Episode 140 – Hans Skillrud

Hallway Chats Episode 140 - Hans Skillrud

Introducing Hans Skillrud

Over the course of seven years, Hans Skillrud built a 12-person web design agency in downtown Chicago and then sold it in early 2019, to focus his attention on his new start up, Termageddon. Termageddon is an auto-updating privacy policy generator.

Show Notes

Twitter | @twitter.com/deepspacehans
Website | termageddon.com

Preferred Pronouns | He/Him

Episode Transcript

Tara: This is Hallway Chats, where we meet people who use WordPress.

Liam: We ask questions and our guests share their stories, ideas, and perspectives.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 140.

Tara: Welcome to Hallway Chats. I’m Tara Claeys.

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today we’re joined by Hans Skillrud. Over the course of seven years, Hans built a 12-person web design agency in downtown Chicago and then sold it in early 2019 to focus his attention on his new start up Termageddon. Termageddon is an auto updating privacy policy generator. Hans, Welcome.

Hans: Thanks for having me.

Tara: Hey glad to see you here today virtually Hans. Thanks so much for joining us. I would love for you to share more of your story here. Tell us more about yourself.

Hans: Absolutely. So, I like starting, I have to pick a divide somewhere. So, I am going to start it when I found WordPress. I should date myself. Pre WordPress and post WordPress because that’s really been a big determiner of my career.

Tara: Yeah. We all have that demarcation point, I think. You can start wherever you want though. If you want to go back further, that’s fine too.

Hans: Well maybe a good example is how I got to WordPress, you know?

Tara: Sure.

Hans: I was one of the first employees of Groupon. Groupon was a hot, young company that was seemingly helping small businesses get more traffic through their doors. And I drink the Kool-Aid as we would say at Groupon. I very much believed in the model of discounting a company 50% off or more, for one day only and bringing people together to try out a place. Over the years though, that company went public and I think their priorities changed and I shared my concerns with management. They disagreed, so I quit. I was managing a sales team of about 150 people and I decided I don’t like their business model anymore and someone, a small business owner is passionate about what they do within their doors, but they aren’t necessarily passionate about bringing that information online. That was what Groupon was taking advantage of in my opinion. So, what I set off to do was to help small business owners, share what they do best online. I think that message, that was the fuel to my midnight fire, midnight oil? I’m always so bad with those things. It was the fuel to my fire to help the small business owner out. Over the course of seven years I found WordPress. I started building WordPress websites, helping small business owners with their exposure online and the company was successful. I built it up to a 12-person team in downtown Chicago. I happened to be dating a privacy attorney at the time and I told her how I used to copy and paste privacy policies over dinner and her jaw dropped. She was like what you doing? I’m like that’s what everyone does. She’s like that’s not what you do anymore, not when we’re dating. Through a few discussions, we came up with the business model for Termageddon. I now have sold my agency and focus all of my time with Donata on. Termageddon is a privacy policy generator. What’s cool about our tech is that you copy and paste an embed code from Termageddon onto the website. That’s what allows us to push updates to the policies when the laws change. We give web agencies a free set of our policies in the hopes that they like our product enough to want to offer Termageddon to their clients. They can resell it or use our affiliate programs, whatever they wish. But what we’re trying to teach the web industry is something I failed at multiple times, which is, the era of copying and pasting privacy policies is over people. Like we have to accept the future. What is about to happen especially in America with privacy laws. So that’s where my focus is now. I’m married to Donata and you guys are the first people say that publicly to, which is really cool.

Tara: Yay!

Hans: Yeah. We work from home now and we run Termageddon together and the rest is history.

Tara: Great. Great story. There’s a lot there to unpack and talk about. So, I am going to go back to the beginning part because I’m curious about Groupon as somebody who used it and hasn’t really seen much of it. It’s sounds like, and I don’t know when that was, that Groupon became a thing, but was that before small businesses had websites? Is that what you’re saying?

Hans: No. So, websites were definitely a thing.

Tara: Ok.

