May 2014

Quality Over Quantity: My Escape

ESC - Exclusive Service Club It’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.

The Art of Being Trustworthy

trust me Several recent mini-projects that have come my way through referrals who see my About page or seeing my profile listed on a recommended list have come to the same conclusion and they’ve asked for a call to verify their initial impression.

Are you trustworthy?

Each person wants to confirm my claims of keeping clients, preferring long-term relationships with clients, and giving a straight answer. Do you make any claims about yourself or your services on any open channels? What would happen if someone tweeted the world asking what they think of your services?

Over the years I’ve been supporting people using WordPress in various roles, hardly a month goes by that someone doesn’t request help after [insert sob story here]. I’ve had claims that a developer took their money TWICE and they still didn’t get what they asked for. Sometimes it’s just been some organization that gets you to send money and shuts down communication and others are people you’d think would care about their reputation.

So before we continue, ask yourself if you are trustworthy enough for someone to send you a couple thousand dollars, do the work that’s been asked of you, do it to the best of your ability (even if that means calling the cavalry if you’re stuck), and do it in a timely manner?

It should be stated that at the time of this writing, I only know of one or two developers in my circle or whom I’ve noted from incoming projects that it was odd that so-and-so did this to the person I’m talking to. I have also been known to contact said developers to get them to come clean and do the work right or, if I know them, ask them their side of the story.

How to convey your trustworthiness

One case was a particularly jumpy client because she was the one who had been taken to the cleaners twice. Thousands of dollars gone and the site was a wreck. It’d been migrated to WordPress from Blogger and all of her SEO juice was gone. None of the permalinks were right. It wasn’t responsive because it wasn’t done in Genesis – as invoiced and discussed – and was barely “done” at all. It was more like a Blogger dump in a crap theme.

Then came the question, though it wasn’t explicitly asked because she was too polite: “The other person was a WordPress “guru” so how do I know you are who you say you are?”

That really is the question, isn’t it?

Let’s look at some clues about how you can start vetting developers you’re looking at hiring:

When did they register their domain? If it was last month, ask them about it.
How long have they used WordPress? How long have they been in business?
Do they have any plugins/themes? Do they contribute to WordPress core?
Check their social stats. Do any of them indicate a following and a real interest in WordPress and coding or just cats?
Do they server WordPress only or are they jacks of all trades and also do Magento, SquareSpace, Drupal, Joomla, and Expression Engine? They can’t be great at all of them.
Do they write about WordPress for the community. Blog, hello!
Do they have any speaking experience at WordCamps or other blogging or development conferences?
Are they listed on any recommended lists?
Can they produce links to any sites they’ve done that look great on all devices? Look for their info in the footer or stylesheet.

If all else fails, or sometimes a first step for my extroverted friends out there, would be a call to let the voice and cadence convey your intentions and abilities. But beware! If you’re not confident on a call, you won’t be doing yourself any favors. You’d best be unavailable by voice if you don’t exude a great ability and attitude on a call.

How about it? Are you hearing more and more about shysters ripping people off or do you have some additional clues to help someone trying to feel out a developer? Comment away!