Lockdown Live S02E04 - Dealing With Problem Clients

angle yep okay okay so let's see if this live will work this time i have no idea and if anybody else will join us so let's just fingers crossed hope that somebody actually sees our new stream and let me see if i can actually stop the old one a moment so if anybody else is actually watching this anybody's joining us from the new stream please do bear with us because we are experiencing a few technical issues okay oh it seems to be working i see [Music] see the live stream okay so let's see if i can actually get that other stream up so anybody that's joining in just bear with me we are just experiencing a few technical issues let's just see if we can get these technical issues sorted out okay stream five people are watching so we've got a live stream okay so we do have a live stream okay great okay okay so there we go can you actually see can you see me now can you see me and hear me now if you taken what 15 20 minutes to get to this point so can you actually see can you hear can you just let me know in the chat if you can and then we'll go back over the first 15 minutes of the live stream so fingers crossed let me know anyway let me know in the chat section yeah it seems like it's going well okay well i can i can see chat things coming up and people can obviously see us so let's just try this again uh new comments let's have a little look yes seeing you happy fantastic okay cool right so we're gonna start off the first 15 minutes of the live stream all over again first 18 minutes so thank you very much for staying with me while we've had this technical issue which can't really complain is the first one we've had since starting these last year okay so first of all i just want to say thank you very much for joining me i'll go and do the usual hellos and everything in a moment but before we do i want to say tonight i've got a special guest on to join me the conversation of the topic we're going to talk about so if you'd like to take a moment i'd like to introduce my guest tonight which is casino and i'm sure many of you know kay and you've seen his work if you haven't you really need to go and do a search on youtube for casino and take a look at his youtube channel and his youtube videos he do some amazing work and since we kind of reached out to have a little chat probably about the best part of a year ago now we've become pretty good friends and i think we share a lot of things in common so tonight we're going to talk about a particular topic we're going to share some of our experiences some of the ways that we've handled those different things before we do i just want to say a quick hello and get casey new to actually just introduce himself and let us know a little bit about what he does okay hello as some of you may know i call myself the digital alchemist and i'm really thrilled to be talking to paul's audience tonight because i really appreciate paul i yeah i kind of met him a year ago in a comment and ever since we've been talking we've been geeking out about gear about a lot of stuff and we have a lot of things in common and i really love the work that he's doing i have a lot of respect for his work and a lot of respect for you guys and girls uh his audience so basically um we started talking and we had a lot of things to share in in common basically because we have kind of the same view about web design web development and the whole industry so i think it's really interesting to be introduced to you tonight because like i said i've been a fan of paul's work for a long time even before i met him and it was really great to start talking to you man just to exchange views because yeah like i said i'm just repeating myself but we have a lot of things in common because in the industry there's a lot of content going uh going on but we really have a should i say a professional view of how things are actually working in the real world so yeah i really appreciate that and i'm really thankful to be here tonight and thankful to meet you guys and girls and it's great to have you as well and like you say we do have a lot of business uh sort of experience and things like that in common so we're gonna touch upon some of those things tonight uh before we do let's do the usual say hello to some of the people that are actually joined in and thankfully come over from the previous live stream to the one that actually works so for those old enough to understand i put an extra 50 pence in the meter and we should have enough juice now to last us till the end of the livestream so who we got in this evening and who are going to say hello to so quite a few have joined over so that's really good to see everybody here so i'm just going to quickly scroll up to the top of the long list abdullah good evening charlie bird always a pleasure to see you balram ripal neil hirusha sam grant well let's go what have we got uh juan sanchez waid michael wright well some great people we've actually great to see you all in again tonight and so many faces that are new coming in which is always great so joe shields i see you here tonight one solution hq christoph keppens i hope i'm saying these names right because i'm terrible at pronouncing names marco david walls good to see you good evening to indianapolis and we've got who else we have uh schries oliveira good evening stratos good to see you as always now i'm going to quickly go and say what i said earlier on so i'm sure case bored of this now because i've already said this once anyway if you are into oxygen page builder or you're interested in oxygen page builder check out stardust's channel on youtube just to a search for start last tutorials he's doing some great work over there showing you how to get more out of oxygen builder if you're new to oxygen builder you've been using it for a little while or you just want to see what it's all about go and check out startup's channel on youtube and take a little look and don't forget to hit that subscribe button smash the bell icon and don't give it a thumbs down give it a thumbs up anyway that's enough me talking good evening lillian good to see you in again tonight dirk yes we are back we are working and we are good to go okay so what do we want to talk about tonight well the first and main topic is going to be all about problem clients now if you've never had a problem client you will have a problem client at some point if you've had a problem client or more than one please do share your experiences with us tonight because as always this is a two-way conversation or knowing three-way conversation so we're just going to kind of talk about some of the experiences we've had some of the types of problems we've found how we've dealt with different things and i'd love you to share your experiences the way that you've dealt with things in the chat section and if you're watching this on replay do the same thing in the comments section drop in the kinds of problems you've had with clients and how you've dealt with them obviously no names or links or anything else will be mentioned either by me tonight by k tonight or anybody in the comment section so that's kind of what i want to talk about tonight so like i say let us know all about your experiences it's okay what's been the worst experience you've had with a client and what kind of experience was it okay so before i start i want to say that most of my clients are really excellent i have a really good relationship with my clients and i just love my clients but it's because i i mean okay i want to but are you frozen for a moment there so i wasn't sure if we were having more technical issues okay no no yeah i think it i think it's going well but what i'm trying to say is basically when i had no experience i had a lot of bad clients and the more experience i got the better it gets and today i'm touching wood but i got a lot of great clients and i'm really excited to have meetings with them actually i had one meeting today and it was it was really it was really cool it was really fun it was stress free and that's what i wish to everyone but if if i have to talk about bad experiences the first one that comes to mind is a couple of years ago you know i i am divorced so i have two daughters and a couple of years ago at christmas time i had one of my my main client basically it was my main client it was my bread and butter and they came to me um during the holidays at christmas and they told me listen we have a big problem the investors want a new website by the fourth of january so could you please create a new website so basically i had like two weeks to create a new website and what i did is i really i really felt for them so i thought okay i'm going to do this and bear in mind i have my daughters um for the holidays one year out of two so every other year i don't have uh my daughters basically so this year i had my daughters and i decided to work on that project and i worked day and night for two weeks to create a full ecommerce website completely customized so it's a i mean it would be a really expensive website basically and i worked really really really hard and now if i make um if i need to make an assessment two years later that company they went bankrupt because they had a really bad uh internal uh company policy and the time i skipped with my family two years ago i would never get it back and i would get i would never get that time back when my daughters and the company went bankrupt and one of the associate because the other one is a really good person is it actually your friend but the other associate is someone that has very sketchy morals to say the least so if if i i try to get some experience out of that it's really i wasted some time during those holidays my daughters will never be 10 years old again and the other one 13 years old again that would never happen and i wasted a lot of time trying to make the best for my clients but at the end of the day they were not correct and the company went bankrupt so one thing i really want to share is of course you need to love your clients and do the best you can because good clients are really a blessing but unfortunately sometimes bad clients happen you need to know how to recognize when you have a bad client and you always need to put things into perspective because nothing is going to replace what you have in life so if i think about that p that time i'm i'm kind of sad that i'm i skipped that time with my kids but to cut a long story short this year i had my kids again and i spent a really good time with it so i really learned and i think that's that's one of the key here i really learned how to um do good work for my clients but also bear in mind the priorities and i think most clients will understand that because they have families too and they know how to put priorities when they they should put priorities but it's really important for you as a freelancer or as a i don't know a small agency to know what the priority priorities are so of course you you should take care of your clients but also bear in mind that if you're going to spend the whole of your holidays just working for someone that may never give back to you i mean it's uh it's a subject for debate yeah i think it's a very good point you bring up the is that you kind of you have to get that balance right i mean if you get clients not all clients are bad clients but some clients can be have bad manners as it were should we say you know they expect things from you that they they wouldn't necessarily expect from someone else and i think it's our job to set boundaries and make sure that we make sure that the clients stick to those boundaries you know that's part of our responsibility um and you can without setting those boundaries or without addressing those things when they start to read their ugly head you can end up like you say in a situation where you're doubling down to do everything you possibly can for them you're not getting the thanks that you realistically should you're not getting the understanding that hang on i've got a life as well you know you've got a short deadline but i've got a life and to expect someone to drop everything for that hey it's unrealistic but like i say i do think a big part of that is how we then address it and rebalance that relationship between ourselves and the clients it's a difficult one to deal with for sure yeah um i'm wondering in the audience how many of you guys and girls are really happy when you have a meeting with the clients because that's what's happening to me right now so today i had a meeting with one of my main clients and i was excited because it's all it's always fun because i got to a point where i got enough experience to know which people i want to work with and which people i don't want to work with but at core i'm a diplomat you know my father used to be a diplomat so i'm a diplomat so i would never say to a client i don't want to work with you i'm not like that but sometimes i would redirect to a company that you know is more in line with what they're looking for but the clients i work with i really want to be excited when i work with them that's what happened today my main client we have a big campaign going on sorry last monday we have the momentum next monday and it's a really stressful moment but we had so much fun today we were on whatsapp we have a group and we was really laughing about it about the whole campaign and stuff and that is gold because i have no stress whatsoever and to be honest that's what's that's what i wish to all of you because when you reach