Hans: It was 2009 when Groupon, which was previously called The Point, which I love that website name, thepoint.com because someone would just say what’s the point? You’re like ah is this some kind of joke? But The Point became Groupon. I surely joined Groupon. But websites were still around. That was 2010 and I was uh, it was a wild ride watching a company go from 100 employees to 30,000 in two years. My career went along with it because of its growth. I was put in a position to manage people which was a wonderful opportunity. I love sales. I love sales. I love sales because I think a lot of people think of sales as bad. I always try to say no, no, no, no, no. People are bad or people are good. It is sales is just a communication channel. So, I only want to do good things with sales. That’s how I trained my sales team. That’s something I really appreciated at Groupon. They gave me the ability to do that for a while. I felt like once the company went public, priorities had changed. Now all of a sudden, we need to be focused on taking additional margins from small business owners. That sounds good and all, but when you’re talking to a small business owner, asking them to discount themselves more than 50%, and then you’re taking more than…well…it’s pubic knowledge… you’re taking more than 50% of the cut revenue raised. I don’t know, something didn’t feel right. So, that’s when I decided it was no longer a fit. At least if you look at the stock market, how Groupon’s performed over the last 10 years, I think I was correct. But who knows?

Tara: Well it’s interesting that you made a change based on sort of an ethical feeling that you had and that you were strong enough or competent enough to do that. Because it sounds like you were doing well there. This was when you were probably quite young, I’m imagining. You said maybe it was your first or second job out of school. So, you know a lot of people would ride that along and wouldn’t really think about what you’re describing. So, I think that’s really admirable and I’m glad to hear it and thanks for sharing that with us.

Hans: Yeah, absolutely. My thought is if you’re going to spend 8 to 10 hours a day of your life toward something, why would you do it towards something that doesn’t make you feel good? Like that is almost half of your life goes to something you’re not proud of. I don’t know if you remember this, but when Groupon first started, it was a 24-hour flash sale and it only went if like a 1000 or more people bought. So, it was special. It was so special because yes, the business was discounting themselves, but it wasn’t permanent. It was like a flash sale and it was meant to be that extra push to having all the people who been saying oh, I’ve been meaning to try that place to finally taking out their card and making a purchase and now committing to coming and trying a place. That’s what I loved about it.

Liam: It was small enough…

Hans: Huh?

Liam: It was small enough that you didn’t have a cupcake shop getting a 100,000 orders.

Hans: That’s exactly correct.

Liam:  How are they ever going to deliver that at three weeks and try to sell on top of that kind of thing?

Hans: The thought is just painful. But there were so many success stories during those first couple of months and years, the first year I would say. And that’s what I loved. That’s what I fell in love with. As Groupon started to turn that one day 24-hour flash sale into one week, two months, six months, ongoing…I was just like this isn’t special to me anymore. That’s when I decided to leave.

Tara: Yeah, interesting.

Liam: So, after you left and started to think about Web design and getting into supporting those smaller businesses in different ways, why WordPress?

Hans: Well, it was a phone call. I was offering social media at the time, social media services. As you all know, the barrier to entry social media marketing, to web design, they are all very low. So, me, being naïve and not really understanding everything I had my low barrier to entry. I had a lot of time on my hands and a lot of work ethic in my heart I guess. And it was a phone call from a guy. I called him. I said hey! Do you need social media services? He was like no, but can you build websites? I am sitting there with my phone against my shoulder to my ear and I am Google searching how do you build websites? I am telling him on the phone of course I can build websites as I’m Google searching how do you build websites? I remember it was…I closed in on I think it was Drupal and WordPress. I just happened to pick WordPress. At the time, it was a 50-50 I could have watched the YouTube video that talked about Drupal. So, I thank my lucky stars that I clicked the WordPress video instead of Drupal. And I was just hooked. I was just hooked. You know? When I was kid, I felt like websites were created by the warlocks or wizards of our times. You know? The magicians of our times. So, it was an extremely liberating feeling inside of me. I felt like I could really provide a service to this world and that was…it was over after that website. I was absolutely hooked from there on out. So, that’s when I used to clock in like 16-hour workdays, happily. I would put in the time because it was so exciting to learn things, like Envato. Remember? Or ThemeForest and stuff? Those were the days.

