] Hi, I am Aaron.

] And I’m Micah. And you are listening to the WP square one podcast. With us today is Brian Casel. You may have heard of the Dos Equis guy, the “Most Interesting Man in the World.” Brian Casel is the “Most Interesting Man on the Web”. He’s got all kinds of stuff going on.

] This is my favorite podcast intro by far of all

] So Brian has done all kinds of things. He, well I probably shouldn’t even try to explain because you’ve done so much. I think we should let that unfold as we go. So how about you give us the 30-second overview from your point of view of what you’re doing now kind of thing and we’ll go from there.

] Yeah, sure. If you look at my website, I’m sure you’ll link it up. That’s where I kind of have just like a running list of all the different businesses, small and large that I’ve worked on over the years. It might look like a lot, but it’s kind of spread out over the course of about 10 years now. I’ve been self employed and kind of, you know, doing a bunch of different things. But basically, I’m a designer and product person by trade. I started out as a web designer doing a lot of work with WordPress. But you know, these days I’m wearing a few different businesses hats and actually you’re catching me at a kind of an interesting time right now. We’re at the end of 2018 and I’m kind of in one of those transition phases. Actually, right now, I’m starting up a brand new company. So the thing that I’m mostly focused on today is a new thing called ProcessKit, which is a software, it will be a software product, for managing any sort of repeatable projects in your business, especially if you’re doing client services. Like, if you’re a web agency or anyone else doing repeatable projects, this is how you can document those processes and automate it with your team and give your, give your team the instructions and, like the next step that they always need to try to make your client services or anything repeatable, more predictable. That’s kind of the goal with this thing. And so I’m hoping to get that built and rolled out in early 2019, but I’ve got other stuff running as well.

] Cool. Yeah, I believe you’ve got significantly more products on your website than I do. So ProcessKit, that’s one of the hardest things in business is to get your processes in order and to onboard new team members, that kind of thing.

] Yeah. A lot of the people who know me, what they tell me all the times that like, I’m the process person. You know, I’ve built some very process oriented businesses, so what kind of pays the bills right now while I’m working on ProcessKit is my business called Audience Ops which is a productized service where my team handles blog content writing and blog content production for a variety of clients. And actually, we now do podcast production as well. But you know, that’s all basically running without me. It has completely freed me up now. So the team basically does everything in that business and I have all this time to work on a new product. But the reason why that’s the case is because we have processes, you know. It’s a remote team. Everybody follows a very predictable schedule, a very predictable workflow. We’ve got contingencies, I’ll document out edge cases and things like that. And so every question that comes from clients, we know how to handle it. Different roles, you know, follow different tasks and things like that. So that’s running pretty predictably thanks to all the processes and automation that we’ve put in. And I’m trying to build ProcessKit too to make running a business like that easier basically.

] So what was kind of the key moment for you? I’m sure you probably didn’t start out having high leverage on your time by having all these processes in place. So what was the key moment for you when you realized, you know, it clicked and process was kind of the way to go with this?

] Ah, yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, I don’t know if that, it was like one moment. It was probably just a lot of moments kind of stacking up one after another. I was freelancing for a couple of years as a, as a web designer doing a lot of work with WordPress. And it kinda got to a point where I became pretty, this happens to most freelancers, right? You get, you get good at freelancing. You get good at going through the routines and working with clients and then you start raising your rates and you’re getting bigger and bigger projects. But then at a certain point after you’ve been at it for a couple of years, or maybe even sooner than that, you know, you hit a point where it’s like, oh, is this it? Like am I just going to keep turning out proposals and then doing another project? And that started to get to me after awhile. It’s like even though I might be raising my rates and getting bigger projects, it wasn’t like my enjoyment of doing that sort of work was getting better and better. It was kind of getting worse. It even got to a point, if you ask about a single moment, there’s probably happened a couple times, but I just remember, you know, closing a pretty big project, pretty big contract. The client signs on the contract. I get a big check and I had this feeling in my stomach like, “Ugh”, like I was not happy. This should be a time that you’re celebrating a big new client, a big contract. But I felt like the opposite because I was like, oh, now my next four months are shot, you know, and I’m going to be stressed out with this. And that’s when I kind of kind of realized like, okay, it’s time for me to actively change what I do for a living.

] Yeah. Sometimes I feel like people use buisiness as an excuse not to improve and not to grow. I hear it all the time with the developers, you know, “Oh, I’m too busy to learn anything new” or “I’m too busy to have time to spend on my business.” So obviously, you’ve got to start somewhere. So it sounds kind of like that’s you’re talking about all these moments stacking on top of each other. It sounds like, one small change starts kind of this chain reaction that over time gets you to where you are now.