that point there's always going to be stress there's always going to be stress let's face it but if you can diminish the stress from a big campaign from your main client you know there's something that you're doing good and that's what what i wish to all of you and that comes with experience and that's why me and paul we really want to uh we really want to share this with you you know it doesn't cost you anything it's a free advice but to be honest i know you're all trying to grind and you know get your business going on but at one point the best business is when you respect your customer and your customer respects you yeah and like i said i think that's that can happen a lot easier when you set boundaries you know i think you know when you're new to freelancing you're new to business we all grab every opportunity that comes along we don't necessarily look for those red flag situations where this client i don't think they're gonna be right because we're just like you say excited to get that new client excited to get that new prospective client thinking of the money thinking of the job thinking of all the things that that go with it and really kind of ignoring the negative things to do with how the project might pan out based upon some of those red flag things that you see to start off with and like dvd says i think and this is a very good point some clients actually think they own you and that's very true some clients do think that because they paid you some money that you now are beholden to them to do everything they say to be there they beckon call um i mean luckily enough i don't really and never really have had that many clients maybe that's down to the way that the relationship was managed from the starting point or something else but when they do come along they can be a real drain on your positivity on your energy on your excitement but like you say when you get a good client and you get that good relationship when the phone rings you pick it up and you have a chat to them and it can be a chat it doesn't have to be about money it doesn't have to be about work it can just be they're calling you up to run an idea past you because they trust what you will tell them you know those kind of clients are the ones that you want to nurture you want to grow and look for the red flags and like you say you don't necessarily have to say to a client thanks but or potential client thanks but no thanks there's other ways of doing it you know you can say unfortunately i'm fully booked up for the next three to six months you know if you're happy to wait then by all means we can take a look at look and work on the project and most people have a shorter deadline than that there's various creative ways in which you can deal with it but don't ever feel like you have to put up with some of the crap that some people can give you and expect you to take it because at the end of the day you might be doing a job for someone you might be being paid by someone but they don't own you you are basically you know you you wouldn't go to them and say i bought product x from you and now i expect your company to maintain that product x for the next 25 years you know it's not realistic and they would probably tell you sorry it doesn't work that way you know so confidence kind of comes as part of the whole package when it comes to becoming a freelancer and these are things that you develop and you they'll grow over time as you become more confident as you deal with more situations and you do have more problem clients and the red flags that kind of come with those kinds of things so yeah it is a difficult one so i think what we're going to do is we're going to just going to take a little look now at some of the comments some of the experiences of other people have had and give our two pence worth on on those kinds of things so let's have a little look i'm gonna go back up so deirdre posted one earlier on so we've got had a client who wanted everything done yesterday and didn't want to pay for it i'm sure okay you've had a very similar experience you've got clients that they want the work done and they are not particularly quick to pay for it or when you give them a price on it they look as if you just you know sort of chop their leg off or something you know yeah i have a good example i had one guy he came into my office and he was like yeah he's hanging out with millionaires and he was telling me how he was hanging out with millionaires in thailand and he got so much money and he got a big business and then we talked about his project for the website and i announced the pricing and then he goes all red like it was gonna you know collapse or something so you know at this point he had no credibility for me he had no credibility whatsoever and he told me well well i have a business but you can't charge too much because you know i'm in charge yeah but i mean at this point he's wasting my time and he really looks like he's not he's got no credibility now i'm always polite with people but honestly when i have some red flags actually i created a video about that but i have a few sentences red flags when people tell me yeah i've done your job i can i've built a thousand websites and i know how to do it at this point in my head it's already over so the the the only thing i'm trying to do is to end the the appointment at this stage but really politely you know um i'm like that this is my education i'm trying to be polite trying to be a diplomat but at one point i'm not gonna waste two hours if you know i know it's it's not going to work out and i think that's part of the job if you want to be a freelancer if you want to have your own business or even if you're working for someone else you need to know who you're going to spend time with people who don't respect you they may never respect you don't waste time with those people people like you know sometimes i even refer to my competitors say go and check them because i think they're going to be a bit good fit for for you i'm never trying to insult people but i've learned over time not to waste time on just trying to create someone that doesn't want to work with you yeah exactly and um voices sort of quoted something i said a little while back which is build relationships not websites you know the website is just a byproduct of that working relationship and if your relationship in the same way you know if if you you're with a partner and it was a bad relationship you know one person was abusive to the other you know verbally you know whatever you wouldn't want to stay there you know you would want to get out of it and it should be no different in business and if anything you should want to get out quicker in business because you're not tied to that person or company so you know forget about whatever it is you're building for that particular person company you know whatever if the relationship is bad it's not gonna get better by continuing to work together so sometimes you just have to just say this is not working cut your ties and just end the relationship i've done it myself a couple of times it's not easy you do beat yourself up about it and you do kind of you do wonder was this something that i did wrong you know what blah blah all the things you do in any kind of relationship friends partners business all those kinds of things and i think what you need to just kind of keep in the back of your mind in any situation like this is that every time a situation like this arises in any part of life but we'll focus on the business side things you can always take something positive away from it whether you've learned something that you didn't know if you've found a way to handle a situation you know all those different things there's always something you can take away from every bad situation no matter what kind of situation it actually is and to give you a kind of an example of a working kind of situation which you knew straight away that it was going to be a bad thing but you know through circumstances and through inexperience you still take the job when i was doing when i had the the company was a partner in a business we were graphic design web design those kinds of things so part of what i did was company branding so logo design those kinds of things and had a potential client come in wanted a logo to be designed had the meeting and already within the space of the five minutes of the meeting you already knew that this person was just there to test you because one of the things you sort of say is like you know there's a comment like so how do i know that you're going to come up with a logo design that i like and my answer was not to be cocky about it or it might have come across as being a bit cocky was well i work with x number of people before and so far i've never had anybody reject the design and i think the comeback was well there's always a first time and let's just say that was a precursor to exactly what happened i don't think anything that i could have done no matter how tight the brief was would have satisfied that individual i think they just had set their mind on it that they were just not going to accept anything that i'd done anything that i created for them and it was just a relationship that very quickly it was just right this is just not working have your money back you crack on at the end of the day it was one of those things that she used something like i don't know like word um was it called word art or something a simple font done it herself and she brought that in and said like oh this is something i put together and that's what they went away and used after the relationship kind of broke down so you kind of looking back you know now i would say oh okay well um maybe i'm not the right person to work with you maybe you need to look at something else and push that potential client back out the door you know like you say looking at the watch and thinking i really don't have time for this i got things i could be doing to make money but yeah you know we live and learn and we have to take something away from every situation no matter how good or bad that situation actually is yeah um i've had the opportunity to work with big brands like mcdonald's uh bnp barry bus bank uh porsche kia alfa romeo those kind of brands a lot of brands i had a chance when i was working for an agency and i'm i'm not going to name any brand but one one of those brands was just a nightmare honestly they treat you treat you like you're nothing and at one point you need to know your worth if you know you got you really got worth and you can really help the the brand and the company then you may want to use your energy to use it for a brand that really wants to work with you and that's my key point so nowadays i mostly work with people who want to work with me so basically the initial um meeting we have i really want to find out if i can bring something to them and if they can bring something to me in return and if i feel that i cannot bring anything i'll be honest i said listen you're doing everything right i don't think i can bring anything but on the other hand if i know i can bring something i really want to go all in i think that's really important when you trying to get your portfolio started it's interesting to have big brand names because it's going to give you credibility but past that stage you really need to focus on what's going to bring you something more than just money of course money is important but you cannot just focus on trying to get money because if you do that then you're going to do things that you don't like and you're going to feel miserable that's a reality absolutely reality yeah that's a a very good way of looking at it you know money is useful money's something we all need but i think when i put the video together probably about a year ago now saying that i'd lost a client and i was happy about it the kind of the underlying message there was that it doesn't matter how much money a client will potentially make you if they cause you stress and heartache and frustration and anxiety they're not worth the money they really are not worth the money you know your health your mental health your physical health has kind of manifested from your mental health when that starts to be affected by a client that's not a good situation to be in you know you wouldn't stay friends with someone that was mentally draining you and was you know whatever and i think that that has to to sort of go over to a client relationship if there's not mutual respect it's already on a bad foot in it's already you know the foundations are just not there to make it a viable relationship long term i don't think yeah exactly and for some of you guys and girl that are just starting out some of the key uh phrases that you know to me are red flags are when people get into my office and they say well i can do your work i've done many websites but i just don't have time for me that's a red flag at this stage most of the time i'm already gone i'm already elsewhere but i'm just trying to end the the meeting politely and it's really important for you to have a few key phrases that you know when it happens okay sometimes it might be the exception and maybe they just you know miss phrase what they were trying to say but most of the time you know if it looks like a duck if it sounds like a it's a duck you know so i think it's really important to uh be confident with yourself and i know that's one of the main problems most of the people having pastor syndrome i had impostor syndrome but be confident past one stage you will know