Episode 45: Lindsay Halsey & Lori Calcott

Hallway Chats: Episode 45 - Lindsay Halsey and Lori Colcott

Introducing Lindsay Halsey & Lori Calcott

Lindsay Halsey and Lori Calcott are co-founders of WP SEO Hub and partners at webShine, a search engine marketing agency in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. They focus on running profitable campaigns for their clients and teaching business owners about holistic SEO practices.

Show Notes

Website | WP SEO Hub
Website | Webshine
Twitter | @wpseohub
Twitter | @lindsay_wpseo
Twitter | @lori_wpseo

Episode Transcript

Liam: This is Hallway Chats, where we talk with some of the unique people in and around WordPress.

Tara: Together, we meet and chat with folks you may not know about in our community.

Liam: With our guests, we’ll explore stories of living – and of making a living with WordPress.

Tara: And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 45.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we’re joined by Lindsay Halsey and Lori Colcott. They are co-founders of WP SEO Hub and partners of webShine, a search engine marketing agency in the rocky mountains of Colorado. They focus on running profitable campaigns for their clients and teaching business owners about holistic SEO practices. Hello, Lindsay and Lori, welcome.

Lindsay: Thanks for having us.

Lori: Hi there.

Tara: Hi. I’m so glad you’re here, welcome. Can you each tell us a little bit more about yourselves after Liam’s introduction?

Lindsay: Sure. This is Lindsay. I live in Basalt, Colorado. I’m the mom of two young children and a wife, love working and playing in the outdoors and focused on WordPress SEO as the main part of my career.

Lori: I’m Lori Colcott. I live in Aspen, Colorado and I also have a family with two young children. I’ve been in Colorado for over 20 years but grew up in Pennsylvania and have been marketing about 20 years, search engine marketing about 12.

Tara: Great. Tell us a little bit more about Colorado? Sounds like a beautiful place where you live. Did you go there, both of you, with a great love of skiing or what brought you to Colorado?

Lori: Yes, I sort of have the typical came out for the winter and never left story. I came out after college and planned on being a ski bum for winter and that turned into pretty much a lifestyle and a commitment to living here.

Lindsay: And I made my way to Colorado in between working as a mountain guide. I was looking for a home base when I wasn’t traveling to mountaineering destinations around the world, and Colorado seemed like a fun place and every year, I found myself spending more time here in Aspen and last time on the road, until now, I live here year-round full-time.

Tara: Do you work there more than you spend time outside? Are you able to split running your own company, is that the way that you approach your recreational life? Is that on par with your work life out there? I get the impression that out there that’s the way a lot of people are so that’s why I ask that.

Lindsay: There’s a pretty good work/life balance in the Roaring Fork Valley and so it’s common custom for businesses here to extend their employees and team members that flexibility to go for a run in the mountains over lunch or to enjoy a morning powder sky on a good snow day. That’s certainly part of our culture here, but we do find ourselves in the office much more than we do out in the mountains and that’s well and good.

Tara: Thank you for sharing that reality. [laughs] But that’s really cool, I’ve heard that before and I think that’s a great things about living in the mountains is that culture. Very cool.

Lori: I can actually ski home from the mountains in my bedroom door. That helps get you out there.

Liam: Now you’re just showing off. [laughter]

Lori: So I say sometimes, I don’t ski hour-wise a lot but maybe more often just because it’s convenient. Instead of going to the gym, I could go up the mountain and make a few rounds.

Tara: Yeah, it’s like walking out the door and going for a run for you or something. That sounds like that’s– well, you got to put more equipment on, I guess.

Lori: A little more dressing prep but yeah.

Liam: That’s just kind of mind-blowing for me. I used to be a downhill skier, in the sense that I was at the top of a hill and I went down it on skis. But I grew up in Illinois and downhill skiing is maybe a 300-foot hill. The last time I did real skiing was in Alaska and I haven’t been in a long time. I can’t drag my family to go again so I just watch the Olympics and wish. You’re making me very envious, you two.

Lori: We feel fortunate.

Tara: Can you tell us your story of how you started a business together, how you started working together and how that’s going for you?

Lindsay: Sure. Lori and I started working together about 10 years ago at a larger web agency. We were both in the search engine marketing department. After a couple of years there, Lori had just started her family and I was thinking about wanting to start a family. We both found ourselves considering going the freelance route to create greater flexibility in our day-to-day work life. We had very complimentary skillsets so I focused a lot on SEO and Lori focuses a lot on pay-per-click advertising and specializes in Google AdWords. Over time, we sort of started discussing what a partnership would look like in going out in a freelance business world and we took that leap of faith about seven and a half years ago.

