[00:00:00] Matt Cromwell: I'd like to kick off this episode by quoting Neil Patel, he says, uh, many successful entrepreneurs won't admit this secret, but I'll let you in on it. There is no such thing as a solo entrepreneur. Nobody who's ever scaled a business from the ground up, did it alone. In fact, left to themselves. They wouldn't have a business at all.

[00:00:20] They'd fail. Uh, and I might say it even more bluntly, you are not enough. Every person is limited in their skillset. You can't be the SEO expert, marketing extraordinaire, elite PHP or react developer, uh, professional technical support technician. And. Of course, the accountant, investor, email marketer, and buyer all at the same time and be successful, you can't do it, uh, you need help.

[00:00:46] And with that in mind, with that cold splash of reality, today we're going to be talking about doing what you love and outsourcing the rest.

[00:00:59] This is WP Product Talk, the place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners. And now enjoy the show.

[00:01:22] Yeah, that's the subject. And welcome, welcome. Katie, thanks for being here today.

[00:01:27] Katie Keith: Yeah. Hi, good to see you and good to see everybody watching.

[00:01:30] Matt Cromwell: And today we're having a special guest named Stephanie Hudson. Stephanie, welcome to the show.

[00:01:38] Stephanie Hudson: Hi guys.

[00:01:40] Katie Keith: Yeah. Thanks for joining us. So could you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about what you do to get started?

[00:01:47] Stephanie Hudson: Sure thing. My name is Stephanie Hudson. I am co founder of a company called Focus WP, where we offer white label, services to agencies and freelancers. We've got a bunch of different, six different teams from design and development to SEO, video editing, all of those kinds of things. Pretty much we could fill in the gaps anywhere in a, um, in that an agency might have some needs.

[00:02:12] And I also. I own my own agency. I mean, I've been, I'm like a internet granny at this point. Like I started my first dub, my first uh, Hello World was in 1996. So I've been around the way. I know a thing or two about this. And we started this company, my partner Tom and I, with The goal of helping agencies and freelancers to avoid some of the pain that we both felt in our agencies.

[00:02:37] So, so that's the, that's the short version of the whole thing, but I'm excited to dive into this topic as we go.

[00:02:44] Matt Cromwell: Excellent. Absolutely. And the way that we always like to kick it off is by starting off by talking about why this subject is so important for WordPress product owners. Personally, I can say like, I, I wrote that, we're doing these new hooks and intros in our episodes and I like, I like them.

[00:03:02] I, I, I fretted over it today. I was like, Oh, this feels like a cold slap in the face to me. Um, there were so many times when I definitely like the thing that a lot of folks call me is like Jack of all trades. And I hate that phrase, Jack of all trades, king of nothing. Cause you

[00:03:18] Stephanie Hudson: know what comes next? Yeah.

[00:03:19] Master of none. Right.

[00:03:20] Matt Cromwell: Exactly. Like, um, And, uh, I try to do all the things. I'm going to do support. I'm going to do design. I'm going to do ad buying. Like, sure, I can do that. I'm an SEO expert. Absolutely. Um, but it definitely, as business grows, I found out the hard way several times that, um, uh, No, I'm not the expert at all these things.

[00:03:39] Um, and, uh, I definitely needed to get, bring in experts to do it in order for the brand to do well. Um, and sometimes founders have to just put their pride aside in order to recognize that they need help. Um, and at the same time, the other tension I think is that you want help, but you can't afford help.

[00:03:59] Um, and that's that special mix of why outsourcing, I think, or contract working, um, becomes kind of the magic sauce, uh, of being able to kind of expand, um, the effectiveness of the work output that you're doing without breaking the bank. Um, that's kind of how I think about it personally. I don't know, Stephanie, how do you, how would you characterize this subject and why it's so important for WordPress product owners?

[00:04:23] Stephanie Hudson: I think specifically in this, in the WordPress space, the folks that I know, the ones that are in sort of my tribe and, um, and me having been around WordPress for forever, it's, um, there's something about the folks that get into web. We are such problem solvers. We are figure it outers, right? This is why we end up being the ones that everybody asks to fix their printer.

[00:04:52] We don't know anything more about printers than anybody else. But when you go home for the holidays or whatever it is, right, we're the tech support. Hey, I can't, my cloud. I just had somebody telling me yesterday, my clouds are full. My clouds are full. What do I do? Right? So they come to us for this information, not because we can build a website, right?

[00:05:08] But because we figure stuff out and technology doesn't intimidate us. And so by nature, that makes it difficult to let go of some things, right? It's hard to, it's because we think like, even if we're not good at it, like with the SEO thing you just said, right? That's an entire discipline completely and totally different than building a website.

[00:05:28] Everything that goes into building a website, technically, design, all of that is really totally different than the methodology to becoming an SEO, like an expert in search engine optimization. So why do we think we can figure that out? Because we figured things out. And so that I think is part of why this is an important topic to discuss because we've got these folks that are so prone to that, you know, that they want to do it all themselves.

[00:05:59] And, and then like what you said, also, when you're starting out, it's really tough. It is tough when you're, when budgets are tight, you know, to figure out how to, how to make it happen. And so, you know, a lot of times you really need to start outsourcing before you need it kind of, which is a, you know, Tricky one.

[00:06:18] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. Katie, what's your take? Um, you've also grown your business from you and Andy essentially to, uh, to a thriving team that, uh, that I've been really impressed with. I got to meet a lot of you at a WordCamp Europe last year. Um, and you just told me you're going to, your team's going to be at, uh, WordCamp Asia, which is cool.

[00:06:37] Um, and, uh, have you done some outsourcing? Like, have you thought about it and why does, why is this so important for other folks to think about too?

