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Investments in You

January 4, 2017

The Year of 2017 Goals for Petersen Media Group

Stock city imageWe all need goals to improve day to day and year to year. The famous quote about overestimating what you can do in a year and overestimating for five or ten years is often attributed to Bill Gates. The quote is actually about change:

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction. -Bill Gates

I say this is even more a reason to set goals: the world doesn’t stand still for you — or anyone — so you can gain an advantage or sort out any messes you have with the comfort of knowing things will be waiting for you as they were. As a reminder, I looked for a post a couple of years ago when I knew I said something about being beyond where we dreamt of being… but it’s already almost been three years since I wrote this:

Where were you FIVE YEARS ago? THREE YEARS? Are you more or less where you wanted to be “someday?” For me, I’m well beyond where I would be by now. I hit that just TWO YEARS into business when my wife quit her job. I’m actually living well into my fantasyland from five years ago.

Take two minutes and think of how much was different in your life from three years ago.

Did you make any goals or take any actionable steps to get where you are today or did it all just happen with what we call “blind luck?” You don’t need to answer that because we all know the answer to that.

What is a goal?

Goals done properly have 5 properties:

  1. they are measurable (don’t set a goal you can’t measure)
  2. they are specific (how much money, how many pounds?)
  3. they have a start and end time (you should have short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals)
  4. they are achievable (you can’t set a short-term goal of being CEO at your Fortune 500 job if you just started in the mail room)
  5. they are realistic (don’t aim to make $10,000/mo more if you don’t change your job or get a new one or start a business)

My goals

2017 goals:

  • take a walk every weekday, weather & health permitting
  • include a junior developer into my workflow before the end of summer
  • go to Busch Gardens with my wife on a date once per month
  • take my boys on an all-guy date once per month
  • start building models again – build at least one Mustang of each generation
  • release two premium themes and two premium plugins for GenesisThe.me in 2017
  • finish my bootstrap business course and release one more course in 2017
  • net $60k in client/service work and $50k with GenesisThe.me in 2017 – that’s bottom line
  • upgrade the business computer before July

5-year goals:

  • be 100% in the products space
  • figure out the employee/contractor thing to work on the business, not in it
  • sell the townhome and get a single-unit home to match this unit: a pond view, cul-de-sac, gated community
  • buy a 2-4 year old Mustang GT 5.0 or greater with cash
  • see the Grand Canyon via long RV road trip with the family
  • celebrate 15 years of marriage, big

10-year goals:

  • sell the business for enough to live comfortably
  • start something new
  • buy a Porche 911 – any year, reasonable condition, with cash
  • celebrate 20 years of marriage, HUGE

Investments in You

January 3, 2017

Forever to Finish, Gone in the Blink of an Eye: 2016

Wow! What a year!

For me, my family, and this business, 2016 was quite the year to remember. Let’s dig into the year in reverse topic order.

Petersen Media Group in 2016

Back in May I wrote about how I almost destroyed the business with a series of decisions and some health issues in 2015. The TL;DR version is that I neglected my self-promotion, growth, and family in 2015 with a partnership that, executed better, would have accomplished each of those much better.

Pretty early in the year, I started a video course for here, which I need to get cracking on the final 2/3 of. Man, the rest of the year really did fly by.

In July I got a series of projects that got the snowball rolling for the rest of the year with new relationships and skills. Right now, I have more ideas and projects to get moving on than I can shake a stick at, so I’m mentoring a padawan learner to work closely with me this summer to tackle a good portion of the coding and getting him real-world experience to decide what to do with the start of his career.

In the final closing moments of WordCamp Tampa 2016, I launched my first premium product into the WordPress space at my GenesisThe.me shop. I worked feverishly all weekend to squash bugs in my Genesis framework starter child theme for developers, which I cleverly named GenesisThe.me Developer Starter. See? I told you it was creative. That weekend, I also began work on a plugin for the shop and planned on launching a second theme in December, which is starting to look a lot like January now.

Family in 2016

Just a few days into the year, we were supposed to be saying goodbye to our newborn foster baby. Then a series of events happened that sat me on the couch late at night creating a “Surprise Adoption” site to raise emergency funds to secure our status with the adoption agency as no longer foster parents but adoptive parents. 11 months later, we found ourselves in the courtroom being sworn in to affirm our second son as a forever Petersen. We’re forever grateful to the over 140 people who donated on the site… and the approximately 50-60% of them who were WordPress-related. This community rocks!

