Petersen Media Group

We help you spend less time ensuring your site is there, and more time making it profitable.

How to Enqueue FontAwesome to Use the Latest Version

FontAwesome
I’m currently creating a custom theme for a client who is also on Rainmaker. Since it’s a closed system and we can’t willy-nilly go in and edit the theme after submission, I wanted to always use the latest version of FontAwesome. What a shame to use outdated social icons in a few months. The icons for Instagram and Google + have both recently changed since I started some of my longer-running projects, so here is the URL to enqueue:

//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/latest/css/font-awesome.min.css

You’re welcome.

Why Partnerships Often Don’t Sail

sailingA reader asked me a good question last week: why don’t you like partnerships? A valid question, and since I’m so big on teaching how I do business, I decided to explain it fully instead of simply answering a comment that a few people might see.

A partnership is like a marriage in many ways. Immediately abandoning any attempt to avoid the obvious, 50% of Americans can’t pick a spouse to weather the storms (or the weekend), so don’t expect any better outcomes in a partnership.

There are many bad reasons to form a partnership, but there are a few valid reasons. The problem lies in the formation of a legal entity to accomplish a common goal because, like marriages, the people involved are often unequally yolked. One of the members of my mastermind group said it this way recently, “I spent as much time working on the partnership relationship than I was doing actual work.”

That directly relates to my constant brain state expecting to be interrupted when I was on a team, as many hours were spent with interpersonal relationships – building and repairing because people are individuals. What happens when individuals are legally bound to share profits and one of them goes off the range?

The list of things that go wrong in partnerships is long, and it’s sometimes referred to as “the D’s.” Divorce, dementia, drugs, disagreement, death, disaster, disability, etc. One partner has many influences on their life that brings garbage into the business, which makes the whole idea of partnerships very risky.

If one person is the business-minded partner and the other spends frivolously or feels mistreated because they what feels like all of the labor while the other “just emails people and travels to conferences.”

the alternatives

You can work with another person who also owns a business and form an agreement between the two companies, referred to as a joint venture. One person can own the business and the other can be a contractor or employee who benefits from an agreement of profit-sharing, which is financially the same as ownership without the mess if things sour.

You can create a commission or affiliate network among the interested parties. This is the loosest form of partnership, and also the easiest to set up. Commissions would be a percentage of sales (be sure it’s reasonable after expenses, so don’t make commission 50% if you pay a lot up front for hosting or your mail list service). Affiliates are people who get paid for making a sale… so that would be ideal for a sales and marketing expert you don’t need to partner with.

It’s kind of funny, but since I started writing this post, I have heard at least three different sources warn about partnerships. Do some of them work? Sure. Copyblogger (now Rainmaker) is still wildly successful and a lot of doctors and lawyers and some accountants have successful partnerships, but those industries are the only consistent winners of this model.

It’s only prudent to be prudent when considering tying yourself to someone else where your money, reputation, livelihood, sanity, and much more are wrapped up in.

How I Almost Destroyed My Business

When I was playing Little League Baseball, I was the smallest kid on the team, and was relegated to right field most of the time. I really wanted to play infield, but I didn’t have the reach of the other kids and I had a tendency to throw a bit wild under pressure.

One day the coach decided to start grooming me for 2nd base during practice. With drill after drill, I got used to ground balls on the dirt instead of grass and the ball got to our tall first baseman every time, so (finally) in my 3rd year of baseball, I started a home game at 2nd base. To everyone’s surprise, including my own, things went okay and I was able to hold the position for consecutive weeks.

Then all of my hard work came undone.
During one game, the other team had runners on multiple bases quite often. I felt unnerved concentrating on where to go, where to look, where to throw, and “dear God, don’t screw up” with everyone watching. Out of nowhere, a blazing ground ball came bouncing off the left side of the pitcher’s mound my direction and, as it was deciding if it was going to bounce one more time in front of me or not, I glanced to my left and my right to remind myself where the runners were.

I took my eye off the ball.

"Never, ever take your eye off the ball"That’s when the ball hit me in the mouth and broke a tooth I’d knocked out the year before. I was dazed. I was embarrassed. I don’t remember who rescued the ball, but it wasn’t me. I sat out the rest of the game with a busted mouth.

Something changed at practices and the next game. I was afraid of every grounder and started to let down my friends and teammates. Soon, I was back in right field, backing up someone who never let the ball get past him unless it went over or around him.

I lost everything I’d worked for to get out of the outfield.

fast-forward thirty years

After almost six years of growing my business, I was tired of wearing 30 hats but hungry for more (mostly better) work. With more work than I knew what to do with, my biggest stressor was trying to find enough hours to meet everyone’s expectations and my obligations set forth upon receipt of project deposits.

I gained access to a team. While I worked on a project, someone else did development on another, and another. The earning potential was great. We had worked out an arrangement that, if things fell together as I saw it happening, I’d double my income with little more work, if not less work.

Life didn’t work as planned. Over the course of the year working on a team made me more distracted. At home, we had newborn foster after newborn foster, and I was thus sleep deprived and missing meetings and deadlines. In the past, I was always able to work these things out under my own label, but things were different now. I was failing friends and clients and friends’ clients.

