing all sorts of jobs, I was really burnt out. I was thinking, “I really should find something that I can really learn more at.” I wasn’t super confident that I had learned everything I needed to know, and I wasn’t ready yet.

My first job straight out of college was Creative Director at a political consulting firm. That was just what came along, I wasn’t really into politics. I was a print designer, web designer, video editor, photographer — all the things I was interested in — it just happened to be for political clients. It was very high stress, long hours, 16-hour days. It was a very small company, but we were working on dozens of campaigns — national campaigns, presidential, from state senate all the way up to presidential. That was a learning experience and that’s where I first started to get into web design.

Brian Gardner: All right, last week we talked about my story and how I ultimately met the gentleman who gave me my first full-time desk job at the architectural firm. How did you meet Wes? Like you said, that was sort of your first real job. I’m always curious how people meet and how they get connected and so on. Tell me about that, because I don’t think I’ve ever heard that real story.

Lauren Mancke: The job was advertised on Facebook, which it was like the first … Facebook back than was just for college kids, really. One of the other guys that worked at the company had advertised it on Facebook that they were hiring. I went to the interview and had my portfolio, they liked it and pretty much hired me, I think that day.

The Beginnings of Brian and Lauren’s Nearly 10-Year Professional Working Relationship

Brian Gardner: All right, so First Tuesday is ultimately the job that you were at when you and I — when our paths crossed back in 2007 or 2008, whenever that was.

Lauren Mancke: 2007.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, okay. It’s all a blur now because it’s almost been 10 years ago, it’s hard to believe.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, you were one of our vendors. They wanted me to start designing the websites for the people running for office. I really didn’t have much website experience other than what I’ve already mentioned, a few sites here and there and some stuff in college that was very basic. I started to do the design and then we hired you to do the development.

I remember talking to you and you pointing me in the right direction and said, “WordPress is a great place to learn.” I started to read the Codex and really started to try to tweak things on the style sheet that I could do. Everything was last-minute at that job. When they wanted to change the website they didn’t have time to wait on a developer to change it, I had to get in there and just dig around. That’s how I learned.

Lauren’s Experience in Creative Entreprenuership

Brian Gardner: Ah, the good old days of learning WordPress and all of that. For sure, I totally remember those days. All right, so you worked with Wes for a couple years. You and I did some things back and forth through that. But at one point you decided that you were done with the high strung atmosphere that you were in there. You decided to take NorthBound full time. I vaguely remember that. Even though we were working together, I don’t think we were considered really good friends yet at that point. I don’t know the real story then, at which point you decided, “It’s time for me to take the jump.” Walk us through that a little bit.

Lauren Mancke: I think at the end of 2008 I had just gotten married. Planning the wedding and being in campaign season — we got married the week after the election. I realized that I just was done with it. I did not want to do anymore campaigns. It took me about another six months to get all my ducks in the row to go out full time. I lined up different freelance clients and I lined up what my services were going to be, what my business plan was.

I told my boss Terry at the time that I was going to try to go out on my own and that if they still needed me I could go on retainer with them for a certain number of hours per week, I think it was ten at an hourly rate. That was my first contract basically, when I went out and took NorthBound full time. That was a good transition, because even though I did have other clients lined up, I had a steady retainer client.

Building an Agency on the Genesis Framework

Lauren Mancke: A lot of my family was nervous, they weren’t sure I was ready for this. I think Will, at the time, was nervous as well. Within a few months I doubled my salary. It just went up from there and grew. I think the next year you started doing Genesis. I was helping you with several of those first themes. I got other clients. In 2010 my husband and some other employees — we got them on board, we got an office on main street, we had interns, tons of clients all over the world. Super fun time. We ended up expanding to the full floor of our office, which was great. Painted, got to decorate — super fun.

Brian Gardner: It’s been fun to watch that part of your life evolve. I know that even one of the early themes that you designed for us included — I still remember, it was some sort of shamrocky green-looking wedding theme. The pictures that were used …

Lauren Mancke: It was like a mint.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, it was like a shamrock mint type of thing. I remember because the pictures, the wedding photos that were used in that were the ones of you and Will. I remember that when you said you got married back in 2000 and …

Lauren Mancke: 2008.