Liam: That’s really neat. I wonder if I can explore the business relationship. You’ve talked about your different areas of professional service focus. I imagine as the work comes in, you divvy it up, if it’s pay-per-click, then one of you handles it, and if it’s SEO stuff, the other one handles it. But how about things like business management, business strategy, making sure people get paid, making sure that the clients pay you, how does that get divvied up? And when you’re thinking about that, was that a conscious decision that one day Lindsay said, “I’m going to do it.” Or maybe Lindsay wasn’t doing it so Lori said, “I’ll do it.” How did that all come about?

Lori: Yeah, I think over the years, we’ve each just kind of found our niches within those required tasks that need completed to run a business. We’ve just sort of divvied them up kind of organically as the company grew. Lindsay has a little bit more experience in economics and numbers so she does a little bit more of the book side of things. I’ve kind of taken on the health insurance and that side of things. Yeah, it just ends up being whoever sort of jumps in and has a little bit more of a knack for it.

Lindsay: I think from a bigger picture concept, we’re 50/50 business partners in all of our ventures and it creates a very collective and collaborative atmosphere in our partnership. That helps to create that balance and we know each other so well over the years, we can tell when one of us is a little more stressed or has a big project deadline that they’re working on for a client. And kind of just like you do around the house with chores and things in your own family life, the other one can kind of pick up a task and lend a hand. That’s been a key part of our partnership that’s been one of the contributing factors to success.

Liam: And I’m interested because you seem very happy with each other as we chat on this video call. I wonder how do you two deal with this stress that might come up with running a business if something went badly or how do you decide if Lindsay wants to go one way and Lori’s thinking, “We should probably go the other.” How does that work as a partnership? How do you resolve that?

Lindsay: That’s a really good question. We’ve been super fortunate over the years to have not run into too many overarching questions. We tend to back each other up so if one of the elements is I’ve been working with a client and for whatever reason the project’s not going very well or the project relationship with the client’s going well, I can talk to Lori and get some insights. She’ll understand if it’s sort of my field that this isn’t a good project for us to continue on or direction, even though that may reduce our collective revenue and things like that. On the smaller scale, that’s been pretty easy. We definitely, as we’ve evolved, our search engine marketing agency is called webShine and continues to grow and do custom search engine marketing projects. But this year, we’ve cofounded WP SEO Hub and now we’re moving into a new space as founders and in startup worlds. It’s leading to much larger questions and that has created, not necessarily a divide where we fall on two either sides of the scale, but an even greater appreciation for having a sounding board to make decisions that sometimes feel well outside of the scope of our expertise or experience.

Tara: It’s so important and you’re very fortunate. I know you know this but you can work together and find that balance comfortably. I would say Liam and I in working on projects together had a similar experience where we sort of just kind of fell into where our interests or gifts or skills or whatever lie. It makes it so easy when that happens naturally, but there are some things that probably neither one of you like to do that you have to kind of step up and do as well.

Lindsay: Yeah, it’s like running a household.

Tara: Yeah. I also know from having formed a partnership myself that we heard all the time, “Don’t form a partnership. Partnerships end up in the courtroom.” Or we talked to a lawyer and the lawyer said, “The only time that I ever talked to partners is when they are breaking up.” Did you get a lot of advice and did you do a lot of planning and prep or was it so natural that it just kind of came together?

Lori: Yeah, I would say the latter. It always felt fairly natural and in a broader sense, I think we both have similar goals and lifestyles. Sort of blending our two lives together in a sense hasn’t been too much of a struggle because at the end of the day, we’re very similar in what we want the day to bring and the outcome to be. That really helps, I think.

Tara: Well, let’s talk about that a little bit because we ask our guests about their thoughts on success and what success means to them. Maybe you can each take a turn and we’ll see if you have similar views? [laughs]

Liam: And we are recording this.

Lori: I guess, personally and professionally, I define success through the quality of my relationships. For me, a good day both on the personal and professional side has a high quality of relationship time. Collaboration in the office, time with my children, time with my husband, and then, ideally, a bit for myself. That, for me, is kind of a success and what I strive for long-term.

Lindsay: Yeah, and I would say success is really looking at the overall picture of the quality of life and that I can have time with my family, support my family, do the things we love, and balance stress to the point that it’s not the overarching factor in life. Yeah, just really finding a nice balance between work, family, friends, recreation, kind of the overall goal.

