Episode 70: Michelle Coe and Brett VanSprewenburg

Hallway Chats: Episode 70 - Michelle Coe and Brett Van Sprewenburg

Introducing Michelle Coe & Brett Van Sprewenburg

Michelle and Brett are informal partners in business and in life. Brett is an engineer, Michelle is a designer. Daily, they balance living and working together 24/7 while building their respective businesses.

Show Notes

Website | Blue Sky Phoenix
Website | Perigee Labs
Twitter | @bsp_design

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. And now the conversation begins. This is Episode 70.

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

Liam: And I’m Liam Dempsey. Today, we are joined by Michelle Coe and Brett VanSprewenburg. Brett and Michell are informal partners in business and in life. Brett is an engineer, Michelle is a designer. Daily, they balance living and working together 24/7 while building their respective businesses. Welcome, Michelle and Brett.

Michelle: Thanks for having us.

Brett: Thanks for having us.

Tara: We are so glad you’re here and we are here live with you, which is a special treat. We are actually in a hallway at a WordCamp which is a treat so it’s great to have you here in person and can you tell us a little bit more about yourselves? And you can take turns as you’d like to.

Brett: We can work it out. Go ahead.

Michelle: I’m Michelle Coe, I own BlueSkyPhoenix. We do brand strategy and web design and development in Northern Virginia.

Brett: I’m obviously also in Northern Virginia and I assist Michelle’s work in WordPress when she has sort of engineering level kind of changes and additions and functionality that needs to be added to a customer’s site as well as I have my own consulting company and I have a couple of business partners in Perigee Labs and that’s my company. We do WordPress sites and custom PHP sites and mobile apps. It’s sort of a general covering of stuff that we do there.

Tara: Cool. How did you guys find each other? Did you start working together?

Brett: Michelle blames me for getting into this.

Tara: Okay. [laughter]

Brett: No, seriously. A designer and stuff like that.

Michelle: Yeah. I started my business back in 2011 when I first moved to Northern Virginia and it took about three weeks of doing a commute from Northern Virginia up to Silver Spring around DC to convince me that commute was not the way I wanted to go. So I started my business and at first, my background being graphic design, I thought that that’s what I was going to do is a lot of print work. And Brett convinced me that no, website design is– you need to get involved with website design. I said, “Okay.” And so I started learning WordPress and learning the ins and outs of web design. That’s how that started.

Tara: Okay. Brett brought you into it. Brett, how did you get into development and coding?

Brett: To go backwards from where Michelle was, from a WordPress perspective, I was thinking along the lines of, what would be a good way for someone who is design-oriented to get into the space of– well, what I perceived is lots of customers could use some with these talents in this space. So I suggested, “Hey, there’s WordPress.” And I didn’t know enough about it or a lot about it at the time. I’m like, “WordPress to me-” This is years ago, 2011, “- sounds like would be a great vehicle for you, Michelle, to deliver your designs to people on the web.” That’s kind of how that happened. Before that, my background in development work was from the corporate world where I was at one time– I worked for Eastman Kodak Company and I ran their professional photography online services area, and e-commerce, and content, and pro-photographer connectivity, stuff like that. I had this sort of self-made background in all of that as well as digital imaging, and photography, and things like that.

Tara: Okay. Do you have a design sensibility as well then with your photography?

Brett: Only when I look at it and go, “Yeah, that’s great.” Or when I look at it and go like, “Yeah, something’s wrong with that. Maybe it’s not the right color or something.” But I often say this, I’m like, “My design is good strong Soviet design.” It’s like, “Boxes, that’s perfect.” And then I look at the stuff that she does and I’m like, “Well, that’s fantastic. I can’t do that.” But I can look at it and go, “Yeah, that’s awesome.”

Michelle: When we’re out in the world talking to people, a lot of times, I’ll say to people, “I’m the one who makes it pretty. He’s the one that makes it work.”

Tara: That is a very good team in two different people. You know, a lot of solopreneurs, which I know is something that you like to talk about, like me and a little bit like Liam too. You have someone who helps you with some of your development work. But you kind of bundle it into one person and you can’t do either one really well. So you have that teamwork going on. I’m going to give a shoutout to Michelle’s art skills because I follow her on Instagram and she does these art snacks and she’s amazingly talented designer. I’ll give a shoutout to follow her on Instagram.