that you have what it takes to build a quality website and to re-help your clients and basically it's just all about respect you know i respect my client i have the utmost respect for my clients because they're building their business they know what they're doing and i i really like the fact that i can help them you know i can bring a blog to help that and i think it's the same thing for paul uh when i see all the tutorials that paul is creating when it comes to dynamic websites i mean there's so much value in there and when you come across a client that realizes that they're really really thankful and i think that's what you what you need to look for and of course when you're getting started just want to get your portfolio you want to get your first client so that's a different story but what me and i think paul also want to uh really focus on is the fact that you need to know your self-worth you're going to build it you know you're going to get experience like everybody else but then you really need to focus on the client that really want to work with you yeah totally um you do need to to know your worth and i think when it comes to building your portfolio i think there's there's a bit there's always been a bit of a misconception and i think probably more so now than ever that a portfolio is really worth being in existence if it's client work if it's paid work but the reality is when someone comes to take a look at the work that you've created i know for me if i was looking at something i wouldn't care if the work was created for a client or just as a practice project just to show their skills you know just to sort of like flex a little bit of what they can do because what you're looking for is not necessarily someone that has great client skills you want someone that has great design skills great sort of coding skills great web design skills whatever it is that you're looking to have sort of put together i think that's more important when it comes to portfolios than than it actually being paid for by someone that will come you know that's something that you can build upon as you grow more experience but to start off with portfolios don't undersell yourself don't undervalue yourself if you are skilled and there's so many ways to learn and develop skills beyond sort of just like you know web design tutorials like myself and k sort of put together you know there's lots of skills just look at places like dribble for example you know most things on there are not being put out for a particular client they're being put out to show the kinds of work that these designers can create and some of the the design work is absolutely phenomenal and knowing that that's their work i'd have no hesitation hiring someone to do that kind of work for me seeing the caliber of the work they created regardless of whether the clients paid them to create it or not because to look at it in a slightly different way nine times out of ten for me well i said no not nine times let's just say 70 percent of the time the end result that i've created for a client with the client's interaction isn't something i want to put in my portfolio because when you create something as a designer you create it to look and function the best it possibly can when a client gets involved they can actually derail that and take you in a direction that's different to what you would do and ultimately the end result in your eyes as a designer is subpar to what you want to do forget the codes forget the functionality the physical looking of the site the logo the branding whatever it is a lot of the time that doesn't meet your standards that's because you're satisfying the client even though you might want to try to educate them you're satisfying the client's requirements needs and vision which isn't necessarily in line with your vision so like i say for me the end result doesn't matter whether it's been paid for or whether it's been something that's completely put together from the designer's mind now speaking of amazing tools this is a really bad segue i do have to thank tonight's sponsor before we go any further so with that really loose and shoddy sort of segue i'm gonna say a quick thank you to our sponsor so today's sponsor is croco block and i'm sure if you are a follower of the channel or anything that i put together you know full well that i do a lot of work with crocker blog both for a sponsored content side of things where i work with them to create content on their own channel and also the content that i create on the wp touch channel so if you're looking to have an amazing amount of control over what you can do with elementor and now a lot more control over gutenberg take a look at crocoblock.com to check out some of the things they can do okay so that's that side of things all done adjusted so thank you very much as always for the continued support from crockerblock let's just carry on now so let's take a look at some of the comments that we've had uh hold on just a quick word because uh for those of you who don't know me i talk about kirk about a lot also on my channel and obviously here i'm just a guest but honestly i i just really recommend to recommend to anyone to just get croco block with elementor if you're going to use elementor pro because there's so much value um in this tool and i remember when i had the first pricing i told everyone this is a steal you should get you should get the um you should get the that pricing because it's great and then they move on to another uh pricing and even now i i still think is a steal if you're a professional so honestly it really helps me in my day-to-day work and i talked about it to uh paul when we just talk we're doing what's up calls there's no affiliate links it's just me and him and i told him that it's really helping me so i recommend it to my friend and not later than yesterday one of my friends called me because he also got a freelancing business and i really think that one good combo if you are going to use elementor i know some people are going to use oxygen and thrive things and it's fine it's great as as long as you love the tools and you know the shoes you're using but if you're going to use elementor pro elementor elementor pro i think croco lock is the ideal compliment so i just wanted to say this and usually be sponsored so that's always good um but just just to sort of talk about uh crocodile quickly before we go back on back on the topic um it's worth it to to know as well that now jet engine jet smart filters and jet search as well as uh jet style whatever it's called i could never get a jets something styling whatever it is all work with gutenberg um so if you don't want to rely upon elemental and astronomer says you don't need elementor pro to do a lot of these things so it might bad if i mention elemental pro you don't need to so there's a lot more functionality coming with gutenberg and a lot of the croco block products and they're also talking about how things are put together so i want to quickly just say that i was reading a comment from andre who's the i think he's the ceo of crocker block and he was saying that the way that the croco block suite has been coded is is 80 independent which means that they should be able to port that over to other platforms so i'm really hoping that we'll see better support for oxygen for gutenberg as well as elemental and you know other page builders if you want to brizzy i mean that'll be another one i'd like to see it for so all being well we will see more widespread support but i'm just great to see that there's more support going into into gutenberg for start as much as i don't like gutenberg i do think there's a lot of reasons to want to use dynamic content inside there and speaking of that we're going to go on to point number two of tonight's live stream which again now that was a smooth segway gutenberg dynamic blocks with generate press and stackable so if you've okay backup if you've taken a look at the wp crew facebook group uh yesterday i think it was i posted about generate press they beat a release of version two and one of the things that's in there that kind of got me a little bit excited is they're going to be supporting dynamic content and also if you use stackable the pro version you can't get this with a free version that's already working and linking that with tool kit tool set toolkit is it toolkit i can navigate right i always say toolkit just yeah toolkit anyway so if you want dynamic content inside gutenberg we're now starting to see more block companies releasing support for those dynamic tools so i know for me i'm really excited about this because as much as i love what elementor pro and elementor and croco block bring to the table it's still nice to have other alternatives where you don't need that amount of power as well as that amount of extra code to do something that could be fairly simple and straightforward so for me i'm all about options i like to see as many options as possible so i'm really excited to see that these things are coming to more platforms and hopefully over the next year it's going to be really exciting to see how we can really start to get more dynamic content up with these other tools that are not so reliant upon just elementor pro toolset thank you very much michael i always get it wrong but yeah tool set i picked up a license for that the other day specifically because um stackable is supporting it straight out of the box and stackable is really nice to work with if you want a cut down version of a page builder inside the guttenberg editor so okay i don't know if you've used gutenberg much with these these kind of block packs like you know sort of stackable like generate blocks those kinds of things i mean do you use that or are you still solely an element or kind of guy these days well i'm going to give an answer in two separate um two separate answers actually so first of all i'm really excited about all the options like you said and especially when i watch your videos your videos because i watch your videos and i really like the fact that we have more options because at the end the end of the day it's us consumers that get the benefit from all these options now i'm also a fierce defender of working with one ecosystem and i'm not saying one ecosystem is better than one than another but if you're running a business you don't want to start learning a new theme a new theme builder every other day you need to focus i think in my opinion it's just my opinion i like to focus on one but then i never mind changing so just to cut a long story short when i started with team page builders i was working with divi and i had a really great time with dv and i would never say anything bad about dv because it i mean it was so great it was really great but at one stage i had a project and dv could not cut it at this point today it could but it took them time to just move her over from page builder to theme builder so i moved over to elementor in elementor pro and i really loved it and then what i did is i used a combo elementor pro with astra theme and i know it by heart i know where every setting is so for me it's way faster to build a project on astra and elementor pro and i like the company also the philosophy they have but like i said i think dv is great also i think the key is to just master a tool and then when you feel limited if you really feel limited you know um long enough so that you can't not work then it's time to look for something else unfortunately that's the rule of the business it's just like you know if you're into the camera business here on youtube there are a lot of content creators that um create videos about cameras and you know all cameras are great today you can shoot 4k like we do in here on the stream there are a lot of tools but there are some videos you can watch on youtube um professional versus beginner so you give the best specked out camera to a beginner and then you give an old camera to a professional and most of the time the professional is gonna you know really cut it and then the beginner is not gonna cut it and that's the way it works but i'm not really stuck to one company one brand what i want to do is to be able to serve my clients the best way and i think of if you're that philosophy then you're always you're always going to win and your clients are going to win if you know your tool better it's like a formula one pilot if you know your car if you know the engine if you know all the little intricacies of um basically the tool you have then you're going to be best at it but i agree with paul it's good to have options because at the end of the end of the day we are the benefiters of competition yep absolutely i mean i mean i'm kind of like in a position where i'm lucky enough to be able to test out lots of different plugins and themes and software and stuff like that but from a professional point of view at this point in time i mean i still work inside elementor and elementor pro with client work you know not that i do that much client work these days anyway i just don't have the time to do it but when you kind of get to know the tools that you're using and you know them well enough that just makes the whole process of specking a job finding out if you're actually capable of creating the end result that the client is looking for it makes it easier when you don't know your tools that well when someone comes along and says oh i want a website that does this and it's a little bit out of the ordinary you know to what you're used to this a little bit outside your