Podcast appearances and mentions of jennifer bourn

This installment of The Axis Effect features Jennifer Bourn, Chief Marketing Officer at Motivation AI. Utilizing AI in an innovative way that few companies do, Motivations AI offers a narrative-based personality assessment to users. But what makes Motivations AI so special is their ability to personalize that assessment on a level rarely seen, with each individual assessment designed around the stories of the people taking said assessment. Combining those personal stories with over 50 years worth of empirical and behavioral data, and Motivations AI effectively gives people the opportunity to understand themselves in a way they never have before, all with the goal of making them better workers and leaders for their teams.   Bourn discusses how Motivations AI respects thee fact that no two leaders are the same and why this is where her company thrives, how the program combines science with AI and individuality, and what the assessment reveals. To learn more, tune in to “Defining the Narrative of AI.”

Jennifer Bourn, CMO of Motivation Code, joins Ernesto to discuss the importance of understanding your motivations to achieve peak performance. Motivation AI goes beyond traditional personality assessments to reveal the underlying drivers behind why you think, act, and make decisions the way you do. By understanding your unique motivations, you can learn how to consistently show up at your best, be more engaged in your work, and contribute significantly to your team or organization. Jennifer also shares valuable insights on how Motivation AI helps businesses in various industries, from hiring and retaining top talent to improving client communication and sales.

Jennifer Bourn has been self-employed for 17 years. She started her creative services agency, Bourn Creative, in 2005 and added on a side hustle, teaching courses and workshops in 2017. When Jennifer's best friend offered her a full-time job, Jennifer was intrigued but also had conditions. She would accept the job, but her side hustle had to stay up and running. A compromise was reached, and now Jennifer has the best of both worlds.

With the Podcast Liftoff Playbook out, and Jennifer Bourn's Profitable Project Plan is open for enrollment right now, I thought it would be a great time to re-air her interview where she talks about running a cohort-based course, and how she built the PPP. I listened to it again as I was looking for inspiration and best practices to realize the Playbook fully. And let me tell you, this episode really holds up! For members, I talk about how my webinar → paid members sales to funnel went. Top Takeaways: Online courses are NOT passive income. If you want your course to be successful, you need to evolve it. Offering a PRO version was a big mistake for Jen because people bought the non-Pro version and tried to get the Pro benefits. The lesson has one offer OR makes the Pro benefits totally different. Running live workshop events are a great way to add accountability and more value to your self-paced courses. You're ensuring your students take action now, instead of procrastinating. Show Notes: Jennifer Bourn Jennifer on Twitter Profitable Project Plan Content Camp Jennifer Bourn and Profitable Project Plan Company of One Introduction to the Block Editor 2021: The Year of Opportunity Join the Creator Crew Sponsored by: Nexcess | Ahrefs | LearnDash

Show Notes Holy Moly, I can’t believe I just clicked publish! Welcome to the first episode of Seeking Satisfaction — a brand new podcast and passion project dedicated not to finding work/life balance but to living an unbalanced life that gives you the freedom to go all-in on meaningful work, delightful play, and peaceful rest. […]

In today's episode, we bring back Joe's conversation with Jennifer Bourn, a designer for twenty years, an agency owner for thirteen years, and a blogger for ten years. She is founding partner at Bourn Creative, a full service design and development company that specializes in purpose-driven design and everything WordPress.   Jennifer talks about her 13-year journey founding and managing an agency that helps new businesses improve their website, drive traffic, and generate leads; and her plans to gradually shift to content services. Her agency also offers online courses and classes for new entrepreneurs.   Episode Resources: Jennifer Bourn's Website Profitable Project Plan Inspired Imperfection Jennifer is on Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.org Leave an Apple podcast review or binge-watch past episodes Send questions to yo@wpmrr.com for the next Q&A pod Visit the WPMRR website   What to Listen For: 00:00 Intro 00:46 Welcome to the pod, Jennifer! 01:49 When you start a company, nobody gives you business training 05:21 Profitable Project Plan: Video courses for new entrepreneurs 07:31 Everybody taking the class at the same place with similar questions 11:10 Courses had started as side revenue stream 15:06 Focusing on monthly recurring revenue (MRR) 17:49 Next course: Lucrative Leads 19:42 The biggest challenges in finding leads 24:13 Gradually shifting to content services and copywriting 28:34 You have to advance your skills if you want to continue running an agency 36:51 Running an agency while raising kids 40:39 Find Jennifer online

Jennifer Bourn has been successfully running Profitable Project Plan, her training program for freelancers and small business owners, for several years. But it wasn’t something that instantly made her a ton or money, and it’s evolved over time. We’re getting back to basics here in 2021, so Jennifer and I talk about what you’ll learn in Profitable Project Plan, but we’ll also talk about how she built it, and how she evolved it to make it the perfect program for anyone who wants to build a better business. (more…) View on separate page Transcript Transcript Coming Soon Sponsored by:Outgrow: Use Code Outgrow+Joe-1Month for a 30 Day Free Trial Restrict Content Pro: Launch your membership site Hostinger: Use JOECASABONA at checkout for additional discountTextExpander: Get 20% off your first year by visiting the this link. Source

Define your business around your lifestyle - not the other way around! With 22 years of experience as a graphic designer, 15 as a web designer/creative agency owner, 10 as a blogger, and 4 as a course creator and content strategist, Jennifer helps small businesses build brands, create content, and grow profitable online platforms. Her renowned business systems and automations allow her business to thrive while she travels with her husband of 21 years and two teenagers, squeezes in daily workouts, tries new recipes, speaks at events, facilitates workshops, and leads online courses like Profitable Project Plan. Cathy talks to Jennifer Bourn about how she grew her business while creating a life she loves being a creator, maker and doer!