Brian Gardner: 8, I was like, “I remember that. I remember the pictures and seeing that, and seeing you in a wedding dress.” Here we are, what, six, seven, eight years later now, you’ve obviously married, you’ve got Fox, your son. I’ve been privy to a very special part of your life, and for that I’m very thankful.

Lauren Mancke: Oh yeah, it’s been great having a consistent … That’s one great thing about the community, is how close you can get to people that are doing the same thing that you’re doing, even if they live across the country.

Brian Gardner: That’s the kind of thing that, as the show goes on and we introduce others on the show and have them come on and talk to them, that will be the fun part. Bringing the community onto the show. Talking to them and hearing their stories, and finding out how they got to where they got to. There’s so many different types of people within the Genesis community — those around StudioPress as a whole. Whether it’s support, or design, or development, or plugins, or whatever — everyone has a story.

At some point there’s that — what you explained with your family being nervous about you going out on your own. I went through a similar thing. I had a decent job with everything guaranteed. As we talked about last week with my story, it got to a point where Revolution’s sales at the time were five figures a month and I said, “You know, I gotta quit. I gotta pursue this. This is fun, this is exciting. There’s money to be made.”

Of course, Shelly’s parents were 60-something at the time and ultra conservative. They were like, “You’re what? You’re leaving your full-time job to play on the Internet?” A different generation. They don’t get that’s basically the mindset right now of a millennial entrepreneur. That’s what everybody does, right? It will be fun to have those folks on and to hear those stories.

As we move a little bit forward past you creating and doing NorthBound full time, at one point — this was 2013 now? As we joked last week, I ultimately finally got to hire you. That was, first of all, monumental in my life. I’m like, “Here it is. I finally have figured out a way.” Thankfully that was through Copyblogger the company, after we merged six years ago almost.

You joined in 2013. I think one of the first things that you did for us was convert all of our themes from XHTML to HTML5. Those who are developers and people familiar with the community and what we’ve built, they’ll understand what that means. Even then — in 2013 you came on and that has also evolved. Right now, as we record here, you’re the Vice President of StudioPress. As recent as yesterday you told me to get out of your space because I was doing things that you had planned to do, which ultimately means you’re running the show here. Walk me through the last couple years of your life and ultimately how you felt the decision has gone, that kind of stuff.

Why Lauren Left Her Business in Pursuit of Something Greater

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, back in 2013 at that time with NorthBound we were actually doing really well, bringing in half a million dollars. I was contemplating — I had talked to a couple investors and I actually was contemplating a merger with another agency, was in talks about that. A lot of those talks required me to keep doing exactly what I had been doing. I think at that time I was ready for something new and ready for a change. You, again, offered me the position and I seriously thought about it. Before I had just said, “No.”

I was really considering it and weighing my options. I knew that it would be a bit of a transition, leaving NorthBound in my husband’s hands and basically stepping away from it — this thing that I had built. I think it was more of a decision to be part of something larger, being a part of the Genesis community and helping that grow. You can only do so much on your own. I think that I really wanted to be a part of StudioPress and help everybody that way. I thought it was a good opportunity.

When I came on, yeah, I converted all of the existing themes from the previous ones. They got little, tiny re-designs. It wasn’t much, it was just some little freshening up as I converted them to HTML5. With 45 themes, it was quite an undertaking.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, that was definitely something I was glad that we got through. Something that you just said resonated with me, which is the, “I wanted to be part of something bigger.” We go through seasons where we want to do our own thing. If we’re successful we want to maintain that and build that, and so on. You get a saturation point of anxiety and stress where you’re sick and tired of doing it all. I know, for me, that happened for sure, probably at least three or four different times over the first couple years of StudioPress.

When Brian Clark came along and said, “Hey, you want to partner up and merge into a bigger company?” There was that part of me that knew I was giving something up — obviously StudioPress as sole owner. At that point StudioPress made up a significant portion of the sales that came into the company.

Yes, there was a little bit of a pay cut involved, but I knew that it was time. It was time to let go and trust in a bigger picture, a bigger vision. Looking back on it, without a doubt there’s no regret. I’m thankful that I did it. Again, I think as we go through the season and start to hear some of these other stories, I think we’ll encounter that same type of situation that other folks have gone through.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah, I think once you’ve been doing something — like I was doing it for ten years at that point — you start to hone in on what you like and dislike, and what your strengths are and what your weaknesses are. Those really come into focus. Me joining Copyblogger, I saw that as an opportunity to really focus on what I enjoy — which is making themes — and taking away the things that I didn’t enjoy.

