[00:00:09.05] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.16] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:09.25] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:11.23] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:13.22] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have affected our businesses over the last seven days. And we've had some reasonably good weather.
[00:00:24.25] - Taylor
Decent weather, yeah.
[00:00:26.01] - Gordon
Yeah, not bad. I actually have my new battery that I spoke about before, my battery pack, and a friend of mine purchased a similar one, and I got a little bit of a kickback because I had a recommendation. They got a discount and I got something as well. And so I went looking to see what I could spend it on. And I bought myself a 110-watt solar panel that will plug into the power pack and allow it to charge using solar panels. And the solar panels are huge. They're quite big. They fold out. And the case that holds them keeps them at the right angle looking up at the sun. And when I got it, I had a couple of days when I was out in the morning and when I got back, sun had gone. But today, I tried it and sun wasn't out at all. Yeah, just...
[00:01:30.23] - Taylor
Typical.
[00:01:31.12] - Gordon
So yeah, I'm going to charge my battery pack with these, but not yet.
[00:01:37.17] - Taylor
Probably not fast, either.
[00:01:39.24] - Gordon
Well, no, it's not that fast, although it is getting about... I did get up to 80 watts for an hour. I think it is 80 watts in an hour. So that's 10 hours worth from nothing to fully powered or fully charged, I should say.
[00:01:59.19] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:59.26] - Gordon
If it was constant. So that's not too bad for free energy. I quite like that. Anyway, let's get straight on to our topics. Do you want to go first or shall I?
[00:02:11.13] - Taylor
I'll go first this week.
[00:02:12.11] - Gordon
All right, off you go.
[00:02:13.24] - Taylor
So my topic is about niching down and finding what you want to do. So recently I have... Well, let me take a step back. So about a year ago, I took graphic design off of my website as a service that I offer. And the reason for doing that is I wanted to focus on websites. And I found that by having the word 'Graphic Design' listed as a service, funnily enough, I got people asking for graphic design. And it wasn't something that I really enjoyed. The graphic design mainly came from designing websites, and that was what I deemed being graphic design. And so I decided to take that off. And now that any work that people come and ask me and say, "can you do this? Can you do some logo changes?" or whatever although I probably could do them, I don't want to do them. So I pass and refer that work out to people that I know. So I get to give work to people that want to do that kind of work. And it's something that I've recently been trying to do more of. Normally, I would try and take on as much as I can because obviously it's more work. But recently I've had enough work that I don't need to take on everything. And I was finding that I was spending more time doing stuff that I didn't want to do than actually working on stuff I wanted to do. So I've been very picky recently about what work I take on, what work I don't take on. And yeah, I think it's something that we all should look at because sometimes we offer services just because we can. If you're an IT company, for example, offering, you offer the basic IT things and then you broaden out and you go, "Oh, what other things can we offer?" And you keep doing that and you keep doing that. And it happens in every industry. And then you get to the point where you offer so many things that you're not a specialist at anything. And there's sometimes money drains of services that don't actually make you a lot of money versus the time required to put in, for example. And so it's something that I think it's important to look at every once in a while. If you are low on work, then obviously that's a reason why people expand and broaden their reach, essentially. But when you're not needing the work, then it's good to niche down. And then you become the expert in that area and you become a specialist rather than a master of none kind of thing.
[00:04:59.07] - Gordon
Yeah, and becoming a specialist means you can charge more and you get to do what you enjoy doing. The downside to that is if your niche has any issues and the bottom falls out of it. So for example, when I was doing entertainment, when I am doing entertainment, when Covid came along, I couldn't do entertainment. I had no work as far as going out doing entertaining. And because that was my speciality and what people came to me for, I couldn't work. So there is that to be aware of as well, because niching down and specialising is a great thing to do, as long as it's sustainable. And if you are going to do that, make sure you look at all different scenarios as to what could happen and change that would stop you being able to do the work you're doing and plan ahead. So have a backup plan or an emergency plan should anything happen, I think.
[00:05:59.02] - Taylor
Yeah, and that's why I said, if you've got the ability and you've got the amount of work coming in, then that's why it's a good idea, because you can then focus your energy on the things that you enjoy, the things that make you the most money. It's a luxury to be in. I fully understand that not everybody is in that position. But if you can work this way up to that, you'll be happier all round, really, I think.
[00:06:29.06] - Gordon
Yeah, it's good. I think planning ahead is also important, though.
[00:06:33.06] - Taylor
Of course.
[00:06:33.29] - Gordon
Look at risks and what could happen and make plans for it. You don't have to have fully formed plans. You just have to have a plan that you can then jump on and make it fully formed really quickly if you need to.
[00:06:48.10] - Taylor
And niching down comes in all different types of forms. It can be going to a specific sector or it can be going for a specific service that you offer. And we're not saying you can only do this exact one service. You can be flexible. And that's the joy and the luxury that you have when you're self employed. You can take on work that you want to take on. There's sometimes where that someone comes to me with a project and it's graphic design. It's like, "actually, I do want to take this on. It's something that I do want to take on." But for the most part, I don't. But I have that option and that choice that I can take on the work that I want to. So I think that's also what it comes down to, is taking on the work that you want to rather than just niching down.
[00:07:35.18] - Gordon
Very good.
