[00:00:00.16] - Gordon
Hello.
[00:00:09.23] - Taylor
Hello.
[00:00:10.26] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.
[00:00:12.19] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:00:14.14] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have been affecting our businesses over the last seven days. And thank you for joining us.
[00:00:24.13] - Taylor
Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:25.17] - Gordon
It's been a busy week, as always. A very strange week for weather. It's been very, very hot. We've had a few rain spots and we've had a thunderstorm. It's been all very different and very difficult to sleep. I don't know about you, but I find it very difficult to sleep in the heat. Do you have trouble with heat? No, you're okay.
[00:00:47.26] - Taylor
I'm okay. I just have the window open normally.
[00:00:50.26] - Gordon
Right. And that's good enough for you, is it?
[00:00:53.08] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:00:53.11] - Gordon
That's good. I quite like an airflow coming through that keeps me cool. Anyway, enough about sleeping patterns. Any news, first of all?
[00:01:02.16] - Taylor
Not from me.
[00:01:03.14] - Gordon
You've got a new version of WP Extended that's been put out recently, haven't you?
[00:01:07.16] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:01:07.26] - Gordon
Lots of updates happening there. So if you are with WP Extended, then make sure you've got the latest version on all your sites. If you aren't yet a customer of WP Extended, go and check it out: wpextended.io. Lots of things happening there. Let's get straight into our topics. Who wants to go first?
[00:01:27.17] - Taylor
You can go first this week.
[00:01:28.06] - Gordon
I'll go first. Okay. So it's been a very busy week for me on several levels. We've got a soft water device that gives us soft water, basically, but you need to put salt blocks into it. So, one of the things I had to do was to go into the garage and make a bit of space. And recently, we had a mouse in there that decided to eat lots of my sweets that I have for children's parties. And there are just Frutella wrappers everywhere. And this space where I was going to put this block salt was no exception. So I basically had to clear everything out, clean it all up, and then put everything back in again, and then put the 60 bags, which are eight kilogrammes each, back in there, or not back in there, find the space for them, put them up so that they're all safe. And I managed to do that on the hottest day possible. Typical, huh? The reason I mentioned... Pardon me. The reason I mentioned this is because there were a few things that I found that I weren't aware were there. I knew I had them, I just wasn't sure they were there. A couple of things I had to throw away because of the mouse, but it's always good to look around and just check those hard to reach corners and things just to see if there's something that you have that you know you have, but you just don't know where it is because I found that for a couple of things. Anyway, that's not my topic. Just thought I'd mention it because I felt there's going to be other people in a similar situation. We spoke about my photography on this drama club that I went to, a few weeks ago, and I just wanted to circle back on it and talk about the experience afterwards. So we We set up a website using WooCommerce in the end. We tried several things, didn't we?
[00:03:36.14] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:03:36.25] - Gordon
But WooCommerce ended up being the best solution. And in fact, I think it worked really well for the upgrade that we had as we went along. So the idea is I went along and took photos for two days at a weekend of a drama club that there's many of them, and they were having a day or two days for parents to come and watch them doing their shows. And there were five shows in total. And so we had a studio set up, we took head shots of all the children. I then took photos during the show and then I went away, came back the next day and we did it all over again. So that's two days worth of work. I then had three half days of work editing the photos. There was about, I think I worked it out, there was about 2,000 photos that I ended up with at the end. That was after the editing. These were then uploaded to the website. Taylor had created a system so that we could batch import them. So that was nice and easy to set them up for print of 5x7s or 10x8s, and they could then make their order. Now, because it was WooCommerce, I looked at the prices that we were charging and thought, "Do you know what? I think we need to offer an incentive." So I I set up a, not a coupon, I'm not sure what you call it. A...
[00:05:05.02] - Taylor
A deal?