It’s a never ending task in figuring out the most effective way to create sustainable goals and compelling interactions with clients for acquiring more web-traffic and leads.Tune in to today’s episode of WPMRR and take some advice from our guests who dominate in sales and marketing.Listen to full episodes below: E26 - Darth Maul on sales and marketing for freelancers (Jennifer Bourn, Profitable Project Plan) E49 - Darth Maul on inventing inbound marketing (David Ly Khim, Hubspot) E63 - Superman on making sales and marketing with WordPress easy (Gregory Karelitz, Hubspot)   What to Listen For:   00:00 Intro 00:12 Building the foundation of your website 01:47 Many people drastically overestimate their website traffic 03:10 Get clarity to talk about what you want to do 05:57 Do you need to keep running paid ads? 08:37 Organic traffic on older content 10:07 Historical optimization versus creating new content 12:42 The benefits of having a user-experience audit  13:57 The advantage and disadvantage of an open source 15:12 HubSpot and automated contact form 18:26 It's not the disconnected tools that creates the problem 20:42 Building on WordPress is hard 23:54 People don't want to fill out long forms 25:13 Feature functionality and delivering great user experience

This week on Audience, we're giving ourselves a hard look in the mirror after chatting with Jennifer Bourn. She's a business builder, helping clients grow their brands and attract new opportunities with concrete tools and tweaks. She kicked off the interview asking an important question, "Let's face it, most of us know we need to be doing [content marketing]. And most of us know we need to be doing. But are we actually doing it?". When life gets in the way and the content marketing to-do list never gets checked off, it's helpful to have someone keep you on track. In this episode, we hope to do just that. Instead of continuing to put it off, Jennifer is here to help plan out our content calendars and stick to it. But we're not throwing you to the wolves with a laundry list of blog posts, social media posts, and audiograms to churn out each week. Jennifer's take on slowly ramping up a content calendar is a more surefire way to avoid burnout and actually enjoy creating new pieces of content from a single episode. Listen to the full episode now to figure out how to reverse engineer how you want a listener to feel after consuming any of your content.

This week on Audience, we’re giving ourselves a hard look in the mirror after chatting with Jennifer Bourn. She’s a business builder, helping clients grow ... Read More >

It’s a never ending task in figuring out the most effective way to create sustainable goals and compelling interactions with clients for acquiring more web-traffic and leads.Tune in to today’s episode of WPMRR and take some advice from our guests who dominate in sales and marketing.Listen to full episodes below: E26 - Darth Maul on sales and marketing for freelancers (Jennifer Bourn, Profitable Project Plan) E49 - Darth Maul on inventing inbound marketing (David Ly Khim, Hubspot) E63 - Superman on making sales and marketing with WordPress easy (Gregory Karelitz, HubSpot)

This week's theme is freelancing! How to get started, find clients, the most common mistakes to avoid, and how to make tough decisions - like choosing expand your team... or remain solo. Listen to the full episodes below: E22 – Princess Leia on developing fearless freelancers (Carrie Dils, Fearless Freelancer) E26 – Darth Maul on sales and marketing for freelancers (Jennifer Bourn, Profitable Project Plan) E40 – Working and thriving solo or as a small agency E46 – Boba Fett on starting a freelance career (Sam Smith, gsamsmith.com) E69 – Harry Potter on hiring the top 1% of freelancers (Nathan Hirsch Freeeup.com)

We've had quite a year with Think Like a Hacker, the podcast about WordPress, security and innovation. For the end of year episode, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at a few of our favorite interviews and news stories. For episode 62, we review conversations with Josepha Haden, Brandy Lawson, Jennifer Bourn, Matt Cromwell, and we look back at the Pipdig story that created a furor earlier this year. Thank you to everyone who sat down with us over the first year of Think Like a Hacker, and thank you to our audience for listening, commenting, and helping Think Like a Hacker become what it is. We have big plans for 2020, and we hope you join us. Happy holidays to everyone celebrating, and we'll see you in 2020.   Here are timestamps if you'd like to jump around: 0:55 Josepha Haden on how she got involved with WordPress 1:59 Jon Brown talks about managing a remote team 3:50 Verious Smith's entrepreneurship journey 5:40 the Pipdig story with Mikey Veenstra 6:53 Ryan Dewhurst on the WP Vulnerability Database 7:44 Brandy Lawson talks about entrepreneurship 8:42 WordPress core and signing core updates 10:19 Matt Cromwell on why open source community matters 11:37 Jennifer Bourn on the benefits of young people in WordPress 13:03 Marieke van de Rakt on Yoast Academy 14:00 Think Like a Hacker at WordCamp US

Jennifer Bourn has been a leader in the WordPress community for years, helping WordPress users of all experience levels get the most out of the platform. She has also created beautiful websites for recognizable brands through her design company, Bourn Creative. At WordCamp Sacramento, we talked about how the WordPress community has opened new experiences for her entire family, her new ventures in training including Content Camp and the Profitable Project Plan, the Bourn family goal of visiting all national parks as well as the future of WordPress.