] Yeah. Early on, the Big Aha moment was to start to think in terms of problems that you’re solving, not technologies that you’re using or techniques that you’re using.

] Can I ask you a question about the remoteness? Yeah, since I hadn’t said anything and like 13 minutes in, I figured I should. As far as remoteness, so my agency, we’re all remote. How do you guys work? Are you guys all in the same time zone? Are you guys global? Tell me about it.

] Not really the same time zone, but similar. So of the 25 people, something like 20 of them are remote. I’m in Connecticut, so I’m on the east coast. But the rest of the team is kind of spread out and in all different times zones. And then we’ve got a few. So all of our team is made up of writer’s copy editors and client managers. Those people are all US-based and in different states. Then we’ve got a couple of virtual assistants who handle some of the set up work with blog posts and whatnot. They’re in the Philippines. Who else? Occasionally I’ll work with a developer in, in Europe. But right now, I’m not doing a ton of new development except for the SAAS, but I’ve actually been working on that myself for most of this year.

] Okay. That’s interesting. I’m always interested in how other agencies or companies work when it comes to remote, cause we’re a hundred percent remote. We try to get together on a regular basis. But I mean it’s, you have some, some I guess some strengths and weaknesses when it comes to that. You know, one of the things that we tried to do is we all jump on a phone call every morning, which is helpful, but we’re all Eastern. You know, we’re all within the Atlanta area. So just wondering on, on that.

] Yeah. Actually on that stuff. You know, I’ve always wanted to have these like big meetups with the team and unfortunately, I haven’t really had a good chance to do it with Audience Ops. I have met some people on the team. Funny enough, my wife has family in the Philippines and we’ve traveled there. And so I met all the people who work in the Philippines. I met all of them. And most of the U.S. people I haven’t actually met in person. Yeah. It’s just like logistically with this size of a team and people coming from so many far off places, it’s just hard to get everybody together. So we haven’t really done that for audience ops. I would like to do that someday though. The other thing about meetings very early on, audience ops today is about three and a half years in, in the first year I tried to have more all team meetings on zoom or Skype or whatever and we do still have a manager’s meeting. The like the four or five managers on the team do get together once every two weeks. It’s, it’s really not that much. And even that call is like 10 minutes long. It’s really short. Like most of our interaction happens on slack and Trello and, and an email and stuff. What I found with those regular daily standup meetings and whatnot in this type of business, everything is so repeatable and so predictable. I mean, we’re literally just turning out the same type of blog content. As the content is unique to each client, but the process and the deliverables are all the same. And all the clients sign up for more or less the same packages. So, so it’s really just kind of like production work. So it’s not like we really have to meet. It’s not like we’re building a new product and every week we’re shipping new features. If we were doing that sort of thing then, yeah, we would totally be meeting daily and talking about progress, but, you know, really just checking in on the status of the production line. It’s not super productive to have meetings I found. So we do have systems in place where we’re communicating daily and slack and, and we do have some, some check-ins and like reports internally and we have like a history of how things are going.

] That sounds like you guys are very streamlined, which I would love for our agency. I think we didn’t take our agency’s seriously met my business partner and me until 2015. So for five years we acted like freelancers. And now that we’ve realized, we need to make our processes better, a little more, streamlined. So, so we can bring people on. You know, the first person we hired, it was a lot to try to explain how the company works. Now we have a lot of documents, you know, a lot of the onboarding processes that honestly, I don’t know anything about. Someone on our team knows about the processes.

] Yeah. That’s a big one is onboarding new team members. We also have a very, streamlined, but it’s, there’s a lot of steps in our new client onboarding process. We’ve got a lot, lot more processes than that, but yeah, it’s been really important for us for sure. I have everything kind of documented.

] I might be hitting you up, I guess what 2019

] Yeah. Well with ProcessKit (that’s ProcessKit.com), the new thing that I’m working on right now is just kind of a landing page describing what it’s going to be. It’s been kind of fun for these last few months because when you enter your email then it goes to a quick survey to kind of ask about processes in your business. But then I invite you into a private Facebook group and or a private Slack. You could choose either one. All these other agency owners and people who are running all sorts of businesses, they’re kind of talking and giving feedback about processes and I’ve been showing like designs and some video screenshots of video walkthroughs of the upcoming product and getting feedback on, on like how it’ll work. So that’s been a really fun process.

] I’m gonna sign up. I might be a good fit for what you’re doing. Awesome. Interesting stuff. I think what you said is funny. You said 2011 might date you. And I’m thinking man, that makes me really old because in my perspective, like the whole responsiveness thing in 2011, was still kind of new. Not new in the aspect of, I mean, I’ve been doing this stuff since like the mid-nineties it’s like, that’s still in my age, I guess.

