Things That Matter Most

Things That Matter Most

Credit Where It’s Due

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Several years ago, I worked at a creative consulting agency that focused on brand strategy and naming for organizations both large and small. Our clients were local non-profits, regional medical centers, multinational technology companies, and all sorts of enterprises in between.

We worked often behind the scenes, building style guides and brand scorecards and nomenclature recommendations that were all later white-labeled by our clients. It was the kind of job where placing a finished piece in your portfolio felt a little disingenuous as, at the end of the day, it had someone else’s name on it.

We were like corporate ghost writers.

Sometimes, though, the projects we worked on required skills outside our areas of expertise. For these projects we hired out to other create firms, subsequently white-labeled their work, and passed things on to the client. I felt a bit guilty as I saw companies like Honda take full and complete credit not only for our work, but for our vendor’s work as well. 1

Once, while working with a large, multinational computing firm I saw a marketing director take credit for a naming idea I had proposed in a team meeting. Their product (currently) wields just shy of 20% of their market. I never wanted individual credit, but having some sort of credit for my team would have helped sooth the launch of their product.

Why Give Credit

There is no worse a feeling than giving your time, sacrificing weekends, compromising time with family, and running yourself into the ground on a project than watching someone else stand up and take credit for your work.

I have worked on teams where we’ve white labeled vendor work before passing it along – we’ve still given them credit in the footnotes of the project, but their name isn’t on the finished product. I’ve worked on teams where clients have white labeled our work before publishing it – often we’ve still gotten credit in project footnotes, readmes, or internal presentations about the project.

I’ve also worked on teams where clients have both white labeled our work and taken sole credit for the project in public. These are the kinds of clients who I’ll never work with again and, if asked for references, will actively condemn partnership with them.

I am very protective of my team. If I ask a team member to sacrifice their evening, or give up their weekend, or take a phone call while they’re on vacation it’s because I truly believe in the quality of the project and that their contribution is vital to its completion. 2 I’ll give them all the credit in the world internally, and also let the client know what lengths we have to go on their behalf because we believe in and value the relationship.

At the end of the day, all I’m expecting is acknowledgment of my team’s contributions. No co-branding, no press releases, no outrageous publish statements. Just when you or your team call out your own contributions, mention the external teams that backed you up and helped drive things through to completion.

Notes:

  1. Particularly when I later saw members of their internal design team use said work as part of their portfolios when applying for and getting jobs in the future. ↩
  2. Note: The times I make such requests from team members are extremely rare and only happen when I’m also giving up personal time and weekends and whatnot. I will never make a request of a team member I’m unwilling to fulfill myself. ↩

7 Things WordPress Developers do Right

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I’ve worked with professionals in several fields, and garnered a pretty opinionated stance on the differences between a few web ecosystems. They’re strong opinions, but they’re rooted in a diverse experience with different pieces of software and the personalities that are best suited to expertise with each.

As a result, I have a fairly high opinion of WordPress developers. The quality of the product, and the stunning community that builds it were what first attracted me to freelancing with WordPress. Given time, they helped attract me to jumping ship from .Net to work full-time on WordPress and PHP.

I recognize a lot of what we, in the WordPress community, do wrong, but I also want to highlight several things we do right.

1. We Understand our Customers’ Problems

WordPress isn’t always the answer, and a majority of savvy WordPress developers recognize this and are willing to say so to their customers. WordPress has a very strong brand, and often the first request out of a client’s mouth is to either use WordPress or explain why we’re not using the software that proudly powers 25% of the Internet to build their site.

Still, WordPress isn’t the answer – the answer is a “streamlined publishing platform” that dovetails neatly with existing workflows. WordPress becomes this due to its highly pluggable nature and the talent of the developers in our industry. We understand that our customers’ problems revolve around publishing and content management workflows, and we adapt our software and approach to fit.

2. We Lead with Technology

Our clients aren’t stupid. They know what WordPress is and the power it holds in the market – it’s a starting point they frequently request by name. But rather than lead with just WordPress, we lead with the flexibility of the platform.

The database is already defined and optimized. User authentication is already set up and provides flexible permissions for any implementation. The content management UI is well-documented and pluggable, allowing for any adaptations the customer might need.

Leading with the flexibility of our tools empowers clients to focus on defining their project needs instead of asking endless questions to build faith in the foundation upon which we’ll be building.

3. We Value Content

Over the past few releases of WordPress, the core team has worked tirelessly to protect the integrity of content. Post locking, asynchronous auto-saves, revision history – these features are all intended to help protect a writer’s content from user or network errors. WordPress also keeps track of the content being edited in a local cache so nothing is lost in the event that the Internet disappears.

Many quality WordPress devs also dogfood their product – in addition to building publishing platforms, we use the same platforms. Frequently. As in every day.

4. We Know our Strengths

I used to work in sales. As a result, I’m a fairly competent salesman if I take a few concerted minutes to shake off the rust before making a sales pitch. Not every engineer is a salesperson, though. One may find her strengths lend more to back-end engineering and delving deeply into heady logic issues – putting this developer face-to-face with a (prospective) client would likely yield awkward silences rather than a sale.

Thankfully, the WordPress community is filled with incredibly smart people who know both their own strengths and their weaknesses. Sales experts focus on business development. API experts focus on back-end engineering. There is little need for anyone to be a jack of all trades, and being able to focus on our strengths makes the community all the stronger.

5. We Know our Customer

WordPress developers, more than developers in other ecosystems, recognize that they are not their customers. We recognize that, while being paid to solve a problem for our direct customer, our responsibility also includes solving problems for our customers’ customers.

How do we increase the visibility of popular articles? How do we lower the barrier to entry for leaving a comment, populating a shopping cart, or passing along a product referral? All of these directly effect our customers, but they also relieve pain points for their customers.

