Your Effective Hourly Rate?

So, I’d like your opinion. 🙏

What if I changed the name of this newsletter? Yes, again. 🤪

The “Morning WP” kinda lends itself to newsletter that comes out every morning. Like news headlines or something similar. And, as much as I might enjoy sending out a newsletter every morning, I don’t have the time. I’d rather create one good one and just nail it once a week. 😎

So, I thought about “The Monday WP”. You know, since it comes out on Mondays.

I’ve thought about using the title I thought of for another newsletter called “The Founder’s Memo”. I could mix it up a bit. Stuff like “WP Memo”. Heck, I could even go back to calling it “The Edge” like the old days.

Anyway, you got ideas? 😇 Not sure if I’ll do it, but thought I’d get your thoughts.

With that, let’s dive into the 486th issue of this newsletter. 😎

Below…

• Do you know your effective hourly rate?
• A look at what’s going on with Concierge (the new guy, and a new service)
• Why you should separate your registrar from your DNS (geeky talk, but I’ll explain 🤪 )

So, let’s dive in…

What’s your effective hourly rate?

Would you spend a lot of time trying to save a few bucks? Well…

My wife and I have a pretty different way of looking at time. And as an example, it became rather obvious several times when we were remodeling our newly purchased home a couple of years ago. Case in point…

One of the things we planned to do, as non-sexy as it is, is to blow new insulation up into our attic. It really increases the efficiency of the house and has a pretty high ROI on the electric bill (especially with our Florida summers).

Now, you can hire it out. Or you can do it yourself. David says: “Let’s hire somebody to do it.” My wife says: “We can do it ourselves”.

Why would she want to do that? To save money, of course. 😎

So, we’d have to rent a machine. Buy bags of insulation. Load it up. Lug that thing up into our attic. Climb around in the attic like monkeys. It’d be miserably hot up there, too. It would take quite a bit of our time and be quite frustrating. OR…

I can pay somebody to get it done – probably in a couple hours. Done!

We did it my way. And yes, I heard about my perceived wrongs a couple of times since. Cuz, that’s what husbands do. 😜 But here’s the thing…

My time has value.

It isn’t even remotely worth it for me to do that myself. The value of my time is higher than that.

Do you place value on your time? You should. One of the biggest mindset shifts one can make in business and in life is to begin to value your own time.

In James Schramko’s book, Work Less, Make More, one of the concepts James is big on is the effective hourly rate (EHR, for short). Your EHR is calculated like so…

• Get how much money you make in a month.
• Subtract your expenses to get net profit.
• Get how many hours you worked that month.
• Divide profit by hours worked.

You then get your effective hourly rate.

Your EHR isn’t how you bill out your time. It isn’t how much you make per hour if you have a job. It taking all of your time spent working – whether on a money-making activity or not – and averaging it all out to find out what your REAL hourly rate is. After all, all business owners do some things that don’t directly make money.

Most of the time, EHR ends up being less than what your official hourly rate might be. In my case, a rough calculation has my own EHR at about $62/hour. Frankly, not high enough. I need to work on that.

But, $62/hour. Does it make any sense for me to blow my own attic insulation? Remember, that includes tracking down the machine, figuring out how to use it, loading it, making trips to get insulation, lugging all this crap around, DOING it. This wouldn’t be a quickie job for me – at all. Plus, there’s the cost of renting the machine, buying the insulation, buying the gear so as not to gag on it up there, etc.

If some task would work out to less than $62/hour, then frankly I should probably be hiring it out to somebody else.

I think it’s the same kind of thing in play when I see people trying to hack their theme when they have no idea how to do it. Or when they try to make a landing page manually just to avoid buying a tool to do it much faster and better.

Case in point, I had one client book an implementation session with me for 3 hours. Cost him $375. But, in that time, we converted 3 small websites he had to Kadence. My hourly rate to him was $125/hour for that call. But, how long would it have taken him? He didn’t know how to use Kadence yet. You can imagine what it would have cost him, if he were to look at it in terms of his own EHR.

If you desperately try to avoid spending money at all costs, even if that means doing a lot of legwork on your own, then you might be REALLY harming your EHR.

Time is the one asset that, once spent, you can’t get back. Money can be made. There’s a bunch of ways to do it.

Make sure you treat your time with the value it deserves.

And, even if your EHR is much lower, ASSIGN a value to it. Your time DOES have value, no matter what. If you spend that time on one thing, you can’t spend it on another. There’s always an opportunity cost.

Plus, thinking in terms of your EHR will help you make better business decisions. 🙂

What’s YOUR effective hourly rate?

It is worth your time to work it out.

And perhaps next week, we’ll talk about some ways to increase it. 😎

This Week In Concierge

Last week was the first week for William, the new developer hire I’ve brought on part-time to assist with client projects. So far, he’s doing quite well and has taken care of a lot of Kadence pages for me. A few of my clients had him working on their site last week.

So far so good!

