“WordPress allows me to be agile in my quoting and the clients I decide to take onboard. A definite plus for any startup.” —
(Source: pweingartz.me)
I realised that my readership has gone up to 5 people now and if 3 is a crowd then 5 must be an audience, right? So I thought it’s only fair that bring my audience up to scratch on who I am and what I do… Exactly.
First and foremost I am a husband and soon to be father of a little boy. I run my own web services company that I only recently started after quitting a very successful career as a designer and developer for World Wide Creative. I loved my job there so much that I still go and drink their coffee every week and they still keep a mug with my mug on it in the kitchen for those special afternoon visits. Mike and Fred love me like a son and Mike even named his first born after me. Fred was going to name one of his children after me but I was a bit too late for that. Instead they opted to name his daughter’s pet hamster after me. Stoked.
Anyway look, all jokes aside, I was a loyal employee to WWC but unfortunately the itch to explore the boundaries of my capabilities needed to be scratched and with many tears and awesome high fives all round I embarked on my solo mission.
I would like to think that my years at WWC equipped me with the knowledge and skills to do what I do today. I was already a CSS guru and during my time at WWC I got to work closely with a talented bunch of programmers and quickly learned the basics of PHP. I latched onto WordPress like a drunk student would latch onto a Jack Black and quickly became the office WordPress guy.
Back in the day WordPress was primarily a blogging tool and I often had to run to the programmers to help me get WordPress to play nice for our next project. Having a hands-on approach with everything in life, I wanted to know all the how’s and why’s and by doing this I learned a lot about the system and programming.
Having said that, WordPress has evolved a lot from then till now and it would be a massive understatement to say that WordPress is only a blogging platform today. Would you believe that this client of mine run’s entirely on WordPress? And she updates the whole site at least once a week from London, so face time for training has been minimal… Massive WIN for client usability!
Anyway, I can write a book about the applications of WordPress and how epic it is, maybe my next post should be about WordPress. The real message here is that I proudly use WordPress as my CMS of choice because I firmly believe that it is a solid well-supported platform that allows me to do everything from budget sites with quick turnaround time right the way through to corporate sites with advanced functionality. WordPress allows me to be agile in my quoting and the clients I decide to take onboard. A definite plus for any startup.
Aside from the designing and WordPress development I also offer a whole bunch of other accompanying services. Like business card design, newsletter design, newsletter campaigns, Google Analytics and Google PPC campaigns etc. Small businesses like to have a one-stop-shop solution and I usually fit the bill quite well.
My other passion and pass-time is photography and I have done a few paying gigs before but this is definitely something that I would like to explore further as a business service. Too often do I get clients who just dont seem to have proper content for their sites and thats a shame because those few pages online are all you have to convince someone that you are the right solution for them. Plus the competition is really stiff.
So there you have it audience of 5, Paul Weingartz in a nutshell.
Please feel free to ask me questions in the comments below or just give your opinion on my thoughts and tell me how wrong I am about the awesomeness of WordPress.
“As a freelancer and individual business owner don’t focus too much on main stream advice, it can bog you down, try to remember the little things about you that make you good at what you do and focus on those skills.” — Paul Weingartz
A few days short of a month into staring up my solo career as an “X” I am finally faced with a dilemma worthy of some serious thought. Im hoping my two readers, yes two - it’s gone up, can be of some assistance.
There is a crossroads that every solo career comes to at one point or another. Some folks know it’s coming and make a decision from the outset, some folks never even knew it existed because they unknowingly made the turn and some folks, like me, get to a certain point in their solo career and then out of nowhere it hits them…
Am I going to market myself as an “I” or a “We”?
This is a very tough question because clearly only one or the other will suffice if you plan on building a solid brand message. Am I right?
Choosing on or the other will also place you in a position where some potential clients coud be lost, but then again the inverse could be true as well.
Now I have already set out on a course to market myself as a “We” even though I’m only a “Me” and I don’t think thats wrong because I have a network of people that I work with and definitely dont do everything myself. The chance for potential customers, who contact me through a referral or my website, to be blindsided by the fact that I’m only one person is something that scares me. How do people perceive my “company”? That’s an important factor for me because I need there to be trust between me and my clients.
FACT: Potential clients that send in a quote request to Acme Web Designs will definitely be skeptical of the fact that the company is run by one dude?
On the flip side of this argument I can just market myself as a solo person. But I dont want to do that. I dont think it’s a sustainable model for future growth and all the ventures I dream up all day long are going to look better marketed under the umbrella of Acme Web Designs than Paul Weingartz - Web Dude.
At the end of the day it’s all about public perception and it comes down to one question: Am I a Freelancer or Business Entity?
Well, I say neither, I’m a businessman and an entrepreneur!
Im only a couple of months into this freelancing gig. The first few months, 9 to be exact, were written off a few weeks ago, but cant be completely discounted because some good did come out of that time and I was working for myself so it counts as freelancing right?
The last few days have been awesome and hectic with a proposal going out almost every day! I have had enough confirmed projects through the front door to comfortably turn down work for the next few months. This is a really awesome feeling, finally being able to say no to client work. It’s not an easy thing to do and probably not the best thing to do at the moment but right now I’d rather say no and pass on the referral, than create angry freelancer-eating monsters.