Conflicts of interest with WordCamp and WordPress Meetup organizers.The WPwatercooler network is sponsored by ServerPress makers of DesktopServer be sure to check them out at https://serverpress.com.A question was posed to the Make WordPress blog recently that many of us found interesting:"Recently, I realized that community organizers do sometimes face a conflict of interest situations, but the team does not really have clear guidelines about how to avoid them, nor best practices for when there is one."https://make.wordpress.org/community/2019/08/15/discussion-how-to-handle-conflict-of-interest-situations/Some questions that were presented to the community were:What different kinds of conflict of interest situations we have now and what we might encounter in the future?How to work around those?Can we accept the conflict of interest in some situations?What would be the best approach to disclose situations where someone notices a conflict of interest?Jennifer Bourn brought this to twitterhttps://twitter.com/jenniferbourn/status/1164559134894649345So we asked her to join us to discuss this on the show. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What’s up, everyone? In this episode, I am joined by Jennifer Bourn, designer and owner of Bourn Creative Agency. Starting a business while pregnant was a challenge for Jennifer. Marketing automation was the key to the freedom and flexibility she wanted for her family, and it eventually paved the way for the client management system behind her business. While project management is important, Jennifer stresses that it can’t come at the expense of client management. Her course, Profitable Project Plan, is designed for developers and business owners to support the client-focused side of their business. It’s a 14-week program that explains Jennifer’s system in an easy-to-understand and interactive way. Listen as Jennifer and I talk about Profitable Project Plan, its development, and how it empowers business owners to create consistency and take control of their business. Building a successful business requires hard work, but it doesn't have to be difficult work. Episode Quotes "Stand on your ground when you take a stand on your business, and do not give in when other people push." "As I got older, I began thinking less about myself and more about the impact that I was having in the world." "Everything that I've done in my business has always been what is sustainable and enjoyable for me." "Success is not the same for every person." "You can never over-communicate. The more you communicate the better." Listen to Learn 01:00 Getting to know Jennifer Bourn, Rapid 5 Questions 04:30 Jennifer's career and business journey 06:34 How marketing automation impacted Jennifer's life and business 09:09 Jennifer's teaching journey and the transition to doing online courses 12:28 Scaling your business - "Success is not the same for every person" 15:13 Profitable Project Plan - course structure & who it’s for 17:05 How to manage the "stuck zone" and help students stay on track 23:07 What is Profitable Project Plan? Why client management is important? 26:51 Profitable Project Plan - selecting the course materials 31:31 The main purpose of tiered pricing 33:00 Jennifer's insights about creating online courses 35:34 Exciting things coming up from Jennifer, website and social media links Get the Bonus Episode! Join us in the bonus segment! It’s a great conversation about Jennifer’s course and her pregnancy story. Grab it here: https://get.zencourses.co/extra

Jennifer Bourn helps small businesses create systems to plan and create their content. She also helps other small-agency owners streamline and systematize their operations. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jennifer-bourn/