[00:06:46] Katie Keith: Yeah, um, so based on what you've both said about how a lot of people that start WordPress product businesses do everything themselves. Well, the reason we need to talk about it is to help us all identify when we need to stop doing that.

[00:07:00] When is the right time to start getting help? And when we do, what's the best way to do that? Because one option is to hire in house staff. staff and the other is outsourcing. There's two options on the table. And so I think we all need to talk about which option to choose in which scenario and how what's right for your business at each stage of it.

[00:07:21] And in terms of your other question, Matt, I'll leave that for story time in terms of kind of my history of outsourcing and. Versus growing a team.

[00:07:31] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Nice. Um, Stephanie, I'd love to hear a little bit also just for everyone, uh, uh, watching and paying attention, uh, in terms of like the outsourcing world, um, that's a service that you all offer.

[00:07:46] Um, uh, at focus WP. Um, but how do you position yourselves in terms of like unique offerings that you have, uh, compared to like, let's go really low scale. Let's go compared to like Fiverr, um, or let's go compared to like Codable, uh, which a lot of our audience is familiar with. Um, tell us a little bit more about what you do.

[00:08:08] Stephanie Hudson: So I, I really wanted to take out, like I said earlier, the pain points of of outsourcing. In fact, sometimes I call what we do, like what, or what we offer is delegating instead of outsourcing. Cause I think sometimes outsourcing has a sort of a negative connotation. You're sending, you're

[00:08:29] Matt Cromwell: sending your

[00:08:30] Stephanie Hudson: valuable work to another country, to somebody you've never seen, you can't speak their language.

[00:08:37] And what inevitably happens in that situation that I think is part of why it gives it a bad taste in people's mouths is like the the ghosting. I mean, we can all agree. That's like, that's the worst. And that's the most scary part. And I for sure have been there where you really hit a wall in a project.

[00:08:55] Either you're too busy or you don't have the skills to finish it. And, uh, you make that leap, you hire somebody and they vanish. And then what happens? You spend all night, all weekend, whatever it is, you're killing yourself. You're missing time with your family. You're like, whatever it is, you know, like that is, that is a frustration that I think is all sort of wrapped up into that outsourcing word.

[00:09:20] And so what I, the way I like to sort of present what we do is a lot of times, even on sales calls, I'll say like, I can see people like, uh, Katie, I could see your door behind you. I say like, okay, imagine if you turned around, opened that door and there was an entire agency staff sitting out there. What would you have them do?

[00:09:37] What instructions would you give? Who would you tell to do what? Just like that. That's how I want to position this. It's like a, like an instant team. Like you just add water and where that, you know, whatever it is, right? So it's like, I want to be that team that is, you know, when you walk out there, you, you don't think anybody's going to ghost on you, right?

[00:09:55] You don't think they're going to vanish. And in, in this setup, because we work on team building and morale, and Other things like that, we really don't experience ghosting. Sometimes people get sick though, or go on vacation or whatever. And so we build redundancy in to take care of all of those issues so that you really, like, if some, like, let's say one of our devs went bonkers and did happen to ghost or, or let's say they got COVID or something like that.

[00:10:24] Honestly, you wouldn't even know it. Most like 99 times out of 100 because we just we have like redundancies all built in so so that we protect you from that pain. So that's one of them. That's the other is HR, which nobody likes either. Like that's also another ugly word that nobody wants to think about.

[00:10:45] Um, But that's why

[00:10:46] Matt Cromwell: it's also a great option for outsourcing too, is because I, like I was our resident HR person on our, our, our business and I was like, I know how to do HR. No, I don't know

[00:10:58] Stephanie Hudson: exactly. We do it all. Right. So, yeah, so that takes, it takes that heat off of it. You don't have to figure out taxes.

[00:11:05] You don't have to figure out paid time off or leave or currencies or blah, blah, blah. Um, you know, like all of those. Yeah. Kind of like icky things to folks like us. You just buy some hours. And use them up as you like.

[00:11:21] Katie Keith: You know, for me, that works with certain tasks, like, I don't know, accounting, you were saying about taxes, but for the, I suppose the most crucial thing people in, um, WordPress product companies think of is outsourcing development and support.

[00:11:37] They're the two key things. Particularly with development, rather than ghosting, when I first started, my biggest fear about outsourcing and all the connotations of that word was quality. Um, because if you're a certain type of company and you pride yourself on the quality of your code, particularly if you are a founder developer, that you have a certain way of doing things.

[00:11:59] Um, how can you ever, Guarantee or assure yourself that when you outsource code it will meet your quality standards.

[00:12:10] Stephanie Hudson: That's um Yeah, I mean that's an issue if you hire in if you hire out if you freelance like no matter what That's a problem. We combat that at focus abp by Building and quality control, which is like getting an extra person, you know, so we have, um, when you submit a ticket, it's a ticketing system, basically.

[00:12:32] So you submit a task via ticket, different, um, interface for different types of tasks because of what you need, you know, you don't need to have like word count or tone. On a development ticket that you do for copywriting. So, you, you submit a ticket and it goes through the role that we call a conductor.

[00:12:51] They're the conductor because they keep the trains moving. They're basically a traffic manager, but they do quality control as well. So, what we do is everything gets filtered. Through the conductor, both directions. So if something seems off with the ticket or it's not clear, they'll get back to you and clarify that before it goes to one of the implementers.

[00:13:08] And, um, so then it goes back through the quality control person, you know, the conductor before it gets back to you. So that, you know, if there was anything that was missed or something went wrong, it gets caught or it, it comes back to you.

[00:13:22] Matt Cromwell: That's awesome. I like that. That makes a lot of sense.