Brian Gardner: There you have it, that is Lauren’s story. Slightly but also very similarly different than mine. Glad to know the evolution of Lauren’s design career. Where she’s gone and what she’s done, and where she’s at now. Now, the fun thing about the show is that next week we are going to be talking about the StudioPress re-design that we recently went through and launched almost six months ago, I think it was what, December?

Lauren Mancke: January.

Brian Gardner: January, okay. See, this is why you run things and take care of all the stuff.

Lauren Mancke: It was ready in December.

Brian Gardner: It was ready in October.

Lauren Mancke: Yeah.

Brian Gardner: Hey, that’s what happens when you have a bigger company and processes and so on. These are the fun things that even over the course of this show we get to talk candidly about, because nothing is rosy 100 percent of the time. We all go through struggles and challenges in running a business, and being online, and all that kind of stuff. It will be fun to talk about that type of stuff. Thankful for you, listeners, that you’re out there. Hopefully giving us a good rating over there at iTunes. Look forward to — how about that plug, right?

Lauren Mancke: Shameless.

Brian Gardner: Hey, that’s how shows like this grow. Anyway, we look forward to talking about the StudioPress re-design next week, thanks for listening.

001.jpg" alt="The Story of StudioPress Founder Brian Gardner">

In this inaugural episode of StudioPress FM, we focus on the story of the founder of StudioPress, Brian Gardner.

Lauren Mancke and Brian discuss how he started the premium WordPress theme industry, StudioPress, and the Genesis Framework.

In this 29-minute episode Brian Gardner and Lauren Mancke discuss:

• How Brian’s career began
• His start with blogging, WordPress, and freelance development
• When Brian and Lauren began working together almost ten years ago
• The one client that changed everything
• The birth of the premium WordPress theme industry
• The launch of StudioPress and the Genesis Framework
• The biggest business decision Brian ever had to make
• His favorite parts of the journey and lessons he learned along the way

Listen to StudioPress FM below ...

001.mp3">Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes

The Show Notes

• StudioPress.com
• Revolution Theme
• Find out more about Brian on BrianGardner.com
• Find out more about Lauren on laurenmancke.com
• Follow Brian on Twitter at @bgardner
• Follow Lauren on Twitter at @laurenmancke

The Transcript

The Story of StudioPress Founder Brian Gardner

Jerod Morris: Hey, Jerod Morris here. If you know anything about Rainmaker Digital and Copyblogger, you may know that we produce incredible live events. Some would say that we produce incredible live events as an excuse to throw great parties, but that’s another story. We’ve got another one coming up this October in Denver. It’s called Digital Commerce Summit, and it is entirely focused on giving you the smartest ways to create and sell digital products and services. You can find out more at Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

We’ll be talking about Digital Commerce Summit in more detail as it gets closer, but for now, I’d like to let a few attendees from our past events speak for us.

Attendee 1: For me, it’s just hearing from the experts. This is my first industry event, so it’s awesome to learn new stuff and also get confirmation that we’re not doing it completely wrong where I work.

Attendee 2: The best part of the conference for me is the being able to mingle with people and realize that you have connections with everyone here. It feels like LinkedIn Live. I also love the parties after each day, being able to talk to the speakers, talk to other people who are here for the first time, people who have been here before.

Attendee 3: I think the best part of the conference for me is understanding how I can service my customers a little more easily. Seeing all the different facets and components of various enterprises then helps me pick the best tools.

Jerod Morris: Hey, we agree — one of the biggest reasons we host a conference every year is so that we can learn how to service our customers, people like you, more easily. Here are just a few more words from folks who have come to our past live events.

Attendee 4: It’s really fun. I think it’s a great mix of beginner information and advanced information. I’m really learning a lot and having a lot of fun.

Attendee 5: The conference is great, especially because it’s a single-track conference where you don’t get distracted by, “Which session should I go to?” and, “Am I missing something?”

Attendee 6: The training and everything, the speakers have been awesome, but I think the coolest aspect for me has been connecting with both people who are putting it on and then other attendees.

Jerod Morris: That’s it for now. There’s a lot more to come on Digital Commerce Summit, and I really hope to see you there in October. Again, to get all the details and the very best deal on tickets, head over to Rainmaker.FM/Summit.