[00:05:05.23] - Gordon
Yeah, it is a deal. It's like a coupon without having to enter a coupon, if you know what I mean. It's automatically applied at the checkout. And the deal that I put in was if you buy four photos, you get the cheapest one for free. And if you buy eight photos, you get the cheapest two for free and so on. And I think that worked really well because there were several orders that I got that were four. And I'm thinking maybe they would have stopped at two, but then they thought, if we buy one more, we get two extra prints. So I think that really worked. And having that deal there is quite nice. I then got a few, about a week or so into the sale of the photos, I had a message from the principal of the drama school, and they said that she was being asked if they could purchase, if her customers could purchase digital prints only as opposed to print prints, so digital copies, I should say. And originally we spoke about this and we decided that wasn't going to be something we wanted to do because they had no control over where the photos would end up. But a lot of people can take a print, they can take a picture of it or a scan of it, and they can then do whatever they want with it anyway. So I thought "Do you know what? I have no problem with it as long as the drama... Keep saying dance. The drama school have no problem with it, then let's do that." So it meant that I then had to go in and update every single product, 2,000 of them, and give them the option to buy a digital print. I keep saying that, a digital copy of a photo instead of a 5x7 or a 10x8. And that actually worked out really, really easy and took a lot less time than I thought it was going to take because we basically just re-imported all of our imports, but with an extra column to create a digital option. And then everyone had a digital option when they were purchasing photos. And the digital option turned out to be a really good option because we sold more digital photos than we did prints, which is quite telling, I feel. We did 28 orders in total, 29 orders in total. There was about 60-ish prints that had been ordered, and the rest were digitals. I think everyone liked the deal, because a lot of them took the deal up. And for those people who didn't have the option of digital at the beginning because they had a week when they weren't purchasing digitals, it was just the prints. So that they didn't get upset, I decided that anyone who bought prints would get the digital copies for free, as a little bonus basically. So all the people who'd made an order before, I sent them the digital versions of the photos, which they weren't expecting, which hopefully means that they were happy. And everyone from then on who ordered a print also got the digital version. And then the prints all got sent to the printer in one go. Which is great because it means that there's one shipping charge, I can get all the photos back, I can put them all into envelopes, hand them over to the principal, and then she can give them out. So a question that I wasn't sure about as I was going into this is, was it going to be worth the effort? Because it was a lot of effort.
[00:08:51.14] - Taylor
It was.
[00:08:52.05] - Gordon
We set up the website, which was something that's now done. So if I do this again, all of that effort has been done. We've already dealt with that; the system is in place and it's been proven to work, which is good. I don't know, and maybe I should ask, in fact, what the customers thought of the ordering process; if they found it easy and intuitive, if they found it difficult, if they found what they wanted easily enough. I think I'm going to message them and see what they say about that. But that part is all done now, so it would be not necessary to redo that. The ordering process, again, that's all done. We just need to then reimport things. And if I were to do this again, I may have to make notes so that I can remind myself what's needed because it was quite specific, wasn't it? The photography part of it is fine. I know what I'm doing there. The order process and the fulfilment of the orders is a manual process. We did that on purpose because there were children involved. And by doing it manually, it meant that I could keep track of who was ordering what and just checking the photos to make sure that the photos they've ordered are of the same person or the same family. That was a restriction put in place by the drama club. So that's a manual process. And obviously, the more orders there are, the more manual processes need to be done. But also the more profit is being made. So it took me in total two, what did I say? Three half days plus two, so it's three and a half days worth of work, effectively. I think that's what it was. It might have been five days in total. It was between three and a half and five days in total to do the whole lot. And the income from that was okay. It was not quite at the target I'd set myself, but I was really close, within sort of 10% of my target, which is pretty good. Would I do it again? Yes, I think I probably would. And the reason for that is that the system is now in place, and it also gives me a little bit of variety. I got to spend two days with a whole group of people who are very creative, who are drama people, they were very interesting. I got to take photos of them, which I enjoy doing. And I think it was a different weekend for me to going out and doing shows. And I quite like the variety, having something different. If I'd gone out and done shows, yes, I think I'd probably have earned more money than I would have done in the whole of the photography job. But it would have been same old, same old. And I'm not saying that it gets boring, because it doesn't get boring. Whenever you do performance, it's always different and it's always exciting because you're meeting a new crowd of people or the same crowd, but at a different age, because I do birthday parties for people that I go back and see again and again. And I don't get bored at all. But it is quite a slog to take all your equipment out, go in and do a show, put it all back again, go to the next show, take it all out, put it all back again, come home and then do the same the next day. It was quite nice to be able to turn up at this venue, set up all my equipment and leave it there for a day and then come back do another day, and then pack it all away again at the end. And it was quite nice working with a team of people, because normally I'm on my own. So yes, I think the answer is yes, I would do it again. But I didn't know that going into this. And so I'm really pleased I did it because I've now got another service that I'm happy to offer people because I now know that I've got a system in place to do it. And it's because I took the opportunity that presented itself to me and ran with it that I was able to know that this is a new service that I can offer. So I'm very pleased that I took that leap of faith, if you like, and I'm reasonably happy with the outcome. I think I'm okay with the outcome. It was around the middle of where I was hoping to be. So that's good. That is pretty much the in-depth analysis of my photography. And I think analysing new opportunities and systems like this is quite important for all businesses. Looking at opportunities, seeing if you can do something new, trying it and seeing if it actually works, and then making a decision as to whether you want to do it again. That's it. That's all I have to say on that. What would you like to talk about?