] Well, I was, I mean, I’ve worked for a web agency in New York, that was like 2005 and then we’re talking about IE6 and table-based layouts and all that fun stuff. And then I went out on my own freelancing. That was the beginning of 2008 I believe.

] Gotcha. Yeah. That’s like ’09 I guess would be a great time. If I could go back, you know, this is WP Square One. If I could go back to square one, you know, I probably would have done some themes, you know, in ’08 or ’09. Because that’s just a prime time to be in that market. Now there’s a lot of people out there selling stuff.

] Yeah. I remember discovering WooThemes and StudioPress and Jason Schuler with Press 75 and IThemes, you know, that group. I remember discovering them at that time and just being completely amazed at what these companies were doing. I had never even thought about the concept of selling any sort of digital products. I was a freelance web designer. I thought that’s all there was. And then I kind of stumbled upon what WooThemes was doing and I was like, “Oh my God, I’m using WordPress. I could build WordPress themes.” I never thought that I could sell products like that.

] And what made you think that? Like, what was

] Yeah. I think just looking back on it, maybe I was kind of naive. I was just so excited about the idea of selling products and seeing somebody else or other people making products out of things that I was already making on a regular basis. Like websites built with WordPress. I already knew exactly how to design and build what they were selling as digital products. And so it wasn’t like something that was so elusive. Like, you know, that I felt out of my reach. It was like I literally know exactly how to build that. I just need to put in the time to do it. And, and I did it. I mean marketing, it wasn’t, it was another story which I really knew nothing about. And I spent the next few years kind of learning a lot about marketing and things, but yeah, it was just kind of exciting too. I think that that also started my interest in working on things.

] Even, even if I might not get paid for them,

] So with your products and things that you’ve come up with what is kind of your approach to, you know, when you have an idea, kind of validating that and making sure that you know how long to spend on it before it’s not worth your time, or that kind of thing?

] Yeah. I think now that I’m a little bit older and been at this a little bit longer, I take a much more methodic and strategic approach. So I run into new ideas all the time and I’ve got a list of shiny object ideas in my notebook. I usually just start by writing it down and get it out of my head and, and sometimes, you know, it might not be the right time for me to pursue a new idea. I might be just in the middle of of another business or something and it, and it would just be too much of a distraction. But if I’m really excited about the idea, I’ll just go ahead and spend an hour and write out a long notes document. You know, what I think this product should be about, how it might work, what I might price it at, who would be the customer, what would be involved, and just get those ideas out of my head and onto a piece of paper that that’s a good first step. And then the next day, the next three days, if it just keeps bugging me, like I keep thinking about that idea and if it seems like an opportunity, then I’ll kind of explore further. Otherwise it’s just an idea that sits in my notebook and maybe I’ll never touch it again. The next step, if I’m serious or if I’m looking for something new to work on, my next step is to run it in front of potential customers. And I have an audience now of people I’ve built, I’ve been blogging and building my email list for several years. So that’s my go-to place is I’ll go to people on my email list and I’ll show them or present some new idea to them, like ProcessKit, what you see right now, that landing page was the first thing that I showed people. I wrote out, I drafted a few different drafts and then I wrote out this kind of manifesto about the problem that I want to set out to solve with ProcessKit. And I put that out there too to my audience. And the thing is, I’ve also started to learn who my audience is and I tend to gravitate towards ideas that I think really solve problems for them. I am much more likely to do products that would fit my audience well rather than just finding a random opportunity out there somewhere. For example, I did spend three or four years working on Restaurant Engine, which was a kind of a SAAS productized service built on WordPress, a website builder built on WordPress for the restaurant industry and I learned a ton. I built that to a significant product business and then I sold it. But one of the reasons I sold it was because it was so disconnected from my people and from my audience. I wanted to get more into products that are, that serve people who I was already connected to and I had an easier time making inroads with and learning from. So that’s, that’s kind of where I, where I try to focus.

] Nice. So question for you about VAs. How’d you

] Over the years. I’ve, I’ve done a few different things. I’ve tried Upwork, which I’ve had some, some successes with, some hit and miss that the service that I’ve been using, which can be a little bit hit and miss, but I still go back to it is called, virtualstafffinder.com and it’s like a one-time fee and then they kind of do the legwork of finding three, pre-vetted candidates and they just give you their contact info and some info about them and then you can basically interview those three candidates. Sometimes I’ll hire one out of the three sometimes two. And again, it’s been a little bit hit and miss, but the few that have joined the team have been on the team for three years, so it’s been working out pretty well.

] Oh, that’s excellent. So that’s cool. Yeah, I know a lot of things are a mess when you’re hiring a complete stranger. Unless you can go to the Philippines and meet them.