Tara: Yeah. Well how did that website turn out? It sounds like you totally did the fake it until you make it kind of thing with that guy.

Hans: Yeah. You know, at the time it wasn’t…it wasn’t fake it until you make it in my mentality. It was like I’m going to figure this out.

Tara: Right.

Hans: This guy’s going to get a great service. I think he paid me like $400 dollars. I probably put 400 hours in.

Tara: Yeah.

Hans: You’re right though. It was fake it ‘til you make it. But at the time, it was just I’m not going to stop until this guy has a working website. I had a lot riding on that mentally at least. Actually, the site came out great. I really liked it. It’s a 7-year-old site so I don’t think it’s around anymore. But it was for a bar in Lincoln Park in Chicago. It’s kind or your neighborhood bar and it was very well received. They were very happy with it.

Liam: That was long enough ago in WordPress that you still had to do a fair amount of kicking to the theme to get it to do what you wanted to do, especially if your default position is not to write code or to try to get some code from somewhere and see if the works. It doesn’t have the drag-and-drop and all-powerful things that are around today.

Tara: Yeah.

Hans: Very quickly finding myself using something called Photoshop. I got very acclimated with that platform as well. Yes. Certainly, over the years, there were quite a few things I went through. I had 75 websites get hacked overnight when Heartbleed hit. You remember Heartbleed? It was the revolution slider. They had that vulnerability and that’s when I learned that paying for cheap hosting gets you cheap support. Cheap hosting as well, so that’s when I started to think about, you know, you get what you pay for in life. That’s one of the best lessons you can learn in web development. You get what you pay for.

Liam: That’s a lot of cleanup work too. That’s not the two sites. 75?

Hans: Yeah. 75 websites. I worked 28 straight hours. 28 straight hours fixing it all. But it was extremely liberating too. I had never managed the WordPress database before. I figured that out real quick and I figured out a rhythm. Like how to identify where the hacks are and how to fix it. You know, as stressful as it was, it was also exhilarating. You know having to figure things out and everything is riding on you. You know? I loved it. I loved it. I lost all my hair because of it, but I loved it.

Tara: Well it’s interesting because what you’re describing so far in your trajectory, I’ll describe the way I am seeing it as reactive. Like you’re learning reactively. Somebody says I need this. I mean we all do this. I certainly have done it. That’s how you learn. Something says I need this, and you say I can do it and then you learn how to do it. Now transitioning to what you doing now, it’s the other way around, right? You are actually proactively going after an opportunity that you see and growing this business that you developed with your wife. I love to hear more about it. I have seen on social media about Termageddon but what you described in just in the opening is more than what I knew about it already. So, I’d love to hear little bit more about the process and working as a team with your new wife. So, tell us about that.

Hans: I love would love to. If you wouldn’t mind, I would love to talk about a very important transition while running my agency.

Tara: Yeah.

Hans: It’s what really turned the reactive to proactive; before we jump into Termageddon if that’s ok?

Tara: Yeah. Of course.

Hans: When you say reactive, you’re absolutely right. That’s exactly how I started the agency but the fundamental shift, the fundamental shift in my agency was when I was able to start scaling it. It was when I learned how to say no. When I learned how to say no to prospects and say I’m not doing that because that’s a good fit for what I want to do and I want to offer this world, everything changed. I know I had some staff at a time. When I said no, I’m not building that website or I’m not solving that. I’m not doing another Heartbleed, you’re going to figure it out. That was the moment everything shifted. I started truly running a business in my opinion. We started generating, we created standard operating procedures, we created best practices within our space and what we also did is we got rid of social media. We got rid of email marketing, we got rid of AdWords, we got rid of Facebook ads. We just did web design and hosting and maintenance. It was crazy because in my mind I’m like oh. We are doing so much less. Things are so much worse. The opposite happened. We took on projects we loved. We started charging way more money than we would’ve ever guessed someone would pay for it. And you know, that was really when I realized I’m running a business here and I have to look out for what’s best to run this business. I need to be run a profitable company. The only way I thought I could do it was by closing in, and rather than trying to be good at everything, getting really good at one thing. That was the “aha” moment.