wheelhouse maybe you can kind of think well okay i'll take on the job and then you find how do i do it you know and that's that's not a good position to be in i mean when you know your tools well you can apply them to any given situation and you also know when you can't apply them but when you're kind of just dabbling with lots of different things you can just get yourself into a position where you can make a career at a hash of things because you just don't know the tools well enough to know their limitations or your limitations of the tools you know there's two kinds of sides to that that side of things so i would definitely agree with you know learn the tools that you want to work with daily but don't be afraid to experiment with other things outside of that to get more comfortable because you know we've talked about this before divi was the de facto page builder for for a while you know prior to that he was visual composer now currently it's elemental now this cycle is going to change there's going to be something that's going to come along that will rival elementor pro and it'll push it to one side and people will move on now at this point in time oxygen is picking up a lot more people because of some of the things that have happened with elemental recently is that going to take over from elementor personally i don't think so not right now and i think it's a little too hardcore for some people whereas elementor is a lot more user-friendly and user-focused so you know this this everything comes in cycles elementor's not going to be here forever same as visual composer you've only got to look at when visual composer release a video showing a new feature i looked at it i think about three days ago when it comes to my feed and within the first hour there was four videos elementor will post a video and in the first hour there's 2 000 views it gives you a good understanding of where those two products lie right now but that's not going to stay the same forever so i think we do need to be cognizant of the fact that things will change and we need to keep up to date with some of the things that are going on while still focusing on our you know sort of tried and tested tool kit when working with paying clients i mean i don't care if you feel the same if you dabble with other things yourself or whether you you kind of focus solely on what you're using now no i'm always open i'm always open what i'm looking for is for reliable partners so basically um what i don't want to do is use some plugins that are going to disappear in six months that's what i don't want to do because i've had this experience before i remember i built a website for in the hotel um and then after something like 12 months the the people who created the plugin they just i don't know they had other interests in life they completely cut the plugin so the client came back to me and we couldn't update the plugin so basically it was really stuck because the whole website was based on this plugin and that's why most of the time i don't like working with free plugins because i'm not sure what's going to happen with the support now some companies have a premium model where they have a premium product and a freemium product and in this way most of the time it works but that's the first barrier basically i really want to be sure i can you know it's going to be reliable basically i can show my clients that in two years time we can update the website is going to be fine but then for the rest i'm really hoping i'm really open because like you said it's an ever-changing landscape and i don't know which company is going to be there in two or three years or in five years what i want is reliable partners you know if you took if you think about um you know standard companies i don't know if you take mercedes or bmw you can think okay in five years time they would be here so you can buy a car and know that the the car parts are going to be there and in terms of software sometimes we're really excited with new tools but the thing is after 6 months 12 months they're gone so what do you do when your clients come and they want to update their website i think it's really important to think about that now we have big names in the industry we have elementor we have tv we have pivot builder we have thrive themes both supports in sources in my opinion and then it really comes to your preference also so what i did personally i purchased a license for elementor i got my lenses for dv i got my lenses for uh oxygen i got my license for people business i paid it myself i didn't get anything for free i tried it and i thought okay for this type of projects i prefer that brand for these type of projects i prefer that brand so really it's up to you but you need to make the choice yourself because we're not in your shoes you may prefer thrive over db over element you really need to try it and test it out and like i often say you you must be willing to spend some money to make some money you know the old free model i mean it was fun in 1999 but today you need to spend a little bit of money to test and bear in mind and most of these tools they're free trials so you know you you should really test it and find fun stuff and the best way in my opinion is to test on a real project um just to give you an example i was so caught up with divi um i didn't want to change i really love divi and i still think it's a beautiful tool but at one stage i had one project where tv didn't have the tools that i needed so i had to move on to elementor and it was really an eye opening experience and maybe it's the same for you maybe moving to oxygen or thrive really open your eyes so that's going to be different for everyone yeah i mean to go back to one of the points you made about things not being around forevermore i mean this was one of the things i mean going back probably 10 years ago now i used to use a couple of different themes on uh envato elements because at the time i mean page builders it was basically visual composer and that was it the important so you know you'd look for you did even though you had things like generate press and things like that that wasn't kind of in my wheelhouse at the time um so i was using different themes on there and you find a couple of different themes that you like and you stick with um impreza was one that was quite good but that ended up becoming bloated but the problem that i found with things like that was that you buy a theme for a particular client project because it fit into what they were trying to achieve and then you'd build it and like you see a year would go by and they come back and go can you change this and we need to update that and you go to take a look if there's an update to the theme and it was gone it had been taken off by the the author and you no longer had access to download it you know no longer had access to support so you couldn't update anything so you're then stuck in a position well what do i do you know but at some point this is going to break so there has been several client projects that i basically be without the client knowing anything about it rebuilt their site at the time in ocean wp because i got so used to using that that i could literally put a site together in the space of half a day so i take this site replicate it on a different domain transfer all the content over check everything worked out so they would be you know there might be some minor differences in there but they would never notice and then i would literally put their site back online solely because i didn't want to have to deal with the fallout that i knew would happen at some point when something happened to that site and i could no longer update it and then i'd have to go back and do it and the client would be peeved at me because this site wouldn't be working for maybe a couple of days you know they might have even seen it you know those kinds of things that we know can happen so it was better for me to do that behind the scenes for a theme that was becoming you know a bit more sort of all-encompassing i think we are spoilt these days with themes if you're using them with themes like bloxy now but oceanwp generate press astra they're well-coded well-designed themes that are more generic so they're great starting points when you want to use them with something like you know um beaver builder or uh you're sort of like i think whatever before uh brizzy or element or those kinds of things so it really is a kind of golden time at this point in time when it comes to building websites there's so many tools out there the first time i used acf for example there was no integrations with any themes there were no plugins it was literally open up the template for your single php your archive page edit inject the code you wanted in today hope to god you didn't screw it up and then try to get that all work in the back end and the front end all those kinds of things but these days you can literally not have to touch a single line of code and you can create amazing websites with tools that don't cost crazy amounts of money yeah i don't want to play the old g here but for those of you who didn't know that time we we used to have to quote everything by hand just think about it and there was no responsive web design at this point yet we had to code everything by hand today is luxury so honestly when i see people using dv thrive beaver gutenberg i mean it's all the same it's just a flavor you want to ride a bmw on a mercedes or a lexus it's all the flavor you want to ride you know you need to test it for yourself see what you like best i mean all those tools there oh they're all amazing you know the big names they're really amazing you need to find what works for you you need to find an ecosystem what i'm trying to look for if i'm trying to to talk practically as a business owner i'm trying to reduce my costs so if i can get some lifetime plans and it's better if i can then i need to see okay if i can can i make some money back the the practical idea is that if you really know the tools you're using you're gonna limit the time you spend learning new craft if you know a theme it could be astra could be bloxy could be cadence whatever but if you know the theme you're working for you don't have to spend one hour looking for options it's gonna take five minutes you know and if you paid i don't know if you pay 70 bucks per hour then five minutes is money you know instead of one hour and that's how you need to think so there's no shortcuts you need to test the tools sometimes you need to spend some money like i said there are some trials test it on a real project that's my best advice see what you prefer and then go all in know your tool and you're going to be way better than people who come with just a shiny object because it's a shiny object syndrome and me and paul know it in the youtube industry i mean sometimes we talk about gear and we love gear we buy the shiny objects but at the end of the day is what you do with the tools you know yeah that's how it works it is it is exactly that i mean to take that to a different uh thing where you're talking about tech and stuff like that i mean i've been a pc user for forever when i moved away from like um non-pc computers right at the beginning i'm talking way way way back so i'm not even going to go then to sort of say i always but i literally bought three macs in the space amen amen brother three max in four months and the reason i bought the third one which was like last week so if you don't follow me on instagram follow me instagram you'll see the photos the reason i did it is not because it's nice and shiny although it is nice and shiny it's because what i do so much video editing now that for me to edit a video on a mac a mac mini for chrysic it's like 699 quid or you can get it for just over 600 pounds yeah i can edit some video to a better standard on there quicker with all the different transitions and with all the different overlays and things then i can on a pc that cost me 1500 quid to build that's just the pc exactly so it just reiterates the point in a different sort of medium but it's still the same thing it's like if you can find tools that make you more productive exactly you become more valuable inside your business and you can therefore make more money per hour because you spend less time fighting the tools and more time using the tools so i know it's a different analogy but it's the same kind of thing and at that point what we're going to do is we're going to move over to a q a so i'm going to press my button now for the q a so hopefully this will work and i'll break everything i do like that little thing it's awesome yeah it's nice the first first question because it's been sort of pulled up and i think it's a really good question from brian if pay build if page builders come and go is something like gutenberg the best option for a site that needs to last a long time so okay i'm going to let you answer your opinion on that to start off with and then i'm going to give my opinion on it i think it's a good question especially for me because i don't use gutenberg yet because i think it's really promising and i think it's going to be great but right now when i need to build a website i need to be sure i control everything on the website so i think when you get into web design you need to have that mentality that it's going to change all of the time i haven't seen ever since i started web design it's not be one year when something hasn't changed every year something's going to change so if you want to work in