Jennifer Bourn Jennifer Bourn helps small businesses create systems to plan and create their content. She also helps other small-agency owners streamline and systematize their operations. Jennifer and I talked about: the importance of systems and processes in both her business and personal lives her ability to identify and implement a systematic approach to any business activity - both hers and her clients the flow of content work in a typical client project the various interpretations of "content first" that she has encountered the importance of adapting your content plan to the needs and style of your client her system for guiding clients through the content-creation process the similarities that she sees across her client base her observation that while everyone thinks they are special and unique, in fact, most clients have very similar fundamental needs the importance of getting systems information out of your head and into actual working procedures how to delegate, automate, and otherwise streamline content (and other) operations the stages of her process: welcome, on-boarding, design, development, launch, exit how she sets the stage for her clients to begin thinking about crucial issues *before* she begins her discovery process how her process helps clients build content momentum by doing easier writing tasks first how her content checklist and associated document templates create a low-stress content-creation experience for her clients how her processes have worked for a range of project sizes - from $3,000 to $30,000 the superiority of a systems approach to a bespoke approach to client work how systematizing and automating simple tasks can give you more time to focus on strategy and other more meaningful work how her systems reduced their workload by 50% shortly after they implemented them her approach to ongoing iterative improvement of her processes the importance of having - and following - a plan how to align your content with the services you offer or the products you sell the benefits of repurposing and reusing your content Jennifer's Bio With 20 years experience as a graphic designer, 14 years experience as a web designer, 13 years as a creative agency owner, and 10 years as a blogger, Jennifer Bourn has worked with hundreds of small-medium sized service-based businesses to build brands, establish profitable online platforms, and claim authority positioning in their niche. She is also a sought-after speaker and writer, earning rave reviews for her workshops, trainings, and valuable articles. Through JenniferBourn.com, Jennifer focuses on providing the information, tools, and resources freelancers need to build thriving, successful businesses and delivering courses that help freelancers make more money. Through her agency, Bourn Creative, she offers a suite of services designed to maximize results and increase profits that include brand strategy, content strategy, and website strategy, as well as copywriting and content implementation. Video Here's the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/t2VWK5hq4xY Transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 38 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Jennifer Bourn. Jennifer is at jenniferbourn.com down in Sacramento, California. She does a lot of creative agency-type stuff down there. I'll have Jennifer tell you a little bit more about herself. Jennifer: Thanks for having me. I am a designer at heart. I got my bachelor's degree in graphic design, so I've been a designer for 20 years, a web designer for 14, an agency owner for 13, a blogger for 10, and the last several years, I've been digging in more into copy writing and content strategy. Through Bourn Creative, I offer client services. Through jenniferbourn.com, I teach freelancers how to implement systems in their business to get more clients,

Jennifer Bourn Jennifer Bourn helps small businesses create systems to plan and create their content. She also helps other small-agency owners streamline and systematize their operations. Jennifer and I talked about: the importance of systems and processes in both her business and personal lives her ability to identify and implement a systematic approach to any business activity - both hers and her clients the flow of content work in a typical client project the various interpretations of "content first" that she has encountered the importance of adapting your content plan to the needs and style of your client her system for guiding clients through the content-creation process the similarities that she sees across her client base her observation that while everyone thinks they are special and unique, in fact, most clients have very similar fundamental needs the importance of getting systems information out of your head and into actual working procedures how to delegate, automate, and otherwise streamline content (and other) operations the stages of her process: welcome, on-boarding, design, development, launch, exit how she sets the stage for her clients to begin thinking about crucial issues *before* she begins her discovery process how her process helps clients build content momentum by doing easier writing tasks first how her content checklist and associated document templates create a low-stress content-creation experience for her clients how her processes have worked for a range of project sizes - from $3,000 to $30,000 the superiority of a systems approach to a bespoke approach to client work how systematizing and automating simple tasks can give you more time to focus on strategy and other more meaningful work how her systems reduced their workload by 50% shortly after they implemented them her approach to ongoing iterative improvement of her processes the importance of having - and following - a plan how to align your content with the services you offer or the products you sell the benefits of repurposing and reusing your content Jennifer's Bio With 20 years experience as a graphic designer, 14 years experience as a web designer, 13 years as a creative agency owner, and 10 years as a blogger, Jennifer Bourn has worked with hundreds of small-medium sized service-based businesses to build brands, establish profitable online platforms, and claim authority positioning in their niche. She is also a sought-after speaker and writer, earning rave reviews for her workshops, trainings, and valuable articles. Through JenniferBourn.com, Jennifer focuses on providing the information, tools, and resources freelancers need to build thriving, successful businesses and delivering courses that help freelancers make more money. Through her agency, Bourn Creative, she offers a suite of services designed to maximize results and increase profits that include brand strategy, content strategy, and website strategy, as well as copywriting and content implementation. Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://youtu.be/t2VWK5hq4xY Transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 38 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Jennifer Bourn. Jennifer is at jenniferbourn.com down in Sacramento, California. She does a lot of creative agency-type stuff down there. I'll have Jennifer tell you a little bit more about herself. Jennifer: Thanks for having me. I am a designer at heart. I got my bachelor's degree in graphic design, so I've been a designer for 20 years, a web designer for 14, an agency owner for 13, a blogger for 10, and the last several years, I've been digging in more into copy writing and content strategy. Through Bourn Creative, I offer client services. Through jenniferbourn.com, I teach freelancers how to implement systems in their business to get more clients,

Jennifer may not be Darth Maul but she’s got a temper like a sith lord if you cross her or her family! Today’s episode is jammed packed with practical tips and tricks for everything from standing out as a freelancer, transitioning out of agency work while still maintaining MRR through courses, and how to get your kids involved in your business. You do not want to miss this one!