Tara: What was the catalyst for that? Was that like a process in and of itself? Did you have someone advising you?

Hans: I do not have anyone advising…uh…well I had a business partner that helped really unfold what standard operating procedures were and how to develop those. But I would definitely say that in the WordPress community, if you are looking for that, there are so many mastermind groups that talk about this, so many Facebook groups that talk about this. So, what I would recommend is looking to those groups. But for me it was really when…it was when I did not want to do…ok. I got it. It was when I mentally decided 16-hour workdays is not the appropriate way to run a business. That was really when I realized it. Great Hans. You got a work ethic. You take a lot of pride in your work ethic. That’s great and all. You are not helping your staff excel and have them improve themselves. When you take on the little work, because they don’t understand how to do it; when you take on that work, you are preventing them from growing. I don’t know exactly what exact situation it was, but it was when I started to say no. I’m not doing it. I felt like I was going to be a horrible boss by saying I’m not doing that. It actually was sure, there was some scraping of knees and figuring things out, but my staff, they all became far better than me in whatever area they were focused on. My designers, fast forward four or five years, there are still with me. They were just insane. Like with what they were able to do with JavaScript and CSS and my support team was just able to provide such a much better level of support than I was ever able do. So, by saying no, I opened up the opportunity for all my smart, intelligence staff to take it from there.

Liam: That’s a tough bridge to cross isn’t it? Because as the owner you’re the leader. I’ll do it. I won’t ask you to do what I won’t do kind of thing, but I couldn’t agree with you more. Unless you step back and allow others the space to learn and to grow and to fail and to support them in their failure, and not throw them over the edge and see if they can swim. But you know, throw them out into the water with a life vest on kind of thing. That’s really interesting the way that you were able to do that and how that led to an increase in, at least worldly success of your company. It sounds like, you know the kind of psychological and emotional success. You seemed like you were a lot happier once you made that transition from what I’m gathering.

Hans: Very much so. I went from stressed and poor to making money and not stressed.

Liam: Not stressed in the same way, right?

Hans: Certainly not. New levels of stress that’s for sure, but better.

Liam: Yeah. Well stress never goes away, it just changes shape.

Hans: That’s right.

Liam: The ultimate change. Let me ask you about success, Hans, if I can. One of our signature questions is focused on exactly that. How would you define success? Maybe it’s a personal definition, maybe a professional definition, maybe for you it’s a combination of both. What’s your definition of success?

Hans: My definition of success is the moment you realize that you dictate your reality and you control your future. Stoicism has been a very important part of my development as a boy to a man, I would say. Realizing that you can’t control what other people do. You can only control your perceptions of things. That is something I wish all people to experience. I hope people kind of get off social media maybe a little bit more and kind of think a bit more. Maybe they reflect a little bit more and they realize that you are in control your own destiny. No matter where you are, in any situation, you are in control of your destiny. Because it is your perception of your reality that dictates everything.

Tara: Yeah, I love that. I heard that early on in your talking about being a salesperson. I was actually going to say something about that. You can define how you view something. It does not have to be how other people view it, like you are talking about sales being something that people think negatively about, or people say they don’t like to do, and you viewed it in a completely different way. You chose to view it in a positive way, as a growth opportunity. So, I noticed that approach that you have to life early-on. So, it fits right into your definition of success. Thanks for sharing that with us. I appreciate it.

Hans: It reminds me actually right before we started recording. We were talking about the virtual wedding I just had.

Tara: Yeah.