[00:13:25] Katie Keith: And we've got a comment from our co host, Amber, who says quality has been the biggest challenge for, um, uh, Equalize Digital when it comes to outsourcing, especially developers.

[00:13:36] So she's had that issue as well. So it's interesting to hear what you've done with that. Some of the others, like Codable, pre vet their developers. And so you know that other people have looked at the quality of their code and things like that. Whereas others like Upwork, for example, Fiverr. Uh, people per hour.

[00:13:54] Does that still exist? I don't know. Um, Review system. And, um, but that's, you don't know who's done the reviews and whether they have your same standards. So I'm always a bit worried about those reviews,

[00:14:09] Stephanie Hudson: right? Yeah, it is tricky. And so the other, the other little thing is If you hire, much like what we're talking about, like us as business owners trying to not be the jack of all trades, master of none.

[00:14:22] If you hire one developer, how many areas of expertise do they have? So if you hire somebody who's phenomenal with PHP and JavaScript, and then you throw a cold fusion task at them, what's going to be the quality of their work? You know, like it depends, like not all of them are good at all things. That's.

[00:14:40] normal. So we also have that built in that we try and have a diverse, um, set of skills among our team with lots of overlap, of course, but, um, that way we also, there's no, um, negative repercussions. In fact, you're in, they're encouraged to reach out for help to their colleagues. They're encouraged to say quickly, this is different than I thought it would be.

[00:15:05] It's over my head. It's out of my, you know, Bucket, you know, like this is not for me. There's never like, cause that's the other thing. I think honestly, I think that a lot of times is what contributes to the ghosting is when a dev can like commits to something that really is outside of their skill set.

[00:15:20] And instead of confronting it, which is a lot more difficult in other countries compared to, you know, the United States, European countries, stuff like that. So, you know, they are not, Comfortable with a confrontation or standing up for themselves or saying things i'm this is a generalization, of course, you know, totally not be anybody but you know, like Um, there are different cultural issues, right?

[00:15:42] And so if you make it a safe place For them to say I don't know how to do this then it becomes less of an issue and That's difficult to do when you've got like one or two devs and you need them to do things and They can't do it, right? So that's why we have like, you know a dozen or so.

[00:16:02] Matt Cromwell: Yeah Yeah, absolutely.

[00:16:04] I think whenever I've had these conversations with, uh, with smaller WordPress shops and they're talking about, I'm thinking I might outsource this or that, the other, like the one expectation I always try to set is like, don't think of it as like, You're going to give some direction and then magic shows up on the other side.

[00:16:22] Like it's not that different in my mind, at least from managing a team member. Um, like when a team member, um, uh, gets directives to get something done, they're going to submit it and it's still going to have to be monitored and checked to see if it's done everything correctly or not. Um, it's not as if we're just like, Being like, just because somebody else is doing it means it's just like going to come out perfect on the other end.

[00:16:47] You still got to still got to do your own management due diligence too. So, yeah. Um, and.

[00:16:53] Stephanie Hudson: Oh, sorry. I didn't mean that. No, no.

[00:16:54] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. You,

[00:16:55] Stephanie Hudson: this kind of, uh, bleeds into another issue that I see with a lot of, um, of the business owners in the space. And that is that they call themselves control freaks. They say, I can't outsource.

[00:17:08] I'm a control freak. And my answer to that is, I don't think you are, I don't think you're a control freak. And I, I say, um, you know, I asked him this question. I said, do you think you're a control freak? Like, so hold on a minute. The reason you're thinking that it's because you care about the product or the service that you deliver as an end result.

[00:17:31] To your clients. That's not called being a control freak. That's called being a good business owner. Like if you care about that and you want it to be done right, that's a good thing. The problem lies when it's not being done right because of how or where or who is doing the work. That doesn't make you a control freak.

[00:17:52] That makes you maybe bad at hiring or bad at briefing or maybe, maybe there's some other things lurking under the surface, but that's not a case where you should just still try and do everything yourself.

[00:18:02] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Uh, I think that's a great segue into, uh, story time. Uh, I want to talk a little bit about our, uh, personal experiences with this subject.

[00:18:12] Um, and, uh, and like what lessons learned, that kind of thing. So, um, on this one, I'd love to start with Katie, if possible. Katie. Um, we already hinted towards your experiences. So, uh, tell us a little bit about, um, what you've done with outsourcing and lessons learned, failures, successes, all that kind of good stuff.

[00:18:32] Katie Keith: Yeah. So I started the business with my husband, Andy, and we would describe ourselves as control freaks. Sorry. Or however you want. You might not be, you might not be, you might just be a good business owner, Katie. Maybe. And we've got past that as we'll get to. But, um, but initially. We were very reluctant to build a team.

[00:18:53] We didn't have any kind of vision or desire to become managers. I hope my team's not watching this. Um, we didn't want to manage people. We just wanted to focus on growing the business and our tasks and specialisms in it. And so, um, I'll answer a question from Igor as part of this, actually, um, which he said, I guess outsourcing is easier when there is revenue.

[00:19:19] Well, when to outsource the first though, that must be the hardest. And that's true when you're just starting. Um, unless you've got, I like seed money or some kind of investment, then you're probably bootstrapped and you may not be going to pay for people time. Where's the money going to come from? So, um, we were very much bootstrapped and we wouldn't have dreamed of outsourcing until there was revenue coming in.

[00:19:45] And then when there was, we still kept doing everything ourselves until basically it just became impossible. Uh, particularly the support side of things. Um, We both did the support, particularly me. And we got to a point where I was spending maybe half of my time on support. And by then there was the revenue to outsource.