Matt continues with Season 8 with the second roundtable episode talking to Jennifer Bourn, Davinder Singh Kainth and Chris Badgett. This panel represents the thought leaders in the WordPress community and they have been working in the WordPress space for a long time by adapting to the changes in WordPress that are impacting their businesses. They finish the episode with projections of WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Listen to this episode: Matt Report - A WordPress podcast for digital business owners Course creators, product makers, and community builders -- oh my! Play Episode Pause Episode Mute/Unmute Episode Rewind 10 Seconds 1x Fast Forward 30 seconds 00:00 / 01:00:25 Subscribe Share RSS Feed Share Link Embed Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 01:00:25 Jennifer Bourn – Co owns a design and development agency called Bourn Creative.  She co-authors a course called Profitable Project Plan that helps designers and developers improve their business. Jennifer is a co-organizer of the Meetup in Sacramento and also WordCamp Sacramento. (0:46) Davinder Singh Kainth – Designs and develops for direct clients and white label clients for several agencies. He has several niche websites for training and recently launched his first podcast called  Smart Web Creators. (1:06) Chris Badgett – Chris is the co-founder of LifterLMS,  a WordPress solution for creating, selling and protecting online courses. He has worked as a freelance WordPress implementer and built a successful freelance agency.  He has the podcast for course creators called LMSCast.  (1:34) What you will learn in this Episode: Changes in WordPress: Jennifer – Day to Day interaction with clients is showing how much WordPress has matured. It used to be a growth area across the board. Now there is growth at the bottom and the top. Jennifer is seeing a squeeze in the middle where there is so much competition. Onboarding a client with processes is so important to see continued success with the middle clients. The “race to the bottom” has so much competition that in order to be profitable you need repeatable processes. (2:53) Chris – The landscape is changing for online courses because of the ease and power of page builders. The tools make WordPress so much easier to use. It becomes less important now that a website is built on WordPress. Chris is still seeing stable growth on the product side and WordPress is still great for a customized solution where extendibility is needed. Enterprise and larger businesses will pay for premium solutions. (6:15) Davinder – people are finding out that WordPress is not “free” even though it is open source. Themes and plugins that are needed for added functionality cost money and will not fit into the $30.00 a month solution offered by a WIX or Squarespace.  Davinder is seeing agency level pricing going up and WordPress tools are now being priced correctly. WordPress still allow you to have total ownership and control of your design and data. (10:29) Theory of New Customer Cycle: There are still customers that are growing their businesses where a startup website no longer works for them. Davinder – efficiency of the page builders lets freelancers handle the middle market and create a niche. It allows a freelancer to work with the business to see how much revenue is being generated from a client's website. (13:47) Chris – is seeing the diffusion of innovation in the WordPress community. Customers who purchased LifterLMS may need additional customization to build a solution.  A client can look at themes, content and request help from freelancers that are considered successful LMSLifter builders. (16:22) Adding Verticles for Agency Business Growth: Jennifer – She has seen the client base shift in Bourn Creative.  Their agency work is no longer focused on startups with limited budgets. Many of her clients are approaching her agency with a website design that needs added features and functionality along with great design. The focus in the business has shifted to long-term partnerships with clients and they have fewer partnerships. The agency has been successful with the shift using retainer projects. She has found if you do not diversify your income stream, you may just burn out. (24:02) Jennifer has also found that offering continuing support for that client with content management or ongoing service often works. You need to ask the client to focus on one thing and try to master it and make it a habit. Then you can offer products that have the biggest impact and provide the most money per hour. (37:22) Davinder – The WordPress has expanded geographically and across many continents. There are more and more people coming into the WordPress space and creating SASS products. Titles in the WordPress space (such as a developer or designer) are being shed as well. There is more opportunity for implementors. (28:15) It is important to get things right and educate the customer. You cannot help the customer much that wants the cheap solution. A client does not care about the back end because they do not interact with it.  Try to recognize the “Perfectionist Bug” and do not deliver more than the customer requests. Restrict yourself to the domain you are most comfortable in and reach out to other people in your community for specific expertise. (18:45) Chris – People are no longer buying a WordPress website. They are looking for a platform or business opportunity and need a solution. A consultant needs to adapt with the times and help a client get results with a small investment. You can advise but have resources available to offer a solution. (33:37) Chris has noticed that the market ranges. His strategy is to get the client to build the site and then let them come back when they realize they need a more robust solution. It is possible to address the market. (35:56) Forecasting the Future of WordPress: Davinder – Thinks the WordPress community will remain as it is now but free features will be offered on WordPress.com. WordPress has never been a good product maker but has built a strong open source community around WordPress.org. WordPress.com will offer more features that can make Automattic more money. There will always be a blurred message around WordPress.org unless you address the hosting dilemma. (45:34) Jennifer – WordPress.com will continue to grow and compete with WIX and Squarespace and will become easier. WordPress.org will still continue for the enterprise that needs functionality and full control. There seems to be a divisiveness with Gutenberg around core but it will continue to grow. (46:56) Chris – WordPress.com is trying to have its cake and eat it too with 3rd party plugins. The support channels may end up being stressed because of the knowledge needed to support all those plugins. The open source WordPress.org will still see a struggle in the marketplace around the branding issue. (49:12) Matt – sees WordPress.com becoming more of an app like experience. WordPress.org may be selling and supporting functionality to WordPress.com. Features may be offered for a cost through the application with a 3rd party marketplace being expanded. (51:20) To Keep in Touch: Jennifer: Jennifer Bourn Bourn Creative Jennifer on Twitter Davinder: Davinder Singh Kainth Davinder on Twitter Smart Web Creators Chris Badgett Chris Badgett Chris on Twitter WordCamp Portland Maine Episode Resources: Prestige Conference Teachable Gutenberg Troy Dean Astra OceanWP Elementor Stripe Beaver Builder Slack James Rose Zoom To Stay in Touch with Episode Guests: Watch the panel discussion on Matt's YouTube channel. To stay connected with the Matt Report, head on over to mattreport.com/subscribe. If you like the show, please leave a 5 Star review over on the Matt Report on iTunes. ★ Support this podcast ★