[00:07:36.04] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:07:37.06] - Gordon
So the topic that I want to talk about today is managing your resources. So we had a family issue during the week. Nothing to do with the family. It was to do with the house. Our washing machine basically started shredding the brand new seal that I'd put in about a week earlier, and we didn't quite know what was going on. So we got someone in to have a look at it, and they basically told us that one of the arms had snapped that holds the drum in place, and that keeps the drum spinning true. And because that arm had gone, it was now wobbling about and it was starting to shred the seal. And he said, "You can spend money on getting it replaced, the arm." But I suddenly thought, "If that arm's gone, the other one's might, it's seven years old. Do I want to get into all that?" So long and short of it is that we got a new washing machine, which arrived this week on Wednesday. And one of the things that I always do is I take the manual and I try and get a digital copy of it, a PDF, which is these days quite easy to do, and put that in a place where everyone has access to it. So I'm managing that resource. So for me, I put them on Evernote, which is a service that allows you to put documents into the cloud. You could do something like Dropbox. That would also work. It's not as good because with Evernote, you can search for documents and you can search for words and so forth. So that is just the family side of it. I try and get all of the documents and the manuals that we have into there so that they're accessible by other members of the family. Any post we have, I've got a document scanner and that will scan things in, make them into a PDF, and again put it onto Evernote. And that way I can do a search for Southeast Water, and it will bring up all the documents and information I've ever put into Evernote about Southeast Water, and I can find things really quickly. I've also got a lot of books and lecture notes and so on that I have in PDF format for my business, whether it be graphic design, website design, magic, whatever it is. I've got lots of these documents, and they're all very well sitting on my hard drive, but they're not doing me any good unless I have a way to find what I need when I need it. So again, putting it in Evernote is a really good option. By having it as a searchable PDF, and there's ways to do that, we use something called OwlOCR, which is a Mac app, and it will take a document that's not OCR'd and make it OCR'd by putting all the metadata in. Basically, OCR basically stands for optical character recognition, and it will take letters that it sees in a document and change them into text, basically. So it makes everything searchable. So putting them into Evernote is one way of doing it. Another way of doing it is to use a resource manager like eagle.cool, which is another really, really good cataloguing type indexing programme, and it's really good. I use it for all sorts of things, mainly, in fact, for images, graphics, that sort of thing. But it does all sorts. It does PDFs, it does sound files, it does screenshots, it does websites, so you can basically screenshot a whole website using their application. It's really good. If you have a Mac, have a look at it because it's really, really good. And the other option is to build your own system, which is what we started doing.
[00:11:48.25] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:11:49.19] - Gordon
We built a document manager in WordPress, and the idea is that I upload a document to it, it then indexes is that document, works out all of the search terms and words that are within that document, and allows me to then search for things using just a standard search box. And the advantage to this is that I can do it from anywhere. I can do it with Evernote as well from anywhere. But just being able to log into a website and being able to find all of the documents that I've put into that website is really, really handy. Now, obviously, I'm in a situation where I can just spin up a WordPress website and host it myself because we host websites. We have the servers to do that. And so that's a really easy option for me and for Taylor to do that. It might not be so easy for you to do that. You could have a local host website where you could put it on your own laptop, for example. That way you've got it with you every time you've got your laptop. But I think the whole point, I mean, there's lots of different ways of doing it. It's a matter of finding the one that works for you. But the main point of what I'm trying to say is it's all very well and good having documents available on your hard drive sitting there. But unless you can actually find what you need when you need it, they're completely useless. So find a way to index them, find a way to manage them, to catalogue them, whatever you want to do. It's a bit like having Lightroom for your photos. I take a lot of photos, and if I didn't have Lightroom, I wouldn't be able to find the photo I wanted quickly and easily. It would end up a bit like my phone with the photo gallery. And I'd have to scroll through and go, "Right, hang on. When was it? Okay, I think it was before that event. Right, go back a bit more." And it would take forever to find everything, especially when you're talking about many thousands of photos. So, yeah, find a way to catalogue and index the content that you have, to manage your business, to allow you to manage your equipment, your resources that you have, whether they be books or PDFs or whatever, and just find a way that you can then put them into a system so that you can find what you need.
[00:14:26.05] - Gordon
MacOS, in fact, does quite a good job of indexing, but not as as some of these other things. Although Apple Intelligence might change that. We'll let you know in September when it all comes out and we're able to test that. Anything you want to say on that?
[00:14:41.23] - Taylor
I don't think so. I use similar things to index. I use a lot of aliases to find things I want to reference, regularly. That makes searching Finder a lot easier by adding keywords that I want to use to index stuff. Things like apps, things like folders and files that I use regularly. I try and index. And yeah, it's just using different ways to index the content that I'm using regularly, really.
[00:15:16.08] - Gordon
Yeah, because I mean, having these resources is all well and good, but it's a bit like a physical book or a physical object. Unless you know where it is, you have to go to the back of the cupboard to find it. And then by the time you've found it, you go, "Oh, that wasn't the one I wanted. It was the other one, which I don't know where that is. Might be in the garage." Physical objects like that are a lot more difficult to catalogue than digital resources. So find a way that your digital resources can be put into a system so that you can very quickly find what you need. That's it. That's all I wanted to say.
[00:15:56.24] - Taylor
Cool.
[00:15:57.03] - Gordon
Anything else you wanted to say today?
[00:15:59.02] - Taylor
I don't think so.
[00:16:00.00] - Gordon
Okay, that's it. Thank you for joining us. As always, we can be found on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.
[00:16:06.09] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:16:11.08] - Gordon
And we should be on all of the major podcast platforms as well. So if you want to listen to us, if that is easier for you, or you prefer not to look at us, which I understand, then you can listen to us on your favourite podcast platform. We will be back with you next week, 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:16:32.20] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:16:35.05] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:16:35.25] - Taylor
Bye.