Voiceover: : StudioPress FM is designed to help creative entrepreneurs build the foundation of a powerful digital business. Tune in weekly as StudioPress founder Brian Gardner and VP of StudioPress Lauren Mancke share their expertise on web design, strategy, and building an online platform.

Lauren Mancke: On this week’s episode, we’ll focus on the founder of StudioPress, Brian Gardner, and his story. We will share how he started the premium WordPress theme industry, his company StudioPress, and the Genesis Framework.

Brian Gardner: Hey, everyone. This is founder of StudioPress, Brian Gardner, and today I’m joined with my co-host, who happens to be vice president of StudioPress, a killer photographer, a mom, the best designer on the planet, Lauren Mancke. Lauren, how are you doing today?

Lauren Mancke: I’m doing good. That’s quite an introduction.

Brian Gardner: You know, you’re not following the script. You’re supposed to say, “I’m good. Really excited about this, Brian. How are you?”

Lauren Mancke: I’m going to go off script.

Brian Gardner: All right. Hey, listen up, everybody [paper crumpling] — that is us throwing the script out of the window. Welcome to the show. Lauren and I have been excited to finally record our first episode. It seems like we’ve been talking about this forever now. Although as creatives, we want everything to be perfect. What I learned last year when I did the No Sidebar podcast is that scripted shows sound like scripted shows.

As two creatives, we are going to just fly by the seat of our pants. We are thankful you are listening. We have a lot to cover, just today, in the series, and just on the whole podcast as a whole. How do you want to kick this off?

Lauren Mancke: I was thinking I could ask you a couple of questions. This first episode, we want to talk about you, Brian, and maybe I could do a little interview style.

Brian Gardner: This is my show because next week will be your show. I guess what we thought was that we would just introduce the StudioPress FM podcast with a little bit about my story, a little bit about your story. Then I think we’re going to go into the redesign of StudioPress. From there, we were going to, after that foundation was set, just go through and cover all kinds of topics — from design and branding and strategy, bringing in members of the community, from Genesis as a whole also.

Let’s get this started.

Lauren Mancke: Let’s start at the beginning. Even before you became an entrepreneur, how did you get started in the working world?

How Brian’s Career Began

Brian Gardner: Let’s go back to my job history. I think that’s a little bit of foundation for all of the things that ultimately brought me to where I’m at. Back in high school, I was a cashier and stock boy at a local convenience store. Unlike other people — my friends, they were into sports, and they did their thing — I actually had to work. I spent three or four nights a week, one day or two over the weekend, working at a local convenience store, doing all kinds of things. That was just kind of a get-me-started job.

Then I went to college, and believe it or not, one of my jobs was being a janitor of the dorms. When you are paying your way through, you’ve got to pretty much take any job. For me, that was just something I needed to do.

It was actually kind of fun because our dorm was one of them. That was an interesting experience. I’ll get to later why certain things like that kind of built into who I am now.

Most importantly, after college, I went back to the same convenience store I worked at. This time I was hired on as a manager. I was working 50 hours a week there, pretty much living there and getting to know all of the customers. There was this one experience while I was there that really started the formation of who I am now. That was, somebody had brought they were bringing coffees out to their car. They dropped the tray and spilled coffee all over the sidewalk. She came back in, and she told us, “Hey, I’m sorry. I have to go get more coffee.”

My boss at the time said, “Don’t worry about it. Fill your cups up and head out.” I looked at her. I’m like, “Aren’t we going to charge her again?” She said, “No. No, of course not. Benefit of the doubt, it’s a loyal customer. We take care of them.” That was my first experience or the introduction to the idea of customer service and how you take care of people because that type of thing goes a long way.

I worked at this convenience store for a couple years as the manager, got to know these customers. We were in a neighborhood, so it was the same people that came through all the time. One of the older gentlemen who came in and got a coffee and donut every morning, one Saturday slipped me his business card.

I got to know him pretty well, and we talked when he would come into the store and whatnot. He slipped me his business card, and he just says, “Call me.” I was confused, kind of had an idea of what he was thinking, so I called him. In short, he basically offered me a job at his company, which was an architectural design company and was a five-day work week, eight to four type of thing, holidays off, that type of stuff, which was so different from when I was working at the time. I was like, “I don’t even care what you do, but I’m going to say yes because I just want to get out of this.”