Over the summer, my wife became a US citizen after moving here as a toddler… and then she got to vote in her very first presidential election. Great timing!

Before the election, we celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary and our sons’ 7th and 1st birthdays. It’s been pretty much non-stop planning and partying since September in our house. If you follow me on Instagram (it’s a private account), you have seen the pics.

Personal

So the end of 2015 ended with me in the ER’s Trauma Room 1 with my heart racing out of control and a few days in the hospital while they sorted things out. The day we were getting adoption papers on our phones was the morning we were sitting in pre-op for a heart catheterization to permanently solve my racing heart issue. Yeah, that’s how we started out the year.

Over the course of the year being a dad of two boys and husband to a wife taking care of two boys while I tried to spend as much time at my desk as possible, I learned a few things about myself, which will be detailed in the following post with my 2017 goals.

On a final note that you won’t find in many year-end posts, with the help of some family seeing there was an issue (though they didn’t know what it was – more like, “figure it out”), I stopped taking prescription opiates for my headaches cold turkey two days after Thanksgiving. Something had been “off” with my personality for a year, which is how long we’d had big changes (see above), but also when I switched from short-acting to long-acting pain meds. So I quit them.

Stay tuned for more

That’s it for last year. Next up: 2017 goals

Investments in You

May 7, 2016

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?

Investments in You

October 16, 2015

Pro-tip: Care Less What Others Think About You

Unlike my usual self, I don’t have an elegant way to enter into this thought, that you should care less what others think of you, so let’s dive in with the belief assumptions of my content’s stance.

  1. I’m not talking about your integrity or public opinion about what kind of person you are. This is about assumptions and first impressions of the superficial sort.
  2. Money is a tool. It buys things. If you put more into it than that, I believe you’re putting too much into it.
  3. The love of money is the root of evil. See above. To strive for money (wealth, reserve, margin) as a tool to serve your family, friends, and those in need is not “love of money.”
  4. Generosity is a muscle. Children are wonderful givers. Most of them. Every time our son gets more than one of something, and sometimes when it’s only one thing, he wants to give it to me or his mom. Stickers, candy, or money. It doesn’t matter. We lose this as adults unless it’s encouraged or exercised.
  5. You can’t help those in financial need unless you have margin. Time and/or wealth is needed. Notice “The Good Samaritan” rented a room for the injured man and told the innkeeper to provide everything needed. He was good for it. He had margin.

With those in place, we can dig into the basis of where this is going. I’ll come out and say that I compare myself with others too often. It’s a fault of mine and it’s one that was learned and reinforced for decades. Only in the last 3-5 years have I actively tried to shake that and I still fail just about every week. I’m in an industry of successful people. I often don’t see myself as “a success” until I’m suddenly reminded how many people know me when I attend a conference. It’s like, “Oh, right… I’ve been doing this a decade in a niche and have now taught 3 Treehouse courses. I forgot. Again.” Still getting used to not being anonymous except to my friends.

At least I don’t have a big head from it, eh?

Anyway, those comparisons are my modern day “keeping up with the Jones'” that is so cliche. They got the Smart TV, they got the MacBook Pro Retina the day it came out, they got the new Mustang GT that is sooooooo on my birthday list (right!). But it’s more subtle for some geeks, especially the professional geeks.

It’s not necessarily the latest and greatest, but it’s more than what it takes to get the job done. Would I love a new Mac Pro? Heck yeah! I have a 2011 Mac Mini. When someone had a spare 2013 Air and remembered that my laptop is a 2008, they gave me the Air… would that have happened if I over-extended myself (or even not) and had a new(er) laptop? Not a chance. I lugged my 90-minute laptop to 6 WordCamps and finally just used my iPad Mini for one. It was too embarrassing to lug my white MacBook around.

I cared too much about what people thought about me. “Hey, isn’t he supposed to be successful? Why does he have that old thing?”

If I had replaced it, we wouldn’t have had margin. That would have stressed my family for the sake of impressing people who wouldn’t be impressed. Everyone has the silver unibody Macs now. That’s not an excuse to justify it.