[00:20:07] Um, but I was like, I know my product's best. How can I possibly trust anybody with my customers? How would they, you know, act like me with the customers and all of those control freak or whatever quality concerned issues. And, um, But you get to a point, um, Eagle, that you don't have a choice. And when you get to that point, you're thinking the decisions are like, well, how do I get that help I need?

[00:20:35] Do I massively scale back my business because I don't want this? Do I want to keep growing? And I have to accept that we need help. And that was the route that we went down. And so we started outsourcing support staff. At first I used an agency that doesn't exist anymore that specialized in WordPress support.

[00:20:55] And they allowed you to have like, um, part time support people. So I just got people for a couple of hours a day or something, which wasn't very good. They, that wasn't enough time to really get them embedded in the business. And then when that company went out of business, um, We started using level up support, uh, which is, uh, still around today.

[00:21:16] And it's the most popular, popular, probably the only dedicated WordPress specifically support engineers company. And, um, as soon as we got them, it was different. Uh, we had a dedicated person who is still with us now, like. Five years later, he's just amazing. And, um, I knew just from his sample replies that it would be a delight to have him in the company.

[00:21:40] And he had all the attitude, personality, WordPress, knowledge, everything. And so that really reassured me and allowed me to start trusting other people with support. And I still have issues with the support. Um, I'm currently, um, approving all the pre sales tickets as kind of a, temporary training exercise to make sure people aren't missing anything.

[00:22:01] And my control freak nature does keep coming back, uh, to, uh, check these things. But the other side of it was development because we got to a stage where. We, my husband, I'm not a developer. My husband, Andy is, and we grew the company to a stage that it wasn't realistic to have one developer. And that was putting restrictions on our growth.

[00:22:28] And we realized that with him as the only developer, we couldn't be adding features or developing new products quickly enough for what we know we could make a success. And again, we didn't want to have an in house developer. team. We had some support people by then, they were outsourced, although they were dedicated.

[00:22:47] And so we turned to places like Codable and Upwork and found developers that way. And we've always been really strict about outsourced developers, uh, because we have quite strict technical standards. And so, For example, whenever we were looking at giving a new developer a project, like maybe we'd start them off with a minor plugin to build something we specialize in quite niche WooCommerce plugins.

[00:23:14] So we found some really specific little ideas they could build like WooCommerce discontinued products or something that's not a huge project. And even before we give them that trial project, uh, Andy would go through their code, not just testing something they'd done, but actually asked for the code and he'd look at how they'd structured it and all of that to check that they had the right kind of attitude to quality.

[00:23:39] So we were always really, really strict on that. Um, and we kept on outsourcing for years and we had lots of very expensive developers that were doing projects for us. And in the end, it worked out as more than full time hours, which was kind of crazy because if you look at the hourly rates of a codable developer, if you're, if you've got them for full time hours, you're spending a lot of money compared to hiring somebody in house.

[00:24:08] So we got to the point that we were like, this is ridiculous. We're at a stage where we should be hiring in house developers. So we went through the advertising process and we hired two senior developers and haven't looked back really. So I think outsourcing was perfect during that kind of initial growth stage where we had the revenue to put into outsource.

[00:24:29] talent, but, um, then we got to a stage where it made sense to go in house when you can afford full time staff and the lower hourly rate that comes from that. But then the final bit of the story is that I'm starting to come around the other side of that because now we've got a team of seven. Could I say something?

[00:24:48] Stephanie Hudson: Could I jump in on you? So this is my, this is what I've seen. Tell me if this is true for you, that like in my, in FocusWP, if I do my job right, We, we end up losing the customer, right? What we want to do is make it so that they can grow their business. And so if, if they grow their business, then they know it doesn't make sense for them to work with us.

[00:25:09] It makes sense for them to hire internally. So we are a growth tool, but then what we see happening is because we've done our job right and they know they can trust us once they continue to grow. Then what we do is I'm guessing this is where you are then is you get bits of overlap or. Uh, little, like, niche things that aren't, like, good time spent for your in staff folks.

[00:25:34] So, either a different problem you want to solve, or a different little service you want to offer and try out, or you just, your devs are, like, just take on the over, um, Overages and stuff, you know, like whatever you don't have time to do. So folks will circle back around. Is that what you were going to say?

[00:25:50] Like, yeah, totally wrong. People

[00:25:53] Katie Keith: do that because that's exactly right. So I now have 17, um, full time team members, including Andy and myself, our team bill is some is like over 70, 000 a month, which is just terrifying. And we don't have the capacity we need. We need more developers Particularly we're not adding features to our plugins as quickly as we would like to be and so I've started to think I don't Really want the commitments of another Developer and we tend to mostly go for senior developers as well because we can just let them run with complex plugins And so I've started thinking again.

[00:26:29] Well, maybe we Start outsourcing again and like a specific projects, um, say add this feature or this set of features to an existing plugin or something like that. Instead of going for a long term commitment. So yeah, that's kind of going back to it, isn't it?

[00:26:47] Matt Cromwell: I love it.

[00:26:47] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:26:49] Matt Cromwell: No, that's great. Um, Stephanie, I do have a question for you.

[00:26:52] I'll prime you right now. I'll jump into my story time, but I'll prime you with like, I'd love to hear a little bit about the story behind the story, like how you went from Stephanie into, uh, Focus WP. Um, sure. That would be really interesting to, um, Um, I'll, I'll, I'll keep mine relatively brief. We, um, the time that I had a give, we, we definitely outsourced things.

[00:27:13] Like, one thing we did from the beginning was we were not gonna run our own books, so we had somebody running payroll for us. Um, and, uh, and doing all the accounting and, um, taxes, all that stuff was outsourced from day one. I was really thankful for that. I did not wanna learn that one, um, and, uh, and I, I think it's a no brainer.