Hans: I think a lot of people would just be upset and mad. Like I don’t get to see my family. Of course, we were upset. We’re sad that we didn’t get to see our family but what we did do is we looked at the pros. We found so many pros and so many wonderful things that came with it. I said this so many times. In life there are pros and cons. Whenever looking at a situation there are pros and cons to everything. Or it’s fact. So, why not just focus on the pros because that’s what you’re your mind is going to focus on. If you have your mind focused on positive things, then you’re going to have a positive light. I would put money on that one.

Tara: Yeah. That’s awesome. Thanks.

Hans: That was hard earned. It was something that like you come by easily. When I say success and how I define it, I’m not saying this is just something where you can turn on Hallway Chats and then all of a sudden enlightened.

Tara: Yeah, darn.

Hans: A little bit more than that.

Tara: Yeah. Do you think that you learned that? Was that something that you grew up with or do you think that you learned that on your own as an adult as you were going through these different phases of your career?

Hans: I learned it on my own for sure. The fact is the web industry is a low barrier to entry business, meaning that there’s a lot of competition that comes in. The next day they’re a web developer. That creates, well probably a whole separate Hallway chats type discussion, but it creates a very competitive environment where people feel like they need to offer low pricing to get business done. And through the struggles of finances and figuring things out, how to build websites, came a lot of reflection and thinking about what I want. Like I always want to take care of the other people, but then I realize I have to take care of myself too. That’s actually a longer-term way to take care of other people. That was kind of the start to it and everything. Then I went vegan too. That was another experience. I never would have saw it coming. I watched a documentary called Cowspiracy and I had my guard down. I thought it was like a UFO adopting cows and some government conspiracy. I thought Cowspiracy was just like a short word for that. So, I had my guard down. I was cooking a pot roast when I watched it. I watched this thing and it just knocked my socks off. I decided to go vegan. I’ve been vegan for four years now.

Tara: Wow.

Hans: This is not a become a vegan agenda by any such stretch of the word. What it was like the first time I realized like, just because I’m fed information doesn’t mean I have to think that way. I can think things differently than what the main stream thinks and there’s a lot of liberation that comes in to when you start doing things that are maybe a little bit against the grain. Or maybe you do it because inside your heart you feel a way. And you want to practice that. I would say that was another part of me kind of coming to the conclusions that I’ve come to.

Liam: An increase sense of awareness.

Hans: I would say that’s a very good description. If fact maybe another definition of success would be the ability to be in the present as much as possible.

Liam: Yeah. That’s cool. Thank you. I want to go back to one of the questions that Tara asked, and you didn’t answer. Because like Tara, I have heard of your business. I’ve heard of what you’re doing over there at Termageddon. It’s on my radar of things that…oh! I should check that out. Then then life. Then life again. Then COVID 19 in all the world. This isn’t a sales pitch or a sales podcast by any means but tell us about the product. What does it work? What’s in it for folks and how do you support them?