You can spend all of your margin and go into debt very easily just trying to keep the pace with people you have no right to compare yourself with. One person I compared myself to looks young… and then I found out he is a decade older than me. It’s not even being fair to myself to do that. Look at where you were 10 years ago and compare it to now. If you’re like most people who improve every month, it’s cruel to turn around and try to compare yourself to someone 10 years your senior.

If I bought that new Mustang while I have a working car that gets the job done (which I wouldn’t do because that depreciation would just be plain stupid), more people would be impressed by it than I would gain in increased pleasure driving it over my existing car. It would serve to impress people I don’t know who see it in the parking lot when I’m inside. How do I know? Because I look at and usually take a photo of every one I see in parking lots.

So I have a few tips to curb your spending related to keeping up to an imaginary, moving line pace:

  • Until you have 3-6 months of expenses saved for an emergency (margin), don’t buy things over $5-20 unless you need them. Knowing what is a need and what is a want is huge. Entertainment can be a Redbox or Netflix night instead of a $12-30 movie night.
  • Let’s mention that emergency fund again.
  • Be content with what you have as long as it gets the job done. I can work myself into a frenzy waiting for my computer to do something, or I can be thankful that when I finish this project, I get paid. Would spending $4k on a computer really increase my income by $4k very quickly? Probably not unless I was doing a bunch of video or photo editing for paying clients.
  • Don’t look at sales fliers/emails and stay away from Amazon until you are buying something you need.
  • Enjoy your friends’ cool things instead of buying your own. Why buy a $1200 gun when your friend will let you shoot his any time you go to the range with him? Borrow movies or share libraries on Vudu. Get your graphic novels from the library.
  • Live on a budget. Don’t think of it as restricting. It’s a way to tell your money where to go and an easy way to give yourself permission to spend wisely without any hesitation. “Oh there’s $50 in entertainment left this month, so this $2 Redbox is no problem.”

So if you want to have enough margin to build wealth for your family and others, you have to care less what others think about you.

Investments in You

August 15, 2015

Never Stop Learning Because Knowledge Is Power

For years I’ve been preaching about being an expert, not a jack of all trades. There are several reasons for this to run down quickly.

  • Experts are called when no one else can fix or build something, so they command higher pay.
  • Experts stay booked if they also do quality work and know how to keep clients happy, so long as their niche can support a full schedule. Even as relatively rare as nuclear power plants are, the best nuclear machinist engineers are called all over the world for their trade.
  • Jacks of all trades can do lots of work, but as soon as something gets complex, they either tap out or disappoint their clients. I get those projects more than should ever happen to good people.

One of the key ways to jump to the next level is to keep learning. Hone your skills in an area until you are confident and efficient. What I’ve done for years is learning at the school of hard knocks by solving client problems. Hunting for snippets or StackExchange solutions has sufficed for me so far, but recently, I’ve needed to fill in the gaps that method created.

a quick story

I started school in Ohio in one of the state’s highest-ranking K-12 schools. My Algebra teacher was a college professor at the community college at night and her husband was a tenured professor of math at BGSU half an hour away. He actually taught our class how to do quadratic equations without showing any work one day when he substituted for her. I was doing really well in Algebra.

We moved to Florida after the first semester of my 10th grade. I’d started Algebra in the regular track because schools in rural Ohio were college-prep, so there was no such thing as an honors program, AP, or anything over a 4.0 GPA. I was reading books and falling asleep in Algebra in Florida, so my parents got me into several honors classes. The problem? I’d missed 6 weeks of their curriculum, which was actually trigonometry.

I struggled for the rest of my math life. I failed College Algebra I. I re-took it the next semester and attended every class in the front 5 rows, did EVERY homework problem in the book, all of the extra credit, and finished with a 109%. I applied the same dedication to Calculus I the next semester and had to drop out before the first exam. That said, I did get a very high A in both Stats I & II, so my take-away is that I am missing fundamental math blocks.

the same applies to work

Since I’ve learned how to code on my own, I’m also missing large blocks in programming. I’m comfortable calling myself a developer but that’s because I’m a coder but I’m clearly not a programmer. Some days I spend an hour or two… or two days… trying to solve a problem in my code or someone’s code I inherited. Arrays, if/else/elseif/for/foreach, and loops give me fits because I know what works, but I didn’t know why.