[00:27:32] I think any, uh, WordPress, um. Uh, small business that's just starting out, who's primarily, probably, uh, developers or marketers in the first place. Like outsource that stuff day one, please. Um, you're not experts, I promise. Um, and, but the other things that we did were like, for example, Uh, I'm always like, uh, like always just a tiny bit, uh, ashamed to say that, like, we launched Give with Fiverr.

[00:28:02] Absolutely. Like, um, the, our, our very first big video that got shared everywhere in the beginning was a videographer from Fiverr with a voiceover from Fiverr. Um, yeah. Was it good? Yeah, it went well. Like, I mean, we wrote the script, um, uh, they, they, they executed. And of course on Fiverr, nothing costs 5 actually.

[00:28:22] Um, but, um, and that's always the trick, um, five

[00:28:25] Stephanie Hudson: or so, five

[00:28:27] Matt Cromwell: or more or a lot more. Um, but, um, it works and it was helpful and we were not going to learn how to be big videographers and nobody wanted our voices over that video. So, uh, it went, it went really well. So, but since coming on to stellar, you know, stellar, of course, has, uh, several hundred employees.

[00:28:46] We still have need to outsource things. Um, and just. Today, on a day to day basis, I can tell you we use a graphic design company named Dellassign. Um, definitely worth looking into. Um, we use another company called LTV plus, which is great at recovering failed, uh, subscription payments. Uh, we also use LevelUp for augmenting our support team.

[00:29:08] Um, We, uh, also have, I'm missing one. Um, there was a fourth one in there. Shoot. Um, but we've definitely used a smattering of different outsourced, um, uh, companies. And I think that that's a lot of the unique offering of, of a place like FocusWP is that, uh, it's not, in my mind, this, Same thing as, um, finding some, uh, small team in a far away country.

[00:29:37] Um, what it sounds like you're offering is a lot similar to what LevelUp does is that you have a team of experts who are there and they augment your existing team. Um, and I, I think it's a, it's, it's a great route. Um, and if you could find quality companies that offer that kind of thing, it makes a big difference.

[00:29:57] Um, and It's super

[00:29:59] Stephanie Hudson: interesting what you said, Matt, about, um, You know, you, we think like, Oh, outsourcing your dev, Oh, that's problematic. And I'm a control freak and all these things come up. But when you say I outsourced our accounting and our taxes, nobody blinks.

[00:30:14] Matt Cromwell: Nobody blinks. Everybody's like, that's

[00:30:16] Stephanie Hudson: a great idea.

[00:30:18] Matt Cromwell: They're like, yes, please sign me up. There's

[00:30:20] Stephanie Hudson: just a stigma around it. That is something that I'm trying to overcome a bit.

[00:30:26] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I do like that term augmenting your existing team. Like, if you say it that way too, it's like, Oh, that's interesting. What are you talking about? And it's like, well, we will do the work for you.

[00:30:36] And then I might steal

[00:30:38] Stephanie Hudson: that.

[00:30:39] Matt Cromwell: They mean, Oh, you mean outsourcing? Well, I mean, technically, yes, but like,

[00:30:43] Stephanie Hudson: that plays into my delegating. You know, changing it to delegating too, if it's part of your team.

[00:30:48] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. Um, so in some ways that's what I wanted to lead into with you too. Like you have your own story of going from a solopreneur probably in one form or another into growing a company.

[00:30:59] Um, I'm sure you had to outsource some things along the way before you started offering outsourcing as a service. Um, I'd love to hear a little bit about that.

[00:31:10] Stephanie Hudson: Uh, so. I met my business partner, Tom Jensen at a WordCamp. It's a, it's a WordCamp romance, not romantic, but you know, like we, that's where we met and began our business romance.

[00:31:24] So, uh, he and I met, I said, I went up to him at a WordCamp. We were there for a Divi meetup actually before the conference started at a little donut, coffee and donut thing. And I, I could tell he didn't know anybody and I didn't know anybody really. And so I went up to him very awkwardly As is my way, because I have this whole thing playing in my head that nobody else is aware of, and I said, Hey, would you like to be my conference buddy?

[00:31:49] He was like, what? And I'm like, I don't know, like, I'm not even shy. But when you're at a conference, you guys know, tell me if this is not true. You, you approach a group by yourself. It's awkward. If you're with somebody and you approach a group, for some reason, it just, you just join the group and start talking.

[00:32:06] I don't know why that is and maybe you're like, I don't know about that. You watch, next time you're at a conference, you, you'll see it. It's like, it's such a bizarre phenomenon, but I think it's better to have a buddy. It's a lot more fun too, anyway. And then you can split up if you care about the sessions and there's two or whatever, you know, so.

[00:32:21] Anyhow, during a couple low, you know, like, um, downtimes when we were talking, I was telling him about maintenance, the, um, the maintenance side of my agency. This was, uh, pre care plan, like before, I think it was Christina Romero that coined that term. Now everybody uses it. But before everybody was like gangbusters about getting people on maintenance plans and care plans.

[00:32:46] Um, I had been sort of. dabbling with that. And I, um, I built a little machine, like I built, I did all the research, figured out how to do it. And then I just hired a part time person to come and do the things. I, she wasn't even a real technical person. And I figured out it cost me like 4 a month and I was charging 75.

[00:33:09] And I'm like, I love maintenance. Everybody else hated it at that time. And he was like, I'm interested. So he like, Two weeks after the conference, he sent me an email and he says, don't freak out, just read this. And it was a business plan. And he said, I think we should start offering that to take this off of the plate of agencies.

[00:33:28] So Focus MVP started doing maintenance. That was it. We were just a maintenance, company, like a white label. We would do the reports. We'd fix things that broke during updates, all that stuff. And we still do those things. But what we noticed was that all of these, uh, freelancers or agency clients that then started working with us and we built trust with, they would say, um, can you help me fix this thing?