Hans: Yeah. So, I think before talking about a solution you always have to talk about the problem. I feel like there’s a lot of education that needs to occur in our industry. Just for American small businesses, very few people realize that there are privacy bills out there in America that will enable citizens to sue businesses for having as little as a contact form on their website. New York, for example, has this bill. New York is a very big state. Once New York passes a bill, New Yorkers will be able to sue businesses of any size and any location for having as little as a contact form on their website, without the proper disclosures, compliant with New York privacy law. This needs to be something that is shared with people and I think it all starts with a web agency. Because a web agency, they are much more in tune to tech then their end client who hired you to help with the tech. So, we all know that privacy is important. Be we kind of want to avoid it and I will admit that I tried to avoid it like the plague for very long time. But the reality is that five years from now, we’re going to be looking back at these times and saying to ourselves remember when people use to just collect your information, your name and email on forms and they wouldn’t say what they do with it? That will come. Just like an SSL certificate. Five years ago, an SSL was kind of a nice thing to have. It’s required for Ecommerce. Beyond that, it’s like a nice thing to have. Nowadays, when you go to website that’s not secure, you’re weirded out. At least I am. I’m like I don’t feel safe on this website. I think the same thing is going to happen with privacy. We have 23 privacy bills in America; each on a state-by-state basis. Each one of these will give citizens of that state certain rights. Those citizens can either complain and a business could be fined, or they can just sue the business. What needs to be understood is that these state privacy laws protect the citizens. They don’t care where the citizen is going to visit a website. So, I’m in Chicago. I don’t care…when I Google search, I could care less about where the website business operator is located. I just go to Google. I do my search and I find my search results. Here in lies the issue. It’s that if you’re a small business and you collect the personal information of people from across state lines, you not only need to comply with your state privacy laws. You need to comply with any privacy law from wherever you’re getting inquiries from. How the heck is a small business owner going to afford to have a privacy attorney monitor privacy laws and then update your privacy policies when the laws change? It will be astronomical. There are 23 privacy bills right now in America. There are three states that already have privacy laws. So, that’s why we created Termageddon. We’re $99 a year. What it is, it’s a privacy policy solution. We call it a solution because you not only can generate a privacy policy quickly through our platform but instead of copying and pasting a privacy policy onto your page, you copy and paste our embed code onto your privacy policy page. That’s what allows us at Termageddon to push updates to it when the laws change. So, our model is very simple. You pay $99 a year, it becomes our job to monitor privacy laws, notify you when new laws have gone into effect or existing laws have been amended and then push updates to your privacy policies when these laws change. Helping you stay compliant and by up-to-date when new laws go into effect. So, that’s the offering. But how do we get to the end business? I will bet just about anything there’s no small business out there, especially in America, that probably know privacy policies, they may even think ok. Maybe I should have one. But they have no idea what’s about to happen. They have no idea. Like in the privacy community, because obviously, we are very involved with privacy attorneys in the privacy community, like back when we used to have beers together, we were sitting there being like what is happening in America? It is about to get nuts. So, what we’re trying to do is trying to educate the web industry. Because that’s the industry I know. That’s the industry I love. I want to help web agencies become aware of these privacy laws and even have a solution to help their clients protect themselves. And that’s why at Termageddon, our business model, is that we give web agencies a free set of our policies. Truly free. Free forever in the hopes that they use it for their own website and also in the hopes that you love it because if you do, we offer the ability for them to resell our Termageddon licenses. They can buy licenses at wholesale rates, buy them one at a time, just each time you have a new client you can buy another wholesale license, invoice your client for a setup fee in the thing, and the license fee. Then we have an affiliate program where we will personally walk your client through the setup process. The client pays us directly and then we pay you a recurring commission for the live time of each referral. So, I’ve hit on the pain points, at least of what I had as an agency owner, which is I need more recurring revenues. I need to show more value to my clients on a recurring basis. And it hits on the client level which is I don’t want to pay an attorney 50,000 a year to my privacy laws when my website is not really doing that intensive data collection. I just have a contact form or I just have Google analytics. That’s the problem and solution.

Tara: That’s really smart. It is something that, I think WordPress now, a new install comes with a blank privacy policy page doesn’t it? Or some kind of privacy policy built into it. It’s something that clients certainly ask about. I love your marketing solution of going to agencies where you can then reach a lot of small businesses who otherwise aren’t in the loop. Here’s a tricky question.

Hans: Go ahead.

Tara: So, what kind of guarantee do you offer? Like what…because I put a privacy policy on a client’s page. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know whenever something happens, I can’t promise…just like I can’t promise they’re not going to get sued for an ADA compliance issue or something like that. We don’t make those promises. Very few agencies do. Some are ADA experts and they charge a lot of money to do that. But that similarly I am just wondering with your wife is the lawyer. So, how do you protect yourself in this case as well?