Queue Treehouse. I got a year subscription on a really good deal from AppSumo a few years ago. In June of 2014, Zac Gordon put out a request for any Genesis developers who were interested in guest teaching and we had met and hit it off at WordCamp Orlando a year or two prior, so he had an easy candidate.

As a result of teaching, I learned a lot, because there’s no better learning tool than needing to teach something. I also started taking a lot of courses. In the last year, I’ve taken Sass, PHP, Git, Grunt, Console Basics, and also taught Modern WordPress Workflow and an intermediate Genesis Theme Development course.

learning pays off

One of the most exciting courses I’ve seen in a while is Hello Tonya’s Apprentice course at WordPress Developer’s Club. https://wpdevelopersclub.com/ I just heard about it on Sunday and have already dived in. I joined the Slack team and have already helped and been helped. It boasts some pretty big names in WordPress development and everyone is pretty big on getting developers a certification underway and ensuring a common knowledge base level. Object-Oriented Programming? I don’t know it yet, but I sure want to.

If you do, then you have to join her 10-person limit course with plenty of one-on-one time and real-world projects. The Apprentice program is on my list as soon as we replace some equipment and I ensure I have a beginner’s knowlege of some more languages and concepts.

So what are you waiting for? What are you learning? How has your programming or coding career evolved over your career? Let’s chat.

Investments in You

December 16, 2014

New Roles: Stop Working IN Your Business

Sometimes life moves at a crazy pace for the better, though that sort of activity can be detrimental to your life and health if you don’t have a plan. Thankfully, I have a plan! Ever since we made the decision to team up with Mason James’ team at The WP Valet, I’ve been forced to make plans.

  • What work will I be doing for PMG now?
  • What work will I be doing for WPV?
  • How will we structure compensation?
  • What does the future look like?

workingFor too long, I’ve been working IN my business instead of working ON my business. Sure, I have days or weekends – like every WordCamp – that makes me think outside of my very limiting box. But then life gets back into stride when the next week begins (or the week after that because of the funk of data-induced paralysis). I’ll implement a new service, remove a batch of clients, or change some major tool. But unless I did work, work didn’t get done. Money didn’t come in. I owned my job.

When I started having CEO lunches with Mason, I still remember his personal shift about 3 lunches in. He started to think about strategy, writing posts, and delegate more duties. There I was, a proud solopreneur sitting on the other side of the booth thinking to myself, “that part of having a team sure must be nice… time to think while others work.” I wondered what I could do for my business if I wasn’t wearing 30 hats.

What if my work was ONLY what I was great at?

What is work?

Since that lunch, I’ve ruminated on that and formed a new view of work and business. It’s confession time, but you’re used to that by now with me. I’m not the best developer. I’m not even close to being the best developer for Genesis. What I do do with extreme passion and ability is to pick a client who wants to work with a professional-grade business to get what they need, especially when what they want isn’t what they need.

Most people want someone to tell them when their idea sucks. Gently. You can tweet that if you want.

More and more, with the scope of my projects, I’ve been gathering an advanced developer or two to do tricky parts going into a plan to avoid a freak-out.

Enter: team skills. Oh. My. Wow!

What happens when you have a good plan, a solid foundation, and then bring in another expert or two to do all of the coding? You become a project manager and strategist. I have no issue in giving mad props to someone who comes up beside me and does what they do better than I can. That’s THEIR specialty. I have become a developer by necessity the same way you become a landlord when you own two houses because your job got transferred.

Once I started to tap dedicated coders, I had to figure out what I was going to do with my days. I wasn’t coding. It took about an hour to realize some changes to make to future-proof things and some new areas to start throwing spaghetti at to see what stuck.

Now I’m busier than ever again.

Remember: Know Thyself

Look at my WordCamp Slide 001 – if you don’t know yourself, you don’t really know anything. I know that I stand for integrity and quality. My grandpa lived by that for over 80 years and I aim to keep that legacy going.

I don’t have to code to provide that. I now have a close network of people who do that 5x better than I ever will, so I am shifting my focus to the skills that my friends don’t have.

I expect that means I’ll be pasting code into Gists for hints about where I went wrong a LOT less now.

And that’s a good thing. For everyone.

So ask yourself today: am I working IN my business or ON my business?