the web design web development industry individual you need to be ready to change all the time change the landscape be used to change if tomorrow gutenberg is the king and i need to adapt i will adapt like i adapted to responsive web design like i adapted to mobile uh design i adapted to that and same thing for paul so i think that it's not really a matter of is gutenberg better it's just do you have the mentality uh to adapt to whatever is gonna come your way when it comes to web design because trust me even after gutenberg something is gonna come maybe we're gonna have holographic uh websites in five years we don't know but i'm ready for that because i know it's gonna change yeah um i'm gonna answer my sort of take on the whole gutenberg thing now as well i don't honestly think at this point in time unless you're just creating a very simple blog that gutenberg is good enough on its own to be useful uh i know they sort of build in the whole sort of like sight building side of things but to me the core gutenberg is still pretty weak you do need to add things like stackable for example or cadence blocks or generate blocks and some other plug-ins onto it to make it truly a usable platform at this point in time great for dealing with blog content where you want to have a little bit more control over that really simplistic layout and pairing it with a theme like blocks cadence astra any of those kinds of things but from a building an entire site that's a little bit more comprehensive more complex no it just is not good enough right now i still think it needs at least two years development as a single platform to become a viable alternative to any of the page builders out there right now even the most basic free versions so no but i would say it is worth taking a little bit of time to learn it to understand it to realize what the limitations are and what its strengths are i mean at this point in time there are not that many strengths but i think there are tools like stackable like cadence blocks like those different plugins and things there's a lot of free plugins as well which i've covered in a video as well that make gutenberg more like working with a page builder that we are used to so global styling global font styling those kinds of things google colors better layout options containers multi-columns and things so things you used to but you will still fight it a little bit because it's kind of like a a hybrid between what you used to have with like visual composer which everything was just done in a really rudimentary fashion where you didn't see how things were actually going to display properly and something like a simple page builder because you're still kind of beholden to the way it's going to display in the dashboard of wordpress which isn't going to look the same as what it does on the front end of your site so you're going to do a lot of back and forth checking your design to make sure everything looks the way you wanted to so it takes more time to do things you could do really quickly in a page builder like elementor brizzy divvy those kinds of things so that's kind of my take right now yeah and if i if i can add to it it's want to use team builders whatever brand you're going to use you're going to get used to having everything you want to have so basically when i use a theme builder i know i can change everything on the website any part and what i don't want to go to now is being limited have a fixed layout i can just change a few things it's really awkward once you've passed the stage and you know you can build anything you want and that's what you get with team builders so i think that if gutenberg want to reach a stage where they can really compete with the team builders they would have to offer that uh that flexibility and you know nowadays when the age of mobile web design because 70 to 80 of people watch websites on mobiles and in my opinion gutenberg is not really ready for prime time when it comes to mobile web design so i think it's a really important flaw and i'm sure it's going to be addressed you know maybe in in a short time but at today while we're recording the uh this stream i think it's not really from prior to primes and when it comes to mobile web design no i think there's there's still a lot of limitations i think there's a comment just now so it's still at this toddler stage which is kind of true but i think the problem with gutenberg is it's really really slow to develop i mean i commented on brizzy not being the fastest to roll out new features but i mean gutenberg what are we over two years into its life cycle probably closer to three now and let's be honest but it's you don't still don't have styling for lots of different options you don't have any kind of global styling options you're still having to work in a back end side of things where you can't even see the theme layout when you're making changes to it so these are all things that to me take it away from being a page builder and more of just a really simple block built i know it's kind of built around blocks anyway but this is why i kind of say when you're working with a blog post it's easy because there's titles there's your quotes there's images there's bulleted lists and there's paragraphs and a couple of other things and galleries and stuff so it's really simple because you think well this is the flow of the page so that makes sense i don't need the distractions of the theme but when you try to design something especially when they want to move it over to becoming an all-encompassing whole sort of like theme replacement tool they really need to up their game big time to make it even remotely viable to do these kinds of things in my opinion it's just it's just too far back and like i said you're patching so many holes with third-party tools like i keep saying like stackable and generate blocks and those kinds of things because they are good good sort of tools to use but then you kind of have to ask yourself that important question of well if i'm adding all these things to it why don't i just use elementor or brizzy or divi because you're just literally putting five or six plugins in on top of the theme to get a remotely close to a design environment you can work with well you may as well just use one of those other tools you know this kind of where's the return on doing it this way is it really going to make that much of a difference when you add all those tools in yeah and you know something that people need to bear in mind is the fact that um we always think about different tools but the clients they don't really care they want the website to work they want return on investment they couldn't care less whether you'd be using db or element or gutenberg so it's always what's driving personally that's always what's driving my decision if i need to build a website if i need to to choose a set of tools what can bring me to point a to point b you know in the best way and give the best to my client and it really helps it really helps because like like i said there's a shiny object syndrome and it's really hard to fight it especially if you're an appsumo user like myself there's a there are a lot of tools but you need to make a decision at one point if you want to start a business and maybe you're watching this you are web designer you work for a company but maybe one day you want to turn into a freelancer and you're going to have to make your own decisions and it's really tough when there's so many choices so like i've been saying from the beginning of the stream and we've been talking about it with paul it's important that you master your ecosystem and then when you find a limitation you move to another one i think gutenberg is really promising i remember when it was first out people hated it it was so much hate and now many people are embracing it so i think it's like everything you know when you start a new thing when it changes people hate it and then people embrace it but like i said to me as a business it's not ready for prime time i need to especially for my business i want to fully customize the website so i want to be able to customize every part and i want it to work and you know before gutenberg can do that to me it's not even in the landscape but i'm i'm watching it it's really interesting and it's really promising yeah i've gone from a hatred of i've gotten to it as i prefer to call it to just a mild disgust of it now you know it's i no longer hate it yeah it's it's like that um yeah i think there's potential but i think the potential isn't coming from gutenberg itself it's coming from the plug-ins that are working alongside good to make it truly a usable thing on its own to me it's still pretty rubbish you know it's just not i i don't understand why they even bothered if i'm brutally honest about it i know there's all this talk of they had to compete with the likes of wix and squarespace and so on well why didn't they just dedicate a team to develop the supporting platform you know the wordpress.com platform and build that thing if people want all those features let them have a self hosted so let them have a hosted platform where they have full control over the entire architecture like webflow like wix like squarespace and then let the people like us get on with using the tools that we're accustomed to and not try to make us use a tool that just really isn't that good you know it just isn't isn't a particularly good piece of software yeah actually i was surprised that they did not try to buy one of the big names in the industry i really thought that was gonna happen because they have kind of a monopoly let's face it nowadays okay there's web float it's weak squarespace but the market share of wordpress is just amazing just imagine you're in the market and one website of the three it's it's your brand i mean you can do pretty much anything you want you could get any loan you want from any bank and i was really surprised they didn't try to buy one of the big names because let's face it some of the big names did better than wordpress itself you know but that's not bad i mean it can happen to all of us you start with something and someone comes with something better but then you need to be smart enough to know what to integrate what not to integrate so i would i was really surprised but i think it's going in the good in a good direction because they kind of understood that why are page and team builders so popular there must be something to it and they're trying to move in the right direction yeah i've said it before in live streams i've said different comments and things i don't understand why they just didn't get someone on board or company on board or like you say buy out someone else and just integrate that into the core of wordpress you know even if they've done something like that and if you if you want to sort of take a look at rivaling the likes of wix and squarespace and things like that surely a kind like a product like brizzy would have been pretty much perfect for it because yeah it is you know fairly user focused which is different to what you've got with you know elementor is very much a traditional page builder you know it's it's not really that different to what's come before it you know like like visual composer and beaver builder and so on it's the all the icons or the widgets drag and drop kind of thing whereas brizzy took a different approach they made they sort of like the link between the on-page editing just a little bit more intuitive and less daunting and in your face so to me i would have thought that something like that would have been a better way of going about it and work with people that have a tried and tested track record that's a lot of teas to just make something that would have been so much better than what it really is these days i just i struggle to see the point in it and i think you can see just by the writings on the sort of like the the wordpress repository what people really do think of it and they're still hammering away at it day in day out you know it's like we're gonna get this square peg in that round hole whether you like it or not you know it's just like i don't care yeah i i honestly to this day i don't i don't understand i think it has to do with corporate mentality if you work in a big company before you know that there's a lot of politics you know inside a company and sometimes you have some weird decisions happening and you don't know why it's just a battle of you know people with influence within the company so honestly i have no inside um news or anything but it's really weird to me when i compare it to other industries try to think of any other industry like i don't know tech or um cars or whatever when one company has kind of a monopoly and if they don't take that advantage i mean they're gonna die at one point so i don't wish that wordpress i wish wordpress a long life but they need to take into consideration that if people are purchasing licenses for team builders is because there is a need that's the market that's the market reality you know that's how it works i remember a long time ago for the oldest of you guys and girls there were the cds and then the minidisc you know meaning this was great it was really small it was you know it was great but the all the whole industry was directed towards cds and that's why we had dismantled today it's laughable because you only have mp3 it's all digital but at that time but i was the only one i knew nobody else the mini disk you know but it was so tiny it was great but the market decided so i think