6. We Support our Work

The WordPress.org support forums. The WordPress Stack Exchange. Twitter. Blog posts. Product support forms. The avenues theme and plugin developers expose to customers are many. We don’t always have time to help every single customer – particularly free customers – but we do build out support channels that help support everyone.

7. We Build a Long-term Strategy

If you’ve ever met a WordPress developer without a long-term business strategy, you’ve met someone who won’t be involved in the community for too much longer. Quality developers often have some sort of long-term goal and a strategy for reaching it, be that publishing a book, securing a position with a larger WordPress agency, or publishing and maintaining a premium theme/plugin.

WordPress itself has always had a lengthier trajectory for its development; the plugin and theme markets that both support and build off WordPress also pave the way for well-architected strategic plans. We ask every day whether or not WordPress has remained relevant and competitive – carrying that conversation on as it pertains to our WordPress-derived products happens almost automatically.

Do You Leave Time on the Table?

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How long does it take you to complete a project?  When you bid for 1 hour of work, does that actually comprise 1 hours of head’s-down labor, or one hour of total focus on the project?  Do you go home at the end of the day and stop working, or do the wheels keep turning long after you’ve punched out for the day?  Everyone’s different, and these questions cover very different ground – but the answer to each is important.

For instance, I usually bid on projects based on actual, head’s-down labor time.  One hour of billed time means I was producing something for a client for a solid hour.  In reality, one hour of billed time works out to about 2 and a half hours of work time.  I spend additional time planning the project and getting ready to start.  I also spend some time after the project making sure my output is “acceptable” according to my own personal quality standards.

Also, I’m a bit of a workaholic.  When I go home, I usually move smoothly from one project to another.  My mornings are spent at work (I consider my employer to be just a full-time client), I take a short break to hit the gym, then I come home and start working on either personal projects or work for other clients.  Typically, I’ll shut things down for the day when it starts getting late enough that I question how much sleep I’ll get before work in the morning.  🙂  I don’t leave very much downtime for myself during the week at all.

Weekends, though, are very different.

Saturdays are “me” days.  Unless I have an unusually high workload, I block out time for personal projects and ignore client work.  This can be anything from writing code for my blog, writing a fiction story, working in the garden, or going out to find another geocache.

Sundays are “no work” days.  I consider Sundays to be my official day off.  I get up, make a big breakfast, and take the day at a leisurely pace.  After church, I might do some laundry, go to a movie, or read a book.  But whatever I do, I make sure it doesn’t feel like work.  The hard part is finding something productive to do that’s not also work.  When I’m too idle, I start to think about unfinished projects … that can lead to working on the projects, and that’s a bad endgame for everyone involved.

Ultimately, though, I leave very little time on the table.  My weeks are filled with work.  My weekends with rest and recuperation.  I still watch TV, but usually just because it’s on in the background while I’m working.  Do I leave enough time on the table?  In reality, there are times when I feel I’ve left too much.  So how much time do you leave on the table?  How much downtime do you have in your week?

The Accidental Consultant

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A couple of summers ago, I found myself in the small office of a tech start-up asking questions about my ambitions as a consultant.  I had finished business school almost a year before, but my age still betrayed my actual skills as a marketer and started these kinds of questions with just about everyone I met.  “Why marketing?”  “Why consulting?”  “Why start-ups?”

Before that day, though, I hadn’t given any real thought to the answer.  I’d craft an explanation around the mission of a particular business or explain that I was looking for something more challenging than a traditional job.  The truth was, I just wanted a job.

It’s been some time since then, and I’m still in consulting.  Actually, with the exception of 4 months of seasonal part-time work, I’ve always been a consultant.  The irony is that I never set out to be one … it just happened.

I’ve heard so many stories about reluctant entrepreneurs that the term has become cliché.  Unfortunately, I find myself in the same boat as many of these individuals – pursuing a career I had no intention of starting in the first place.  It’s awkward to find yourself travelling a path you never set out to walk, but a bit exciting, too.  I get to set my own hours, I choose who I work with, and I get to claim all of my finished work as purely mine.  It’s a fantastic feeling, but it’s fraught with frustration as well.

There are times I’d give almost anything to be working a traditional job.  To have set hours, a set list of to-do items, expectations set by someone other than myself.  But those times come the most when I’m having a questioning day.  The kind of day where I question whether or not consulting was the right field for me to be in.  It takes just one bad client experience to start the questioning phase … but just one good client experience to end it.

I’d never give up doing what I love, no matter how hard it might be to keep moving forward.  So for all of you who are just starting out in the field, keep this in mind:

If you love doing the work, don’t let anyone take it away from you.  Even if you fell in to the work completely by accident.

Pay Time

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At a sales training seminar a couple weeks ago, the presenter spoke on the topic of separating pay time from no pay time.  I was very familiar with this concept, but not in quite the way he put it.  All of us recognize the importance of tracking billable versus non-billable hours, but “pay time” doesn’t necessarily mean billable hours.

Think of it this way.  A billable hour is an hour of your time for which you can directly bill a client.  At the same time, some of your client work might translate to non-billable hours.  Think of proposal creation and new client meetings.  Most consultants provide this time as a free service.

Pay time is a different concept all together.  If you double the amount of pay time involved in your job, you double the amount of pay coming in the door.  On the same note, if you double your no pay time, your wallet doesn’t seem any heavier.

If you were to double the amount of time you spend in new client meetings, you will increase your bottom line (more new business meetings = more new business in most industries).  But many of us ignore this simple fact so we can focus on optimizing our billable time.  When you think of these non-billable hours as pay time, though, it changes the dynamic drastically.

How many hours do you commit to each week?  How many are billable?  How much of that is pay time?  Is your focus in the right place?