Some of what we’ve been working on last week is:

• Continuing to prep a client’s site for launch readiness, with the focus being a re-build on Kadence for performance purposes. Frankly, the site looks a heck of a lot better, too!
• Making some tweaks and customizations to a Surecart setup. Frankly, I still prefer WooCommerce for all it’s integrations and flexibility, but SureCart is definitely a pretty clean product to use. Simpler than Woo in some ways, to be sure.
• Did a full site performance audit and optimization for a client. It is a BuddyBoss membership site, so performance can be an issue. So, we always want to keep it as lean and mean as we can.
• Re-built a client’s main lead magnet to a Kadence landing page for better performance.
• Finished another client’s list import into BeeHiiv and got the domain properly authenticated for reliable email deliverability
• Took a client’s raw sales copy and worked my Kadence magic to turn it into a proper sales page
• Re-built a client’s site, transitioning her out of Thrive Themes

I have also made it official…. I created a service called Implementation Sessions. During an implementation session, we’ll just work together on your site. Simple as that.

Implementation Sessions can be booked using Anytime Credits, just like other calls. But, with these sessions, we’re not just going to talk about your business. We’ll be building.

WordPress Quick Bits

FluentBoards 1.2 Released. FluentBoards is the most recent plugin release from the team behind FluentCRM, Fluent Forms, FluentBooking and more. FluentBoards is for project maangement. Think Trello inside of WordPress and integrated into your CRM. Version 1.2 has a new calendar view for your tasks, due date reminders, custom fields, user profile and several other improvements. This plugin is maturing nicely. It is still available in it’s launch offer for a lifetime license.

Kadence Gets a Flex Grow Option. Kadence Blocks has been updated to now include a “flex grow” option on section blocks. This allows you to control how sections stretch and align easily. If you build sites with Kadence, it is handy to how best to use Rows and Sections. You can check out how sections work here.

Uncanny Automator 5.9 Released. This automation tool for WordPress now has some new integrations, recipes notes, bulk import/export, and more. One of the new integrations is with Kadence, so you can build a form with Kadence and trigger automations when the form is submitted. Read more about the 5.9 update here.

FluentSMTP Now Does HTML to Text. FluentSMTP has been updated and now includes the ability to automatically convert HTML emails to plain text. This is a handy feature, since providing a good text version of your outgoing emails as a fallback makes them more accessible as well as better deliverability since the spam filters are less likely to catch them. FluentSMTP is and always will be free and does what the paid SMTP plugins do.

Wix Master Plan To Conquer WordPress? Video here covering the Wix masterplan to attempt to give WordPress a real fight. Big budgets and big marketing team that want to really challenge WordPress’s market domination. Interesting insider look at things.

Unhappy With Your Site’s Performance?

Let’s Fix It!

Fixing the performance of your website is often confusing. Lots of jargon. Lots of advice… most of it confusing. And truth is, it is a pretty holistic thing to tackle. You need to have a “big picture” understanding of what’s going on. You can’t just install a plugin and be done with it.

When you book WP Speed Fix, we’ll fix up your site’s performance scores. And we’ll do it together. I have the experience and all of the tools. And we’ll get it done.

Let’s Fix Your Site Performance

Why You Should Separate Your Registrar From Your DNS

OK, well that’s a geeky title if you don’t know what those things are. 🤪 But, let me explain…

Your domain registrar is where you BUY your domain. And it is where you set your nameservers (two of them, typically). Your nameservers then control where you manage your DNS. DNS is all the settings for your domain and where things point to. Various types of DNS entries control where your website shows up, where your email goes, and a bunch of other things.

But, here’s the big idea here…

I do not recommend that you BUY your domain in the same place where you manage your DNS.

Frankly, I also don’t recommend you buy your domain from your web host. I know some web hosts offer that, but it makes it more difficult to switch hosts later.

And that’s my point here…

See, I’m a big advocate of digital sovereignty. It means owning your own platform. And, if you’re going to trust a third-party, it means you’ve got an exit plan. And there’s redundancy.

A lot of people buy their domain, manage their domain, and host their website all with the same company. For instance, Siteground offers this. And, yep, it is obviously convenient. But, it also gives one single point of failure. And because every aspect of your site is now hosted with one single company, it makes it a lot harder to switch away later if that became necessary.

I have a LOT of clients’ domain DNS that I manage via Cloudflare. Cloudflare works great for that. And my clients trust me to manage it as needed because most of them don’t know how to handle DNS or don’t care to bother with it. 😇

But, I would never want complete reliance on me. All of my clients have their domain under their own ownership at whatever registrar they chose. Namecheap, Godaddy, whatever. But, then we just point the nameservers to Cloudflare and manage it from there.

What happens if I suddenly go rogue or drop dead one day? 🤪 My clients don’t need to depend on me to handle their DNS. Because, they can just go into their registrar, switch the nameservers to another service and they’re in full control again.

Separating these services provides redundancy.

Buy domains in a place you like and only use them for that one purpose. I use Namecheap myself.

Manage your DNS somewhere else. I think Cloudflare makes the most sense, personally. Their free services are more than adequate, so you probably have no need to buy a thing.

Then, host somewhere else. I work with Rocket mostly.

Use companies that are best at the jobs they do. Rather than one company trying to do everything in one spot.

Yes, it is convenient. But, also makes you pretty dependent on them.