I became a project manager at this architectural firm. I was probably the youngest by probably 10 years there. I was kind of seen as the kid, the computer guy who taught himself a lot of stuff on the computer, which will ultimately get to where we’re at now. That’s my work history in a nutshell. Just things there I learned that are much more applicable to what I do now.

Lauren Mancke: At that architectural firm, isn’t that when you started writing on your blog?

Brian’s Start with Blogging, WordPress, and Freelance Development

Brian Gardner: Yeah, let’s go back, I think 2006, 2007 is where it was. I was very confident with what I was doing, but I was also bored. It was a desk job. I was crunching numbers and estimating projects. As even a creative back then, I wanted to start writing. This was back in the day when Google’s Blogger was the big thing and WordPress was very, very new. I started blogging on Blogger. It just didn’t do anything for me. A friend of mine said, “You should check out this WordPress thing because it’s a much better, more sophisticated thing,” which is funny because compared to where it’s at now, back then it was archaic.

I installed WordPress and figured out through Googling around how to set up WordPress install and what was web hosting and all of that. I started blogging on the side just as a fun thing to do. Yes, I did a little bit on the clock to kill time. I started blogging, and that was the start of the entrepreneurial journey.

Lauren Mancke: Right, because that’s when you started to do freelance jobs, right?

Brian Gardner: Yeah, what happened was, I didn’t like the theme I was using. Back then, there was a free theme repository. I had pulled down a theme, and as a neat freak and organizational type of person, I opened up these files that made up this theme. Of course, I didn’t even know what a theme was, or PHP files or CSS, back in the day. I was flying blind and just trying to see what would work and what wouldn’t work. Ultimately, I cleaned up the theme I was using. I renamed it. I thought I was like this real programmer kind of guy and, at one point, decided to make themes available on my site.

I would take themes and customize them, got my feet wet with design, and did what I felt was right, and started making these themes available for download for free in hopes that people would use them. The links in the footer would go back to my site, and they could read all about my journal and stuff that I was going through, which I figured people might be interested in. Who knows?

I did that, and some of those people who would download the themes would ultimately contact me and say, “Hey, I’m using your free theme. I want to know if you can help me change a few colors or whatnot.” These little freelance jobs that I took, $25, $50, to kind of tweak a few things grew into more of a thing where people would ask for full custom sites types of things, $250, $500 back in the day is what I charged. It was vacation money back at the time.

Lauren Mancke: That’s about when we met, right? That’s when our paths crossed?

When Brian and Lauren Began Working Together Almost 10 Years Ago

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I can’t remember what year it was, but I think it was Wes who reached out at one point, your old boss.

Lauren Mancke: It was 2007.

Brian Gardner: 2007, yeah, so he reached out and asked if I could do a couple of themes for I don’t know if they were your client sites or even his own site. He contracted me to do a couple of these sites and obviously connected me to you because you were the one who had done the designs for him. I was going to just do the development part. You and I back then, even though, fast forward nine years, we had no idea that we would be really working this closely together. That was the start of our relationship, just kind of on a casual, you were a client of mine type of thing — and look, here we are.

Lauren Mancke: Those were some pretty basic sites. I’m glad they are not on the Internet anymore. Besides us being your client, did you have any other clients at that time?

The One Client That Changed Everything

Brian Gardner: Yeah, there were a couple other people who, believe or not, were regulars that they had more than one project for me to do. It was nice to kind of have a few people who would continually send me work. Moonlighting was pretty much my gig, and I was doing these sites late at night, on the weekends, and a little bit during the day at work, but I don’t ever like to admit that. That’s how those types of things happen. Maybe a year or so into that part of my life, I had this client, a Boston real estate guy, and he was pretty much the guy that changed everything.

Lauren Mancke: How did he do that?

Brian Gardner: This is a story I tell all the time. To this day, I do not mention his name. I prefer to keep him in anonymity. I think that, at some point, and I’m 95 percent kidding when I say this, but I still think he’s going to come back and ask for royalties because he really was the guy that changed my life, my family’s life, really a lot of the things that transpired since then.