as a company you need to really look at the market and you need to look at the reality so either you're gonna thrive or you just going to go away did any of you heard of kodak kodak was a big name in the photo industry and then they were just gone like nokia for the mobiles you know mobile nokia was so amazing and today i mean some of you don't know what nokia is i mean that's a reality so wordpress has to be humble enough to know that if they don't move with the flow they just might go like just any other company in the world well the thing is i think wordpress need to potentially realize that not apple i mean apple are one of those companies that are in a very enviable position where they get rid of things that we take for granted you know ports on phones headphone jack and things like that yeah and that changes the industry you know the industry adapts to what apple have kind of dictated you know there are not many companies that are in the tech industry then that have that kind of relationship and that kind of power to change the industry and i think wordpress is not one of those companies so they do need to sort of understand that you know they might think a decision is the right decision but when the market rejects it which is what a lot of the markets done with gutenberg up until you know recently that maybe they're doing something wrong maybe it isn't the right thing to go about doing this kind of thing you know so yeah it is a difficult one i mean personally for me i just think they could have spent their time and their money in so many other better places the media management the dashboard just various different things that could have been given some actual attention but everything has kind of been primarily focused on gutenberg at the expense of what people really want you know and that that is ultimately what it is you say what people really want yeah and let me ask you ask a question to the audience um how many of you are excited when there's a new ios release you know or a new mac os release people talk ab about it there are youtube videos and people just watch videos but how many of you are excited when there's a new wordpress release you know no i think yeah when there's a new wordpress version it's fear because people are thinking oh crap how many of my exactly is it gonna crash exactly and that's my point if wordpress had a philosophy i'm not talking about the whole market philosophy i'm just you should be excited when there's a new uh wordpress version out i mean it's exciting some of the software we use for live streaming like ecom live i mean it's exciting i watched the streams they they last for like one hour and they talk about the new features and i'm so excited you know but when wordpress comes out like paul said i'm like man i'm gonna to do some maintenance what's gonna happen it's gonna work you know and i mean there's a problem there in my opinion yeah it's i think it's the same with with elementor um i'm not not to sort of rag on them for any reason yeah but when a new version comes out you've already got to look on the facebook groups and you see people should i update has anybody updated what problems have you had how how did you get around it and you always get the same answers you know the sort of like stage insight and all those kinds of things but it is i think this is indicative of these kinds of tools is that there is an underlying knowledge that there's a good chance things are going to break and they could be critical breaks and it's just like that's just no no can't deal with that that's too much stress and great if there's only you know two sites but when you've got a hundred sites for clients that is a massive amount of stress when that comes out just not not good not as good at all thank you very much brian said thank you so much k and paul for your in-depth answer to my question so appreciate it thank you my pleasure and thank you very much for giving such a good question yeah you're welcome and i just um want to give a shout out to some of the comments because someone from mexico uh in the comments oh that's really gay people have all over the island so i said we've got people from all over the world internet which is awesome yeah i just wanted to say that uh deidre she was kodak south africa's designer for 10 years and it was a great 10 years so she actually used to work for kodak so that's pretty cool to know also you could remember all the kodak things and that yeah it was crazy because kodak i mean was massive you know i think with the instability cameras the instant you know sort of that was a massive thing as well as the sort of role film for you know slrs and things but it's crazy to see how digital basically wiped out kodak you know pretty much completely yeah and that's what i wanted to talk about because things actually move all the time so i can see we got sandor skippers from the netherlands to get bruno pirat from bulgaria it's really exciting to have all you all of you guys and girls here in the in the comments so once again i'm really thankful for meeting uh paul's audience it's been a pleasure i think we're gonna take a couple more questions and i think we'll wrap it up we've kind of run over a little bit but i think part of that was the technical issues that we experienced tonight so if you've got any questions with regards to what we've been talking about tonight gutenberg dynamic content with regards to gutenberg or dealing with dodgy clients then please do pop those in the comment section into the chat so we can take a little look at those and uh we'll try our best to answer them now please do bear in mind that when you're asking questions there's only so much we can actually answer there's only certain kinds of questions some things are pretty technical by their very nature which means it's quite difficult to give a full and detailed answer with regards to that side of things so i'm gonna do bruno first of all what do you think of new build just like builders like zion and bricks i mean have you tried or heard of either of those uh okay i'll be totally honest i haven't heard of those i'm pretty sure i took a look at zion a little while back um but i've seen i've taken a look at some different page builders and i think there are some interesting ones out there i don't think there's anything that's really breaking the mold i think there's a lot of things that are being done that are very safe and in the same line as things we already know you know the icons with the widgets down the left or the right hand side you know you may go look at some things and they are very reminiscent of the tools you're already using is that a good or a bad thing i think it's more of a safe bet they're probably thinking that taking someone that's a user of shall we say elemental and then take it over to something that looks very similar and operates in a very similar fashion that you know you're going to have that familiarity that comfort that ease of knowing how to get around things but then the flip side of that is what are you bringing to the table you know what what's your unique selling point over a tool that we're already using we've been using for three four years we're familiar with we know the quirks of it we know we can do what exactly are they bringing to the table you know let let me know what you think i mean that's kind of my thought with it well i think there are new tools every day and like i said it's really tempting to jump into new tools but that's when you're just an enthusiast when you run a business you need to be able to actually monetize your investment so if your tools make it to prime time and it's got a solid track record and i know it's gonna help me do better than what i currently have then i won't hesitate i mean if he really helps the business then okay but there are so many tools coming up every day that you really need to have some kind of focus and maybe try it on a side project but you really need tools that are going to last and tools of which you can get support that's really really important because if you need support for a client and there's no support then your client's not going to be happy you're going to lose business they're going to talk to other people in your local area and that's going to be bad so i think it really matters to really carefully choose the tools but also at the same time you need to leave your mind open to look at the new alternatives now honestly those brand those brands haven't made it to my inner circle so i'm not saying it's not good i'm just saying i haven't heard enough about it and i i watch a lot of news on the industry so well i i can't find everything that's going around but i haven't i haven't tried it so i'm happy to try it but like i said i have one ecosystem and when i feel the need to move to another ecosystem then is the time good good answer okay so the next thing we've got to say is let me just have a little look at this question here's a good one anthony t clients that want to edit their own sites but don't want to pay a retainer how do you convince them they need this retainer for updates and support first of all i'll answer how i would generally tend to deal with that i've kind of been of the mindset for the big part that i create content management systems before wordpress i built my own kind of thing so my clients have pretty much always gone on to some kind of cms and for me the thought process behind it was more a case of i would rather then be able to maintain this site than me having to make all the changes to it primarily because when you've got five clients it's easy to make updates when you've got a hundred clients you certainly are in a position where you're probably not making as much money as building a new project and you're supporting all those clients and adding new content all those kinds of things that being said i probably would look at it a little differently these days because i think more people are getting more used to having maintenance plans having retainers and things and maybe that's one of those things that you could look at and then you could you could cherry pick what you want to do i mean i don't think you should ever force a client onto any kind of retainer i think you should just give them the benefits of why a retainer might be good value for them and if they want to do it themselves they don't know what they're doing then you can think well okay they're not going to buy a retainer so i can charge them if money is this sort of like interesting fact and you haven't factored this into the original proposal i can train them give them one-to-one training or i can create dedicated training to show them how to do different things on the site or generic training i mean there's lots of ways you can approach doing this you know video written whatever you kind of want to do and then let them get on with it but make them aware of the fact that if they make a mess of things that you will fix it but there will be charges involved and you charge them at the full rate your full hourly rate kind of thing so it incentivizes them to have some kind of retainer and you can always sell them a simple care plan that doesn't involve updates you know as in like updating content and designs and things but it gives them a support mechanism that they can have in place in the background like an insurance policy that if something goes wrong it's not going to cost them your 50 or 70 pounds an hour rate it's gonna be slightly less than that you know because they paid for it in advance as it were there's lots of ways you could approach it i don't think forcing a client into a maintenance or care plan is a good thing make the options available give them alternatives give them all the options they need and just make them aware that if they don't take something like that out if they need you in the future which they invariably will at some point there will be charges and those charges are your hourly rate build however you want to do it that's how i would generally approach it but kay you might be completely different to what i'm i'm sort of thinking there no actually i totally agree um usually what i tell my clients i offer a training it's a two hours training so that they can maintain their their own website but then i tell them if you're just going to update some content you don't need me honestly it's going to be more expensive than if you do it yourself but if you want me to change the structure then you might want a professional it could be me it could be someone else but i'm you know one of my pride is to give full access to my clients so if they want to work with someone else they're completely free to go with someone else but most of the time they stick with me and just for updating content they can do it themselves and oftentimes i give that example that i have one of the my viewers on youtube she's 69 years old she followed one of my courses to create a one page website and now she's selling websites to seniors so you know if she can do it you know most of my client can do it you know i'm really proud about that and the truth is if you use an easy enough system just to change the content the the clients they love it but then when they don't have the thumb or they want something more complex then they reach out to me what i've had last week i had one client and i told her that before i released the website i said one thing you should not do is just click on update and update all plugins when there's a maintenance because that's the best way to break your website but