Everything became too much after over two months with a newborn we brought home from the hospital (the one we are in the process of adopting now). We resumed our separate ways over missed deadlines affecting others and just days later I had a heart episode that put me in the ER Trauma 1 and a hospital room for 3 days right before Christmas… and heart surgery right after New Year’s. It turned out that I had a heart defect that had likely been affecting my energy and oxygen levels for quite a while.

Something had to change.

My frustrated wife sat me down to talk about why I was insane in the membrane. We finally figured out that I had inadvertently trained my brain to expect to be interrupted. Chats, emails, text messages, tweets, Slack, and tiny people in the house all burst my thought bubbles constantly. I didn’t start tasks (let alone projects) for fear of getting interrupted. I rarely finished anything I started.

With lots of effort, I sorted that out, but there were no projects now. For a year, I had focused on someone else’s business. I stopped writing articles, developing new products, and promoting my primary skills.

I had taken my eye off the ball. Again.

My network thought I was busy with “my job” though we still have no idea why site contacts slowed to a drip and were almost instantly turned off with one email.

what turned it around

Well, I started talking about new ideas and new projects again. The world saw me busy and shaking trees. With that as the only quantifiable change, contacts picked up, the contacts started signing up, and I’m nearly back to having too much work.

It has been a full 4-month process of a humongous pivot to new business. I fall asleep most nights by 8pm, mentally exhausted, but very satisfied in my work once again. With new things coming out, the spark is there and people are excited and talking about them:

  • GenesisThe.me is nearing launch. With just desktop viewport remaining for coding, the only major building blocks unbuilt are documentation, support, and the shop with a demo. I’ve sold 4 limited-edition lifetime updates and support licenses and those people are my early adopters.
  • WordPress learning is in full swing with my Bootstrap Your WordPress Business video series. 5 of the 16 videos are posted, and at a $78 early-bird price, people are taking advantage of the discount before it’s done. I got 4 major sponsors for the series: StudioPress, WP Engine, Gravity Forms, and DesktopServer.
  • Related to my last article on Impostor Syndrome, I’m releasing a premium plugin that will be sold in the theme shop. It’s under tight wraps, but I’ve connected with a Genesis core developer to make sure it’s solid code.
  • Still doing full-site and mini projects, both custom and customized. I’m still one of the few who use mobile-first stylesheets and have positioned myself pretty solidly as a mobile-first advocate for Genesis themes.
  • I’ve taken on several support contracts to supplement projects and add residual income while product sales ramp up. I don’t want very many so I can keep my standards of communication and quality high, so that’s just about at full capacity already.

There you have it. I almost killed my business last year. Have you done something similar and had to start over or did you recover with a reboot?

The Other Side of Impostor Syndrome

Talking about impostor syndrome (IP) became a hot topic in 2015. Did you see it happen? Many posts popped up, as well as several WordCamp and Ruby conference talks.

Most everyone has it, even the egomaniacs in the room, but probably not the meglomaniacs. They take care of that self-image thing way better. I know I have IP and have for well over two decades, until I reach a point of boredom in a position because there is little or nothing else to learn, let alone master. That’s about the time I’d move on to another job. Challenges are fun, so maybe it’s a case of yearning for IP? That’s a discussion for my mental health professional.

For those who are late to the game, IP is the underlying (or more self-aware) sense within yourself that others know more than you do about what you’re doing and you aren’t worthy of your position at your company or in your circle of friends. It’s only a matter of time before they find out you’re a fraud and exile you to live out the rest of your days on Dagobah with Yoda. It prevents you from asking for help (or at least feel ashamed when you do) and tapping the resources of your team or network.

but it doesn’t have to be that way

I’ve been working on a project since October that has been my plan to productize when I got it working. One delay led to another, which led to another, but it’s finally done. Now that it’s done I realized I don’t have the toolset to convert it to a product. There are several gaps in my programming abilities. I’ve also not yet sold a commercial plugin. Stealth Login Page has over 70,000 downloads and 20,000 active installs, but it’s free and just sits in the WP repo for download.

One attitude to have is to look at everyone who knows how to do such a level of programming, but that is focusing on the wrong thing. Those people have spent the time and energy to learn some additional skills that allow such wonderful packages of code.

Someone could also be defeated and give up on a great idea. That’d be a terrible state for me, because ideas come pretty easily for me and have to spend time sorting out which ones are worth pursuing. If that was my default, I’d have only done one Treehouse course, not three… and also would have skipped Modern WordPress Workflow because when that idea happened, 50% or more of it was something I was learning and mastering as we went.

my favorite option

Collaborate. While I don’t believe partnerships are a good idea for something with two people, with one person as the idea/code/IP rights, they can work out commission or profit-sharing to those who help bring it to fruition and/or keep it going. Harness your weaknesses by accessing them in the form of others’ strengths.

Just like joining a team increases the abilities of the individuals nearly exponentially, combining forces for single item projects is a great way to quickly bring something to market… like Andy Wilkerson and I did for Customizer Remove All Parts in 2015. We had that ready in less than a week based on some lines of code I uncovered to do what I wanted to do, and he put them into a plugin and we started marketing it as our free collaboration.

So what’s holding you back? What do you need help with?