[00:14:13.19] - Taylor
So I want to talk about a monthly business review. So something that Kyle from The Admin Bar does is he reviews his accounts and his business every single month. Normally at the end of the month or beginning of the first month. And what he does is he creates a very brief overview of how the month went. So he's shared this before in the slack and The Admin Bar slack for the bar flies. And he goes along the lines of whether it was a good month, just overall how he felt it went, in terms of his monthly target, so how much he wants to bring in for the month that he's set himself, and also how that compares to his year. So whether he's up on his annual target or whether he's below. Because obviously, he can be up on your monthly target, but actually still be behind in your annual. And then just where he's at, how many hours he works, things like that. Whether he felt stressed or whether he felt that he had a productive and a good month, or if there's some project that he wanted to finish but didn't get. So it just summarises his business in the month. And it's really interesting to read for someone that's on the outside. There's no numbers attached to it. It's only ever percentages. But it's just interesting to see that even some people have completely different months based on the time of year and things like that. And there's a couple of other people that do something similar to what Carl does in the group, and they also share. And it's interesting to read how the same month can have completely different outcomes based on your circumstances. I have a friend who had a baby a couple of months ago, and he shared a photo of a chart of his income on a monthly basis. And you could see that you could pretty much pinpoint when the baby happened because the amount of money just dropped off because he took time off work, for example. And it's something that I want to start doing for my business, closing the... Doing a reconcile of my accounts every single month, but also just analysing and reviewing my business in general. I think a lot of people do the reconciling of their accounts every month, but they don't actually look at and go, "how am I doing in terms of my targets that I've set myself in the business?" How you want to define those targets, whether they're monetary, whether they're "am I bringing the same amount of money for less time, for example?" You may want to be more financially free. And so being able to do more with your time and not earn as much money is what your target is rather than, can you bring in the most amount of money? So it's reviewing the targets that you set. And obviously, you then need to set those targets initially for that to be possible. So the first step is obviously for me to go through and think about the targets and things that I want to review and then put things in place to, one, track it. So if it's stuff like hours, tracking how many hours I'm spending on certain areas, now being part of a team for building a plug-in, it would be useful to track how long I'm spending for my personal business versus the plug-in for example, because I can see how much time I'm spending on those both and see which is giving me the bigger investment and bring a return on investment, really, where I'm spending the most time. And just, yeah, being able to look at it from a top level, but also on a more granular level. And it's something that I think everyone should do because it helps you be able to forecast as well. If you're able to know, "okay, well, I didn't bring in as much this month, so next month I need to make sure that I'm on it and find out why. Why did I bring in less money? Was it because I worked less? Because I went on holiday, for example? Was it because I just wasn't very focused and I just wasn't really with it and not really doing as much meaningful work? Or maybe because I just hadn't been invoicing." I've had plenty of times where I have draft invoices created in my system, but because I'm so busy, they never get sent out. And so I've missed income because I've just been so busy and I haven't reviewed that. And it's been a couple of months that go by before I notice that. So it's these things that it's good to check in with yourself every month and then also look at the broader picture. How are you in terms of where you want to be? There's a Twitter account called The Progress In A Year. And what it is, it's basically like a bar chart. Sorry, it's like a progress bar, sorry. And it tells you how far in the year you've gone. So for example, we are just over halfway through the year. And so it posts a picture every single day or tweets every single day, saying we are 50% of the way through, we're 51% of the way through the year. And it's quite a scary thing. It's quite a scary account to follow, but also it's quite a good account to follow because it keeps you updated on, actually, this is where we're at. Sometimes we don't realise how far or how fast things happen. For me, we're already in July. Sorry, we're already in August and it's just gone so quickly.
[00:20:15.00] - Gordon
Yeah, case in point. You thought it was July.
[00:20:18.25] - Taylor
And so, yeah, it's one of those things where things can go by very, very quickly and you're on autopilot, but not actually taking a step back and thinking about how things are going. And so, yeah, just being mindful, really, I think.
[00:20:34.28] - Gordon
One of the things you said, which resonated with me was seeing how you were doing towards your annual goal. Now, that could be a problem, because if your work is seasonal, if you get lots of work in the winter and very little work in the summer, for example, it's going to be very difficult to know if you are on target unless you've got historical data. So you need to compare it with not only this month versus last month, but this month versus this month last year, and maybe the year before.
[00:21:12.14] - Taylor
And that's exactly something that Kyle does. He goes, "I'm up on last year's..." And again, because he has the historical data, he can see the fluctuation of his income over the course of a year in terms of month by month. And again, he can see that. So when you're reviewing the business at the end of the month, you can go, "Okay, well, next month, last year was low. So, I need to prepare for that." So either that's something working harder or just being mindful that, okay, it may be, I may not bring in as much money this month. And you can plan for that. You can either work harder in the months that you...