I was doing a freelance custom design for him. He wanted a real estate blog. I whipped up this design, and I was like, “I’m going to above and beyond,” and created this template that would work as a front page, so it would look more like a website than a blog. Then I sent him a link to the demo, and I said, “What do you think of this?” He wrote back, and he says, “This is great, but it’s not what I need. I need just a blog, and it’s got to be very basic.”

I was crushed. I thought to myself, “This is the greatest thing I’ve ever created. It’s way better than anything else that’s out there,” but he rejected it. He said that it wasn’t that I wasn’t good enough, it was just better than what he needed. It didn’t suit what he was looking for. At that point, I was left with this design, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it.

The Birth of the Premium WordPress Theme Industry

Brian Gardner: Thankfully, I had built an audience, and I did what felt right. I followed my gut and just wrote up a blog post and said, “Hey, this is something I created. Would anybody buy it?” That risk, that blog post was the catalyst to what would then transpire over the next year or two of my life, which was the formulation of Revolution because people wrote back on the blog and comments and said, “Heck yeah, that’s great. I would love to buy that.”

I followed up that blog post with another one. Basically saying, “How much would you pay for a premium WordPress theme?” To this day, it’s arguable that, that is actually how the premium WordPress theme industry was named. Lots of people gave feedback, ranged anywhere between $50 and $100.

Even then, I had no business training, no schooling, and any of that stuff, but I knew that was an opportunity. I knew that there was probably hundreds of people who actually wrote on that and said, “I would buy that.” I knew it was an opportunity to create something in a way that could be packaged and resold. That was the Revolution WordPress theme.

Lauren Mancke: I’ve definitely heard that you coined the phrase ‘premium WordPress theme.’ I think it’s pretty amazing that you were able to just start an entire industry like that.

Brian Gardner: Most of these types of stories, especially startups nowadays, they usually come back to, at the core of that story, some sort of passion projects, something somebody created to solve their own problem. It’s never well, it’s not never, but most success stories come out of the accidental entrepreneur concept, which is people who don’t set out to go do something. It just happens, and then they roll with it.

For me, that was totally the case. At the time, I think Shelly was either pregnant or we were trying to get pregnant. I had no interest in leaving my day job because it was stable. I had income. I had vacation, benefits, insurance, and all that stuff. Never in a million years after I started selling Revolution did I think four months later I would be quitting my secure, stable job to do this ‘Internet thing’ — but that’s how it played out.

Lauren Mancke: How did Revolution then turn into StudioPress? A lot of our listeners might not know how that transitioned. I know I know because I was there, but give us a little rundown of how that transition went down.

The Launch of StudioPress and the Genesis Framework

Brian Gardner: The short story is, back in the day, even though WordPress itself was an open-source project, Revolution, I was selling it as a proprietary thing where and I’ll link to a couple of articles around this in the show notes. In short, I decided to take Revolution, which at the time we were selling, and make it open source. In other words, apply the GPL license to it. Part of that process was difficult because I was making a big change and risking potentially a lot of money.

I called up Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, and asked if he would be willing to have a conversation with me about this. At the time, there were few other people who started selling themes. They were also doing a proprietary license deal, which was, in a sense, against the ideology of WordPress and open source. I didn’t want to be seen as a black sheep. I called Matt, and he said, “Yep.” I flew out to California and met with him. At the point, CEO of Automattic, which is the company behind WordPress, and the three of us sat alongside Jason Schuller, my friend from Press75 at the time.

We sat in a room and talked about Revolution going open source. Out of that conversation, it became Revolution 2, which was sort of a, as I look back, hokey transition. It was just my way of saying, “This is Revolution done a different way.”

Not too long into that, I was served a cease and desist letter from a company in the United Kingdom that claimed some sort of confusion with their Revolution software, and again, like I said, I had no business knowledge whatsoever, no legal nothing. I was just doing what I thought was right. I brought that to an intellectual property attorney, and he said, “You can probably fight this and maybe win. It would cost a lot of money, so it might just make sense to rebrand.”

At that point, I thought it was suicide, brand suicide. I thought it was going to be the end of the world. I went ahead and looked up some domain names, and StudioPress was one that was available for purchase. I think it was BuyDomains.com or something like that, but I was like, “Eh, it’s got the press studio, kind of insinuates design.” Yes, I did Google StudioPress and make sure that there was no other conflict because the last thing I wanted to do was end up in the same boat.