Investments in You

October 21, 2014

How Eight Years Is Both Forever and (Just) a Day

happy anniversaryI have done a pretty good job keeping this site all professional and not personal, but when I was thinking about where to post this for today, I realized that most of my professional posts are personal anyway. My business is an extension of my life: my values, my ethics, and my relationships.

Well, this is my BIG relationship. Most of you probably don’t know the Mrs. behind Petersen Media Group, but I can assure you that I married way up. When we met, I was full of potential, but a quick label indicating me to be a less ambitious man based on my status at the time would have been warranted. Shoot, a lot of people still had their doubts as they were eating our wedding cake, I’m sure.

Thinking back on eight years, I simultaneously can’t believe we’ve done all we’ve done in less than a decade and also feel like we’ve hardly begun to grow old together yet. Maybe another 18 foster kids will change that feeling but I’m not ready for a walker quite yet. Maybe a one-story ranch, but not a walker.

While I was a guest at Treehouse filming my course for Genesis Framework Foundations, I took a few moments to write a script and loaded it into the teleprompter and asked my producer and audio tech if we could film something really fast. They gladly obliged and handed this over to me, so Babe, this has been waiting for over a month. I hope you like it.

The funny reality of out business is that Kristin is the one with the business and marketing degree. I’ve got the professional writing degree – the grammar nazi. She’s the organized one; I freak out when my white board has 4 projects and a couple are lingering after I start a new one. She’s the financial whiz; Kristin balances the books while we figure out running a business together. She’s the hobby blogger and I’m the theme developer and site consultant.

Just last week, I went to her completely overreacting about something out of my control and did my best Hulk impression and she calmly smiled and said what she’d do. “I’VE ALREADY DONE THAT! RAAWWWRRRR!!!!” I took a Xanax and went back to work. She’s awesome.

A month ago, we had just come off a 2-month special needs fostering a newborn and I’d just wrapped up about 3 weeks straight with only 3 hours of sleep per night and client work was really getting behind… and so was our income. It was a super happy ending: he was adopted, and I said, “calm down, watch what I’m going to do.” We’ve been sick the last week and all is good because we met our needs about a week and a half ago because she let me ignore the little things and just work.

We balance each other out and my clients are the big benefactors of her input and conversations at dinner and in the car.

It’s more than fair to say that we wouldn’t be where we are today without her input into our business on a regular basis, even though she doesn’t know how to write code or price out a project.

Investments in You

May 26, 2014

Quality Over Quantity: My Escape

ESC - Exclusive Service ClubIt’s been made pretty clear recently that the constants in our lives have a lot of control. We all have the same number of minutes in each day and one brain that can only control so much at once. A lot of us have families that need our attention, sometimes throughout the day. It’s these constants that forced me to look at what I’m doing and ask “can I do this better?”

I scheduled a call with a very successful startup expert and I listened for 30 minutes to ideas and tips until we struck on something.

stretched thin

“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
-Bilbo Baggins The Lord of the Ring

Too many obligations to trade time for money and producing something every month have created a couple of nasty unintended consequences that are unacceptable in my eyes. First, I’ve let a couple of people down with my work or my communication or both. Second, I feel torn separating myself from my family for so much of the day and for so many first time events.

This current model is tied directly with getting time at my desk and being insanely productive, all the while keeping up with my network, my inbox, and just trying to keep up with my writing. (Remember that book I started last January?)

In this situation, I’m often put in a position to choose to help someone new or a loyal long-time (or loyal and infrequent) client. Notes are scattered over my desk after giving up trying to track these things in Evernote. I was sending apologies after someone would e-mail after eight days asking what the status was and I’d completely forgotten about something. That’s not okay!

it is time for a change

It’s time for quality over quantity. My partial dedication to that is clear on my site. Rather than doing a crappy portfolio thrown together or a lot of 900-word posts that no one reads and has room to comment on, I respond to requests for my work and my 50 posts have over 600 comments. This mindset needs to pour over into my workflow with development and my project calendar.

A couple of weeks ago, I pushed <ESC> on Twitter and invited a few long-term clients who could really dig into what I’m aiming for. Now it’s time to write more about it and offer it here. The TL;DR version is: rather than being the last to find out about a client’s plans with their business and site, only to often waste time and money, to partner with me to be an integral part of their support network and take their business to another level through their site.

limited availability

This sort of partnering can’t be done large-scale, so I created the Exclusive Service Club (<ESC>) for just 10 clients if I’m going to get involved to the tune of about 10 hours per month. It is a move to trade new client projects for reserved time with my best clients who want to use my years of experience with WordPress more than building something with WordPress.

who is this for?