Liam: Perhaps not surprisingly I hear a lot of similarities between your two definitions and they’re both unique in their own way but there’s definitely an emphasis on family and on loved ones and on work as means of fulfillment and not as an end to itself. Let me ask you about that then, as business owners and also as just individuals, what’s the single most important thing you each do every day to achieve or continue success that you’ve garnered so far?

Lindsay: That’s a really good question. As moms, business owners, and now founders, there’s really no one day that’s the same because consistent routine is pretty hard to come by. one of the things that I focused on after having had children and finding my time fragmented in a new way is to do one thing for myself every day. Some days that’s something big like getting to go skiing with friends for a half day or something like that, and other days it’s something really small like reading five pages before I fall asleep at night. But the conscious part of that is that I try to define what that moment was so that as the days and the weeks roll by, I don’t feel like I’m losing myself too much to work and family life and there are still some defining moments that are just me.

Liam: And do you define those at the end of the day or do you set them out at the start? Sounds like probably at the end upon reflection.

Lindsay: Typically, upon reflection but some days, it’s a little bit more conscientious. By Wednesday, if I haven’t gotten any exercise in the work week, it might be, “Okay, I need to do something for myself today. And that’s going to mean not getting this task or project done and leaving for a long lunch break.”

Tara: Lindsay, I love the deliberateness that you’re expressing about that in terms of not just doing something but really keeping track of it and making sure even if it wasn’t in your plan that that was the thing that you did for the day, that you can look back and say, “Oh yeah, there was that thing I did.” I think that’s great that you’re keeping it in mind and being mindful. I always think of the analogy of putting the mask on when you’re in the airplane and they tell you when you’re with your kid to put the mask on yourself first and then put it on your child. You need to take care of yourself in order to take care of everyone else. That’s excellent, good job. How about you, Lori?

Lori: I would say at the end of the day, it’s nice to look back and have some sort of balance in the day. Every once in a while, you have one of those days where it’s like, “Wow, I don’t feel like I succeeded well at work, as mother, or–” There’s just no balance and you end the day being like, “Wow, what just happened?” There’s a good check-in to be like, I need to be conscious of where I spend my time and make sure I’m feeling that balance in making those moments throughout the day where I do sit down and just hang out with my kids for a little completely undistracted, or go for that walk if nothing else and clear my mind. Yeah, just taking each moment in chunks if you have to and making the best of them.

Liam: Again, I’m hearing similarities in answers here and I like that and I think that’s pretty neat and speaks volumes about your partnership. How do you, if you do at all– and this is maybe a little off-topic, I’m going to ask it anyway. You both have a huge focus on work/life balance in a very practical way. It sounds like it’s a huge personal priority for both of you as individuals and then probably together as business owners, how or do you take that to your sales and marketing messages when you’re looking at clients and discussing opportunities? Does that come up in a relationship, the early days, how does that work?

Lori: That’s a really good question and something we should probably do more of. I think a big component of our success to date in business and in our partnership has been in our communication with clients. We’re very quick to respond and we like spending time with clients, not just being behind our computer doing search engine marketing. In that, we tend to be a bit too available and to not always set those boundaries. That’s something that in sales and onboarding process I think we could both do better is to give people those guidelines. And then we also struggle with, yes, we do have working hours but because we do take flexibility in our work schedule between nine and five, we often find ourselves making up for a couple of lost hours at the end of the day or early morning. I tend to work on Sunday afternoons while my little ones are ideally taking a nap. Then clients start to get accustomed to us being available on, say, a Sunday because I did respond to an email and we sort of train people to believe that we work 24/7, and work ethic and responsiveness is great. Then, on the other hand, at times it can be a bit too much and an area that we need to draw more boundaries.

Tara: We’ll send later a tool that you can use with email. Once you realize what that can do for you in terms of not letting your client know that you’re working on Sundays is a great tool and tip someone gave me a while ago and I love using that. Sometimes I’ll catch myself at 10 o’clock at night replying to something and being like, “Oh, wait, no. Don’t reply at 10 o’clock at night, set for the morning.”

Lori: That’s a good tip. That’ll be our takeaway from today’s talk. We will go and take action on that.

Liam: Outstanding. Let me ask you, what’s been your biggest challenge to date? I’ll ask you to focus on either getting your partnership up and running or launching your new WP SEO Hub, maybe one or the other, if you could focus on that?