Hans: Absolutely. It’s a great question. I’ll go back to the fact that WordPress offers a privacy policy by default. It’s a wonderful step towards raising awareness that privacy policies are important. Unfortunately, the template is not compliant with any single privacy law. And if you asked the contributors who helped build that privacy policy feature of WordPress, they’ll be the first ones to say. No. These are not compliant. They’re intended to raise awareness of what’s happening. That’s why I think the WordPress adding a default privacy policy, it’s beautiful in the sense that it added awareness, it’s terrifying that I think a lot of people are using it and thinking their life is now solved. Their problem is now solved. That’s what concerns me. So, just like in life, pros and cons. So, when it comes to our side and guaranteeing, just like how you don’t guarantee ADA compliance, we cannot guarantee that you won’t get sued. Because we’re in America and obviously Termageddon services, UK and Canada as well, but we can’t…just like an attorney…we can’t guarantee you won’t get sued. Termageddon can’t guarantee you won’t get sued. But, what I would say is like looking at our set up, we have the vice chair of the American Bar Association who runs the American Bar Association’s E-privacy committee    that is in charge of ensuring that our policies are top-notch. We obviously use a lot of software and speaking with a lot of privacy attorneys on best practices, and our entire business model is focused on making sure no one gets in trouble. So, I would say that is hopefully good enough motivation to say that we try to provide the most comprehensive policies in the world. Now, the reason why we can’t offer a guarantee is because when we ask this question do you sell the personal information you collect? You could say yes, and we would be none the wiser. We can’t control what you actually do with the information your collect. So, if you say no, I don’t sell information, but you do and then you get sued, that’s why we have our disclaimer saying you know we’re not a legal service provider. We don’t know if you’re lying when you fill out this questionnaire. Obviously, what we do is we try to make the questionnaire as understandable as possible so that you can add the appropriate disclosures which are required by law.

Liam: Hans? I feel like we could go on like this for hours and hours and hours.

Hans:  I don’t know, it’s privacy policies. It’s pretty boring stuff.

Liam: (laughs) Tara’s enthralled. Let me slide in with one last question if I can. It’s really one another on of our signature ones, and it’s about advice. What’s the best advice you’ve ever been given, received, come across, read and successfully implemented in your life?

Hans: You dictate your reality. And I know that this is same answer as what you define as success, but is it is been the hallmark to my life. It has transformed my perception of how to look at things and it is by far the most influential in my life. I can put this to an example. I realize that one day I hope to have kids. I was thinking about this when I met Donata because I fell in love with her from the moment I met her. I started thinking about like long term what I want to do. When I had to come to decide do I want to sell my agency? It became a lot easier of a decision to make. It was still difficult, but it was a lot easier of a decision to make because I thought my future…I see my reality being able to raise children in my own house running a company with my wife. When we’re together and we can create an environment that nurtures our children far better than me working 12-hour days in downtown Chicago and then moving to a tiny apartment. So, that’s where I was like, you know what? I see my reality being this and that’s how I dictated it.

Liam: Yeah. I love that! That’s fantastic. What a way to take us out. Over to you Tara.

Tara: Yeah. That’s great. You’re forward thinking. You’re no longer reactive.

Hans: No longer reactive.

Tara: Completely flipped. I love seeing that. It’s great. Thank you so much for sharing all this. I could like…I just put in Slack to Liam I am engrossed. You have to ask the question. It’s been great chatting with you. I am sorry that we’re out of time. Where can people find online?

Hans: DeepSpaceHans on Twitter. My handle is @DeepSpaceHans. I hang out on Twitter when I am on social media, but you can always go to Termageddon and fill out a form submission. I am happy to talk if you haven’t noticed. So, if ever want to chat, I would love to chat.

Tara: Sounds great. Thanks so much.

Hans: Absolutely. Thank you both.

Liam and Tara: Bye for now.

Tara: If you like what we’re doing here – meeting new people in our WordPress community – we invite you to tell others about it. We’re on iTunes and at hallwaychats-staging.ulpgsyz6-liquidwebsites.com.

Liam: Better yet, ask your WordPress friends and colleagues to join us on the show. Encourage them to complete the “Be on the show” form on our site, to tell us about themselves.

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