[00:33:53] Like, I can't figure out why this is broken. Or would you guys just build a site for me or all this stuff? And so we were like, wait a minute. And we, we both recognized the pain that they were feeling was stuff that we'd both gone through in our agencies as well. So that's when we started to build out, we built out the development team first.

[00:34:11] And then the, then I think, uh, design came next. And then we started to like add these more teams. And Tom has told me I'm not allowed to add any more teams for the time being because like I get carried away and get so excited. But, um, and mostly right now we can cover pretty much anything. The only thing we kind of don't do is paid ads, which we may get into.

[00:34:31] But other than that, we've got design, development, copywriting, SEO, uh, video editing, which is kind of a smaller one, but it's useful for social media and stuff like that. And we've got some admins too. So just in case there's any related administrative stuff on a project. So with all that, you can kind of get Just about anything done.

[00:34:51] We're also launching, which I'm really excited about is a project manager.

[00:34:56] Matt Cromwell: Oh, wow. Nice.

[00:34:56] Stephanie Hudson: So what we do now is, you know, our conductors are the traffic managers, but you manage your project. You don't, you give the tasks, you set the deadlines, all of that. And so what we're bringing in is another person into that mix so that you can just hand off an entire project.

[00:35:14] Matt Cromwell: Wow.

[00:35:15] Stephanie Hudson: And that way they, You know, they'll come up with a detailed scope, estimate estimates on time for every different department, and then they'll run the teams and get the things done and just keep you in the loop on it. So I'm real excited about that. That's something that, you know, when we had our little humble beginnings of, um, maintenance only, I would have never seen that coming, but we just keep listening to like what our, our customers needs are and what their, where their pain points are.

[00:35:44] And it's not. hard because we've felt every single one of them, you know? So we, we know what it feels like. And sometimes when you're out there doing your thing, you feel like you're the only one. And so to hear other folks going through it, uh, can be validating and also it can make it easier to ask for help for some reason, you know, like if you think like, oh, everybody else is just doing this on their own, why can't I?

[00:36:10] And then you realize like, the ones that are really succeeding actually aren't. Probably. Yeah. That's really interesting. I don't know if my story took a left turn. I love it. That's a great story.

[00:36:21] Matt Cromwell: I mean, it started with a romance and it went on. It was great.

[00:36:24] Katie Keith: Yeah. I love what you said about project managers, because an earlier part of my story is before we started selling plugins, when we were a WordPress agency.

[00:36:38] And again, we didn't want to have an in house team and we never did hire staff for that. We had lots and lots of freelancers and outsourced people. And we got to a limit of our growth as an agency because of my project management capacity. So I was the project manager for all of the projects and I would be hiring designers and developers and SEOs and whatever.

[00:37:03] But I would be that central hub, uh, which would make things happen, communicate with the clients. And I could only manage up to, I think it was like 10 projects at once. And even though I wasn't doing the work and that was like more than full time hours, I was very busy. Um, and I tried finding project managers, but I found it really hard to, train them in the way of my company and things like that.

[00:37:28] And like we had, you know, when to say no to clients and things like that, we did a lot of building theme based websites and parts of building a website using a theme is knowing when to say no, that's not what the theme does. Becoming a custom development project. So a project manager, which is already trained in taking on that kind of work, I can see would be useful.

[00:37:51] Stephanie Hudson: Yeah. Keeping things in scope on time. Uh, on or under budget. That's the mantra for the project manager. So that's awesome. Well,

[00:38:01] Matt Cromwell: I want to circle back essentially to Igor's question, uh, which is, um, uh, which we would answer through our best advice. Uh, Igor from the beginning was like. What, what's the first step?

[00:38:13] What, what, when, when do I know when I should actually start outsourcing something? Is that a revenue question? Is it a pain point question? Uh, I like how earlier Katie said that, um, you start doing it because you have to, like you can't get everything done anymore. Um, the

[00:38:29] Stephanie Hudson: trouble, the trouble with that, if I may interject is the scenario that I mentioned earlier, which is if you are full tilt and you wait, Until you are in a pinch.

[00:38:41] It is a very stressful situation, and it's very difficult to then because as also has been mentioned in the comments, Amber says, like, the brief is so important. How detailed is your brief? Are you following up with the tasks that you've been sent in? You know, all of those things like you still have to manage manage the project.

[00:39:00] So if you wait till you are absolutely underwater, uh, slammed with things, then Mhm. It's going to make that a strain even to outsource and, and then you end up in the situation like the one I told earlier, which we've all been there too, right? Where the person just vanishes and you're stuck trying to do it, even though you were too full to take, you know, to do it in the first place.

[00:39:22] So, so it is important to start at least building those relationships and it's very difficult. I know it's so hard when you don't have. So one of the things I've been trying to help, um, folks do is I'm sending out like a weekly email to give ideas and suggestions on what tasks you could sell to your customers, your clients, and how much you could charge for it.

[00:39:48] So if you're already, Like just at a max level of what you're able to do and what you're bringing in. What if I gave you a script that said, um, sell a website, speed ups to all your customers. Right. And it'll cost you right around like. I don't know, uh, 199, I think, 149, I can't remember what it is on our site.

[00:40:11] And then you could sell that for three, four, 500, depending on your customer and the site. If it's an e commerce site, things like that, it's of course hugely important and very technical. You know, there's all these different things, right? So if I can give you a script, so you could say like, let me add this on.

[00:40:26] So we can either fill a skill gap. Or we can also help you add on things that you aren't currently offering. So if we could say like, let's do these things where it's like, it's an extra thing, but we'll do all the work and you just make that extra bit of money. So you're not making a hundred percent of course, but you're marking up and making money without doing the work really.