[00:21:53.29] - Gordon
Or take a holiday in the months when you're not busy. You don't want to take a holiday in the months when you're really busy. Accountants, for example, historically, they've been very busy January, February, because you're getting the accounts ready to put in in April, and people leave it to the last minute. So, an accountant going on holiday, middle of February is dire. It's the worst thing they could do. And one of the things I did when I started out, and I didn't keep it going, mainly because systems weren't in place. But as an entertainer, I was tracking week by week on the number of enquiries that I got and the number of bookings I took from that week and how much those bookings were worth, so that I could see if there were any trends for a particular week in the year. For example, September, when everyone goes back to school, do I then find that I get lots of enquiries coming in at that point because people have just realised that, in fact, their child's birthday is that month or the month after. And because they've had the whole of the summer holiday, they've not even thought about it. And that is actually the case. That is exactly what happens. I didn't keep it going because at the time, what I was doing is I was printing out the spreadsheet that I was creating weekly. And I had a stack of paper this big, and I never really looked through it very often to see what the historical data was. I do keep track of the income that I take from performance on a month by month basis, and I've got a spreadsheet which shows me how it compares to all the historical data I have. I don't do it for Drayson Design, interestingly. Drayson Design is something that... The only fluctuation for me is when I lose or I gain a hosting client or domain name client, which is an annual or every two years payment. The only fluctuation with that is either losing or gaining, but also doing websites or things like the photography job. And I can very easily see from my database where the fluctuations are. And maybe that'll be an exercise I should do. I should go back through my database and see when payments were due and put them all into a spreadsheet and just see if one month is busier than the other. Because with Drayson Design, I basically do the work as I can around the other performance work that I have. So it's not so much of a, I have to do this much this month because I've got the magic, which I know is going to cover bills and things. So that's not so much of an issue. Oh, lots of beep's going on. Yeah. Anything else you want to say about anything today?
[00:25:12.07] - Taylor
I don't think so. It's just, yeah, something that I think is important to do in all aspects, not just your business, reviewing your house, reviewing... Are things organised in a way that makes sense?
[00:25:28.07] - Gordon
Do you know where everything is? Which is what I found in the garage.
[00:25:32.08] - Taylor
Do you need to get rid of stuff that's old.
[00:25:34.12] - Gordon
I did. I got rid of some things.
[00:25:36.11] - Taylor
Kept hold of for longer than you should have. Just things that help you keep on top of it. It can get overwhelming when you have so many different things to try and juggle and keep track of and review and maintain. But obviously just keeping in mind something that will work. People have what we call a spring clean, and that's usually you do that once a year where you deep clean the house and you do that exactly that, you review everything in your house. And that's an annual task that people do. So it doesn't have to be monthly if it's not something that's super urgent and important. But for the things that are, then it's good to look back. I try and review my weeks, for example, on just how I did generally. I keep accountability to a couple of friends and stuff like that. And so I can see through the week as the week progresses, how I get on. I could very easily tell you that as the week goes on, I get less work done. Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are the best days for me in terms of work. And that's because I come back from Sunday through to Monday, go to the gym, and I'm on it. I'm ready to do stuff, whereas on the tail end, it's near the end, it's near the weekend.
[00:26:56.12] - Gordon
And it's the opposite for me because a lot of my shows are at the weekend, so I'm gearing up to make sure they're prepared and everything's ready for them near the end of the week. So it's different for me. I'm a bit quieter at the beginning of the week, although I've come back from my shows and I'm doing admin for that. So it's a bit more laid back for the first couple of days. It's very interesting what you're saying. And I think it boils down to the more data you have, the more information you have, the better the decisions you'll make. That's pretty much what we're saying, isn't it?
[00:27:31.24] - Taylor
Use the data that you have to make calculated decisions.
[00:27:35.15] - Gordon
Yeah, and if you don't have the data, find a way or a process to be able to get that data. Yeah, more information you have, better your decisions will be.
[00:27:46.00] - Taylor
Cool.
[00:27:46.10] - Gordon
That's it from me.
[00:27:47.08] - Taylor
That's it from me as well.
[00:27:48.11] - Gordon
Thank you so much for joining us. As always, you can find us on YouTube. Please like, share and subscribe.
[00:27:54.18] - Taylor
You can also go to our website thisweekwith.co.uk to find all of our past episodes.
[00:27:59.05] - Gordon
We also have a group on Facebook and we post our YouTube video once it's all done and is up, so you can look at it there, but it's going to be a few days later. We're also on all the major podcast platforms. Google podcast has now closed down, so if you use that and you haven't used it for a couple of weeks, then you will no longer have access. You'll have to find another one. We like Pocketcasts, don't we?
[00:28:23.20] - Taylor
Yeah.
[00:28:23.27] - Gordon
Yeah, that's a good one. That's an app rather than a platform, but we're on most of the platforms. Please subscribe to those and then you won't miss an episode. Thank you for joining us. We'll be back with you next week, 1pm on Friday. Until then, my name is Gordon and I'm from Drayson Design.
[00:28:43.13] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.
[00:28:45.28] - Gordon
Goodbye.
[00:28:46.14] - Taylor
Bye.