Liam: Excellent. I’m interested in kind of the interplay of WordPress in your two respective businesses and you just said when you were chatting about when you were talking to clients and the like, that both of you sometimes talk to. It sounded like your clients, Michelle. And I wonder how does that work, how does that kind of come together for you in real life? “This is my colleague, this is what our sources do, this is–” How do you spin that in a way so that when they hire you and your business, they know they’re getting what they know what they’re getting?

Michelle: Right. Most of my clients know from the start that when they’re hiring me, they’re getting more of a designer and a brand strategist. I really work with them on a lot of the strategy aspects of it. I’m helping them figure out who their ideal client is and working out their logo and their overall look and feel. Sometimes I’m even getting into some of the mission statement and content writing and voice and everything that feeds into that brand, and then roll it into a website design. Now, my favorite clients to work for are startups and small businesses. I really have a heart for smaller entrepreneurs. A lot of times, I luck out in that way because they don’t really need really complex websites out of the gate. However, whenever I’m out talking to a client, I’m able to say to that client, “Oh, you have something more complex? Great. That’s not a problem. I have a team here locally that I will eye on to do all of my complex coding work, and let me bring in my lead engineer and we’ll talk about this more complex issue.” That’s when I’ll bring Brett into the conversation.

Brett: The guy on the other side of the monitor. I sit on the other side.

Tara: Oh, you face each other? Your desk is in the same room?

Michelle: Yeah. Our office is in our home and we have a double-sided desk. I have my two monitors on my side of the desk and he has his two monitors on the other side of the desk.

Brett: But there’s a spot I can sort of lean over and look past if I look over.

Tara: Do you have the same taste in music? Do you listen to music when you work?

Brett: Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes it’s a distraction so yeah, there’s been periods of time when we play a lot of music, and then periods of time when it’s really quiet because phone calls and things are going on or something that’s being focused on or something like that. I thought maybe you just told everybody, “Oh, I know a guy.” I thought that was it.

Michelle: No. [laughter]

Brett: Like, “Oh, yeah. I got a guy for that.” But to back up what you’re saying really is a lot of the clients– and I find this when I do work on the site too is they will have sort of typical needs up to a point, and then there’s one area of, you can’t get that functionality out of the box. It’s like, this thing, whatever it might be, maybe it’s a plugin, maybe it’s something based out of WordPress or whatever. That’s close. And a lot of times, it’s connected with a rule or a permission or some sort of type of file or they’re uploading some kind of activity that needs to be looked in upon by interested parties and it needs to be protected or only shown to certain people or downloaded in a certain way. It’s like, everything else is fine except for this one little bit. We just need something built that handles our particular data or our particular process. I tend to focus on those areas and build things out that are like, “Hey, I did this WordPress site for this guy who does a golf club thing.” You have a whole bunch of golf courses that participate underneath his banner and he’s got this club card that goes between them all. People, as they play, collect points on this card. It needs a place to upload these points, he’s got these CSV documents he pulls out of this other back-end database, uploads it to the WordPress site. And then people come in and log in using their card IDs and things like that, check on their free rounds and how they’re going with their points. Not very WordPressy, right, usually? But it really wasn’t a big deal for me to kind of add that functionality. And WordPress was a great thing because this guy is not really technical, for instance, to handle this stuff. So it’s really easy to point him at the back-end of WordPress and say, “Click this, upload this.” It’s all laid out. I tend to treat WordPress more as a convenient framework of things that are already built.

Liam: Yes, it’s good at that.

Tara: Yeah. Let’s spin away from the technical and to the question that we ask everybody, which is about your definition of success. You work together from home. I don’t know if this is something that you talk about with each other or if this is something that you thought about in preparation for this conversation with us. But we really love to hear how people think about success and how they work toward it, I’ll turn it over to that.