[00:40:44] So if you could start doing things like that, um, I go, that gives you. the ability to start figuring out how to outsource. It starts helping you build relationships and it helps you get better at those briefs too. Right. And it's not, um, a big risk because it's not, The cost is, is built into the price. So if you can sell that first, then you have the money to go pay for the hours and have it done.

[00:41:15] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. I like what you say there. Um, uh, about if you wait until it's painful, it's too late. Um, uh, that's one of the things I've done on the support side for forever is, uh, I talk about how to be monitoring your capacity, uh, on your, of your support team so that you're hiring proactively rather than reactively.

[00:41:37] Uh, because by the time you have like a felt need, um, to hire somebody, you're probably already three or four weeks too late. Um, because you have to recruit, you have to interview, you have to hire, you have to onboard, I mean, it's going to take another four or five, six weeks until that person is even up to any kind of, um, volume that matters to you.

[00:41:58] Um, so if you're not working ahead, um, then, uh, then you got to, you're too late. Basically. Um, with that said, let's jump into best advice. Um, we want to help folks know when they need to, um, uh, start outsourcing one way or another. So, uh, and this is like elevator pitch. Um, you're like passing somebody by at a WordCamp hallway track and they're like, Hey, Stephanie, you're an expert, uh, on outsourcing.

[00:42:25] Tell me what's your best advice for. When I should start outsourcing stuff. Uh, three sentences or ish or something. Ready, set, Stephanie, go.

[00:42:35] Stephanie Hudson: Trying to make me say something with brevity is always a challenge. Uh, I think we kind of just touched on the when, basically now. Start now. Start now. And just stick a toe in.

[00:42:48] Start. Try something and see how it works and start to refine. Like, it's not just always about, again, the ability of the contractor, right? It's about your ability to instruct them. To give them a brief to give them instructions to set a reasonable deadlines and expectations to do the quality control in the project, you know, there's, there's a lot of things that are still on you when you, when you outsource stuff.

[00:43:14] So if you could just start, then you start, you learn a lot about yourself. I learned a ton, just building this team and starting down this road. And now I help people figure, figure that out as well. The other side of that. So we talked about the when, um, sometimes a different question is, you know, What? And, and I often, I have a little chart I do.

[00:43:37] It's just like a simple four quadrant thing. And it's like, um, things that you love, things you hate, things you're good at, things you're terrible at. And you sort of plot your, you know, I'm, I made this big, huge list, handwritten list of all of the things I do. Which is a long list if you're a business owner and broke it down to task level.

[00:43:59] And then I went through with a red highlighter and a green highlighter. Like, what do I love? What do I hate? And if it's something that I hate and I'm not very good at, hello, accounting, finance, taxes, right? That's an easy decision. And if it's something that you love doing. But maybe you're not so good at it.

[00:44:16] Hello, design for me, graphic design. Like I love it, but I'm not good. You know, like, so in that way you kind of can get a visual and refine the things that you should do. Another little trick that I teach people, which is not very good for my business, but sometimes. Outsource things at home. If you are struggling with your work life balance, you have family of all this stuff, like hire somebody to outsource house cleaning, outsource grocery shopping, get a meal plan, do like outsource, like think about your life in, in whole, because when we're enter entrepreneurs running startups or businesses, it's very difficult to balance all of it.

[00:44:54] Right? So those things that aren't. important, you know, like cleaning your toilet. It does not gonna, I mean, some of us, I don't know, I can't speak for everybody, but that's not going to give you total fulfillment in your life. That time is better spent either with your family or making money, right? So if you can outsource those things and spend your time on other things that have value, that's the other thing.

[00:45:14] I told you, Matt, there's no chance I was doing an elevator. It's maybe where it's a law. It's a tall building. This was a long elevator ride. I'm sorry.

[00:45:21] Matt Cromwell: No, it's great. It's great. Uh, I appreciate it. Uh, it's passionate and interesting and full of content and, and, and insight. I appreciate it. Um, Katie, what's your best advice?

[00:45:32] What would you tell Igor and others like Igor who want to get involved? I love that Igor is

[00:45:36] Stephanie Hudson: like, we're, this is, this show's for you, Igor.

[00:45:38] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, we're only talking to him. There's like 10 people here, but it's only for Igor.

[00:45:45] Katie Keith: And my advice is to think about where your business is and plan accordingly. So if you're a startup with lots of funding, then probably hire an in house team for things that you really need people in your team and outsource for the sort of smaller or part time tasks or something that's a bit sticky.

[00:46:05] Uh, standalone like accounting. If you are more of a owner, developer, bootstrapped, then I'd say don't go into debt. Do it yourself for a while, but as soon as there are signs that you are gonna be successful, then start thinking and investing a bit in getting that help. Because as Stephanie said, you don't want it to catch up with you and then you're just.

[00:46:28] chasing your tail the whole time and can't really sit back and do it properly. And as Amber said earlier on the comment, the brief is so important. And so you need to have that head space to do it. Otherwise you'll just be like, Oh, outsourcing, it doesn't work. Well, that's because you didn't put into it what was needed.

[00:46:46] And I'd say as a general rule, as the final point, would be that you should outsource things where you do not need full time hours and or it is a, um, time limited project that will end. Whereas if you need full time hours or more for an ongoing permanent situation, then maybe go in house. Great advice.

[00:47:10] That's a great one.

[00:47:11] Matt Cromwell: Love it. Really good. Yeah, my advice was very similar to, um, what Stephanie said about that, that matrix. Don't copy me, Matt. Well, I'd say, you know, love and hate, uh, versus good at, bad at, I'd love to see that actual matrix. Uh, I'm sure you have it somewhere. I do. I have it right in front of me.