Matt continues with Season 8 with the second roundtable episode talking to Jennifer Bourn, Davinder Singh Kainth and Chris Badgett. This panel represents the thought leaders in the WordPress community and they have been working in the WordPress space for a long time by adapting to the changes in WordPress that are impacting their businesses. They finish the episode with projections of WordPress.com and WordPress.org. (more…)

This episode is all about automation to onboard your clients and keep them happy throughout the web design process. Jennifer and I chat about using a hands-off system to educate your clients before you start work, help them through the process, let them know when their input will be required and more. It's an amazing […]

This episode is all about automation to onboard your clients and keep them happy throughout the web design process. Jennifer and I chat about using a hands-off system to educate your clients before you start work, help them through the process, let them know when their input will be required and more. It’s an amazing ... Read more

Jennifer Bourn is the founder of Bourn Creative and creator of the Profitable Project Plan. She’s also a freelancer who’s doing it right. She has worked out the perfect system to get and manage client projects; in this episode we’re going to talk all about how she built it. Show Notes Jennifer Bourn Profitable Project […] The post Jennifer Bourn and Profitable Project Plan appeared first on How I Built It.

Jennifer Bourn is an award-winning website designer. She also runs her own small business. At the beginning of 2011, her web design business ate up all of her time. 100+ hour work weeks were the norm. Travel (her passion) was impossible. Stress was high. Important tasks were falling through the cracks. Then, during her annual business retreat, she created a simple system to help onboard her new customers. Instead of repeating herself, she sent a series of automated emails that: set expectations outlined the project requested specific information sent useful tips and pretty much delighted all of her customers. Her automated email onboarding system worked so well, she added it to other parts of her business. In 1 year Jennifer was able to year cut her 100+ hour work week, filled with admin and email, to a 30-hour work week where she can focus on the thing she does best... design beautiful websites. I love this story so much. Listen in to find out exactly how Jennifer managed to: save time increase profits provide a better service by creating simple client management systems for her web design company. These automations worked when she played, didn't need to be managed and never let any step slip through the cracks. Enjoy! In this episode we cover: Specific automation tools. How to scale without hiring. What you need to do before creating your first system. Why systems can give you the confidence to raise your rates. Where to find time to create your systems. Quotables: "I was surprised by the amount of information I had to repeat to my clients." "You can't delegate crap unless you have a system for people to follow. Otherwise, you are just setting everyone up for failure." "Systems will boost profitability in your business." "The larger clients you get, the less automation the appreciate [but we still use the same systems, just took out the automation]." "You have to work on your business, not in your business." "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." -  Maya Angelou Links and resources mention: Zapier - Connect apps and automate workflows. It's like the duct tape of the internet. MailChimp - Email marketing automation. AgileCRM - Contact management and sales automation. Ryan Clover - Zack's amazing web developer. TextExpander – Expand custom keyboard shortcuts into frequently-used text and pictures. TextExpander podcast #010 Emyth - famous book on small business systems Emyth podcast #012 Work The System MemberPress - membership plugin for WordPress AffiliateWP - affiliate program plugin for WordPress Chris Lema - smart WordPress developer Profitable Project Plan (aff link) - Jennifer's full system and training in a 12-week starting January 23, 2018 Client Captivation Webinar - Thursday, January 18, 2018, at 12:00 pm Pacific Time Relationship Engine – A private Facebook community to help service-based entrepreneurs get more clients. – zacharysexton.com/relationship Connect with Zack and Jennifer: Jennifer's Twitter: @jenniferbourn Jennifer LinkedIn: /in/jenniferbourn Jennifer Website: jenniferbourn.com Zack's Twitter: @zwsexton Zack's LinkedIn: /in/zacharysexton Leave iTunes Review: zacharysexton.com/review Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Overcast, PocketCast or your favorite podcast player. It’s easy, you’ll get new episodes automatically, and it also helps the show gain exposure. The shownotes can be found at zacharysexton.com/49

In this episode, Jennifer Bourn, lead organizer of WordCamp Sacramento (among other things), will discuss encouraging public speaking from the meetup to the camp and beyond.The post WPblab EP84 – Encouraging Speaking at Your Local Meetup w/ Jennifer Bourn appeared first on WPwatercooler. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Attracting and working with clients can be challenging. Implement the right practices and processes, though, and you can design a stellar small business and lifestyle. That's what Jennifer and Brian Bourn have done with their agency, Bourn Creative. They purposefully keep the operation small, and yet have set things up for both maximum profitability and... Listen to episode

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. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Launch your new site today! 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 ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes 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.