Michelle: We did talk about it actually on the drive up to WordCamp this weekend and I think in some ways, our goals are very similar with a little different twist. I’m very focused on– success for me professionally is all about creating value for my clients and really helping my client get their work out into the world. Which is one of the reasons why I love working with startups, because they got all this passion and they just can’t wait and they’ve got some great big idea, and I get to get in right at the ground floor and help them to kind of get focused and then I get to kind of push them out of the nest, and they go make great things, and then they become successful and I get a lot of reward seeing that come to pass. I don’t need to have my name on the front door necessarily, but just to know that I’ve created value for that customer is just hugely rewarding to me. That’s how I measure success, more than dollars. It also both professionally and personally for me, my definition of success has a lot to do with freedom and being true to myself. If I can’t be creating my business in a way that makes sense for me or creating a life in a way that makes sense for me, then there’s no sense in doing it. I had a mentor a few years ago when I was really struggling. One of the many struggling points that you have with business is your business is involving. So I sat down with this mentor and this gentleman’s been in the business forever and ever and he’s a management consultant and whatever, and I’m sharing my woes and he says, “Well, if you’re not in business to make money, then you shouldn’t be in business.” And I looked at him and I was like, “Are you for real right now? Because that just–” If this were a perfect universe, I would just meet with the client and do great things together with that client and put great work out in the world, and they would just send me money, and I’d be just totally good with that. And I realized that that’s not the way the world works and that’s why I have invoicing software, but that’s not my driver. For me, success is measured very differently.

Tara: I’m going to ask you a follow-up on your first definition when you talk about helping these new startups, helping companies get themselves, their presence defined, and out into the world. How is that measured? When you launch, is it that feeling that you’ve succeeded because now they’re live or is it each step along the way? How do you assess that? Or how would you say a project was or wasn’t successful then in that way or your business was or wasn’t successful?

Michelle: It’s really for me, my biggest reward is to see the smile on the client’s face or to have them email me in all caps, “I LOVE THIS WEBSITE WHICH I JUST GOT THREE DAYS AGO!” And I was like, “Yes!”

Tara: That is a great feeling.

Michelle: To have somebody, especially somebody who’s coming from a space where either they’ve had a developer flake on them, or they’ve been to three logo designers and not found what they wanted. And then they come to me and I listen, and they’re like, “Wow, you listen.”, “Yeah, no kidding, that makes me a better designer for you. Tell me more.” And I spend a lot of time with them at the front-end, and sometimes that backfires on me. But more often than not, it’s really about them being delighted with what they end up with at the end of the day.

Tara: So that feedback?

Michelle: Yeah, that feedback is great. And then, obviously, that creates loyalty. And so the next time they have a need, they come back to me and they go, “So Michelle, now I need this thing. Can you do this thing?” And either I say yes or I say, “No, but I know a guy.” [laughter]

Liam: Good segue.

Tara: What a great team you are.

Brett: Well, it’s funny because mine is somewhat similar but you’ll know the difference in thought process and I’ll explain. When I talk with clients about things, I like to talk to them about– I sort of try and get to figure out where they’re at regarding their process or their data or what it is that they’re doing. And then I make suggestions and say, “Oh, that’s cool. I like what you’re doing there.” Could be golf or steel or some non-profit agency or whatever. I’m like, “Okay, this is what we can do with your data. Let’s do this and let’s do that, how to reach your people. Here’s a cool technique we can do, here’s a new feature.” And I like it when I can get sort of people sucked in with the possibilities of doing these sort of things. Because at the end, my professional feeling of success with something is along the lines of, “They got a lot out of it. They’re actually using the things that I thought were special about the buildout and they’re using those features.” So I feel like I’ve done a good job and I feel success when somebody uses this tool, this utility that I built for them to it’s fullest extent, because I’m sort of a believer in the most successful tools are those that are used by people in ways that its inventors never thought of. That’s a successful tool. I try and build successful tools. And to that end, I know that software is self-limiting because it either has that feature or it doesn’t. I try and build in those sort of things in the front-end by talking about the possibilities with people to say, “Hey, that’s cool. Have you thought about this, how these two things might connect, or this external system may be able to interact with that?” Or something like that to try and give them and draw more ideas out of them. I suppose it also results in, “Hey, can we give you some more money for you to build that?” I’m like, “Well, sure. That would be fine.”