Lindsay: Professionally, the biggest challenge to date has definitely been launching our latest venture, WP SEO Hub. There are so many unknowns which makes it very exciting and fun and stimulating. I feel like every hour I’ve spent working on this new venture has been challenging and fun and just what I needed sort of when I was feeling a bit stale in my agency career. It’s been very inspiring. But it is a new venture and for me, it has been more challenging and scary than some of the other more personal moments in life like starting a family and getting married and some other big pivotal moments. This one has felt a bit more challenging but also very exciting.

Liam: How about you, Lori?

Lori: I would say I agree. Professionally, WP SEO Hub has definitely put another layer onto our work life that every once in a while we look back and say, “Wow, we actually had it pretty easy before when we were doing two ventures.” But at the same time, we don’t regret it at all. I did write AdWords book a few years back and in some ways, it’s similar to that where we were doing our daily work and then I would go home and write at night. That was definitely challenging, I had two small children at the time so my quiet time was basically 10:00 to 2:00 AM was when I would sit down and write. But that’s a little different from WP SEO Hub in that there was a due date and an end date. It did at some point completely end and this just kind of keeps and hopefully continues to keep growing and growing.

Liam: Right, for better or worse, it won’t end.

Lori: Exactly.

Tara: When you talked, Lindsay, about the challenge and the fear associated with starting business, why do you think that is? What is the most challenging or frightening part of starting this new venture would you say?

Lindsay: Well, there’s a financial component so that’s definitely a bit of a leap of faith of how much do we invest in ourselves and in our business versus just like every other freelancer. How much money do you keep in your business and how much do you take out. So, that is definitely a challenge and something that kind of makes the skin in the game seem a bit larger. When we started webShine, we had two computers, we both worked from home, we had no teammates or employees, so we had exceptionally low overhead and it did not feel like there was a financial leap of faith. There’s definitely that component with WP SEO Hub but that’s balanced for me by there is the opportunity to grow in a new way and to reach a new market that we can’t in our custom search marketing work. I’m really enjoying one of the challenges that’s sort of a small component of what we’re doing is speaking at WordCamps. As a former mountain guide, I was very accustomed to teaching and speaking in groups and leading in the mountains. I haven’t done that professionally in business since then. There was a big gap in time where that was a missing component of my life and I’m enjoying the nervous energy and preparations and things like that, but are going into getting prepared to speak at a WordCamp or to be on a podcast and to do things that are just a bit new and different for us.

Tara: Yeah, we can relate to that. Both Liam and I have spoken at WordCamps, too. It takes a lot more work than it seems like it should, I think, and it is a little bit nerve-racking, too. I think you get over it but never completely over it.

Liam: I think if you do get over it, you don’t care anymore.

Lindsay: That’s good to know because I’m not getting over it. Each time, I feel like I’m going back through that same process of putting a lot of effort into the talk and then getting nervous before it, and then enjoying it in the moment. That’s been fun. But I think for us and kind of back to that life in the mountains and career, one thing that mountain guiding, ski patrolling in our community here is it’s very community-oriented and a very collective sense of energy. That was also something that was missing a bit from my professional life, when I made the turn into SEO I found it a lot less collaboration and a lot more competition. People sort of keeping their cards close to home in a way that I wasn’t really accustomed to in working in the outdoor industry. One of the biggest delights of this past year has been becoming part of the WordPress community and seeing how welcoming and collaborative and innovative it is and feeling that same energy that I was getting out of a previous career, but now in something that’s in tech.

Tara: Yeah, the WordPress community is very supportive. In terms of starting your business and starting this product, WP SEO Hub, where have you guys turned for advice on starting up something like that? Have you made mistakes? How are you following that path towards building a product in a business never having done anything like it before?

Lindsay: We have learned to reach out to this welcoming community and try to get to know some of the players that can be sort of mentors in the field for us. We’re working right now with Chris Lema and he’s helping us on the product development side kind of almost taking a step back from where we started and really looking at the goal of the product and how to position it in the WordPress marketspace and that’s been very valuable.

Lori: Yeah, I think finding mentors in this space, speaking with customers and prospects and getting feedback and just asking really, “Hey, can you give me five minutes of your time and take a look at our website and let us know what you like, what you don’t like, what’s confusing?” So really trying to ask a lot of questions. And then we’ve also started engaging in a small community here, the Aspen WordPress Meetup, and that’s been a really fun group of diverse different talents and another way to get some input and guidance as we grow our business.