In this episode we discuss WordCamp Sacramento 2016, about half of the normal WP-Tonic round-table panel were presenting at this year’s Sacramento WordCamp event and we all had a great-time. We would like to say that Jennifer Bourn, the organizing team and the weekend’s volunteers did an amazing job!   Everyone on our panel this week was in attendance at WordCamp Sacramento 2016. Sallie, Kim, and Jonathan all gave presentations as speakers, and John was part of the organizing team. Here is our recap of Sacramento WordCamp 2016. Episode 136 Table of Contents 0:00 Intros 2:01 WordPress News Story #1: 25 Things I Learned as an Organizer of a WordCamp by SanJeev Mishra https://sanjeevmishra.com/things-learnt-wordcamp-nashik-2016/ 14:15 WordPress News Story #2: WP REST API Content Endpoints Officially Approved for Merge into WordPress 4.7 https://wptavern.com/wp-rest-api-officially-approved-for-merge-into-wordpress-4-7 21:04 Main Story: Recap of WordCamp Sacramento 2016 21:28 Sallie's presentation on Flexbox and what other presentations she enjoyed 23:05 Kim's presentation on Learning Management Systems and the hallway track 26:03 What presentations Jonathan enjoyed on Saturday 31:16 Sallie's observations from the Happiness Bar on Sunday 33:49 The presentations John saw during WordCamp weekend 35:34 The surprising thing John and the Beaver Builder team have in common 36:07 The positive reactions everyone had from this WordCamp 38:31 John's interesting takeaways from the Happiness Bar 41:09 Kim's takeaways from WordCamp Sacramento 2016 42:05 Audience reactions to Jonathan's presentation on podcasting with WordPress 44:08 When to expect WordCamp Sacramento 2017 45:17 Podcast outros   =================== Links mentioned during the show: Sacramento WordCamp 2016 https://2016.sacramento.wordcamp.org/ Tate Barber: My Time At WordCamp Sacramento https://medium.com/@tatemz/my-time-at-wordcamp-sacramento-490202b587a5#.yazwfp1ov   ===================   Find more bonus content for this episode at the WP-Tonic website: https://www.wp-tonic.com/podcast/136-wordcamp-sacramento-2016-review/   ===================   Subscribe to WP-Tonic on iTunes   https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/wp-tonic-wordpress-podcast/id893083124?mt=2 =========== WP-Tonic is a WordPress support and maintenance service, and publishers of a twice weekly business-focused WordPress podcast where we talk with some of the most successful people in WordPress development, business, and online marketing.      

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. Rainmaker.FM is Brought to You By Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Launch your new site today! 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 ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes 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.

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 By Discover why 201,344 website owners trust StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. 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 ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes 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.

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 ... Download MP3Subscribe by RSSSubscribe in iTunes The Show Notes Follow Rebecca on Twitter RebeccaGill.com Web Savvy Marketing Web Savvy Marketing Themes 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, 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.

Both Brian and Jennifer Bourn have been on the show before, but this is the first time I've had them on the podcast together. I've had the opportunity to sit down for a number of "one on one" conversations with the Bourns over the past few years and every time I walk away both challenged and inspired. The Bourns just celebrated their 10th year in business and they've learned most things the hard way over time. What they've learned though is the art of being intentional with scheduling to meet the delicate balance between running a successful company and being present as a family. Tune in for a truly enjoyable and frank conversation with the Bourns.

Attention WordPress agency owners…or hopeful owners! In today's episode, I sit down with Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative and hash out what it takes to go from freelancer mode to agency mode. One of the lessons I'd like you to take away from this chat is sharpening your onboarding process. That subtle, yet oh-so-important phase from the first e-mail contact up to price negotiations round. We'll cover that and more in today's episode! Interview with Jennifer Bourn Can you purchase one specific software package and get the magic key to organizing your business, getting more clients and generating more revenue? Acquiring a software package is just a the first step to creating a path or process called client onboarding. As Jennifer Bourn explains, she spent a year setting up the software package she selected for Bourn Creative with heaps of customized materials. She built a procedure to escort her carefully screened new clients through their journey of creating and launching their new website. Listening options Itunes:subscribe to MattReport Stitcher:subscribe to MattReport Viewing What was discussed during the conversation between Matt and Jennifer Bourn (Times correspond to video) 2:00 When did you change your mindset from being in the freelancer world to the agency world? 3:45 How important is trust when you are bringing on freelancers or part time employees? 6:10 What do you look for when bringing on a developer to a project 8:30 How do you introduce the team concept to the client? 10:45 What is your new client onboarding process like? 14:00 How and when did you realize you needed to charge for discovery process with clients? 17:00 What are the red flags that stop you from working with a client? 18:30 How do you structure your payment terms? 21:00 How did you decide that Infusionsoft was the proper long term solution for your business? 23:00 How does Infusionsoft replace the need for hiring additional staff members? 31:00 What is your best channel to find new clients? 32:20 What other software do you use that pairs well with Infusionsoft? List of Resources Mentioned InfusionSoft Prestige Conference (Matt and Jennifer are both presenting) Examples of User Onboarding for popular Apps   Join Matt Report Pro and connect in with our Mastermind Group Call ★ Support this podcast ★