One client, from before I was even thinking about starting a WordPress business, is preparing to publish a book. We are going over his site with a fine-toothed comb and ensuring it is up to 2014 snuff, features him in a good light for the book, and putting some new tricks I’ve learned about SEO and mobile design into his 9-month old theme.

Another client has built his site from nothing to several thousand visitors per day, but he’s very meticulous about his SEO and making sure each post looks good. He’s getting some new Schema.org markup on his older theme and we will slowly plan out a new mobile design instead of banging it out and moving on to the next project.

If either of these things sound like things your site could use, let’s talk about it. I’ve created a form at the bottom of this page just for you.

Investments in You

February 2, 2014

Lessons From 5 Years in WordPress Business

2011-09-22February 2nd marked our 5th year in business. What started as moonlighting while working a full-time job and going to night school for my BA turned into a business on Groundhog’s Day in 2009.

That month was kicked off by friends who had businesses and were waiting for me to have enough time to create a nicer WordPress site for them, and I suddenly had all the time in the world to work on sites.

There have been high times and low times. This is actually a low time for us so it felt awkward to write this, BUT IT’S A MILESTONE, and I have faith it will work out. We are doing what we are meant to do, both as individuals and as a family.

Times I conceded I’d get a job if a project didn’t come in by X day and times my wife was insisting she needed to go back to work. Neither of those things came to fruition because the work always came in time.

It’s these times that make me look back at epiphanies like I had a few months ago about where we are now compared to where we thought we could be by now, 5 years ago.

Where were you FIVE YEARS ago? THREE YEARS? Are you more or less where you wanted to be “someday?” For me, I’m well beyond where I would be by now. I hit that just TWO YEARS into business when my wife quit her job. I’m actually living well into my fantasyland from five years ago.

Lessons

I’ve learned a few lessons along the way that are important to remember. Remember where you came from and don’t abandon those people – and don’t get too busy to help the people who first believed in you when you were a risk. It’s a very good idea to give to the community and don’t charge for everything, but don’t go hungry because you helped a friend – business is business. Obey the Golden Rule – everyday. Believe in yourself and surround yourself with those who believe in you. Have trustworthy people you can bounce ideas off of or ask questions before making a major decision – wisdom in the counsel of many if the counselors are wise.

Stats & facts

I spent a little time and compiled some stats and facts from our first 5 years in business and in 2013:

  • 228 clients in total since 2009
  • 1,300 invoices since 2009
  • 313 invoices for site development since 2009
  • $342,000 in gross revenue since 2009
  • 4 hosts and 5 servers used since 2009
  • 4 WordCamps attended since 2009
  • 8 desk moves since 2009, including not having one
  • 4 desk moves in 2013
  • 2 WordCamps attended in 2013
  • 75 clients served in 2013
  • 24 full sites launched in 2013
  • 260 invoices in 2013 (1 per weekday)
  • 27 sites migrated to WP Engine in 2013
  • 1,654,905 visitors to all of my hosted sites LAST MONTH

Thank you all for the opportunity to serve you and serve with you. I can’t imagine doing anything else right now.

Investments in You

January 31, 2014

Being More Authentic

sunshine-flowersI’m pretty big on avoiding people who aren’t authentic. I know people who are sunshine and blowing bubbles in fields of green, allergy-free grass every day, but you know there’s a hurricane in the area. When things don’t line up, I get annoyed that they’re not being honest with their friends.

Then I was faced with the brutal reality that I’ve been doing the same thing.

I’m sorry.

When I greet people now, I’m not going to ask them, “how are you doing?” or “how is your day?” Those questions are too easily dismissed with a formed-by-habit, “fine” and don’t connect us any closer, other than I was polite enough to ask about them. Instead, I’ll ask a more thought-provoking question.

What’s been the highlight of your day/week/month/year?”

We’re not alone on this journey. Let’s connect. So…

What’s been the highlight of your January? Is there anything I can do to improve your February? Talk to me in the comments. I won’t bite.

Investments in You

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