[00:47:29] Do you want to see it right now? Yeah, maybe pull it up while I'm thinking of my way to articulate it. Um, okay. There's a little share screen button at the bottom there. Um, mm-Hmm. . But, um, essentially like, um, try to find the thing that you shouldn't be doing. Um, like I, I was a developer. I did no support. I could do those things, like if I just add more of me, like the company didn't need more of me at that time.

[00:47:55] Uh, the company did need a really good marketer. Uh, at the time, and that was, that was useful. Our, our graphic designer, um, things that I could do, but I really am not so great at, um, really identifying that mix of things I think is, is the best place to start. Um, and I would ask around, like I listed a whole bunch of different agencies that we've worked with that do this type of work.

[00:48:19] Um, and they, and they have different foci. Um, and of course, uh, Focus WP has a lot of different offerings.

[00:48:26] Stephanie Hudson: Foci. Yeah. Is that aral of focus?

[00:48:30] Matt Cromwell: That's the of focus, like cactus? It's absolutely, I mean, that's my business

[00:48:33] Stephanie Hudson: name and I didn't even know that , that's, I feel like you made that up. It's not like a cactus.

[00:48:38] Matt Cromwell: No, it's absolutely the plural of focus, uh, I don't know. I

[00:48:42] Stephanie Hudson: feel like that's important information for me to have with that being my business

[00:48:46] Matt Cromwell: name. If you multiply your company by several, they become Fokai WP, I guess. But uh, uh, yeah, let's bring up this, uh, this chart here, what do we got? Okay,

[00:48:57] Stephanie Hudson: so this is my very, very detailed, with many points of datum, since we're doing weird promos.

[00:49:07] Multiple datum is datum. So I did like, okay, so I did this with emojis, like, there's design for me is on high on the enjoy but not good at. Uh, code, I'm kind of in the middle, copywriting, sale, uh, no, that's accounting, I think, that's, uh, that's accounting. Sales is what I'm good at and I enjoy it. Uh, I don't remember what I put all these things in.

[00:49:28] Anyway, you do your own, and then all of these, um, quadrants come in, and once you start to visualize them in this way, you could say like, Okay, well it's real easy what you should, like, anything that's falling in that little red square.

[00:49:42] Matt Cromwell: Yep.

[00:49:44] Stephanie Hudson: Offload it. And, and the world is a training. Oh, that's project management.

[00:49:49] I forgot. I made the conductor. Yeah, it's the conductor and admin stuff. Oh, I'm like my attention to detail. Isn't great. I like doing this stuff. I like going out and talking to people and selling and doing marketing and stuff. So, um, and the maintenance is easy for me too, but that's like a whole nother random thing, but anyway, so that's, that's just, it's so, so Simple.

[00:50:10] Yeah, but it's very powerful. Sometimes if you can just force yourself to sit down and do a little childish exercise like that in whatever format you want, you don't have to use emojis because it's very powerful. You know, you might forget what they mean.

[00:50:23] Matt Cromwell: Crayons and emojis, please. I love it. That's awesome.

[00:50:27] Well, Stephanie, this has been great. So helpful. So useful. Um, and I really do hope that we see an uptick in productive, um, outsourcing happening in the WordPress space. Me too. To Stephanie, tell the world where they can find you. Um, and other good bonus info that you get.

[00:50:46] Stephanie Hudson: Our website is focus, wp. co not .com, but if you go to focuswp.co/wppt WP Product Talk, the initials WPPT, we've got a, we've got a little special something. For the audience here, we've got a coupon code save 20 percent off of ours. So if you want to, if you want to try us out, um, that makes it a pretty darn good deal. You can also use that code for maintenance.

[00:51:13] If you'd like to sign up, our maintenance is super cheap. It's only 34 bucks a month. And, um, so if you want to go and sign up that to get that off your plate, that's a super easy one. And, uh, and then I also have a Facebook group that is very active. It's called focus on your biz. It is a lovely bunch of folks.

[00:51:31] We hang out every Thursday, um, evening, 5 PM Eastern. So it's a little late for Europeans, but, uh, we still get a bunch it's, it's early morning for Australia and eat late evening for. the UK and England. So we get a, we get a global crew in there, which is really fun. So every Thursday we get together and talk and, um, and we've even been like playing around on discord a little bit, which is like, I don't know.

[00:51:56] I don't know. I'm like, I'm not, I'm not used to that one yet, but, but anyway, go over there to that, um, the scrolling link, WPPT and we'll, um, there'll be all the links to all of the, all of the things. And, uh, thanks for having me

[00:52:08] Katie Keith: on you

[00:52:09] Stephanie Hudson: guys.

[00:52:10] Matt Cromwell: So

[00:52:10] Katie Keith: Stephanie, is there an end date on that discount because a big, uh, the majority of people will watch this later.

[00:52:18] Matt Cromwell: Nice.

[00:52:19] Katie Keith: Yeah.

[00:52:20] Matt Cromwell: I hope people keep listening. Just for the WPPT audience. Thanks so much for that. Um, cool, cool folks. Well, next week's going to be a surprise. We're going to surprise a topic, surprise guests, everybody, but we will be here. Same bat time, same bat channel. It's gonna

[00:52:35] Stephanie Hudson: be a surprise for you too, I'm guessing.

[00:52:37] Katie Keith: Shut up. . Those

[00:52:39] Matt Cromwell: our secrets. Those are our secrets. Secret sauce there. Um, but thank you so much and uh, everybody enjoy. Have a good week.

[00:52:47] Stephanie Hudson: Thanks everybody. Bye bye.