Tara: Yeah. You’re a good problem solver.

Brett: Yeah, that’s what I do. I fix things or fix until it’s broke, broke it, break it until it’s fixed.

Liam: If we talk about success in kind of a business standpoint. I know, Michelle, you made it very clear that it’s not about money but at some point, it has to be. It’s not an end of itself but rent, and/or mortgages, and/or food don’t just show up.

Brett: It’s weird, but yeah. [laughter]

Liam: And the two of you have two separate businesses. And inevitably, you’re in some point in time going to find you both have to launch that site on Friday or the deadline for your respective bigger projects are coming in looming near. How do you, as a couple, as individuals who can’t just swear at each other and go home to your respective homes because you’re already there. How does that work in real life? How do you maintain that kind of successful working relationship that the joy of being around each other when Brett’s feeling the heat from his client, you’re feeling the heat, Michelle, from your client, and there’s only so much time, how does that work?

Brett: It’s like an anti-success answer.

Liam: Yes, because it comes back to– that’s going to inevitably happen so how do you keep staying successful with those kinds of practical challenges?

Brett: It does and actually, it’s still a challenge because I’ll say that if you’re asking what’s the biggest challenge in your life, and that’s what I mean by sort of anti-success, is finding time to not work sometimes and to manage your time successfully. I still struggle with that, and I’m using different techniques and we’re having stand-up meetings or sometimes we sit for those. Sometimes we get out on the deck and sit under the umbrella back on sunshine, still a meeting though. Trust me, it’s very serious. Or sometimes we just talk like, “Hey, how are things going today?” And that’s sort of like draw you back to your tasks to try and move things forward because personally, I find that I’m not very good about managing my own time properly and I’ll end up too focused on something and not able to switch to all these other things that need to be done. That causes a problem. I don’t sleep a lot in some cases where, “Hey, this has to happen on Friday. So does this, so does this.” I’m like, “Well, that’s caffeine time at midnight. Okay, here we go.” That is the issue in that it collides and you’re absolutely right, it collides with what real life is– right now, it’s pure grunt getting over those things. It’s just pure energy and it’s lot of individual contributorship to get those things over the finish line. But there’s a limit. I don’t know where that is yet but I don’t know how to solve that problem exactly.

Tara: Do you help each other in those situations? I know my husband, I tell my husband all the time, “Just come in and tell me to stop.” And he’s afraid sometimes to do that because I’m not good at stopping myself. Do you rely on each other for that?

Brett: No. Actually, we don’t tell each other to stop. Or actually, sometimes I do. I say, “You know, you should probably go to bed.” It’s along the lines of the, I can just tell sometimes, “Hey, how do you do this?”, “Well, here’s how you do it.”, “That’s just dumb.” [laughter]

Michelle: And then it’s not right after that but shortly after that, he’ll go, “Maybe it’s time to go to bed.”

Brett: “Tomorrow will be good for this.”

Michelle: “You can finish that tomorrow.”

Tara: And then you say, “Just five minutes more.” And then 20 minutes later, you’re still there?

Michelle: No, I usually take that queue. Early on, it was– we’re working at it. It’s always, it is a whole another component when you’re living with that person too, it’s like a whole another aspect to it. But we’re getting better at it, we’re working at communicating more, at telling each other when to stop. And encouraging each other to do other things besides work.

Brett: Like I asked you, “Hey, we’re going to yoga tonight?” That’s not me telling her to go to yoga, it’s just reminding her to think about, “Maybe we should go to yoga tonight.” Because that’s always very uplifting renewing experience for you.

Tara: Well, this brings me to one of the other questions that we ask, which is about advice. It sounds like you kind of give each other some advice but can you share with us some advice that you’ve received that has stuck with you and that you use in your life ongoing that’s important to you?

Brett: Yeah, yoga. [laughs]

Michelle: My best advice that I received was from my mom years ago and it was probably about 10 years ago. She gave me a bracelet and on it, it said, “To thy own self be true.” And I was living an entirely different life at the time. I was living in Western New York and my life was very, very different than it is now. most people who knew me back then would not even know me now. It’s so night and day different. I moved to Virginia to completely reboot my life. And I decided that if I was going to reboot my life, I was going to do it on my terms or no terms at all. I was going to remain true to myself. So far, that’s been really my main guiding principle and that has stuck with me and served me really well.