then probably she forgot and she did it so what happened is the the brexit the the website was completely broken so i had to fix it and then yeah like paul said it was my hourly rate but because i told her so before we even release the final website she knew what would happen and there was no problem with it and then she said okay i'm ready to move to a maintenance plan so sometimes it needs to happen for some of the clients the right way to take the maintenance plan but then some clients you need to bear in mind that some clients they have the human resources inside maybe they have someone that has already built a website and they don't they know how to uh do a maintenance and you need to be ready for that you need to accept that but most of the clients they they are thankful they need your help as long as it's reasonable you know and it makes sense and the pricing is good for what they get you're not going to have any problem in my opinion but again it kind of goes back what we're saying earlier on which is building relationships not building websites when you build a relationship and the client trusts you to know that you're not going to rip them off then it makes the whole process easier and like you say when you're honest and open up front that there's going to be costs involved if they don't have a kind of care plan in any kind of way then they've got themselves to blame if they get themselves into a position like that and to kind of continue that on again this is another one about anthony t's questions just kind of continuation to what we've just been talking about he said what about theme or plug-in updates a lot of clients don't understand what that means if they neglect it even have to explain to them they don't care until something happens what i do with that is there's an annual fee for minor updates in other words wordpress 5.1 5.2 5.3 and so on that they pay me every year regardless that's that's a fee that i charge them every single year what it doesn't include are major revisions so six seven you know elementor 3.0 wordpress 5.0 those kinds of things because they generally come with more chance of breaking things which means that the the whole process could be a lot more time consuming and therefore i do not include that in there if they have a care or make them as plan i'll include it in that side of things but the sort of the update plan should we say this an annual thing they build that regardless and that just means that they pay in for me to do that in the background so they don't have to worry about it they don't really get much of a choice in the matter and if they don't don't want to take it out older clients for example if and when things go wrong they then go on to the you pay me my my hourly rate and i will charge you my full hourly rate to fix the problems that you didn't want to deal with over the last year 18 months two years whatever you kind of want to do so for me that's kind of how i would do it and again kay i mean what what are your thoughts on this how do you handle that kind of situation if it arises for you these days i think we have the same the same vision of things but just before i answer i just want to shout out to steve pro gave a super chat and i think we kind of skipped that so thank you for uh for the stream but yeah i think it's really the relationship first and i've talked about it in a few of my videos see some many of the people in my audience ask me how can we get more clients and they're all about just online and i'm all digital by the way i call myself the digital alchemy so what i'm going to say is going to be shocking to you but i make most of my business with face-to-face networking you know i'm in a business group um it's called bni i'm i'm in the bni chapter but i guess most i get most of my business from there i used to uh i live on an island so i was in terms of seo i was like first on google for like two or three years but most of the clients i got were really i'm sorry to say but really cheapos you know they were looking for the cheapest websites and to be honest i wasted so much time whereas now i do face to face networking business meetings people that don't really talk about the price you know when i talk to them they don't re it's not that they don't care about the price it's they know that good good work takes money so they will talk about other things like how much time it's going to take and what would i get for my money but not i want the cheapest price so i often advise people to maybe look elsewhere i'm not saying you should all go into face-to-face networking i'm just saying when everybody's looking to one direction and you know i'm not talking about fiverr or something but see you see what i'm trying to say maybe it's time to look into another direction where some other clients are because some people the truth is some of my clients they will never go on those websites because you know at first and they don't know nothing about digital so they you know they don't have that reflex to go to fiverr and those type of website and freelancer they just called some friends and they say do you know someone who can build websites you know and if you're in the business circle then they're going to refer to you and all the barriers are really lowered you know i don't know about you paul but i get many inquiries per day on my email people selling me seo services web design services i don't know them i'm never going to do business with them i just hit spam you know and their email address is like the spam and they're going to reach let's less people yeah that's not that's not a good idea and i think it starts there and when you build a relationship like paul said and i've seen that over and over again i have some clients not only do they ask me for more business they they really asking me what can we do together but then they bring me other clients exactly it's all about the relationships i do agree with you there it's like if you build a good relationship that goes a long way and forget about just the work that you do with that one particular client they're going to tell other people that they want to work with and i think you you you sort of like hit the nail on the head there is when you get someone that's interested in working with you and the first thing they say is how long would it take you to do what i need not how much would it cost me that's a good indicator that's a client you want to work with that's the kind of client you want to get on board because they're not bothered about the price they're bothered about getting the results in a timely manner in a time that they need to get those results and the price is just something that goes with it to get it you know you can't say well i'm gonna build you a five-page website it's gonna cost you 25 grand you know that's just taking the mick but you know and again when you build a relationship i've got um a client that i'm just wrapping up a website for and i've worked with this client for 15 years and he'll phone me up and say i got a new business venture i mean the guy's a millionaire multi-millionaire do you know what i mean yeah but a more down-to-earth guy you would just not you wouldn't ever meet and you'll phone me up and they go paul i've been talking to my guys over in dubai and we've got a business idea kind of thing and it's like okay cool need a website for it how quickly you do it for me this is what it's called can you get a domain for me and never does he ever ask me what's it gonna cost i don't think that's ever even part of the question forget about the fact that he's a millionaire he knows that at eight he knows i'm not gonna take the mick and rip him off he knows that i get the job done he trusts me to know that i'll create something that he'll be proud to put his name and his business name to so all those things are totally out of the equation which makes that relationship so much easier because it's just when that's the only question is when how long you know how long is it going to take to get this done and that that makes your life so much easier because then you just literally look at your diary and go i've got a space there and i can do it then for you cool plug me in you know and and that's it job done exactly and that's something i really want to share i mean it's really in my heart when i see so many people struggling to get clients and they're all in the same place trying to compete for the cheapest you know the cheaper web design and i don't think that's the way to go you know i don't think that's the way to go some time ago people said yeah websites are going to disappear because we have mobile apps now tell me if you're in the audience how many apps do you use on your mobile phone you know and i love apps but maybe i use three or four or five apps on my phone and my guess is that for most of you it's gonna be the same thing so website are here they're here to stay maybe they're gonna leave one day but right now they're still they're still there so the thing is some clients they ready to pay good money because they want good results you know did you ever get free gas at the station i don't know about you but that never happened to me so free stuff is great but the the reality is you know usually when it's free is that you are the product so you know it's all it's always a balance it's always a balance sometimes you know one of one of my favorite plugins uh on wordpress is duplicator it's free it's really great um but apart from that i mean they've been there for like 10 years or something but most of the other free tools that i use they're gone they're gone that's a reality so yeah it's it's the same thing when your client works with you they want to know that you be in business in two years time and guess what if you don't get paid you're not going to be in business so it's not all about money but it kind of makes sense you know it kind of makes sense that you need to be able to invest in your own business and i think it's really important because when you're going to work with a client if the if your only goal is just to make quick money off of them it's going to be a one-shot it's it's gonna be a one shot and then you need to look for other clients all the time but if your clients appreciate you if they appreciate the time you're gonna spend and the knowledge you're gonna put you know in their project they're gonna help you and i'm even going to go further even if you're just starting out and you're up front you say listen i'm just i'm just starting and i remember like nine years ago when i started freelancing at my first client and guess what he called me like i think he was two weeks ago and he said yeah i remember i work with you it was so great i'm gonna buy a new company i want to work with you i mean that's really exciting because i mean it's been years and he has a good impression on the work i i made for him and over the those years he brought me four or five clients so that's where that's where you want to get actually yeah you've got to think how much is that client actually worth you know it's not just the one job it's the residual income from hosting maintenance care those kinds of things word of mouth that they'll get you other clients coming back to you when they've got new projects so that one client that could be worth say two or three thousand pounds dollars you know whatever you are wherever you are for this one if that goes well and you build that relationship and there's trust there over the next 10 years that 3 000 could be 30 000. well just think when you get 20 clients like that then suddenly you know your bank balance starts to look a lot healthier than it did by just constantly chasing that cheap client that 300 client that 400 client with the mindset of oh well i get a residual income off them you have to get a lot of clients in to get residual income and then keep those clients and that's different to finding a good client i'd rather have 10 clients that make me 3 000 pounds a year than i would to have to go and find 50 clients it'll make me a thousand you know that's hard work because then it's constantly chasing constantly spending money to find clients to convert clients the time it takes to do proposals because you know yourself proposals take a heck of a long time to do there's research there's writing there's working out the quotes there's looking at the tools you might need to invest in to get that project to completion there's a lot of moving parts before they even give you a single cent well when you're chasing constantly looking for new and you turn over your turn rate of finding clients is very very high that becomes very very difficult to sustain that before you start to make any money back and then you're constantly trying to make money while building sites while chasing clients while doing all the ancillary stuff to get them that's just too much like stress that's like a hamster on a wheel exactly it's it's it's uh it's really exhausting and if you allow me paul i see one of the comments we have anthony t that says what about themes plugin updates a lot of clients don't understand what that means and if they neglect it even after explaining it to them they don't care until something happens and my key here is that before it happens you tell them what the consequences are so usually what i tell my clients when i release the website i really insist on the fact that i offer a maintenance plan and if they don't take it then from the moment i release the administrator code to them they're in charge if something