We rebranded as StudioPress, and there was a blog post announcing it, sort of alluding to the fact that it was a necessary change. One thing I learned is when you build a loyal audience, they’ll follow you no matter what. My concern that sales would tank and that the community wouldn’t understand quickly subsided once I rebranded, and StudioPress set itself off at that point.

Lauren Mancke: I think at that time, right around then, is when I actually was starting to go full-time freelancing. What year was that?

Brian Gardner: 2010-ish, 2009, ’10, ’11, ’12? Something around there.

Lauren Mancke: I think maybe 2009. You were one of my clients. I had some steady clients. That was kind of the impetus for me to go out on my own and quit my full-time job. One of those first big jobs I had was with you, doing a few theme designs.

Brian Gardner: I don’t know which of the times you are talking about because I think back then I tried to hire you three or four different times, but you were a prima donna. You were charging too much money, and I couldn’t afford you at the time. I think I at least three times you and I tried to figure out a way to work together on a full-time basis.

I knew back then that you were a great designer and you still are. I knew that, as an opportunistic person who wants to take my business to the next level, you had to play a part. So yes, we went back and forth a number of times to figure out how you can get involved. It probably wasn’t until the merge with Copyblogger that we were in a position to finally make that happen.

Lauren Mancke: You did ask me a few times.

Brian Gardner: You know what, I kept feeling rejected — like I was asking the pretty girl to the dance, and she kept saying no for some reason or like that she had someone better. I’m like, “One of these times I’m just going to stop asking,” but here we are.

Lauren Mancke: It worked out. The stars aligned, and the timing worked out.

Brian Gardner: For sure.

Lauren Mancke: A couple of those first projects we worked on, I remember helping with the brand of Genesis.

Brian Gardner: Before the Copyblogger merge, I had this idea. I think at the time Thesis by Chris Pearson was sort of becoming the thorn in my side, competitor, impacting sales type of thing. I knew at that point I needed to do something that was a little bit different from where I was doing. StudioPress, we had a number of individual themes that we were producing. I think a couple maybe you designed or I outsourced. The problem became once we had a number of themes that shared some code base.

This kind of gets into the history of Genesis itself, which was every time that we would need to update a function, I’d update every single theme. Around that time, Nathan Rice, who is currently lead developer at Rainmaker Digital, our company. He was working at iThemes with our friend Cory Miller. I think I told him at one point — I was outsourcing some kind of code work for him as well — I told him, I said, “Hey, look, if things ever don’t work out between you and iThemes, give me a call,” because I knew that there was this thing I wanted to build.

I didn’t know really if it was possible or what it would be called or anything like that, but I had this idea.

A few months later, he called back and said, “Hey, it looks like I’m going to no longer be working with iThemes, so here I am.” I pitched him the idea. I said, “Look, all of our themes share code base. Can we build something?” I don’t know even if I knew what a framework was or if it was called that back in the day, but I said, “Can we build something that basically shares the same code base, and then the design is just laid over the top?”

I always like to use the idea of an iPhone, or even a car for that matter, where the paint job is the design, and the engine is always the same.

You can change the way the car looks without having to change the engine. So I pitched him the idea. I said, “Let’s build something like that.” That was the initial conversation we had with Genesis.

Once we built Genesis and introduced that idea and concept to the WordPress community, people bought into it. Obviously, we had a pretty good following through StudioPress and me personally. That sort of transitioned from standalone themes to what’s now Genesis the framework and the child theme system that comes along with it.

Lauren Mancke: Then, taking that further, how was StudioPress then affected by the merger with the Copyblogger?

The Biggest Business Decision Brian Ever Had to Make

Brian Gardner: That’s a fun story. Chris Pearson and Brian Clark dissolved their relationship over at DIYThemes, and Brian reached out to me and said, “Hey, look. I’m looking to do something. I wanted to know if you want to partner together.” Of course I knew who Brian was from just Copyblogger and just the prominence he had in the blogging and marketing world. I knew that that was a huge opportunity to ultimately take StudioPress to the next level.

There were lots of elements around StudioPress that I didn’t want to be doing — i.e., support, account management, and things like that. I knew that there was just a next step and that merging into Copyblogger would do it. Him and I and three of our other partners flew out to Denver and formed the company in practically 35, 40 minutes.