Tara: That’s a really concrete example. Did it take you a while to– she gave you that bracelet and you started thinking about that and took you a long time to act on that and make this big move? This amount of change, or was it something that clicked for you?

Michelle: I think that in the back of my mind, I’ve been thinking about this major change for some time. It wasn’t like my mom specifically was giving me permission to make this big change, because I don’t need my mother’s permission, right? Although if you meet my mother, it would be good for her to–

Liam: It’s not a bad habit if you get it.

Michelle: It’s not a bad habit, but it’s not required. But just having that reminder was like, “Yeah, no, I do have permission. I can make this life what I want it to be and I don’t have to stay where I am. I can create this life in a much better way.” That was the catalyst that really generated this massive, massive change in my life.

Brett: And come to her talk tomorrow to hear the rest of the story.

Michelle: Yeah.

Tara: It’s true.

Liam: Can I ask about the bracelet, the gift? Do you know if that was a deliberate gift from your mother or was it a bracelet and it was a style that you liked and she just happened to give the gift, and it was fortuitous that it had that and you took it in a way? If I’m prying too much, feel free to say so.

Michelle: No, no, that’s fine. I don’t know if my mom gave it hoping to precipitate the extreme action that was taken. However, she knew that I was struggling and she knew that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. She just wants, like every good mom, wants their child to be happy. She knew that if I stopped trying to make everyone else happy and started being true to what I needed in order to be happy, that everything would be okay. So I think her gift was very deliberate in that sense.

Tara: Does she know the impact that it had on you?

Michelle: Yeah, I have spoken to her about it.

Tara: That’s wonderful, thanks for sharing that.

Liam: That’s great, thank you.

Michelle: Sure.

Tara: Brett?

Brett: Mine’s not nearly heartfelt.

Tara: I was going to say. [laughter]

Liam: Michelle just set a really high bar, what are you going to do about it?

Brett: I know, not nearly so heartfelt but mine is so much more– you’ll understand when I tell you what it is. It’s from a series of books that I read a long long time ago. Given specifically to me, not necessarily. Was it general advice that I incorporated in my life? Sure. The series of books and this philosophy has permeated pretty much everything that I do. The advice was this from Douglas Adams and it was simply, “Don’t panic.” The thought process in his laughable look on life and his critical way of examining stupidity or people who think that they’re smart and what it is that they are going through and just analyzing the craziness and the, “Why do you even do that?” It’s the questioning of automatic actions and actually examining processes or thought-processes, or things that people do or institutions to the point of absurdity, which I’ve really internalized throughout my life. So don’t panic, that would be my advice. See, not bad?

Liam: Calmful way to be mindful.

Tara: Yes.

Michelle: Yeah. And honestly, you were asking about how do we– when we’ve got these deadlines and stuff like that. He’s really my counter-point. I’m flipping out and kind of like, “Woah.” And he’s just the more you turn up the heat, the more calm he gets, and that is why, because he’s like, “Don’t panic.” When he does start to panic, that’s when I know we’re in trouble. [laughter]

Brett: Essentially, “Oh, you’re upset? Oh, no. Oh, boy.”

Tara: That’s great. Both of those are great pieces of advice and they go well together, thank you for sharing that. We are coming up on the end of our time together. I know we’ve got to get back to the WordCamp, too, so we really are so grateful that you took the time out from WordCamp to find a quiet little spot and tell your story and share your ideas with us. Thanks so much. Where can people find you online?

Michelle: Most of my social media– you can find me at Blueskyphoenix.com or my social media for Instagram and Facebook is @blueskyphoenix. If you’re looking for me on Twitter, you have to look for me at @bsp_design because some guy in Manila has my Twitter handle, which I’m still trying to get back. [laughter]

Brett: You can just come to Perigeelabs.com for me. Like the moon, apogee, perigee, perigee when it’s close.

Liam: Thank you both for joining us, it’s been a real pleasure getting to know you.

Tara: Thanks so much.

Michelle: Thank you.

Brett: Thank you very much.

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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