Attention WordPress agency owners…or hopeful owners! In today’s episode, I sit down with Jennifer Bourn of Bourn Creative and hash out what it takes to go from freelancer mode to agency mode. One of the lessons I’d like you to take away from this chat is sharpening your onboarding process. That subtle, yet oh-so-important phase from the first e-mail contact up to price negotiations round. We’ll cover that and more in today’s episode! (more…)

  In this episode of the podcast, Jennifer Bourn teaches us everything she has learned over the last nine years of servicing small businesses and why constant communication and active project management has been the key to success. Bourn Creative raise their rates every six months and seem be getting busier and busier. Listen to the interview to learn how they do it. The post Episode #35 – Jennifer Bourn from Bourn Creative appeared first on WP Elevation.

Jennifer Bourn, Creative Director of Bourn Creative talks about how to understand what your clients want, what niching down means when you can't define your avatar and how to use Twitter to connect weeks ahead of time with the people you'll be meeting at conferences. Also, she shares how to create evangelists for your brand, how to grow your business without going into debt and how to generate leads from your booth when sponsoring events. For pictures and more, go to: http://borntoinfluence.com/JenniferBourn

Jennifer Bourn, Creative Director of Bourn Creative talks about how to understand what your clients want, what niching down means when you can't define your avatar and how to use Twitter to connect weeks ahead of time with the people you'll be meeting at conferences. Also, she shares how to create evangelists for your brand, how to grow your business without going into debt and how to generate leads from your booth when sponsoring events. For pictures and more, go to: http://borntoinfluence.com/JenniferBourn

One of my favorite aspects of my podcast is the interviews I get to do! (what... did you think I was going to say something about how funny I think I am? :-) ) Even though I'm the one getting in touch with the interviewee it's still fun when we finally connect on Skype for the actual interview. With many of the interviews it's the first time we've actually spoken outside of a conversation via email or social media. That was the case with Jennifer Bourn of BournCreative.com. The funny thing is that Jennifer and her husband and business partner Brian live all of an hour away from where I live. Which, I'll get a chance to meet them in person next week as they invited me to speak at the Sacramento WordPress Meetup and of course I said "absolutely!" (I'll let you know how that goes, it should be fun). One of the (many) reasons I had asked Jennifer if she would be up for an interview is because I had seen Jennifer at a conference or two in the past (I think it was Ali Brown's "Shine" in 2010), had seen her site (love her work) but had noticed that they had started popping up in the #GenesisWP conversations on Twitter as they were now using Genesis for all their client work. Most people  in the "Genesis" community aren't part of the "Internet Marketing" scene (for lack of a better description -for the life of me I can't think of a better way to explain that). Because I knew Jennifer was also part of that community I thought it would be a great  interview to show a successful merging of two styles of business. After my recent post "The Real Housewives of WordPress" where I talked about the different 'perceived' communities within WordPress I think you'll get a good insight on how you can be a part of whatever community you create and want to be a part of after listening to my interview with Jennifer. [sws_grey_box box_size="550"] "Don't network where your competitors are." - Jennifer Bourn [/sws_grey_box]I love hearing the stories behind the business and the brand - especially the bumps and bruises along the way (we all want to hear we're not the only ones, right?). Jennifer didn't hold back anything. ;-) From transitioning her business as a solo entrepreneur to having her husband join full time (and he started from scratch in terms of coding and development and is now brilliant at it. I know, kind of nauseating...), it's all here. And because I'm such a geek about quotes (not sure if I've ever shared that tidbit here, but I am.... I have 3 different quotes on my monitors as I type this) I grabbed a few from the interview that struck a nerve with me, the first one being above in regards to not networking where your competitors are as well as the quote I started the podcast with today: [sws_grey_box box_size="550"] "If you aren't saying No 50% of the time you're not charging enough." - Jennifer Bourn [/sws_grey_box]A third and final quote that certainly left me with something to think about: [sws_grey_box box_size="550"] "Get out from behind your computer." - Jennifer Bourn [/sws_grey_box]I'm not really a shy person and I like to think I'm pretty social, but I can also get caught up in the day to day "stuff" of life and can easily paint a picture for myself that going to something or networking is a pain (need to get ready, drive into San Francisco, blah, blah, blah.. I know, poor me)- not anymore. As long as I don't have a prior commitment? I'm in. Which is why I said yes to speaking at the Sacramento Meetup next week. And of course if you're in the area we'd love to have you join us. Register for the Sacramento WordPress Meetup Here. Like Jennifer mentioned in the podcast, Bourn Creative is hiring! If you think you might be a good fit for this amazingly creative team, check out the job listing and apply today. Enjoy the interview! Links mentioned in this episode BournCreative.com Job Listing at Bourn Creative