I just think that things around here are almost getting comfortable. Im settling in, getting my jobs through the door and getting paid. Sounds good but I think getting comfortable is a sign that some change is needed.
I want to take on a personal project, call it a startup if you like. Im still undecided as to what that is going to be but something small and WordPress centric will prob be a good one to start with. I think using the skills that you are comfortable with and creating something that you yourself have a need for is a good way to make your foray into the Start Up community.
Brian Casel built WPbids using skills that he possessed and it seems pretty solid. I like the idea of WordPress Applications and this is probably where I would look to start. If you have any ideas, you know what to do! Or just post a comment.
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“If you have the skills to do client work, you have the skills to make your own product.” —
(Source: 37signals.com)
So for the fear of boring my one potential reader to death I have decided to stop with the backdated posting from the last week and get with the times, plus its really draining having to recount the last week over and over again. So here I am, present time.
So whats happened over the last week? I finally got that jolt of inspiration needed to name my company. It came in the form of a late night G-Talk conversation with a very talented Mr. Roed from World Wide Creative. I asked Fred if he could do it all over today, what would he have named his company? Fred being the kind of guy that he is probably just blurted out the first thing that came to mind but it was brilliant and I loved it.
A quick trip to godaddy.com and the domain was registered. I was in business. The lesson here is that when you undertake to start something new you should look to friends and colleagues and run your thoughts and ideas past them. Fred solved something that caused me almost 2 days of agony, and I was nowhere near anything that I was happy with, in a minute.
Im also going to take this little lesson with me in moving forward. I dont think that I can ever be 100% happy with any ideas that dont have at least some input from someone other than myself.
Thursday was spent finishing up on my first paid-for project. After I finished the job I sent it off to the client and continued to work on some branding ideas. I ran with a few different logos and ultimately left the fine tweaking up to the awesome community at dribbble.com and forrst.com. The input I got from Forrst especially was awesome and it allowed me to finalise the logo in an afternoon. Awesome!
It might seem like Im rushing things a bit but let me tell you this: If I dont get a half decent site up and running by the next 3-4 days then I probably never will. I have already put a few solid proposals out there and I have at least 2 awesome ideas that I want to work on for potential annuity income. Project work will always come before personal branding because that pays the bills. Personal projects, however awesome the idea, will always come stone dead last in the list of priorities. Maybe this is something I need to address.
If your aim is to freelance purely to service clients then ignore my previous statement but I am not in the solo game just to make a few pretty websites for my clients. I am here to do something that will buy me some level of financial independence. And the only way I’m going to get to work on those personal projects is if I get my own housekeeping in order.
So in the first week I have managed to procure enough project work for the next 2 months and I have a solid base to launch a company website from. Not bad but not good enough either. If I had things my way I would have had that site up already.
In my previous post I outlined, very briefly, whats been going on for the last couple of months in Paulville. I am now on a complete solo flight from zero to hero and plan to chronicle my discoveries and decisions right here. Day by day. Old school.
I really dont want to go into details about my previous “venture” since the guys are still carrying the torch are awesome and I wish them all the best of luck but to put some of my whining into perspective I’d have to say that I wasted 9 months and a ton of cash on a wasted venture. Im a bit sour to say the least.
I now, from today, have to start a brand new company! Exciting right? First things first. What do we call it? Id the .com available? What services do we offer? How can “we” be “we” if there is only me? Not so exciting anymore.
I have tried a few times to set up a site for myself with very little or no success. Thats funny because I make pretty websites for all and sundry but I cant get my own house in order. To be fair to myself I have to admit that before it was a luxury, something I didn’t need, now it’s a necessity. Something that I am going to NEED moving forward.
First of all I decided to kick start my blog. Hence this post. At the moment its running on Tumblr but I am definitely going to move it onto Wordpress soon. Priorities, bleh.
Secondly I started the grueling task of finding a suitable name for my new company. After doing some browsing of online galleries for inspiration and subsequent visits to godaddy.com I realised that this was going to be a much harder task than I anticipated.
After I decided to NOT self-brand (tanks you Freelanceswitch) I started searching for that name…
I have spent the whole day and I have a few ideas that I think are solid. I’m going to sleep on them and run them past my wife in the morning.
As some of you might know I quit my day-job some 9 months ago in search of the awesome freelancing utopia that so many people in my field enjoy.
I spent these last 9 months building a business with some very talented people and was really having a good ol time! Cashflow was happening and clients were rolling in even though we only had word of mouth advertising going. Well to cut a potentially long story short. It didn’t work out as planned and here we are a few months later and a whole lot wiser with a blank slate. (18 March 2011).
I consider myself extremely lucky and felt somewhat relieved once the final goodbyes have been said. Weird? Absefekenlutely!
Let me put it this way: The problem is that I wasn’t doing anything different or new, client work was order of the day and my life was still being lived from one deadline to the next. Not the reason I left the security of my awesome job that I loved.
At first I was shocked and a bit bleak that things had turned out the way they had but I’m definitely a guy with a go-getter attitude and I realised that I had to make hay while the sun was shining, so heres a day-by-day account of what I did.
D-Day +3
Today was spent pretty much tied up in admin, phone calls and conversations. Not much towards my future was done but I managed to give myself a blank slate start for tomorrow. I managed to play some X-Box :)