We sat down and just knocked it all out and said, “This is what we want to do. This is what we want to build.” From there, we merged StudioPress into Copyblogger, formed that company, which ultimately meant that I was giving up full control of what I called my baby back in the day. A lot has happened over the last six years, much for the good, and StudioPress is still going strong. Finally got a chance to hire you. You’ve worked your way up through everything, and now you’re vice president of StudioPress. I like to call you my right-hand man, or if anything, you call me your right-hand man. You’re pretty much running the show now.

Lauren Mancke: Over those six years, a lot’s happened. Have you any favorite parts on that whole journey?

Brian’s Favorite Parts of the Journey and Lessons He Learned Along the Way

Brian Gardner: Yeah, I think what it comes down to is, I’ve always been kind of a gathering type. I love the idea of community and building something that appeals to a lot of people and where people can come together.

The company itself has become that for us, where we started out as five partners and a handful of employees. Over the last six years, we’ve grown and evolved and have built new lines of business, and that’s necessitated hiring. Tony Clark, our COO, he’s a really smart guy, and he’s like a company builder. He sets up the infrastructure of the company and the processes. He really helped form the company into something special.

Even just in April, we were all out in Denver together. Probably 50 to 60 of us, a lot of people coming from overseas, from south America. It’s crazy to then come together in one room. It feels like a true family. The standing joke kind of within our company is that we’re The Goonies and that we’re misfits creating meaningful work.

That’s one part of the last years that I’ve really gotten to enjoy is just working with different people, caring for other people, and so on.

The community itself that we’ve built around Genesis is just as awesome. The people who are building their own businesses around Genesis and selling services and products around that has been phenomenal to watch. I’ve met a lot of good people, many of which we’ve been able to meet in person. Some I call brothers and sisters. We’re that close.

That to me is, and always has been, the most important part of all of it. It’s really what helps me get up in the morning and why I want to do work and talk to people and help identify where we can promote their work. We’ve done some things lately, like add third-party themes to StudioPress in our Pro Plus package, as well as even sharing their work on our Facebook page.

We recently created a newsletter called StudioPress Notes where we talk about the latest things.

It’s been just really fun to watch the community, from developers to designers to everybody in between, gather around this product. They kind of serve as what I call brand ambassadors. They are making money and putting food on their table because of something that we started, that they are building upon. Those two parts of all of this is really been my favorite part of it all.

Lauren Mancke: I think also having a couple people on the show, too, will be a great idea about where we can take this podcast.

Plans for the Future

Brian Gardner: StudioPress FM, for me, is really going to be about that same sort of thing. We’re going to extend our platform in the spirit of trying to help other people’s platforms. In other words, yes, you and I are going to talk and riff about things that are happening and things we go through, work in our workday, and identifying design trends and what we should build and all of that.

The other part of it, and what I think will be fascinating for our listeners, is to bring in people from the community so we can hear their story, so we can hear what they’re up to and what they think about what we’re doing, but also just what the industry as a whole is doing.

There’s all kinds of people that I’ve already got in mind that I want to have on the show. We’ll go through a series probably, a four-part series where we’ll bring in maybe some designers, and then another series would be developers and so on. Industry people that can help bring some wisdom to the show. It’s going to be a fun deal. I’m really excited that we finally did this. I think it all hinged upon the fact that we landed on a great design for the podcast album cover. I think that was something we struggled with a little bit.

Lauren Mancke: That did take a few drafts.

Brian Gardner: The one thing we learned is that, in some sort of fashion, you and I are a little bit oil and water when it comes to taste. Typically, we resonate a lot, but there are some things and the podcast music itself was another instance where we just had to say, “We love each other, and we’re are going to have to find a way to meet in the middle.”

Lauren Mancke: We had to compromise.

Brian Gardner: Yeah, and that’s what the whole show is going to be about, where you can do your thing for a while, I’ll do my thing for a while. As long we are relatively on the same page, then things should work out.

With that said and on that note, I think we’ll end the show. We’re going to keep our shows typically around 30 minutes, just in the spirit of giving enough information, but not too much to where it takes away from your day. We love you guys. We appreciate your listening.

Next week, we’re going to hear Lauren’s story because it differs much from mine. It’ll be fun to hear her talk more and to hear what she went through, how she got here, and all of that. That’s a wrap.

Lauren Mancke: So tune in.

Brian Gardner: Next week, StudioPress FM.