happens they're going to pay my harley rate like paul paul said and what i found out is that i never had once an issue you know people had issues they came to me and i mean if the the website had the virus i told them i don't deal with viruses so basically what i would do is put the last um backup that i had and that's about it then i put my hourly rate i never had anyone complain people um the clients told me yeah you told me that it's true it's my fault you know so it's really important that before things happen you're really upfront you tell them the consequences you're not trying to patronize them you're just explaining okay this is the truth this is the reality of website building today if you don't update update your website the right way you might come across with the virus you might you know might have any kind of issues and you know once i release the administrator codes i don't know what you or your employees are going to do with it so if you have any issues you can call up on me or someone else but then it's going to be my hourly rate never had an issue people paying me and most of the time after that they take a maintenance plan yeah i i agree you know it's a big part of it is educating clients before they become clients while they're clients and that that isn't just sort of like you say patronize anybody it is a fact that you do need to educate people because if you go and buy a car and it's your first car you've never owned a car in your life and you go to buy a brand new car do you expect that car to run forever you know do you know about servicing do you know about tax mots you know in the uk might be different in other countries and things for all the different things the different costs that go with owning a car when you go to a showroom one of the things that you'd want that sales person to tell you is these are the things you have to take into consideration owning a car you know and it's it's not different to a website not everybody's owned a website so they don't know all these things that might have to to go on you know a lot of people are under the impression that you pay for a website they say that you'll need hosting and domain registrations what's hosting what's that do and it's like then you would explain to them what hosting is but you you don't look at them and go like well they're a bit dull it's just this is a world they're not used to you know we're used to it we deal with these terms day in day out so it's nothing new to us in the same way that a mechanic knows exactly what is involved in servicing a car so when you drive it off the forecourt they know all these different things well unless someone tells you you don't know so it's no different so you still need you do need to educate people as part of your sales process to what they need to understand by owning a website it isn't just a case of pay your money now and that's it forever more you know this ongoing cost there's different things you have there's lots of moving parts and and wordpress makes that even more complicate complex because it is something that you've got an open architecture so there's plugins there's themes there's a wordpress core all those things update and need updates so unless you tell some of these things how would they ever know do you know so it's like yeah i i do agree now we're going to take two more questions because i'm conscious of the fact that we are literally coming up to the two-hour mark so athena we're gonna come to your question in a moment but before we do i'm gonna answer mtl and e-commerce uh hello paul and kay you guys rock and this has been uh this is great to have you two come together to propose a live event we're a huge business community in montreal and we would love to have you on board so what i would suggest is to mtl uh plus e-commerce either reach out to myself and okay let us know what you're looking for i will have a little bit of a conversation and we'll see what we can do from there so hook us up you know just contact us uh you can do that very easily just go to the wp tets website and just use the um what's it called collaborate form on there and k how can they get in touch with you what's the best way to get in touch with you well they can just go to casinos.com contact and then they can just shoot an email from there there we go cool so mtl plus e-commerce if you want to reach out to us please do so and we'll speak to you soon so athena we're gonna use this as the last one for tonight athena do you ever attach a charge for writing a proposal so okay i'm gonna let you answer this one first and i'm gonna come back with my my answer on that as well okay so i've i've a different process now than from when i started so now first of all i'm trying to assess the client i'm trying to know do they really are they really serious about the business because the reality is that some people come to my office they ask me and i from the get go with experience i know that either they don't have the budget or they're just daydreaming at this stage you know i'm not trying to insult anyone but it's just experience but then usually what i do before i write a full-length proposal i would just um announce some pricing you know up and down so sometimes gonna com someone is gonna come and say yeah i wanna five pages website and it's gonna i'm gonna say it's gonna go from that price to that price if you if you are interested let me know i write a proposal and usually from there you will understand if people are serious or not and they say well i'm gonna think about it i'll come back to you you know okay maybe they don't have the budget yet and once again i'm not trying to insult everyone maybe they don't have the budget now maybe they have the budget in six months because it happens but then i don't have to write a proposal so what i'm trying to do is to really assess whether it's a serious project and whether it's they have the budget for the pricing that i have because every profession is going to be different so i found out that by doing that they don't they do not feel insulted and if they come back to me and say yeah please uh send me the proposal at least i know that from the price range that i issued um they're interested you know there's no guarantee i'm gonna get the business but at least i know it's in their budget range and from there i write a proposal yeah yeah sorry just just just to finish i don't charge for the proposal uh itself but one caveat is when i have a project where it's really complex what i tell them is that if they want me to write a a document where i've done every feature then they yeah i'm going to charge for it but then what i do is if they decide at the end to do business with me i'm going to withdraw the the amount i charge for that complex project from the final project yeah that's a good way to say if you've got a very complex project that requires a really comprehensive proposal and a lot of research to be able to create that proposal then i think that's probably a good way of approaching it that you charge them and if they take out the they have they work with you on that project then they basically have that amount taken off the total price so you know that's kind of like a bit of a win-win for everybody there i think for me probably a little different um i think before you even get the proposal phrase you're going to end up having more than one meeting generally your initial contact is going to be you know they're looking for a website they're going to give you some basic information but the reality is before you can get to the point of creating any kind of proposal that has any merit to it you're going to need to find out a good solid understanding of what they're looking for and have that conversation to maybe educate them on the things they need as opposed to the things they may think they want all those kinds of things that go with it i think by you by the time you've done that you've got a good solid understanding of whether this is going to be a client that's going to be a a good fit someone that's going to pay someone that has the budget i mean don't ever be afraid to talk about budgets they've got the budget to work with you and if that all kind of pans out then you get the proposal phase that's a good chance then to find out whether you're going to win it or not but if you do get to the point of creating a proposal and you just feel like well this isn't the client that i really want to work with or this isn't gonna they're not gonna go for this deal anyway then i mean with a tool like better proposals or fresh proposals which is something we looked at a little while back because they're so quick to put a basic proposal together you could literally spend 15 minutes as opposed to spending several hours you could put together a very brief proposal you can price it to whatever you think is going to be reasonable for the project itself even if you know they're not going to go for it and that way you don't waste too much time on doing that whereas you probably spend more time on a project that's either coming from a a recommendation that's coming to you from a previous client that you've worked with or someone just got a good feeling that unless the price is going to be crazy you're going to probably win the job then you put more time and effort into it but i'm never really charged for creating a proposal but i think i would probably take kaye's advice there that if i was going to work on something that was really quite a comprehensive project that required a lot of research and therefore a lot of time spent on creating that proposal i think kay's way of approaching that is probably one of the best ways of doing it you know you'd say yes i'm going to charge you for it because all this works involved but if you go with me you're going to have that taken off the overall price so you're not going to be out of pocket whatsoever if you don't well you paid me for the time that i spent getting all this information together for you yeah just to follow up on that i have a big project coming out on monday it's 70 70 pages websites so at the beginning the client did they didn't really know what they wanted to do and ask them do you have a document with you know basically the brief what you want and they didn't have it so what i proposed to them okay i'm going to help you with that with the process we're going to define it together but it's going to take some time so they pay me an amount for doing that and the reason why i charge is because like i think like everyone else when i was just a junior i did that for free and then what happened the client was really happy and then he found someone that did it for cheaper you know the cheapo yeah i've done the brief i worked three weeks on it and you went to work with someone else uh who did it for you know one tenth of what i charge but then cut a long story short one year after they came back to me to say well uh we want to work with you because we didn't get what we wanted but still you still feel sour all the time i spent on this project so now that's the way i do it and i said okay i'm going to charge you that but if you decide to do the final work for me with me i'm going to withdraw that amount from um the final amount so it's kind of an it's incentive and it works well it works in my experience yeah excellent answer well i'm going to say that's all the questions we're going to take now because like i say i'm conscious of the fact that we've been basically streaming for the last two hours which it seems to fly by anyway so i want to say thank you very much to kay for being my guest tonight for getting involved for answering so many questions so succinctly it's been an absolute pleasure and just thank you very much for everybody that's joined in tonight the questions the comments the feedback as always it's absolutely invaluable and i'll be back on a in the next live stream in two weeks time so be sure to do that and if you'd like to see k come back on again and we can cover another topic in the future let me know in the chat let me know in the comments let me know over on the facebook group and don't forget to head over to k's youtube channel and make sure you hit that subscribe button and slap the bell icon to be notified as soon as new content has been added so thank you very much kay if there's anything you want to say now please do say so and then we'll wrap the stream up i just want to say thank you for having me i'm really thrilled to meet your audience it was really great i hope we're gonna have some more streams like that because i i didn't see the time fly so i had a really great time so thank you for all of you all the comments i really appreciate it awesome stuff well i can see we've already got some people that want you to come back on so i think we have to do this a little bit more regularly and we'll do uh do a live stream every couple of weeks every couple of months or something and we'll we'll pick a topic and we'll discuss it like we've done tonight because i think it's been incredibly invaluable for not only myself but i think for everybody that's joined in tonight so thank you very much kate i shall wrap this stream up now and uh we shall see you all in a couple of weeks time so thank you very much everybody for joining in tonight and take care and look after yourselves thank you see you soon

Channel: WPTuts

Views: 1,353

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Id: ImhIxezsd2k

Length: 111min 26sec (6686 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 25 2021