Liam: I’m going to steer us through one of our signature questions here and maybe I’ll start with Lori because we started with Lindsay last time. But I’ll ask you both and I’ll give you both time to respond. What’s been the single most valuable piece of advice, personal or professional, that you’ve received and implemented in your life? Or one of the most valuable, most challenging thing. What’s something that somebody told you and made an impact and you’ve carried it with you and seen the benefits of it?

Lori: Sorry, this is going to be a tough one. Do you want to go because I know you have an answer already.

Liam: Alright, well, let Lindsay chime in first. Tag, you’re it!

Lindsay: I’ll jump in and give Lori a moment to think. I guess a very valuable piece of advice that I’ve received, although I cannot claim to have implemented it properly is the concept of going slow to go fast. It comes out of working in the mountains, working as an IMT that when there is a crisis at hand, the first thing you want to do is go as quickly as you can to fix the problem, especially if in mountain situations, there are occasionally life-threatening consequences. But at the end of the day, slowing down will let you go faster. That has been something that in the mountains I found much more natural and in business, I definitely have to make a more conscientious effort to follow that advice.

Liam: That’s solid, I like that. Slow to go fast. Did that give Lori the time to–? [laughter]

Lindsay: We’ll see.

Liam: or did she go too fast?

Tara: Did you google it? [laughs]

Lori: I would say, in a similar vein just spending a lot of my young adult and adult life in Colorado, in the mountains, but coming from Pennsylvania, a lot of times, it just takes pushing yourself that little extra bit that you didn’t think you had in you or that you could do, things that maybe you want to turn around but the summit’s right there and you think that that’s the only option but then you push through and you realize that it wasn’t nearly as difficult to get there as you thought it would be once you made up your mind to do it. I guess, our work life is very similar, it’s just kind of setting those goals and persevering to get there.

Tara: Yeah, I think both of those are great advice. Lindsay, your go slow to go fast reminds me of something I’ve been reading about lately and learning about meditation and sort of mindfulness is the idea of responding and not reacting. I feel like a lot of times when having sort of started a business, a lot of times, you don’t have the advance time to plan things out so you end up reacting a lot to things because you have to instead of responding to them thoughtfully or working it into your plan. I think you’re right on target with that idea of going slow to go fast. Of course, starting a venture like this and, as you said, putting some capital into it with the product, Lori, your advice about going for it and not being afraid of the summit is also really applicable to what you guys have done. I think you have both implemented that in what you’re doing it seems to me anyway.

Lori: Thank you.

Lindsay: Thanks.

Lori: We’re trying.

Liam: We have just a few minutes left so I’m going to throw another kind of sideways question at you, I’m sorry. As you’ve built a partnership together, you’ve launched this new business together, and I’ll ask this of both of you, what’s something you’ve found that you’ve discovered that you’re very good at that really surprised you that you either are good at it or could get to be good at it and now are good at it?

Lindsay: That’s a very good question.

Liam: Sorry, I’m really putting you two on the spot today.

Lindsay: Yeah, I think that the biggest thing that I feel like I’m getting better at is problem-solving and trying to find the joy in that, and trying to think creatively about problems small to large. That’s definitely a bigger component of what we’re doing now in managing a new business and balancing all of these different acts and something that I certainly had to exercise more and doing quite a bit more of now.

Lori: And I come from a science background and always thought I’d be more of a science researcher and so when I ended up in marketing world, it seemed like a pretty big leap but then finding myself back in the search engine marketing side of things, it is nice to have all the data and the numbers and to be able to really quantify what we’re doing in some way. That’s one thing I have the data skills in me but it’s nice to be able to apply them in a marketing sense.

Tara: Excellent. It’s nice when you discover those things and you’ve really put those to good use working together. And we are running out of time, we are out of time. I want to thank you both for being on our show today and for sharing your story, I think it’s an inspiration in terms of having a partnership in a business which is challenging but you guys seem to have made it work really well, and I look forward to seeing good things happening from your agency and your product. Can you tell us where people can find you online?

Lindsay: Sure. People can find us at Wpseohub.com and thank you so much for having us here.

Liam: You’re very welcome, it’s been a real pleasure getting to know you and thank you for entertaining my less than predictable questions today.

Lori: Thank you.

Tara: Thank you so much. Alright, bye.

Liam: See you later. Bye.

Lori: Bye.

Lindsay: Bye.

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.

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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