] Yeah, I mean, I met them a year after they started working.

] Yeah, that’s, that’s cool. Micah, you got

] Oh, I’ve got lots of questions, but I say we lead in with our primary question.

] Okay. I wasn’t sure if it was that time.

] Well, I think this will lead off into other questions anyways.

] Let’s do it. I’ll do it. So the podcast is called WP Square One. And I had said before, going back to square one. So Brian, if you were to go back to square one, what would you do differently?

] Well, which square one, right? Are we talking about like say, back when you’re a freelancer and you’re frustrated with how things are going and you wanted to change things? Yeah, well, I think that the thing that that really sticks out is just like, I stumbled into these things after a couple of years of, of freelancing, which was like products and marketing and even even entrepreneurship, like the term or being an entrepreneur. I did not think of myself as an entrepreneur when I, when I went freelance, I, when people ask me what I did, I said I’m a web designer and it’s weird because it was in my blood. My father is self-employed, my grandfathers both owned businesses, but for whatever reason, it wasn’t one of those things that I had always set out to be an entrepreneur. But after like two or three years of doing the freelance web design thing, I started to just stumble into entrepreneurship podcasts like the WordPress themes market. That was my first entry point into selling digital products. But from there I got into listening to Mixergy interviews and then other business podcasts. I wish that I had, discovered that stuff a little bit sooner and maybe been a little bit more intentional about being a business owner. I’m not just this person who works by the hour. I stumbled into that eventually, but it would have been nice if I had made that shift in mindset a little bit sooner. What was I going to say? The other thing that comes to mind; so I’ve been self-employed since 2008, so more than 10 years now, and I think the first three or four years of that I was alone. I was working in my bedroom alone and a few contacts here and there, you know, on Twitter and whatnot. But like I did not get out to conferences and meet people once I started doing that. I’m not even a huge conference goer but over the last five or six years I started to really get into a few key communities of other entrepreneurs and people who are self-employed, who I have a lot of things in common with. And we live in all different places, but we not only, we stay in touch online through, through Twitter and Skype and email and stuff, but we, we do make a point to go meet up in person. And, and have fun together. So like, like one of the conferences I go to is Microconf every year in Vegas. It’s kind of for bootstrapped entrepreneurs. A lot of my circle of friends go there. But the other thing that I’m very passionate about now is this idea of tiny conferences. And so Brad Touesnard, who is another WordPress person, he and I have been friends for a couple of years and, and we, we put together what we call big snow, tiny comp. It’s a, we get 12 business owners together in a house in Vermont when we go skiing and snowboarding. And we talk about business for three days. Since we started that about six years ago, another one has to, our other friend started the same thing in Colorado and I know their friends started one in Europe. I go to these small meetups or tiny conferences if you will, and these are my friends. We’re all running businesses and we talk on Slack and in between throughout the year and just having a group of friends and advisors to go to and get to know and follow along with their business and they fall along with my business. It’s been just so valuable, more than people realize. It’s really, really valuable to have a group of people to share ideas with.

] I like that because as a freelancer, so I quit my job in Oh eight also. I’m in my office/extra bedroom and I’m spinning a lot of time by myself and no one to learn from. And I think that’s where, for me at least, the WordPress community has come in, you know, been able to find businesses that are similar to mine and just bounce ideas and ask “how do you do this?”, “How do you do that type thing?”, which is very valuable. So I guess reaching out to those people in your areas is important.

] Yeah. And I mean for me, like really all my friends these days, I mean I have a lot of close friends that I grew up with and everything from the, like the New York Tri-State area. But the, most of my close friends these days are other business owners and they don’t live anywhere near where I live. They’re my quote-unquote friends on the Internet, you know? And in these past few years, you know, we’ve made a point to go travel and have these meetups together and there is a different level of value that you can get, even if you know people on Twitter or know people in forums or on blogs and podcasts, that’s one thing, but there’s a different level when you’re in a room and hanging out with people over beers or over dinner and you get more candid, more open. You get to really help each other out. It’s really good.

] Okay. I was going to say, this sounds like a

] Of course. Yeah. When it was Brad’s idea at first he was like, we should just get together and snowboard and talk business and get a group. I was like, I’m in whatever, whatever we do, I’m like, let’s do it. This is happening.

] That’s awesome. Well, I appreciate your time and as I said, I’m going to fill out that form on processkit.com. But what are the best ways to reach out to you via Twitter or one of your many websites?

] Yeah, so on Twitter I’m @casjam. And then my main website is https://briancasel.com/. I’ll give you guys the link because it’s spelled a little bit weird, but that’s where you can see what I’m up to. I’ve got my email newsletter there.

] Sounds good. Well, thank you for your time.

] Yeah. Thanks for having me on guys.